Daniel LaPlante Case Analysis | Did He Actually Hide in Walls or is this an Urban Legend?

hello this is dr grande today's question is can i analyze the case of daniel laplante just a reminder i'm not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about could be happening in a situation like this if you enjoy this video please like it subscribe to my channel and consider supporting me on patreon i'll put the link to patreon in the description for this video this is an interesting case but one that has a lot of misinformation surrounding a certain part of it namely the alleged stalking behavior of daniel laplante the original story appears to have been expanded into a number of fanciful narratives and it can be difficult to know what is true and what is false in reference to this case the plant has somehow become an urban legend i'm going to go through the timeline with the information that appears credible then i'll talk about the part of the story which is difficult or impossible to verify i'll start with a brief background i'll move to the timeline of the crimes then i'll offer my analysis daniel laplante was born on may 15 1970 he was raised by his mother and stepfather in townsend massachusetts he was bullied in school he had dyslexia there were also some concerns with mental health which i'll cover in the analysis a plant started committing crimes at an early age he manifested an unusual appearance his behavior was described as weird and creepy he allegedly tortured small animals and he did not seem to have a commitment to hygiene he was sent to a mental health professional at a young age due to these factors allegedly that professional mistreated the plant the plant would begin committing burglaries when he was a teenager in 1986 he burglarized a house with three occupants and held them hostage with a hatchet he was arrested now there's other information out there about him hiding in the walls and pretending to be a ghost and all this stuff the stories may be part of this urban legend i'll talk about that in my analysis as i mentioned before the plant's mother put up the ten thousand dollars in bail to have him released from a juvenile detention facility in october of 1987 he returned to living with his mother and stepfather he promptly returned to committing burglaries on october 14 he would steal two ruger 22 caliber handguns and a large quantity of cash from a house one of those handguns was discovered by his stepfather in la plant's laundry basket the stepfather confronted laplante who claimed he had obtained the gun a year earlier but plant's brother and a friend both saw the plant with hundreds of dollars in cash in his possession even though the plant was unemployed at the time moving to november 16 1987 the plant burglarizes the home of the gustavsson family in townsend massachusetts he would steal items like cable television boxes remote controls cordless phones and silver coins he put a phone and a cable box in his brother's tool cabinet and told the brother that he was trying to hide the items from his parents the brother noticed that la plant had silver coins and a plant requested that the brother help him obtain 22 caliber cartridges this brings us to december 1 1987. the plant again illegally makes entry into the home of the gustafson family he encounters a pregnant nursery school teacher named priscilla gustafsson after sexually assaulting her la plant used one of the 22 caliber pistols he had stolen before to shoot priscilla multiple times through a pillow he then murdered her two children ages seven and 5 by drowning them in separate bathrooms now moving to december 2 the next day a plant left his home in the evening after the police had arrived and asked to speak with him the next day he burglarized two different houses and stole a 32 caliber revolver he tried to get into a third house but was unsuccessful he made his way into another house and confronted a woman at gunpoint he forced her to drive him in her van to another town she escaped from the van and he continued driving the police found him in an industrial park dumpster they found the 32 caliber revolver in his underwear and a 32 caliber cartridge in his shoe a good deal of evidence connected la plant to the crimes including fibers found on his shirt that were matched to multiple items from the crime scene and the murder weapon was found in an abandoned vehicle on the property of the plant's residence he was eventually convicted in connection with the three murders and sentenced to three life sentences in prison he has ostensibly been an ideal inmate he earned a high school equivalency diploma tutored other inmates assumed leadership roles in prison groups and completed college-level courses at some point he also started worshiping satan this doesn't seem consistent with his other achievements i think this would probably reduce his chances of getting parole in 2017 the plant asked for a sentence reduction at a resentencing hearing he had been imprisoned for 30 years and he thought it was time to be released a mental health professional testified that the plant was not remorseful and had no emotions the judge did not reduce the sentence but la plant will be eligible for parole in 15 years from the time of that hearing under his original sentence now moving to my analysis so i'll first start with this narrative about the stalking behavior the part i talked about that could be an urban legend in the timeline i talked about how laplante was arrested for taking a family hostage with the hatchet here is the expanded version of that story keep in mind it is impossible to verify i couldn't find any truly credible news articles to support it just a bunch of different internet articles that appear to have a copy of a copy effect going on it could be true it could be false there's no way to know what the primary source was if there was ever a primary source like what was the original source that all these people seem to copy i can't find it anywhere so here's the story a plant committed a number of burglaries which we know is true but the story adds on this idea that he used to relocate items during the commission of a burglary leaving the homeowner to wonder if someone had actually been in the house kind of a creepy effect so i imagine that in the house he would take like glasses plants books different items that would be laying around and just kind of move them from one place to the other people would come home and wonder if they did that if somebody else in the house did that maybe the house was burglarized again kind of that creepy mysterious effect the story continues by saying that he obtained the phone number of one of the houses he burglarized which i suppose is believable enough because back in the late 1980s phone numbers were sometimes printed on a little piece of paper that was attached to the phone in the house the burglarized lived a father and his two daughters ages 15 and eight a plant was interested in having a relationship with the 15 year old he called the house using the phone number that he had obtained he convinced the 15 year old that a mutual friend gave him the phone number they started talking and she agreed to go out with him so just like that a stranger calls and she's fine going out with him they went out on a date but la plant seemed obsessed with talking about the girl's mother who had recently died of cancer so he had this morbid fascination with the mother the girl decided not to go out with him again then as if this wasn't hard enough to believe already the story grabs another gear the plant breaks into the home and lives in the walls and a crawl space he drills small peepholes in the walls so he can spy on the girls the noun people is curious it's rarely ever presented with a positive or even neutral connotation like you don't hear the phrase i was so glad to find those peepholes or does this wall also come with peepholes the plant made noises in the walls at night when the girls were in bed like banging on the walls and tapping sounds the girls started to believe that the sounds must be their dead mother like a ghost some versions of the story say that they had held a seance before the plant broke into the house and when the plants started doing that it kind of matched up with their expectation again very difficult to believe again thinking that their dead mother was a ghost wandering in the house they would ask the walls questions and laplante would respond with more noises arranged in a way to act as if he was answering on behalf of the mother like he responds by making a noise right after they ask a question so they might say tap one time for yes and two for no or something like that i don't know what he was supposed to be communicating i doubt it was something like morse code but just some type of acknowledgement to respond to what they were saying now the girls tell their father what's going on and he gets angry at them thinking they're just making all this stuff up he sends them to receive mental health counseling then we see the story says that there's a few incidents where the plant writes on the walls with ketchup of course trying to make it look like it was blood he starts moving items around in the house like he ostensibly did before some items are missing the father and the girls are out of the house at one point the father is frustrated with them still believing they are causing the noises and moving the items around he makes his way back into the house and discovers the plant standing in the girl's bedroom holding a hatchet in addition a plant is wearing makeup a wig and the dead mother's clothing a struggle ensued and somehow the police became involved they find the plant hiding in a crawl space he got there by going through a secret passageway behind a built-in cupboard which i guess was just conveniently there or maybe he somehow made it when he broke in like he broke through the wall the story fails to explain how if he really did this he managed to get a ten thousand dollar bond one would think that a judge would be pretty disturbed from a story with a teenager hiding in the walls of a house i mean that seems like a fairly major crime so magically i guess he gets a very soft judge who's like oh yeah i used to do that when i was a kid and just lets him go on ten thousand dollars bail the story also fails to address a lot of other issues but i'll talk about that in a moment i'll offer my thoughts on the verifiable part of the story and then i'll move to examining the urban legend part or whatever it is even without all the creepy stalking behavior this case is frightening enough it involves the murder of a pregnant woman and her two children as far as mental health factors it was reported that the plant had conduct disorder when he was young although it's not clear if he was actually diagnosed with that when he was young or if that was an assumption made later on sometimes in criminal cases that happens there'll be a defendant who clearly has anti-social personality disorder and the mental health profession will say well when he was under 18 he likely had conduct disorder so that doesn't mean he was necessarily diagnosed at the time now as an adult la plant was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder this is characterized by symptoms such as repeatedly breaking the law lying impulsivity being irresponsible and disregarding the safety of others all these symptoms seem consistent with the behavior that's described in the verifiable portion of the story it was also reported that la plant had something that was referred to as hyperactivity disorder i imagine they're referring to adhd attention deficit hyperactivity disorder again it's not clear if this was something he was diagnosed with at the time or something that they figured out later on this seems like a fairly straightforward case of somebody who manifested increasingly dangerous behavior until eventually he made his way to homicide his crimes were senseless and indicative of someone who should never be released back into society i understand he was under 18 at the time of the crimes and many people do not feel like someone under 18 should be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole in this case i think life in prison is probably simply necessary to keep the public safe any meaningful rehabilitation will have to occur behind bars now moving to the more fanciful narrative the plants unheard of stalking behavior living in someone's walls and crawl space for two months the components of the story seem just a little too perfect meaning they're arranged to make a compelling story he just happens to stalk a girl whose mother recently died she just happens to want to communicate with the mother like through a seance or something she and the sister are open to communicating with sounds in the walls i think a more natural reaction would be to scream and run out of the room then of course there's this whole idea that the plant is living in the house for two months i guess he could have snuck out and eaten their food and used their bathroom but there would still be a lot of down time i would think that it would get pretty boring just staying in the walls in the crawl space and i imagine sleeping in there would be fairly uncomfortable the plant doesn't strike me as having the patience to pull off this type of crime over a two-month period he was highly impulsive yeah we're supposed to believe he was willing to just hang out there for two months and make these different noises and terrorize the people while kind of laughing to himself essentially we're supposed to believe that he impersonated a ghost for all this time so maybe through doing this he developed an appreciation for how hard they work maybe he's like promoting this idea that they should be unionized it just doesn't make a lot of sense now whether the story is true or not or perhaps an exaggeration i think it does speak to the importance of properly researching a topic a few internet articles that are clearly copied from one place do not represent proof that something happened they just represent that people knew how to copy things something that's already fairly well established when ghosts or ghost-like behavior gets added to a story the story becomes more interesting for many people more compelling but ultimately the tragedy of this story is that it takes away attention from la plant's more serious crimes those are my thoughts on daniel laplante please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always i hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

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Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021