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Late last week my hometown was rocked by two seemingly unrelated events.

One was the sad discovery of the skeletal remains of missing University of Virginia student, Hannah Graham, on a rural property approximately 10 miles from where she was last seen. The other, which occurred a few days before the grisly discovery, were comments made in an interview by famous author/resident John Grisham, where he criticized “harsh” sentences for those who view child porn. (Grisham has since apologized.)

Apparently the comments came after Grisham shared that a good friend he knew from law school was sentenced to jail after he was caught downloading indecent images of underaged girls.

While on the surface, the two things seem to have nothing in common, there is one similarity: a disbelief by some that the people we think we know can do heinous things.

As soon there was an arrest in the Hannah Graham case—weeks before her remains were found—there was a bunch of media coverage featuring remarks made by family, friends, and acquaintances of suspect Jesse Matthew.

The most often-repeated ones were, “There was no way he could have done it!” or “He appeared to be such a gentle giant!”

As someone who has lived in the area for 13 years, I thought the same thing when the news first broke. While I did not know him well, I often saw him on Charlottesville’s downtown mall. His large build, distinctive hair and tendency to wear shiny athletic shorts made him a stand out.

He always seemed to be a nice guy.

At the very least there was nothing about him that screamed out he could possibly be a suspected serial rapist and killer. (As I write this, Matthew has just been charged with the 2005 attempted rape of a Northern Virginia woman and is being looked at as a possible suspect in the murder of two other college women including Morgan Harrington who also went missing in Charlottesville in 2009 and whose remains were later found on a rural property five miles from where Graham’s were discovered.)

I have no way of knowing if Matthew is guilty or not, but it does seem that he may have had a side to him that few were aware of.

Likewise, when John Grisham mentioned his “good buddy” and implied that he may have accidentally downloaded child porn images which he claimed were “16 year olds made to look 30” , he left out the part that the man “also sent some 13 images to an undercover police officer in Canada, resulting in a conviction for “sending and receiving” child pornography”. It is possible Grisham didn’t know.

The truth is, many of us have certain images that come to mind when we think of a rapist, a murderer, or someone who would exchange sexual images of young children with others.

Usually, they look nothing like the people we know much less our friends.

Thanks to popular culture, we often think of people who commit such acts as being pure evil or looking different from most “normal” people. For instance, I always think of the infamous Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. While I was quite young at the time when the movie came out, I remember criticism from gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights groups that claimed the movie was offensive to transgender people.

While the filmmakers denied any such intention, there was no denying that a character like him was creepy and that if most people encountered such a person in real life, they would probably walk in the opposite direction. Likewise, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series scared the hell out of me. His human skin mask alone was the stuff of nightmares.

Ironically, the man who inspired both of the characters, Wisconsin farmer Ed Gein, was about as ordinary-appearing as they come. In fact, those who knew him recalled him as being shy in school and a target of bullying. As an adult, he held down steady jobs and was pretty much unremarkable in every way except for his penchant for murdering women and making things out of their bones and skin.

It’s interesting to note that even after he was confided to a mental hospital where he would live for the rest of his life, those who worked there remarked that overall he was polite and didn’t cause any trouble.

While Gein is an extreme example the fact remains that many people who do bad things aren’t monsters 24/7 nor do they really differ that much from the rest of us. Indeed, one of the many problems I have with the word “monster” is that it suggests someone who is extraordinary in some way when the fact is most people-even those who do awful things-are complex. Few people are ever bad or evil all the time. Even Hitler was known for his love of his German Shepard.

With that said, the fact that so many of us have these stereotypes even if we don’t admit to them means that we can often ignore the signs that something may be off or even if there are no signs, it explains why there is often a reluctance to even consider the fact that someone we know may be capable of evil.

Lest anyone think I am saying we have to be hyper-vigilant about everyone we meet or view everyone as a potential pedophile, rapist, or murder, I am not. I believe that there are more good people in the world than there are bad. However, the idea that we can ever really know someone well enough to know that they can never engage in bad acts is not very realistic either. As a criminal defense friend of mine once shared, it isn’t uncommon for people convicted of terrible crimes to say, “I never knew I was capable of this before it happened.”

When it comes to preventing tragedies like the Graham case or protecting our kids from people who want to exploit them, one thing to keep in mind is that evil usually doesn’t come in a scary-looking package.

More often than not, the people who do bad things are surprisingly similar to us. In some cases, they may even be us. Only when we acknowledge this can the world truly be safer.

 

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Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: Pensiero at Flickr