John F. Sendelbach

Saturday, May 30, 2026

Part 2: Dark Tetrad vs.High-Functioning Distress Tolerance & Post-Traumatic Growth

The Anti-Psychopath: A Clinical Comparison the Literature Isn't Equipped to Make

Dark Tetrad vs. Its Documented Inverse, Across Six Years of Parallel Behavioral Records

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

The clinical literature on personality pathology is well-developed in one direction.

It has precise, validated instruments for measuring what goes wrong with a human mind under social and institutional conditions. It has the Dark Tetrad. It has the PCL-R. It has decades of research on narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism — their signatures, their escalation patterns, their resistance to intervention, their effects on the people around them.

What the literature almost entirely lacks is language for the documented inverse: the person who absorbs six years of Dark Tetrad behavior directed at them and produces, instead of an equivalent explosion, a behavioral theory, a park design, a native plant nursery, and a 30,000-word public archive.

That gap is what this essay is about.

Part 1: The Mental Evaluation They Should Be Requesting — And Who Should Be in the Chair

A Sarcastic, Documented, Thoroughly Unsympathetic Analysis of Six Years of Projection in Western Massachusetts

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

I hear they want to give me a mental evaluation.

I want to go on record as fully supportive of this initiative. Mental health screenings are valuable. Early intervention saves lives. The therapeutic community of western Massachusetts deserves our respect and our business.

I would simply like to suggest, with the utmost professional courtesy, that they may have identified the wrong patient.

Allow me to make the case.

Exhibit A: The Affidavit That Accidentally Diagnosed Its Author

On March 3, 2023, Katherine Hennessey submitted a sworn affidavit to the Greenfield District Court. In it, she stated — under penalty of perjury, before a judge, as a formal legal document — that she believed I would "try to hurt or even kill me or members of my family."

She then added the dog!!!

The Women Who Broke the Bridge

Part I: The Bench and the Cosmic Joke

There is a polished granite bench on a hill in Buckland Cemetery overlooking the Deerfield River valley. I cut it myself. The Garfield Wright family — a local Jewish family — asked me to move large stones from their property and shape a permanent memorial for Susan after she died. They wanted it solid enough to last centuries, with space for a bronze plaque telling her story. I gave them exactly that.

The stone is dense, cool to the touch even in summer sun, with tight grain that takes a mirror polish. Run your hand across it and you feel the hours I spent — the rasp of the diamond pads, the wet slurry, the final buff that makes it shine like dark water. When I finished bolting it down that day, the church chimes across the valley started playing Amazing Grace. I stopped working, stood up straight, and just listened. The notes drifted over the river, through the maples, and landed right on that bench like some divine punchline. A Jewish family trusted me — a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape guy — with their dead. And here I was, thirty-five years into building things people actually use: benches, fountains, memorials, ironwork that holds up bridges and lives.

And down in the valley, a network of women had spent six straight years trying to erase me from existence.

Frankenstein Gates, Flower Bridges

The Bridge of Flowers — that 400-foot reinforced concrete arch masterpiece built in 1908 as a trolley bridge, lovingly transformed in 1929 by the Shelburne Falls Women’s Club into the world’s most romantic floating garden — just got a multimillion-dollar facelift. New concrete, fresh paint, the whole nine yards. And then they bolted on these fence posts. Behold, the monstrosity:

Stock parts. Random ad-lib inserts. Horizontals welded like a guy in oven mitts fighting a windstorm. That weird filler piece? Welded like a middle-school art project left out in the rain. You can hear the welder: “Eh, good enough for government work,” followed by three seconds of grinding and a shrug.
This isn’t craftsmanship. This is a monstrosity abomination atrocity horror travesty disgrace blunder catastrophe debacle mishap aberration deformity caricature pastiche Frankenstein eyesore blight blemish blotch scar intrusion excrescence carbuncle misfeature kludge hodgepodge patchwork design atrocity visual disaster stylistic trainwreck aesthetic failure ugly concrete urban tumor aesthetic dumpster fire monstrous cathedral bad taste temple ugliness discordance stylistic aberration unsightly disharmonious structure incongruity monumental misjudgment affront embarrassing mishmash incoherent mess pollution crime against architecture spectacle skyline glaring monument hideous all rolled into one poorly-welded black-painted disaster.
Let’s rewind for a second. The Shelburne Falls Historic District — listed on the National Register in 1988, spanning both Shelburne and Buckland — is a jewel of 19th-century New England mill village preservation. From indigenous salmon fishing grounds at the dramatic 40-foot drop, to the industrial boom powered by the river (hello, Lamson & Goodnow cutlery empire), to the glacial potholes, the Iron Bridge, and this very Bridge of Flowers. It’s all about adaptive reuse, architectural integrity, and respecting the character of the place.
The town even has Design Guidelines (1999 edition and all) that talk about preserving historic character, avoiding visual intrusions, and maintaining the aesthetic harmony that draws tourists from around the world. The Rt. 112 Scenic Byway documents celebrate this very stretch as a highlight.
And yet… this.
The Bridge of Flowers is supposed to be poetic. Romantic. A National Register star and scenic byway highlight. Instead, we get Frankenstein’s gate — mismatched stock parts and amateur welds slapped onto a beloved landmark like it was an afterthought from the clearance aisle.
For three-point-two million dollars I expected work that honored the district’s legacy, not something that screams “budget hardware store + Harbor Freight special.”
This is the same Bridge of Flowers Committee that just burned through $60,000 on a soil remediation fiasco — scraping, replacing, and replanting while pointedly ignoring the one local with the most hands-on experience designing and building successful features on that very bridge. Same committee. Same arrogance about its own competence. Documented now in both dirt and metal.
Whoever approved this should spend the summer standing next to it, smiling for tourist photos while visitors whisper, “…what the hell is that?”
I’ll keep documenting. Because if they’re going to treat one of Western Mass’s greatest treasures like a high-school shop class final exam, the least we can do is provide the blooper reel.
Stay classy, Shelburne Falls. Or at least pretend to when the historic preservation folks are watching.

Outing the Small-Town Theater of Rushing with COVID, Screaming Profanities, and Calling It "Child Safety"

There is a moment from June 6, 2020 that has stayed with me longer than most.

The confrontation on the Iron Bridge had wound down. The locked elbows, the following, the screaming — all of it had settled into the uneasy aftermath that follows public scenes in small towns. Katherine Hennessey was still there. In the conversation that followed she said something I have turned over in my mind many times since:

"I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."

I said: "I am here for the adults who are actually operating on this information."

What follows is a documented analysis of what "being there for the children" looked like in practice across six years of recorded, sworn, and witnessed events. All video and audio referenced in this piece exists. The transcripts are the record.


1. June 6, 2020: The Origin

The raw transcript of the June 6, 2020 video — the one Alouette Batteau posted to Facebook, which reached twenty-two thousand people and was covered by the Greenfield Recorder without an interview from me — is in the public record.

At timestamp 7:23, Katherine Hennessey states directly: "I'm here with signs like that to let the children, the brown children who live in this town... I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."

Those children were present on the bridge during this confrontation. They were present while adults screamed profanities. They were present while a group of people followed a man who was trying to walk away, locked elbows to block his path, and refused to let him pass.

The profanities were directed at me. "Fuck you, John Sendelbach" — at volume, on a public bridge, in the presence of those children, by the adults who had brought them there. The camera was rolling. The moral credential and the recorded conduct exist on the very same tape.

PETITION FOR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION

Shelburne Police Department and Municipal Officials — A Six-Year Documented Record of Selective Enforcement, Institutional Failure, Embedded Conflicts of Interest, and Escalating Harm to a Whistleblower

Initiated by: John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

To:

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell

Northwestern District Attorney's Office · First ADA Steven Gagne

Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST)

Shelburne Board of Selectmen · Buckland Board of Selectmen

Franklin County Sheriff's Department

Every fact stated in this petition is drawn from police reports, court dockets, federal court orders, DA investigations, sworn testimony, medical records, and documented video and audio evidence. All cited case numbers, report numbers, and docket numbers are on the public record. Nothing in this petition is a legal conclusion. All referenced legal findings are those of sitting judges in active proceedings.

This is not a complaint about a neighborhood dispute. It is a documented record of a municipal police department whose written policy of selective enforcement produced a predictable six-year chain of escalating harm — ignored warnings, a false criminal charge, a public beating, the destruction of evidence, and a continuing failure to self-correct even as federal courts and state investigators accumulated findings against its personnel. It is also a record of a Select Board that was warned, responded with silence, and then endorsed the department with public money. And it is, at this writing, a whistleblower safety statement from a citizen who has documented reasons to fear what comes next.