Megyn Kelly hosts a mega-episode covering the 1996 JonBenét Ramsey murder, where John Ramsey details police incompetence and the 2008 DNA exoneration of his family. The show then shifts to Danny Strong's "Dopesick," exposing how Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family manipulated the FDA with fake studies to profit billions before paying $8.5 billion in fines. Finally, experts analyze "family annihilators" like Chris Watts and Alec Murdock, revealing their crimes stem from psychopathic coercive control rather than isolated rage, urging society to recognize these deadly power dynamics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Little John Case00:10:16
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Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111, every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
And today's mega true crime episode, we are going into the archives and bringing you a deep dive into the John Binet Ramsey case with her father, John Ramsey.
We also have our episode about dope sick and the opioid crisis in America.
This happens to be one of my favorite episodes ever the dope sick episode.
Incredible, incredible story.
And the filmmaker, like, you're going to love this, as well as an episode we call.
Family Annihilators.
You know what that is, right?
Remember when Alec Murdoch was on the stand?
It was one of the final questions the prosecution asked him.
Are you a family annihilator?
He denied it.
We now know, of course, he is and was.
Well, he's not the only one.
This was an intense episode on some of the worst of the worst criminals, including Chris Watts.
I mean, that story is so chilling, but whenever it's on, I cannot turn away.
In any event, enjoy the true crime episode, mega, and we will be back tomorrow.
Live.
We'll see you then.
Today on the program, we are speaking with John Ramsey, the father of little John Benet Ramsey.
John Benet's murder remains one of the most covered stories of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Yet, despite decades of intense media attention, police investigations, and over 20,000 tips in this case, we still don't know the person or persons responsible for her death.
But there are several new developments in the case.
And John is here to walk us through what they are and whether he believes they could lead to finding his daughter's killer after all these years.
First, a reminder of how this story began.
It was Christmas night, 1996, Boulder, Colorado.
The Ramsey home was decorated with holiday wreaths tied with bows.
John and his now late wife, Patsy Ramsey, had put six year old John Binet to bed after returning home from a Christmas dinner with friends.
When Patsy woke up early the next morning and went downstairs, she found a ransom note.
At the bottom of the steps.
It read in part, We have your daughter in our possession.
Patsy ran to John Binet's room, she would later tell authorities, but she was nowhere to be found.
Patsy called 911.
Her voice was hysterical, begging for police to come as soon as possible.
At the end of the call, you can hear Patsy praying and pleading, Help me, Jesus, help me.
There's a ransom note here.
It's a ransom note.
It says, SBTC, victory.
Please.
Okay, what's your name?
Are you Patty?
Patty Lamb here, I'm the mother.
Oh my God.
Please.
Okay, I'm sending an office over, okay?
Please.
Do you know how long she's been gone?
No, I don't.
Please, we just got out.
Is she on here?
Oh my God, please.
Okay, please.
I am, honey.
Please.
Take a deep breath, please.
Okay.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Patty?
You couldn't hear it as well there, but she is on there saying, Help me, Jesus, help me, Jesus.
Oh, hours later, their little girl's body was found in the basement of their home, not by police, but by John, who was sent around by the detective who was there saying, Go look for any belongings of hers that may be out of place.
And he found his own child.
John Binet had been strangled and left for dead on a concrete floor.
Police focused their investigation almost solely on John and Patsy.
Believing there was no way an intruder was responsible.
Why?
That's one of the big questions here.
Why did they believe that?
Because there's a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite.
They believed the parents did it.
Case pretty much closed in their eyes.
It would take years before DNA evidence would clear them in 2008.
But Patsy would never live to see that day.
She died of ovarian cancer two years earlier, 10 years after the death of her little six year old.
Oh, so tragic.
To this day, John's hope.
Is that this case will be solved.
And that hope remains in the hands of the same police department that pointed the finger at him wrongly.
John Ramsey is here today.
John, thank you so much for being with us.
Well, it's my pleasure.
Thank you for having me on.
Oh, I've been following you for so many years, following the case and seeing so many of your interviews, and you've handled it with such dignity.
I appreciate the fact that here we are 25 years later, and you're still, still trying to keep interest on the case and try to call attention to what you need, you think, to solve it.
And there's breaking news, I should say, about the detectives involved in your case.
That's extraordinary.
The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy.
Who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on leads, he didn't do this, he didn't do that.
There's news about him today.
I assume you've heard what's happened to him.
Yes.
Yeah, it was a big step forward, I think, in this case because he was a roadblock.
When he was assigned to this case 25, 26 years ago, he was at that time an auto theft investigator, and now he's put on the investigation of a murder of a child.
And I've never criticized the Boulder police for not knowing what they're doing or not having any experience.
They didn't even have a homicide department.
But I have criticized them over the years for the reason that they would not accept help from those who offered it.
And lots of help was offered.
Right in the beginning, the Denver police offered to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them.
Boulder said, no, we don't need that.
We've got this under control.
That's been going on for 26 years, and they've just kind of had it.
It's time to do something different, put some people in charge that know what they're doing, and be willing to put their ego and arrogance aside and accept help.
Yeah.
The detective's name was Tom Trujillo.
He was one of the lead investigators in John Benet's case.
He just received an involuntary transfer to another division where he's going to be working the midnight shift, not a promotion, in addition to a three day suspension.
And they've basically said that he and another were not, they were not investigating, appropriately investigating several cases.
They said John Binet's case was not one of them.
These are the cases that he's being accused of, you know, half assing it on were not homicide cases.
But he is being accused of not doing his job and not following through on leads and so on and other significant investigations.
Do you feel, you know, validated at all by that?
Well, it.
In a way, yes.
We've, uh, we've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of, uh, thinking out of the box.
And, and more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, uh, and ego, uh, prevented anybody from coming in to help.
You know, our system, the way it's set up is kind of crazy, but, you know, there's 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country.
Each one's a little island of authority.
And if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it.
With the exception of a few things like bank robbies, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited.
And that's a real crazy system because there's tons of qualified help that could have come in, wanted to come in, but unless they were invited and asked to come in to help, they can't.
And it's been a huge frustration.
And that's really what I'm very critical of the police department.
On that issue.
Of course.
Because you see, the bigger cities tend to have a higher homicide rate and thus more experienced homicide detectives and people who know how to preserve a crime scene and preserve evidence.
And that's the problem.
That was one of the major problems right from the get go with this, which let's take a step back now and talk and set up the crime so that people have a better feeling for what they did and didn't do and why you really kind of want this case wrested from them right now.
I mean, it's been 26 years.
It's kind of time.
You know, there should be a statute of limitations for the police.
If they haven't solved it, they should be able to be compelled to give the evidence to the family or to somebody else who might be able to have a go at it.
But we'll get to that.
Locked Doors and Stun Guns00:15:37
Exactly.
So let's go back.
Let's go back to December 26, 1996.
You were living in Boulder, Colorado with Patsy, your wife, with little John Benet, who was six.
You had a son, too, Burke, at the time, who was 10.
And things are going well for you.
You were a successful business executive.
Was Patsy a stay at home wife?
Yes, yes, she was.
Okay.
She's very devoted.
She was taking care of the children.
Okay.
Very devoted mom.
We've seen the videos of her.
She seemed like a very loving mother.
And you just celebrated Christmas Day.
Was there anything out of the ordinary on that day, Christmas Day?
No, it was a very normal day.
We had gotten up early, of course, and had made a breakfast.
And then all day long, kids were in and out of the house with their friends, coming and going and playing with new toys.
And very normal.
Very normal Christmas day for us.
So, you went out over to a friend's house to eat Christmas evening dinner, the dinner on the 25th with the kids?
Yes.
Okay.
So, you go over there and you go ahead.
Well, I say the friends we visited have kids our age, our kids' age.
And so they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family get together.
So, what time did you get home from that dinner?
Well, I think if I recall, it was about 9 30.
John Binet had fallen asleep on the way home, and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired.
She'd been up all day and having fun and playing.
And so I carried her upstairs and put her on her bed.
And then Patsy came up and got her ready for bed and tucked her in.
So Patsy put on John Binet's pajamas that night, and this would later become an issue what she was wearing.
What did Patsy put John Binet in?
I don't remember, quite frankly.
I'd have to look at the pictures, but it was just nightclothes.
But my understanding of the reason I asked you, John, is that I, in reading up in the case, that there was an allegation that Patsy said she put her in a red outfit, like red PJs.
And when she was found, she was in white.
Is that familiar to you?
Yeah, well, I didn't know about the red nightgown.
I had never heard that.
But when I found her, she had on like a black and white.
Pants and a top.
Okay.
So Patsy puts her in bed.
So, probably by 10 o'clock, John Binet was in her bed.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And what time did you guys go to bed in Burke, too?
It'd been shortly after that, probably 10 30, I guess.
Yeah.
And your son, too?
Yes.
Yeah.
He went to bed immediately.
When we got home.
Yeah, he's also a little guy.
It's not like you have a teenager at that point who likes to stay up late.
Oh, he was nine years old.
You go to bed.
Worn out from Christmas Day as well.
Okay.
So everybody goes to bed by 10 30.
And you, like in our house, before we go to sleep, we lock all the doors, make sure the security's on, all that stuff.
Did you have any of that on your house?
We had an alarm system that was in the house when we bought it.
And it was the type that at that time the theory was.
You scare everybody out of the house, including the intruder.
It was just this horrible, loud noise.
And so we didn't use it.
It went off once.
John Bede, about dinner time, I don't know, six months or eight months before, was playing.
We didn't know it, but she was punching the buttons on the alarm system.
And this horrible sound came up.
And I ran into where the control box was.
And I remember John Bede looking at me like, And said, This makes my ears loud.
So, but we've all been there.
Those security systems can be, they can definitely be more annoying than, you know, they ought to be when they go off.
They go off when you don't want them to.
In this case, this would have given you a heart attack if it went off.
So, what about, what else was there?
Did you, were there locks on the doors or the windows?
What was the security setup?
It was an old house built in 1927.
It, yes, there were locks on the doors.
And, Just typical window locks, but I didn't check them that night.
And that's to my deep regret.
We were tired, and we always assumed Boulder was kind of an Ozzy and Harriet, flowers coming up, quiet, safe place.
And so you get complacent.
And I regretfully admit we are complacent.
No, I know it.
I know it.
I mean, I grew up in upstate New York.
We never locked our doors ever, we go away for vacation.
For a week and not even lock the door, and yeah, there was never an incident.
It's you know, I've told people, I said, you know, just be aware there are bad people everywhere, not just because you live in a nice neighborhood, uh, or don't live in South LA that you're safe, but don't be paranoid, but just be aware that your home should be your sanctuary.
And that's a huge regret on my part to become complacent.
Do you know if you had locked just the doors?
Of course, you say you didn't check the windows, but had you locked the doors?
Well, I thought I did.
Yeah.
There was a door found open that morning, not by me, but by the police.
It shouldn't have been opened.
It's possible the kids were playing and went through it and didn't close it.
I doubt it because that was kind of in a sub basement area.
They wouldn't have been going down there.
But I think the killer was in the house when we got home.
And it, He waited until we were in bed and took John Monet from her room.
It's a chilling thought.
It's a chilling thought just to have him lying in wait there for murder.
Can I ask you, too, just before we leave the subject of security, was there a dog?
Was there any other layers?
John Monet had a little dog.
His name was Jock.
And we had taken over the neighbors before we went out to dinner because we were going to leave town the next morning and have a second Christmas with my older children.
And then we had a reservation for the family on the Disney Big Red Boat.
And that was our take place right after Christmas.
So we took the dog and took him to our neighbors, and they were going to take care of him until we got home.
Right.
That's.
Oh gosh, I'm sorry.
Like all these things you'd like to have back.
And who knows whether they would have made a difference.
But yeah, the dog, they basically say as many layers as you can put between a potential bad guy and those you love, the better.
Yes.
You know, you're most vulnerable at night when you're asleep, for sure.
And it's just prudent to pay attention to that regardless of where you live.
How far away were.
Your children's bedrooms from your bedroom?
Well, they were, it was an old house.
There were basement, ground floor, second floor, and the second floor is where the kids were.
And then the upstairs attic, we converted it to a master bedroom.
So, in terms of distance, I don't know, 30 feet, maybe something like that, 40 feet, but also on a different level.
Did you sleep with the doors closed to your bedrooms?
Like, do you believe if you had.
No, they were open.
So, do you believe if she had yelled, you would have heard it?
I think so.
Yeah, I really do.
I think with virtual certainty, we're sure a stun gun was used, perhaps when she was asleep in her bed.
Don't know that for a fact, but.
But yeah, I think if she'd have screamed or there'd been noise, we would have heard it, I think.
There were marks on her face and I think her neck too that suggested a stun gun had been used on her.
John, forgive me because I don't know the answer to this, but what would a stun gun do to a person when used?
I mean, would it incapacitate you for a time?
What would it do?
Well, apparently it does.
I don't know.
We had it looked at.
Police discounted that idea.
And we had it looked at by a doctor who specializes in that kind of stuff somehow.
And he said, with 99% certainty, those are stun gun marks.
But I think because we didn't hear anything, you would think at least if this creature had come in and.
Started to take Jamine from her bed, she would have screamed, and we would certainly have heard that.
Yeah.
Even if he covered her mouth, you know, you could hear something, some sort of signs of a struggle.
But if the stun gun were used, and of course, I know that you found her with duct tape on her mouth, that could have kept her quiet.
All right.
So let's back up.
So you, so Patsy comes downstairs early.
They say it was 5 52 a.m. was that 9 1 1 call.
So it was early in the morning.
You say you were taking a trip.
And was that your first sign that something was wrong?
She finds this ransom note at the bottom of the stairs.
And then what?
Does she come find you or what happens next?
Well, she screamed.
And it was, you know, I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed.
I could tell from the scream, it was something was very, very wrong.
And I ran down and she had this ransom note and.
You know, it was just an unbelievable thing.
And we went, or I did, I think I did it, looked, check, make sure Brooke was okay, because his bedroom was on kind of the other end of the house.
And he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep.
So he knew he was safe.
And so I, you know, I took the note, and I mean, Patsy explained, said, hey, this is a ransom note, gentlemen.
He's gone and checked her room.
And, you know, So, I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note.
It was three pages.
And just told Patsy to call the police, call the police, call 911.
And of course, funny thing, we were criticized for that because the ransom note told us not to do that.
Well, that's silly.
Of course, we did.
Of course, of course.
You're not going to call the police, and you don't follow the directions of a kidnapper to not call law enforcement.
Yeah.
So, Patsy called.
Immediately, she was standing by the phone at that time, and I was still trying to comprehend what the note said and what was going on.
I'll get to the note in one second.
I think it's worth reading so that the audience can understand how bizarre it was.
Before we do that, I want to play the longer Patsy 911 call because to this day, even though you've been totally exonerated, people say, Oh, the parents did it.
You know how it is.
Oh, yeah.
That'll be interesting.
Even after the killer's arrested and convicted, they'll still be a percentage of the killer.
DNA has exonerated you.
So it's like, okay.
But I, as a mother, you hear Patsy Ramsey in this 911 call, and you can hear the sheer panic in her voice.
And especially if you listen to the longer version, which I'll play here, it's sound by two.
For a 911 emergency.
Please, let's find them by 515th Street.
Let's find them, ma'am.
We have a kidnapping.
All right, please.
Explain to me what's going on, okay?
There, we have a note left, and our daughter's gone.
A note was left, and your daughter is gone.
How old is your daughter?
She's gone.
She's gone.
Six years old.
How long ago was it?
I don't know.
I just found the note.
And my daughter, is it the same as Tinder?
What?
Is it the same as Tinder?
I don't know.
There's a ransom note here.
It's a ransom note?
It says SBTC.
Victory.
Please.
Okay, what's your name?
Are you Pat?
Patty Ramsey, I'm the lover.
Oh my god!
Please.
Okay, I'm sending her not to film, okay?
Please.
Do you know how long she's been gone?
No, I don't.
Please, we just got out.
Is she on here?
Oh my god, please.
Okay, come on.
Is this her buddy?
I am, honey.
Please.
Take a deep breath, okay?
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Patty?
That's where she says, Help me, Jesus.
She's in a sheer panic.
You were there.
All she knew at that point was John Binet was missing because she wasn't in her bed.
And you can feel, you must have been feeling the same, John, just the slow reveal of wait, a ransom note and wait, she's actually not in her room.
What on earth is going on here?
Well, we didn't know.
We knew she, according to what the note said, that they have our daughter.
And We were not to call the police.
And if we did, she would be beheaded.
And it was dark, it was cold out.
It was a horrible feeling.
I tell people it's like when, if you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, you have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child?
And it's a terrible feeling.
And I think all parents have experienced that.
From time to time, when their little ones are gone out of sight, you don't know where they are.
And that was the feeling we had.
And it went on for until one in the afternoon.
And then an even worse feeling came.
We've all had that.
We've all had that.
And the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming.
And you kept waiting, kept waiting for that to happen.
Pray for an Earlier Delivery00:04:15
Patsy, you know, waiting for it with the 911 operator and doing the only thing you can do at that point, which is pray to Jesus.
Just pray, pray, pray, pray.
It's not as you think it is.
The note is one of the most important and bizarre things of this whole case.
The handwritten note, which for our listening audience, we've put on the screen and you can see it on YouTube, it's handwritten.
It's three pages long, as you point out.
I'm going to read it just so the audience understands what you guys read.
It was addressed to you, you, John Ramsey, right?
Dear Mr. Ramsey.
And then it reads as follows Listen carefully!
We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.
We do respect your business, spelled wrong, but not the country it serves.
At this time, we have your daughter in our possession, spelled wrong.
She is safe and unharmed.
And if you want to see her, if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000 from your account.
$100,000 will be in $100 bills, the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.
Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank.
When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag.
I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery.
The delivery will be exhausting, so I advise you to be rested.
If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence.
A earlier delivery pickup of your daughter.
Another grammatical error.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter.
You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.
The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them.
Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded.
If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies.
If you alert bank authorities, she dies.
If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies.
You will be scanned for electronic devices, and if any are found, she dies.
You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics.
You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart towards us.
Follow our instructions, and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.
You and your family are under constant scrutiny, as well as the authorities.
Don't try to grow up brain, John.
You are not the only fat cat around, so don't think that killing will be difficult.
Don't underestimate us, John.
Use that good southern common sense of yours.
It is up to you now, John.
Victory!
S.B.T.C.
Absolutely bizarre.
When you read that, other than the obvious, was there anything, you know, I've had a chance to read it and reread it.
What jumped out at you?
Well, there are several things that you wonder what did that mean to the killer?
One was the amount of the ransom money request 118,000.
Why not a million?
Why not, you know, 100,000?
Why 118?
That had some significance to the killer.
And then the other, of course, was the beheading concept.
You know, that's very un.
You don't think about that as a punishment or a penalty, but yet that's a very common thing nowadays.
We read about some of the terrorists and stuff that goes on.
So you wonder well, are they?
Is it really a terrorist group or terrorist individuals?
And that's a common thing.
Threat they can make.
And then, of course, the final thing was SBTC.
What does that mean?
Victory.
That's sign off.
So those are kind of the three elements in my mind that just didn't make sense.
Handwriting Analysis Confirmed00:02:48
And the $118,000 happened to be my annual bonus that year.
And that was paid in January of 1996.
And That is somewhat of a logical where that number came from.
They would have had to know that.
But the rest of it just didn't make sense.
It was a bizarre note.
I mean, I've been told too that in a way it's a gift because I've been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a sample, three pages, if we had the handwriting of the killer, it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note.
It's a big sample.
Of their handwriting.
What did the handwriting analysts say could be gleaned about the writing?
Could they tell anything about age, gender, psychological state, any of that?
Well, we didn't get that from the handwriting people.
Typically, they just told us what their findings were, and they rank their findings on a scale of one to five.
One is absolutely, this person wrote it when they're doing comparison.
A five is absolutely no way.
And I was a one.
They said, absolutely, you did not write it.
Pastor was a four and a half.
And you say, why four and a half?
And I was told that there's, depending on who you're taught, To write, uh, what generation there are certain things that are kind of common, but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them.
So the police were told, Hey, you guys better look somewhere else because we don't see, uh, the that either parent wrote the note.
Wait, but wait, wait, back up because I thought you said one means you wrote it, five means no way.
Is it the opposite?
And that you they then you just said that you were a one, suggesting, Oh, no, I was five.
Sorry, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
You were five.
Patsy was five.
And Patsy was a four and a half.
Okay.
So you were both on exactly the scale of you didn't write it, or there's virtually no chance that you wrote it.
Right.
Yes.
Okay.
Got it.
So, what about since then, the psychologists, the psychiatrists?
I'm sure you've had people like that, FBI profilers who have read it.
And were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it?
Yeah.
John Douglas, who started the whole FBI profiling program and is pretty much considered the top of the heap as far as that skill set and accomplishments, we spent a couple, three days with him early on.
Incompetence Becomes Cornerstone00:05:41
Because our attorneys asked him to spend some time with us.
But his conclusion was and prediction is it's a young person fascinated by movies, probably in his 20s, maybe early 30s.
And he said, This was not about John Bonet.
This was directed at you to hurt you, John.
Somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you.
And this was done to hurt you.
And I thought, well, I couldn't possibly know anybody that I've made angry to that degree.
And he said, you may not even know who they are.
They've either observed you in the newspaper or whatever and developed this either anger or jealousy of me.
That was John's conclusion.
And I think he's right.
Now, Lou Smith, who was the.
Legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement to put up to and was put on this case by the district attorney early on.
And um, Lou felt it was a kidnapping gone wrong.
And I always thought, well, those are two opposite um theories.
And Lou was a legendary detective in Colorado.
And somebody pointed out to me recently that, well, that could be those two are not incompatible, those two theories.
I thought, well, you're right, they're not, yeah.
So, yeah, that's somebody who wanted to hurt you went in there to kidnap your child.
Right.
And that thought hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought, well, here you got two top experts saying, giving me two different theories, but they're compatible.
Yeah, they're compatible.
But what about, I mean, the thing about just random intruder coming in that doesn't make sense if you look at the note is how do they know?
You are from Atlanta originally, no?
Like you are from the South.
The 118,000, how would they know your bonus?
I mean, it has to be somebody who, And I realize there's a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus, but it seems like a small chance.
It seems much more likely somebody worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number.
Well, there's two ways I guess they could have known that.
You know, they worked in our company.
That amount was on my paycheck stub since the previous January as a deferred compensation bonus.
So, those, you know, we weren't real careful with that kind of stuff in our house.
We could have been.
Tucked in a drawer, or somebody that knew that from some connection inside of our company.
To me, that's the logical explanation.
The only other explanation I heard was Psalm 118, it is right in the middle of the Bible.
It references the stone, stone becomes the cornerstone, is one of the passages.
And, you know, could that be the SPTC?
And it's possible as well.
One of the suspects that we are interested in signed his high school yearbook Stone Becomes His Cornerstone.
So, whoa.
It's a very bizarre note.
And, and, uh, what did they say, John?
What did they say about, um, and I want to know like, did they go and speak to everybody at your company?
Like, did they, I mean, that'd be like the first place I would start as a detective, right?
Like, somebody knows what he made.
Somebody doesn't like him.
They've made that clear.
They know where his roots are.
They know you're from the South.
So let's talk to everybody from the company.
Well, that kind of stuff just wasn't done.
They should have done a neighborhood survey that morning, gone around the houses to the neighborhood.
And, you know, if you see anything unusual, what What have you, you know, they didn't do any of that.
So they basically, in fact, the detective, the only detective so called that was there that morning, concluded that I was the killer because, quote, she saw it in my eyes.
And that became the conclusion before they'd even looked at evidence or investigated anything.
And this is Linda Arndt.
Yeah.
And just, we were just dealing with incompetence.
Well, in Linda's case, not just incompetence, but maybe a desire to cover up her incompetence because she isn't the one who said, search the house after seven hours of sitting there.
She didn't search the house.
The foot patrolman who got there per the 911 call earlier, he didn't search the house adequately.
She didn't do it.
And that's the reason you were put in the position of finding your own little girl.
Well, that's exactly right.
In fact, to show you what kind of environment she was working in, the chief of police said, we didn't treat this as a crime scene because it was a kidnapping.
And you shake your head and think, where do these people come from?
Horrifying.
I mean, just because at that point they didn't know that it was a homicide, you got a six year old girl who's been taken from her bed in the middle of the night.
That's a five alarm fire.
Yeah, exactly.
If that's not a crime, I don't know what it is.
But that was the quote.
Because I could give you a dozen quotes that were just astounding from the police department over the years.
But that was really the first one that was just unbelievable.
Forensics Find Unidentified Prints00:15:20
What about the misspellings?
And the improper grammar and the use of the word attache, which is not really a thing we say in America.
It can mean either diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here, but it's a bizarre.
We're a small foreign faction.
Just for people who think, forgive me again for raising your son.
He too was ruled out, as I understand it, by the DNA in 2008.
But this is not the writing of a nine year old.
We're a small foreign faction.
Like people, you got to use your head.
But anyway, these misspellings and the improper grammar throughout.
Tells us something could be used intentionally, but this doesn't sound like a very well educated person.
No, I got a letter.
We had a lot of people trying to help, and I got a letter from a teacher.
She taught English to non English speaking people, and she said the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English.
Based on her experience teaching them to read and write English and speak English.
And I thought that was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that.
And, you know, we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, or at that time, just Lockheed.
You know, I take that, let's see.
Well, anyway, Lockheed Martin bought Lockheed sometime in there.
But we had to, they required us to put a sign on the front of our building, which was downtown Boulder, a Lockheed Martin corporation.
And at the time, I thought that's like raving it.
Waving a red flag in front of a bull.
Boulder's an ultra liberal place.
And to put a, I'm sure in their minds, a manufacturer of weapons sign in downtown Boulder was just inviting trouble.
It made me nervous, frankly, to do that at the time.
Right.
And they referenced your company.
We do respect your business, spelled wrong, spelled B U S S I. At double S, S S I N E S S, but not the country that it serves.
So interesting.
They clearly, they're referencing something about what you do.
Yeah, that was bizarre as well.
And I start, you know, I'm of course trying to think who this possibly could have been.
And I wondered at times whether this was a kind of an amateur terrorist group or person that fantasized some things and.
I'm sure you've got to consider everything.
I mean, the guy, the Unabomber, he used to write about himself as we and suggest it was some sort of international thing.
Like he wanted to make himself sound bigger and more important than just an I.
And this guy slips into the first person later in the ransom note.
But yeah, it wouldn't be unusual for an individual to try to make themselves sound bigger or more nefarious in this way.
Very true.
Now, I really do subscribe to.
John Douglas's theory that this is somebody that wanted to hurt me.
And that's a tough burden to carry.
But thankfully, John said, You may not even know him.
You know, we'd been in the paper a few weeks before, having hit a significant sales goal for us, and our marketing people wanted to put it in the paper.
And I sort of had this gut feeling that that's not really a good idea.
But I wanted our people to be proud of their company.
And so we did it.
And that could have targeted me because I had a picture of me in quotes and stuff in the paper.
That could have been a.
You never know how you're affecting a sick mind who's going to transfer onto you.
Who knows?
Yeah, that's the problem.
We had people, you know, we hired two detectives to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it.
And in fact, we tried very hard early days to get the case moved somewhere else to another jurisdiction.
They could have put it in the sheriff's department's office, which is a competent organization, it was at the time, and had dual authority over it.
We could have very easily had a sheriff's officer come to our home that morning instead of the city police department.
And that was a tragic first mistake, I guess, that's luck of the draw, that's what happened.
So, you know, it just wasn't ever properly handled.
And to this day, it is still not properly handled.
Well, and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you, because of course, the other theory is that it's some pedophile, right?
That's what a lot of people are saying.
Well, those are the two conflicting, and I thought the time conflicting.
Theories between John Douglas and Lou Smith.
I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder, but random intruder doesn't necessarily mean pedophile there to get your little girl, right?
Because that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her, right?
Because it was unclear, forgive me for the details, John, but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man.
Well, first of all, this was not a random intruder.
This is somebody who had watched us, knew what our patterns were, knew we were going to be out that evening, left the note on the back stairway, which is the stairway we always use, but would not have been obvious to somebody that came into the house.
We had a front stairway, but we never used that.
And so, why did they leave the ransom note on the back stairway?
How did they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning?
So it would have, I mean, there's some elements where somebody could have come into our home.
It was not a hard home to break into, regret to say, and really understood where things were.
Or they could have been in the house for hours before we got home.
But are we sure that the person, that sexual gratification was a goal of the killer?
I don't know.
I think, you know, there's another case.
Seven months later, that happened in the neighborhood.
Yes, I know about Amy, and I want to talk to you about Amy.
Forgive me for interrupting you because I want to go down this line, but I want to give us the proper time.
And I got to squeeze in a quick commercial break.
So let me pause you right there, John Ramsey, and we'll come right back.
So much more to discuss.
It's an honor to have you here.
I know it's not easy to discuss, even 26 years later.
Even just losing any loved one is tough to discuss, and certainly under these circumstances, even harder.
Stand by, John.
Couple things we're going to discuss when John comes back on in a minute.
And that is on the ransom note, do the police believe it was written before or after the murder?
That's one of the big questions because I know the police had said originally not even a serial killer would have the steadiness to write a note like this after a murder.
So what do they think?
And by the way, a draft of this had been found.
He had started, the killer had started on a legal pad that was found in the Ramsey house by saying, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, and then started over, addressing it just to Mr. Ramsey.
And then you heard what followed.
So There are a lot of questions still about this note and what can be gleaned from it.
Before we get to all that, I'm going to play you Patsy Ramsey's describing of the ransom note in a 1997 interview with CNN.
I couldn't read the whole thing.
I just gotten up.
It was the day after Christmas and we were going to go visiting.
And it was quite early in the morning and I had gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make.
coffee and we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas and I always come down that staircase and I'm usually the first one down and the note was lying across the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads and it was
of dimly lit Because it was very early in the morning.
And I started to read it, and it was addressed to John.
It said, Mr. Ramsey.
And it said, We have your daughter.
You know, it just wasn't registering.
And I may have gotten through another sentence.
Like, we have your daughter.
And I don't know if I got any further than that.
And that's when she called 911.
The whole thing is just, I mean, what was on the note?
Were there fingerprints?
Was there touch DNA of any kind?
John Ramsey's been saying, even if you didn't find, Fingerprints, there might have been DNA.
Even if the person had worn gloves, there might have been DNA on that letter.
Has it been tested?
If not, why not?
Apparently, there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA, even in 2022 when touch DNA is out there.
DNA has evolved so much.
We're going to discuss all of that with John, plus the neighbor Amy, a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a man in her bedroom in the middle of the night, just months after John Benet.
Wait until you hear what the police did in that case.
With Triple Tex, we will see the Enkelt of Leveres of the Mellingen for Nettbeticki.
Oh, Samenbanner.
Oh, Chiropractor.
Oh, Maschinenlehrer.
Oh, Advokate.
Oh, Alarmsesskapper.
Oh, Reinskapsförder.
Oh, Begrabelsuspirot.
Oh, Kondolierer.
Oh, Selvölgele, Elektriker.
Ah, ah, ah, ah.
And what's the good thing?
Triple Tex is the first time we will see the Mellingen for the 3rd of May.
Here is our Reinskapsprogramme.
Triple Tex.
The Lunners are here.
can the spare Trumpf bonus post trimmen.
So we do that.
Fuel Kraft.
So, John, on the subject of the ransom note, before we leave that, there had been a draft addressed to both of you, then the final was just you.
It was written on a legal pad found in your home.
And that's the question were there any fingerprints?
Has it been tested for DNA?
Do you know where it came from in the house?
And was that area tested for fingerprints, et cetera, at the time?
I don't know.
I think my feeling was that the forensics people that came in, Did a pretty good job in finding a palm print that was unidentified, untracked to anybody, footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house, things like that.
But whether this stuff was ever tested or not, I don't know.
We know there are five or six, maybe seven items that were originally taken from the crime scene, sent to an outside lab for testing, along with others.
And five or six of those items were not tested, they were returned to the police.
I don't know why the police didn't want to pay for it because back then it was expensive to do DNA testing.
Uh, but we know there's five or six items that had never been tested.
And so what else wasn't?
I do know that the forensic people spent about, the detectives spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA, well, we're finished.
And he said, you can't be finished.
Get back in there.
Uh, so they took a very cursory look at it and then were ordered back in by the DA, uh, forensics, uh, Investigator experienced one told me they'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence, not two hours.
So, God only knows what was compromised.
And I know Linda Arndt, the detective, also didn't secure the scene.
She let your friends come over and come into the house.
She sent you to look around, as we discussed.
And then, after you found John Binet, as I understand it, she actually moved John Binet's body again from one spot to closer by the Christmas tree, which Just should never be done when you're dealing with a homicide victim.
Right.
No, I, yeah, she just was way in overhead.
And, you know, I was criticized for disturbing the crime scene when I found John May by picking her up and holding her.
And what parent wouldn't do that?
It's just insane to be to that kind of level of misunderstanding of a parent's love for a child.
No, that's, it's not possible not to pick up your child and hold her and.
And at that point, you didn't know whether she was gone.
Can we spend a minute on that?
Because we talked about how Linda said, okay, search the house.
It's one o'clock now in the afternoon.
No one's called, you know, no kidnapper.
And I understand the note said, well, I'll call tomorrow.
So it was unclear whether they meant the 26th or the 27th.
Right.
But you're sitting there and you're waiting and nothing's happening.
And now it's one o'clock in the afternoon.
She says, go look around the house.
And the people who want to say, oh, you know, look at John, one of the things they say is, oh, he went right to the room.
He went to the basement and he went right to there's a storage room off the basement where she was found.
Is that true?
Like, what did you do after Linda said go search the house?
Well, we, a friend of mine that was there to help console us, she said for both of us to go search the house.
And so we went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start.
Third floor, you couldn't get into the third floor from outside.
So we went to the basement and Went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up.
And there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step.
And I told my friend, I said, that suitcase should not be there.
That's way out of place.
We wouldn't have put it there.
Faith Tested by Loss00:04:23
And so we.
Then I went into the only other room in that basement.
We called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar.
Dark, one door going into it, no entrances from the outside.
And I opened the door and, of course, immediately found John Monet.
And, you know, I don't.
We heard Lynn Darn say on the media or on an interview that, well, I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom.
Why'd he do that?
This just was logical to me.
But yeah, it.
Do you remember that moment?
I mean, do you remember?
Was it, did it switch from concern to panic?
You know, do you remember emotionally what that was?
It was a switch from panic and it was a relief.
Thank God I found my child.
And that was the immediate feeling that I'd found her.
She's safe.
And, um, but it fairly quickly concluded that she wasn't all right.
And, um, so I just picked her up and ran, carried her screaming, actually, I was screaming, uh, uh, to, uh, upstairs to take her to help.
I mean, I don't know, it was just an instinctive reaction, I guess.
But, uh, and we laid her down on the floor of the, uh, living room in front of the Christmas tree and, Linda Art had looked for a pulse and looked up at me and said, No, she's gone.
And I guess it was that moment when she saw in my eyes that I was the killer.
So, and then we rushed out of the house pretty quickly, and we never went back in that home.
That was the last time we were in that home.
John, can I ask you?
Because I know that one of the things that John Vinay was wearing was her cross, her cross necklace.
And according to what I read, and we heard Patsy praying to Jesus to help her, help her.
And I wondered if you were a family of faith and if what this did to that, right?
If you were able to carry that on.
Well, that's a good question.
And I really had to face that issue when my oldest daughter was killed in a car accident about four years before.
And The first words that came out of my mouth were, There is no God.
There is no God.
How could a loving God let this happen to a beautiful young child?
She was 20, 21.
But it really forced me to think about my faith.
And I spent, I had a friend come alongside of me and said, I'm going to help you study the Bible.
And he was a real mentor to me in that struggle to understand why this would happen.
I was a Christian.
I had joined the club.
You know, if you're in the club, you shouldn't be subject to harm or tragedy.
And of course, that's not at all what the Bible says.
You're going to get persecuted.
But I struggled with that for really three or four years.
You know, is there an afterlife?
Will I see Beth, my oldest daughter, again?
It was tough for three or four years.
But I'd kind of wrestled that down to, yeah, there is more to life than just what we see here.
And, um, And so when we lost John Bonet, I didn't have to go through that struggle.
You know, I'd already been through why did God let this happen?
So it was, my faith was not challenged when John Bonet was killed, only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my oldest daughter.
Then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the authorities, but pretty close.
Mary Lacey Focuses Strategy00:15:45
I mean, the DA earlier, before Mary Lacey, the DA said they didn't do it, the DNA rules them out.
Four months after John Bonet died, the DA, Alex Hunter, said, Patsy and John are the focus.
They're the focus.
Opened up a grand jury proceeding, and the grand jury came back and said, Don't see anything that you're going to be able to pursue as a, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt.
The DA ultimately had to admit that.
But I mean, you're going through being accused.
And then on top of all that, John, you've got the media coverage, right?
Which basically tried to make John Binet and Patsy into this bizarre daughter mother team.
You know, she was exploited, she was sexualized.
Beauty pageant videos on endless loop, on endless loop.
So, talk about that for a bit and what that was like for you.
Well, you know, the media, of course, jumped on it, but they were being fed information that was misleading, wrong.
And we were told by Mary Lacey several years after she got into her position as the new DA, she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone, whether it's the FBI or some wacko psychologist, put intense pressure on the family.
We know it's one of the two.
They're in the house, either the father killed her or the mother did.
One of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure on them.
And Mary Lacey, the DA, said that was their strategy to solve the case.
And so they released a lot of information, misleading information, incorrect information to the media.
And of course, the media ran with it.
And we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion.
We didn't know that's exactly what was happening, but it was confirmed by the DA.
And the problem for the police was they did a great job of convicting us in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media, but they couldn't charge us.
We would have.
It had been a bloodbath for them in a court because the evidence was quite contradictory to that.
As they got into looking at the evidence, because they'd made their conclusion, I believe, on the day or the day after of John Monet's murder, and then went about, let's find the evidence to prove it.
Well, the evidence they were finding was contradictory to that conclusion.
And that became a problem for them because the media and the public was screaming, hey, arrest them, charge them.
And they couldn't.
Well, and meanwhile, in the interviews, you held firm.
I mean, Patsy, they got all up in her grill.
And when I watch her, because I've spent a lot of time with this guy's name is Phil Houston.
He invented the CIA's deception detection technique that they still use today.
It was there 25 years.
There's all sorts of ways you can tell somebody's lying.
And they're pretty foolproof if you know how to apply them.
And one of the things is just sort of no BS.
You don't do convincing behavior, you're just hardcore no, no, you know, stop.
Like, I mean, I'm sure if I showed him the Patsy Ramsey tapes with the cops, he'd be like, Why did they waste so much time with her?
Right?
Like it was pretty obvious.
And I'll just show some to the audience a clip.
This is from 1998, two years later.
Police interview with Patsy.
They're telling her falsely that they have trace evidence linking her or you to the murder.
I would be suggesting if I had that, how would you react?
Here it is, top five.
If I told you right now that we have trace evidence that appears to link you.
To the death of John Bonet, what would you tell me?
Totally impossible.
Totally impossible.
How is it impossible?
I did not kill my child.
I didn't have a thing to do with it.
And I'm not talking, you know, somebody's guess or some rumor or some story.
I don't care what you're talking about.
I'm talking about.
Scientific evidence.
I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is.
Go back to the damn drawing board.
I didn't do it.
John Ramsey didn't do it, and we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it.
My life has been hell from that day forward.
And I want nothing more than to find out who is responsible for this.
Okay?
I mean, I want to work with you, not against you.
Okay?
This child was the most precious thing in my life.
And I can't stand the thought, thinking that somebody's out here walking on the street.
God knows they might do it again to some other child.
You know, quit screwing around asking me about things that are ridiculous and let's find the person that did this.
Wow.
The frustration, it's palpable because it's like, as she points out, he could be hurting other children.
Right.
Yes.
And probably did.
There's a high probability, I'm told, that that creature kind of creature doesn't just stop with one.
Maybe has done it before.
This is right around the time where Lou Smith walked out, the detective, the retired detective who they brought in because they couldn't solve the case.
And he solved every single case he ever worked on except for this one.
They brought him in, take fresh eyes.
What do you think?
And Lou took his fresh eyes, looked at everything and said, they didn't do it.
This is not Patsy and Ramsey, that's the wrong tree to bark up.
And they didn't listen to him to the point where he quit.
He called this a travesty and said they were trying to railroad you.
It's crazy, John, that that wasn't the end of the story.
It would take another 10 years for Mary Lacey to get that DNA test and say, just stop, stop with the obsessive focus on the Ramseys.
Now that's true.
Lou told me, you know, after he resigned and we were able to talk to him freely, that he'd looked at the case for several months and all the evidence and said, no, please, the police are going the wrong direction.
So he said he went to their war room where they were strategizing this assault, frankly, and said, you know, you guys have looked at this case longer than I have, but, you know, I've looked at it and have you ever thought maybe you're going the wrong direction?
And he said it was like pouring a bucket of water on the participants.
They wouldn't talk to him after that.
They banned him from their war room and just wouldn't listen.
And that's what he said.
I'm not going to be part of persecuting an innocent person and resign and continue to work on the case for the rest of his life, which I was very grateful for.
And he was an amazing fellow.
Well, on the, I think it was a 60 Minutes Australia piece I watched, they had old tapes of him.
And he went to the crime scene, to your old house, and he went to that window that was broken in your basement because one of the theories was nobody got in through that window.
That was a window you had broken not long before because you had locked yourself out of the house and you were trying to get in.
That's true.
Yeah.
So people were saying, No, somebody said only a midget could get through, little person could get through that window.
That wasn't it.
This is back on, it had to be one of the mother, the mother of the father.
And he goes right through it.
The video shows him going right through it.
Was that something, by the way, I meant to ask you?
Did you go through it to when you had locked yourself out?
Had you gone through that window to get in?
Yes.
I had locked myself out one day and Nobody was home, and so that was the way I got into the house so I could unlock the door.
I didn't have a key.
Uh, you know, the person that said, No, that no, it's impossible for someone to get through that window was the detective investigating the case.
It was purely misleading, purely false information, but it biased everybody, the public, the media, towards us once more.
That was the whole strategy, and so that was confirmed by the district attorney to us that that was that was her whole strategy.
And she also said, Their only Evidence that they would present, and it's really not evidence that led them to think that we were guilty, was we did not act right that morning.
And that's the allegation was that Patsy was distraught, but that you didn't cry.
And one of the cops on the scene said, I never saw them console each other.
And in my presence, I never saw them hold one another.
Yeah, well, look, they've watched too much crime scene movie or TV, I think.
When I lost my first daughter, Beth, I got a phone call from my brother, and he said, John, Beth is gone.
She's killed.
And there's nothing I could do.
I couldn't get her to the best doctors, I couldn't rush to her side.
It was over.
That morning with John Monet, it wasn't over yet.
I could get her back if I kept my wits about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do.
I didn't, I was.
Focused on getting her back, and I felt I could get her back.
I'd arranged for the ransom money to be available almost immediately.
One of the, again, this Linda Arnold, I think, wrote in her report that John was observed casually going through the mail that morning.
There was a mail drop where the mail came through the house for the front door, and I was going through it.
I was looking for another possible communication from the kidnapper.
The police should have been doing that.
I was not casually going through the mail, but that was her interpretation of that.
Again, biased perspective by someone who has never been in that situation to evaluate whether somebody's acting right or not.
So that was my focus.
You know, Patsy was rough.
She was in bad shape.
She had a bowl in front of her in case she threw up.
But I was focused 100% on whatever I could do to get Jaminet back.
That was my job.
Can we talk about two things?
We've touched on the Mary Lacey exoneration of 2008 based on DNA.
DNA came along.
Thank God they did get some DNA and preserve it back in 96.
DNA has come leaps and bounds since then, and it had to some extent by 2008.
So she said, We've tested it and we've identified the perpetrator as one, possibly two, unidentified males.
So, no hit in the database, but they could tell it was a male and they could tell it was one, possibly two.
That's when she said it's not the Ramses.
Can I just say for the record, did that include Burke?
Yeah, it did.
Burke was exonerated early on.
He had to be interviewed by the child psychologists that were associated with the police department.
They said, absolutely no way.
Burke was not involved.
He was a nine year old, 60 pound child.
Because CBS would do a piece really pointing the finger at Burke in 2016, and he sued over it, and they settled.
I don't know what they settled for, but in later years, armchair detective wannabes have decided maybe it was him, maybe it was the nine year old, but the Mary Lacey conclusion was it was not Burke.
Right.
And that was a conclusion that even the police came to very early on, and they ruled out that possibility.
Yeah.
In fact, they offered to support us in this suit against CBS if we needed their help.
Wow.
To discount that ridiculous accusation.
So he went on Dr. Phil not long after that.
And then it just stirred up more.
You know, people were like, he wasn't acting right.
I'm going to play a sound bite.
I'd love to get your thoughts on it.
I really don't know.
I don't know how people sort of fly into the case.
You've been living it in the worst way for 26 years.
So put this in perspective for us.
This is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016.
A police officer comes in your room, which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer has come in your room with a flashlight looking around.
And you still just stay in bed.
To be fair, I didn't know it was a police officer.
It's just kind of.
But somebody comes in your room with a flashlight, and you never get up and say, What is going on here?
I guess I kind of like to avoid conflict, or I don't know.
I guess I just felt safer there.
Were you curious?
I'm not the worry type.
I'm not the.
I guess part of me doesn't want to know what's going on.
Critics would say you weren't curious because you already knew.
He didn't have to get up and go check because he knew exactly what had happened.
I was scared, I think.
I mean, I didn't know if there was some bad guy downstairs.
My dad was chasing off with a gun or, you know, I had no idea.
Let's clear this up once and for all.
Did you do anything to harm your sister, John Bonet?
No.
Did you murder your sister, John Bonet?
No.
And just for the listening audience, Burke's answers are all said through what looks like a smile, which is one of the things his critics would react to.
Go ahead, John, your thoughts on it.
Well, Burke smiles all the time.
When he talks, he just naturally smiles.
And those are just laughable criticisms.
This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case, not something that a nine year old could even possibly do.
So that's just, it's really disgusting that.
People jump to that kind of a conclusion.
Let's move on because one of the other storylines, as we touched on a minute ago, was the pageants and whether a pedophile was, you know, she captured the attention of a pedophile.
And they do say that some of these pageants can be very attractive to pedophiles in the same way that, you know, most pedophiles, like, if you want to find a pedophile, you don't go to like an AARP meeting.
You know, they wind up.
They volunteer for the Boy Scouts, and it's sad, but it's true.
They go where children are.
So, that was forget the blame, right?
I'm not interested in that storyline.
But it is possible that this person was a pedophile and had seen John Bonet at one of these pageants where she was a darling.
I mean, she was winning them, she was absolutely beautiful in every way.
So, what do you make of that theory if we're thinking of the possible intruder?
Maybe they also knew you, but a possible intruder pedophile.
It's possible.
Patsy had been diagnosed with stage four cancer a couple of years before this happened, and she went through some pretty rough chemotherapy treatments and was declared in remission.
DNA Labs Seek Alive Morning00:15:17
And she didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother daughter time into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime.
And I didn't really care for these little pageants.
I mean, I'm a father, and I'd have preferred my daughters were burkers until they were about 30.
But that wasn't my choice.
And I thought, well, this is just wonderful mother daughter time for Patsy and John Bonet.
They didn't take it seriously.
Yeah, so we got to win.
We got to win.
In fact, Patsy and I joked, it'd be good if she lost a few of these pageants because she needs to understand you'd always win in life.
But she just, John Bonet loved doing it.
It was fun.
She was an extreme extrovert.
And people accused Patsy of dragging John Bonet to these pageants for her own.
Satisfaction.
That wasn't true at all.
It was just something John Bada enjoyed doing.
And Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things, which she did.
But I always thought the people at these little pageants were just moms and grandmoms.
And that's quite, there was one indication, of course, we learned later that, yeah, there was at least one guy there that wasn't there for his daughter based on some questioning that came out and some comments.
But it's possible.
And But I still fall back to, I think, John Douglas's theory and Lou Smith's.
It might have targeted who John Bonet is, and she was my daughter.
And she was obviously, I'm told, and I never read the autopsy, I just couldn't bring myself to do that.
But I, of course, hear through the news that she was sexually assaulted and that.
That wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me as much as to satisfy this creature's desires.
So, this is why, forgive me, and if you don't want to go here, we don't have to, but this is why when I was reading the autopsy report, and we don't have to get into details, but the one thing they said, it was unclear to me whether they had semen, whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve.
And there was a suggestion that maybe there was some sort of, you know, they hurt her in some way sexually that didn't involve.
You know, a male body part.
And that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you.
Like maybe it wasn't a pedophile, maybe it was somebody who was just trying to hurt her as opposed to sexualize her or do anything sexual with her.
Yeah, that's possible.
And there was no semen found, but not dissimilar to this situation, a case similar to a break in that happened a few months later in the same neighborhood.
With Amy.
Yes.
Okay.
So let's talk about that.
There are many people who Lou Smith had been taking a hard look at, you know, the honest investigator who quit before he died, unfortunately, in 2010.
And he gave the list of suspects to his daughter, which is how we know who he's looking at.
And the daughter's a hero.
She's running around getting these people's DNA without them knowing it.
It's like kind of amazing, this piece of the story.
But I'm so grateful for that group.
Before we get to Lou and his daughter and what happened there, there's this.
There's this neighbor, and we're calling, and the papers are calling the daughter Amy.
Her parents don't want her outed.
Understandable.
There's a sexual assault victim.
But Amy, I think, was very young, too, nine or 12, right around there.
I didn't know a whole lot about that case.
I knew that it happened, but I think she and John Bunet were in a dance class together.
And I think she was a year older than John Bunet, maybe.
Oh, I know.
Actually, my producers are telling me she's 12.
So she's a young girl, and she's at home.
This is months after John Binet was killed.
Amy is in the same neighborhood, and she had a man wake her up dressed in black in the middle of the night who tried to muzzle her so that she couldn't scream and sexually assaulted her.
And by the grace of God, her mother heard something.
By the grace of God, truly, her mother heard something and heard muffled voices coming from her 12 year old daughter's room in a way that sounded very unsafe.
The mother grabbed pepper spray.
And went into the room.
I mean, it's an extraordinary story.
And the guy jumped out the second floor window and ran.
I mean, it's a miracle.
Thank God that unfortunately the daughter was molested, but she was not killed.
And they went to the Boulder cops and said, We think this might have had something to do with John Bonet.
Like, it's too close in time.
And, you know, here's our evidence.
And the dad is on record as saying, The Boulder cops could not have cared less, were not interested in pursuing any link between the two cases.
And they really felt like it was because they were just focused on you two.
Right.
That's what I've learned.
When I first heard about this, I thought, well, that's a very similar MO for the criminal as it was in our case.
He was in the house when they came home that night.
They went to bed, and then it Three in the morning, he entered the little girl's room.
And I thought, man, that's so similar to what I think happened in our case.
And Chief Beckner, who was the police chief, chief of police, was asked, Is there a connection?
He said, Oh, no, these cases aren't the same because the second little girl wasn't murdered.
And it was one more of the unbelievable statements that came out of the police department.
Of course, it's similar.
And thankfully, she wasn't murdered.
But I'd heard that the father was quoted as saying on a scale of one to 10 in terms of police performance, I'll give him a minus five.
So he was very unhappy with them as well, but only because they just kind of blew off the case and went on.
And there's a real danger when the police get tunnel vision.
They're real, I mean, every defense attorney who's ever represented a murder defendant argues they had tunnel vision on my guy.
My guy didn't do it, they had tunnel vision on him.
But in some cases, it really is true.
And it can result in the wrong person being arrested and put on trial.
Thankfully, not in your case, but you were heading down that lane.
Oh, absolutely.
And we weren't worried about this.
I mean, it was distressing, but our attorney said, look, the system's broken.
The police don't know what they're doing.
We cannot promise you you won't be charged with the murder.
We'll promise you one thing with 100% money back guarantee we will destroy him in court.
So don't worry about that.
But it's not going to be fun, but do not worry about being convicted.
We'll kill them because we knew what the evidence was and what they were trying to do.
We had one experienced district attorney tell us look, I have never, ever seen police try to explain away unidentified male DNA in a sexual assault case.
Never.
That's the key piece of evidence.
And yet, that's what the Board of Police tried to do that was a real problem for them that we had this unidentified male DNA.
Yes, that's a massive problem.
And it's the reason you've never been charged.
And it's the reason Mary Macy says it wasn't you guys.
On the subject of DNA, I read that the coroner did not examine the body until seven hours after she was discovered.
And that the coroner only spent 10 minutes at the crime scene.
That's a crazy amount of time.
That's, I mean, seven hours is a long delay.
And I wonder, John, whether they.
Have you ever been told whether they were able to determine the time of death?
I've never been told.
No, I don't know.
Do you have any reason to believe there's any chance she was alive in the morning?
You know, before, like, I hate to go there, but like when the first cop got there, you know, is there any chance she was alive?
I don't think so.
She was strangled to death, is my interpretation of what I've heard.
And then, Struck with an object that created a pretty good crack in her skull, took to be totally accurate.
So I don't think she could have possibly been alive that morning.
Okay.
But that's another area of DNA that absolutely should be examined because there was a murder weapon.
There was like a rope, they call it a garotte.
And It was tied to a little piece of wood.
And so, that one of the questions I know, John, people are asking is, did they ever, one end of the rope had a knot and one had two knots or something like that.
But the question was, did they ever untie the knots and test in there for DNA?
To my knowledge, no.
They had sent a number of samples like that to Bodie Labs, which is an outside DNA lab, and for some reason chose not to test or not to pay for the tests of five or six items, one of which was the groat.
And that's one of the things we're asking the governor to make happen let's get those items tested.
Why weren't they tested?
Was it because it was too expensive?
They wanted to save money?
I don't know.
What do you think is in the box of things that have not been tested?
I don't know.
I don't know.
One journalist that has followed this case almost to the beginning has that information, and I need to get that from her, but I don't know exactly what it is.
She said there are five or six items that have never been tested.
And the police keep referring back to, well, it's just a minute amount of DNA.
We don't want to ruin it.
Well, that just tells me they've either, well, they haven't tested the other items or they've lost them.
Or misplace them.
For some reason, they always stay away from these other five or six items that have never been tested or checked for DNA evidence.
And that's what we're asking to be done.
And their reluctance to even mention those items makes me think they've either misplaced them or lost them.
Oh, goodness.
I know.
And you're on a push to have the governor remove this case from the Boulder PD and let these sophisticated DNA labs.
Have access to this as opposed to relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far.
There are really sophisticated DNA labs.
Do you have confidence that if they had access to this box, for lack of a better descriptor, they could make whatever progress is possible?
They could make it.
And that's really all we're asking the governor to do push the case either out of the boulder hands or require them to take this evidence.
To be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get.
If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with.
Yes.
This has been done in the last few years with remarkable success.
And really, what got me, had me, I might take the gloves off with the police is we had spent some time with the regional FBI folks there in Denver and Got a relationship where we said, Look, this is what needs to happen.
And in fact, they're the ones that said, Look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology.
We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it.
We don't have it at the FBI.
They certainly don't have it at the state level.
And of course, it's not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level.
They told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these one or two very cutting edge labs outside and then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.
And there's a hope that would move this case along to conclusion.
They went to the Boulder police and said, We're here to help.
We'd like to make this happen.
We'd help you.
You can take all the credit.
And the Boulder police blew them off and said, No, we don't need your help.
And that was the game's over, as far as I'm concerned.
We got to start.
When was that?
How long ago?
Oh, it's probably six months ago.
Just so people know, I had this woman on my show at NBC.
Cece Moore is her name.
And I know you must have talked to her.
She's the one who was really at the center of this genealogy research.
And what they do is they take a piece of DNA.
And we already know that the DNA that they found on John Bonet did not produce a hit in the databases that are available, at least as of the last time they told us.
So the perpetrator.
Had not gone into the system yet, but they don't need that.
All they need is for somebody related to the perpetrator to be in the DNA system.
So if I were in the DNA system, let's say I wanted to do 23andMe, let's see what my ancestry is, but whatever.
Then if my results got uploaded on this other website that CC Moore uses, that a lot of people who upload their DNA results use because you get more information from it, it's not 23andMe, it's something related.
So let's say they're sitting there, she can access them.
She may not, you know, she can see a lot of things on there.
And let's say I have a relative who commits a crime.
That relative's DNA was not going to pop up.
Like maybe they committed a crime, but the crime scene, they didn't see him because he didn't, he hadn't been arrested yet.
But mine will.
And this is what Cece Moore, she's like, all I can tell you is that Megyn Kelly is related to this killer.
And so I'm going to build this big family tree around Megyn Kelly.
I'm going to figure out who her grandfather, what great grandfather, look at her husband's side.
I'm going to look at, because all this stuff is publicly available.
She looks through wedding announcements and birth announcements.
It's crazy great detective work.
And she gets her man.
I mean, CeCe Moore is like, they saw a case a week doing this.
And so, if we could take a fresh look at the John Binet DNA from that perspective, even if the guy's never gotten into the system from the last time they tested it, somebody might be in the system that could lead us to him.
That's right.
Justice System and Forgiveness00:08:33
The COVID system that the FBI uses, the federal database of criminals or arrested felons, is fairly small.
The states can contribute or not to that database.
It takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database, but it's of people that have already been found criminal or at least arrested for felonies.
And it depends on the state what that rule is, but it's not a very big database.
And what the public database of the 23andMe, in a way, both Jan and I, Submitted our $35, get our ancestry to that database.
They find a reasonably, you know, close match or something the least is of interest.
And they do almost a backwards family tree.
And then they find, hey, here's a relative that lived in Boulder in December 1996.
Then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his DNA.
And these remarkable success solutions to these old, old cases have been using that technique.
And most of these people were not on anybody's radar.
They weren't in the COVID or the federal database.
And in fact, the Golden State Killer, which was, I think, the first one found this way, was a 40 year old case and he was a retired cop.
So he wasn't in the criminal database.
Exactly.
But our relative was.
And that's what we're asking the governor to make happen.
I don't care how it happens, that's what has to happen.
And now, what he's saying, John, is well, he hasn't said anything as I understand it.
But the Buller PD are there like, hey, we have great news.
We're now going to refer this case to the cold case unit.
And the cold case unit we believe is going to do better than the other case unit.
Why?
Don't know.
I've never heard of this cold case unit.
Why?
They said we're going to refer to them next year.
Well, that could be 12 months from now.
But I guess you say, well, it's no big rush.
It's been 26 years.
What's the hurry?
It's a huge frustration for us.
Do you believe that's just a cover?
Is that a CYA?
Yeah, absolutely.
That was put out before I even released the governor's letter, which I only released because he never responded.
I thought that was, I would have at least expected to say, yeah, we'll take a look at it.
Or I received your letter.
Still hasn't responded?
No.
No.
When I follow up with him.
Yeah, I'm not asking him to, you know, apologize to us for the.
Faulty performance of the Colorado justice system.
I don't want that.
I just want to do the right thing.
This is what can be done.
You need to do it.
Yeah.
Well, we're definitely going to follow up with his office and find out what his response is, and we'll stay on it.
And we'll annoy him to the point where he's going to have to respond because I know a lot of people in media who would be very happy to help me annoy him.
I would love that.
And that's what it's going to take.
It's going to take intense public pressure to do the right thing.
That's all we're asking him to do.
None of them will do anything unless forced to by the public.
And the people of Colorado and the country are on your side.
They're not on the side of some law enforcement group that's trying to protect its own backside.
So I actually think we can make progress with this.
But first, I have to squeeze in a break.
All right, stand by, John.
Quick break.
I'll be right back to you after this.
John, Dylan Howard put together an extraordinary podcast called The Killing of John Benet Ramsey.
And it's a 12 part series in which he took a very deep dive into possible suspects in the case I recommend it to everybody, and in part based off of Lou Smith's work and the work of his daughter.
Having listened to all of that and cooperated with that, do you have a chief suspect?
You know, it's easy to say, well, that's the guy based on circumstantial evidence.
In fact, that happened.
Fairly early on, a person was brought to our attention by his girlfriend, former girlfriend, and had some pretty compelling data that would lead you to believe, hey, this is the guy.
In fact, I said that to our attorneys.
I said, whoa, this is the guy.
And they said, no, no, no, don't do a Boulder police on us.
We can't jump to conclusions.
It was a reminder that that's exactly what happened and that we got to be careful too.
And so there's been four or five people like that that have come up on the radar, on our radar.
And But it's never been enough evidence.
And, you know, private individuals are going to do so much.
They need the authority of the government to really dig into stuff.
Yeah.
And so we could only go so far in some of these investigations.
And so these people are still, in my mind, suspects of interest, people of interest, but you don't want to be investigated.
That's the point.
They need to be investigated.
One of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that.
Window broken in the basement, saw there was a scuff mark below the window.
There was a suitcase there, which we talked about briefly, that wasn't normally there.
And in it, they found a duvet, a Dr. Seuss book, and fibers of the outfit John Binet was wearing that night, indicating perhaps the murderer might have tried to kidnap her or remove her from the scene in the suitcase, but it was too big.
But that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene if only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads.
The point is, The governor must get involved.
The governor must remove this case from the Boulder PD.
They must get the fibers and the DNA that is available to a qualified lab and start working with the family instead of against them after all these years.
In the time we have left, how do you do it?
Because I know you said you've forgiven whoever did this to John Binet.
And John, it just seems like a mountain too high.
How do you do that?
Well, I dealt with forgiveness a lot over the few years after John Binet was killed.
And I've looked back at how I felt and progressed with that challenge.
Certainly, in the first couple of years, there was no forgiveness.
In fact, I've told people if you put this guy in the same room with me and I know he's the killer, he won't come out alive.
And I would be able to do that with no remorse.
And that's not right, but that's how I felt.
And then I got to the point where I said, okay, well, forgiveness belongs to the victim.
And I'm really not the victim.
John Bonet was a victim.
So only she can.
Forgive, and that's of course not possible.
And that kind of got me off the hook.
And then I finally realized forgiveness is really a gift you give yourself.
You release that anger and that desire for revenge.
Doesn't mean you feel sorry for the, in our case, the killer.
I still want him held to the accountability to the extreme level of our justice system.
But I've released that anger and, um, It still crops up every now and then, but it's a benefit to myself to release that in the form of forgiveness.
Don't want him held.
Staying connected to God helps, I know.
And I'm sure this time of year, even all these years later, is very tough on you.
I know you've remarried.
I'm so happy to hear that.
God bless you, John, and your family.
And I think there's a way of finding a Merry Christmas.
You know, I hope that you've.
Found that way.
And I'll be praying for you this year in particular.
We had a hard time with Christmas for several years.
Far and I didn't realize you got to remember what Christmas is for.
And that's reassuring in our case.
We know John Monet is safe and we'll see her again.
Amen to that.
Real People Stories Sparked00:14:56
Take care.
Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story, and we'll stay on it.
Thank you, Megan.
I really appreciate it.
Wow.
Just keep them in your prayers and keep their family in your prayers.
That little girl's with her mama now.
For that, we can be painful.
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We have a very different kind of crime story to bring to you today.
Have you heard about the Sackler family?
By the end of this show, you will.
You'll know their story well.
And the story of the opioid crisis in America.
It's stunning, it is devastating, and it is indeed criminal.
I was so moved by the recent Hulu series, Dopesick.
If you haven't seen this, you must, you must, that I wanted to do a show on it.
And today, I'm very, very happy to be joined in just a bit by the author of the book that inspired the series, as well as separately, The creator of the series Dope Sick.
Danny Strong is the director, executive producer of Dope Sick, and he joins me now.
Danny, thank you so much for being here.
You're the creator, you're the showrunner.
And let me just kick it off with you know, we're going to get into it, but it's basically about how the opioid crisis in America unfolded.
What attracted you to that subject matter?
Well, first off, thanks so much for having me on your show.
Of course.
And, you know, I'm so thrilled you watched the show and we're so taken by it.
So it's all very appreciated.
It all began when a producer named John Goldwyn, who's a really terrific producer, came to me and said, Do you want to write and direct a movie on the opioid crisis?
And I had read this New Yorker article by Patrick Radin Keith that came out in 2017 that basically blew the story up as far as the Sackler family's involvement with Purdue Pharma, with OxyContin, in a very damning way.
I think that that article was a major turning point in sort of the history.
Of the opioid crisis and who was ultimately responsible for sparking it and setting the flames and then keeping that fire going for at least a decade, if not longer.
And so I went back and I had reread the article and I read very closely this time as far as a potential adaptation or not adaptation, but just as a research.
And I was fascinated, stunned, shocked, appalled.
I then went on and got some books that had already been written.
On the opioid crisis, a book called Painkiller, a book called Dreamland.
My horror grew even more.
And I just thought, I have to do this.
I have to figure out a way to dramatize the story for as big an audience as I can, because this is one of the most stunning crime stories in the history of the country.
And at the time, this was 2018 when I was really deep diving into it.
And Purdue Pharma and OxyContin, the prescribing had started to come down in the United States, but they were now using their same dishonest, manipulative, false techniques, advertising techniques, and marketing techniques in foreign countries.
So when I first started, I had viewed the show as a warning to the rest of the world that Purdue Pharma is coming to lie to you and to addict you to OxyContin.
So that's sort of what sparked the journey.
You come by your storytelling skills, honestly.
It's funny because when I saw your name, I'm like, I know that name.
I know that name.
And I know you've worked with Jay Roach, who was, of course, the director of the movie Bombshell, which I have a connection to.
I have nothing to do with the movie, but there was a person playing me in it.
But that's not how I knew you.
It was from Gilmore Girls.
There you go.
Which you were on for a while playing Doyle McMaster.
But you've also written several big movies, right?
Game Change, Recount.
And you wrote.
The Butler, your co writer and maybe producer on Empire as well.
I mean, like a lot of big hits in your past.
Good stuff.
Thank you.
But this is like, this is your project.
So it's got to feel different to you in a way.
Yeah, it was.
I knew that I would be doing heavy lifting.
I had directed an independent film before that had gotten into Sundance, which was very exciting.
But this was on a much, much bigger scale as far as creating show running.
I knew I was going to be directing the last couple episodes.
And it was great to just sort of take the reins of it.
And partly why I felt like, okay, this is a good project for me to do that with for my first time.
Was because I was so passionate about it and I was so enraged by what had happened.
And it seemed like, well, if you're gonna, you know, for me, I always worry, I always get a worst case scenario, right?
You know, what's gonna happen if the whole thing's a disaster and a massive failure?
And so I thought, well, if this thing explodes in my face, I'd rather go down swinging on something that I feel really, really passionate about.
This feeling is what makes you a success.
They say that there was a Kaiser poll that said 56% of Americans either know someone who is an addict.
Or who died from addiction.
I feel like it's probably even higher than that.
I have someone, I've revealed to my audience that someone in my family, my family of origin, fell into the opioid crisis.
And when a family member falls into it, the entire family falls into it, as you know from being the storyteller of this series.
I wondered whether you had any personal experience that made you want to do the show.
I didn't, and I'm so fortunate to be able to say that, that sentence.
Um, I'm, I don't know anyone close to me that had a opioid use disorder.
I myself have not fallen down any kind of rabbit hole like that.
Uh, the rabbit hole I fell down was the rabbit hole of the crimes of Purdue Pharma and the culpability of the Sackler family.
And that was a rabbit hole that a number of people have fallen down.
You know, when I start talking about this to, to different people that have written books on them.
Who may have had a personal experience with addiction or a family or friends that has.
But what we all have in common is once you start deep diving into what happens, you can't believe it.
You can't believe what this company did and how literally a group of, I don't know, 20 people, 30 people from one family made billions and billions of dollars off of the suffering.
Of an entire nation.
And, you know, when you talk about how the whole family gets affected by this when it happens to one person, it's so true.
You know, everyone talks about the statistics of now it's over 700,000 people have died from some type of opioid overdose since the crisis essentially began.
However, that number doesn't even begin to tell the story of the families that are devastated, the family members that.
That lose years of their life of suffering, of loved ones who have fallen into this, and the people that are still alive that didn't die from an overdose, but are either still struggling with opioid use disorder or lost years of their life to it and are now just trying to put the pieces back together.
I mean, the sort of victims of it continue to splinter on and on and on in a way that's extremely profound.
I know many people think that the homeless issue that is plaguing so many major American cities.
Is heavily sparked by the opioid crisis and people that have fallen into opioid use disorder.
No, it's so true because even if you're one of the quote lucky ones who doesn't get killed by an overdose, I mean, I've seen it happen firsthand, it changes you.
It changes a person, it can at least radically to where the person you knew is all but gone, replaced by someone else who's a stranger to you who you have to get to know and who that person, him or herself, has to get to know.
It's just like a new version of you.
That doesn't tend to be new and improved.
Like these drugs do so much lasting damage.
And then the drugs you have to take to get off of them and stay off of them can do damage as well.
It's just a cycle that, even if you manage to pull yourself out of it, it's very hard to shake the effects of it.
And the movie and the book and this whole series of sort of research and writings about it are an attempt at accountability, at storytelling and explanation.
How did it happen and accountability?
And what I loved about it, Danny, is when you go through it, You don't know you're part of a national story, right?
You just think, Oh my God, something's terrible is happening in my family or to my people.
And, and it took years, I think, for most of us who were sucked into it to realize, Oh my God, this was a thing.
This was a national epidemic.
And now this is the next piece, which is caused by specific individuals because it was.
And I, I agree with your demonization of the Sacklers who we'll get into.
So let's, let's talk about the film itself because you basically, the characters are fictional.
Right.
So you made them up.
Some of them.
But they're loosely based, yes, on real people.
Some are not even loosely based.
Some are just the actual people.
I mean, the Sackler family, I use the real names.
And then the key prosecutors out of the Western District of Virginia, the U.S. Attorney there and two of his prosecutors, those are real people as well.
And then the people in the town, Finch Creek, that is, it's a fictional name, Finch Creek.
I wanted to do this sort of every town, USA, Appalachia.
Concept to have a couple of people be our victims that represented millions of people in that case?
The star originally in the beginning episodes is a young female minor named Betsy, played by Caitlin Deaver, who suffers an injury.
She's the daughter of a minor as well.
She lives with her parents.
She's not a drug addict, she's not an alcoholic.
She's a sweet, dreamy faced young minor.
It's just such an interesting job for a young woman like that.
Sympathetic character for sure.
And I love that you chose her because this was representative of, I think, the opioid crisis for most people.
These weren't back alley deals, these were people who were prescribed a drug by a doctor they trusted to treat an injury that was real.
And then the spiral came.
Yeah, absolutely.
And partly why I did this approach was because this is where Purdue Pharma, that was their phase one areas where they targeted, which were rural areas filled with people that had a higher prescription rate of opioids because they just got injured a lot on the job.
So miners, loggers, farmers.
Those were basically the three areas that Purdue Pharma initially targeted.
And so it was in Southwestern Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and rural Maine.
We were kind of the ground zero spots.
And I chose Appalachia and I chose mining.
I thought it was very sort of emblematic of sort of our iconic view of how this all began.
And I started watching YouTube videos of different people in these areas.
And these YouTube videos, it's a technique I use for research because there's something so authentic about them.
They're often amateur videos that are just taken by real people trying to put some kind of short subject documentary together about their lives.
And I was so taken by so many of the miners and the pride they had and what they did, and that there was this sort of magical connection to the mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the mountains in Appalachia.
And, you know, when I went on a research trip up there, I understood where that connection came from because they're really beautiful.
It's just this very beautiful part of the country and very sort of isolated and on its own.
So it seemed to me, oh, this is a great way into the story.
And I, you know, in one of the videos, I saw this young woman who was a minor being interviewed.
She struck me as someone who seemed like she was a lesbian.
And I thought, wow, that's really interesting being a lesbian in a very, you know, conservative part of the country where that may not be as accepted as, say, it is in New York City where I live.
And I just wanted to explore these different issues.
And so, what happens when the issue begins, her arc begins about her sexuality and what that means to her and her family.
But it quickly takes a left hand turn when the drug use completely consumes it and takes it over.
And that was so very much kind of the early stages of me putting this together.
And I do want to throw a huge shout out to Beth Macy and her incredible book, Dope Sick.
We ended up getting teamed up after I'd come up with these initial ideas.
And I read the book and I loved it.
And Beth has been an incredible part of the project and the process.
Her and I kept doing interviews all the way throughout the entire process.
So she gets a big shout out to dope sick author Beth Macy.
And anyone listening to this, if you've seen the show and you haven't read the book yet, I highly recommend it.
Yeah, she's coming up next.
So they're going to meet her momentarily.
But she does get it.
I mean, she, she's sort of, her book is not totally dissimilar from Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance.
You know, it just takes a hard, honest, and sometimes unfavorable view of Appalachia and what's happened there.
Elaborate Pharma Plays00:16:07
And it's not, it's not critical of the people.
It's just, There's joblessness and there's disability claims and there's globalization and there are all sorts of things that have affected this part of the country that gets ignored too often.
And then people are like, how did Trump get in office?
And it's like, well, it's complicated, but it's understandable if you take the time.
Okay, so.
Got a doubt.
You've got, she's, Betsy is one of our main stars.
And then you've got Dr. Samuel Fenix, right?
Yeah.
Just wanna make sure I'm pronouncing it right, because I know I'm a Sam.
And that's played by Michael Keaton.
And this character is trying to help his community.
He loves West Virginia, he loves Appalachia, he loves the minors.
He's trying to help, but like so many doctors in the opioid crisis, really didn't, right?
He was pulled in by Purdue Pharma, as so many real life doctors were, and it's dazzling.
Snazzy drug reps who are saying all sorts of things about this drug, which is so exciting that they fooled even the doctors, which was a critical part of their plan.
Yeah, 100%.
I think there's this perception of that all doctors that prescribed Oxycontin were evil pill mill doctors that were essentially legal drug dealers.
And those people certainly did exist.
And there were many pill mills and a number of people that have been arrested and gotten massive jail sentences 30 years, 25 years.
However, I believe that the majority of the doctors prescribing Oxycontin were not that.
They were completely well intentioned doctors.
That believed what Purdue Pharma had told them.
And even the sales reps at Purdue Pharma believed, at least initially, the information that they were given.
There was basically this elaborate con in which Purdue Pharma, well, I'll start with these independent pain societies.
These independent pain societies were creating this new movement that pain has been wildly under treated in this country and that opioids are much safer.
Than we have perceived them for decades.
And that this movement went so far as to term pain as the new fifth vital sign.
So, this was a huge campaign that was happening late 80s into the mid 90s into the late 90s, right?
During this whole period that coincided with Purdue Pharma coming up with a new opioid that they were marketing as non addictive, which tied into the national movement of yes, and opioids are much safer.
And then these pain societies would put out studies.
Certain doctors would write articles that would end up in these really respected news, medical news journals.
And it gave this elaborate appearance that there's a whole new movement in medication and in pain treatment.
And what we have learned is that these pain societies were not independent.
They were partially or fully, in some cases, funded by Purdue Pharma.
The doctors that were writing articles were funded by Purdue Pharma.
And in some cases, the periodicals.
That these articles would come out in were funded by Purdue Pharma.
So it was like an elaborate shell game, a con.
And then when you go back in time to the 1950s and the 1960s, there was a man who basically created all of this, this entire elaborate shell game of having fake studies being written about by doctors on your payroll, put in periodicals that are also on your payroll that you would then use that to convince doctors of whatever you're trying to convince them.
Was Arthur Sackler, the uncle of Richard Sackler, who was the godfather of Oxycontin, right?
So you see, oh no, this is what the family, they've been doing this for the last 50 years.
This is just their playbook.
And when you get into that, that this is a generational scam, I view it as sort of like pharmagrifters.
They're a family of pharmagrifters, right?
And then it goes back generations.
It gets to be incredibly fascinating.
That there's this long history of it and quite devious.
You know, this is covered in the book Dope Sick, but there's another book called Empire of Pain that came out not too long ago that goes into Arthur Sackler in the 50s and the 60s in such exquisite detail.
I call it Charles Dickens in Hell.
I mean, it's very decadent and quite fascinating the entire family history of what they've done.
Obviously, the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma are, they do not come out favorably in the movie or the book or life.
Although their lives are pretty good.
Their lives are pretty damn good.
But I'll tell you, the biggest villain right after them is the FDA.
And you will not believe how Purdue Pharma managed to convince all these doctors that Oxycontin was less addictive, that the doctors could feel totally comfortable prescribing it to young minors who may have hurt their backs and so on.
Freeform, just go for it.
It's totally safe.
How did they do it?
With the help of Of a complicit FDA, which the movie exposes brilliantly.
We have more with Danny after this quick break.
Don't go away.
So, Danny, before I get to FDA, Richard Sackler, can you help me?
I love this actor.
Michael, is it Stolbarg?
Stolbarg.
Stolbarg.
Okay, because I always see it written and I never hear it spoken.
I loved him in Boardwalk Empire.
He was totally brilliant in that series.
He was in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, many other films.
You'll recognize him.
He's such a good villain.
He's amazing at being a villain.
So, he plays Richard Sackler.
And Richard Sackler, what you learn is more than any other Sackler, and that's saying something, is hugely ambitious.
He's incredibly driven and he's also very smart.
But he was determined once he created this baby, Oxycontin, because a patent on another drug they owned was running out, Purdue Pharma, and they needed a new star in the Purdue Pharma family, and Oxycontin was it.
So he was determined to make sure it got marketed out there, that the sales were exponential.
And here's just a clip from the movie.
This is Soundbite One of Michael Stobarg.
Richard Sackler listen board doesn't seem to understand I'm trying to make this a blockbuster drug Which I can't do without more sales reps Dr. Richard with all these new sales reps.
We won't even have enough doctors for them to target IMS is about to release a 3.0 version that tracks daily prescriptions instead of quarterly So if we double our sales force we can use this data to target doctors prescribing Lordab and Vicodin and Flip them to Oxycontin The upgrade is a million dollars.
Do you know who created the IMS database?
Arthur Sackler.
It's been kept secret for years, but this is a family invention that was sold off years ago.
And now you're telling me we should deny all this data that only exists because of my fucking uncle?
Purchase the upgrade and increase the sales force.
Thank you.
And that's exactly what they did.
And that Salesforce went out there and did his bidding in a way that was pretty sickening.
It was pretty gross.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, first off, thanks for all your compliments for Michael's performance.
I think he is unbelievable in this show.
And it's funny, he plays all these villains in person.
He's literally the sweetest guy you'll ever meet.
Yeah, he's so sweet.
And Michael Keaton and Caitlin Deaver both give staggering performances.
They were actually just nominated for Critics' Choice Awards for their performances.
Right.
As was the series, right?
It's just an incredible group of people.
So I just want to give my love to them and my entire cast, who I think is amazing.
You know, one of the things that.
Mara Winningham, she was amazing too.
Pardon?
Mara Winningham, amazing.
She plays Betsy's mother.
Oh, God, be it.
Come on.
It's Mara Winningham.
She's unbelievable, right?
Everything.
She's great in everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Rosario Dawson, too, is just a story.
She's that Rosario Dawson plays the badass DEA agent who will not be shut up.
She just is like, she's a dog with a bone.
And while everybody's like, shut up, go away.
Purdue Pharma is very powerful and rich.
She just doesn't give a damn.
She just continues on.
Not having it, not having it.
And a really cool person, too.
But so one of the things I really wanted to do with Richard Sackler, right, is he's so demonized in everything you read and so despised by so many people.
And then I was able to.
Interview a number of people that knew him and worked with him, and they seem to hate him even more than the people.
I thought you were taking a different turn there.
Yeah, he's not like the most loved individual when you know him one on one.
And what was important to me was well, what really made him tick?
What's really going on here?
Is it just money?
Because it's hard for me to believe that it's just money because he's already rich.
They're already rich before Oxycontin even existed, right?
So, I went on a deep dive to do everything I could to try to figure out.
So, what makes this guy tick?
And I went to the extent of I did a therapy session where I role played that I was Richard Sackler.
I'd never done anything like this before.
And a friend of mine is a really successful screenwriter, and his wife is a therapist.
And he had done this with her.
So, he was like, Why don't you try doing a session with my wife where you role play Richard Sackler?
And it was incredible to try to get under the skin of this person.
And I think that.
That I think Stuhlbarg did a great job of that as well.
And that there are some really interesting layers to what's happening here.
He grew up with this famous uncle that we discussed earlier.
And I think he desperately didn't want to be a dilettante.
He wanted to prove that he could succeed on his own.
And what he ends up doing is he ends up succeeding probably beyond anyone's wildest expectations and maybe the most successful person in the history of this family as far as the revenue that he brought in.
But that drive to succeed, well, it had.
Consequences and those consequences were the opioid crisis and the devastation that it brought to this country.
And if you were to point to one individual most responsible for it, I think the blame has to go directly to Richard Sackler.
And I think that these many of these books that have been written back that up.
This isn't my own conclusion, it's sort of the historical record at this point.
Yeah, I think Beth Macy is going to say that too that it's not that Oxycontin was the only drug being abused during the opioid crisis.
But it was certainly patient zero, if you will.
It was the biggest and most important and most effective and widespread.
And the way they did it is indicative of how many problems there were with the system, including the FDA.
So the FDA, they're supposed to be on our side.
That's supposed to be a government watchdog that looks out for the little guy.
But in the same way, so many people have been distrusting many government agencies over the past 10 years or so, this agency is on that page too because they weren't looking out for the little guy.
They looked.
Looked out for Purdue.
And in particular, a guy named Dr. Curtis Wright at the FDA.
Well, why don't you tell us what they did for Oxycontin and then what happened to Dr. Wright?
This story is one of the first jaw droppers of the opioid crisis origin story when you start to research it.
So, one of the most effective tools that Purdue Pharma had in marketing the drug and getting doctors to feel comfortable that this.
Opioid was less addictive than other opioids was because the FDA granted them a label that said that was the case.
It was an unprecedented label that essentially said that this drug is less addictive than other opioids.
And so, a doctor seeing this label, being told this, it was a major part of the sales pitch.
Well, that's going to really make them feel much more comfortable trying it.
Besides that elaborate shell game that I talked about earlier, this is what takes it over the edge in a very significant way.
And the wording of this warning label was highly unusual.
It barely makes sense.
It's a little confusing.
It says, you know, is believed, Oxycontin is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug because, or the time release system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug.
Well, believed, believed by who?
Who believes it?
You know, negative.
Do you believe it?
Do I believe it?
I mean, it doesn't even say who believes it.
And so when you scratch the surface, so how could this unprecedented label that gave them a blank check to say that the drug was less addictive?
Well, how does that come to be?
Well, clearly, there were studies that were done that showed that was again, no, there were no studies.
It was the time mechanism that was able to just this time release system convince the FDA of the case.
Well, what happened was the guy that approved this label, Curtis Wright, he goes and 18 months later gets a job at Purdue Pharma for $400,000 a year.
I'm guessing he was making about $100,000 a year at the FDA.
So the appearance of corruption.
Is so staggering.
I still feel like there needs to be a major investigation into Curtis Wright and the failures at the FDA.
And rule change.
They should not be allowed to take jobs with Big Pharma within 10 years of leaving the FDA.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons why I thought this story is so profound because it goes beyond a criminal company and it goes beyond the dishonesty of a few people.
It ends up tying into the very broken nature of our government's relationship with private industry.
And that if someone could have a job at the FDA in which they are directly overseeing pharma companies, and then they can immediately go work for those pharma companies, the revolving door.
You end up with situations like what happened here.
And I think that it's not even just Curtis Wright, but the FDA stayed really lenient on Purdue Pharma for many years, siding with them over and over and over again.
And how could Curtis Wright's massive salary and job not have some sort of influence on these future decisions where people are working at the FDA thinking either A, there's a job for me at Purdue Pharma when I get out, or B, a job at At a consulting company that can be hired by Purdue Pharma.
Or in one case, a person was put on a board at Tufts University that Purdue Pharma was in charge of that board, right?
And being put on these boards, well, that's really helpful for the person's career.
So there's all sorts of goodies to be had for your career, your future, your pocketbook by playing ball with Purdue Pharma.
And I think that looking at the revolving door, coming up with new rules that could not enable someone.
To oversee their warning label and then go work for them within 18 months.
She could have gone to work for them the next day.
It's obvious.
It's so clear, right?
When you spell it out, what happened.
Poison Pushed by Reps00:07:49
Just as a compliment to all of this reporting and discussion, 60 Minutes did a piece not long ago taking a deep dive on all of this.
It was in 2019.
And they interviewed a whistleblower from within Big Pharma.
This guy himself was a Big Pharma kind of guy.
He was selling drugs, I mean, legal drugs.
His name was Ed Thompson.
He was telling 60 Minutes that when Oxy was first approved in 1995, it was based on science.
1995 is the very first time we've met Oxycontin.
It was based on science that only showed it was safe and effective when used short term.
Okay.
But six years later in 2001, pressured by big pharma and pain sufferers, the FDA made a fateful decision and expanded the use of Oxycontin to just about anybody with chronic ailments.
Anybody with chronic ailments, like back pain, arthritis, could now use it.
And 60 Minutes got their hands on a court order.
That would demand the production of the documents.
It showed there were secret meetings between the FDA in which they bowed to Purdue Pharma's demands to ignore the lack of scientific data and change the label to you can use this around the clock for an extended period of time.
Ed Thompson said it opened the floodgates.
It was the point of no return for the FDA.
They were in bed, under the covers, naked, next to the Sacklers for the duration.
And as you point out now, not just because of Oxy, but 700,000 Americans are dead.
I mean, yes, Oxycontin and other opioids did help some people.
We should point that out.
But those in charge knew it was also extremely deadly, and they denied it at every turn.
Yeah.
And Oxycontin has real, um, there's, there's some real, uh, good use for Oxycontin and opioids, severe pain, cancer pain, post, uh, surgery treatment.
Uh, it's very effective for it, but Purdue Pharma had already had a drug, MS Cotton, that did that.
And they knew how much money you could make by having a drug for severe pain, for cancer treatment, for post surgery treatment.
And it's a pretty small market, but by opening it up to chronic pain, And here was the other element to it.
It wasn't just chronic pain, but moderate pain, right?
Because it's now non addictive, it could be used for all sorts of ailments like wisdom teeth surgery or migraine headaches or all sorts of things that an addictive narcotic never should have been used for.
And that combination of that and using it for chronic pain, which meant you had to be on it on an ongoing basis, you know, opened it up this skyrocketing of addiction and overdoses.
And I will put another.
There is another category too of people, which are people with severe chronic pain that have been able to effectively use OxyContin to treat their chronic pain that now can't get access to it either.
So now there's like another set of victims because of the dishonesty that occurred in the marketing and promotion of this drug.
The other villain inside of Purdue Pharma, in addition to the other Sacklers who are 100% on board.
With this drug, they were just worried about how much money it would make.
They weren't worried about people's health from the sound of it.
Was the drug reps.
Now, the drug reps are the people who go out to the doctors and try to convince them that this is a great drug and that they should prescribe it to all their patients.
And the film does a great job of showing people the pressure on them by their top guy to push, push, push.
We're making bigger, bigger pills of Oxy, more and more Oxy in each pill.
The answer, if you're starting to feel withdrawal, is not less OxyContin.
It's more Oxycontin.
That's your body telling you you need Oxycontin.
And the drug reps, I mean, basically, they were told do whatever you need to do.
Push, push, push.
Like, you've got to get not necessarily people hooked, but you've got to push this drug and you've got to sort of convince people to push it no matter what you have to give them.
Trying to look for the exact sound bite we have.
Oh, is it SOT2?
Okay, listen, SOT2.
Make your doctors feel special.
Get dolled up.
Take them to expensive dinners.
Offer to fill up their car with gas just to get 10 minutes to pitch.
Bribe the receptionist with a Manny Petty so she'll let you in the office.
But you have to get to know your doctors, which is why we will give you full psychological profiles on each of them.
If they've got kids, get them tickets to Disney World.
If they're going through a divorce, get them laid.
Whatever it takes to win their friendship.
and their trust.
They were important, really important.
Oh, yeah.
They were a very, very significant part of the process.
And what Purdue did, they did a couple of things that was very clever and very devious.
One was they were the first time where, in selling a class two narcotic, where people's bonuses were tied into the number of milligrams that they sold.
Oh, my God.
So the more milligrams that they sold, the higher the bonus they got.
Then they also went out of their way to not hire people that had a background.
In opioids or in narcotics, because one could argue those people would have been suspicious of the claim that it was less addictive than other opioids.
And I interviewed a number of Purdue Pharma reps, former Purdue Pharma reps, and there's been a lot written about them.
And the sort of theme that comes up frequently is they believed what they were told, they believed the studies, but then at a certain point, it becomes clear to them.
That it's not true.
And I remember I asked one of them, I said, What was the moment?
What was the moment where you realized, oh, there is something very wrong with this drug?
And he had, he had, he remembered the exact moment of what it was.
He said it was when he pulled up to a pain clinic and it looked like a tailgate party out front, that there were a massive amount of people grilling meat, hanging out, beer.
It was like a giant party outside of a pain clinic when everyone was waiting to go get their Oxycontin.
So they were definitely culpable.
At a certain point, even though Purdue did go out of their way to try to trick the pharma reps as well.
Well, yeah.
I mean, if they could be sincere and earnest in the pitch, so much the better, right?
Not everybody has that acting ability, right?
Like the people in your cast, most people would have to actually believe it in order to be effective at selling it.
The series does a great job of painting the relationship between Michael Keaton's character, this well meaning West Virginian doctor, and one of those sales reps.
The character's name is Billy Cutler, played by Will Poulter.
And Billy is sort of this, he's a fresh faced kid who's trying to make it and get a good salary and so on.
And he starts off believing in the drug.
And you sort of see that change over time.
And his relationship with Michael Keaton is very good.
And that changes over time.
And even Michael Keaton is touting the drug as a doctor to his community early on in the film, saying, you know, trust me, you guys, these are good people.
I know you're good people.
Come by pain, honestly, and I'm going to help you fix it, honestly.
And by the end of the movie, there's a, Tumultuous exchange between the Michael Keaton's doctor character and this Billy Cutler character, the drug rep, where you can feel the deterioration, you can feel the crisis that they are in, that the nation is in.
Rage Against the Doc00:02:03
It's soundbite nine.
No, no, sorry.
Forgive me.
It's yeah, it's soundbite eight.
Take a listen.
So poison, Billy.
What's that?
That's all it says.
So poison.
That's what you do.
That's just poison.
No, Doc, yeah.
No, that's what it is.
Yeah, it's poison.
I can talk you through it, doc.
It's a new concept.
It's all in here.
These are good, hardworking people.
These are good, hardworking people.
You have FDA labeled this.
Doc, anything in here that you don't understand, I can talk to you.
Okay.
Get out.
Get out.
All right.
You to get going.
Don't ever come to the doctor.
Dog, get out of here.
Dog, you guys, please.
You have more fingers than that.
I'll fucking kill you.
Yeah, I'll fucking kill you myself.
The anger, you're feeling it yourself as an audience member by that point in the series.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, that was, I remember when I was writing that scene and I hadn't planned on him punching him.
And then I wrote the scene, and I felt like it didn't capture the true rage of what this doctor would be going through.
And so I rewrote it with him punching him and it becoming the sort of melee that it turns into.
And there's a number of moments throughout the show that are, in many ways, my rage and my anger, and some of the dialogue that people say is very much a product of the anger that I have about what happened.
And there's something, you know, I feel so fortunate that I'm able to express.
That anger to millions of people in the work that I do.
It's a very unusual situation to be in.
And I remember someone asked me, So, do you get it out of your system?
Kidnapped by Opioid Chemistry00:02:52
Are you released in a therapeutic way?
And I said, No, but it does feel good.
It's a temporary release.
I can relate to my job too, frankly.
But I appreciate outlets like yours for helping me do it without having to be firsthand involved in it.
So, what happened?
What happened to Purdue Pharma?
What happened to this company, to Richard Sackler?
That's the part that.
Outrages Danny the most from what I read, and that's where we're going to pick it up right after this quick break on where they are now.
And remember, folks, you can catch the Megan Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
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Now would be a good time to ask you what dope sick means.
I just sort of blindly started watching it, not even asking that question.
And then it gets explained in the series.
It is a thing.
What is it?
Yeah.
So dope sick is the condition one feels that has an opioid use disorder, the withdrawal pain they feel that is so severe and staggering that they feel like they're going to die if they're not able to get their next fix of some type of opioid.
And it's so all.
All empowering, all overwhelming.
People will turn their back on everything in their life to not get dope sick their family, their children, their jobs.
This is how people end up, you know, living under a bridge in a tent, is because that withdrawal pain overwhelms every sense of their body, soul, et cetera.
And it's one of the deviousness, the diabolical nature.
Of opioids when you become addicted to them is that they hijack your brain.
They change your brain chemistry.
So, the sort of the stereotype or the perception that many people have is that someone who's addicted to opioids, that they can't get off, they're weak, they're maybe lazy, and they just want to get high, they're losers, they're junkies.
It's a lot of judgment.
But when you dig into it, what you learn is oh no, their brain has been hijacked and they cannot live.
Without it.
And that's what makes it so uniquely difficult to overcome opioid use disorder.
And that's where the word dope set comes from.
Criminal Prosecutions Begin00:06:26
Yeah.
It's another word, it's like they're kidnapped.
They've been kidnapped by this drug, the real person.
And it's so hard to get them back, no matter how much the ransom you pay.
So the series takes us through the progression that one of the characters has and that the country has as well, which is past.
Oxycontin.
The next drug of choice is heroin.
It's sort of the gateway to heroin.
And then in more modern times, illicit fentanyl, which is where we are now.
This is what people are dealing with currently.
And it's incredibly hard to get off of.
I'm talking to you.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, what were you saying?
Oh, I was just saying fentanyl is so dangerous.
Literally one pill can kill you.
I mean, that's how severe and dangerous this whole crisis has become.
Yep.
So the progression happens for one of the characters and it happens for the nation too.
And in the meantime, you're asked, you're shown the effort by some law enforcement agents.
You mentioned the West Virginia prosecutors.
Certain people at the higher levels of the federal government were on the good guy's side and certain people were not.
It's never fully explained what was happening, but we're led to believe that Purdue Pharma had connections even there.
They hired Rudy Giuliani.
He knew how to work the government.
This is at the height of his popularity right after 9 11.
And he tried to work his magic on Purdue's behalf, used his good name on their behalf, which is just, oh, it hurts.
And ultimately, the civil lawsuits and finally the criminal prosecutions against Purdue Pharma got us where, Danny?
Well, the criminal prosecutions.
So, and that's where the show ends.
The season basically ends around, it's in 2007, which is a settlement that Purdue Pharma has with the US government.
Three executives plead to misdemeanors and does from this settlement, in which the company pleads to a felony, $600 million in fines.
So, is this, do they change their ways?
Are they reformed by this settlement?
The answer is a definitive no.
In fact, and this is where for me, I start to think that these people are sociopaths because they have had this massive investigation against them.
They have pled guilty to a felony.
There is so much data at this point in 2007 of overdoses, crime rates, communities devastated.
Do they change their ways?
Do they make any sort of adjustments?
No, they hit the gas and they sell even harder and they triple their sales.
In two years.
And like I said, that's where I start to think, oh, oh, they're literally sociopaths, where they just do not care.
They don't care about any of the damage that they're causing.
They are just trying to make as much money as possible.
So then that brings us now to 2021.
In 2020, lo and behold, they have to plead guilty to two more sets of felonies.
And instead of $600 million in fines, it's $8.5 billion in fines.
Partly this settlement was because they blew off the safeguards of the 2007 settlement.
The company goes into bankruptcy.
They end up getting this very favorable judgment in which the Sackler family will pay out, I believe it was $3.5 billion.
$4.5, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, billion dollars in fines.
However, they are now immune to all future civil litigation.
However, here's where it gets a little interesting, or very interesting, depending on your point of view, is that they are not immune to criminal liability.
And they could still be prosecuted, the Sackler family.
And there was a big rally outside the Justice Department just a few days ago, filled with activists, filled with Rick Mountcastle, the real prosecutor who we dramatize in the show, was there, gave a speech.
I actually gave a speech.
There were three former US, three former Justice Department prosecutors giving a speech to push the Justice Department to file criminal charges against members of the Sackler family.
So, this isn't over.
And now, the common belief has always been amongst I don't know who, but that this will never happen, that they'll never be charged.
However, there is a push now.
I think that the TV show has put a lot of attention on it and given it some momentum.
And it's really emboldened the activists who threw this rally.
And supposedly, there's going to be a Justice Department meeting in the next week with the lawyer for these activists and some of the activists.
And they're better, they better meet with them because.
Literally, Purdue Pharma certainly has met with the Justice Department many times.
So I would think these activists should be able to get this meeting.
But so there is a push right now for criminal charges.
There is a huge sense amongst these activists that justice has not been served.
The company has now pled guilty to three felonies, but no individuals have.
And the company didn't make these decisions, individuals made these decisions.
And the Sacklers paid money toward that bankruptcy settlement of Purdue, but they still have plenty of money.
It's not unlike the Epstein case with justice on the wrong side for a lot of years and now getting it right.
Danny Strong, thank you so much for being here and for telling this story and all the best with it.
Oh, thank you so much, Megan.
I had a great time talking about this with you.
So thank you so much for having me here.
Ma, all the best.
Take care.
Up next, the journalist who wrote the book, Dope Sick, Beth Macy.
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Cracking Cocaine Crisis One00:08:45
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Führkraft, de lunnerschei o vite.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Joining me now, Beth Macy, journalist and author who wrote the book Dopesick, which was recently adapted into the TV series that you've been hearing us talk about.
Beth, thank you so much for being with us today.
I loved your book and I love your work.
And I think you have this sage ability to see things that the rest of us can't necessarily see.
So we're lucky to have journalists like you.
That's okay.
Thank you.
That's the truth.
I mean, you saw something here when it came to these small distressed communities in Appalachia and similarities that were in all of these towns and then similar ways of dealing with the problems.
So, first, can you just describe sort of what were.
What were some of the problems they shared that sort of preceded the opioid crisis?
So, one of the factors about where the crisis first broke out was the fact that Purdue Pharma bought data that showed them which communities were sort of rife to be exploited by their products.
That is, they picked the communities in America, these tended to be distressed rural towns where the jobs were going away.
So, you first see the crisis erupting in places like Southwest Virginia, West Virginia, rural Maine, because Purdue knew that doctors in those communities were already prescribing competing opioids at a higher rate.
And with their FDA label that we now know is quite in question, they went out and they tried with the reps, they tried to flip.
The doctors from prescribing Percocet, Vicodin, Loritab to Oxycontin, which they said was safer because of this continuous release mechanism.
And they got the doctors to flip thanks to that FDA insert, which was completely bought and paid for by Purdue Pharma to the great expense of really lower, not even, I mean, maybe lower to middle income Americans to begin with.
And then it spread and spread and spread.
I know you write about.
A study that took a look at the life expectancy of people in these regions and how, like, the difference between the bottom fifth in terms of income and wealth and the top fifth in income and wealth in this country is huge.
It's something like a difference of 13 years in life expectancy.
And so these people really have been overlooked by a system that has been focused on globalization, that's been trying to kill coal, and no one's been paying any attention to them.
And then Purdue Pharma did and managed to manipulate their very doctors to sort of turn on them without understanding that's what they were doing.
Right.
And that was a real double whammy.
If you've already lost the majority of your job, some of the communities I was reporting on for my first book, Factory Man, which came out in 2014, which is about the aftermath of globalization.
As I was wrapping up that reporting, I was starting to hear things like we've got a heroin crisis in Martinsville, Virginia.
We're talking like a tiny town about an hour south of me here in Roanoke, Virginia.
And I didn't understand it at the time, nor did most journalists, that the Oxycontin story.
Was so related to the heroin epidemic story because they're basically chemical cousins.
And when the drugs start to get harder to get, more expensive around 2010, 2012, you and I may not have known that Oxycontin and heroin were chemical cousins, but the cartels did.
And so they bring them in and start converting people to heroin because it's cheaper, it's easier to get.
And they know that one's fear of becoming dope sick, that is, this excruciating feeling of withdrawal that they all say is like, The worst flu times 100 really is one hell of a good business model.
And can you explain what the cartels, which we already know are evil, do to the drug in order to make sure the clientele gets hooked and keeps coming back?
Well, first, they just, I remember the story from a young woman named Tess Henry that I followed for Dope Sick.
And she could pinpoint the month that the DEA started cracking down.
Hydrocodone products had been up scheduled, I think it was like 2014.
And she said, all of a sudden, She couldn't get the pills on the black market from her dealer.
And so he personally showed her how to snort heroin, which you think heroin, yuck, you know, if you're her, which she did at first.
But really, if you're snorting in a line, it was just the same as she had been snorting the pills.
And once, because of opioids, you need more and more in order not to get dope sick.
Then when the snorting, the heroin didn't work, her dealer, Taught her how to shoot it up.
And that, you know, times a million across our country, that's the way it went down.
And now we have fentanyl poisoning the drug supply because it's smaller, more potent, and easier to smuggle in.
In the book, you write about how they would, they'll sort of pack the initial dose with some extras and you get this big high and you love it.
And then you come back and they lower the dosage and your next.
Your next delivery.
So then you start to get the feeling you need the next hit sooner, you pay more, you know, and now they've got you.
I mean, now you're a customer for life.
Is heroin a lot cheaper than Oxycontin?
And I mean, obviously, you don't get a prescription for it, so you just get it like on the streets, but it's more accessible and it's cheaper.
Absolutely.
It's a lot cheaper.
And forgive me, I don't remember exactly how much it's going for right now.
But of course, fentanyl is in all of the drugs right now.
So you're getting people overdosing with cocaine that's laced with fentanyl, MDMA drugs.
And these are so much easier to get on the black market than the treatment, the medicines, the medication assisted treatment that science says is the gold standard of care for treating people with opioid use disorder.
I mean, that's.
It's so much easier to just go out and get dope again rather than it is to be treated like a human being with a medical condition in our healthcare system.
And so you get hooked on something like Oxycontin thanks to Purdue and its fancy marketing skills and its manipulation of the FDA and doctors and its own sales reps.
And then when you either run out of money or the ability to get more prescriptions, once the government cracked down on these pill pushers, then where are you?
Because you're still addicted and you can't get your drug anymore.
So you turn to heroin or you turn to fentanyl and you have a high.
Likelihood of dying.
I mean, that's the thing.
So we didn't solve the opioid crisis by cracking down on some of these characters.
No, absolutely.
Nor did we solve the opioid crisis by reducing prescriptions, even.
A lot of people thought that would help with overdoses because, and maybe it does help with not starting new cases, but for the people who are already addicted, that horse is long out of the barn.
So that's why we need.
To make these addiction treatments and modalities so much more accessible than they are.
Yeah.
Well, we'll get to the treatment in just a little bit.
But the book, also the series based on the book, does a great job of showing you how it can corrupt your life, how it can corrupt the life of somebody who is innocent, who is well meaning, who is not, I don't know, you know how it is when you grew up, at least in the 70s, you talked about people who got addicted to drugs, you think of somebody who was kind of dirty, kind of a dirt bag, you know, like, oh, gross, who does drugs?
That's not what happened with the opioid crisis.
Dad Stigmatized and Ashamed00:02:56
And it's one of the things I love about the storytelling because it accurately represents that, you know, whatever, moms, daughters, you know, innocent high school kids getting sucked into this.
The path in the movie of the main star takes us, her name is Betsy, played by Caitlin Deaver, takes us to a really low moment when her parents figure out she's still on drugs.
They've tried to get her rehab and she's still on drugs.
And if you've ever had an addict in your family, you've been through something like this because they don't get clean right away.
First time they try, you go through this over and over.
Lies and sneaking and cheating with more and escalating to other drugs.
And it's captured powerfully in what we have labeled as Soundbite Nine.
Watch.
I sold all of it.
You've been going to AA.
This is where I get my pills.
What?
You're welcome.
Huh?
Get your goddamn pills.
Dad, no, no, no.
The only thing you care about is your hands off of me.
Oh, goddamn pills.
I don't know if you can take that.
Uh-huh.
Right here.
You sold your mama's precious heirlooms for this trash.
Huh?
Get in there.
Dad!
Dad!
No!
I thought we were burning hell.
My God, it's upsetting to watch.
I mean, it's upsetting to watch because it's too realistic.
And I know you.
It's too realistic.
And I've heard from parents who have been triggered by watching it, who are on Twitter warning other parents.
I mean, this is such a common story.
Folks like this stealing from their relatives.
You know, they've been stigmatized and made to feel ashamed.
Thanksgiving Without Thanks00:07:57
And parents, many of whom, just like Betsy's parents, don't really understand the science behind opioid use disorder.
So they too are ashamed.
I mean, I was talking to somebody at the rally just Friday night who works with families in Massachusetts.
And she said people will still call her and they're dealing with it in their family.
And they'll want to meet her four towns over from where she lives because they're so stigmatized by the hoax that the Sacklers did on families in America, stigmatizing the wrong people.
The thought of the doctor telling an innocent patient who comes in there earnestly seeking the treatment of pain and the way they pitched Oxy as non addictive and totally safe.
And first they'd give you, you know, these small units.
And then when the small units were supposed to last, they were supposed to last overnight, even.
And then people said, well, they're not lasting.
I need help.
And Purdue said, well, let's call that breakthrough pain.
That's breakthrough pain.
And the way we're going to address that is with take a guess.
More Oxycontin, and then they kept making the pills bigger and bigger.
And even the initial dosages given to the patients would be bigger and bigger.
And all I can think watching that scene is you know, imagine saying to a patient who came in for minor back pain, just looking for some relief, I'll give you this drug.
It will turn you into a bomb.
You will become a human bomb that will blow up your entire family, your life as you know it, all of your loved ones.
It will turn you into a thief, into a liar, into a felon, and possibly into a dead corpse.
Here you go.
That's the warning that these drugs should have had on them.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I say this to physicians' groups, maybe not quite that forcefully as you, Megan, but I will say that 5,000 of you went out to fancy resorts, courtesy of Purdue Pharma, and learned how to become good prescribers of their drug.
They took gifts, they took fancy dinners.
And when journalists aren't even allowed to go to take somebody out for lunch, right?
And yet, these doctors that make a lot of money already are taking these free trips.
They're becoming paid speakers for the company.
And what I say to doctors is I know you were lied to, but you helped get us into this mess and you need to help get us out.
And what's the answer to that?
How can they?
So, we know that not everyone responds the same to addiction.
We know that a person with heroin addiction, a typical person, it's going to take them five to six treatment attempts and over eight years to get just one year of sobriety.
So, that's one thing we have to get realize that this is a chronic relapsing disease.
We know that buprenorphine and methadone, which people call MAT for medication assisted treatment, reduce overdose deaths by 50 to 60% or more in some cases.
And, but that Also, it's really important to get people housing and social supports and counseling along with this.
These are all things we don't do very well in this country as we see the homelessness rate skyrocketing.
And many of the young people that I followed in my book ended up in prison, ended up doing sex work, living homeless.
I mean, people who were doctors' kids, people who were civic leaders' kids.
Wealth didn't protect anyone in this case.
In fact, because of the stigma attached to wealthier families, in some cases, It made it worse.
People would send their kids away to these abstinence only rehabs, spend a fortune for them.
A lot of middle class families would remortgage their homes to send them to exactly the kind of treatment that science says doesn't really work for opioid use disorder.
And you've seen that in the Keaton story when he's there.
I forget if it's episode six or seven.
He's like, Hey, you've been back here a lot, right?
In rehab.
And the guy says, Yeah, five or six times.
And he says, You know, but it worked.
It worked for me finally.
And he says, Well, were you alcohol?
And he says, Yeah, alcohol.
So we know that the rehab works better for abstinence only modalities, work better than for opioids, which you really most people need the medication assisted treatment.
See, that's another thing that we didn't know when going through this, right?
Like, I remember being one of the, you know, you got to go cold turkey, you know, you got to let this person hit rock bottom.
I don't reveal who it was in my family because I don't have the permission of the person or the person's other family members.
But, um, You know, I was of the mind of like tough love.
You know, you can't keep picking up the pieces.
You can't give this person the home that they lost because of all the lies and all the drugs and all the bankruptcies and all.
You can't do that.
You know, like let them deal with the loss of natural consequences.
And it's only now with some distance that I start to see it's just not that simple.
And you can't really apply the rules you may have thought applied to a disease like alcoholism.
And you can take issue with my plan even there to this.
That's absolutely right.
And I saw that over and over and over again.
And it's still happening.
You know, parents are sort of beating their heads against the wall and they're being told, many of them are being told that that's the way to do it.
I tell the story of this mom in my new book, Raising Lazarus, which comes out next August, who had this critical moment where she knew her son was going to die if he didn't get help.
And her best friend had a teenage daughter who had cancer.
And she said, I'm going to treat him the way Lisa treats Amelia.
I'm not going to just kick him out of the house.
I'm going to feed him.
If he comes home and he's high, I'm not going to engage, but I'm also not going to be cruel.
And then we're going to have a conversation the next day.
And I'm not giving up on him.
And she says now he's six years into sobriety.
She says her only regret was that she hadn't approached his addiction like the medical condition it was much sooner.
It's so hard that she's a strong woman because, unlike the cancer patient, this patient is lying and cheating and stealing and bankrupting other family members.
And, you know, you're angry with them, right?
It's like you have to check your anger because what you really want is to solve it.
You know, you don't want to just punish.
It's not about retribution.
It's like, I want this all to stop.
And the way to stop is your friend's approach.
But, man, it's.
It's so hard.
You're right.
And they mess up your Christmas dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner.
And they hurt everyone you love.
Everyone you love.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I will never forget with Tess, who was the young woman I followed the most in Dope Sick.
She would disappear and live homeless.
And then she'd come home every now and then.
And the last Thanksgiving they had together, she had hurt her siblings so much that, and they were very much kind of had come up in tough love that they were just done with her.
And Even though she made the whole meal, she did all the shopping.
And her mom just sent me a picture the other day after Thanksgiving.
She goes, Remember this?
It was Tessa's last.
She called it the thankless Thanksgiving.
She made the whole meal and no one thanked her.
And, you know, shortly after, she had another breakdown and, you know, she went back out in the streets.
And, you know, I know her mother wishes she would have acted sooner with love.
And she now says, you know, Rock Bottom has a basement, the basement has a trapdoor.
Market Users Plead Guilty00:13:02
I wish I knew now what I knew then what I knew now.
It's a good line.
Coming up, we're going to talk about how the system is not positioned, not at all, to help people who find themselves addicted to opioids get out of it and get their lives straight and clean.
To the contrary, it's built, I think, to keep them down, and it does a really effective job at it.
We'll pick it up there with Beth Macy coming up right after this.
So, Beth, just to take a step back, the book does a good job of explaining how we've had some shifts as a country.
This isn't the first time that we've been, I guess, dope sick.
And you talk about how one of the things that struck me in the book was that you talked about how they used to, it was, I'm looking at my note here, in 1899, bear, bear, as in bear aspirin, was cranking out a ton of heroin a year and selling it in 23 countries.
And you write that in the US, cough drops and even baby soothing syrups were laced.
With heroin.
So, this is in the late 1800s.
We were given heroin to our babies.
Yeah.
So, this kind of comes about as the result of Civil War wounds and women who had lost their families.
And heroin is actually introduced by Bayer as a cure for morphinism, which is doctors would give morphine away along with needles to patients and have them use them as needed.
And of course, Just as then, even though then it was much lighter dosage than the heroin we have certainly of now is, but people would need more and more.
And then when the Harrison Narcotics Act came along in 1914, outlawing most of the black market uses of the drug, people then went to the black market.
And so that's when there became this dichotomy between legitimate white market users who were prescribed and So called black market users.
So, for most of the 1900s until 1996, when Purdue comes out with Oxycontin, we knew that opioids were addictive and should only be used in the instances of cancer, end of life, post surgery, but just for a few days because doctors were rightly worried about addiction, which we've known for centuries, actually.
And yet, Purdue managed to flip the narrative, not just for Oxycontin, but through the pain societies that They funded a lot of, um, and through things like the joint commission, which they had a role in, um, you know, things like uh, consumer surveys where patients would, you know, give a hospital a bad ding.
You see that playing out in the show when our character Randy is in the hospital for prostate cancer.
Um, we just they just uh shifted that narrative uh right away and it it all blew up again.
So, in other words, just to add to that, you're saying because this is portrayed in the film, the movie, too, um, that.
If you go to the hospital and you have a negative experience and you give them a bad rating because they didn't address your pain, that hurts the hospital.
And so there was a big push started by OxyContin to Purdue to get doctors and nurses on it.
If you feel pain, there's no more like just dealing with it.
And there's no more like, all right, well, let's titrate it a little bit.
You know, it's give them, why not?
Why not more?
Why not more OxyContin?
And if you're worried about it, here's this special FDA label that says don't worry about it.
But like there was a consumerist.
Response to this pain problem that the hospitals had to worry about because they are, after all, businesses.
Absolutely.
They could lose the ratings.
They could lose reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid if they didn't treat a person's pain.
And still today, I was at the ER with a friend not long ago.
You still see that rate your pain scale with the smiley faces, one to 10.
So there are still elements of it, although I think most doctors and nurses are much wiser about it.
And one of the things we've done since the mid 90s, the mid to the early aughts, is we've gotten around the problem of doctor jumping, right?
I don't know what the technical term for it is, but I get a prescription from Dr. Smith for Oxycontin and he fills it, but he knows only to give me 30 days worth or one.
Back then, they were giving a few refills.
But then I go to Dr. Jones because Dr. Smith's not going to give me anymore when I ran out of it after a week and I get one from him and then I get one from this other female doctor.
You can't do that anymore, right?
Technically, you're not supposed to be able to do that.
Yeah, all the states now have, they're called PDMPs, prescription monitoring programs.
I think only one state is a holdout, but you see Michael Keaton doing that at the height of his addiction.
He's in, The corner of far southwest Virginia, and it's just a half hour drive to get to Tennessee and this way to Kentucky, this way to West Virginia.
And they would really take advantage of that.
And you also see in the show this idea that, oh, they're cutting down, they're cutting back on prescribing at home, but people would rent vans to drive down.
They called it the Pillbilly Express or the Oxycontin Express.
They would drive down to Florida, which had no restrictions at the time, and you would see these.
Strip mall office setups with doctors prescribing without hardly even doing exams, and they would be running pharmacies out their back door.
I mean, sometimes in like the equivalent of a food truck, you know?
Because you could get rich as a doctor by doing that.
You could get rich as a doctor by doing that.
And by the way, one of the things that's happened in the news recently, just a couple of weeks ago, was a judgment of liability against CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart for their role in the opioid crisis, their pharmacies.
And a couple of other ones like Rite Aid and another had settled.
So they were also swept in, in just indiscriminately filling all these prescriptions when, and we're not just talking about mild abuse, but in abuse of these drugs that should have been obvious to any pharmacy.
Then yet they turned a blind eye because they too made a lot of money off of this.
Absolutely.
That's right.
And what you have now, and every time I do an interview, I'll hear from the chronic pain community.
But when I, and they're angry because a lot of folks who are actually on stable dosages, Of legit pain medications are being abandoned as well.
And so you see some of those folks either suffering in pain or going to the black market and getting heroin laced with fentanyl or committing suicide.
So that's a concern too, but that's directly because of the actions of Purdue making it so overprescribed to start with that it's hard to suss out for some doctors who's legit and who isn't.
But so just Just a nod to the fact that, you know, there are other unintended victims of this today.
And I hear from them a lot.
The lawsuits started to come against Purdue as people started to feel it, as communities started to put together that entire towns were falling apart and found themselves addicted.
I mean, in particular in Appalachia.
And the big one we mentioned a minute ago with Danny Strong was the 2007 settlement with Purdue, where the three executives pleaded guilty to, was it a felony?
It was a felony.
Yes.
Yeah, to a felony.
No, I'm sorry.
The executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanors.
They were on probation for a few years.
They had fines, but the company made it.
And then the holding company, not Purdue Pharma, rather, but Purdue Frederick, pleaded guilty to a felony.
Now, if Purdue Pharma would have pleaded guilty, I mean, their lawyers were so ahead of everybody else on this.
They cunningly knew that Purdue Pharma wouldn't be able to continue to sell Oxycontin if it had a felony.
So they did the deal.
With the holding company Purdue Frederick.
And it was allowed.
And by the way, none of those executives was last name Sackler.
It was all three other guys.
Absolutely.
Yes, absolutely.
And if you talk to the activists now, because Danny and I were just with a bunch of them on Friday at this rally on December 3rd, they didn't even know the name Sackler back then.
And think about that.
Like, you know, you've got all these museums and wings and whatnot.
But back then, if you went to the Purdue Farmer website, you wouldn't even see the name Sackler on anything.
They were very clever and as word that these, Lawsuits were coming up.
They cleverly, you know, resigned from their board positions and, you know, in a way allowed their philanthropy to sort of cloak their villainy.
So, how did they come back?
You know, we were just talking with Danny about how they, I think, tripled their sales within a couple of years.
They went forward, the Sacklers and Purdue, like nothing had ever happened.
That's right.
Well, a lot of the government regulators that should have been monitoring, Their corporate integrity agreement.
I mean, corporate integrity agreement, the very phrase is kind of laughable when you see how they just continued to do what they were doing before and in many ways amped up their sales.
Richard Sackler personally went on sales calls at least one time that we know of, and they hired McKinsey to double down, to sell, sell, sell.
And we don't have structures in place to make sure.
That the proper checks are happening such that in 2020, the company pleads guilty to more felonies, which are basically the same kind of fraudulent behaviors.
In between those two times, I mean, when would you say we became aware of the opioid crisis?
You know, we as a nation had the national consciousness that this was a thing.
That's a really good question.
In 2015, the Nobel winning economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote about a bombshell study, it was on the cover of Time magazine, Deaths of Despair.
So we realized that for the first time in American history since World War I, our life expectancy was going down.
And it was going down largely due to opioid overdose.
Alcoholism related diseases like cirrhosis of the liver into suicide.
But by far the biggest of those three factors was opioids.
You had Sam Canoni's book Dreamland, which came out in 2016, I believe.
My book came out in 2018.
And then the lawsuits started happening.
And a lot of those, most of the suits ended up over 2,600 lawsuits were brought by cities and counties and state governments.
They ended up in the multi district litigation under the direction of Judge Polster in Cleveland.
But Purdue was able to pull their case out by filing bankruptcy.
And where did they file bankruptcy?
Not in a location where they actually conduct business, but they filed it in the jurisdiction of a bankruptcy judge named Robert Drain, who is known for being one of the minority of judges who allows what's called a third party release, which is like a bankruptcy loophole.
They file in White Plains, because they know Drain is one of the few judges that allows the Sackler to attach to get civil immunity from further litigation in exchange for their settlement.
Yeah.
And just to make clear, this is an issue because the Sacklers individually were not filing for bankruptcy.
They're billionaires, just Purdue Pharma was.
But they wanted to sort of glom on to their company and say, oh, and no lawsuits against us and no more criminal, no trouble for us of any kind.
Because we've contributed $4 billion, and we've contributed to this massive bankruptcy settlement.
But they basically, but that was backfunded, as I understand, by Purdue anyway.
So it's all fungible.
These are still going to be billionaires.
And now, if this goes through, they can't be sued.
So if you take that 10.4 and then you let them pay off the 4.5 over nine years, by the way, they have nine years to pay it.
So with investments at the going rate, they could be richer.
At the end of the nine years, than they are right now.
I mean, where is the justice in that?
Oh my gosh, they're clever.
Suboxone Blood Needle Test00:09:49
I mean, that's definitely something we saw in all of this.
They're clever.
One of the things you point out in your book, and I think it's good too, is a couple of very famous deaths.
You know, sometimes.
I don't want to say these people were used by a higher power to sort of underscore the dangers of drugs to us, but you point out in the book Philip Seymour Hoffman's death.
I mean, this incredibly promising actor who was just stunning when he died.
Prince died.
I mean, both of them swept up in this same crisis that we're talking about.
And sometimes seeing somebody that famous and talented, seeing their life cut short, can really be I don't know, it gets your attention and it focuses you in a way that can be productive.
Yes, it's a wake up call.
And as I think somebody in the book said, nobody wants to tell Prince that he has an opioid problem, right?
So, back to this idea that wealth and power can protect you from this, nobody's protected from this.
This is why we all need to pay attention and become advocates for our own medical treatments.
Yep.
So then it morphs from Oxy to the heroin scene.
And you write in your book about how this is like the suburban heroin scene, the young teenage girl.
Heroin scene would shock people.
Can you talk about that a bit?
Because it's hard to believe that young cheerleaders are doing heroin, but they are.
Yeah.
And of course, not all of them, but unlike you and I growing up in the 70s and 80s, when kids would experiment with alcohol or weed, maybe some mushrooms or something, I don't know.
But you talk about kids that grew up in the 90s and the aughts, they had pills at their disposal because.
Purdue had massively talked doctors into massively over prescribing these drugs.
So a kid could just experiment like the way a kid in years your would have done with alcohol or marijuana, but only now they're using a much more dangerous drug.
And so, I mean, actually, I was just at a premiere event here in Roanoke with the first person I ever knew who this had happened to.
And he was a young man.
Who named Spencer Mumpower?
And when I first met him, he was from a wealthy family.
His mom was a civic leader, had a chain of jewelry stores, and he was about to go to federal prison for five and a half years for having sold heroin to his former private school classmate who died.
And I spent the summer hanging out with him, trying to learn about this nascent cell of heroin users in the wealthy white suburbs of Roanoke.
And he said, Dude, I'm the one that told you what the word dope sick meant.
And I was like, You're absolutely right.
I didn't know what it meant then, but I remember him describing how if he said, if your dope man wasn't coming until, you know, for three more days and you only had this little, this much left, you would parse it out so that you would still have a little bit at the end because the driving fear of all of it was this fear of withdrawal and this fear of dope sickness.
Of course, this, like any addiction, is more likely to affect you if you have a parent who is an addict.
Your book points out that I think you have a 50 to 60%, you're 50 to 60% more likely to become addicted if you have a parent who is an addict.
So, you know, there is, of course, as with any addiction, an extra special red warning label to people who have that in their family.
But there is a treatment, and we talked about how, you know, the version of AA doesn't work so well for the opioid addicts, but there is a treatment called Suboxone that.
That does help.
Now, it too is considered a controlled substance, right?
Like an opiate.
It's an opiate.
So it will show up in your blood if you want to do a job that tests your blood before they hire you.
It will show up and it will show up as Suboxone.
And then they'll know that you're on that drug, which helps you get off of another opiate.
So you've got sort of an opioid in your blood, which is helping you get off of probably a more serious opioid.
And boom, Bob's your uncle.
I mean, these jobs aren't going to hire you.
That's a real problem, but that drug seems to be.
Very much part of the solution to this crisis.
Absolutely.
It's protective.
And Megan, it has buprenorphine in it, which is the opioid that kind of gloms on to the opioid receptor.
But it also has naloxone in it, which is the generic name for Narcan, so that if somebody does go out and use it, it's not going to work for them.
And so it is protective in that way.
And you see in our show the way the Michael Keaton character is stigmatized for being on it.
And he said, it's.
It's what's keeping me clean.
I've never felt clearer than I have in my life.
You see Betsy go to the AA meeting and be told that she's considering going on it, but somebody says to her, you know, that's just treating a drug with another drug.
And this happened over and over to the young people that I was following for my book.
And it is a real problem, especially among law enforcement people who have seen it diverted and sold.
But I would argue, and many experts argue, that the reason it is.
So widely diverted is because it largely isn't available to the people who need it.
So there is this big market demand for it.
Only one in five people with opioid use disorder has access to it.
So that's something we know it works.
We know it's dangerous to go off of harder opioids without being on it.
So we really need to make it available at a scale to match the crisis.
How long can one stay on it?
So, everyone's different.
And some people think it's okay.
You might have to be on it for the rest of your life.
Dr. Van Z, the doctor who's portrayed in the show, he told me years ago he said he's got patients weaned down very, very slowly and they might just be on a teeny little bit every day.
But he's afraid because he's seen people, you know, even when they're on a small amount, when they go off, some have relapsed.
And so he's very, very cautious about it.
He only does it when a person voluntarily wants.
Voluntarily wants to taper off, but it's something to be done with all caution.
But he, I mean, he does have some amazing success stories, as do all MAT doctors.
I mean, the thing about law enforcement is they only see the bad side of it, the people breaking the law side of it.
They don't see the people who are getting jobs back, getting their kids back.
Well, and I think employers need to see that drug and maybe have a different reaction instead of seeing, like, oh, drug addict and they've got an opioid in them now.
It's no, someone who, Has actively taken steps to change their life.
And you can find out for how long they've been clean and been on it because you're not taking opioids in addition to Suboxone if you're taking Suboxone.
But to me, it's just so frustrating because you see, Beth, it's like these companies, they get you addicted.
They get you addicted to their drug.
Your life spirals.
So many of these people wind up committing crimes, whether it's shoplifting or something with cars, what have you, because they're desperate, selling drugs, buying drugs.
Now they have a criminal record.
Then they get on Suboxone, which is the way out for a lot of them.
Then they can't get a job because they've got that in their blood, which is a tell.
So now you, you know, your employers are looking at somebody who's got a criminal past, who's got this drug, which is a tell, who probably doesn't present all that well physically because they've been an addict for all this time.
And it's an impossible spiral to pull yourself out of.
You need so much support, so much love, so much understanding from your family, from society, from employers, from law enforcement, from the judicial system.
And from we didn't even touch the story of expanded Medicaid and I. You know, your book is really smart on that.
I love people to read your arguments for Medicaid expansion.
It's just the number one tool for reducing overdose deaths in various states, but we still have 12 states that haven't expanded it, right?
Yep.
Yep.
Again, I think they think it may be tough love, but it may just be cruel and a way of stopping people from getting out of a really tough situation.
Right.
And as this opioid litigation money, as it starts to funnel down, is so important.
That states and communities get together people who really understand the science and aren't just, you know, spouting off this tough love crap, which isn't working and is starting to meet people where they are.
We know that people who visit needle exchanges, I know that sounds counterintuitive.
Why are you going to give a drug user a clean needle?
Well, because they're going to use regardless until they get real help.
So, why don't we make sure they use safely?
And that's going to cut down on the Spread of hepatitis C and HIV, which is skyrocketing in some communities.
Yeah, no, they're also five times more likely to enter treatment when they go to a needle exchange.
Oh, and on top of that, you've said it's cheaper to pay for the needle than it is to pay for the disease, the treatment of the disease they're going to get from dirty needles.
So it's like society's in, we're in this whether we want to be or not.
And the only question now is what is the smart way of dealing with it?
Beth Macy is one of the people who has been calling attention to it for a long time with thoughtful diagnoses and possible solutions.
I'm grateful for you, Beth.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Megan.
Really appreciate it.
All the best.
Survivors Never Hurt Again00:15:41
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Fuhrkraft, the lunner say o vite.
Family annihilator.
It's a term you may have heard recently during the Alec Murdoch trial.
The prosecutor, even asking Alec directly, If he qualified as one.
Do you remember this?
Watch.
Are you a family annihilator?
A family annihilator?
You mean like, did I shoot my wife and my son?
Yes.
No.
I would never hurt Maggie Murdock.
I would never hurt Paul Murdock under any circumstances.
Of course, the jury rejected that assertion, finding Murdoch guilty of fatally shooting his wife Maggie and his son Paul.
Maggie was 52, Paul was 22, and he's now serving life in prison.
Murdering those close to you is an unimaginable act to most people, but Alec Murdoch is not the first or the last to kill his family.
He's one of many.
In a gruesome group of family annihilators.
When I heard that term in that trial, it got me thinking, I'd never heard that term before.
And I'm in the news business and we cover crime a lot.
It's a thing, it's an actual thing in criminology and those who study it.
And it's just extra, right?
I mean, murder is terrible under any circumstances, but what kind of a person can kill their entire family or a huge portion of it?
What makes a seemingly well liked, successful, Man, these are not all derelicts.
In fact, they tend to be successful people.
Blow up his life in this manner.
Kill the people who are supposed to be most important to him.
What kind of psychology makes you do that?
How do we recognize this potential in a mate, a man, a partner?
Today, we're going to do a deep dive into the motivations and the psyche of these individuals.
We are also going to discuss what can be done to prevent this kind of violence.
What are the warning signs?
How do you know?
If you are potentially with somebody like this, joining me now to dig into it all is Laura Richards.
Laura is an award winning criminal behavioral analyst and expert on domestic abuse and coercive control.
She also hosts the popular podcasts Crime Analyst and Real Crime Profile.
Laura, so great to have you here on the show.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Good to speak with you, Megan.
So, since he used that term in the Murdoch trial, Creighton Waters, the prosecutor, I've gone down a dark rabbit hole, and I know you've been there for years studying these people and figuring out what makes a family annihilator, what makes them tick.
And I have since watched everything I can get my hands on about I've already there on Alec Murdoch, but on Chris Watts, who murdered his entire family in Colorado a few years back in 2018, his wife, his two beautiful daughters in the most disgusting, awful way.
Picking up the case of Jeffrey McDonald, which I have covered over the years as a journalist, but this is a guy back in 1970.
And you could go, I mean, you could pick so many cases, unfortunately.
These are just the ones that got my interest.
And Jeffrey McDonald was a very successful surgeon, Green Beret, who was convicted of murdering his wife and two daughters as well in just the most brutal fashion.
And the thing about these three cases, Laura, that jumped out to me, like the ones that the reason they pulled me in, is because all three of these guys were super successful.
You know, on paper, they were doing well.
Like Chris Watts wasn't rich like the other two, but the other two, and well, I mean, Jeffrey McDonald wasn't rich either, but he was going to be because he was a surgeon.
Just accolades, professional success, very well liked.
No one would go back and say, oh, yes, yeah, yeah, you could have seen it coming.
The opposite.
So let's start with what it is.
Define for us what makes one a family annihilator.
Well, I think we have to work on the basis that if you understand what domestic abuse and domestic homicide is about, the motivation is power and control.
And that's really what the perpetrators are seeking to achieve.
They want power and control and they're trying to control the person or the people and the narrative.
So I've studied many, many cases.
I've worked on many, many cases.
They are absolutely horrific.
I think people really do struggle to understand how what the media might describe as the perfect dad, a good dad, A good, dutiful husband, or I've even heard a perpetrator described as being good at DIY.
And the media tend to eulogize and memorialize the perpetrator, which makes it harder for the general public to really understand how it happened.
But actually, when I door knock and speak to the grandparents and those who have survived, and I've done that across my 27 year career, I find a very different picture emerge.
And the picture is always the same.
And that's of A man, because we are talking about men, this is very much a male related issue.
It's a man who wanted to coercively control, and coercive control are the key hallmarks and what we should be asking about rather than physical assaults.
I want to tell people just a little bit more about your credentials because they are impressive.
Founder of Paladin, the world's first national stalking advocacy service, as a survivor I don't really love that term, but as somebody who has.
I had a very bad stalker who went to jail and then a mental facility for 10 years.
So it was a serious case.
I appreciate what you do.
There aren't enough experts like you.
You also created, you mentioned DASH, the domestic abuse, stalking, and honor based violence risk identification assessment and management model, which was implemented across all police services in the UK.
The DASH checklist is credited with having reduced domestic murders by 58% in London across 13 years.
So you know what you're doing.
You are a true expert in all of this.
And it's all kind of related, you know, the stalking, the domestic abuse.
This is not an indictment of all men.
This is an indictment of abusers and helping both men and women recognize the signs because you may be a great guy who never abused anybody, but you might have a daughter who a man like this comes into her life or a sister or, you know, it could be a friend.
And so men can be advocates of women in this situation as well, even if it's not, you know, them personally.
Absolutely.
And thank you for sharing your own experience of stalking because it is important.
We do talk about it.
It's why I created an advocacy service because a lot of victims don't get the support that they need, the psychological and emotional support that when they're trying to survive something and bearing in mind, when I tend to work with people, they haven't survived it.
So I agree with you.
Survivor is the wrong term, particularly when someone's going through it and trying to ensure law enforcement understand the behaviors.
Well, that's everything that Paladin is set up to do and changing the law to make sure The laws reflect women's lived experience when they are subjected to abuse.
And that's a really important part of my work and ensuring that men work alongside us.
Because, yes, it takes all men to help with changing and challenging and holding men to account when they are abusive.
And that's when they're sexist, misogynistic.
These are the types of mindset and the types of behaviors that we want people to be challenging because it can lead to much more serious things happening when a man feels that.
They are not getting their way or they are being disrespected in some way, or they feel that their control, they're losing their control over someone.
Well, that can be when something catastrophic occurs.
And too often, like I said, when we ask the right questions of grandmothers and grandfathers, and it might be brothers and sisters.
And when I ask them the questions, I always see a pattern emerge.
And like I said, the media often report on things and they just do a very, Cursory look at what's gone on, and they may talk to a neighbor who might turn around and say, Oh, he was a lovely dad, or he took the children to the sweet shop, and yes, he was a really nice man, or he was fearful that he'd lose the children, and that's why he killed them.
And then this narrative goes in the media and the newspapers, and that's what people then take as what's gone on.
But it's a really dangerous narrative because oftentimes the warning signs are there, and women can be framed.
Really blamed for something that's happened to them.
And I'll give you an example.
There was a recent horrific murder in the UK, an incredible woman called Emma Patterson and her seven year old daughter who were killed.
And the media, first of all, reported on three people who died in Epsom, Surrey.
They didn't say how, but there was a whole load of media, social media traffic about was it carbon monoxide poisoning?
But the police put out a statement, said they're not looking for anybody else in connection with their deaths.
And They said it's an isolated incident.
So, from all my work, I always hear police say that.
And that means that it's domestic violence related.
That's the code word.
And it's not an isolated incident because it's a pandemic of women being killed.
And it turned out there were gunshots heard just before the emergency services turned up.
And George Patterson shot them both dead.
And the male had put an article together.
And the headline was because she was a very successful headmistress of a school in Epsom, did her.
Overachieving and putting him in the shadow, did that lead to this tragedy?
And I wrote on the headline and fixed it and said, no, he did this all on his own.
Because we very quickly get into excusing someone's behavior when it is unacceptable.
This was something that he planned, premeditated.
But the dominant narrative then is in the media that perhaps she's to blame and she's framed intentionally and that she's to be blamed in some way.
And for me, that's just unacceptable.
I've seen it over and over and over again.
And it gives a very false narrative of what's gone on.
We can do that when it comes to divorce, right?
Was she.
Overbearing?
Was she difficult to live with?
Was she okay?
We're not all perfect.
We can't do that when it comes to domestic violence.
No annoying, negative, unfortunate behavior by the woman justifies domestic violence of any kind.
Absolutely not.
Well, if you follow the narrative through, what does seven year old Letty do?
I mean, I can't even imagine the fear and the terror that she must have felt understanding that, you know, was mom killed before her and she watched or was.
Letty killed first, you know, that fear and terror for a child to know that they're not safe and they're unsafe, something catastrophic is about to happen at the hands of the man who's meant to love and care for them.
And these are the things, the places I spend, you know, my time and my mind working out what's happened, but also the psychology.
What makes a man become this way?
Because the vast, vast majority of men are wonderful, beautiful human beings, just like women, and would never hurt a woman that they love or in their life at all.
In fact, they would want to hurt a man who did that.
But there is.
An unhealthy contingent.
And it's always, you know, I mean, it's not always, but it's just, I grew up in the 70s and every night on the news, there were stories about the serial killers killing all these women.
It's always like a series of women who get killed by these weird men.
Something's gone wrong with them.
So, what is it that's in their background that makes these guys be able to succeed in life, able to be well liked?
But instead of being a loving, caring husband, they go this route.
Yeah.
So my background is in forensic and legal psychology.
So I have spent a lot of time in the psychological research and analysis and the psychopathology of men who kill.
And, and I will say they're not all homogenous.
So we can't say it's all for the same reason specifically.
Contexts are different.
But what I can see is what is the thing that really is the motivator is this need for power and control and that power and control.
Well, you know, I'm going to mention the P word, the patriarchy, because we all live in the patriarchy where.
Laws and systems and processes are created by men for men.
And that's why women have a very tough time because our lived experiences aren't included in laws, for example.
So that's why we're having to change laws on stalking and on coercive control.
So it is this overriding need to have to control things, to have power over.
And Megan, you mentioned serial killers.
I mean, it's all the same thing, right?
Because men who harm women in their significant Lives, as in women who are significant to them, can also harm women who are not significant to them.
And this connection is one that I made at New Scotland Yard by profiling domestic violence rapists.
And I spent a lot of time profiling 450 of them, looking at them and doing a psychological autopsy backwards of who they are and what they do.
You know, the first five years of my career were trying to identify the serial rapist, the serial killer, the serial perpetrator who abducts children.
And the one thing I found in their background consistently was domestic abuse and coercive control.
So, these things do interconnect.
And Dr. Robert Hare, who created the psychopathy checklist, he in 1993 showed us that 25% of domestic violence perpetrators are psychopaths.
And I would expect that to be far higher as a figure now.
And when I'm training police and others, I'm always talking about psychopathy because we don't screen enough for it.
So, there are unfortunately many psychopaths who we may have relationships with and they have this need for power and control and they have no empathy.
Autonomy Lost to Coercion00:14:09
They have no remorse and it's all about them, me, myself, and I, the narcissism.
So that's what I see as the inter, you know, the thing that interconnects that law enforcement are trained.
Well, this is domestic violence here and these are the domestic violence perpetrators.
This is child abuse here.
This is sexual violence here.
And they're taught in boxes and categories, but that's not how offenders offend.
So the more that we understand the traits of psychopathy and the more that we screen for it and that we take domestic violence perpetrators.
Seriously, and we see it as serious crime and we hold them to account and we challenge their behavior looking for coercive control.
Then we start to get into proper threat assessment and risk management.
Can I just say a couple things?
It actually used to be the lie.
I was criticizing Michael Cohen, former lawyer to President Trump, for having said this as recently as 2007 or 2008, saying the law is you cannot rape your wife.
That is not true in the state of New York, even as of 2007.
But at one point in our history, it was true.
Not so long ago.
Not so long ago.
The laws actually are really, I mean, they don't protect women in the way that they need.
Yes, certainly when it comes to murder, but on domestic abuse, no.
On stalking, no.
I remember in my case, The stalking, the requirements were I was going to have to, I had to appear in person if I wanted to make this complaint against my stalker who was dangerous, who was already a felon, who was trained in weapons.
There was, and the number one rule of dealing with a stalker is don't deal with the stalker.
Don't talk to the stalker.
Don't have interactions with the stalker.
Anything you have will be perceived as a yes.
And it was like they were wanting me to show up in court and deal with him.
I'm like, you got to be crazy.
And I've talked to so many domestic abuse victims who have the same requirement.
There's no way they want to show up in court.
With the husband who's been beating them behind closed doors and doesn't want this to become a known thing at all, and have to say it publicly.
It's absurd.
Yes, and that's everything the stalker wants.
They want you to be in that courtroom.
And the same with the domestic abuser, you know, that power and control and being able to see you terrified and have that power and control over you.
And this is exactly why every legal process, be it court, you have to have special measures that reflect women's experiences.
And by the way, and you know this, but laws that protect us.
At the point of murder, it is too late.
You know, what I've been trying to do is prevent murders in slow motion.
It's the what happens before that we get in and we early identify, intervene, and we prevent so that we don't have, particularly in America, four to five women who are murdered every day by a current or former male partner.
That is a stark finding.
And yet, most people don't even realize how bad it is, but it's just increasing.
And most people don't know about the family annihilators or familicide.
And obviously, what's reported in the media is what.
People pay attention to.
So we've got a long way to go, but a lot of my work in the UK has had some very good results.
But unfortunately, in law enforcement, you can bring something in and the leaders sign up to it, and then they move on, and someone else comes in, and you get this constant cycle and churn of staff.
But it is important to have these conversations about coercive control and stalking, and that there is a lot that we can do to early identify, intervene, and prevent.
And a lot of it comes from listening to the victims.
It's the problem with a lot of abuse victims is they, of course, like when you look at the situation, you think, oh, and I used to be one of these people.
If he hit me, I'd be gone.
I'd be out of there.
One hit.
But it doesn't happen that simply.
They build the control over the woman over time.
They love bomb you, they come into your life, this wonderful man.
So the woman falls in love with this seemingly wonderful person, sometimes marries this seemingly wonderful person.
And then bit by bit, the erosion of the woman, her autonomy, her independence begins.
And you make the small sacrifices first, only later do they turn into the big sacrifices.
And eventually, in many of these cases, it turns violent.
But by that point, the woman is so lost versus where she was a year earlier when they met, et cetera.
She does not have the same power or resolve or confidence or just strength that she once had.
They're very, very effective manipulators, these abusers.
Yes.
And you use the word there, manipulators.
And, you know, this is a very, it's a behavioral regime, really, when we're talking about coercive control that a perpetrator will use to make someone fall in love with them.
So the love bombing that is a strategic campaign to make someone fall in love with them, the gaslighting and the charm, because many of these individuals are actually charming.
And that's a trait of psychopathy.
So the charm can happen.
The victim can feel that they've met the right.
Person, this is the love of their life.
And that can be a chemical reaction too the endorphins, the dopamine, all of these good chemicals to so that we mate with somebody.
So there is this thing of crazy love when somebody is love bombing us.
We want to feel special.
Of course we do.
And then we start to spend more time with that person.
And then gradually we may become more dependent on that person.
And that can be a strategic campaign.
The setup can start from day one when we meet.
The perpetrator.
And then once we are in, we tend to be in deep.
And so it's very conflicting and it's very confusing.
And we think that we love that person, but oftentimes we don't really know who they are because they're also forcing intimacy very quickly.
So the whirlwind relationship that happens.
So I often say to women and girls who I mentor slow down, enjoy the honeymoon period, get to know that person in every situation possible, get to meet their family, their friends, understand exactly who they are.
Where's the rush?
Why jump in?
And I always say intimacy takes time to build.
So, some of the warning signs are if you've got someone who's trying to push the relationship very quickly, who's making these grand declarations of love, like John Meehan did to Deborah Newell I want to die in your arms.
I love you.
I want to be with you forever, he says on date number two and three.
Well, that's forced intimacy.
And that's not authentic.
It's an artificial and superficial thing that's happening.
So, slowing things down and really taking our time.
Time to get to know somebody is really important and not giving too much information away about ourselves.
You know, enjoy the courtship.
That's what I always say.
It takes at least a year to really get to know someone.
But the coercive controller can be very good at bringing their A game to manipulate.
And it can all seem very plausible as well.
But once they've got you under their control and once you are dependent upon that person, and normally they isolate you, they want to take you away from your mom and your dad and your best friend.
So once you're isolated, you're very much.
Within their monopoly, your perception is monopolized by them.
And actually, Biderman, who studied prisoners of war, the eight principles of what he saw, what happens to someone who is having their autonomy and their agency eroded.
He's put together these eight principles of the Charter of Coercion.
It's exactly what I see.
You overlay it with the victims of a coercive controller, and it's exactly the same traits that you see.
So we should take it seriously.
And some of these men are psychopaths, and they've learned their tradecraft.
Very well.
I always say, like, look around.
Okay, after a year, look around.
Do you still have friends?
Are you still in touch with your family?
If not, why not?
Like, take a hard look back and say, yes, okay, you fall in love, you prioritize the other person.
It's this mad, like, oh, I only want to be with him.
Okay, but most normal people do not want to steer you away from your family, find reasons for you not to take the trip home to see mom, divert the phone call to or from mom or dad.
None of that is normal.
That's the beginning.
Yes, a healthy relationship is very much, and I, I might sound a bit LA woo woo here, but it's very much about opening someone's world up and helping them reach their full potential.
If you genuinely love someone and care for them, you want their world to be bigger.
You want them to experience everything in life.
But what I see with the coercive controllers, they do the opposite.
They shrink the victim's world down.
They want to micromanage and micro control every part of it.
And they don't want other people interfering like the mums and the dads and the best friends.
So they shrink the world down and it's actually.
Much more about what they're taking away from the woman.
And it's an unfreedom that happens because, yes, the victim might not be in shackles or chains, but they're invisible chains.
So, what are some of the questions to determine whether you're looking at coercive control?
Well, we'd never ask someone directly, are you being coercively controlled?
Because it's a very new term.
But what you're trying to understand is whether somebody has their own autonomy and freedom to make their own choices.
So, you know, and do they feel safe to make their own choices, i.e., Could they just go to work or could they go and see a friend without having to check in with their partner?
Can they decide what they want to wear and what they're going to eat and when they go to the gym?
Or are they under micro surveillance and every detail of their lives is being regulated by somebody else?
And there's a fear of consequence if they breach any of those rules that have been put in place by the abuser.
And what I also see about these rules that get put in place, i.e., what you can eat, who you can see, when you can see them.
How you dress, how you have your hair.
If you have a job, then maybe you're only allowed to interact.
If you're a hairdresser, you're only allowed to cut women's hair, not men's hair.
These are all the rules that I've seen laid down for victims.
So you're really trying to check on somebody have they got their own agency?
Have they got their own autonomy?
Have they got freedom to make decisions about their own life and how they conduct themselves on a day to day basis?
And normally with the victims, it's the smallest things.
That is so insidious that they're not allowed to do, or there's this unfreedom where they have to check in with that other person at all times.
Even if they go and see a friend, they have to take a picture to show where they are and who they're with.
Or, like with Oscar Pistorius, with some of his previous girlfriends, he used to make them take a photo of themselves wearing their pajamas to prove that they were sat at home.
I've even seen a perpetrator say to a victim, they have to flush the toilet at home so that he knows that they are at home and they haven't left because the toilet had a very specific sound.
And these are all the micro rules and regulations that you're trying to understand.
Is that how somebody's having to live their life?
Are they isolated?
Are they closed down and closed off?
Even if the victim says it's how they want to live their life.
Well, as human beings, we like to interact with people.
So even when I hear someone telling me that, I know that there is likely coercion there.
I, not long ago, was at a social event where they were serving hors d'oeuvres.
And this particular husband said to his thin, in shape wife who was grabbing an hors d'oeuvre, Do you really think you need that?
And it just made my skin crawl because it's not, yes, it's rude to suggest this thin woman, you know, to monitor what she's eating at all, thin or fat.
But to me, it just telegraphed there's way more there.
If he's doing that in public in front of me and others, I can only imagine what happens behind closed doors.
So there are these little red flags, even for us outsiders with our friends.
Yes.
And oftentimes we don't pick up on those things, right?
And, you know, even if a victim, we're friends with someone and then they fall off the radar, we think, well, maybe it's something we've done rather than actually, are they being told not to speak to Laura?
And they're not allowed to speak to me.
But we tend to look inwardly first.
It's probably something I've done.
So I'm not going to overstep.
Where I always say to people, check in with your friend, just see how they're doing.
Don't think it's something that you've done.
Ask them about that comment and how it made them feel.
Because oftentimes we isolate the victim even more by not asking them that question.
But yes, that is red flag.
Flag behavior.
You know, it's up to us as adults to choose if we want to eat something or not.
We don't have to check in with someone, but just sowing that seed and corralling, you know, that seed in someone's head, well, maybe I shouldn't eat this.
And it's like a closing down of someone and making them second guess themselves.
And before you know it, these little behaviors become bigger.
And a victim doesn't even know which way is up anymore.
They're gaslit and they've got this reality distortion.
They don't know what they like anymore and they can't make their own decisions.
And Laura, I think an important point too is that this can happen to any woman.
I know, you know, some women think, oh, I'm too well educated.
I am too rich.
I come from too good a family.
I have too good a support system around me.
It can happen to any woman.
It can.
And what I'll say is oftentimes these individuals are attracted to very strong women.
So, you know, that can be a barrier for someone sharing their experience because they say, well, everyone thought I was such a strong woman.
I had it together.
Mallory Long Term Needing00:15:41
It couldn't possibly happen to someone like me.
But it does.
It can happen to anybody.
There's no particular profile when it comes to the victim.
And yes, I think we carry these stereotypes in our head about the type of person that will suffer and be subjected to domestic abuse and coercive control.
But there is no type.
But with the perpetrator, there is more of a psychopathology.
It is about them needing to control things, needing to have things their way.
And some women would tell me they have to win at all costs.
And these are some of the key things that when I'm listening to women describe what's happening to them, they have to win at all costs.
It's their way or the highway, you know, for them, it's no way at all.
And it ends when I say it ends.
And we will live together as man and wife until I decide otherwise.
That tells me really there's only one person in the relationship.
What's fascinating about this, this is a serious problem and well worth discussing.
I'm glad we're doing it, obviously.
But as I listen to this, not a ton of this relates in my mind to Alec Murdoch or Chris Watts or this guy, Joe McDonald.
And we can outline the details of those second two cases.
I mean, I think most people at this point understand what happened with Alex Murdoch, but in case you don't, he was just found guilty of murdering his wife and his son, his 22 year old son.
He shot them both, shot his son.
Paul in the face shot his son's head off, was the testimony.
Shot his wife Maggie at least five times.
It was a painful death.
And he was this very well respected attorney, fourth generation, money, law.
His whole family had been the solicitors in this so called Lowcountry in South Carolina.
And that means like the chief prosecutor.
So they really were the law.
And he had a decent amount of dough.
We later found out he was on drugs, or so he said.
Had tons of money problems.
He'd been stealing all this money from his law firm and so on.
So his life was imploding.
But just on paper, the guy looked like he had it all together.
And I listened to the whole trial.
There was no allegation of domestic abuse.
There was definitely outside of the trial an allegation that he cheated on her that did not wind up in front of the jury.
The sister of Maggie, the murder victim, said that she was happy.
She said, you know, they had their problems, but she was happy.
So, you know, it wasn't, there was no evidence of a controlling personality when it came to her, I guess.
I mean, not that you'll tell me, but.
And then the son, of course, I don't, the son had gotten him in trouble.
The son had been driving the boat in his fatal boat crash that killed a 19 year old girl, Mallory Beach.
They were being sued for it, it was really upending Alex's life.
But I just, let's start there.
Do you see co occurrence of control in the Alec Murdoch case?
Yes.
And the clue is in the fact that he controlled everything, their family controlled everything.
That name in that region is a very powerful name, and we mustn't lose.
Track of that.
They created the laws, they were the law, right?
So he always got his way.
And that's a very important point because when someone always gets their way, they don't have to be irate or upset about something because they can just control things through their power, their personal power, but also their family power.
And just looking at what happened with Paul and what a horrific situation with Mallory on the boat.
And I first just want to say, you know, she really is the.
The primary victim, the first victim, and that Paul put the boat into gear, having assaulted his ex girlfriend and assaulted her in front of everybody.
And that was the first time that others saw that he was abusing her.
Well, where did he learn that behavior from of abusing her multiple times?
There was a whole history.
He was 22 or he was younger then, but he was abusing her.
And she gave testimony about horrific abuse that she suffered.
Well, where did he learn that from?
And his entire story.
She's come on camera.
She's now in a special talking all about it.
I saw it too.
It was chilling and it was repeated.
And horrific abuse.
And I applaud her for speaking out.
But I don't think the apple falls far from the tree.
And he's learned that behavior somewhere in his name.
He's learned that he calls his granddad up and his dad, and they fix everything for him.
So there's no accountability, no responsibility taking.
And that's what that family have been doing for generations because they were the law and people were scared of them.
And I'd spoken to people in that area.
They've told me this themselves.
So we mustn't forget the name and their wealth and what that means to.
What they can have power over and who they can have power over.
And here you have a situation where Paul and that particular civil case, well, all of that was coming home to roost in that the accounts were going to be audited and they were part of that civil trial and they had been requested.
And Alec had also been challenged by the chief financial officer for to the tune of $800,000 going missing in legal fees.
And he was challenged about that.
Right.
So his world is starting to unravel.
Maggie had left him.
She was living in the beach house.
She wasn't living at Moselle.
So there's separation.
And we know that with separation, 76% of murders happen at the point of separation.
And when Alec had actually messaged her to say, I want to meet up with you, she had texted her sister saying, I wonder what he's up to.
You know, he's up to something.
And that's why she goes to meet him up at the kennels.
But there were rumors that she wanted a divorce.
There were rumors that she had a forensic accountant coming in and.
Things were unraveling.
And therefore, he is now in a situation where he feels like he's losing control.
Well, that can be a catastrophic set of circumstances for a man who is a lawyer.
So let's not forget, equally, you know, a good trial lawyer, someone who's very good at reading people and situations.
And up until this point, he has not got into trouble.
But I believe he was trying to control the situation and the narrative.
He was trying to control Paul and he was angry at him, hence the injuries and crime scene assessment.
We look at.
I look at how someone's killed because that paints a picture the way that he was killed and the way Maggie was.
And he was the one that was there at that time.
That was proven through Snapchat, through the videos that Paul Talk took, him and Maggie talking.
So he lied about being present, but he was there.
And he lied about whether he checked their pulses or not.
He didn't have time to check their pulses and he'd changed his clothes.
So this to me is somebody who is very controlling, very manipulative.
And of course, there are 99 charges that are still outstanding, the financial.
Charges.
So for me, this is a, and I don't like to use the word classic, but it is a classic domestic violence murder.
And yes, there's debt, there's money issues, and so on, and it was unraveling, but it's got all the hallmarks.
And, you know, in terms of psychopathy traits, where they all seem to be there, particularly lack of empathy and remorse and responsibility taking.
Yes.
Well, let's go there because this is what the, I don't get it.
I don't get how, because they showed the family videos of the birthday parties and everyone seemed to really love him.
His kids seemed to really love him.
He seemed to show love for his children as well.
I don't know that he was in the running for Father of the Year, but there was testimony that they seemed like a very loving family.
It wasn't outwardly, at least, perceived by anybody who took that witness stand as a damaged, dysfunctional family in the sense of abuse or in that sense.
So, what makes a man who.
But it depends what you're looking for, doesn't it, Megan?
Totally.
To the point that we've been discussing for 40 minutes.
But what makes a man who.
I'm just going to say that he did love his son, Paul.
I don't know how he felt about Maggie.
But I'm going to say he loved his son.
Like, I don't know.
Maybe not.
Maybe he's not capable of it.
How can a man who does love his son shoot his head off like that one day, you know, seemingly out of the blue?
Well, my first question before we get to that one is why was Paul drinking to such excess?
You know, a kid who's drinking that amount of alcohol to blot stuff out tells me there's more that's going on.
And I don't profess to know anything about that.
That's such a good point.
Can I just say, no one's asking that?
That's like all the coverage I have done of this case and listened to of this case.
No one, I have yet to hear anybody ask that question.
That's a very good question.
Because he wasn't just drinking to socialize, was he?
He was drinking to absolute excess that his friend said that this.
Timmy character came out, this very angry, abusive drunk.
Why was he drinking to that level?
And why were his family letting him?
That tells me a lot.
And if I were to go in and ask questions, I think I'd probably uncover a lot, well, a different story and a narrative to this happy, healthy family dynamic.
Because there's nothing healthy in a young boy not taking responsibility for his actions and a grandfather and a father who are just happy to sweep it all under the carpet, no matter how bad, no matter who gets injured.
And hurt, you know, there's very little empathy or care for anybody else other than them.
It's all about circling the wagons and protecting themselves, even when Mallory died.
And I do think that that is the biggest fear and threat for Alec Murdoch all of it is unravelling and it's about the reflection on him.
He wants to do what he's always done, which is circle the wagons, close everybody down, shut everything, take their voices away so that no one says what's really gone on.
But it is all about to come out in a civil case, particularly the forensic accounting.
So it's all about to be laid bare.
And I think that when someone feels they are at that stage and the psychopathology for someone like him, where they're about to lose everything, as he sees it, he's the most important person and he's eliminating the problem.
And the problems are Paul and Maggie, because Maggie's there.
So it's all a means to an end, which tells me that there's a high. probability that he would score highly on the psychopathy checklist.
What kind of questions are on that list?
It seems like an interesting list to have, like for your first date.
Well, they are.
And I do indirect assessments of perpetrators, and particularly when we talk about psychopathy, because one of the traits is a pathological liar, right?
So you wouldn't want to rely on them to self report because they lie.
And that's everything I've seen about his behavior, right?
That's what he did.
And superficial charm.
That's the first trait that you ask about, where somebody has a glebe sense of charm.
It's not really who they are.
And charm is very much a manipulator, it's a choice.
We're not born with charm.
A grandiose estimation of self.
So thinking you're bigger and better than who you really are.
Pathological liar, proneness to boredom and impulsivity, manipulation, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of responsibility taking, shallow effect, and superficial emotional response to things.
So Oftentimes, the emotional range is very limited.
So, with family annihilators, that's what I tend to see.
Their emotional range is limited.
Parasitic lifestyle, sexual promiscuity.
So, if there's infidelity, I'm always very interested in that when someone's cheating.
It happened in all three of the cases, all three that I mentioned Murdoch, Watts, and McDonald.
And it's often they want what they want.
And, like with Chris Watts, who's in a relationship with Nikki, and lots of people blamed her, where actually it's his behavior, it's his actions.
Even though What he did makes no sense in terms of a long term plan.
And perhaps we'll get to that because psychopaths, in fact, I'll say it now, but psychopaths are very good in the moment, but they're not good long term planners.
And they have early behavioral problems and lack of realistic long term goals.
So that's what I was talking to with good in the moment, but not very good on a longer term basis.
Can I just jump in and ask you a quick about one you said before that shallow affect?
What do you mean?
Yeah.
So again, it's a very superficial sense of a reaction to things.
Because they can be chameleon esque.
So, what they tend to do is mimic other people, particularly when it comes to empathy.
So, they will describe things like Chris Watts did.
He said, I was bawling my eyes out.
Well, if you're crying, tell us the emotion of that crying, not describing the crying.
And when he first interacted with law enforcement and they appeared, everything was shallow effect.
There was no, he described having emotions, but he didn't show us the emotion.
There was no sign of him crying.
This reminds me of a show I did when I was on NBC.
I call it the Mothers of Sparta show.
It's a long story, but essentially it was Mothers of Sociopaths.
It was Mothers of Teenage Sociopaths.
And the mothers knew, the mothers knew, and were jumping up and down saying, I am the mother of the next school shooter.
I'm telling you, and there's no place for me to go.
I can't get help.
Nobody will take this person.
They haven't yet committed a crime, but they can't yet be committed civilly, so on.
So one of the moms was saying her 16 year old, who was obsessed with child pornography, she knew she was.
She was at her wits' end.
She was trying to get him help or arrested at that point.
She said he was doing better because he was learning how to feign empathy.
She's like, you know, he's doing a little better now because he's learning how it looks on someone's face and when to use that facial expression in this certain tone.
She saw that as, you know, a possible ticket into the quote, normal world for him.
And I just, I never forgot that thinking, is that a good thing?
No, is the answer.
And, you know, your reaction is right.
And, you know, children are taught how to think about emotions when they're little.
And I think that is very important that it's a feeling, it's not a description and it's not a mirror, mirroring back of.
And yes, that she might be putting it in the positive because maybe she thought that he was getting a sense of the feeling rather than just acting the emotion.
And that is one of the clear signs of psychopathy.
And we know it when we see it, when someone's not authentic in that feeling.
That's everything I saw about Chris Watts describing emotion, not feeling it.
There was no point where he said, I just can't bear this.
She's got lupus.
I'm so worried.
She's got the children.
What?
Okay, you're giving me your business card, but where are you going to go?
And what are you going to do?
We've got to find her.
There was no emotion at all.
He had cognitive load because he just remembered everything that he was meant to do and say.
And that's why it was a very inauthentic interaction right from the start.
So I'm going to show a soundbite from him in one second, but.
I want to let you finish your list.
I interrupted because that shallow affect sounded interesting to me.
So you keep going.
Yes.
Good Restaurant Tourists Sun00:02:30
Well, the next one, actually, Megan, relates to exactly what you just said juvenile delinquency.
So when, you know, a kid's constantly getting into trouble.
And yes, mums do know.
And what I will say is that when mums reach out for help, you know, there really is a problem, you know, because fierce mummers, mumma bears, you know, I'm a mummer.
You want to protect your child.
And, you know, oftentimes they may be protected.
But, and we've seen that with Gabby Petit.
And Brian Laundrie, right?
To the nth degree, where they say that they love Gabby and she was like a daughter to them, but yet she doesn't return any of the Petito family's calls to where is Gabby when Brian returns home in their daughter's van, not even in his own van, without his fiance.
So there we've got a clear example of a mum and dad protecting son.
But, you know, equally, if you have somebody saying, I need help, and it's because of all these traits that I'm seeing, that's when we can actually.
Work together to intervene and prevent something more serious happening and help with someone's psychosocial development.
So, yeah, the juvenile delinquency, short term extramarital relationships, irresponsibility, I think I said, and impulsivity and criminal revocation, breaching orders.
So, not ever able to control their impulsivity and criminal versatility.
So, if they score 30 or over, they're a psychopath.
And unfortunately, there are more than what Dr. Hare originally said about 1% in the population because we rarely screen for psychopathy.
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Empathy Biggest Search Weight00:15:34
I think it's a really important thing that professionals really do up their game, particularly when we're talking about domestic violence, because some of the individuals we've talked about, I believe, are psychopaths.
And right now, there isn't a cure for psychopathy.
That's not that some psychologists say, well, just because we haven't found it yet.
It doesn't mean to say that it doesn't exist.
Is there a distinction for you between sociopaths and psychopaths?
Yes.
I mean, you know, the lack of empathy is the biggest tell of a psychopath.
I mean, sociopaths don't believe the rules apply to them.
And, you know, there is a diagnostic test, again, that you can do.
They don't believe the rules apply to them, but they tend to understand what they're doing is wrong and they may still have empathy.
But with psychopathy, they genuinely do not.
Feel.
They have no ability to put themselves in that other person's shoes and feel, you know, upset or distressed.
That's why appealing to them just doesn't work or a victim's family.
But tell us where her body is.
You know, they won't emote at all, they won't have that feeling.
So empathy is the biggest flag out of the 20 that somebody's a psychopath.
Would you say Alex Murdoch is a psychopath?
I mean, I have to be careful here because I haven't indirectly assessed him of putting together everything that others who know him best, because I rely on the people in that person's life to report on everything they know about that person.
But seeing the lack of empathy again, the fact he can sit there in court, the fact everything that he did thereafter, and the way that even when an officer appeared, the first responder to that call, he basically said, How are you doing?
And just went into this mode of chatting normally to him when his wife and son have been brutally murdered.
And he's approaching it, how are you doing?
All very casual.
And then getting out, just like Chris Watts, getting out the narrative that he needs to convey and seeing very little emotion.
And what emotion he did show in court, I don't believe the jurors bought it.
I think they felt that that was shallow effect.
It wasn't authentic.
It didn't seem authentic to me, I have to say.
But people emote in different ways.
But everything that happened after the shooting.
He alleged that he was shot and came out with this whole narrative that seemed to connect with the first narrative when he said it was, you know, revenge because of Paul's crash.
That's what he said originally to the first responder as to why Maggie and Paul were dead.
And he seemed to have this story that he was sticking to, but a real lack of empathy and, you know, devastation for the fact that Maggie and Paul are dead.
It's comforting to know that there is a checklist, you know, because.
You don't want to think.
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there thinking, Am I married to a psychopath?
How do I know?
Because Alec Murdoch was such an effective manipulator, as you point out, that's a common trait that they have.
All these people were taking this stand and saying, I felt totally duped.
I feel like I did not know him at all once his terrible financial crimes came out.
I mean, taking care of kids who had just lost their mother, taking care of kids with cancer, kids in terrible car accidents, and so on.
These people saying, I just, I had no idea who he actually was.
And so there'll be a lot of people thinking, Am I married to somebody who I don't actually know?
But there's a long list.
And so you've got to be able to tick off a bunch of these things before you get to the point of, I might be with a psychopath.
This is all like amazing.
Let's talk about Chris Watts because we mentioned him a few times, and I'm sure the audience is looking for a reminder on him and his story.
So this was Colorado, 19.
I want to get it in front of me.
Hold on a second.
It's page 18, I think.
Colorado, 2018, and Frederick, Colorado.
He was 33.
And he strangled his wife, 34 year old Shanann Watts, who was 15 weeks pregnant with their third child, who was a boy.
They had two girls.
They had a three year old daughter, Celeste, and a four year old daughter, Bella.
And this guy, this relationship, this whole story so confuses me.
Again, I've gone down the rabbit hole on this.
Look at him.
He's a good looking guy.
He had a job, it wasn't like a surgeon, like we're going to get to with Jeff McDonald.
He worked at the Weld County oil site, and she had a good job too, a middle class family.
Had some financial problems, but not overwhelming and pervasive.
Had what looked like the perfect family.
The neighbors in the Netflix documentary, I think it was, described them that they were saying, I watched Chris Watts.
I thought, I got to up my game as a parent.
I got to spend more time with my kids.
Got to get out there and throw the ball with him.
Look at him.
Look at this guy.
He, according to the reports, was the more subservient one.
I'm not sure if that's the right word, but she seemed more dominant than he did.
She seemed more in control in terms of family decision making.
You know, this is where I want to live.
This is what I want for the girls.
This is what I want you to do.
And he seemed more of like a yes man than someone who is engaging in coercive control.
This is my layperson's opinion.
You can take this apart in a second.
That's my approach, my takeaway, watching it.
Then he loses a bunch of weight, never a good sign in a marriage, loses a bunch of weight and starts an affair with a co worker.
And his wife, Shanann, goes away with the girls for six weeks to visit family in North Carolina.
He falls for this other woman pretty hard.
And we know, I think it's from his Google searches that he was Googling things like, when do you say I love you?
Like, what does it feel like to be in love?
Weird searches that a normal person would not be doing that are definitely a flag.
And then the wife comes back from the business trip at two in the morning.
She'd been with the girlfriends on a true business trip, comes back at two in the morning.
And what we know is now, because he ultimately confessed, he, Strangled her to death.
They had a fight.
They had some sort of an argument.
He strangled her to death.
He says he took his two daughters who were alive in the backseat of the truck over their dead mother's body, which was on the floor of the backseat, drove to the oil site, smothered his three year old and his five year old.
The five year old said, Are you going to do to me what you just did to Cece, the three year old, and said, Daddy, no.
It's too horrific to even really conjure.
And he did it anyway.
He did it anyway.
And then he disposed of the daughter's bodies in the oil tanks.
Put one in one oil tank and one in the other.
So gruesome, he could even describe the sound of their little bodies hitting the liquid and buried his wife in a shallow grave nearby.
This guy, who had friends, who again was perceived by some as his model.
Father who doesn't have some long criminal history, I don't get it.
And I'm desperate to get it.
Would you help me get it?
Yes.
And I think the way you describe it, you know, again, people should remember what he did and what he said he did too.
And he has changed his narrative at least four times.
But the way that he described putting their bodies into that oil tanker, I believe that version of what happened.
And for us all to think about the fear and the terror that the children must feel, having seen what happened, I believe Bella saw what happened to her mum, and then having this sense that these horrific things are going to happen to you.
At the hands of your daddy, someone who's meant to care, love you, and look after you.
And those moments are just so haunting.
And I think when we understand how the media characterized him as a good father, a good dad, this perfect, dutiful husband.
And of course, there were all these different videos of Shanann because her business was on Facebook, of her, and she was described as bossy and oh, this nagging woman and too strong.
Instantly, we get into the victim blame and the empathy of excusing what he did.
And that is everything wrong with the way these cases are not only understood, but the way that they're talked about in the media.
And when we think about when Chris and Shanann first got together, she was very ill with lupus and she was heavily dependent on him.
She thought he was her savior.
And that's what she said.
She couldn't have got by without him.
So the relationship dynamic was very different.
She was wholly dependent on him.
They got married.
She didn't know whether she could have children.
And then by a miracle, because of lupus, she had two children, two girls.
And then the relationship dynamic started to change and she started to work more.
And yes, they had debt.
And that's another important point, but the dynamic shifted and she was working, she was going out.
She was no longer as dependent on him.
And as you described, you know, the dynamic shift and that can happen in a relationship.
He then starts this Thrive program, which is something that she's advocating for as well as part of her business.
And he starts to lose all this weight.
And then he starts to feel himself more, and he's taking this introvert, he is now becoming someone quite different.
Even Shanann said that she didn't know.
He was taking videos of himself working out.
And then he meets Nikki and he falls for her hook, line, and sinker.
He's writing her these love notes at a time where Shanann is sensing that things are going terribly wrong in their relationship.
And then she finds out she's pregnant.
And maybe that pregnancy is used as a way to try and bring them closer.
But of course, what we know is that babies don't tend to bring you closer, they tend to add more stress and pressure.
And he, by other people's opinions, didn't want the baby.
They had a gender reveal party that was cancelled.
And she sensed that he didn't want the baby.
And even the video of them.
Announcing the baby, he just clearly wasn't happy about the whole thing.
That's true.
And you can say he was shy on camera, but you can see that he was not excited about it.
He cancelled this gender reveal.
He was seeing Nikki.
He wanted to invest in that relationship.
He told Nikki that he had separated or was separating from Shanann, which wasn't happening.
And Shanann goes off, you know, she's writing these letters to him saying, I'll do anything to fix it.
Tell me what you need, Chris.
And he's withholding sex from her.
He is completely out of the relationship and she's desperate to restore the relationship, and his attention is elsewhere.
He's doing these Google searches.
When do you tell someone that you're in love with them or how?
Well, that tells you about the shallow effect.
It's not really a feeling because you just say it and you do it.
You don't research it to understand it, right?
So that's the shallow effect.
Well, what do you make of his?
This is my own antiquated notion of control.
You know, I. didn't feel like he was the one controlling because she's writing him these notes like, I've been gone for six weeks.
You haven't, you called me twice.
You'd think a man would want to talk to his wife and daughters.
And he writes back, You're so right.
I'm so sorry.
I love you, honey.
I'll do better.
All of his notes back during that six week period.
And this is all leading up to the murder.
It's right before he murders them.
He's, you know, he's using the emojis.
He's really, you know, kind of sweet.
Yes, he's ignoring her, but when He texts, it always seems to be from like a beta role, you know, that just how I read those texts.
And the reason I found it alarming is it just didn't sound like someone who's going to go commit a murder.
I don't know what somebody sounds like who's going to go commit a triple murder, but I just don't picture them using emojis.
And so, where am I going wrong?
Well, they tend to be very cool, calm and collected, actually.
Every case I've seen when we've had even CCTV footage of them in the act, it's cool, calm and collected.
Um, but where are you going, going wrong?
I wouldn't say you're going wrong.
You're interpreting what you're seeing, but my interpretation would be he's managing her.
He's manipulating her.
He's keeping her at arm's length, telling her what she needs to hear to get off his back because he's cheating on her.
He's going sand dune surfing with Nikki.
He clearly wants to be with Nikki.
He's telling Nikki that he's going to leave Shanannon.
Nikki suspects he's cheating on her because, as women, we know we know the signs.
We may not tell people about it, but Shanann actually did.
She did go to that conference after that trip, and that's where she was when she came back at one o'clock or whatever it was.
She had found that on her credit card because they didn't have much money, there was something like $60 that the lazy dog had been spent.
She believed it was she was cheating, he was cheating on her.
I believe.
That she came back to confront him because she came back early and her best friend said she wasn't herself.
At the conference, she was just really out of sorts.
She wasn't eating.
She was really upset.
And I believe she came back to confront him.
And it's at the point of being confronted.
He says that he pushed her off of him or he, yeah, he got himself off of her.
And I believe that they were having sex.
There was some attempt to restore the relationship, but his account he said, I told her I didn't love her and I didn't want to be with her anymore.
And I pushed her away and I found my hands around her neck.
Well, even that account is inauthentic because you don't just find your hands around someone's neck and it takes minutes, not seconds, to strangle someone and asphyxiate them and kill them.
And the girls were shallow sleepers.
And I believe one of them came in and he took those decisions.
That was all on him.
And it may not have been someone that was something that was premeditated, but it unfolded.
And the worst thing that he then did was put Shanann into the car.
And load the two girls into the car.
And he had 45 minutes to make the right decision.
But he took those two girls with their mother dead in the car and he then strangles them and asphyxiates them one by one and then disposes of their body as if they're rubbish, as if they're just trash.
And he buries Shanann.
And it's in those moments that he makes those decisions, but he carries on the lie.
Even when the police are called, he's carrying on the lie.
She was 15 weeks pregnant.
You know, there was no care or concern.
My wife's mission, she's got lupus, 15 weeks pregnant.
My two girls, everything was about maintenance, and he was cool, calm, and collected.
And it was the neighbor who spotted his behavior, who said that he's more animated than usual, that he pulled the car up, the truck up to the door.
And it was the neighbor saying, I don't know, there's something, it's just not right.
Confession Blames Peterson Wife00:15:47
I don't know.
The neighbor was a star.
He's saying they argued and she just left with the children.
Well, there was no evidence that she had just left with the children.
Her phone was there, the car was there.
How would she?
She even be able to get the children out without the car?
Where would she go?
It was all lies, but it was the neighbour on his behaviour who spotted that everything he was saying and doing was not accurate.
And then he pulls the video up to show the police.
And then you see Chris looking very awkward.
But he, I don't believe, planned the whole event in terms of killing Shanann.
She confronted him.
And I think she probably said to him, I'm leaving you and I'm taking the children.
And it's that he said that, right?
You'll never see your.
He said she said something to the effect of, you'll never see the children again.
Of course, you know, if she thinks he's cheating on her and the marriage is falling apart and he's trying to leave her, that's the kind of thing a wife and mother might say.
Yeah.
And a good father would say, well, look, we have to work this out, but I don't want to be with you anymore.
And we have to work the children out of who, you know, and when we get custody.
But let's talk about that another time.
But let's separate for now.
But that's not what he did.
He put his hands around her neck.
He strangled her for a period of minutes to the point that she wasn't just unconscious, that she was dead and she was carrying his baby.
And then he took the two girls and put them in the car and he chose to kill them too.
And he could have made very different choices.
There were other choices at the table.
Is that if I can't have someone who will?
Is that psychopathy?
Is it evil?
Like, I don't understand.
I even get, forgive me, I'm not justified.
I get killing the wife.
I mean, like anybody who listens to Dateline knows that happens all the time.
I don't understand what can then make you kill your three year old and your five year old in the manner that we've just been discussing.
What is that?
Yes, well, only he and those men who do it know it.
But I believe that for Chris Watts, it was about wiping them all out.
And he believed that he had a chance of a new relationship with Nikki.
And in his mind, although it makes no sense to anybody else, that's why he took the choices that he did.
And of course, it's with catastrophic consequences.
But this wasn't in red mist.
This wasn't a moment where he makes a decision.
It's over 45 minutes plus where he makes those choices and then he sticks.
To that story, and there were other choices that he could have made, but he didn't.
And that tells me about him.
That tells me about the type of person he really is.
And I have scored him on the psychopathy checklist, and he scores lower than 20, but I don't have all the information available.
But what I did see was the lack of empathy, and that he was even flirting with one of the CBI officers who was interviewing him, and he was attempting to manipulate.
And that's why he changed his story multiple times.
He believed that he was capable of getting away with it, and that's what he was trying to do.
Let's show the audience a clip of him.
This was before he confessed, and he was still playing the game with the media I have no idea where they went.
She took off with the children in the middle of the night.
Here's Chris Watts before his confession.
I hope that she's somewhere safe right now and with the kids.
But I mean, could she have been?
Could she have just taken off?
I don't know.
But if somebody has her and they're not safe, I want them back now.
My God, that is so obviously untrue and not how a real grieving father and husband would act.
Not authentic at all.
And that's where you would be pressing to get more answers from him.
You know, she's pregnant, 15 weeks pregnant, and with lupus, with his two daughters.
And I do believe he felt he could control the narrative and that he could control other people and manipulate them.
So the question is did we ever really know, or, you know, did anyone really know who Chris Watts was?
Is this Really, who he is now, and this was him, and that's what he was masking, you know, for many years.
And he didn't let people in because of who he truly was.
And that's what I believe, what we're seeing after the fact that's him, him making those decisions.
Don't you think it's like a Scott Peterson situation?
Yes, I do.
And I've talked about Lacey and Connor Peterson again.
She was pregnant, and the choices that he made, where there were other choices on the table, but they're the choices that he made, and that's why he's still in prison, and that's where he must remain.
What do you make of the fact that Chris Watts, when he did confess, he was forced to confess?
Let's not kid ourselves.
I mean, they had him.
The woman who ran the lie detector on him was crazy good.
She put him at ease.
She was, oh, this is all just fun.
You know, you know, one of us knows the truth.
And now we're both about to know the truth.
I thought she did a great job.
And she did, along with her partner, extract the confession.
But they had a lot of evidence.
They had the GPS, they knew he had gone to the oil tanks.
They had a lot.
So he winds up confessing.
They bring in his dad.
He confesses to his dad.
And in that moment, one of the themes of our discussion has been the blaming of the woman.
What did she do?
What'd she do?
In that moment, listen to what he said.
I know you're familiar.
I'll play it for the audience.
Here's his confession.
You lost it and you choked her.
You choked her?
You lost it and you choked her or what?
Asked the dad.
Age.
Age.
And the babies are gone?
And that I put my hands around my wife's neck and did that same thing.
So it's hard to understand there, but what he's saying is she, Shanann, killed my babies.
So I put my hands around her neck and did the same thing to her.
In that moment of confession, he's blaming Shanann.
Which tells you everything you need to know about him.
You know, it's very rare for a woman to behave in that way.
And under these circumstances, it's highly unlikely.
But he was happy for Shanann to take the blame for his actions and his behavior.
And later admitted that that wasn't true anyway.
So, I mean, we know it was a lie.
He's serving life sentences and will not be getting paroled.
Let's jump to the case of McDonald, Jeff McDonald.
This turned into the book Fatal Vision, which I really recommend.
I listened to it via audio.
It was done so well by Joe McGinnis.
Fascinating story with the book, too.
Joe McGinnis basically got recruited by McDonald to write the book and then turned on McGinnis.
I think McDonald thought it was going to be an exonerating type of tome.
It wound up going the other way.
And McDonald sued McGinnis, who did have to pay him some sort of a settlement.
Because I didn't look deep into it, but I think it's because it was like a breach of contract.
They basically suggested you lured him into thinking you were going to make it sound a different way.
Anyway, it's a great book.
It's very interesting.
Jeff McDonald, surgeon, went to Princeton, went to Northwestern for his med school, went to Columbia Presbyterian for his internship, then joined the Green Berets and was serving and training, jumping out of airplanes, was going to be a surgeon for the Army, and then Go out into the world and make a bunch of money at Yale.
He hoped to get a job at Yale.
And his wife, Colette, was his high school sweetheart.
She was a nice, nice lady from all the accounts, was also very bright, had been studying in college herself, winds up getting pregnant.
She puts her life on hold, sacrifices for him.
This is back in the 60s.
So, you know, the society was kind of set up this way.
And they had two beautiful daughters, Kimberly and Chrissy.
And they're living right off of campus on base.
Or, I think, on or off campus on base.
And one night, in the middle of the night, he kills them.
He kills all three of them in a very similar situation the wife and the two daughters to the Chris Watts case.
This guy has got everything going for him.
And by all accounts, a lovely wife who's very supportive of him and beautiful daughters, same.
And says it was hippies, that it was a Sharon Tate type situation where this woman and three men came into the apartment in the middle of the night, stabbed him.
He had like one puncture wound that a surgeon like McDonald would have known had a place without killing himself.
And the women were absolutely slaughtered.
His wife and his two girls were absolutely slaughtered with a number of puncture wounds and ice pick.
I mean, just absolutely brutal.
And they wind up saying, first, oh, we don't have, you know what?
He didn't do it.
We're going to buy the hippie story.
But his wife's father would not let go of it.
He initially defended McDonald, but when he got a hard look at the evidence that had been submitted in the preliminary hearing, turned and spent the rest of his life making sure that justice was done.
And ultimately it was.
And Jeff McDonald went to prison.
But here's Jeff McDonald on the Dick Cavett show, taking us back now in time to 1970, December 15th.
The murders had happened a month earlier.
This is a month after his wife.
Say again.
Okay.
Oh, oh, yeah, okay, it happened in February.
The murders happened in February, so it was less than a year later.
Talking about the murders of his wife and daughters as follows Could you talk about what happened on that night last February?
Well, I can skim through it briefly.
To get deep into it, yeah, it does produce a lot of emotion on my part.
But very briefly, my wife came home and we had a before bedtime drink, really, and watched the beginning of a late night talk show.
He's smiling.
The audience is laughing.
And Laura, he did the thing you said.
He said, Getting into it brings up a lot of emotion.
You know, like, trust me, wink, wink.
Trust me, I'm not actually going to show you that.
Yes.
I mean, that short clip just reminds me of Scott Peterson and the Diane Sawyer interview, where it's clear to me that he thought he, in both situations, they can control and influence and manipulate.
And like with Diane Sawyer, I don't know if you saw that interview with Scott Peterson that he did months later, bearing in mind Lacey was still missing and he laughs inappropriately.
He smiles inappropriately.
He doesn't declaratively say he didn't kill Lacey and Connor.
And Diane Sawyer is just not buying any of it.
I mean, her bullshit detector was.
Pretty well honed.
And there's an 11 minute clip where it's very clear there was deception.
And a lot of the work that I do, I look for indicators for veracity and deception.
So without knowing that individual's baseline behavior, but knowing the, did you say he was in the Marines?
He was in the.
Yeah, he was a Green Beret.
Yeah.
He was a Green Beret, right?
So he's used to power and control.
He's used to influencing.
He's intelligent.
I can see that.
He believes that people are going to buy what he's selling.
But the leakage that's there is telling us something quite different.
And that's why you're always looking for words, actions, behavior that are congruent, but also facial expressions, micro expressions, et cetera.
Are they describing the emotion or are they living and feeling the emotion?
I mean, you don't talk briefly about and skim through the brief details of your wife and your daughter's absolute slaughter.
I've never heard someone say that before, unless they're lying.
What about the brutality of the murders?
Like that, in a way, that to me is evidence that he didn't do it.
I mean, he did it.
I'm not disputing that.
I'm just saying no one could believe that somebody would take an ice pick and over and over and over stab their three year old.
Like this just doesn't, that would lead somebody to believe it had to be an outsider.
Do you think that's why those murders were so brutal?
It's quite possible.
I mean, if you choose to use things like that, the point to looking at someone outside the house because of the way it was done.
But I don't know the case in detail.
But from looking at him and the way that he presents, and the fact that he invited a journalist in to write a book that was supposed to exonerate him, and the journalist who deep dived into the case, and of course, a lot of investigative journalists are very good at what they do.
And the journalist didn't buy it based on the facts and the evidence.
And more importantly, the jury didn't buy it based on the facts and the evidence.
And all my work is about going on the facts and the evidence.
You have to look at everything, forensically deconstruct everything.
You know, about the behavior and as well as forensic opportunities, but oftentimes it's not always what's present, it's what's absent.
You know, what's absent at the scene or what's absent in terms of emotion and who's trying to control the narrative.
You know, and controlling the narrative also is a very interesting thing that I see coercive controllers do after the event that they want to get their story out there.
And oftentimes, because they're a man and they're cool, calm, and collected, people gravitate to their narrative.
But the victims aren't here to tell us otherwise, are they?
There's no one.
His wife can't tell us what happened.
That's why the forensics have to tell us what was the sequence of events, what happened.
And equally, the dynamics of the relationship.
Was she looking to separate?
Was she saying to him, I've had enough for whatever reason?
Had he abused one of the children, for example, and she said, Colette said, I've had enough and I'm going to leave you.
And we know at the point of separation with these coercively controlling men, they want to control the situation.
And if I can't have you, no one will.
And how dare you make that decision?
I'm the one who makes the decisions and it ends when I say it ends and how it ends.
And that's equally 76% of the murders happen at the point where the woman says enough.
That case, according to the book, again, Fatal Vision, the father of Colette, the wife, saw Jeff McDonald go on Dick Havitt, saw him smirking, working the crowd.
Again, this is not even a year after the murders.
And it was his first turn, you know, like, I might be dealing with a killer.
Like, he might actually have killed them and then stayed on him to get the transcript from this.
Preliminary hearing that was done inside the military that determined he didn't do it.
And the father poured over these 2,000 pages, word by word by word, and found so many inconsistencies in Jeff's story and started to piece it together.
And then these prosecutors went back and did this in depth investigation of Jeff McDonald to see, kind of along the lines of what you're saying, whether these wonderful accounts of him, oh, he's so wonderful at Princeton, wonderful at Northwestern, and the greatest surgeon ever, really matched up with, was it really true?
Emotionally Dysregulated Joking Brian00:14:51
If you just dug a little deeper, Like you were saying about why was Paul Murdoch drinking so much?
Why are the parents allowing that?
Dig a little deeper.
What's there?
And they found out he had completely downplayed his number of infidelities.
They'd only been married, they were young.
He'd been cheating all over the place in disgusting and pervasive ways.
He had been seen abusing her.
And I know you've called attention to this in particular at least once seen smacking her across the face, like hands on the face, hands on the neck.
I know you've said that's a special red flag.
And we saw it in the Gabby Petito case too.
Can you speak to that?
Yes.
Well, any hands going around the face, you know, if a man puts his hands around a woman's face, it covers your nose and your mouth.
And that's what Brian Laundrie did to Gabby.
And of course, we've seen photographic evidence subsequently that her family's lawyers have released for, for purpose just before the police were called that showed that she had an injury.
But the police didn't follow up when Gabby told them about the hand around the mouth and where the cuts came from and any attempt to strangle or asphyxiate.
by a man to a woman, it increases the risk sevenfold.
So, and it increases the risk to serious harm and femicide.
So it really is a high risk factor.
And I would imagine with Colette, whatever was seen or witnessed was probably the tip of the iceberg to what she was really experiencing behind closed doors.
And if he were womanizing, cheating on her, disrespecting her, and she had two little girls, she may well have said enough is enough.
And with his psychopathology, And used to being in control and wanting to be in control.
And I would imagine that he's a man who wants to win and things are on his terms and she's there to meet his needs.
And how dare she make a decision that is not within her gift to decide?
And that could be the point where he then assaults her.
It could have been one of the girls.
I don't know.
But something happened and with catastrophic consequence.
And what a horrific case.
And I'm so glad that her father.
Followed his instincts and that he kept asking questions.
And that's what I ask all my listeners on Crime Analysts to do ask questions, be curious, and always trust your instincts.
And the people who know someone like Jeff McDonald the best, the father who's observed him in different situations, knows when something's not right.
And thank goodness he was there to advocate on behalf of his murdered daughter and grandchildren.
Sometimes that's exactly what it takes to get to answers, the real answers.
And the truth of what went on.
Just like we saw Chris Watts confessing to his dad when everything is stacked against him and he's got nowhere to go, his dad was the one that ultimately got the answer out of him by flipping it onto Shanann.
And then he confesses.
So, again, the people who know the perpetrator the best, they're the ones who should really be asking questions and working with professionals to make sure the right questions are asked and not to let something go when something seems off.
Let's spend a minute on Gabby because, you know, I have to admit to you, I've done a lot of interviews of domestic violence victims.
And when I saw that police stop, you know, where she was trying to say he hit me first and so on, I understood what was happening there.
But I also felt bad for the cops.
I know that's not right.
I know the cops did not handle it.
We had a whole debate with lawyers on whether they should be sued and so on.
I don't know.
I had conflicting feelings about it.
They seemed like caring individuals.
But the truth is, they really mishandled that entire.
Scenario.
And I'm not blaming them for Gabby's death, but one can only wonder had they intervened more aggressively, would it have led to her escape?
Just a different result.
Again, not to blame them, but just to call attention to there's a warning sign here.
There's a really clear warning sign in her interaction with these cops.
Somebody had called 911.
They had said that they had seen a man hit a woman.
The cops went, they pulled him over, and they found a crying Gabby Petito with a mark on her face.
And then we later found out a mark on her neck.
And She tried to blame herself.
We have a bit of that.
Here it is.
We want to know the truth if he actually hit you.
Oh, I guess.
I guess, yeah, but I hit him first.
Where did he hit you?
Don't worry.
Just be honest.
He grabbed my face.
He's like.
Slapped your face or what?
Well, like he grabbed me with his nail.
And I guess that's why it looks.
I definitely have a cut right here because I can feel it.
Yeah.
It looks like it's really firm.
She gets really worked up.
And when she does, she swings and she had her cell phone in her hand.
So I was just trying to push her away.
Well, to be honest, I definitely hit him first.
Where'd you hit him?
I slapped him.
You slapped him first?
And then it's on his face?
He gets to tell me to shut up.
What do you make of that whole thing?
Yes, I've spent a long time on crime analysts going through the case and dissecting forensically the police stop, because of course it is on their body cam footage.
And the first thing that struck me about Gabby was just how emotionally dysregulated she was.
And, you know, I train law enforcement.
I wrote the book, Policing Domestic Violence, that's behind me with two police officers when I was at New Scotland Yard.
And it's part of the Blackstone Policing Guide series of helping officers ask the right questions and use their powers.
And one of the key things is if you've got a victim in trauma, which Gabby was clearly emotionally dysregulated, find out why.
And if you've got a perpetrator, and bearing in mind the 911, the call that came in was about, and I'll quote it, a gentleman slapping the woman.
Well, that ain't no gentleman for a start.
But the point was that the call was a call for assistance because of the male's behavior, not the female's.
And Gabby instantly took responsibility, which a lot of victims do.
And therefore, the attempt to separate them was the right one.
But putting her in the back of the police car, which is where you put a suspect, and shutting her off wasn't a good move.
And keeping Brian out and spending 80% of their time with Brian, who straight away threw Gabby under the bus in an attempt to manipulate.
And control the narrative.
I train officers to question that.
That is a very clear manipulation.
And his narrative should have been challenged because at no point was it challenged.
And he was the first to admit that he had shoved her and that he had locked her out of her van.
He took her keys and they did a van check and it was registered to Gabby, not him.
He took her keys.
He took her phone and he stopped her from getting into her vehicle.
And then one of the other callers said that he took her backpack out and had put it on the outside of the van and he'd threatened to drive off and leave her there on her own.
So, who really is the person with the power and control here?
It's very obviously Brian, and that she was in fear and she was trying to get her keys and get her phone.
She just wanted to be in the van, and he was controlling her movements and not allowing her to have the space that she needed to be in her van.
And he was threatening to leave her there on her own, a lone female.
And that narrative should have been challenged.
That case is reminding me.
Of some of these other cases that we're discussing, like the McDonald one, where, oh, Colette, she was so happy she was this domestic wife of this green beret surgeon and two little girls.
That's what we saw on the outside.
And what we also saw in the Gabby case was the van, and I love the van and van life, and we're doing our yoga.
This image that we know was untrue.
We were being misled.
And it's not uncommon at all for the victims of domestic violence or the perpetrators of it.
To mislead us actively and willingly.
Yes, but the clues are there.
I mean, when you get two independent male witnesses calling it in because they're concerned, it takes a lot to call the police.
Most people don't want to get involved with the police.
So, for two independent men to say there's a problem, well, that's the first thing that they should pay attention to.
What are they being told?
Why are they even attending?
You know, Officer Robbins did try and do the right thing, but he was a junior officer.
He wasn't even through his training period.
And Eric Pratt, the supervisor, was the one that made a very quick decision that Gabby was the primary aggressor.
Well, actually, I've written the chapter on primary aggressor because we have the same, where you have to be very careful in not just believing the calm, cool, collected male narrative.
And oftentimes that's what police attend a distraught, emotionally dysregulated female and a very calm, cool, and collected individual, a male normally.
And then they gravitate to that cool, calm, collected male and their narrative rather than thinking, Why is this young woman so emotionally dysregulated?
This is a disproportionate reaction to what we're being told.
And hang on a minute.
Didn't Brian say she's got this little website?
Isn't he devaluing her and saying, oh, she's crazy, making out that she's the crazy one?
And even when Officer Robbins tried to challenge him, he again threw it back to Gabby being the problem.
So, with experience, and that's why supervisors and mentors are very important to check and to challenge.
And unfortunately, with misogyny, oftentimes, and Those officers, what we saw was yes, they may look like they are being caring towards Gabby, but they were also very misogynistic and very patronizing and condescending.
And, you know, did they not realize that 16 to 24 year olds are the most at risk group of domestic violence and femicide, the women?
Because in 2021, 2022, and 2023, it's unacceptable for officers not to be trained.
So for me, this is a very clear training issue, but the attitudes are also problematic.
When they instantly go into just believing the male narrative without any challenge, and they put her in the box of just being the hysterical, emotional woman, and aren't all women crazy?
Because that was the subtext between Brian and those officers with their fists pumping, and oh, these women are, you know, my ex wife, she's on, she's no longer my wife anymore, and she's on pills because she's so crazy.
These were the things that the officers were talking about with Brian.
And then they were laughing and joking.
And for Gabby, who's in the back of the car, Is she hearing them laughing and joking?
How does that feel to her when she's just on her own, isolated, and there they all are joking and laughing with Brian?
That sends a very clear message to her.
You know, this is all leading me to recall something you wrote about how we socialize girls all wrong in some ways.
You know, be a good girl, go along to get along, don't make waves.
You know, the pain in the ass girl is somebody nobody wants to be around or promote or work with.
We talk about it a lot these days because there are all these teachers who want to have secrets with our kids now.
And, you know, a lot of us mothers have been saying, you don't get to have secrets with my child.
No adult gets to have secrets with my child.
I raise my children to, To understand that that's a big red flag, a grown up who wants to have a secret with you.
That's how kids get abused.
And it's how women get abused.
It's just like a common theme that I'm feeling now and listening to you.
And I want to leave it on an empowering note so that the people listening to this don't just feel like, oh, it sucks to be a woman.
I'm going to get abused.
No one's going to care.
The laws don't protect me.
I'm going to fall in love, but it's going to turn out to be some abusive psychopath.
What is it?
What can women do, right?
Like, meaningful things that they can do to protect themselves, to take control of their own lives and their own safety?
Well, I think, you know, girls are groomed to be polite, compassionate, and to put other people's needs above their own.
And what we need to do is, yes, you can still be polite, but to know your own needs and not be afraid to voice what you need and not be afraid to be difficult.
Because you mentioned the good girl, but those of us who challenge things, we're the difficult ones.
We're the ones that tend to run into problems because we're asking the difficult questions.
So the things that I always say are to be curious.
When something doesn't feel right or look right or sound right, Be curious and ask questions about the person.
Don't just accept their word for it.
Don't, you know, ignore what your instinct is telling you.
And that's probably the biggest one is trusting your instinct of if something feels right or somebody feels off.
You know, every rape case I've worked, every time when I've gone back through the statement, the woman sensed when she was in danger and then she didn't want to upset the person.
So she didn't get off the train, she didn't walk across to the other platform or go down a different street.
She didn't want to upset the person.
So, You know, not being polite in that way to the detriment of our own safety and to always, always trust your instinct.
We have more brain cells in our stomach than a dog has in its head.
And I've got a rather lovely golden doodle called Beatrice, but when my gut's tweaking, it's telling me something.
So always listen to that because we can talk, Megan, and we can try and empower women, but only women can empower themselves, right?
To ask the questions, to take action, and don't be afraid to ask advice from older people.
You know, older mentors, females, I mentor a number of younger women of things that where they say, but is this normal?
Is that right?
I mean, he says that that's what everybody does of sending pictures, you know, naked pictures, et cetera.
But he says, I'm a prude when I don't do it.
I mean, should I?
You know, my number one rule is never send pictures because you don't know where they're going to end up.
So again, just asking, trusting someone, you know, like yourself, myself, and asking those questions from someone who's seen it and done it before and to be mentored.
Because I think for younger women, particularly 16 to 24, They're not taught what a healthy relationship is.
Boys Discussions Updating Info00:03:37
There's a big information gap.
They're taught how to have sex and the mechanics of it, but they're not taught about emotional safety and, you know, being in a healthy relationship of what's healthy versus what's unhealthy.
And I think if we were doing that piece, we would be able to spot the behaviors and we'd do it with boys as well boys and men of what behaviors are they learning that's bad that they shouldn't be using.
And it's early that we want to get into it.
Age appropriate.
Discussions, of course.
And I agree with you.
The secret things is a big problem.
You know, that's how pedophiles and sex offenders get the trust of a child that it's a secret between me and you.
So teachers should absolutely not be talking about secrets.
That's a big safeguarding risk.
So, yes, I think it's having more conversations and girls and women, you know, stepping into their personal power and not being afraid to make a noise and get louder when there's a problem.
Yes, get louder is great advice.
And if it doesn't come easy to you, then practice.
Keep practicing because it comes easier over time.
Now, wait, before we go, I know about the podcast, but is there a book that the people can buy of yours?
You mentioned the one behind you.
Is that just for police or can we all learn from that one?
I mean, it's a wider book that anybody can read.
And a lot of people tell me they can't get in and out of the chapters.
It's called Policing Domestic Violence.
I am in discussions about updating it.
I mean, the actual detail of and the case studies I use in there with my co authors, it's all still relevant.
But some of the laws now, we've got new laws on coercive control, on stalking, all sorts of things that we're in discussion about updating it.
And I'm also running a whole series of masterclasses because I do deliver a lot of training and some of them are virtual training masterclasses where people can log on just as we're talking and I talk through lots of cases and the dash.
I've got a stalking.
Class on May the ninth and tenth, and Dash on May the twenty third, twenty fourth, and Coercive Control on June the sixth and seventh.
And you can just email laura Richards, PA at gmail.com if you're interested in that.
Oh, great.
And it's, and your website is the laura Richards.com, the laura Richards.com, and also dash riskchecklist.co.uk.
It is at the moment being updated and it will be a dot com in the future.
But yes, I put a lot of information out there to help people, and there's Paladin, the National Stalking Advocacy Service, where there's lots of information on there.
If you believe that you're being stalked, God bless you for all that you've done and that you continue to do your podcasts, your books, your advocacy, your mentorship, all of it.
Thanks for being here.
It's a pleasure getting to know you.
Thank you.
Well, I've enjoyed it very much.
And thank you for you sharing your experience.
And enjoyed is the wrong word, but I think these discussions and informed discussion and conversations and interviews are so important.
So thank you for inviting me on.
Thanks for joining us today.
Fascinating conversation.
What I love about Laura, She's spot on.
She's done her homework.
Every fact she was reciting, I was like, yes, I love people who really actually do their homework and they can recite the facts, sort of like a Victor Davis Hansen, in conversation, and you can trust their info.
That's Laura.
She was great.
Looking forward to having her back on.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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