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