DISTURBED GROUND-Carla Norton

woman's many aliases, would soon become her obsession. By the end of the story, Bert has disappeared and the cops are digging up seven corpses from the backyard of the boarding house. Author Carla Norton, author of Perfect Victim skillfully unfolds the many layered character of this classic Arsenic and Old Lace style serial killer. At the pinnacle of her fame and glory, Dorothea was like a junkie with a philanthropic habit. Everyone dipped into her pot and benefited from

her largesse. She was ultimately tried on nine counts of murder and sentence to death. The book that we're featured featuring this evening is Disturbed Ground, with my special guest journalist and author Carla and Norton. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Carla Norton, Thank.

book a little bit later. Now, basically, one of the questions I asked often before, without giving any really any of this story away, tell us why you decided to write about this story, why this story was compelling to you.

just couldn't get my head around it. And when I started looking into it, I began to understand kind of the the softer human element and how it was that this professional con who'd been getting waved with murder literally for years and years and years was finally caught. And I just thought, this is an amazing story. Somebody's going to write about it, and it could be me. So I just dove right in.

He was He didn't really speak English very well. In fact, for years people didn't think he spoke English at all. But what was interesting about Bert is that Dorothea made a mistake in targeting him because most of the people that she took into her boarding house and then later killed were people that didn't have family checking on them. And even though Bert didn't have family, he did have a social worker, Judy Moyce, who was attached to him, and so Bert was they kind of a bad choice

for a victim. But let me give you a lit bit of history first of all, because the thing about Doroth Thea is that she had been a con artist all her life, since a very young age. And I like to say if she had been bad smell and bearded and tattooed, she wouldn't have gotten away with this for so long. But she was a white haired lady

who lied that she was old than she was. She told people she was seventy and without her teeth, with her pale, pale skin and her snowy white hair, she could look seventy, but in fact she was only fifty nine when she was arrested. And so she played the little old lady role, and no one would have suspected

that she was preying upon these needy people. She would meet them at a bar and bite them into a boarding house, find out how much they were getting for their various social security, disability pension checks, whatever, and select her victims.

in the household. And she controlled the mail so once somebody started getting their checks delivered to the house, she was the only one who could open the mailbox, and then she would have them sign over their checks to her, and ultimately, after they were deceased, she continued receiving their checks because she buried them in the yard, knew they were gone, and she would sign them herself over to her.

She'd take them down to the corner to Joe's Corner Bar, where she was well known, and he would cast the checks at a bank and bring back thousands of dollars to her every month. She had a really a seamless con going and she went to church every Sunday. She was very generous again at the bar's local bars, she would sit at certain corner and chat up some elderly fellow who was in need of a place to live.

And my gosh, she had a place in her boarding house that had just opened up, and wouldn't you like to come and see it? And it was, you know, clean, well run. There were no guns being pulled on anyone. It wasn't noisy. She made sure that people got up early. If you missed breakfast, then you didn't get to eat. So she would get up very early in the morning and make breakfast. Before that she would be gardening, and

she did have a remarkably beautiful rose garden. We know now that it was a very well fertilized rose garden.

a Southern Californian orphan at a very young age. Dorothy Helen Gray was initially her name. So everything about her was a layer and another layer, and a layer on top of that of a false identity.

She would, you know, credit her lavish gifts on being a retired surgeon to some people. Years before that, she I think she was kind of a in the Hispanic community, had been known kind of as a healer, you know that if you had you know, the flu or toothache or something, Dorothea can fix you up. And she was

known as La dac Tora. And in fact, she would host a table at the charity ball and at one point then Governor Jerry Brown, who is now again California's governor, recognized her and crossed the room to kiss her cheek and ask her to dance. Because she had such a reputation of being a very charitable individual within the community. So yeah, it's kind of phenomenal. She, like I say, she went to church regularly, but then she would go

from the church almost directly to the bar. She also she didn't drive, and so she had a taxi driver that she often called, and the taxi driver would take her to the what do you call it, the hardware labur store gardening and she'd buy gardening surprise, you know, soil and lime and plants and all kinds of things

for her garden. So she was busy. And she even the medications that she cashed or that she had subscript prescriptions for were under two different names, as well as the names of the various people that had lived in her house, so she was she had identification. I think they found driver's licenses in five different names for Dorothea after she was arrested. But in fact, her life started when she was very young, and I found that one

of the most fascinating things about the trial. When she was a young teenager, she went to school in Napa for a short time. She was living in with an older brother, and she told the other kids that she was a Portuguese exchange student and so she had a little trouble with English, but that she was a math medical genius. And they were so fascinated by her that they wrote an article about her for the school newspaper. And when the administration read that, of course they were

baffled because they knew she wasn't an exchange student. So these wild fabrications started when she was quite young.

by her parole from running a boarding house. She shouldn't have been administering medicaid to anyone because what she had done before was that she had passed her off herself off as a home healthcare nurse, and so then she would be taking care of someone who was sick and elderly, and she stole her jewelry, she stole her checks, and they testified against her. So then she learned that if you leave them alive, you're in danger of going to prison.

Because during that same period of time, she actually committed her first murder. And this is the one that's the most interesting to me, because Ruth Monroe believe that Dorothy was her friend. The two of them went into business together and they were running a restaurant. Well, Ruth Monroe was the one that was putting up the money, and large amounts of cash were then disappearing, and Ruth Monroe had a family who would come and check on her.

Ruth and dory Thea became roommates, and when Ruth fell ill, her family was very concerned about her, but Dorothea was taking care of her. She assured them that Ruth was going to be fine. She was taking care of her, and the children went home, and then Ruth died very early in the morning, I think at about five am, and Dorothea called an ambulance and said that her friend had had a heart attack. And when you have an older, overwelight woman living with another older woman, you don't imagine

that it's a murder scene. And so they took her off and did the autopsy, found that it was not a heart attack, that she had died from a drug overdose, and of course by then there was no crime scene. This was two weeks later, I believe, and then you have two choices. It's either suicide or it's murder. So they decided it was suicide, and the family never accepted that. But at about that time Dorothea was arrested and put in prison. For drugging and robbing all other people who

then testified against her. So she had a period in taught of time while she was in prisoned to think about her mistakes. And when she got out, that's when she started committing more murders. In fact, when she was tried, she was tried on nine murder counts, down on seven. There were the seven bodies found in the yard. But prior to that, there was Ruth Monroe, and then there was a charming older gentleman who wanted to marry her, who wrote to her while she was in prison, I'm sorry, did you.

her belonging. She had a guide to pharmaceuticals. But what was interesting because the seven people that were an earth from her yard, and let me talk about them for a while. She ran the s boarding house. She would meet someone, they would move in, she would take excellent care of them. Everyone would be so impressed, and then they would simply disappear. And a lot of these people were alcoholic, somewhat itinerate had very little, you know, in

terms of means. They were retired, they didn't have jobs, so there was no one to miss them. They didn't have family, and if they disappeared, very few people came asking questions. And if they did well, people wandered off all the time. So, you know, she would say, I don't know where you know, Betty went. You know, she was here, and now she said she was going to up to Oregon. She'd just make something up and she would then give away their clothes to charity and bringing

someone else well in the meantime. She so she was always kind of preparing for someone else to be brought into her lair. And what she did was so clever because she would have these workers come to the house.

Every time someone came to her house, she basically collected their medicines from them, So even if they weren't around anymore, she would still have a supply. And it was very difficult during the trial for the prosecutor to prove that she had murdered these people because they were so decomposed. And that was a really key part of the trial. When you have ill people who have heart conditions and diabetes and are alcoholic and all you know, you name it.

They had all kinds of severe medical conditions, how do you prove that they were murdered. Well, it was very interesting and I actually have a graph in the back of the book that one of the drugs that Dorothea had two prescriptions for and a big stash of was dalmain, and dalmaine when it's administered very quickly metabolizes into a

different chemical compound. So if someone has taken that within twenty four hours of death, there's a marker you can tell that they took it within twenty four hours of the time they were killed. And all of the bodies exhumed had some residue of dalmain in their system that proved that they've been administered that drug shortly before their death, whether or not they'd ever had a prescription.

So tell us about Bert Montoya and get back to where Judy is in his life. Takes a liking to Bert and the incredible journey that he goes through and the great effort from this good Samaritan Judy, her and Beth and a couple other people. But tell us about that incredible journey of Bert from in this story.

run by good hearted people. And on Sundays they would take busloads of them to church and they had I believe they had coffee and you know, some minor breakfast in the morning. But most of the people then would go home. Bert was one of the few that would come back. Every night. He would do what they called the walk and he would walk from the Volunteers of America in the morning to a soup kitchen I think two miles away and he'd end up back at VOA's

dtox again at night. And Judy moyce worked there. She started working there and her job was to get homeless people off the street. She would find people that maybe they were schizophrenic and they weren't taking their meds and they just needed some help to get back into some kind of more wholesome situation. But the problem with Bert was that he didn't have any ID and many people feared that he was illegal and that he would be deported.

But he communicated to her that he was American, that he was born in Costa Rica, but he had immigrated, and so she set about trying to find his Social Security card and it took her months and months of letters and writing, and finally she did find his Social Security card and the reason that was important was that then he could get some benefits, and that meant he could move out of this very uncomfortable warehouse and into an actual home. And then she started searching around and

Dorothea came with very high recommends. I mean there were not There aren't many people that take you know, homeless basically homeless mentally ill people. Bert was not an especially attractive man. He was unkempt, and Dorothea took him under her wing. She cleaned them up, she bought him clothes, he started becoming more verbal. She got him to take his medication, and one day Judy Moyce came over and she was astonished that he initiated a conversation with her

and said, how are you doing? I heard you were sick, And that was so unlike him, because usually he was very shy and he would just kind of mumble and hang out in the background. He actually called dorothy A mama, and she took pride. She was always patting him and talking about how well he was doing, and so he seemed to be the text BOOKUET of you know, what could happen if someone were put in the right situation. But then something happened that, in retrospect, was really ominous.

Around this time, Judy Moys was busy with other things, and she wasn't checking regularly on Bert. She has a son who has a mental disability, and she had lots of her own problems, and she was working. But during this time I think perhaps Dorothea saw her window opportunity.

This is also about the time one of her other tenants, Ben Feint, disappeared, and then inexplicably, Bert left Dorothea's, walked all the way across town and went back to the Volunteers of America's shelter, to the Detox Shelter, and he spoke to a friend of his there who couldn't understand why he had come back, and he said he didn't want to go back to Dorothea's. And his friend said, but why, I mean, you have your own room, you have a bed, you have hot meals served to you,

you've got a TV in your room. I mean, Bert, why wouldn't you want to be with Dorothea? And Bert didn't articulate really what his concern was. He seemed unhappy, but this worker just couldn't understand. He thought maybe he was lonely or whatever, but he was convinced that there was no way that Bert couldn't possibly be happy back in this corrugated mell shelter with a bunch of snoring drunks when he could have his own room, in his own bed and clean clothes. So he took him back.

He drove him back to Dorothea's and Bert stopped him. He asked him to stop, and having dropped off about a block before the house because he was afraid Dorothea would be mad if she saw him dropped off in this other fellow's car. And that was the last time this fellows saw him. I'm trying to think of his name. I think his name was Chuck or Charlie. And he was quite i won't say cheerful, but you know, regretful later when he realized that that was the last time

he ever saw Burt. And within a couple of months from that, Bert was gone. And that that was when all the domino started to fall because Judy stopped by to visit Bert. You know, haven't seen him for a while, Dorothea, how's he doing, and Dorothea said, well, he's in Mexico visiting my family. Yes, I took him to Mexico and they liked him so much they asked him to stay.

And if, perhaps if Dorothy had come up with a better story, she would have gotten away with this, but Judy insisted that he would not be would not be okay in Mexico, no matter how great generous her relatives were. He couldn't be getting his Social Security checks and he needed to come back to the States. And Dorothea then promised, oh, yes, yes, I'll bring him back. I'll bring He'll be back next week. And when Judy came back next week, he wasn't there,

and she made another story. And when this went on, Judy said, well, I'm I'm going to have to call the police. And Dorothy said, no, no, no, no, I'll go down and get him myself. I promised he'll be here Saturday. And when Judy showed up on Saturday, again, he was not there. And again she had an elaborate story about how some relatives had shown up and you know, taken him along to Utah, and she kept, you know, weaving more and more elaborate tales and Judy, unlike many people,

was quite persistent. And at one point one of the other tenants, John Sharp, who was you know, a man who lived up to his name. He's a pretty sharp guy, pulled Judiette aside and said, there's something going on here. He had noticed these long trenches being dug in the backyard, and then he'd get up the next day and the trenches would be filled in, and Ben think was gone.

And so he told her about that, and so she went to the police and they kind of scoffed at her story that this little lady was murdering people right in the middle of downtown Sacramento. But then the police went and they asked. They actually brought shovels and asked to dig in the art, and Dorothea gave her broke characters. She said, oh, yes, that would be fine. I have no idea what's back there. And they started digging and

they found a leg bone, a human leg bone. So they shut down all the digging, and Dorothea called the detective of Cabrera over and said, am I under arrest? And he said no. She said, well, would you mind if I go and have coffee with my cousin and he said that would be fine. And by then there was quite a you know, an audience, I should say, there were a lot of spectators, neighbors. There was police tape,

they brought in heavy equipment for the digging. The media had I had gathered and Dorothea was the antithesis of understatement. She was there with her pink umbrella and her purple pump and her red coat, and he escorted her, Detective Cabrera escorted her past all of the media to go have coffee, allegedly, and when they exhumed a body, she was gone. And once they decided they would arrest her,

she had disappeared. And that's when they did. They all out manhunt, and they you know, realized that she was an ex con, that she'd been conning her Pearle officers for years, and they didn't know where she was. It was really embarrassing, of course for Sacramento law enforcement. They watched the airport and uh the bus station. But what

Dorothya did was very clever. They found out later. She took a taxi to a bar in West Sacramento and had a few drinks with a friend, and then she took a taxi all the way to Stockton, which is about sixty miles south of Sacramento, and there she caught a bus and went to Los Angeles. And so she had fled, the fled Sacramento and apparently even called the police and gave them, or had someone give them a false tip that she was in Reno. And so they were the police were all ready for her to fly

into Reno. They had the you know, the flights, and uh, of course she was not in Reno. So she was a very clever escape artist and she probably would have gotten away with it. Shall I continue telling you this story because.

to the police more of what he knew. And he had a room underneath the stairs, and he said that one night he'd heard this thump thump, thump thump coming down the stairs, that it was about two in the morning, and it scared him so much that he he couldn't go back to sleep, and he propped a door against a chair against the door. So the police then that's when they started bringing in the heavy equipment and watching the house. But they didn't have apparently they didn't have

enough to arrest Dorothea at that time. So they continued with the exhamations from the yard, and as I said, they found seven suuried there. And what is really not a very big yard. I mean, it's not like it was, you know, an acre in the middle of Sacramento. It was just a regular lot right there on a fairly busy street. With a sidewalk and big shady trees, and they, you know, were continuing with their all points bulletin. She

was over in the news. But meanwhile, Dorothea was had had fled to Los Angeles and she just stayed in her hotel room for several days, and then finally she kind of went back to her old routine what was limited to her. She decided she needed a drink. She called a taxi. She went to a bar, She sat at the counter. She struck up a conversation with this fellow,

and she charmed him completely. She said she had just come into town and then scrupulous taxi had driven off with her luggage, and and it was clearly getting close to Thanksgiving, and so she chatted up this guy and said she would make Thanksgiving dinner for him, and so they made an arrangement. He was going to come pick her up the next day and take her shopping. And something was eating at him. He thought she kind of

looked familiar. And then the news came on and they had a picture of her, and he thought, she looks like she could be but gosh, I really don't know, and I'd hate for that really to be her. So what was interesting. He didn't call police. He called the TV station I think it was CBS and talked to the reporter and they talked for quite a while, and the reporter got his address and came with some photographs and called his news team and then called the police.

And when they arrested her, she was quite acquiescent, and they flew her back to Sacramento and started these proceedings knowing like could believe that she could have gotten away with it all this time. And I think that was what's so fascinating about this case is that she she was so successful, and you don't think about female serial killers. They're really quite rare, and and she was one of the most successful that I know of.

And no one else was accused of helping her. I mean, I think that there's one fellow who was called her major Duomo, they called him, who was a good friend of hers. But again, she wasn't in a position to say I didn't do it, but he helped me. So since she didn't testify, they were not They didn't bring charges against anyone else. They only brought charges against her.

And even then it was a year long trial. I've felt so sorry for the jurors because it really was a very arduous, ongoing trial, and the prosecutor lost forty pounds during the whole course of the others he was working hard.

cocktail of things in these people's bodies. The problem was that you there are no studies. You can't murder someone, bury them and then test them, you know, months or years later to see what the levels are. And so you don't know whether these drugs become more concentrated in the liver and the brain as the body desiccates, or whether they actually dissipate as the body decomposes and pass

out with the fluids. And so that was the argument that went back and forth and back and forth with the expert forensic toxicologists who came on on stand and testified, and also why these people's doctors came and testified about their chronic medical conditions. But eventually it came pretty clear not only from the combinations of drugs that were in

their systems. And again Dorothea was the common link. Even if they had never had a prescription for Dealmain, they would have Delmain in their systems, and she had at least two prescriptions ongoing into different names for Dealmain, and she would hoard them. I mean, if you you know, if you have sixty pills and then break them up in a glass of bourbon, that's a pretty strong drink. But anyway, the other thing is the manner in which the bodies were buried. They were all wrapped in the

same way. They were wrapped in sheets. They had something these pads. I think they're called Chuck's pads. They're kind of essentially like a big diaper put over their faces and then they were wrapped and taped and then with

plastic bags over them. They lie sprinkled on them. So they were there were commonalities in the way all of the bodies were prepared for burial, and so there was no no question that it was quite intentional that they you know, they didn't just stumble out into the garden and fall into a hole and get covered with leaves or uh. And they weren't disposed of in ways that

were terribly dissimilar. Although I have to say that the first woman that Dorothea murdered, the first woman who went missing, Betty Palmer, was extraordinary in that she had no head, hands or feet, and I can only suppose that Dorothea felt that that would make her harder to identify if the body was found, and those body parts were never found.

defense was or what was the prosecutions? I know that you couldn't say when because of the degradation that happened over this long period of time, But could they draw any again circumstantial to a great degree, But could they say anything about the first again, Debbie Palmer with the hands and and uh and head missing and the lie which would seem to progress the decomposition radically as well? So tell us how really the prosecution against the defense

and what the defense really chose to use. Tell us a little bit about that.

of experts. I think that the question is not you know who was a better attorney or who presented the better case, so much as you know what was going on in the minds of the jurors, because it really just takes one and to me, logically, if she murdered one, she murdered them all. And yet the jury found her guilty on only four counts. Now that's kind of hard

to fathom. But it came out later that there was one juror who did not believe that poisons and could be pharmaceuticals, and the other jurors could not convince them of that, and so for that reason, and they deliberated for a record amount of time. I'm trying to remember how long it was, how many days. It was well over a month, and they even tried to come back as a hung jury, and they judge asked them to go and deliberate some more, and finally that's the best

they could do. They came back with four murder counts, and to me, that defies logic. But then I wasn't on the jury, and it only takes one person who's unconvinced to hang a jury, so that's the best they

could do. And to me, the saddest thing about that was Ruth Monroe, because she was the woman who her death was ruled a suicide, and she had a very active family who testified, and they were very upset because Dorothy had pretended to bear friend and their mother would never have committed suicide, and so they never got the satisfaction of seeing their mother's death vindicated. So I think

that was extremely hard for them. What's interesting, too, is that for the California court system, once someone is convicted on multiple murder counts, then the trial goes to another phase, which is the penalty phase, and it's a death penalty state. So at that point there was a shift. Once she had been convicted on those four counts, there is a

shift towards basically the defense begging for her life. And what was extraordinary about that was that they brought out all kinds of information about her past that I had not been able to in earth. I'd been researching her at that time for three or four years, because this went on for so long, and I'd found some marriage certificates under different names and different things, but I had

not realized that she had such a horrible childhood. And they brought out a forensic psychiatrist that then testify about what Dorothy had gone through as a child, which truly was horrific. I mean, her father died of tuberculosis when she was quite young. There was a house full of children. I'm going to forget if it was four or six kids that would be left alone for days at a time. They would, you know, basically be rummaging through garbage cans

in the neighborhood and and neighbors would call. And I guess they didn't have child protective services at that time because these days they would have been taken away from their mother. But she was she was her mother was a was a prostitute. She would bring men to the house or she would disappear for long periods. And then her mother was killed in a motorcycle accident. And Dorothea, I think was nine when she was shipped off to

an orphanage. And we can only imagine what happened there so, and then after that, that's when she started concocting these elaborate lies. So you know, she's certainly a damaged, a damaged individual. And they even brought in a woman. Everyone was astonished that she had a daughter, and her daughter came and testified. She didn't know her mother, of course, but the defense team was able to locate her and she was quite a sympathetic witness. So they didn't sentence

her to death. They sent her to life without parole, and Dorothea died. It's almost two years ago now, I believe in prison.

that she did get convicted on. So I think that the more controversy there was over these people, or that the perhaps more confused or maybe the better the case that the defense made for those cases. But the ones that didn't get a lot of attention in court or were the ones she was convicted on.

what I mean. It's regrettable that you don't get justice for all those other cases, but certainly as long as she's prosecuted, and it's I think that justice has done overall.

pull off then wouldn't be replicable today. It did wake people up that, you know, the system was flawed, and so there were some changes made, and I would hope, you know, and part of what was I was thinking when I was writing the book is that I hope that people pay a little more attention and don't just assume that just because someone looks nice that they're going to be taking good care of mom or dad or grandpa.

That you need to be a little more suspicious and and you know, question people's motives and also their background. It's interesting too, you know, talking to an FBI agent recently, there's kind of a saying that in terms of serial killers, that that men kill in the bedroom and women kill in the kitchen, and generally women who are killers generally tend to use poisons as opposed to violent means, and so they can more easily disguise the the murder as a natural death.

So they're kind of mirror images of those stories. But a lot of people ask me about the difference stream writing fiction and nonfiction, and the closest I can explain is that when you're writing non fiction, the story must serve the facts, and when you're writing fiction, the facts serve the story, so you have a different priority when

when you're writing those kinds of books. You really have to be very careful in writing nonfiction because it's always this little voice on your shoulder bit that lawyers and doctors and you know, forensic experts are going to be reading your book with a very critical eye. If you get one thing wrong, they're going to throw the book

across the room. So you're always very cautious about your credibility, Whereas when you're writing fiction, you know, I've made up a fake town because I didn't want someone saying there's really not an exit there when you go right across the lake, or I didn't want people arguing about the facts of the geography. Yeah.

about this story. Tell us when this book was published, tell us when the story actually occurred, at least in terms of the trial, because stories started way much much before that. But tell us just a little tell our audience. It's just a little bit about this incredible case and when it did occur.

seven years. When she was released, she and the life fled together and the trial was in nineteen eighty five. And so it was a case that it was so unsettling because it's about brainwashing, or captivity, syndrome, Stockholm syndrome, mind control, coercion, you can use a lot of different terms. But it was so unsettling. I thought nothing like this

would ever happen again. And then, of course there have been the three women just actually a year ago today, the three women in Cleveland who were discovered, the jac de Gard case, which is just absolutely startling to imagine anybody held for eighteen years. The Elizabeth Smart case is the one that has I really think caught public attention.

She was held for nine months, but she was such a sympathetic is such a sympathetic and inspiring young woman that she has really I think taught the public a lot about not only about what a victim goes through, but what a survivor must do to overcome that kind of ordeal. And she's a real advocate for something called rad Kids for teaching kids self defense to fight off

abductors in any case, perfect victim. When it came out, because it discusses these mind control issues that were not well understood, it was picked up by the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit put on their reading list, and the book came out and was on the New York Times Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list for eighteen weeks. It was number one on that list for four weeks, and it's never gone

out of print. It's still something that I think every time there's a horrific kidnapping story, that there's another resurgence of interest in the story. And I'm very glad that I have maintained contact with the victim of that story. She's alive and well, there's not a lot of blood on the walls. It's not a grizzly murder, but it's psychologically, I think, just a fascinating a fascinating story and an astonishing crime. You know.

I didn't like the trial. Well, this trial is incredible because not only of the information that comes out at trial, but for this woman that's been held in captivity for seven years to now have to answer to now have to be cross examined, now has to you know, been shut away from society and their family and everyone else

with these threats now has to go to court. And it's just an incredible, incredible viewpoint that you put the reader in to be able to get this incredible landmark trial and to really, by virtue of your entire book, Perfect Victim, to understand this. Colleen stan Jan Hooker and mister Hooker, I guess to a great degree the book were instead different from those other cases. And again before this time, the only the public really only knew about

the Patty Hirst case. And I mean that is a confusing case because Patty Hirst of course goes on to do some crime under the tulge of her abductors. So this story that you have is just again a psychological thriller. It really is. I'm not overstating this, and it's again that's why I wanted to have you on when talking about disturb Brown but Perfect Victim, I just got to extol the virtues of how great this true crime book is.

It's one of the most unique and incredible books. So I just want to thank you for this interview about disturb Brown, but also again I got to have you back on to talk specifically about Perfect Victim.

the courtroom, but that were a real conundrum. And when you bring up Patty Hurst, I mean, yes, she was tried for crime since she committed after she'd gone through this very intense indoctrination and had taken essentially a slave name.

And so there are similarities between those two cases. And then once again it was the same courtroom, the same state, and people didn't believe that Colin stan had been held captive by Cameron Hooker for all those years against her will, and it was partly because they didn't understand the mind control issues and how you go about subverting someone's will over a very intense period of time of torture and deprivation.

into this abduction and enslavement of his victims. So I thought it interesting that you included a little reference as well and again this John Fowls, it's a fictional account.

if you think, jeez, that, how could it get any worse? Well, now you have a trial, and it isn't black and white, It isn't an easy conviction. People are not familiar with this. They actually can't believe this. And as far as a defense attorney this, he's a really good, dedicated attorney that's giving a very very vigorous defense to his client.