Where'd Todd Go?...
On Dealing With Psychopaths and Stalking
Chapter 18 - "I DON'T LIKE HIM...HE STEALS ALL THE ATTENTION AWAY FROM YOU"
ON SUSAN ANN TIPTON / K9PDL
GAINESVILLE AMATEUR RADIO SOCIETY
Jeff even would tag-team me with his own wife, Susan Tipton/K9PDL.
Jeff liked to pick on me and get me into trouble with others. And whenever he thought he might be going too far and that he might possibly be at risk of getting himself into trouble, he'd stop and hand me off to his wife and she'd take over the harassment. ...And the cycle would continually repeat.
Susan Tipton is a narcissistic type...someone with an extreme superiority complex. She believes herself smarter and better than everyone around her. She enjoys being mean and cruel to people, pushing things to the limits, right up to the point where you're ready to call the cops if she doesn't stop, and then she disappears for a while - until she feels things have cooled off again. That's her M.O. She sits back quietly while you're raving mad, screaming in complaint about her while at the top of your lungs, demanding people do something about her...while she makes what I call a "frozen shock" face. It's really awkward to see. That is, as she's making these faces, she holds her face perfectly still. She never animates. It's like she saw the reaction in some photo in some magazine and she practiced it, waiting for that opportunity to use it someday...but she forgot that she needs to animate the look like every other normal person does. And that's the thing. In the magazine, there's no animation to help her fine tune it. So all she knows is the frozen look. I notice these things about her. Just me, though. LOL. Nobody else. But I promise you this: everyone who has ever experienced Susan Tipton's sadism will read this sentence and say to themselves, "You know?...He's smack damn dead on about that! Sh#&! He's exactly right! I'd never caught on to that before; but now that I think back on my experiences with her...he's absolutely right!"
Jeff would tell me stories about her. ...How she would sit up in bed with him at night, and bitch about me. ...How she hated me without end. ...How she didn't want him cooperating with me in any public service-related things because, Jeff quoted, "(Todd) takes all the spotlight and attention from you". He'd tell me how she'd torture him... She'd withhold sex from him, withhold dinner from him or maybe refuse to cook for him, make him do chores, keep him busy with stupid little things if he spent time any with me. ...Or she'd do the same to get him to harass me. I always thought it was kind of sick how Jeff would complain to me about how she'd "force" him to be mean to me. ...Force him? There's a word which is real good in situations like that. It's called "no." But, as I've personally experienced with Susan, there is no "no" allowed. If you try it, she targets you, vengefully. And I've told her "no" many times before. I've also told her to knock it off, before. To be quite honest, I've even told her to go find a long sword and jump on it, before. She doesn't like men like that. Men aren't supposed to talk back and challenge her. Men are to be controlled. They're just stupid little puppies; and if they disobey, they get punished and kicked in the corner until they comply. Period.
She's domineering. He told me that she would encourage him to harass me, and then get mad at him if he didn't do what she said. And he'd put it to me in this way like...like I should feel sorry for him or something. He'd tell me things like this and feign complaint, and then he'd show NO understanding for MY situation, and explain it to me in a manner which made it sound like he HAD to do the things that he did, and like it was OKAY to sacrifice me..."because I knew you could take it." Listening to him was always a jaw dropper, because in one sentence he'd complain about the things Susan would do to him, rant and complain about how she tortures him; and in the next, he'd just as easily throw me off the cliff and think nothing of it. One second, he's trying to show how he understands what it's like when someone tortures you; and in the next, he couldn't understand what you were seeing wrong with him when he'd torture YOU, and he'd feign being taken aback by your anger. It wasn't any problem to him as he saw it, and I was just being ridiculous to complain about all the things he was causing to happen to me. And when nailed to the wall, he'd always blame Susan - as if this was the standing order or something.
Jeff told me about how she once came home in 2004 with the brightest smile, happier than a clam, and bragging: "I know something you don't know! I know something you don't know!" He asked her what was up, and she said "I know a secret! After some torture of Jeff she eventually revealed that she'd received a copy of the Winter 2004 edition of the Florida Engineer, wherein my best friend Alisa was mentioned. It had her full name (which I'd been with good reason trying to keep secret from them - and all of the more malicious hams), her picture, and various other information about her in it. I'm standing there listening to Jeff describe Susan's excitement (remember we're talking about a woman I always believed to be incapable of feeling anything...at least anything good), and I became ill. Jeff thought this funny. I didn't. Remember...we're talking about a woman who hates my guts, here; who can't stand me. And yet, she has this inexplicable obsessive compulsive need to know EVERYTHING about me and what's going on in my life. And I was not particularly excited about that fact that a woman like this was so strangely interested in who my other friends were - and especially in showing such a deeply specific interest in my female friend. Why did this matter so much? Why was it so exciting to Susan? Nobody else who is normal reacts this way over information such as this. I didn't think it was funny at all. I thought it not the least bit normal and quite scary, in fact. Jesus! What the hell is it with narcissistic assholes being so damned interested in not just my friends but my female friends? Why is everyone so interested in going after her? What is going after her supposed to do? First they went after Angie Enyedi...intererstingly enough, afer I had told them about how Angie had told me how proud she was of my work with Skywarn. Now they want to know information about Alisa. With all of the stuff that I was going through at the hands of the local hams, and all of the bad things that I had experienced...finding out that one of the people who hated me so very much was VERY excited to find out who my best friend was and who thought it was such an exciting thing was to me reason to worry and be very afraid.
I was always scared around Susan. Everyone I've asked says the same thing. She's weird. She's odd. At first glance, people don't like her. The description that I most often get is "I just didn't like her. First time I saw her I got shivers. She just looks like she's mean." They get this really uncomfortable feeling around her. You feel really intimidated. For some, they'd say that the hairs on the back of their neck would crawl. I'd feel the exact same thing. She is extremely intimidating. She's very domineering. She interrupts. She takes over conversations. Over the years, in person, and during ham club meetings and get-togethers, various people have described to me the relationship dynamic that they too have observed between Jeff and Susan:
"She treats him like he's one of the dogs."
"She treats their own DOGS better then she does him!"
"You notice how she berates him all the time; cuts him low...always in front of others, publicly?"
"You notice how she commands him all the time?"
"Ever notice how he rarely talks back; and when he does, she gets meaner?"
The dogs obey her, too. ...Poodles. ...Always poodles with Susan. They can be trained. They can be dominated, controlled, commanded. This is what she wants from people. When people don't obey, they must be taught to cower to her. When she commands the dogs, they always cower...always. ...Like they're deathly afraid of getting beaten to a pulp. I witnessed her smack the shit out of her cat Pixie, years ago - simply because the poor cat decided to sit on a barstool in the kitchen. That's all. Not on a table. On a bar stool. It was a really hard smack, too. The cat didn't deserve that. It wasn't doing anything to warrant that kind of a reaction. It just wasn't right. But she hit the cat without hesitation, right in front of me, showing that she felt that what she was doing to the cat was justified and that she thought I would think so, too, or something. I wondered "What if that was her kid? Would she smack the kid like that for sitting on the barstool without permission?" WTF, man. Jeezus. Once you get to see how this woman is around her animals, and you witness first-hand how her animals react around her, all the walls fall down, and you begin to realize some things about her.
When she doesn't like you, she cuts you off and won't let you finish sentences or thoughts. She'll make jokes about you in front of your peers and try to get other people to laugh at you. During a presentation that I was making about the Alachua County EMWIN Project at a meeting of the Gainesville Amateur Radio Society, she constantly interrupted me and would throw a barrage of insults at me. She put down my ideas in front of everyone. She'd stop me in mid sentence and say "I think it's stupid!", "I think it's ridiculous!", "I think it's a waste of time!", "I think it's a waste of money!" And when she wasn't busy insulting me, she was flirting deliberately loudly with David Price/WA4ET, who was sitting behind her, snickering very loudly, and making sure that everyone could hear the further insults she was making to him about my project idea. And rather than reprimand her or try to make her stop, instead members would laugh. No one bothered to do anything to shut her up. They were too afraid of retribution if they tried. She was ruthlessly mean and sadistically cruel. I guarantee you, though...had I tried to do that to her or anyone else in that club, I would have been reprimanded immediately. This is the power that psychopaths have over others. They get to do whatever they want, ruling with intimidation and fear of retribution.
Ever the narcissist, she's constantly bragging about her IQ, and about how smart she is. She can't stay away from the on-screen word games at Kazbor's, and she's always trying to encourage everybody else to join in so that she can compare her levels with yours and make herself feel superior. I remember there was one occasion, during a lunch gettogether with other office people at another restaurant, where she bragged about how in her job she could look up information about anyone she wanted. I was like "...ANYONE?" She said "...AN-Y-BOD-Y," not immediately recognizing what I was actually getting at. She said she worked with some UF database called "C.H.R.I.S.", and that she could look up "whatever information that I want" off of it. Jeff corrected her with "...Yah, but that's only with students, though!" Whereupon she corrected back that that " didn't matter", she had access to "other things." Jeff did not correct her any further. (sigh) ...As if he'd learned when to let things go. And she boasted about this in quite an unusually proud way, like her access to this information made her God or something, and you and everybody else were nothing. In actuality, such bragging of this sort is a serious violation of policy for a worker working with databases which utilizes "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII). I work for the Census Bureau and we're instructed NOT to tell people what software we use, or to discuss anything about our software or databases in any way, or even to reveal what surveys we're working on at any particular time, so as to prevent unscrupulous types from targeting you and possibly using social engineering to attempt to glean any information off of you, including sensitive information. It's part of our IT security training! I am *sure* that every place that deals with computers and data (Information Technology) and PII in this manner has a similar policy and I am sure that this bragging...was in violation of that policy. That was something I am sure I was not supposed to know - I don't care what the venue, what the situation, who we were. This was spoken in the open in a restaurant! ...The Chili's on Archer Road, to be specific. Things like that just don't concern her. I wonder...if her boss had discovered that she had said that, would she have been fired? Between Jeff and Susan, both...these two are a highly irresponsible IT security risk whenever their egos come online.
...Egotistical people and computers are not two things that you want to put together in the same room. I mean really. No. It's a dangerous combination. It's like putting a sociopath in charge of a very important secret military mission. They may be able to do the job very well...but you can't count on them to always carry it out to the intended mission objective. They tend to be out of control and to do what they want and at some point it will be inevitable that they'll fail you. There have been real studies on this. You can try to train them to be ace pilots. But when crunch time comes, they get so focused on causing the one thing right in front of them harm that they fail to watch what is going on around them...right into the ground. This tends to also be how people like this get caught. Again...just like Kevin Mitnik.
When you make Susan mad, she targets you. She attacks your intelligence, your good standing, your credibility. She tries to make you look stupid and inconsequential in front of your peers. And she laughs - like she thinks everyone in the room is so proud of her for pointing out these things, when actually, the entire room is sneaking stares back and forth at each other and shaking their heads, widening their eyes in inquisition and disbelief, wondering why this woman is going so far to beat this person to a pulp and why she seems to know no place to stop and how she actually seems to be enjoying what she is doing. This is the difference between you and me, and people with an ASPD (anti-social personality disorder). And when you try to complain, and to make it stop, to defend yourself, she makes this practiced look of "shock", deliberately posed, and deliberately held for some long seconds for effect. It's quite weird to see. It's as if the look was taken from some magazine she once perused - frozen; immovable; lacking the normal continual animation that is seen in normal people. It's as if she stood in front of a mirror and practiced the look over and over until she thought she had it just right. When she makes it, it's somehow "fake" and seems "forced", like she was looking for or waiting for the opportunity to make that face so as to make everyone notice and think that you were a horrifically bad person being so unnecessarily cruel to her. I actually have a photo of this look, somewhere. When around Susan, I always had this super bad feeling of darkness and evil while in her presence. I always had this feeling like...like I was some kind of "prey" and she was a dark "predator". Like I was some mouse and she was the cat, pawing me around for no good reason except for the fun of it. Over the years, many people have related similar stories about her to me.
Sometimes when she's trying to put someone down, or trying to belittle a situation, she's very flirty, bubbly, and seemingly all around happy...the life of the party. ...Conversational. ...Upbeat. ...Seemingly the nicest person in the whole wide world. She's trying to put on the impression of someone docile, incapable of harm. But there are "things" about her that you won't notice until you've been around her a little longer - because you weren't paying attention the first time. She constantly belittles others. All the time, actually. On first meet, it's there, but it's veiled, disguised, not easily noticeable. She's looking for the way in to you...to put you in the chair with the cut off legs. She always has a better story than you. She has to be the most important thing at the table. You're just about the dumbest, but she's tolerating you. When people complain about her, she minimalizes the horror stories that people tell about her. It's never her fault. The other person was being ridiculous, over-reacting, picking on her. The other person was making a mountain out of a mole-hill and she...why she was just this innocent little doe-eyed deer being chased by the awful hunters for NO reason. And she's so very, really good at it. I've watched time and again as she convinced otherwise really smart people (whom you'd think would be smarter) that she was just some innocent little thing. She does most of the talking. Everybody else shakes their heads in agreement. She is a master at charming people, persuading people, convincing very intelligent people that she's the innocent victim and that you are the evil bad guy who is picking on her for no reason. It blows me away to watch it happen. And she does a very good "help me! help me! they're picking on me!" act. She's better than Jeff in charm and persuasiveness. In fact, she usually tells Jeff to shut up and she intervenes and takes over whenever Jeff gets into trouble with me.
But if only people would interview around a little, ask questions...deeper questions...and be just a little more observant, and pay attention a little more closely...the spells would be broken with Susan, and she would lose her power. It's all right there in front of them. They just have to look harder.
Even her mother fled...
Jeff once told me that Susan's mother was going to move here to Gainesville to be closer to her but that Susan was so mean and cruel with her that she actually changed her mind and now (or at least as of a few years ago)...they don't talk much. He also told me that Susan came home actually crying and upset one day because apparently her boss had called her to the office and reprimanded her and told her that multiple co-workers had filed complaints against her because she was very rude, mean, condescending, cruel and vindictive; and her employer told her to knock it off or she'd be fired. He told me she "couldn't understand" why her boss had been so mean to her. HAH! SHIT! Holy COW! So like...what, man? Does she think she should be allowed to treat people that way? and that her boss was just being...what?...oblivious and just didn't understand??? Let me guess: it's all everybody else's fault. Right? I've been hearing that from those two for years. Even Jeff has admitted to me that she is mean and vindictive and he's told me that even he has told her that she needs to chill out or else something is going to happen. But he says she doesn't listen.
Jeff also told me that the University of Florida's Dean of Veterinary Medicine even had words with her, for the exact same reasons. ...People had been complaining about her rudeness and condescensions and vindictive, mean behavior, and according to Jeff, the Dean gave her an ultimatum and said that if she didn't stop it then she would be permanently banned from ever putting foot on the UF Livestock Pavilion, and Veterinary School property, and from attending dogs shows, or bringing her dogs ever again.
Back in 1985/1986, my ex-wife and I used to live in a little loft apartment somewhere back behind the Burger King on University Avenue. (The BK no longer exists, now. It's a Target Copy.) It was just after Susan and her husband and about three other people had been caught hacking into the University of Florida's IFAS computer, back then. Susan had lost her original job because of the computer crime conviction and now she was working as a Manager at the Burger King. My wife was a greeter/cashier, there. She was constantly coming home very worked up and upset and even crying because of the way that Susan used to treat her. She'd complain about how difficult Susan was to work with, and how monstrously overbearing she was, and cruel, sometimes to the point of making her mad, or making her cry. She often told me that she wanted to quit. And in fact, one day...she actually did. ...Because of Susan's condescending behavior and unnecessarily cruel attitude. Interestingly, this was some years before I'd actually personally met Jeff and Susan in ham radio circles. That didn't actually occur until sometime around 1992 or so. (Yah. I've got a minimum 18 years worth of experience behind me with these two. You can consider me the expert witness, by now.)
Susan thinks of herself as smarter than everyone else. She sees everyone else as being lower than her. She's rude and smart to people. She feigns not seeing it, but she knows very well what she is doing. She thinks the world should be subservient to her, agree with her, obey her. When people object, she harasses them, and becomes even meaner and more vindictive. She convinces herself that the people she's mean to actually deserve it. When people tell her to knock it off, she sees this as an attack against her for no reason. She believes that it's okay to berate and belittle others at their expense, and that people should put up with it because it's no big deal. When you try to make her stop, this is considered being rude and mean to her, and from that point on, she sees nothing wrong with being mean to you. From personal experience, she seems to actually delude herself into believing that the whole world agrees with her when she's being publicly abusive. I sometimes wondered if she imagined the world actually applauding her in her mind or something - raising their arms towards her in admiration, glorification and affection, thinking herself somewhat akin to Jesus Christ or something. I've tried to figure out what would make someone so openly and publicly mean and cruel and not see what they were doing, or even so much as be concerned what other people thought. I am continually amazed by how many people there are out there like this...who don't seem to have an understanding of "tact", or to know where the "limits" are, and who seem so tunnel-visioned on going ON and ON and ON in picking on people - even to the point of discovery, or losing their "fan base", if you want to go so far as to call it that. Susan is one of those. At first meet, she seems really smart, and really personable, and maybe even helpful. But when you continually make the mistake of not giving her the attention she's so badly wanting, or of contradicting something she's said, or correcting her, or of putting her in her place and telling her to stop being rude to you... Well, then you get on her shit list, and she becomes your worst nightmare...your worst enemy. Oh and...authority level often dictates how well she listens to you, and how much you get to see. If you're somebody important, you may never notice any of these things. She's too busy kissing your butt and trying to add another important figure in her repertoire of "friends".
There are more weird things about her...
Years ago, Susan was acting very strange. She normally hated my guts. But then suddenly she flipped. She was actually reacting with me in a manner which can only be described as a very obvious "flirting" type of behavior - getting close, giggly, touching. (Not quite a sexual kind of touching, but putting hands on my shoulders, gently poking my side, etc. - things that weren't natural for her considering how much she hated me and that she knew I did not like her. But touching in any way between us was not at any time ever understood to be any kind of an acceptable thing.) I wondered what happened to this woman who hated me so much, and what had made her flip her lid. Was she on some sort of meds or something? I didn't like her and I wanted nothing to do with her and I was assuming that she was doing it to harass me and to deliberately make me feel uncomfortable - or maybe she was using me to punish Jeff for some unknown infraction that I was not privy to. That crossed my mind. I've seen her react this way with a few other guys, too, before. ...For example, during a particular GARC club meeting. Jeff would even see this going on at times and he would do nothing. But when four different ham radio operators came up to me and then accused me of fliring with Jeff's wife, I got upset. I told Jeff to tell her to knock it the fuck off, and to tell her that four hams had now come to me complaining and accusing me of flirting with her, not the other way around, and that I wanted it to stop. (The hams who witnessed it, but not necessarily who said anything to me, included Scott West himself, Steve King, Ed Amsbury, Walt Johnson, Shannon Boal, John Warne - all off whom were giving me incredulous looks every time they saw it.) Rather than give her all of these important details, I think Jeff instead went to her and said something very close to "Guess what? Todd thinks you like him!", because immediately after that, she got set off and became an even worse an enemy towards me than she had been before. It took Jeff so long to tell her anything about it, though. I told him repeatedly to say something to her about it, and he would not; and he acted like a man in denial; like he had seen nothing. He refused to do anything about it at all.21
So yah...they tag team. Jeff works Susan up. Susan works Jeff up. You end up pissed off and screaming, and looking like a lunatic. Then when people ask questions, they feign not knowing anything about it, they leave important information out, say bare minimal, and allow people to draw their own (incorrect) assumptive conclusions. The both of them think that this strategy, used on people that they target, is just way funny. "Just don't let them GET to you!", you say. Heh. If you're saying that, you don't know these people. If only it were so simple. These people hunt you down and seek you out. And if you're not around, they cause you trouble with other people behind your back. It's in their genetic and psychological makeup to do this.
Unfortunately, in the case of Susan, singing "A Morning After" backwards does not make her implode and force her to get sucked back into the depths of Hell through flaming cracks in the earth as it does in Southpark.
"light the for looking on keep Let's
sunshine the find to chance a have We
night the to on hold can we If
after morning a be to got There's
I'd appreciate hearing from other people who may have been affected by either or both of these two. It would be nice to know that I wasn't the ONLY one that they picked on. I know that sounds weird to say, but...I think you know what I mean.
Dealing with these people - Jeff, Susan...everybody involved...has been extremely difficult, humiliating, embarrassing, and horrifically scary - not to mention physically, mentally, and emotionally painful and draining.