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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime History and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. Law enforcement professionals and criminologists long have been challenged to arrive at a consensus over the most accurate ways to classify serial killers. With predators as diverse as the lesser known William Zamasi to slick con artists such as Ted Bundy, one description certainly does not fit all when it comes to grouping the depraved minds that comprise
America's most prolific murderers. Veteran criminal profiler Steve Daniels takes a detailed look into the behavioral inticracies that separate contract killers from sexual deviance, highly organized planners from low functioning opportunists. Daniels advances the notion that current classification models falls short of the reality faced by law enforcement and prosecutors offering an additional profiling tool in the battle against violent crime.
The book that we're featuring this evening is Gazing into the Abyss serial killer William Zamastil, the victims and other killers, with my special guests, former parole agent, author and researcher Steve Daniels. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Steve, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me very much. Thank you very much. Let's start off first with your background in law enforcement. Could you give that to us for share.
I spent twenty seven years with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. The last nine years were as a high risk parole agent, which means the people on my caseload were considered assaulted and dangerous, and virtually every one of them had at least one murder on their record. So I got to
know murders very intimately. I was in their homes, at their workplaces, met their girlfriends, etc. I am the chairman of a cole case team for the Wisconsin Association of Homicide Investigators, and we just recently completed our twenty third successful case review.
Congratulations, thank you. Let's talk about William zama Still and you take us, as you do in your book, to August first, nineteen seventy eight, and you talk about a young man. We don't know who that is so far, but because a young man promised to take his girlfriend and her kids shopping, So take us to August first, nineteen seventy eight. What essentially happens that day in nineteen seventy eight with this man and these children. Take us from there, please?
Okay? Well, the unnamed man I will mention later on, but his girlfriend needed to go shopping, and he promised to take them to a local mall, but he spent much of the day drinking with a heavy consumption of alcohol, fell asleep on the couch. The young woman was getting extremely frustrated, so she woke him up, obviously still intoxicated, very ornery. The man had a history of being very volatile when drinking. They went to the CoP's department store,
which is now closed. On the way, they were driving some back rowe. He opened up a suitcase, pulled out a thirty eight caliber and a forty five caliber, ordered her to drive those back roads, and then proceeded to fire the guns out the passenger side window. Shell casings were flying all over the place. The woman hollered at him, imploring him to stop. He would not cease firing. Finally, he complied. Just that they arrived at the department store. She went in. He said that he would come back
and get her. He failed to return, but a young woman named Mary Johnson who worked in a mall. She was extremely vivacious, wonderful young lady. In a matter of fact, she was getting ready to be married. She was planning her wedding, which is going to happen August fifth, in a small town in Wisconsin. Anyway, Zama still was waiting in a car and confronted Mary. She was a stranger to him. He had never met her before, and he forced her into a car around five point fifteen pm,
when she had finished her shift. He was approached. He produced a handgun. He made Mary move to the passenger seat of the automobile. She was obviously being abducted, and I'm sure she realized that. Drove around for about forty to forty five minutes, took her to this absolutely beautiful park in the southern part of the state, August w
Durleth Park, beautiful pristine wooded area. He took Mary back into the woods, had the forty five handgun from this suitcase in the back seat of the car, forced Mary to walk down a path with him, told her to get undressed. Basically, obviously you can hear her pleading. I'm sure she was that she didn't care what you do, what he does to her, but she just wants to live. She's getting married. Well, told her to lie down, she complied.
He unzipped his pants, forced sex, excuse me, forced sex on Mary, and then I'm sure she said, if you let me go, I won't tell anyone. No one knows what Mary said, but anyway, the gun was in plain sight. She was laying on her stomach. He straddled her, jacked around into the gun, and hearing the sound, Mary turned to look at him and then probably put her head down in defeat, and he killed her and got dressed
and left. In the process. He left his wallet at the scene, and he thought he might go back and get it, but then thought, no, no, we cannot do this. I can't do this. So he called a deputy he had worked with in the past, said I think I did something really wrong. Met the deputy at a store and took him into custody. The guy's name was William Zama Still that was his last homicide in nineteen seventy eight.
Had a very very short killing career. But anyway, Mary Johnson was buried the day she was scheduled to be married, which makes it even twice as sad.
Yeah, incredible. Now you write that there wasn't much to investigate in terms of this murder since he had this confession, and he went on to confess to this murder and directed him to the park, So they had that much, but just looking at them, and of course they would look at somebody like this was capable of this, and looking at him for other murders. So how does that work? And who is the person that's investigating and looking into the possibility of other murders?
All right, William obviously gets convicted of first degree murder. He goes into the Wisconsin prison system, and so many of these killers they absolutely love to talk. I mean, it's just unimaginable why you would tell anybody what you did. But anyway, he befriended another inmate who was in for murder murdering the stepdaughter of a police chief, and he became friends. Excuse me, they shared a sell and Zama still basically told this guy, well, they're looking at me
for other murders. I killed a CoP's son out West. I killed some people in California. Well, this guy was getting out, so he had no qualms about contacting the police, so he contacted the police. Rick Leewell was an investigator for the Wisconsin State Department of Justice and he was a fantastic investigator. He was Homicide Investigator of the Year twice. He had some extremely famous cases, very famous in Wisconsin
and probably beyond. And he retired and the Department of Justice got a grant to bring some people back to review cold cases. So Rick Leeuell comes back from retirement. This guy wants to talk to somebody. Rick Lewell goes to prison to see the anonymous tipster and the guy says, well, yeah, I mean, he's told me about all these murders, and he even talked about Christine Rothschild. And we can talk
about Christine a little later. She was a co ed that was murdered on the Madison campus in nineteen sixty eight. But he even admitted to killing Christine Rothschild. So everybody's antenna went up. That's still a cold case. Rick Leewell meets with Zama still on a number of occasions. They come to some plea agreements, and Zama still says, you know, for some of the things that I want, I want to do my time in Wisconsin, I don't want the
death penalty, et cetera. He admits to killing Lisa Joe Sheener, who was the daughter of an FBI agent, not the son of a cop, and two individuals who were hitch hiking in California, and he admitted to killing Christine Rothschild. Well, here we go. Well the grant runs out, he leaves. Another individual who's still an investigator comes into the scene, meets with Zama still and gets everything in writing except Christine Rothschild. He said, no, I'm not doing that anymore.
I'm not going there. So Christine Rothschild is still a cold case, and the other murders are accounted for, and Zama still goes to trial, and he's doing life in Wisconsin as a detainer for a life sentence in Arizona in the federal prison system, and a detainer for two murders in California.
There is let's talk about the murders again. To take a look at his character and the moo and his signature at these murders. Lisa Joe Shaner May twenty ninth, nineteen seventy three, and we talk about her. She resided in Tucson, Arizona.
Right, Lisa Joel was the daughter of an FBI agent, And she was to an airport, excuse me to pick up her husband who is coming home from leave in the military. So she goes to the airport. Her dad kind of says, well, maybe I should go and get him. No, no, I'll go get him. I'll go get him. So she goes to pick him up and parks on the parking ramp and no one hears from Lisa. And her husband comes home. He's got his duffel bag and he's ready to vacation for a while. No Lisa calls the dad.
Dad says, well, I saw her leave. She left, you know, two and a half hours ago. So he comes to the airport to find his daughter and finds her abandoned car on the parking ramp. Basically, all that comes to this whole thing is he abducted this woman, took her out into the desert, sexually assaulted her, killed her, gave her a shallow bargil, which is just kind of a surface burial, and her body or remains of her body, were found by two guys looking for Indian head arrows
on the Army Reserve. So it's just another type of victim for Zamba. Still, he picks these women that are not high risk. They're not living higher risk lifestyles. You know, Mary Johnson was leaving work and Lisa Joe Shaner was waiting to pick up her husband. I mean, you would think there was nothing that would put them in danger, but that's one of his that's one of his mos. He gets people that are not high risk, at least the ones that he's been convicted for.
He also admitted to the siblings Jacqueline and her brother. Yeah, can you tell us about those murders that he admitted to.
Jacqueline and her brother were well they were kind of wild child's wild children, and they were going to hitchhike to another part of California. Well, mom says, I really wish you wouldn't do that, but okay, we're going to do it. So they get a ride to a gas station and she calls her mom and says, you know, what this really nice guy is going to pick us up and give us a ride the rest of the way. Well,
Malcolm was seventeen, Jacqueline was eighteen. They were coming from Canoga Park, California, and they wanted to see Jacqueline's boyfriend, so they were heading to Las Vegas. Well, the Bradshaw siblings left Puchillo and were intent on hitchhiking back to their home. They were seen at a gas station in Barstall, California, and then she called in said a white male with sandy colored hair driving a small pickup with suitcases in the back picked them up to give them a ride. Well,
obviously they didn't make it. They were a little more high risk to individuals hitchhiking. However, you would think with two of them it'd be a little safer. But Zamazil sexually assaulted both of them, left their bodies posed, if you will, shot him both and then was arrested because when the cool Case team came into came into business, he admitted to killing those two individuals too.
You say that there was some evidence that they were both sexually assaulted, which is very yes, interesting and rare.
I would say, well, Zamasil's sister said that he is bisexual and that he would if he needed something like a place to stay or you know, a job or whatever it needed to be, he would he would have sex with males, so that the raping of the young boy, the Bradshaw boy, is not out of character for him at all. He worked at a hotel in la and he was probably living with a homosexual there because the guy had a room in Zamasfield didn't have any money
to pay for a room. So yes, there's evidence that he was bisexual.
You talk about too in one of the murderers or more I think two, where he stole the victim's car. So again, not a very bright thing to do, but something he did do well, high risk as well.
Yes, and his early criminality, early on before the murders came to be known, he was a car thief, so stealing cars was part of his pattern. And he also stole suitcases from the people that he killed and you know, left him in the backseat of a car. And that was you know, one of the trophies or the tokens that linked him to the crimes. It was a suitcase from the Bradshaw girl.
Yeah, yeah, it was also interesting too, that the that they went and looked and searched and found other evidence in the woods when they did look after this crime, didn't.
They look with the Bradshaws or with Lisa.
In one of the cases?
Well they yeah, they found they only found Lisa's remains, but they found the bodies of the Bradshaws posed semi nude. And then there was some basic evidence. There was some footprints. Xama still was always known to work cowboy boots. There were footprints in the sand in the area that matched his when they did casting. So, you know, the guy is a very disorganized killer. I mean, I'm sure your listeners know what that term is all about. But he's
just very disorganized. He he leaves his waallet at one murder scene. You know, he steals cars, he steals tokens and suitcases, and leaves his prints in the sand. I mean, the guy's not real sharp, he's not the brightest. So but he had a very short killing career. I mean, I think I mentioned that before, but if his first murder was Christine Rothschild in nineteen sixty eight and the one he was captured for was Mary Johnson in nineteen seventy eight. That's only a ten year killing career. That's
pretty short. And basically, what if he did kill Christine, and I believe he did. If he did kill Christine, he was probably a teenager eighteen seventeen, and he was a chronic guy that ran away from home constantly, and he didn't do well in school. So across the street from the hall, the college room College Hall where Christine was found was the University Hospital, and it was believed he spent some time at Universe the hospital before they tore it down. And Christine would walk every day on
campus and she was absolutely beautiful girl. She was a model, and she was gregarious. She had a lot of friends, but she would walk every day early and then she stop and have a cigarette. Well at the time she stopped at the hall where they found her body, and she was buried, I'm not buried. She was in the bushes, well posed. And Zama still basically said that she was
his first kill. And usually when you say this is my first kill, you intimate that there's going to be a second, and a third and a fourth that there
already wasn't one. So that led people to think that Zama still certainly did kill Christine and Rick Luell, who again who we mentioned before, was part of that investigation, and he basically said he thought it was just a teenage inexperience with sex, kind of poking and prodding, and her gloves were found shoved in her throat, probably so she wouldn't scream, and then she was murdered and left posed behind the bushes. But anyway, he admitted to it.
I mean, other people think there was another serial killer involved who was a doctor, a medical doctor on campus and who wore camouflage to work, and he was almost like a specter. He would just appear when people were talking and then he'd be gone. And Christine had said she felt someone was looking in her dorm windows and kind of stalking her. And by the way, that's one thing to look for on college campus, is if you're having some issues our dorm burglaries and dorm peeping toms
and that sort of thing. But Christine really felt she was being watched and this guy was kind of trying to ingratiate himself with her. She was really leery of him. He may have seen her sitting outside smoking and he knew some of her habits. He was just a really creepy guy. He had photos when he was in Africa. He had photos of a couple of massacred families, massacred with machetes, and they believe that he may in fact have been the person that massacred the families. But he
never admitted to killing Christine. But the investigation, you know, obviously turned around because you know, Zama still said, well, I killed Christine Rockchild. Basically you said I killed a young woman named Chrissy on campus. Well that was her.
You talk about that, there was an extradition from California or to California, pardon me, and there was a you talk about the prosecution, the DA dropping them. Can you explain in what way they dropped the ball in terms of this plea agreement?
Well, dropping the ball. What I meant was the guy that picked up or Rick Leewell left off, didn't get to sign confession on Christine. So Zama still got basically everything he wanted. He's doing his time in California. I mean, I'm sorry. In Wisconsin, he's got a life sentence, so he's not going to get out, he's not going to get the death penalty. He's going to be in federal prison in Arizona, and then there's a destainterer after that for California. So the guy's never going to see the
light of day, but he's in Wisconsin. That's what he wanted. And they never got assigned confession on Christine because the guy didn't push sama Still on it. That's that's what I meant by dropping the ball.
M right, there was still as a result of Still of this confession that he made, the and the and the details that he gave the police to corroborate that those confessions, there was still other victims that were potentially he was suspected of in that case, in that investigation and that assumption what was done and what cases were investigated specifically, Well, there was.
A reporter out there that in that area that wrote that the desert is the number one burial ground in the country for murdered victims. That it's better than some cemetery because you're never going to find them and there's no grave markings. But he believes that there were a number of victims attributed to Sama Stield, some of them unnamed. You know, he got a fight with a guy and the guy never appeared again. Nobody knows what the guy's
name was. But the reporter thinks that there may be up to twenty or thirty victims, and like I mentioned, most of them unnamed. It's just he was so transient. I mean, he was a vagabond and he was living in the trashy hotels, get a job where he'd get a job, spend a lot of time in bars CD bars. So you get in a fight, you meet somebody out in the street, you kill him, you dump him someplace nobody even knows who. Nobody even knows who did it or who the guy really is. So a lot of
the victims for Zama still go unnamed. Obviously, there's Mary, and then Christine, we think, and then the other ones that we mentioned are the ones that are named. And you know, that makes him a serial killer. He really is and was an enigma. I mean the guy was six feet four, about two and ninety pounds, flew totally under the radar, totally matter of fact. When I started doing this this book, I contacted some of the chroniclers of serial killers, the ones that keep databases and files
and that sort of thing. Many of them never heard his Zama still until I mentioned his name. So I missed that this guy really really flew low under the radar, And if it wouldn't have been for Mary Johnson and leaving his wallet there, he may still be out and still be killing.
He talked to the informant, the cell mate, and he said that there was mining shafts that he would put bodies down. And you write that he was a tow truck driver. He talked about the desert. He was a tow truck driver in the Mahama Desert. So he had a lot of potential, didn't he.
He had a lot of potential. And I would even wager as being a tow truck driver, there might have been some civilians and people broken down on the side of the road that he may have killed them too, and dumped them down the tunnels the caves. I mean, there's no counting how many victims he truly has, except the ones that he was convicted for.
You talk to the guy, sorry, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead, No, go ahead.
I forgot what I was gonna say.
You talk about a military man, given that that he would assault someone. You talk about a military man that was heading home and pulled over to the side of the road and was bashed in the head with a rock and his vehicles stolen, just as an example of a potential crime that Zamosto could have easily perpetrated.
Yes, exactly, you're exactly right. Yep, you know the guy. He's a chameleon. Often presents himself as a nice guy. He claims he has a criminal record in many states, which is obviously true if he had murders in other states. He used different kind of weapons. Most of his victims that we can tell obviously convicted for were women, but there was a man in there, the Bradshaw Boy. There are some men attributed to him unnamed, so his victim
pool is not very select. It's victims of convenience. And how much more convenient can it be if you're driving a tow truck on the highway in the desert and somebody's pulled over. So yeah, he's His prison record is pretty interesting too. He's he's a bully. Some people call him,
say he's a snitch when it benefits him. He was a member of what was called the European Culture Club, which is euphemism for the prison motorcycle Brotherhood, which is a gang, and they had a banquet and the PMBs got in the middle of the room and did a chant and you know, in their hand signs, and there were civilians there, family members coming to have a banquet with the European Culture Club, and they they left. They
were frightened. He was violent in prison. He told people, if you knew what I did, you'd run from me. He got in some fights. She banged the guy's head in the bar between the cell. So yeah, his prison record is not good. But he has a very volatile temper, obviously when he's drinking, but not when he's drinking too. He's told people that he enjoyed the killing. So he's a hedonistic killer. If you go to Ron Holmes's profiles, he's a hedonistic killer. He enjoys killing. That's what it's
all about for him. He says, if you like to hunt, that's the thrill of the hunt. He abducted his victims and populated places, which made it risky for him. Yeah, the guy, actually, he just he loves to kill. That's as simple as it is. He doesn't even enjoy the hunt all that much, just enjoys the killing. Always carried a knife, so he used different methods of killing. So he's hard guy to peg. I mean no, very disorganized, very hedonistic and very very mobile, almost a nomad.
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murder to start your ritual today. Now, Steve, we were talking about William Zamastil, his personal behavior, some of the incredible things that he said to the informant in prison, some of the fascinating details, unique mo and signature of this killer. But you talk about in this book as well, a need for a new category of multiple murder, a
new classification. Maybe you can explain the need for this new classification in your mind, and as you do, we will talk about soon after a case study that sort of explains this necessity in detail.
Well, I've belonged to a couple of serial murder websites on Facebook, and then there is a lot of debate about are higher killers serial killers? Are gang members serial killers? I don't believe they are. There's six types of homicide. There's the single, the double, which is two victims in one place, the triple, three victims in one place, the spree two more or more victims in separate locations, as a continuing act mass murder four more victims in the
one location. A hit man can do any of those. Okay, he can kill four people in one location. He can kill two people in one location. A gang executioner can do that. But a serial killer, the individual that I believe, is very sexually driven, very sexually. The fantasies are so brazen and so bizarre and so hateful and means spirited that the act can never live up to the fantasy. That's why they keep killing to get that fantasy. Yep. Okay, So hit men and gang executioners, etc. Are not driven
by fantasy, and they usually don't take trophies. It's a matter of convenience, it's a matter of economics. It's a matter of fulfilling the leaders wishes. We need a category for that. Now you'll notice in the paper that I wrote, I don't have a name for it. I mean, I don't have a name for it. Compulsive economic killer or you know, I hope somebody comes up with a good name for it. But generally speaking, these types of killers, they can be, you know, member of an African American
street gang. They can be a member of a Caucasian motorcycle gang and Asian gang, Mexican cartel. You know, it doesn't know any boundaries as far as ethnicity is concerned. But almost every one of those types of killings is for some type of expediency within the organization. Okay, it killed unproductive members, uncooperative drug dealers, snitches, people that talked to the police, informants, personal killings. I don't like this guy in the gang, so get rid of him. Okay.
To me, that's not a serial killer. That is someone killing simply for to fulfill the wishes of another individual. And there's no cooling and the only cooling off period for these guys, if you want to call it, that is in between kills before someone suggests or orders or tells them to kill again. So, like I said, a hitman or a gang executioner can be any one of the five killing five types of murder. I just don't think he can be a serial killer.
You talk about also sort of the talk of people that have the potential I know that the FBI has changed their definition to instead of three murders and the cooling off period two. But there is taught even among them about the classification of people that certainly have demonstrated through their crimes, the potential to be a serial killer. And you talk about the cases of the interrupted serial killer. So can you talk about that sure.
When, for example, there's an individual who kidnaps a woman, this is hypothetical, kidnaps a woman, keeps her tied up for three weeks, rapes her, kills her, and dumps her body, and then he's interrupted. The police investigate, they find him, he goes to prison, he goes to a mental health facility. His career as a serial killer is interrupted, but he still has all the earmarkings of a serial killer who would go on to do it again if he wasn't caught.
And I believe that there are plenty of the individuals out there, quite a number of them from our state of Wisconsin. And Enzo Yatsek, who is the with the Atypical Homicide Research Group, he goes to forrest so far as to say an attempted murder or just some of the things that you do as an individual, the researching you do on the website, the people you followed. You know, you can have that serial killer mindset, you know, habitual offender,
habitual killer mindset without killing anybody. And there's a big debate about that. You know, how wide are we going to make these margins? You know, if you start talking about one killer instead of two, you know, where are we taking this? But I'm a firm believer that the interrupted serial killer is he's out there, he's dangerous, and it's a good thing we got him off the streets because the individuals that I talked to, they said they would do it again.
In a link, you cite Lawrence Singleton and you you call him the epitome of an interrupted serial killer do to the voraciousness of his sexual desires. Again, just what we were talking about. This is September twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight. Tell us what he does with the hitchhiker Mary Vincent, who's fifteen years old.
Yeah, she's hit Shriking's like she said, she's fifteen years old. She's in California. She thinks she's getting a ride from this guy. That's a good samaritan. He's kind of older. I'm not sure if that was Singleton's first attack, but he was pretty old then to just be starting. So he picked Mary up, takes her to a secluded spot, repeatedly raped her, and then to complete whatever his fantasy is telling him in his twisted brain, is that he
needs to cut her hands off. Okay, and not only does he cut her hands off about up to the elbow, he pitches her over a cliff and she's naked and she hits the ground and she still survives. That's crowd amazing to me. Yeah, and she climbs up and flags down a car. This is a real good samarit. And here's this naked teenager, blood everywhere, no arms, no hands, and gives her a ride to the hospital. Mary gets hooks, you know, she gets.
Prosthetics. We were talking about Mary Vincent, and she had prosthetic arms by the time that he was convicted or arrested for this crime.
She got the prosthetic arms very shortly after he was arrested. I believe when he went to trial, she already had the prosthetic arms. But he got eight years and no one wanted him on parole, so he finished his sentence in kind of like a mobile home on the grounds of sam Quentin until he discharged from parole. And when you discharge from parole, it means you don't have an agent, you don't report to anybody. You've completed your entire sentence. Okay.
So he moves to Florida and gets involved in some I don't know, low level theft and that kind of stuff. But one day a neighbor, here's a phone the police. She heard a scream nineteen ninety seven, but Singleton was assaulting a woman in his apartment. The police go to the door. Singleton is standing there with a knife in his hand, covered in blood, and on the floor was Roxane Hayes, who'd been stabbed in multiple times in a murderous frenzy. So his career was interrupted with Mary Vincent.
No more serial murder for him until he gets out and he starts again. I mean that is the epitome of an interrupted serial killer.
Yeah. Absolutely. You talk about next. A killer named John Weber, Missus Trott was in the spring of eighty nine. You say that he looked like a crazed werewolf and wore a firm mask. You talk about this case.
I spent about twelve to sixteen hours interviewing John. He's a very interesting young man, not so young anymore, but he had he looked like a werewolf, and his defense attorney wanted him to look like that because they were pushing a not guilty by a reason of insanity defense, So he came to court looking like he was crazed. Anyway,
he picked up his knee. I'm sorry. His sister in law, Carla, took her for a ride on November eleventh and nineteen eighty six, and she didn't tell anybody worse who she was going with, so she never returned home. He murdered her, left her, buried her partially on a vacant lot that was near the family's property. He made an audio tape of that of what he did to Mary. I'm sorry
to Carla to it was absolutely vile, disgusting, filthy. No person in their mind should have to listen to that, and I think the jury did, and I'm sure they were just traumatized by what they heard. But he tortured her and did many things to her, cut off some portions of her body, cannibalized her, etc. Okay, he makes this tape to scare his wife because he's going to
kill his wife. So he takes his wife out and sexually assaults her, plays the tape for and beats her with a shovel, brings her to the hospital and says some men abducted her while she was out in the woods. And stuck to that story for quite a while until till they figured it, Wait a minute, John, come on, why don't we sit down and talk about this. And finally he said, you're right, I did it. I tried to kill her. They tried to put him with some
other crimes. There was somebody missing in a state fair in Milwaukee, and they thought they saw Weber around that area at the time. He was in the military, and they tried to see if there were some murders when he was in the military. I'm not sure what became of that investigation, but when I interviewed John, he would tell me that I would say John, if you ever get out on parole, what does your agent need to
know about you? And he said, well, number one, do not ever ever let me near high school sporting events where they're cheerleaders. I can't be in that kind of company because somebody is going to get hurt. His fantasy life was so intense, so intense that he would have to leave his workstation multiple times a day to go to the men's room to masturbate. You know. Wesley Dodd, the child killer, said that he could think of nothing else. He said, it's amazing I could hold a job because
all I thought about was killing kids. Well, that's how John Webber was. All he could think about was his fantasies, and he just they overtook him. And I believe he still has them. They may be less, but they're not certainly not gone. I think maybe medication helps. I don't know. But one day, when I was wrapping up the interview, he had to go to eat. He said, can I tell you something? Sure, of course you can't. He said, when I was twelve years old, I would dream about
eating my neighbor. He said, that's not normal, is it? I said, well, John, no, it's actually not normal. So as far as I'm concerned, that guy is definitely an interrupted serial killer and would still be killing today if he wasn't incarcerated for the rest of his life. So it's this, it's this, oh man, this thought process. This it's cyclical. It never goes away. The cooling off period
is different lengths of time for different individuals. But once that cooling off period is done, you got to kill again. So and John would have killed again. So it's kind of interesting. His social worker in the prison I thought was very inappropriate. He went to the town where John was from Phillips, Wisconsin, and purchased a Phillips, Wisconsin sweatshirt to wear and ate at the diners that John ate at.
And I thought that was quite inappropriate. And I was interviewing John, and we were continuing interviewing, and the social work convinced John that I was writing a book about him. Well, at the time, I had no intentions of writing a book about him, but John sent me a letter saying, I don't want to talk to you anymore. We're done, our conversations are over. So you know, this just happened to enter into my book. When we're talking about interrupted
serial killers. But John was evil. He was evil on the streets.
So you talk about the well Laurence Singleton was sentenced to a relatively light sentence I guess given just due to the difficulties at trial to prosecute him and give him assign him a more serious sentence. But he was out in eight years. And you talk about being a high profile parole officer. Was there not any mandatory parole that he was due after his incarceration? And what do you have to say about somebody that obviously somebody could
see the potential. And of course with this woman on the floor, Rocks and Hayes certainly proved what he was capable. Well again, well, as.
I mentioned with Singleton, he could not leave the prison grounds. So he got fourteen years. I did eight. So he had probably I don't know, five more years, possibly on parole supervision, maybe four depending if he had any good time coming. So he had to stay on the grounds of San Quentin in a mobile home. If he went anywhere, a correctional officer would have to take him. So he stayed there until he did discharge. And as I mentioned,
discharge means that you have completed your entire sentence. You don't report to anybody, you don't have an agent, you don't do any urine screens, drug tests, you do nothing. You're freeman. And that's what Singleton did. So he wandered around the country, god knows what he did and ended up doing some petty crimes in Florida and then ended up murdering rox and As. So obviously the fantasies and the thrill didn't go away with him either.
You sit and other go ahead. Sorry, I was gonna say.
John Will John has a life sentence, and there is no mandatory release with a life sentence. Okay, there's a time when you get to see the parole word after so many years, but there's no mandatory release, which means they have to let you out and then you finish your sentence on parole. So John is never going to get out. I mean he is. He's going to die in prison, as are many of these individuals, simply because
a it was first to be intentional homicide. Plus they attacked on so many other things with him, you know, sexual assault, kidnapping, in that, I think he's got life plus nine hundred and eighty years, So I don't No one has to worry about John getting out and killing anybody anymore. And that's where people say, why don't they kill in prison? I mean, what's different. Well, I'll tell you what I believe is different. In prison, their victim
pool isn't there. Okay, there's no children for Wesley Dodd to kill. There's no young women for John Webber to kill. There's no hitchhikers for Zama Still to kill. There's you know, their victim pool is gone, totally gone, which takes them a little bit out of the game. Plus it's probably the healthiest they've been in their adult life. When Richard Ramirez was killing in his final frenzy, he was living
on Coca cola, twinkies and cigarettes and cocaine. Henry Lucas was living on cigarettes, marijuana, coffee, and sugar and junk food. So do I think that that influences health, influences some of the actions. Yes, and their health is good in prison. They get three squares. It's probably the best they've slept in years. Yes, there's drugs available, but everybody doesn't take them. So they don't kill in prison because their high profile. Also,
and I think correctional officers treat them different. They have a little bit of fame, a little bit of celebrity status to them. So you see some sterial killers kill in prison, but not very many of them.
So yeah, and it's it's also not the same circumstance that they were excited about in their murderous career as well, and very very difficult to get away with murder in prison, very much more difficult. So correct different dynamics and a completely different type of murder for these kind of killers.
There was an really interesting guy, do we have time sure for one more? The name is Joe Clark. He's from Wisconsin. Joe just a strange individual. He abducted, by the way, Just as an aside, I think kidnapping and abduction are two different things. I think when you kidnap someone, there is talk of a ransom and then you'll get the person back. When you abduct someone, I think it's for very nefarious purposes murder, sexual assault, that sort of thing. So I try to use abduct whenever I can, but
sometimes I slip. Anyway, Police found a screen that cut for Christopher Steiner's bedroom and muddy footprints. He was found about a week later, his body line over a fallen tree in a sandbar. No noted injuries that they could find, but they were certain it was murder. Okay, On July twenty ninth, I think it was. In nineteen ninety five, another youth went missing. He found himself being carried and dragged and hoisted in order to run through the backwoods.
And you're still half asleep, so he really didn't even know what was going on. Joe Clark took his victim to it. Oh, just filthy, abandoned hobble. And he loved, he loved. One of his fantasies was to hear bones break. He loved to grab and twist and yank and manipulate until an ankle broke or and then he went for the leg, just a sexual fantasy for the perpetrator. And then he would then he would buy in the wounds, kind of makeshift with sock like casts. And that's the
other part of his fantasy. He loved white athletic socks, and he loved the smell of them. He u They finally, finally the victim got away and called I won one, And they did a ought, exhumed the body and found out you know what, Wait a minute, wait a minute, here there's way too many similarities. So Clark got one hundred years in prison, right, So yeah, I mean, I just think a kid, a teenager who likes to hear the bones break and snap, and likes athletic socks and
to smell them. Those are pretty bizarre fantasies.
When you talk about the youth. And you said another couple dramatic cases where young serial killers started at a young age, and then we get back to Christine Rothschild. Rothschild and the idea that he could Zamostil could have done this at fifteen or fifteen years of age. What was about the crime itself that indicated, for lack of better term, a lack of sophistication as a killer.
With Christine, well, she was dumped behind some bushes at Sterling Hall. And if I can just mention this, Sterling Hall came to fame at the University of Wisconsin in the early nineteen seventies, Ragtag bunch of domestic terrorists which we didn't call him back then, blew up Sterling Hall. It was a math research center for the army, so they blew it up. And there was an individual, a researcher in there, and he died as a result of that explosion. But that's the same hall that Christine's body
was found behind the bushes and basically the gloves. It was very unsophisticated, really unsophisticated. Like there was a lot of grabbing and tearing of clothes, and like I said, the gloves were shoved down her mouth to probably keep her from screaming. There was no completed sexual assault that I remember from her, and her clothes were ripped in her her raincoat was inside out. I mean to me that screams of Xama still very unsophisticated, and that lack
of sophistication followed him through his adult killing career. You know, it took a guy to come and he was unlocking the door at Stirling home. He looked in the bushes and he thought it was a mannequin and he looks and you know, there's Christine, dirty, muddy, wet. It was raining, and you know, like rick Lewell said, he just thought this was something that ripped really wrong and a lot of a lot of sexual innuendo, but nothing completed, and you know, nothing well, just unsophisticated.
You use the term in this book. Maybe I'm mispronouncing that berfurcated or bifurcated, bifurcated. Can you explain that I will.
Some people, some researchers and professionals, are trying to get rid of the word spree killing because they believe it really is so hard to define. I don't think it is. But okay, so some people call it serial serial murder at warp speed. Some people call it a mobile mass murder. So what the bifurcated means in a lot of spree killings is the killing starts maybe in a private place at home, you kill your mom and your dad, and then you take it to someplace else and you kill
three other people. Well, that's a bifurcated mass murder. It happens in two places. And they're trying to get rid of the term spree killer. I quite frankly like the term spree killer. And I think it's I think it hits the nail on the head. But you know that's above my pay range. So but there's some good work being done out there, some really good work in the area of some new new information is going to be
coming out the Laura Brand. Laura Brand is a young woman who has interviewed fifty serial killers, and she is coming out with a study on that she designed herself. Plus she's doing a documentary and a book on the Toolbox killers Bittiger and Norris.
You're familiar with them, absolutely, okay.
And Anzoyatsik is doing some great work with the Atypical Homicide Research Group, Tom Hargrove Murder Accountability Projects. So there's some new new ideas coming and I think people that are into true crime will really kind of get an idea that this is not a stagnant subject. We're finding new killers every day and we're finding new ideas about them, and I think they'll be fleased.
Interesting. Yeah, So you talked about Enzo Yasis, the serial killer expert and founder of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative. Yes, and he talks about potential killers we had mentioned as fledging or budding killers and homicidal
homicidal ideation, just the process of thinking about murder. And we talked about some of those people in the terms of serial killers and sort of interest in serial killers, I would say, or attention to where does William Zama still stand in terms of people looking at serial killers, how do they look at him. I know he's not as well known, and you cite up a bunch of other not so well known Wisconsin serial killers, but you
have decided to feature William Zama Still. What do others as a result feel about William Zama Still and his status as a serial killer on a scale of.
Zero to ten two, he is so unknown, refuses to talk, so everything is you know, research, and nobody gets to meet him face to face because I've sent him letters and he doesn't even respond to him. I sent his family letters, they don't respond, So he is so he's not as famous as other Wisconsin ones. I mean you mentioned that yourself. Jeffrey Dahmer and ed Geen and you know, Edward Edwards, all those individuals, they're much more famous than
Jeffrey Dahmer and they probably will. And if people don't read my book, and that's up to them, they'll never know who williams. Zama Still is because he's not out in the moor front.
Yes, he was absolutely a fascinating serial killer. And what's in interesting too is that you cite a bunch of other ones and provide the details of the serial killer in their cases, and quite shocking to realize in Wisconsin alone, this many infamous serial killers that we know of when you mentioned already, but all of these other ones that certainly warrant notice by the true crime audience and obviously by investigators, and that's why they were convicted of multiple
murder in many cases in Wisconsin.
Yes, yes, there's some very famous ones, and you know, I'm not proud of that, but there are some very famous ones. And there's some famous interrupted serial killers too, you know that I mentioned in the book. So yeah, you said you've done five hundred interviews.
That this is will be about five hundred and ninety interviews over eleven year span of time on murder.
Yeah, most of its serial killers.
I would say not, I wouldn't. I don't know about most, but I don't know about most because there's certainly it's the most shocking killer, So it's certainly anybody that and many of these killers are one off killers, maybe convicted of one or two. They certainly don't are aren't classified as serial killers, but in terms of shocking killers, they
certainly make the grade. So yeah, so this will be about five hundred and ninety episodes talking about gazing into the ABYSS Steve for those people that might want to take a look at this work and other work. I know you have a couple other books as well, or One on the Way and another book, So tell us about where we might find Gazing into the Abyss and your other work.
Well. Gazing into the Abyss is from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The other book called Harry, A Study of Teenage mass Murderers. This is a case in nineteen sixty three where a teenager murdered his whole family, probably the first progeny mass murder in recorded history in Wisconsin. It happened in Green Bay on a little side street. My father was the lead investigator on the case. And Harry has never talked to anyone either, absolutely, and he's been
institutionalized since the day after the killings. He was arrested, went to jail, couldn't defend himself in court or couldn't assist in his defense, went to the state mental health facility till he could aid in his defense, came back to the jail, was convicted, and went to prison, and he's been there ever since. So then there's nineteen sixty three, and I talk about a couple other things in the book school shooters and some other mass murders in Wisconsin
that I call Harry's legacy came after him. The book I'm working on now is two parts. It's a spree killing in the city of Warsaw where a young detective was murdered along with five other people. And the second part of the book is a sniper in a little county in northern Wisconsin where he shot and killed three teenagers that were swimming in a river and it was kind of militaristic. So that's the next book. I don't even have a title for it yet.
Incredible. Well, we'll look forward to talking to you about both of those books, hopefully in the very very near future. I want to thank you so much Steve Daniels for coming on and talking about gazing into the Abyss serial killer, William Zamastell, the victims and other killers. Thank you so much for this interview and you have a great evening. Thank you, and good night.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you, good night.