Investigating Psychopaths

Since psychopaths are pathological liars and their every interaction with others is self-serving and strategic, even seasoned investigators and forensic psychologists have great difficulty dealing with them. Basically, they’re always faced with the liar’s paradox yet still need to get useful and true information from them. Katherine Ramsland (from trutv.com) wrote an excellent article about [...]

Natalee Holloway’s Mom Visits Joran van der Sloot in Prison: Psychopaths and Pathological Lying

On Wednesday Beth Twitty, the mother of Natalee Holloway, entered a maximum security prison in Peru to confront her daughter’s suspected killer, Joran van der Sloot, face to face. He refused to speak to her, so there was no interview. But even if there had been, Twitty wouldn’t have gotten closer to the truth regarding her daughter’s murder. For psychopaths, the concept of truth doesn’t exist, just as the notion of love doesn’t exist either. For such pathological individuals, truth is only a means to an end: whatever gets them whatever they want at the moment or helps them continue to play malicious cat and mouse games with others. Joran van der Sloot has been playing such sadistic games with the police and with Natalee’s mother for years. Any opportunity to speak to him would be an occasion to continue the deception. In his groundbreaking work on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, Hervey Cleckley states that the most significant symptoms of psychopathy are “untruthfulness and insincerity.” Psychopaths are pathological liars. They not only lie profusely to others, but also their whole identity is an elaborate ruse.

What is a Psychopath? The Case of Joran van der Sloot

There has been some debate in the media recently about whether or not Joran van der Sloot–the young man suspected of killing Nataee Holloway in 2005 and charged with the murder of Stephany Tatiana Flores Ramirez five years later–is a serial killer, similar to Ted Bundy. What is becoming obviously clear, however, is that he is a textbook case psychopath.