The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  I dated this guy named Bryan. We met at a party of a friend of mine, and he must have asked somebody there for my number [researching the victim]. Before I even got home, he’d left me three messages [overly invested]. I told him I didn’t want to go out with him, but he was so enthusiastic about it that I really didn’t have any choice [Men who cannot let go choose women who cannot say No]. In the beginning, he was super-attentive, always seemed to know what I wanted. He remembered everything I ever said [hyper-attentiveness]. It was flattering, but it also made me uncomfortable [victim intuitively feels uncomfortable]. Like when he remembered that I once mentioned needing more space for my books, he just showed up one day with shelves and all the stuff and just put them up [offering unsolicited help; loan-sharking]. I couldn’t say no. And he read so much into whatever I said. Once he asked if I’d go to a basketball game with him, and I said maybe. He later said, ‘You promised’ [projecting onto others emotions or commitments that are not present]. Also, he talked about serious things so early, like living together and marriage and children [whirlwind pace, placing issues on the agenda prematurely]. He started with jokes about that stuff the first time we went out, and later he wasn’t joking. Or when he suggested that I have a phone in my car. I wasn’t sure I even wanted a car phone, but he borrowed my car and just had one installed (loan-sharking). It was a gift, so what could I say? And, of course, he called me whenever I was in the car [monitoring activity and whereabouts]. And he was so adamant that I never speak to my ex-boyfriend on that car phone. Later, he got angry if I spoke to my ex at all [jealousy]. There were also a couple of my friends he didn’t like me to see [isolating her from friends], and he stopped spending time with any of his own friends [making another person responsible to be one’s whole social world]. Finally, when I told him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend, he refused to hear it [refusing to hear “no”].

  All this is done on auto-pilot by the stalker, who seeks to control the other person so she can’t leave him. Being in control is an alternative to being loved, and since his identity is so precariously dependent on a relationship, he carefully shores up every possible leak. In so doing, he also strangles the life out of the relationship, ensuring that it could never be what he says (and maybe even believes) he wants.

  Bryan would not pursue a woman who could really say and mean No, though he is very interested in one who initially says No and then gives in. I assure you that Bryan tested Katherine on this point within minutes of meeting her:

  Bryan: Can I get you something to drink?

  Katherine: No, but thank you.

  Bryan: Oh, come on, what’ll you have?

  Katherine: Well, I could have a soft drink, I guess.

  This may appear to be a minor exchange, but it is actually a very significant test. Bryan found something she said no to, tried a light persuasion, and Katherine gave in, perhaps just because she wanted to be nice. He will next try one a notch more significant, then another, then another, and finally he’s found someone he can control. The exchange about the drink is the same as the exchange they will later have about dating, and later about breaking up. It becomes an unspoken agreement that he will drive and she will be the passenger. The trouble comes when she tries to re-negotiate that agreement.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Popular news stories would have us believe that stalking is like a virus that strikes its victims without warning, but Katherine, like most victims, got a signal of discomfort right at the start—and ignored it. Nearly every victim I’ve ever spoken with stayed in even after she wanted out. It doesn’t have to be that way. Women can follow those early signals of intuition right from the start.

  Dating carries several risks: the risk of disappointment, the risk of boredom, the risk of rejection, and the risk of letting some troubled, scary man into your life. The whole process is most similar to an audition, except that the stakes are higher. A date might look like the audition in Tootsie, in which the man wants the part so badly that he’ll do anything to get it, or it can be an opportunity for the woman to evaluate important pre-incident indicators. Doesn’t sound romantic? Well, daters are doing an evaluation anyway; they’re just doing it badly. I am suggesting only that the evaluation be conscious and informed.

  The woman can steer the conversation to the man’s last break-up and evaluate how he describes it. Does he accept responsibility for his part? Is he still invested? Was he slow to let go, slow to hear what the woman communicated? Has he let go yet? Who broke up with whom? This last question is an important one, because stalkers are rarely the ones who initiate break-ups. Has he had several “love-at-first-sight” relationships? Falling for people in a big way based on just a little exposure to them, particularly if this is a pattern, is a valuable PIN. A woman can explore a new date’s perception of male and female roles as well as his ideas about commitment, obsession, and freedom. A woman can observe if and how the man tries to change her mind, even on little things. I am not proposing a checklist of blunt questions, but I am suggesting that all the information is there to be mined through artful conversation.

  The final lesson in that ideal class for young men and women would center on the fact that contrary to the scary and alarming stories shown on the local news, very few date-stalking situations end in violence. The newspeople would have you believe that if you’re being stalked, you’d better get your will in order, but this level of alarm is usually inappropriate. Date-stalkers do not jump from nonviolent harassment to homicide without escalations along the way, escalations that are almost always apparent or at least detectable.

  To avoid these situations, listen to yourself right from the start. To avoid escalation if you are already in a stalking situation, listen to yourself at every step along the way. When it comes to date-stalkers, your intuition is now loaded, so listen.

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  The families of those date-stalkers who physically harmed their victims, like the families of the other criminals discussed in this book, have had to face a question no parent ever wants to ask: Why did our child grow up to be violent? The answers can help parents and others see the warning signs and patterns years before they get that tragic phone call or visit from the police.

  I’ve learned a lot about this from young people who killed others, some who killed themselves, and as you’ll see in the next chapter, one who did a little of both.

  ▪ CHAPTER TWELVE ▪

  FEAR OF CHILDREN

  “My father did not tell me how to live.

  He lived, and let me watch him do it.”

  —Clarence Budinton Kelland

  The staff at Saint Augustine Church was busy preparing for its biggest day of the year. Those who’d been around for a while correctly predicted a full chapel, but their prediction of a congregation gathered in happy anticipation of Christmas was very wrong. This year it would be more like a funeral, though different in one important respect: Mourners in a church are usually far from where their loved ones died, but those gathered at Saint Augustine’s that Christmas Eve would be just a few feet from where the bodies were found, one dead, one near dead.

  Everyone at the mass knew about the grisly discovery, but not one person could claim to understand why two eighteen-year-old boys would stand in the shadow of their church and each shoot himself in the mouth with a sawed-off shotgun.

  After every violent tragedy, loved ones are forced to take a hard look at everything in their lives. They begin an awful and usually unrewarding search for responsibility. Family members cluster at the two far ends of the spectrum: those who blame themselves and those who blame others. The kids their children spent time with, the other parent, the jilting girlfriend—someone will invariably be doused with the family’s shame and rage and guilt.

  Often, a parent will blame the person who sold a child drugs, but James Vance’s mother went much further from home. She blamed a heavy-metal rock band named Judas Priest, and she blamed the mom-and-pop record store that sold their records. She insisted the
proprietors should have predicted that the album Stained Class would compel her son to enter into a suicide pact with his friend Ray. She felt the store should have warned the boys about the lethality of that album.

  When I was asked to testify in the case on behalf of the owners of the record store, I anticipated an interesting study into the media’s impact on violence. I did not expect it to be the only case of my career I would later wish I hadn’t taken. I had volunteered for many unpleasant explorations and performed with fairly unhesitating professionalism, but when the time came, I did not want to go into that churchyard, I did not want to feel the quiet depression and grief of Ray’s mother, nor challenge Mrs. Vance’s strong denial. I did not want to study the autopsy reports, nor see the photos, nor come to learn the details of this sad story.

  But I did it all, and James Vance ended up as my unwitting and unlikely guide into the lives and experiences of many young Americans. From him, I learned how they feel about drugs, alcohol, television, ambition, intimacy, and crime. He would help me answer the question of so many parents: What are the warning signs that my child might be prone to violence? From the vantage point of that churchyard, I saw young people as I’d never seen them before. Much of what James taught me applies to gang violence, but it also helps explain the sometimes more frightening behavior of middle-class young men whose brutality takes everyone by surprise.

  James Vance was obsessed with Judas Priest, attracted to the sinister and violent nature of their music and public persona. He liked the demonic themes of the artwork on their album covers, the monsters and gore, so at the instant he saw Ray shoot himself in the head, the sheer gruesomeness of it did not impress him. Like too many other young Americans, he had been getting comfortable with graphic violence for a long while, and images of gory skulls were fairly mundane to him.

  Standing in the churchyard, he looked at his friend’s body and for a moment considered breaking the suicide pact they’d made. But then he figured that if he didn’t shoot himself, he’d get blamed for Ray’s death anyway, so he reached down into the blood, picked up the shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. But he did not die.

  In his less than enthusiastic positioning of that shotgun in his mouth, he failed to kill himself but succeeded at creating an unsettling irony: He became as frightening to behold as anything that ever appeared on the cover of a Judas Priest album. In his hesitation to murder himself, James shot off the bottom of his face. His chin, jaw, tongue, and teeth, were all gone, blown around that churchyard. I cannot describe how he looked, and I also cannot forget it. I’ve seen my share of alarming autopsy photos, of people so injured that death was the only possible result, people so injured that death was probably a relief, but something about James Vance living in a body damaged more than enough to be dead was profoundly disturbing.

  Even lawyers who thought they’d seen it all were shaken when he arrived at depositions, a towel wrapped around his neck to catch saliva that ran freely from where the bottom of his face had been. His appearance had become a metaphor for what had been going on inside him. He had wanted to be menacing and frightening. He had aspired to the specialness he thought violence could bring him, and he got there… completely.

  Aided by his mother who helped interpret his unusual speech during the days he was questioned, James told lawyers about his case, and also about his time. I listened carefully. I learned that he and Ray had wanted to do something big and bad, though not necessarily commit suicide. It was the violence they wanted, not the end of life. They had considered going on a shooting spree at a nearby shopping center. Unlike thousands of teens who commit suicide, they were not despondent that night—they were wild. High on drugs and alcohol, their choice of music blaring, they destroyed everything in Ray’s room, then jumped out the window with the shotgun, and ran through the streets toward the church.

  They were not unique among young people who commit terrible violences, and neither were their families. Mrs. Vance was not the only parent to bring a lawsuit against a rock band; in fact, such suits are becoming fairly frequent.

  During the Vance case, there were plenty of other teenagers around the country who did horrible things. Three boys in a small Missouri town, one of them the student-body president, invited their friend Steven Newberry to go out in the woods with them to “kill something.” Steven wasn’t told that he was the something, though that became apparent when they began beating him with baseball bats. He asked them why, and they explained to the near-dead boy, “Because it’s fun, Steve.”

  Within hours, they were caught and confessed matter-of-factly to murder. Like James Vance, they were fans of heavy-metal, but these teenagers did not blame a musical group. They jumped right over Judas Priest and went directly to blaming Satan. Just like Michael Pacewitz, who said the devil instructed him to stab a three-year-old to death. Just like Suzan and Michael Carson, who blamed Allah for telling them to kill people. But families can’t sue Satan or Allah, so record stores and musical groups are sometimes all they’ve got.

  James Vance referred to the members of the band as “metal gods.” He said they were his bible and that he was “the defender of the Judas Priest faith.” Of his relationship with these people he’d never met, he said, “It was like a marriage—intimacy that developed over a period of time, and it was until death do us part.”

  Can specific media products compel people to violence that they would otherwise not have committed? This is, perhaps, a reasonable question.

  Could that record store have predicted that the Stained Class album was dangerous and would lead to the shootings? This is a less reasonable question, but great controversies are often tested at the outside edges of an issue.

  When researchers in my office studied hazards that were supposedly associated with music albums, they found one man who had gotten sick after ingesting a vinyl record, another who had a heart attack while dancing to some jaunty polka music, another who made a weapon out of shards from a broken record. (The range of things people might do with any product makes it next to impossible to foresee all risks.) Researchers also found an article with a headline that at first seemed relevant: “MAN KILLED WHILE LISTENING TO HEAVY-METAL MUSIC.” The victim, it turned out, was walking along listening to an Ozzy Osbourne tape on headphones when he was struck by a train. On the news clipping, a dark-humored associate of mine had written the words “killed by heavy metal, literally.” The heavy metal in trains surely has resulted in many more deaths than the heavy metal in music, even so-called death metal music.

  The group Judas Priest did not create James Vance, of course, but in a sense, he created them. When he was asked about a particular lyric, “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him by hand,” he recited it as “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him a hand.” So he had done more than just react to the songs; he had actually rewritten them, taken a lyric about someone being cared for and turned it into something about cannibalism. Even his admiration was expressed in violent terms. James said he was so enamored of the band that he would do anything for them, “kill many people or shoot the president through the head.” He told lawyers that if the band had said, “Let’s see who can kill the most people,” he would have gone out and done something terrible. In fact, the band said no such thing, and he did something terrible anyway.

  As part of my work on the case, I studied fifty-six other cases involving young people who involved a music star in their violent acts, suicides, attempted suicides, or suicide threats. This sampling provides a window through which to view the topic:

  A teenager asked a famous singer to send him a gun he could use to commit suicide.

  A young man threatened to commit suicide unless a female recording artist visited him. He wrote to her, “I even tried to put myself into a coma in hopes that my mom would get ahold of you and you would come see me.”

  A man took an overdose of pills in order to “travel through time” and reach a recording artist.

  A man wr
ote to a female recording artist, “If you don’t marry me, I’ll take an overdose.” (In a turning of the legal liability tables, he sent along the lyrics to a song he had written for her entitled “Suicide Is on My Mind.”)

  A young man who believed that a female recording artist was his wife and that she was hiding from him attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.

  Another wrote to a media star in terms reminiscent of James Vance: “I smoke pot and listen to rock music; basically, my story is in the vinyl. Life as I live it really isn’t worth it. I’ll tell you this, when I attempt suicide it won’t be an attempt.”

  Could the parents of all these people and the thousands like them reasonably blame some distant media star for the challenges their families faced, or would the answers be found closer to home?

  To explore that, I started a hypothetical list of the hundred most significant influences, the PINs that might precede teen violence. An addiction to media products is somewhere on that list, but alcohol and drugs are closer to the top. They, unlike media products, are proven and intended to affect the perceptions and behavior of all people who ingest them. James Vance offered support for this position when he described an acquaintance who had attempted suicide a number of times. Asked if that individual had a drug problem, he replied, “Yes, that goes hand in hand.” He also stated, “An alcoholic is a very violent individual, and when you drink excessively, you become violent, and that has been my life experience.” (I wonder with whom he gained that experience.)