KILLER MINDS-Amanda Howard

host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening. Amanda Howard is a best selling true crime author, fiction writer, and violent crimes consultant who has written nineteen books over the past fourteen years, including ten books on a wide range of true crime cases. She has also interviewed some of the world's most heinous serial killers over two decades and has collected a vast pool of information on various types

of killers, their motives, and rituals. In Killer Minds, Amanda Howard investigates sixty cases a serial murder from around the world. Using primary resources and the actual words of the serial killers. Amanda reconstructs both infamous and lesser known crimes and provides an insight into the minds of serial killers. The book is broken into the following chapters, child Killers, Strangers We Know, thrill Killers, Killer Kids, Poisoners, group Killers, Black Widows and

Parents who Kill. The book that were featuring this evening is Killer Minds, An Insight into the Minds of serial Killers, with my special guest, journalists and author Amanda Howard. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for a Greenness interview. Amanda Howard.

term a serial killer. Tell us a little bit about that.

way that Bundy killed his victims. And then we go into the known strangers, and that's these men and and Gasey fits into this category where they're, you know, these high functioning, great members of the community and everyone knows them and they're and they're great friends with everybody, but they harbor this secret and so that gives them a

sort of different sort of subspecies as well. And then we go into killers like the thrill killers, who, like Ivan Malay, who's a local case here, they actually kill because they just want to kill. It's not about the sexual elements so much as about the hunting. So there's a fair few killers that go into that category. Sorry. Our killer kids, again, is a very different category that I could probably actually I think I did write a

book on this case. But there's a lot of children who go on to kill that tend to be due to an arrested development and so why they kill at such a young agees just a fascinating topic. And again they're very different to our sexual killers, our poisoners. Obviously, that's about a quick dispatch often and it's about getting rid of people who are in their way or for the pure joy of it. A couple of other sort

of of categories. I mean, we have our tandem killers, and on my own podcast we do a lot of these tandem killer cases because there's that fascination of that dynamic that happens between the stronger killer and the weaker killer and how they can interact and function, and how these people come together in a type of perfect storm, and how they can create a murderous campaign that may

not have happened if they didn't get together. And then of course we have our parents who kill, which is a very graphic topic that goes into these parents who you know, like as as a parent myself, I don't understand, but I try to understand how they decide that they would have these babies and just continually kill them over years.

I mean, we had Mary Beth Tinning who just died recently, who likely killed eight of her nine children, and it's just shocking that they that they can go that far and carry these babies and and just end up deciding that that's what's going to happen within a very few sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes months. But it's it's quite it just it just shows that the serial killer term

is far too broad these days. I mean, when the FBI started there their research, they were looking at people like Kemper, who was very much in this very small sample size. They were all the same age, most of them were white, they all had pretty much for female victims, and so it was a very concentrated sample. But since that time, you know, we've seen people like Derek Todd who killed across racial lines and all of this sort of stuff that sort of breaks down that profile. And

I'm sorry, I'm going on. I know you've got me talking now. Dan, I'm so sorry, but it just shows that we need to sort of go into more depth and break down that umbrella of the term serial killer.

of other killers as you do. Where is there still some controversy we've seen in the last few years from the definition. I think it's the FBI that has said it from three murders adjusted down to two murders with that same kind of psychopathology evident. Where is there some controversy today about serial killing and its definition and where do you in this book see a difference.

Because you know, Caspolbig who is a child killer here Ed Australia does not fit into the same category as Ed Kemper who killed co eds in the nineteen seventies, So we need to sort of break it down because the profiles that we have are very very basic and it and we need to sort of create these subcategories where we can have the child killers, we can have the k killer children, we can have the tandem killers, we can have the poisoners, the black widows, and all

of these sorts of cases because they can't fit together. And you know, we expect to just say serial killer and we think Bundy, but we never sort of think of Mark du Trow and other cases that we're going to go into today. So I think there's extra sort of profiling sections for each of these different sub subcategories.

incredibly hard to read. Let's talk about Mark Dutrow and also, just as you mentioned before the show, tell us about the research done to be able to write about Mark du trou and what that research meant in terms of your health.

very big pond. This massive pedophile ring that was happening in Belgium at the time that actually went all the way to royalty. There was judges involved, police call parliamentary members. It was this massive rotten underbelly of Belgium and they actually put out a call for people who believed that they were victims of this pedophile ring to come forward and give their statements. So what I read during that is some of the most horrific graphic detail that I

have ever I couldn't have even imagined it. There is evidence of young girls, babies, and they killed the babies as they're born. Like I mean, we are talking graphic, horrific stuff, including photographs of children in submissive poses and sexually explicit s and m and all of this sort of horrific stuff that I threw my laptop across the room and stopped writing. It sent me to a therapist. I couldn't cope with what I had just seen and read. I mean, as authors to keep a distance, but sometimes

the darkness does get in. And I had a young daughter at the time she's now a teenager, but at the time that there was one picture of this one little girl who looked like her, and it just broke me, and I thought, why am I doing this? What's going on? I've just read the most horrific stuff. That these people are evil. There's nothing worse than the information that I read. That I had to go and see a therapist. I had to stop writing, I had to leave it alone.

The publisher didn't really like that, but they had to

deal with that. But it was about me realizing that though we think that we can keep a distance, were human and we need to be able to feel that these emotions and these poor victims and these girls who are now in their thirties and forties, and what they went through and the torture and what they saw and being passed around all of these pedophile groups, and and you know, it involved their parents and their grandparents and all of this sort of horrific detail that I read

that I couldn't put in the book. It's just it's it's just too horrific. But it just sort of created this this feeling in me that there's evil and then there's those that are beyond evil. And it was a tough case to get through. I eventually did return to the book, and Mark de Trow then also appears in Killer Minds as well, But it's just it's a case that will always be up there with just a few

others that created nightmares for me. And you know, we go to bed and we try and think about the nice things and think about our families, but there's some cases that do get in and Mark t Trow was one of them.

You talk about this, we won't get into his early life. Everybody says they had horrible things happened to them when they were young. But needless to say, when he was twenty years old, he was married, he had a couple sons, and then he was divorced and she claimed horrific spousal violence and sexual abuse of the children. At that point, he had an affair with this Michelle Martin, and it became a second wife. Correct. He used to have a white van, and we talk about he starts stocking children

at swimming centers around Belgium in his white van. Who was just to outline the horror of this story and why it's it's so horrific, is can you tell us who is in company? Who who is in company with when he does this? And then introduced some of the couple of his friends that that he is associated with. We talked, You talked about and alluded to the pedophile ring, But how does it start with these four members?

French surname. I'm sure that you would probably do a better van. And he was actually a main partner to Detroux, and the two of them would do a lot more. And there was a few others that helped, including a guy called Weinstein who ended up being a victim of Detro's because he was boasting to people and everything, and so Mark de Trow actually killed him, so he is one of his victims, which sort of confuses that serah

killer term again because his chosen victims were females. But he did kill one of his companions, and there was other people involved that were important members of society, and so they would grab the girls, they would tie them up in the van and sexually assault them and often dump them. And they did this for years and years and years until they decided to make it a bit

more of a permanent arrangement. And what they did was Marc de Trunt to one of his homes, and he had multiple homes, and he was unemployed, and people knew that he had all these homes, and he had all of this construction equipment and big giant excavators and all of this stuff. No one questioned it, which sort of suggested that people knew what was going on because they were members of the police and all of this that

were involved, that they just turned a blind eye. And what happened was that he actually abducted to eight year old girls, so Julie le Legen and Melissa Rousseau. I'm sorry about the pronunciation of some of these names, and he took them back to his home in Belgium and they produced videos and all of this sexual assault of

these two eight year old girls. Now, how how they actually died was Datrow actually went to jail for car theft, and he told his wife to keep them alive, and she was too scared to go into the dungeon to feed them, and so they ended up starving to death. So it's just absolutely horrific what those two little eight year old girls went through. And I read the case file and it's pretty horrific what their last couple of

months of life were like. Yeah, but going on from there, they actually le Lev and Datrow actually then arrest abducted Anne Marchelle and Effie Lambrex. Now they were eighteen year old girls, but they looked a lot younger, and so it was almost an accidental abduction because they wanted younger girls.

And so they were kept for only a very short time, and then they were drugged and buried alive, and they were buried beside win steam because he had sort of stuffed up with your reduction of those two girls so gone. So it's actually quite shocking, but that they were kept for a short time. And then in I think it was nineteen ninety six, Dutrow ended up kidnapping Sabine Zaden,

who was a twelve year old girl. And there was a big outcry about that there was girls being abducted and this girl had disappeared, and she was actually gone for quite some time and they kept looking for them, and police had actually been Todtro's house several times in it had heard children crying out asking for help, but they could never find them because the way that they were hidden in these dungeons, which are very much like the Fritzel case in Austria a couple of years ago,

that these these doors, they were hidden behind shelving and all of this sort of stuff, so though they could hear them, knew that they were there, they didn't find them and didn't keep trying to find them, so that they could have probably saved the first two girls and then saved the others. But thankfully Sabine and there was an another girl that was abducted just before they were captured, Letitia dell Has, and they were kept and raped repeatedly

during their captive period. But then the press and the public had caused such a great outcry that they knew where to find them because someone had seen the spooky white band when he had abducted Letitia, so they were able to go and get them within a couple of weeks of her abduction. So the last two girls did survive, and both of them spoke out at length at the trial of de Troux, who went on with the whole arm,

just a small fish pedophile group. But Sabine and Letitia said that they only were raped by him, and so that's where the trial went, and they refused to investigate further. There was a judge that wanted it to go higher, and that's where all of the witness testimony come from, all these other victims. But he was actually sacked and told to not look into this and to leave it alone. And so only datrou and his gang of Michelle Martin and Michelle Lealev went to prison for these cases.

but he's never going to be charged. Were incarcerated for this, but the Belgium, the Belgium people tried to have it changed and fixed, and they did a lot, but it just come down to this small group of four people and only three were incarcerated, and Michelle Martin is actually out of prison now. But it's they knew something was happening and that there was too many rumors for there not to be evidence, but it was just shut down. But I mean, a lot of the information is online.

You can actually look up the ex dossiers and read these transcripts of these interviews with these girls who now at thirty and forty what they had experienced, as you know, three four, five, fifteen year olds. It's just been horrific. But no one, no one went into it. And actually one of the victims who spoke out, Regina, loof people went on news programs and current affairs shows to actually discredit her and just say, honor, she's a crazy crack

pot and this didn't happen. That didn't happen. But she was able to take people to the places where these things happened, where bones were found and blood splatter was found and everything, and they still chose to ignore her case.

didn't pronounce that properly. He was acquitted of all charges, but he did get five years for drug related charges, so he escaped from charges essentially two of this again seemed like a big pedophile group, but only a few people convicted and those sentences. Was there outrage at that leniency, at those sentences or any of those decisions.

of prison. I mean, he's only been in prison for about twenty years and he wants out. And I mean the judge that was digging into this case, he was sacked purely because he had a dinner with the victims' families and they said, oh no, no, this is instantly a conflict of interest. You can't look into this case. And they've brought in someone who just basically just washed the case away and said, yeah, Mark the Trow's guilty, go to prison, go away everyone else. So, I mean,

everyone knew that there was corruption involved. Even a million people marching in the streets wasn't enough to change the outcome or to create enough buzz to make them fight this further and to get the real ring leaders involved, because I mean, it's still going on. And that's the scary part. Mark de Trow might be in prison, but this pedophile ring is still going on.

grab someone off off the street and take them. So they're our stranger killings that they're the ones who see the opportunity and take it, whereas the known strangers like John Wyne Gacy and Dean Call, they're members of the community and people actually flock to them, and so to procure that they're victims, both Gaycy and Call used younger boys to actually entice people to their house, and they would often go a couple of times before they were

actually killed, so they got to know their victims, and their victims got to know their killer before everything ended up terrifically wrong. So that's the distinction there. So it's about building relationships where they're victims. It might just be a few hours, but often Gaycy or Call would actually have people come to their home and you know, and they'd smoke weed for a while and they'd watch Porno's

or play a couple of games of pool. So it wasn't about getting them in the house and attacking and killing them, whereas the stranger killings often do that. They actually go and grab a victim, take them home, and they're dead pretty quickly, often after sort of a shortened period of torture. These known strangers take that time and they're able to create an environment where they're comfortable enough

to do the killings. Dean Call used to so Brooks and Henley to entice some of the teenage boys to come to his home in Houston and they would play pool for a while and they'd get drunk. And you know,

teenage boys'd be happy to do that. I mean, most teenagers want to go and get drunk, and so that's what what would happen, is that they would go and party until they would often wake up tied to Dean Call's torture board, and then that they'd be sodomized, they'd be beaten, they'd be tortured, and then that they'd be killed and buried in a boat shed that he'd hired. So it's very different to the opportunitnistic killers that we have.

And this is how these sorts of known strangers like Gacy and Call get up to Dean Cole had twenty eight victims and Gaycy had thirt thirty three, and this is how they do it because Dankole had a local candy business and people knew him and he was part of the society. He was a veteran, and it was just Noah would have suspected him. So this is how he was able to get to at least twenty eight victims.

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correspondence with this Henley. Explain that before we go more into and dive into the story of being Coral or the Candyman.

was seventeen then, so do the math. He's quite old now and he has spent his entire adult life in prison as an a Now, though we don't feel sympathy for these people who murder children or kill anyone, but you have to wonder if there's something there that even at seventeen, Henley was under duress from Call. And there's as I said, that you can't be said sympathetic, but you have to wonder that he was just a pawn

in Call's game. And you know, he has spent all of this time in prisons as an accomplice to a horrific serial killer. And I don't know if a lifelong sentence was the right sentence in this case. I believe that had he not come into calls home, he may never have killed. And I don't think he's a serial killer. He's someone who was just put into that environment where it was kill or be killed, And I don't know. It just messes where my head a bit. And Brooks

was the same. Brooks was incarcerated too, and as far as I'm aware, he's still in prison as well. Actually

I know he's still in prison. But there is a twist to Henley's case in that on one day nineteen sixty eight, I think it was, he actually bought a female victim home and Cale got really really upset by it because his preference was between age boys, and so Carl drugged them all and Henley woke up tied to the board like the other victims were, and he sort of convinced Paul to let him go and together he would kill the female victim and Carl would kill the

male victim that he'd bought, and they sort of call let Henley go, and he pretended to wrap his girlfriend that he brought to the house and then sort of call teased him about something and the two got into a fight, and Carl become angry and said to Henley, well, you know, if you didn't like this, well you're just gonna have to kill me, and going at him and going at him, and Henley actually grabbed a gun and

shot Dean called dead. So there's actually there's a recording out there of Wayne calling his mum and saying, I shot Dean, And it's a weird moment because her response is, oh, no, you know, her son just wrung her and said, I've murdered someone, and there's no she doesn't ask what happened? How like, what's going on? It's just oh no, it's actually quite odd. It sort of suggests to me that she knew something wrong was going on and this was

the out come that she wasn't surprised by. So then Henley and Brooks took the police to the boat ship where they started to dig up all of these boys. So and the two of them have been in prison ever since, and Colin never faced justice because Henley shot him dead.

of them knew each other. And there's all these boys disappearing, and the police, like they did with Gaycy, just assume they all run away. So no one saw it as a spike or that there was an issue going on, or you know, it was just too great a coincidence that all these teenage boys were sudden not being found, but the investigations weren't happening. So no, that the boys

run away, We're not going to look. So all of these families stood around this boat shed and saw their boys get get pulled out, and you think twenty eight victims at least, what like, where could have the police stop this from happening? Where could they have thought, hang a sick let's look into this And everyone goes, oh, the last place that they was seen as Dean Cole's place, But no one did that until Henley shot Dean Cole dead. This was going to continue.

into these details, but incredible torture of these boys. How do you reconcile that these boys would go do that for any regardless of any motivation or threat.

you also have after think about the parents. Why are you letting your twelve year old boy hang with this man day after day, week after week, and an option. I don't know. I feel sorry for Brooks and Henley, but yes, at the same time, as you said, they knew what was going to happen, they participated in what happened, and they helped kill these victims, so they're equally as culpable. But I think they wouldn't have become Seriah killers themselves.

It's just under the guidance of call that this happened.

name into one of the boy's chests. Now, this was a bad child, but again we talk about their horrific upbringings and for a child to killer ten has been a horrific journey to that point. She had been prostituted

by her mother. She'd been abused by so many people, full she'd been in and out of girls homes and all of this, so it culminated in a very short spree of two killings, and she actually had a friend help her with One of the victims, who sat a name was also Belle, which is quite surprising, but Sha

was actually slightly older. But it was Mary who was the instigator, and she actually, like the day before her eleventh birthday, she lured a four year old boy called Martin to an abandoned house and she she did this herself, and she took the boy there and strangled him and

sort of harmed his corpse. And then a couple of months later, with normal Belle, they took a three year old boy to some wasteland and the two of them sort of attacked him and she etched a big m across his his stomach and she sort of mutilated his genitals and cut his hair off and basically just sort of did a lot of anger harm. So she sort of acted out all of her probably pent up anger at and frustration that she had at home on this three year old boy. And the scary part is that

when she killed her first victim. The family had a viewing and that they were preparing for the funeral and everything, and Mary turned up and said, I want to see his dead body, just just just as plain as that, you know, And they're like, you're an eleven year old girl, please, you know, this is very sad, and she she's like, no, no, no, I want to see him, you know. She was that sort of blase about it. So she was put in prison for quite some time, and she she escaped when

she was about sixteen and fell pregnant. She went for a couple of weeks and had a wild ride yep, and went back to prison. But in England, like we have here, children can't be held for life, so Wayne Henley would have been released under UK and Australian law.

So at the age of eighteen she was released, given a new name, and she's been found a few times over the years, but basically the people who need to know who she is and where she is, and she's been kept safe because I mean it comes into culpability of a ten year old girl being responsible for what she'd done. And so yeah, so she's lived a harmless

life since then. So that the case isn't well known, but it often comes up because of the two ten year old boys who killed the two year old toddler in in the UK in the nineties, which is another big case that happened, and both of those boys were released also eighteen, though one of them's now back in prison for about the fifth time. So as a case,

it does come up because of that. It makes you wonder what creates a ten year old killer, and it's something that's perplexing, and they're quite hard to actually interview and get to. I'm actually interviewing a child killer in Australia. He was eighteen when he killed a victim and he was suspected of two others. So I've been actually interviewing him for just this year so far. As I said, they're actually hard to find an interview, but I'm trying to delve into this a bit further to see what

creates a child killer. So well, a child who kills so interesting.

if this person could have been stopped. So tell us a little bit about William Herons and how old was he when he began his killing spree.

When I write these cases, I go from the point that people have been incarcerated and they've gone through appeals. If they're still in prison, as suggested, there's enough evidence to put them there. Now. Heron's who was convicted of three victims. So there was three female victims. They were middle aged, most of them, so around forty five or so,

which is my age. So I can say say that, and they were stabbed and attacked, but there was sort of no suspects and it was only that Heron's had a criminal record and he was actually captured trying to break into a home and had a gun. Did they believe that he was the killer. So police at the time we're looking for several other susc including a female at one of the scenes, and we don't know why that. We know that they believed that the second victim was

actually killed by female. So it's actually quite strange. But when Herons was arrested, they actually kept him awake for six days. They refused him food and water, and they used that im pentathole on him as well as light detectives. Now this is a seventeen year old boy in a room with all of these police officers, no lawyer, and

after six days he confessed. I think he would have confessed to being Jesus Christ at that point, and so it's actually quite I mean, it's quite shocking that this is how he was sentenced, was based on his own confession. And I mean, he was Chicago's longest serving prisoner. He died at eighty three in prison, so he was in there for I'm terrible at mass so don't make me

work out out. But at sixty odd years and he always claimed that he had been railroaded by their tactics to confess, so he may have been innocent, but he went to jail for the case. And so he had

three victims. As I said, they were all stabbed, they were also beaten, and they were that they did struggle with their attacker, which I think might suggest why they thought one of the victims was killed by a female, because there was such a struggle that happened, and I don't think a male would grab lipstickers as quickly as a female would to write that, but that there'd been other witnesses that had had seen heron in the area, and he'd been in and out of boys' homes to

that point for similar attacks, So he had gone into people's houses and taken similar things that what was taken at the three kill sites. So that sort of is a bit more evident against him. So it's a case. It's quite interesting and one that I keep coming back to because I think that we could dig and find more on this, whether to prove or disprove he is the killer. But seventeen to eighty three he was in prison. That's a very long time.

robbing the place. The family came home and rather than trying to escape or or get away on a pri and co just massacre the entire family. So like BTK, starts with a massive killing, and over the next couple of years he would do this. He would go into their homes and he would break in, steal what he could,

and then kill the entire family. Often he would do that first and then rob the place, but often it was the other way around that he would tie them all up and make them watch him sort of defile their homes, and then once they were dead, he would burn the house the ground. So we had a very distinct signature to what he did. And he did this over and over and over again. He got sick of his accomplice and ended up just just going it alone,

and he would kill massive families. You know, he would go and kill the family of four, family of ten, a family of eight, and he would do this over and over and over again and burn the places down. So not only was the serial killer and a burglar, he was also an arsonist. So he's one of these killers who just enjoyed what he did did the first time and just kept doing it over and over and

over again until he was finally captured. And obviously, when you have such a distinct pattern, police were able to quickly link them all together and new to it. It

was a work of a serial killer. And after the debacle of the Chickachillo case where they believed that that the Ukraine and Russia don't have serial killers because that's a US thing, they were able to quickly link all of this together, believe they had a serial killer and so Onopri and Co. Was actually caught quite quickly, but after a massive count of fifty two victims.

they escalate until they slip up. And that's for what he did there.

families out. But Holmes, he's almost the stand alone case because he is so different, and you know, he burnt down his castle in Chicago, and he had used a lots of different methods of killing, and there was some financial gain when he killed Benjamin Pizzel, and there's evidence has suggested that there were some sexual elements to some of his victims. But he's just a case that it was almost where can I put him? Because he can

fit in so many different cases. I mean, you could also consider him a mass killer because his victims could have been, you know, in the hundreds as far as we're aware.

in Canada which has just come through. So it's going to be just just that next section of killers that don't fit under that umbrella of serial killer as easily as we'd like them too. So there's about eight different categories in that. I would have to look it up approves. I haven't looked at it for a couple of weeks. I've been working on some other projects. But yeah, I

know that the first chapter is cannibals. I'm opening with Dama, which is probably people will say he probably didn't eat a lot of his victims, but I mean there's pieces in the fridge for a reason, so he's definitely the opening scene.

this and the dramatic examples. And again, I can't even imagine you having to hold some of the stuff that you held back with some of these stories like Mark Dutroux and Dean Coral, and we left a lot of those details out for the reader to discover because again, hard to read, hard to read the incredible evil that these people perpetrated on their victims, and when you see other children put into servitude with this evil person, it's just again it's visual to me. Yeah, the images that

were created with this book. So I want to thank you very much Amanda for coming on and talking about killer minds. You mentioned earlier, and I forgot to mention you also are a podcaster, So why don't you talk about your podcasts and how people might be able to find it, and also if you have a website for your books or for a personal website, let us know about that.

I also have a Monsters who Murder dot com website, as well as Amanda Howard dot com dot a U website which is sadly out of date because I'm busy. But people can also find me on Twitter at Amanda Howard seventy three, and on Facebook and Instagram and all of those. I usually just Amanda Howard author or something like that. I'm pretty easy to find and I'm often

on there, so I'm in lots of Facebook groups. I'm in Dan's group and all these sorts of places, so I'm around and I'm happy to talk to people about these cases. So this is what I do. They call me the serial killer Whisperer because I seem to get some information out of some killers that no one else does. I've had a couple of marriage proposals over the years and a few things like that. They sent some very interesting gifts that I do talk about on the podcast, so please come and find me.