[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.