The man accused of plotting to kill his Edmonton-based business partner likely spiralled down an increasingly self-delusional path, says a local crime expert.
Investigators allege Dr. Michael Mockovak attempted to hire a hitman to snuff out Clearly Lasik co-founder Joseph King -- a case that perfectly fits the profile of a well-to-do individual pushed to the point of hiring a killer, said Grant MacEwan University criminologist Bill Pitt.
BOXED IN
"It fits the profile perfectly of someone who views somebody as a hindrance to the obtainment of a goal -- usually financial or business-related," he said.
"They box themselves in psychologically to the point where they paint themselves into a corner."
Murder-for-hire plots, he said, tend to be hatched by people with means who feel pushed to the brink by others close to them and become more and more irrational as their emotions take over, Pitt said.
And because of the high emotional stakes, that also makes them prone to mistakes as they go deeper into the fantasy of arranging a murder, he added.
"They get to the point where it becomes hyper-personalized and it becomes an obsessive misinterpretation of events," Pitt said.
"It's very clumsy -- it's television-type forensics and they don't understand the complexities of getting this done and getting away with it."
In Mockovak's case, he trusted an employee at his company he believed had ties to the Russian mafia.
Instead, his confidant became an informant for the FBI that ultimately led to last week's arrest of Mockovak in connection with the plot.
KILLER DOCTOR CASE
The case parallels that of former doctor Abraham Cooper who was imprisoned for manslaughter after his partner Doug Snider disappeared on May 5, 1999, from Fairview, about 400 km northwest of Edmonton.
Cooper sued Snider following a dispute over the loss of Cooper's hospital privileges in Fairview and was never seen again after the pair met in Snider's office to discuss the impasse.
Cooper was convicted after Snider's blood was found in the office and his clothes were found in Cooper's car.
