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CAYMAN ISLANDS – One night in 1969, Jamaican serial killer and sociopath Keith Clarke shot and killed my neighbour Julius Walenta in Mannings Hill, now called Smokey Vale. I was ten years old at the time and heard every shot that Clarke fired from his .32 revolver. My father tried to call Walenta but the telephone or landline was dead, the wire having been cut. Next morning, a profusion of police personnel and cars on the outside road, confirmed the worst.
Later, the wife of Walenta said that the shooter helped her put the fatally wounded husband in their car to go to hospital, claiming it was a case of mistaken identity. Three houses on an isolated hilltop, two owned by men with Polish sounding names, the other, a Catholic seminary. The real target had been my father.
An extensive terror campaign directed by whom?
For some time, my parents and their six children slept in one room at night with an armed guard outside, driven by fear and a lucky escape.
A miss is as good as a mile.
A Sociopath
When confronted by a sociopath, it is useful to recognize their distinguishing characteristics, being a deep disregard for rules, a lack of empathy and a lack of guilt or remorse in their daily life of immoral, even criminal acts. Keith Clarke had been involved in murders, shootings, robberies and a rape before being killed by a prison guard nearly a year later, trying to escape.
That particular deviant would not terrorize Jamaicans again, but many more exist.
Regrettably, the Caribbean continues to be beset by sociopaths or wolves in sheep skins, tigers in goat skins and snakes in mongoose skins.
Many more sociopaths walk among us as family, friends, acquaintances, spouses, partners, couples, officials, government employees, even leaders. Regrettably, they are not outed for many reasons, including an exceptional skill to hide their true identity, sometimes for many years, or create an impenetrable illusion, false at every turn.
Everyone knows the type but hardly speak of it.
Among my relatives are a mother and son team of serial thieves.
Helpfully, they give off many signs that are often ignored because of their societal, emotional, romantic or political power that are nonetheless recognizable. Always right when wrong, surrounded by a coterie of truth deniers, given to many statements of little value other than to pursue a false narrative and the creation of a cult atmosphere where even those who should know better, look back at viewers from the television or other media with a puzzled, almost drugged demeanour.
Slowly the curtain of lies will be drawn and the sunlight of truth will enter, but it is for the onlookers to come to their own realization. Walk to honesty and reality, but away from being led down the garden path.
Truth and acknowledgement can set you free.
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