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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker 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 Zufanski, Good evening.
Learn the terrifying truth behind the world's deadliest serial killers. Serial Killers haunt our dreams and inspire the terrifying villains of TV shows and horror movies. But how much do you really know about the minds behind the world's deadliest killers? What drives these murderers to kill and kill again, and what fuels our fascination with the true stories of their
horrific crimes. Now, forensic Psychologists, private investigator and crime writer doctor Joni E. Johnston brings you the answers to these questions and more. Serial Killers one hundred and one Questions True Crime Fans Ask, dives into the case files of the most infamous murders in history and answers the questions true crime fans have been dying to ask. The book that we're featuring this evening is Serial Killers one hundred and one questions true crime fans ask with my special
guest journalists and author and doctor doctor Joni Johnston. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Doctor Jony Johnston.
Thank you so much.
Dan.
I am just delighted to be here.
I'm delighted to have you on. This is such a fascinating book. First off, tell us a little bit more about your background and how you came to want and write this incredible book.
Well, I grew up with a mom who was, I guess, a true crime buff before we even thought about true crime buffs. She used to watch all those shows Mannics and Ironside and Hawaii five O and all these shows, and so I always watched her watch those that got interested in that. And then when I was fourteen, we're on a family vacation and I picked up the book Helter Skelter, which is about Charles Manson and whose family, and I just was, I don't know how to even
say it, like captivated by the story. I couldn't understand it. Of course, I was horrified by it, and I was also just intrigued in terms of why would somebody do these things, especially to somebody that they don't even know.
And so I think that first piaqued my curiosity. And then when I was a senior in high school, Ted Bundy escaped from a prison in Colorado made its way to FSU, which was about eighty miles from my house, and I was around the same age at the time, and so it was huge news and just horrifying to the community. And I think that really solidified and turned me from being somebody who would have always been interested in, I think crime, into it, really becoming a profession and deciding to go into it.
You say that you first worked right out of grad school with victims of abuse and neglect, then later on you worked at a maximum maximum security prison, So view the entire gamut tell us a little bit about that experience, but more so the parts of this book that you've put together based on that experience.
I feel really fortunate that I've been able in my career to work with both victims and family members of victims as well as perpetrators, because it really, I'm hoping,
has given me a well rounded perspective. So, yeah, I started out my first year at a graduate school working with families who had been court ordered into treatment for some kinds of neglect, child abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and really witness firsthand the devastation that that reeks on children, also how resilient children are, all the things that can make that trauma worse, things that can make that trauma better.
But it really was such a tough beginning in some respects to my professional career, because it's one thing to read about it or research it. It's another thing to really witness it on a regular basis. And I think there was a point in my early career when I just would feel such anger and rage toward these perpetrators
who were doing these horrible things. And at the same time, I remember sometimes Dan going to testify in termination of parental rights trials, you know, where these kids are going to be permanently removed, and I would just be, you know, very passionate and a crusader about going and testifying. And then I'd go and I would see this mom or this dad, mainly a mom who looks like a baby herself.
You know, I'm going to be like, you know, I would have all this this all these feelings and this anger and stuff, and you know, I would kind of be like, where do I direct this? Because you can see the kind of multi generational patterns of dysfunction and violence and abused kind of kind of handed down. So I do think sometimes, like I said, it was such a blessing in a way to be able to witness that side of crime and the very personal side of crime.
And then you're right, I did kind of come full circle. Many years later, I worked in a maxim security prison for a couple of years. I've spent probably fifteen years
evaluating offenders, oftentimes violent offenders. And what's interesting is that, you know, I have seen a lot of things and recognize that just as there's so many factors that you know, affect victims in terms of the again, their ability to recover from it, how they were victimized, why they were victimized, the circumstances, I found the same thing with so many perpetrators.
That know, every perpetrator was unique and they had their own story and it never excused what they did, but it did help me understand I think that you know, not all perpetrators obviously are the same, and there are people in there who, you know, if life circumstans answers were different. I don't think they would have ever ended up there. And then there were people in there that I felt like I would never want to meet in a dark alley, So it really I think, you know.
I was teaching at a graduate program recently and I really encouraged all the students. You know, if you're going to be in forensic psychology, please consider making sure that you work with everybody involved in that system, because I think it does help you know understand the complexity of it.
You write about how this book is organized by questions. Where were those questions derived from? You talk about your Psychology Today blog, but tell us where other sources of these questions came from.
Well, it's interesting the idea directly came from my reader. So I've been writing a Psychology Today blog called the Human Equation for over ten years now and just have been very lucky to have so many great readers who follow the column, and I literally would get people write me all these questions, and a lot of them I knew from our research, and some of them I didn't. And I've kept this running tally of questions that people have asked and as well as I guess myths and
miss misconceptions. So it's probably a combination of the research, the misunderstandings that I saw in the media over and over again, and then again the questions the readers asked me, and then a couple of years ago, the beginning of COVID, I thought, you know, this is a great time for me to really sit down from my readers first and foremost, and then just to make sure I know as much as I can answer those questions in a very you know, hopefully readable format. And that's just what I did.
You have all of these parts, could you tell us the parts and what they represent?
Well the parts of the book. I did try to like look for themes as I was going through, because one hundred and one questions is a lot of questions, and I thought, okay, how do we categorize these? And so I just started out pretty much with the basics. You know, what is a serial killer? How many are there?
You know, are there? Or some of the things that we think about serial killers true For example, many of us, particularly if we follow true crime, part of something called the McDonald's triad, which is bedwetting, fire setting, and animal cruelty. At an early age, we used to think that that was like the you know, the crystal ball of who's going to become a serial killer. It's become much more
complicated as we know. So the first part was just kind of like this basic kind of definitions demographics, and then I kind of started looking again at some of the serial killer psyche. You know, what are the motives of serial killers? Are their common backgrounds, is it nature versus nurture, those kinds of things. And then I, you know, looked at some one of my favorite topics, which is female serial killers. For some reason, have kind of an
interest in female still killers. And I also think that, you know, we as a country tend to be somewhat ethnocentric, right, you know, we kind of tend to focus, which is probably two of every country. You're You're focused on what's happening here, and yet there are some very interesting serial killers from around the world, and so I wanted to be sure that I included those, and then you know,
and looked at modern day serial killers. It's just amazing to me, especially you know, during the past couple of years, we've seen so many programs and documentaries and shows about kind of the serial killers of the seventies and eighties.
So we've seen you know, John Wayne Gacy, We've seen Ted Bundy, We've seen Richard Ramirez, and yet there are a lot of stori killers, less of course than the heyday of serial killers in the seventies and eighties, but there are serial killers today, and so I wanted to be sure and kind of go, hey, even though we're very lucky that the number and prevalence of serial killers does seem to have decreased, don't think that they aren't
out there and that they're still happening. So I wanted to be sure that I covered at some of them, and then I want to just spend some time just talking about kind of I guess, coming full circle again and talking about some of the you know, the friends and the families and the impact of that, and also some of the heroic stories, because it's amazing how many stories there are of courageous victims you managed to get away or who are willing to testify and look that
person in the face who did horrible things to them. And there's even at least one case where the family was responsible for capturing the serial killers. I just want to be sure and just say, hey, you know, victims are survivors, and sometimes they're more than that.
You right that since nineteen hundred there have been three thousand identified American serial killers responsible for close to ten thousand deaths. What have you found about the prevalence of serial killing in the US as opposed to other countries, and tell us a little bit more expand a little bit more about some of the myths that we have about the serial killers.
Right to start, well, certainly this proble will come as surprise to nobody that the United States leads the world in terms of the number of serial killers that have been identified and captured. And I want to make sure I underline that because there's I think there's probably no question that there have been more serial killers in the United States, but we also tend to be better at catching them, and so there's a little bit of a cavity out there that, yeah, we definitely lead by a lot,
you know, a real lot. I think the UK is second, and then South Africa's third, and they are way way, way, way way down in comparison to US. So but there is again there's a whole issue that we tend to
be better at catching them. So you know, there's all kinds of theories as to why that's the case, because if you look at violence in general, we tend to fall in the middle as a country, so we're not like necessarily the most violent country in the world, but we just for some reason have the most serial killers. And then talking about myths, I think there are a lot of myths about steal killers. I've kind of alluded to one that they all have this kind of triad
that we can identify them early on. I think another pretty common myth is this kind of evil genius myth that stial killers are just super super smart and they get away with our crimes because they're just cunning and they just can kind of outsmart everybody. And we know that there are some outliers, and there have been some very very smart killers, but if you look as a group,
they aren't particularly smart. We tend to find serial killers overrepresented at the end of the spectrum, so you have more probably gifted serial killers than the normal population, but you also have a lot more serial killers who are at the lower end of the spectrum. So that tends to be kind of an interesting finding. But certainly this idea that Hannibal Lecter, you know, is the poster child
for serial killers is really really a myth. And I guess the last thing I would mention in terms of a misconception is and I think it's because, you know, the media tends to focus on sexually motivated serial killers, and those kinds of killers tend to get the most coverage and the most press. And again that's you know, our you know, Richard Ramires or the dating game killer, or the Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, and there's a bunch we can name. Those are all sexually motivated
serial killers. And I think it's important to realize that there are lots of different motives that drive serial killing, and money, for one thing, is a huge motive in a significant number of serial killers. Revenge can be, psychosis can be. So our perception of who is a serial killer, I think is somewhat narrow. When you look at the definition, it's much broader.
You also discussed the latest research as well that what causes someone to become a serial killer. Obviously we have no idea, but we as you right, we are learning.
We are learning.
You said there's no single recipe.
What have you learned?
Well, there is no single recipe. I mean what we think is if you are trying to put together a recipe in terms of, okay, how can we develop a serial killer or create one? You would probably put things in the mix, like somebody who has a GEP genetic predisposition to psychopathy. You would also put in some childhood trauma, most often parental abuse or neglect. It would be helpful
probably to throw in a head injury. They might have some difficulties and adolescents some kind of formative sexual experience. You're talking about sexually motivated serial killers, and so you're kind of developing all these ingredients that are more prevalent in you know, still killers as opposed to the average population.
But again they are exceptions to every rule. So you can find serial killers who seem to have not only a normal childhood, but some of them seem to have almost an idyllic childhood, and if they turn out that way. So I think we know some ingredients, But what we don't know, I think is that perfect recipe. I think because it's just more complex than that, and there always seems to be this kind of X factor, you know,
that we don't quite figure out. Because Tanna, it's like for every person who has a terrible childhood, and I've met people who just really had nightmare childhoods who became not only very empathetic, but they became crusaders for us. There are people with similar experiences. So what does that mean? Right? It means that most people who are abused, even horribly don't become murderers or violent or serial killers. So why
does this put person become this way? And that's I think the part that we're trying to really tease out and understand.
You include a story that's completely perplexing, despite what you just said, and use this example of the Stainer family. When young Steven, seven years old, is abducted by predator Kenneth Parnell and convinced that his family doesn't want him anymore, he takes care of him, and taking care of him means continued sexual assault until he decides to abduct the five year old. Tell us a little bit more about this story that you include.
That is one of the most interesting stories to me, not only in the book, but just in general. How can you have a family where you have a victim of a child predator who I mean, this is an extreme example, you're right, of this sexual predator abducts this young boy off the street, convinces him that his family doesn't want him, basically threw them away, gave him to him. He's with him for years, you know, is subjected to
all these terrible things. And yet when apparently, you know, Stephen is the predator, Parnell I think starts thinking that, you know, Stephen has kind of aging out of his sexual interest range, and so he decides to abduct another victim. And here's this person who's gone through all this for years, and you're right, he decides I'm not letting this happen to somebody else and has the courage to literally rescue this five year old. And of course, is you and
I both know the irony of this. Not only is here's somebody who's been victimized for years who becomes the savior of another child and uses that experience to do that, but now has a brother, Carrie, who becomes a serial killer himself. And that is just really it's almost like it, you know, if it was a fiction movie or a fiction book, you just be like, this is ridiculous, this can ever happen.
Absolutely. You also discuss many people believe that mental illness has a bigger role in serial killing than you have found, but also the role of psychopathy. Tell us a little bit about what you found.
Yeah, a couple of things. The whole mental illness issue is kind of a hot button for me, and I think it is a hot button just because you know, whenever you see a horrific murder, whether it's a mash shooting, whether it's you know, a serial killer, whatever, what is the first headline, right is this mentally ill person has gone off the rails and done these horrible things. And I think the first question is how do we define
mental illness? You know, most of us define mental illness as are things like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, sit what we call severe mental illnesses. And if you look at that, very few serial killers have ever had that, or been
diagnosed with that, or exhibited symptoms consistent with that. There have been a few, but again that's there was a man named Herbert Mullins, for example, who clearly was psychotic, developed the delusion that there was going to be these that could be these horrible earthquakes in San Francisco that were going to destroy the whole city and just kill
thousands of people. And the only way to prevent that was to make human sacrifices, basically, and so he began killing people in his mind, thinking he was, I guess,
sacrificing a small number for the greater good. And a colleague of mine interviewed him not only around the time that he was arrested, but several years later, and this clearly was somebody who was under the influence of a severe middal illness, and genuinely, even you know, twenty thirty years later, continue to believe that he had done the
right thing. That is incredibly, incredibly rare. Now, when you're talking about do most serial killers meet some kind of diagnostic criteria where if you include things like a personality disorder, which you know most of us would not consider necessarily a serious mental illness, yes, you're going to find an
overrepresentation of a personality disorder. If you're talking about sexually motivated serial killers, you're going to find a greater prevalence of paraphilias, you know, sexual sadism and those kinds of things. So I'm not saying that, you know, most serial killers are free of any mental health symptoms if you include all these other things. But we tend to. You know, when we read things about somebody being mentally ill, we do tend to jump to these ones that we're all
aware of. And again, the relationship between those specific diagnoses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, etxetera, posteumatic stress disorder, the relationship between those diagnoses and serial killing is almost zero.
Yes, you write about a poster child for psychopathy, Peter Woodcock, and this is also the was other questions about our serial killers ever rehabilitated. Tell us about this Peter Woodcock story and what it demonstrates.
Well, I think, you know, I do want to to talk a little bit about psychopathy, because you know, psychopathy is obviously something I think that's gotten a lot of buzz in the literature, in the in the any of the late literature, we always I'm always reading stories like if your significant other likes black coffee a psychopath? Or what else do we read? You know, like I don't know if this person is a scorpio.
I don't know.
They're just these kind of strange correlations, you know. So psychopathy, I think it also can meet everything from this person meets that you know, the diagnosaur criteria I've given them the psychopagy checklist all the way to I'm mad at my ex boyfriend right because he broke my heart or he was selfish or he was a jerk or whatever, and he's a psychopath. So I think that term tends to be overused. So that's I think the first thing
I wanted to say. But we do know again, I think that there are a significant number, if not the majority, of serial careers who wouldn't meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. And I think, you know, one of the challenges that we have is knowing what to do with individuals who
meet that criteria. You know, we know, as children, they begin to exhibit some different behaviors, different traits at a relatively early age, and there's some promising research that suggests that if we can kind of catch that early on, we might be able to kind of reverse that course. But as adults, it's very challenging in terms of knowing what to do. And one of the things that we know also is that, you know, psycho people who meet the I keep saying, I hate to say psychopaths because
it's like saying schizophrenics. It's like, this person might have this, but they're not that right. So we'll just say, you know, people with psychopathy sometimes do not do very well in traditional therapy. Number one, they don't want to go to therapy. Number two, they just become better manipulators, you know, sometimes
they do go to therapy. And so you have people like Peter Woodcock who are able to really you know, work the system and convince people that they're healthier, they're normal or whatever, and they just repeat things over and over again.
Let's talk about female serial killers. You say that in the twentieth century they made up thirty percent of all serial killers, which is very very interesting. You say today that's about ten percent. Just tell some of the things that you found of the differences between female serial killers and their male counterparts, and some of the other things that you found in this interesting research.
Yeah. I thought it was really fascinating when I came across the statistic that in nineteen hundred to think about at least thirty percent of serial killers being women, because we oftentimes don't even think that there are female serial killers, and how much it's gone down. I think there's a couple of different kind of interesting hypotheses about that. One is that the primary motive for female stir killers tends to be money, are financially motivated, which is different from
male serial killers. Not that male stir killers don't serially kill four money, but that's not the number one goal oftentimes like it is for female show killers. And so my guess is that the reason there were so many more statistically female SOO killers back to the nineteen hundreds is because there were so many more limited opportunities economically
for women. So if you couldn't own property, if you couldn't get a divorced ub permission, if you had trouble getting a job, or you couldn't work, it isn't like most women thought, well, okay, I'm going to have to you know, use serial widowhood, you know, as a career path, right or start killing people. But I think it did probably tempt a few people who maybe were deviant to begin with, and I think that that has something to
do with it. And I think as those economic opportunities opened up, there was less of a motivation, you know, money was less of a motivation.
You said that some of the differences were though that the targets of the killing for female serial killers as well, and also that they enjoyed much more of a longevity in terms of their killing careers.
Yeah, I think that when you look at female serial killers, you're looking at who they are, who they're interested in. You know that when you look at females serial killers, they are gathering people, right, They're gathering people around them. They are victimizing, for the most part, their own children. You know, it's just kind of what it's almost like what we think about when you think about females, I mean, male serial killers hunting and hunting for not just for victims,
but for strangers and those kinds of things. It is a typical hunter gatherer thing. I think a lot of times is that as female store killers, we tend to gather people around us. We tend to victimize people around us. It's just different, and we tend to get away with that longer because of that.
You cite Alien Warnow's because it's probably one of the most prominent serial killers period that people will cite when they talk about female serial killers. Is there anything about Aileen Warnos that seemed to be much different than the modern day research about female serial killers and their motivations.
Well, we certainly thought, you know, for a while thought that Aileen Warnos was the only female serial killer, and I think it's because she operated in a very kind of a more masculine way. You know, she was shooting strangers, she wasn't poisoning them, she was suffocating them. I mean, she was kind of doing things that we think male
serial killers do. And I think because of that, that really did kind of throw things off a little bit in terms of, oh, there's nobody like Aileen Awaarenos, and it's like, well, she may have operated differently, but yeah, this is somebody who's going out and killing strangers and being very violent. She's not being sneaky, She's being very upfront and doing what she wants to do. And I
think that's very much more like a man. We think about serial killers, we think about men shooting, we think about men hunting, we think about those kind of aggressive things where, you know, and we talk about women we tend to be mean, sneakier, less under the radar, and because of that getting away with things a lot longer.
How has the perception, our perception, the media's perception changed viewing the female serial killer.
I think we've we've developed a little bit more in a weird kind of way appreciation for her because again, I think she has been better able to kind of fly under the radar for long because we know that they're killing. Their killing careers tend to be a lot longer and to have more victims. And I think again, it's because it's almost like a role model kind of reversal, where we do you know, we do look at female
serial killers and underestimate them on a regular basis. We know, for example that you know, when you're talking about somebody who uses poison, forty percent of the time they do it again. So I think again that you know, women, female social killers are just flying under that radar a lot more than we think.
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where you go to try ZipRecruiter for free. Once again, that's ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r der. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire Now, Jonny, we were talking about female serial killers and the interesting and surprising information that you unearthed via these questions and your research about female serial killers in the world, and you cite some incredible cases in the US. Lori Valo, now that's before the media right now, and Charles Dabll and religion's rule in
serial killing? What did you find in terms of help prevalent religion is in serial killing?
Lori Valo and Charles day Bell is kind of a classic example. I mean just in terms of you know, when you have three or four people who've been murdered, who died, I mean, that certainly does count. But you know, when I think about, like I said, when I think about religion, you know, it does have a whole different kind of meaning. Does the meat does that? Does the
religion impact people's behavior? I mean I mentioned that the serial killer Herbert Mullins, who thought that, you know, he had some divine need to save people from an earthquake. And there's clearly an idea of somebody who is influenced by religion and is killing because of that. And then when you have situations like that, you know, Lorivell Valo
and Charles day Bell, that's a whole other thing. And it brings up an interesting question of what is mental illness versus what is religious beliefs or extreme Richish beliefs and I think where it's one thing we're trying to kind of figure out what does that mean, because when you look at the law, it's pretty black and white in terms of of you know, if somebody's in a cult,
we don't oftentimes give them a pass legally. It's like, hey, you could have chosen to have these beliefs, So if you do bad things under the influence these beliefs, you're going to be legally responsible, Whereas that's not the case. If you are severely male ill and you're having religious delusions, then you might be found not guilty by reason of insanity. And those are the tricky things to kind of tease out.
You write about, how often do serial killers start off as rapists? What's the prevalence?
Well, we do, and I mean, you know, I think we'd have to kind of parse out that we're talking about sexually motivated serial killers. It is very common to see. It's almost yeah, it's almost inevitable since we're you know, we're talking again about a specific kind of a serial killer. But yeah, we almost always have this kind of escalation where you're talking about a sexual still killer who starts
out with peeping or stealing underwear. And those kinds of things, and then you know, things just kind of start escalate. You know, so you have somebody going from what we call them fetish burglaries and then they go to you know, sexual assault, and then you have you know, murder, and then you know, it just kind of becomes you know, this, this escalation tends to happen.
Someone asked you how prevalent, over indulgent families were in to contribute to the serial killer phenomena itself.
Yeah, I think that's another interesting way because we always think we're going to have this horrible you know, childhood background, and that's kind of necessary and sufficient. But yeah, I mean we're talking about different I guess ranges of inappropriate behavior and how that kind of works into everything. But yeah, we were talking about you know, starting out with this kind of progression of fantasies and you know how that
works itself out. But yeah, it's just there's just a lot of a lot of things to think about, and we're talking about again, sexually motived serial killers starting with what you know, we don't even know exactly what starts it, what starts somebody having an unusual you know, have an unusual idea about you know, I'm trying to think what I was going to say here, just again, just when you're looking at the progression when you're talking about sexually
motivated stir killers and how that does oftentimes start out in a kind of an innocuous thing and then kind of escalate over time and become something that almost takes in a life of its own.
You talk about the that some of these people have this privilege and then some of the parents tell them how unique they are, and so that contributes that to their narcissism, which we can later under the right environment, develop into much more serious things like psychopathy. But you also discuss because people have asked, is fame a new motive?
I think that the same part of it certainly applies to when you're talking about mass shooters or mass murderers. I think that's become really a direct motive. The serial killer thing. I don't know that I've seen fame be so much a motive when you're talking about fame, you know, with steial killers, sometimes you have copycats that kind of are reflected. It's just it is very very complicated. I think.
You know, when you're talking about different people and what their motives are and those kinds of things.
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Now you also flu in this I thought was very interesting. I'd never read about this before. When people say has there ever been someone asked you, has there any been anyone like the fictional character Dexter of Revenge, the serial killer hell bent on Revenge of other serial killers? And then you cite the case of Pedro Rodriguez Filo, our killer Pete tell us a little bit more about this dexter type criminal.
Yeah, he's from South America. I mean has just killed. We don't even know how many people that he's killed, but he seemed to have a coping strategy of killing all the people who were in prison where he was. So it's almost like he wanted to kill. He had this desire to kill, and he just kind of continued that. He kept Yeah, I'm trying to think what's the easiest
way to kind of kind of talk about that. I mean, this is somebody who I think thought, Okay, I'm going to turn my love killing, your interest in that kind of on its head. And so he would go into the prison and did this over and over and over again and just would wipe out and kill all these people that he justified that these are people who deserve
to be killing. And he talked very openly about the fact that he really enjoyed that and he had no remorse whatsoever, because again he said, I don't think he knew about Dexter, but in his mind, I'm targeting the people who need to be eliminated. I need to hear, couldn't just be wiped from the face of the earth. Yes, So he thought he was turning it into something good in an odd kind of way.
You have a chapter called Victims Who Got Away, and you say that they are the real unsung heroes, and you cite a case July eighteenth, twenty fifteen, where a woman named Heather Saul calls nine to one one that a man had pointed a gun at her this Neil Falls, and tried to rape her, and so he lost control of the gun, as you write, and she took that gun and shot him in self defense. So when they looked in the trunk of Neil Falls, they found a
kill kit, a list of future kills. They later connected him to ten other murders in Nevada and Ohio, I believe. And also the things that were in that kill kit were very blatant. Bulletproof vests, four sets of handcuffs, bleach restraints, so everything in there to prove that this woman had just avoided and then helped to capture a serial killer
that was not on the radar of police whatsoever. Very interesting story of Victims who Got Away, And you cite, of course, the other famous cases of Richard Ramirez, his victim Whitney Bennett escaped Ted Bundy. Of course, Carol Durance escaped, and you talk about another woman from a serial killer, Juan David Ortez, this eric A Pina. She jumps out of a car with a gunpoint another. So some of the more interesting research that you had in this book is how people could avoid being a victim of a
serial killer. The notion of compliance will say, tell us what you've found.
But one of the things that we did that we did find out pretty consistently is once you get in a car with somebody, that seems to just turn things into a very bad place. And that, yeah, there might be some differences in terms of how much you fight, depending on how that approaches you, but in general, once somebody has you kind of under their control, the odds of you surviving and getting out of that go way down.
So you know, overall, it seems to be better to fight than not because again, once you are confined, once that happens, it really does start leading in a start leading in a very difficult direction. And yeah, that was directly result of this this study that looked and kind of said, okay, how do people so how do people survive? You know, how do they survive? And that's yeah, that's pretty much what we found is. You know, as long
as the person you know, this person is is. You know, when you're captured, the odds of you surviving are going way down. We do have we do have examples of people who've jumped out the cars, you know, have've managed to call out of windows. But yeah, it's it's very very scary and discouraging. You know, we don't want you know, we don't want people. You know, we need to protect people.
You also talk about the the toll that it takes when a serial killer because you cite some cases in here where people confess to being a serial killer and they pointed the finger at their partner. There was a famous case that Keith Jasperson had to basically plead with his attorney at court to prove that he was actually the killer after this woman had implicated herself and her partner and her partner.
Yeah, that was a pretty pretty strange, very very strange scenario. Can you imagine here's a serial killer and yet you know, this person's kind of a way kind of getting off because a woman was so angry or trying to get away from her boyfriend that not only does she confess, but she confessed for him and they spent a few years in prison, and really ironically, it was a serial killer himself who worked diligently to get this couple freed. They would never the judge was so angry at her,
he would never essentially exonerate her. He basically let her conviction stand even though she was able to get out of prison. He did exonerate her boyfriend, who she was really trying to target. But yeah, it was pretty pretty amazing to think of that.
You say that there were sixty two serial killers who killed one hundred and fourteen additional victims after an innocent person was incarcerated, and you say those victims could have been saved. And as we say, it would be better when that we've seen in the movies the perpetrator points the gun at somebody from say, a few feet away, and says, walk with me or come with me.
You right that very much?
That person would be better off screaming and running away.
Yes, that seems to be a pretty you know, a pretty consistent finding. Again, you know, it really does seem like it. You know, if you're trapped in any way and the odds of you surviving are you know, are slim or none, and you know something I don't know that many of us have thought about, but it really does make a difference to think about. You know, what's that going to mean? You know, it's yeah, it's just kind of interesting.
You right in this and near the end of this book that you've always been intrigued by the extremes extremes of human behavior, especially the dark ones, and it's in
your nature. But you talk about the battle to fight against violent crime and whether law enforcement is winning that battle, and the use of research like yourself as a forensic psychologist in the aid to try to prevent violent crime, and the new tools that are being used, such as that was used to the Golden State killer was apprehended
using new tools available to law enforcement. So, in your conclusion, what were some of the things that you could conclude about serial killing after writing this book.
I think one thing, and probably the most significant thing, is just how diverse they are. I mean, our old idea of you know, a white guy who's in his twenties and thirties, and I'm trying to think of what will be another example of that. But I think the main thing is just that it's just much more broad. There's just so many different motives. There's so many different people and different experiences that this idea that serial killers fit into the small kind of mold is really a myth.
There's all different motives, there's all different genders, there's all different races, there's all different ages, and so I think we really need to broaden our understanding of what a serial killer is. It's you know, it's really to be a serial killer. It just requires killing to people at
different times. So it's much much broader than we've thought that it is, and we are making progress, I think, in identifying some of the characteristics and some of the life events that you know are kind of the hallmark of serial killers. But we have a lot more to learn about those kinds of things.
You're right that mass murder is up statistically, a rape has also been increasing, and murder rates have decreased, but the national clearance rate is sixty percent.
In nineteen sixty.
Five, you write it was ninety percent, So you conclude that there was fewer people getting murdered, but also fewer cases getting solved.
Yeah, that's such an interesting and interesting finding and so ironic, and it almost seems like there are fewer crimes that are getting committed, but more sophisticated crimes and more sophisticated criminals, And so in some respects there have been some hypothesis that say, maybe there are more serial killers out there that we don't know about because are getting away with
it a lot longer. Now, the flip side of that is, as you alluded to, is there's a lot more technology, particularly this genetic genealogy is really a game changer when it comes to solving some of these cases. So I think that, you know, I do think it's true. I think both are true. I think we certainly have seen the murder rate go down, and yet I do believe that the murderers that are being committed are often being committed by more sophisticated criminals that are harder to detect.
You know, they're watching all the crime shows, or they're watching forensic fiholes, they're learning, they're studying other serial killers, and they're just becoming smarter.
You say that for.
Forensic psychologists like yourself, you're still trying to find that elusive recipe that makes a serial killer. But you do know some of the common elements trauma, abuse, social isolation, genetic vulnerabilities, even a head injury.
Absolutely, we are learning some of those ingredients that we don't have their recipe, and of course that just you know, has implications for us in terms of maybe prevention at some point. I mean, we can start recognizing, as I mentioned earlier, we can start recognizing vulnerabilities and children or vulnerabilities earlier on that can help us intervene and you know, before somebody starts killing, or after they kill one time, before they kill serially.
You say that there's a lot of good that comes from the discussions and even from podcasts and television shows, documentaries and books. Again, what you write about some of this good, What has happened as a result of people being so fascinated and tuned in.
Well, I think one thing it's just been pretty amazing is we've seen these kind of citizen detectives come up. I mean, there have been incredible assistance in some of these crimes. And obviously we don't want to interfere with law enforce and then we want to be a value add But I don't know how much you've followed the Lori Valu Chad Dabo case, but I've never seen anything like it. I mean, you had people who were literally following them around and they're confronting them as a you know,
we're reporting where they were. The Gappy Patito case, you know, if it hadn't been for individuals who were out and listening to the media and listening to police asking for help, they literally, you know, two people actually literally located that van. So I do think that we're seeing people becoming much more willing, you know, if they see something to say something.
I also think we're becoming much more safety conscious, understanding what you know, making sure that there's not that situational vulnerability, knowing what to do in certain situations. I know my teenage might have two daughters that are in college, and they are so much more aware of, you know, where they're going and making sure their friends know where they're going and being safe and having these little birdies which is kind of like a little you know, alarm system
with them. And so I think there's been a lot of good that it's come out of some of the increased interest in true prime. I mean, of course there's a flip side of that as well, which we all know about. There's a line there between right, you know, we want to make sure that we're respectful of victims and recognizing these are real families, these are real lives
that are being impacted. But I do think that there have been a lot of really good things everything as I mentioned, from awareness to providing useful tips and calling in things and not being as much of a bystander I think as we used to be.
Finally, you do talk about some research because people are concerned about the psychopathic team, the teen that's capable of killing or sexual assault. What was in conclusion, what was some of the research concerning teens who kill young people?
It is such a complicated topic. I'm actually doing right now a lot of forensic evaluations on adults who receive life with parole as juveniles. And so, as you can imagine, these are some horrific, horrific crimes that these teenagers have committed. And so the issue becomes what do we do with these juveniles who have committeed these horrendous crimes? And yet there's all these studies that show that the adolescent brain
is not as developed as an adult brain. A child at fifteen is much more in general malleable, they're much more treatable. Their brain is does develop. I mean that the people that I see at forty and forty five and fifty are not the same people that they were at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. At the same time, age does not mean a person is maturing in the
sense that their sexual proclivities are necessarily disappearing. And so I think we're trying to find a way to accommodate the fact that a teenager who commits a violent crime is probably more rehabilitatable, is probably more amenable to development, to maturity, and to growing out of some of these crimes, and also at the same time recognizing that again that doesn't guarantee that we have to evaluate that person based on the crime, and I think we do have to
build in some safeguards in terms of, you know, she just person we tried as an adult or as a juvenile. If they're tried as an adult, do we lock them up and throw away the key? And there are just some a lot of questions about that. I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with the Eric Smith case. This was the boy who at thirteen brutally murdered four year old little boy and was convicted as an adult at thirteen and was recently released. Recently being the past
couple of months. He spent I think twenty six years in prison, and I was fortunate enough to be able to read all of his parole interviews and parole hearings from age I think he became eligible for parole technically at twenty two, and so he was denied parole. He was paroled on his eleventh parole hearing. What really struck me is that I did feel like, at forty one, he has done what we have required of him, we
being the prison system, our criminal justice system. He has done everything asked of him to kind of be rehabilitated, and I felt like, at this point he's a relatively low inmate. I will also tell you in reading through his parole hearings at twenty eight, at thirty, I felt
like he was incredibly high risk for reoffending. So we need to take an age into account, we need to take social maturity into account, but we also need to take into all these other variables to make sure that we're not just letting somebody out at twenty one who did something terrible at thirteen or fourteen, and that we don't throw, you know, again, locking them and throw away the.
Key because they have and this is coming from somebody as you write, You're not a bleeding our liberal by any means.
No, I'm not, But I do think it raises some interesting questions Dan, in terms of when you have somebody like Eric Smith, the question becomes, and this the art isn't there's no answer. Here's the question. The question is what is the purpose of our criminal justice system? Is it punishment? There's an argument being made for that. Is it rehabilitation. There's an argument to be made for that.
And then the question becomes, Okay, how much rehabilitation do we ask for or do we just say, if you do this at thirteen or fifteen, you have forfeited your freedom for the rest of your life. And those are questions we have to answer as a society.
And you also have the question of psychopathy and the notion that it cannot be rehabilitated.
Yes, I mean, there seems to be a lot of evidence that we don't know too much how to change that. At the same time, it's important to recognize that most people who are psychopathic are not committing violent crimes. So just because you are a psychopath does not necessarily mean that you are a violent offender. You are not likely to be. But again, this is where it's like we're chasing our tails sometimes. If you are a violent offender
and a psychopath, that is a problem. And because we know that there is a link between psychopathy in violent offenders and recidivism.
Yes, I want to thank you very much for coming on doctor Joni Johnson talking about your book Serial Killers. One hundred and one questions true crime fans ask for those that might want to take a look at other work. Do you have a website? Let's talk about your blog and your podcast. Direct people to those please.
My website is pretty easy. It's doctor Joni Johnston dot com and it's j O N I and then John sto N and it has tons and tons of articles on there. There's also a free newsletter called Mind Detectives that I send out once a week. It just is kind of an update on true crime cases. My psychology to blog is called The Human Equation. I'd love that I have the most amazing readers, and it also just talks about law and forensic psychology and crime and how
those all kind of fit together. YouTube channel slash podcast is called Unmasking a Murderer and we just take cases and what I like to say is that I like to think of the story or the crime is really the launching pad. So my job as a psychologist hopefully is to educate and inform. So there's the entertaining part in terms of they're always interesting stories, but that is the beginning for me. Let's take what happened and then learn from it in some way.
Absolutely, thank you so much, doctor Joni Johnston, Serial Killers, one hundred and one questions true crimes fans ask. It's been fascinating. Thank you so much. You have a great evening, good night, Thank you.
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