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, DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
In nineteen seventy five, after Manson family member Lynette Squeaky Frome's attempt to kill President Cheryl Ford, the FBI found a cache of letters in the would be assassin's Sacramento apartment. The return address belonged to future forensic psychologist Jeffrey Smalden, then a young undergraduate. A decade later, after the shocking murders of two co workers, Smaaldon's quest to understand the twisted minds and motivations of killers became personal in a
way it never had been before. That beast was not me. Documents five decades of conversations with murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, serial sniper Thomas Lee Dillon, and Donald Harvey, then thought to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. Through letters prison visits and interviews. Smaalden gives readers a terrifying look into the darkest recesses
of the human psyche. The book that we're featuring this evening is That Beast Was Not Me One forensic psychologist. Five decades of conversations with killers with my special guest, forensic psychologist and author, Jeffrey L. Smaalden. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Jeffrey EL. Smaalden.
Thank you for having me, Dan, thank you so much.
And congratulations on your book. Thank you The Beast That Was Not Me. Now, in this book, you take us to December nineteen eighty three and the story of the murders of Paddy Maddox and her friend Joyce McFadden. And this is at the Riverside Hospital. Tell us about your professional position at this hospital at that time in nineteen eighty three, and tell us about Paddy Maddox and her friend Joyce McFadden.
Well, at the time of the hospital murders in December of nineteen eighty three, I was an assistant vice president at what was then the largest private general hospital in Ohio called Riverside Methodist Hospital. I had been there for
about two and a half years at that point. I had begun as an administrative resident and then stayed on and I had administrative responsibility at the hospital for a number of departments, including a fairly large combined psychiatric substance abuse unit of about one hundred and thirty eight beds, and then I also had responsibility for this very small medical research lab that was located just off the main corridor of the hospital and just down the hallway from
the waiting area for the radiology department. I had had a total of six employees, a single door that served as entrance and exit. Again that door right around the corner from the hospital's main corridor, and I wasn't really involved in the day to day operations of the research lab because I was the administrator responsibility for responsible for it.
But I had regular contact with the employees and would typically you know, stop in there every few days or every week is to see how things were going, and met regularly with the director. But right before I left Columbus for my parents' home in Western New York that Christmas, they had their little department Christmas party, and as administration's representative, I attended that, and everybody was there. All the six medical research lab employees were there. You know. It was
a low key but convivial affair. Everyone was in upbeat spirits. We were all talking about our plans for the holidays. Nothing seemingly unusual at all. And Patty and Joyce were both there that day and seeming just like they always did. They were both very friendly people, ready smile, always ready with the greeting when I saw them in the hall.
And the next thing I knew, I was up at my parents' house between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and I got a call from the director of public relations at the hospital and she said, Jeff, I've got some terrible news. And I said, what's that? And I thought I had a pretty good idea what she was going to say. That there had been some kind of tragedy involving one
of the psychiatric patients. Not long before then, one of the psychiatric patients had stuck a big pen into his chest in the middle of the night, taking his own life. So that had been a recent tragedy. Another one had been a psychiatric patient had been given a temporary leave to walk around the hospital grounds with his young daughter and killed her on the hospital grounds. So I thought that this call was going to be about some other
tragedy involving one of the psychiatric patients. And she said, Joyce McFadden and Patty Maddox were murdered on Friday afternoon, between four thirty and five o'clock in the afternoon. And I said what I mean, And no news could have stunned me more than that, And that's all all I could say was no way. And she explained that the director of the research lab, who had been off work that week, had stopped in to check his mail and phone messages and found Joyce laying in a pool of
blood in the lab. She turned out she had been stabbed close to thirty times, her legs were bound and blood was all over and he ran screaming from the lab. Hospital security guard and a family practice physician who happened to hear him screaming, accompanied him back to the lab. Found that Joyce had no pulse, and soon after the police arrived and Patty Maddox's body was found in a walk in refrigerator that was ordinarily used to store tissue samples.
And you know again, I was up at my parents in New York when I received news of this double homicide. But I was just absolutely flabbergasted by it, and I thought, I need to go back down there. I need to return to work at that place. And when I came back to Columbus the day after receiving the phone call, as I say in the book, it was like there was an invisible force field preventing my return to the hospital. Initially, I just couldn't bring myself to go there. In short
order and found that everything had changed. They hadn't arrested anyone. Nobody had a clue who would have wanted to kill Paddy maddox and Joyce McFadden. I was this prickly tension in the air, and gaggles of employees in the hallway talking about it, and everyone had their favorite suspect, so to put it mildly. Going back to work, and then the next weeks and months, and as it turned out, two years without an arrest made that a very difficult place to work.
You righte that you finally had enough and you began to prepare your graduation school application. Tell us about this application and your plan.
Well, if I can back up just a little to sort of set the stage in terms of where I was in my life. At that point, I was a fledgling hospital administrator. I was going to be an English professor. I did a master's degree in English at Purdue, went back to my undergraduate school, taught English for a year, then on a gram went to Trinity College in Dublin
to study modern Irish literature for a year. That was the path that I was on, And then I decided, I don't really think that academia would be a good niche for me. I don't think I would thrive in that environment, so I need to think of a different path. And when I came back from Ireland, and I'll tell this briefly, but I think it's an important part of
the story, at least it is for me. My mother was a nurse at the local hospital and I said to her one day, mile, I have no idea where to go with my life now that I'm not going to be an English professor. I don't know what to do. And she said, well, down at the hospital where I work, there are a couple of nice looking young men. I don't really know what they do, but they're very friendly. Every time I greet them in the hall, they greet me, and I've heard them referred to as administrators. Have you
ever thought of hospital administration? And I said no, And then I said what's hospital administration? And she said know either. Why don't you go out and talk to one of them? So I did, and he said, yeah, why don't you. I did my masters at George Washington. Why don't you do yours there and then come back to work for me? And I thought that almost sounds like a job offer. I had nothing else going on at the time, so
I applied to one school, George Washington. I needed to basically get a full financial ride to be able to go there for unknown reasons, because I had never taken a business class in my life. I just ended up concluding they must have seen me as some sort of bizarre sleeper candidate that they were willing to cast their lot with. But I got admitted, did my masters there, and then the last part of the degree was an
administrative residency. And I could have ended up anywhere in the country for that, and I ended up at this hospital in Riverside or in Columbus And turned out that you know, this is like a decade after an earlier chapter in my life that I'm sure we'll get to where I was as a very young man twenty one
years old, corresponding with members of the Manson family. And so when these murders occurred in December of eighty three, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here in my early twenties, I'm corresponding with Charles Manson, but I kind of felt like I'd left that chapter behind, And now these two women are murdered in the hospital, in
a department I'm responsible for. I think maybe I'm meant to do a PhD in forensic psychology and find a vantage point where I can begin learning about the minds of the kinds of people who would kill Joyce McFadden and Patty Maddox. So I started thinking about going back to school at Ohio State. I ended up starting work toward my PhD in August of nineteen eighty five, about a year well, yeah, about a year and a half after the Riverside murders.
You talked about how you reached out to people like Charles Manson and other members of his family a decade earlier than you did in your decision to study murder. Right, So tell us how on Earth you came to write, Charles Manson, How did you come up with this idea? Where did it come from?
Well? I grew up the son of I always refer to him this way because I think it conjures a certain accurate image in people's mind. I grew up the son of a Hoover era g man, very traditional FBI agent, and during my growing up years there was always kind of a low hum of talk at home about crime and criminality and law, and so I always had that interest percolating in the back of my mind. And when I was a senior in college, Helter Skelder actually came
out in nineteen seventy four. My senior year in college was seventy four or seventy five. But when the Manson family murders occurred in August of nineteen sixty nine, I paid them absolutely no attention. I was fifteen years old, totally up to my ears in my social life and the upcoming fall football season and so on. Never read the newspaper, never watched the evening news, so I didn't
really know anything about the carnage in LA. But when Helter Skelter came out, and I had before that, I had read one other book about the Manson family when I was studying my junior year in college overseas, but I read Helder Skelder in a single sitting caffeine fueled binge that began about three o'clock one afternoon and ended about eleven o'clock the next morning. I just couldn't put
it down. I was so entranced by the story. And again, I'm twenty one years old, and I think what I was most fascinated with wasn't so much Manson himself, but these people who looked up to him as sort of a godlike figure, and if you believed media portrayals of them, seemed willing to do almost anything at his behest. He would get the idea that they had almost lost the ability to think and act independently. And one day in my abnormal psychology class, my professor mentioned that he had
read Helter Skelter. I don't remember the context for him mentioning that, but I thought, well, I'm going to stay after class today and talk with him about that book and about my questions about some of these people who came from backgrounds not unlike my own middle class backgrounds and ended up in thrall to this career convict with a fourth grade education. So I stayed after class and I raised that issue, and when I did, he said, well,
that's interesting. Have you ever thought of writing to them? And I said no, I literally that thought had never crossed my mind. The idea of writing the members of the Manson family was the furthest thing from my mind. And he said, well, it might be interesting to hear what their voices sound like on paper and see if
they match the portrayals of them in the media. So, after a period of time thinking about it, I decided to do that, and to my surprise, most of the people I wrote to wrote me back, including Manson and Squeaky thro Me and her roommate fellow Manson devotee Sandy Good, Susan Atkins, Tex Watson, and others.
You had quite the experience corresponding with Charles Manson, didn't you.
I did. Yeah. I didn't know what to expect from him. I had to know the sense that he was some sort of bizarre lunatic from his portrayal and Helter Skelter and other meat. But I didn't really know what letters from him would be like. And you know, I was pretty manipulative. My goal was to convince him to write
me back. That was basically my bottom line objective. And in the very first letter I wrote to him, I had thought to myself when I sat down to write that letter, well, what could I write that might make Charles Manson decide to write me back. That was my cynical kind of way of thinking. And I knew from what I'd read that he was a frustrated musician, that he had been moving in the orbit of some Hollywood A and B list musicians in nineteen sixty eight and
sixty nine. So I written a letter expressing interest in his music, and in particular wondering how I could obtain a copy of the album of his songs that his old prison buddy Phil Kaufman, who went on to become, you know, sort of a well known roadie, was Emily Emmy Lou Harris's roadie for years, but he had been in prison with Manson and he produced this album during
Manson's trial. So I asked Manson if he knew how I could obtain a copy of that album, and Manson immediately saw through my cynical posturing and just wrote back and said, you know, stop with this bullshit. You know, tell me what you're really interested in. It's not songs and poetry, because what does that all matter? Tell me what you're really interested in. And I thought, well, I've been called out here, I was a fake and a phony. I could either bail out or I could try another approach.
So I wrote him again, and this time I told him a little about me who I was, that I was a senior in college, that I had read Helder Skelter and another book about his case called The Family, and that I was interested in how he had been portrayed and in the media and so on, and that I was open to the possibility that certain of the people who had written about his case didn't get everything right. That I was interested in his perspective. And he then
wrote sort of a contemplative letter. I later learned this was definitely not Charles Manson's default posture. Reflective, contemplative was not his default posture. But I must have caught him on a good day, and he said, at the beginning of that letter, take everything you've ever heard about me, and think about it as backwards. The media created this monster image. That beast was not me, that's where the
title of my book comes from. That beast was not me, but it's what everyone needs me to be, so they make me up to be a reflection of all their fears and lies. And I, you know, I was young and green and receptive. You know. Now I would look at that and see it as what it is. But then I thought, oh, that's at least interesting. Maybe Manson's not exactly as he's been portrayed in the media.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now we were talking about your correspondence with Charles Manson, but you also reached out to a couple of his other family member because we were very interested, especially in the idea that you thought that it absurd that these family members were one dimensional robots without a mind of their own.
Correct And I couldn't figure that out. I was interested in how they would come across in letters. And I mean that part of the story is interesting. I knew how to find Charles Manson. I knew he was on the special Adjustment unit at fulsome prison that had been made clear in the final pages of Helder Skelter. But I knew that Squeaky from Me, who by most accounts was his first or second in command of the Manson family and one of his earliest followers and most zealous advocates,
was not in prison. And when I had learned that she and some of his other followers were not in prison, I remember initially that whole idea creeked me out, because I just thought, how could they have been part of this group of people and not landed in prison? But they hadn't. But I didn't know where Squeaky FROMI was or how to contact her, and I used a pretty unorthodox approach that probably had a very small percentage chance
of working, but it did. I had read in Helder Skelter that one of the assistant District attorneys in the LA office had befriended her and some of the other Manson girls when they were sitting vigil on the sidewalk outside the Hall of Justice while Manson was on trial. And so I wrote a letter to Squeaky FROMY and I put it in a larger envelope addressed to this assistant District DA, and I said, if you know where Squeaky FROMI is, would you complete the address on my
envelope to her? And send it to her, and I really thought that would go nowhere. And he wrote me back immediately and said, yeah, I do know where she is. He didn't give me her address, but he said, I did as you requested, completed the address, and I sent her your letter, and then in less than a week she responded. So I had my first look at what a letter from one of Manson's followers would look like.
And again I was curious about the degree of congruence between what a letter from one of them would look like and how they'd been portrayed in the media. And I get this envelope with floral accents on it, and inside was stationary with the same floral accents and very neat, but very loopy. I always kind of call it looks like middle school middle middle school girl loopy handwriting, which is probably unfair to characterize middle school's girl's handwriting that way,
but that's what impressed me. And there were lots of drawings of flowers and smiley faces, and lots of talk of love and togetherness. And at one point during her letters, she said, Jeff Charlie didn't do it. He is it with his underlined and she said the only person who understands how to bring about world peace. And I'm reading this thinking, what you know? This woman, though she wasn't involved directly in the Tate lobbyond the murders, knew all
about them. There was no question about that. And yet this rhetoric sounded very hippieish and centered in ideals peace and love. And so for me, the mystery continued beyond that letter.
You also corresponded with Sandra Good. You said that she wrote you four letters over a period of six weeks. What was the conversation like with her or the correspondence I might say.
She did she took over the correspondence. And I always knew that the letters I wrote were to Sandy and Squeaky, that they lived together, the very close friends. They lived in an attic apartment in Sacramento. I didn't know this at the time, but a third woman named Susan Murphy was sharing the space with them.
But I always.
Addressed my letters to both Sandy and Squeaky, And at first the first letter I got from Sandy, I was impressed by how intelligent she was, how articulate she was. She used bright pink stationery. She wrote, well, again, not what I expected from these people. But she continued with squeakys themes of love and peace, and Charlie understands. They kept using the term earth balance. He knows how to
bring about earth balance. And they kept expressing concerns for the environment and so on, and you know, so no references to the murders at all yet. And then I get a letter from Sandy Good one day, which I always say it began in the way you always hope no letter from the Manson family will begin, right, Jeff, we're moving out of the realm of words. And I remember thinking, oh, I don't really want to move out of the realm of word. That's where I'm that's my
comfort zone. And in that letter she started she referenced the Tate Lobiaca murders explicitly for the first time, and she began writing in sort of a poc elliptic terms about things that were going to go down. She recommended I stay away from La because horrible things were going to go down there, and just these kind of cryptic messages about bad things like karma as she said that was going to occur. And I remember being alarmed by this change in her tone. But not so much that
I bailed out of the correspondence. So I wrote her back after that letter, and then I got the last letter that I received from her during that period. It was Mark June thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, and it was
about a sixteen page handwritten letter. And in that letter, she was encouraging me to phone corporation heads who she said were complicit and polluting the environment and so on, and she would say things like, if they aren't paying attention, say things like do you know who Charles Manson is? Remember Sharon Tate? Or tell them a wave of assassins will soon sweep through their homes and splash blood from
room to room. She referred to people getting their arms chopped off, encouraged me to recruit some of my friends if she said they weren't Mommy's boys, and into sort of a killer core of people who would go out in the forest and kill hunters and then leave signs on the trees saying there are hunters hunter hunting hunters. All of this meant as part of kind of a campaign of eco terrorism, and they were clearly looking to
me to play an active role in this. And I remember at the time thinking Okay, now I'm in way over my head. Yes, I was having images of these women appearing on my parents' doorstone. And by the way,
my dad was in the FBI during this period. I was living with them in Western New York and getting these letters from Manson Squeaky, from Sandy Good addressed to their address, and I thought, I need to get out of this because I was frightened, and so I sent a letter to Squeaky, and Sandy mailed it to a friend of mine who lived in Wisconsin and asked her to mail it from there so it would have a Wisconsin postmark. And in my letter, I'd said I'd left
my address in Western New York. I was hitchhiking for the summer, didn't have a stable address. And then it was about two months later that I heard Squeaky had attempted to assassinate President Ford.
You're right that now, forty five years on, Sandy and Squeaky are both free from prison. Sandy paroled in December eighty five and Squeaky released on parole in two thousand and eight. You talk about your correspondence, your decision to write to Ted Bundy. Tell us about that.
You know approximately the year anniversary of the hospital murders was approaching. I had decided by then that I was going to leave hospital administration and that I was going to if I got admitted to Ohio State, I was
going to begin to work toward my PhD there. But I thought, and still no one had been arrested for the Riverside murders, and I thought, well, if anyone knows about murder, particularly the kinds of murder where the perpetrator seems to disappear into thin air, Ted Bundy would know.
And he's on death row right now, facing two death sentences, one for his rampage at the Cayamega sorority house at Florida State and the other four the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of a twelve year old girl, still denying, by the way, that any of these murders were his doing. Sure, well, he was all a big coincidence, all these gas credit card slips that tied him to the various locations and so on. But I knew he was on death row
in Florida. So I thought, well, I'm going to write to Ted Bundy, and I'm not going to say right from the start that I have an interest in picking his brain about these crimes in Columbus, but maybe I can develop enough rapport with him that eventually he'll agree to a dialogue that would turn out to be fruitful for me in some way. And I told him I
wrote him a pretty long handwritten letter. He would have known that I'd read quite a bit about his case, including the book The Only Living Witness, where he had agreed to talk about the crimes attributed to him but only in the third person, sort of how someone might have committed these crimes. So he knew from my letter. I knew about that. And I said at the end of my letter, I'm not trying to bother you, so if you don't respond to this letter, you'll never hear
from me again. And he didn't respond, so I thought, Okay, well that's that, and I thought that was the end of it. But then a little over a year later, just a couple months after I had begun work toward my PhD, I get a Christmas card from Ted wishing me and mine all best wishes and health in the coming year. And it was a you know, one of those cards with a sort of a bountiful picture photograph on the cover, sort of a corncopeia with things pouring
out of it. And then I also got a letter from him, and I remember my frame of mind when I got this letter. Okay, this guy's on death row, and yeah, his prospects are grim at best. And he begins the letter, Dear Jeffrey, I received your letter approximately a year ago. I've kept I've kept it amongst that's the word he used amongst my papers. Back around the time you wrote, I withdrew into a kind of cocoon.
He had suffered a number of legal setbacks, and I'm just now coming out and beginning to communicate with people again. As for your questions, all I can say is I found them very searching and thoughtful. And then he says, I want you to know that I've never felt better in my life, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. I hope the same can be said for you. And then this is
the good part. You know, this guy whose signature characteristic is the unbelievable distances he would travel in search of his victims, and in FBI parlance, he would be called a rover killed women. You know in Oregon, Houston, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Florida. He signs off his letter, take care, watch yourself, travel light piece ted Yes. And you know, later, when I studied more serial killers, I came to understand. I mean,
that's the classic serial killers tease. That's Bundy sitting on death row in Florida thinking I'm going to end with this clever thing. And in one way, it could be read as a recipe for how to survive if you're a predator like me. Always be aware of your surroundings, be mobile, be ready to move at a moment's notice. But it could also be read as a recipe for how to survive a predator like me by being aware
and being mobile and ready to move. And I thought he probably enjoyed it tremendously, thinking that he had said something so clever.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, let's get to one of the most fascinating interviews that you conducted in your career, and this is before you were involved in as a forensic psychologist. But tell us about the chapter you call The Clown and your interaction with John Wayne Gacy, first in letters and phone calls and then in a visit to the Minard Correctional Center December sixteenth, nineteen eighty six.
Yeah, I had begun work towards my PhD in the fall of eighty five, and I still had in mind, even though I hadn't gotten very far with Ted Bundy, but I still didn't mind. I have things to learn from some of these notorious serial killers. And Gaysey was the next one who came to mind. I knew he was on death row in Illinois, having been convicted of murdering thirty three boys and young men. And again, I thought, the likelihood of Gacy responding to my overture is probably
fairly low, but I'm going to try it anyway. So I wrote to him, and he responded right away in a somewhat churlish way. He said, if you think you know anything at all about me from reading these books that have been published, I got news for you. You know nothing about me. So he was a little prickly right off the bat, but he said, at the end of his letter, you know, write me back and we'll see
where this goes. And so I did. And this was the beginning of a correspondence that last for three years, and at some point during that year, nineteen eighty six, we began having occasional phone conversations, and I mean, I remember during those phone conversations, Gasey came across as very kind of low key, sounded like a blue collar kind
of guy, easy to talk with. But one thing that really sticks in my mind because it was noteworthy for what it taught me about Gasey, and then I later learned it had more brought had broader applications than just Gaysey's personality. He sent me something that he called it the Polish College Entrance Exam, and it was a series of little puzzles called drudles, and he acted like everyone in the world world knew what a drudal was but me,
but I didn't. But what a drudl is is a little visual representation of some kind that stands for like a slogan or a saying or something. And the challenge is to find out what it stands for. And so he sent me it was a piece of paper divided into a grid with maybe twenty little squares, and in each of those squares was a drudal and I was supposed to figure out what each one of them stood for.
And with a little assistance from my wife. I got almost all of them, I think, and Gasey said, next time we talk on the phone, let's go through the entrance exam, as he called it. So we did. Next time we talked on the phone, he said, you know, let's go through your answers to the entrance exam. And one of the items on there, it had a horizontal line. Above the horizontal line was the word ground, and then
under the horizontal line were six footprints. So it wasn't difficult to figure out that it stood for six feet underground, right, And I came up with that pretty easily, And I remember thinking, you know, this is a guy who had twenty six bodies buried in the crawl space underneath his house. That's just an odd thing to make into a joke. So or we're going through these over the phone, I came to that one, and as soon as I said six feet underground, Gasey chortled and said, that's a cute one.
And I didn't say anything because I didn't want to push him. I was sensitive to him not wanting to bail out on the correspondence. I didn't challenge him. But then about a week later, in a letter, I said, I got to be honest with you when we were going through that entrance exam and I came to that six feet under item, and you said, that's a cute one. That made me uncomfortable given the facts of your case.
And he went crazy. He acted like any suggestion that there was a relationship between that and the facts of his case was preposterous, and he said, I think we need to stop corresponding right now. If you're going to challenge me and make me feel like I'm being interrogated, I think we need to stop this correspondence right now. But then at the end of the letter, he said, it's up to you whether we continue, and you know,
he agreed to let's just put that behind us. But I had learned from that that he was very prickly quick to get his back up when challenged. And later on when I made two different visits to see him in Illinois, two days each visit, so four days and roughly twenty hours all together. And one of many things stick in my mind from the time that I spent with him in person, but one of them that sticks in my mind most vividly is we were talking about the victims in his case, these young boys and men
who he was found guilty of killing. As far as he would go was to tell me that he knew something about five of them. The other ones, he said, lots of people had keys to that house. There were the police didn't investigate other people. Blah blah, blah blah blah. He could have gone on days about how he was persecuted and the police had done an inadequate investigatory job
and so on. But we were talking one day and I was pushing him gently about the five that he said he knew something about, and like, I asked him about one of the ones. He told me he knew something about it, and he said, yeah, you know, he worked for me. His mother wanted me to help him get off drugs, and I was trying to do that. But you know, he was a wild kid and had all kinds of problems. And I said, yeah, but didn't he end up in your call space? How did that happen?
And Gasey said, well, I can't get into that. My attorney won't let me talk about that. And at about that juncture in the conversation, he says, you know what, Jeff, I've got pictures of every one of those kids who
they say I kill back in my cell. And he positioned his hands as you had positioned your hands if you were fanning out a deck of playing cards, and he said, I look at the pictures of those kids, and they are no more real to me than And that day he had brought a painting out of the Dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that he was hoping I would purchase, and it was leaning into the wall and he suddenly said he hesitated, like he didn't know how to finish that sense, and then he said,
they are no more real to me than the cartoon figures in that painting. And by the way, that painting showing the dwarfs next to the opening to a mine, had a shovel in the bottom left hand corner. So that was a moment with Gacy that I've never forgot.
You asked him about his guilt and the murders, and he said it was all bs, even though you pointed out that he had confessed numerous times, including to his attorneys.
Yeah, he just kept stonewalling my questions about the crimes themselves. And I said, yeah, but you confess to these right, and he said, come on, Jeff, you're smarter than that. He said, now you're just going with all the speculation and the hypotheses and everything. All that's that served as
the foundation of the state's case against me. And I said, well, my understanding is you not only confessed multiple times to the police, but you confess to your own attorney and another attorney who was president at the time the night before your arrest. And Gasey said, I was on so many drugs at that time. Who knows what I might have said to my attorneys. And then he says, of the confessions to the police, shown show me the recording.
Where's the recording? And there's not one, which is I still don't really understand that, frankly, why no recording was made of his confessions. Apparently there were, there was more than one of them, but there doesn't exist a recording. And Gasey always leaned on that as kind of the
cornerstone of his case, that no such confession exists. He said, all you've got is the notes of those desk planes police officers, and you know that they wanted to clean the case up, so they just wrote what they wanted to write. I didn't confess.
He also tried to put it on former employees Michael Rossi and David Kram, until the point where you said, hey, that's enough, can we talk about your sexuality?
Yeah, I mean he was obsessed with Cram and Rossi. Well, I eventually shifted the discussion to his sexuality because that was something I wanted to talk with him about. And I had the sense that he could talk about Cram and Rossi all day and how they must have been involved. And I should say that I know there are people who are knowledgeable about the Gacy case who don't discount the possibility that Rossi and Cram were involved in some of these murders. They testified at its trial, they were
interviewed by the police. They were never charged, But I don't think it's an absolutely preposterous idea that they knew more than they ever admitted. But anyway, yeah, I mean gay Gaycy could go on and on about them, and then at one point I said, Okay, enough of that, let's can we talk about your sexuality?
And he denied being gay and described it as a sexual incorrectly, but he was basically describing that it didn't matter to him as long as he got off, So he was essentially bisexual by definition.
Yeah, yeah, by definition. I think by his use of the term asexual, which I told him I didn't really understand because that usually means none like a moral you know, not not following any moral code. But I think what he meant is, I don't really care like these people who I'm involved with in some kind of transactional sexual episode. You know, I don't care, like you said, if I get off, doesn't matter to me if it's a man
or a woman. So I think that's what he meant about by asexual, that I just don't care about the other person at all.
You describe in this book the incredible meetings you had with him, the two visits, and Casey's behavior at this opining on various subjects and just his know it all nature, but also that he always brought to these visits his notebook, his photo album, and the file with your name on it. But he also showed you letters from two prospective authors that were interested in his case.
He did. Yeah, he had a whole notebook full of things, And I asked him at one point, can we talk about some of the other people you've corresponded with and you've heard from and he said, yeah, we can talk about him. And he loved saying, you know, everybody wants to interview me. They want me on Good Morning America forty eight hours, sixty minutes. I'm not talking to any of those people. It's not up to me to correct all their mistakes. They dug their hole, now they can
live in it. So he loved sort of talking about how he turned down all of these people who were interested in his story. But the two that I think you're referring to that seemed to excite him the most was he showed me a letter from Oprah that I'm sure Oprah would be horrified to have seen the light of day. Yes, now, she was a young reporter in Chicago, popular but very you know, local, She was a regional, achieved nothing close to the fame and influence that she
would later receive. And she wrote Gacy a handwritten I don't know if fawning is too strong a word, but basically begging for his attention, you know, please let me be the one to interview you. And Gasey loved showing me the letter, loved reading it and the tone pointing out the tone of it, and then saying, you know, screw her. I don't need to talk to her. I'm
not going to talk with Oprah Winfrey. And then the other one was from Truman Capodi, who, of course you know, author of the famous in Cold Blood and the literary celebrity by that point, but Capodi had written him a very short letter wondering if Gacy would consider allowing him to write his life story. And again Gasey, you know, so grandio, so narcissistic, just love saying I'm not going to talk with that guy. Why would I let him write my life story?
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. We were continuing talking about your visit with John Wayne Gacy. How is it that you end up exiting from your correspondence and your visiting from John Wayne Gacy? Tell us about your last encounter, your last correspondence with him.
Well, I had gone to visit him a second time in nineteen eighty seven, and then in nineteen eighty eight, I had completed my coursework at Ohio State and my wife and I were relocating to Connecticut for a year where I was doing my one year predoctoral internship at a state psychiatric hospital, and I did continue corresponding with Gasey after our move, but I had set a goal for myself of completing my dissertation during that year, which was a lot of upcoming work. And I finally just
decided I had learned over time. And I don't know whether this is obvious, but corresponding with these people requires a fair amount of time and energy and emphasis on the word energy, and I just didn't have it anymore. With Gay. I was kind of weary. I'd heard his rationalizations and his expressions of aggrievement many many times by then, and I just had other things to occupy my time. I had spent the four days with him, and those
had been sobering experiences for me. In a way, I was green, and I didn't fully recognize how vulnerable I was at the time, but I recognized some degree of vulnerability.
I had decided I was not going to go back there again, though Gasey urged me to, And as I write in my book late later on, when I read the book of someone else who had had visits with Gasey much much closer to the time of Gasey's execution in nineteen ninety four, at a time when Gasey would have known that the gig was about up, that his appeals were over and he was going to be executed. Gasey behaved in a way that when I read about it, I thought, you know, I really put myself in harm's way.
There were no guards anywhere around during the entire time I spent with Gasey. We were very isolated and death row, and looking back, I know.
I was very vulnerable.
Could have gotten myself killed in a way that I didn't understand at the time. But Gasey, at the time of my visits to him, still held out some hope, no matter how fragile, that maybe he could get some relief through the appellate process at least have his death sentence reversed. So he was on his best behavior, she was not closer to the time of his execution.
You're right about what you are referring to, and that's Jason Moss. Unlike yourself, he decides to use a ploy to attract Gasey in correspondence and then ends up visiting him as well. That was the difference in the approach that you use used and he used to try to solicit Gasey and interview him well.
In a very deliberate way. And Moss was working under the advisorship of a well known psychologist named Jeffrey Coddler. He was in college in Las Vegas. But Moss's idea for an honors project was that he was he would posture as the ideal victim for a number of serial killers, and his eventual book, called The Last Victim, focuses mainly
on Gasey. But in writing to Gasey, he presented himself as a sexually confused member of a dysfunctional family, and Gasey took the bait right away, and before long they were trading pornographic fantasies. Gasey was encouraging him to initiate a sexual relationship with his younger brother, and when Moss went to visit Gasey, and of course I'm reading about all of this years after my encounters with Gasey, about oh five, six, seven years seven years after maybe well,
actually the book came even later. The Moss's contacts with Gasey were about seven years after mine. The book came a few years after that. But so I'm reading about this long after my contacts with Gasey. But when Moss goes to visit Gasey, Gasey, you know, greets him with a not immediately, but a little ways into their first day, with a torrent of verbal and emotional abuse and threatens to rape him and says he could do it and get away with it. The guards are nowhere near there.
They couldn't stop it. There's no way they'd be able to stop it before it happened. And at the end of that first day's visit, Gasey gave Moss a bracelet that he asked him to wear when he came back the next day, and he reached down into his pants and pulled a pair of bikini underwear out of his own underwear and gave it to Moss and told him
he wanted him to wear it the next day. And Moss told him he wore the bikini underwear, which he did not, but he did have the bracelet on when he went back to see him the next day, and you know, they were just short of It was either going to be a fight, and Moss was trained in martial arts, so he thought he was going to have
to fight Gasey. But Gasey you know, did things like when they shook hands, stroked the inside of his palm with his finger, went to kiss his neck at one point when he was standing behind Moss and again told him I'm going to lay you out and rape you in this space, and there's no one here who can stop it. And Moss was so freaked out. Eventually, a guard came at just the right time and stopped this. And I mean wasn't aware of it happening, but the
guard's arrival stopped Gacy. And then Moss was supposed to return for a third day and didn't do it because he was so totally freaked out by what occurred. And I was freaked out, frankly when I read that.
Yeah, it's an incredible story. Yeah, you take us to late nineteen ninety one now and a chapter you call The Sniper, tell us about your involvement with Thomas Lee Dillon and your role and consulting at this point in your career.
Well, by that time, I had obtained my PhD from Ohio State, but I was still very new in practice. I'd only been licensed for practice little over a year, as I recall, but I had given a talk to a group of a statewide group of mitigation specialists. And mitigation specialists are people who work with defense attorneys in death penalty cases. They collect records, they do family interviews. Their job is to basically assemble the information to help
the defense attorneys understand the backgrounds of their clients. And I had given a talk to this group of mitigation specialists and mentioned my contacts with Gacy and Bundy and Manson,
and so there was this highly publicized case. There were a series of sniper shootings in five different counties in the eastern part of Ohio, and they were fascinating because there was no indication that the shooter had had any interactions with the victims, most of them except for the first one who was shot at on the road side when he was jogging, but most of these were two three hundred feet off the road, killed with a high
powered rifle. And eventually the authorities in these different counties, who you know, were a little slow to communicate with one another initially and connect these crimes, but they eventually one of the murders took place on federal property, which brought the FBI in, and then a task force was assembled and they announced that they had decided there was a serial killer at work in eastern Ohio, and the case got a tremendous amount of publicity, and then eventually
they arrested a man named Thomas Lee Dillon, who was a twenty year employee of the Canton Water Department. He was married, lived in a very well kept up house in a rural suburb south of Canton. He had a ten year old son, a group of friends who he played tennis with sometimes. And once Dylan was arrested, the couple people who had attended this presentation I had given spoke with his attorneys and said, you know, this guy hasn't been in practice very long, but he's got a
history of dealing with serial killers. Jeff Smalden would be a good defense expert. So they applied for funding from the court and I was appointed as the defense psychological expert and spent a fair amount of time with Dylan. I didn't do all of the things I would have liked to do as the defense expert, because the case ended when Dylan finally pled guilty to five counts of aggravated murder, which obviated the need for a trial, and
so I never testified. But before that happened. You know, I did a fair amount of work on the case.
He had originally come to the attention of the stifled authorities when he contacted the newspaper, and then there was some clues that he left. But he also, during his incarceration, was infatuated with a journalist and gave her some information.
Correct on both counts. Dan I believe she was acting on the recommendation of some law enforcement officials, But the mother of one of his victims, the youngest of his victims, reasoned that there was a good chance that he was following local news coverage of the case, which turned out to be correct, and she wrote a series of letters to the newspaper which she intended as bait, hoping that he would you make himself known, and he did. He
couldn't resist. He eventually answered her letter and heard her son's name. The victim had been Jamie Paxton, and he announced himself right away, I'm the murderer of Jamie Paxton. And then he went on to sort of pontificate, how you know, given the technical definition of a serial killer, I guess I am one. And he said I thought no more of killing Jamie Paxton than I would of shooting a bottle at the dump, you know, just a sort of deliberately cruel, provocative statement intended for the mother
of this victim. And then one thing that really got the attention of the authorities. And again I see it as that serial killer's tease these guys. Dylan was very smart, IQ of about one hundred and forty five. He was a graduate of Ohio State's journalism School, which we'll get to in a second. But he, you know, he thinks he's smarter than the authorities, and he loves this cat
and mouse game of hiding in plain sight. So he embeds in his letter the statement, Okay, now you know some information about what happened to your son, but you still don't know the who, what, where, when and why? You know journalism terms, right, and like who talks that way? And the authority said, what is this? You know, why did he say that? And then later, of course, when they learned he was a graduate of Ohio State's journalism school, it made sense that he would have said, but you
don't know the who, where, why, when? How So I think Dylan enjoyed himself when he wrote that letter. Yeah. Then eventually when he actually had just pled guilty to these five counts of aggravated murder, and he had become infatuated with this local newscaster from Steubenville, Ohio, had a picture of her up in his cell even and she had requested an interview with him, and he agreed, and so they met at the jail where he was being
kept in Caldwell, Ohio. And I have a tape of that interview, and there are some fascinating things in there that stick out of my mind. But one of them in particular, and it sort of harkens back to the anecdote I told about Gasey where he says, those kids are no more real to me than and he points to the picture of the dwarfs and says, than those cartoon characters. This woman interviewing Dylan says, so when you're lying in bed at night, do you think of these
people you killed? And Dylan just kind of got sort of like the question didn't quite land with him. He got sort of a confused look on his face, and then he shrugs and says, Nah, not really. I don't think of them as individuals. I just think of them as a group. And I remember thinking, what a strange thing to say, and he didn't even show any sign that he understood that most people would view that as a bizarre thing to say. I don't think of them as individuals.
You're right that he was very cooperative in talking about his formative years, in his psychological development, his fantasies. But he also you noted that he thought he wanted to be known as such a unique killer because he had no motive.
Seemingly exactly he would if he said once, He said at least ten times while he and I were talking, has there ever been a crime like this before? Has there ever been a murder like this before? Has there ever been anything in Ohio like this before? No relationship with the victims, you know, they're all strangers. He clearly was thinking in terms of a unique niche for himself.
And at one point, because I knew that a lot of these people who commit serial murder are students of other serial murder cases, I tried to find out how much he knew about other cases and how interested he was, and I said, so, do you read much about serial murder? And his initial response was no, not really, And then before long it became clear to me that not only
did he read about him. He was sort of a walking encyclopedia about them, and he said all kinds of interesting things about cases that he had read about, including we were talking about the Leopold and Loeb case, you know, the two brilliant young men near Chicago who set out to commit the perfect crime and screwed up by leaving behind a pair of eyeglasses. But Dylan, after we talked about that case for a while, he said, you know, that idea of murder as a mental exercise, that's something
that I can relate to. And like you said, that idea of the killer sort of abstracted from the case, no motive, no relationship with the victims, no contact with the victims. That was attractive to Dylan, and he admitted, as much, you know, murder is a mental exercise.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, finally, let's talk about as you do. August nineteen eighty seven, a former nursing assistant, Donald Harvey, led guilty to killing thirty seven patients and admitted he killed many more, and he committed the vast majority of murders during appointment at two Cincinnati area hospitals. You right for you. The Harvey story was irresistible. Tell us why.
When I was in graduate school in nineteen eighty seven, when Donald Harvey led guilty to these I believe thirty seven murders and told authorities that he had committed many more than that, and it was irresistible to me. He had allegedly committed most of his murders at two hospitals that were not far down I seventy one from where I lived in Columbus, and I knew at the time that he was being held at the maximum security Lucasville Prison.
So I decided to reach out to him in the same way I had ted Bundy and then John Wayne Gacy, thinking that there were probably some things that I could learn from him. And he didn't respond to that letter at all, So I kind of filed it to the side, and I thought, well, I was in graduate school at the time, and I thought maybe there'll be another opportunity.
And so later, after I had been in practice, I believe about four years, this was after my involvement in the Thomas Lee Dillon case, I decided to have another go at Harvey. And by then I knew the importance of working through an inmate's attorney if they still had an attorney of record. So I contacted William Whalen, who was based in Cincinnati and who I knew had been his attorney at the level of his at the time
of his trial. And I asked, mister Whalen, do you think Donald Harvey would be willing to talk with me? And if he would be, would you be willing to sponsor such an interview? And he said yeah, I would have no objection to it at all, as long as you allowed me to be present. And I said I would have no difficulty with that at all. And he said, let me talk with Donald and get back to you.
So he did about two weeks later, and he said, yeah, he's willing to talk with you, and he gave me a few dates, so I picked one and we arranged a time to meet. Harvey was no longer at Lucasville, the maximum security prison. He was at Warren Correctional Facility, also in southern Ohio. So I met mister Whalen there and bend about three hours with Harvey. And I call that chapter of my book a contented Killer, because I
mean Harvey basked in the attention. Clearly loved talking about these murders, never expressed an iota of remorse for any of them, even the most gruesome that he described with the matter of fact manner that most people would use to describe putting together the ingredients for a meal. He was very, very boyish looking, totally unthreatening seeming young man who just spoke with extraordinary candor and casualness about these many lives he had taken.
You said he had an uncanny memory, and especially about the details of those murders he did.
He would even talk about these occurred in healthcare facilities, and in some cases he could recall the room number of the person that he killed. He occasionally became confused about the method of killing. He would say, you know, to be honest, I can't I can't be sure if I smothered him with his pillow, or if I injected poison into one of the IV lines. He could occasionally become confused about that. But yeah, he had an uncanny memory for little details.
Getting away with so many murders for so long. Even though some coworkers did suspect him, he didn't know that he felt, as he writes, and he says, he told you he felt invincible, didn't.
He He did, and he loved that sense of power and control. And even though he presented with his very moderate temperament, the smile seldom left his face during the three hours I spent with him, and he talked about these murders, but he clearly reveled in being able to put something over on people with more education than he had, more authority in the hospital hierarchy, and he believed it was unfair that he would have to cover on weekends
for some of these physicians who were out golfing. And he loved the idea that he could get away with this, and that, you know, as you said, even though some of the employees began to suspect him, he didn't know that. He thought he was on top of the world and nobody was smart, no one was as smart as he was and could detect him.
In the end of this book, you talk about how you decided from an early age to live venturously, and you say it was no surprise that you wound up being a forensic psychologist. Tell us about your track record, the murders that you investigated and the cases that you were involved with, well, I ended up.
Being involved as a consultant on close to three hundred death penalty cases. I also worked on many other kinds of cases, both criminal and civil, competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility aka sanity, sex offender risk assessment cases. I was the courts expert in well over one thousand child
custody cases. And when I say that I decided at an early age to live venturously, well, what I mean by that is that I always was straining against the outer boundaries of the world my very conservative parents had in mind for me. And I don't mean that as criticism of my parents at all, but I just was, you know. I say in the book how I looked forward to episodes of outer Limits and Twilight Zone because they hinted at the possibility that those boundaries could be
pushed back. And throughout my life I made a lot of choices that involved a degree of risk and speculation on my part about how things were going to play out, and dealt with a lot of uncertainty. But I tried to live venturously in the sense that I sought out uncommon experiences that I thought would be edifying to me in some way, and they would involve a level of excitement for me as well.
In closing, tell us about how the murder case of Patty maddox and Joyce McFadden and your investigation further of that case really led you somehow to your calling as a forensic psychologist.
Well, that case changed My life changed. It's strange how something happens, and in retrospect you can see how everything else changed as a result of that. As a result of those murders, I decided to leave the field of healthcare administration and pursue my PhD and a career in
forensic psychology. The thing that I haven't mentioned about that case that sort of played into my fascination with are inability often to make correct judgments about people based on the kinds of superficial cues that govern most of our
interpersonal relationships. After the murder of Joyce McFadden and Patty Maddox, I remember attending the memorial service at the hospital for the two women and shaking the hands of the two apparently bereft husbands who appeared shattered and probably still in shock from the murders, and offering my condolences. And I'm going to focus on Bill Maddox because I have more to say about him. It won't take me long. But he was known to be very conservative, a churchgoer, Baptist.
He and his wife had a four month old daughter. There was no reason, at least at least no reason I knew of to suspect that he could possibly have had anything to do with the murder of his wife. But about you know, two and a half years later, when I hear about the shootout in Florida involving Bill Maddox, and I realized that the person all of us thought Bill Maddox was was a very far cry from the
person he really was. You know, that really helped sort of solidify the questioning part of my journey, where I wondered, you know, who are these people and how can we pick them out from all the other people around us?
Tell us about your decision to finally write this book and have it published.
Well, the idea of writing a book had been percolating in my mind for quite a while, probably from maybe a decade into my career as a forensic psychologist, because I knew that I had accumulated a lot of uncommon experiences that I I hoped I would be able to relate in a way that would engage an audience of readers.
Back then, I didn't have in mind just writing a book about killers, like I thought about longstanding interest in fundamentalist snake candlers, sideshow performers and the people who flocked to see them, and the interesting dynamic between performer and audience, and a lot of just unusual things, kind of pockets of American culture that had intrigued me at various times.
And when I finally in earnest began to write this book, and it was around the time of the onset of the pandemic where that kind of created the scene where I was able to find the discipline and time to really work on this book. I decided I had too much material if I used that kind of wide range lens lens to look at the experiences of my life, and that's when I decided to narrow my focus and specifically deal with my five decades of conversations and interactions with killers.
It certainly is an extraordinary experience interviewing the people that you do and this book as a result. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about your book. The Beast was not me One Forensic Psychologist, Five decades of Conversations with Killers. For those that might want to find out more information about this book, do you have a website and do you do any social media?
I do have a website. It's Jeffrey J. E. F F R E Y Smolden sm A L L d O N dot com. There's a lot of background information there, a lot of information about this book. Not realactive on soccial media, though I do participate on Instagram and Facebook, so your listeners who may be interested will be able to find me there as well as at my website. My book is available on Amazon through Barnes and Noble, also directly from Black Line and Publishing which published it.
Thank you so much, Jeffrey L. Smaalden. The Beast was not me. One Forensic Psychologist, Five decades of Conversations with Killers. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks very much, Dan, Thank you,