What if you could have a career where the opportunities are as fast as our nation, where it's not about mission statements, but a shared mission. At US Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders, from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities. CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe. Join US Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at CBP dot gov, slash careers.
Lucky Land Casino, asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Lucky?
In line of the Delhi, I guess.
Ahi in my dentist's office more than months?
Actually do I have to say?
Yes?
You do?
In the car before my kids PTA meeting?
Really?
Yes?
Excuse me?
What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
I never win?
And tell well, there you have it. You could get lucky anywhere. Playing at lucky landslots dot com. Play for free right now? Are you feeling lucky?
No?
We just necessary foid.
We can do my low eighteen plus terms conditions plus what'say, HOADI?
You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. 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 Zupansky.
Good Evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. For twenty five years, John E. Douglas worked for the FB where he headed the Elite Investigation Support Unit, the real life model for FBI agent Jack Crawford in Silence of
the Lamb. He's had a brilliant and terrifying career getting inside the minds of notorious murderers and serial killers, including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz, Son of Sam. Written with longtime collaborator Mark Lsheger, Law and Disorder is
Douglas's most provocative and personal book to date. In it, he addresses every law enforcement professional's worst nightmare, those cases where, for one reason or another, justice was delayed or even denied, through a series of character driven case histories from the earliest trials in Phalam, Massachusetts to the bungled trial of Amanda Knox. Douglas shows what happens when the system breaks down and bias, media coverage, and other influences get in
the way of a dispassionate pursuit of the evidence. Here also are Douglas's personal reflections on his ongoing search for the truth, from painful lessons learned early in his career to his controversial findings in the West Memphis three and John Vana Ramsey investigations. Brimming with procedural detail, Law and Disorder is an eye opening insider's account of the exhilaration
and frustration that attend the quest for justice. The book we're featuring this evening is Law and Disorder and with my special guest, author and documentary and filmmaker Mark Olshaker. Welcome to the program, and thank you for the agreeing to this interview.
Mark, Thank you, Jan thanks for having me.
I hope that's the proper pronunciation of your name, Mark, Yes, it is.
You did very well, the name like Spanski. I guess you can appreciate a name like Oldshaker.
Well, uh, that you can pronounce my name is fantastic. Then one it around here so it's amazing. I've heard everything, so thank you very much for this is a big thrill. Like I had said to you just previous that we've got to speak a little bit. You know, mind Hunters is huge. I first got introduced to your book, your writing with John Douglas mind Hunters and then Journey into Darkness.
So and of course you know, you guys are just legendary in terms of now that you see Criminal Minds a big series on television and so much emphasis on the stuff that you were involved with way back when. Tell us a little bit because I had I was just fascinated with your background. But you and if I'm not correct to date, in nineteen ninety two, you you eventually won an Emmy for this, a PBS series on Nova, the Mind of a serial Killer and a serial Killer.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, because we want to get the background on how you two guys teamed up. Basically, this is not similar to some of the relationships where, uh, you know, they're a law enforcement guy and there's a journalist and author. So you guys are an actual team and you got together in nineteen ninety four, Mindhunters Incorporated tell us about though the Mind of a serial Killer in nineteen ninety that series. Please.
What happened then was I, like so many other people, I had read Silence of the Lambs, the book by Thomas Harris, and I was fascinated by it. And when I heard that they were going to make a movie of it, I went to my producers at Nova, the PBS Science series and said, look, I read this book, which I loved, and if the movie is anywhere near as good, I had no idea it would be the huge hit it was. I said, people are going to be very interested in this subject, and why don't we
go in and get the real story. And at that point the FBI was very cooperative. They were happy to
have the publicity. And I brought my production team into the FBI Academy at Quantico and we started looking into it, and I said, this is a fascinating subject, and the most fascinating part of it was this guy, John Douglas, who I had not known before, but who himself had been a legend in criminal investigative analysis circles as the behavioral profiling pioneer, and he was the one who the character of Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs was based on and he was the head of this group
of profilers called the Investigative Support Unit, and we made a film Mind of a Serial Killer, as you talk about, which shows how this unit brought a repeated serial rapist and murderer to ground and got him prosecuted and convicted. And the show did very well, as you say, it had emi consideration, and interestingly enough, once it was on PBS, the Investigative Support Unit overnight started getting even more requests
than it already had. And I just became fascinated by this unit that where the people could look at a crime scene or as John did, look at photographs, crime scene investigative materials and say, okay, you're looking for a twenty two to twenty seven year old white male loaner who lives within a mile of the crime scene. He went to high school, he graduated high school, but not college. He is on psychotropic drugs of some some type. He lives with his parents or some other family member. He
does not drive, he has no driver's license. He is nocturnal, he is underemployed. Oh and by the way, you've already interviewed him, and this describes This actually describes someone who is now serving a life term for murder in the New York correctional system. So I became fascinated by this. I often say to people that as a previous novelist of thrillers and as a documentary filmmaker, you're always looking for great characters. And I found one right in front
of me, a living character who was fascinating. And then a couple of years later, when John got ready to retire from the Bureau, after as you say, twenty five years of service, Dan, he called me and said would I be interested in working with him on a memoir of his experience? And I said, yes, I would. Let's want and I I'll introduce you to my agent. We'll
go to New York and see if there's any interest. Well, there was a tremendous amount of interest, and out of that book came the book mind Hunter that you mentioned, and it did well enough that we were asked to do other books, and this book we've just published, Law and Disorder, is our eighth book together now. And so
I don't know how you describe our relationship. We often joke that John is a detective pretend to be a writer, and I'm a writer pretending to be a detective, but in fact we really do have sort of a Sherlock Holmes and doctor Watson relationship, and we now investigate cases together and write about them.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Now, this latest book that you've penned together, is what is the intention or what is the focus of this book Line Disorder?
Well, that's actually the critical question, Dan, and what all of our other books have really been about showing showing
how to get the bad guy. And what we realized here when John got out of the Bureau and he started working for on other cases like the John Benet Ramsey case, what we realized was that the skills that he developed in the Bureau, what we call criminal investigative analysis or or behavioral profiling, were not only applicable to catching the bad guys, but they were just as applicable to getting to the truth of cases that are already been adjudicated and exonerating people who had been unfairly or
wrongfully convicted, or, if not convicted in the courts, convicted in the arena of the public or the media, as was the case of John ben Ay Ramsey's parents, who were almost immediately convicted in that court of public opinion, and as soon as John began working on the case, he realized that they didn't do it. And so what this book is really about is the unending and difficult
quest for real justice. And we go through a number of cases, including the Ramsey case, including the West Memphis three case, which has been quite celebrated and John was involved with all, so the Amanda Knox case in Perusia, Italy, in which it should have been obvious to investigators what
actually happened, but instead the wrong people were convicted. And what we do is we go through these cases and show what happens, what the horrible consequences can be when preconceived notions or an already existing worldview or prejudice or whatever else takes the place of rigorous investigation and evidence based investigation and searching. And this can apply to police, to prosecutors, to the media, to the public in general.
And what happens is when you get all of them together, you have a perfect storm which leads to false convictions. And one of the things that amazed me Dan when I started researching this book with John, is how many times cases hang on what we call false confessions in other words, a confession that is not true, and there
are any number of reasons for them. But one of the things we realized was that anybody who is reasonably trained in investigative techniques, and you don't even have to be a John Douglas, I consider consider myself one of those, at this point I could get I could get a confession from almost anybody on anything, anything, if you give me enough time and resources, and I don't even have to touch the person. I don't have to beat them up or threaten them. I just need enough time with
them and I can get a confession. So getting a false confession is not that difficult. Getting a true confession is more problematic.
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know what I found interesting with this book too, is that you really do basically spell out that profiling really is just the you know we've always talked about, well it's not the all and be all, it's just absolute. But really profiling and the work that John Douglas has done with this Investigative Special Unit is that really it's just better evidence analysis. It's looking, like he says, you can't just profile the crime scene. You
have to profile everything. You have to profile the environment, the location, the situation. So again it's looking at the crime scene, the crime itself, the perpetrator, the interview, just looking at it a little more or a lot more progressively.
You're absolutely right, Dan, I think that's a tremendous point to emphasize. And here would be a perfect example of what you're talking about would be the John Benet Ramsey case. Everybody in the public and the police was convinced that these parents had killed this little girl because that's what
parents do and that's what they expected. But if you study the medical examiner's report, in other words, nothing to do with profiling, You study the medical examiner's report on how this child died, and then you try to correlate that with the behavior on the scene and what we know, you will see, as we explain in this book, that
the parents couldn't have done it. So what this is doing is this is taking good, solid, scientific evidence, evidence based investigation, correlating it with what we know about profiling and human behavior, and coming up with your conclusion in a logical, methodical way based on that evidence.
Well. Yeah, but you also point out in the book too that it's also understandable sometimes not necessary obviously not tolerable, but that there's a certain amount of pressure created by say, irresponsible media or absolutlure to have solved something recently. So there ends up being this very human nature coming into play where there's a lot of pressure. And so again justice is not does not prove absolutely.
And you've and you've brought up another very good point, Dan, which is that justice does not take place in a vacuum. There always is a social public media context to do everything is you've pointed out, and and you can't dismiss that when you're evaluating the case.
What I found very very interesting and I was laughing, and then I found it very humorous and of course fascinating. And I didn't know that where I thought I knew quite a bit about the Salem and then of course, and then of course concern So tell us about the beginning of the book and why you included and maybe you can tell us about it, but also why you included a story about Salem, Massachusett and tell us about that place.
Another another good question. Everybody knows the name Salem Witch trials, not many of us know that much about them. What was interesting is what a metaphor it was for the worst of criminal injustice. Today we start we start the book, as you say, with the Salem witch Trials sixteen ninety three in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the first person to be brought before the uh what they called at that point, the Court of Oya and Termina, was the woman named Bridget Bishop.
Hello, it is a Ryan And I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino dot com. I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing. They were also playing Chumba Casino. Coincidence, I think not everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino's home to the hundreds at casino style games. Do you can play for free anytime, anywhere, even at thirty thousand feet. So sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot
com to claim you're free. Welcome bonet. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com. And lived at chumber lain.
Nover necessarily Daly Ripod where everybody lost in terms of conditions eighteen lassop. She always wore black. She was considered odd by the community, and she didn't go to church. Three hundred years later, exactly nineteen ninety three, in West Memphis, Arkansas, three eight year old boys are apparently brutally murdered in a wooded ravine. The first person they bring to trial as a defendant is an eighteen year old kid named Damien Eccles. He is accused of having murdered these kids
in a satanic ritualized way. What's interesting about Damien And remember what I just said about Bridgid Bishop. He always wore black, he was considered odd by the community, and he didn't go to church. And he was convicted and sentenced to death. Now that's three hundred years separate these two events, but not much else.
Yeah, it is fascinating and tell us a little bit more about the original Salem trials and what if what you're trying to convey it in its representation, Well, this is.
Why we decided to use these because what the theme of this book really is is what happens when a crime occurs that, rather than thinking about it as an individual crime, it fits into the preconceived notions or worldview of the community. Now, this community in Salem believed in witches. They believed in witchcraft and the supernatural, and so when a group of young and teenaged girls started acting in a very peculiar manner and started doing things that were
not explainable in any kind of rational sense. It was assumed that they had been possessed by witches, and so the first thing you do is you look for the witches. And they were all too eager to identify the witches, and then they started. Then they started prosecuting them. Now we think of medieval witches being burned at the steak and all of that, well this was a little more modern than that. Nobody was burned at the steak. Here, these witches were hanged, but they were in fact executed.
And what happened was soon the community just started cannibalizing and turning on itself, and you never knew who was going to be accused next. And there are so many interesting parallels to the present. For example, they thought they had good scientific evidence, and the scientific evidence that they had was if somebody saw a accused witch's shape or specter, in other words, their supernatural embodiment lurking above them. That was considered good scientific proof that that person was a witch,
and that was used to condict people. But then Cotton Mather, who was one of the one of the most important clerics of the day in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said, you know, I think you may have it wrong. This is not good science. And the reason it wasn't good science was because if this was all, if these witches were all acting on behalf of the devil, the devil could assume any shape he wanted. Everybody knew that, so
they could have been misinterpreting the evidence. It might not have been these individuals themselves who were accused of being a witch. It could have been the devil. And suddenly everybody said, oh, you know, maybe the science isn't so good after all. What was and what's fascinating is we still have bad scientific evidence today. Now again, going back to West Memphis three hundred years later, this was a community and a law enforcement establishment that believed in Satanism.
They believed Satanic activity was happening all over the place. So when three young boys were killed in what looked like a rich at first a ritualistic fashion, they figured, all right, who's likely to have committed that kind of thing? And they rounded up three kids, one of them whom was illiterate and had a functional like Q of about sixty five, and they got him to confess to a crime which clearly he hadn't done, and named to other
people who he hardly knew. Again a very interesting parallel, But the parallel almost stops there, because by the next year, by sixteen ninety four, the people around Massachusetts Bay, had serious second thoughts about what they had done, particularly when Cotton Mather's father Increased Mather, who was the president of Harvard University and a very distinguished cleric. He had been in England and when he got back he said, you know,
this does not seem like the right thing. And people started rethinking it, and within a year anybody who was left in prison had been let out. The families of those killed had been paid reparations by the state legislature, and they started immediately to try to live it down in West Memphis, Arkansas. It took eighteen years for people like John Douglas and other investigators to get these three innocent young men not exonerated, just let out of prison,
which happened about two years ago. And by the time Damian Eccles, the supposed ringleader, was let out, he went from age eighteen when he was convicted. He was let out of jail, of prison, off of death row when he was thirty six years old. He had spent half of his life on death row for a crime he not only didn't commit, but was nowhere near. And this is something dan the community, the police should have known.
It should have been obvious by the type of crime, by the type of evidence, by the lack of evidence. And yet it took somebody like John Douglas coming into the community and saying you've totally misinterpreted this crime, and then having the scientific experts to back him up with good, hard science, which they never had before. And it's really a shame. The same thing with the Amanda Knox case
in Italy. You have this twenty year old American girl who is convicted of ritualistically satanically killing her flatmate in this bizarre ceremony. Now I submit to you that, first of all, the idea of satanic murder basically does not exist. It's a myth of those who believe and some in law enforcement. The FBI has no documented cases of a
taking place in any Western country. And yet the prosecutor was sure that this is what had taken place, and so all evidence then pointed to this young girl who had never been in trouble in her life suddenly being seized with the idea that she should kill her roommate in a ritualized sexual orgy.
Yeah.
And uh and the and the evidence just wasn't there.
Uh.
And what was particularly interesting in this case is the evidence of who actually did it was there. They they caught that, the police did catch that person. His DNA was all over the place, Amanda's was nowhere, and yet they stuck to their story and she spent five years in prison before she was let out.
Well, it is I've done a few programs of wrongly convicted persons in the US, and it seems over zealous prosecuted prosecutors, even when they're faced with DNA evidence, are reluctant to let Like you say, there was methmis they could have been leading wasn't exonerated, but they reluctantly let him out. I mean that's right. Not only was John Douglas uh involved with that, And there was Hollywood stars lined up for this. There was a lot of people that were that were It seemed obvious to a lot of.
People and Johnny Depp it was involved. Metallica. Metallica, yes, so many people were involved and uh, and a lot of it was financed and orchestrated by Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings, who with his life companion fran Walsh, we're really tremendous heroes in this.
Yeah, it's shameful that, you know, a proud judicial system is actually being it's you know, it's it's it's shameful that the reputation of that judicial system is marred by these Again, people didn't have If you're wrong, you're wrong, and you have to say that.
So exactly, a.
Person like John Douglas, which has been on on the side of law and certainly not you know, he talks about, you know, a murderers being executed and uh, you know, he doesn't shy away from that verdict. Absolutely for him to be basically on the other side of the system looking for innocent people among convicted people is an interesting and profound testament itself.
Thank you for saying that.
I agree with you, Yeah, and enough that you're going to dedicate a whole book to this as well, you know, and so I applaud you guys for doing that as well.
Well, you know, we we there are a number of primes. In this book, we've been very reflective and John has said where he was wrong in past cases because of things he didn't understand, or because he assumed that all evidence he got he received from local police or local investigators was good evidence. And you know, John had to go through a lot of soul searching and introspection when we wrote this book because he had to understand and
admit the times when he was wrong. Or here's another perfect example, years after the all that to do in the John Benet Ramsay case, when the Boulder District Attorney finally identified John Mark Carr, who was that very strange young man who they apprehended in Thailand who said that he had been there when John Benet had died and had given all kinds of strange stories about that. And John and I believed that they had finally gotten the
right guy. Why did we believe that? We believed it because of a preconceived notion of ours, which was that with all that they'd been through, with all the embarrassments, with all of the false leads in that case, the Boulder District Attorney's office certainly wouldn't have gone public and made a big deal out of this if they didn't have this guy dead to right, so if they didn't know everything about him and were sure that they finally had the right guy, then when they extradited him and
brought him back to Colorado and his DNA didn't even match exemplars they had from the crime scene, we threw up her hands and said, what are they out of their minds to do something like this? But we were taken in because we couldn't believe that they would make the same mistake again. So you know, we were taken in.
Yeah, incredible, and you know in the media media basically what it also taught me a lesson too, because this was I was much younger and obviously much more naive. A lot of people try to judge a lot of things a politician by a debate or by commercial or and it's the same when you see Ramsey. She was
distraught and she was obviously on medication. So to someone like me at that time, I thought she was disingenuous, and so I convicted her in my mind from her reaction on television, which is irresponsible, and the media preyed upon that as well.
Well, you know, Dan, you're absolutely right, and this goes back a long way back in nineteen thirty two, when Charles Lindbergh's toddler's son, Charlie Junior, was kidnapped in New Jersey.
A lot of people thought that Lindbergh himself must be in because he was so stoic, and he never showed any emotion and he seemed so control oriented, And you just have to realize everybody reacts in their own way, and this is a man who knew that the only way to survive in desperate situations like flying across the Atlantic Ocean by yourself for the first time, is to be in total control, to be totally dispassionate, and he was able to do that, and so it's very easy
to misinterpret somebody's One of the things we realized in dealing with all the victims and victims families that we've dealt with over the years is you really don't know how you're going to react in the time of crisis and horror and tragedy. And if we evaluate or judge other people who we see in those situations, we do so at our peril because we don't know how we would react ourselves. I swear to you, yeah, yeah, Well.
The thing is that if you're basing it on that, and that's that's what normal police procedure was. They did have tunnel vision and narrowly focused on suspects that they felt were good and did a lot of this gut instinct. Profiling really does a lot of excluding of people. Like you were saying with this book, is you've got to the point where you can't exclude people even in retrospect. You can go that's absolute information.
And I think that's another important point to get across, which is profilers like John Douglas, they don't catch criminals. The police catch criminals. They help what they What profiling can do for a for a local investigation is either reaffirm or redirect the investigation, in other words, show that you're on the right track with the suspects you have or that you should readjust and go in a different direction.
That's what it can do. And then when a suspect is apprehended, you can also evaluate and see, well does this person meet the right criteria and uh, if not, go in a different direction. And if he does, how can you interrogate him?
What? What?
What are some good interrogation techniques you can use? What are proactive techniques, and then if he gets to trial, we also have good trial strategy that profilers can help with.
Well.
The basic art or science of profiling has been criticized by some people. But what's interesting is that, and probably why you have so much credibility as well, is that the when you had the attempt at identifying a suspect through profiling with your mind of a serial killer, you guys, are accurate but one detail. And even that one detail you're still confident because you say that one detail can be explained as well. That's very interesting.
And you're talking you're talking about age, of course I know, and uh. And in this in the mind of a serial killer, the profilers got the age wrong by fifteen years. Uh. And what was very interesting is then when you looked at the suspects record, he had been imprisoned on sexual charges for fifteen years, so essentially he'd been put on ice, his development had been arrested, and when he was let out, he picked up right where he left off.
Yeah, tell us more about that profiling that you did. Do.
Okay, Round two, name something that's not boring, laundry, a book club, computer solitaire.
Huh oh, sorry, we were looking for chumbuck Casino.
Chum.
That's right, chumbucasino dot com as over one hundred casino style games joined today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes.
Chum.
Chumbucasino dot com.
Plus Condition of the Blue webs retails with the Lucky Landslide. You can get lucky just about anywhere.
This is your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's fine, but we're just gonna circle up here a while and get lucky. No, no, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes add up quick. So I suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right, and start getting lucky.
Pay for free at Lucky landslipes dot com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary void. We're prohibited by Law eighteen plus. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details.
And the identification, the whole process that you were successful in identifying, and this is you know, back in ninety two. So tell us a little bit more about the bit of the not the victim, but the suspect itself and how you were successful and was what made up the profile itself.
Well, the first thing you do is you look at the crime scenes, you see what kind of person it is. You can tell a lot about crime scenes from crime scenes, and one of the things that became clear in this case is, first of all, all of the victims were prostitutes or street people. Now what's interesting is you wouldn't think of it at first, but we can often lump prostitutes, children, and the elderly into some of the same categories. And that category is that they are the most vulnerable, They
are the least able to defend themselves. But somebody who would attack a prostitute, we would start by concluding, this is not somebody who feels good about himself. This is not somebody like a Ted Bundy who is handsome in glib and feels that he has the gifts to seduce a woman and get her under his influence on his own. With a prostitute, all you have to do is say come along. And so we knew immediately that this was not somebody who felt good about himself who had a
lot of social skills. So that tells you something. We we found out from the crime scenes that this person was coming back to the crime scenes after death, so he probably had some necrophiliac interests, and he was masturbating on the at the scenes. We also, uh, there were a number there were a number of uh uh indications that he had already injected himself into the investigation. So we started looking at places that police tended to hang out.
And from experience, we knew that each of these things we were finding out has other elements and attributes attached to them. And then and eventually he was he was identified, He was caught and convicted. He he admitted the crimes but claimed could be a multiple personality, which is very interesting because we find out that in most multiple personalities seemed to develop post arrest.
But he he was.
He was convicted and put in prison in New York and and died in prison, fortunately for the rest of us.
Yeah, successful conclusion. How did he how did what was the evidence that he had? What exactly was the evidence that he had injected himself into the investigation?
You know, I don't remember at h at this point anymore, but I think you know, you can tell if what. One of the things that you can that you can do is uh there are proactive techniques where you can put out certain pieces of information which you can then see if the unsub or unknown subject is responding to. And sometimes you can plant information that is that only he would know or that he would not know is
not true. So there are and I'm not giving away any secrets, there are any number of ways that police and investigators have of manipulating subjects so that their behavior will give them away. And I can tell you the more you try to if you're a if you're an offender, the more you try to cover up your behavior, the more behavioral evidence you are going to display.
Although, serial killers that are listening.
Uh, and if you know, if, if and if they're listening, the one thing I want to get across, and we've said this over and over again, there are no hannibal lecters out there. That's a that's a figment of a writer's imagination.
Uh.
Most serial killers, most predatory sexual offenders are inadequate, nobody unaccomplished, nobody's whose only whose, only accomplishment and only quest in life is for this manipulation, domination and control of those that he perceives weaker than him so that he can get satisfaction. And that's the only way he can get satisfaction. And when they're not on the hunt. They're fantasizing about it. And so these are not heroic individuals. These are not
macho individuals. These are deeply inadequate, cowardly individuals.
Yea, and not so bright and not so bright.
Thank god, it's one thing, one thing we have working for us.
Yeah, evil genius, Yeah exactly. Now. The thing is what you include in your book too, is is the a case in nineteen forty six with the Suzanne Daignan that was kidnapped. Now what did this tell us about this case? And when you finished, then we can I'll ask you what you've learned from this and why it felt it necessary to feature it in the book. What exactly you're you're trying to convey in.
The book with story this case that you're referring to, this was someone who was terrorized post war Chicago in nineteen forty six. It was the so called lipstick killer. And he was called the lipstick killer because he killed two adult women and supposedly.
On on.
The mirror of a bathroom mirror of one of them. He wrote in lipstick for for heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself and then supposedly. And you'll see why I say supposedly in a moment, Uh, this same killer killed a young girl, Susan Degnan, who you talked about, and chopped up her body and put it in very foot pieces in various parts of the
sewer sewers. The police went. The Chicago Police went through a lot of suspects before they finally found a young student, a young college student named William Herron's.
H E I R E N S.
And he we know that he was kind of a petty thief. He did breaking and entering. He had he liked collecting sun years that he from places that he broke into. And after going through a number of other suspects who I must say, according to the records, we found the police treated brutally, some of whom ended up in the hospital. After interrogations, they decided that Heron's was their guy. They got him. They caught him in a
breaking and entering. They got him after several attempts to sign a confession, threatening him with the death penalty if he didn't. He signed the confession, went to trial, went before a judge, pleaded guilty on the advice of his court appointed lawyers. Almost immediately recanted his testimony, and he died last year as the longest serving prisoner in the
American penal system. Now. He was one of the first people that John Douglas interviewed when he was a young FBI agent trying to do this study of actual incarcerated killers, and what he said was and what John said at the time was, boy, this guy he's got an answer for everything he said. If I hadn't seen the record, if I hadn't seen the fingerprints themselves, if I hadn't seen the confession, if I hadn't seen the crime scene photos, I'd believe this guy was telling the truth. I'd believe
he was innocent. And that's actually what we said in our first book, Mindhunter. And then in light of all of the other things that we've learned since John left the Bureau, and that all evidence is not equal and that all investigations are not properly conducted, we started looking into all of the elements of this, and we realized that William Heron's previous behavior did not fit in with the kind of crimes that the lipstick so called lipstick
killer committed. His crimes did not at all relate to those of somebody who would murder a little girl, chop her up in pieces, and put her body in the sewer. None of his previous crimes, none of his previous behavior correlated with these cases. In fact, we found suspects that the Chicago police had dealt with who actually made more sense.
And we concluded that in all likelihood, William Herrins, though a petty thief and a breaking and entering guy, was probably innocent and spent his whole life in prison needlessly.
And that was.
Quite a revelation, quite something to have to deal with. We realized. We looked back at all the evidence, the fingerprints, everything, and there was nothing to say it couldn't have been planted. And then when we looked at the behavior of the Chicago police at that point, we realized that, as yourself pointed out Dan at the beginning of the show, it was very important to them to stop this reign of
terror and this public demand for blood. It was very important for them to have a suspect and then a convicted defendant, and that's what they got. Well, So so that became an object lesson for John and me and uh and it stayed with us.
Yeah, there's a lot of comprehension when you see that they beat the one suspect enough that he's got this huge settlement.
For the time exactly.
And so then they were talk about increased pressure. They were pressured enough to beat this guy alf dead right, and then from there they were really looking for somebody to just cover their own tracks.
Absolutely. Yeah. And also if you are if you are a if you are a publicly elected prosecutor, which is another thing we think, you know, we don't believe the judges or prosecutors should be a publicly elected If you're a publicly elected prosecutor and you have a major crime and you have the choice to make of whether to indict someone or leave the case open, there's a you were going to find be very hard pressed not to come up with a suspect that your voters won.
Yeah. In Canada, we don't have that system. We don't vote for judges and we don't prosecutors and sheriffs, so we don't have that the politics coming into play, yeah,
which is very which is very good. It's better. It's better in that respect, I think, especially when you see over zealous again convictions, you know, so in small places as well, So by the time anybody looks at these things, you know, the the small center, I mean, not the just small town, but you know, things can take on a whole life of their own.
Absolutely.
Now, the the other idea, or pardon me, the other idea with William Herron's how certain and this I'm just speaking as somebody that might be again looking at this and saying, how how can you just make that kind of decision that you said, Well, there could be possibly the fingerprint planted, and apparently there was. There wasn't enough for the fingerprint to be conclusive. Wasn't it nine points.
Out of twelve something like that or nine out of eighteen or whatever whatever the current the standard of the time was, I don't know.
But right so certain based on the technique of profiling itself. I know you said that when you talk about that he could not have committed this crime because the level, the level of sophistication, or the level of the gravity, and based on that he didn't have any of that background whatsoever. Again, were enough?
Sure? I understand. One of the one of the things you look at is past behavior, and every criminal evolves in a certain way. In other words, nobody suddenly wakes up one day and says, well, I think I'll go commit the perfect crime, or I think I'll go out and murder somebody just because I feel like it. There's usually an a and there's usually a connection. And we found that criminals generally stay within their own comfort zone or they evolve in the same direction they're going. William
Herons was a student in school. He was a smart guy. He had a bad family background and he took it out through breaking and entering. But when we looked at him, there was nothing in his background, nothing in his psychological profile that would suggest that he would then become a.
Murderer.
Now this is complicated by the fact that he did carry a gun and when he was apprehended he did shoot at a policeman, but there is there was nothing predator that was defensive on his part, although certainly wrong, there was nothing in his background that we could describe as predatory or looking for looking to be a rapist
or a murderer. And so when you put it all together, when you put the totality of the case together with the fact that there were other suspects who actually were more related in their backgrounds and in the evidence to these three crimes, we conclude that, and then when you take into consideration the fact that he was brutally interrogated, that he had court appointed lawyers who believed he was guilty, who were just trying to save his life, that they
tried to get him to confess several times and he didn't. He did once, then he went back on it, and he went back and forth on that. He finally confessed, signed a confession after a tremendous amount of coercion, and
almost immediately withdrew it. You have to say, when if you look at the totality of the evidence, if you look at the context of the time and what we know that the Chicago police were doing to get confessions at that point, the overwhelming lar likelihood when you take all of that in totality is that this was a bad conviction. Again, I can't say one hundred percent, but the preponderance of the evidence certainly suggests that at this point.
And the other the other evolution, if I might just add dan the other thing is for sixty some years he was a model prisoner. He gave nobody any trouble after that in prison. Yeah, well, there are a lot of nothing aggressive about him.
Yeah. The thing is what I found interesting is that you talk about that there was no and again this is the evolution of the of the research that John Douglas was involved with early as a pioneer, and then there has been an evolution, and like you say that John has realized that his past naivity regarding this and he had a different outlook regarding some of the evidence that the way he looks at it as opposed to the way he would have looked at it.
That's why I talk.
About that there was no traumatic event in William Herron's life that would then turn him into something like this. There was nothing that would precipitated this. There was nothing that would there was no trigger.
There was no trigger, no precipitating incident. That's right.
And as a break and enter artist, he really even wasn't really wasn't there for the goods. It wasn't He wasn't a desperate thief. He didn't need the money so much. So I think this is a you know, this is how far profially has gone that you guys can look at this evidence and again a completely different perspective.
And again you have to be mature enough to say you may have been wrong in the past.
Yeah, but it makes that hard for prosecutors absolutely go back twenty five years and to a mint something like that that they've been holding on because of course somebody's sitting in jail for twenty five years, that that would weigh heavy on your conscience.
Say, it certainly would weigh heavily on your conscience. But we we end the book with.
With a.
With a vitation of a case from nineteen thirty five that went before the Supreme Court in Burger versus the United States, and that established the principle that which I'm sure you have in Canada and should have elsewhere in the world. Where a prosecutor is not there solely solely to convict. A defense attorney is there solely to defend an accused man or woman defendant. But a prosecutor has
a higher responsibility. The prosecutor is supposed to determine that justice is being served, and the prosecutor, if he does not think that there is sufficient evidence to bring a conviction, that prosecutor is supposed to stand up and say this is not a good case. And very few have the courage to do that.
Yeah, I see a lot of cases of circumstantial evidence being put to a jury. Where not to talk about Canada so much, but Canadian courts will if there isn't enough evidence, then that case is going to collapse. If it doesn't, if they don't take it to a jury, at least the jury is instructed, or at least the case proceeds that that person is is not convicted.
You know when circumstantial evidence, you know, sometimes gets a bad name, but if it's good circumstantial evidence, that's as good as anything else. I mean, eyewitnesses can be wrong, as you know, as we've said, confessions can be wrong. So it's the totality of the case. And one thing which we you know, which we say is you know, you're a communicator, as am I you're you're a journalist. What we do is tell stories. But that's also what
the criminal justice system is all about. In a trial, you have both sides are using basically the same fact pattern, and yet the prosecutor and the defense tell two stories. And the one that the jury thinks rings the most true, is the most interesting, is the most likely, is the one that wins.
Certainly, certainly, now tell us a little bit about when you talked about your team that you have you and John. He's part detective, you're part reporter, that he is the analyst and you're the interpreter. Tell us a little bit more more about about this mind Hunter Inc. That you came up with in nineteen ninety four. What was your goal and how do you guys actually work well.
What we decided was that we get along very well, and I guess we both have our own egos, but I think we really appreciate each other's skills and talents. And so when John got out of the out of the bureau and we started writing books, we formed mind Hunters Incorporated as an entity, and we've written our books through that. When we have had to hire other researchers or investigators, we do it through that entity, and we've now started investigating cases that John has been called into.
We also now have a website in which we post our own views and commentaries on perspectives on profiling and
criminal justice. The web addresses www dot mind Huntersinc. Dot com, m I N D h U N T E R S dot com, i NC dot com, which we invite all of your listeners to look at, and we kind of act as a team now, John is certainly the lead investigator on that team, and we try to pick cases where we think he can make an impact, as is the case with West Memphis three, where when he went down and started looking into that case, what he really did was redefined the entire crime away from a
satanic ritualized group cause homicide into what we call a personal cause homicide, where he said, this is not three people. There's no evidence of three people. This is one person. It has nothing to do with satanic ritual and it is clear from the behavioral evidence that the killer actually knew at least one of the three boys and probably all three, whereas the three defendants who were convicted didn't know any of these kids. It never met them.
Right, Yeah, very interesting. Now you have another project and I don't know the first one was with John, but is this new Nova project on TVs who killed Lindbergh's baby?
Yes, John is involved in that. One that was actually based on a book we did a number of years years ago called The Cases That Haunt Us, where we investigated prominent cases where of murder cases where there was no satisfactory outcome, where it was never solved. We started with Jack the Ripper, went all the way up through John Benet Ramsay and explained took a completely fresh look at each case and said, what can we at this point tell and what can't we tell. I do believe
that we actually solved the Jack the Ripper case. Other people may disagree with us. We analyzed the Lizzie Borden case and Lindbergh and we've gotten through one of our correspondents who had read the book, we got some potentially interesting new evidence on the Lindberg case, which in American courts, in American newspapers was called the crime of the Century nineteen thirty two. You have to remember at the time, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world.
He and his wife Anne were like American royalty, and when his baby twenty month old son was kidnapped, it was like the Prince of England had been kidnapped. And so we went back and examined this eighty year old case, went back to the actual crime scene, to the house where it took place, and said, what can we tell about this, what new things can we learn or what at this late day can we say conclusively about this crime?
And we said several things. The big controversy all these years has been well, was Bruno Richard Haufman who was convicted and executed? Was he really guilty or was he set up? We determined several things. One he was definitely guilty. Number two, he did not act alone. And we did this through a combination of profiling and scientific analysis, and we have a reasonably good candidate for who worked with him. That program is you can take a look at it now.
It was on January thirtieth in the United States. Anybody who wants to see it can go to PBS dot org and look up Nova who Killed Lindbergh's Baby? And you can now see the program online if you're interested. And John is the star of the show.
Yeah, it's amazing. Now you guys are doing profiles of historic crimes. It's just incredible.
So yeah, and I think that when we did Jack the Ripper, for instance, we went back to London, we retraced all of the crime scenes, we went back to Scotland Yard through their records, and we found out something that we thought was rather astounding. Aside from thinking we figured out who it was, we also realized and I think the evidence is very strong for this. Although it's
not been made public public other than by us. Is that Scotland Yard actually knew the identity of Jack the Ripper and chose not to make it public.
Incredible, incredible. Now, probably a lot of people were hinting, you know, out of Hell was there was not exactly that, but that sure might be some possibility. The other thing I thought was very fascinating was that you and again I've heard you know talk of this, but you guys, really I think nailed it. It was that the message, one of the messages left by Jack the Ripper was again not likely.
Or exactly And that is one of the great ironies of the case that the only note from Jack the Ripper in which he calls himself Jack the Ripper, we believed to be a fake, whereas as you as you mentioned the from Hell note, which was another note we believed to be from the actual killer, in which there is no mention of the name Jack or the Ripper
or anything else like that. And what's very interesting about all this, and the sort of the greater lesson is we were really hoping against hope that we would find out that the killer was one of the really interesting sexy possibilities like the son of the Prince of Wales, or the royal physician, or even Walter Sickert, the a Victorian painter, or somebody like that. The person it turned out to be was quite obscure. And that's the problem.
If you have a case like Jack the Ripper, if you have a case like Amanda Knox, if you have a case like John Benet Ramsay, the press grabs hold of a story that's much more interesting in its way
than what really happened. In other words, if you say, in the Amanda Knox case, this beautiful American teenager comes over and suddenly kills her roommate in this ritualized frenzy, that's a much more interesting and titillating story than to say, this African drifter from the Ivory Coast came in and to rob the place, look for drugs, and when he saw that somebody was home, opportunistically raped and then murdered her. Nearly as interesting as the first scenario I put forth.
But that happens to be the truth.
And the media loves good looking people, whether.
That's absolutely or not, you know, absolutely absolutely, yeah.
And it was interesting too, is that you also spoke about the lipstick killer and the same thing that you determine that you know what, this might just have been the same thing where you know, very ambitious journalists said, you know, I'm going to make this story even better than it is.
And what's very interesting, and that's that's absolutely right. And the lipstick killer case, all of the great reporting on that story, and when I say great reporting, I really mean great novel writing came from the Chicago Tribune. I mean it wasn't from the police. The Chicago Tribune made up the case.
Yeah, incredible. Yeah, you know, sometimes they stick with it. And you know it was a man in ox was another one where the Italian media had sort of a bone to pick with the US. So it turned into some of those evil American tourists want in women kind of you know, for the prosecutor again trying to say face a little bit. So that was another very very interesting aspect of the story that again it's understandable, but certainly not anyway there.
And we and we tried to cover all of those dynamics of all of these cases in law and disorder and I hope your your listeners will will find it interesting and edifying. We try to tell stories that are story driven, that are character driven, and yet have a point to them. And I hope we've done it here.
Yeah. And then some of the biggest cases that no matter how much analysis, whether you've read one book with this perspective that you guys have, with this different way of looking at things, and especially these cases again, it's just like a fresh look at some of the things you thought you knew. So it's very very, very interesting.
Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, the uh, I can't tell you, Dan, how many times people have come up to me and said, oh, you've written about Amanda Knox. Well, she really did it, didn't she? And I say no, and they said, you're kidding. And I said, well, what makes you think they have? And they'll say, well, I'm just assumed that she looks like she's done it. I mean they did. The press said that she did it.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a sad state that we don't learn anything from the media. I mean, it almost began with Jack the Ripper and HH Holmes.
And absolutely, and I don't know how much.
We've learned from that. The sensationalistic and titlizing media. Sometimes once they focus on something that's you know, it's incorrect, It doesn't matter.
That's right. It takes all the life of its own.
Yeah, absolutely, And to the again, to the miscarriage of justice. And really i'm glad that you guys have hammered home that point because sometimes it is just about when you know, some of the biggest source of information. Sometimes there's law and order on television which is fictional, but it really does come down to winning cases rather than let's keep in mind here what this whole system was set up to do exactly.
Sometimes the best justice we can yeah, the best justice we can come up with is to say, we don't know who did it, but we know for sure who didn't do it.
Yeah, yeah, And we got to keep that in mind. And that is the most virtuous of pursuits. So when we're talking about this, so of course that's why yourself and John have joined on this pursuit. So I want to thank you very much. I don't want thank you very much for coming on the show.
Market well, thank you, Dan, and thank you for your astute and penetrating questions. It's always it's always a pleasure to be interviewed by somebody who has read the material, understands it and has thought about it well.
Thank you very much. This has been a big thrill and I'm sure the audiences enjoy this and I hope to talk to you again soon.
In the very near future and any time to my pleasure. Thank you very good to take care my bye.