Who knows? Maybe not hunt her down but one can envision a desperate predator, encircled, irrational and doing harm to someone who is about to be a witness against him or about to act as news reporter exposing those hidden secrets. If given the opportunity, this predator, I can imagine, could take out Lindsay if she were close to him in this moment of desperation. He made the threat and so had processed the idea in his mind. The next is whether or not he would make a substantial step toward taking her out with him or not. I don't know. Anybody is capable of anything when provoked sufficiently in my book.Kishkumen wrote: ↑Fri Oct 16, 2020 7:39 amYes, that news from Lindsay was extremely disturbing, but, unfortunately, not all that surprising. We have to imagine that he was extremely desperate as his life unravelled before his eyes. All of these years he secretly abused kids and took such great pains to hide it while maintaining a respectable façade. Now his life as he had known it was ending. For him it was a kind of death, and he was furious with the world and himself as he desperately looked for a way out. As painful as it would have been, facing up to his crimes was the better way to deal with it, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in his shoes. There must have been such great self-loathing. So much pain and guilt.
I doubt he would have gone to the trouble of hunting down Lindsay to harm her. His threat, however, is entirely consistent with other incidents that occurred when Tom was frightened and angry. One of his former Signature Books associates reported that in the past he had accosted her and verbally abused her in a wild and disturbing way when he felt she had been hired into a position that was, according to his view, rightfully his. The man that would do that would certainly threaten Lindsay in a desperate moment. I don't see, however, him actually following through on the threat. We should recall that his acts of physical aggression were carefully planned to maintain secrecy. He did not threaten them openly or talk about them openly. Therefore, an open threat of this kind is not the sort of thing he would likely have actually followed through on.
That said, yes, he was a predator to the end. Bullying of this kind is just another form of predation. It comes from the same place of sickness and fear. We cannot separate Tom the bully from Tom the sexual predator. It may be that Tom had a hole in him that freaked the ____ out of him and that he desperately needed to fill by making himself feel powerful anyway he could without regard for the health and safety of others. Tom died a predator. It is extremely sad. May his victims and family find healing.
Anyway, this is a sad story any way one looks at it. It brings up horrible thoughts about the Kimballs I knew growing up and I wonder if they might have been victims too. It brings up horrible thoughts about my distant cousin and the claims his wife made about her bishop father and the nasty deeds he committed against his daughters and how he got away with it because he had apostle and 70's friends in the ward where he was bishop. It brings up horrible thoughts of how the old Deseret Gym in Salt Lake City was a den of child predators and how some friends fell victim to these evil men and how the church brushed it under the rug. This has to change. I know child predation is all over society but I wonder if it is more prevalent in Utah and among Mormons due to the authoritarian, over-obsessed with sex culture that is there? I heard that child pornography is a big problem in Utah. Does anyone here know of the statistics on this? Is it more of a problem in Utah than in other areas of the country, world? I wonder how polygamy plays into this and the custom of marrying teenage brides a la Lorenzo Snow and Warren Jeffs? When one views women and children as chattel, without rights, anything is possible.