Is it normal that i think they're lying?

In most cases, it’s all in the editing.
I was working at one of the last remaining video stores in my hometown and when that shut I was interviewed and I said a whole bunch of progressive stuff, with only a few words expressing sentiment, what made the cut? The sentiment. That’s what people want, what they cling to.

"He had rancid farts that often lingered on his clothes. When he entered the room you could tell if he had another episode."

Some of these people could be knowingly and deliberately lying, but I suspect the explanation might be more complicated in many cases.

It can be extremely challenging to get your head around the fact that someone you believed you knew well and liked turned out to be capable of heinous acts. We all want to believe we're a good judge of character, but if we're confronted with evidence that this isn't true, that can cause a serious case of cognitive dissonance.

We deal with cognitive dissonance in one of two ways: either we refuse to accept the validity of the evidence and double-down on our faulty belief, or we accept our belief was wrong.

Some people have such fragile egos that they can _never_ accept they were wrong about anything. For the rest of us, accepting we were wrong is uncomfortable at the very least. Even worse, accepting we were seriously wrong about one thing can lead us to question whether we might also be wrong about other things we believe to be true. That can be so profoundly disconcerting that people tend to deal with cognitive dissonance by finding ways to justify their prior perceptions and beliefs.

I suspect that in some of these cases, the friends and family of the culprit can't accept that they ignored red flags and any negative gut feelings they may have had, so they hold on to the idea that those signals simply didn't exist, and what the person did was completely out of character.

In other cases, I'm willing to believe that those warning signs really weren't present. Psychopaths are extremely talented at putting up a false front and fooling virtually everyone about what's actually going on in their twisted minds. Ted Bundy is a classic case of someone who was extremely charming and fun to be with until suddenly he wasn't either of those things.

A little honesty would be refreshing.

He was a selfish prick who loved to kick puppies and always left the toilet seat up. Fuck that guy.

Where is everyone's replies going?

He left the bathroom door open while he took shits and he once ate an entire pizza that I brought home and had the nerve to ask "So where's yours?" afterwards. He listened to porn full-blast at 3 am and you could always tell when he came because he would fart loudly - I recall him farting at least 12 times in one hour. 12 times! Great guy, though.

Victims, not the culprits.