Beat and Set Fire to Ex-Wife

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Man beat and set fire to ex-wife to avoid paying child support.

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David Morgan appears in court to await his sentencing. (KOMO Photo)

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April 13th 2016

SEATTLE — David Morgan has been sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison.

Prosecutors say he beat Brenda Welch and set her on fire in 2014 so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support or part of his pension.

Brenda, who was severely beaten, doused in gasoline, and set on fire, says she has no memory of the attack. Twenty percent of her body was burned and her face was unrecognizable after the attack. She also suffered a skull fracture and a broken nose and has lost her sense of smell and taste.

Is David Morgan a psychopath? Without a thorough evaluation using Dr. Robert Hare’s PCL-R Psychopathy Checklist, the most comprehensive tool for testing a subject’s level of psychopathy, we cannot claim that the label is scientifically accurate. What we can do, however, is compare an individual’s behaviors to the list of characteristic psychopathic traits established by the American Psychiatric Association. In this case, there can be no doubt that David Morgan has displayed extreme selfishness, a sense of entitlement, cunning and callously cruel behavior, risk taking, domination of another, violence, and lack of empathy and remorse.  Some will still insist that without professional psychiatry credentials or ‘proof’ of a subject’s psychopathy in the form of results from a PCL-R test officially approved by medical authorities, you are not qualified to ‘diagnose’ and you have no right to label anyone. OK. Let’s appease such critics even if we disagree, and instead of risking misuse of the terms sociopath or psychopath, we’ll simply call David Morgan sociopathic or psychopathic.

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