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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 trum 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. Long before the era of young people committing mass murder became a too common event, sixteen year old Harry Hebert made world news when he killed all five members of his family and Kennedy era Green Bay, Wisconsin. Here to be a relatively normal teenager, a member of the high school track team, Harry harbored a deep resentment that would make its ugly appearance on a cold winter's
day in nineteen sixty three. In systematically systemically executing his family, Harry became his first the first documented teenage mass murderer in Wisconsin history. Criminal profile veteran Steve Daniels details Harry's case and provides insight into what makes Harry and other mass murderers tick. The book that we're featuring this evening is Harry, a study of teenage mass murderers with my special guest, journalist and author and former law enforcement member,
Steve Daniels. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Steve Daniel, thanks for having me.
I appreciate you so much.
Thank you so much. Let's start off as you do you had, please tell us about your twenty six years and criminal justice system and what your role was, especially in the last twelve years before we talk about the influences that brought you to this profiling and this criminal justice career.
I started out in corrections in Wisconsin, in the drug treatment program for heavily addicted inmates, those that used a needle, those that did a lot of the harder drugs. When an opening came available in Green Bay and Probation and Parole, I transferred up and became a parole agent about a few years into it. The last twelve years of my career, I was a higher risk agent, and that meant that the offenders on my caseload were considered assaulted and dangerous,
and they were on the streets. I saw them many times, multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, at their job, at their home, in my office, any of the individuals that were considered dangerous on my caseload, the majority of them had at least one murder on their record. That's how I became really interested in homicide. One individual I can tell you about was another mass murder case. He killed his a fifteen year old, killed his father, mother, brother,
and wounded his sister, left her for dead. And because at that particular time in Wisconsin, he was too young to wave into adult court, so he did three and a half years in a juvenile prison for three and a half murders, got out and re entered the system as an adult, and because of his juvenile record three homicides, he was on my caseload and he was considered dangerous in the community. So I got to know murderers pretty well.
I had a couple of family annihilators, that's what you call individuals that killed their entire family, and Harry happened to be one of them. But he was an institutional case. So if someone is in a prison, they have to have an agent available them on the streets just in case they get out. So Harry was on my institution caseload, and that's how I got to know him.
Right, you talk you write about it in this book too, that about your late father. Norman Daniels tell us a little bit about his influence in year of decision to go into law enforcement, but also his involvement in every case that's written about in this book, No, not.
Every case that's written about. His involvement that really got me started was with Harry. I was in eighth grade and he was gone for days and days at a time. He'd come home and take a shower and get two hours sleep, and then he'd be gone again because this case was such magnificent proportions. So I would sit and listen to him talk. And as the year progressed, I became more and more interested in the criminal mind and in the law enforcement career. And I remember when I
was older, an older teenager sometimes home from college. He would come home from a murder scene. And I'll tell you, the last murder that he worked on was absolutely horrific. His hair turned white, his face kind of got gray and saggy, and he was smoking really heavily. So there
are many victims to murder. But he would come home and I'd be waiting up for him, and we'd sit in the family room and I'd ask him questions about the murder and he would tell me and we talk about homicide, and that is when I really that's the hook that caught me. So when I went to college, I decided, I'm in a major in criminal justice and do something in the system. The last murder he worked on that was, like I said, that changed his life dramatically.
I think it killed him early. A bunch of outlaw bikers held a woman against her will in a bar on New Year's Eve, and they sexually assaulted her and broke some of her bones and beat her severely, and then they took her out to a kind of a garbage dump and cut her throat and then left her. And she had enough about her to walk to the highway and then died on the side of the highway
with her head almost cut off. And that was late early in the morning on New Year's Day, and they called him in and he was gone forever for that case. I rarely saw him unless he came home late and I waited.
Up for him.
So he wasn't really all that thrill that I was going to go into the criminal justice system, because he knew that it was, you know, the hours were terrible. I was going to be away from home, and you know, we weren't really appreciated back then. Remember they used to call policeman pigs back in that time, so he wasn't enthralled with my choice. But anyway, I decided to go.
Now you have a couple people, doctor David Walters tell us about his influence and his influence on your career.
David Walters was a unique man. He was an inmate in the prison system in Florida. When he got out, he worked his way up through the ranks of the criminal justice system, got a PhD, and became a warden at one of the prisons in Florida, and he came to Wisconsin University, Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where I was going, and he was one of the influences in my life because he made the criminal justice programming in classes so interesting, so realistic, and so hands on that it almost well
was not almost. It made me feel good to be choosing this particular path in my life, even though, as I mentioned, criminal justice studies and police science and those things were not popular back when I was going to college in the sixties and seventies, But it didn't matter to me. Because he made the classes so phenomenal. I think of my major. I think I had four classes with him, juvenile delinquency, criminology, penealogy, in one other one
that kind of slips my memory right now. But no, he was a wonderful man and a really good teacher.
You say, there's a second figure, another person named well, Richard Walter. He was a scholar. What did he impart too? What was his influence?
He was a social worker in Michigan in the prison system and he developed he along with Robert Keppel, who was the lead investigator in the Ted Bundy case, they developed a new process for profiling and he would do seminars around the country. And I went to one of his seminars and he had me hooked to. I mean the guy, First of all, it looks like a corpse. I mean, he looks like a walking cadaver. He's got I think he'd got one suit in his black and he's just he says, the only exercise he gets is
from coughing because he smokes so much. But the guy is absolutely brilliant. And he was a member of the VIDOC Society. And I don't know if your listeners are familiar with that. But the VIDOC Society was a private organization started by three men. Richard Walter was one of them, and they met every Thursday in Philadelphia and people agencies from around the country would bring their cold cases and after a gourmet lunch, they would talk about the cold
case and give the investigating agencies some tips. So we were going to start a cold case team here in Wisconsin. I was the chairman of getting it started, and I decided we are going to model our coal case team after the VIDOC Society, except we wouldn't have a gourmet lunch.
We have bagels. But I flew out to Philadelphia and spent three days with Richard, and the first two days he spent all the time with me, telling me about profiling, telling me about some of his ideas pre killing behavior, post killing behavior, and how that's important to profile the killer. And then on the third day I went to a bide Ox Society meeting and sat in while they profile
the cold case from South Carolina. So I brought that information back to Wisconsin with me and started our cold case team here and we are still functioning today.
Right now, let's get to this study of teenage mass murderers. With the focus on this Harry Hebert and Green Bay, Wisconsin. Tell us a little bit about Green Bay, Wisconsin for people that don't really know much about it at that time. You talk about the population about sixty three thousand, So tell us just a little bit about green Bay, Wisconsin its makeup, and then tell us a little bit about Harry's Hebert's life, his family life with father Jack.
And so green Bay back then, like like you said, was about sixty thousand people. It was except for the Native American population right next door to us. Virtually it was one hundred percent white. Back then. The only black individuals we had in town were usually packers, and it was a ross belt city, and the paper plants were just prominent in the whole economy. But the emissions from the paper plants were so horrendous. I mean, they would
actually make your eyes water and it absolutely smelled. They've cleaned that up since it was kind of like a place you might see on a Christmas card. They had unbelievable great windows in a department store. On Thanksgiving and beyond animated puppets, et cetera. People would finish Thanksgiving dinner and go and watch these these puppets. There was an elderly lady that sat in a booth outside and played
Christmas records over loud speakers on these street lights. It was middle class, maybe middle to lower crime was probably not really all that rampant back then. I think the one that really woke everybody up was obviously Hairy, And what happened there Green Bay was well, I want to say, I don't want to say behind the times, but it was really slow living, probably some of the kind of stuff you might have seen on some of the TV shows back then. The holidays were wonderful. Halloween was great.
You know, the kids would rush home and gulp their suppers down and put their costumes on, and everybody would go out trick or treating and Halloween and nobody worried about you know, pins and or poison in candy back then. So it was really kind of a simple time. But Harry really changed all that pretty dramatically.
Tell us about his family life with his father kind of he was sixteen years old when this happened, but you go back and tell a little bit about his background before that and the living situation that he was in at that time.
Harry was in a blended family at the time. There was his dad, Jack, who was really not a very pleasant human being, and there was his mother who was from a different marriage. His brother John or stepbrother John from another marriage, and his mother Joyce, and the sisters Janice and Judy. They were all part of the blended family. Jack was very stoic. He was also a dare deevil.
He would get shot out of a cannon and he would daredevil racing, and he always made Harry come with him and clean up the mess and do some of the parts, fix some of the parts in some of the cars, and some of the things that exploded in the fair. Harry was really unremarkable, I mean really unremarkable. He was probably a C student, did not like school,
really enjoyed after school. He was on the track team, a pole of alter and he would make full length football fields and line them off for the kids in the neighborhood to play. And he really enjoyed sports. He did not enjoy helping his dad, and that became a bone of contention. I believe that Harry's dad was a very abusive man, really abusive I think to his wife. There are episodes where people saw him grabbing her arm
and twisting it. And on one occasion she was having coffee and cigarettes with a friend and said that she bought a dress New Year's Eve and that's probably the last thresh she's going to buy. So she kind of think she had a feeling that something was going to happen in that family. As a matter of fact, when the murders first occurred and the rumor mill was kind of running around, people thought that Jack was probably the
individual that killed the family and not Harry. I believe Harry was abused at very least emotionally, quite possibly physically, and I believe there was some sexual abuse in the family,
maybe toward the twins. But one of the crime scene photos of the murder scenario was Jack the dad laying on the couch with his pants on zipped and his penis out, and a friend of theirs who would come to visit Harry said he walked through the family room where he was sleeping on the couch like that, and it just creeped him out so much that he never
went back through that room. He always back door. But he said, as far as he could tell, the dad would sleep like that, you know, whenever he hadn't took a nap, which indicates to me that there is some kind of sexual friction in that household, now against whom I couldn't tell you for sure. Harry never mentioned anything about anything, not even his reason for doing the killings. So but do I believe there was abuse? Yes, Harry's mother lived in Lacrosse and apparently didn't want to have
him around. So when Jack got Harry as a younger kid, he was pretty ragtag, tattered clothes, absolutely filthy feet. From everything I've read, his dad has spent a couple of days scrubbing him. So he was at the very least neglected with his mother. So he goes from neglect to potential abuse, and obviously that has that must have played some role in his mind, you know, to to set off the killings.
You also write about stepmother Joyce, and it seemed that she had a plan to escape this marriage. He wasn't happy in this marriage with Jack either, and possibly that Harry might have heard a conversation regarding that escape from the marriage.
Yes, Now, the plan from Joyce was mentioned, but as far as I can tell, it was never detailed, so she may have set it to a friend maybe in passing or like I said, when we were sitting around smoking and drinking coffee, and I believe Harry may have overheard that and it kind of sets something off, like he didn't want his family to break up, although I find that really difficult to believe, because he was at odds with his stepbrother continually and his dad, like I said,
was probably abusive, so it was not a happy household by any stretch of the imagination. So I think that got Harry into planning what he was going to do. And like many adolescents, you know, the plan may seem detailed to him, but it's kind of haphazard and certainly can't be carried out. So anyway, that takes Harry to January in nineteen sixty three, and that's when the murders occurred.
Now you say that he, despite being immature, he had a written plan, and you provide that in this book. So the pre slaughter plans, what are those? Tell us some of the checklists that he had, and it's demonstrative of this immaturity that you speak of.
Yell Well, he after the killings, police searched his locker and in one of the textbooks they found a plan that he had written out and it was basically automatic twenty two rifle and loaded. So we wanted to get the gun. And some of this part does not make any sense at all. Have your feet wrapped in towels or rags, okay, And I think that was probably not to get blood on him and to maybe wipe stuff up on the floor. But then a few down there it says, get rid of the towels or rags and
walk around in bare feet to all the bodies. I can't make headner tails out of that. But he had in the plan hit dad and mom first. Then as they come in. And I believe that someone that's going to commit a mass murder they choose who's going to be first by one of two reasons. It's the person that gave them the most abuse or the person they believe they have to get rid of so that they can complete the act. And Harry's dad fit into both
of those categories. I mean, his dad was the strongest and he was home first, So you hit dad first and then get him out of the way, and then mom because she's maybe the next I don't know, the next obstacle. However, it didn't work that way. He was going to take all of his money and hide it in the closet, and then he was going to shoe himself in the right arm and the right leg and then call the police or wait to get discovered, whichever one. That meant that I have no idea. But there was
some more. He had a checklist he needed to get money, and he calls it crap, and I think it means his belongings, food, sleeping materials, clothes, weapons, cigarettes he didn't smoke, school locker check that out, and materials to take to the Pulaski Boys. The Pulaski is a small town, maybe twenty minutes from Green Bay, and his friends lived there, and that's where he was going to go and stay with them. He wanted to have the guns lift, he wanted to have lay up somewhere after the murders. See
this will tell you the immaturity of the plan. That he didn't already get that he was going to go to Pulaski High School and enrolled by another name. Well, not ever thinking that you know, the authorities at the high school we're going to say, well, where's your mom and dad and where's your school records? How come you're coming here, and so that would obviously that wasn't going to work. But he was captured the next day, so none of his plan really had to go into effect.
But let's let's let's talk about what happened a month before, because you talk about precipitating factors and this is very, very important. So what happened the month before? You say that Harry and his stepbrother John and a friend were caught shoplifting. Now, this incident, along with the poor grades in school and this bad relationship with John, and some indications that Harry was thinking of running away, what did his parents do about a month before?
Is well, after all that happened, they had Harry go into therapy and he only made it to one session, didn't go to any others. So obviously there was some underlying things that were really starting to gnaw at Harry. The shoplifting was part of it, the idea that he couldn't get his driver's license. They wouldn't let him get his driver's license, and a friend of his said that
Harry was really exhibiting some strange, strange behavior. There was a dog in the neighborhood that was wounded and they believed that Harry was the one that shot that dog. Animal cruelty, and this is pretty disgusting, but there was a mushal basket in the backyard behind Harry's house and it was full of human feces, and they believed that Harry was going outside to use the restroom. I mean, so it's this real strange, strange mindset that's kind of
focusing in. And then Harry was, excuse me, stealing some of the twin sisters underwear, and they believe that he was doing heavily involved in masturbation. So you add all this together and then you throw in the abuse, and I think Harry just finally had enough of everything and snapped and never went back to counseling, and then the homicides occurred. Harry was a strange and he still is a strange man. When he was on my institution, Caseload, I went to see him a couple times. He doesn't
say much. He's never said why he did the killings, but he was a strange young man, and I think that all came to a head and really set him off until February.
Let's talk about what happens. You talk about his plan. He has a plan. He enlists a friend in this plan, and that's not so unusual, as you write in this book in other cases. So tell us about this plan and you talk about that just before that, he attempted to buy a pistol. So what happens in that attempt, and tell us a little bit more about his plans and what he does that dayful day in February.
Okay, well, he didn't try to buy a pistol, and obviously he was too young, so again another part of a plan that doesn't work out. So most teenage mass murderers in the early days of mass murder, the weapon of choice was usually a family gun Okay, a rifle or a pistol. It's not the high tech weaponry that there is today. So but Harry wanted his own gun, and he did go hunting with his dad on occasion, so he knew how to use a gun. But like I said, he was too young, so they couldn't they
couldn't sell it to him. What he did was I believe that he tried to enlist a friend. I'm not sure how much he told him. He might have told him the whole story, but he wanted to be able to go to this friend's house and you know, hide out for as long as it possibly took again in that adolescent mind, because he didn't realize that if a family is dead and one family member isn't there anymore, that pretty much they're the ones that did it. So he got with his friend in Pulaski and said, I'm
coming to your house. I'll meet you here. You pick me up, and we'll go to your house and I will stay there for a while. And I'm going to do that because and we don't know what the because was. Because I'm running away, because I'm going to kill my family, because I can't stand this anymore, because I want to go to your school. We don't know what the because was.
It's like a blank line at the end. So but Harry had you know, there was two guns in Harry's house, a twenty two rifle in the twenty two pistol, which he knew how to use both of them. And on February eighteenth, nineteen sixty three, at twenty six twenty six hazel Wood Lane, it came to a really blood drenched end. Harry got the guns. His dad was sleeping on the couch. He shot his Dad twice got him out of the way, you know, the person that could end the spree quickly.
So Dad was gone. John, his stepbrother, heard the shooting. He was upstairs, came running down the steps. He saw Harry with a gun. Harry shot him once, wounded him. He turned around to run back up the steps, and he shot him again and he died. The girls, the twins, were in the kitchen getting dinner, ready to help mom, who was grocery shopping, and Harry came into the kitchen shot the twins. One of them fell under the kitchen table,
the other one just fell on the kitchen floor. Mom came home with a bag of groceries and came in, and she didn't see I don't believe she saw the girls right away, the twins. So she came into the kitchen to put the groceries on the table, and Harry walked in, and I believe he startled her, and he shot and killed her, and then decided the rest of his plan. Clean it up, you know, pack my stuff, put blankets on my feet, wipe up the blood, et cetera. So I don't believe the whole event. I don't believe
the whole event took I don't know fifteen minutes. The longest thing to do was wait for mom to get home. So and she came home pretty quickly. So this mash murder occurred in a very short period of time.
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gilt free cereal at magicspoon dot com. Slash true murder and use the code true murder to save five dollars off your order. Steve, we were talking about the slaughter of this person's family. What you write about even more sinister, I think and vicious is that he checks the pulse of his siblings and then when they aren't actually dead, he shoots them again in the head. So he's very accurate and very lethal. Yes, tell us about this plan to escape? What does he do after these murders?
He calls his friend from Pulaski and says, can you come and pick me up and bring me to your house. His friend picks him up. Obviously, when the police are called the next morning, go to the house, Harry's not there. Well, they know it's him, and because Pulaski is not in the city jurisdiction, it's in the county jurisdiction. The Green Bay police contacted the friend and told him they'd like
to talk to him. So he came into town. A deputy sat laid down in the back seat of the car, and they went out to the home and the friend called or honked or had Harry come outside. And when Harry came outside and slid into the front seat, the deputy in the back seat arrested him. And that was the end of that. I mean, it was not grand or glorious, and Harry has been He was in jail the day after the killings. He was waved into adult court.
He couldn't he wasn't found able to aid in his defense, so he went to a state mental health facility until nineteen sixty eight, five years, came back to Brown County for trial, was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. So Harry, even with his grand plan was has not been out in free society since the day after the murders.
Right you talk about this. The sentencing eventually were concurrence sentences. So despite the toll that the amount of people that he killed, he does have parole hearings. He's always a role.
Yes. As a matter of fact, that's one of the strangest sentencing structures for the crimes that I have ever seen in my career. In corrections, there was five bodies, five first degree murders in the judge. I don't know if it was because of Harry's age or because they considered it one event and not five separate events. The sentencing sentencings were concurrent, which means you're right, Harry, he does get to and has seen the parole board on
a number of occasions. And because back then you could see the parle board after thirteen point four years, I think, and because all of his sentences that work together, he only got to see him after thirteen point four years. If they were all consecutive, he would have to have done thirteen point four years on each one of them before he could have seen the parole board. Yeah. So yeah,
he really caught a break. I can't believe, although I've been fooled before, I can't believe any parole board is going to let someone out of prison with five homicides on their jacket. But stranger things have happened. He now says that he has Native American heritage and calls himself Hawk and he has hair down to his waist. And you know, that's it the best I can tell you. A couple times they went to see him, he was very, very reticent, uh, trying to make some parole plans just
in case, and you know, he didn't want to. He wanted to go to halfway house in another city. And I said, no, that's not going to happen. You're coming back to Green Bay to where people can keep an eye on you. I mean, come on, you're a five time killer. So yeah, we were not friends. And when I contacted him for this book, he wanted nothing to do with me. So that's where it stands.
Yeah, you know, I believe you talk about it. Go ahead, sorry.
I believe that in his mind, like in many killer's minds, that involves the family of some sort. I believe that they see it as a personal growth experience. What they do, they are going to have a better life after. They are going to personally grow out of this bad experience. So Harry killed his family. He got them out of the way. No more roadblock growth Number one, he was going to stay with a friend and get out of
that house. Growth number two. And he was going to go to a different school and meet some new friends and maybe be on their track team growth number three. So for many killers, not necessarily serial killers or bank robbers or that sort of thing, but individuals involved in family type killings, murder can be definitely a personal growth experience for them, and I believe that's what he felt.
You talk about that he is an example his case. Harry's case is an example of the if not the first or one of the very very first teenage mass murders mass murderers in Wisconsin, but also in subcategories that you talk about in this book. His case is unique in other ways as well, and you talk about how you can categorize his case but not necesscessarily fitted into one neat category. Tell us about some of the analysis of this case and what it does represent in terms
of one of the earliest cases. To demonstrate what it does well.
A couple of things. There are three types of mass murderers teen mass murderers, and I'll get that to that in a minute. But if you look at teenage mass murders now and I'm not saying any of this actually causes murder. I think it's the noise of murder and it just kind of fuels the ideas. But if you look at family mass murder, now, there are oftentimes drugs, okay, there's oftentimes violent video games. There's oftentimes some really high tech weapons in the house, okay. So things are different
now than they were then. When Harry did his killing, there was none of that, none of that. He used a twenty two rifle that his dad used for hunting. He was not a drug user, he did not drink, there were no video games, there was no violent music, there was no outside influence. So that's one way that it's really different. And as it progressed through the years, I think the teenage mass murderers became much more sophisticated, at least sophisticated in what they did and how they
did it. They just like there's a case in a short synopsis of a case in the book, Richard Brenheiser killed his family, shot them all and all five of them. He then put the bodies in a car, moved the car, and set the car on fire. So basically they were shot. But when the police were called it was for a burning car, and then they found the burned, charred bodies in the car, and Brenneiser thought, well, maybe this will get rid of some of the evidence and the police
won't be able to make sure it's a murder. So, at least in his mind, that's much more sophisticated than what Harry did. And it progresses on and on and on, and pretty soon you got some teen mass murderers that are pretty pretty sophisticated, pretty dangerous individuals if they're not caught. And I think, well, there's three types of family mass murders.
Teen family mass murders. There's the severely abused, those individuals in a family that are abused in any way, shape or form, sexually, emotionally, physically, but it's severe, Okay, They are probably the most the most common. There's some kind of abuse in a family. And obviously, as we talked, we saw that where there was abuse in Harry's family, at least you know that we assume there was sexual and physical. And Harry's dad, by the way, was well
I believe he was a sexual offender too. He had been convicted of assault assaulting a woman in nineteen fifty for he went to prison. Uh, not much information on that, but there was gossip around the neighborhood that he was in devoyeurism, peaking in the neighborhood's windows, et cetera, and again sleeping on the couch in front of everybody with your you know, your penis out. So I believe Harry
was sexually abused. Then there's the extremely mentally ill. And I believe there was some mental illness in Harry's case because they had him seeing a therapist at least once, and he had another time scheduled. So I believe Harry certainly was mentally ill. And then there is the the a and these are the most remorseful, the ones that are extremely mentally ill, they are the ones that are most reforceful. And then there's the anti social. These are
the ones that could be considered young socio paths. They are very violent, very dangerous, have absolutely no remorse, And these are the ones that garner the most publicity. You know, these are the kids that you know, if they're involved in a murder of their family and the police come and they're in the backseat of the car, they're smiling, or they might give the camera the finger or you know, some things like that. I mean, there is no remorse. They you know, they don't care. They're going to a
different situation. And again, in their mind it might be personal growth if they don't get arrested, but they do. So I believe, though, Harry fits into all three of those categories, right, And that's not easy. But I believe he's mentally ill. I believe he was sexually assaulted, and I believe that there is some degree of antisocial about him simply because of the way he dealt with other people in school. He had virtually no friends, you know, he was he was involved in a couple of fights
at the behest of his dad. And so I believe Harry was into all three categories, and I believe the ones go ahead.
You call this progeny mass murder, Yes, tell us why and what this term refers to.
Well, progeny means, you know, an offspring, usually a male. So if it's a family annihilator, for example, like John List. You know, I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with John List, but you know he's an adult that killed his family and went on the run for a number of years. Progeny means that it's not an adult in the family that commits the murders. It's a offspring, a child, and that's what progeny means. So that's it's a separate
category because it's a kid and not an adult. But I think some of the kids fit into the same typology as the adult murders.
So you don't write about this in the book, but I'm very curious to know what they deemed Harry's mental illness that necessitate him putting him in a hospital for four years before his criminal trial.
Well, I think basically what it was was that his age and the case was so new and so bizarre. I mean, it got international publicity. There was some people from Japan here covering it. So I think it was because his lawyer, who prior to dying, still visited Harry in the prison. His lawyer decided that A he's very very young. B he's too young to assist in his defense. And if someone cannot assist in their defense, then they need to go to a mental health facility until they can.
So what they did to Harry there, I have no idea because our juvenile records, so, but you know, and I'm sure that he was slated to go into some treatment programs in the adult prison system. Whether he did or not, I don't know, but you know, he's not getting out, so apparently he hasn't met some guidelines. But I think it was just the sheer magnitude of the crime.
I had another guy who was on When you are found n Giri not kilty by a reason of insanity in the court, then you go to the state mental health facility in Madison, Mendota. Now that doesn't mean you get a free play. You are at that facility for the length of the sentence that you would be sentenced to if you were convicted. So this guy I had on my case though, killed his wife and killed his baby, another family annihilator that was, and he had sex with
his wife's corpse. So that was considered so bizarre for this area. I mean, that had never happened before for this area that they said, this has got to be some kind of mental illness. So he went to the state mental health facility and to get out. You know, in prison you see a parole board at the mental health facility. You've come before the judge and proved to
him that you're no longer a threat to society. Well, he petitioned the judge after a number of years, and you know, they found him to be okay, So he was out. And because of the murderers, he was on my caseload and I revoked him a couple of times and sent him back for antisocial behavior. But so Harry doesn't have that. Harry doesn't have that pleasure of coming before the judge. He has to see the parole board.
So right, you talk about in this and you discuss many things, but the idea that some people think that the the brain isn't fully developed till the year of twenty five years of age. But you talk about how Wisconsin law and other state laws, and you provide a case where a fifteen year old killed his family sr Rinki. The law was changed. Again of the sheer magnitude of the horror of these kinds of crimes. Tell us about that case and the law of that changed.
Okay, Well, I'll call him Steve because he was a juvenile when it happened. That's not his real name. But Steve and his family lived in rural Marathon County and in April, early in April, I believe it was the seventh in the eighties. They were out in the front playing football and looked like a normal day. I mean, it didn't look like anything was really wrong. That evening, Steve goes upstairs, unsheathed a rifle, come downstairs, shoots his dad,
his mom, his brother. They're dead, and he wounds his sister and she must put her hand up like people do when they're going to get shot. She put her hand up, and the bullet went into her hand and down into her shoulder and wounded her. And I believe she played dead. The young boy stole his father's truck and drove to some relative's house. He was actually stopped by the state patrol and he was fifteen with out a driver's license, and they let him go. They said,
just go home, okay. He went to some relative's house and they said what are you doing here? And they called and the home and the daughter answered the phone and said what happened. They called the police, the sheriff. He came to the home and the girl answered the door, and they said she looked like a ghost, like an apparition. There was a light shining behind her. She was pale and ashen and bleeding. But back then you could not wave someone into adult court until you're at fifteen years old.
That has since changed, as you mentioned, there are now very very very young kids waved into adult court for a heinous crime. I think what happened. There was another case, and I don't remember it exactly, where a young man killed his dad when he came home from work, and those two cases assisted in changing the law in Wisconsin. But it's really interesting, you know. We started out talking about being a parole agent and some of the stuff
I had to do. When I found out that this young man who had killed his family was back in the system for he was ramming squad cars in Milwaukee and he was in a tow truck. I think he was trying to escape. They thought he was burglarizing someplace. So he went to prison for reckless endangerment. And when I found out he was getting out, I thought, how can somebody fifteen years old killed their entire family? And the only thing he ever said about it was I
decide when someone has to die, Okay, that's it. No one knows why, et cetera. So I contacted the investigating officer in Marathon County and I said, I really need come and talk to you, I have to get inside this guy's head. He said, yeah, come on, So I went. It's about ninety miles from here, so I got up early and went. First of all, he said, let's look
at the forensic evidence. So he showed me the crime scene photos and talked about what happened and what the young man said when they were interrogating him and questioning him. So we went through all of that, which kind of gave me some insight into what was happening. Then he brought in the step parents foster parents of the daughter that was still alive, his sister and I them, and they were very frightened that the young man was going to get out and come back and do some harm.
And she was getting married to a police officer. And I said, look, you don't have to worry about him coming to the funeral and messing things up on the day of the funeral. If I have to, I'll put him in jail for the day for the weekend so he doesn't come there. And I have the authority to do that. Then we went to the house where the crimes happened, and this is really creepy. The people across the street bought it and move into it, and I said, you know, And the tableau was pretty much the same
as it was the night of the shooting. The furniture was in the same place. That's really eerie. But there was a little red spot under a rug, and I said, what's under that rug? And they kind of rolled it back, and there was still blood on the floor, on the wooden floor, and in the room where the sister was shot, there was still bullet holes in the floorboard. And I thought to myself, this is one creepy family.
Wow.
But so anyway, those two crimes changed the law. I think I just rambled on too long about being a parole agent, but those two crimes changed the law, and subsequently, now there are younger kids going to prison.
Right. You write about in this book too, about school shooters and that phenomena, but also the comparison with Harry's crime and others that were school shooters that also included some members of their family being killed. Can you tell us about that in that comparison.
Well, there was an attempt at school shooting here in Green Bay not all that long ago. I was retired, but my partner was still working and did the pre sentence on the main planner of the shooting. Okay, Harry got his gun and shot his family. The school shooters, first of all, they had a magnitude of weapons. The police when they went to their home they had boxes and boxes and boxes of guns, homemade explosive ammunition, etc. So again you talk about how things have changed and
how that sophistication level has risen a bit. And they also had target practice target range in the basement, and they had the kind of foam heads that you put wigs on, and they were shooting into those and practicing. Harry didn't practice. He may have practiced in his mind,
but he didn't practice. These guys were practiced. And the only reason that they didn't engage in the school shooting was because one of the members kind of chickened out and said, you know what, I really can't go through with this and contacted the police, and they interfered and
arrested the people and that was it. But some school shooters, not necessarily those boys that were here in Green Bay, but some school shooters nationally have Remember last time we talked about and you asked me what the word bifurcated means, and bifurcated means bifurcated, means it's in two parts the crime. One part of the crime happens here, and the second
part of the crime happens here. Okay, a number of the school shooters have killed mom or dad or both and then moved on to being involved in the school shooting. That's happened on more than one occasion. And I think what happens is there is so much lust to kill something or somebody, and I'm not gonna let mom and
dad stop me. I'm not gonna let them get in the way, and so I'm going to take them out and that takes care of that issue, and then I can go and do whatever I want to do in the school or the movie theater or what happens to be. So that's the bifurcation. Murders happen in two separate places.
One of the elements of this phenomena, though, that we talk about how things have changed since Harry. Harry, as you write, couldn't have been influenced by any of these other people later that are seeking publicity as part of their revenge and the retaliation and their vindication. So there are other elements now that come into play as well, that also, I don't know, speak to the sophistication, but also speak to the more example of extreme mental illness in some of the cases that you cite.
Well, first of all, I agree with one hundred percent with you that Harry did not have I called, you know, the noise of violence or the noise of hate. He did not have. These guys have that constantly and continually,
and I think that adds to the impetus. I think that there's some severe mental illness when you talk about these kids that are involved in well, look, for example, look at the guy that shot Congressman Gabrielle Gifford's Jared lockmanth I mean the guy, and I hate to say this because it really sounds prejudicial, but the guy just looks like he's mentally ill. And the guy that did the school shooting, I mean, when you look at him, he looks like he doesn't even know where he is.
So I think that I think the mental illness. The access to high tech weaponry feeds off of all of the outside noise of violence. So I think when you're playing dangerous games and maybe some drugs and etc. Et cetera, and the other things you mentioned, is that there was nobody for Harry to compare himself too, to to outdo that person. Many mass murderers now, I mean they actually say that they're going to outdo the previous person before them.
So if somebody had, you know, eight victims, I'm going to try to make sure I get eleven because i want to show that I'm badder than this guy. Harry had no one to compare himself to.
But Harry was, as you talk about, naive and only sixteen years old. He did some things that exhibited that again, that sociopathic traits in that burying the clothes and having to wherewithal to do some of those things in terms of planning escape and his life after these murders.
Yeah, well, you know when you talk about the McDonald triad, when you usually talk about it for ceilia murder, and I'm sure your people are aware of that Harry had. Harry had two of those. He shot a dog and when he came from from his mother's house he was suffering from uranieces bed wedding. You know, the only thing left was random fire setting. But I'm not sure that that I'm not sure that's mental illness. I really truly think that's a part of being a antisocial person or sociopathy,
and I think that's what Harry was. And like I said, he went to the mental health center because they've never experienced this before in the criminal justice system here in sixty thousand people Green Bay. You know, my father had investigated some other homicides, but never five people by a teenager, so this was new to the entire system. And I think some of that stuff fed into the fact that he needs to get checked out. We just we can't,
you know. And he's stealing underwear, his sister's underwear, and masturbating quite often from what I understand.
So yeah, he does have a very next personality when you when you do know, and you do, and I've read many many accounts share some of those sociopathic traits in some of those things, with the masturbation and the just the where he seems to be headed psychologically was where a lot of these other people ended up. So there's very many things. I agree. There is mental illness, and there was abuse, but there was also those traits
where many people see a separation between those. Again, just an innocent kid, but a very very sociopathic trait inherent there.
Well, and look at the guy we just talked about, the young man in Marathon County, the fifteen year old that killed his family. I mean, when someone excuse me, says to him, let's talk about this, I mean, what happened he said, I decide when it's time for somebody to die. I mean, you cannot get more sociopathic than that, anymore anti social. And I'll tell you one more thing about him, if it's not too much. He could not leave. He could not enter Marathon County as one of his
rules of parole, okay, without my permission. I had to know he was going there. So one night I got a call from the Chano County, which is the county next to Marathon, and they had stopped him tail light out or whatever they used. And I said, look, it's three in the morning. Is he drunk. No, he's not drunk. Tell him I will see him first thing in the morning. I'm not going to drive to Shano at three o'clock.
But okay, so he goes. He goes to Shano, I mean Marathon, and he doesn't know his family's buried in Milwaukee, all five of them. He doesn't know his family's buried in Milwaukee. So I call a friend of mine who's an FBI profiler, and I said, why is this kid going back to Marathon County, you know, at all hours of the night or day. And the profiler said, I told him what the crime was. And the profiler said, he's probably looking for his parents grave to urinate on him.
So again, how antisocial can you possibly get when you're Yeah, so yeah. Anyway, he didn't know they were in Milwaukee, so he couldn't have found him anyway.
Incredible. You write in this book that this is far too common. You talked about the two hundred and twenty five parents per year, less than the eighties and the nineties where it was three hundred per year. Tell us a little bit more about these frightening statistics about parents murdered.
Well, you know, when you're when you're a teenager, the people that make you the maddest, whether it's real or perceived, the people that make you the maddest are your parents. You know, cut your hair, go cut the grass, and stuff that you assume is just mom, oh my god, why don't they get off my case? Well, I think sometimes it goes beyond that. Look at the Menendez brothers for example. Okay, everybody said these guys had had it made.
They had it made, they had lived in a mansion, they had cars and et cetera, and they ended up shotgunning their mother and father. Well, now there's people looking for a new trial because it came out that they were both severely sexually abused by their dad. So I think, what's happening in this family structure is so so secretive, and oftentimes there is nobody for these kids to talk to, and it like Harry, and it kind of boils over. This this kettle boils over And Okay, here comes the
personal growth again. I mean, look what happened to the Menendez after they killed their parents. Well, they got brand new cars, they were going on vacation. You want to talk about personal growth. I got rid of the problem and look at my life now. So yeah.
Yeah. And the thing is too that you know, a child, especially or a person that isn't fully mature, and their only experience is that family unit, and as fractured as that family unit is, that's their entire world. There's school, there's their outside of extracurricular activities, but however, their main world. And if that's a troubling world. You can see what happened, especially in the case of this young man Harry.
Yes, yeah, you know my wife just you know the secrets that happened in a house. My wife was a high school teacher and she had a girl in her class that we just found out recently that she was sexually assaulted by her dad so often that she would take her plate of food at dinner and go lock yourself in the bathroom eat in there because she didn't want to be sexually assaulted by her dad, who is
now in prison for doing that. But I mean the secrets that happened inside these homes that push kids to different limits, and some of the limits are get a gun and let's get rid of this.
Yeah. Incredible. I want to thank you very much Steve for coming on and talking about Harry A Study of Teenage mass Murderers. It's been a very very interesting interview, certainly for those that might want to take a look at Harry. Is there an Amazon page with Harry and your other work?
Well, yep, tut. Just type in click on books, type in Harry, but make sure you put Harry A Study of Teenage mass Murderers, because if you just put Harry. You're going to get a bunch of books on Harry Potter.
Yeah, okay, yeah, makes sense. Yes, well, thank you so much, Steve. That's been fascinating. Harry A study of teenage murderers. Thank you so much, Steve. You have a great evening. Thank you so much for this interview.
Thanks dam bye bye bye