Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective see a side of life. The average person is
Speaker 1: never exposed her I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Speaker 1: Join me now as I take you into this world.
Speaker 1: Imagine you open your leather box to a letter from
Speaker 1: Ted Bundy or a handmade Christmas card from John Wayne Gacy.
Speaker 1: My guest today, forensic psychologist doctor Jeffrey Smalden, doesn't have
Speaker 1: to imagine. He's communicated with some of America's most notorious
Speaker 1: killers trying to understand them. I found the conversation fascinating,
Speaker 1: and it gave a surprising insight into the mind of evil.
Speaker 1: Take a listen, doctor Jeffrey Smallman. Welcome to I Catch Killers.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Good to be here. Gary.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm excited about sitting down and speaking with you.
Speaker 1: Although I've spent the past weekend reading through your book.
Speaker 1: The Beast was not me and it's pretty heavy reading.
Speaker 2: I suppose it is. I mean, it's you know, I
Speaker 2: think of that. It's mainly a memoir true crime second,
Speaker 2: but it's got some pretty dark stuff in it for sure.
Speaker 1: Well, I think the way that you told the story
Speaker 1: through your perspective, and there was I might say, almost
Speaker 1: an innocence to you at the start when you were
Speaker 1: a meeting with some of these notorious, notorious killers.
Speaker 2: Probably giving me a little more credit than I deserved. Actually,
Speaker 2: I was very young and pretty stupid in most ways
Speaker 2: in some of the early things reported in my book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with it, Like, I was a homicide detective for
Speaker 1: over twenty years, and I know what it's like sitting
Speaker 1: and communicating with people that are evil or have committed
Speaker 1: crimes that shocked most people. How did you isolate yourself
Speaker 1: from the type of people.
Speaker 3: You were you were dealing with.
Speaker 1: How did you, from a personal point of view, step
Speaker 1: back from it and not walk away thinking the whole
Speaker 1: world's evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you probably learned early on in your career to
Speaker 2: do the same thing, and I did too, Otherwise I
Speaker 2: couldn't have done my job, and that's to compartmentalize pretty well.
Speaker 2: I mean, you have to be. I'm a good compartmentalizer. Weirdly,
Speaker 2: I've been asked that question before, and I didn't really
Speaker 2: bring a lot of it home with me. During most
Speaker 2: of my career, I had a wife to young kids,
Speaker 2: and for whatever reason, this maybe says something pathological about me,
Speaker 2: I don't know, but never I never had any mirrors
Speaker 2: about you know, the crime scene photos, and I wasn't
Speaker 2: the one doing like crime scene analysis like you probably,
Speaker 2: but I saw the photographs of some of the most
Speaker 2: gruesome crime scenes imaginable. I think it became good at compartmentalizing.
Speaker 1: I have a theory on it that I'm talking to
Speaker 1: a psychologist and talking about theories of the mind. A
Speaker 1: theory on it that when I went to a homicide scene,
Speaker 1: I was focusing on doing the work. And I'm sure
Speaker 1: that was your focus when you're sitting down speaking to
Speaker 1: these killers, consulting with them, that you're focused on your job.
Speaker 1: And I think that provides a degree of protection from
Speaker 1: the horrors that you see or hear about the people
Speaker 1: that you meet.
Speaker 2: I think that's right. You focus on what you're doing.
Speaker 2: This is my job, and you know, you just you
Speaker 2: couldn't take that home with you, certainly not at the
Speaker 2: level of intensity you experience while you're actually going through
Speaker 2: the encounter, either with the suspect or with the crime
Speaker 2: scene itself. You just, you know, if you were walking
Speaker 2: around with that in your head all the time, you'd
Speaker 2: have a hard time functioning. But you did bring up
Speaker 2: one interesting point, I think, at least implicitly, and that's,
Speaker 2: you know, you deal with these people. It would be
Speaker 2: nice if they all look like Charles Manson, because we
Speaker 2: would all go to immediately turn and run. But most
Speaker 2: of them don't. Most of them are very well camouflaged.
Speaker 2: They've got a carefully curated social persona. And I did
Speaker 2: think frequently over the years about the relatively superficial cues
Speaker 2: that all of us use every day. And you know,
Speaker 2: it seems like a nice guy, nothing the least bit threatening,
Speaker 2: easy to talk to, and a lot of people rely
Speaker 2: on those cues to put themselves in positions where they
Speaker 2: would be potentially very vulnerable to a predator, for example,
Speaker 2: a Gazy or a Bundy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what you're saying. There the normality of people
Speaker 1: that have committed horrendous crimes, and it is hard not
Speaker 1: to drop your guard down because I think it's human nature.
Speaker 1: And I would often say to people, you locked me
Speaker 1: in a room with someone long enough, and there I
Speaker 1: will develop a rapport.
Speaker 3: I think it's human nature.
Speaker 1: And some of those people are very bad people, but
Speaker 1: you start to communicate, your socialize, and it's just human nature.
Speaker 3: I think that you make that connection.
Speaker 2: And that's certainly how I thought about my interviews with
Speaker 2: even some of the most horrible people on the planet.
Speaker 2: One of the things, and not every forensic psychologist would
Speaker 2: agree with me on this approach, but I always tried
Speaker 2: to establish a very horizontal relationship with whoever I was
Speaker 2: talking with. Never never wanted to come across as the
Speaker 2: expert looking down on someone, always trying to make it
Speaker 2: conversation well. I always introduced myself as Jeff, not doctor Smolden,
Speaker 2: gave them my business card. They could see who I was.
Speaker 2: Their attorneys told them they knew I was a psychologist.
Speaker 2: I didn't need to tell them that what I was
Speaker 2: interested in mainly is making a connection with them.
Speaker 1: Right in your book you talked about and we're going
Speaker 1: to speak about specific killers and people that you met
Speaker 1: through the course of your career, but just talking in
Speaker 1: a general sense. I picked up there and I found
Speaker 1: it interesting. That made me reflect a little bit that
Speaker 1: a lot of the people you spoke to didn't understand irony.
Speaker 1: And you've got people that have committed or are in
Speaker 1: jail or on death row horrendous things and they're talking
Speaker 1: about someone else. Oh, I don't agree with that type
Speaker 1: of behavior. And you raised it very well and quite
Speaker 1: humorously in your book about you know, there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of irony there given the fact that you're in
Speaker 1: here for murdering a dozen people. Is that a right
Speaker 1: that they've got because I link like irony. Maybe they
Speaker 1: haven't got empathy. They don't understand. But I thought it
Speaker 1: was quite a revelation to me reading that I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about the fact that they don't see the irony
Speaker 1: in situations.
Speaker 2: It's something I often had occasion to think about throughout
Speaker 2: my career, but I don't know what it is. It
Speaker 2: just didn't seem to grasp irony. One particularly dramatic example
Speaker 2: of that was, you know, Gasey talked with me for
Speaker 2: hours on end about how he couldn't possibly have killed
Speaker 2: all of these boys and young men who he was
Speaker 2: convicted of killing, twenty six of whom were found in
Speaker 2: the crawl space under his suburban home. He could go
Speaker 2: on for hours and hours about all kinds of different
Speaker 2: people had keys to that house. The cops assumed it
Speaker 2: was like a normal residence, but it wasn't. There were
Speaker 2: people been, people coming out, and he could go on
Speaker 2: forever like that. But he insisted that the cops really
Speaker 2: had the wrong guy. But he saw no irony in
Speaker 2: posturing as an expert about serial murder. He would address
Speaker 2: these national FBI conferences. They would invite him to be
Speaker 2: a guest through some sort of technology, and he would
Speaker 2: do it. And I would say, John, what makes you
Speaker 2: think you have anything special to contribute to law enforcement
Speaker 2: studying the mind of the serial killer when you insist
Speaker 2: that you're not one? And he would just pause for
Speaker 2: he would just pause from and say, well, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just assume that I've got something to say that
Speaker 2: there's worth there.
Speaker 1: Listening to a bit of a floor in these argument
Speaker 1: or rationale. Let's talk about John Wayne Gacy, because I
Speaker 1: don't know, there's something very chilling about that man, and
Speaker 1: I've read the aspects and your dealings with him in
Speaker 1: the book, but also know the I think it was
Speaker 1: thirty three victims that he had. Could you expe' flying
Speaker 1: to our listeners, and I think most people went that
Speaker 1: you start talking about remember who he is, because it
Speaker 1: was someone that was just I don't know the nature
Speaker 1: of the crimes. It was pure leval tell us about
Speaker 1: the crimes, and then how you became connected to him
Speaker 1: and how you started communicating with him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if Gasey's infamy same in Australia
Speaker 2: as it is in the United States. And even if
Speaker 2: it was, Yeah, I talk with a lot of college
Speaker 2: age students and Gasey is at most kind of a
Speaker 2: footnote in their minds, where for people of my generation,
Speaker 2: you know, he was one of the truly monstrous he
Speaker 2: and Bundy and Manson. But basically in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: Gasey had his own business in a suburb outside Chicago,
Speaker 2: not far from O'Hara Airport, and it was called PDM Painting.
Speaker 2: Decorating and modeling, I think, or maintenance maybe. But he
Speaker 2: had a company and he hired a lot of young
Speaker 2: boys to work with them, and some of them disappeared
Speaker 2: under mysterious circumstances, and in the end he was convicted
Speaker 2: of thirty three murders. There were twenty six bodies found
Speaker 2: buried in the crawl space underneath his house. There were
Speaker 2: three others buried at other locations on his property, and
Speaker 2: then when he ran out of space, he started disposing
Speaker 2: of them in the nearby Desk Plains river. So he
Speaker 2: threw four in the river, for a total of thirty three.
Speaker 2: And he was arrested in December of nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: These killings had begun in nineteen seventy two, and he,
Speaker 2: like a lot of these predatory killers. He chose people
Speaker 2: who might not immediately be missed. Maybe they had problems,
Speaker 2: they were addicted to drugs, they had legal issues, and
Speaker 2: some of their families in quiet you know what happened
Speaker 2: to so and so He was working for you, And
Speaker 2: Gasey would say, well, you know how hard I was
Speaker 2: working to get him off drugs and put him on
Speaker 2: the straight and narrow. And he disappeared one day. I
Speaker 2: don't know where he went. So there were any number
Speaker 2: of cases like that where people inquired, but they were
Speaker 2: relatively quick to believe Gasey's bullshit about what really happened,
Speaker 2: and in the end what happened and got him arrested.
Speaker 2: It's really a creepy story. And I've been to this
Speaker 2: location and it was a drug store like a chemist
Speaker 2: back in nineteen seventy eight. Now it's a childcare center,
Speaker 2: but it's where it's where Gasey speak about irony. Casey
Speaker 2: wouldn't get that one at all, but where he abducted
Speaker 2: his final victim. That is drug store talking the owner
Speaker 2: about doing some remodeling inside, and he saw a young
Speaker 2: man and said, hey, I can pay you more money
Speaker 2: than they're paying you here. I want to talk with
Speaker 2: me about a summer job. And the kid's mother was
Speaker 2: in the parking lot, and this is a small parking lot.
Speaker 2: She was there waiting for him to take take I
Speaker 2: think it was her birthday. And he went over to
Speaker 2: her and said, I'm just going to talk with this
Speaker 2: guy for a few minutes. I'll be right there. And
Speaker 2: he was never seen again. And Gasey insisted he had
Speaker 2: never seen this guy and knew nothing about it, and
Speaker 2: it was some very good police work that Gasey would
Speaker 2: never admit that it was good police work, but it was.
Speaker 2: They tracked down a receipt from a photo order at
Speaker 2: the at the drug store that a coworker of his
Speaker 2: had put in a jacket that she had lent to him,
Speaker 2: so that that receipt ended up in Gasey's kitchen trash bag,
Speaker 2: and the police found it there and did further invest
Speaker 2: and you know, the gig was up for Geisey in
Speaker 2: December of seventy eight.
Speaker 1: So thirty thirty three victims all up over what sort
Speaker 1: of period of time, whether these murders being committed.
Speaker 2: Seventy two, nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's frightening the way that he got away with
Speaker 1: it for so long. But I think that he had
Speaker 1: that confidence to present as a decent person. He might
Speaker 1: have his flaws in his personality, but people mustn't have
Speaker 1: suspected him to have that. Many people disappear around you
Speaker 1: and suspicion, but he had enough bluff to get through
Speaker 1: it for all those years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very disarming. I remember after that I spent with
Speaker 2: him on death row in Illinois back in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: I called my wife from this fleabag hotel that Gasey
Speaker 2: had recommended for me, and she said, My wife said, so,
Speaker 2: what were your impressions of Geese? And I said, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's the sort of guy. If I walked into a
Speaker 2: bar for a beer and he was sitting there and
Speaker 2: I sat next to him, within minutes we would be talking.
Speaker 2: He would seem totally unthreatening. He would talk about politics, sports,
Speaker 2: and what I would eventually notice before too long, actually
Speaker 2: was that he had literally no interest in my point
Speaker 2: of view at all. It always came back to him.
Speaker 2: He would pause and make a perfunctory where did you
Speaker 2: say you're from? Or what do you do? And then
Speaker 2: immediately it would go back to him. So that would
Speaker 2: have stuck out. But he would come across as a
Speaker 2: very normal guy. And he's a world class bullshitter. I mean,
Speaker 2: he could just talk and talk and talk. And what
Speaker 2: happened with these young men, quite a few of them
Speaker 2: he picked up trolling the streets of downtown Chicago. Some
Speaker 2: of them were addicted to drugs and into prostitution. Gave
Speaker 2: See would pick them up, drug them, typically put chloroform
Speaker 2: over their face in a mask or some some sort
Speaker 2: of towel, and they would come too at his house
Speaker 2: and Gasey would say, you know, let me let me
Speaker 2: get you a beer or you know, settle in and
Speaker 2: after a while, maybe you watch some porn movies. And
Speaker 2: then he would say something, you know what, I spend
Speaker 2: a lot of time as a clown. I got a
Speaker 2: registered clown outfit, and I go to nursing homes sometimes
Speaker 2: and I play the clown at children's parties. I've got
Speaker 2: a couple of tricks. You want to see them. And
Speaker 2: he said, let me show you the let me show
Speaker 2: you the handcuff trick. And Gasey would put the handcuffs
Speaker 2: on himself and get out of them and say try it,
Speaker 2: try it. You can do it too, but you got
Speaker 2: to be clever. And the kid would let him put
Speaker 2: the handcuffs on and he said, I can't get out,
Speaker 2: and Gacy would say, you know what the trick is,
Speaker 2: and then he'd hold up the key, and by that time,
Speaker 2: you know, the guy was disabled by this guy who
Speaker 2: had seemed not the least bit threatening.
Speaker 1: That's how he would lieu of the mean was he
Speaker 1: openly homosexual or was he living because I think he
Speaker 1: was married, wasn't he? Was he married at one site?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I had a couple children, and his second
Speaker 2: wife was actually living with him in the house that
Speaker 2: he had done some time in Iowa, a more western state,
Speaker 2: on a couple of sodomy charges involving a teenage boy.
Speaker 2: Served a short time in prison, and then they agreed
Speaker 2: to parole him to his mother's house in Chicago, where
Speaker 2: he was from. So he went to Chicago and for
Speaker 2: a while lived with his second wife, and she had
Speaker 2: two children, I believe, who weren't Gasey's biodical children. I
Speaker 2: lived with them and the murders. There may have been
Speaker 2: a murder that occurred while she was still there, but
Speaker 2: she divorced him, got out of the picture, and that's
Speaker 2: when the murder, you know, the rate of murders really accelerated.
Speaker 1: Once once she was off His saying how was he
Speaker 1: actually killing the victims?
Speaker 3: What was he?
Speaker 1: Did he have an mo in the why did he
Speaker 1: would kill the victims or what happened to them once
Speaker 1: I were restrained by.
Speaker 2: He was a sadist. He tortured one of them lived
Speaker 2: and wrote a book called twenty nine below about his
Speaker 2: experience surviving Gacy. And interestingly, he's the one surviving victim
Speaker 2: I believe who says, you know, he was half knocked
Speaker 2: out by chloroform or whatever Gaysey had used to knock
Speaker 2: him out, but he said he saw a second man
Speaker 2: in the room. That's all. The mystery of the Gaycy
Speaker 2: case was that second man. Was he hallucinating it or
Speaker 2: was there really a second man. Gaysey had some bad
Speaker 2: actors working with him, and I think the police suspected
Speaker 2: that one of them was involved. But anyway, this person
Speaker 2: who survived Gaysey's torture, he described just a horrible ordeal
Speaker 2: of being I think electrically shocked. He was put in
Speaker 2: the bathtub for a while, so they were electrical shocks,
Speaker 2: as I said, chloroform. And he loved tightening a noose
Speaker 2: around someone's neck and then loosening it and tightening again
Speaker 2: and loosening it. He enjoyed that, the fear and the
Speaker 2: power that that gave him. So yeah, sadist and psychopathic killer.
Speaker 1: Let's wind it back a bit and we'll get back
Speaker 1: into Gasey shortly. But tell us about your journey to
Speaker 1: becoming a forensic psychologist because at a little bit different.
Speaker 1: You didn't start out from day one monting to be
Speaker 1: a forensic psychologist. Tell us a little bit about your
Speaker 1: background and how you found your way into the work that.
Speaker 2: You Yeah, I mean, I didn't take any sort of
Speaker 2: direct passage. You know, some kids say as a teenager,
Speaker 2: I knew I wanted to become a psychologist. The opposite
Speaker 2: was true for me. I was a teenager with no
Speaker 2: interest in forensic psychology. I couldn't have told you what
Speaker 2: it was. I thought I was going to be an
Speaker 2: English professor, and I went to graduate school. I did
Speaker 2: a master's degree in English. Then I went and taught
Speaker 2: for a year at my undergraduate school, and then I
Speaker 2: got a grant to study modern Irish literature at Trinity
Speaker 2: College in Dublin. So I went there for a year
Speaker 2: and I was an absolutely wonderful year. When I say that,
Speaker 2: that was the year when I decided not to go
Speaker 2: on for my PhD and become an English professor. People said, what,
Speaker 2: you spend a year at Trinity College, and what was
Speaker 2: bad about it? What convinced you not to continue in
Speaker 2: that direction? And there was nothing bad about my Trinity
Speaker 2: College experience. He was wonderful. I still love literature, but yeah,
Speaker 2: I began to I think at that time in the seventies,
Speaker 2: the prevailing mantra in English departments, at least in the
Speaker 2: States was publish or perish, and you needed to publish
Speaker 2: a tenure and get a promotion. And I just didn't
Speaker 2: want to be on intellectual trial all that time and
Speaker 2: have to prove myself over and over again, so I
Speaker 2: decided not to do that. But then a lot of
Speaker 2: people this experience where you make a decision that seems
Speaker 2: very underdetermined, like there's not much foundation for it, seems
Speaker 2: kind of random, and then it changes the rest of
Speaker 2: your life. And that's what happened with me. And I'll
Speaker 2: tell you what happened. And by the way, we need
Speaker 2: to go back in time to get to the Manson stuff,
Speaker 2: because that's back before this. Talking to my mom one day,
Speaker 2: I'm in my late twenties and I said, I have
Speaker 2: no idea what to do with my life. And she said, well,
Speaker 2: have you ever thought of hospital administration? And I said,
Speaker 2: I've never heard of it. Hospital administration? What is it?
Speaker 2: And she was a nurse at the local hospital, so
Speaker 2: she said, well, I don't really know what it is either,
Speaker 2: but there are a couple of nice looking young men
Speaker 2: down at the hospital where I work, and I've heard
Speaker 2: them referred to as administrators. They always say hi to
Speaker 2: me when I pass them in the hallway. Why don't
Speaker 2: you go down and talk to one of them? So
Speaker 2: I had nothing better to do, and I did.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 2: Seemed like a nice guy. He seemed to like me,
Speaker 2: and he said, I'll tell you what you do, Jeff.
Speaker 2: Go to George Washington University, get your masters that's where
Speaker 2: he had gotten his, and then come back and work
Speaker 2: for me. And it kind of sounded like a job offer.
Speaker 2: And I literally applied to one school. If I had
Speaker 2: gotten rejected there, that would have been the end of
Speaker 2: hospital administration. But I got accepted and I went there,
Speaker 2: and then I ended up doing a residency at a
Speaker 2: hospital here in Columbus, Ohio, where I still live, and
Speaker 2: two of my coworkers were murdered at the hospital. But
Speaker 2: after those murders, I thought, I don't really want to
Speaker 2: be a hospital administrator. I never did, so I went
Speaker 2: back to graduate school with the goal of becoming a
Speaker 2: forensic psychologist.
Speaker 1: Pat your interest tell me about the two co workers
Speaker 1: that were murdered, because well, you've just described it steered
Speaker 1: your career, but it had a sort of profound effect
Speaker 1: on you. And you know a lot of us go
Speaker 1: through life and never knowing anyone that's been murdered, so
Speaker 1: you would have felt the pain and that the shock
Speaker 1: that comes with a homicide. Tell us about that and
Speaker 1: how it played out in the end, because I think
Speaker 1: that's very interesting too.
Speaker 2: It is, and as a homicide investigator, that part would
Speaker 2: be fascinating to you. Yeah, yeah, I mean I was
Speaker 2: at the hospital. I completed my residency year, they asked
Speaker 2: me to stay on. I kept getting promoted, even though
Speaker 2: I had no special skills as a hospital administrator, but
Speaker 2: I kept getting promoted. And among the departments that I
Speaker 2: had responsibility for was this small research lab that a
Speaker 2: total of six employees and it was located just around
Speaker 2: the corner from the main corridor of the hospital, had
Speaker 2: a single door that served as ex veterans, and the
Speaker 2: lab itself was probably the size of an average living room,
Speaker 2: very small. For Christmas that year, as the administrative contact
Speaker 2: for that department, they invited me to their small party.
Speaker 2: I went. All the talk was of plans for Christmas.
Speaker 2: Everybody seemed upbeat, and I went home to Western New
Speaker 2: York Agara Falls, where my parents lived for the holidays.
Speaker 2: And while I'm there, I get a call from the
Speaker 2: director of public relations at the hospital and Jeff, I've
Speaker 2: got horrible news. And my assumption was that something horrible
Speaker 2: had happened in the mental health and Addiction building that
Speaker 2: I also had responsibility for. So I'm expecting something that
Speaker 2: happened there. And she says Joyce and Patty were murdered
Speaker 2: in the research lab Friday afternoon between four point thirty
Speaker 2: and fiveh five, And I said, what I mean? I
Speaker 2: no news could have shocked me more. I was absolutely astonished,
Speaker 2: I said, jayceon Patty, I was just with them, She said,
Speaker 2: I know. And nobody has reported seeing anything unusual anyone.
Speaker 2: And right around the corner from the main hospital corridor
Speaker 2: and right down the hallway from the radiology department waiting room,
Speaker 2: so it wasn't an isolated nobody reported seeing anything unusual,
Speaker 2: any unusual people going through that door. The police arrested
Speaker 2: no one, And as you can imagine, it was bizarre
Speaker 2: returning to work there and all of a sudden, work
Speaker 2: had our favorite suspects, people who we thought might have
Speaker 2: committed the murder. My favorite suspect was the first person
Speaker 2: on the crime scene who found the first woman on
Speaker 2: the floor, and he was off that week, but he
Speaker 2: had come in to check his phone messages and so on,
Speaker 2: and he found Joyce on the floor and then went
Speaker 2: screaming out into the hallway, and a doctor came in
Speaker 2: and found her dead, and then they called the police
Speaker 2: and they found the other woman in a walk in freezer.
Speaker 2: But that incident was so shocking to me and everyone
Speaker 2: around me, like Joyce and Patty were both very nice,
Speaker 2: very friendly women. Nobody could imagine anybody who would want
Speaker 2: to kill them. And Patty had a four month old
Speaker 2: infant at the time of her death, and she was,
Speaker 2: according to what everybody said, happily married, very conservative, So
Speaker 2: nobody could imagine who could have committed these murders. And
Speaker 2: we had a memorial service for the women at the hospital,
Speaker 2: and I shook the hands of both of the surviving
Speaker 2: spouses and they appeared bereft and you know, in shock.
Speaker 2: And so months went by and there were no arrests Oh,
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, this guy who found the bodies
Speaker 2: was a very hot headed, very intelligent, pretty narcissistic research
Speaker 2: and he and I had butted heads. I knew how
Speaker 2: angry he could get, so I thought, well, not only
Speaker 2: was he the first person on the scene, but he's
Speaker 2: a hothead. Would I ever have said he was capable
Speaker 2: of a double homicide in no way, But now that
Speaker 2: there is a double homicide.
Speaker 3: He is looking that why I'm looking at.
Speaker 2: Him, and I'm sitting across my desk from him every
Speaker 2: day watching him weep, and I'm I think there's a
Speaker 2: good chance that you killed Joyce and Patty, not saying
Speaker 2: that obviously. So after about six months, I thought, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to do this more. And that's when I
Speaker 2: went back to graduate school. Those murders changed my life.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons maybe that they changed my
Speaker 2: life so dramatically is that I mentioned a minute ago
Speaker 2: that the Manson stuff had occurred almost a decade before
Speaker 2: that correspondence. A lot of members of the Manson family
Speaker 2: gotten up to my ears in that. But that was
Speaker 2: the past. That was almost a decade before. Now this
Speaker 2: double homicide. I feel like murder is following me around
Speaker 2: or something, and I thought, well, I might as well
Speaker 2: embrace become a forensic psychologist.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, different different reasons. Now, the twist or the
Speaker 1: resolution of that double murder, it was in fact the
Speaker 1: husband of the lady with the four month old child,
Speaker 1: and that played out in dramatic circumstances used on the track.
Speaker 1: Can you just tell the listeners how it was eventually resolved.
Speaker 2: It's actually officially still a old case. They've never definitively
Speaker 2: tied him to the homicides. But however, I had lunch
Speaker 2: with the head homicide detective about he's deceased now, but
Speaker 2: about a decade ago, and we talked about this in detail,
Speaker 2: and he was the one who went looking for something
Speaker 2: that would have definitively tied this guy to the hospital
Speaker 2: murders and never found anything. But what happened is that, like,
Speaker 2: let's see the murders one December thirtieth, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: We're in spring of nineteen eighty six now, so two
Speaker 2: and a half years later, I pick up the newspaper
Speaker 2: one day there's big screaming headlines, biggest shootout in FBI history.
Speaker 2: Two agents killed, four I think four wounded. Two suspects
Speaker 2: killed in the shootout. I'm thinking well, my dad had
Speaker 2: just retired from the FBI. But as soon as I
Speaker 2: saw worst shootout in FBI history, I started reading the
Speaker 2: article and I got a on the page and it
Speaker 2: said that these two suspects had been involved in a
Speaker 2: series of daytime bank robberies where they would outfit themselves
Speaker 2: in campulage and show up with machine guns. They were
Speaker 2: suspected of at least one murder. And I get halfway
Speaker 2: down the column and it says the two killed suspects
Speaker 2: were William Maddox, formerly of Columbus, Ohio, and Michael J. Plattner.
Speaker 2: William Maddox not that William Maddox can't possibly be the
Speaker 2: one with the four month old child? Who and what
Speaker 2: happened is he hooked up with an old body of
Speaker 2: his the assumption of the he was a sociopath and
Speaker 2: decided I'm through with this middle class life, I'm done
Speaker 2: with Patty, and I'm gonna do something different. He hooked
Speaker 2: up with an old buddy, They moved to Florida, started
Speaker 2: a lawn company. He remarried a woman who he met
Speaker 2: in a church singles group.
Speaker 1: And I picked yeah, I picked up on that in
Speaker 1: your book too. Yeah, we won't judge, but yeah, he
Speaker 1: was a predator in the church singles group.
Speaker 2: I mean he was a predator, but a predator fully
Speaker 2: clothed in sheepslothing. I mean, there's no outwardly that looked
Speaker 2: dangerous about him. Another of those cases are blended in
Speaker 2: very well. But was capable of extreme violence.
Speaker 1: But that is and I think that's a chilling thing
Speaker 1: for the public too. And you reference Charles Manson, then
Speaker 1: obviously you know the way he presents that's what you
Speaker 1: want a monster to look like. But there's other people
Speaker 1: that get away of a lot of crimes because they
Speaker 1: come across. As you said, the cases are still open
Speaker 1: on the murder of the two women, but there is
Speaker 1: that grieving husband at the funeral that you're shaking hands.
Speaker 1: We've been a couple of years later, he's in the
Speaker 1: biggest shoe there. Then with FBI agents, then multiple people killed.
Speaker 2: I just mentioned two little details about that the crime
Speaker 2: scene at the hospital had already been processed by the police.
Speaker 2: It was released to the hospital to have an outside
Speaker 2: clean up agency come in and clean it up. But
Speaker 2: I was one of the few people who had a
Speaker 2: key to the lab because I was the administrator responsible,
Speaker 2: and my parents stopped on their way to Florida, like
Speaker 2: within the period, probably within a month of the murders,
Speaker 2: and I said to my dad, when I would you
Speaker 2: be interested in going over and seeing the lab where
Speaker 2: these murders took place. He said absolutely. So we went
Speaker 2: over and at night where nobody would really notice us
Speaker 2: going into the lab, and my dad, who he wasn't
Speaker 2: a homicide detective, that's not what he did, but he
Speaker 2: was a law enforcement officer, and he looked around and
Speaker 2: he said, you know what, this could have looked at
Speaker 2: first like a robbery gone bad because some of the
Speaker 2: women's possessions were taken. But I don't think that's what
Speaker 2: it was. I think it was staged to look like that,
Speaker 2: but it was actually something very different. I wouldn't be
Speaker 2: surprised if the killer could have accomplished his objective with
Speaker 2: a silencer and two gunshot wounds instead of these twenty
Speaker 2: five stab wounds in the upper chest and neck area.
Speaker 2: I think that was to mislead the authorities. So that
Speaker 2: was one thing of interest, and the other thing was
Speaker 2: not long ago. Within the last eight months, I was
Speaker 2: contacted by a former physician from the hospital who I knew,
Speaker 2: though not real well. He had read my book, and
Speaker 2: he was the physician who when the first person on
Speaker 2: the crime scene ran out screaming in the hallway. He
Speaker 2: was the physician nearby who went in and pronounced the
Speaker 2: first woman dead. So he was right there on the
Speaker 2: crime scene before the police arrived. And he said, Jeff,
Speaker 2: would you be interested in me writing down memories of
Speaker 2: that day? I said absolutely, so he did and he
Speaker 2: sent them to me. And I was a long way
Speaker 2: being a forensic psychologist at that point, and even when
Speaker 2: I became one, I was no expert in crime scene analysis.
Speaker 2: And I certainly didn't see that crime scene, and I
Speaker 2: didn't even see photos of that crime scene. But his
Speaker 2: name was Ed Bope. Ed said, you know what, the
Speaker 2: first thing I noticed when I went into the lab
Speaker 2: that day is that there were no defense wounds on Joyce.
Speaker 2: There were no signs that she tried to defend herself,
Speaker 2: and she was positioned on the bottom on the floor
Speaker 2: like in a fetal position, and there were all these
Speaker 2: stab wounds across her upper chest and neck, like more
Speaker 2: than twenty And the first thing I thought was there
Speaker 2: had to have been two people. Somebody had to have
Speaker 2: held her from behind for all those stab wounds to
Speaker 2: be made from the front without her struggling and there
Speaker 2: being signs of struggle. I thought it was a very
Speaker 2: interesting observation, and it made me think really for the
Speaker 2: first time that probably both of them were there.
Speaker 1: It would Yeah, I think that's a reasonable assumption from
Speaker 1: the way you've described it. And yeah, the fact that
Speaker 1: he was running with he's mate committing those other crimes,
Speaker 1: that's certainly something.
Speaker 2: But particularly if it was both of them, I still
Speaker 2: nobody has any idea how they got in and out
Speaker 2: of that lab without anybody seeing. They would have had
Speaker 2: to have had blood all over them.
Speaker 1: But that many stab wounds most definitely, Guys, it's Gary
Speaker 1: jubilin here. Want to get more out of I Catch Killers,
Speaker 1: then you should head over to our new video feed
Speaker 1: on Spotify where you can watch every episode of I
Speaker 1: Catch Killers. Just search for I Catch Killers video in
Speaker 1: your Spotify app and start watching today. Okay, well that
Speaker 1: was your shock. You needed to find your find your career,
Speaker 1: and steer you towards your career. We're going out of
Speaker 1: sequence in terms of the people that you deal with.
Speaker 1: But while we're on the John Wayne Gacy. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about how you got in contact with him, And I
Speaker 1: know this flowed on after you'd spoken to the Manson family.
Speaker 1: Talk us through the communications you had with John Gacy
Speaker 1: and your visits with him in prison.
Speaker 2: Well, I decided to start graduate school and begin work
Speaker 2: with my PhD in psychology with the hospital murders still
Speaker 2: very much preoccupying me at that point, that they hadn't
Speaker 2: been solved when I began graduate school, and I thought,
Speaker 2: and I was kind of a compulsive reader of true
Speaker 2: crime back then, but I thought, I wonder if there's
Speaker 2: a way for a more direct avenue of access into
Speaker 2: the brains of people who kill on Maybe if I
Speaker 2: could find one, they might improve my thinking about the
Speaker 2: kind of person who could have killed my two co workers.
Speaker 2: That was my thinking, and so I thought. The first
Speaker 2: thing I thought was, well, Bundy is down in Florida
Speaker 2: doing two death sentences. I'll try to contact him. And
Speaker 2: that's another whole chapter we've talked about. But I had
Speaker 2: a brief, very interesting correspondence with Bundy, but it became
Speaker 2: clear to me that it wasn't going to progress in
Speaker 2: the way I wanted it to. He wasn't willing to
Speaker 2: really have a dialogue with me, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: who else might I talk to? I knew John Wayne
Speaker 2: Gacy was serving a death sentence in Illinois, convicted of
Speaker 2: thirty three murders, so I decided to contact him, and
Speaker 2: I wrote him a letter, told him that I'd read
Speaker 2: several books about his case. He would have known from
Speaker 2: reading my letter that I knew quite a bit about it,
Speaker 2: and I said I'd like to. I didn't mention the
Speaker 2: hospital murders for the net first letter. I just wanted
Speaker 2: to do engage him, and I told him, you know,
Speaker 2: are you willing to talk with me? Have a dialogue
Speaker 2: through letters? In true narcissist fashion, he said, if you
Speaker 2: think you know one thing about me from those books
Speaker 2: you've read, I am sorry to tell you you're wrong.
Speaker 2: You don't know one thing about me. Like he's he's
Speaker 2: the black box with all the privileged information, and you
Speaker 2: can come get it or not, but don't think you
Speaker 2: found that anywhere else. You need to come to the source.
Speaker 2: And that began a correspondence that lasted three calendar years,
Speaker 2: and he began calling me on the phone once in
Speaker 2: a while, but he said, after we'd been corresponding for
Speaker 2: about seven months. Why don't you come visit me. I
Speaker 2: hadn't thought of doing that. It was four hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty miles away from where I lived, but I decided, Well,
Speaker 2: I mean that I always remind people when I tell
Speaker 2: this story. I was early on in my graduate work.
Speaker 2: I had never when I went out to visit Gacy,
Speaker 2: I had never before been in the same room as
Speaker 2: someone known to have committed murder, even one murder. That's
Speaker 2: how green I was. And I drove out there to
Speaker 2: see him and spent two days with him on that
Speaker 2: first visit, and then made a subsequent visit where I
Speaker 2: also spent two days.
Speaker 1: What was your take away from me sitting down and
Speaker 1: spending those times with him.
Speaker 2: Well, quite a few things, you know, I think I
Speaker 2: said before. He was a world class bullshitter, and it
Speaker 2: became wearying at times. You know a lot of people think,
Speaker 2: boy singing across from a guy who's killed thirty three people,
Speaker 2: You know, your nerves must have been on end, and
Speaker 2: the adrenaline must have been coursing through you. But it
Speaker 2: really wasn't like that. He greeted me by said, this
Speaker 2: is the first day of my first visit there. I
Speaker 2: extended my hand and he extended his handcuffed hand, and
Speaker 2: I said, hi, Jeff, and he said, Jeff, I'm John,
Speaker 2: or you can call me j W if you want to.
Speaker 2: That's what a lot of the guards call me. And
Speaker 2: then the very next thing he said was, I know,
Speaker 2: I know you've come looking for the monster. Well you're
Speaker 2: gonna meet the man. That's how he talked, You're gonna
Speaker 2: meet the man. I mean, the grandiosity was something old. Truly,
Speaker 2: You're gonna meet the man. So we sat down, and yeah,
Speaker 2: he was. I could just see him working. I could
Speaker 2: see his mind working and realize how skillfully he disarmed
Speaker 2: his victims. He just for one thing, he just wouldn't
Speaker 2: stop talking, and he just controlled the conversation that way.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't stop talking, and you know, we started talking
Speaker 2: about mutual interests, football, democratic politics, and he was very
Speaker 2: easy to talk with, not the least bit threatening at
Speaker 2: one point. And you know, this is one example I
Speaker 2: think of how green I was. There are a lot of them.
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 2: He came out on each of the four days that
Speaker 2: I spent with him, he would come out with this
Speaker 2: log book and then usually some photograph albums. He was
Speaker 2: so compulsive that in this log bookstered every piece of mail.
Speaker 2: He was every meal. He ate what time he got up,
Speaker 2: what time he went to bed visitors. He was very compulsive.
Speaker 2: And uh, after we'd talked, trying to think whether this
Speaker 2: was on the first day, it occurred a couple of
Speaker 2: different times. He said. We were sitting at a relatively
Speaker 2: small table in a death row visiting room, either side
Speaker 2: of the table, and he said, come over on my
Speaker 2: side of the table, and I remember thinking I don't
Speaker 2: want to. I don't want to go over there, but
Speaker 2: I also won't communicate fear. So I thought, okay, you know,
Speaker 2: I know like and I already knew by this time
Speaker 2: by the way, that the guards weren't monitoring us at all.
Speaker 2: I learned that there was a video camera in the room,
Speaker 2: but we were not being monitored.
Speaker 1: People often think the Gile visits in situations a lot
Speaker 1: that you've got a screen twein you or the guards
Speaker 1: are standing standing around, but you are potentially vulnerable, and
Speaker 1: I would, and the way you're describing it now, and
Speaker 1: as you were written in the book, I'm thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're putting yourself out there a little bit. He's on
Speaker 1: death row. He hasn't got anything to lose. It might
Speaker 1: be his final scalp, taking out this naive visitor that's
Speaker 1: coming to myself.
Speaker 3: What's he got to lose? Yeah, that's the reality of it.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a very good us that you raise, and
Speaker 2: he's still at the time I saw him on both
Speaker 2: of my visits, had hopes of having his death sentence
Speaker 2: of return.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, Well.
Speaker 2: I think he was as behavior in the sense he
Speaker 2: wasn't going to attack me or even though while I
Speaker 2: was sitting next to him he could just put those
Speaker 2: cuffed hands over my head and squeezed his massive forearms
Speaker 2: around my neck, nothing like that happened. But what was
Speaker 2: really sobering for me is some years later he was
Speaker 2: executed in nineteen ninety four. My visits to him were
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty six and eighty seven, closer time with
Speaker 2: his execution, and basically it would have been clear to
Speaker 2: him that the gig is up. My appeals exhausted them,
Speaker 2: and this kid who had corresponded with him his idea
Speaker 2: was and he was actually working under the tutelage of
Speaker 2: a very well known psychologist. This was like his freshman
Speaker 2: honors college or a freshman honors, propped in college, and
Speaker 2: his idea was, I'm going to posture as the ideal
Speaker 2: victim for a number of incarcerated serial killer, including Gaysey,
Speaker 2: and with Gacy, he postured as a sexually confused product,
Speaker 2: dysfunctional family and Gaycy and he began exchanging pornographic fan
Speaker 2: fantasses by letter, and then Gasey invited him come visit me.
Speaker 2: Young Man went on to write a book called The
Speaker 2: Last Victim, which tells about his time with Gasey, and
Speaker 2: it was very clear from his description that he met
Speaker 2: Gasey in the simm I did. The setting was this,
Speaker 2: and the situation was totally different. Gasey attacked him verbally, emotional,
Speaker 2: threatened to rape him. Said you know I could rape
Speaker 2: you on this floor and nobody would come to help
Speaker 2: you in time, basically in so many words, saying your mind,
Speaker 2: and it got very heroin. Gasey gave him a bracelet
Speaker 2: a pair of underwear that he wanted him to wear
Speaker 2: the next day when he came back, and he got
Speaker 2: really crazy. And I thought, when I read that book,
Speaker 2: you know I was in more danger than I realized.
Speaker 2: It was probably Gasey's hope that somehow he could find relief,
Speaker 2: you well, at courts that acted it as the buffer
Speaker 2: between me and this madman's.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating sitting down with someone like that and the
Speaker 1: nature of the crimes, like I can't comprehend. I sat
Speaker 1: with many serial killers, but of that nature, the brutality
Speaker 1: of his crimes and the way he did it, the
Speaker 1: fact that you have all these bodies buried under the
Speaker 1: under your home and still continuing on. It's it's quite
Speaker 1: quite chilling. But it's also quite frightening that he can present,
Speaker 1: for all intents and purposes, as a relatively normal person.
Speaker 1: If you took him out of that environment, as you described,
Speaker 1: if you sat down beside him in the bar, you'd
Speaker 1: strike up a conversation.
Speaker 2: I think that's the most frightening. Yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: the word succeed to talk about predators, but is in
Speaker 2: fact how they succeed as serial killers because they're under
Speaker 2: the radar, they come across as normal.
Speaker 1: Well, you would know because you've I'm looking at just
Speaker 1: the type of things that you've done. That's a consultation
Speaker 1: with close to three hundred death penalty cases, which would
Speaker 1: be interesting and evaluated more than a thousand murderers, serial killers,
Speaker 1: mass killers, sprees or kinds. So you've really seen it
Speaker 1: throughout your career, and a couple of things I just
Speaker 1: want to talk about because this questions are often asked
Speaker 1: of me, and I'm not qualified enough to say I
Speaker 1: can speculate. But people often say, with the killers, are
Speaker 1: they born the old nature or nurture situation? What's your
Speaker 1: take on that? With all your studies that you've done
Speaker 1: and all the work that you've done.
Speaker 2: Well, I really can't claim any privileged expertise. I'm not
Speaker 2: a researcher into neurology and so on, but I think
Speaker 2: most mental health agree that it's some combination of those things.
Speaker 2: Something wrong in the hardwiring though when they A radiologist
Speaker 2: examined Gacy's brain following his execution and found no abnormalities
Speaker 2: that he But I think most people agree that there's
Speaker 2: something amiss in their hardwiring when they enter the world
Speaker 2: and then that interacts with their experiences. Could John Gasey
Speaker 2: have not become a killer had he instead of having
Speaker 2: an alcoholic, abusive father, you know, some nurturing teacher or
Speaker 2: something like that. Maybe, I maybe because course toward a
Speaker 2: serial killer could have been interrupted in that way. You know,
Speaker 2: he had our skills, he could have succeeded in business.
Speaker 2: But there's a book by one pretty well known psychiatrist.
Speaker 2: I won't mention her by name, but she has actually
Speaker 2: floated the possibility that one day will identify a real
Speaker 2: killer bean and identify serial killers before they're born. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think that's a very world I don't think many
Speaker 2: people believe that that's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the way the world's going, Jeff, But I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going to happen. Are you familiar with
Speaker 1: the work of James Fallon. I think he's over in California.
Speaker 1: His take on it was he did some pet scans
Speaker 1: of brains of some of the US's worst killers to
Speaker 1: see if there's some pattern he could detect and to
Speaker 1: balance that out as a by way of comparison. He
Speaker 1: also needed people that weren't notorious killers to get the
Speaker 1: pet scans down of their brains, of which he did
Speaker 1: his own brain, and he came up with the same
Speaker 1: predisposition as some of these most notorious killers. I don't
Speaker 1: know the details, but it was some pattern in the
Speaker 1: frontal lobe of the brain, and he he's rationale was
Speaker 1: he's got that pre disposition in what he saw in
Speaker 1: examining the brains. But he grew up in those crucial
Speaker 1: years from infancy up to sort of three year old.
Speaker 1: He grew up in a loving, nurturing environment with parents
Speaker 1: and all that. And that's probably if he grew up
Speaker 1: in say a war zone or in a troubled household,
Speaker 1: that might have played out. He might have turned out
Speaker 1: the person he is. So he sort of gives it
Speaker 1: the combination not this similar to what you're saying. It's
Speaker 1: probably a combination, combination of both that lends itself to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's what most mental health professionals
Speaker 2: would say, Yeah, if they could specify exactly what that
Speaker 2: weird alchemy is that produces the killer.
Speaker 1: Eventually, we all always say, you know, just in the
Speaker 1: terminology of a psychopath or yeah, it's easy to label
Speaker 1: someone as psychopath or show path. With the killers that
Speaker 1: you've dealt with, do you think that's a proper description
Speaker 1: of the people that they are to commit those crimes?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I do. I mean not certainly. Not all of
Speaker 2: the death penalty killers that I valuated are psychopaths. I
Speaker 2: mean the formal diagnosis of psychopathy come with the use
Speaker 2: of Robert Hare's compathy Checklist, and most forensic psychologists, particularly
Speaker 2: in death penalty cases, don't use that because if you
Speaker 2: come up with a number and says you know someone's
Speaker 2: a psychopath or they're not, and to use the term
Speaker 2: psychopath in court is so inflammatory. The thought is that
Speaker 2: you know, as soon as the jury hears that word,
Speaker 2: they'll stop thinking about everything else. Sure, most mental health
Speaker 2: professionals use the only instrument that you really can use
Speaker 2: to dig know psychopathy. Typically, if I was a value
Speaker 2: death penalty defendant, I would use the DSM, which is
Speaker 2: the diagnostic and statistical manual at least in the United
Speaker 2: States that's used for diagnosing all kinds of conditions, And
Speaker 2: the closest thing in that to psychopathy, though they're not equal,
Speaker 2: is anti social personality disorder, and so I diagnosed many
Speaker 2: people as having anti social personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.
Speaker 2: My experienced personality. Severe personality disorders were of the most
Speaker 2: common diagnosis among death penalty defents. You know, some people think, oh,
Speaker 2: a personality disorder. That's like that guy down the street. O.
Speaker 2: I can't stand he's a jerk, but mental health professionals
Speaker 2: use the term in a very different way. It speaks
Speaker 2: to a very calcified, deeply ingrained personality to sort of
Speaker 2: For example, if one of the characteristics of antisocial personality
Speaker 2: is the inability to experience empathy, well it's a pretty
Speaker 2: big deal. I mean, if you're not able to experience empathy.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a bit of a problem, man, a.
Speaker 2: Bit of a problem in the social world, and you're
Speaker 2: likely to get in trouble. So it's not like in
Speaker 2: my testimony I was trying to shield the jury from
Speaker 2: really damning characteristics of the people they evaluated, but I
Speaker 2: tried not to use really incendiary words still, path.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was listening to a solicited the talk just
Speaker 1: last night at the university and talking about come sentencing
Speaker 1: and the weight that's placed on reports from psychiatrists or
Speaker 1: psychologists on there, and it made me think about it.
Speaker 1: You do have to choose your words carefully, don't you,
Speaker 1: Because you've put up there as an expert judge, magistrate,
Speaker 1: that's what they've got to make reference to. It does
Speaker 1: carry a carry a big impact in the court system, it.
Speaker 2: Does, and that, yeah, that was a big part of
Speaker 2: my job. In a lot of those death well a
Speaker 2: lot of these death penalty cases pled out before trial,
Speaker 2: but a lot of them went to trial, at least
Speaker 2: in the United States. What happens in a death penalty
Speaker 2: case is there's the first trial, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: what everybody knows, guilt or innocence. And then if the
Speaker 2: person's found guilty, which they nearly always were, then the
Speaker 2: second is the sentencing or mitigation phase, and that's basically
Speaker 2: where it's the defenses show to put on expert witnesses,
Speaker 2: testimony from family members, physicians, whatever, and that's where I
Speaker 2: would usually come in to tell the story that I'd
Speaker 2: learned as a result of my investigation into this person's background.
Speaker 2: Usually involved not not just multiple interviews with the convicted
Speaker 2: murderer and testing, but interviews with collateral and informants like
Speaker 2: family members, sometimes former coaches, cub scoal leaders, you know whatever,
Speaker 2: to try to tell as complete a story as I
Speaker 2: could tell. And one of the things I always emphasize
Speaker 2: is that like I was never ever there to advocate
Speaker 2: for the defense cause, and if it seemed like I was,
Speaker 2: I would lose the jury immediately. I was always there
Speaker 2: as an educator, not to try to convince them not
Speaker 2: to sentence this death, or just to tell a story
Speaker 2: of what I know based on all my testing and.
Speaker 1: So on present objective. I would imagine from a personal
Speaker 1: point of view, it would there's a lot of weight
Speaker 1: on you. You're sitting down speaking assessing people that are
Speaker 1: on death row. We don't have it here in Australia.
Speaker 1: I would imagine that it's a pretty pressured position to
Speaker 1: be in.
Speaker 2: Well is. I mean a lot of the cases I
Speaker 2: worked on were very high publicity, as there was stress
Speaker 2: when it came time for me to appear at a
Speaker 2: sensing hearing, though I got used to that and I
Speaker 2: think I was a reasonably good witness. But one of
Speaker 2: the best things that ever happened to me in my
Speaker 2: years of working on death penalty cases it was the
Speaker 2: case of a spree killer in Columbus, Ohio, where I live.
Speaker 2: This guy had killed four people, including an infant, and
Speaker 2: attempted to kill many more, and you know it was
Speaker 2: just he an holding cell outside the courtroom. He wrote
Speaker 2: on the wall like scorecard of how many he got,
Speaker 2: and you know, like he was the winner of the competition.
Speaker 2: Really incredibly lamatory that the judge limited it. The judge
Speaker 2: only permitted one piece of this graffiti. But my point
Speaker 2: is this guy was a bad guy and never expressed
Speaker 2: a sentila of remarks, and so I testified about him,
Speaker 2: and he had serious mental health problems. I talked about him.
Speaker 2: But after my testimony, the judge recessed for a minute,
Speaker 2: and the wife of one of his victims and her daughter,
Speaker 2: the daughter of the victim, and said, you know, you
Speaker 2: testified for the defense or on the defense requested your testimony.
Speaker 2: We understand that you were just doing your job. We
Speaker 2: thought you did a very good job as a witness.
Speaker 2: And that was a big deal to me to have
Speaker 2: victims approach me and tell.
Speaker 1: Me, okay, I can imagine I'm again because most people
Speaker 1: don't get exposed to it. No, I wasn't going to
Speaker 1: get down these path But just a general question, what
Speaker 1: are the people like like sitting on death row? Are
Speaker 1: they hoping? Are they scared? What is there a thing
Speaker 1: that you saw or if you've sat there with hundreds
Speaker 1: of people facing a death penalty, what sort of impact
Speaker 1: does it have on them?
Speaker 2: Think anybody's ever asked me that question. It's a good one.
Speaker 2: One example comes to mind. I worked on the case
Speaker 2: of this guy killed. He was a cult leader. He
Speaker 2: had killed, executed a family of five, including three young children,
Speaker 2: and before his arrest, you know, lorded over this group
Speaker 2: of people who he claimed he was a prophet. They
Speaker 2: were an offshoot of Mormonism, claimed he was a prophet
Speaker 2: and so on, and he was the guy with the
Speaker 2: power and convinced this group of people to help him
Speaker 2: carry out these outrageous crimes. And I got involved on
Speaker 2: his case at the appellate level. I wasn't involved at
Speaker 2: the trial level, so he was already on death row
Speaker 2: when I asked to re evaluate him. I went to
Speaker 2: see him on death row. And typically in the sentencing
Speaker 2: hearing of these cases, the convicted murderer was given an
Speaker 2: opportunity to make an unsworn statement, and attorneys usually tell them,
Speaker 2: unless you can muster some degree of sincerity and get
Speaker 2: up there and say I'm sorry, then we're not going
Speaker 2: to ask anything of you. In this case, this guy's
Speaker 2: name was Jeffrey Lungren. A couple of books have written
Speaker 2: petn about his case. Free Lunger, and he had no
Speaker 2: interest in advice from anyone, including his attorneys and het
Speaker 2: witness stand in thunder for more than an entire day
Speaker 2: about why these murders justified and you know, it's just
Speaker 2: an outrageous and went on and on and on like
Speaker 2: he was in the pulpit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I could imagine.
Speaker 2: I remember I read his whole unsworn statement and he
Speaker 2: came to the part about killing the children and he says,
Speaker 2: now we come to the touchy subject, the death of children,
Speaker 2: and then he justify it with these scriptures. He read
Speaker 2: so a very bad guy. But my point, I went
Speaker 2: to see him on death row. I saw him before
Speaker 2: I met him, and he was like lumbering around, just
Speaker 2: waiting for the next order that he in one of
Speaker 2: the guards. He looked like he was in control of anything.
Speaker 2: He had just kind of become this subservient, habituated rogue guy.
Speaker 2: I remember this. This is just a funny. I think
Speaker 2: it's funny. This guy was well known in Ohio because
Speaker 2: he had been the leader of an insurrectionist group of
Speaker 2: at the maximum security prison in Ohio called Lucasville. There
Speaker 2: was a riot there in nineteen ninety three and George
Speaker 2: George was like the spokesperson for the inmates, and he
Speaker 2: was a big career criminal like his hands were like basements.
Speaker 2: Very likable guy, had been in prison forever. But I
Speaker 2: remember this because I went to see George to continue
Speaker 2: an interview with him the day after nine to eleven. George,
Speaker 2: I remember, George says, you know what I'm telling you this, Jeff,
Speaker 2: and I mean it. If they let me out of here,
Speaker 2: I will travel to Afghanistan and I will find that
Speaker 2: effort and I will mess him up. And now I'll
Speaker 2: come back here and I'll walk right back into the cell.
Speaker 2: You take my word on that. I just thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: it's bizarre. I think them adjust in different ways to
Speaker 2: being all.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, you've got to see and you said a
Speaker 1: funny story. You've got to see the humor in all
Speaker 1: the darkness, haven't you. Otherwise you'll fall down that rabbit
Speaker 1: hole yourself. And at least you can appreciate some irony too.
Speaker 3: That's a good thing.
Speaker 1: We might we might take a break here when we
Speaker 1: get back for part two. I want to delve deep
Speaker 1: into your communications with the Manson family like that.
Speaker 3: That's I don't know.
Speaker 1: Something about that whole Charles Manson and the time, the
Speaker 1: period late sixties. It's just left an indelible impression on everyone,
Speaker 1: not just in the US, over here in our country
Speaker 1: as well. We'll talk talk about that and delve into
Speaker 1: a few other things. I want to touch on Ted Bundy.
Speaker 1: I know you had a couple of communications with him.
Speaker 1: He's one of the notorious people that resonate with all
Speaker 1: of us over here. We've all heard about Ted Bundy.
Speaker 1: So let's take a take a break and we'll be
Speaker 1: back for part two shortly
Speaker 2: M