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Feb. 8, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:49
Edition 518 - Dr Katherine Ramsland
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Very many thanks for all of your communications.
I'm hearing from more and more of you now and it's really marvelous to hear the stories of the way that a lot of you say this show has helped you through these difficult days of lockdown.
Perhaps it's given you mentally somewhere else to go during this period.
And I have to say, and I think I've said this before, that it works in reverse too, because when I'm doing this, which is the thing that I love, then I'm not thinking about the awful state the world has managed to get itself into.
And I'm not worrying about how am I personally going to get out of this, and all of us.
You know, it is a chance to think beyond the present.
And, you know, that's what you tell me.
So thank you very much.
I've had some wonderful emails lately.
And thank you for them.
When you get in touch through my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, please tell me who you are, where you are, and the way that you use this show.
I think it is remarkable in this last year.
None of us knew that it would turn out to be a year and more as it's turning out to be now.
The way that we've come together in this period, I think has been pretty remarkable.
You know, we formed a community, and I thank you very much for that.
You know, if I ever doubted what I was doing, and believe me, many times I have, I think I've doubted it an awful lot less lately.
You know, it's kept me going, and it's great to know that it's kept some of you going too.
So thank you very much indeed.
Thank you to Haley for booking the online guests, by the way.
Good of her to do that.
You know, we keep on going through these times.
Now, the topic on this edition of The Unexplained is a difficult one.
Sometimes they are.
You know, they're not all topics that are kind of neutral.
Sometimes the topics are difficult and disturbing, and this is one of those times.
We're going to talk about serial killers.
Now, some of the descriptions of the things that you will hear will not be pleasant.
So I want to put this just little caveat in, this warning, that if you are disturbed by such things, if they upset you, please skip this edition.
Don't listen to it.
And certainly this is not one for the kids.
If you are fascinated and feel that you'd like to expand your knowledge of the psychology and methods of such people, then this is a conversation that I think you might value.
I think.
Catherine Ramsland is an American author and professor of forensic psychology.
She has written a remarkable 60 books or more, upwards of a thousand articles, mostly in crime, forensic science, serial killers, that kind of thing.
She is and has been for a quarter of a century an expert in these things.
We're going to be talking about her new book, but also about her work in general on serial killers, what motivates them, how they're caught, and sometimes how they think they can't be caught.
In fact, a lot of times, as you will hear, how these people feel they can't be caught.
It's a chilling discussion.
It is not for the faint-hearted, so if you are squeamish and upset by such discussions, you know, please don't worry about it.
Just skip this one.
Let it go.
But if you want to learn about these things and the psychology behind such people and what we are doing to try and combat them, remove them from our society, then I think you may well be interested in what you are about to hear.
So Catherine Ramsland, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, thank you very much for being part of my show.
Theunexplained.tv is the place to go if you want to communicate with me.
You can follow the link and send me an email from there.
Don't forget, of course, to engage with the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And thank you very much if you've done that recently.
Let's get to the US now.
Catherine Ramsland.
So Catherine, thank you for standing by and hearing that.
How are you?
I'm fine.
It's been my work for the past 25 years.
So we can get into that, I think, now then.
You know, obviously it is vital we have such people as yourself, because otherwise, how will we ever understand the actions of people who kill?
What is the attraction of the work for you?
For me, I think it's simply that there are a lot of different motivations for serial murder and a lot of different developmental trajectories in people's lives.
So it's sort of an area where we don't have a lot of information.
Those of us who are in it tend to be pioneers in a way, and certainly in the much earlier days than now.
And we do need people who will take the time to take these cases apart and really look at the factors involved in what makes somebody into a serial killer.
There isn't any formula.
Each case has its own unique factors, but there are some common overlaps as well.
And so somebody needs to study them.
Right.
So I guess as Clint Eastwood once said in a movie, it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
Exactly.
That's how I feel.
I totally understand.
And I'm glad that you do because I don't think, even though my father was a cop, I don't think it's a job that I would be able to do at all.
Now, Catherine, I've been watching a series.
You may have been watching this yourself.
During these lockdown weeks, I'm having to find new things to divert me when I'm not actually working, which is a lot of the time.
It's a Netflix series called I Am a Killer, and it examines the cases of a number of people.
If you've seen this, you'll know what I'm talking about.
And I'm surprised in equal measure, not only at the people who are profiled, but also at my interest.
When I've watched one, I've got to watch another.
What do you think, for those of us, that's almost all of us, who would never even contemplate killing another, what is the fascination, do you think, for people like me?
Well, first of all, being able to watch somebody talk about the kinds of things they've done to other people is difficult, but television Shows like Netflix series give us a safe frame in which to get close to feelings of dread, feeling disturbed by what people do, watching someone, their demeanor as they talk about it, being horrified by it.
But it's still a safe place for us because even though they seem to be talking to us, they're at a very safe distance.
So part of it's that, part of it's the puzzle of a person's life.
How do they, not only how did they get to the point where they could do these things, but how did they develop these attitudes about it?
And in some instances, how are they able to pass as normal while also harboring a very dark proclivity that they don't seem to have any remorse about?
And also, I'm surprised, shocked, and chilled by, in many of the cases in that series, and of course, these people are not serial killers we're talking about, but they are killers, the ability to be able to justify and explain what they did.
A seemingly inexplicable thing in most of the cases in that series gets an explanation from the person who perpetrated it.
Well, I think moralities can be very slippery.
And I think we're seeing that in politics as well, as we have probably all of human existence, how slippery it is if somebody wants to justify what they've done so that they can feel okay about themselves.
It's not hard to find a moral theory that will support that.
So it's not just criminals.
I think we all have that propensity to find a way to justify things we've done that maybe we wouldn't otherwise not be proud of.
And it's simply a human ability to do it.
For most of us, there are checks and balances built in at childhood, very, very young.
What if they say, give me a child until he or she is seven, and I will show you the man or woman?
In most cases, it seems to me that attitudes are formed at that kind of age.
And for almost all of us, there are boundaries, and those boundaries are pretty quickly established.
What do you think it is?
And this is probably too general a question, but let's ask it anyway.
What do you think it takes for somebody not to have those boundaries?
I think the boundaries are often guarded by a depth of emotional commitment.
It's not just about what's right and wrong, but it's about how we feel about it and especially how it reflects our own sense of who we are, our sense of integrity.
So, for example, Dennis Raid of the BTK serial killer, whom I worked with for five years on his autobiography, talked about how he always felt, even though he's kind of wandering away from shore, he always felt as if the shore was there to get back to.
In other words, the moral ground.
And then one day he looked and the shore wasn't there anymore.
And it just was a gradual process.
And I think that's exactly the idea is if you don't have an emotional commitment to holding those, holding the line, it's not that hard to cross.
And once crossed and you don't feel particularly bad about it or you feel justified for some reason, it isn't that hard to keep going.
So it's incremental in the same way that people will justify on a trivial level shoplifting or people may justify cheating on a partner.
It's an incremental thing and it involves adjustments to morality that people make or find themselves making.
Exactly.
And there are things you would say you'd never do, but then a situation arises, you find yourself doing it, and then we have ways to make that be okay in the context.
We tend to think of serial killing.
And before I want to get into a number of the cases that you discuss in the book, the book that we're talking about, I think it's important to establish whether the serial killer per se is something that is a modern phenomenon within modern times, within the last couple of hundred years.
Is that so?
That is not so.
We have serial murder cases dating back to ancient Rome.
And I think there's a lot of cases that probably have never been documented because it depends a lot on the law enforcement system in any given country, in any given era, and what kinds of records they're keeping and what kinds of investigations they're doing.
And we certainly didn't have forensic science back in 1400 or something like that.
So it's very hard to say how many, but certainly we know they've been around way back and all the records will show that there are cases of serial murder.
And do the punishment regimes, the strength of the punishment regimes, whether a country has capital punishment or doesn't have capital punishment, whether a country has really, really long prison terms, possibly indefinite prison terms, does that make a difference to people's propensity to do this?
Well, I mean, first of all, a serial killer isn't a criminal type.
It's a description of behavior.
So there are a lot of differences in the psychology of these different killers.
Some might feel deterred by some of this, but most of them have what we call a narcissistic immunity, where they think even if there is capital punishment or life in prison, it's not going to affect them because they're not going to get caught.
Right.
So they think that they won't get caught, so they're not going to the chair.
Right.
So that's not a deterrent.
So a lot of this is the mindset.
And it doesn't really matter.
I think you're saying to me what the punishment regime in a particular state may be, a particular country may be, that's not going to affect these particular people.
I think it's rare.
In some cases, you will find that because they're not all the same, but overall, it isn't going to affect them.
So how come that message Then, if that is so, hasn't really got through in the United States where there are still states and where, in fact, before the end of the term of the previous president, a number of people went to their deaths.
How come that message hasn't got through to every state of the United States?
Well, we might call ourselves the United States, but I'm not so sure.
We have a lot of differences from one area of the United States to another in terms of how people feel about capital punishment or life imprisonment or crime in general.
So it's just different.
Some people think it's about retribution.
Some people think it's about community safety.
Some people think it's, you know, there are any number of reasons why a certain state would continue to have capital punishment.
But even at that, just because they have it doesn't mean the governor at that time is going to sign any orders for it.
There are a lot of states that where they might have it, but they don't use it or haven't used it in a long time.
And it's slowly going out.
You know, a lot less states have it than used to.
But we have so many different attitudes in this country about, you know, from conservative to liberal, as you do in your country.
So I think it's very hard to make a generalization about why do we still have this.
And, you know, in some cases, the things that persuade the public that it's not a good idea to be putting killers to death are the mistakes that are made.
You know, because mistakes, if you make a mistake and you've executed somebody, you can't bring them back.
We had a case in the United Kingdom, and just very quickly, this was, I think it was it, late 50s, early 60s, of a guy shouting to an accomplice.
Police had arrived at the scene of a crime.
I think it was a burglary of some kind, theft of some kind.
And one shouted to the other who had a gun, let him have it.
And that was the, you might even remember this famous celebrated case.
And those words were argued about in the trial.
And the words, let him have it, can either mean, let him have the gun, give it to him, and let's make this over, or let him have it, shoot him.
And of course, a police officer got shot and killed.
And a man for saying those words was hanged in the United Kingdom, one of the last people to be hanged in this country.
And, you know, that is often used as a reason why you shouldn't be putting people to death for crimes of this nature, for killing people, because if you make a mistake, you cannot reverse the mistake.
Well, we definitely have innocent people who have been executed in our country.
And that's in part because we use the word science to cover techniques that have never been scientifically verified.
It really is going to depend a lot on juries, the makeup of the jury, the kinds of experts and how they come across, the attitudes of a particular area.
There's a lot that goes on with that.
And yes, that's true that you can't erase these mistakes.
And that is a good argument against capital punishment.
Although, you know, I have to say I'm a human being, and sometimes I read news stories about people who willfully kill.
And sometimes I think those people ought to be put to death for it.
And I think a lot of human beings will have that feeling.
But as we say, you could say I agree with capital punishment in principle, but not in practice, basically, because in practice, we're really bad at it.
Well, no, it does.
I mean, that encapsulates it beautifully.
And I will use those words again.
Thank you for those.
I've never thought of it that way.
And the case that I'm talking about was 1953.
And it was, of course, the famous case of Derek Bentley, a man who was hanged wrongly.
They made a movie out of this.
And, of course, this was used as a reason that the death penalty in the United Kingdom was a bad thing because this man was, you know, hanged for the wrong reason.
And we can't bring him back now.
I think it was useful to have that conversation.
I'd like, if I may, to unpick some of the cases in your book then, Catherine, next.
Sure.
Okay, we're talking with Catherine Ramsland.
She has studied the psychology and the modus operandi, I guess you could call it, of a variety of serial killers, including some of America's most notorious and also some of this country's most notorious, it has to be said.
And Catherine, I suppose, just while we're talking generalities, before we just dive into the specific cases, is it usually true that the kind of person who does this comes from a deeply damaged background and they then self-justify the acts in which they become involved?
That's, I'm not sure, I wouldn't say it's usually true.
I mean, we have a variety of backgrounds from which they come, and we certainly have serial killers who don't really have much damaging stuff in their background at all.
But we do have serial killers who've had head injuries, who've been subjected to child abuse or deprivation.
But one of the things that I think is really important is the role of perception.
Because sometimes people overreact to something in their environment and think that it's abuse when it's simply a parent doing ordinary discipline.
But they think it's abuse, so they get angry and they hold that anger in, and then they use it against people.
So we can't discount the role of perception as part of the way an individual processes their upbringing and whatever circumstance they find themselves in, because sometimes that leads to developing these ideas of entitlement, resentment, anger, that they're not getting what they think they deserve.
Society is to blame for this.
Their parents are to blame for this.
So sometimes it really is about somebody just overinterpreting what's really happening to them and making that into A big issue that develops into an attitude that they don't care what they do to other people.
I didn't study a lot of psychology.
I was a politics graduate, but we did do a little bit of psychology as it relates to the way people blame political actors, maybe politicians or whoever it might be, for the bad things in their lives.
And, you know, when it gets to the stage where people protest and maybe protest turns in some countries and some circumstances violent.
And I seem to remember the hierarchy was that they lash out at the person responsible if they can find that person and that person's near, at the nearest person to that person if they can't do that.
And then if they can't do that, they'll lash out at just anybody.
Does that play into this?
Well, sometimes they won't lash out at the person responsible because that will lose them something that they need.
So they'll lash out at a symbolic person.
For example, Ed Kemper, Edmund Kemper, would pick up hitchhiking college co-eds and murder them, dismember them, behead them, et cetera.
And all of his anger was really aimed at his mother, who finally was one of his last two victims.
But for, you know, for a couple of years, he really couldn't do anything to her because he lived with her.
So he needed her, but he was angry at her.
And so other people paid the price.
And in that case, and that case probably has parallels with many other cases, were there not signs there for people to see?
In that case, there were signs because when he was 15, he murdered his grandparents and had a very peculiar attitude about it.
He just didn't like his grandmother, the way she was talking to him, so he killed her to see what it felt like to kill.
And then he killed his grandfather to protect him against discovering that his wife had just been murdered by their grandson.
So yeah, he had a lot of red flags right away.
And he got away with that for a while, presumably, obviously.
Well, he didn't get away with it.
I mean, he turned himself in, and then he went to a facility where he was treated as a juvenile.
But then he learned, unfortunately, because he was very bright, they let him look at all the psychological testing that they were doing.
So he memorized all the answers and knew what they were expecting.
When it came time for them to evaluate him, he knew exactly what to say.
And at the time when they declared that he was safe, he had the head of a victim in his car outside.
Oh, my Lord.
I mean, just to say to my listeners, some of the details of the cases that we'll be talking about, of course, are unpleasant and are unsavory.
If you are upset by such things, then this is not the hour of the show to listen to.
But, you know, this is chilling and fascinating in the same moment.
So I was going to ask you this later, but I think this is a good time to ask it now, Catherine.
It seems to me that these people often have a quotient of intelligence of savvy over and above most of us.
No, that's actually a myth about serial killers, and it comes from a series of interviews the FBI did back in the 1980s when they basically found articulate, incarcerated serial killers who were willing to talk to them.
And so it seemed as if serial killers in general were more, were smarter than the average person, but that's only because they picked the smarter ones to talk to.
So in general, now that we know a lot more and have had done a lot more testing, their IQ is all over the map.
But their street savvy is really what we're talking about.
What I call criminal intelligence is different, and obviously that would be higher than ordinary people.
But their IQs, you know, a lot of them are really ordinary or even below average.
But the man that you've just been talking about, his ability to realize the questions that I've had sight of will be useful to me in the future.
I better memorize those.
I mean, you have to be pretty smart.
Yeah, he was.
Bundy was above average.
I mean, we have some that are above average, but in general, serial killers don't show that to be true.
But some are.
You talked about Ted Bundy, very famous American serial killer, multiple victims.
He was one, and there are a number of people in this book of this kind.
You describe him as being seen as charismatic.
He was charismatic.
He had a level of confidence that persuaded people that he knew what he was talking about, that he had abilities he didn't really have, and that he had that, what I mentioned, the narcissistic immunity, the sense that they couldn't touch him, that even if they caught him, they wouldn't be able to convict him.
But even if they did, they wouldn't be able to execute him.
He just had that, he carried that attitude throughout, all the way up to the end when he was executed, really kind of not quite believing it was happening to him.
So the charisma had a lot to do with his sense of, he knew that people viewed him as larger than life.
And so he kind of embodied that.
He was a chameleon.
He would be whatever it took to present himself in the ways that he thought people expected.
And so he played people all the time based on what he knew would get them to respond to him.
So he was always manipulating, always watching for his advantage.
It's an horrific case.
I mean, this man raped and murdered numerous women and girls in the 70s.
And he had the brass neck, as we say here.
He had the front to be able to tough this out.
He denied it consistently for a very long period, as you said.
Yes.
His method was, as you say, to use his charisma, so-called.
Apparently, he would gain the trust of victims, approach them in public places.
He would maybe say that he was injured or, you know, there was a problem that he had, or he would impersonate some authority figure.
Then he'd knock them unconscious.
Then he'd take them somewhere, rape them, and strangle them.
So, you know, this man was absolutely calculating to the nth degree.
Yeah, and even to the point where he fixed up his Volkswagen Beetle to be able to get the passenger side seat out when he needed to.
He had a crowbar and handcuffs.
He had a murder kit always right there with him.
So he was always ready.
He always figured out what did he need to do to approach somebody.
And he used different things.
And some of the things he used, he learned in psychology class because he was a psychology major in college.
And he learned from some of the psych experiments what would get people to buy into a story in which he could dupe them and take advantage of them.
If he was a psychology major, why did, I mean, hindsight is 2020, I know that.
If he was a psychology major, then how come those educating him could not see signs that there was something amiss?
Well, first of all, it was 1960s when he was a college student.
We didn't know, we weren't even using the phrase serial killer at the time.
And typically, college professors are not looking for red flags.
I was an exception.
They're not typically looking for red flags in their students of are you a serial killer?
So why would they have seen it?
He was also very good at a facade, a facade of being a nice guy, a caring person, intelligent.
Even though he was skipping classes, a lot of people thought that he was a smart law student who knew what he was doing.
He basically admitted he couldn't understand anything in the law classes he took, but that's not the way he comported himself.
He acted as if he had it all together.
And he was able to play on expectations.
This is the predator's advantage, no matter what kind of predation they're doing, is to watch for what people expect, play into it to put them at their ease, and then exploit that to their own advantage.
And so if people are delivered what they expect, and this would go for all of us, so we have to absolve anybody who might have come into contact with him, I think.
If you get what you expect and the person looks okay, you are not going to look any further.
Correct.
And they'll tell you a story that's completely false.
But most of us don't go do research on everybody we meet and the stories they tell.
We accept a lot of things at face value.
That's just a tendency of ours.
We relax.
We tend to trust people.
But funny, I mean, one of the single survivor talked about the reason she was on her guard is he walked up and pretended to be a cop, wanted to, he thought someone was trying to break into her vehicle, but he smelled of alcohol.
And so that kind of made her feel like, that's so odd.
And then he was driving this Volkswagen Beetle, even though he claimed he was sort of undercover.
She thought that was odd.
So she kept her guard up, and that's how she was able to get away when he did make his move.
But he typically made his move very quickly and to the point where there just was no defense.
So getting the trust involved and then being ready to move on it really fast.
You did a lot of work on a case called the BTK case.
This was Dennis, as you mentioned before, Dennis Rader.
He was known as, well, the abbreviation was for blind torture kill.
And this sounds absolutely appalling, but this guy had a seven-year reign of terror, didn't he?
Ten people.
Well, more than seven.
He started in 74 and he ended in 91, 1991.
And then actually in 2004, he targeted an 11th victim and was ready to go, but got hindered in that and then got arrested.
So he operated for a long time, but he was not caught.
From the time he first killed, which is a family of four, it was 30 years before he was arrested.
30 years.
Yeah.
And obviously this case you know a lot about.
How can that be?
I mean, that has to be a big reflection on his ability to evade capture.
It wasn't, well, more luck than the brilliant ability.
He was a family man.
He was the vice president and then the president of his church council.
He had a regular job.
He was an ordinary guy.
There was nothing about him that would make anyone think that this was the BTK killer.
So he knew how to play.
And what he calls it is cubing.
And I think this is a very good concept.
Some people call it compartmentalizing.
But if you think of a cube and on each side, there's a sort of a persona, like a family man, a thief, a serial killer, good father, a churchgoer, you know, and whatever context is needed,
he can slip that face of the cube into that situation and pass as a good father or, you know, a praying member of his church, et cetera.
So he knew how to work the situations so that it protected the thing that he really wanted to do, which was not just murder, but he did breaking and entering, foyerism.
You know, he's constantly watching people, looking in their windows and whatnot, and breaking into a lot of houses.
He actually had about 55 projects, is what he called them, projects.
Any of them could have resulted in murder if the people had come home when he was in their house.
So he was very methodical about what he did.
Extremely methodical, but also lucky.
I can't emphasize that enough because he made a lot of mistakes, too.
Did the finger of suspicion ever point at him?
I say that for a reason, because as you know, we have the most notorious serial killer in my lifetime, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who died recently and his appalling reign in the north of England, late 70s up to 1980.
Peter Sutcliffe was on the police radar a number of times.
He was interviewed by police nine times, and it was a piece of routine police work in the end that got him.
Was this man the BTK?
Was he ever under suspicion?
He wasn't under suspicion by anyone in official circles, but his wife actually saw a few things.
She noticed that he misspelled words in the same way as some of the notes that the BTK killer had sent.
But she still didn't think he was the guy by any means.
She just thought that was weird.
And he had a way to explain it very quickly, and she was willing to accept that.
But he wasn't ever on anyone's radar as this is the guy, never.
Most of these people get caught in the end.
The Zodiac Killer, they made a movie out of that one, in and around San Francisco, 1960s, 1970s, played the police a merry dance, didn't he, for a very long time, sending them notes, taunting them.
The Zodiac Killer effectively got away with it.
Seems to have so far.
I'm not going to say completely because we said that about the Green River killer, and he's been caught.
What was the Green River killer?
Same with the Golden State Killer.
There were people who've said he'll never be caught.
He was caught.
And what kind of operatives were they?
The Golden State Killer, Joseph D'Angelo, he first started as a breaking and entering guy.
He had a whole series of, in California, a whole series of breaking and entering.
Then he switched that out to rape.
He was an East Area rapist.
And then he began to murder single people and couples.
And so they put all three of those different series of crimes together as the golden state killer.
And they used genealogical DNA analysis to finally identify him after many years.
So he started in the 70s as well, just like Rader, and was only identified in 2018.
So do you think the Zodiac killer is so far unidentified?
There have been many theories.
And I think recently there was analysis of one of the cryptic notes that that person sent that appeared to take us somewhere.
So you think that the Zodiac killer may one day be identified?
I think that's likely because we do have fingerprint and some DNA, although I know that the Zodiac people who are fanatical about the case will claim, oh, that's all been corrupted.
None of that works.
It's like the Jack the Ripper case.
As I'm sure you know, there's well over 300 candidates for Jack the Ripper.
And there's an entire, every single person who has their favorite suspect has an entire network of logic to make sure that that person remains the chief suspect in their mind.
Same thing happens with the Zodiac case.
So even if you say, well, there's a fingerprint, they'll say, well, not really.
Right.
Or, you know, there's any number of reasons why somebody doesn't fit who might be the suspect.
Well, even if that person was still alive, what you've just said would fuel defense lawyers, attorneys for 20 years.
We're talking with Catherine Ramsland in the U.S., partly about her new book, the title and details we'll get at the end of this, but also about her life's work.
25 years, isn't it, Catherine?
Yeah, about that much, yeah.
Boy.
And what was it, I know you said at the beginning of this, somebody has to do this work, but you know, what was it that made you finally decide to dedicate a large chunk of your professional career to this 25 years ago?
Well, you know, I started in the field of philosophy.
I was a philosophy professor, but when I was a kid in my hometown, there was a serial killer of coeds of college students.
And so I really, I followed that.
And then during the 1990s, I ended up doing research for a book with the FBI profiler, John Douglas.
He was looking at a number of cases, so I was able to work with him.
And between that and then writing for the Core TV website, I just kept adding more and more stuff to my serial killer repertoire and eventually wrote a number of books about them.
But it all started, I would say, in my childhood when there was a serial killer at large.
In this country and in my lifetime, the serial killing case that is most remembered, it's a little before my time, but if you lived in the area, I was in the northwest of England as a kid, my first 22 years.
So this would be constantly in the media.
The Moores murderers, Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, they worked as a chilling, appalling team.
They're in the book.
What did you learn about them?
I think one of the surprising things for me in that case was how Myra Hindley actually was kind of a stalker because she wanted Ian Brady to notice her.
She thought he was cool and intellectual and whatnot.
She'd carry around books that she pretended to read.
She'd show up in places.
She wanted to catch his attention.
So it's kind of an interesting way that she managed to get involved with him.
And then once they were involved, he then worked on her very permeable moral boundaries to slowly work her into a team who would then go lure children that he could then kill.
How much she was involved, who knows?
They have differing stories on that.
But I think their case is a really interesting one to show how teams can work.
And this isn't just about a compliant accomplice.
She was very much involved in this.
And I think she had more reservations, certainly, than he did, obviously, because it wasn't her idea initially, but she went along with it.
She knew he had leveraged her into being complicit in it.
But, you know, they had songs.
They picked a song for each of their victims.
They went to picnics on the moors near the graves.
There was a lot that she was involved in as an equal partner.
So I think they make a very good model for what we talk about when we talk about when two people meet and it erupts into this series of murders.
how does that happen psychologically?
Do you think he would or could have done all of that without an accomplice?
He could have done any of that without an accomplice, but he liked manipulating an accomplice into it as well.
And he even went for a third member of their team, which was his big mistake, obviously, because, you know, he and he worked that guy as well, who was related to Myra Henley.
He worked him in this sort of gradual way, same thing, but he misread the signals.
And as a result, they got arrested.
You know, it breaks my heart still to think of the many TV reports I saw as a kid of the family members of victims who carried on the campaign about these two, whether there was ever talk of parole for Myra Hindley or whatever it might be, or whatever it might be, you know, they were never out of the media because the hurt that that caused, obviously, is never going to go away.
These were innocent children.
The question that flows from all of this is what is it that allows depths of depravity of that kind to emerge in so-called human beings?
I think a lot of it comes down to anger, entitlement, resentment, and that mixes with lust.
And when you get, that's a very powerful combination that drives people into believing, and especially someone like Ian Brady, who already had embraced certain kinds of philosophies, because again, you have that intelligence factor.
He could easily justify doing whatever he wanted to do.
And obviously he was a pedophile, so he could justify getting someone else involved in order to, you know, harm these children the way he did.
And he was a particularly cruel type of person.
I mean, it was really, really pathetic and ugly.
And a lot of it, I think, came out of his anger and sense of entitlement.
And even though this was a very, very, very long time ago, it really is.
Was it?
Well, it was a long time ago.
Let's put it that way.
You know, for a lot of people listening to this, they were decades from being born.
And, you know, sometimes it shouldn't ever, but the memory fades slightly.
But it does make you wonder that, you know, obviously, you know, they were not as clever as they thought they were.
And they were caught in the end in the way that you discuss, because they tried to allow or bring in somebody else into this.
And that was the thing that opened the floodgates.
But it seems chilling to think that they weren't caught earlier, I suppose.
That there was nothing that betrayed them.
I agree, but I think what happens is they tend to isolate where, you know, because they are protecting this depravity as much as possible because they want to continue.
It's a myth that serial killers want to get caught.
Mostly they don't.
They want to continue what they're doing.
And so part of that, you know, the secrecy is keeping that protection up.
And that often means not socializing a lot or not, and especially in teams, we get whoever's leading the way, because sometimes it is a female, tends to isolate the other partner from their family and relatives.
They might think something's wrong, but most people aren't going to default to, oh, they're serial killers, especially if they're related to them.
They're just not going to do that.
I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer's father wrote a book about his son, and there were a lot of signals that he managed to make what looked malignant into something benign.
He managed to talk himself into believing his son was just, oh, this, he's gone through a phase, oh, they misunderstood what he was really doing.
So he wrote a book talking about how easy it was for him to not see the signals that were right in front of him.
And I think that's true of almost everybody because few people are going to believe that a loved one or a child of theirs is this, you know, could possibly be this kind of human being.
In the case of the Moors murderers, we had a man in this country called Lord Longford.
I'm not sure whether you're aware of him, but he was a Labour Party member of the House of Lords here, a very high-profile man.
And he championed for many years the cause of Myra Hindley, campaigned for her to be paroled.
I have to say, I never really understood what it was that made him want to do that.
can these people be fit for parole ever can they be I told you that at the beginning of this.
He would have told you that it is impossible to reform somebody like that.
I agree with him.
I have to say, would a psychologist believe that it would be possible to get into the mindset of somebody like that or any serial killer and do a reset that would be permanent?
I think most of these campaigns are for the lesser partner of a team, like Carla Homolka, for example.
She did get paroled.
She got out.
She's a mother now.
She's never killed anybody since then.
So most of these campaigns are about the one who it really wasn't their idea to kill.
And had they never met the dominant partner, they never would have committed these crimes.
And I think that there is an argument to be made there.
And I think those people probably would be salvageable.
And Carol Ann Fugate, another one with Charles Starkweather in our country.
She was paroled.
She opened a flower shop.
She got married.
She was fine.
So that works.
But now you're asking, can a psychopathic serial killer be completely reformed?
We don't yet have that kind of treatment.
They certainly are working on treatments for psychopaths, cognitive behavioral therapy.
Most of that has to come at early intervention stages, childhood and into adolescence.
I don't think you can take an adult who has, like, let's say Dennis Rader, killed 10 people, and there he is, you know, in his 70s.
Should we let him out?
I think he's still dangerous, frankly.
I don't think we should.
I've known him for 10 years.
There would never be a time when I would say, yeah, I think we can let him out.
Does that generalize to all of them?
No.
But it's very difficult to say who's salvageable and who isn't.
And the problem will always be, won't it?
That if there is the smallest scintilla of doubt, and there must always be about these people, then we can't possibly, if they are imprisoned, allow them out into society or anywhere near it.
Yeah, we've done it a few times.
Jack Unterveger, an Austrian who is in the book, he wrote plays and novels, and they thought, oh, you know, art has cured him.
And they got him out.
And he started murdering.
And then he became a journalist covering his own murders.
So there were people who were mistaken.
They thought that because he was an intellectual now, he was safe.
And he's not the only one like that who we have allowed out because we thought they showed some redeeming quality and then they started killing again.
It's a frightening thought, isn't it?
I'm sorry for my pause there, but I'm just trying to think over the enormity of this.
I don't think I would want to be a person tasked with having to make those sorts of decisions.
I don't think so because I don't think because there is always the doubt and if you were making a decision of that kind and you got it wrong, as in the case of that Austrian guy, then that surely has to live with you for the rest of your life.
Right.
Do you think that we are more or less prone in the society that we've got now to throw up serial killers?
Do you think there are more of them about, less of them about?
I think it's difficult to say because of the different mechanisms in different countries for recording these things, for investigating these things.
There are certainly people making the argument that there are less of them.
There are certainly less in America.
Are there less around the world?
It's not possible to say.
Last question.
And I'm grateful for this conversation.
I think it's a conversation that had to be had.
But there would be people who would say that just by discussing these people, we add to their, quotes, notoriety and we shouldn't discuss them.
What do you say to that?
I think we do add to their notoriety, but we also add the ability to prepare people to see the red flags, to call it in if it needs to be, to do interventions.
So without discussing it, I mean, I can discuss it right now, and maybe several professionals are going to contact me, and together we're going to think of some things that we wouldn't have been able to before.
So there are pros and cons, of course, to any kind of discussion of them.
But I think the pros outweigh the cons.
And the very, very last question that I've just thought of, but I think it needs to be asked.
And sadly, it's going to need a short answer.
But if we were able in many of these cases to intercept these people at a very early stage, if we'd been able to spot the flags in ways that we can today, do you think we could have stopped them?
Well, yeah, I mean, we could have stopped them.
Once you see the flags, maybe I don't understand your question.
Well, I mean, do you think that we could have reformed them at a very early stage?
If you discover the propensities early enough, then you can turn it around.
We have programs right now where we are working with adolescents at risk of becoming adult psychopaths.
And we know that because of the violence they've already committed.
And some of these programs are having very good, they're expensive, but they're having very positive effects on the lives of these people who might otherwise go on to become some kind of extreme offender, mass murder, spree, or serial.
I think what we see from the data is that there are effective treatments if they're done early enough.
Catherine Ramson, thank you for giving me your time.
You're welcome.
And just quickly, what is the title of the book that we've been discussing?
The book is How to Catch a Killer, and it's about 30 different serial killers and the categories, law enforcement, mistakes they made, forensic innovation, how they've been caught.
Well, that was never going to be an easy or light discussion.
These topics can't be.
But I think we may have learned something from Catherine Ramsland.
I think her book is definitely well worth seeing and reading to get some kind of understanding as to how these things happen and what we can do to try and shield ourselves from this and combat such things in our society.
You know, they are the unthinkable for most of us.
And it is interesting to engage with somebody who's made her life's work, trying to understand how these things happen and what we can do about it.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay calm, stay safe, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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