The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see aside of life the average person is never exposed to. 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. What there's the difference between a serial killer and a lone actor? Today I'm joined by Ern Sherrington. Ern is a forensic psychologist who became a detective and moved into counter terrorism and loan actor threat assessment. If anyone's qualified
to talk about acts of mass violence, it's him. Ian Sherrington. Welcome to I Catch Killers.
Thank you Gary for having me.
Well, I'm excited about the conversation. We're going to have. You've got some vast experience and a whole range of things. You've got the academic take on crime, and also you worked as a police officer for a very long time over in the UK.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I'm slightly unusual in that sense that I was a detective for many years, but also before that I was a psychologist and academic as well, So yeah, have that combination.
Yeah, well, it's a different way of looking at crime. Speaking of crime, I look today that lay in actors, mass killings, extreme ideology, that seems to be the concern of law enforcement and the major concern. I look back at my career in homicide, and we had the gangland killings, we had occasionally serial killings. We looked at that that
was the focus of domestic domestic violence. But am I reading the landscape correctly, like these mess killings loan actors a realistic threat to law enforcement in this day and age.
Yeah, I mean when I started my career, I worked almost exclusively on serial killer cases things like that as a behavioral analyst, So I thought a lot about that and I was aware of kind of these issues then, but certainly in recent years the loan actors style mass attack. Sometimes it's terrorism, sometimes it's not. But that sort of attack is far more prevalent today, and in my opinion, it's a growing problem, and not a problem that's particularly
like just focused on one country. It's an international issue, certainly. Yeah, that's the way I would see it.
Before we get into the detail, because I want to talk about those indicators and all that tell us a bit about your background, because I find that fascinating, and the psychologists have become a policeman. I've seen it the other way around thee Yeah, yeah, it tell us about your journey.
Yeah. So when I was a kid, I sort of loved d Agatha Christie, you know, Arthur Conan, Douge, Shelock Holmes, all that stuff. So I was sort of obsessed with the whole thing before, you know, when I was quite young, and as I got older, I got into the psychology of it, and I started reading books about serial killers, which is kind of worrying, isn't it in a way. But as a fifteen year old, but I read a book People, one of the indicators that we probably back then. Yeah,
so I've sort of turned it around. But I read a book called Alone with the Devil, which is a book by an American psychiatrist. His name is Ronald Markman. It's a book from the eighties, so I don't even
know if you can get it anymore. But he talked a lot about interviewing Charles Manson's followers, and it was sort of in my head like how did how did he manage to convince those people to get involved in a murder and all this sort of stuff, and so I just found it fascinating the book, and from there I basically went to university studied psychology, and then from there I did a master's in friends psychology. So I got involved in understanding criminals, particularly murders and sexual offenses.
And most of the class that I was in that course with went on to work in prisons or clinical psychology, Whereas I always had this thing kind of in a sense of justice or I was interested, but I wanted to actually catch them, if that makes sense. I wanted to be on that side, which I guess is just individual. So I applied for a job at a national agency in the UK, and this is about twenty five years ago now, and I got the job and it was
just being set up that unit. It was a kind of unit designed to study serial of sex offenders and stranger murderers across the UK. So we built a big database of these things, all the behaviors that you might see in a particular murder case. And what I'd done just before that was I done my dissertation on murder. So I looked specifically at a crime scene. If someone's attacked in a murder and their face is attacked, does that indicate whether or not the suspect knew their victim?
And I was allowed to go through a series of case files from a police force and examine this and study this and test it, and ultimately what the dissertation found was that there was two types of situations. One was if someone was killed and then the person wanted to cover up the crime. You know, body disposed, all that sort of thing. They sometimes would damage the face or the teeth, all that kind of thing you might see an organized crime, so they're disguising the identity of
the victim. But the other side of it was when individuals knew the person, often they would attack someone's face because the face is like who they are, if that makes sense, like the window to your soul, it's.
Who you and they're trying to bootherate that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is a kind of dissertation to do, but interesting for me at the time. So I took that with me and I went on to become a behavioral analyst, is what it's called. So I was a senior analyst at this unit and I did that for six or seven years. And what that unit's doing, it's really linking crimes. So what we were interested in was serial murders and sex offenses. So we were trying to see if we can link crimes across the country.
There's a famous serial killer in the UK called Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper if you heard of him. Yeah, So in the sort of late seventies, he attacked he killed thirteen women. He was a truck driver and he drove all over the north of England. And what they realized back then that you'd have murder investigations rue on bits of paper. There's no computers in the way that we have now, no DNA, so you're not linking crimes in
the way that we would be able to now. So the unit was kind of set up for the purpose of trying to improve that because in the UK there's forty three different police forces, so this is the idea of trying to talk to them all, you know.
And those investigations operating in silos and not passing on information. We had the same situation here that I won't say mistakes because we just didn't understand at that point in time the linkage that you could make between the investigations even between different state police but local area commands and
crime and occur and be investigated in isolation. That type of study I've found that fascinating, And what you're talking about is not this similar to a journey I went on looking as a homicide detective, looking at those type of type of links between the offenses, and they also find that fascinating what can be told from a crime scene, the way the body is disposed of, and different things that you pick up from operational experience as a homicide detective.
But I like the academic research that's done that clearly you're involved in that sort of supports the theories. Whereas a detective can walk in and go I think this has happened, but there's now it's just more of an instinct. But the academic research that in the field that you were doing was adding the science to it.
Yeah. Indeed, so if you imagine, you know, having now been a detective, you can't done it the other way around, like you say, but you start to realize that actually, as a detective, a lot of kind of what makes your career, if you like, is the cases you work. You know, in that unit, I was exposed to more cases, like understanding them, reading them than an average detective would ever be. So the value comes partly from the research and the analysis, but also from seeing so many of them.
Because in one police force in the UK, you don't have many serial murders or many stranger rapes and things like that. So we would be sent into the inquiry team quite early on in the investigation. We'd go to the crime scene, we do all of those kinds of things, meet with the SiO, and then we'd give them advice and write a report. But we're also given them suggestions of investigations, investigative suggestions they might want to follow because we've seen it in another case. So it's kind of
useful to bring that knowledge. And obviously the purpose is also to try and link crime, so try and bring in other offenses or suspects that they may not have considered that live in other parts of the country. Having done it for a number of years, what I found was that it really worked the best if you caught someone.
So take Peter Sutcliffe as an example. You could then look back over their crimes and consider not just their behavior, the sort of behaviors that they would show in their crime, which is kind of this idea of an mo you know, it's this signature of how they behave, but also where they lived, where they worked, what their movements were over many years, and you tend to give you like then like anchor points that you can draw in other crimes from.
There's lots of examples where that's being quite successful, but with sort of linkage behavior which isn't too dissimilar to what I'm interested in now. Is what you're looking at is you're putting yourself in the mind of that person, which is a kind of a dark approach, but it's the necessary approach. Yeah, I do understand that. Yeah, So if you look at a series of say a series of murders, often people start at a younger age, they
get older over the years. If they get away with it long enough, But also they start to learn behaviors from previous incidents because say it's gone wrong for them, or they've been caught once for a minor offense, so they might be more careful next time, or they might decide to choose to target someone in a different location because it's easier for them to get away with it.
So you start to try and work that out. Always in your mind, it's not like you can link crimes just say well, they're exactly the same, because they never are. And one of the things that used to strike me about it was when it's planned, you know, the idea of planning a murder attack or a murder of this kind. Often there are similarities between them, but a lot of these offenders are people with jobs, with everyday lives. Many of them had families, so they live a normal routine.
So often their offending would hang off the routine. But sometimes they would just basically be given an opportunity by chance, so that then suddenly they commit a crime that's quite different to the rest of the others. So these are all sorts of things that used to have to think about.
It's complicated. The choice of victims is always an interesting who the victims are, and that Peter Sutcliffe one. Did he have a particular style of victim that he would.
Target, Yes, so he was known to target sex workers. Initially, he was unusual in the sense that he's very violent and very immediate violence, often using weapons. He used to take a hammer around with him and attack victims like that. As the years went on and it was more difficult to catch him, he became this idea that the FBI used, which is this organized versus disorganized kind of patterns of
serial killers. He started off quite organized, and then as it went on, he became more disorganized, so he became more reckless. He stopped targeting sex workers and started to attack other women. But he was able to use his job as a means with which to kind of come in and out of a particular community and move into another community very easily. And I suppose when you look at a crime like that in the seventies, as I said, you've got no DNA, you've got no CCTV. Really, you've
got nothing like that at all. Totally different environmental Yeah, so in some senses, I mean, we didn't exist then either. We went back through those kinds of crimes and other serial killers crimes, but in some senses the behae in those days, the behaviors or you really go up to link crimes together. Nowadays a lot of DNA science makes it possible to do that much easier.
Well, you can with durna that's left you. Instead of speculating that these crimes are linked, you can lock it in. We've had that with serial sex offenders where the durna has been left at the scene. The other thing I find interesting in something that I think from an investigative point of view, quite often we miss, but it's interesting
that you raise it. The lifestyle of the offender. Sometimes that pattern that you're trying to work out what the patterns all about, but it's quite often linked to their
home environment or their employment. We had a rapist on the North Shore that was operating and he would only strike on Tuesdays and Thursday nights, and it was confusing at first, what's this about, But as it eventually played out and he was arrested, charged and convicted with the offenses, it was to do with knights that he was away from home because he was supposedly doing a tech course or an evening course. So he could leave his home
without any suspicion boom rays. But that's why Tuesdays and Thursdays. But it's a complex thing. But I was fortunate in my career worked very closely with doctor Sarah Yull forensic psychologists in New South Wales Police, and I found it fascinating getting that different different perspective from the psychological perspective.
You have the police and we look at things a certain way, and then having someone come in and she would quite often we'd have briefing, after briefings, sit down with her and she'd explained something and the moment she said, I think, yes, okay, that's what we need. I embrace working with Sarah. I love working with Sarah. There was some police that had a bit of a resistance to it, or what are these quacks going to bring into Did
you experience that at all? Was there any resistance with the expertise that you bought into criminal investigation because as you know as now having worked as a cop, we can be fairly sitting their ways.
Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I smiled slightly then, because I'm sort of remembering my younger self. But yeah, we would be sent into major investigations, you know, policing. Back then you're kind of going into often quite a male dominated environment as well, and sometimes slightly macho environment. And yeah, you're a kind of twenty something psychologist with an opinion. I was quite opinionated. I think at the time, I'm smiling there. Yeah, you can imagine me, can't you.
Who's that? You know, what's he doing here? Sort of thing. So every now and again i'd say something valuable and then you'd get the attention of an SiO. You know, you would have that, and often it was about building trust. But you know, you've been a murder SiO. I mean, you don't have much time to think. Your huge pressure's lots to think about all at once, and so a psychologist or a behavioral analyst kind of pointing out a few things is one of the things you need to
think about, but not necessarily always the priority. So it was difficult early days to get to get heard, and over time we just sort of built a relationship. So what you found was if you worked with the same SiO, then you tended to have a kind of better relationship.
And I was like, they can understand that the value you can add to the investigation.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And often people often think about crime analysis as intelligence analysis, which is a different thing. It's much more to do with linking intelligence and even sometimes doing charts and kind of showing crime patterns and things like that. That's not really what we were doing. We were doing behavioral linkage, so we were in a different space.
But I was assigned my career, I was assigned the North of England and Scotland as a senior around list, so I spent a lot of time up there, even though I lived in the South of England, and spent time with some of the Scottish CIOs in Glasgow and Edinburgh and then in the North of England too, so we kind of build a relationship to the point then that they might ring you up and say what do
you think of this behavior? As often the questions we'd get because it was a bit odd or so odd behaviors are sometimes useful because underneath there's some reason for them, but you often see them in series, you know, links and patterns. It was interesting, but all I'd say is becoming an SAA years later, I'm always very nice to analysts, as you can imagine, because because I understand it, and I kind of see their plate.
If you like, you know, look, is a team in any homicide investigation or major investigation, that's a team effort from the bottom persons at the top person. It's all about contributing. But I'm just reflecting on some of the things that Sarah helped me with. I was on a serial killing case and the victims four year old girl,
sixteen year old girl, and sixteen year old boy. And it was hard to articulate because we're pushing this matter through court and a whole range of things, and hard to articulate because people going, well, you say, because I was arguing that these crimes are linked, and it would be put back, well, oh that the victims one's a four year old girl, one's a sixteen year old girl, sixteen year old boy. And I try to articulate that
they were linked. And there was very good reasons why these crimes were linked, and the tendency and coincidence evidence that were related, the way the bodies were disposed of. But Sarah, when I was creating documents for the court and doing affidavids and different things, identified that this person was motivated. It was a sexual motivation. And he is
prepared to kill to get a sexual satisfaction. He wasn't driven by the sex, wasn't aimed at the victims, but it was he was prepared to kill those victims to satisfy his sexual urges. And all of a sudden, it
was a light bulb moment. And I've been working on the case for years trying to argue and justify why I'm saying these crimes are linked, and just little things like that I felt were beneficial another thing that I would use the psychologists for in police in I'd like to get your view on this because I think you've done some study on this as well, about police interviews, whether it's a crucial witness or the suspect, and break it down in the basis or the most basic form
carried or a stick, What way should I approach the interview? I found that beneficial before I sat down in the interview room. Sometimes is that something that you were involved in as well?
Yeah, I didn't personally advise around that, but we did give them a sense of what sort of person they might be talking too about years later, when I'm doing the police interviews myself and I've been in Sao where we've had psychologists and we've had people guiding us in
terms of the approach to interviews. And I'm a big advocate of the whole peace model and the rapport of things, so that back in the day, even when I started, I mean when I was a police officer, you know, you were sort of thrown in and you ask your questions a little bit kind of staccata, don't you and looking at a piece of paper and all this, and I sort of came with a different view because of my background, I guess, so I used to keep it very relaxed and try and not it's not befriending people,
you know, you know what they've done, but it's just about kind of sometimes preparing beforehand so they don't dislike you if you like immediately. And sometimes as an SiO, we had interview teams that interviewed suspects and I would make a decision to pull someone out of that because the suspect clearly doesn't like their face or the way they come across, whatever it is. They might remind them
of someone, but they didn't have the rapport. And I just think rapport if you're going to get anywhere in a police interview I think reports important, so I always choose to try and make conversational. Obviously, in the back of your head you've got the kind of points you want to get across and the evidence that you want to try and improve. But I found no real benefits of trying to take someone head on or morally kind of dominate them if you like, because of what they've done.
I always felt in the interview room the most simplest form not to show judgment, not to sit there and if I'm interviewing you just sort of rolling my eyes. If you talk about something and not be judgmental, if anyone's going to open up to you, you can't sit there being judgmental with your arms crossed and giving them attitude. It's about having a conversation and letting them because one thing I found in the interview room is that people often say, how do you get a confession out of someone?
Quite often, and we're not talking perhaps serial killers or maybe serial killers, but quite often people want to unburden themselves. They carry this guilt of a crime, and if I'm honest, what I'm is letting them unburden the pressure of carrying this secret that's been troubling them for a long time, and that often pays dividends in the interview room.
Yeah, Like, there's lots of examples of serial killers, particularly where they haven't they've never admitted their crimes, you know, So in some ways they're not going to do it in the first few days to a police officer. They haven't done it their whole life. Even those that have died haven't admitted anything, if that makes sense. So it's always worth worth trying, as you say, to kind of
get someone to unburden themselves. But I always used to kind of try and see it as a relationship of sorts that in that moment, because if you think about what we talked about a bit earlier, the serial killer sort of mindset, a lot of that's about power and dominance and things. Anyway, they don't want to be caught. They don't they want to ultimately come out again. They're not necessarily going to listen to you if you start
challenging them on everything or look down on them. But yeah, interviewing, I used to love interviewing just because it was one of those things where I suppose, to a point, you're trying, you're trying to get them to, as you say, unburden themselves, admit the crime, and sometimes that would happen, and sometimes completely to your own surprise. I remember once interviewing a guy for a series of kind of knife point robberies.
Didn't speak at all, and then right at the end he just kind of cracked and started crying and apologized and all that sort of you know. So it can happen. Is even when they say no comment repeatedly, which is often the case, if the interview is good enough to kind of get across their points and try and connect with them. Connect him with someone that's not even talking back to you is quite difficult, but if they're able to do that, then it can be really effective.
How did you find your way from being the psychologist and the nerdy kid that comes into the stripe force room or the incident room and explains what you've learned at UNI to becoming a police officer, because that's a big career change for it.
Yeah. Yeah, I was quite well established, so it was a big jump and I went back to being a police you know, bobby on the beat as they call it in London. So that was the stepmade.
So just to make this so I thought, we understand that. So you're there, you're working on major crimes, you're I mean, an input to it, but you've decided you wanted a career in law enforcement, like as in being a swamp swarm member.
Yeah, what it was. I worked on a case as a guy called Robert Black, who's a child killer from the UK in the eighties. One of the most awful people really, and it was a difficult case. But he killed three young girls over a period of about five years. But as I said earlier, there was no DNA then, there was nothing like that. He drove a van he
used to deliver posters and things. He came from Scotland and he abduct the children and the borders of Scotland or north of England, and then after he murdered them, he took them to sort of the Midlands about three hundred miles or so away, dumped their bodies and it went on for years and he wasn't caught, so I
picked it up after he was caught. He was caught in nineteen ninety but the way he was caught so he was he was in the process of abducting another young girl in Scotland and someone saw him snatch the girl from the street, heart her in the van, and he took down the registration number. It always gives me chills to talk about this or think about it. But this guy knew a local police officer, so he told him and so they looked out for this van and strangely,
it drove straight back past. They saw the registration number. So the police officer stopped the van and then they opened the back of the van and the young girl, I think she was six years old, was in a sleeping bag, tied up in the van and she was still alive. But the police officer was her dad, just
by chance. Yeah, So this extraordinary story. And he he was caught for that and then taken to a trial, and it took about four years to get him to trial for that fence another offense, and then the three that he'd murdered. And what amazed me about it was that back in those days, if you went to petrol station, you would like sign, wouldn't you with a pen to pay for something? But the petrol companies would keep all those receipts. They'd send them away to huge kind of warehouses.
So nothing was digital then. And the police went through something like five hundred thousand petrol receipts in this investigation over years to work out where Robert Black was the times of all these murders, and just the sheer kind of effort magnitude. Yeah, and this is detectives, right, Yeah. And I was just so impressed by it, and I was just sort of thinking, you know, wow, this is incredible. And then later years later, I worked on a similar case.
It was an island that was linked to that series, and he was actually convicted of that about twenty years later, and again the same thing. They went through so much information and took it took so many years, but they didn't give up. And there was something in that that just kind of lit me up. Really want to want
to join the police. And I had this. I was older, so I had this strange feeling of like, do I really want to do this, you know, go back to uniform and be in the tough streets of London and all this sort of thing. And most of my classmates were like eighteen, They looked about twelve, you know, and I imagine yeah, and I was I was sort of like completely out of almost out of my depth. You have to fight people as well, and you know, and all that stuff. And it was obviously they you know,
they fight you, but have to fight back sometimes. But I remember I remember a couple of times in the classes in the training center sort of answering questions with this sort of I know about serial murder and you know, and my classmates were not impressed at all. So it was a very rude awakening. It was like, no, you've got to go to this shoplifting, you know. So it was it was a tough transition, but it was something
about that case was a big part of it. Just I wanted to be a detective and I was kind of willing to take the step. I just wanted to be closer to I guess, the action, the result, you know, the justice part of it. You really want to.
I think from a career point of view, being a detective and on big cases, I find it fascinating and that's so stimulating. And that's not dismissing the horrific nature of the crimes that you're investigating, but to get on an investigation and work it through from start to finish, that can be a very rewarding career. How long did it take you to get back into the field there's a detective and start leading investigations.
In the UK, you do two years probation they call it. Yeah, so I guess it's similar here. But yeah, so two years in uniform, which was a huge grounding. I have to say, like, you know, it's it's a really important thing and it makes you understand the kind of people and what you're dealing with all that kind of stuff. So I joined the CID so I think they call the CIB here, so it's General Investigation Detectives. So I
was a kind of a constable working in London. So I became an acting detective sergeant fairly quickly, work some cases doing that, and then I moved police forces. I moved to a county force, which is like a country force if you like. Again another sort of shock really from London to that. Weirdly, I was busier because I think you get more crimes given to you as a detective, but the place that the area is safer largely than
a city, you know. So there I took promotion, so I became a DI and that's when I started to sort of SiO things, I think, and I was on a proactive team, so we targeted robberies and burglars and kind of this idea of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, things like that. So that point I then started to run those cases. And then what what I found was like all this stuff I'd learned before, which I'd had to almost bury really to be kind of authentic in that, you.
Know, you concentrate on the general the boot policing and yeah, do that. Yeah, I can understand that all your academic studies wouldn't have come in the great deal of assistance at that stage.
I used to get told off because I would interview for too long and so hopefully won't go on, but or I would, you know, I would overthink like the crime.
You know, Sorry, I shouldn't be laughing at He's understandable, and I can imagine that, but yeah, it would be hard for you, Yeah.
Because if you sort of you're trying to analyze as someone who's I don't know, stealing from a shop and you're trying to understand why they do it and all this sort of stuff, and then you've got thirty crimes to investigate, you know, and your sergeants sort of hitting around the head going can you please if you're still in the interview room. Yeah, can you please just close that one? It was a bit like that. I'm luckily for me, I had good, good supervisors who sort of
knocked it out of me. But then as I kind of grew back up into a DEI and the later a detective chief inspector, I was able to draw back on that knowledge and experience. So it kind of went full circle. Because the more serious the crime you're involved in them, as you said earlier, the more helpful it is to have an understanding of why they do it,
you know, and how to how to apply that. And I kind of often lent on people like I was when I was younger, brought them in because it just helped me and it kept me kind of in touch with that. So but yeah, an interesting and interesting journey. I was really glad not to have completely left it behind.
How did your interest get into glowing actors and mess killings? What drew you into interest in that field?
So? I was working as a detective inspector in child protection, so how to I ran a unit which investigated child abuse child sexual exploitation, which is this kind of a it's a more modern term, but it's kind of bringing normally young teenage girls into kind of prostitution, sex work, stuff like that, and it's a pretty difficult, difficult crime
to get your head around. But often what was sort of involved in those cases was this idea of vulnerability and people being drawn into it and older men or merely kind of offering money or opportunity or things like that to kind of kind of get their own sexual
kind of gratification, I suppose. And at the time, what was happening in sort of work the world of extremism and terrorism was young people getting drawn into that, and what you could see was it's kind of a similar process in some ways, this idea of radicalization, but the process is really taking vulnerable people, often young people, and sort of drawing them into crime. And it's almost comparable
as well to grooming in gangs. You know, often you get you get people, and what you sort of see is the young people tend to have these kind of shattered lives, abuse perhaps at home, or difficulties at home, and then they're trying to find a place for themselves and they get drawn into the wrong crowd. They're trying to find the yea. Quite often this is it and
it's a powerful thing. So there was sort of a direct translation across into that, and I saw a job in counter terrorism, but it was counter extremism stuff initially, so it was looking at how to sort of reduce that radicalization and help vulnerable mostly children but sometimes adults, how to steer them out of it, how to support and help them. That was my first kind of step into that, and there's a lot of there's a lot of psychology in that the process, and so it interested
me that that idea of it. So I did that for a few years, and then because I was a detective and I had experience, applied for another job then as an SiO. So that an SiO in that world means that you're you're effective. Some of your work is kind of working with people that haven't done anything, but you're monitoring them effectively. But quite a lot of it is around investigating crimes or near near kind of crimes. So this is where mass attacks became on the radar,
so I was involved. I can't talk like too far into those just because they're recent and they're sensitive, but these are crimes that involve individuals that have that intention to carry out mass attacks. Sometimes the attack itself is quite kind of not always clear cut its terrorism or not. It's often a debate about that, and that sort of rages on in the background. But I was able to work on some of those cases, and when you do that, you get very involved in trying to understand their journey
to that. And as a detective it's a slightly different thing to a psychologist in a sense. And you'd know this very well, is that when you're looking at someone's background that's carried out a murder or a crime like that, you're interested in what evidence is that going to provide to the court. You know, that's your kind of almost your focus, isn't it. But I suppose I started to think about along with that is why have they done this?
How have they got into this situation? Became aware of sort of that, and then I got involved in inquests, which is where you take these matters to a court, and the idea is not so much about convicting someone, but it's about why did this happen? How can we
stop it happened in the future. So I ended up doing all this sort of deep dive stuff and getting involved in trying to understand what was happening, and then an opportunity came to work as like the national lead for behavior if you like, so applying forensic psychology and all the behavioral work that I've done before to this issue. And so I did that for a number of years.
So it's sort of perhaps a convoluted journey, but it was good for me to be able to kind of bring that back in and apply it slightly differently and be able to think about that thing. But really I'm still in the position now even where it's about understanding understanding why people do something in order to help you either stop it or investigate it. You know, that's the idea.
I want to talk about your experience. But before we do, I just touch on the psychology of say a serial killer as compared to what motivates or what's the psychology behind someone that commits a violent offense in the loan Egg, the mess killing.
Yeah, sure, so I kind of look at it not so much in terms of what happens, you know, so obviously people are killed in these incidents either way, but look at it in terms of their intent, what's their purpose? And in a simple term, a serial killer is often almost exclusively interested in some sort of sexual gratification, So whether or not they actually use some sort of sexual behavior in the killing itself, or whether the act of killing is some kind of graification for them. Either way,
it's very normally a sexual crime. That's the truth of it. With loan actors mass attacks, most of them, although there's different types, most of them focus on this idea of going out with a blaze of glory. So it's this idea of it's their last kind of hurrahs, their last moments, because the likelihood is they're either going to be killed afterwards by the law enforcement or they're going to be imprisoned,
and so for them it's a final act. A serial killer by its nature, because it's sexual crime, they don't want to be caught. They want to carry on offending, whereas with these lone actor or these mass attacks, there's often a notoriety attached to it. So it's this idea of being remembered, being seen as special somehow, and sometimes that's in death and sometimes that's in life and they're in prison, but either way it's much more to do with that, and so you get quite a different profile
generally between those two types of people. There is a sort of a blurring now which I've seen, which is this idea of nihilistic violin extremism, which is a term that's come from America in the last year or so. And these are people that are killing or doing these acts for the sake of it, because they have no real kind of attachment to society or morality, so they just want to do it for the sake of it.
And so in some senses, I can see some links between this idea of serial killers doing it for the sake of it, But that's a kind of special niche if you like, of this problem. There's lots of different types.
So terminology you said, yeah, is that something that America is starting or is starting to see in the US.
Yeah, I mean you see cases around the world, but certainly these are often young people. They're online and there's a subculture of young people online that talk about this thing, and the idea is it's around violence for violence sake.
So what you don't see so much now in those cases particularly is an ideology or let's say they focus on a specific ideology, so they may have lots of different interest in ideologies, but ultimately they're not doing it for a cause they're doing it for the sake of it. They're doing it in order to achieve some notoriety, but also just to kind of cause destruction to society. That there's no kind of political, religious, ideol, logical cause around it.
And it's a worrying trend. And it's a strange trend. And a lot of it is online, driven online by groups that communicate on the dark web or sometimes stream online too. So this sort of issue, because I've had this career where I've sort of followed these sort of mass murders or serial killings, I can almost see how it's evolved over time the last twenty twenty five years. So it's worrying, but it's kind of interesting for me too to understand it, because what I'm interested in is
how can we prevent these kinds of acts? How can we stop them?
It's concerning, isn't it That You've had another layer there? But with loan actors' mass killings, there's invariably not an escape plan, like they think this is their final statement. As you said earlier, they're making a statement that makes it difficult for policing, Like by the time police homicide investigation traditionally is a reactive investigation. The crimes occurred, and
you investigate the crime. The big problem here all the tests of law enforcement now it's proactive investigation to prevent those crimes. By the time those crimes have happened, the catastrophic results from the crimes. So we've got to shift our focus from being reactive in investigating major crime to being proactive. Is that a fear assessment?
Yeah, I think there's a few things going on. I mean, obviously if the suspect dies in the process, which often happens, then there's a kind of difficulty for families of victims that there's no justice, right this kind of yeah, no
answers as well, which is a very difficult thing. And so this kind of concern for law enforcement around how do we stop these things before they happen, as opposed to of course you can investigate them, and of course those that survive you can take to court, etc. But is there a way that we can actually prevent these before they happen? Which is a shift, and it's not always possible. It's not a case of like it's easy to do this. It's very difficult to spot these things.
But certainly whenever I've looked back at cases that have happened and gone into the detail about that journey of the suspect before they carried out the attack, particularly in
the weeks before. You can see signs indicators present in almost all cases, and that's what sort of interests me, and from a law enforcement point of view, obviously that's something that they should be tuned into, of course, but I guess for me and my experience, often when you see the indicators, it's almost before law enforcement are involved.
It's tracking it back slightly earlier than that, because these kinds of behaviors are the sorts of things that you would see if you know that person day to day, you'd see a change because you know what they're like normally.
So it's not leaving the petn of criminal offenses that have come to the attention of law enforcement. There's subtle shifts or changes that might not miss necessarily be brought to the attention of law enforcement.
Yeah, exactly, And often they're not brought to the attention of law enforcement because people either don't notice them, they're not tuned into what's going on, or they become normal these kinds of behaviors Because these often these people have extreme views or they behave in extreme sometimes violent ways in their life anyway. But also what they're not seeing
is the opportunity to report. So they might worry about reporting it to law enforcement or to some of the support agencies that you now see around the world because they don't want to get them in trouble. They're concerned about what the outcome would be for their friend, loved one, all that kind of stuff. And I think human nature often people don't like to tell on other people, you know.
And people were the closer you're goin to try to protect them and not. Yeah, bring the attention. But well, it's a shifting landscape, isn't it that, PEPs. We've all got to change the way we think and view things. Hey 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. Well here in your background, and it's fascinating and full credit to you for carving the career out in the way that you have. But I think it sets you up very well to talk about what we're talking about here about violent ideation and what is it? First of all, what is the thing behind these people that, whether they're alone actors or people that commit mass killings, these aggrievance is it? What's the grievance about, what's the
tipping point about? Tell us just give us an overview of the type of people that commit these crimes.
Yeah, sure, so violent ideation. I'll try and I'll try and cover some of the labels because it's difficult for people, and they are they're often used interchangeably or they've changed every couple of years, So I try and make it sounds what it really is. But violent ideation slight something slightly different. It might it might happen in a mass attack,
but it might not. But really that's the idea of having violent thoughts, intrusive thoughts, So people think about either harming themselves or other people, and it's something that's often linked to not you know, it's rare, but it can be linked to some mental health conditions, some serious mental health conditions, schizophrenia of being one of them, but there's others. So violent violent ideation isn't necessarily in always in these mass attack cases, what you do get, which is more common,
is this idea of grievance. And so if we take this idea of ideology, which is ideological violence, which is the sort of classic carrying out an act of a mass attack, or an act of violence for a cause, religious, political, racial, all those sorts of things, and these are things that people might be familiar with, a grievance is something that is probably a better term to use, I would say nowadays, because often these cases have ideology and that's part of it,
but often they don't, and sometimes they're just all mixed in together. It's really quite confusing. You can't you can't quite work out what they really believe. The reason I quite like the idea of a grievance, it's called grievance
based violence or grievance fuel violence. The reason I like it is because it gets it gets away a little bit from the beliefs and it focuses more on the psychology, so that the idea that someone has a grievance is the idea that they've been wronged or they've been kind of affronted or and so they're angry about that and in a very simple sense. If someone has a personal grievance, it might be that they've been fired from their job, right,
it's quite simple. So they've got a grievance against their boss or maybe the company, and they might decide, I'm so angry about that, I'm going to take action against that, you know, and they'll carry on an attack. And you see things like that. You might see cases where it's symbolic. So maybe the organization has done something to their family or something like that or them, and they decide to attack the building that represents that organization something like that.
And these are sort of personal grievances, but that grievance could be against society, you know, if they blame society or the government, or the police or any individual person could be a celebrity. They blame them for their life, which is kind of they've got a bad life. They're isolated, they're marginalized, so they want that kind of it's like a revenge almost they want and they want that because they want their power back. They want they want to
feel like they're powerful and they can overcome it. And that's the sort of psychology behind it. What we also see is this idea of where people adopt a particular cause, say a religious or political cause, which you see obviously in some of these cases, they take it on as a personal grievance internally, so they start they start to
actually absorb that. If they're watching the TV and they see their particular group or whoever they associate with, and they don't have to be a member, they might just you know, support them, and they see them coming to harm or they see like bad things playing out, maybe they're going to feel that personally. So the process of a grievance is the same. So there's still having that feeling of anger, that feeling of like how dare you I'm going to get justice. It's just the fact that
they're getting it for the group. They're defending the group. If that makes sense, Yeah, that does.
You're breaking there's a grievance. What the initiated. The grievance can be from a personal grievance or an aspect with a group, an ideology that they don't believe in, something political, But the overriding thing is that it's a grievance that they've got.
Yeah, and the important thing is that unlike the sort of serial killer thing, which is often driven by sort of personal sexual gratification. This is driven by a kind of a sense of wanting to do something important, to do something meaningful for that group or for them to
get their power back. But also it's often in these cases you see this idea of being remembered so notoriety, so this idea of they're effectively trying to be an important person, but they're coming from a low place, right, They're coming from a kind of low self worth, low self esteem place, and by doing this, they're kind of getting some groundback and they're able to do that, and so you go just onto the idea of a tipping point.
So what you see in these cases is often a moment where they go from someone who's angry and might say stuff and might have little incidents where they tend to argue with people, or they might even get into a fight or do something maybe less violent but still violent, and then something happens that kind of pushes them to go all the way. And that kind of comes in two ways. The first would be like an internal tipping point.
So most of that relates to things that go wrong in their life, like we all have it, don't we sort off, someone dies, divorce, lose your job, they might they might have an issue with immigration, or they might be arrested, something goes wrong, and at that point they're much more volatile and they've got less to lose. So tipping point is almost this idea of nothing to lose. The other sort of tipping point you get is an
external one, so I call them flash points. But it's it's sort of thing like like you see on watching TV and there's a war on which you know is current at the moment someone's watching it. They're getting angry about that, and it's kind of it's gotten so angry they already have this this grievance or these beliefs.
And they're sitting at home and they're saying, I a show, go into a school or something medi gazette and mets it.
Yeah, So cases can be tipped like that. So it means that someone goes from thinking about it, talking about it, to actually, right, I'm going to do something about this. That's what I'm going to do. And in those cases it's quite interesting nowadays, particularly because back in the day we used to watch TV and you'd see the images that you'd get on TV, right, that was it a
few channels to choose from. Now people can go online and they can watch footage from someone's phone in the war zone, right or you know, it might it might be a not a war zone. It might be another attack. So it might be another attacks occurred somewhere, and that might inspire them to act too, do you see what I mean? So I do.
And they can play it on Route peap before, they can watch it continuously, and yeah, they can fester on it. I can see how it changes the changes the dynamics completely.
And there's a phenomena that occurs where people get angry about those things, but often also watch a lot of it because it desnsitizes them to it as well. Because often these people, some of them are violent naturally, but often they're not. They've never done anything like this. It's a big deal for them. So and so that's that's the way I see it. And these things can happen
over years, or they can happen over weeks. You know, cases of extreme timing where people have fested on these subjects for a long time and it's something just snaps them to move.
That's given an understanding of the type of person that we're dealing with here some of the indicators that I've made some notes here at common sence, I suppose because the whole thing about law enforcement here is we want to prevent these or identify these before they carry out the acts. Expressions of violent ideation, threatening behavior, fascination with violence, social withdrawal. These are the type of things that are indicators if they behave mood changes. I'm looking through the
whole list of them, and I find it fascinating. Preoccupation with personal grievances, substance abuse, preparation for violence, changes in routine, unsolved conflict or stresses. So what you were describing, these are all the things these are. That's the person that carries out these acts. These are the type of signposts that all signs that they could be going down that path.
Is that correct? Yeah? Every case is different, and some of their things you list their present, sometimes they're not, so it's different combinations. The easiest way to sort of see it is to look at it from say the idea that if someone wakes up one day, yeah, and they decide to carry out an attack leading up to that, what what might you see? And the reason I mentioned the grieving grievance and the tipping point first is because
they're often there. The grievance particularly is almost always there. So you're going to get people who have views that aren't necessarily going to do this, and you're also going to have people that have those views have a terrible time in their life, something happens, and they still don't do it. But my view has always been you should
you should still consider that. If that's someone you're already concerned about and then they have a major life event or something happens you know, in the world or even locally that that's quite significant, then those are the moments that you should kind of check in with them and focus in on them. And so if someone you, a member of the public's got friend or family or something like that, then they should be concerned around those things.
Because this is the idea of flash points. So you can't predict exactly who's going to go ahead and do this, but those moments are concern But then what you move into once they've decided, you move into this preparation phase. There's two parts of that really. One is this sort
of physical preparation. So it's almost always a planned crime this, I mean, there are examples of where it's very spontaneous, but most of them there is an element of planning, often rudimentary because often the methods that are used are nowadays are kind of They might use a knife or a car or something kind of like that. But there is this planning phase, and so some of them will start to kind of look at where they're going to do it. They're going to pick somewhere to do it.
They might look at kind of how many people are there? How can they get away with it? They might think about how important is that site? Is that going to get the attention that I want by doing this? It is often what this is also about. And then they're going to have to acquire a weapon of some sort if that's the way they're going to do it. So
all those things take time and planning. Some of it's kind of obvious, but if you're sort of if you know that person and they'rever extreme, and then they start to kind of either talk about because some do just talk about it openly, and that's obviously a big flag, you know, a big red flag. The other thing that happens is that sometimes with this planning phase, they tend to kind of go off the radar. You know, they
become very withdrawn. Suddenly they become secretive, they sort of disappear and they won't sort of tell anyone what they're up to.
So these are the I call them indicators, I'm not sure if that's the right terminology, but type of indicators that people should look out for when, yeah, if they're concerned about someone going down this pathway. We're going to take a break now when we get back, because I know in the other discussions that we've had a big thing is about how we can minimize the risk associated
with people like this. So let's talk more in depth about that the type of dig even deeper into the indicators ways of preventing this, and I think we're both in the grants will never be able to stop it completely. But it's not just law enforcement, it's everyone's invested in trying to reduce these type of the type of criminal acts. We'll be back shortly for part two.
Okay, cheers,