Dr. Tristin Engels

Any small red flag gets reframed as a misunderstanding or some kind of like quirk or someone else's problem.

Social workers did this.

Neighbors did this.

Even the tenants did this.

There's also the halo effect.

When a person appears warm or helpful in one domain, we assume goodness and generalize that to all other domains.

Dorothea presented herself as altruistic, so people extended that trait to everything she did.

Put all those biases together and you get a psychological blind spot big enough for someone like her to operate in plain sight undetected for as long as she did.

And when a predator looks nothing like our mental image of a predator, we're less likely to notice warning signs, even when they're right in front of us.

I think this moment marks a major escalation for Dorothea.

It's the first time that she's enlisted someone in a way that couldn't be concealed or reframed.

There was no handyman unknowingly hauling a sealed box.

There's no, like, ambiguous odd job.

This was explicit.

Chief saw exactly what she was doing.

And because Dorothea's worldview was entirely transactional, both Betty and Chief had reached the end of their usefulness to her.

So at that point, they aren't human beings to her anymore.

They were liabilities.

Anyone who could question her, expose her, or simply knew too much became a threat to her survival and her control.

And threats were meant to be eliminated.