Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2018 1:20:23 GMT
Most likely he didn't kill people in Bakersfield. And most likely he would have known Bakersfield as some generic well-known place so he didn't have to be connected to there in any way.
But if we think VR and EAR are the same and that VR killed Snelling, then we know that the EAR had killed at least once. So if he says that he has killed, that part must be deductively true based on those premises. So if this was a red herring, it had some truth to it too. He wants to alert his victims to the fact that he is able to kill. "Some people" as opposed to "a person" is vague enough and the exaggeration would serve the purpose of painting him as a killer of multiple people, which sounds more convincing and frightening than saying "that one guy" (which would paint him almost as some sort of a desperate loser).
But the Bakersfield-part. Saying that he killed in Bakersfield when he in fact killed (at least) in Visalia. The proximity of Bakersfield to Visalia makes it more compelling to think that Bakersfield was not just a generic reference although it very well could have been.
I'm just entertaining a thought. To make it clear: I think the mention of Bakersfield was one red herring among the many others. But is there a logic to a lie that could give hints at truth?
If we accept that he killed in Visalia and that he said he had killed in Bakersfield, then (assuming he wasn't really an experienced killer yet at this point) it seems like he might have used Bakersfield as a substitute for Visalia. Of course someone who has killed could still make up lies and stories about killing without having his actual kills in mind. But we don't know how his mind works so it's open to speculation.
If he substituted Visalia with Bakersfield, what could that tell us if anything? Obviously he wanted to lie about the location. Obviously Bakersfield was generic enough. Let's assume he came from South-West, which would mean that Bakersfield and Visalia were both in the same direction for him. They would have the shared attribute of being in the same direction to North-East. He would associate them as "similar" in that regard. Same goes of course for the opposite constellation; if coming from North-East, both were South-West, and so on... But if he wanted to substitute Visalia with something "not similar", and still chose a location (Bakersfield) relatively close to it - that would suggest he still saw a clear difference between them, separating the two. I'm just thinking about the possible element of diametrical substitution at play in his chosen specifics for a lie.
By virtue of what would Visalia and Bakersfield exclude each other so much so that he would choose a relatively approximate substitute for Visalia, when he could have chosen some more remote and still generic enough location just as well? Maybe there is nothing to it. It was just Bakersfield on a whim.
Still I'm interested in this. Two places with relatively little distance to each other. He could associate them with each other if they were in the same direction from where he came. But he didn't want to associate them with each other, because Bakersfield was meant to mislead. Would he choose as his preferred deceptive substitute something he in any way associated as "similar" to the thing substituted for, if the deception should gain it's efficiency due to the difference between? I don't know, obviously.
I'm just wondering what would clearly separate Visalia from Bakersfield in this sense. Of course they are two completely different places, but that's not the question. Back to the diametrical element: Visalia and Bakersfield, despite their relative proximity to each other, would have a status of difference, even that of polar opposition, if he was located in the middle between those two. If he goes to kill in North-East from where he came from, then choosing a location that was in the exact opposite direction (i.e. South-West) would suffice for him to separate those two from each other, because they would be "opposed" to each other from the position of middle. This all would depend on his mental associations, of course. And also has to do the question I often think about: how big was his world? If he came from a little town in the middle between Bakersfield and Visalia, in all his cleverness he could still have that kind of a perspective in regard to the geographic scale, so as to naturally think that the diametrical relationship between Bakersfield and Visalia would suffice to separate them from each other clearly, despite their relative proximity to each other.
This is only a speculative thought and perhaps a convoluted one, too.