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The Megyn Kelly Show
Missing Plane MH370 Mystery, Horrifying Chris Watts Case, D.C. Sniper Saga - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode
04:38:44
Megyn brings a mega-episode of past "true crime" shows every Sunday in March, beginning with the missing plane MH370 mystery, the horrifying Chris Watts case, and the D.C. Sniper saga.
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Megan Kelly show live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East. Hey everyone, I'm Meyen Kelly. Welcome to today's bonus Sunday true crime episode. We've got some news coming in in the world of MK true crime. More on that next week. So all month we're going to be bringing you a Sunday mega episode featuring some MK show true crime coverage. Today's includes in depth features on the missing plane, MH370, the horrifying, horrifying Chris Watts case. Once you hear about that case, you never forget it and the DC Sniper saga. All right, here it is. Hope you enjoy the program and we will see you Monday. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show and the final day of our hot crime summer week. Today we investigate the mystery of MH370, the missing plane. You may think you know this story, but you do not know it like this. Oh my gosh. We're going to take you from takeoff to the controversial search and investigation with famed writer, author and journalist William Longavicha. In addition to his journalism, he's also an aviation expert. He was a professional pilot for many years before turning to journalism, and he has researched and investigated the MH370 findings more than pretty much any other journalist, including those involved with that recent Netflix special. And we're going to get to that, too. We will try to get to the bottom once and for all about what happened, where that plane is. And we will get into the head of that pilot, Set the stage. Because I watched this whole special, you know, on Netflix about what happened to the plane. I was excited. I was like, okay, I want my answers. I walked away frustrated and kind of angry that I had been led down a bunch of paths that seemed equally unreasonable and led to trust people who turned out to be, to me, kind of quacky and, and didn't get any answers. There wasn't an answer. So is there an answer? I mean, is there a better place to go for what not definitively, but most likely happened to MH370?
- [03:27]
C
Yes, there is completely an answer. It's indisputable. In fact, the answer is indisputable. The motive is a different question. The why is the question. The what is is, is indisputable.
- [03:42]
B
So let's start there. What, what happened to MH370?
- [03:47]
C
This airplane took off. It was in, in 2014, March, and at night, just after midnight out of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. So Air Malaysia, they were going to Beijing, about a six hour flight straight on up the coast of Asia basically to Beijing. And after about, you know, after leveling off, a few minutes after leveling off, I got over the South China Sea, disappeared from radar. This does occasionally happen. It usually means there's a crash which happens immediately. In this case, there was no crash. It disappeared from radar. And for reasons we can discuss, we know that it kept flying not toward Beijing, but essentially 90 degrees to that path and then in the roughly opposite direction toward the South Pole, out over the Indian Ocean for about seven hours. And that doesn't fit any profile that any of us have ever seen before with an airplane accident, whether it's a terrorist act or explosion or a system failure. It just, it disappeared after a very, very strange flight, an enigmatic flight that was, we were able to piece together, however conclusively. And at the end of that flight, it ran out of gas and went into the deep ocean in a remote part of the Indian Ocean and has not yet been found, period.
- [05:18]
B
It basically was on its way northeast toward Beijing. It turned around, it crossed back over, and then it went south over the Indian Ocean. And this is what you say happened. And there are data points that support that theory, the most important being the Inmarsat data. Right. Can you explain what that is?
- [05:39]
C
Yes, I would say that the most important initial data points is primary radar. Right. So that either military radar or just raw radar, that's the. And that showed within a few days, it clearly showed that the airplane turned west across the, the Melee Peninsula and then went northwest up the Straits of Malacca, around the top of Indonesia, and then south from there into the depths of the Indian Ocean. It was on radar for a long time after making the first turn was or was not the first thing.
- [06:15]
B
It was or was not. It was. Or wake up, it was okay, it was.
- [06:21]
C
It was not on prime. It was on primary radar. It was not on normal air traffic control computer enhanced transponder based secondary radar, which is the normal air traffic control radar, carries a lot of data with it. It was on the kind of radar that the military uses for air defense reasons and also that lies underneath normal air traffic control radar. So it was an unenhanced raw target. And it. That is, it was the first thing, no matter what, it stayed, I think I'm going to say it was in the air of being seen by some form of radar for about an hour after making the first crazy silent turn, off course from Beijing. As it proceeded then around the top of Indonesia. It then disappeared from radar range, normal radar range, both Thai and Indonesian, let alone Malaysian military. And then the. But at about the same time that that occurred, that it was being lost from normal radar. It. It's complicated to explain this, but a series of electronic handshakes began. And these handshakes are related to an obscure communication device in the ceiling of the cabin of the 777. This was a triple seven Boeing that is responsible for some forms of communication, largely entertainment stuff and other things, reports to maintenance. So satellite based. And those handshakes where either the airplane was or the ground based satellite, the ground base of the satellite system was trying to establish communications, always unsuccessfully. But the attempt to establish communications carried with it whispers of content with hints of location and of direction. And in the end of a final violent dive, that the use of that information, which was basically interpreted in London, in Marsad as the company was, was revolutionary. That information never been used before. There were two forms of it, these handshakes. And they were able to. In Marsat in London, they specifically were able to derive distance from the satellite. And there were, I think seven handshakes may be a little wrong on that, but roughly seven handshakes, each of which gave. It gave a distance from the satellite and an arc. And then also through a Doppler effect, if you know what I mean, distortion of frequencies. And I'm simplifying it a little bit related to the speed of the airplane and problems with the wobbling satellite. They were able to in Marsat was able in London to derive directional information or at least turn information. So the turns were seen because it. It warped sort of like a train going by, you know, a Doppler effect. It warped the signals and a train going by. I'm talking audio, a train whistle, anything like that. That's, of course, the famous Doppler effect. We all learned about it in high school, but it was happening electronically out over the Indian Ocean. This was never. This is revolutionary stuff. And it was. It was out of desperation that these brilliant people in London realized they had real information. They could go back into the records during those hours and derive from that satellite a lot of information of where the airplane was at any given time or at each given handshake and where it was turning. So that's what I'm talking about.
- [10:25]
B
That's fascinating. So let's start back at the first kind of radar that you said picked up the plane. You said it wasn't the normal air traffic control radar. Now, why do we know why that was, that it wasn't being picked up on the normal air traffic control radar?
- [10:45]
C
Well, because the airplane's transponder was turned off. Whether. If we're talking about a simple, simple, single failure, this is not uncommon. It's why airplanes typically have two transponders. I mean, transponder failures are not uncommon. And, you know, it's not very exotic technology, that kind of transponder. It's similar to the traffic, the total transponders you have in your car, Easy pass or something like that. So the transponder transmits all kinds of information about the airplane, the flight number, where it's going, et cetera, et cetera, altitude. It piggybacks on the data coming in with raw primary radar. So we know that the transponder turned off. Did it turn itself off or did someone turn it off? Well, given that it's totally unrelated to communications, it happened seconds after communications stopped. And given that it is totally unrelated to which way the airplane's flying, it happened at the same time that the airplane made its first radical crazy turn. We know it was turned off. It didn't turn itself off. These are independent. These would be independent issues. So, yeah, it's a logical deduction.
- [12:11]
B
What about the second transfer? I mean, were they. Were they both. Were they both turned off because you say there's a backup? They both would have been turned off.
- [12:18]
C
Yeah, well, that's. No, they weren't. You can't turn off the primary. I mean, the primary is what the military uses to see pieces of metal in the sky. Right. They don't rely on transponders to say when the enemy is invading their airspace. So.
- [12:32]
B
Right.
- [12:32]
C
Primary transponder. You can't turn it off. It's just Going to pick you up. And in fact the Malaysian air traffic control has a baseline primary radar, but they didn't look at it. We're talking levels of incompetence here. Right. Which is part of the story of what, what happened here in terms of the disappearance. The military very quickly said, admitted basically out of Penang on the peninsula there where they have a fish, a fighter base that they, they were watching it or at least they said they were watching it, they should have been watching it. And they said, well we knew it was a, a, we knew what the airplane was, so we didn't bother to, to make anything out of it. We didn't send any interceptors up to find out what's going because we knew it was MH370. So who cares? Well that, that falls apart in a hurry because the search, the initial search took place in the South China Sea, totally the wrong place, as if the airplane had gone down on course for Beijing and the military. So that is just completely not believable. It very quickly was obviously a cover up which is completely believable in Malaysia. Political embarrassment, corruption, brutality, whatever. Dysfunctional government, dysfunctional military. They were either asleep and there's some indication they may actually have been asleep or they were just incompetent. The military was in one way or another was tracking this thing right along and didn't do anything about it. Why ask them? I've tried. You don't get very far with that kind of question in Malaysia. So the primary radar was showing it and, and it was, let's say it was both the military radar and the civilian primary radar. The military fessed up a lot sooner than the civilian did to having had primary radar on this machine on this airplane. But they came up with all kinds of crazy excuses why they didn't do anything about it. So it does, we don't know. I mean truly they could have been been asleep.
- [14:57]
B
Is there a record of it? So we know it did in fact appear on the radar and the real question is just why didn't they do anything about it? They were asleep, they didn't care, they were incompetent. But do we know it did in fact appear on their radar?
- [15:10]
C
Yeah, we do. I mean that's, the images exist and not the full radar record, but they, they, they certainly exist and they, they were pretty widely disseminated. Yes, we do. There it is. They, they provided images that showed it but then provided false explanations for their inaction.
- [15:30]
B
Got it. And this is all relevant to what I think is your belief as to why this plane did what it did. And that relates to the pilot and that explains if it relates to an intentional decision by the pilot, why there might have been a cover up, why the Malaysian government might have misled us. I mean, it really does explain a lot if this was an intentional downing of an aircraft by the pilot. But to this day the Malaysians are saying that's not what this was. That wasn't it. So let's talk about, before we get into the pilot, let's just talk about the end of the flight so we can take the viewers and the listeners there. Then it turns south over the Indian Ocean, which is a bear of an ocean. My God. God. The, the videotapes I've seen of the retrieval efforts they did make, the Australians did, the Chinese did. There was, there were a few efforts to actually see if they could find debris someplace in the Indian Ocean.
- [16:32]
C
More than three years of efforts by the, primarily by the Australians. Yeah, and $100 million on that.
- [16:39]
B
And we've got some videotape of those boats out there trying to do it. And it was just, it was chilling to me because the waves they dealt with like that is a scary ocean and they were on it for a long time. And that's where we believe this aircraft wound up. But one of the mysteries is in this post 911 world in which this plane may have been taken down, why wouldn't the passengers have fought? Why, why would they have allowed. Somebody might have realized at some point it was making weird turns. They, they were well past the number of hours it would have taken them to get to Beijing by the time we believe the plane went down. So what, what happened to the passengers? What do you think?
- [17:22]
C
It's, no one really knows, but it's because of the amount of time that transpired, it's likely that they were incapacitated in one way or another very early in the event. Right. So after, right after the first left turn turning away from Beijing, we know the airplane climbed to 40,000ft. It had been at 35,000ft. 40,000ft was the, pretty much the ceiling of the airplane performance ceiling at that time, that weight that night. So they climbed as high as they could go. And it's, it's, I think there would be general agreement. Well, there's a lot of disagreement here because people have all kinds of crazy theories, but reasonable people think that the, the passengers were incapacitated and actually probably killed by depressurizing the airplane. Very easy to do, you depression, you throw a switch, you depressurize the cabin, the people basically go to sleep and, you know, masks fall, but they put them on, but they're no good at that altitude. Those are. Masks are good only for riding a short descent down to higher pressures in the lower altitudes, 40,000ft. The mask is really not going to do you a normal mask. But in the cockpit there are four pressure masks which are different. Right. They pressurize the oxygen flow to the lungs. So you have a sort of a mini pressurized airplane. If you put that mask on, they're quick donning masks. So slap those on, depressurize the airplane, everybody in the back dies within minutes. A peaceful death. Not screaming.
- [19:06]
B
How, how, how would it be a peaceful death?
- [19:09]
C
Well, because people go to extreme hypoxia. People go to sleep. They don't, they don't, they're not gasping for breath really. They don't feel that they're suffocating. Yeah, hypoxia. So it, it seems, I think many people would agree, that the airplane was depressurized at roughly the same time that the entire electrical system was shut down, which is another matter that, and this is all very closely associated with the first left turn away from Beijing and a short, a tight turn, high G load turn and a climb to 40,000ft.
- [19:50]
B
If you were going to depressurize the aircraft with a switch, why would you need to go up to 40,000ft?
- [19:56]
C
You don't. So, you know, that's like overkill, but it makes it happen faster. So. Yeah. And you also don't need to make such a tight turn. We know that that initial turn away from Beijing was not flown on autopilot. It was too tight for an autopilot. It was flown by hand and it was. Somebody was flying that airplane and made that turn. It was a tight turn, steep bank angle, high bank angle, hygiene.
- [20:23]
B
Why, why would that be the choice?
- [20:26]
C
I don't know.
- [20:28]
B
Okay.
- [20:28]
C
I don't know.
- [20:28]
B
That doesn't tell you anything.
- [20:30]
C
Not entirely rational, obviously.
- [20:35]
B
So then we go out over the Indian Ocean and we go south. For how many hours was it over the Indian Ocean?
- [20:42]
C
Well, the whole flight lasted what, seven hours, six hours, I think probably five hours over the Indian Ocean, something like that. Yeah. I'm gonna guess about. I have to go back and look at my notes and all that. That's been a long time for me, but several hours, actually, over the Indian Ocean.
- [21:01]
B
That's a long time, by the way. Right. So is there anything to be gleaned from that?
- [21:09]
A
No.
- [21:10]
C
I mean, why would if, if a guy is suicidal and Intent on killing himself and all his passengers. Why would he wait so long to do it? That's totally unknown. I have a theory which is nothing, nothing at all solid. Is, is. Is that the. If indeed the captain did this, and I think he did okay, why waltz around this. His name's Zahari. He may have a. Having committed to this flight path that he presumably actually had thought through in advance and practiced on a flight simulator, that he, that he found himself in a quandary that he actually knew he couldn't turn back. For one thing, he probably killed the entire plane load of passengers. And also he just deviated, you know, from the course to Beijing that he couldn't go back home ever again. He knew that he had to die, but he didn't want to die. Maybe or he was savoring the last moments of his life. I don't know. It's always struck me is that that long flight, the length of that flight after he made that last turn out over the Indian Ocean and then flew pretty much straight for five hours. Let's say that he was in a. Some kind of an emotional or philosophical quandary. I, I want to. I don't want to. I want to. I don't want to. And it just went on until he ran out of gas. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it. And finally he let it do it to him. But I, I don't know that. And I think I know that nobody knows that. That that's. Why would he take five hours? Why not just do what every other suicidal pilot does? And there are quite a few have been around you a fairly stand, not standard, but an occasional occurrence. You push the airplane into the ground right away, within minutes. You don't wait around. So he waited around for five hours. So I, I cannot explain that.
- [23:22]
B
It's incredibly eerie to think about that man up there potentially flying that aircraft with dead bodies filling up the cabin, dead at his hand.
- [23:31]
C
Just get the door. He's the door shut. He doesn't need to worry about that.
- [23:36]
B
But he knew, is my point. He knew it was on his soul. It was on his moral conscience. But what about the co pilot under this theory?
- [23:43]
C
Well, now you're bringing that up. So yes, it's inconceivable that the co pilot was involved in this. He was a young man, he was getting married. He, he was 24 years old, 27 years old. Fareek Hamid. He, he, he was riding high because to be a co pilot, a first officer on a Boeing 777 in Malaysia. In Malaysia is a really big deal in society. So he was just riding as high as you can ride almost in Malaysia and he was about to get married and all this. He was not political, he was not religious. He. There was no motive conceivable for this guy. We know he was not involved in this so we know that. That he had to be eliminated one way or another. Now the obvious one is to lock that the captain locked him out. We've seen this before in the German wings accident in, in Europe the co pilot locked the captain out when he went to the toilet. When we've seen variations of the lockout theme. Whether you get yourself alone in the cabin and then you crash the airplane, if that's your, you know, desire. I, I don't know how long we can go on this but after I wrote this piece a man approached me, a man I've known for a long time. I guess I should not name him but he's one of the preeminent human factors accident investigators in the world and very well known and very respected
- [25:35]
A
and
- [25:35]
C
had a private conversation with me and he said that he was doing studies on. He was doing studies on voice analysis of the radio transmissions. Now remember, the cockpit voice recorder was never found so all they had to go on for human factors with voice were the radio transmissions. I had noticed and I wrote about the fact that the captain, he was handling the radios and the co pilot was handling the flying of the airplane or managing the co pilot the, the autopilot and totally normal on departure from Kuala Lumpur. That the captain's Zahari his radio transmissions were weird. He was making unnecessary unusual radio transmissions. I, I noticed it and from the transcripts I never heard them but from the transcripts you could tell what do you do that this is reporting level when he shouldn't have reported level reporting level again when he. There was no reason he hadn't changed his altitude. He was just then blowing some the final response where he should have read back a frequency and didn't do it. Why I made a note of that and didn't have an answer when I wrote the piece. This highly respected man approached me a little bit later and he had been on the. Associated with the investigation in Qualapore and he said that he and a partner have been doing studies for years about measuring stress in people's voices and largely with either cockpit voice recorders or with radio transmissions. And I'm going to get this wrong, so don't quote me on this but what he said to me and I have every reason to believe him, a very, very sober guy, is that they know, they have found that as people. People's stress goes up in airplane accidents and also in shipping, certain shipping accidents, that you can measure changes in the. The timber, I think, is the word, the tone of the voice, it gets higher, okay, as the stress goes up. And also that the. The language becomes more and more confused. So the first level is normal, say baseline normal radio transmission. The second level, you. It's. It's getting a little bit higher. This level. Let's call that level two. The third level is. It's getting higher and also confused, grammatically confused, like they're not really talking in normal sentences. And the fourth level is something. And the fifth level is just howling screams as people are dying. This guy's listened to more people dying on tape than probably anybody in the world. And he also told me that it was. That it's. 90% of pilots who die in a cockpit are screaming when they die. 10% aren't so. And they. He doesn't know why, but 10% stay cool. And I know certain situations, certain Brazilian flight, for instance, where the Brazilian pilots just stayed cool, cool, cool, but most of them scream. And in the very end, in this flight, he measured and he had a graft and showed me the graphs, the changes in Sahari's voice and radio transmissions from the ground where he was talking to ground control at the airport through the takeoff to the point of leveling off to the first unnecessary transmissions that I had noticed were strange. But okay, I don't know why. He. Maybe he was getting sloppy and it went up the scale. It got to a level, you know, three or something. He, he was, he was mixing his language. His voice was really high. Zahari. And it peaked right after, soon after the initial level off at 37,000ft. And then as the minutes went by, there were another, say seven or 10 minutes before the airplane turned and disappeared. His subsequent radio transmissions began to descent, that began to normalize. Never got normal. On the basis of that, though, you know, you can't prove it at all. He believes that what happened to the co pilot was that the captain attacked the co pilot right after living off. Now, there are various ways that you can kill a guy sitting in the cockpit with you, including, you know, act crash axes and whatever it is. So he believes that he had. Has audible evidence of an attack that occurred in the cockpit. I don't know if that's true. He doesn't know if that's true. He's a sober guy. I'm a sober guy, so it's interesting. It does make sense. We don't know exactly what happened to the first officer, the co pilot. We, but we do know he wasn't up there sucking his thumb when the other guy was flying for seven hours like that. I mean, he was incapacitated too. Did the captain send him back to the bathroom? Did he go back by himself? That would be unusual because they had just taken off from Kuala Lumpur and they hadn't been in the air very long and get locked out by the captain. Was it a lockout? We don't know. But if he was away from the cockpit, he wouldn't have had pressure oxygen. He would have been just like the passengers and the flight attendants, susceptible to depressurization, we don't know.
- [31:42]
B
All he needed to do was come up with some excuse to get him out of the cockpit and then he would have been just like the other passengers. Can I just clarify something, William? You. Did you say that this gentleman picked up on radio transmissions that happened after they signed off, you know, Malaysia Flight 370. Good night. They happened after that?
- [32:03]
C
No, before. Before Good night. That, that was the last radio transmission. It, these are radio transmissions that started on the ground call that baseline normal and ended with a final sign off and they peaked in their strangeness and the stress level that could be measured in the voice and the changes in the voice right after the airplane leveled off at 37,000.
- [32:29]
B
Wow. So he could have, it's possible under this theory that he could have killed the co pilot before he even signed off with air traffic control.
- [32:37]
C
Yeah, I'm not tabloid. I don't think you are either. And so, you know, we veer too easily into the tabloid territory here. But it's, it is a possible explanation and I, I mentioned it because I have such deep respect for the guy who brought it up to me, who made a special trip to see me to explain this to me with evidence. And I, I've long, long known and respected him. And you can't get more sober than this guy is. He's not a crazy in any way. He's very serious.
- [33:17]
B
Let's talk about possible motive and what they found at Zahari's home because the flight simulator made a lot of news. The picture of him sitting in front of his home flight simulator. And they did find a route on there that looks like this one, I'm told, but they also found routes, you know, hundreds of routes on there. And you know, there's been a debate about how much we can really tell from the fact that that one route may have been on his flight simulator and also what was going on in his life. You know, the Malaysians would tell us this is a happy man, well adjusted man. This is not a depressed guy. There's no reason to think he had it in him to kill 239 passengers just on a whim. So can you speak a little bit about what we know of him outside of the aircraft?
- [34:08]
C
Let's take the simulator first. We know that he had the simulator. He was a simulator buff, he was an airplane buff. He was also an Internet buff and he was in chat groups and social media and blah blah, blah. But he, he was running hundreds of flights. Was the Microsoft simulator, but a fancy setup. It wasn't a full motion simulator, but it was a pretty fancy setup. Invested thousands of dollars into this thing and he played with it a lot. So there were hundreds of flights, as you say, that were recorded by that simulator and then rather clumsily erased, but they were kind of all over the map. And then there was this one flight which was also erased with the other flights. And this flight eerily duplicated the turns, the irrational turns, the flight path with no reason and no destination, no landing. Airport. That actually did occur. That's number one. Number two, and I eventually, I mean initially put no weight in this. I thought this is. But there are other aspects of it which, which amount to that. Of all those flights, this was the. Is. I think I'm right about this. I could be wrong. But of all those flights this was the only one that was flown in a very particular way. Whereas the other flights he would essentially turn on the autopilot and let the simulator fly for hours and run the entire flight smoothly, start to finish. Or maybe he'd stop it and, and didn't go get a cup of coffee and forget it. But this is a flight in which he advanced the aircraft along that path manually. So. And it's the only one. So there was a different approach to this flight. So he was as if he was impatient. So he's pushing it forward, pushing it forward, pushing it forward by hand basically manually and not. And then also I think subtracting the fuel. My impression is that the fuel subtraction was not happening automatically. So he had to punch a few keys and take out some fuel to establish the actual fuel exhaustion point. So there is that, which is odd. And the, the other thing about the simulator is that he, there was really no reason to do this. In other words, why would you need a simulator and that's the, the other side. Like maybe this hit, maybe that's totally by chance because if I wanted to figure out how I want to crash an airplane, I know how much fuel I've got on board, I know where I want to go down if I want to run out of gas and I just go to Google Earth, I mean you can do the same thing on Google Earth. So you know, you don't need a simulator for this. And Google Earth,
- [37:03]
B
what's the answer to that, do you think?
- [37:05]
C
I don't know.
- [37:07]
B
I mean is it, is it possible it was, it was a message.
- [37:14]
C
People say that and that he was leaving a message, a goodbye. If so it's a really bizarre goodbye because he erased it along with the other stuff and he would then assume that the FBI and others would come in and find it and, and, and pull it out of the memory and, and, and that mean that's a really, really obscure way to say goodbye. Was he trying to sow confusion? Well, it didn't. So much confusion, I have no idea. And see, unlike many observers of this accident, amateur observers, and I'm an amateur observer, I don't claim to know everything. There are things about this accident that are unknown and will probably always be unknown.
- [38:00]
B
What about his mental state? Was there evidence that this was a depressed guy or his life wasn't going well?
- [38:09]
C
Yes. When I was in Kuala Lumpur on this assignment for the, for the Atlantic Monthly, I, I spent a lot of time on that because it was so obvious to me it became obvious really quickly that the airplane didn't fail, that the pilot failed, that this was an intentional act and it fit a pattern of other intentional acts, suicide murders that I've written about in the Atlantic over the years. So it wasn't extremely surprising to me that a guy, a pilot would do this. It does very rarely, but it does occur. The list is, I can, I can name them on, you know it takes probably two hands to name them. But so I, I was immediately, well not immediately but the farther I got into this in Kuala Lumpur wondering about what was deal with this guy. Well, the Malaysians were putting out a story that he, everything was hunky dory. He was sort of in a way like the co, the co pilot who was indeed hunky dory. Right. He was this young guy getting married. But the more I talked to people, the more I looked around, the more obvious it became to me that he was. Despite what the Malaysians were saying, despite what their God awful police report, this completely corrupted police report Said they painted him as a model citizen. He was deeply, deeply disturbed. He was going through, you could say an intense midlife crisis. You know, I think that's a polite way of putting it. He was 53. His wife had left him. His children were grown and, and had left also out of the house. Normally. Normally. But he was alone in his house. Big house. He had two houses. His wife had moved into another house. And the first sign of trouble I, I noticed was that his wife was saying, as I think it was one of his daughters was saying that everything was normal. Daddy, he's such a nice guy. Everything was fine. He was happy. He wasn't fine. His wife had just left him. And I don't know how soon before the accident. That's some time before. And then other things began to appear about his mental condition. He was obsessing about some cute little Internet models. They were twins, you know, far beneath his age, you know, like professional virgins. Right. He was just writing the messages and they were, you know, whatever the word is for that. But they were making a splash in Malaysian society by being cute little clean cut girls. And it was like really inappropriate for this guy. What is he doing? He's 53. And they were, I think in their 20s. That's weird. A sign of mental distress. And there were other things that began to add up to point to a very unhappy man. And I really don't even talk about them. I think it's appropriate to talk about them. But it became apparent to me, me that the wife and daughter were covering up for him and the reputation of their husband, father, and also that the Malaysian government was covering up for him because they didn't want to be embarrassed. And that's really typical for a country like Malaysia or let's say for Malaysia. It's very typical. It's all about face saving, covering up, dishonesty, corruption. It's a very dishonest place on some level.
- [42:09]
B
When you say so, when you say there's something more that you don't want to talk about, can you give us like a category like sexual or sexual?
- [42:15]
C
Sexual. Sexual.
- [42:17]
B
Okay, yeah.
- [42:17]
C
Sexual. Yeah. But again, I, you know, I know quite a bit about that now and I never wrote about it and I, I don't. But it does explain to me when I was in Malaysia, I really wasn't so interested in his motivations, his motives because I, it became apparent to me that he had done this and if he had done this, well, what gain would there be in finding out exactly why he had done it? Why you gotta get into the airline population globally and try to weed out people who might do this for those psychological reasons he can't do.
- [42:55]
B
We like to tell ourselves that, you know, we like to tell ourselves that because we like to think we have some control over stopping the next guy. You know, that. That one you mentioned, the German pilot who flew that plane into the side of the mountain, was just unforgettable and such a mystery to the rest of us civilians. Like how what. How, you know, why didn't they see the signs? And you think if you can figure out what are the signs, then you can prevent the next one.
- [43:20]
C
Well, in that case, there was a fairly long track record of psychological problems. The German guy and they, you know, Lufthansa should have known he had a real. A real psychological problem going on with depression. And, And. But in Zahari's case, no. And it's a famous problem in aviation globally as an airline or an aviation regulatory agency or as passengers. You really cannot predict who is going to crash your airplane. It's been a problem since the beginning of aviation. It remains a problem today. It's very, very difficult to do. I would say it's impossible. You really can't do it on the basis of flight hours, of licenses, of, you know, exams.
- [44:10]
B
It.
- [44:10]
C
It's a very stubborn problem. Now, it's very rare that airplane. The airline pilots crash airplanes. Very, very rare. But when they do, it's almost always a big surprise. And that's not because people are asleep at the wheel. It's. It's that. It's. The reason is that it's just about impossible to predict. So who. So to go into Qu and really go to ground on what his motivations were, I thought at the time was not worth my time. I mean, I. I was more interested in what was the evidence that existed and still exists to what went wrong. And was any possibility of a technical failure. And there is no possibility of technical failure, no conceivable possibility of combinations of technical failures could have caused the airplane to do what did before it crashed. There's nothing on earth that could explain that. It has to be human intervention. And it's pretty inconceivable that it would be anybody other than Zahari.
- [45:18]
B
Let's talk about some of the other theories that are out there. One that was explored by the Netflix documentary was they. They had a woman. I will go through a few of them. So they get more. They get progressively outlandish. We'll start with the one that's perhaps the least outlandish Landish. They had a woman who said she was an expert. Not really. She was like a home amateur who had become what she felt was somewhat of an expert in detecting debris in the ocean via satellite images. And she felt very strongly that she did find said debris over in. Was the other ocean on the South China Sea on the way, which would have been. No, not in the Indian Ocean. She said she found debris floating.
- [46:03]
C
I know the French. She's French.
- [46:06]
B
No, the French lady blames us, the Americans. No, there was a civilian woman in this documentary who said, I can see via satellite images debris in the. In the South China Sea. That is very consistent with airplane debris. And the plane went down on its way to Malaysia. I mean, to China, to Beijing, just as it was supposed to. It didn't make a turn. And why don't they just go and search? Just go and search because you'll find the debris there. So what do we. Is there any chance this thing actually did go down on course?
- [46:43]
C
Well, if it did go down, of course, you'd have to explain the fact that a significant amount of debris washed up in Madagascar right on the other side. How do you.
- [46:51]
B
How did it get.
- [46:52]
C
How do you get there from. From the South China Sea? You don't get there. So it's. You'd have to go below Singapore and come up to them.
- [47:00]
B
Well, no, their theory would be that wasn't. That wasn't MH370 over on the other side on the. On the west side in the West Bank.
- [47:08]
C
We know it was MH370. We know it was MH370. Some. Some of those things are unmistakably MH370 because of serial numbers. Some don't have serial numbers, but we're off of 777s. Unmistakably. Well, take an inventory of the number of 777s that have crashed in the Indian Ocean. So you know this. The debris that was found was either ambiguous, okay, Some of it, you really couldn't tell, or it had serial numbers. That's totally unambiguous. That was MH370. Or it was unambiguously as Triple 7 without a serial number. But it was found in the Indian Ocean, so forget it.
- [47:47]
B
Okay, but could it. Could it have been messed with? There's a suggestion in the movie that debris found that would be consistent with all this happening over in the west in the South Indian Sea, in the Indian Sea. The way you're explaining, that might have been dropped there. There could have been the Malaysians interfering. Right. That they, they intentionally dropped something there or some other actors, maybe the Russians to make it look like MH370 went down in that ocean. But really it didn't. It wound up in Kazakhstan or it went down on its way to Beijing over on the east in a different ocean altogether. What do you make of that theory?
- [48:24]
C
Conspiratorial fantasy. I mean, you know, I, I make, I, I, what I make of it is not total and utter nonsense and it's over overly embroidered, unnecessarily complicated, requiring a level of conspiracy that doesn't exist. Can exist in a country like Malaysia or any other country for that matter. You know what, what can come out will come out and that's just not, that's not where it's at. It's just this amateur, amateur stuff. The greatest to ever play the game,
- [48:59]
A
return to finish what they started. Welcome to Survivor 50. I wanted one more shot to play the game that I fell in love with 25 years ago.
- [49:08]
D
I want to win against the best of the best.
- [49:11]
A
I chickened out at the final tribal. Season 50.
- [49:14]
B
It's an honor.
- [49:15]
A
Light your torch. I've got some unfinished business.
- [49:17]
C
Be part of history.
- [49:18]
D
I have more to play for.
- [49:20]
A
This time bigger than ever. Survivor 50 new CBS Wednesday at 87 Central and streaming on Paramount.
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C
Plus do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself
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B
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C
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A
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- [50:00]
B
I mentioned Kazakhstan because there is a man named Jeff Walter Wise who features prominently in this doc. I don't know, I don't know if we should call it a documentary but this film and he's featured prominently quite a bit. He's been all over the news since his plane went down offering different theories and one of his theories is that the plane may have been hijacked potentially by the Russians. Somebody may have gone down into the belly of the aircraft via a hatch that would have been right in front of the first class department and messed with the signaling such that it would have thrown off the Emarsat data that says pretty definitively it went south over the Indian Ocean, not north toward Russia, towards Kazakhstan. Here's a little bit of Jeff Wise offering some of some of his theories from the film.
- [50:54]
A
A modern commercial jetliner is in communication multiple ways with the outside world.
- [51:01]
C
All of them went dark at the same time.
- [51:04]
B
Why?
- [51:06]
C
The most obvious answer would be catastrophic failure.
- [51:13]
B
The plane blew up, it impacted the
- [51:15]
C
ocean, it suffered a fire so intense
- [51:19]
A
that it just destroyed all the equipment
- [51:20]
B
simultaneously before anyone could issue a mayday call.
- [51:24]
A
But the plane's debris was still not found underneath the spot where that disruption and communication occurred. If it wasn't catastrophic failure, what's option two? The only really obvious possibility is that somebody on board the plane deliberately turned
- [51:47]
B
off its electronic communication signals.
- [51:50]
C
And if that's the case, the question is, who? Who?
- [51:54]
B
So he goes on to say, if you want to find links between the Russians and this plane, he's not taking it to the pilot. He's taking it someplace else. There are. There were three Russians on board this plane, and some. One of them could have gotten down into that hatch I mentioned, messed with the comms, and the other, the other tech that was down there and thrown everybody off. Perhaps the plane is sitting to this day someplace in Kazakhstan or elsewhere.
- [52:26]
C
Well, I happen to know Jeff Wise. He's a friend of mine. Let's just say that I have always respectfully and sort of vehemently disagreed with him, and I've always told him that, you know, he, He. He has presented his arguments to me at length, and I, I worry about it, frankly. So it's, it's not in the realm of reality. So, yeah, that's all I can say. I. He's a great guy.
- [53:16]
B
Well, the question is for what? You know, who would have had the sophistication to get out, get down there, and the ability to get down there right in the middle of the other passengers and then had the sophistication to turn off, you know, communications equipments and throw off the Amarset data? I mean, that is one. That is next level sophistication by a potential hijacker. And then the hijackers, typically when they hijack, they want something as a result of their feet, and they usually claim credit. You know, none of that, none of that happened here.
- [53:48]
C
Of course, you're absolutely right. It's. That's number one in all of this theorizing that this was the hijack. It's not a high, it was not a hijacking. Could also, with that particular theory, required a level of sophistication in terms of understanding the, the handshakes that we were talking about before that even in MARSAD didn't have when the airplane went down. So how would the, the, the, the, the functioning of these two forms of audio handshakes and not audio electronic handshakes was not known to really anybody for analysis. So if you don't know it in order to analyze it, how does somebody else know it in order to hijack an airplane? It's the hoax theory, right? So it's just inconceivable and it delivers a level of expertise into the Russian hands when they can't even keep quiet enough on the front in Ukraine to get off their damn cell phones to keep from getting hit by drones and missiles. Right, spotted. There's not a huge level of sophistication going on in Russian culture and science. And this would require some huge level of sophistication beyond anything to pull that off. No way. And for what reason, as you say, but also no way. It's just inconceivable. But you know, the music there when you played that clip, you know, the drumming, the ominous drumming and all that, that helps, I guess, builds the drama.
- [55:30]
B
Well, here was the biggest shock and to me, disappointment of the film. They hold in abeyance this French journalist who pops up every once in a while and she's built up as a credible source who's probably got the answer as we spend time with Jeff Wise's theory and with the satellite woman who's analyzing the debris over in the South China Sea. And they keep sort of teasing the French journalist as somebody who's going to be the straight shooter who might have real answers for us. And then finally they let her tell us what her theory is. And her theory is we, the Americans, did it. We downed the plane intentionally because it had some sort of goods in the cargo. Lithium batteries, other things, perhaps something relating to tech out of Singapore we don't know that we needed to get rid of. And here's a bit of this woman in the big reveal from the one they built up more than anybody on, on us in our role in it, it's Satu. So at 1:19am MH370 is requested to change over to the Vietnamese airspace and Malaysian 370 contact 120 decimal 9. Captain Zahari signs off with his now infamous good night. Good night.
- [56:53]
C
Malaysia 3 10.
- [56:55]
B
And this is the perfect moment for an interception to take place. So it's possible in that Moment the two US Awoks moved into action and jammed MH370, Making it disappear from the radar. Maybe it receives an order from the
- [57:27]
D
awoks to go and land somewhere nearby
- [57:32]
B
when Captain Zahari receives the order. It's possible that he says no,
- [57:40]
A
he
- [57:40]
D
does not accept this order.
- [57:43]
B
They still need to stop the plane and its precious cargo to arrive Beijing. So either through a missing strike or a mid air collision and MH7 0 met its fate. The theory there being. This is how she says it. The cargo. Oh, they say inside MH370's cargo were 2.5 tons of, of electronics, including lithium batteries, walkie talkies and accessories. That the cargo was loaded without being scanned, which caused this journalist Florence de Changer to believe that the cargo contained highly sensitive US technology. And these two US AWOK planes, which are military planes, spotted it and that she says they were also spotted near MH370 in the air. They asked him to land so they could inspect the cargo. He refused to do so. And then they shot down MH370 over the south China Sea.
- [59:01]
C
You know, conspiracy stuff like that demands belief in the perfection of government agencies. Also evil intent and desperation. Just, it's, it's just nonsense. Right, nonsense. And also, by the way, how do you explain the debris than in the Indian Ocean?
- [59:22]
B
But that's what the movie suggests is fake. Because it's fake news.
- [59:28]
C
Yeah, don't mention that. But it's, it's, yeah, fake news. It's, it's, it's just nonsense, obviously. And it, you know, if you look at the history of airplane accidents, airline accidents, rare is the airline accident where somebody doesn't come up with a reason that it was either a bomb or shot down, preferably by the American military. And I know of only one case where the US military has shot down an airliner and that's the Iranian Airbus. And I believe the ship was the stark, I believe mistook it for an Iranian war plane coming at it and shouted down and full of passengers that that was a truly horrendous mistake. And it was. And, but typically, how long did it take for that to get out? A few hours. You don't keep secrets like that in the U S Military. The U. S. Military leaks like sieve. So no, that didn't happen. Yes, every time, not every time, but many times when airplanes go down, people come out of the woodwork to say it was a missile, it was a bomb, you know, and it sometimes is, but very rarely. I mean we know the Russians shot down the Korean airlines, I believe, 747 that strayed over their territory way back when, the closing days of the 83 of the cold War.
- [61:06]
B
Well, there was one more recent. There was, there was the Russian shot down MH17 not long after.
- [61:15]
C
Oh, that too.
- [61:15]
B
Was it after this one?
- [61:16]
C
Absolutely.
- [61:17]
B
That too.
- [61:18]
C
That too. But again, it's. It wasn't any big mystery about what happened there. It's like, you don't keep secrets like that. And the Russians say, well, we didn't do it. They did. We. They didn't do it. We did whatever, you know. Yeah, you shot it down. And it was a mistake. Almost certainly was a mistake in this. In this case in Ukraine. So, you know, they didn't intend to shoot it down. So to have intentional shoot down of this Malaysian flight. No, sorry.
- [61:46]
B
I know, because it had lithium batteries on it. We didn't want the Chinese to get the lithium batteries, so we killed 239 civilians. Doesn't really sound like us.
- [61:54]
C
Yeah, no, it doesn't. It's completely unrealistic. I think she's. I don't know what motivates her. I think she probably believes what she says. Most of these people do, you know, that's. That's the fever. You know, you get into that, you get that fever, you start believing it, and that's. You say, the fever. The rabbit hole. Thank God I'm not in that category. I frankly haven't thought about this life, you know, for a few years.
- [62:20]
B
Well, the article is spectacular. So. So walk us through what, what. What happened with the investigation. Why, you know, you had the one guy, he was featured in the film as well, who was out there finding all the debris. He had asked oceanographers, like, if a plane went down in the Indian Ocean, tell me about the currents, where would the debris wash up? And the guy then went to those places, and sure enough, he started finding debris, which, as you point out, some had serial numbers, some didn't. There were questions about whether he was plopping the stuff on the beach right before he miraculously found it with. With press in tow. That's how the film portrays him.
- [62:57]
C
Oh, really?
- [62:58]
B
Yeah. Gibson? Yeah. Do you know him?
- [63:01]
C
Sure.
- [63:02]
B
Yeah. I think you may have mentioned him in your article.
- [63:04]
C
That's really unfair. You know, it. Blaine is a very complicated guy, and, you know, the idea that he would manufacture this stuff in order to gain publicity for himself is ridiculous. I know that from deep experience with him. He's complicated and he is obsessive in life, not just with MH370. He goes from one obsession to the other. He's an adventurer. He's a world traveler. I think he's gone to 180 countries or 190 countries, and that's his goal in life. He's complicated, but he's not a, he's not a cynic. In fact he should be more cynical, more doubting. So if the press is following him, which I didn't know, but I don't doubt that he showed up with some press in tow. But the idea that that would be his motivation is wrong. It dismissed. It's unfair to him as a person. Now what he did is, I think
- [64:15]
B
it is hard to believe. Sorry, go ahead.
- [64:20]
C
It's much less significant than what he, than he thinks the finding of those, of that debris, other people. The first debris that was found was not found by him. It was found on radio, the island of the French island radio by a beach cleaning crew and that had a serial number on the flapper on and was off that airplane. So and that's the, the debris that was then analyzed by the French and the, the American NTSB got involved in, in North Paris at the lab, the French laboratory. And that's a, a serious piece of debris and evidence. And it was not Blaine Gibson who found it. Blaine Gibson did find debris that is either Certainly assignable to MH370 or likely to be MH370 along with a lot of other debris that turned out to be a fishing boat caught on fire, that kind of stuff. And he didn't, never claimed to know the difference really. So he, I like him a lot actually. I, I, I, I. There's, there's room in this world for all kinds of eccentric people. He's one of them.
- [65:30]
B
What happened to the rest of the debris? That's one of the questions so many people are asking and why they spent three years in the Indian Ocean looking for something, luggage, human remains, the rest of the plane, God willing, the, the black box recorder, you know, all of that stuff. It's hard for some people to wrap their arms around the fact that it's all gone. We only have little pieces like where's the main debris?
- [66:02]
C
We know the answer to that is it's at the bottom of the ocean, probably in some deep canyon. It's very deep ocean there that has been searched at least once, maybe twice and missed because searching in the deep ocean, that ocean there, where it went down then first of all, it's a vast area as you said. It also hadn't even been mapped essentially, at least in a non classified way. So it's lying at the bottom of the ocean in pieces because we also know that it didn't hit. This was not a water landing that occurred right. This was A high energy, high, high energy impact and the airplane shattered as airplanes do if they hit the water at high speed. So it's little pieces. Probably the most intact pieces are parts of the engines. But you know, try to find a couple of medium, I mean big engines, big jet engines, not that big compared to the size of the ocean and the depth of the ocean and the irregularity of the ocean in that part of the, of the world. It's not a flat plane ocean, it's cut by canyons and mountains and you can drag devices across it and you'll easily miss things down there the size of skyscrapers. So. Oh, it's down there somewhere. The question is why? And I came to this very early on, like why are they doing this? Why? It was ongoing when I, the search was ongoing when I was writing the piece basically. And I said to many people, why are you doing this? You're not going to find anything. I mean if you do find anything, it's not going to matter because
- [67:40]
B
the
- [67:40]
C
black box is not going to tell you anything you don't already know. The, the, the, the cockpit voice recorder is a two hour loop until you hear the, the cockpit. And that's the guy says reciting his apologies to the cockpit voice recorder. It's almost certainly with not and, and the system recordings the flight data recorder. It's not going to tell you really very much of inference. It'll tell you which engine to quit first, which ended with second. Some stuff about the fuel, some stuff about the final speeds. That's a longer loop. But it really wouldn't say anything we don't already know. So why are you spending all this effort, all this money to drag the ocean in the hope of finding this thing? And in my impression at the time was if you find it, so what? And I think that became the overall conclusion. It really didn't matter to find it. Enough is enough. It was driven as many, in many cases driven by political pressures and the families of the dead.
- [68:49]
B
Yeah.
- [68:49]
C
Now, yeah, that's a legitimate thing. I mean people don't want to just walk away from their dead loved ones and say, oh well, you know, we'll never find them. You know, so there's a huge amount of political pressure to be compassionate and I understand that completely. But it from a logical point of view, strictly logical point of view, it didn't make any sense. And they finally said, okay, enough is enough. Who's funding.
- [69:15]
B
Do you think that there's, that there's reason to believe that he downed the plane there knowing that it would be impossible to retrieve the remnants.
- [69:29]
C
I think so. Impossible to retrieve the remnants. At least put a big hurt on the search. But I don't know how much he knew about the sub. Nobody knew that much about the subsurface ocean in that place. And he probably didn't know exactly where he was going to go down. The airplane, we know pretty. Surely it went down because it ran out of gas. One engine went first, the other engine went second, and then the, the APU little jet engine in the back, cut in, cut out. If that was all sort of. You could tell from the satellite handshakes what was going on in an approximate way. But he wouldn't have known that in advance and the simulation wouldn't have told him that, wouldn't simulate that to that degree. So, you know, what were the winds? So I don't. I think that he wanted to bury himself.
- [70:28]
B
Yeah.
- [70:30]
C
And bury the memory of what he did or was doing and bury. And bury his life, you know. And I, I mean, he did a very, very bad thing and he wasn't a very, very bad person. He went. Hayward. And how soon before the flight he went haywire? There's evidence that he had. He was going haywire for weeks before. Oh, I forgot to mention to you that the. Though the wife and the daughter were originally saying he was a happy, happy guy, well adjusted. And that's what they were maintaining when I was in Qualu Poor. And I said, no, this is not true. This is, this is. He was not adjusted. Well, they then came out, I don't know how long afterward and have since said to newspapers, I think an Australian newspaper, that no, he was very, very unhappy. Well, no kidding. Of course he was unhappy. You know, that, that. So he was very unhappy. Midlife crisis,
- [71:42]
B
my God. I mean, 239 dead. Think of how we think about Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy. They, they don't hold a candle to this guy. Like there's this, this name does not yet live in infamy. Say again.
- [72:00]
C
Think about the children that were on that airplane. That's what I think about the children, you know. Right. I mean, it's inexpic. Inexplicably evil. A terrible, terrible thing. Yeah, awful. And the thing about an airplane is that more than most modes of killing, it lends itself to mass killing because they're big airplanes that carry a lot of people. Now why, if you want to kill yourself, you don't just go out and kill yourself. I don't know. Most people do. They don't take others with them. And they, when they do that, of course, they, they, they commit enormous violence on their friends and families. Suicide does. And it's enormously selfish and they should be, you know, ashamed. But in, in this case, and we've seen these cases before, they decide they're going to take other people with them.
- [73:01]
B
Can you explain to us the. The Malaysian government's role in this remaining quote, unquote, a mystery for so long. Like, what was it there? They were just embarrassed that their pilot appeared to be suicidal and committed this terrible act, and so they did everything possible to cover it up.
- [73:22]
C
Yes. And, and, and it, it, again, it gets into some sexual stuff. It gets into, you know, really deep political stuff in, in Malaysia. And I frankly have not tracked it because it doesn't interest me. Malaysian politics, that's the one subject that really does not interest me. But yeah, it certainly played a role here. He was politically active. He was a partisan, political partisan. And there were, you know, his, the man he was in favor of, his prime minister was in jail and blah, blah, blah, and then out of jail. And the Malaysian government, whether on a political level or on a bureaucratic level, the staff, the deep state, is scared. They're afraid. They're afraid for their careers, they're afraid for their reputations. In a small society like a place that's a big country where very few people will actually run it. Their friends, their careers, their reputations, their ability to make money, steal money, that is, that's Malaysia. It's a rough place. You know, you don't. You can go to Malaysia, as I've done a few times in the past for the Atlantic on different subjects, piracy being one. And you find that it's, you know, you can see why there are tourists there, especially on the, along the coast. There's some beautiful beaches and resort hotels and Kuala Lumpur could be, you know, it's a shopping center city and whatever. But you scratch beneath the surface there. You start poking around areas that they don't want you to poke around, and you're taking your life in your hands. And there's no question about that. People disappear off the streets. They do now. They did then. And this is not something you just approach casually. And I have said that, you know, Blaine, if he, if he wants to really get at this and have a real adventure in life, go back to Qualport, start asking questions. But, you know, he's, he's, he's rather paranoid and frightened and to some extent for good reason, he, he worries about being killed and assassinated or. Yeah, basically not arrested but just taken off, taken out. The Chinese crazy.
- [75:53]
B
Why aren't the Chinese like the plane was filled mostly with Chinese citizens, so why wouldn't China be putting its foot down and saying we will find out, we will figure this out. We do think it was your pilot. You know, why would they be so hands off on, on getting to the real truth here?
- [76:15]
C
It's a version of Malaysia. I mean it's, it's kind of, it's a more advanced, more populated version, more powerful version of Malaysia. I mean look at how they responded to the COVID thing. I mean, I mean, but they in
- [76:28]
B
this scenario don't have anything to cover up. This isn't their sin. You would think they'd want a real answer.
- [76:35]
C
No, I'm not sure of that because they don't want their citizens making trouble. So I, I can't speak for what the Chinese authorities. I, I do know for sure that the Chinese authorities, after a little bit of sympathy told them to shut up. And expressions of sympathy or demands for further investigations that happened in China were absolutely shut down. And no one certain terms when that started to happen, I don't know. But it was a few months after the accident. Initially the Chinese were on the side of. Right. You know, let's, let's find out what happened. It wasn't one of their airplanes, but their citizens started making too much of a fuss and the Chinese don't like fusses. So I think that's pretty much why, you know, they did that. I don't think they felt any way responsible for this, but they just don't like, you know, rabble rousing. They need to keep things calm, keep a lid on it. And, and that's what they did. They put a lid on this.
- [77:34]
B
That does sound like them. There's been so many theories. I remember being on the air when this happened at Fox and it was such a mystery, you know, right from the beginning it was very confusing because nothing made sense to us civilians right off the top. We've covered a lot of airplanes going down as news anchors, but nothing here was familiar or made sense. You may remember at the time Don Lemon over on CNN said maybe it was a black hole that swallowed up the airplane. So there was a lot of non based questioning going on out there. Not, not well founded questioning going on out there. What do you, what do you think you know, has been missed? Like how, how? I guess I'm trying to ask the fact that most new news anchors and news journalists have no background in Aviation seems to me to have been a real handicap in covering this story well, and some being sucked down, conspiracy rabbit holes and so on. As somebody who's both a journalist and a former pilot, what's been your impression?
- [78:39]
C
Well, aviation lends itself to ignorance because it does require experience and education. It's a little bit mysterious. Not very, but it's a little bit mysterious. And, you know, reporters aren't pilots or engineers and all of that. So it's basically that. I mean, especially in a case where you don't have the ntsb. NTSB was there, but they, you know, they basically fled the investigation in Malaysia. They would not say that, but that's what happened.
- [79:16]
B
That's.
- [79:17]
C
That's why. Because the airplane disappeared and. And it leaves. As I said, I don't really watch television, but I would expect that to be the case in this case. On the other hand, I, who have covered major airplane accidents ever since the Value Jet thing in the Everglades, and I mean near France and you name Egypt there and things in Brazil, and I've been all over the world covering. That's not what I really primarily do, but it's what I've been assigned to do at the request of my editors for years. So I've been to many of the really big airplane accident investigations. I know that I normally don't even start into them until a year has gone by and let the crowd wander on. And then I come in with a very long article and very knowledgeable because frankly, I grew up around airplanes. And my friends are my deep friends among accident investigators who talk to me both in Europe and in the United States. They trust me because I don't write nonsense. On the other hand, on the third hand, I had an early experience with the Value Jet accident in the everglades, where a DC9, an airplane you don't see anymore, little twin jet belonging to Value Jet, went down in the Everglades. And it was. It turned out to be a cargo fire, oxygen canisters, a really interesting story. I went down to Miami for that, for the Atlantic. And this is a long time ago. And I was holding myself to be superior to these reporters who were around. These are, you know, television reporters, national and local reporters, normal reporters. And I was naive and kind of snobby about it within my own mind. I didn't make that clear to them. But I thought, you guys, you know, I know what this was. This was an electrical fire. I know that because I, as a cargo pilot had had a series of electrical fires that looked A lot like the fire that took this airplane down. And so I thought, yeah, you guys, whatever. Well, it turned out they were right and I was wrong. So now it was easy for me because I didn't have to write anything about it for a year. So I ended up not looking like a fool. So I, I earned an early lesson to respecting the non technical aspect of normal reporters. The ability of reporters to get to a story that they are not experts in and actually maybe do better than an expert like me. I am an expert in aviation. Much as I sort of regret it, they did a better job than I did. And for me it was a profound lesson. So I'm the last person, person who's going to denigrate. I don't know what they're saying about MH370. I don't watch TV, I don't know, but I, but I will never denigrate reports. Plus I spent three years in Baghdad where, you know, where I watched my closest proximity to normal reporters, which I'm not was. I came away from that well very early on. I developed a deep respect for the reporters, the ordinary reporters, you know, Chicago TV and New York Times, blah blah, blah, TV for horse, cnn. They were around me that I had never really been around these people before. I watched them almost as much as I watched the war. And I was, I came away from it with a deep respect for their courage, for their intelligence, for their ability to learn quickly. And I, again, I'm the last person who's going to criticize normal reporters for their lack of expertise in Iraq. They had it all. They knew exactly what was going on very early. They knew we were losing the war and they had a problem transmitting that information to the American public because they had to be filtered by the institutions that sent them there, the editors and the readers and so forth. But the reporters were incredibly smart, dedicated, brave beyond belief. And so I'm a fan.
- [83:31]
B
Ah, well, let me ask you this as somebody who has had lengthy experience reporting on these many accidents. I mean, to someone like me, it affects me as a journalist, it affects me as a mom, as a human and as an airline traveler, because I'm not the strongest, most secure person when I'm up there. I definitely have a fear of flying and things like this are very scary. You know, to the stuff you were saying about how he could just depressurize the airplane and in, in a couple of minutes you'd be dead. Like, I realize how incredibly rare this is, but just a word from you in, in parting on the safety of air travel and what, what people like me should be remembering when we go up there.
- [84:18]
C
Well, I mean, it's often said and, and usually believe, but that airplanes are very, very. Airline travel is very, very safe. And that is correct. I mean statistically you just. This cannot be denied. So being afraid of flying on the airlines is sort of like being afraid, afraid of crossing the road. And you would. Of course, I mean, I would and do willingly send my small children. I've got small children and older children. Well, get on the airplane. No problem. Whatever. Well, good. No problem. I don't even, I don't think about it like who's flying the airplane when I'm not flying the airplane, you know, who's, who's in front of me.
- [84:53]
B
Fine.
- [84:53]
C
And that a lot of them are not very smart people. But the system is so monitored and dependent on teamwork and training and this and that, that it turns out to be very, very safe. And it's become that way partly largely through engineering which starting, starting with the advent of the jet engine in 1960s and the airplane, the job got more and more boring and more and more safe. Right. So that's number one, it doesn't take much to fly one of these airplanes. And, and, and you got two guys or women, a man, a woman, whoever, who can do it in the front. That's number one. Number two, if, if you look at the, the thing that seems to scare people the most from my casual observation and conversation, you know, around dinner table, it's turbulence, Right? Yeah. And I know that dominates in a terrible way the lives of airline pilots. They go around, they tiptoe around the, the passengers fear of turbulence. It's terrible because they only have one life and the passengers threshold for turbulence is ridiculous. The airplanes can handle a whole lot more turbulence than the passengers can. There's no problem with turbulence. When I get in severe turbulence and I had a job, my last job is flying and hunting severe weather. Right. So going into severe turbulence and other forms of severe weather on purpose for a few years I did that and I was trying to transitioning to journalism. But yeah, you know, we hunted the worst weather nationwide in the US nationwide and flew into it for days on end. And for technical reasons, it was a job. But point is, we were flying into conditions that no airliner ever goes into ever, ever. They get a few little bumps which would be not even worth thinking about for a pilot. And people are writing letters to the senator and the congressman. They think they're dying. That's a big Problem. And it's totally unnecessary. The airplanes are extraordinarily strong. And to give you an example, we would fly to turbulence that would. Is so rough that you couldn't see the instrument panels. Right. It's shaking so hard. And also that would, depending on the design of the seat belt and so forth, would bruise your thighs. You know, you have a shoulder harness, too, but you come away with from it bruised, physically bruised. The airplane doesn't care. It's fine. But tell that to the passengers. So if there's one thing you can say very specific, other than check the statistics, it's safe globally and safe for a reason, then you can say very specifically, learn about turbulence. You know, don't be afraid of turbulence. That's. I had a assignment from Vanity Fair after the Atlantic was working Vanity Fair. They came up with the idea of sending me to find the worst airline in the world and fly with it.
- [88:10]
B
Oh, boy.
- [88:11]
C
And I. The most unsafe airline in the world and fly with them. And they. I found them in Kinshas.
- [88:16]
B
That's a terrible assignment. What are they doing, trying to kill you off?
- [88:22]
C
No, that was great. No, no, it's great. I had a great time. And, and up in the cockpit of these old Soviet turboprops flying around Congo and.
- [88:32]
A
Oh, my.
- [88:33]
C
Really a lot of them. But anyway, these are. Airlines are blacklisted, right? You can't take them anywhere out of Congo. And they crash all the time. Okay. They're not like airlines here. They don't crash. They hardly ever crash. Those guys, they crash them all the time. Sometimes they die, sometimes they don't. Usually don't die. But I went and, and, and I truly had a great time doing that for a few weeks with these pilots.
- [88:59]
B
Why? How was that a great time? You're a crazy man. Say yes to that. Who would say, how is that fun?
- [89:08]
C
The point is, that's how safe airplanes are. You know, they don't crash. And if they do crash, they're probably not going to kill you and whatever, it's fine, you know. And by the way, everybody dies sometime.
- [89:23]
B
Oh, God. That is of no comfort when you're up there and thinking, it's this time, it's right now. Yeah, but everything else you said, that's a different thing. That was a soothing balm. I. I'm gonna be thinking about that story about going into the bad weather and the plane can take a lot more than we allow it to. You know, I would say that all you need is just like the. Just the jolly word from the captain that's all like, I would bear out the turbulent ride. If, you know, just be nice to have the pilot say, like, oh, no, extra charge for the fun ride. Something like that. Keep us going as long as you can. Hear, there's no panic.
- [89:58]
C
So burned out. If you look at the air traffic control conversations, the percentage of those are ride, what are known as ride reports. So they're seeking from air traffic control, ride reports from airplanes that are going ahead of them. And it's a lot of ride reports, ride reports, ride reports. It's really awful. It's awful for the lives of the pilots. And so it puts you in a bad mood. And every time you get in turbulence, you have to excuse it to the passengers. Makes you really surly in a hurry because it's such not a problem and it's messing with the lives of the pilots.
- [90:37]
B
Okay, well, that. That also makes me feel better. I mean, we need to be a little tougher because they do. I mean, I appreciate when they tell you it's going to be bumpy. Okay, it's fine. It's gonna be bumpy. But they need to be saying it's going to be bumpy and we're going to be fine. You don't have to worry about the bumps. I mean, like, that. That should be the second part of the message, which it isn't.
- [90:54]
C
Yeah. People don't believe in.
- [90:57]
B
You have been wonderful, William. Gosh, it's so nice to meet you and have such a clear thinker and researcher and talker on the show and something this complex. What a pleasure. Please come back.
- [91:08]
C
Thank you very much.
- [91:10]
B
Oh, what an incredible story. My gosh. Just a sad, strange mystery that may never get fully officially solved but really gets you thinking right. And a perfect way to end our hot crime summer week. I want to tell you that I am off next week spending some time traveling with my family for our summer vacay. We will be back with you on June 26th live to talk about all the news. Have a great, great week, and I'll talk to you soon.
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D
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B
Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megygyn Kelly show and to the first day of our hotel crime summer week. Yes, our hot crime summer series was so popular last year, we are bringing it back by popular demand. And we kick off this week with a case that has haunted me and so many for years. I just, I cannot get over it. I need to understand it. And that is the case of Christopher Watts. In August of 2018, Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann, along with their two little girls. The murders were gruesome and seemingly out of the blue. The disturbing details of this murder and the lack of red flags leading up to it has haunted me. It makes it so hard to understand. But I feel like we must. We, we have to try. Here to help us dig into the details and to answer my questions is retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen o'. Toole. Throughout her career, she has helped capture, interview, and understand some of the world's most infamous criminals. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, the Green River Killer, the Zodiac Killer, and many more. She also worked the Elizabeth Smart and the Natalee Holloway disappearances, the Columbine shootings, and many, many other very high profile cases. She's the perfect person to help us break down this case. Mary Ellen, great to see you again. How are you?
- [94:13]
D
I'm good. How are you doing?
- [94:15]
B
I'm doing great, thank you. I'm so glad to have you here. This case has been haunting me as of late. I got onto the Chris Watts story because of the Alec Murdoch case and the use of the term family annihilators. And then we did a whole show on family annihilators and we mentioned Chris Watts, but I just can't get past it and I needed to spend more time on it. And I'm so glad to have someone with your expertise here to help walk us through it. It's just one of the most disturbing crime cases I've ever seen. And I'm into crime, I follow crime, and. But this one is just unforgettable in its awfulness. You, you've lived your life fighting crime. And trying to figure out criminals professionally. Is it, is it as bad as I say, you know, as somebody who's seen a lot more crime than I have, is it a standout?
- [95:11]
D
Well, I think it's definitely a standout and I'll tell you why. When you have a case like this where the parent, especially the biological parent, goes after their own children, it really causes the case to stand apart from other crimes. I can understand domestic violence, which is a partner kills another partner. That's actually fortunately very common. But when you see someone going after their biological children purposefully, that makes it extremely egregious. And then the manner in which the children were killed here and the manner in which their bodies were disposed of in such a callous and cold blooded way, it's really, really disturbing.
- [95:57]
B
So let's go through the story. When these two met, they seemed very much in love. Shannon was larger than life, very strong personality, but had been going through a difficult time. She'd been diagnosed with lupus. And this woman documented her whole life on Facebook. So we have a lot of videotape of her. It makes you feel like you kind of knew her. Here's a little bit of Shannon sharing the story of how she and Chris Watts were met. My friend sent me a friend suggestion for him. It was actually his cousin's wife.
- [96:26]
D
And I deleted it.
- [96:29]
B
I was like, I'm not interested. I don't want to meet a guy. Bye.
- [96:32]
A
Bye.
- [96:33]
B
So I deleted her friend's suggestion for him. I was diagnosed two months later and I went through one of the, I would say, darkest times of my life because things just got scarier. Got a friend suggest friend request from Chris. I was in a really, really, really bad place and I got a friend request from Chris on Facebook. And I was like, oh, what the heck?
- [96:56]
C
I'm never gonna meet him.
- [96:57]
B
Except one thing led to another and eight years later, we have two kids, we live in Colorado, and he's the best thing that has ever happened to me. Do you think there's any connection between the fact that she was in a dark place physically and mentally when, when she met this guy and the ultimate fate that she met could have been.
- [97:24]
D
Sometimes our judgment is colored or flawed by our own emotional experiences like poor health. So certainly could have been their personalities seemed diametrically opposite. And when you go back and you look at how people pair up, you wonder how much somebody really is aware of the other person's personality and how much they're really aware of how that person is going to handle life. And the Stressors of life and all the things that that life brings in terms of challenges and so forth. And my experience over the years is that we really don't read people very well. We oftentimes read what we want to see, and that may have been impacting the relationship here. And, and again, it's, it's really very common.
- [98:12]
B
They met in 2010, they got married in 2012, and she was killed in 2013. I mean, it all happened so fast. And look, I, I met my husband in July of. Was it. Oh, sorry. Okay, so it was 2018 that she was killed. Sorry. But I, I met my husband in July of 06 and we were married by March of 08. So I'm not saying it can't happen quickly and work out wonderfully, but I do think there's just a little bit of a warning here where if you meet your partner in a very low time in your life, take the time to make sure you're not for emotional or other reasons, overlooking potential warning signs of a problem.
- [98:54]
D
I agree with you, and that's certainly one of the things I cover with my students in class when we study violent crime is what are all of those characteristics that confuse us, that impact our ability to read people, especially at a time in our life when it really becomes important. What do we look at that really don't tell us the potential for dangerousness? And what should we be looking at in terms of personality traits? And again, I think it's really very common, but we're not raised and we're not trained to know what to look for.
- [99:30]
B
They had a baby pretty soon into the marriage, again married on November 3, 2012, December 17, 2013. First child, Bella was born. And then they suffered a bankruptcy and 2015. So two years later, their second daughter, CeCe, her name was Celeste, was born. So two babies in a couple of years. Flash forward to three years after that, and she's pregnant with their third child, a little boy. Now, anybody who's had two babies in two years in the marriage, all it's stressful and then they have a bankruptcy in the middle of it. That doesn't make you kill anybody, that doesn't turn anybody into a murderer. So as you look back at this situation, knowing what Chris Watts would ultimately do, you know, do you have any thoughts on those years? Any red flags? Anything jump out at you?
- [100:22]
D
Well, I started to look when the case even happened, started to go back and look at when did the stressors really start. These are not cases where someone just snaps and they decide one Morning. This is what they're going to do. They're going to annihilate their whole family. There's thinking about it beforehand, there's planning about it beforehand, even if they don't admit to it. So when did the stress really begin? And it probably really started to compound about the time that they filed for bankruptcy and then when they started to have the children. We know that those are very stressful times in relationships, especially depending on the person's personality, if they have a difficult time dealing with the idea that we have one more baby, we have one more pressure in my life, especially with those kinds of thought processes that can be very stressful. So now you've got a second child and then you have, surprisingly, now you have a third child. And so I think the stress and possibly the resentment had been building actually for years. It didn't just happen. Days before Chris committed the murders in
- [101:36]
B
June of 2018 is when everything started to take a turn for the worst. That is when he met the woman who would become his affair partner. And it is when Shannon told him that she was expecting a third child, which he very clearly did not want. She of course, put the clip on Facebook where she told him the news. And any outsider could see the guy was not thrilled, notwithstanding what his words were. Here's a bit of that. She's wearing a shirt that reads, oops, we did it again. And he walks in.
- [102:15]
A
We did it again. I like that shirt. Really?
- [102:24]
D
Really.
- [102:26]
C
That's awesome.
- [102:33]
A
So pink means that's just the test.
- [102:35]
B
I know.
- [102:35]
A
It just says the pink is going to be girls.
- [102:37]
B
I don't know.
- [102:40]
A
Just the test. That's awesome.
- [102:47]
C
Guess.
- [102:47]
A
I guess, guess when you want to. What happens?
- [102:55]
B
That bit at the end there, right? That bit at the end where they. Wow. As he's looking at the pregnancy test and not to mention. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's something you say when your kid is like, you know, I, I got on first base. You know, you find that you're having a child, it's. It tends to be in a very emotional, very moving moment. None of which was present there.
- [103:18]
D
No, but, you know, I looked at that again. I remember seeing that years ago. But I also looked at his confessions and he is one of the most subdued, low key people in those confessions. So I think that's his personality. He's not going to be extremely expressive. It's just not part of who he is. And so that reaction to the news that Shannan is going to have a third baby is, you know, is pretty much in keeping with his very low key, almost at times depressive personality. It's the. It's the common. At the end when he says words to the effect something about when you want something, meaning when she wants it. He did not make a comment about what he wanted, so I thought the affect was keeping with how he is. But it was the final comment that was telling to me.
- [104:15]
B
Is there any reason to be concerned if you partner up with somebody who has that flat affect as a default, like they have difficulty feeling emotion. They have difficulty feeling emotion, whether it's great love or great hesitancy in committing a murder, you know, they're not built in a way that is necessarily safe.
- [104:39]
D
Well, that's a good point. But I think with. With the whole idea of being able to understand your partner or your family members, you know, you have to really look at them and, and. And be a pretty good judge of character on a daily basis and not, you know, just every couple of months or something like that. So you. I think it's important to look at whether or not they're becoming more depressed. Are they talking about suicide? Are they talking about leaving the family? Are they talking about not wanting to be a part of the family again? So for me, there are a lot of puzzle pieces that are likely missing from this family that were never post Facebook that would give us more indications that he had started to check out. But with that checking out, was there any indication that. That with. With that decision to no longer be really an emotional part of the family, could that have meant that that anger towards Shanann was building and building and building? Because looking at Chris, you don't see an angry man, but that means he's internalized it. But what did she see on a daily basis, what did she see? Would have just looked at and said, he's just having a bad day. And. And sometimes that's the case, but sometimes it's not the case. And those are the kind of indicators that you want to look for.
- [106:05]
B
He. To me, everything seems to go downhill as soon as he meets this other woman like his. Be it to me based on her Facebook, based on the Netflix documentary, which is very worth your time on this whole show. It's called American Murder, the Family Next Door. He was kind of the beta in the relationship. I mean, she was the alpha and in control about most of the decisions they were making. And then he met this other woman and really started distancing himself and started, it seemed to me like a hatred started to brew for Shannon. The other. The Other woman's name is Nicole Kessinger. She worked like he did at this petroleum company. We're showing a picture of her on the board now. And I mean, they met in June of 2018. It was August 13, 2018, that he committed a triple murder, quadruple murder of his entire family. I mean, two months. Mary Elliott. How, how do we even start to understand that?
- [107:06]
D
Well, his girlfriend, the woman that he met and started to have the affair with, she was the kind of the conduit. He was already in that emotional state. My sense is that he feeling incredible animosity towards Shanann and she didn't realize it. Then she meet, he meets this woman and it could have been Susie Smith, it could have been, you know, Ann Jones. But he meets her and, and she, she responds to him and they begin to have that relationship. I don't think it was specifically her, but I think he was ready at that point. So I think it had been building up.
- [107:43]
B
That's interesting. So it could have been anyway, because we'll talk about her. But she's been very demonized by most people looking at this case and there are questions about whether she did something intentionally to encourage this.
- [107:57]
D
Well, I think I would be really careful as, as a profiler to credit her with any involvement in this case until I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to her and look at her background, look at her personality, look at the kinds of things that, you know, that kind of really made her tick on a daily basis to see whether or not her personality lends itself to being co opted like this. Because if it did, we have to look at it and say they just met, they just met. She starts to have this relationship which she's probably very excited about. She's even looking at wedding dresses. And then to jump to the conclusion that now she morphs into this co conspirator to help him, you know, annihilate his whole family. And is, is a little bit too much for me at this point. I think she got caught up in this, in the excitement of having this relationship. And it really is hard when something like this happens. Just like Scott Peterson. Not to say, oh, she had to know or she had to encourage him. That is a big step to say that the partner encouraged Chris in something like this. I'm not sure that that's there.
- [109:14]
B
And we know that in Scott Peterson. Amber Frey did not know anything about Lacy Peterson. She was truly caught off guard that he was married at all, had no idea. And as soon as she found out, she went to cops, work with them, and is part of the reason he is now in prison. She was a good guy in the whole thing. This woman. I don't know. She definitely misled the cops. She tried to tell them, oh, I didn't know he was married. And then they found Google searches by her. Does the mistress ever get the man? I mean, she knew. She knew that he was married and downplayed her knowledge with the police. It doesn't mean she encouraged a murder, a triple, quadruple murder. But it's one of the reasons why this woman has now had to change her name. She's effectively in witness protection because people blamed her. So at the same time, we see that lackluster. I'm having the third baby reaction. Shannon posted one of many videos of the daughters talking about their dad, Chris, on Facebook. And I mean, you could find any number of these. But every video between him and the children showed a loving interaction, what looked like a loving interaction. This is one that, you know, really pulls on the heartstrings because, you know what's going to happen to this young girl. But here's Bella on June 14, 2018, 4 years old at the time, singing a song about how much she loved him. My daddy is a hero he helps
- [110:37]
C
me we grow up strong he helped
- [110:41]
A
me snuggle, too he reads me books he tied my shoes if you're a
- [110:52]
B
hero Flew and blue My daddy Daddy, I love you oh, my God. I don't. This is why I'm so obsessed with this case. How does someone who we have to acknowledge is a human being who has seen that video and has created and loved that child for four years, within two months of that, kill her, murder her, and dump her in an oil tank. How? How?
- [111:28]
D
Well, a couple of things I think probably are going on. I think he likely didn't respond the way most people would have to that video. The video probably added more pressure to him to feel that he needed to stay with the family, when in fact, he did not want to stay with the family. He may have even resented that, that video, seeing them because he was ready to go. He was ready to start life over again. He had new plans, and so he was emotionally separating himself from his family at a certain point. And when you do that, to be pulled back into the family, once you've decided, I'm done, it's over, I'm just going to wrap it up. That can also contribute to the anger. And with somebody like with Chris, who internalizes that anger, it's really hard to measure it. Because usually people express their anger. They yell, they scream, their face gets red. That doesn't seem to be the case with him. But I'm also not sure that he wasn't looking at those videos thinking, I'm separating. Enough with this. I'm moving on with my life. I'm starting over again. So looking at your kids maybe may have been certainly a part of that.
- [112:43]
B
This is interesting because this is in no way to blame Shannon for anything that happened to her, but there is a chance it was an emotional manipulation by her. I mean, the affair started in June of 18. That's when this video was made and posted. And there was another video posted by Shannon right around the same time, talking about, you know, how you're like, you're our rock, you're the great. And I did wonder, is it any accident she's trying to build him up in this way right around this time? Hold on a second. We have it here. It's a Father's Day message, okay? And in it, she's saying, chris, we're so incredibly blessed to have you. You do so much every day for us. You take such great care of us. You're the reason I was brave enough to agree to number three. From laundry to kids showers. You're incredible, and we are so lucky to have you in our life. Happy Father's Day. Now, to me, Mary Ellen, this suggests this is over the top. You know, I. This is just over the. It makes it. It sound like she's trying to prove something or maybe manipulate a bit or
- [113:47]
D
maybe in her way, appeal to him. So, for example, if you're in a relationship with someone and you try to have a conversation with them, let's fix things.
- [113:58]
C
Let's.
- [113:59]
D
Let's make this better. And your partner shuts down on you. They won't talk, or they'll just answer in one or two words. So you can't have a conversation about it. They just emotionally turn off when that happens. You have to have an outlet. You have to have a way you feel to be able to express to them how you feel so you can do something. And Shanann was probably feeling at that point, she was losing Chris, and he wasn't talking to her about it. So I could see where she would naturally put something up on Facebook and try to appeal to him that way. But you're right, it. It does seem over the top, but she may have been kind of at feeling it. At her last resort was to get his attention. And, hey, please listen to how. How we're feeling about you. We don't want to lose you.
- [114:49]
B
For the next two months, she would ramp that up, as any spouse might. You could tell that Shannon felt him distancing himself from her. She wound up taking a six week trip to North Carolina, where they were from, and brought the girls home to the grandparents and was getting frustrated that he wasn't even texting or calling to check in on his wife and two daughters and she was pregnant. You know, weeks were going by without him seeming to give a damn about how they were doing or trying to reach out. And, you know, she would do what any spouse would do, which is like, thanks for all the calls. What's going on?
- [115:24]
D
Right.
- [115:24]
B
In retrospect, how do you think, like, would he have received that in the same way you're saying he might have received the My Daddy is My Hero video? You know, like, I don't need this pressure. I'm trying to get out of this thing.
- [115:40]
D
I think that's more than likely how he responded. I'm done internally, mentally. When you have a case like this, at least in the cases that I've worked or been aware of, there is a mental break where the person says, I'm done. They don't necessarily tell their partner, I'm done, but they're done and they make the decision to move on. And again, they don't have to tell anybody, they just do. So any efforts to reel them back in will just upset them and make them angry, but their partner doesn't know it. So that failure to communicate is a huge problem. When you're dealing with someone that throws up these emotional walls and internalizes how they feel. And how they feel is they're getting angrier and angrier and angrier. And Shannan may not have seen that. She may not have been aware of that. That's his personality. That's not something that he just started once he married her. That's how he was. He just internalized his feelings. He has very flat affect. I think he's. His ability to empathize her is really very low. And even his ability to empathize with his kids, it's really pretty low. And when you compound that with. He's made the decision now to move on with this new girlfriend, that's a serious issue. Again, if he keeps getting angrier and angrier and angrier.
- [117:07]
B
So we know that was happening. We know that, because we'll get to this. But the letters he wrote some woman from prison where he talked in great detail about the night of the murders are absolutely horrifying. His Coldness, his lack of empathy, his. The. How he described, especially the murder of his wife and how little he felt for her. All of that is building over this two month period for sure. And you're saying it would have been longer than that. But here's how he was responding to her. It's such a juxtaposition. The Netflix documentary does a great job of laying out her texts to him and then his responses. And she is understandably getting a little bit more aggravated, but she's not, forgive the term, getting like, bitchy. She's just like, hey, you know what's going on? And instead of being like, I've got something need to discuss with you when you get back, or like, I'm not in a good place right now, which would be what an honest person might say. Here are some full screen quotes showing how he was responding to her. He writes, I didn't see these facetimes and I'm sorry I missed those calls. I'm very, very, very sorry the FaceTime went through on my work phone. And then here's another one where he's trying to appease her, saying, I know, and I will facetime Bella and cece as soon as I wake up. From now on, I'm extremely sorry. I feel like a jackass. Please be okay. So, Mary Ellen, when you hear him talking like that again, he seems, like whipped. He seems like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm so, so, so, so, so sorry. I don't. I feel like most of us wouldn't look at that and be like, that guy's about to murder his family.
- [118:44]
D
No, I don't think most people would look at it like that. But I think what he's doing there, I think he's buying time. I think he's buying time so he doesn't raise her suspicions any higher. And her suspicions are, are being raised. She starts to doubt what he's saying to her. He's. She's starting to doubt whether or not he's being loyal to her. He. She's starting to doubt whether or not he has a girlfriend. And he's trying to del that. But what we don't know is at what point in their relationship in the past. And this becomes important because past behavior can predict, predict future behavior. At what point in the past had Chris become really angry with Shannan based on her responding to him this way? And what did he do? How did he retaliate against her? What had he done in the past to demonstrate his anger. We know it. At a certain point he started to spike her drinks with oxycodone. So had he done that in the past and was she aware of that? So that behavior seems to will probably be lost with time. We won't know that. But again, this probably wasn't the first time that he behaved like this, but it was the first time he acted out in such a lethal way.
- [120:03]
B
Is the inability to express anger a
- [120:07]
D
warning sign in combination with other things, it could be a warning sign. Especially if the, the retaliation in those circumstances is really excessive. That's what you have to look for. It's one thing to be shy. It's one thing to be quiet. It's one thing to be more introverted. But when you're angry and somebody is making you angry, how do you act out? What do you do? Do you go into their room and take all their clothes and throw them out the window? Do you destroy something and then leave it for them to clean up? What do you do when you're really angry but you're a person that internalizes thing and have little empathy for your partner? With all he has a cluster of traits that I think were very important but that resistance to sitting down, having a conversation, expressing himself, showing his anger, expressing his anger in, you know, in, in a way that is, you know, proper and acceptable. What had he done in the past? And, and again, that's what we're missing here. We don't know what, how he did that in the past. There's a difference between liking a house
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B
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D
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B
Another thing I can't help but feel and I realize people have affairs all the time. They don't wind up Killing their spouse. But, but the affair was so dangerous here. It really was the spark, you know, that lit the fuse on this keg of dynamite. And as you see him starting to pull away from Shanann and the girls, you see fire between Chris Watts and his affair partner Nicole. You see, she's texting him nude photos of herself. He's, he seems to be becoming, you know, near obsessed with her. Like he's got to see her more and more. As soon as Shannon goes out of town, he, he's going out with Nicole. He's trying at first to cover up, you know, the bills because they don't have any money on the bank statement. But then eventually he stops doing that. And Shannon is indeed watching the bank statement and seeing, you know, he said he went to this restaurant, but I can see the bill is double what it should be for one guy. And so she's getting on. But like to me, I can't help feeling like you are playing with fire. When you have an affair outside of your marriage. You don't know what you are starting inside of yourself or someone else or your spouse.
- [123:34]
D
Yeah, certainly can be, it certainly can be dangerous. And I'm, my sense at this point is that Chris is not happy with his life. And he's not really blaming himself. He's blaming Shannan. He may be feeling very trapped, very backed up in the corner, may feel like he has no control. So there are other, other feelings that he's, that are going on. It's just not his inability to express himself. So he's now engaged in this behavior where it's almost escalating to the point where he's rubbing it in her face. He's not responding to her communications when she, he's back here on the east coast trying to communicate with him. He is taking his girlfriend out. He's spending time, he's probably extremely distant from her when he is home. He's probably very short tempered with her. So, you know, again, those are things that become kind of that, that slow evolving snowball that is rolling forward. But a lot of it has to do with him thinking that the only way out of this relationship, the only way to move on with his life is to annihilate his family. But that means you have to get to the point where you develop hate for them. And hate is not anger. Hate is a very cold blooded emotion. And it takes out, it takes a while to develop that. But to be able to carry out something so cold blooded and so heartless, you have to blame people for what they've done to you, right or wrong, you have to blame them. And then your only way out of your life is to destroy them.
- [125:19]
B
Whose mind goes to murder? You know, there's, there's good old fashioned divorce.
- [125:27]
D
Yeah, there's good old fashioned divorce. And we see it in so many cases where people will not take that logical step to file for divorce,
- [125:41]
B
get
- [125:41]
D
custody of the children, do it in a very pro social way. And why people choose to behave like this is just astounding. To think that this would be a way out and to think like that also makes me think that your sense of what is pro social versus what's antisocial has to be a little flawed as well. You can't get away with something like this. Who's the first person you look at when a partner is murdered? Who's the first person you look at when young children are murdered? You look at the partner, the surviving partner. So there's, there's no even good sense in committing a crime like this. So that's, that's one of the confusing. He's so dumb, Marion. Pardon?
- [126:30]
B
More judgment. He's so dumb. We now know, thanks to again, these letters that he wrote, he was planning this crime. He, it was not spur of the moment, at least so he would later claim.
- [126:40]
D
So who.
- [126:42]
B
He's not a complete. Maybe he is, maybe I'm overestimating his intelligence. But who that's planning to annihilate their family doesn't come up with a sound plan to explain where they went. You know, who leaves like the wife's purse sitting there and the keys sitting there and her shoes sitting there and her car sitting there and just wants people to believe she just walked away with their two young daughters while she was pregnant, shoeless, purseless, keyless, phoneless. Like it was so dumb, it was so predictable that he would get caught.
- [127:17]
D
Well, the other thing that I thought he did, in addition to everything that you've said, to leave those things behind and knowing that his wife would never leave the house without, without her cell phone that seemed to be, you know, tied to her side. When he gave that TV interview where he stood there with the emotion that he did have, and he had a smirk on his face and he talked about wanting to see his children again. And I looked at that when I watched it the first time, it was pretty clear, at least to me, this man is responsible for having murdered his entire family. The moment I saw that, that again, I thought of Peterson. And when he gave his interview right after his wife went missing, but Chris talked about wanting to see his kids and his wife again. He didn't say he wanted them back. He said, I want to see them. So he was very guarded in what he said, but that was one of the stupidest things that he could have done, was to attempt to do that TV interview and expect to have people believe him. So I don't think this person was very successful, sophisticated when it came to criminal behavior, and I think that accounts for it. Was there also some narcissism there where he's smarter than everybody else? Yeah, that could have been there, too. But I think that there is just a naivete about thinking that he could get away with this.
- [128:35]
B
I mean, the same. I'm going to ask you the same when we get to the polygraph. Like, who that knows he's done this, sits willingly for a polygraph and an interview with police. Hello. You can always say, I'm gonna have a lawyer. I don't feel comfortable. He didn't. And it's what led to his confession. Here is a bit of that television interview to which you just referred.
- [128:55]
A
I left work for work early that morning. Like, 5:15, 5:30. So, like, she barely let me. She barely got. Barely gotten into bed, pretty much.
- [129:05]
B
This might be a tough question, but
- [129:08]
C
did you guys get into an argument before she left?
- [129:11]
A
It wasn't. It wasn't like an argument. We had an emotional conversation, but I'll leave it at that. But it's. I just want them back. I just. I just want them to come back. And if. If they're not safe right now, that's what's. That's what's tearing me apart. Because if they are safe, they're coming back. But if they're not, this. This. This has gotta stop. Like, somebody has to come forward. Shanann, Bella, Celeste, if you're out there, just. Just come back. Like, if somebody has her, just please bring her back. I need to see everybody. I need to see everybody again. This house is not complete with. Without anybody here. Please bring her back.
- [129:53]
B
Oh, my God, Mar. I'm like. It's all about himself. First of all, like, if you were actually missing your spouse and your children, I think you'd say, I am so terribly worried. Please. Where are you? You know I'll do anything to find you. This is how you can reach me? This is how. This is where we are. Whatever. You'd plead to the kidnapper. He's like, if they're not okay, this needs to end. I mean, this is. It's been a lot for me. You Know, crazy.
- [130:18]
D
Yeah. And I. And I think with. With a number of these family annihilators, it really is very selfish. Their approach to what happened, their description of what happened, their amount of commitment, their investment of emotion in explaining what happened. And you see that in his interviews with the detectives doesn't make a strong emotional investment in the interviews. And I've done hundreds of interviews with people, some guilty, some not guilty, but you see generally a tremendous amount of emotion with him. It's just very flat. You don't see it again. And I think it's all about him, him. And again, I think that's very consistent with someone who does annihilate their entire family.
- [131:04]
B
The meanwhile, the, the neighbors knew enough and. And Shanann's friends knew enough about him to suspect him immediately. The God bless her friend, Shannan's friend. Another Nicole, this one was Nicole Atkinson, who was all over her disappearance like white on rice. I mean, she was like, she's pregnant. She has a doctor's appointment today. We were just on a business trip. I dropped her off here at 2am she should be here. She was going to the doctor. She's not answering her phone. That's not like her. And she's the one who called 91 1. Just here's a flavor of that. It's Nicole calling 91 1-soft-4. All kind of communications. This is Stacy. Hi, Stacy. My name's Nicole and I'm calling because
- [131:47]
D
I'm concerned about a friend of mine. I dropped her off at her house
- [131:52]
B
at 2 in the morning last night because we were out of town together and we were on the way back
- [131:56]
D
from the airport and
- [131:59]
B
she's pregnant and
- [132:01]
D
I haven't been able to get a
- [132:02]
B
hold of her this morning, and I've
- [132:03]
D
gone to her house and her car
- [132:05]
B
is there and stuff like that, but she won't answer the door, she won't answer phone calls, she won't answer text messages. And I'm just really, really concerned. And she had a doctor's appointment this morning and she didn't go to it.
- [132:16]
D
And I'm just.
- [132:17]
B
I don't know what to do. I've called him and talked to him, and he said that she went on
- [132:22]
D
a play date with her other two daughters.
- [132:24]
B
But, like, if she went on a
- [132:25]
D
play date, they're both in car seats.
- [132:26]
B
Why would she not take her car? So good. As somebody who's devoted her life to law enforcement, Marilyn, just what's the lesson there for concerned friends, concerned family members is this woman did not wait two seconds.
- [132:41]
D
Oh, Absolutely. When you suspect that there's something going on or that you're really worried because there's not that typical pattern that you expected. Somebody doesn't show up, somebody doesn't go into an appointment, don't worry about embarrassing yourself or bothering the police.
- [132:59]
B
Call.
- [133:01]
D
Report it. Make sure people know about it. Check with others. Find out. Don't just let it go and say, I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure that she'll show up somehow, someplace. Don't do that. Be very proactive, which is what happened here. And I think that made an incredible difference in how this case was ultimately resolved and how quickly it was resolved.
- [133:22]
B
And it was good, too, I have to say, for Shannon to have shared her concerns about her marriage with, you know, a couple of close friends, because they then knew when she went missing. We think we know what's going on here. I mean, I recognize, out of respect for your marriage, you're not running around to everybody saying, we have this argument. We have that argument. But this was getting to a point where Shannon was getting really worried. And, I mean, there's a lesson there, too, like, do confide in at least a friend or two.
- [133:51]
D
I think that was very impressive here, that a friend realized pretty much right away something was wrong. That suggests to me that the friends did not see Chris the same way that Shanann did. And it would have been interesting if this did go to trial. What would this friend have testified to? What had she seen? What were her instincts? What had she overheard? Were there examples of domestic violence in the household? And I suspect that there were. They may have been a little bit subdued, but I suspect that there was domestic violence. And so these friends may have been telling Shanann, leave him. There's something wrong with this guy. You need to get away him. But to make a phone call that quickly and to be that concern, that suggests that they knew more than. Than what it would appear by just kind of living across the street. They were more aware of the dynamics of that relationship.
- [134:49]
B
Definitely. And we'll talk about the actual murder in a second. But the. The other neighbor. While we're on the subject of the neighbors and the friends, the other neighbor was great. He had had a camera out in front of his house for security purposes. And he pulled up the footage, and this is all from the police body cam. We can see he's like. He had his truck in front of his house this morning at 5am and then. And Chris is. Chris Watts is in there. He's in the guy's house. And then as soon as Chris Watts walks out, the neighbor's like, that's not normal. He's not a talker. What's happening? We have a little bit of that again from Netflix. Here it is. S6.
- [135:25]
A
So unless they pulled it right here.
- [135:27]
B
Yeah, but I would have caught her watching now. Diesel. Yeah, I thought nothing.
- [135:43]
D
Nothing for the rest of the day. No, that's it.
- [135:46]
A
You just want to go talk to him. I'm going to get his info real quick.
- [135:50]
B
He's not acting right? No, he's not acting right. He's never rocking back and forth. And he said he's not acting right. He's rocking back and forth. He's not acting right. And. And that guy, as he's describing what his cameras may or may not have picked up on there, he's not talking about Chris Watts's truck pulling out. You can see Chris Watts like, the hands are on the head. M. Like you can tell he's stressed out. I don't think he realized the neighbor has camera.
- [136:22]
D
Well, he probably wasn't aware of that. But you know what it also tells me is that these neighbors were suspicious of Chris before that morning. When they saw that behavior, they interpreted it correctly, but they were suspicious of him before. So my question would be, if I were interviewing them, why were you suspicious of him? Why were you so able to zero in on that behavior and interpret it correctly? What did you know beforehand that would be helpful to understand how this relationship unraveled?
- [136:54]
B
Good point. Because, you know, in a lot of these cases, you see the neighbors saying, no, I could never have seen him doing this. These neighbors and friends were like, it's the husband. This isn't normal.
- [137:04]
D
That he did right away. Right?
- [137:06]
B
Yeah. So let's talk about the crime. It's the reason why this case became such a national story and haunts us still. She comes home from the business trip. Trip two in the morning, two plus between two and three, she had told her friends that she was on the business trip with. I'm going to talk to him about what I saw on the receipts for the credit card and my fear that he's having an affair. She had already been texting about how he wouldn't touch her. He knew she wanted sex and he didn't give it to her, and it's not normal. And she felt him distancing from her. Her. So she shows up and she said, according to that friend who had called 91 1- Nicole Atkinson, she. She had given Shannon a ride to her home, and she said that that Shannan had planned on giving a speech. I guess one of the friends said Shannan had read me or sent me a draft of a speech she planned to give to Chris when she arrived, saying some to this effect. I try to fix things and make them better. This is making me crazy. I need you to give just a little bit of what I did or didn't do, so I'm not going crazy in my head to figure it out. I know I can't fix this by myself. We are going to have to work together. Chris would later tell investigators that she got home around 1:48 in the morning and that she, Shannan, initiated sex and that then they went to bed. He claimed that then he murdered her. He claimed that initially that he killed her and then killed the daughters. And then he would shift the story as time went on. No, I'm sorry, let me correct that. He initially claimed that he killed her because she killed the daughters. That was his first confession. We have it on tape. The police were interrogating him. And before. Let me set it up like this. Before they got him to confess, they sat down with a polygraph. And the polygraph operator, Mary Ellen, she was. I thought she was amazing. She's super cash. You know, like, we're just gonna ask you a few questions. You know, everybody does these polygraphs and, like, you know, whatever. And he doesn't actually confess here, but this sets the table for the confession. Here's a bit of that. And obviously, I mean, I hope that, you know, if you did have something to do with their disappearance, it would be really stupid for you to come in and take a polygraph today.
- [139:38]
C
Exactly right.
- [139:39]
B
Like, it would be really dumb.
- [139:41]
D
Like, you should not be here right now sitting in this chair.
- [139:44]
B
If you had anything to do with Shannan and the little girl, she disappeared. Okay, okay. So he sits for the polygraph. They ask him all the questions. He denies having anything to do with it. And then they come back to him, she and a male colleague, and they start really pressing him, like, you didn't tell the truth. We know the truth. And then they bring in his dad. His dad is the one who gets the confession out of him. And here is a bit of that. She smothered him? He asks, choke them. I didn't. I didn't hear anything. They're gone.
- [140:33]
D
I don't know what you talking to her about that.
- [140:40]
A
Talk.
- [140:40]
C
Talk to her about separation and everything about.
- [140:44]
B
I don't know, like, what else to say. Like, I freaked out. I freaked out and I had to do the Same blanking thing to her. Those are my kids. So what do you make of all of the. How the police handled the interrogation, the polygraph, and then bringing the dad in?
- [141:05]
D
I thought it was impressive. And just to start off with the woman interrogator, she says something very effective. She said, if you had anything to do with this, you shouldn't be sitting here talking to me. In other words, only sit here and talk to me if you're innocent. Giving him an out. And she did that purposefully. So I think the way that she did that and also did it in a kind of a really pretty low key, easygoing way, I thought that was really very effective. And during the polygraph, again, I think you get more out of trying to build rapport with people and not yelling and screaming at them. So I thought that they did, did really a good job, an excellent job as a matter of fact. And I was amazed when I saw them bring in the father. This shows me that they were very flexible to try whatever they had to try to get to the truth. You typically would not bring in a parent or a spouse into an interview. Just wouldn't do that unless you felt it was completely necessary. So they probably briefed the father, they probably explained what they had in terms of evidence, explained what they have in terms of the facts of the case. And they brought him in after they, they went through the briefing of the father. And that worked extremely well. And the father did an extraordinary job of, you know, showing his son love and care, putting his arm around him and getting him to explain what happened. Even though it wasn't the truth the first time around, but still it got the ball rolling. So that says a lot about the, the investigators. They operated that interview.
- [142:45]
B
I can't help but look at that and say that seems like a loving dad. Seems like a responsible man who would go in there and do that. How does a man like that have a son like that?
- [142:57]
D
I know he seemed very, he seemed very kind and very loving. But from some of the information that I read, I don't know that he had that kind of relationship with his daughter in law. But nonetheless, you cannot like your in laws, but you still don't kill them. But I think the father fulfilled the fatherly role. He wanted to emphasize with his son how important it was that he tell the truth. He, you could see the father knew just what the repercussions were going to be. And he played the role of the father extremely well. He didn't play the role of an attorney, he didn't Play the role of a negotiator. He went in there because he cared about his son. It doesn't mean that his son is the, you know, exact, in the exact likeness of him. It just means that he did his job really well. Parents that have kids that act in a very violent way, in a very brutal way, they have a difficult time seeing it. They have a difficult time understanding. How the heck did you get to be like that?
- [144:08]
B
I like, can any of us raise a killer? Do you know if you're raising a killer?
- [144:14]
D
Well, number one, I think it's possible for, for families and parents to raise someone that can ultimately act out in a way that ends in somebody else being murdered. But you have to look at what were the circumstances of the murder. And in this case, very cold blooded. In this case it was planned. In this case it involved the biological children. In this case it involved a triple murder. And the, the spouse, Shanann, Celeste, Bella, were treated like objects. That's very different than someone that murders in a really impulsive way or someone that murders because they've had too much to drink. So in this case, I'm sure the family is really struggling with what the heck happened here? How did this, how did this happen?
- [145:03]
B
Do you think there'd be signs, Marilyn, doing what you do? Do you think if we got that dad on camera and he was really honest, honest about raising Chris Watts, he'd have stories of like, whether it's animal torture or lack of empathy, you know, do you. Are there. Usually
- [145:21]
D
there are, there are red flags along the way. But I'll tell you this, and I've seen it over the last, I don't know, 40 years, whatever, but it's so difficult for family members to look at a loved one and say there's a problem, you have a problem. How you get along with people, how you interact with people, the rage that you show or that you don't show, but it's there. We know it's there. It's so difficult for family members to see that. And really that's part of the reason that we have problems. When we put out the warning behaviors for these mass shooters. The warning behaviors are really designed for the family to see. And then once you analyze one of these cases, the family said, well, I didn't see anything. So I've just seen this and heard this over and over again. When you love someone, you just don't see what's there. Oftentimes that can be dangerous, as you
- [146:15]
B
pointed out, even if you're the wife versus the neighbor. Versus the friend. You know, it could be. Go beyond that sort of blindness, the parents in this person who's a family annihilator, benefits from that blindness, from the people who love him most. He confessed there he tried to blame the murder of the children on Shanann. That wasn't true. He later told the truth that he killed all three of them, including his unborn son, which makes it four. And later he would write in a handwritten letter from prison to a pen pal, Sherrilyn Case needle, and he would detail how he claimed he first attempted to kill the daughters before he killed Shanann. Now, I don't know what to believe. I don't know whether this is true, the order in which he did the murders, but this is what he wrote. I went to Bella's room, then Cece's room. Bella was the older, Cece was the younger, and used a pillow from their bed. That's why the cause of death was smothering. After I left, left Cece's room, then I climbed back in bed with Shannan and our argument ensued. He goes on. He said he told Shannan about his affair with that woman, Nicole, and said that their marriage wouldn't last, that Shannan replied Chris would not see the kids again, and then he strangled her to death. He then wrote, after Shanann had passed, Bella and CeCe woke back up. Up. Woke back up. I'm not sure how they woke back up, but they did. Bella, who was four, came in and asked what was wrong with Mom. And Chris said he then wrapped Shanann in a blanket, carried her to the truck, put the two daughters in the back seat, and drove to the oil site where he worked, where the oil tanks were. Before we get to that stage, there's so much in here that you won't see the kids again. Chris Watts wouldn't have cared about that. Like he. He didn't want to see the kids again. I'm not sure why he's even offering that detail. But why is he saying he tried to smother the girls before he killed Shanann and then later he will change the story? I think I actually. I'm not sure later. The story is simply I smothered them at the oil site.
- [148:43]
C
Right.
- [148:45]
D
Well, if we're to assume that what he wrote in. In the letter to a female pen pal is true, then he had to have a motive for wanting his two baby girls killed first. And that may have been so they didn't interrupt him when he was killing Shanann. If we are to assume then, however, on the other hand, that he said that for other reasons that. And they weren't true, but he wanted to impress this pen pal, then that would be very telling about some serious issues with his. His personality. My sense is that may have been true, that he went in and attempted to murder the two girls first. That was the first time he attempted murder. He was not successful. And that the reason may have been because he knew it was going to be more difficult to kill his wife. She could make noise, she could scream, she could fight him. And he did not want the baby girls to come in and interrupt him because then it would be difficult to carry out the murder of Shanann. My sense is that's probably. If that's true, that's probably the sequence of events and the reason that he would have done that, he didn't do it successfully. And so when he gets to the site where he has already buried his wife, now he's got to look into the eyes of his daughters and kill them as they sit in the truck. Which is almost worse than killing them while they're semi asleep.
- [150:20]
B
Yeah, it is worse. If you can get worse, it is worse. This is a viewer warning. I mean, this is genuinely disturbing. So I want to let the viewers know this is. Is dark, dark, dark stuff I'm about to read in more letters to this cadle. He reverses his claim to the police earlier that the murders were spontaneous. He writes, August 12th, when I finished putting the girls to bed, I walked away and said, that's the last time I'm going to be tucking my babies in. I knew what was going to happen the day before and I did nothing to stop it. I mean, what a strange phrasing. I did nothing to stop it. As though he knew it was somebody else who was going to do it. Later, he said of Shanann, isn't it weird how I look back and what I remember so much is her face getting all black with streaks of mascara. All the weeks of me thinking about killing her and now I was faced with it. I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki. They asked me why she couldn't fight back. It's because she couldn't fight back back. Her eyes filled with blood as she looked at me and she died. I knew she was gone when she relieved herself. And then he goes on to talk about the daughters, which we can talk about in a second, but that this poor woman, completely helpless, several months pregnant, dying on her bed at the hands of the man she loved and was building A family with and he can talk about all I, I, all I really. Isn't it so weird? All I remember is the streaks of mascara, the coldness, the inhumanity.
- [151:59]
D
Yeah, that's what I mean. There's just a cold blooded aspect from beginning to end about all of this. And what he remembers about what her face looked like, what he remembers about the blood in her eyes. That's not somebody that truly empathized with her, that loved her. That's really someone that had great hatred and disdain for her. So the hatred. And again, when you see hatred in a case, it takes you down a different path because there's only two things you can do when you hate another human being and hatred takes time to develop. The only two things that you can do is you can destroy them or you can remove yourself completely from them. Hatred gives you very few options if, if that's how you feel about another human being. And what he's describing is almost, he's describing someone that's not human but what it's his wife, it's the mother of his children. And yet he's describing her as someone that's almost a monster.
- [153:02]
B
Yes, because he goes on in this letter, he dumped his wife's body in a shallow grave that he dug at the oil site. And he writes I, I, he says, when I dug the hole, it seemed a lot deeper than it was. As I pulled on the sheet, she rolled out and into the hole. I think she had given birth. She landed face down. I remember being so angry with her that I was not going to change how she landed. This is the same guy who wrote those texts a few weeks earlier. I'm so, so, so, so, so sorry. You know, the sweet, compliant, docile Chris. This is that guy who loathed her so much he murdered her. He couldn't be bothered to flip her right side up. And talked about his dead baby as if it was a absolute nothing, a piece of trash.
- [154:01]
D
And basically his words really defy him. That's exactly what it was. And he hated her, meaning Shanann so much that he wouldn't lean over into the grave he dug for her and turn her over. And he comments that he thinks that she gave bir. This is, he's speaking about somebody that's a non human object. He's not. And that non human perception of somebody is consistent with hatred. So again we see the same very cold blooded features as he's reliving, having, putting her in the grave and seeing, you know, the fact that she's rolled over and she's probably given birth already. And then he covers her up and walks away. It really doesn't get any more hateful than that. And that really goes to that lack of feeling and emotion and that ability to, to empathize. It's just not there. It's just not there at all.
- [154:58]
B
How is this person walking amongst us in society and not. And people aren't knowing he's this man? How, how does this person go to the CVS and collect his prescription from the pharmacist, or interact with the mailman or have any friendly relations in, in life? You know, how is it not that, like, we have a sea of people coming forward to say he's a psychopath and we all knew that. Like, we all said, this guy's gonna snap. He's a bad guy. That's not what happened.
- [155:27]
D
No, it's not what happened. He did not snap. And I don't think that this man meets the features of psychopathy. They're not there. I didn't think that they were there at the time because that. But it doesn't mean that he can't have this cold blooded side to him where he's made the decision that this woman is ruining his life, life and the only way to regain control is to kill her and to kill the. The two babies. So he's able to reconcile that this is what he has to do. But I think walking around in life and going to the store and interacting with people, he's just not putting out a lot of emotion. People that will describe him will say, yeah, he was a nice guy, didn't know him very well. He kept him himself. He was kind of quiet. And that's by design, that's by purpose. But when you're in a really intimate relationship with someone like that, it becomes really important, no matter who they are, to realize how do they handle what's going on in everyday life. Do they engage in domestic violence? Do they engage in acting out in violent ways or really passive aggressive ways? It really becomes important to try to, you know, understand that and to measure
- [156:40]
B
that the murder of the daughters is almost unspeakable. I don't, I don't know that we can ever understand it. That's what I'm trying to do. That's my feudal mission to understand. He. He says in the letter that his daughters walked in on him as he was wrapping Shannon in a bed sheet, that he drove to the oil site where he buried Shannan, and it was there that he, he smothered Cece first. The Little girl. And then he went for Bella, the four year old. Forgive me, this is so dark. Again, an audience warning, he writes, little quiet. Bella had a will to live. Out of all three, Bella is the only one that put up a fight. I will hear her soft little voice for the rest of my life saying, daddy, no. She knew what I was doing to her. She may not have understood death, but she knew I was killing her. I can't, I can't reconcile the fact that there are people like this on this earth sharing space with me, my family, my audience, you. I can't reconcile it. I can understand Charles Manson, I can understand Jeffrey Dahmer. I see them, I say lunatic. Got it. I would notice, steer clear. This guy, guy was kind of a good looking guy. He had a decent job, he had a beautiful family. He didn't have some history that we knew of hurting people or animals. How can this monster, monster. How can I spot the next one? I guess is what I'm asking you, Mary Ellen. Like, what good can come from this that can prevent this? I, I can't live without an answer.
- [158:23]
D
Let me say it this way. We cannot look at somebody and just tell that they are going to be dangerous. We just can't do it. You can see people on the street that are scary looking, but unwashed hair or frumpy clothes, living on a homeless lifestyle does not correlate to being violent. It just doesn't. But we grow up thinking that we can look at someone and we can just tell they're going to be dangerous. If someone has a good job, if they go to church, if they like animals, if they have children. Those are all features that we believe make them safe, make them harmless. That couldn't be further from the truth. The whole idea of the potential for dangerousness comes from within their personalities. And if they get trapped or feel, they get trapped or feel angry and begin to develop hatred, that's all done internally. But. And it depends on the right set of circumstances. So let's go back with Chris Watts. If Chris Watts's life was based on a different set of circumstances, he may never have murdered anybody. He's not a serial killer. The right set of circumstances came together and, and he decided that this was the only way that he could deal with it. And the only way was to, in my opinion, he was blaming Shanann for a life that, in which he was miserable. But if those circumstances didn't exist, if he had never gotten married and lived alone somewhere, don't think he would go on to commit murder.
- [160:15]
B
The question about the daughters is, of course, why, you know, like, we understand sort of why the wife, you know, yes, divorce, but spouses kill their other spouse sometimes. Why. Why the daughters?
- [160:34]
D
The only one that's really going to know that is Chris. And wouldn't you love to have the opportunity to ask him and with the hope that he would be candid and truthful with you? So the only thing that we say in cases like this is we have to look at the behavior. These little girls were not a threat to him. These little girls were not going to be dangerous, but he killed them anyway. And he killed them by looking in their eyes and smothering them. And then that's not even enough. Then he takes them into these oil containers and then drops them in. He basically wants to destroy them as though they never existed. So think about that. He wanted them as though they never existed.
- [161:18]
B
He.
- [161:19]
D
That tells me, if I were talking to him, Chris, you didn't never want. You never wanted to be a dad. You never wanted those responsibilities. You didn't want a life like the one that you had. And is it true that you felt once you could get rid of every memory of those girls and who they were, you could get back some control of a life that you wanted? That may be the approach I would take with them. Because he was trying to destroy them physically, take their life away. And that's the way to do it. That's what he did.
- [161:52]
B
Yeah. That's interesting. So the discarding, the way in which he discarded the daughter's bodies, which is one of the most gruesome parts of the story, dropping them in these neighboring oil tanks, talking about how he could. He could hear the splash when the bodies hit, and that. That told him how. How. How much oil was in each tank. Not. Not even together. Not even in the same tank. Shove them through this little hole. I mean, she's shoving his dead daughters. It. It's just. It just shows you. Yeah, the. The level of callousness. This is not. This is not. I snapped. You know, I found out my wife was having an affair, and I shot her. Not excusing that, obviously, this is something. This is just a whole nother level of. Of evil and anger. And you're saying. Same as we. We interviewed another great, great expert who is also saying he. He. He doesn't look like a psychopath. And that's. That's what's most terrifying. So it's hatred. It's loathing of the life that you're in. And we may not have a bunch of red flags, other than maybe he doesn't express his anger. Maybe he's got controlling behaviors, possibly domestic violence that you may or may not know about. God, that's not much to go on.
- [163:09]
D
No, not as observers from the inside, outside looking in. But if Shanann were here with us today, we'd certainly want to ask her questions about some of that behavior that kind of evolved over the years that they were married. It seems pretty clear to me that he saw Shanann as the enemy. She was the cause for his being miserable. She was the cause for his feeling trapped. He. She was the cause for how he viewed life. Is it true? Of course not. He's an adult male. But the way he viewed it is. Is I think that that component, you know, had to be there, and those children were anchors around his neck in order to move forward. He had to start over again. I remember he used. I had cases where the. The spouse would take the other spouse up to, like, to a mountainside, and then they would push the spouse over. And those were really hard cases to. To really investigate. But as you begin to unravel that, and it was different from this, but still some of the components are the same. As you begin to unravel it, you see the same kind of emotional changing. They started to live their life over again. They started a new life. They no longer were married to this person. They no longer were in a relationship. So mentally, they checked out months before they murdered their spouse. And so the murder was almost anticlimactic because they needed to get rid of the person that made their life miserable. They needed to be gone. Completely, absolutely gone. Not divorced, not live in another city. They needed to be gone.
- [164:51]
B
Erased. Right. So he winds up pleading guilty. They. I mean, of course they had him and that spared his life. He was given five life sentences. And even the judge, Marcelo Kopkow, was absolutely horrified by the circumstances of this case. I mean, I know a lot of judges, been in front of a lot of judges over the course of my life. It's very rare that they offer this strong a personal opinion on a case. But here's just a little bit of the judge during the sentencing hearing, November 19, 2018.
- [165:27]
A
I've been a judicial officer now for starting my 17th year. And I could objectively say that this is perhaps the most important, inhumane and vicious crime that I have handled out of the thousands of cases that I have seen. And nothing less than a maximum sentence would be appropriate. And anything less than the maximum sentence would depreciate the seriousness of this Offense.
- [166:09]
B
You know, usually we have the death penalty in part because we want to deter. You know, we want to punish. We also want to deter other criminals. Does. Does this sentence fit the crime? And do you think it effectively deters the next Chris Watts?
- [166:27]
D
In my opinion, it fits the crime. Do I think it will deter someone else from doing this again? No, I don't. I don't see that happening. But in a case like this, this. I always think about that when a person gets a sentence like this sitting in prison, you're a young man still. You are in prison for the rest of your life. You're never going anywhere. I mean, that is a profoundly negative, profoundly impactful sentence. And. And certainly the judge thought it was consistent with the incredible damage that he did. But will it. Will somebody else stop and think about Chris Watts? If the right set of circumstances exist for them tomorrow, will they think about Chris Watts and say to themselves, I better not do this? And I would say to you, I don't think so.
- [167:23]
B
That's not how the criminal mind works. The. The line in his letter to the pen pal that I just read saying, I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki. She would keep me from Nikki. He needed to be with the affair partner. He felt it on some sort of primal level. Reminded me of the last line of the movie Presumed Innocent. Spoiler alert. If you haven't seen Presumed Innocent or read the Scott Turow book, tune out now, because it's a great, great, great, powerful last line line there. The circumstances of whom murdered whom were different. But he. He's. He said the following. This is a husband writing about his affair with all deliberation and intent. I reached for Carolyn. I cannot pretend it was an accident. I reached for Carolyn and set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another. Set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another. I'm not saying you have an affair and you're going to become a murderer, but as I said earlier, you are playing with radioactive materials. So many cases where one of the spousal partners has an affair, ultimately leading. Lead to some sort of marital violence, including murder. I mean, I'm. How many times have you seen it, Mary Ellen? A lot. A lot.
- [168:57]
D
And then you. You include in that just the emotion that exists in a relationship. Emotion that if. If you compound it with, the person has weapons in the house, the person has children in the house. Now you've got an incredibly Explosive situation, Incredibly explosive. And, you know, depending personalities of the people involved, it can become exponentially explosive.
- [169:25]
B
What happens to the people who were friends with Shannan? I mean, I feel like we know what happens to her family members. They try to move on with their lives. I don't know how you do it as the mother, as the brother. You know, the dad was at the sentencing hearing with heartfelt remarks as well. He was so angry. Called Chris Watts a monster. But what about the other victims? You know, like the best friend, Nicole, who called 91 1.
- [169:49]
D
How did.
- [169:49]
B
What happens to them?
- [169:52]
D
I would say this. They'll never have closure. The C word does not work in a crime of violence. You just never have closure. I would say there's going to be a certain level, certain level of guilt that exists for the rest of their life. They would go through the stages of death and dying. And that's pointed out beautifully by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross years ago, who wrote about. About the stages of death and dying. And I think they wake up some mornings feeling very guilty. Why didn't I do more? Then the next morning it's sadness, and then the next morning it's anger. Eventually, if you can get to the level of acceptance, that's where you want to be. But I find most people don't get there. Most people struggle with, should they have done more, could they have done more? Could they have stopped it? And family members go through similar feelings of just being on that roller coaster where every day it's different. And Dr. Ross says we need to get to the level of acceptance. But I can tell you, in a case like this, there's no one that will get to the level of acceptance of what happened.
- [170:57]
B
You are someone who has worked on so many of these big murder cases from the Zodiac Killer, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, were involved in the Elizabeth Smart, the Natalie Holloway disappearances. I mean, you've dealt with evil professionally your entire life.
- [171:15]
C
Life.
- [171:15]
B
So how do you walk the streets? How do you laugh at silly jokes? How. You know, how are we as humans to compartmentalize this into the right box so that we can go have dinner with our families tonight and laugh and be joyful and understand how to categorize evil
- [171:37]
D
the way that I. I was really trained to do it. I. I'm actually a mental health counselor by training. But going through the FBI, we learned to become. We had to become desensitized because of what we saw. You just couldn't do your job. And I hear people talk about doctors and nurses that Work in emergency rooms. And I think to myself, oh, my God, how do they do that? They see people come in, they have to sew limbs back on, and I don't know how they do that. I found the perfect job because it lets me get into the criminal mind and explore and understand behavior. I find it not upsetting, but very challenging. And I think that perspective has really helped tremendously. If this bothered me, if this was something that hung on to me seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I can tell you that I could not do it. I just couldn't. And I also think the way that I was raised has been really helpful. We were raised in a family that having a really solid, good sense of humor and pulling away from things, knowing when. When the time was right to pull away from things, has been really helpful. But I'm just really challenged. I'll think tonight about Chris Watts. I'll think about. Boy, I would love to talk to him someday. I'll think about more reasons that this happened, because I'm always in. In searching for why people behave the way that they do. You, especially in a case like this,
- [173:08]
B
you're not walking around thinking, potential killer, he's. There's another, like, you know, I think I'm gonna get eaten by a shark every time I go in the ocean because I'm in news. And so this is just. We, you know, we cover these stories. You're not thinking that way when you're just walking down the street.
- [173:24]
D
No, I'm not. And I'll tell you why. Because when you look at somebody, I just know you could be wearing a beautiful suit and leather shoes and a leather briefcase, and the thoughts that are going in your head, head on, in somebody's head could be as frightening as anything in the world. We cannot tell just by looking at someone that they're not going to hurt us. So I watch behavior. I can sit for hours and just watch human behavior in a restaurant or in a train station. That's what gets me interested. It's not how they look, it's how they behave.
- [173:55]
B
Do you think if I gave you 10 people and I let you watch them each for two hours in a train station, in a restaurant, whatever the sex setting were, do you think you'd be able to say these are the top two candidates for crime, for murder?
- [174:09]
D
No, I don't think I could do that. I would probably be able to tell you more about their personality, but I think I would need more opportunities to see them in different contexts and see how they interact. With people they didn't know, strangers and then people that they were in their close circle and profilers get the kind of the wrap that we can look at. People know what's going on in their head, but we have to study their patterns of behavior over a lifetime. So two hours wouldn't be enough time.
- [174:39]
B
Do you have any kids you marry? Like what's your. I don't know if you reveal that publicly, but I'm just wondering what do you tell like your kids or your nieces or your friends? Kids like to protect themselves.
- [174:52]
D
It's really funny because I have nieces and nephews and, and they don't really want to know a lot about what I know. And so they don't ask me questions and I don't force my information on them. My students ask me a lot of questions. So I'm very sensitive about letting people know as much as they want to know. Every once in a while it gets the better of me. And if somebody I know is about to engage in behavior that I think is really risky, I'll tell them. But I understand too that they probably won't listen and they'll go forward and have to see for themselves what will happen.
- [175:33]
B
I'm like only extroverts in my life from now on. If you're not a talker, if you can't express anger, you're out. You're out of here. You gotta laugh, right? Because it's just this stuff is so dark. But I, I'm always looking for the lessons, you know, just whatever lessons we can find to make our society a little safer, our kids a little safer and just to, just to wrestle with the basic question of good versus evil. And when evil's in front of you, how do you spot it?
- [176:02]
D
And you don't just see it the first time. And extroverts tend to be probably. Extroversion is a, is a trait of psychopathy. So that's not good either. So you really have to be screwed. You really do have to look at people's behavior and see how they treat other people, see how they, they happen to react when they're ang angry, when they're stressed out, what do they do? You really have to, to understand the behavior. And that's just not one sit down session. That's just not one time where you go out to dinner. If you're going to let somebody into your home, if you're going to let somebody into your comfort zone, you really have to do an analysis of, of their behavior over time and place. And distance and with different people.
- [176:47]
B
And you know what else? I will say this, rounding back to the affair, if you think your partner's having an affair there, I'm sorry, But especially if you're the wife and this is the, and it's a man cheating on you, be careful, Be careful about the confrontation. Be careful in general. The odds are he's not feeling all warm and fuzzy toward you. There could be hatred, as Mary Ellen points out, there could be hatred for you growing. It might not just be an innocent dalliance like you're, you're in a danger zone there.
- [177:16]
D
Well, and I think the research is certainly going to back you up on that because the time for a spouse to be really at highest risk is oftentimes when they say to a cheating spouse, I'm leaving you, you're not going to see the kids again, that can really ignite an already incendiary situation. So understand domestic violence. That is really critical. Be aware that you could unknowingly incite a worse situation. So, so you're absolutely correct.
- [177:51]
B
Take precautions. You can deliver news like that in the presence of a loved one, someone who could protect you can have your exit plan and should have your exit plan all laid out. There are these small but meaningful things that we can do to, to just, just in case. Just in case. Mary Ellen o', Toole, it's always fascinating talking to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being one of the good guys and helping put guys like this behind bars and helping us figure out what makes them tick so we can hopefully prevent the next one. So good to talk to you again.
- [178:20]
D
Thank you for having me very much.
- [178:22]
B
All the best to you. Thanks for joining us today. Our Hot Crime Summer week continues tomorrow with an in depth look into the Jody Arias case with my pal Mark Eiglarsch. We'll talk to you then.
- [178:39]
D
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A
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show. Today we are looking back at one of the most chilling shooting sprees in our nation's history. It was just over one year after 911 and for three weeks in October of 2002, the D.C. area was under siege. No one, no one, it seemed, was safe. Attacks targeted people from every walk of life, doing the most common of tasks, pumping gas, shopping, mowing the lawn, just walking, just walking down the street. At first, law enforcement thought the shooter was likely a white older man, perhaps with military experience. But as they pieced together the clues, the reality was much different. Today we are going to take a fascinating look into the Beltway sniper case and we are thrilled to be joined by some of the someone who was working for the FBI at that time. Jim Clemente is truly a living legend whose own personal story is also fascinating. He's a former FBI profiler who went on to bring his expertise to the small screen and now has a number of exciting projects that we'll get into in a bit. Jim Clementi, welcome to the show.
- [180:46]
A
Hello Megan. Thank you for having me. It's very great to be here and I really appreciate all the work that you do getting out all this amazing true crime.
- [180:57]
B
Oh, Jim, thank you for saying that. From you, that's a great compliment because I know you've devoted your life to catching bad guys and talking about it and helping people understand the process and how it's done. I've learned from you and our listeners and viewers are about to as well if they haven't caught your work yet. This case, I remember this so well. I was just about to move to the DC area and so was watching it, you know, with great interest and thankfully had not yet gotten there. But the thing that was just so terrifying about it was there was no way of preventing other than staying in your house all day and not doing any of the normal things you would do. There was absolutely no way of preventing it from happening to you because like I say, it could literally have been you were just walking down the street. There was no method, it seemed, to how they chose their victims.
- [181:45]
A
Yeah, there was a very random process going on. And with snipers, that's generally the case. Snipers will actually have absolutely no relationship to their victims. They actually choose a method of operation that distances themselves from their victims. They want to feel like God taking life from afar and above. And because of that, they typically pick random victims that just happen into their purview. But in that case, when that was going on, there were so many people who were putting up double blankets over all their windows in their houses who were, when they went to. Had to go to the grocery store, were pulling up right next to the front or actually crawl walking into the grocery stores or while they're getting gas. It was a terrifying time in that whole Washington D.C. area.
- [182:36]
B
It's not like today, you know, when post Covid ordering your groceries is not uncommon. People know how to do that. They know how to do most things without leaving their house. The world has now been set up to allow that. Back then you had to leave the house. You had to.
- [182:51]
A
Correct.
- [182:51]
B
Go outside, you know, and it was like places like Michael's, you know, who hasn't been to Michael's, you know, to go get whatever. A baking tray for the holiday cookies. Home Depot. Exactly. Or your gas. You know, it's like I. I read too, and I didn't remember this from the time, but they. Some gas station owners were setting up big tarps around the area area where you'd pump your gas so that you could feel confident no one would shoot you. That it was a month of hell.
- [183:19]
A
It was, it was the most direct, horrific terroristic event since 9 11. And it was seen as. Since it was within a year of when 911 happened. It was seen as potentially an extension of 9 11. People thought that this could be some outside terrorist who was running amok in the Washington D.C. area, particularly because D.C. is such a political place and all these shootings happened right around D.C. and even right into D.C. and those things got people worried, especially people in the FBI.
- [184:01]
B
Yeah, I remember it was like the three things not to. Not to compare because 911 is in a class of its own. But we had, we suffered that terrorist attack, then the anthrax scare came. And then within 12 months or so, we're looking at the DC sniper attacks. These seemingly at random. And you know, people may remember 10 people died, but 20 people were shot. I mean 13 as part of that one month. But it actually wound up going well beyond that, which we'll get to.
- [184:28]
A
Well beyond beyond. Yeah.
- [184:29]
B
So it was, it truly was terror events of terror back then. And people wonder why. You know, now the benefit of hindsight we submitted to the security state, you know, the expansion of all these programs and spying and so on. We were scared.
- [184:44]
A
Yeah, well, we were vulnerable and we had to do something as a country to sort of counteract that. I think 911 taught us not only that we were vulnerable, but that we were extremely lucky because that attack could have killed upwards of hundreds of thousands of people. And to lose 3,000 lives on that day was horrific and I'll never forget it. But the fact is there were 150,000 people working in the World Trade center alone. And if one of those towers had fallen sideways instead of just collapsing on its itself, we don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people could have been killed.
- [185:26]
B
It just gave me the chills. You're so right. But I do remember that feeling of being terrorized. And in a way the DC sniper brought it out in people. Even more than 9 11. Like 911 seems so extraordinary. I don't know that we were worrying that that would happen regularly. You know, it was like such an extraordinary attack by this man we understood far away in a cave in Afghanistan. It took extraordinary amounts of planning and so on, but the DC sniper was getting person after person after person, day after day after day and very, very few clues to go on. It's not like we think we got him or there's someone in custody. It took almost the whole month before it was like, okay, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning. Okay, the first, the first. And we can then go back. Let's just do the ones that we experienced as a nation together, those 13 shootings, shootings 10 of which resulted in fatalities first. And then we can go back and take a look at what was happening prior to that spree, which helps put everything into perspective. Okay, I'm trying to get my dates in front of me. The first one. October 2, 2002, 55 year old James D. Martin, a program analyst for the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is shocked shot in the parking lot of Shoppers Food warehouse in Wheaton, Maryland. Now at that point, what did we know? Did we know this is like a killing for joy? You know what I mean? Do we think he had enemies? What was known at this point?
- [187:07]
A
There was obviously a big question mark. Was he singled out because of his job? He worked for the government. I mean at least a government entity. And because of that we weren't sure whether this was a politically motivated attack or whether it is a personal attack. Right. In the beginning, we don't know. We have to do a deep dive on victimology. We have to understand who this person is. And right at the beginning, his job stood out as something that could be related to some kind of terrorist government attack. As it turns out, in a very short period of time, all hell would break loose.
- [187:51]
B
And it would soon become clear we're
- [187:53]
A
talking about a small town, you know, in, in a county that, that literally never sees this kind of, of violent crime when, when basically in one day, day, their, their murder rate is multiplied by 50%.
- [188:15]
B
Yeah.
- [188:15]
A
Their entire year, they get in in one day.
- [188:20]
B
So in the beginning you're thinking, like you say, is it something to do with his job? What is it? Let's look into all of that. But that lasted about 24 hours as far as I can see. I mean, it was, it was less than a day before the next crime took place. That was of a 39 year old man, landscaper named James L. Buchanan. Police were called to the crime scene. They found him, he'd been fatally shot while mowing a lawn at a commercial establishment near Rockville, Maryland. So now, I mean, at least one of the other clues here is this isn't about class right now you've got somebody who's probably more professionally educated. Now you got a different guy who mows lawns for a living. Living. Both men, one's almost 40, one's 55 and not, I don't know, but Rockville, Maryland versus Wheaton, Maryland, not, not too far away, right?
- [189:11]
A
Not too far. They're neighboring towns. But, but the thing about it is that we didn't know right away that these were related. We had to. I mean, ballistics is what actually created that connection. But it took a little while to get, get the bullets from both of these victims and to match them to the same being fired from the same weapon. The fact is that when Buchanan's body was found, it looked like it was an accident. He was mowing lawn. It looked like maybe a rock kicked up or some glass kicked up and struck him. But then it was determined that he was actually shot. And so now we have two shootings within a fairly short geographic distance in both in towns where there wasn't a lot of shootings. So there's, there's some connection being drawn at this point. The FBI is not involved at this point yet. It's a local police matter. The Montgomery County Police Department or Montgomery County Sheriff's Department was brought in immediately. And at that point they were, they had had, I think they had just a handful of detectives working for them. And of course these detectives would have to go from one scene to the next. And of course Normally they would get one shooting every several months, and now they have two shootings within 24 hours, 27 hours, maybe.
- [190:41]
B
Do you remember whether there were eyewitnesses this early? You know, I imagine they'd be asking, did anybody see anything? Like, did anybody see anything? Did anybody have something to report on how it went down?
- [190:53]
A
There were a lot of. There were a lot of people interviewed. And the problem here in this case at this time is that whoever the shooter is, he's a ghost. Nobody sees him, nobody heard exactly where the shot came from. In the case of the second shooting, they didn't even know a shot went off. So there was some confusion at that point. Of course, there are people who were interviewed, and this is something that we have to deal with all the time. When people are interviewed about something as horrible as a murder, sometimes they will sort of fill in blanks that they don't really have in their memory. They will do this either intentionally or unintentionally. And this can cause an investigation to go off on tangents and actually really impede a thorough and quick investigation. And we will start to see that very shortly as these shootings keep continuing.
- [191:55]
B
I'm recalling this story of a law school professor who got to class late, said, so sorry. Had a road rage incident, Lunatic on the street, street, I'm fine. Let's move on. About 10 minutes later, somebody shows up, frothing at the mouth, at the classroom door, banging on the door, threatening, threatening. Finally, the guy comes in, has a gun. This is back when I was in law school. So, you know, early 90s, before we were, you know, crazy about, you know, Matt, this is a mass shooting. There's a mass shooting. There's a mass shooting. Pulls out a gun, everybody says, some people get down, some people cower, people scream. Before everybody had a cell phone. And the professor keeps yelling, the guy runs out, the intruder runs out. The professor goes to run after him, comes back into the classroom minutes later, hands out a form to everybody in the classroom and says, write down everything you remember about the introduction intruder. It was all a farce. And today you would get sued by every single student in that class today.
- [193:08]
A
You would. But it's a great teaching experiment because it's a social experiment really. But what it is is trying to demonstrate the fallacy that eyewitness testimony is actually accurate. We do exactly the same thing in the FBI Academy and the FBI National Academy Academy. We actually staged though actual bank robberies, for example, for our students to witness. And they are there on site. And you'll have 50 students, either new agent trainees or advanced police trainees, who are witnessing exactly the same event. And then we do sort of a chart, a flowchart of all the different answers. How many shots were fired? What color was the vehicle? How many people in the vehicle? How long were they in the bank? How long did they shoot when they came out, how many shots were fired? Then all of these details, and you will see that they're all over the place. But then we teach people, these people who professionally have to be able to recount details very well, how to focus and how to weed out all the other aspects that can distract you. Because when you're involved in a life situation and then a violent crime happens in front of you, you didn't expect it to happen. You were expecting to take notes or to go to the store or to pick up your daughter from school, and something else intervened. But all those other things are still distracting you.
- [194:42]
B
Right? So that's the next level for anybody training to be basically in your job, which is, is to learn to use all that adrenaline for good, to pay hyper attention. I remember my colleague, we wound up practicing law together. And she used to be a nurse before she went to law school. And so this had happened to her in her law school. And it was a great. Because somebody else was there who had witnessed her behavior. And they were telling me that she, her name was Sandy, unlike virtually everybody in the class, having been a nurse, was used to trauma situations. And so while like some of the big male burly guys in the class were underneath their desks, she was like, you over there. There was a guy in a wheelchair near the front door. She's like, get him away from that front door. You move there, you move this. She totally took command. This is, you know, Dominion Attack.
- [195:32]
A
Sounds like she had Special Forces training.
- [195:34]
C
Right?
- [195:34]
B
She just, she'd been through trauma. And of course, the point of the story is their eyewitness identifications were horrible, horrible, horrible. You know, it's like, man wearing a big yellow Morton Salt jacket, man wearing lumberjack, you know, shirt. A woman. Some people said it was a woman. It's like so unreliable. So, yes, to your point, the eyewitness IDs, you can't put that much stock in them unless you get the miracle of, holy cow, they're all identical. They really did get a look at this person.
- [196:05]
A
Well, and again, it's going to be a filtering out process. And that's what we do when we do all these mass interviews when we're doing sort of Neighborhood canvases and so forth. We want to ask exactly the same questions and then we can measure the answers against each other. If you don't have a form for that, and every officer is out asking different questions, you can never really find out which people are telling the truth and which people aren't. And again, it might be, be unintentional. In other words, some people believe that they are actually recounting what happened. But what happens is memory is not a digital video of this event. Memory is stored in several different areas. Each one of your senses has the ability to store information from a memory in a different part of your brain. And in order to remember it, you have to pull those pieces together. Together. If there's a piece missing, if you don't remember what it sounded like or what somebody looked like, or how tall somebody was, your brain will fill in what you expect. And if you're focusing only on that gun, which many times people say that gun barrel looked massive when the gun was pointing at them, and it focuses your attention on that and away from the features of the person that are right in front of you. But we've developed the way of actually maximizing the ability of somebody to recall things.
- [197:32]
B
Really?
- [197:33]
A
Yeah, we developed cognitive interviewing and basically it's a way to get people to relax and to put themselves back into the situation in a non threatening way. And then we engage all of their senses, not just their sight and sound. Most people will recount events through sight and sound, but they won't tell you what the temperature was like on that day, what smell came into their nose while they were. Smells are big, but if you bring those things back, it's like linking up a chain in your brain to all the different parts of your memory and pulling, you can pull them out more easily. So we tried to do that without any suggestion, but we do certain techniques to get people to think about it. And one of the ways is to get them to tell us what happened the first thing in the morning. Morning. And go detail by detail what they did that morning. So by the time they get to the event, their brain is already used to recounting a lot of detail. And again, getting all that sensory information involved just ramps up the ability of somebody to remember something. For example, if I said, tell me about Thanksgiving at your home when you were a kid, one of the first things you'll remember is the family being together, the smells of the turkey cooking, everybody being together, the, the mood, the ambiance, the, the how people were situated in, around the table, all those Kinds of things will help you have a much more rich experience when you try to recall that. And that's what we try to do about crimes too.
- [199:09]
B
That's good stuff. I mean, who hasn't had the experience of you they're out of your deodorant when you're at the store. So you get something that's a one off and then when you put it on you're like summer 1986, you know, it's like you don't necessarily know the date, but you know you've had it before. And just the smell takes you back to that place.
- [199:30]
A
Yeah, your smell, your sense of smell is the most directly wired to your brain. There's only one synapse between the nerves that end coming from your nose and getting to your brain. So because of that, it's one of the most incredible ways to recall something, something just by smell.
- [199:50]
B
Oh, this is a fascinating side journey. We could do a whole show just on this. All right, so back to the D.C. back to murder. Yeah, back to the D.C. sniper. So you mentioned ballistics. So how long does it take to get the bull? I mean in a situation like that where now we've had a shooting on October 2nd and the very next day James L. Buchanan, the 39 year old landscaper, gets shot. Could you possibly have much information on the ballistics that quickly?
- [200:17]
A
Not yet. First of all, they're two different towns and then the shootings happened. All the first six shootings happened within 27 hours. So it wasn't literally till towards the end of that 27 hours that we started to get information that these were all. They all seemed to be a ballistic match. And then that was confirmed shortly thereafter. But when you start seeing then shooting after shooting, you can start because it's such an anomaly in this area to have a sniper shooting. In other words, there were shootings in this county, but these, these shootings were typically with a handgun by someone who was right in front of the person. And there is some kind of ongoing dispute or a robbery gone bad, an armed robbery gone bad. Bat this kind of shooting where there's a sniper who is completely distanced and invisible to everybody. That is something that's a very unique thing. And just that behavior in and of itself started to link these crimes by mo.
- [201:27]
B
So we talked about the first two, that October 3rd was the big day. There was just the one on October 2nd though. Right before that first killing there had been a shot fired through a window at Michael's craft store store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. But no one was hit. Okay, so now we have two victims. Later that same day, October 3rd, Prem Kumar Wallachar, 52, a part time cab driver, killed while pumping gas in the Aspen Hill area of Montgomery County, Maryland. Again, that's where the first, that's where that Michaels was. That's number three. Then October 4, October 3, again, Sarah Ramos, 34. Now it's a one woman, Silver Spring, Maryland, killed at a post office. A witness report seeing a white van or a truck speed away from the post office parking lot immediately after the shooting. And we'll get back to that white van. One second. Then comes number five. October 3rd, still, Loriann Lewis Rivera, 25. Again. Now, now we're on to young women, Silver Spring, Maryland, shot dead at a Shell gas station in Kensington. And then number six, October 3rd, 2002. This is the only one in Washington, D.C. pascal, Charlotte, left over the line, right? Yeah. 72 years old, shot in the chest as he just walked down Georgia Avenue. Taken to a hospital where he dies less than an hour later. That last one, number six, the first shooting to occur at night. The others I had forgotten about, this were all in broad daylight. That's crazy. Crazy.
- [203:00]
A
It is crazy. And what it does is it tells us immediately as profilers that the person who did this had a high level of criminal sophistication. And what does that mean? Well, it means he knows how to plan and execute his crimes. Another thing that we saw now you have six shots, six kills within 27 hours, a very tight time frame. Generally this kind of shooting would be labeled a spree. In other words, an offender who is going off and just killing as many people as he or she can in a row. But generally when we see that, when we have a shooting spree, we see some level of decompensation in the shooter, in his skills and his planning. Things just don't go according to plan, plan and things start falling apart. He might have to carjack somebody's car to get away. He might have to shoot out with the police or somebody else who pulls a gun on him. None of that happened here. So we felt that this offender, while he was certainly in, had to be in his late 30s or early 40s, at least that he had some kind of military or police training. Training and experience. It couldn't be somebody who just learned how to shoot a gun at paper targets. Because when you're shooting at human beings, when you actually take a life that actually takes a certain kind of individual and somebody who's doing that and is not rattled by it, that's somebody who's done it before. And like you said about your nurse in the example in law school, she had gone through trauma, which is why she could remain calm. And I mentioned about Special Forces training. They put you through every possible horrible scenario and anything that could go wrong and things blowing up all around you so that when you're in Special Forces and you're in a firefight, you actually calm down. You actually can see things that other people can't even see because they're focused on all the bangs and the bullets and the, the explosions, while you are focused on what you need to do to survive this and stop the threat. So we have just, in that first day, a tremendous amount of information. One, a sniper. He chose his weapon. He chose this weapon because he wanted to feel like God. He wanted to feel omnipotent. He wanted to feel like he could take a life from afar and above and nobody can stop him. And he chooses when their lives ended. And that that came out because these random victims who couldn't have been planned, in other words, some of them had just as a fluke, sat down on a bench or just decided to go to the post office, that kind of thing. You can't actually know that this person is going to be at that place at that time. And so when we put all that together, these, the random victimologies, the sniper, the fact that he had not decompensated at all, we really thought we were looking for somebody who had to be at least in his late 30s, maybe early 40s, and experienced the line of fire before.
- [206:29]
B
Why the late 30s and 40s? I understand that, you know, possible ex military, but why late 30s and 40s?
- [206:35]
A
Well, because the, the calm, cool, collected manner in which he planned and executed perfectly these crimes, we thought if they were in their 20s or even 30s, that, that the person wouldn't have had the level of experience necessary to actually kill that many people and never make a mistake and never be scene.
- [206:59]
B
It's weird, but it's like they wouldn't have had the maturity is basically what you're saying.
- [207:03]
A
Exactly. Because what happens is when profiling is nothing more than reverse engineering a crime. And so we look at the behavior exhibited at crime scene and work backwards to the type of person who committed that crime. Of course, victimology is the first thing we look at. Who are they picking as their victims? If they're picking people who are out on the street late at night, night street workers, you know, sex workers, drug addicts, runaways, those are easy pickings. Nobody is looking for them. Nobody's protecting them. They're out on their own and they're putting themselves in a very risky situation. I'm not judging them, just telling you how risky it is. But if he's shooting people in the privacy and security of their own homes, what does that tell you? He has to have a higher sophistication level. He has to get to people where they are most safe, and he's doing almost that. He's shooting people in broad daylight in the normal course of their life with literally hundreds if not thousands of potential eyewitnesses. How is he doing that? How is he doing that? And nobody's seen him. And you mentioned the white van.
- [208:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, wait, we hold on on that one for one second. I know that we get we have more on the God comment complex later, but what was it at that point that suggested to you that this person may have one?
- [208:28]
A
The reason why we theorize that he had a God complex is because of his choice of weapon in crime. His MO screams out God complex. We have studied all the other sniper cases in the history of the US and we have seen their psychiatrist. And the way I always like to explain it, I break it down this way that genetics loads the gun, personality and psychology aim it, and your experiences pull the trigger. And that means it's a complicated mix of biopsycho and social that actually makes someone into a killer. In other words, they have to have the genetic preference, predisposition, or at least potentiality to be a killer. They have their own personality and psychology, which is the filter through which they then experience life's experiences. So that becomes the critical part, because you develop your own personality and psychology. You start with a certain basis, but you make literal, literally in your life tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of private little decisions in the privacy of your own mind. And those decisions about when you come into conflict with someone, are you going to sort of try to push away from the negative or are you going to embrace the dark side? Are you going to actually just give into it and in fact do everything you can to do bad things for the rest of your life? And what happens is these little choices that we make when we're very young then become bigger choices. And there are times in your life where you could get off that road and correct. But if you don't, it has this snowball effect that by the time you're in your 20s, and if you're impulsive, you may act out very badly. If you're in your 30s, you will think about it more. If you're in your 40s, you will plan it very carefully and execute it very well. A lot of people can plan things, but they typically fall apart unless you've had a tremendous amount of experience doing that thing. So that's why we felt in this case that he was older. And the fact that he chose, out of all the weapons he could have chosen, chosen somebody as sophisticated as this. He chooses a sniper rifle at a distance because he wants to feel powerful. This empowers him by taking the lives of others. And this is something that we've learned from interviewing long, detailed interviews with other snipers, people who have been successful and people who have been stopped before they took. Killed anyone.
- [211:22]
B
What is it about that kind of a weapon and killing somebody from a distance with a sniper rifle that is meaningful to them? The challenge of it?
- [211:33]
A
Well, there is a certain challenge of it, but they see it as a way to be godlike. You know, everybody thinks of God up in heaven, and God decides when somebody lives or dies, Right? So that's what they're doing. They're sort of assuming the role of God. They're superimposing that on people. They want to cause the fear and terror that they successfully did in the entire Washington, D.C. maryland, Virginia, Beltway area. That was his goal. It was very clear. He didn't come out with a statement saying, saying, I want this much money. I will stop if you do that. He was trying to engender terror by not letting anybody feel like they were safe. And so all the parents were worried about sending their kids to school. All the people that had to go to work, all the people that had to work in outdoor jobs, all the people that had to get gas in their cars, every. Everybody was terrified at that time.
- [212:44]
B
When you were talking about how calm, how collected one would have to be to execute, you know, this murder spree the way he did, how would somebody being a sociopath factor in? Right. Like, could a sociopath who is 22 have that same calmness that just a crazed killer might have at age 42?
- [213:11]
A
Right. Well, first of all, sociopathy, a sociopath is a diagnosis. It's a psychological diagnosis. It's in the dsm. And you have to actually do tests to diagnose a person like that. Instead, in law enforcement, we do indirect personality assessments and we talk about psychopathy instead. Psychopathy, the disorder that leads that means somebody is a psychopath, is based on what Dr. Robert Hare put together. He put together the PCLR, the psychopathy. Excuse me, the psychopathy checklist. Revised, which has 20 different aspects that make it up. And what you do is you rate someone a 0 if they don't have this trait, a 1 if they kind of had this trait, and a 2 if they definitely have this trait. And it's things like narcissism and getting in trouble when they're kids and things like that. Multiple marriages, a lot of problems in their life. But if you score more than 30, you're classified as a psychopath. If you score more than 20, a lot of people think, think you're probably there or almost there. But one of the things that. One of the most prevalent traits in psychopaths is a lack of human empathy. Now what does that mean? What is empathy? It's our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes and feel bad about them when they go through bad things. And it's one of the things that helps prevent us from hurting people and being violent. This is a sort of a survival mechanism that our brain puts in, in front of it's sort of our frontal lobe, it's our policeman. It basically says, stop before you go too far. And many psychopaths have none of that at all. They are completely devoid of empathy and many of them are completely devoid of human emotion. Now, the smart one ones can see it in other people and they can
- [215:24]
B
mimic it, learn to fake it.
- [215:26]
A
Right, Fake it very well. And that's what they use to manipulate people.
- [215:30]
B
Ted Bundy.
- [215:31]
A
Ted Bundy is a great example. Also, I don't really love giving names of people that are bad. I work for the victims, not for the bad guys. But Vandersloot, the guy who killed Natalee Holloway and also the daughter of a South American race car driver. And on the five year anniversary of killing Natalie Holloway.
- [216:02]
B
Oh, that's right, I forgot he killed a second person. Totally forgot that until you mentioned it.
- [216:06]
A
She found out because she read something on the Internet about him on the anniversary and he ends up killing her. But what he does is he walks out of the hotel room with two empty coffee cups, goes and gets coffee and comes back to, quote, discover her dead. Immediately after killing her, he recovers, comes up with a plan. If I go out and look and carry two cups, I can say I thought she was still alive. She was alive when was I left and when I came back, I found her dead. He's immediately trying to build an alibi. Well, guess what? He didn't realize that there was a camera literally right outside his hotel room door. And nobody went in or out after he left. And so they were very easily able to break through that alibi. But the important thing is that psychopaths have the ability to recover quickly. They actually live for thrills. So they're exciting people to be around, for example. But in this case, we saw the fact that he was able to do this in a cold, calculated manner as not only confirming that he was probably going to be high on the psychopathy checklist, but also confirming that he had experience doing exactly this somewhere in the his life.
- [217:30]
B
We need that checklist posted in the show notes so that young women dating can just quietly drop these questions. Can't do it all at once, ladies. It's too on the nose. But, you know, just like over the first date, you could maybe squeeze in two, you know, second date, have like a friend show up and ask a few. There must be a way of peppering these if your instances haven't served you well.
- [217:51]
A
I, I would be, I would be a little cautious about it just because, because people who haven't done this thousands of times can sort of misinterpret behavior. There's a lot of things that people, a lot of little traits or characteristics of psychological disorders, minor characteristics of them that we all have. But people can see those minor characteristics and think it means everything in the diagnostic category and they could be wrong that way. Although we actually did a show for Audible and it's called Am I Dating a Serial Killer?
- [218:31]
B
I wanted to ask you about that
- [218:33]
A
and believe me, when, you know, some of it's kind of light hearted and it's hosted by a comedian, so we try to get to the lighter side of it. But there was one case in particular where they called me in to interview this woman because I believe she was dating a psychopath. I believe that he was a very dangerous person and in fact he did end up killing someone. So, my God, you should be incredibly careful when you meet somebody new because especially somebody who is charming, charismatic and energetic and has all these amazing stories. You should kind of dig down and meet their friends and their families. And if they say, well, I don't really talk to my family, big red flag. If they say, well, I don't have a lot of friends, big red flag. There are, you know, if you look at, let's say, the Tinder swindler, that guy, I mean, when he did his thing, he made women feel incredibly special. He flew them on a private jet, he did all these amazing things, all these gifts. He said his life was totally consumed by them. Well, it's all a very well planned out manipulation and you have to be able to as much as you're feeling great about it and it's amazing and it's exactly what you wanted. If it's real, it will survive you stepping back and taking some time and saying, okay, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to slow this down. We're going to look into some things. We're going to take some time to actually get to know each other before we make all these amazing moves. And that will put a wrench in his plans because he needs you to go fast so that he can move on to the next one and the next one and the next one.
- [220:24]
B
Maybe, maybe it's not so bad to be dating somebody who's a little dull. Maybe you could. Maybe dull in the beginning is good because it sounds like they don't tend to project dull if they're trying to swindle you or woo you or sort of just get you under their power. So, yeah, okay, that's a good thing to look for. I mean, ideally hot but dull. So consider that ladies, and we'll, we'll continue more of this in a little bit with Jim because definitely want to know more about am I dating a serial killer? Who doesn't, who wouldn't listen to that? Okay, so, and by the way, just because you're not a serial killer doesn't mean you're safe. I mean, psychopath, sociopath, these are all deeply problems. Killing animals, always deeply problematic. And people, women overlook it. It's like, oh, what do you mean he killed the family cat? Oh, but he's so handsome and he treats me so well. Ladies, pay attention. All right, wait, stand by because I want to get to, I want to get back to sniper and get us through that. So now we move on to the next day and it takes us to October 4th. Another person is shot, though she survives. A 43 year old woman, Caroline Sieber. Well, back to Michael's, a parking lot. She's putting her bags inside of her Toyota minivan. You can picture it, can't you? You know, you can picture yourself doing this. Amazingly, she survives. But the D.C. virginia, Maryland sort of area is absolutely in a panic now. I mean, as we discussed, and here's just a little bit of sound from locals at and around that time. This is SOT5. I do walk around my community with a little more caution than I did before. Outside, they can't go outside and the blinds in the schools are all closed. So it's very much a bunker kind of mentality.
- [222:08]
D
You know, feeling that they're experiencing.
- [222:11]
C
As soon as people get home from work, they stay in, they're not going out. Even the restaurants are. There's nobody in the restaurants. Residents of Washington have faced an awful lot of stuff in the last year from people, people flying airplanes into buildings, the anthrax attacks. We face, you know, crazy shooters most days of the year, at least the threat of it. So we're just trying to go along as business as usual.
- [222:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, easier said than done.
- [222:44]
A
Yeah. That that man was an anomaly at the time. And I'll tell you both, Tim, my brother Tim was also an FBI agent. And I arrived at that Michael store at exactly time because it turns out that it is almost equidistant between our two houses. We literally pulled up, I look over as, as I'm pulling into a parking space, he's pulling into the one right next to me. And we ran up to the sheriff and we said, you know, how can we help? And unfortunately, I wouldn't say that, that the sheriff had been equipped or his department to handle something like, like this. The fact is that all these shootings the days before happened up north of Washington DC and just touching into the north side of Washington DC. And now he goes 50 miles south of Washington DC. What the hell is going on here? But to me, the first thing that I thought was, hmm, kind of did all these shootings north of DC, working his way into DC, just touching into DC and then he jumps 50 miles south. Why is he avoiding Washington DC? Possibly because he knows he'd go head to head with the FBI and the other federal agencies in Washington D.C. who have a worldwide network of agents and communication versus the small towns around D.C. that have access to DC's news, but they don't have, have the FBI, they don't have federal law enforcement, they don't have big city, big police departments.
- [224:24]
C
Oh, so funny.
- [224:25]
A
So he's dancing around the biggest media circus in the world, but not dealing head to head with big law enforcement.
- [224:34]
B
So you're getting this picture of somebody who has some sophistication for sure.
- [224:38]
C
Exactly.
- [224:38]
A
This is not some bumpkin and is thinking about what he's doing and why he's doing it. So he's a planner, he's a manipulator. But Tim and I, we, we ended up finding out that, that the sheriff had let go all of the, all of the witnesses that had been there, did not take any names.
- [224:59]
D
What?
- [225:00]
A
And, and did not do a canvas of the area for any forensics. Actually the media Line that he set up had been about 50ft away from from where the van was. And what I did was I looked at the angle of entry because the bullet went through her and into the back of her van. And so I looked at the angle of entry and then I spotted a sign a few hundred yards away. And I started walking off a grid to do a grid search of the area. This is something that I'm very experienced in. And I walked 87 strides
- [225:38]
B
until I
- [225:38]
A
found a shell casing from a 223. And that was the kind of weapon that was being used. So although the press were at 50ft from the van, this piece of evidence was 87 yards away. So we had to.
- [225:55]
B
So they're contaminating the whole crime scene.
- [225:57]
A
Well, they could have, but the fact is that this is why I think he chose small town law enforcement versus the big guns. And he was very smart to do that. And he would continue to do that, dancing back and forth north and south around Washington D.C. and not in Washington D.C. properly.
- [226:16]
B
Can you explain more about the weapon? You know, in today's day and age, everyone's familiar now with AR15 less. So this rifle.
- [226:24]
A
Yeah, I mean it is, it's a 223. It is a Bushmaster, which. It's a Bushmaster 223. It's just, that's just the brand. I mean, it's the same kind of weapon that an M16 would be the project. The shell casing is rather large and the projectile is rather small, which means it's going to go fast and far. It's an accurate weapon. It's very semi automatic. Yes, it's semi automatic. And it's basically the kind of weapon that, you know, troops on the ground and military will use. Because it's so simple, it's very hard to jam. You could stick it in mud and pick it back up and still use the weapon. And so it's, it's a very reliable type of weapon and certainly functional for this particular type of crime.
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D
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- [228:21]
B
The troops use machine guns. This is not that. This is.
- [228:24]
A
No, this is single, right?
- [228:25]
B
Yeah. One trigger, one bullet.
- [228:27]
A
Right. But so far, that's all he's needed.
- [228:31]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [228:31]
A
One shot, one kill. And that, that is something that is really up until this. It's very scary because it also tells us that this person really knows what he's doing because in order for him to be invisible, in other words, nobody actually saw him pull the trigger ever. It means he has to have a really good sniper's perch. And since it's out in public in the daylight, that means he has some way of concealing himself. And of course, people started hearing, we started hearing about a white fence who. That sped away from one of the scenes. Well, if you heard shots and you were in a white van, well, it's very reasonable that you might want to speed away. It's also very important to know that a white, sorry, a white commercial van is actually the most common type of van used in small businesses. And in fact, one of the, the cable companies the year before had sold off 1800 of these white vans in the area because they were ramping up a new fleet. And so there were overabundance. And I think at one of the shooting scenes, when one of the local police officers told my brother, yeah, we're looking for the white band. Somebody saw the white band van. My brother said, okay, stop right here. We're at an intersection. I want you to count the number of white vans you see right now. And it was nine or 13 white vans that just in their sight line right then. So somebody's always going to be searching for the white van. If somebody tells you to think about the white van, you're going to see the white van.
- [230:20]
B
I mean, I've told my, my kids, like as you get to be driving age or you're driving with your friends or whatever, whatever. Do not park next to vans. Do not park next to a van. There is no point. There's no reason. There's plenty of parking spots. Just bad things happen. It's just too easy for bad guys to reach out and grab somebody who's Smaller, weaker.
- [230:40]
A
Right.
- [230:40]
B
And take them.
- [230:41]
A
No question. It's good to be proactive. It's good to be situationally aware. And in this case what ends up happening is that the sheriff, when I went back and talked to him and I, I said, what have the people said? Because Michaels is literally in the parking lot of what's called the Spotsylvania Mall. And I looked around, there were at least 3,000 cars visible to me at that time. And I said, what witnesses? What have they said? And he said, there were no witnesses. I sent them all. And I said, come on, somebody, somebody must have said something. And he said, well, there's this one guy, but he's 18 years old and he uses drugs and he's lied to us before. And he said, what? And I said, what did he say? He said, he said it was a black guy with an afro peeled out in a dark sedan. And I said, great. Did you put out an APB on it? He said, no, I put out the APB on the white van just like Chief Moose told us.
- [231:42]
B
Wow.
- [231:43]
A
And I just took in a deep breath. But I also clocked it. Now this is an unreliable witness who's lied to the police before, who's a drug user. But it could be.
- [231:54]
B
Why would he lie about this? Yeah, it could be. And the other thing is, our viewers may not, maybe they do remember, but there we didn't have cameras everywhere back then. This is immediately post 9 11. It would take a while for that apparatus to get up at every corner of America. It wasn't there yet.
- [232:12]
A
And not only that, this was a very rural area. This is Fredericksburg, Virginia. In fact, it's Spotsylvania County, Virginia and it's a tiny little area that happens to have some box stores and some a mall. But it's generally, it's just a very suburban 55 miles away from Washington D.C. kind of quiet little bedroom town. And, and nobody.
- [232:38]
B
The iPhone didn't come out until 2007 as well. So people weren't popping open their phones and getting the immediate aftermath. Sometimes it bears reminders, you know, about how we used to live versus now and these things that we've just become accustomed to.
- [232:53]
A
Yeah, we were using pagers in the FBI at the time.
- [232:56]
B
Okay. So the next shooting, and thank goodness this person survived, was of a child, a 13 year old, shot critically wounded outside of the Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. So he was shot in the chest, but he survived. He would later testify at one of the trials. And two days later, on October 9, 2002. Keep in mind, again, this started, as far as we know, on October 2nd. So here we are, a week into this, a tarot card is found near the scene of that shooting at the school. And this is a, a, I would say, first big clue.
- [233:33]
A
No, absolutely. Well, the first big clue about that is that this was a response to a lot of the unfortunate statements that police and political figures in the area were making at the time. We told them that the sniper has a God complex. And the last thing you want to do is challenge that sniper. What you want to do is appease them and then hopefully they will sort of lower their aggression and actually start communicating instead. What happened was the Chief Moose made a statement that the streets are safe, the schools are safe. So to prove them wrong, after they called the sniper a coward, going after unarmed people, all this other stuff, person after person was paraded in front of the cameras saying that they wanted to make a statement. And what they did was they shot somebody on their way into school, this 13 year old boy. And like you said, luckily he survived. And when they did the search there, they found the sniper perch in a patch of woods next to the school. And this tarot card was there. And very, very in alignment with our profile at this point was the statement on the top. Call me God. And this confirmed, and I think finally Chief Moose listened to us about this sniper. It's the death tarot card and it says call me God on it. And then on the back it says, this is for you, Mr. Police. Police, no press, and call me God again. And this was a very interesting thing. And as we began to really crunch all this data that we were getting the information from all the shootings that happened in one day with one shot, one kill, the fact that he's bouncing around to these small jurisdictions, the fact that nobody has actually seen him, the fact that everybody's chasing ghost White Ventures hands. The fact that he communicated with us saying call me God. And the fact that he said, this is for you, Mr. Police. Well, that really raised some issues with Jim Fitzgerald, who was my buddy in the behavioral analysis unit and who had started forensic linguistic profiling. And that is using the actual content of the words, the construction of the language, language to tell a lot about the writer. And what we found was a great amount of detail that we would start to think about. But we didn't actually have sort of a, a, you know, sit down, drag out, profile session until a few days, several days later.
- [236:32]
B
So the tarot card was big, big. But the focus on the white van would continue, for example, the same day the tarot card was found. October 9, another shooting. Dean Harold Myers, 53, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, killed while pumping gas at a station in Manassas, Virginia. A white minivan seen in the area is first thought to have some connection with the shooting, later cleared by police. October 11, 2002. Kenneth Bridges, 53, a Philadelphia businessman, killed at an Exxon station just off I95 near Philadelphia. Frederick, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Police enforce a huge roadblock trying to find a white van like vehicle with a ladder rack on top. Sorry, go ahead, Jim.
- [237:15]
A
And let me tell you something about that. That was Massaponic, Virginia. It's the exit just south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. So just south of where the Michaels shooting happened, just one exit down the road. My brother was one of the first law enforcement to show up at that scene scene. And as soon as he got there, he called his wife. They lived, as I said, just not a short distance away. And he said, stay inside, whatever you do, don't come out here. And she said, I just left that very gas station. And she literally had the receipt from pumping gas literally 10 minutes before the shot was fired there. Now, fortunately, she was in a big white fire van, but it was one of those big 15 passenger white vans that stood stands taller than she is. So a sniper would never have had a shot with her standing next to that van. It was very fortunate. But unfortunately, the man who did stop there, he literally stopped there because he didn't want to have to. He was driving up to Philadelphia, I believe he didn't want to have to stop anywhere near D.C. because of the snow. He said, I'll fill up my tank here and then I'll be able to drive the rest of the way to Philly. He was actually on the phone with his wife telling her that when he was shot and killed. Terribly tragic story.
- [238:38]
B
And this is another reason why the whole thing was so disconcerting is. And I talked about this with our. With our guest on the zodiac killings, in which the people. There seemed to be no motive. You know, the Zodiac killer didn't steal purses or wallets or. Or commit sexual assaults. It just seemed to be killing for fun. And so it was like, those are especially disturbing because we like to believe we can find patterns that we can then avoid that will keep us safe. I think it's just a psychological crutch. And this is similar. It's lacking any crutch for any sane person to try to use because this could have happened to Anyone, a child near a school, a person pumping gas, a person getting groceries, a man walking down the street. It's like the liquor store, the parking lots. There's just no stopping. Anything you did improv as a hermit
- [239:32]
A
was, was a risk anything you did. And as I said earlier, people were literally putting up blankets over every window in their house. They were afraid not only of going out in public, they were afraid that since so many people were off the street street, that the sniper was going to start shooting people in their own homes. This is a. It's a very effective tool when you randomly kill people at will with nobody being able to identify you or stop you. The terror level just kept rising over these 23 days. It just became unbelievably scary just to live and operate in that area. My brother, to his credit, he ran the SWAT team at the Washington field office of the FBI. He had all his SWAT team members out patrolling the area because he started, we helped him kind of profile the kinds of places that these shootings were taking place. They were all near good avenues for egress. A highway nearby so they can get away fast. That was important to the shooter. So. So he was driving around to small towns, exits around big highways so that he could try to interdict. And unfortunately, he actually heard the shot at the Home Depot. And I think that's the next shooting.
- [240:59]
B
Your brother did, Tim.
- [241:01]
A
Yes, Tim did. And he was the first law enforcement to arrive at that scene.
- [241:06]
B
Oh, my God.
- [241:06]
A
And unfortunately, it was an FBI employee that had been shot and killed.
- [241:11]
B
Yes. Yes. Okay. And that was a woman, right? That was Linda Franklin, 47, Arlington, Virginia. This is the 11th victim, though not yet fatality because two of the earlier folks survived. She was shot and killed by a single gunshot in the Home Depot parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, Virginia. An FBI intelligence analyst and I knew that you and your brother were working this case, but I did not know that he was the first on, on that scene, which must have been horrific. 47 is not old. And to have. Have it turn out to be someone who's essentially a colleague, even worse.
- [241:49]
A
And he just, he just describes, you know, seeing her, her husband, you know, holding her and her dying in his arms, and it just was horrific. And this really got him even more riled up. And he knew that this was a very sophisticated killer. And we had been talking throughout this whole process, and at about this time, we decided we need to really do a push to try to gather all this information and get it out to all the law enforcement agencies in the Area. Area. And it would be very shortly after that that the Ashland shooting happened. That was. That was even further south away from D.C. about halfway between Fredericksburg and Richmond, Virginia.
- [242:40]
B
So that was October 19th. That was October 19th, 2002, five days after.
- [242:47]
A
I can't remember.
- [242:48]
B
So there's two more. And after Linda for Franklin, 47, was killed, five days later, October 19th, Jeffrey Hopper, 37, shot in a parking lot at a Ponderosa steakhouse. To me, that is just.
- [242:58]
A
That's the one in Ashland. Yeah, that's the one.
- [243:00]
B
He did survive. He survived. But, you know, the Ponderosa. God, we all grew up going to the Ponderosa. It's just like these things that are Americana. You know, there's something about it that's just. It shakes you to the core. The doctors were able to remove the bullet from. From Jeffrey Hopper during surgery and connect. Connect it to the others, the ballistics coming back from the other victims. And amazingly, he did survive. The final victim was Oct. 22, 2002, bus driver Conrad Johnson, 35, of Oxon Hill, Maryland, shot while just standing on the top step inside of his commuter bus in Aspen Hill, Maryland. He would later die. He was the 13th person known to be shot by the DC sniper. Again, three of those survived. Ten were killed. Got ahead, Jim.
- [243:44]
A
So what happened was that when. When the shot happened, I was actually in the. When the shooting happened in Ashland, Virginia, I was actually in Richmond, Virginia, at the time. So I came up. My brother got to the crime scene before I did, and he. He found, I'd say, a situation in great disarray. And what he did was he was working with the FBI's Human Sent Recovery department dogs. And these dogs were specially trained to pick up the scent and actually follow the path most recently taken by that human. If they're in this area. And it's an amazing program, but it would take me many hours to actually explain all the things they did. But when my brother arrived, all of the searchers were going in a particular area because. Because the victim said, I heard the shot, and it came from that direction. And when Tim. When they presented the scent pads from the tarot card that had been found and also some of the shell casings that had been found, they were able to. They got a scent, and their dog said that it was in the opposite direction. And. And all the cops said, nah, it's not that way. This is the way the victim said it came from. And Tim knew that the guy was standing next to a brick wall. And the echoes that you can get off a Brick wall of a shot can, can make it sound like it comes from anywhere. And so he, the dog takes off in one direction. As soon as they break the line of the woods, he sees an area where it's laid out. It's. The leaves are all crushed down like somebody was laying there. And he shines his flashlight up and there, tacked to a tree, is a. Is a little baggie, like a Halloween baggie with some pink lined note paper in it. And he says, well, obviously they left us another message. Unfortunately, there was a big argument about whether or not they should open this thing. But Tim said, I can read through it. And it says, the streets are not safe. Your children are not safe anywhere. He said, there's a threat in this. We need to open it now. We need to get this out to the public. And because it was in a small town and they didn't know who should be in charge, they decided to hold onto it. It was, it was now late, late, late into the morning, and they wanted to wait till the bosses wait in. So they did not open it in time to get the call that came into that Ponderosa at the payphone right at the front door that was ringing while they were still on the scene at 6 o' clock in the morning. And nobody answered the phone. So it was an attempt by the sniper to actually communicate with law enforcement. It's a missed opportunity. And there would be others, let me tell you. But the thing that we knew from this letter, when we finally got it open and we read what was going on, we saw a huge dichotomy between the actions, the plan, planning and the execution of the shootings. And then these communications. And you can see it right now, there are those little covers on it.
- [247:06]
B
This is the COVID sheet to the letter that you just referenced. Let me just set it up for. The COVID sheet reads for you, Mr. Police. Call me God in quotes. Do not release to the press. Keep going, Jim.
- [247:16]
A
Yeah, and you can see there's stars on it. Like, like this was a kindergarten, you know, homework assignment that was handed in and done well. So they, the teacher put little stars on it. That's what it looked like. It was very immature and childish. So when we get into the profiling room and we're around our table and we're all arguing about this case and trying to figure out who this sniper is, we had definitely nailed down that this is a very experienced and sophisticated person who's probably, now we're thinking in his early to mid four, who is police or military trained. Police or military experience, who is, who is on a mission. Like he literally has a very specific mission and he's carrying it out flawlessly. Nobody has seen him yet. And so we kind of nailed those aspects of the profile. And Jim Fitzgerald says, guys, I understand exactly what you're saying, saying and, and I agree with you. But here's the problem. When this guy's communicating with us, I gotta say he's, he's immature. He says this is for you Mr. Police. As if he's looking up to the police. He's writing on, you know, basically on, on kids school paper and he's putting stars on it. What kind of self respecting 45 year old man is gonna do this? If this guy is an adult, he's just barely adult, but I'm thinking he's younger. This is what Jim Fitzgerald says. And everybody's like no way, that's not possible. It can't be. Somebody who's this sophisticated, can't be that young. There's no way, it's not possible for them to have done this without police military training and experience on the line of fire. And so I said look, then we have one of two possibilities here. Either we have, have a situation where we have a 45 year old man who's incredibly experienced, who's incredibly great at planning and executing these shootings, but he decompensates when he's communicating with us and he acts like a teenager or for the first time in U.S. criminal history, we have a sniper team and everybody blew up. No, snipers don't play well with other each other. They don't, they work alone. Every case in history so far has been like this. You're a fool if you think it's otherwise. And Fitz chimes in, he says, well it would make sense because I'm telling you, whoever wrote this is like a child. How can he be so sophisticated and be a child? And everybody's telling me it can't happen. And I said well it could happen. If you have a 45 year old and you have a 15 year old and the 45 year old is controlling the 15 year old.
- [250:00]
B
You said
- [250:02]
A
yeah I did. And I said in my mind the way he could control him best is to totally control him by sexually victimizing him. And everybody says, oh, you're an expert in that field, that's why you think that's happening. They didn't believe it. And I started talking them through it and I started saying how, how this is a possibility. And in fact I convinced them there was a probability and we actually put it in the profile at that point. Point totally unconfirmed until 11 years later. But.
- [250:33]
B
Well, that one piece of it. But the rest of it would be confirmed within days.
- [250:37]
A
Oh, yes, right. But the part of it about how. How these two snipers, for the first time in US History, were willing and able to work together. One was training the other, it turns out, and Muhammad was sexually abusing Malv. Basically from the beginning,
- [251:05]
B
It was unfathomable even to these FBI experts. It took a profiler like you to say, trust me, this is a real possibility we need to be taking seriously. And yeah, and can you just. Can you speak to also, too? Because the other clue that was in this. This letter was that phrase Mr. Police. You spoke to how it suggested he was young, but it suggested something else as well.
- [251:31]
A
Right. And another thing that Jim Fitzgerald brought up was the fact that the tarot card, plus the phrase Mr. Police, he said, Mr. Police is actually a phrase used a lot. It's a disrespectful thing, but it looks polite.
- [251:48]
B
Right.
- [251:48]
A
It's used a lot in Jamaican reggae songs. So he said, I'm feeling like there's a Jamaican or Caribbean influence in this writer's life. He said, I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a Jamaican American or African American who has Jamaican roots or Caribbean roots. And I said, you know, back at the Michaels store shooting, the one eyewitness that the sheriff told me about, who he thought was a liar because he was a drug user and he had lied to the police before, he said, right, it was a guy with a big Afro, a black guy who peeled out in a dark sedan. We need to change this profile, profile from a white van, work van, to a dark sedan. And we're probably looking for two African Americans with some tie to the Caribbean. And that changed everything.
- [253:00]
B
Now you've got a different profile. And as it would turn out, you got the right one, but you don't have the guys and you don't have the right, right car. And, you know, still there's.
- [253:11]
A
We don't know which car it is. We just have a general feeling. And it turns out as they went back and interviewed people who were around the neighborhood of the first two or three days of shooting, one of them had also seen not a car racing away from the scene, but a dark sedan slowly pulling away from the scene scene. That is a smart tactician. That is somebody who knows that racing away is going to raise the awareness and set off the alarms. But Slowly driving down a neighborhood street. It probably isn't going to really stand out in anybody's mind.
- [253:48]
B
And so how did we get from that point to just a few days later? The final victim was shot on October 22, and within 20, within 48 hours, there was an arrest. And in between, I should say this, here's. You mentioned Chief Moose. I mean, right around that time, right before the capture, he had this message for the community which still sounded rather scary. This is sound bite 1.
- [254:19]
A
The person or people have demonstrated willingness and ability to shoot people of all ages, all races, all genders, and they've struck at different times of the day, different days at different locations. We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language in the message that pertains to the threat. It is in the form of a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.
- [255:00]
B
My God, the thought of hearing that,
- [255:03]
A
yeah, that would be pretty scary. And if you notice the person standing behind Chief Moose at that moment, I believe was an FBI agent. And what he said was basically exactly what we recommended that he said. And I think my brother had a great deal to do with the fact that that line came out because he was very, very adamant that people should know that the children of this community are being of the entire area are being threatened by these guys so that they would protect their kids, so that we wouldn't put kids in harm's way. And what happened was they wanted to just hide the fact that there was a direct threat in the local letter. But we said it will actually appease the shooter if you continue his line of communication, if you put it out there, he knows it's going to scare people. He will feel good about it. He might calm down.
- [256:02]
B
Because we showed the COVID sheet to that letter left by the Ponderosa, but the body of it, per CBS reporting at the time, the body of it read, included a demand for $10 million giving the 16 digit account number and a PIN that was from a stolen bank of America platinum credit card. And it included the chilling postscript quote, your children are not safe anywhere at any time. So, yeah, so the, the, the threat had been made and now the Chief Moose was listening to you. It's pointless to go out there and tell the community that they are safe and that you've got it under control. A, it's not true and B, it's provocative to the sniper.
- [256:40]
C
Right?
- [256:40]
A
Absolutely. And so what happens at this point, point is that. And this is something we were trying to encourage, we were trying to Encourage communication from the sniper or snipers at this point. And what happened was they called the. The. Excuse me. They called the hotline. And very unfortunately, when they called, they said, call me, God. And people on the task force force who took that call thought that it was just somebody gaming them.
- [257:14]
B
Oh, no.
- [257:14]
A
And scamming them. And they actually hung up the phone. They called back again. They actually wrote about this in that note. It was very unfortunate. But eventually one thing that they did was they called up a priest and they left a voice message on. On that priest's voice recording. Phone recording. Answering machine.
- [257:42]
B
Sorry, voicemail. It's been so long. It's been so long.
- [257:44]
A
I know. I couldn't even remember. Anyway, on his answering machine. And in that, they said, you should look what happened in. And I'm trying to remember the name of town. It might have been Arlington. Where was that shot fired? Through the. Through the Apple. Excuse me, through the Michaels store. Where nobody got hit.
- [258:11]
B
Yes. Hold on a second. Wasn't that. That was a Michael's in Aspen Hill, Maryland.
- [258:17]
A
All right. I'm talking about. Yeah, before that, there was actually a shooting in. In Montgomery, Alabama.
- [258:24]
B
Right.
- [258:25]
A
Montgomery. There you go. Okay.
- [258:26]
B
Yeah.
- [258:26]
A
So that was one of the ones
- [258:28]
B
that we hadn't yet discussed that was on the list.
- [258:30]
C
Right.
- [258:30]
B
Not attributable to the sniper yet, But. But other murders were happening in the country and around this time. And one of them was about to get linked in.
- [258:38]
A
Right. And so what happened was in the. In the message that was left on this priest's answering machine, they said, look at the shooting in Montgomery. And everybody there, because we were talking about the first days of shootings in Montgomery county, thought it was Montgomery County, Maryland. But somebody came up with the idea. Idea. Maybe he's talking about Montgomery, Alabama. It could be. And so they looked at. To see if there were any unsolved shootings there. And yes, there was a store. And somebody came in and picked up a magazine and then left. And then a couple of minutes later, a bullet goes flying through the window, just missing. This is a woman behind the cash register. And in that case, they had picked up a magazine. And let me just tell you, glossy magazines are the absolute best surface in the world for collecting fingerprints. If you touch that, the oils in your finger will interact with the photograph that's on the COVID And it actually burns it in permanently. Burns your fingerprint in permanently into that picture. And if you've ever tried to. That's why people who are trying to save magazines or put them in plastic sleeves. So they don't get destroyed that way. Well, they had a perfect fingerprint which came back to a 15 year old named Malvo, who they were then able to track to a relationship with an older man, female Muhammad, back in the state, who was from the state of Washington. And they found his car, he had a Caprice. They got his license plate and they went and the FBI went to his place in the state of Washington and basically did a search warrant. They found a tree stump in his backyard. They literally excavated the tree stump, shipped it to the lab, took out lots of different bullets from. From it and match them to the shooting the shooter in the D.C. sniper case. So we knew then who we were looking for. And when that APB had gone out, you know, with the profile and everything meshed together, then within 24 hours, they were actually spotted by a trucker at a rest stop sleeping in the, in the caprice. And the FBI's HRT team moved in. There were hundreds of other law enforcement and truckers actually chipped in and helped blocking off roadways and the escape routes so that they couldn't get away. And they were taken down without anybody any further loss of life.
- [261:30]
B
Jim, why did they call that in? I mean, it was in a way a confession to say, check out that the shooting in Montgomery. I don't know that they knew that they left a fingerprint, but they must have known it could potentially be tied to them.
- [261:45]
A
He felt omnipotent at this point. He felt like there's no way. He felt law enforcement was so stupid they would never catch him. He was bragging. He was trying to get people to realize that he was even better and he'd done much more than they thought he did. And now it actually gets tracked back to a number of other crimes that occurred in a spree that had gone all the way across the uk, the US Where Muhammad was training Malvo how to kill people.
- [262:13]
B
Right. And that's the category that we left out of the initial discussion. But I said it was at least 20 people that they shot. Thirteen we went through. But there were at least seven more. Right. In the month leading up to the D.C. sniper spree as he training this young teenager they met, as I understand it, in the Caribbean. Malvo's mother was not the greatest greatest and somehow allowed. Yeah, she allowed him to be just kind of turned over to this guy. And Muhammad started training him to kill. And Malvo went along with it.
- [262:47]
A
Right. Well, what ended up happening was it wouldn't really come out to 11 years later when Malvo spoke publicly, and he did this to his great. I don't know. Declaration detriment. Because speaking about this in jamaica, which is an extremely homophobic place to this day, they consider. If you. If you're a male and you're sexually victimized by a male, they consider that homosexual activity on the victim's part. I mean, it has nothing to do with the victim's sexuality. It has to do with an older person taking. Taking advantage of a younger person. But malvo came out and said. Said that when muhammad picked him up out of this shelter, basically, he was homeless. His mother had abandoned him. His mother had abandoned him several times already in his life before the time he reached 15 years of age, and his father was completely absent in his life. Muhammad came in and said, I'll be your father figure. You know, I'll train you. I'll make you a man. And he slowed. Was grooming him into this sexual victimization, and he was also training him to become a killer. At first it was target practice, and then it evolved into human murder.
- [264:09]
B
Sick. The. The car. Can we talk about it? Because once you guys got to look at the car, Things would become much more clear about how they were getting away with this, how they were approaching. Can you talk about what the car told you?
- [264:26]
A
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, the car was a very old caprice, One of these large, oversized cars that would never make it today because it's so big and it's a gas guzzler. What they did was they cut a little hole out in the back by the license plate so that you could basically fold down the stick seats and lay inside and stick just the point of the rifle out of the rifle barrel out of that hole. And there was enough room for you to see the sight. To sight your target. But you can also see how it would limit them from shooting very high or very low because you have a very limited entrance where the gun barrel could be protruding from. So most of the sound of the shot is going to be contained within that trunk. If they weren't wearing headphones in there, they would have blown their eardrums out if they kept firing that weapon in such a close space. But we understand that a number of the shootings were done by muhammad, and some of them were, quote, training shots done by maozo.
- [265:39]
B
Wow.
- [265:40]
A
They may have been the ones that people survived, because it's very difficult for us to think that malvo, at such a young age, Would have been able to carry out the shootings that happened in the beginning. And at least in one of the cases, we know that somebody saw Malvo driving away from the scene. That was the Spotsylvania Mall, Mike.
- [266:06]
B
And they also had. He. He's spoken about how he admits to killing people himself, but he also says he was the lookout. He would make sure that there was no one in the line of fire, Not. Not for that person's protection, but just so that they didn't have that many witnesses. And it was a clear shot. So one would scout and the other one would kill. And they had done something with the back seat to make it possible, I guess, to lie down, you know, from. From the back seat straight into the trunk. So I assume on your belly you can, you know, be in shooting position?
- [266:34]
A
Position, yes, absolutely. But what was even more disturbing than everything that had been that had come out was when we found out that Muhammad's actual motive, although he said what he was doing, is training Malvo to be a killer. And that he wanted to create a school for kids his age. And he would train all of them and he'd form an army to just take over and fight the oppression that he grew up in. And that kind of stuff that was all just garbage. What it actually was, his wife had gotten custody of their children. He was pissed off, and he was going to kill his wife so that he could then regain custody of his children. And what he did was he made this whole pledge men up so that he could kill a whole bunch of people and then shoot his wife as part of this, hoping that it would just be seen as one of the random victims and nobody would suspect him. Diabolically, he would be awarded his children back.
- [267:43]
B
Here is Muhammad's ex wife on how she found out that he was the suspect and what she thought. This sat through.
- [267:52]
C
The way I found out that it
- [267:53]
B
was John was when ATF knocked on
- [267:56]
D
my door and said that they were
- [267:58]
B
gonna name John as the sniper. And so they asked me, well, do
- [268:04]
D
you think that he would do something like this?
- [268:06]
C
And I was like, well, I don't.
- [268:10]
A
Yeah.
- [268:11]
B
I said, well, why would you think that? I said, well, he said he could take a small city, terrorize the it.
- [268:17]
C
They would think it would be a
- [268:18]
B
group of people and it would only be me. I mean, I'm. I wonder. Jim was. Did anybody ask her? So when we had a sniper problem on our hands. Did you ever think that could be my ex husband?
- [268:35]
A
I don't. I think in general, people, when things. Terrible things happen, generally people in the community don't think it's going to happen to the them we still feel like this distance. I think in this particular case,
- [268:49]
B
you
- [268:49]
A
know, I've spoken to her personally about this. I think she was, she was not at all. Especially the white van of it and, and all that. All these distractions that were out there and, and since he never. He didn't specifically tell her that he would be a sniper, but he did say he could terrorize the town and kill a bunch of people and then kill her and everybody would think it would be all part of that same plan. So what about Malvo?
- [269:20]
B
Okay, I don't think she knew either. I just wondered if it occurred to her after that threat, how do you take a not well treated, I guess not well raised, but not terrorist 15 year old boy and turn him into what he called calls a monster. Malvo is still sitting in prison. I'll set it up with this soundbite from him not long ago. This is soundbite 6 I mean I was a monster. I mean if you look up the definition, I mean that's what a monster is. I was a ghoul, I was a thief. I stole people's lives. I did, I did some else bidding just because they said so. I mean that is the definition of a monster. That was him speaking of the Washington Post in 2012.
- [270:13]
A
Yeah, I think what happened was a combination of. Remember I talked about the genetics, loading the gun, personality psychology, aiming it and the experiences pull the trigger. I think in his case because he was born in a situation that was not only poverty stricken but you know, he himself had been taken advantage of a number of times and you know, not just sexually with Muhammad but other things that had happened to him. And he was basically booted from place to place and living on the streets scrapping for himself. He didn't feel connected to society at all. And the fact that fact that Muhammad was sexually victimizing him, which is manipulating him and grooming him both as a sexual abuse victim and as a killer. What he did was the choice of weapon. The separation between the shooters and the victims gave Muhammad the ability to tell. To teach Malvo that there no nobody, you don't know them, they don't know you. There's no connection here. It's easy to do and I think just it was a perfect storm. Both the needs that this kid had and he had to have the potentiality. I mean I don't know how much anger and rage had built up inside of him. But certainly being victimized over and over again by Muhammad and the same person that you looked up to the Same person that you thought of as a father figure figure because you didn't have one. This is what he was searching for in his life. It was a really. It was a deadly combination.
- [271:52]
B
My God, he starts hurting you and he starts making you hurt others. Here's a little bit more of Malvo recounting how it was that Muhammad took hold of him. Sat 7 He gave me his time.
- [272:07]
D
His time.
- [272:07]
B
That's the only thing we possessed and
- [272:10]
D
where we invested tell what we value.
- [272:12]
B
He gave me his time. He was consistent. Even though the consistency was madness. He was consistent. He gave me his time. Wow. His time. Muhammad's time ran out on November 10, 2009 when he was executed by lethal injection. He designed. He declined to make a final statement statement. He was 48 years old when he died. He was 41 years old at the time of his arrest. And the, the courts and the legislatures, the supreme court have gone round and round on the younger of the pair on Malvo because the supreme court, well, would eventually rule that it is unconstitutional to. In 2012, they ruled to, to pass down mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders. That it violates the eighth amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and therefore what to do with Malvo. So he'd been tried in a couple of different states and in Virginia they did change the law to not allowing life without parole sentences for juveniles. So he can't have a life sentence without parole. Right, you know, there, right now. But if he were paroled from Virginia, then he would have to begin serving his Maryland sentence. And there's a question about whether he could ever get out or whether he would just be in jail in perpetuity because one state after the other would start executing their sentences against him. I don't know. You tell me. Because Malvo's attorneys right now are seeking sentencing release or release or release, which seems, that seems impossible to me.
- [273:57]
A
Well, well, I don't know. I'm not sure what's going to happen. I will say this. I mean, Malvo was pretty messed up at the time of his arrest. I've seen some of the art that he produced when he was in his cell. Some of his statements at the time were very, very negative. He had been really pushed over to the dark side. I mean, I'm not saying that he didn't make choices, but he made 15 year old choices. And sometimes that can be reversed. When you hear him speak today, he says a lot of the right things. He may one day be able to convince a parole board that he's Been rehabilitated. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I do think that the way, at least the way the law is right now, if he does get released from Virginia, he will be serving time in, in Maryland, and I don't see that he'll be able to ever get out.
- [274:52]
B
Yeah, I don't. I think even our current soft on crime policies don't go to the likes of the DC sniper. Understanding of the two, he, he was not the most culpable, but you can't kill and terrorize that many people and walk free again. He did get married in prison. It always never ceases to amaze me. Never ceases to amaze me. Jim, these women who marry prisoners, I don't know what, you could do a whole profile on them. I'm sure I could. Right. This, this woman, she started writing to him, then she went in, they said it was beautiful. They were allowed to hold hands. The institution was very accommodating. His state prison in Virginia, he's enriched her life as much as she has enriched his. I mean, I don't know what that says about her life. And one of his original trial attorneys comes out and says he's met the bride. Very impressive young lady. Educated. Her eyes are wide open, close in age to Malvo, who's now 37, 7. And they are, quote, soul mates, according to the lawyer.
- [275:51]
A
Well, I think there's. There's a lot involved in that psychology, and it happens very often. I mean, it happened with Ramirez here in California. I mean, they made him into a rock star. All these women were, were literally throwing themselves at him. It was really.
- [276:05]
B
Wait, which guy was that? Remind me.
- [276:07]
A
Resendez. No, Ramirez. The night stalker here in California.
- [276:12]
B
Stalker?
- [276:12]
A
Yeah, he, he, he did. He killed a lot of people. He was very brutal. He was very bloody. It was. I mean, some of the stuff I can't even recount that he did. But one of the problems is that I think the women that typically will do this, some of them are very religious and they feel like they are. They have a mission to save these people. Others feel so insecure and insignificant in their own life that they want some connection to something famous or even infamous. And it's actually kind of safe. You can be next to a serial killer, but be safe, because that serial killer is in prison for the rest of his life. So you can maintain this connection, have this proximity to fame, and yet not have the risk. So it's a very, very strange psychology that puts people in this place. But as you said, it happens so often. And so many of these killers, who I like to forget the names of, actually end up getting married to mainly women on the outside who have this kind of complex.
- [277:28]
B
Yep. It happened with Eric Menendez too. Somebody married him. I just get like these women who would spend their lives like that when, you know, it's not like every man's a peach, but at least the ones who, you know, you can actually touch might be a more fruitful place to cast your, your rod and reel. I don't know. I don't have a lot of sympathy, I have to say. I don't think that they should let this guy out of jail. I will say that as now the Virginia law has been softened, consistent with the U.S. supreme Court ruling, they're now looking at getting this sentencing release from Maryland, which would be next up to hold him. And we're told the decision in Maryland could come this month, month on that. So it's a very, it's a timely discussion we're having. I don't think the odds are in his favor. I mean, Maryland is pretty blue. Even Virginia is these days, but not that blue. And I gotta leave it on this note, Jim, because you spent a lot of years at the FBI. I know your brother did too. Thoughts on the difference then and now? The way we look at our FBI, the way America thinks about its FBI, you know, the partisan politics that have been on display out of that organization over the past few years. And I know you're retired now, but how you think about it.
- [278:42]
A
Well, I certainly still know a number of people who continue to work for the FBI. And we have sort of a lift serve that we correspond all the retired agents together and to a man and woman. Everybody's very upset with the image of the FBI now. And unfortunately, some of the really negative things. I mean, I think the most horrific thing that that came out against the FBI was, was the lack of involvement in the Nasser investigation. But I think a lot of the political things that have happened are happening way, way, way up here. But the agents, the street agents, the people who dedicate their lives and careers and put their lives on the line, not the administrative administrators, not the leaders of it, but the people who put their lives on the line. They have remained absolutely the same throughout all of this, and they will continue to. And I think that's the saving grace for the FBI. You don't become an FBI agent because you do it for the money. You don't become an FBI agent because you're lazy and you can't Find something else to, to do. The FBI picks and I'm not trying to be, you know, self aggrandizing here. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to become an FBI agent and to work there for 22 years. But the FBI picks people. There are hundreds of thousands of people who apply to the FBI and not that many get picked up every year, maybe a thousand every year. And, and the fact is there's only about 14,000 agents in the whole country and around the world. So it's a very picky job and it's very difficult to get in. It's very difficult to maintain your job there. And part of that is the excellence that they demand from you. And I think that that excellence has not changed. And it is what's going to save the image of the FBI because literally the people who have laid down their lives for people in the FBI and we lost quite a few agents in the last few years. Some of them were first responders on 911 and got cancer and others. There were two agents that were killed in Florida just executing a child sex crimes warrant, search warrant at a house. And it's just, it's a dangerous job. And the people that do it are good people. Unfortunately, I think when, when law enforcement officers or agents get involved, involved in politics or political decisions, it can never go right.
- [281:25]
B
Yeah, it brings shame upon the whole organization. To your credit, I should point out, you obviously were an FBI supervisory Special agent, a profiler. 22 years with the FBI, investigated all sorts of cases. Bank robberies, serial killers, public corruption, sex crimes, abductions, homicides. On it goes. But there are only 25 profilers out of 14,000 FBI agents. And you are one of them. Very compelled, competitive. So to your credit, you had an amazing career with them and continue. And now speaking about these stories, you have a production company, XG Productions. We talked about Am I Dating a Serial Killer? Which you can find on Audible. If you want to hear more about that. A different host, but she gets into it. And then another one called Best Case, Worst Case, that's on Spotify and Apple and you're in that one. And that seems to be kind of what, what we're doing here. Taking listeners behind police lines, giving them unparalleled access to law enforcement. Looking back at some of the most memorable cases that they were on. Sounds like you got a bunch of episodes. Are they out now?
- [282:25]
A
It sounds as of over 300 episodes out.
- [282:28]
B
Yeah. That's amazing.
- [282:30]
A
Yeah. And basically Francie Hakes, who's a former state and local and federal prosecutor. She and I host Best Case, Worst Case. We talk to cops and lawyers and related law enforcement professionals about their careers and what's the best case and the worst case that they remember from their career. And what that does is it shows people what the spectrum, the continuum of the kinds of cases that law enforcement has to live with and also the kinds of people that make up law enforcement. There's 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, over 500,000 officers and agents. And they're very diverse group of people, but only a few make the bad choices that make the headlines. The rest of them dedicate their lives, literally put their lives on the line, and many of them lose their lives over the course or get injured over the course of their careers. But they are a good group of people who are trying to do good and help people, people stay safe and stop crime. And that's, that's a really laudable thing.
- [283:39]
B
And that's something of which the public needs to be reminded. Those of us on our show have very close connections, family, family connections with law enforcement. Try to remember that in all of this madness, when the reporting hits, that's dishonest and politically driven. Thank you for your service and to be continued.
- [283:57]
A
All right, well, thank you for doing this. I appreciate the opportunity to be, be here.
- [284:01]
B
Wow. What a story. What a case. Thank you all for joining us today and all week. You can find more of our true crime content on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast for free and check us out on YouTube. Go over there and subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com Megan Kelly. And we would appreciate you smashing that like button and keep on coming back for more great content. We appreciate it.
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D
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