Original subtitles

[man] The thing inside of me is like the appetite.

It's like a wolf that's feeling the hunger.

[officer] Right.

[officer] Okay.

[Dr. Nameeta Sahni] He's living a parasitic life.

He's an adult who can't seem to hold down a job,

he's been in trouble with the law, on and off,

he's continuing to drink,

despite it being terms of his supervision,

and these markers are all indicators of psychopathy.

[Dr. Chriscelyn Tussey] You can hear the fear

in Christopher Thompson's mother's voice.

She's scared,

and she's worried about what's going to happen,

and it seems like it's based off of prior behavior

that's been problematic and worrisome in the past.

[officer] Mmm-hmm.

[reporter] Des Moines police were called

after a coworker of 50-year-old Paula Thompson

noticed she hadn't been at work lately.

They found that there was a door ajar,

and they entered into the home to check on her,

and unfortunately, found her deceased inside the home.

[reporter] For hours, detectives were on a search

for her son, 32-year-old Christopher Thompson,

and finally found him three hours later,

when he turned himself in to the Polk County Jail.

[sniffles]

[sighs wearily]

[Dr. Jonathan DeRight] He doesn't have any emotion in his voice.

He says "I killed her" the same way

that someone might say

where they had dinner last night.

His specific type of lack of empathy

really has more of a juvenile type quality.

He almost seems like

he has the problem solving skills

of a three-year-old, but obviously,

the aggressive skills of an adult,

and that could be a bad combination.

[sighs]

Many of us are able to regulate our emotions

like a dimmer switch.

We know when to turn things up,

we know when to turn them down,

and it's situation by situation.

Thompson shows us

that he really functions like a light switch.

He's either on, or he's off,

and when he's on, he's volatile.

When he's drinking and he's on,

he's not only volatile, he's violent.

He almost sounds surprised, when reliving it,

that it happened that fast,

but he also then goes on to say

he hit her a few more times,

and that's where we see, with individuals like Thompson

that have these psychopathic tendencies,

there's that inability to regulate

their emotions and their rage,

and it just came stumbling out.

[exhales]

[Tussey] Victim blaming is

a common characteristic in psychopathic behavior.

Mr. Thompson is exhibiting a failure

to accept responsibility.

He's saying, "Well, she was negative."

"She kept telling me I wasn't living life well."

And so, essentially, it's her fault

that he acted the way that he did,

and, ultimately, killed her.

[DeRight] You can see how he had

this narcissistic injury.

When someone is very narcissistic,

which is almost always

what you'll see in psychopaths,

they have a very fragile ego.

It's inflated, almost like a balloon that's been inflated

just about at its capacity, and if anything

is going to disrupt that ego, it's going to burst.

[DeRight] What he's talking about was

kind of a white-hot rage,

where he was just fully unhinged,

not trying to control his behaviors anymore.

He seems to remember it pretty well,

so I don't think he blacked out.

He may be trying to get across the point

where he's not planning to do this,

he didn't try to do it, he was just reacting.

He's trying to take away some of the potential blame.

Ultimately, the decision to move his mother's body

really seems like it was

more about a convenience for him,

that it was just offensive and messy.

[DeRight] You have to think about, at that point,

five days with a dead body that you're living near,

it's going to start smelling,

and he was sitting there playing video games.

He was kind of living this fantasy life,

where no one was bothering him.

[Sahni] His decision to go about his daily routine,

playing video games, continuing to drink,

continuing to watch television,

as if life is normal,

could be both his own way

of processing and coping with what he had just done,

that he just distances himself from it psychologically.

It may also be a very clear indication

of the shallow affect

and the lack of empathy and remorse

that this very psychopathic individual experiences.

[Detective] Yeah.

Someone who has a conscience and a heavy heart

is probably not the same person

who, after admitting to a murder,

drives to Walmart,

and goes and eats popcorn chicken

in their car.

[Sahni] Thompson's actually utilizing

the same passive approach to his life

that he always has.

He doesn't make any decisions,

he lets the world come to him,

and he lets life happen to him.

He didn't turn himself in right after he killed her.

He turned himself in after his mother's friend

discovered that she was missing,

and he started to realize

people would start coming around to the house.

[Tussey] There are multiple instances

of Mr. Thompson's problematic behavior,

starting with early teens,

so for instance, he's staying with a friend.

When they ask him to wash the dishes,

he gets upset, and ultimately ends up

trying to run over them with a vehicle,

and in another instance,

he is staying with a different family friend,

and this family friend asked him to leave,

and he threatens them with a knife.

[Sahni] Thompson is really showing us an individual

who can't deal with his emotions.

He doesn't know how to deal with disappointment,

with rejection, with rage.

He also has a very low threshold

for when those emotions kick in.

If he's asked to do anything

he doesn't want to do, like a spoiled child,

he tantrums.

[Detective] Mmm-hmm.

[Sahni] Individuals who exhibit

extreme levels of antisociality,

as well as psychopathy,

do sometimes have a pattern of harming animals.

Sometimes they harm animals

because they're more vulnerable.

They are easy to coerce, and to control.

He just doesn't seem connected to the value for life.

[Sahni] Thompson acknowledges that he had

some difficulty sleeping, knowing that his dead mother

was in the other room, but for days,

he continued going about his daily routine.

He left the house,

he went to the liquor store and got more alcohol,

as if he hadn't just killed his mother.

We have to wonder,

if a friend had not noticed that she was missing,

how long would Thompson have continued

living in the home with his decomposing mother?

Ultimately, he's confessed. It's over.

Now he doesn't even have to worry about

the real cleanup of her body.

He can just move on to an incarceration,

where he won't have to take care of himself yet again.

He doesn't have to take care of the mess

that he created at the house,

and he can go on to the next stage of his life,

basically allowing someone else to care for him.