Bill isn't sociopathic. He cares deeply for his daughter, and he does have some (skewed) sense of morality deep down.



What Bill IS is an excellent actor. And at the end of the HeartGold urn, he WANTED the world to believe he was sociopathic, including Alice. Which led to him doing a lot of things that he regretted even before he did them.



A LOT of things.



And just when he thinks he can reasonably settle into a potential clean slate in Pokearth-2, here comes Sabrina to dig up all the skeletons in his closet. The only reasonable answer to this is to run like a scared deer.



Let it never be said that Bill MacKenzie is too chicken to run from a battle.