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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. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, Dck. 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. Stephen Singular is the author of twenty five nonfiction books, many of them about high profile criminal cases. His first book in nineteen eighty seven was Talk to Death, The Life and Murder of Alan Berg, which became the basis for the nineteen eighty nine Oliver Stone film Talk Radio and set the tone for his journalistic career. Since nineteen ninety one, Denver native Joyce Jocks Singular has partnered
with Stephen on eight of the true crime books. The nineteen ninety five study of the O. J. Simpson case, Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hysteria hysteria surrounding these murders and explored the racial underpinnings of the case. In their nineteen ninety nine book Presumed Guilty, an investigation into the John beIN Ay Ramsay case, the media and
the culture of pornography. They conducted a similar probe for the infamous child killing and Boulder, Colorado in two thousand and fifteen the Spiral Notebook, The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth, and in two thousand and sixteen, Shadow on the Mountain, Nancy Feister, Doctor William Style and the Murder of Asmen's Golden Girl.
The singulars have an intense interest in the psychological aspects of murder, which has shaped their work together as forensic journalists. A number of their books have focused on the intersection of religion and violence, including their two thousand and six book Unholy met Life and Crimes of the BTK serial Killer and the Wichita Divide, The Murder of Doctor George Tiller, and The Battle over Abortion. Also their books include A Killing in the Family, Sweet Evil, and Charmed to Death.
Anyone You Want Me to Be? The story of the internet's first known serial killer, was co authored with John Douglas and in two thousand and six, When Men Became Become Gods, Mormon polygamist Warren Jeff's His Cult of Fear and the Women Who Fought Back. Stephen and Joyce are currently working on an mythology about national and international cult leaders to be published in the summer twenty twenty. Stephen and joy Singular True Crime Retrospective. Welcome back to the program,
and thank you so very much for this interview. Joyce and Steven Singular.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, it's good to be back.
Dan, thank you very much. Let's talk Stephen right away with what you were doing your work as a freelance journalist. We mentioned, I mentioned that you are the author of twenty five nonfiction books. Tell us about what happened how you came to be the author of Talk to Death. Give us those circumstances in which you became involved.
Well, very quickly. I grew up in rural Kansas, and I was very attached to the radio. It was the medium that I was most drawn to. In a small town, you know, you could hear Chicago and New Orleans, Kansas City, all that. So when I moved to Denver nineteen eighty one in September, I turned on the radio and I heard this and talking very fast and with his nasal voice, and he was talking about anti semitism and racism in America,
which I had always been interested in. But he was highly provocative and his name was Alan Berg, and I decided I had to get to know who this was and maybe write about him. I'd never really had any interest much in crime before, but I met him, wrote about him for the Denver Post of Sunday Magazine, and then in June of nineteen eighty four, he was gunned down in his driveway and people thought at the time just one enraged listener had probably taken him out, but
that launched a huge investigation across the United States. And right after he was killed, I was asked by Rolling Stone I knew the editor there to write about Berg, and we were all assuming again it was just an individual that had killed him, but his things unfolded. It turned out that there was a group from the Northwest called the Order, a group of neo Nazis, kind of the Grandfather's godfathers to the white nationalist movement today, and
they had committed two hundred and forty crimes. They had stolen about five million dollars, they had killed four other people besides Burg, and their activities launched the largest investigation into domestic terrorism in American history at that time, so it kind of fell into my lap. I'd known Berg a bit, you know, when he was living, and then I was asked to write about this, and then when it unfolded as this much much bigger story than just him, I thought, you know, I'd like to write a book
about this. So I proceeded from there, and it's really the story of Berg and the story of the people who killed him, you know, doing the work, I thought, I really like this. I like being in courtrooms, I like watching lawyers work, seeing how the criminal justice system works. So it was just a launching pad for doing this, you know. Ever since.
Right now you said it's set the tone for your journalistic career in what way in that very first book that you wrote through crime book, what were some of the things that you learned and in retrospect now you could see where valuable and did set the course for the tone and the direction of your true crime writing career.
Well, one of the things I learned, which has echoed through some of the other books, is that you have when people spew out hateful rhetoric, racist rhetoric, things of that nature, they may not be the one who's actually involved in the crime, but they that information hits other people, and some of those people may not be very stable emotional, emotionally or mentally, and that filters out and it has
very significant consequences. I mean, this has been prominent in our culture in the last few years that when people do these things and then when bad, you know, bad things happen or people get killed, they often say, well, I had nothing to do with that. I was just exercising free speech. But this occurs in the Burg, in the Berg murder, and then twenty five years later when doctor Tiller is killed by Scott Rohder in Wichita, Kansas.
You see the same dynamics in play. You know, Bill Riley was going on Bill O'Reilly was going on Fox News Night after nine and saying Tiller the baby killer and spewing a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, and then somebody shows up and actually takes the action. So this dynamic, you know, was something that I identified early on, and I think it you know, it became an important theme in a number of the books.
Right certainly, now, what is the next book? According to what I've seen, is that a killing in the Family is the next book? If I'm not correct, tell me which book is next? Yeah, and Joyce, by that time you have joined his co author with this book.
Now, actually that book was just about That book had already come out, a very interesting story about a man in California that the coerced and really persuaded his young stepdaughter to kill his wife. And that was made into a television movie. And but right when I met Steve, that was just coming out onto television, and Steve had given me a copy of Talk to Death and we discussed his book. I was very interested. I've been interested
in true crime before I met Steve. I would read like The Killer besides me, and you know, we both shared an interest in Cold Blood by Truman Capoti. So we had a lot in common. We liked, you know, we're very fascinated by the psychological elements. What drives people? How could somebody that appears so seemingly normal commit these types of acts? That's really what you know, we were both interested in, not the sensationalistic, you know, gore factor.
And so when Killing in the Family came out, you know, we watched that on television. It was very well done. And then what happened was we were by that time living together in Denver, and there was a trial going on in Colorado Springs, which is just south of Denver, and there was a young woman named Jennifer really who This is one of those books where religion intersected with violence. Basically this long story short. She was married with a
couple of young children. She got involved with a man named Brian Hood who also had I think three young children. They started an affair. He told her that it would be okay. He was very involved in like evangelical Christianity, and he told her, he persuaded her, this is a woman that had never even had a parking ticket, very smart, intelligent woman, very nice, right to kill his wife. She gunned down his wife and dressed up in her husband's army fatigues. And he told her that it would be okay,
that God would forgive her. You know, he wouldn't forgive adultery, but he would forgive this murder murderous act if she just then repented. So what happened was I started going down to the trials with Steve, the murder trials and the insanity hearings, and what I noticed, what happened was that it happened strictly by accident. I had noticed things that Steve wasn't noticing because you know, it was sort
of like two genders are better than one. And I would tell him things about what the defendant was wearing to come, you know, to appear more you know, innocent looking, and I would tell Steve things that I had overheard in the women's restroom, say what people were talking about. So we found that, you know, the combination of my observations and Steve's observations, you know, started producing like a wider perspective of what was going on in one particular case.
Right, and women were very interested in that case because, as joy said, this was like the woman next door, you know, never caused trouble, never did anything bad, you know, how did she evolve from that into a cold blooded killer? So there were lots and lots of women at the at the legal proceedings, and Joyce you know, spoke with them, and that added ave dimension to the book.
And later on we in one of the rare instances where we were actually able to interview the subject of one of the books. We years later after that book had come out, we were contacted by a man who was in a ministry down in Canyon City, Colorado, where Jennifer was then imprisoned in the women's prison, and he told us that she wanted some copies of the book to send to her children because her husband had told her children that she had died in a house fire.
And then but when the children got old enough, they started going on the internet and they saw that she hadn't died in a house fire. So what happened was we we went down to the prison and visited her, and that was really a unique experience for us to
actually sit across from someone. You know, she had been I think it was life without parole that she got, so she had no chance of getting out, and she wanted to eventually write her own book, and so we were able to kind of really ask her about, you know, why, how could you have done something like this? Very bright woman, I mean, someone that you would have wanted to be your friend, so personable, charming, you know, everything you would
want in a friend. And I remember looking at her hands in prison and just thinking that those are the hands that actually picked up a gun and gunned down another human being in cold blood. Very surreal experience, but we found that when we tried getting to the moment of committing the crime, that she was sort of in denial about it. It was kind of like the devil
made me do it type of response. And when we knew then that we couldn't we couldn't go any further with her, She couldn't process it in a normal fashion.
Yeah, it was, but it was very intriguing situation really because she still was seemingly a very nice person. So it, you know, brings you back to sort of the core question around all true crime. You know, what is the nature of evil? I mean, how does it work? How does it work inside of a person? You know, is it just there during the moment and then you know, does it go away? So it was a fascinating story.
Let's talk about Sweet Evil. What was on the surface, It seems like somewhat of a routine or somewhat routine murder story. Tell us something about sweet evil.
That is the Sweet Evil book. I mean that the story of Jennifer reality is that that story and the core question again at the center of it is basically psychological. You know, a psychological study of this person who you know, came from a very good family, we met her parents, wonderful people, all the opportunities in the world, and you know,
just just the accumulation of bad decisions. I mean, you see this a lot in true crime, you know, where this man comes along and starts to tempt her and and he's a master manipulator at getting her to do what thing, small thing, you know, Go get your husband's clothes and show them to me. You know, does your husband have a gun? You know, could you show that to me? And it's he was a salesman and he just you know, one of the sales techniques is to get people to say yes and yes and yes, and
then finally you close the deal. And that's exactly what he did with her. So her, the character study of her at the center of this was was what sort of created the mystery. I mean, you knew what happened, but you were everybody was groping for the why of it because people liked her, but you know, she had done this unfathomable thing.
And if I may say one thing, the title sweet Evil, the reason Steve called it that was because that was her quote, she said that brian Hood had sweetened the evil.
Yeah.
And then also that was when I started noticing the really paying attention to the collateral damage that these killers do to the families, to their extent families, to their friends, the ripple effect of an act like this for their children. You know, it's just it's unfathomable what an act like that can do as far as mass damage.
Yeah, Like Brian Hood, the one who talked her into this, had three young children, and so he gets Jennifer to gun down his wife and then he gets convicted with the thirty year prison and something like that, and his parents, who are in their sixties. Then you know, inherit these three young kids and have to raise them. And again it's just the tendrils that come out from a tragedy like this. We're very moving.
You talk about collateral damage, ripple effect, mass damage. One of the incredible true crime classics that you have written together is Legacy of Deception investigation of Mark Furman in Racism in the LAPD. Tell us a little bit about legacy of deception and really what this story was about when you looked into investigated Mark Farman.
Well, I'll try to condense it. It's a very long, complicated story, but again it builds on the first book The Brooke Talked to Death, which was which came out in nineteen eighty seven. But in nineteen eighty five and six I had interviewed a number of people about far right groups, many of them in the far West, Neo Nazis, fellow travelers in that realm, and I got to know people in law enforcement who were investigating those types of folks,
and so some of those were in southern California. There was a very strong group down there called arm Anyway, the Simpson case erupts in June of nineteen ninety four, ten years almost to the day after the bird killing, and about six or seven weeks went by and we got a call with.
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Here from somebody in law enforcement in southern California whom I had known because of that experience, and basically said, you know, would you like to know more about this case and get involved in it? And I was like, no, you know, there are ten thousand people writing about this.
Oh, we had no intention of working on that.
I mean we lived in Denver, you know, yeah, and we were watching what everybody else is watching, which is a guy going down the freeway who looks like he's going to kill himself, and he looks very, very guilty, and you know, we just saw what ninety million other people saw. And then there was a little persuasion on this person's end and said, I will give you four
pieces of information. This was inside the LA legal system that people don't know about, and if you would really like to know more, not about just this case, but maybe about how you function as a journalist, maybe about how your society functions, how your media functions, etc. Etc. You might have a very educational experience if you were willing to sort of get off the sidelines and get involved. And I'd never done anything like this before, so I
was very hesitant. We were given four pieces of information and managed to convey them to the defense team. You know, six days after getting the information, I was sitting in the LA office of Robert Shapiro, who was Simpson's lead lawyer at the time before Johnny Cochran took over with the private the head private investigator for their team, and a couple of other lawyers, and again try to condense
this as much as possible. But they said that the four pieces of information were all wrong, which I did not expect because I was there basically trying to give them information that would help their cause. As time unfolded, everything we were told turned out to be true. People
can verify this through the trial. The most important piece of information by far was that was that the blood that was that was collected from the two crime scenes came out of the blood that was drawn from Simpson after he returned from Chicago on June thirteenth, the day after the crime complicated. But what it means is when a suspect is taken into custody, their blood is drawn, it is placed in a tube. The tube contains a
chemical called EDTA. So if you were to test that blood later on and it had TA in it, which is a preservative, that would tell you that it did not come out of the defendant on the night of the crime, but it came out from this test tube. That means out any doubt that evidence was planted, and that throws the whole trial and everything else into confusion.
Astonishingly enough, I wrote a book proposal about this in November of nineteen ninety four, which was three months before the trial again, and it was released on various major media, The LA Times, in New York Times, all of them neglected. It paid no attention to it, just followed the party line. Again, if you were to follow all of this closely. It came out during the trial in April and May of
ninety five. When Simpson was easily acquitted of the charges in October of ninety five, some of the jurors talked about this evidence and some other things that I had given it a defense. So it's the completely untold story behind the OJ Simpson case. If people would read the book, it's called Legacy of Deception. It's available on Kendell, I think they would learn some things about this case that
they don't know. And from a personal point of view, it was a profound education in you know how we view these things on via the media and how when you go below the surface it can be an entirely different story.
Certainly, certainly tell us Joyce about the book Charmed to Death.
Okay, Well, that was also that one was made into a Fox television movie. Very interesting story about a woman who allegedly had killed more than one of her husbands but was convicted of for sure killing. This one in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is a ski town in the mountains west of us. And what happened was she was very manipulative, very charming. She moved into this little ski town and armed her way with this local. He owned a hardware store and it was his name, Jerry Bugs,
Jerry Bugs. And then she ended up having an affair with another man and the two of them conspired to kill him. And I covered that trial. It was interesting because at that time, this is when we really split off to start having to work together for the family business. It was really born. Steve was working on the Legacy of Deception book and I had to go up to
the mountains to cover that murder trial. And then you know, all put all the notes together that you get and then form a narrative, you know, from all the evidence, and I brought those back and then Steve wove them into the story. And her own son, one of her own sons from another marriage, ended up testifying against her in court, and you know that helped convict her. So now she is in prison for life. Yeah.
I was also able to get into the jail up there and steamboat not long after she was arrested. And she had used these various charms. She was married about twelve times. The number was a little bit uncertain, but several of the husbands, you know, turned up dead, and so she was known as the Black Widow Killer. But again, she was completely the opposite of Jennifer Reality, who was
this nice, sweet person. This was a totally manipulative woman and you could just tell within five minutes that she was capable of, you know, all kinds of things.
Well, she tried to charm you, didn't she.
Yeah, she tried to tell me that it was all lies, and you know, she'd be out of there in a couple of weeks and then she'd tell me the real story, and you know, I could see that she'd been wrong. So it was it was coming face to face with
the real psychopath in this particular situation. So, you know, one of the interesting things that sort of bounces forward from this is that if we're talking about three women involved in murders so far, one was the daughter of the man in southern California in a killing in the family.
The other was in Jennifer Reality and Colorado Springs. And now we have Joe Cooit in Theeamboat Springs and so this plays a little bit forward with the Ramsey case where Patsy Ramsey will be accused by untold numbers of people of killing her daughter. But we had this prior experience, so I think it plays into that.
You talk about that this the only book to suggest something other than the two conventional scenarios one of the Ramseys killed a child or intruder. Did it tell us more about presumed guilty and the investigation that you undertook for this book.
Well, we again. Joyce has been sort of the one to prod me in certain instances, which has been a good thing. And because on January first, in nineteen ninety seven, she was watching CNN as the first big Ramsey interview of the parents on the case, and she said, you know, we live in Denver, so Boulder is about thirty minutes away, and she said, you know, we should look into this.
But part of the reason why I said that was because we had a young son at the time who was a few years younger than John Maine, and at the time it was you know, it was terrifying to think that just thirty miles away from you there could be a killer on the loose, somebody that was brazen enough to break into your home and kill your child
and then leave your child with a ransom in your basement. So, of course, as a new mother, as a young mother, younger, younger, youngish, I said, this is a story that we need to look into right now. And sometimes Steve has been resistant, you know.
Well yeah, when there are again ten thousand other people covering that, I'm like, well, maybe not, you know. But we went to the first major press conference on the case, which was in early January of ninety seven, and we met a reporter there for a local television station in Denver and she said, there's something I want to show you. You should come to my station the following night, and
we did, and we went into a back room. And now this is early nineteen ninety seven, the internet publicly is just a couple of years old, and there was a hacker there and he started showing us what was available online in terms of child pornography and very very graphic stuff being done with children.
Yeah, young girls that were bound and gagged, much like John Benet had been found, you know, with their hands tied sort of in bondage type of positions.
It was by far the closest thing visually to what the crime, to what the crime actually looked like so number one. You know, that was very startling in and of itself, but you suddenly realized there's this whole other criminal realm that's being born now with the Internet. I mean, child borne was about the hardest thing to move around as there was. Now it's bouncing all over the world.
Way before the Dark Web, we didn't know anything about.
It, way before law enforcement really understood what was going on. So and it was a business. I mean people were selling things, and they were buying things, and they were trading pictures.
Of their own that's right. I remember the hacker typed in, does anyone have any pictures of John Bna? And there was like a feeding frenzy, like sharks at the reef, you know, all these hits started coming in like, yeah, do you have any get or alive? And the people, the few other people besides us that were standing in the room, we were just we were just astonished.
And again, if there's a theme here, and it's certainly true in the Simpson case, I think it's true. And in some of the other books that you know, you just had this media crush saying you know, mom did it, Dad did it? Maybe the nine year old kid did it? Heraldo Rivera, you know, tries the parents on television in
a mock trial and finds them guilty. And it's just, you know, for anybody with any serious interest in journalism or crime, it was just a lot of noise, you know, and you want to go behind that noise and say is there anything else there?
But also not just a lot of noise. The local Yeah, the local talking the radio hosts were talking about it in such a way that you could have been easily influencing a jury pool.
And yeah, and if you examine the three prior women or females who committed these murders, you start to investigate it, you start to look into it, and you see this pattern that leads up to violence. I mean you can chart it, you can look at it if you're a you know, a reporter who does this sort of thing. So, I mean, nobody who has been investigated more deeply than Patsy Ramsey by the Boulder Police Department, who also thought she was guilty. I mean, there are videotapes of this
that you can watch. In all of that, there's absolutely no pattern of any sort of behavior bad behavior on her part. There was never one person who came forward with an anecdote about you know, violence against her daughter or anything like that. Not a bruise, not a mark. So you pull back and you say, well, you know, maybe we're looking at something else here. We began interviewing pageant mothers in the area.
Pageant mothers that had been in the same contest and that knew Patsy Ramsey and that knew other people in that circle. And at this point we noticed since now we're interviewing people together. Before it was just Steve as the lone male journalist interviewing people. But then when we started interviewing people together, especially women, and the women in the pageant world in jam Manet's circle, they were pretty freaked out about all this, as you can well imagine.
So what we found and what we noted was that now we're a couple with a young child interviewing people and there and that sort of opened doorways. People were not as suspicious or on their their guard was off a little bit. So that that's where we started noticing that we were working together as a male and female as a couple, really start started gaining entree into some of the interviewing.
Situations, right and what and what all of the pageant brothers told us to a person was that following the murder, they had been receiving these midnight phone calls from John Maine's primary pageant photographer and personal photographer, a man named Randy Simons, and he was hysterical. He was crying and screaming, I did not kill John Benney. I did not kill John Benney. And this wasn't something that other people were
looking into. So after about one hundred days, when there wasn't an arrest, as the media kept saying there would be, I went over and gave some information to the district attorney Alex Hunter in the case. He was very open to receive it, which was surprising, and he didn't know who Randy Simons was. I mean, here you have her photographer freaking out and the police were so fixated on the two parents that they weren't conducting a broader investigation.
And we told him about the internet activities and the images there, and he was very interested and said, basically, if you would go look into this and report back to me, that would be a good thing. I mean, that's just not what you expect the district need to say in such a high profile crime. And it was of course illegal to go very far down the road of looking at child pornography, so that didn't happen, but
it was a doorway into the case. And so when we looked at all of this and basically said, neither of the two scenarios really seems to make any sense. The media had framed it as either the Ramses did this and are completely guilty, or an intruder did it and they're completely innocent. But you know what about all that space in between, I mean, law enforcement hasn't been able to solve this. It doesn't make any sense to
forensic people. So the book that came out Presumed Guilty in nineteen ninety nine essentially said there's a third scenario here where the Ramseys could be guilty of something, but maybe it's not murder, and maybe this is a far more complicated situation than it's really been presented as over almost the last three years. A grand jury looked at all of the evidence for thirteen months in nineteen ninety
eight ninety nine, and they came to some conclusions. But curiously enough, this district Attorney, Alex Hunter, not only refused to pursue what they did, but sealed the documents forever and seemingly forever. So we had a grand jury set for thirteen months, which is a very long time, cost several million dollars to do this sort of thing, and then the public has told you don't get to see any of their findings. This sets off a whole lot of other questions, primarily being why why don't we get
to know? So anyway, flash forward fourteen years to twenty thirteen. The Bolder newspaper sued the District Attorney's office to find out what was in those documents, and the him said count four of the indictment. The grand juries actually decided to indict the Ramseys, but not on murder. Count four said they exposed their daughter to the individual that committed this crime, and Count seven said then they subsequently were
involved in the cover up of the crime. So there's only been one book written in the many books that have written about the Ramsey case that said there's a middle ground between total innocence and total guilt, and that is precisely what the grand jury concluded. And we could talk for hours about why the Boulder legal system did not pursue these charges when they had the opportunity to
do that. In brief, I would suggest that because they did not want what occurred in this crime to come out, because it would have been I believe, very bad for Bolder's reputation and perhaps are its legal system.
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So again, if you want to go below the surface of some of these major crimes, that book is called Presumed Guilty and it does not toe the party line in any sense at all.
Let's talk about Unholy Messenger, The Life and Crimes of the VTK serial Killer, another again true crime classic and also one of the most important cases wellst the most fascinating cases that captivated the world's audience. Tell us about unholding messengers, Well.
Tell much till how you got started.
I again, I grew up in eastern Kansas, in a very small town, and in the spring we used to go out there with our son after school was out. And so in the spring of two thousand and five June May, we drove out there and I took my son, who was twelve years old, I think, to the gym and there was a my old basketball coach was there and he said, you have to write about this BTK case.
And I was again it was like, I just think that other people are doing that, and he said, no, I'm serious, and he took out a cell phone and he dialed a number and he handed me the phone and he said, here, talk to my son in law Dan. And his son in law was on the task force that investigated BTK for the year between when he came out of hiding in February March of two thousand and four and when he was arrested on February twenty fifth
of two thousand and five. So here was a guy who was on the ground in all the meetings, all of the investigation and was actually one of the people who arrested BTK. So I took the call and the next day I was in front of him, and it was a fabulous you know, inside track on how the investigation unfolded and what went on and all of the dynamics around that. So it was it was a great you know, perspective on the situation. I also met the
pastor of Btk's church, Lutheran church. His name was Pastor Michael Clark, and he and Raider Denis Rader BTK were
very very close. Denis Rader was the president of his church while carrying out some of these crimes or plotting some crimes, and again, it was just it was just a fabulous juxtaposition of here's law enforcement and what they went through, and here's this minister who was a very very decent and good man trying to come to terms with the fact that his president is the most notorious serial killer in the history of you know, the whole region.
So I was fortunate to have those connections because I think it makes it a much more intimate book.
And because you grew up in a town very similar to where Raider grew up in, you kind of had you know that sense of what the repression was like growing up at that time.
Yeah, I grew up in a town about nine hundred people, and Denis Rader lived in a town of similar size just north of Wichita for thirty year years, or at least when the investigation was active. All of the profiling was around somebody in which to an urban person, somebody who would you know, could not be normal because they
couldn't possibly fit into the community. That was the whole basis of their looking for BTK, And that's why they couldn't find him, because here he was living in this small town, working for city government, being very normal husband and father with two kids, president of his church, and fitting in perfectly. So it's in some ways it's the most fascinating of the serial killers that we've actually written about, because it seemed to me just to be totally psychologically driven.
In other words, he was he wasn't doing anything for money or anything like that. He just said this enormous repression inside of himself. Sexual repression, creative repression, are historic repression, the kind of thing I grew up around and understood very well, and it just would come out in the most heinous ways imaginable. So I thought it was a great, you know, way to do a psychological study of a serial killer.
And that particular story the BTK. We went to Wichita this last fall and Steve was on camera. I was a consultant for a CNN program that's going to be on I believe maybe in May of this year.
Right, Yeah, so it was you know, when you're writing nonfiction, it takes you know, a little bit of luck, I think, to get to the right people, and we've been fortunate enough to do that on numerous occasions.
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crime writing career up to that point. Tell us about the making of anyone you want me to be. Where you teamed up with the FBI legend John Douglas.
Well, I saw a little article. I was reading the newspaper. Well, I've always been in newshound, so I was reading the Denver Post one day, and I saw a small, little article, not very big, just telling about how these bodies had been found in these big fifty five was it fifty five gallon? See eighty five gallon barrels in a part of eastern rural Kansas. And you know, so we contacted Steve's ant who lived very close to that part of the state, and she had also been, you know, keeping
clippings about it and saving information about it. So we drove out there and we decided that this would be our next book.
He was.
John Robinson. John E. Robinson, was thought to be the first known internet serial killer. Very unusual, and again this was, you know, in the early days of the Internet, not
a lot known this. He was a very interesting fellow in that he was very charismatic, charming, had these dual life going on where he was a business, fairly successful businessman in his own right, and on one side and on the other he had this secret life going on where he was into bondage and s and M. And he started luring women out to eastern Kansas on the
pretext of giving them offering them jobs. And one of the fascinating things about this particular fellow was that just the variety of different women that he attracted, from like a young college goth girl to the most conservative prison library in all different ages. But then and there was also another thing about him that it would just make your jaw drop. He posed as a as a businessman
that was trying to help young unwed women. And so what he did was he got this one young woman who was pregnant, had a child, and he was going to offer her, you know, a job doing some kind of business work, you know, administrative assistant type of thing. What happened he she went missing, He took her baby. He sold the baby to his brother and said that it was you know, this child that had come up for adoption. And then his brother raised this young woman as his own daughter, I mean unheard of.
Yeah, and they didn't and he didn't have any idea about any of this until fifteen years later. Robinson started out as a petty criminal, you know, stealing stamps, stealing a little bit of money, forgery, you know, very simple basic stuff. But then he started killing, and as Joyce said, he was the first known person who was already a serial killer throughout the late eighties early nineties, and then
just transitioned those skills over to the Internet. So his hunting ground, which had been you know, around Kansas City, suddenly expanded, you know, the world wide Web, and he was pulling in women Fromentucky, in Indiana and Texas, Corney in Colorado and Texas, and a number of them ended up did and they ended up in the barrels that Joy saluted to. So it was a you know, it was a fascinating thing of sort of watching how technology evolves.
I mean he was initially using like fake stuff on a xerox machine when that came out, and then you know, when the technology got a lot more sophisticated, like with the Internet, then he started using that.
It was a real cautionary tale in that he was luring these women with, you know, ostensibly a better life or to be their lover, or to offer them some sort of job traveling in the world. So it was like it was if something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. But in this instance, it got these women killed.
Yeah, and again he was posing and you know, living in the suburbs, active in the church, cub Scout, active in you know, social activities and all of that. So you know, it's the evil next door syndrome again.
And we went to New York to be on twenty twenty their news program about this particular case.
Yeah, that was last October.
That aired so interesting. You mentioned that you don't shy away from controversial subject matters, and so some of these books, just the tone of them. Let's talk about the witch adat Divide, the murder of doctor George Tiller, and battle over abortion. Again, you're not shying away from controversial subject matters with this book.
No, And again if one of the themes you'll pick up here is that you know, I'm from Kansas. Kansas has had, you know, some very notorious crimes, the first biggest being you know, in cold Blood with Dick Hycock and and Perry Smith, and you know Capote's book about it. So we have the John Robinson case, which is in suburban Kansas City, the BTK cases in Wichita, and then again doctor George Tiller, who is the nation's best known abortion doctor, was gone down in his church, his Lutheran
church on May thirty first of two thousand and nine. Again, I had now had a contacts in law enforcement in which daw from the BTK case and I was again contacted and you know, basically giving an inside track again on this particular case. This echoes back if we echo back here to the allen Berg case, which we talked about earlier, because in this particular case you had I
believe I mentioned earlier. I mean, you have Bill O'Reilly now talking to three point five million people night on Fox News and just hammering away at doctor Tiller again and again, Tiller the baby killer. All of that. I mean, So there's this actual progression from where I started writing.
And you had a few people in the Northwest Wood spouting this anti Semitic, racist stuff that ends in death, and now you have somebody addressing millions of people and putting out what I think is a very dangerous message because in both cases, the person who killed Berg was named Bruce Pearce and he was emotionally unstable. Twenty five years later, Scott wrote, from suburban Kansas City has had an increasing problems with mental health and things like this.
He becomes as somewhat as a result of that, he becomes very anti government, very anti abortion. He joins that movement. He's very well aware of all this noise around that's coming from the media, and he decides to pick up a gun and act on it. So again, I think a cautionary tale here is that words matter, emotions matter, your involvement matters, how you participate in the media matters.
There are consequences for these things, especially when they hit an at risk population as they do over and over again. We will see it again in Charlottesville when the woman gets run over by somebody with mental problems, again based around some of these inflammatory ideas. So this theme keeps surfacing again and again in our culture. But I wrote about doctor Tiller's life and I wrote about Scott Wrot's
life and how they know they collided. It's sort of it's called the Divide which ta divide because our country is so divided over this, and it's basically the story of these two families and how they collide and it ends in tragedy. So again, I think it's a it's a comprehensive look at sort of the dynamics around the abortion issue and what can come from inflammatory rhetoric.
And this book has just recently been optioned for a movie.
Yeah that's class. Let's talk about again in religion intersects with everything in this particular story when men become God.
Ye yeah, Well what happened with that one was I was watching Steve on he was on Anderson Cooper three point sixty, who was doing a one hour program on the BTK serial killer. So I'm in Denver watching it. Steve's in New York on CNN and at the end, and they kept doing these promos and at the end of the program they had you know, we're going to be talking about Warren Jeffs, who's you know, this polygamous leader in southern Utah on the border of Utah and Arizona.
And I think was he on the FBI's temos wind list.
This is April of two thousand and six and he's just about.
To go on the So it was a big story and it had been brought to light about polygamy in this country a few years earlier with HBO's program Big Love, which I Steve, I think you watched it too. It was fascinating you. But that was a lot different than the polygamists that we began researching. Big Love was this semi fictional story that took place in suburban Salt Lake City with one man that had three wives and you know,
and it was all very sanitized. But when we drove, when Steve came back from New York, I said, you know, this story about Warren Jeffs, I think women would be really interested in this story. And women sort of drive the market in stories like this and in true crime and especially when they kept showing the women in these long prairie type of dresses with the prairie hairstyle, but on cell phones with modern technology. I said, you know, I just have a feeling that women are going to
be very interested in this story. So Steve was resistant, and he said, there's already been a book written about I think it was Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer, but that only went up to the end of ruling Jeff's who was Warren Jeff's father, and blood atonement and other issues within the community. So I said, now, you know, let's just drive down there and drive to Colorado City, Utah, and see what's going on. And we
didn't really have we didn't have any contacts. We just had heard about certain people that had spoken out, including a woman named Elaine Tyler who ran an organization called the Hope Organization that helped women in that community, in the Ligamus community escape if they wanted to get out of that lifestyle. So, armed with just that one name, we threw our twelve year old son in the back of the car and drove down And it's a long drive. It must have been a thirteen or fourteen hour drive
to drive down there. So what happened is we went to Elaine Tyler and she was fielding calls from all over the world because now the story has gone global and people are intensely interested in the subject. You know, how could these communities be kind of operating under the radar in these very isolated parts of the US and also Canada. They were branches of them in Canada too,
And so we went to her. She was kind enough to, you know, listen, to have a meeting with us, and she gave us the name of a person in Colorado, c Utah, a lawman by the name of Gary Engels. But she said she cautioned us before we drove into town. She said, now when you go into this town, and I think it was a community of about what people. Okay, she said, really mind your p's and q's. Stop at
every stop sign. Don't do any traffic infraction whatsoever, because all the police in that community work for Warren Jeff's. They're all part of the community, so they then they do not like outsiders. So we went into town and it was a very beautiful, isolated part of the country, own about one hundred miles from the Grand canyon, very very secluded. I mean, it looks like you're going back into biblical times or something. And we drove around and
the people you could tell we were being watched. People would look out the windows at you through the slats of their blinds, and it was a very strange feeling being in the in our own country, but kind of seeing that you were not welcome in a certain area. We couldn't believe that this was happening within our country. So we went to Gary Engel's office and he had a little He was in a like a double ye trailer on the outskirts of town, and he offered to give us a ride to the town to show us around.
Well, you have to understand that for fifty years, law enforcement had totally left this town alone. There had been a raid earlier in nineteen fifty three, and it had gone sideways for the government, and they said, we're just going to let these people do whatever they want. They want to have fifty wives and one hundred children, that's
up to them. So finally, after fifty years, women in the community were so outraged at what was happening that a few of them broke off and said went to the governor or government and law enfor said, you have to enforce the laws here against the ancest underage marriage, polygamy, taking girls across state lines for sexual purposes, all of those things. So they sent this man, Gary, this one man to go investigate, and he was obviously the most hated person in the community.
So so anyway, we got in his suv and he was giving us the tour around town. And it was amazing because the houses that they lived in were these huge compounds surrounded by giant concrete walls. Because there could be you know, forty seven children in one family. It was beyond belief. So we're driving and immediately we start getting followed by I think it was about three vehicles with tinted windows. And he said, oh, you know, Warren's
henchmen are after us. So we're a little nervous. I'm sitting in the back seat with my son, you know, and seats in the front seat. So he starts driving faster and faster. Pretty soon he does this maneuver where he turns around and then we're and then we are now following the henchmen. And it was and you have to understand, the climate was very tense and tense because at the time we didn't know, nobody really knew if
they had stockpiled weapons. There had been some talk, some rumors, and not just idle rumors, but people in law enforcement thought that maybe they had stockpiled weapons on the outskirts of town, and they didn't want another Waco type of situation to occur. You know, where the David koresh compound was surrounded by the FBI and there's a shootout and a lot of people got killed. So the climate in that community was tense, to say the least.
So we began talking with women who had broken away from this, which is a very difficult thing to do, very courageous on their part. I mean, the subtitle of the book is Fundamentalist Warren Jeffs and the women who fought back, And part of the book is telling their story about their struggle to get law enforcement to actually do something against Jess. I mean, he had come in, he had now broken up families, he had sent the fathers away, redistributed the children to people that he liked, men.
That he liked better, killed all the dogs and kill the.
Dogs, decided who could get married and who couldn't. Was again taking these girls over the state line. That's the violation of federal violation what was called a man act.
And marrying very young girls to very old men.
Right. So anyway, that was the basis of the book, which was a man hunt for Jeffs, which he was caught right outside Las Vegas in late August of nineteen or of two thousand and six. He went on trial in two thousand and seven. He was convicted in Utah of what's called accomplice to rape. A very very courageous young woman named Alissa Wall came forward and said that
he had forced her in the marriage. This was the first person who was really willing to take the stand, go against her family, go against her community, her religion, and take the stand to actually convict Jeffs. He was that conviction would subsequently be overturned. But as some will remember, in early April of two thousand and eight, the Texas authorities raided his new compound down in Texas and near Eldaredo, Texas and created just a phenomenal meth that occurred down there.
Four hundred and sixty three children were taken off the ranch and separated from their families. Very reminiscent of the Raid of fifty three against the community.
They were sent to foster homes and that type of thing.
And so Jess had built this temple on this land, this ranch, and they raided the temple and found very incrimininating evidence against him of what appeared to be, you know, marrying girls about the age of eleven twelve. So you actually had visual evidence now of some of the things that were going on inside of this community. Again all in the name of religion, how they interpreted their religion. So he would ultimately be tried in Texas and given
a life sentence. But Joyce tell them what happened when the book came out.
Well, when the book came out, I asked the publisher, the publishing house Saint Martin's Press in New York, to send a copy to then Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.
He was a.
Converted Mormon, but he had been watching this story closely as everybody else was, and you know, he was paying particular interest because he was he was not a fundamentalist Latter day Saint. He was a Latter Day Saint, which you know, he was the more the typical Mormon religion. So all this is going on, and they sent the book to Senator Read and Steve was down in Eldorado, Texas covering, you know, what was going on with that raid.
And all of a sudden, well I got an email saying please call this number, and it was a number in Washington, d C. So I called him up and I said, I got a message to call this number. I didn't know who it was. And the woman said, can you please hold the line, Senator Reid would like to talk to you. So then comes the Senate Majority leader on the phone, and I was I was stunned. I mean, it's not every day that you talked to, you know, the third most powerful man in the American government.
And I said, he said, I said what he said?
This?
I can't oh, I know. He started making jokes about our name singular. He said, singular. That sounds like the medicine that I take for my you know, allergies or something. So that took me by surprise because he was just kind of talking to me in this very you know, offhanded fashion. And I said, well, well, what did you think of the book? And he said, well, I thought I thought it read like fiction. I couldn't believe that you know all the details in there. He said, I'd
like to speak to your husband about this. So I gave him Steve's cell phone number down and he was in Texas, and the next thing you knew, we were invited to Washington to appear in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on hearings associated I think it was polygamy Crimes against.
Crimes associated poligamy, right, So the federal government, over a period of time has gotten involved. Jeff's is serving a life sentence in Texas. His stranglehold over that community, which was very real when we first started to look into this in two thousand and six, has broken down a lot. People can own their own homes, which they couldn't do before was a communal trust. They can own their own businesses, They have a lot more freedom. All the strictures he
put on them have more or less gone away. His reign of terror has basically ended. So it's that's there's still problems there and he still has control over certain people, but there actually has been a lot of progress, and I think it all goes back to those handful of women you know, who stood up when they needed to. I mean, it's almost like a precursor to the Me Too movement and just said no more, We're not going to take this anymore and force law enforcement to enforce
the laws down there. And that's a very good thing.
And that was and that one was made into a Lifetime movie called Outlaw Profit, which was the name of that's what we originally wanted to name the book, Outlaw Profit.
Yeah. So again it's again it's another example of how people use religion to you know, maintain power over other people and commit crimes. And that's run that's ran through the Tiller book and the Berg book and the Sweet Evil Book and this book is.
Well, let's talk about something when you talk about Reign of Terror, let's talk about the Spiral notebook and what did you see? What did you find as authors that other people seemingly didn't see or conclude?
Well, yeah, go ahead, Steve.
Well, as you know, as an author of these kinds of books, what you do essentially is you know, there's a crime, usually an arrest, and there are many many court documents that are generated from that process, and you usually have access to those documents, you know, evidence of depositions, testimony, and then the air court proceedings, in preliminary hearings and trials and all that. And that's the grist of your mill.
That's what you sort of used to create the narrative that again, like Senator, to read, you hope that somebody will say this reads like fiction or like a story that's really rolling out smoothly. And that's what occurred in
every book that we've talked about so far. When James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, did what he did on the early morning of July twentieth, twenty twelve, in suburban and easton Right, just east of Denver, immediately there was a permanent, almost permanent gag order put on all documents around this. So again it was Joyce, you know, you tell him sort of how we got involved.
Well, once again, once again, I was watching television as this thing was unfolding on the newshound.
In the folding about seven miles from where we were.
Yeah. Yeah, even though Steve was, you know, a reporter for the Denver Post. I have been a news down all my life, and so as this was happening, and on Saturday morning.
Friday morning, was it Friday morning?
Yeah, I and our son was now in college, first year in college, and he was home on summer break. He was sleeping in the basement and I told Steve, I said, you know, this is the theater that we used to go to on occasion. You know, could have been us. Of course, I probably wouldn't have been going to watch you know, the Dark Night Rises at the midnight showing, but it could have been us if it, you know, if that person had decided to kill a
bunch of people in some other movie. And then so I said, why don't we just drive over to Well, actually James Holmes apartment was not too far from us, maybe I don't know, several miles. So at that time, the police had these robots outside trying to figure out if there were any more explosives in his apartment, and indeed there were, and they were trying to see if
they could go in without setting them off. So we got we drove up to where James Holmes apartment was, and we started talking to people that were They had all been evacuated, even the apartment buildings, you know, just to the to the north and the south in the different directions of Holmes apartment building, and they were they were just in shock. They couldn't believe that, you know,
this was happening so close to them. You don't you magine you hear about these things happening in other places, but you never you can never quite fathom it when it comes to your community. So we started talking to them, getting their impressions. Then we drove over to the actual theater and it was all cordoned off. The media had
to be in a certain area. So we went up to where the media were, and they had just let out the people that had been in the theater, the survivors, and they had put all those people in a nearby school so they could interview them and get their reports and their you know, their statements about what they had seen and heard. And so all these young people were filling it, filing out, and some of them came over to where the media was and we started talking to
a young man. He had his ticket stub in his hand. He was shaking, he had been up all night, very very upset. And we started taking you know, just taking notes, and we knew that it was a big story. There's no media from all over the country, you know, coming this is a huge event. So but but what happened was we usually get our information from you know, trial trial testimony and documents things like that, but there was a gag order put on stee Can you talk so I could get some water?
Yes, So we were presented with an unusual set of circumstances and wanting to maybe write about this, but not having access to the normal things that you that you
would good. And then an added ingredient is if in the courses conversation we talked about our son being very young when when the Ramsey case emerged, we talked about him being twelve years old when we went to Utah to write about the Warren Jeff's But now he's nineteen years old and he is close in some ways to the demographic of many of these young male shooters, and so we were interested to get his perspective on it, and we started talking with him, and it's when he
kind of you know, stepped into the into the family business here. That's part of this whole narrative.
I remember saying to him, I said, you know, when these events happened, what do you what do your friends say when these big shootings happened? What do they think about it? Oh? Well, you know they might post about it. On Facebook for a minute and then everybody forgets about it. And I said, well, what do you what do you mean that just seems like so? And then he said, well, you you didn't grow up the way that I did.
You don't know what it was like growing up in my you know, with my generation, with the Internet, with being bullied on social media, with the kind of movies we've been exposed to, with all these different facts, with the music we've grown up with everything, the video games. So you started, you know, telling us. So we started interviewing him at length, and then we started interviewing his friends.
So we thought, you know, well, if we can't profile James Holmes, you know, as much as you would like to, because you just didn't have access to these things. By now, America had seen many, many, many mass shootings at schools, public other public places. This was, you know, something that had become common in the culture. So what if you didn't decide to just profile the one individual whom we always call it the aberrant individual who committed these crimes.
But what in the culture is aberrant? What might be influencing these young men to do this over and over and over again. And that so we with our son's help. He said things to us like, as Joyce said, you don't know how I grew up, Well, what does that mean? And then he said, I know, I know kids, I know guys who could have done this, you know, easily.
And so.
We began to explore that what in the culture might be influencing people, you know, to to nudge them or push them in this direction.
And what is the.
Difference between like say, our generation, which is considered the Baby Boomers, with his generation, which is the millennials. Part of the thing that we were seeing was that they grew up with they were always growing up with these doom and gloom, apocalyptic types of events happening, for example, like you know, Y two K and nine to eleven, and you know, it was just like one thing after another.
And we thought, well, we grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, you know, yeah, but they seemed to have had it, you know, they were surrounded by it more.
And you know, obviously a lot of the violence depicted, you know, fictional violence and movies and things like that. And as I think most people listening to this probably no you know, James Holmes had sort of modeled himself after the Joker in the movie the Batman movies, and you know, had gone so far as to sort of dye his hair, I guess, to look like the Joker
in one of the movies. And I think the movie that preceded this one, the Joker had put together thirty million dollars in cash and had decided to burn it in the movie.
Now, I think it was in this one, Steve the Dark Knight Rises, Yeah, with the Ledger playing the Joker. Yeah.
Yeah, but anyway, that to burn the movie to make a statement about you know, materialism and.
You know your values.
Yeah. Values. So James Holmes, on the afternoon before he went into the theater, had put together this elaborate notebook, spiral notebook. That's why the book is called the Spiral notebook, and he decided to send it to his psychiatrist, who was the head of the psychiatric department at the University of Colorado. James Holmes also was a PhD student. This was not somebody who was not educated or not intelligent. He had a three point nine four great average in college.
He was I believe I made a kappa. He had all of these opportunities and he when he sent his notebook, in which he knew the authorities would eventually find. He had put some burnt twenty dollar bills in there to echo what the Joker had done in the movie, to sort of say that the whole notebook is about his trying to find meaning in the culture, his trying to find basically a reason not to become violent. And he mentioned some of the cultural influences that we were starting to examine.
You know.
For example, our son told us a lot about violent video games, which we really didn't know very much about because we really didn't have them in the house when he was growing up.
Yeah, you knew that they were playing him at other people's house. You can't really, you know, guard your child from everything.
That Glmes was watching eight hours of violent videos in the run up to the crime.
And when he did and when he was committing the crime, he had this kind of electronic, hard, throbbing, pulsing music on. It's sort of like he was in a video game, you know, when he was gunning him all down.
When our son talked a lot to us about the prescription medications like adderall that were given to young people when they were experiencing psychological difficulty or things like that. In the James Holmes story, in the spring of twenty twelve, he sought out the head of psychiatry there at the University of Colorado. He went in and said that he wanted to kill a lot of people. That's pretty much
a direct quote. He was prescribed these drugs. He came back again, he was very tormented, he was looking for a connection, he needed help.
Well, he was prescribed benzo diazepines and also you know SSRIs right, but he was.
In real psychological and emotional distress and he was trying to help himself. And the response was to prescribe the meds, and then when he came back, the response was to increase the dose. And again it just the story becomes
about something larger than just this one aver individual. If you would go through the list of some of the most well known school shooters or mass shooters over the last fifteen or twenty years, there's a striking sense they're i mean, all documented of how many of these people were on these medications, the ill effects of that, and sort of the inability to deal with whatever was the underlying psychological problem.
Not saying that those medications are not helpful. They certainly help a lot of people. But what we were finding after talking to a lot of the neuroscientists and the different types of you know, the doctors that we were talking to, the brain is plastic still at that age, you know, between like the teams and the early twenties. It's still developing. So you kind of you kind of wonder what kind of effect is it having on people,
you know, has that been studying enough. But one thing I'd like to say about working on this book, and I talked earlier about collateral damage of seeing you know, how families and people are affected by one person's you know,
decision to kill. But when I had to cover this particular murder trial, I have to tell you that I've seen a lot in my years of covering murder trials from women, you know, from the remnants of the women in the bodies and the barrels being you know, shown on autopsy photos, you know, from every every kind of
thing you could possibly imagine. But I've never seen anything like what to have to sit there and watch the autopsy photos of the you know, the of this people that were shot in the theater, including the young six year old girl and they had therapy dogs in the court that day, and the therapy dogs were for anybody that was in the courtroom that day watching, you know, and having to sit there through that. I couldn't watch all of it. I had to put my head down
at times. But the collateral damage in this case was not just all those families of the and the people that were not only killed but maimed forever, you know, paralyzed, but our whole community because Denver had had the Columbine shooters, you know how many years earlier? Was it thirteen years earlier? So that is what gave us the impetus to say, you know, maybe we'll start writing some fiction for a while,
maybe we'll write a screenplay. And we did. We wrote a fictional screenplay and that's been optioned by a producer in la and we're very happy to be working on that. And not to say that we will no, not to say that we won't ever work on a true crime book again, but that was the turning point for me anyway, or a theater.
So what we learned from writing the book, and we would hope that others would learn some things from it if they read the book, is that just more of a broader examination of some of these things that we're talking about, the violent video games, the medications, the joyce
referred earlier, the bullying, the all of these influences. And throughout the book we interview and quote young people, so it's not just relying on you know, older I mean people our age, but to get their voices and their perspectives about who's doing these kind of acts and what can we learn from it, And so it became more of a cultural examination than just a look at this one case.
We don't have enough time to go into this book we have. I've covered this book The Shadow on the Mountain, Nancy Feister, doctor William Styler, and the Murder of Aspens Golden Girl, but I wanted to mention that it seems another lesser theme is the incredible wealth that some of these suspects enjoyed and was a factor in many of these cases, wasn't it.
Yes, it is. I mean, money definitely played a role in that particular book, Shadow on the Mountain. Money was a factor in the John Robinson case. He was killing these women and then taking their money. Warren Jeff's was doing many different things, some of them illegal to generate money for his sex so he could continue to rule over them. So yes, it absolutely is.
I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about this true crime retrospect, and I also want to urge listeners to go to the archives and listen to the other dedicated interviews that we had about each one of your books. Not all of the books that we covered this evening, but many of these books that we've discussed this evening. I want to ask how
they may take a look at. Do you have a website, Stephen and Joyce tell us how they might take a look at all of the books that we talked about today.
That is called stephensingular dot com. It's s T E p h E N s I N g U l a r dot com and that has all the up to date information and including this new book that's coming out in July. I think of this year called killer Cults, which there are a lot of parallels between the cult leaders and some of the serial killers that we've talked about today.
Right and for those interested in the in the O. J. Simpson book Legacy of Deception or the John in a. Ramsey book, they're linked. Presume guilty. These are available on Amazon Kendall as the books.
I think there are links on the website too.
Yeah, yeah, so, and we post on there any time we're going to do media things or other event.
So we'd like to thank you so much Stan for taking the time to go through all these books with us today. I know it's a lot, but we really appreciate your support. And yeah, it's been great being on again.
Thank you very much for having us on.
It's an absolute pleasure, and it really is. You are two of the most deserving people to talk about these These are and when I talk about true crime classics, I think people generalize about so many books, but these definitely are true crime classics. And just the way that you approach each one of these books a thorough, incredibly exhaustive investigation, and the incredible access that you have as credible and respected journalists brings the listener into a world
that they wouldn't have otherwise. So I want to thank you very much for your complete body of work so far, and we look forward to talking to you and discussing Killer Cuts in the next following months. So I want to thank you very much. Steven and Joyce, thank you very much.
Good night, good night,