22 ms·

Worst Roommate Ever

408 points by wallflower 9y ago

hprotagonist 9y ago
This sounds eerily close to David Peritz's shenanigans in california: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/berkeley-sarah-lawrence-professor-house-rental-saga/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/berkeley-sarah-... edit: but way crazier. Good grief.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I didn't realize the simple matter of not having an address on checks was such a red flag.
  - mnw21cam 9y ago
    I have never seen an address on a cheque. Sounds like a really bad idea to me (privacy etc). Since when was that a thing, and what banks should I be avoiding?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      In the US, printed checks don't need to be issued by banks and it's pretty much up to the person you're giving the check to whether they think it's an acceptable check or not. But, yes, to the degree checks are still used, the norm is to have an address printed on them. At least historically, a lot of stores wouldn't accept so-called blank checks without any personalization (understanding that's not quite the same thing as not having an address.)
      - mnw21cam 9y ago
        Holy cow! (about multiple things you just wrote).
        daxelrod 9y ago
        It's even worse. In the US, mechanically speaking, you only really need an account number and routing number to pull money from someone else's account. (Legally, you also need their permission.) These two numbers are printed on the check. In fact, some merchants will accept a check at point of sale, and then use those numbers to initiate an ACH electronic transfer, then void the check instead of cashing it. Checks really are nothing more than IOU notes for the writer's bank to honor.
        ghaff 9y ago
        Checks almost certainly fall into the category of US systems that we'd never design today but which work well enough for most people most of the time that there seems to be no great urgency to roll out a better replacement system. Obviously options exist even today but "writing a check" is still the norm for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.
        mnw21cam 9y ago
        Holy cow! About yet more things. I think the last time I bought anything at a shop with a cheque was 1997. I think almost all shops around here (UK) stopped accepting them a long time ago.
        ghaff 9y ago
        It's pretty uncommon in the US to pay at a store with a check. I certainly haven't done it in years and it's probably been a long time since I've seen anyone else do it. Larger retail chains tend to use some sort of electronic check verification system but they don't make it easy to pay by check (if they allow it at all) and it's pretty rare these days. However, it's still the norm to pay service people who come to your house or individuals who you owe money to for something by handwritten check.
        stevenwoo 9y ago
        I still see people in grocery stores paying by check and I live in Silicon Valley. It's usually older people.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Barring a real-time clearance system (as I believe most stores still accepting checks tend to use), a check is just basically an IOU with a promise that there's enough money in your banking account to cover it. Especially in a rental situation, I'm not sure that the lack of an address is a huge red flag--after all, the person is probably between addresses. But a complete blank check without even a name on it? Yeah, that's a red flag given that, even if you've just opened up a new account, today you can get personalized checks within a few days if not on the spot.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > But a complete blank check without even a name on it? Yeah, that's a red flag At the very least, it’s a reminder to check ID and run a background check.
ghthor 9y ago
The resentment of Cain leads to him murdering Abel. Very sad story here =(
0x7f800000 9y ago
One of the most important tools we have for social encounters like interviewing a stranger as a potential new roommate is our "gut" reaction, which is our hard-won evolutionary instincts warning us of potential danger -- warning that something is off about the person or their situation. Trust your gut.
- mtgex 9y ago
  I completely disagree. I think our "gut" is infinitely biased. No one is immune. If you believe you do not have racial, ethnic, and gender biases you are wrong. And, if you read the article, everyone's gut reaction was that this man was an unassuming, down to earth, great guy, and they got along with him very well at first. The article makes clear that their gut reaction failed them.
  - devin 9y ago
    Not so fast. The comment by a student saying that he scared them is also mentioned in the article.
    - gwern 9y ago
      The student is leaving it on a rating website and so likely was taking his course, which is much more than first impressions.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    On the other hand, gut reactions to sociopaths and psychopaths are a thing. Too often though people take your view of it, and try to rationalize that feeling away. I’d rather trust my gut and ignore the pretty mediocre studies about unconscious bias that seem hard to replicate, thanks.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Yes in this instance false negatives are very bad. It's better to reject ten perfectly acceptable roommates than to accept one crazy ax-murderer roommate.
lr4444lr 9y ago
Just the thought of being forced out of my house, or even having it invaded confrontationally by someone like this who is relentless and antagonistic, immediately gives me the gut reaction that if I take a baseball bat at night, catch him while he's sleeping, and beat him badly enough to the point where I can safely call the cops and claim I just defended myself after he tried to drag me into his room and I grabbed a bat, what's his recourse? I play a convincing victim of assault, and he's got what to counter it, a serial history of manipulation while recuperating in the hospital? I might even call the cops a few times leading up to the big night with fake domestic violence complaints just to butter it up even better in preparation for it. I can't be the only one who thinks along these lines.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Well, if that ever happens in your future, I'm sure your comment will be used as evidence against you in court :) I'm not a lawyer, but I'd definitely recommend you don't "take the law into your own hands." I've seen more than enough episodes of Forensic Files to know that very intelligent people can play back an attack and put it together no matter how counterintuitive it seems.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  If you’re committed to assault and battery with a risk of murder, you might as well just disappear him. Note that I recommend neither course or action for obvious moral and legal reasons.
- danielvf 9y ago
  The police are really, really not that stupid. And remember, this guy is a lawyer, who spent his fighting tenant battles, has stabbed people, and shortly after this, murdered someone. If you live, his words alone as a lawyer and a practiced manipulator would be win out over you. Much less the actual crime scene evidence. And you just might not live, since you were going into it without the idea that this could be a fight to death, and he could legaly kill you in self defense. No, what solves this kind of thing is the truth, relentless pieced together and recorded, gaining the ability to say no, while protecting yourself from harm.
- 9y ago
danielvf 9y ago
The author of ZeroMQ wrote a book on recognizing people like this, and more importantly how to get yourself out of prison they’ve put you in. The action plans have helped me. The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends. Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button. https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details
- nwatson 9y ago
  Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far. The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful. I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations. If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't. EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Horror-Monologue-By-Marlon-Brando-218225354 https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it. EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
  - castle-bravo 9y ago
    I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this matter, but here's how I see it: Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They lack certain abilities that enable them to integrate well into human groups and would not survive well in the paleolithic. With increasing population densities in the neolithic and in the modern age, it became possible for psychopaths to survive and pass on their genes. I think that psychopaths are still rare for a few reasons: the mutation may be recessive, or high population density is too recent for the mutation to have spread widely, or psychopaths may be more likely to die by violence, or they may invest too few resources in their children. In any case, I think increasing numbers of psychopaths would pose a long-term existental threat to human civilization. As far as productive uses for psychopaths go (if we can identify them before maturity), I have no suggestions; it is not wise to put guns into the hands of heartless people who would turn them on us if they perceived any advantage in doing so; one need only look at the example of Mexican cartels founded by special forces to see this.
bvod 9y ago
This article does not belong on HN.
- seizethecheese 9y ago
  Variants of this comment pop up a lot. HN is a democracy. By definition, if it makes it to the front page, it belongs there.
  - mark_edward 9y ago
    HN is an oligarchy, the mods have a lot of arbitrary and invisibly operating power, they're not elected, not subjected to popular control. I'm not necessarily complaining, it's what make the site what it is, but it's definitely not a democracy.
    - seizethecheese 9y ago
      The mods don't place things on the front page, but they can remove them. It's democracy with some control.
- wehere1 9y ago
  lmao your life must be so boring do you inject monads into your eyeballs so your fragile mind won't be subjected to non-programming content?
- 3131s 9y ago
  Actually it does revolve around a guy who essentially hacked the laws around tenancy through extreme cleverness, and social engineered his way through a very peculiar life. This story is really wild and it looks like you and many others didn't actually read it before commenting. It's one of the best longform pieces that I've read in a while.
  - bvod 9y ago
    Actually I read the whole thing - it was written really well. But it's far from extremely clever what he did. Anyone who's studied tenancy law for more than a few days could do the same. The only difference he had was being sociopathic enough to do so - a point which the article makes in the end when he turns out to be a murderer. Furthermore, none of the above are in any way related to engineering or hackernews, and it's completely off topic for this site.
artificial 9y ago
Meet Jeb, a roommate from hell originally posted on SomethingAwful.com ages ago: http://www.wyseguys.com/blag/shitty-roommate/meet-jed/ http://www.wyseguys.com/blag/shitty-roommate/meet-jed/
- SuperNinKenDo 9y ago
  Wait. Is this the same "Jeb"?
  - lagadu 9y ago
    No, he says the names are fake.
- Grangar 9y ago
  First thing I thought of when I read the title!
- M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
  Here's another classic, the Shay story: http://archive.is/K9s6G http://archive.is/K9s6G
simen 9y ago
It's crazy how people who were terrorized by this guy blame themselves for the fact that he turned out to be a murderer, and couldn't take the punishment. Must have been a master at gaslighting.
- itronitron 9y ago
  i think this is due to two human traits/biases, 1) seeing something wildly out of the norm leads to doubts about one's perceptual abilities immediately after the fact (in other words, did I just see that happen, I know I saw it, but that can't have been what just happened...) and unless you write down careful notes immediately you will doubt that it actually happened. 2) people want to be right because it makes them feel safer that the world they know is the world they live in, hence people will hold out hope that all the weirdness can be explained away (and sometimes it can).
- zdfjkhiuj 9y ago
  Most people aren't psychopaths. The man was crazy, but he was still a person and didn't deserve to die. You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
  - wils1245 9y ago
    There’s a big difference between empathy and guilt. That people feel guilty and responsible for what happened to the man is a legacy of his manipulation, and not something to be celebrated.
PascLeRasc 9y ago
I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this who really got on each others' nerves (all three of us just needed a semester of housing to finish school). They'd both brought their own toasters and just wanted theirs out and the others in a cabinet. I think they had less than 5 conversations in person, instead putting all their incredibly minor complaints in a group text so I'd have to see it. The bathroom just had two towel hangers and they both wanted to hang two towels and would put the other's on the floor even if it was just wet. One would go away for the weekend and try to calculate that they should pay 5% less in utilities for the month because of that. They'd buy something like paper towels and announce that we each owed them $1.50 for that. We had a mail slot and they'd pick up their mail off the floor when they got home and then step on everyone else's. My only solace is that these people must be incredibly unhappy all the time.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  That's nothing like what happened in the article.
- megablast 9y ago
  > I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this Did you even read the article?
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  I’ve never had problems like this. I had a policy with flat mates which was. If you put food in the fridge, expect me to eat it, if I put food in the fridge, I expect you to eat it, I’m not going to argue about fridge space or who bought what. It’s not worth the time and effort.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > or who bought what Why? Why aren't people entitled to the things they buy? It just rewards people with peculiar tastes or low budgets.
    - 9y ago
QML 9y ago
Maybe the United States does have a mental health issue — maybe we should pay attention more to how college-aged men and women mature.
dannylandau 9y ago
What an incredible riveting story! One of the best I've read in the NYT magazine.
- rweba 9y ago
  This is New York Magazine not the New York Times magazine (which I think still appears in print every Sunday).
whack 9y ago
The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren't on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out. As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.
- chrischen 9y ago
  SF has pretty lenient tenancy laws but even then, if someone stops paying rent, you can evict them.
  - zxcmx 9y ago
    Its a bit more complicated than that. If you are both leasing from the landlord you have equal rights and actually only the landlord can evict. If you are the master leaseholder and your roommate is subleasing then you have many of the obligations of a landlord.. which means you actually have a lot of regulations to comply with that will probably trip you up if your lessee is both malicious and litigous. Especially if the sublease was established without a contract. Usually you can get away with it bcause the kinds of people who just stop paying rent are deadbeats and won't challenge.
    - fizwhiz 9y ago
      Jian Yaaaaaaang
      - Double_a_92 9y ago
        I get the reference, but you can't joke on here! People here seem to be really serious professional guys.
js2 9y ago
Wow, he's like Michael Keaton's character in Pacific Heights, but worse.
mrunkel 9y ago
Huh, as I started reading I was thinking "I've had some pretty bad roommates, I wonder if this is worse." About a quarter of the way through I realized this is way worse. About three quarters of the way through I was filled with dread as I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well. Excellent writing..
- mlazos 9y ago
  I had the exact same experience. I was an inch away from not reading the end, then the stabbing happened, then the murder happened... then everyone was dead.. Insane. It escalated quickly.
  - Tokkemon 9y ago
    It's like Hamlet. A really slow burn through four acts, and all of the sudden it explodes like a powder keg on fire!
- nem000 9y ago
  That was also exactly what I thought and my experiences didn't even came close. Come to think about it I only had decent roommates after all..
subroutine 9y ago
Did anyone else read this paragraph wonder wtf really happened... "Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)" I looked into it... The Times Shreveport, Louisiana 31 Jan 1976 https://goo.gl/E7za2q https://goo.gl/E7za2q
- dannylandau 9y ago
  Great find! So, not exactly consistent with the NYT piece.
  - subroutine 9y ago
    Oddly not. Though, this Bachman guy was the direct cause of so much crazy stuff, I can hardly blame them for glossing over a proximal event (but wouldn't be surprised if he was somehow an instigator). If someone made a movie about this guy's life, I would watch. (also, just a trivial note, this is a NYMag piece, not NYT)
  - ejstronge 9y ago
    > Great find! So, not exactly consistent with the NYT piece. First, this is not a NYT article. What do you think is inconsistent? The article tries to highlight the idea that ‘beheading’ was said rhetorically.
benatkin 9y ago
Reminds me of this guy: http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-stiff-contractors/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-stiff-contractors...
LearnerHerzog 9y ago
I couldn't help but imagine an older version of Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley while reading the name throughout the story. https://i.imgur.com/qXUq2eX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qXUq2eX.jpg
- imjk 9y ago
  Except in the show, it's Bachman who's the landlord taken advantage of by a menacing tenant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZACkzuZeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZACkzuZeE
shdwban 9y ago
NYT has jumped the shark. The Trump shit hole comment was an "alleged" comment but they failed to use that quakifier. Something you have to expect from the top newspaper on earth. Edit: come out of hiding Mr downvoter and argue on facts. Downvoted only warm my heart because I know Trump haters don't have any valid points to argue on and just wait for cnn to tell them what to think ,and to not read wiki leaks because only they are allowed ;)
- sctb 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445421 and marked it off-topic. I'm sorry, but if you continue to post like this we'll ban the account.
- mischov 9y ago
  The source of the original article is New York Magazine, not the NYT.
  - shdwban 9y ago
    Wow, so you're assuming I'm a troll. And you're assuming that others are rational beings and downvoted me because I was off topic. My parent also mentioned NYT, wasn't downvoted. Being complete incorrect vs me being off topic (and definitely on topic in the immediate context) yet factual. Your assumptions are biased. Edit: and now rather than owning up to your mistake, you ninja-edited your comment. Just like NYT. Good.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - shdwban 9y ago
      My understanding is that -4 is the lowest a post can be downvoted. Both my posts have reached that point so further downvotes wouldn't be effective. I'm creating this dummy post #1 for other cnn watchers late to the party. Mods please let me know if this is against the rules and I will remove. Thanks.
youdontknowtho 9y ago
This is one of those extreme pieces that illustrate a libertarian trope about property rights. "Due to some crazy librul laws about renting apartments this psycho stabbed me and ate my cat..." Landlord laws are there to protect people from property owners that are often unfair and discriminatory. It is the VAST-99.999%-almost-always-few-exceptions-case that landlords are unfair to tenants rather than psycho's like this or other scenarios.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Also, usually the tenancy laws are much less strict when the landlord is sharing the dwelling with the tenant. There is pretty much zero chance that they wouldn't have been able to evict him quickly if they had good legal representation. This is more of an example of how the legal system is unfair to people without good legal representation than it is of how tenancy laws are unfair.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 9y ago
This is not LIFE. It made a motherfucking article in nymag.com. AKA it'll never be your boring life. AKA You get to choose the interesting bits of life and what you want to be in nymag.com mag if you want to try really hard. Otherwise skip the horror, tone it down a fuckload and live life in a good way. Most people won't fuck you over, don't become the cunt that thinks they will (With a little caution) else you'll just become the 'evil' person in the article and the subject of the next story as the cynical hate the world stip it of everything person.
EdgarVerona 9y ago
Imagine being his brother. Yikes. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to feel a sense of familial duty toward such a person. Those tenants were entrapped for sure, but I get the feeling none of them were as trapped as his brother was.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aje403 9y ago
I housed a guy temporarily who was eerily similar to this. Reading this article rings too many bells. Very good looking. Mysterious past, including pretending to have a law degree (he had taken a bunch of law classes and rambled as if he were an expert). He was being chased by the Columbians and the Jews with a truly absurd story behind it. Used encrypted phone apps. Stalking his ex girlfriend at an expensive nightclub once a week. I could go on. Things got a little old after awhile but we had quite a few fun adventures together and he wasn't (at least then) violent. I would be highly unsurprised if he eventually turns violent when he gets older and he questions his own delusions of grandeur. Moral of the story: be very careful of who you let into your home and personal life. It sounds easy until you find out the hard way for yourself. Trust your instinct if it's good, if not, always make sure close friends and family are aware of any strangers you're bringing into your life, even if they seem innocuous at first.
creep 9y ago
"... they handed him the Rubbermaid bins and Abigail. But Bachman was enraged when they declined to give back Zachary — they had sent him to live with a woman in the suburbs, and the judge had permitted her to keep him. " God, that hurt. I actually do feel sorry for this man.
- jsl1212 9y ago
  Did you miss the part where he took the cats of one of his former victims to a kill shelter?
dunham1 9y ago
I needed my score to come up! I didn’t have much on there but everything that’s there was negative to the point where I couldn’t even get approved for anything to get my numbers up. So my colleague at work told me of an expert that helps in fixing credit, she said he’s tested and trusted. It was so hard to believe at first because I’ve never heard of that. But she gave the assurance that I have nothing to worry about by telling me he provides proof before payment and how her scores increased from bad to excellent by him. Then, few days after making a down payment to the hacker for help...he got me the best results I could ever wish for. My credit score moved from 456 to 790. Spy Stealth is the best. Here’s is email address for those who’d like to work with him spystealth dot org at gmail dot com. You’ll be glad I did this.
dunham1 9y ago
THANK YOU SPY STEALTH! I was referred to Spy Stealth with the understanding he could assist me with my credit...I was trying to buy a home. So I gave him the job and he got my credit report smoothly with no trace. Go for the best hacker alive, his email address is spystealth dot org at g/m/a/i/l dot com.

408 points by wallflower 9y ago

This sounds eerily close to David Peritz's shenanigans in california: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/berkeley-sarah-lawrence-professor-house-rental-saga/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/berkeley-sarah-... edit: but way crazier. Good grief.

stevenwoo 9y ago
I didn't realize the simple matter of not having an address on checks was such a red flag.
- mnw21cam 9y ago
  I have never seen an address on a cheque. Sounds like a really bad idea to me (privacy etc). Since when was that a thing, and what banks should I be avoiding?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    In the US, printed checks don't need to be issued by banks and it's pretty much up to the person you're giving the check to whether they think it's an acceptable check or not. But, yes, to the degree checks are still used, the norm is to have an address printed on them. At least historically, a lot of stores wouldn't accept so-called blank checks without any personalization (understanding that's not quite the same thing as not having an address.)
    - mnw21cam 9y ago
      Holy cow! (about multiple things you just wrote).
      - daxelrod 9y ago
        It's even worse. In the US, mechanically speaking, you only really need an account number and routing number to pull money from someone else's account. (Legally, you also need their permission.) These two numbers are printed on the check. In fact, some merchants will accept a check at point of sale, and then use those numbers to initiate an ACH electronic transfer, then void the check instead of cashing it. Checks really are nothing more than IOU notes for the writer's bank to honor.
        ghaff 9y ago
        Checks almost certainly fall into the category of US systems that we'd never design today but which work well enough for most people most of the time that there seems to be no great urgency to roll out a better replacement system. Obviously options exist even today but "writing a check" is still the norm for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.
        mnw21cam 9y ago
        Holy cow! About yet more things. I think the last time I bought anything at a shop with a cheque was 1997. I think almost all shops around here (UK) stopped accepting them a long time ago.
        ghaff 9y ago
        It's pretty uncommon in the US to pay at a store with a check. I certainly haven't done it in years and it's probably been a long time since I've seen anyone else do it. Larger retail chains tend to use some sort of electronic check verification system but they don't make it easy to pay by check (if they allow it at all) and it's pretty rare these days. However, it's still the norm to pay service people who come to your house or individuals who you owe money to for something by handwritten check.
        stevenwoo 9y ago
        I still see people in grocery stores paying by check and I live in Silicon Valley. It's usually older people.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Barring a real-time clearance system (as I believe most stores still accepting checks tend to use), a check is just basically an IOU with a promise that there's enough money in your banking account to cover it. Especially in a rental situation, I'm not sure that the lack of an address is a huge red flag--after all, the person is probably between addresses. But a complete blank check without even a name on it? Yeah, that's a red flag given that, even if you've just opened up a new account, today you can get personalized checks within a few days if not on the spot.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > But a complete blank check without even a name on it? Yeah, that's a red flag At the very least, it’s a reminder to check ID and run a background check.

ghthor 9y ago

The resentment of Cain leads to him murdering Abel. Very sad story here =(

0x7f800000 9y ago

One of the most important tools we have for social encounters like interviewing a stranger as a potential new roommate is our "gut" reaction, which is our hard-won evolutionary instincts warning us of potential danger -- warning that something is off about the person or their situation. Trust your gut.

mtgex 9y ago
I completely disagree. I think our "gut" is infinitely biased. No one is immune. If you believe you do not have racial, ethnic, and gender biases you are wrong. And, if you read the article, everyone's gut reaction was that this man was an unassuming, down to earth, great guy, and they got along with him very well at first. The article makes clear that their gut reaction failed them.
- devin 9y ago
  Not so fast. The comment by a student saying that he scared them is also mentioned in the article.
  - gwern 9y ago
    The student is leaving it on a rating website and so likely was taking his course, which is much more than first impressions.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  On the other hand, gut reactions to sociopaths and psychopaths are a thing. Too often though people take your view of it, and try to rationalize that feeling away. I’d rather trust my gut and ignore the pretty mediocre studies about unconscious bias that seem hard to replicate, thanks.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yes in this instance false negatives are very bad. It's better to reject ten perfectly acceptable roommates than to accept one crazy ax-murderer roommate.

lr4444lr 9y ago

Just the thought of being forced out of my house, or even having it invaded confrontationally by someone like this who is relentless and antagonistic, immediately gives me the gut reaction that if I take a baseball bat at night, catch him while he's sleeping, and beat him badly enough to the point where I can safely call the cops and claim I just defended myself after he tried to drag me into his room and I grabbed a bat, what's his recourse? I play a convincing victim of assault, and he's got what to counter it, a serial history of manipulation while recuperating in the hospital? I might even call the cops a few times leading up to the big night with fake domestic violence complaints just to butter it up even better in preparation for it. I can't be the only one who thinks along these lines.

rocky1138 9y ago
Well, if that ever happens in your future, I'm sure your comment will be used as evidence against you in court :) I'm not a lawyer, but I'd definitely recommend you don't "take the law into your own hands." I've seen more than enough episodes of Forensic Files to know that very intelligent people can play back an attack and put it together no matter how counterintuitive it seems.
IntronExon 9y ago
If you’re committed to assault and battery with a risk of murder, you might as well just disappear him. Note that I recommend neither course or action for obvious moral and legal reasons.
danielvf 9y ago
The police are really, really not that stupid. And remember, this guy is a lawyer, who spent his fighting tenant battles, has stabbed people, and shortly after this, murdered someone. If you live, his words alone as a lawyer and a practiced manipulator would be win out over you. Much less the actual crime scene evidence. And you just might not live, since you were going into it without the idea that this could be a fight to death, and he could legaly kill you in self defense. No, what solves this kind of thing is the truth, relentless pieced together and recorded, gaining the ability to say no, while protecting yourself from harm.
9y ago

danielvf 9y ago

The author of ZeroMQ wrote a book on recognizing people like this, and more importantly how to get yourself out of prison they’ve put you in. The action plans have helped me. The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends. Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button. https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details

nwatson 9y ago
Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far. The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful. I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations. If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't. EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Horror-Monologue-By-Marlon-Brando-218225354 https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it. EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
- castle-bravo 9y ago
  I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this matter, but here's how I see it: Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They lack certain abilities that enable them to integrate well into human groups and would not survive well in the paleolithic. With increasing population densities in the neolithic and in the modern age, it became possible for psychopaths to survive and pass on their genes. I think that psychopaths are still rare for a few reasons: the mutation may be recessive, or high population density is too recent for the mutation to have spread widely, or psychopaths may be more likely to die by violence, or they may invest too few resources in their children. In any case, I think increasing numbers of psychopaths would pose a long-term existental threat to human civilization. As far as productive uses for psychopaths go (if we can identify them before maturity), I have no suggestions; it is not wise to put guns into the hands of heartless people who would turn them on us if they perceived any advantage in doing so; one need only look at the example of Mexican cartels founded by special forces to see this.

bvod 9y ago

This article does not belong on HN.

seizethecheese 9y ago
Variants of this comment pop up a lot. HN is a democracy. By definition, if it makes it to the front page, it belongs there.
- mark_edward 9y ago
  HN is an oligarchy, the mods have a lot of arbitrary and invisibly operating power, they're not elected, not subjected to popular control. I'm not necessarily complaining, it's what make the site what it is, but it's definitely not a democracy.
  - seizethecheese 9y ago
    The mods don't place things on the front page, but they can remove them. It's democracy with some control.
wehere1 9y ago
lmao your life must be so boring do you inject monads into your eyeballs so your fragile mind won't be subjected to non-programming content?
3131s 9y ago
Actually it does revolve around a guy who essentially hacked the laws around tenancy through extreme cleverness, and social engineered his way through a very peculiar life. This story is really wild and it looks like you and many others didn't actually read it before commenting. It's one of the best longform pieces that I've read in a while.
- bvod 9y ago
  Actually I read the whole thing - it was written really well. But it's far from extremely clever what he did. Anyone who's studied tenancy law for more than a few days could do the same. The only difference he had was being sociopathic enough to do so - a point which the article makes in the end when he turns out to be a murderer. Furthermore, none of the above are in any way related to engineering or hackernews, and it's completely off topic for this site.

artificial 9y ago

Meet Jeb, a roommate from hell originally posted on SomethingAwful.com ages ago: http://www.wyseguys.com/blag/shitty-roommate/meet-jed/ http://www.wyseguys.com/blag/shitty-roommate/meet-jed/

SuperNinKenDo 9y ago
Wait. Is this the same "Jeb"?
- lagadu 9y ago
  No, he says the names are fake.
Grangar 9y ago
First thing I thought of when I read the title!
M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
Here's another classic, the Shay story: http://archive.is/K9s6G http://archive.is/K9s6G

simen 9y ago

It's crazy how people who were terrorized by this guy blame themselves for the fact that he turned out to be a murderer, and couldn't take the punishment. Must have been a master at gaslighting.

itronitron 9y ago
i think this is due to two human traits/biases, 1) seeing something wildly out of the norm leads to doubts about one's perceptual abilities immediately after the fact (in other words, did I just see that happen, I know I saw it, but that can't have been what just happened...) and unless you write down careful notes immediately you will doubt that it actually happened. 2) people want to be right because it makes them feel safer that the world they know is the world they live in, hence people will hold out hope that all the weirdness can be explained away (and sometimes it can).
zdfjkhiuj 9y ago
Most people aren't psychopaths. The man was crazy, but he was still a person and didn't deserve to die. You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
- wils1245 9y ago
  There’s a big difference between empathy and guilt. That people feel guilty and responsible for what happened to the man is a legacy of his manipulation, and not something to be celebrated.

PascLeRasc 9y ago

I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this who really got on each others' nerves (all three of us just needed a semester of housing to finish school). They'd both brought their own toasters and just wanted theirs out and the others in a cabinet. I think they had less than 5 conversations in person, instead putting all their incredibly minor complaints in a group text so I'd have to see it. The bathroom just had two towel hangers and they both wanted to hang two towels and would put the other's on the floor even if it was just wet. One would go away for the weekend and try to calculate that they should pay 5% less in utilities for the month because of that. They'd buy something like paper towels and announce that we each owed them $1.50 for that. We had a mail slot and they'd pick up their mail off the floor when they got home and then step on everyone else's. My only solace is that these people must be incredibly unhappy all the time.

quickthrower2 9y ago
That's nothing like what happened in the article.
megablast 9y ago
> I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this Did you even read the article?
philliphaydon 9y ago
I’ve never had problems like this. I had a policy with flat mates which was. If you put food in the fridge, expect me to eat it, if I put food in the fridge, I expect you to eat it, I’m not going to argue about fridge space or who bought what. It’s not worth the time and effort.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > or who bought what Why? Why aren't people entitled to the things they buy? It just rewards people with peculiar tastes or low budgets.
  - 9y ago

QML 9y ago

Maybe the United States does have a mental health issue — maybe we should pay attention more to how college-aged men and women mature.

dannylandau 9y ago

What an incredible riveting story! One of the best I've read in the NYT magazine.

rweba 9y ago
This is New York Magazine not the New York Times magazine (which I think still appears in print every Sunday).

whack 9y ago

The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren't on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out. As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.

chrischen 9y ago
SF has pretty lenient tenancy laws but even then, if someone stops paying rent, you can evict them.
- zxcmx 9y ago
  Its a bit more complicated than that. If you are both leasing from the landlord you have equal rights and actually only the landlord can evict. If you are the master leaseholder and your roommate is subleasing then you have many of the obligations of a landlord.. which means you actually have a lot of regulations to comply with that will probably trip you up if your lessee is both malicious and litigous. Especially if the sublease was established without a contract. Usually you can get away with it bcause the kinds of people who just stop paying rent are deadbeats and won't challenge.
  - fizwhiz 9y ago
    Jian Yaaaaaaang
    - Double_a_92 9y ago
      I get the reference, but you can't joke on here! People here seem to be really serious professional guys.

js2 9y ago

Wow, he's like Michael Keaton's character in Pacific Heights, but worse.

mrunkel 9y ago

Huh, as I started reading I was thinking "I've had some pretty bad roommates, I wonder if this is worse." About a quarter of the way through I realized this is way worse. About three quarters of the way through I was filled with dread as I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well. Excellent writing..

mlazos 9y ago
I had the exact same experience. I was an inch away from not reading the end, then the stabbing happened, then the murder happened... then everyone was dead.. Insane. It escalated quickly.
- Tokkemon 9y ago
  It's like Hamlet. A really slow burn through four acts, and all of the sudden it explodes like a powder keg on fire!
nem000 9y ago
That was also exactly what I thought and my experiences didn't even came close. Come to think about it I only had decent roommates after all..

subroutine 9y ago

Did anyone else read this paragraph wonder wtf really happened... "Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)" I looked into it... The Times Shreveport, Louisiana 31 Jan 1976 https://goo.gl/E7za2q https://goo.gl/E7za2q

dannylandau 9y ago
Great find! So, not exactly consistent with the NYT piece.
- subroutine 9y ago
  Oddly not. Though, this Bachman guy was the direct cause of so much crazy stuff, I can hardly blame them for glossing over a proximal event (but wouldn't be surprised if he was somehow an instigator). If someone made a movie about this guy's life, I would watch. (also, just a trivial note, this is a NYMag piece, not NYT)
- ejstronge 9y ago
  > Great find! So, not exactly consistent with the NYT piece. First, this is not a NYT article. What do you think is inconsistent? The article tries to highlight the idea that ‘beheading’ was said rhetorically.

benatkin 9y ago

Reminds me of this guy: http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-stiff-contractors/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-stiff-contractors...

LearnerHerzog 9y ago

I couldn't help but imagine an older version of Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley while reading the name throughout the story. https://i.imgur.com/qXUq2eX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qXUq2eX.jpg

imjk 9y ago
Except in the show, it's Bachman who's the landlord taken advantage of by a menacing tenant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZACkzuZeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZACkzuZeE

shdwban 9y ago

NYT has jumped the shark. The Trump shit hole comment was an "alleged" comment but they failed to use that quakifier. Something you have to expect from the top newspaper on earth. Edit: come out of hiding Mr downvoter and argue on facts. Downvoted only warm my heart because I know Trump haters don't have any valid points to argue on and just wait for cnn to tell them what to think ,and to not read wiki leaks because only they are allowed ;)

sctb 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445421 and marked it off-topic. I'm sorry, but if you continue to post like this we'll ban the account.
mischov 9y ago
The source of the original article is New York Magazine, not the NYT.
- shdwban 9y ago
  Wow, so you're assuming I'm a troll. And you're assuming that others are rational beings and downvoted me because I was off topic. My parent also mentioned NYT, wasn't downvoted. Being complete incorrect vs me being off topic (and definitely on topic in the immediate context) yet factual. Your assumptions are biased. Edit: and now rather than owning up to your mistake, you ninja-edited your comment. Just like NYT. Good.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - shdwban 9y ago
    My understanding is that -4 is the lowest a post can be downvoted. Both my posts have reached that point so further downvotes wouldn't be effective. I'm creating this dummy post #1 for other cnn watchers late to the party. Mods please let me know if this is against the rules and I will remove. Thanks.

youdontknowtho 9y ago

This is one of those extreme pieces that illustrate a libertarian trope about property rights. "Due to some crazy librul laws about renting apartments this psycho stabbed me and ate my cat..." Landlord laws are there to protect people from property owners that are often unfair and discriminatory. It is the VAST-99.999%-almost-always-few-exceptions-case that landlords are unfair to tenants rather than psycho's like this or other scenarios.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
Also, usually the tenancy laws are much less strict when the landlord is sharing the dwelling with the tenant. There is pretty much zero chance that they wouldn't have been able to evict him quickly if they had good legal representation. This is more of an example of how the legal system is unfair to people without good legal representation than it is of how tenancy laws are unfair.
deleted 9y ago
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aaron695 9y ago

This is not LIFE. It made a motherfucking article in nymag.com. AKA it'll never be your boring life. AKA You get to choose the interesting bits of life and what you want to be in nymag.com mag if you want to try really hard. Otherwise skip the horror, tone it down a fuckload and live life in a good way. Most people won't fuck you over, don't become the cunt that thinks they will (With a little caution) else you'll just become the 'evil' person in the article and the subject of the next story as the cynical hate the world stip it of everything person.

EdgarVerona 9y ago

Imagine being his brother. Yikes. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to feel a sense of familial duty toward such a person. Those tenants were entrapped for sure, but I get the feeling none of them were as trapped as his brother was.

deleted 9y ago

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aje403 9y ago

I housed a guy temporarily who was eerily similar to this. Reading this article rings too many bells. Very good looking. Mysterious past, including pretending to have a law degree (he had taken a bunch of law classes and rambled as if he were an expert). He was being chased by the Columbians and the Jews with a truly absurd story behind it. Used encrypted phone apps. Stalking his ex girlfriend at an expensive nightclub once a week. I could go on. Things got a little old after awhile but we had quite a few fun adventures together and he wasn't (at least then) violent. I would be highly unsurprised if he eventually turns violent when he gets older and he questions his own delusions of grandeur. Moral of the story: be very careful of who you let into your home and personal life. It sounds easy until you find out the hard way for yourself. Trust your instinct if it's good, if not, always make sure close friends and family are aware of any strangers you're bringing into your life, even if they seem innocuous at first.

creep 9y ago

"... they handed him the Rubbermaid bins and Abigail. But Bachman was enraged when they declined to give back Zachary — they had sent him to live with a woman in the suburbs, and the judge had permitted her to keep him. " God, that hurt. I actually do feel sorry for this man.

jsl1212 9y ago
Did you miss the part where he took the cats of one of his former victims to a kill shelter?

dunham1 9y ago

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dunham1 9y ago

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