How I cope with people behaving badly: for one thing I study them

I came back from the library with several books on True Crime one of which by M. William Phelps is I think outstanding. This book called "Kill For Me" is about a frightening guy who doesn't want to do the job himself for fear of going back to jail, persuades another, a young woman, to do his killing for him. This turns out to be a particularly heinous murder of a woman who has charged him with assault and rape. He wants her killed so she can't testify against him, and succeeds in getting the charge dropped temporarily while the detectives try to figure out his connection to her murder. When they interview the woman who did it whom he has subsequently married she is such a novice and so young to become a killer that they are suspicious right away that she knows something about the murder. You think now her life is ruined as well as his because of what she has agreed to do. When she thinks of backing out, she is too frightened of him and too much under his domination and influence not to do the murder he has ordered her to do.
The story is also of the victim's determination to have him charged for kidnapping her, beating her up and raping her repeatedly even though she becomes more and more fearful that he will kill her before she can testify. Her dilemma shows us why it is so hard to go through the system to get justice.
Another woman he also held captive files charges also. During her time with him he choked her to unconsciousness three times and allowed her to survive. So he must have decided that he had better kill the one who might send him to jail for the longest sentence.
I was thinking that both women were lucky to survive the attacks, and Sandee did not survive to testify against him in court.
When you get guys like this running around, you have the worst possible out of control men you can imagine for women to contend with.
So I read and study True Crime because I am a woman who has survived a number of threats to kill, assaults, torture sessions and so on and am still living in a place not entirely safe at times when a violent person surfaces with threatening behavior.
My last neighbor who appeared to be doing hard drugs whenever he could afford them left in his wake one dead woman he persuaded to do cocaine with him, only in her fifties, and I am sure a number of other women scarred by some frightening encounters with him as he was a predator, able to persuade quite a few women to allow him into their lives. He took their money, talked them into doing drugs with him if he could, and certainly inflicted some bad psychological damage on all of them.
I knew he was bad news when I heard him snarl at a woman knocking on his door, "Get away from my door, you fucking cunt, and don't ever bother me again." After he had spent some time a few days before courting her. He turned on me after he had gotten extremely paranoid I supposed from taking too many drugs and just could not stand having me as a neighbor, so he filed an incident report a copy of which he left on my door, saying I had been taking far too much interest in his affairs. He called me 'a nosy old bitch' in the report. When I read this I knocked on his door and asked him who told him I was taking an interest in his affairs as I had up to that point not discussed him with anyone. He said, "Nobody has to tell me. I just figured it out!"
Later management pointed out to me that he had filed this report suggesting I must have done something to deserve it. I thought all I really had to be was a woman to bring out the beast in him sooner or later.
I was on the defensive the rest of the time he was here, trying to keep from being a target of his sometimes insane paranoia, and I have cultivated the habit of hardly letting anyone in my apartment, let alone someone I do not know very well. Just from that habit I was safer than a lot of the younger women in the complex who were more trusting.
So it is very easy for a woman to run into a guy she comes to think might be capable of her murder. I was thinking before that guy moved when they were trying to evict him that I would not be surprised if he ended up involved in a homicide. He would not have been charged for the woman's death whose health obviously could not sustain a weekend of doing cocaine which is what I heard happened just before her death. I saw him enter women's apartments so I knew he was having some success as a Lothario as he started off soft spoken, and well mannered, and quite good looking. I was glad that my days of being tempted by such younger men were over. In his case, that kept me safer. Only being in his forties, he did not see me as a possible conquest in my late seventies. But had I lived alone in a house and he found it out, I think he would have tried more.
I see this guy as being on the road to extreme violence perpetuated against women and not too much I could think of to stop him except filing incident reports and trying to get him evicted. He was beyond reach psychologically, I thought, even though I had quite a few conversations with him to see if there was anything I could say that might have an effect on him. It sounded like he was ready to take almost any kind of drug he could buy or persuade someone to give him. He would go into great detail about all the physical things he had wrong with him, but never once admitted to illegal drug use and what effect that might have on his stability. He told me he was from one state and he told others a different state, so he was not telling the truth about hardly anything. He was embellishing, elaborating, and just plain embroidering the facts I am sure.
He seemed aware that his ex wife who had had two kids by him was probably scared to death of him, and had surely notified just about everybody she could that when he was living in town, he was a high risk to her safety. One of the last things he told me was "I know where she lives. I could do anything I wanted to her." Implying he must not be so dangerous after all. He said he could not see their children without a therapist present and he could not afford the price of the therapist. So he said he had not seen them since he had moved to town over a year ago. I figured his record of behavior had to be pretty bad for this kind of result.
Just by bad luck, I happen to draw him as a next door neighbor, right across the hall from me, which I thought soon put me into jeopardy up until the time he moved. I saw him back in here a few weeks later and was surprised I felt frightened just seeing his face. I said what is he doing back here?
I found out that because he was not evicted he was allowed back on the property but just to visit someone after which he was supposed to leave, I suppose because of all the complaints filed on him. But when I think of all the innocent people out there whose paths he will cross, I knew they were now in a lot more danger than I was.
Which is why I continue to study True Crime to see if I can learn more about how we women can protect ourselves from such men even if we can't cure them!