"Mindhunter" John Douglas on the Mind of a Serial Killer
He’s a legendary criminal profiler and the inspiration behind the hit Netflix series, “Mindhunter.” John Douglas has sat across the table from some of the most notoriously evil killers of our time from Charles Manson to the Son of Sam. He’s interviewed several hundred violent offenders and personally investigated or supervised over 5,000 violent crime investigations. In this interview, Douglas reveals his unique insight into his profiling process and explains how he’s helped identify and capture some of America’s most depraved minds and dangerous criminals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The fantasy is something that they are the writer, the producer, their director, the actor, and it's perfect.
The fantasy is always perfect, but the crime never works out that way.
So there's never this satisfaction for the perfect crime, and so the beat goes on.
They look for more and they look for more victims.
Hi, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Bye.
He's a legendary criminal profiler and the inspiration behind the hit Netflix series Mindhunter, one of my favorite shows on television, just saying.
John Douglas has sat across the table from some of the most notoriously evil killers of our time, Charles Manson, son of Sam, even BTK.
Blind Torture Kills, what it stands for.
He's interviewed several hundred violent offenders and personally investigated or supervised over 5,000 violent crime investigations.
With true crime being so popular in America today, I think it's pretty cool.
We have one of the fathers of its investigative elements with us.
Today, John's here to reveal his unique insight into his profiling process and to explain how he's helped to identify and capture some of America's most deprived minds and dangerous criminals.
So I gotta start off.
I was so spellbound by this Netflix show, Mindhunter.
The whole idea that we didn't know about criminal profiling that much anyway at this time, and just to set up real quickly for everybody, they always were looking for the motive, right?
And the motive was you hate the husband or you're trying to steal money, right?
The obvious motives.
But these guys that you're talking about have different kinds of motives.
What got you into this?
What got me into it was I was at a very young age when I was recruited by the Bureau of the Air Force at 25 years of age.
Then went back to Quantico.
Then I was assigned to the Detroit office.
And I was always interested in trying to understand if I'm arresting a fugitive, I want to know where he went.
Was there anything I could see in his background that would help us apprehend him sooner?
But it was Super Bowl Sunday in 1972, and we were going to arrest a couple hundred guys in Detroit, organized crime figures, hit men.
And I was going to arrest three that day, again, 25. And one of the first people I arrested, he looked like Paul Newman, a nice, good-looking guy.
And I got him in the car, and I always like to talk.
I like to talk and learn.
I want to learn from them.
And I had him cuffed.
And I said, Frank, man, I said, what's with you?
Every couple of years, it seems like we're arresting you, the state police is arresting you, the local police.
And he says, man, you don't get it, kid.
I said, what are you talking about?
It was raining that day, and he looks over to the right side of the pane of glass, and he said, you see those two raindrops over there?
I said, yeah, what about it?
He says, I bet you the one on the left gets down to the pane of glass before the one on the right.
So I said, okay, let's go, man.
I'll bet you in the back.
So...
Sure enough, he wins the raindrop race.
And he says, you see what I'm talking about, kid?
And I said, what?
He beat me in a raindrop race, right?
And he said, no, man.
He says, look, we don't need a Super Bowl.
All we need are two raindrops.
We are who we are.
And you are not going to change us, Douglas.
You're not going to change us.
The FBI, I don't care who you're talking about.
It's within us.
It's within, you know, our brain, our soul.
The thrill-seeking?
Right.
And it was just something where they just, it's thrill-seeking and it's power that they have and the We have control over others.
And so I always wondered, because I was interested in the behavioral science, if I could make it back to Quantico, would I be able to apply this to violent offenders?
So when I came back now, at 32 years of age, I was a SWAT team member, a sniper on the SWAT team, a hostage negotiator.
I already had a couple of advanced degrees.
I was beginning a doctorate.
And I went back, and I sat in back a class, and just like in the Mindhunter series, was auditing.
And I see these instructors, they're older than me, but they're getting their facts wrong, and the students are challenging them.
They're challenging their facts.
Amen.
I worked the case.
I worked the case.
You're wrong.
So I'm supposed to be auditing these.
I'm going to be up in front of this class pretty soon.
What can I do to accelerate my learning?
So we had these road schools in those days.
Two weeks at a time, you're on the road.
You could be a week in Boise, Idaho, then you go on to LA and train the LA people.
Why are they called road schools?
Because it was just Rose School's term that we used in the FBI. You've got to go out and teach.
Rather than teach at Quantico now, we're going to send you out there and you're going to go to the local academies, police academies.
So I told my partner, I said, Matt, let's go into the penitentiary.
Let's see if these people will talk to us.
Let's see if Charles Manson or Ed Kemper or Sirhan Sirhan or James Earl Ray...
If they'll talk, he's like, you're crazy, man.
You're crazy.
Let's see.
These guys are probably bored and whatever.
So, went in.
Started going to the penitentiary.
Didn't ask for bureau permission.
When the bureau found out about it, what the hell are you doing?
Going in, doing these kind of interviews.
Well, that part of the story is true.
I thought they made that up.
No, no.
That's all true.
Oh, did you even know you were doing this?
No.
That makes a lot of balls.
And when you saw my office in the basement, my office was 60 feet underground, 10 times deeper than dead people, I would tell people.
It was 60 feet under.
So that's exactly true.
What are you doing at?
It should be just like a dragnet or whatever.
And then we...
I teamed up with Dr. Ann Burgess, who's the Wendy character in the Mindhunter.
The Boston University professor?
Right.
But she's a forensic nurse.
She's not a psychologist.
And she didn't teach us how to do the interviews, these interrogations, whatever we were doing.
She helped us develop this computerized instrument, a 57-page computerized instrument.
We did it as a team covering the victim, covering the crime, the offender, the pre-offense behavior, post-offense behavior, criminal history, all these different things.
And that's what she did.
But I didn't ask her, how should I go interview Manson?
And then now we finally got approval.
We got the grant.
They're showing on television.
The backstory is different, Dr. Oz.
The backstory, when I came back, I was married, had one child.
And this is really kind of funny because my wife's been a schoolteacher for 47 years.
And I live in Fredericksburg, a small community.
And we're watching the first show because we hadn't seen it.
And by the first show, it was a little violent.
By the second show, there's some sex in one of the...
Right.
And she's trying to teach him something.
Is that supposed to be me?
My wife tells me.
I said, well, sure as hell isn't me.
This is Hollywood.
I've seen this part here in this show.
It's not me.
Oh, this is embarrassing.
I live in a...
You're proud.
Yeah, I know, yeah.
Yeah, so...
So we started doing the interviews, and then the cases started rolling in.
So I got the first year, it was like 50, and cops are coming in.
Now you're starting to be like E.F. Hutton.
When you talk, people are listening, and a young, young, young guy, you know, full of vigor here.
And so the cases are coming, and then every year they start 50. Now it's 100, 150. By the time I retire, it'll be 1,000 cases.
But meanwhile, what's happening to me, and you saw it in the Minot show, is when Kemper grabbed me.
Kemper never grabbed me.
Like that.
But what was happening to me was...
Just to set up, sorry.
So Kemper's 6'9", huge person.
300 pounds.
And he lifts up the character who's playing you, and you feel the fear of having someone like that control you.
Until then, Kemper's been this incredibly charismatic, kindly guy that you sit down and have...
In fact, the cops that were...
who arrested him couldn't believe it was him because they were all friends with him, personal friends.
So back to the reality.
Yeah, so the...
He didn't really grab you.
He didn't grab me.
But what was happening to me, I was beginning to get burned out.
I was getting burned out in the job.
It was the nature of the work and then the volume of the work And then dealing with the victims, in some cases, like in the current book, The Killer Across the Table, where the mother, Mrs. Delisandre, wants me to go through all the details of what happened to her daughter.
How was her daughter killed?
Did my daughter fight, tell me about the bruising and all that?
And it is emotionally devastating for me.
And so here I was up in New York City in 1983.
I was in here, up here in November, training several hundred police from all over the area.
And during my presentation, I thought I was having a heart attack.
I thought, I'm thinking of these cases I got to do.
I just came back from England on the Yorkshire Ripper case.
I got to go up to Alaska where a man named Hanson is abducting women and flying them up into the wilderness, stripping them down naked and hunting them down like wild animals.
I got to deal with that.
I got to deal with the Green River murder case and just other cases you don't even know about.
I had this anxiety attack and I'm thinking, oh man, regroup dogs, man, regroup, regroup.
And no one probably caught it.
But I was able to regroup, came back to Quantico, took out income protection insurance, more life insurance.
I thought at 38, I may be dying here.
And the day I leave to go to Seattle to train some of these young agents who they assigned to me to train, I go second by my wife twice.
I go out there and tremendous...
Pain in the right side of my head.
And I tell the agent, I think I'm getting the flu.
I think I'm getting the flu.
So look, this is what you have to do.
It's Tuesday.
I'll see you Friday.
We'll head back to Washington, D.C. That night, the last thing I remember, I'm falling and I'm collapsing and my head hits the floor and I have a not disturb sign on the hotel room.
So you spent a couple of days there.
Yeah, I spent several days on the floor.
When they kicked down the door, My heartbeat was 220. My body temperature was 107. And they said when they took me to the emergency room, my right temporal lobe was bleeding.
And every couple of minutes, they said my body just started shaking, shaking, trembling.
It was diagnosed as viral encephalitis, but they said my immune system was just so low.
There's lots more when we come back.
While you're trying to crack these cases, you're on death's door for a while and It takes you out of...
Five months, I would say.
How did that change...
You.
You went from being the nation's premier profiler to someone who'd face death and come back.
It made me a good leader for the people that were going to be working for me.
Because when I began to see signs of burnout for them, I went to stress psychologists.
And when I see that, I would break FBI rules and let them go home.
And it was always a battle for me to balance my life.
I would actually...
It sounds kind of morbid.
I would go to the cemetery, this Veterans Cemetery, where I was going to be buried on that day just to kind of look around to see who my neighbors would have been here.
And so anytime I start where I can no longer balance the life where you're struggling, I was running to the point of exhaustion.
I was drinking too much, and I come home, you try to decompress.
You go to a room, and before you can meet the children, it does affect you personally, your interaction with your family.
I'd be lying to you if I say you're in bed with your wife and...
Some amorous, you know, thing you perhaps are going to do.
But just that day you're working some vicious lust murder case, it affects you.
And you wake up, you may have nightmares from this.
How do you process all of that?
I mean, is there an, like, in the FBI therapist?
Yeah, I went to, and they said I was burning the candle at both ends, and that...
But it's bigger than that.
It's like Mehmet has a burn scandal at both ends.
The surgeon, he's working really hard, many hours a day, but he's not confronted by the darkness, that side of It's humanity that most of us just try to avoid.
Just to pursue that for a second, I think you can answer this in this context.
What makes a killer?
Is evil real?
Does true evil exist?
Because that would be the thing that would keep me up at night, that would mess me up from getting back engaged with my kids if I had faced something that I thought was all around us.
That means we're all at risk.
Yeah.
It's almost, you're talking about a nature-nurture type of thing, too?
I mean, they're evil people, but I just don't believe there's an evil gene.
I think there are certain things we know, inherited addiction, impulsive behavior.
Right.
These people that you interviewed, the Kempers, the BTKs, were they made evil?
Yes.
They were.
They came from, and even in here, in the book now.
The Killer Across the Table, by the way, a wonderful book that John wrote with Mark Olshiker.
Yeah.
Yeah, so you see this in the background.
In fact, one of the guys in here, he was a guy.
Two years ago, they rescued a woman in a storage container in South Carolina and got to interview him in depth.
When he was 15, he raped a 14-year-old girl.
But his background is classic, and he wants me to tell him about, you know, why.
Why do I do the things that I did?
He killed four people in a motorcycle shop.
A case I was down speaking at a university and the cops came up and I did an analysis and then they didn't take my analysis.
They should have because I told them the killer is a disgruntled customer and he's in the files and they rather focused in on a guy who found the bodies, thought that his behavior, you know, was weird.
But he's asking me to tell him about his background.
I said, your background is very, very typical.
It doesn't surprise me what happened.
You were born into this world.
Your mother really didn't want anything to do with you.
She abandoned you.
She was running around with other men.
You had a family member that was sexually abusing you as well.
Your dad wanted nothing to do.
He's a biological dad.
So that your parents break up.
Your mother remarries, remarries.
You go out to visit your biological dad in Tempe, Arizona.
And you don't have much of a relationship.
So at 15 years of age, you rape a 14-year-old girl.
And they send you not to a juvenile prison.
They send you to a man's prison for 15 years, 30 years.
And you're a smart guy, Todd.
And you go back...
You go back to South Carolina where you pick up two degrees.
You pick up a real estate license, a broker's license.
You end up owning a real estate company.
You also have a private pilot's license, but you've got this one problem.
If someone does you wrong, you've got to retaliate.
And just like you retaliated to the people that sold you that motorcycle, In 2002, you waited months and months and months.
You were angry with them because you crashed that motorcycle because you didn't know how to ride the motorcycle.
And you also found out in your belief that they stole that motorcycle because it was a chop shop and you wanted revenge.
But you waited and waited and waited.
And then you went in to stay.
And you went in and you killed four people.
And his name was in the indices, in the file.
The cops stopped.
And they would have found out he was a registered sex offender.
He has this criminal history here.
And he went on to kill.
And then he went on to abduct this girl and When the police rescued her in a storage container.
So the backgrounds, and I said, I don't forgive you.
I know what happened, but it's free will, and you were able to make these choices.
You made the wrong choices, but you knew right from wrong.
You knew the nature and consequences of your actions, and you screwed up, Todd.
You screwed up, and now you've got to pay, but...
Smart guy, really smart, a smart individual.
It seems like there's a sexual element, some kind of sexual abuse or at least dysfunction in a lot of these cases.
Is that a correct rating of that?
Right.
There's always some type of another guy in here, Donald Harvey, who killed close to 100 hospital patients as an orderly.
In fact, just the other day, I don't know if you saw it in Germany.
I saw that.
400. 400. Yeah, a nurse.
A nurse did the same thing Harvey did here.
Nurses, you know, they're the only ones there with the patient at two in the morning.
They can inject you with all kinds of things.
Plus, you see, typically we deal with predators, you know, like the bun days that go out and hunt.
But here, you don't have to do the hunting.
Your victims are right there.
That's right.
And so the...
They're there.
They can kill him.
They won't do autopsies on him because he died of old age, even though he's maybe given him more morphine than he needs.
It's cyanide.
So what happened in the U.S. nurse's case?
What made him an evil genius?
With him...
And he was really charismatic.
He was real charismatic.
A lot of these guys are real charismatic.
I make them real comfortable so they feel comfortable with me.
But he came into this world.
He was pretty smart.
He was smart in school, but he was sexually assaulted when he was four years of age by an uncle and then sexually assaulted by a neighbor.
And then...
Interesting with him, he would later then pretty much extort them to get things out of them.
He'll continue the sex as he got older, but he's got a black male limb.
But the thing about it, with the first killing, he went in this service and attempted suicide.
And they release them.
He works in a hospital, and the first person who he kills, and they all loved him.
They thought he was the greatest guy in the world.
He's there to change the bedding, and the patient defecated in bed.
As he reaches in to clean and change the sheets, the patient pushes feces in his face.
So what he will say is, you know, he got angry at the patient and all this, and he And he says, well, they should have known better.
They shouldn't have put me there.
So he kills her.
And he's calling himself, he kills him, he calls himself the angel of death.
I said, wait, Paul.
I said, Harvey, I said, this is an angel of death.
This is not a mercy killing.
It's not a mercy killing.
You put a catheter into this man.
And then after you put the catheter in, you got a clothes hanger, which is straightened out, and you rammed that coat hanger through that catheter, and this man, you know, bled to death.
Well, yeah, he said, yeah, that's not really a mercy.
And then you killed some neighbors that you didn't like.
You were poisoning them, and you were then poisoning your boyfriend, because he was running around with guys in the park on Mondays, and you decided on Sundays you'll start poisoning him so that he won't run around in parks.
And they said, well, yeah, you're right.
But it's interesting, the way they talk, it's just so nonchalant.
There's no remorse.
So there's no prefrontal cortex dysfunction?
There's no trauma?
I mean, people who have head injuries...
Well, he was dropped on his head a couple of times as a kid.
He was dropped.
Is there a part of it?
Because they don't seem to...
You're having this very matter-of-fact discussion.
I can't imagine having a discussion like that with anybody.
Yeah.
But you're commenting on, well, you killed him, but it really wasn't a mercy killing.
I mean, that's not discussions we normally have.
There's something a little wrong there.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
There's something wrong there.
I mean, but they're not insane.
You know, there's premeditation there.
He was trained in the morgue.
He ended up having relations with the technician that's more in the morgue.
And the mortician was telling him how if you kill people, you know, put plastic.
Don't use just a sheet because the fibers will show up, you know, be certain marks.
So put a plastic on it first.
Then you can put a pillow over the face.
And he was having an affair with him.
So he was ridiculous.
Interesting.
But I did that interview with MSNBC. MSNBC, I came to New York.
They weren't happy with my interview.
Interview with him.
Or this other guy, Condro, who killed his friend's children.
And I think what they were surprised at, and I've seen some other shows where a guy like me, they'll come in like a real hard-nosed, tough guy with a growling kind of face.
I'm not that way.
I'm not that way at all.
And so I'm asking, for example, Harvey about animal torturing.
Because it's one of the things we find is that it's a pretty good predictor when you start saying, Acting out animal cruelty, torturing of animals, picking out something weak and vulnerable, and then later on they progress weak and vulnerable.
They'll go to vulnerable people, drug addicts, prostitutes, elderly people here.
But, you know, it was, what they didn't like about me was that I would kind of smile with them.
Like, I asked Harvey, you know, what all did you kill?
He said, well, I killed this, I killed this chicken.
And, well, that's, you're on a farm.
He says, yeah, but...
But this chicken here, my mother really liked this chicken.
She really didn't want me to have it.
I really wanted it.
So I killed it.
And then I killed a couple of cows.
Why did you do that?
A neighbor's cows.
I said, because I was angry with this guy.
So I cut his throat.
A couple of times, and they killed a few of his cows.
And he says, well, that's all I did.
And so I smiled, and I said, that's more than most of us.
So MSNBC sees me smiling.
They think I've got to be in this guy's face, and...
And the same thing when I interviewed Conjo.
This guy was killing his friend's children, like USOB. They ought to execute you.
No, I'm trying to get information.
And when you do an interview, sometimes you go...
Go on an interview.
You only want to know one thing.
There's one main thing.
Because you kind of know the case.
I go in there well prepared.
No notes.
No tape recorders like they're showing.
I want to maintain eye contact.
We're dealing with paranoid individuals who they don't trust necessarily you.
What are you doing with the notes?
What are you doing with the tape recorder?
I don't trust the correction.
So I go in there pretty well prepared.
You know, on the case and know the case pretty much backwards and forwards.
And they did not like that.
You said you want one question answered.
Yeah, the one question.
Okay, like Dennis Rader, the BTK Strangler, who I worked and I interviewed him.
Dennis, why did you stop?
Why did you stop for years at a time?
Because we in law enforcement think that maybe they moved on to another city.
Maybe they're incarcerated.
Maybe they died.
And what happened?
He said, well, on this day, I came home.
He was a compliance officer.
Another thing.
A lot of them are police buffs, so he can wear a badge.
They love that stuff.
Compliance officer.
The offense is infringing on your neighbor's property.
Move it.
Your grass is too high.
Cut it.
That type of thing.
So I come home this day, and he was into cross-dressing with his victim's clothing.
He was also into auto-eroticism.
Strangling.
Strangling.
And had a mask he would wear that he painted eyebrows, eyes and a mouth, lipstick and hair.
Was wearing that when his wife comes walking in.
What the hell is this?
I got a problem.
He said, you're damn right you got a problem.
His wife thought, what the hell is going on?
She didn't put two and two together knowing that he was the BTK strangler.
She calls the VA center to say, look, I have this friend whose husband is doing this.
What does that mean?
So they explained to her what that means.
Maybe whoever this person is will get over this.
That's what scared him.
He said, John, that's what scared me.
So I stopped.
But then I went back.
The killing again.
And then she caught me again another time wearing victims' dresses and doing this cross-dressing stuff.
And I stopped.
I stopped.
Well, when did you finally surface again?
Because then you went under for a lot of years.
Well, when there was a guy in Wichita that was going to write a book.
If anybody's going to write a book about me, it's going to be me.
So how in hell are you going to publish this book?
What are you doing?
And he says, well, I'll bury this book that may one day, 100 years from now, someone will realize that Dennis Rader was the BTK strangler.
He was just lucky, too.
He wasn't smart.
He had just 100 IQ, but stupid.
He starts communicating with the police, and he tells the police, and they're going back and forth through the newspaper, through codes, and he tells them, If I send you a floppy disk, will you be able to trace this floppy disk back to me?
And the police, what are they going to say?
No, of course.
We can't do something that's way too sophisticated.
So in comes the floppy disk, and they get the computer guys all around.
You know, they're ready to do all this scientific stuff.
Difficult.
No, you don't have to be.
We can do it.
Comes in.
He's sticking it in the computer.
Up pops.
Christ Lutheran Church.
Dennis Rader, president of the church.
Now they zero in on him.
Interesting what they did.
We have DNA from a murder he did of this family, Otero family, in 1979. And one of the victims, the one he was really after, a young girl, he brought down to the basement, tied her up.
And he masturbated on her.
So we have DNA, in that case, saved from 1979, or the police do.
What they do is they go to Kansas State University to find out where his daughter went to school.
She went there.
And they go into the clinic where she had a pap smear done.
And I didn't realize this.
They hang on to those for years and years, apparently.
No, and they got the DNA from that.
And they got the DNA. And so what?
So...
After they listen to him, listen to him.
All we can tell you, Dennis, is that the father of your daughter is the BTK Strangler.
Your daughter's father is a BTK strangler.
And he looks at that and hears that and he says, okay.
So then he proceeds to talk and he just spills his guts.
He doesn't care a thing about the victims.
What I didn't like about the case was when the prosecutor, she wanted to make a name for herself and he plea bargained.
And so they really didn't have to have him go to court to go through.
All he had to do was say, yes, I killed this person.
But she made him go through every case and all the specific details, which he loved.
He loved going through all these cases over and over again because this inadequate nobody was finally a somebody in his life.
And what is your motivation?
What is it about?
And I had an idea what it was.
He says, it's all about the rope, John.
And what he meant was that with the rope he was binding, bondage was the thing.
Bondage was more the selection of the victim, the hunt for the victim, and then the bondage.
And, of course, he asked the kill.
It is, and he had all these drawings, which I have, of what his fantasies were.
And he acted the fantasies out that he would draw.
But the difference is, with fantasy, with all these different kind of killers, is the fantasy is something that they are, the writer, the producer, their director, the actor, and it's perfect.
The fantasy is always perfect.
But the crime is never perfect.
It never works out that way.
So there's never this satisfaction for the perfect crime.
And so the beat goes on.
They're looking for more and they look for more victims.
More questions after the break.
So I've got a couple tapes, if it's okay.
What you're really good at is the actual interviews.
This is so riveting to me to understand how you get into this.
Most of us get caught up in the fact he killed 12 people.
I would have never thought to ask Dennis Rader why he stopped.
Of course, that's the perfect question to ask.
Charles Manson.
He's described as a showman.
And I'm just curious if he's different than how we today see him, at least on television.
So I'm going to play a short clip of one of Charles Manson's many interviews.
I'm going to listen to what he had to say when asked if he felt guilty.
So let's play the clip, please.
There's no need to feel guilty.
I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of.
Maybe I haven't done enough.
I might be ashamed of that for not doing enough.
For not giving enough.
For not being more perceptive.
For not being aware enough.
For not understanding.
For being stupid.
Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people.
Then I would have felt better.
Then when I felt like I really offered society something.
Yeah, that brings back flashbacks because he's very melodic when he speaks.
And when I did the interview with him, I made sure there was furniture in there because I knew...
I'm 6'2", he's 5'2".
I knew he was going to dominate me because he used to be on a George Spahn ranch and sit up on top of the rock and preach to his followers.
He wasn't really a big drug addict.
He would take just enough drugs just to get high.
But he used drugs to control his family, so-called family.
When he had sex with the members there, he would script them as if they were having sex with their father.
A lot of these kids who gravitated to the Ashbury were running away from home, their dad, the God Almighty Buck.
So he then took over being this father figure.
But he is not a serial killer.
I know Vincent Bugliosi was alive.
I didn't like the comments I made about him.
Because I thought even if he got out, I said, he probably, if he got out of prison, he's dead now.
But if he got out of prison, this was just a few years ago, he...
He wouldn't be committing crimes.
Vincent?
Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote, he was the prosecutor in the case against him and had the theory of the Helter Skelter.
And he preached that, Manson preached that, Helter Skelter, which was the white album of the Beatles.
And he interpreted that, that there's going to be a race war.
And there's going to be this race war between the blacks and the whites, won by the blacks, but we're going to come forward 144,000 strong with our dune buggies armed with machine guns and we'll wipe all of the blacks off and then we'll run the world.
It really was BS. I mean, he didn't really believe this stuff.
What he really wanted was sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
And he really was close to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, wanted to be in the band.
Dennis Wilson liked him because he was providing girls for him.
What he learned, he was this charismatic individual, very experienced.
He spent half of his life in prison.
So when he goes to hate Ashbury, these kids, they don't know anything about crime or anything at all.
He's able to know how to manipulate them.
But he got them to believe so much in this white album, this race war type of thing, that he lost control of.
Control of the group.
Unlike David Koresh, in Waco, Texas, David Koresh kept his people confined and were not able to leave the compound.
Same thing with Jim Jones in Guyana, 913 people killed that he takes down there and they drink the cyanide, you know, Kool-Aid.
So, but he is a master manipulator.
And, and, and I try to almost kind of sound like him, like the tape you just played going in.
Again, we didn't have notes or anything like that.
And he sat on top of a table dominating me.
The fact that he was, The funny part during the interview is when we were finished.
We interviewed him a few times over the years.
He says, you got to give me something.
You got to give me something.
What do you mean you got to give me something?
What do you want from me?
He said, those glasses.
You got those Ray-Bans?
I want those Ray-Bans.
What, do you want the Ray-Ban?
He says, because I gotta, they know, now I'm talking to the FBI. I gotta show I ripped you guys off, that I stole something from you, and that you're not even aware of, so I can go back there.
So we had to give him our nice Ray-Ban sunglasses so he could, you know, boast about it.
But he didn't, it's a lack of remorse in his comments.
I'm fascinated by all this background, but as you listen to him say that, Oh, yeah.
There's nothing.
Because, you see, he is the victim.
He is the victim of society.
And then he gets – so you have these really crazy kind of theories.
But then some of the stuff he's saying, him and I interviewed Squeaky Fromm and Sandra Good and interviewed them in West Virginia and down in Florida, you know, prison.
That thing was the – It was pollution and blue skies and clear water.
And what they're saying, I mean, I want blue skies and no pollution.
So some of the stuff they're saying, you know, you agree with.
It's just that, okay, Sandy, good.
You should not have extorted this nuclear power plant.
You screwed up there.
And Squeaky, you probably shouldn't have shot at Gerald Ford.
And that got you in prison.
That's how they ended up in prison.
Squeaky's still in prison.
Sandra Good is out of prison.
Is he pretty common for these types of criminals, serial murderers, this idea that they're a victim?
Yes.
I know you said the former guy wasn't insane, but he sounds pretty insane to me.
There's definitely a lack of cognition.
Yeah, IQ was 120. He's street smart.
He's not educated.
He's educated in the prison system his whole life.
And he was brought into his world.
His mother was a prostitute.
The father's name was Maddox for a while, and they would force him to wear women's clothing, girls' clothing, when he sent him to school.
And, of course, he was very, very tiny.
He was bullied upon.
Then he started acting out, again, the animal cruelty, committing now crimes of...
In burglaries and also we call it the Dyer Act.
He would steal, stolen cars.
But he became educated through the criminal system.
So he's just very, very, you know, knowledgeable.
Why is he called the Dyer Act?
I don't know why.
I forget why.
It was D-Y-E-R. It was stolen cars and the Bureau had worked.
These are taken across interstate lines.
What's the purpose of stealing a car?
Yeah.
Just the car, then sell it.
Sell it, make money.
Steal the car and make it, or just simply for transportation.
So there is a type.
These guys all kind of fall into the same pattern, it looks like.
Yeah, they're all different.
Some are a little bit different in the way they murdered.
David Berkowitz is more, up here in New York, was more of an assassination-style killing.
The son of Sam going after girls in lovers' lanes.
Well, speaking of different people, let me play one more tape.
This is from Ted Bundy.
Now, Ted, this is an interview right before his execution.
He's talking about what he felt the next day after his first murder.
This is important because one of the things that John Douglas has talked a lot about was that initial experience of what it felt like to get started.
To wake up in the morning and realize what I had done, and with a clear mind and all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact at that moment, absolutely horrified that I was capable absolutely horrified that I was capable of doing something like that.
He actually crazily, Charles Manson, most people would think of as a crazy person, although he's charismatic to his group.
Anybody charismatic, law student, handsome, and he seems like he actually had insight into what he had done criminally.
How do you compare the two?
He was able, again, it was the fantasy thing with him that started to develop.
And he didn't, everyone thinks he had such a great early childhood.
No, he was, his mother had him out of wedlock in like 1946.
And in those days, you know, they couldn't talk about stuff like that.
So they sent her away.
And little do you know, when he was growing up, they told him that his mother was his sister.
So that was his sister, and his grandparents were the ones to raise him.
And later on, he would find out about that upbringing.
He was...
He's the early childhood.
Again, he's still somewhat different, but he's able to, he says, to compartmentalize it.
It looks like he's getting ready to be executed here, and you don't have it here, but he will blame things.
He was speaking to this Reverend Dobbins at the time.
That pornography was the cause of his problems.
And then pornography was no longer satisfying.
So he wanted to go and act out the things that he was seeing in the magazine.
When they called me, they called me back to discuss this.
Because do you want to study him?
We can keep him alive.
Do you want to study him?
And he talked about the pornography.
And he said, no, no.
We see the pornography.
The pornography...
It fuels the fantasy.
It's not the cause of him to do these things.
But we pretty well have a good handle on Bundy.
We've interviewed him several times, and one of my agents in my unit went down, got pretty close to him, and was with him at the point when he got executed.
And I said, but we pretty well study him, so you can move on with the execution and carry this thing through.
A lot of people, when I do these interviews, they think, oh, man, you really feel for this guy.
I mean, this guy...
And the things that he did, I said, I mean, I'm feigning empathy I'm trying to get information.
Maybe I'm something wrong with me.
Maybe I said, if you're looking for a volunteer to pull the switch on this guy, Gary Heidnik in Philadelphia, who kept women in the pit of a basement, like in Silence of the Lambs, he was the guy I interviewed.
In fact, Leslie Stahl followed me in 60 minutes into the prison, and I coached the prosecution on that case.
But he had women in that prison.
In that basement of his, he would put women in there, fill the pit up with water, and get electric wire, and we were in shackles, and electrocute them, and he killed one, and this is pockets, I guess I can say this here, he ended up putting this victim in a meat grinder, or fed that victim to the other victims and as well as the dog that he had.
When I interviewed him, he doesn't care anything about that.
I said, I was treating the women nicely at birthday parties down there.
Now, you will say he's insane, right?
This guy is crazy.
He had over $600,000 in the bank that he invested in the stock market, and the stockbroker testified that Gary Heidnik was picking out his own investments here.
He also put cinder blocks around the windows in the basement so no one can hear the screams and yells and turn up the radios.
So if they start yelling, no one can hear that.
The only time I got to him, and again, once again, was with the mother.
It was the mother thing, bringing that up.
And he just went nuts.
He wanted to pull the mic from his shirt, and Leslie Stahl is there, and looking at this guy.
It's amazing.
And I've seen it so many times.
And somebody just did a review.
You probably look on your own books.
You'll see reviews.
I shouldn't look at them.
Even the good reviews.
Don't look at them.
There's a tendency to look.
You want to look.
So then I saw one.
This one, she gave me a three.
So I'm reading it.
And she doesn't like what I have to say in her book.
This is about the killer across the table, your book.
The killer across the table, where, like I'm saying, it's a parental thing, and more times than not, it's coming on the mother's side here.
I was so tempted to answer her, but I'm not.
But I felt like saying, so she gave the example, well, Mrs. D'Alessandro should not have sent her child out to, you know, to collect money for the box of cookies.
Oh, so we're going to blame the victims now.
We're going to blame the surviving victims.
Not the teacher at the house that she knocked, you know, on the door.
So we're going to blame everything on Mrs. D'Alessandro.
In fact, in those days, you could pretty much go, you know, go, yeah.
You should be allowed to.
That's the thing about victim shaming.
You should be allowed to.
Yes.
Whether you would do it or not in your family and how paranoid you are, that's your own personal decision.
Listen, John Douglas, unbelievable.
I've enjoyed hosting you on the show.
Oh, thank you.
That was great.
But I love hearing from the folks who were there.
Yeah.
If you have something else come up, give me a call.
Oh, I believe you.
The killer across table, wonderful book with lots of five-star ratings.
