Alison Summers

“You are dealing with a psychopath,” the psychiatrist said.

I had told her the history. I had shown her the e-mails, explained about the sabotage of jobs, the destruction of property, and the relentless harassment by a man I had briefly dated.

It was the same conclusion my therapist had reached, but I wanted a second opinion. By then he had been stalking me for about three years.

I attempted a joke. “You mean like a serial killer?”

“Most psychopaths don’t murder people. They destroy people’s lives in other ways.”

“What should I do? How do you deal with a psychopath?”

“First, it is essential you have no further contact with him. You can see from these e-mails that he feeds off your upset. Your appeals to his conscience have been useless. A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience.”

“Second, you should join a support group.”

Stalking is a game played by two people. Predator and prey. The psychiatrist’s advice—sever all contact and join a support group—was helpful, but she couldn’t tell me how to exit the game. Nobody could. The best outcome anyone could predict was that the stalker would get bored one day and move on to somebody else.

I didn’t want to wait around, putting my life on hold, constantly wondering what his next move would be. At my local bookstore, I picked up a book of New York Times interviews with Ted Bundy. And that’s where I started my education. In fact I became a bit of a Bundy authority. Yes, me and Ted. Who would have predicted?

Ted Bundy turned out to be an excellent place to start. He loved to talk about himself. Talk and talk. He was engaging, intelligent, and friendly. I could imagine myself accepting a lift from him after a book party. That was what was most unnerving—he seemed normal. No, worse—he seemed nice.

I had always thought I had good instincts about people. But the ex-boyfriend who ended up stalking me had flown under my radar. So my challenge was this: if I could teach myself to identify a chameleon like Bundy, I could feel safe in the world again. So I read books. I took extensive notes. I started to get a clearer picture.

As the shrink had recommended, I joined a support group. A door opened to a different world. I glimpsed the vast army of casualties psychopaths create. In my group, the ex-partners of psychopaths were almost all women. Eight out of ten psychopaths are male, and most of them are heterosexual. In other words, most psychopaths date and marry females.

All the group members told similar stories to mine. “We’ve been stalked by the same psychopath,” we’d joke. We hadn’t of course; it was just the same personality disorder. "Manipulation. Domination. Control." According to criminal profiler John Douglas, this is what motivates all psychopaths, whether they are serial killers, con artists, date rapists, stalkers or domestic abusers.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me that people like this existed?” was a common refrain in the group. “Why wasn’t I told?” Members argued that if they had known about psychopaths, they would have protected themselves better.

In this book you will find out how to identify a psychopath and thus deny him the opportunity to harm you in the future. You’ll learn how to recognize a psychopath by his personality traits and patterns of behavior, so you can walk away. And what if you’re wrong? If a man shows even a few symptoms of psychopathy, you don’t want him in your life.