Stormspotter-Todd's Blog

Where'd Todd Go?...
     On Dealing With Psychopaths and Stalking

Chapter 2 -
BECOMING AN UNWILLING EXPERT

I have effectively become an "expert" now on harassment and stalking; on psychopathy and sociopathy, and other Anti-social Personality Disorders. (Note that I said "effectively", and not literally. I make NO claim to having any degrees on the subject. That being said, personaly experienced what I have, and having read what I have, puts me a level of understanding that most don't have.) I have purchased a number of books on the subject now, each with copious highlighting, notes, and Post-its attached. They include Nasty People (Jay Carter), the sociopath next door (Martha Stout), Without Conscience (Robert D. Hare), and Snakes In Suits (Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare). All are very good books on the subject of Anti-social Personality Disorders and psychopathy/sociopathy. For those who have been victims of people like this I highly recommend them: for general people, cops, social workers, and even research workers - be you psychology-related or forensics-related.

Wanna see what a sample library of a "victim" looks like? Click here.

You can't do any research on these people without first understanding some VERY important things about them. To TRUST them during your research efforts is to make a HUGE mistake. These people have the ability to make a cop believe that a senseless murder was actually okay, and actually even necessary, and you WILL come away laughing, grinning, and agreeing with these types, even feeling sorry for them, and/or even feeling that they were inspiring people to talk to!...even innocent! In fact, if you're particularly gullible, you won't even MAKE it to the part where you get home and ask yourself how that even just happened. Some come away truly believing in every word they heard, convinced to research no further than the self-deluded speeches of the psychopath, becoming a die hard follower! I'm not making that up. Trained psychoanalysts have complained of having been so manipulated and duped during prison interviews with them. It's been documented...time and again! Read the damned books, people! It's more important than you know. I've also read online articles such as Suffering Souls (John Seabrook), and watched documentary films such as The Art of Urban Survival - Chapter One: Defense Against The Psychopath (Stefan H. Verstappen) which makes a good quick summary, and I, Psychopath (Ian Walker). Unfortunately, I know more than most average people know about socio/psychopathy - barring other victims, and not counting, of course, the psychologists out there who have actually made specific studies into it. I know for a fact that I know far more than the local cops apparently do...and I can tell you that they know utterly nothing, and believe in a lot of utter nonsensical, suppositional, and "gut feeling" crapola, instead - which is almost always wrong. They aren't aware that they should even be concerned about such a thing called "psychopathy" or "sociopathy". It's a very unfortunate and very disconcerting thing too, because they are the people you go to to handle problems with people like this. And when they don't know what they're dealing with, it's usually YOU who ends up getting blamed, accused of exaggerating things and of blowing things way out of proportion, and there's a tendency in police departments to minimalize the events and the trauma that you're going through, and to even make fun of you, and to look at you like you're the problem, instead. It's quite scary to experience. You have NO idea what it's like. And what usually happens is, when the bad guys see that even the COPS aren't willing to come to your rescue, they usually get worse. And that's what happened to me. (In my case, cops went as far as to deliberately sabotage a harassment case that I'd filed against two people, and another department haphazardly fumbled a computer hacking case that I'd filed against another person - preventing it from ever seeing the light of day in any courtroom - because they'd listened to a Faculty Advisor who spoke highly of the perpetrator and vouched for him. [The same Emergency Manager who had interfered in the previous harassment investigation that I'd filed with GPD had talked with the Faculty Advisor and convinced him yet again that I was a problem, not the perpetrator.] As a result, the police didn't take me seriously, and keystone-copped the handling of the investigation and the evidence.)

I wouldn't have known to research the right subject had I not accidentally read Nasty People, a book that my mother happened to have on her bookshelf. I was packing away her things and I came across it. Dunno where she got it. I know that at one time she was having a problem with some really mean and vindictive co-workers at the VA and I suspect that her lawyer may have suggested it to her. I read it. And what I read matched just about everything that I had been experiencing. It consoled me and scared me at the same time. After reading that book, I wanted to know more; and I graduated on to the others.

I wanted to know what was wrong with me that so many people felt they needed to treat me this way, and bring harm to me. I wanted to understand. I wanted to know what to do. How do I protect myself? How do I make them stop? What was going ON? ...and WHY? What the hell was DRIVING these people to go SO FAR??? ...to go so far that they often put themselves at risk of being caught, and so vehemently that they end up risking the careers and lifestyles of those around them, too, without concern? What made them so TUNNEL-VISIONED on attacking me? There is either a very, very real HATRED going on, here...or there is something definitely, seriously, and DREADFULLY wrong with these people! ...What did I DO????

But it wasn't me. It had nothing to do with me. It had to do with them. It had to do with people who wanted fame and attention and power. At first I was a means to thier ends. But when I discovered who they were, suddenly I was in the WAY of their end, and I'd figured them out; and they felt it was necessary to destroy my reputation and believability in order to protect themselves - before I called their attention to the rest of the world.

I was dealing with "psychopaths."

...And all of them...were either Officers, Members and/or Associates of the Gainesville Amateur Radio Society (GARS) and the University of Florida's Gator Amateur Radio Club (GARC). Both organizations were producing people who were by the perfect definition a real danger to society. (Many were also concurrent members of various local Emergency Management civilian public service programs such as CERT, SATERN, Alachua County Fire/Rescue Reserves, as well as with the Alachua County Red Cross.)

But I'm done hiding. I'm done putting up with these people. I'm not going to deal with it anymore. I'm standing up for myself, now. And I'm coming back out into the light again. I can't let these people destroy me and my life. I have to get control back.

In the meantime, I have decided to document it. I've decided to put it out there for other people - as warning to the existence of these types of people, as warning to watch out for them, as a means of recognizing the things that they can pull, the things that they can do to you, as a means of understanding in some way, and in so doing, thus becoming a means of coping, and of consolation to other victims by helping them to know that it wasn't their fault. It is also hoped that some scientists somewhere will be able to use this in some way to aid in the study of bullies and bullying...of psychopaths.

There is SOME random, miscellaneous information about what happened to me available elsewhere - such as in the Alachua County SKYWARN What's New and News & Announcements pages, and in some other places - that I've been slowly working on. But they weren't really the appropriate venue, and more importantly, it was hard at the time to rehash the things that were happening to me. For a while it was like this: You want to warn people and to let them know; but then, what happened to you is also so traumatic that you really can't bring yourself to go back over it again at that moment. I'd start writing, and then I'd say to myself "I just can't go fully back into this just yet." And so, I'd stop typing and the entry would be shorter than I wanted, or perhaps even contain so little information that it would not make much sense. But lately, this blog seems to be gleaning most all of my energy and attention right now, and I think I'm going to go with it and make THIS the most important document. I'll copy it to some other side places, too; refine it; organize it better. Then I think I may even actually look into publishing it...be it with changes, as a psychological thriller; or maybe as an educational tool based on real-life events. I don't know. But I'm NOT gonna sit by and just take this up my butt and "keep my mouth shut" (as Frederick Scott West once put it), if that's what people are thinking.