Talk:Jeff Duffy/@comment-36744766-20190112153948/@comment-3452092-20190112155410

Pierce. Not that I condone anything Duffy did, obviously, but Pierce's pure hatred of the son he loved at least in concept previously outweighed his care for anything else including the safety of anyone else and in a way he was the one who created the circumstances that lead to Margaret being the kind of person who would have Alanis murdered which lead to the life Duffy grew up with and he is the one that essentially built a criminal empire, at least a mini localized one. It doesn't forgive what he did, but Duffy tried to rationalize that if he had been brought up by the father who did originally want him, he wouldn't have had the miserable early childhood he had (nothing said his later childhood was bad and it appears that it was likely good, but at that point he was already in a bad place and apparently the news about his biological parents tipped the balance and messed him up beyond easy repair, since I do think if the right person or people had noticed what was going on this whole thing could have been stopped long before it started). We know nothing about Pierce prior to this book but for the most part he is essentially portrayed as someone who had everything handed to him and was taught that everything belonged to him, so when things got tough, he resorted to making sure everything stayed his legal or not and when he knew his wife had killed the woman he'd fallen in love with he cared more about his own freedom than justice for Alanis. Yes, both men were essentially very selfish, caring most for themselves (though I think at least a little of Duffy's motivation was for his mother, just not most of it), but the stories behind that make me choose Piece as the worse of the two.