The Dark Plague of Psychotic Delusion

It can happen anywhere. And it does. A parent's deepest, darkest nightmare, a child abducted. There one moment, vibrant, alive, beloved and cherished, an entire lifetime ahead when anything might be possible. Gone, the next; as though a dark cloud descended and removed that warmly precocious, adventure-seeking, emotionally needy child from all that life exposed the child to, up to that dangerous and final moment.

How deeply aware can parents remain of the frailty of existence of their children, anxious to secure their safety yet needing to trust the environment, social and natural, in which they are raised? Who might suspect that lurking in the shadows of a perfectly ordinary day is a menace that no one could quite foresee, one that would change life in the most utterly cruel way, the separation of parent and child, an eternity of anguish and pain.

Situations reveal themselves. There are areas of the world where children are taken and held for ransom, eventually restored to their families. There are other places where children are taken from their families and introduced to a squalid and dangerous interlude of conflict or slavery, and occasionally rescue occurs, occasionally not; these forgotten children of an unprotected social order.

Then there are the predators, society's psychopaths who have always preyed on children. The predators have always been there, whether in the local church wearing the vestments of a religious order, or whether wearing the familiar face of a neighbour. And then there are those, social misfits, sociopaths who find no place for themselves in the stream of civility and the social contract of trust and empathy.

There are also those vulnerable children whose parents have somehow failed the elemental trials of parenthood, who themselves succumb to alcohol, promiscuity and drugs, whose children become self-reliant and in their innocence also become targets. The young woman, Terri-Lynne McClintic was likely one of those who raised herself, becoming a target for a partnership in horror with a man whose lack of empathy for others could not be contained.

This young woman, in her association with a psychopath became one herself. She became an enabler, spiriting a young child from the comfort of familiarity to dark horror as a hostage of a hostile, murderously hateful child molester. The utter degradation of these personalities inflicting pain and unimaginable fear in a child simply can not be understood by normal human intelligence.