Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic PsychologyHealy, William
Science
Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic Psychology
Healy, William
Criminal psychology; Swindlers and swindling
In evidence of the character of this man and his wife we have
seen several statements from reliable people. The man's son by
his first wife came to this country and lived with them. He
found his own father impossible--a terribly bad man who was
continually fighting at home. He himself urged his step-mother
to break up the home on account of the way in which she was
abused. He made a statement of this fact under oath. (It is
only fair to say in this whole connection that these people all
came from a part of Europe where what we call a common-law
marriage is an ordinary relationship.) It was from the language
of her father that Libby first gained acquaintance with bad sex
ideas, we are assured by the mother. After a terrific time of
stress Libby's mother was rescued from her miserable conditions
by the man who later lived with her and finally married her, and
who has supported her and been true to her ever since. He is a
sympathetic man of good reputation.
Libby's maternal grandparents died early and her mother had to
begin very young to support herself. All that we know of the
mother's developmental history is that she had some sort of
illness with convulsions once as a child and is said to have been
laid away for dead. She has brothers and sisters who are said to
be quite normal. She knows her own relatives and her first
husband's, also, and feels very sure there has been no case of
insanity, feeblemindedness, or epilepsy among them.
Libby's moral history is of great import. She became definitely
delinquent very early in life. At 13 years she had already been
in an institution for delinquent girls in an eastern State and
the superintendent writes that she was notorious for
disobedience, lying, and stealing. She was placed there twice,
besides having been returned once after an escape. When she was
6 or 7 years of age she began thieving. She took things from her
mother's trunk and pawned them. The child stole from the
people's rooms where her mother worked as janitress. Later she
was truant and associated with immoral girls. In Chicago she
stole a bracelet and a ring from a down-town store, wearing the
bracelet later. She took $15 from a neighbor's house. She went
to saloons in company with an immoral woman, and at least on one
occasion she had been drinking. At 12 or 13 she was known to be
``crazy about boys,'' but probably was not immoral then. The
mother insists that the girl, resembling her father in this, is
most changeable in disposition. Long before the trial for murder
her pastor had urged the mother to put the girl away in an
institution, but the mother's heart was too soft. (It seems
strange that all this evidence of the girl's own bad character
and unreliability, which was readily obtained by us, was not
utilized at the time when she first made the charges of murder.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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