Thomas Richards
TRAVIS LANGLEY
“Tax fraud—but it wasn’t my fault!”
—Thomas Richards1
In the barber shop at the prison where the survivors have taken shelter, someone beheads Hershel Greene’s youngest daughters, Susie and Rachel. While Hershel, Rick, and others accuse some of the few remaining inmates, a different inmate—Thomas Richards, the self-proclaimed white-collar criminal who seems nerdy and oh so nice, beyond suspicion after having ingratiated himself by helping the women while they move into the otherwise vacant prison—finds Andrea in the laundry room and attempts to behead her. Andrea fights back. He chases her into the prison yard. There Rick beats him so hard and for so long that he mangles both the killer’s face and his own hand. The incident scars Andrea’s face, breaks Rick’s hand beyond repair, and inspires a dictatorial attitude in Rick as he decides that they have to hang Richards. When one misguided survivor, Patricia, tries to free Richards, believing him to be “crazy, not evil,” he attacks her too, and so the dead twins’ older sister, Maggie, guns him down.2
Was Patricia right to assume he must be “crazy,” needing help instead of a hanging? Some crimes are so monstrous that the average person assumes that their perpetrators must be mentally ill because no rational person could do such a thing. Many people wonder how any jury could have looked at Jeffrey Dahmer—who’d murdered, dismembered, and sometimes eaten 17 young men and older boys—and found him sane. Dahmer knew what he was doing, though. However bizarre his ideas, choices, and actions might have been at times, he knew he was killing people and knew it was wrong.3
Insanity is a legal term, not a psychiatric diagnosis, and its definition can vary from state to state and nation to nation, depending on how the relevant legal standards are worded. The most common standard, the “right/wrong test,” deems a defendant insane only if, as a result of a mental disease or defect, the person either didn’t know what he or she was doing or didn’t know it was wrong.4 When Thomas Richards attacks Andrea, he is not trying to fight off some creature he has hallucinated; he knowingly tries to decapitate a living woman.
Richards appears to be a serial killer, although not even his fellow inmates know the real reason for his incarceration. Had he been arrested as a serial killer, they’d have heard. A police officer’s description at the start of The Walking Dead: Season One video game indicates that he has been convicted for murdering and dismembering his own wife. Although Richard seems accustomed to his role as beheader of young women, killing the youngest girls first suggests that after months of confinement, he is starting out small. He may be experimenting with decapitation to test the way the world now works, because an intact brain means even a detached head can reanimate.
Tempting as it may be to throw together a profile of a typical serial beheader or any other serial killer, no one follows a rule book when becoming a monster. There is no standard.5 Compared with other murderers, expressive beheaders are more likely to kill relatives or engage in cannibalism or necrophilia, although the majority do not. Compared with terrorists and executioners, whose violence is more instrumental (with extrinsic motivation, aimed serving an ulterior purpose), serial beheaders’ violence is more expressive, intrinsically motivated: They kill for the way it makes them feel.
Thomas Richards meets every criterion for evil’s dark tetrad: psychopathic in both personality and actions, dangerously self-centered, deceitfully manipulative, and sadistically cruel. Yes, sadistic. He leaves decapitated girls to reanimate just as Woodbury’s Governor, the man who cuts off the hand that Rick ruined punching Richards, does with his own victims. Furthermore, if Richards simply wants to kill Andrea, he could slit her throat before she knows what’s happening instead of flashing his knife and announcing what he plans to do. He toys with her until she escapes, and then his temper takes control. Insanity does not explain his actions because he is not insane. When he decides and prepares to kill, he realizes what he’s doing. Subsequently losing control and recklessly running into the prison yard while shouting and wielding a knife does not change that.
References
Davidson, R. (2011, January 18). Supervillains and the insanity defense. Law and the Multiverse: http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/01/18/supervillains-and-the-insanity-defense/.
Nichols, D. S. (2006). Tell me a story: MMPI responses and personal biography in the case of a serial killer. Journal of Personality Assessment, 86, 242–262.
Ramsland, K. (2006). Inside the minds of serial killers: Why they kill. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Notes
1. Issue 13 (2004).
2. Issues 13–18 (2004–2005).
3. Nichols (2006).
4. Davidson (2011).
5. Ramsland (2006).