Anita Perkins

Anita Perkins is a forensic psychologist whose work after the Bradley attack places her between clinical inquiry and law enforcement. She is neither a police officer nor a detached observer: she interviews TifAni FaNelli about Arthur Finnerman and Ben Hunter, shares what she learns with investigators, and produces an influential report on the two attackers. Her role matters because her professional interpretations shape how the violence and its survivors are understood, including how TifAni’s behavior is read against her.

Identity and Introduction

Anita enters TifAni’s hospital room after the attack, introduced not by Dr. Levitt but as Dr. Perkins. She is dressed informally, in faded jeans and new white sneakers, with a silver bob. Her manner is quiet and firm; she asks TifAni to use her first name and offers to get her anything she needs. The restrained introduction establishes a personal, reassuring manner, but the conversation soon reveals that the meeting has an investigative purpose as well as a clinical one.

TifAni has already given officers information about Arthur and Ben, including their names, while still in shock. Anita acknowledges that this information has been important to police, then explains that she is trying to assemble a clear picture of the two young men and understand why they acted as they did. When TifAni asks whether she is a psychiatrist or a police officer, Anita identifies herself as a forensic psychologist who does occasional consulting work with the Philadelphia police force. She is not herself a police officer, but she makes the terms of the interview explicit: she will share what TifAni tells her with the police.

Interviewing TifAni

Anita directs the conversation toward TifAni’s relationship with Arthur, whom she understands to have been her friend. That focus places the interview within a wider inquiry into the attackers rather than limiting it to TifAni’s immediate account of the previous day. The distinction is important: Anita is gathering information about the connections and histories surrounding the attack, and TifAni must decide what to disclose while knowing that her answers will reach investigators.

The investigation later turns directly to Dean Barton and to TifAni’s history with him. Detectives ask whether they had been friends, and TifAni recounts the assaults at Dean’s house and a later attack at Olivia Kaplan’s house. When Detective Vencino questions why she tried to save Dean from Arthur, TifAni says she was trying to save herself. These exchanges show the difficult interpretive environment around Anita’s inquiry: TifAni’s actions are examined not only as evidence about the attack but as behavior that others may judge without understanding her reasons.

Findings on Arthur and Ben

Anita’s report, which becomes publicly available, applies the Hare test, a twenty-item inventory used to assess psychopathic traits and behaviors, to Arthur. He scores far beyond the ordinary range. The report does not present every act of apparent protectiveness as proof of genuine care; it describes how a person with psychopathic traits may identify another person’s vulnerabilities and use them to serve his own purposes. TifAni, reading the assessment, reconsiders the protective role Arthur had played in her life and cannot be certain whether his actions reflected empathy, imitation, or manipulation.

The report also interprets Arthur and Ben’s partnership through the criminological concept of the dyad: a pair whose members intensify one another’s violent impulses. In Anita’s account, Arthur is the controlling and violence-seeking partner, while Ben’s volatility can help provoke him. Their plan had developed over six months, much of which Ben spent in a mental rehabilitation center while presenting himself to staff as no longer a danger to himself. The report further suggests that Arthur found a new source of encouragement in someone whose anger and pain sustained his readiness for violence. Although Anita does not name TifAni in this discussion, TifAni recognizes herself in the description and wonders whether her last encounter with Arthur helped set him off.

Assessment and Aftermath

Anita’s assessment of TifAni also enters the post-attack record. She concludes that TifAni displayed little emotion for her dead classmates and appeared eager to return to school now that her so-called problem peers were gone. That interpretation becomes one element in the suspicion directed at TifAni, alongside the yearbook writings, her fingerprints on the gun, and Dean’s claim that Arthur had told her to kill him. The school questions whether she should return, and public opinion treats her as a possible participant despite the absence of sufficient evidence to charge her with a crime.

The report therefore carries a double significance. It offers an organized account of the relationship between Arthur and Ben, and it supplies investigators and the public with a psychological framework for interpreting their actions. At the same time, its observations about TifAni demonstrate how professional assessment can contribute to a judgment of a survivor’s credibility and emotional response. Anita is not depicted as the sole cause of the suspicion against TifAni; rather, her conclusions become part of a larger process in which behavior is scrutinized and competing accounts receive unequal weight.