“You don’t see how guilt helps anyone, but it has been the question for years now, all through your trial and your many fruitless appeals. Are you capable? They ask. Are you physically capable of feeling empathy?”

The prison system, the media, and society at large are preoccupied with whether Ansel is a psychopath. The label functions as an easy way to explain his crimes and condemn him to death. Kukafka posits that reducing a man like Ansel to a label is unwise because it obfuscates the underlying factors that influenced his decisions while denying the reality that all humans are capable of both wonderful and awful things.

“‘This is yours now,’ Lavender said. ‘It will always keep you safe’.”

Lavender gifts Ansel her mother’s locket with the promise that it will keep him safe. Her subsequent, accidental revocation of the gift symbolizes the way Ansel’s chance at a safe and happy childhood was taken from him. As an adult, Ansel seeks out this lost sense of safety by murdering women.

“In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.”

Men like Johnny and Ansel make choices that turn them into monsters in the eyes of the public. Here, Lavender laments the preventability of their actions—they, like all people, had the option to be kind and gentle, and they chose violence instead.