Hi, everybody!

Suppose we have gentleman A who desperately wants to kill his wife lady B. A is a professional man firmly ensconced in the upper middle class. Yet he has ruled out hiring an assassin. He doesn't want to run the risk of unwittingly conspiring with a person who might turn out to be an FBI agent undercover. He is determined to do the act himself.

Why? It could be anything, I suppose. Let us say that she is carrying on an affair; and while not to excuse her behavior, we might be looking at a case, here, where the motive for it is the husband's emotional unavailability due to excessive focus on his career. We might cite the film noir picture "Dial 'M' for Murder (Ray Milland and Grace Kelly) as well as "Secret Window."

While the Ray Milland/Grace Kelly movie was my favorite version, by far, I also enjoyed the remake with Michael Douglass and Gwennyth Paltrow "A Perfect Murder."

Even though he is determined to do the act himself, the act does not fit in with his self image. From his perspective the murder is a one-time means to solve a problem. He will commit murder but doesn't want to think of himself as a murderer. He does not want to live in the state of crime.

Suppose, through some kind of science fictional device, he could create an actual doppelganger of himself, who, at his direction , would commit the act of murdering his wife. Suppose that he had control over the doppelganger, could tuck him away somewhere, and if and when he needed to do so (when suspicion against himself became overwhelming) heroically hunt down and bring in the "real" killer a la The Fugitive.

Now, the doppelganger should not look exactly like the perpetrator because then when and if he is produced, people would only think that the two of them had been in collusion. The doppelganger should be the issue, if you will, of Gentleman A, but should not physically resemble him. Ideally the doppelganger should look as monstrous as is feasible (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

In this way the gentleman can have both the benefit of having his problem removed without being, himself, "guilty" of it, having plausible deniability, and if need be, being the "hero."

By the way, if anyone has ever watched the original Star Trek (Captain Kirk),l remember the episode in which Captain James T. Kirk had a transporter accident and his personality was split into its "good" half and "evil" half?

Since it is not possible to create actual doppelgangers, the sociopaths I alluded to previously try to come as close as possible to this ideal with the means available to them. That is the goal of the psychological contortions they go through in order to displace their guilt.

wingedcentaur