I remember thinking that a lot of mysterious deaths like eleven-month-old Tailor Grethen’s were signed out as sudden infant death syndrome or SIDS when maybe they shouldn’t be. I remember wondering how he really died as I imagined little angelic-looking Carrie doing something undetectable to her precious baby brother. Wedging his head between the mattress and the side of the crib. Positioning him in a way that ensured he couldn’t breathe. Smothering him. To quote Benton quoting Gilbert O’Sullivan:

Alone again, naturally.

Carrie would remain an only child in a blighted universe all by herself. Homeschooled, she had no classmates, friends or ordinary activities. She didn’t go to the movies, take music lessons, play sports or read for pleasure. The only television programs she was allowed to watch were fundamentalist religious ones about Jesus and judgment, about who’s saved and who isn’t. The Jim and Tammy Show. The 700 Club. Jerry Falwell. She listened to TV preachers threaten eternal damnation and other hellfire scares, and by the time she was six, Carrie knew all about sin.

Her mother made sure of it. Benton believes she not only didn’t stop her daughter from being sexually abused, it was the mother’s idea. She egged it on, enticing a host of men with her pretty child as a party favor. Carrie was lagniappe, a little something extra that her mother freely offered and would severely punish her for afterward. Carrie was forced to beg for forgiveness, to forsake her evil ways and perform degrading acts of penance after every battery and rape.

Her superior mental discipline and ability to dissociate have made her a supremely successful psychopath, possibly the most successful one he’s ever encountered, says Benton, who has studied and pursued her much of his career. She can transport herself mentally, detaching herself so completely that she doesn’t feel stress or pain, and she knows how to wait. Carrie will delay gratification for decades if the reward is worth it, and lying and truth are different sides of the same reality to her. She could say the world is flat, the moon made of cheese, and she’d pass a polygraph.

Emotions such as fear, remorse and sorrow are colors missing from her palette, and it was Lucy’s bad luck that this perfect storm of a malicious human being would be her supervisor at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility. My innocent and immature niece literally was assigned to Carrie during the college internship I personally arranged, using my influence and connections. Lucy wasn’t much more than a child at the time.