The relationship of Allan and Betty Gore, as portrayed in Love and Death, was peculiar in its own sense, and there were a lot of underlying conflicts and issues that had already cracked the very foundation of their marriage. Allan was quite an impassive man, and contrary to him, his wife was sensitive and let all sorts of negative emotions take over her in cases of conflict. In this article, we will try to decipher if Betty was actually delusional and if it could be a possibility that whatever Candy had claimed in court was absolutely true.
Spoilers Alert
Did Betty Gore have Mental Health Issues?
Betty had some internal issues where, a lot of times, she got irritated and just couldn’t control her anger or stop herself from behaving in an uncordial manner. She was also very particular about things and often lost her temper or got annoyed if somebody interfered with her plans. We had gotten a glimpse of this behavior at the beginning of Love and Death itself when she was seen telling Allan to leave after the community meetup, as her doctor had told her that the probability of her getting pregnant was quite high if she tried at a particular period and time. Allan was the calmer one in the relationship, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have any issues with his wife’s behavior. He often felt emotionally saturated, listening to her problems and making sure that he didn’t do anything that made her more paranoid. Betty had an extramarital affair for a reason that most people wouldn’t find anything wrong with. Allan had to often go out of town because of work, and Betty, for some unknown reason, didn’t like it at all. She had explicitly stated in the past that she didn’t feel it was good for their relationship, and though Allan used to avoid most of the business trips, sometimes he was obligated to go on one.
Once, Allan went on one such trip, and Betty had an affair with a young boy. Her action hurt Allan, but what made him more concerned was that she had indulged only because she wanted to teach Allan a lesson and make him feel insecure. She wanted Allan to repent of his actions, but why would any man have qualms about going on a business trip if he was not doing any activity that could be termed immoral and infidel? Betty suffered from severe postpartum depression, and after the birth of her second child, she just didn’t want to go through the entire ordeal again. Things were slowly getting better between Betty and Allan when the latter left town for a work trip once again, and all hell broke loose. That was the same time when Betty started feeling anxious about the fact that she was pregnant once again.
Allan had to sit with her and make her understand that everything would be right between them and that it was just a matter of a few days. Allan kept calling Betty from his office, as he had serious doubts about the fact that she would try to hurt herself. We are not saying that Betty was totally delusional, but we do feel that she was suffering from something similar to an anxiety disorder. She had a habit of assuming the worst and feeling tense about situations where nothing was going wrong in reality. She was scared that Allan would abandon her, and that dread made her take a lot of steps, through which she pushed Allan even further apart.
Candy had gone to her house on the 13th of June 1980, when Allan was not in town, and Betty was already feeling a bit jittery and apprehensive about getting pregnant once again. It was not like Betty got some hard and solid news about her husband cheating on her, but her intuition told her that he had something with Candy. She had never, before that fateful day, even confronted Allan or anybody else she might have had suspicions about. But that day, for some unknown reason, she didn’t want to keep it inside her, and she ended up asking Candy if she had an affair with her husband.
Now that Allan believed that Betty was in such an unstable state of mind that she was capable of hurting herself, it could be possible that Candy was speaking the truth and not just trying to manipulate the narrative to justify her actions. We know that the general perception in cases like these is that the defendant is guilty, and that’s what the media and the people also thought at that time. But what if it were those one-off cases where the survivor was the initiator? In this case, even both parties had certain repressed emotions that they didn’t even know were subdued inside their core. Maybe Dr. Fason was right to speculate that when Betty was asked to shut up, she would have been reminded of her mother and completely dissociated her own being from her actions. Because it is true that if Candy had actually planned to murder Betty before, then it had to be the worst planned murder that had ever happened. We don’t know how the real Betty was, but seeing the way she was portrayed in the series, we cannot deny that she was not capable of doing something like this.
Did Allan’s Actions Trigger Betty?
Now that we think of it, it is possible that Allan’s action impacted Betty adversely and not the other way around. Considering how quickly Allan moved on and married after Betty’s death, it is possible that Betty always had doubts about his loyalty. Maybe that feeling of insecurity was eating her from the inside, and after the birth of her baby, she was just not able to handle her emotions. Maybe Betty’s indulging in an extramarital affair was just a response to her feeling neglected. Again, it is one of those things that we can only speculate about, and there is no way of knowing the truth, but on the basis of what we saw at the end of the Love and Death season finale, we are inclined to believe that those insecurities and fears that Betty had were not totally unfounded.
The problem was also that Betty never addressed the issue directly, and she never confronted Allan about it. Instead, she just found different reasons to stop her husband from going out of town. Allan did behave very strangely after Betty’s death. The tragedy had affected Allan like it would have affected any person who was not very closely related to her but was still close enough to get a bit taken aback by the horrifying manner in which she was killed. Allan had started seeing another girl even before the trial was over, and it seemed like he just wanted to get past the incident and forget it like a bad dream. We don’t believe that Allan even fought for the custody of his children, and we don’t know if he was this detached from before or if the change had happened over a period of time.
In the autopsy report, it was stated that Betty wasn’t pregnant when Candy killed her, and we can safely assume that whatever she was feeling at the time was the result of an insecure mind that got triggered even more when the woman who had an affair with her husband came in front of her.
