Image Credit: Global Okanagan

PENTICTON - David Wesley Bobbitt is a clinical psychopath who showed uncommon violent behaviour even as a child, a forensic psychiatrist said today.

Penticton knows Bobbitt best for his most recent, perhaps his most heinous crime when he took a young mother and her child captive for hours inside Dave's Second Hand Store on Ellis Avenue. But his sentencing and dangerous offender hearing in Penticton Supreme Court shows his violent past started at home when he was 12. At 13, he pulled a knife in school. He beat up girls a grade younger, threatened teachers, and drew satanic images in his books. He was asked to leave home at age 15 and dropped out of school at the same time.

He was tested in prison by Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe, a clinical forensic psychiatrist, who told the court today he scored Bobbitt at 89 per cent on a psychopathy test—a score of 62 per cent is considered a high score by some testing models.

In interviews, Bobbitt played the victim. It's hard to tell what's true or a lie, but Bobbitt told Lohrasbe he suffered from abuse as a child and adult, and was a good person who always helped others in the community. Lohrasbe called it a “grandiose self-evaluation.”

“People who know me will laugh at the idea that I’m violent,” Bobbitt told him.

"That's the story he'd like us to believe," Lohrasbe said.

Bobbitt gave his own account of the 2011 crime, which Lohrasbe called “ludicrous" blaming of the victim with “no emotion to the truth.” It is common for psychopaths to avoid blame and place it elsewhere, he said, but usually it's more general like 'society' rather than specific people.

But Bobbitt contradicted himself, as he has done in the past, and bragged of his “enormous wealth," Lohrasbe said—another lie.

He said Bobbitt manufactures stories and can’t keep track of them, also common pathological liars and psychopaths.

Throughout his past, Bobbitt had homicidal tendencies, such as threatening to kill others, individually and on a mass scale. Lohrasbe said homicidal thoughts are part of Bobbitt’s psychology, and he can’t make the distinction between the weight of his words and the factual truth. The inability to empathize with others is a psychopathic trait, he said.

Psychopaths are “simply unable to walk in the shoes of another human being,” Lohrasbe said. “Empathy can’t be taught or created.”

Lohrasbe will continue his testimony Thursday. His evidence will be taken into consideration by Justice Peter Rogers who will decide Bobbitt’s sentencing for the 2011 assault charges and whether he will be labelled a dangerous offender. A dangerous offender is considered to be an extreme threat to the public based on a longstanding history of violence.

Bobbitt pleaded guilty to seven charges including sexual assault, aggravated assault and confinement.

To contact the reporter for this story, email Meaghan Archer at marcher@infotelnews.ca or call 250-488-3065. To contact the editor, Marshall Jones, email mjones@infotelnews.ca or call 250-718-2724.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014