DANGEROUS GROUND-M. William Phelps

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Award winning investigative journalist M William Phelps reveals the identity of Raven, the serial killer who co starred with him on Dark Minds, and tells the story of his intriguing with one of America's most disturbing killers. In September twenty eleven, M William Phelps made a bold decision that would change the landscape of reality based television and his own life.

He asked a convicted serial killer to act as a consultant for his TV series under the code name Raven, the Murderer shared his insights into the minds of other killers and helped analyze their crimes. As the series became an international sensation, Raven became Phelps's unlikely confidant, ally and friend. In this deeply personal account, Phelps traces his own family's dark history and takes us into the heart and soul

of a serial murderer. He also chronicles the complex relationships he developed with Raven, from questions about morality to Raven's thoughts on the still unsolved brutal myrdal of Phelps's sister in law. The author found himself grappling with an unwonted, unexpected,

unsettling connection with a c old, blooded killer. Drawing on over seven thousand pages of letters, dozens of hours of recorded conversations, personal and Skype visits, and a friendship five years in the making, Phelps shed's new light on Raven's bloody history, including details of an unknown victim, the location

of a still buried body. In a jaw dropping admission, eye opening and provocative, dangerous ground is an unforgettable journey into the mind of a charming, manipulative psychopath that few would dare to know and the determined journalist who did just that. The book that we're featuring this evening is Dangerous Ground, My Friendship with a Serial Killer with journalist and author and television producer M William Phelps. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for a

Greenness interview. M William Phelps, Dan, how you doing.

and so what do I do with it? And what I decided was ever since the Dark Mind Daring on ID in twenty eleven, I believe it started, people been asking me about my sister in law's case, and you know, she was five months pregnant, she was thirty six years old. She was strangled to death with a pillowcase over her head, telephone quote around her neck, and my brother subsequently died several years later. And thinking about that story, always ask me how I got into true crime, writing my journey,

and people asked me my own story. So I figured this was a great opportunity to tell all those stories and kind of use Jessperson's story as the backdrop for it. So the first section of the book is called friends, the second section is called family, and the third section

is called faith. And you know, the friends is a loose term, but you know, I talk about our relationship there, and in the middle I talk about his family, his background, him as a child and me as a child did we go back and forth and then the end is faith. It's how I lost faith and how he has had faith in me to tell his story.

was his guy. Well, at the end of that season, Kelly says, you should develop your own guy, you know, And so in late twenty ten, I started writing to different serial killers, and John Kelly's one who suggested really Jess Person, Joel Rifkin, a couple others, and I wrote to these guys and I began to get letters back and jess person just struck me as a kind of guy who wanted to talk and talk and talk, and the kind of guy who really wanted to impress me. He knew my work, he had read my work, and

he was impressed by what I had done. He really respected me as a writer, and I started to receive, you know, an abundant letters from him, and then we started talking on the phone, and I realized right away that, you know, he's the guy we need for the show.

I mean, I could go on and on, and I wanted to look at those cases and bring some exposure to those cases because those a lot of those cases are just collecting dust. And so the way I design the show was I go out, I investigate, I do my own work, I interview cops, I inter members of the victims and so forth. But then I go back to John Kelly, my forensic psychologists, and kind of build a profile with him as the guy we might be looking for the unsubs as we call them, and unidentified subject.

And then we go to a serial killer on the phone. We don't expose who he is, we disguise his voice, and we'd get his opinion after I said the case that I'm looking at that particular week, that episode, and the way I'd explained it's no different really than using Phil Simms from the New York Giants to comment on the Giants game on Sunday on CBS. I mecause it's

really the same concept. You know, you're going to an expert in the field for expert analysis of what you're doing, and there's no better expert to quality to help you catch the serial killer than a serial killer. So that's what that's the premise of the show. And and for your listeners, you can go to YouTube and just google Dark Minds and you come up with probably fifteen of

the twenty two episodes we filmed. And and you'll hear Raven and and you know, so I would ask him, you know, to give any example, Dan, I would, I would say, you know, I'd send him information about a killer and a case, and he'd look at he'd got the victims, he'd look at the way the bodies were found, he'd look at all the everything, and he'd relate it back to his own mind and what he would do in this certain situation. And he'd give that analysis. And it helped. I believe it helped.

many during that year. Is seven more than seven thousand pages over the course of the five years I received from him as far as letters go, I have probably fifty or sixty letters right now sitting on my desk in my office that are unopened that I just I can't keep up with the guy amazing. So I went out there and I was with my crew from Dark Minds. We were actually shooting in Oregon at the time. Uh. And I went out there and I sat with him,

and you know, and he's a massive man. I mean he's six seven at the time, he was over three hundred pounds. And you know, we sat chair chair, and I mean inches away from each other. And I sat and I'm a pretty solid guy. I'm a big guy, and you know, he was just massive. And he's sitting there in front of me, and his two hands were on his knees and his hands were maybe I don't know,

eighteen inches away from me. And the first thought I had was, those are the same hands that strangled eight women, you know, And here they are just inches away from my own throat. So I said to him, I said, I said, I said, I called him Ray, you know, I called him Raven or jesperson. I said, could you kill me? Could you kill me? Because at this time we had become he had he had, he had begun to really start to trust me. I was his confident. I mean, he really really liked me at this time,

a year into it. And he said, if I had to, he said, I wouldn't want to, but if I had to, I could. I could easily kill you if you were in the way. And so so, you know, thus began our personal relationship there physical we were right in front of each other, and we just began to talk and I began to just develop them as a source. And what was the devastating part about the day was not only everything he said, but when I left there, I left, I left the prison kind of in a daze, you know.

And so me and my crew we go down the street, we go to the Kinko's, We go to the coffee shop, and someone broke into our vehicle and stole my bag and I got stuck in Oregon. We were on our way to Vancouver. It was a nightmare. It just turned into a nightmare and it and really, Danny, it goes back to something John Kelly, my forensic psychology just warned

me about before I embarked on this journey. Because John Kelly had been talking to serial killers for many, many years, John Wayne Gacy, many many famous serial killers he'd interviewed, and he said to me, he said, Matt, listen. He said, you're a tough guy. You know, you're strong, You're solid. You're a Catholic. I mean you're not only are a Catholic, but you go to Mass four or five times a week. You know you you think you've got control of everything.

You've written thirty books about murderers. You've written six seven books about serial killers, he said. But let me tell you something. He said, if the devil knocks on your door and you let them in, you better be ready to dance with him, because if you're not, he's going to get inside your head. And I kind of laughed at Kelly in my own little funny way that we joke around, and I said, come on, Kelly, you're talking about Phelps. Man. I'm tough, rock solid. No one's gonna

crack me. But boy, you read that book Dan and he broke me and broke me.

not changed, You've just gotten used to it. And so so this is what happened over the course of the time. I mean, I was talking to this guy happy face. So much. I was reading his letters, and at one time the prison decides, okay, you guys want to start skyping, You're welcome to do that. So we start skyping. So this guy's infected every part of my life. And you know, here's an example. Here's a small example, because Kelly always told me, John Kelly, he said, matt He said, when

you pick up that phone, be ready psychologically. You always have to be em William Phelps. When you pick up that phone. You can never be Matthew. He calls me, Matthew, you can never be that guy, that husband, that father. You can't be that guy. You gotta be em William Phelps. So here's an example of how it would go. We'd be talking and talking about, you know, all these clinical things, these serial killer stuff, and I'd say, listen, man, I got to go. My daughter's got a volley I'll talk

to you tomorrow or next week or whatever. Bang hang up. And I'd stop and I'd say I slipped, because the next time I would talk to him, this is how the conversation would begin. How did that volleyball game turn out? With your daughter? And I'd get pissed and I'd say, listen, man, you don't have the right to ask me about my personal life. And he'd say, well, you invited it, you know, you mentioned it, So I just thought it was okay.

So little things like that begin to slip, and then you begin, you know, that slips farther and farther until you realize it. So that's how that went.

was his first murder overall. It happened in Portland. And what happens is with Tanya Bennett is in nineteen ninety he kills Tanya Bennett, dumps her body like near the Vista House outside of Portland, and two people are subsequently arrested for that murder, tried and convicted while he is now becoming this serial killer. So he's watching his process unfold as he's killing other people, other women. He sees two people and put in prison for murder he committed,

and he's at first he's laughing about it. It's funny and wow, I've gotten away with it. Not only have I gotten away with it, but two people are in prison. And then we fast forward to I think it's nineteen ninety six, and he's arrested, he's put in prison for life, and he's in his cell and an article it comes out in the La Times, a big, huge article. I mean, I don't know how many words it was, but it's eleven pages long or something Internet page is long, by

Barry Siegel. I believe the big time journalist, big time article about happy face and this tiny Bennett case and how two people could be wrongly convicted of this crime. And Jefferson reads this article and he gets in. He claims he has an epiphany that oh my god, God, not only were two people wrong, you know wrongly, you know, convicted and tried and convicted and put away. But I believe the prosecutor and the cops knew that they had

the wrong people, and they still prosecuted them anyway. And if there's one thing about jessperson that he is obsessive about, it's the fact that he's admitted his wrongs. So everybody else must cough up and admit their wrongs, and if they don't, he's going to do it for them. So he wanted me to reinvestigate the entire benecase and write about it and in proof that they knew, that the cops knew, and that the prosecutor knew they had the

wrong people, but they went ahead with it anyway. And his contention at the time was all the cops fed them information in order for them to know certain details about the murder, you know, but the cops knew that they were not the right people. So I said, okay, I said, you know, I'll give you that promise. You know, I don't have to I don't have to promise you anything, but I promise that I'll look into that and I will write about my findings whatever they are. Be prepared

for what I find. And so thus I looked into it. I began to reinterview most of the people involved and look at the case, and you know, I came to a conclusion.

And I was it was, I wrote in Dangerous Ground in my book, I write it was like a death to me when they canceled that show. I mean, the general manager of ID is the one who broke the news to me, because he knew how hard it was going to be. All shows are ultimately canceled, but I felt that I had more work to do. Nonetheless, I get over that and I think to myself, I think I can't tell him. I got to keep him going because I need his help and need his help on

many different levels. And one of the levels was I wanted to maybe do a documentary on all the stuff that I had collected from him. I mean all the audio, the Skype recordings I recorded, all the all the skype interviews on GoPro I have, you know, and those will be coming out them. I'm going to be I'm going to be premier in some of that video on Doctor Oz in September. And and I actually just signed a deal for the rights to the book to make a documentary with a with a big company, and and so

that that was what I had in mind. But the other thing was I didn't want to tell him because I didn't want him to come out and start saying he was raven. That was one of the reasons too, because he was itching to get some notoriety out of this. It really it really irked him that he couldn't he couldn't take part in the notoriety of being raven. Here he is on TV every week, national TV, I mean international or really the show aired him, I don't know,

twenty countries. So here he was, and he couldn't take credit for it. And for a serial killer not to be able to take credit for some is very you know, that's a blow to their ego, you know. So there were many different reasons why I didn't tell him right away.

You know, I don't know about that story. I mean, you know, it's in the book and it's it's in quotes from him, and you know, there's no one else to dispute it because by the time I got out, was on my way out to talk to Les Jefferson, his father, he had died. He had passed, so I

couldn't do that. But yeah, I mean his childhood was one of you know, he was the he was the kid in the family that everybody kind of pushed around, that every according to him, that everybody kind of not only his siblings but his dad and people at school kind of made fun of because of his size, kind of kind of said, you know, you're dopey, you're stupid, you know. I think his brother started calling him igor uh.

And and in school he was kind of ridiculed a little bit, and he was always to blame for everything. He told me. You know, he banged on about this a lot that everybody blamed me for everything. My dad. My dad would lie and about things and and and put the blame on me. Always my fault, always my fault,

always my fault. So you know what I look for as a as a as a when I put my clinical hat on and I start to look at stuff as a serial killer expert and researcher, I begin I try to look for a couple of things in serial killers, addictions and and sexual abuse. And I and for for the life of me, I couldn't figure out his addiction because he wasn't addicted to drugs, He wasn't addicted to alcohol,

any of that. And I'm like, there's got to be an addiction there, because all serial killers are addicted to something sex. I thought maybe it was sex for a while, and then bang, it comes late gambling. He admits to me that he had a gambling addiction. The sexual abuse I could never get out of him really the idea

that he was sexually abused. Jack Olsen wrote a book called I Creation of a serial Killer in which he talks about about Jesferson, in which he talks about a neighbor kind of not necessarily sexually abusing him, but maybe, you know, sexually confusing him, that sort of thing. But I didn't find no real outwardly sexual abuse. But the one thing that stood out in all of it to me was really sobering in many ways, and he didn't

really want to get too deep into it. He wrote me a manifesto at one time of his life, from the eighteen hundreds up until the day his last murder, and that what I mean by manifesto is this was

different from the letters. He took three thick, two hundred and fifty page notebooks and he wrote out his whole life for me, and in all those seven hundred pages or whatever they were, and that that particular manifesto, I think he mentioned his mother once And I asked, I said, do you realize you mentioned mother once in this whole thing? And I said, that's very telling to me. Why And he didn't have an answer for it. So I believe there's something deep seated there between him and his mouth.

What it is, I don't know.

with his wife. He's not having any sex with his wife, and he talks about that as something that really bothered him, you know, and he talks about how Rose would say things to the nature of, you know, when he made an advance, he'd say, go stick it in a keyhole something like that, or go masturbate or something like that. And he didn't like that. He didn't take particular he wasn't too particularly fond of that kind of talk. And he really develops some anger toward not only Rose, but

women in general, I believe from that. And so so we have this guy who's who's now divorcing, but he's living there and for a couple of years there where he was having sex with his wife, he was getting prostitutes, And what he began to tell me was that he believed that Rose and other women he didn't like it when they used him, and he said, most women will use men, most women would use me. And he really

was angry about this. And then there's a connection between his first victim, Tanya Bennett, where she makes he claims she makes an advance at him at the bar. He brings her home there there and then he makes an advance at her and she tells him go stick it in a keyhole, and he said, that was it. I snapped punched her and I didn't stop. But if you look at all his victims the way he describes them to me, you'll see that in each one of the cases he believes that woman used him in some way

and that was it. That was it for her.

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And he also talked about, as you described in the book, how murder got easier and as you describe, how his murders got more brutal and more settlement masochistic. So tell us some of the revealing conversations that he begins to convey to you.

It just it. It starts, it starts to work on me, and I don't even realize it really. Going back to the metaphor of the water, I just I'm kind of used to it. And in one of those instances, it's it's Angela Sabrieze is Andrews. Sabrieze was victim number six or seven, I believe, and with Angels Sabrize, I asked him, you know, I said, listen, you know the story about you Ty and Angelus to breeze to the bottom of your truck and dragging her down the highway for twelve miles.

I said, no one's really ever asked you, you know. And I might digress him in and say I was amazed at the questions that were never asked of this guy. And he, you know, by other journalists. So I asked him, I said listen, I said, man, I said, was she alive or was she dead when you tied her underneath

that truck? And he started laughing. He said, it would make a much better story for you if she was alive, but I think she was dead, and he would chuckle, you know, and I'd say, what are you talking about? I mean, what do you mean, what are you trying to say? You know? Are you are you? Are you trying to leave it ambiguous for me? And he's like, no, look, I think she was dead and he'd laugh, you know.

And so it was images like that of perhaps a woman still alive being dragged unerneath the truck that would wake me up in the middle of the night and I'd be staring at my ceiling and thinking, oh my god, what did this woman go through? What did any of these women go through? I mean, you know, he was the kind of killer that you said the wrong thing, and that was it you had. If you were a woman, you had these hands around your throat and he was strangling you to death, and he was looking at you

in the eyes, staring into your face. You know, bitch, you should have never said that, you know, why did you say that? And he would justify it by blaming the victim. He would talk about karma. It was always karma. These women crossed my path. They were meant to die. I was meant to kill them. You know. That sort of stuff, and that sort of stuff really began to bother me, you know, because I know it's all bullshit. That's what I know. You know, this guy is a

cycle path and cycle paths they don't care. I mean, they have no empathy. You know, they don't care. You know, if you cross your path and they want you dead, you're dead.

a killer. I found that one of the most incredible parts of this exchange between you two, what are the kind of things that you finally, in frustration, after hearing so much of like you called someone's ridiculousness, and just on and on and on, what do you what are the kinds of things you finally say to him in this kind of confrontation and what's his response back?

So I'll bets off. Dude, anything is possible with you. That's a fair question. And I would hang up the phone. I would hang up the phone, and he'd call back a couple of days and he'd say, listen, I'm sorry, And I'd say, listen, man, you know, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this. I'm not going to sit here and get angry at you on the phone, you know, and and and hang up on you. That's not the way this is going to work, you know.

He you know, he had no trouble answering questions as long as the question didn't challenge him in a way that he felt betrayed a confidence between us. You know. Yeah, so as long as he felt that his narcissism and his ego could uh could blossom during the answer, he was fine. But when I hit him hard, you know, he'd get mad. He'd get mad.

and you got to get me out. You got to bail me out. And he said, I don't have to bail you out. I'm not bailing you out. That's you know, that's your problem. And here we go with the with that trigger for him. The trigger for him was you know you're using me, right, that's the trigger. If he thinks you're using if he thinks he's being used by a woman, watch out, that's the that's the switch that's gonna flip. So she begins to really really gnaw at him with this you gotta get me out of jail,

you gotta bail me out. Listen, we're gonna be together. And she starts talking about let's get engaged, and she's talking about all this off and he's like he's just listening and listening and listening, and he's telling her no, no, no, no no, and this is not how it's going to go. I'm gonna tell you how it's going to go. You go to jail, then you're on your own. I got to take this load of steel across country. I can't be bothered with you. And she's like, you don't understand.

You got to get me out of jail. And he goes, you know what, I got a way to get you out of jail, and he grabs her by the neck and he brings her in the back of his cab and he strangles her to death. And then he looks at her and he says, now you're out of that court date. You don't have to worry about it anymore. And so there it is. There's the psychopath, there's the happy face to kill her. That he had had enough, he felt he was being used and so this person had to die. That's his answer death.

And one of his things was he'd like to go to Burger King of McDonald's and get some fries hamburg and sit down and eat, and then come into the cab and push her aside and take a nap, either dump her off on the side of the road or push her aside. In a couple of instance, he took a nap right near the body. I mean that, you know that that exemplifies the type of person that he is. He's a psychopath. He does not care best stuff does not bother him. In one instance, which which actually I

have a skype video of him describing this. In one instance, he brings the cheeseburger back into the truck and he and he and he even says to her and when he was telling me this, he's laughing. And on film I have it on some where he's laughing while he's describing the scene. He's like, I was telling her, if she was a good girl, she could have had some

of this burger, but she wasn't a good girl. And he laughed about it, so, you know, and that's type of stuff where you know, I'm the journalist I'm there, you know, and and and I'm like, I write it, I write in dangerous ground, I write, you know, objectivity, no such thing for a journalist. That's that's all bullshit. You can stay objective to a certain point, but object objectivity. I'd be sick to my stomach when he would tell

me stories like that, you know. And sometimes I would tell them, I would say, man, you know, you have no respect for the victims of your crimes, even now later after you've been arrested, and you need to show respect. You know. He almost never called them by their names. They were always victim one, two, three, or it or they. He would never personalize them.

is your big goal? What would you like to do with it?

if it's affecting you like that? Well, I'm going to go back to the metaphor that you know, before you realize that you have hypothermia in that cold water, and because you're used to the water at this point, you don't realize your body is cool enough, so you get hypothermia. So that is a metaphor. One of the things that kept me in this was he had a couple of cases that I was really interested in from the very

get go. One of them is a Jane Doe in Florida, and the Jane Doe in Florida is a woman who he picked up in Tampa who strangles maybe five hundred miles into the journey, three hundred miles into the journey and dumps her body along the I ten on the Panhandle in Florida. She's found a couple of years later. When he's arrested, he admits to killing her, tells them all the information he can about her. Her name was Sue,

Suzanne Susette. He doesn't really know, you know, where she was coming from, where she was heading Lake Tahoe, Reno, that area, and you know, that's about all I know. And for twenty years, while he's in jail, Florida law enforcement is writing to him and they're saying, can you help us because we can't identify her. We put her in, we put our DNA into the into codis, into the databases, and nothing pops up, you know. And I'm a victim's advocate.

I mean, murders affected my family, and I'm thinking, this poor woman is a box of bones in a forensic lab in Florida. Her whole legacy is a number on a box. This woman needs to be in the ground in the town where she's from, with her name on a tombstone so her family members can memorialize her and think about her and remember her that way. And that kind of made me sad. That kind of drove me, and I said to myself I said, I can maybe help here. Now. He would send me all the mail

that he would get over the years. He sent me all the letters from Florida law enforcement. And he told me flat out, he said, I'm not helping them. And he said, you know, if I help them, what's going to happen is we identify her, her family comes forward, they want to press the case. I end up in court in Florida, and then I get the chair and then I'm dead. And there's one thing serial killers do not.

Like most serial killers that I've interviewed and I've written about, and I've written seven books about, they're afraid of dying. They're afraid of death. Serial killers have no trouble dolling out death. But boy, you put it in their doorstep, in front of their face, and they get scared. So he was afraid that the family, you know, that he would end up. And so he's like, I'm not helping them. In the DA, nobody will give me immunity, you know

if I help. So I said to him, I said, well, let me see what I can do about that, and maybe me and you can work on it together. That'd be something we can do together. So I went behind his back, and I started talking to Florida and I talked to them for I don't know how long a year, maybe six months before before he even knew. But to backtrack even more. I after I told him that I was, let me see what I can do. I waited a couple months and I got him on the phone and

they said, listen, man. I spoke to the DA in Florida and they gave me. They gave me verbal confirmation that they looked me in the eye and shook my and said, we're not going to prosecute him for this case. We just want to identify the woman. He gave me a guarantee that there's no way you'll be prosecuted for the case. And he goes, really, and I said, yeah, they guaranteed it. And at this time, I don't know, four years into our relationship, he trusts me one hundred percent.

My word is gospel to him. Whatever I say to him, he does and he believes. And I lied. It was a lie. I never spoke to the prosecutor. I never spoke to anybody. And I'm like, what do I care if I lie? What do I care if he's prosecuted? Down there, I hope he is. So thus begins what Florida tried to do for twenty years. Now I'm able to facilitate. I'm able to facilitate him. Who he's an artist at this point, he's become a really well groomed, well trained artist. I get him to start drawing a

picture of her. He looked in her eyes, he strangled at her death. There's one thing serial killers, you know, don't forget, and that's they're victims. Excuse me. So then I tell him, I said, listen, why don't I give Florida call and let me let me put you in contact with the forensic art artists who's been trying to get a hold of you and trying to work with you.

And he goes, yeah, do that, knowing that I had been talking to these guys for six months already, and and and kind of saying, listen, I'm going to get him to help you. What do you want? What do you questions? What can I ask him? And I had gotten all the reports, and I questioned him on everything and about this case, him not knowing that I had the reports, and his answers were, you know, he was telling the truth. According to reports, so so I put

it all together. I put, I put, facilitated the whole thing, and kind of acted as the liaison between the two. And we came up with a composite, a really great picture that he drew from memory, and then a composite made from her skull, and boy, when we put the two together, they overlapped, they matched. So his memory in this skull matched in the last trip I made down the Florida really Palmach County Sheriff's obviously actually actually gave me a replica of her skull which sits on my desk,

Jane Doe, an exact replica. And yeah, because of all the work I did in that case, So that was kind of driving me a little bit, you know that. In another case, it was kind of driving me to there could be some redemption in this whole madness for me, you know, there could be something good that comes out of this.

that is an addiction memoir. I mean, my brother's addiction to heroin is there in the opening pages of the book, in the prologue, he's on methodon and those opening pages, my addiction to alcohol, my sobriety, Diane, my sister in law, her addiction with my brother to drugs, hard drugs, and how even my grandfather, of whom I never met, his addiction to alcohol, and how he died, and how it all really manifests in our lives, and and and I read.

You know, I got to say that if you're a writer and you write books for a living, whatever kind of books you do, right, ultimately you're going to tell the story of your own life. It's going to happen. You're gonna end up doing it. And for the life of me, I never, for one minute ever thought that when I told my story and it stared back at me,

what would happen. Because when you when you when you remember something child'sood trauma, a good memory, when you remember it in your head and you think about it, it's there's a narrative of it in your head and there's pictures in your head. And everybody goes through that. But let me tell you something, Dan, you write it down on paper and you begin to think about it in a different way. As I wrote in the author's note in the book, I didn't sit down and dredge up

memories to write this book. What I did was wherever I was at the time and the memory came in to my head about something that I want to include in a book. I wrote it on my iPad, I wrote it on my iPhone. I just wrote notes about it. So I wasn't forcing myself to come up with memories as I sat down every morning to write. I didn't

want to do that. A lot of times I would be in bed in the middle of the night, I'd wake up and I'd start writing about something so so so through all of that, you know, jessperson, while I'm I'm writing that type of stuff. I didn't tell him about any of that stuff, but he kept asking when am I going to help you with your sister in law's murder? And I'd be like, man, you know, let's keep that out of it. You know, how can you possibly help me with her unsolved murder? And he said, well,

I've been helping you with the Dark Minds cases. I mean, I don't know those cases until you give me the information I could maybe help you with hers. And you know what, he was right, I mean, he didn't know any of these case is until I sent them the research to look at and then he could analyze and comment on him. And so I broke down a little bit and kind of began to explain to him about her case and what our family went through and all

of that, and he had a revelation. It really made a sobering point that because of the person she was, you know, we're talking nineteen ninety six, she was murdered. I mean, here it is twenty one years later, and you know, every freaking year we hear the same thing from the state police and the prosecutors. Many of these people I know I've written books about, and I know we hear the same thing. Oh we're waiting for DNA, Well, you're waiting for DNA twenty years later, you're waiting for

tests to come back. I mean, And he said, they're just telling you that, man, they don't care about your sister in law's case, just like the girls I murdered. They don't care, don't care. There's certain girls that they care about and certain they don't and and and and In the book, I kind of I I kind of put a name on it. I call it the Natalie

Holloway effect. So if you're a blonde haired, blue eyed, white girl with with a family who's got some money or whatever, and you go missing, well, Jesus, the satellite trucks are at your door and the cases everywhere. But if you're a Hispanic girl from you know, Hartford, Connecticut or Wooster, or you're my sister in law from from Hartford, and you're you know, you're you're not the most upstanding citizen, forget it. Man. There's nobody, you know, satellite trucks at

your house helping you. And he made that point to me clear, and he was right. Yeah.

what I should do. He sketches out the documentary. Oh, this is okay, this is what you need to interview the and he just tries to take control of the whole process. And I get him on the phone and I'm like, dude, you're not writing this book. I'm writing a book about my experience. Is about you, dark minds. I made a promise to you about the Tany Bennet case. That's going to be in it, and it's going to be about my life. You're not gonna sketch out my

book for me. And I kind of heard the air come out of his bullown a little bit but he went along, you know, and he's like, Okay, whatever you want to do, I'm behind.

But one of the interesting things was when I went out there for that last visit that I write about in the book, was what I get in the mail after I come back from him. I get a certified, you know, letter, notarized. He's given me his body. He wants to, you know, when he dies. He wants me to claim his body. And I'm like, I don't want

your body. All I want is your brain. And that might sound bizarre, but I want to donate the brain to the research I talk about and I support that's in the book The Research That's going on in England by Adrian Rayne that psychopaths are born. So psychopaths are born. The part of the brain where you're supposed to have empathy sympathy is not there. So I'm hoping that he can at least do one of these good things and give us some scientific research from his brain. At the in the end, you.

who they are. It's not any fault of their own. It's not any And look, that might sound bizarre, that might sound weird, but that's the truth. It's of no fault of their own. It's this is who they are, you know. And yeah, and that was a revelation to me. You know that we want to blame the person, you know, And yes, we can blame them for the murders they committed stuff, but for being who they are. That's who they are. They can't change who they are.

do you have a website? You do have a website, Facebook page. Tell us how they might contact you or look at your other work.

I believe, is trying to find that woman. I know where she is and to show that he did not kill this woman, Cynthia Rose.