persephone jugson is a sociopath in a corset (porcelainic) wrote in find_the_crack, @ 2009-11-17 00:22:00 |
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Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the “truth” of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments. So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?- page 15
“When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.”- page 233
Persephone Jugson. Eighteen years old. A fresh-faced kid, only just graduated from high school in June. And here it was August, she’d been married less than twenty-four hours to a man twice her age that her parents had set her up with, and she was already a widow. It was tragic no matter how you looked at it, but it was Detective Sturgis Podmore’s job to look beyond the tragic. He was absolutely convinced that the kid was behind her husband’s death, but there was no proof, nothing but his own gut screaming at him that the girl was as guilty as sin. He just couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about her, the way she sat in the room, her eyes red and puffy from crying, her shoulders slumped. She looked broken up over her husband’s death. In fact, she played the role of distressed widow to the letter. None of it sat right with him. It was all too perfect, too neat and tidy. Podmore would bet his badge and gun right then and there that the girl was a murderess. He looked over his notes one last time before going in to interview her – it was an interview, not an interrogation, just supposed to get her story as a tragic bystander. The couple had come down for breakfast in the B&B’s dining room, then gone back to their room. The staff downstairs heard a crash, a woman’s scream, a gunshot. They all rushed upstairs to find a man standing in front of the windows. He had shot the husband. Wife on the floor beside the husband, trying to stop the bleeding. Before anyone could do anything, the man was gone. Maid went to call 911. Husband died in his new wife’s arms. Nothing at all implicated the young widow sitting in the next room. But Podmore could not shake his gut instinct that there was something off here. He was going to prove that she had murdered – or at least conspired to murder – her husband, even if it cost him his career. The interview was a disaster: the widow Jugson let nothing slip. There was absolutely nothing that could be used to hold her or to charge her. She went free. Podmore kept dogging after her and her family, until they got a restraining order on him. He was bumped down to being a traffic cop and it was implied by more than a few of his superiors that he was letting his prejudices against the girl’s rich family and against the age difference between the girl and her deceased husband get in the way of his objectivity. Podmore began doubting himself, wondering if it really had been his own prejudices at work. And then one day, two years later, the girl suffered a complete psychotic and mental break, killing one of her high school friends in the process. She confessed to her husband’s murder, implicating not just herself for the conspiracy, but also her older brother for the actual murder. Podmore was reinstated as a detective. Sociopath was the official diagnosis. She had spent months learning how to behave as a grieving widow, going so far as to keep it up in public for all those years after the murder. It turned out that she had taught herself to convincingly cry on cue as a child, to get out of trouble or to get things she wanted. She was the best actress that the bureau had ever seen, but Podmore’s years of experience in arresting murderers had managed to see beyond the act, see the emptiness in her eyes, the nearly-imperceptible stiffening of her shoulders under an unexpected line of questioning, even when he didn’t realize at the time what it was he was seeing. |