You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley
and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by author Jillian Lauren to talk about
her brand new book, Behold the Monster, Confronting America's most prolific serial killer,
Chilian. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for
having me. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your personal
and professional background. Sure. I am an author and journalist and sometime murder
silver and definitely a rock wife and terrible kickboxer and an advocate for victims' rights.
And I this is my fourth book, We Hold the Monster. I
my first book got a lot of hooplah because it was frankly, I don't
tend to use a word very much, but I was sex trafficked to the
country of Bernai when I was just three days after I was eighteen years old,
and so it's really about that experience being the mistress of the Prince of
Burnai. And then a book about parenting kids with special needs novel, and
then this Behold a Monster, which is about the conversations that I had with
America's most prolific serial killer. Talk to us a little bit about how you
got into this case. How does one stumble across a serial killer, much
less the most prolific one in US history. I had no idea. I
was writing a novel and I interviewed this famous infamous detective Mitsy Roberts, who
if anyone reads Michael Connolly, and everyone reads Michael Connolly, his character Renee
Ballard is based on Mitsy. I'll tell you the real thing is even saltier
and spicier. And I scored this interview with her through Michael, just through
the writing community, and I was talking to her about I had piece about
Black Dahlia in this novel, which one day I hope you all will read.
But at the end of that interview, so we had been talking about
police procedure and LA history, and I said, what are you most proud
of? And she said, I'm proud of them all. But I did
catch this serial killer once and that was pretty cool. And I was like,
what, I messed this interview up so badly. I buried the lead
And she said I wasn't the one asking the questions, and I said,
just tell me about this real quick. She said that Samuel Little had been
convicted in twenty fourteen. She was working in what was at the time the
Cold Case Special Section, and they were using a grant from the Department of
Justice, but to run old cold case evidence. And there was a significant
push toward this at that time because Dana fingerprinting really hasn't been an effect in
this country until nineteen ninety one. In any case, they got one,
two, three hits Bank and they all had the same mo all matched to
sam Little, and then there was a cross country man hunt for him because
he was a transient and I didn't know where he was at any time,
there was no He was very good at staying in the shadows nuts. That's
how he did what he did. I asked Mitzy. I called her and
I said, Jacative Roberts, would you mind if I looked into this story.
It seems very underreported, And she said, you have our blessings,
like we believe there are many more victims across the country, but there are
limited resources in small jurisdictions that and also limited interest. You know, many
there isn't a cold case department in many cities. And when I call Omaha
and I say, you know how many people are in your department? Talked
to the cold case detective and she says me one, Yeah, yeah,
Cincinnati me Kelly, I'm best, amazing detective. Yeah, I'm like,
who's the cold case team? Me? And that's in those cities where you
were lucky enough to find somebody doing cold cases at all. It takes passion.
It does take passion on the part of the detective to pursue these They're
not they're long slogging like you just don't know, and so many times heartbreaking
cases. But takes somebody as a particular kind of passion. When were these
conversations with Detective Roberts. How far back are we going in the development of
your wait let me tell you. October twenty seventeen, I thought I was
writing an eight thousand word piece for New York Magazine. I was saying,
this is going to be my piece of true crime rape portage. There is
no eye in this story. And a memoirist by trade, really there is
no story without my eye. Of course, I wound up inserted into.
I wound up inserted into a federal investigation that I did. I really didn't
expect that part. But what I did was I called my editor at New
York Magazine and I said, I've got this underreported serial killer. And it's
not just gonna do another serial killer, another gruesome. You need to have
an angle. I was like, Okay, I'm gonna start writing letters.
So I started writing letters, which it takes about six months to get you
to get your allowance your entry into California prison, maximum security prison, it
takes about six months. So it was like six months of letters before I
actually got in there and faced it. Now, when your first interacting or
attempting to interact with someone like Samuel Little. Who are you writing to do
You write the Samuel Little and it's screened by the warden or staff. Yeah,
there's all the malice screened. There are definitely things you can and cannot
send. You can't send pornographic material, you can't send any maps, you
can't send things like that. None of these were an issue. Or although
I may have sent him maps if I could have and had him go with
them, because that's part of what our relationship turned into, is him giving
me these hints or like helping me solve his murders. But yeah, they
screened that, but they were all there was all a bunch of hogwash anyway,
because his whole he was he maintained his innocence. He said, my
upside down case, and I'm just the unluckiest guy in the world. I
turn up at the wrong plays at the wrong time. That's how my evidence,
that's how my DNA gets there. And I had and until I got
in there and based him, I wasn't going to start challenging that. I
have an ace in the hall. I have an aunt who's a very famous
psychiatrist, and she told me don't expect him, don't expect to be able
to tease the truth from the lies right away, and also don't even expect
that he can't. I have this wonderful quote from your aunt, and that's
actually one of the questions I was about to head into. And I loved
this quote. She described psychopathy as saying, psychopathy is like jeopardy. All
answers are questions, and don't expect to win. I can tell you what
it feels like to be around a psychopath. He'll steal the shirt off your
back. He'll tell you if he's stealing the shirt off your back, still
you will be inexplicably compelled to give him the shirt off your back. Is
that the way you felt spending time with him, Yes, and even more
so helped me identify questionable relationships in my own life and my history, Like
spending time with Samuel way out there on the fringe. So you may think
that there are many serial killers operating out there based on media interest, but
there actually aren't. It's a rare thing. And so to see the far
edges of violence against women, I started to be able to look and a
little bit closer to the center into my life and be like, oh,
that guy was a psycho, Like that guy was for realist psycho. Now
that I know all this about it, it was an amazing learning journey for
me. But yes, that is actually absolutely how it felt. And everything
was a transaction. I was reading where you were talking about having to set
up food for him. Was it always about hey, Sam, here to
talk have some funnyans? What did it always have to be that transactional I
give you food, you give me information? Or was there more to it
than that the food that I got him and set up for him, And
people have been so disgusted, I'm like, yeah, I have wiped the
corners of his mouth and opened to soda and gave him these gross chicken wings
and then had to have chicken wing breath in my face because one thing psychopaths
do is talk really quietly so that you have to lean it and it just
is until you're like what what And you're like five inches now from garlic garbecue
wings from the prison vending machines. But the reason the setting up stuff for
him, So we were always at we were at the VP table, where
like if you're at the auction, it's like the number one table It was
right in front of the deputies. It was under like twelve cameras. I
was like, this is so vip, except it was a little tiny table
and because he was in a wheelchairs, so I just felt like gigantor sitting
at this tiny table. But the feeding him was in part of performance for
the people around us, because the transaction wasn't the food. He could have
given a darn about those chicken wings. It was about everyone around him seeing
this put together lady. All of a sudden, he's got a visitor and
she's taking care of him, like she's serving him. And also like he
wanted service from women, and I picked that up right away. I was
just like, serve this guy and do it in front of everybody because it
gave him. It gave him a lot of juju in the yard and when
they're like, who's that, who's that nice white lady in a black dress
showing up to feed your chicken wings? And god knows what he said.
I do actually know several things he said, but it's not important. The
importance was the performance. Let's talk about the logistics for a second. I
had assumed that when you went to meet with a serial killer, in a
maximum security prison that you'd be on one side of a very thick set of
glass, he'd be on the other side. There'd be no physical contact because
you know, you were blocked from one another, and that's not the situation
at all as you describe it. You would think that, and that is
exactly what I thought. No other information. You're not a cop, you're
not law enforcement, you said yourself. Family, I'm yeah, I'm really
glad those skills weren't tested. But no, I was in the family visiting
room. Every time you visit an inmate. Depending on their status, you
could be like a level four, a level three, depending on what your
jacket is. But he just managed to do what he always did his whole
life, which is just like slide through the cracks, just like right under
the radar. That was a lot of metaphors, but that's what he did.
And so when I showed up and the guard said to me, how
do you know little and I was just like, he's a friend. I
was gonna be like, I'm a journalist, go get every single guard who
works at this prison, them squirt me out right now. But I said,
I'm a friend. He was like a friend, My but I'm not
swearing you're good. But they always had me right right there, and I
got to know the deputies. And I have these sort of this mix of
like really hard journalism, I'll go really deep and like I will go for
the jugular if it's the moment to do, and I do several times in
the book. And this is not how I treat victim interviews, which I
think are actually the best thing I do. But I will definitely go for
the jugular. And these interviews were a whole other ball game from anything I've
ever done. There were so many emotional and just acrobatics that I did.
You talked about the fact chapter ten that and I love this quote that you
use. I'm quitting your writing back to you. I hope you don't mind,
but I love that. Are you kidding? It's like my dream come
true. I'm a writer. I marked up your book extensively at that.
So clever. Okay, Anyway, when I write so, you quoted from
OURFK first of all in chapter ten by saying every society gets the kind of
criminal deserves. What's equally true is that every community gets the kind of law
enforcement it insists on. And then you followed that up with what I think
is the best statement you said. I do not know Samuel Little was the
criminal we deserved, but I know he's the criminal we allowed. So talk
a little bit about the failures of the criminal justice system that let this guy
walk free for so many years, Because it was during that chapter that I'm
sitting there writing WTF in the margins and underling and scribbling and exclamation pointing and
yelling every once in a while, talk about failures that let him go.
Everyone who sees his rap sheet has that response, has like a big WTF
and big I had a big crying fit. I couldn't believe it, Like
you look at that raps. The Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman, who has
prosecutes almost every capital case in La Chester Turner, Grim Sleeper, now Harass
van Ball most recently, she cried when she first saw this rap sheet.
So how to get away with it? Okay, there are a few reasons
a failure of the criminal justice system is certainly one of those. There were
just he worked very specifically, sherry picking his victims for where they lived,
for their social status. He picked marginalized victims, often women of color,
Many times addicts prostitutes, And if you go down to Pascagoula, Mississippi,
the police there will tell you that you really couldn't commit a crime. In
the early eighties against a black prostitute in Pasco Cool, it was not considered
a crime. There were those kind of failures, the failures more of just
ignoring and of placing different worth on different victims of crime. And it's something
that I didn't make up, but apparently every popularized. I was a criminologist
named Steven Eggers who said that there are people who are less dead and people
who are more dead. I fear the governor's blonde, adorable daughter who goes
missing on spring break, you are the most dead. And if you are
a black prostitute on crack, you are the least dead. And cops in
LA used to patrol. Cops used to call in these murders. There were
women turning up in dumpsters every morning in the eighties and early nineties, with
a crack epidemic and with unjust sentencing for drugs used in primarily minority neighborhoods.
I think, I say in the book, it left an entire generation of
women with their asses hanging out on Figaroa Street. That's true, and they
were just like fodder for predators. Cops would call this in as an NHI,
no humans involved. There's been a one eighty seven on fifth and May
or whatever. It's an NHI or simply a no one. So that's the
failure of the criminal justice system. Now we go to the grand jury that
failed to indict him in Pascagoula and also a murder that went to trial,
and there were nuts eyewitnesses and this he had such specific things as a cast
on his leg, and they just said, theseuses are not credible. There's
not enough physical evidence. I'm like, what would be enough physical evidence other
than your hair on her body? That hair could have been blown from.
I'm like, it's us. It's us as a society, because if you're
tried by a jury of your peers, that would be met. And those
juries failed again and again. It wasn't like he was tried three times before
the fourth they finally convicted him, and that's not including his juvenile convictions.
So for killers like Samuel Little and Lonnie Franklin Junior, the Grim Sleeper in
Los Angeles, they figured this out. They figure out if I focus on
women at the margins, sex workers, people that are addicted to drugs,
people that are women of color. These are people that I can pray on
and no one's going to come looking for them if you will care. To
the point where Sam just stopped even burying the bodies, he would murder the
women in his car. I think he tried to body bury a body once
and it was harder work that he thought it was going to be, and
there was a foot sticking out and they found it and he thought it was
all over for him. But then no one came for him. That's the
thing. No one came for him, and he was like, oh gosh,
maybe I can get away with this, and then yeah, absolutely,
those particular killers focused in on marginalized women. Sam put it really well,
he said, I know when I said to him, I had my hard
times with drugs and with violent men, and I'm just really glad I never
because he was like, you're my angel, You're my love. And I'd
be like, yeah, you'd kill me in half a second. He's oh,
yeah, app a second, and I was like, you know you
and he said, no, I wouldn't kill you because I don't kill no
governors or senators, and I'm quoting him here, I know this one or
a New York journalists. It'd be all over the papers in a second.
I killed women no one cared about. So I was going through And you've
got a wonderful map at the front of the book where you talk about we
mark off the different places where he was murdering women. So when my friend
Kenzie made that map, and we really worked on it hard together because I
was like, I don't just want to have I want to have something that
feels, yeah, like of his travels, not just like a map.
It's a wonderful illustration. I actually I found it really instructive. One of
the things that I noticed. So, if you total up everything, he
killed women in twenty six states and Washington, DC. Did he ever give
you any insight as to why he spent more time in certain states than others?
Like I noticed, for example, he didn't have any victims in Virginia.
He did it in just about every other state in the South, but
not Virginia. And he never went into the Northeast. I noticed that too.
Did he ever tell you why, like why were some areas more of
interest to him than others. You'd have to have known the history of these
places at the time to really ask specifically. Like Pascoula, Mississippi had a
place called Carver Village, and in Carver Village you get anything you wanted any
time in the day or night. On one side was the projects. On
the other side they called the Front. That was like guns, drugs,
hookers, strippers, duke joints, And there was this sort of allure to
the Front for people, certainly for Hilda, is how she explained it to
me. One of his living victims just always have heard these stories about the
Front, can keep herself away. But so if you see why he goes
to Pascagoula so many times, it's because the Front. It's like getting a
I don't know, Nickelodeon toys, r us shopping spree. He could just
pick off women that would never be noticed again. And so I think a
lot of the city he picked someone up. In New Orleans, Sarah Brown
was one of his earlier victims. Now later so he was also traveling with
his girlfriend much of this time. His girlfriend, Jean, he was with
for fifteen years. He was thirty years older than him. She was a
master shoplifter, like master shoplifter and half blind. She had a monocle and
would literally military crawl and to like I can't remember what the like department store
was at the time, I'm Nordstrums figure and just clear out a jewelry counter
into this bag she'd sewn herself, I know. And it was like the
invisibility. She's just an old, blind black woman. The invisibility she got
from that, and so a lot of the cities they picked were because she
could steal there and sell the goods like people would put in like Tina Turner
would say, I want to Sergio Valente jump suit in a size ten,
and she'd go get her one and sell it to her at half price.
Yeah, Geane knew people. And then Sam would go steal a steak or
run a red light or wind up and that's part of the length of the
rap sheet. He would just go do something stupid, and he would call
it that by day murder by night. He's like, all this time I
was hiding. They just thought I was a petty piece, and they'd let
me go and I go kill someone. You're listening to mind over Murder.
We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
Mind over Murder. Did he ever get into why? What was in it
for him to kill this amazing number of women? I know that's a strange
place to go, but spoke to him so many times and for such length,
did you ever get a satisfactory why? From your perspective? If you're
asking me, why are there serial killers in humanity? Why does this manifest?
There are numerous and I could tell you numerous theories. I think no
one really has the why for that. Sam's why is it was sex.
Strangulation was sex for him, There was no other sex. There were times
where I was like pacing the kitchen leg What if the only way I could
have sex was to kill people? Would I kill people? My husband would
just take me by the arms and be like, Jillian, come back to
Earth. No, you wouldn't. I have news for you. You wouldn't
you've compassion for people. But that was essentially it. He became obsessed with
necks, with strangulation, with a control of air, which is a tremendous
amount of control. It's all about control. Every single one of them down
the line will tell you they own their victims forever. In heaven or in
some way or other, and that was Sam, She's in heaven or in
hell. We're gonna have a big palace. We're all gonna live in together.
And I was just like, oh, okay, sure, just put
my name on one of those bunks. Can't wait. Actually, some of
the victims they really would like a chance to hang out with because they're wonderful.
But yeah, like he says, God made me as I was.
That's another thing down the line. I almost always say I'm good with God.
So I'm good. I've been forgiven, I've been saved, I've been
Sam's arguments he was forgiven every time he killed someone because he prayed to God
as he was killing them to forgive him. I know. I asked him,
I said, do you think that they should have been forgiving you at
that moment? And he was like, I would hate to see where they're
going if they didn't. And that was when people say, like, what
were the scariest or most disgusting moments like I would say when he said,
basically, if these victims didn't forgive me while I was murdering them in an
extended, intentionally painful way and often beating them, and very little rape as
we would define it in terms of having a rape kit, it was still
sexual assault. And for him to say, like if they didn't forgive him
right at that moment, that they'd be going to hell. I could have
crawled over that table and taking his eyes out. I just had such enough
of it. But it's amazing to have had the opportunity to interview him for
so long, because people don't get that. It's not the Gaytlies days of
the Chiman Capoti days or the New York Girls send you out for a year
or what turned into four years for Capote, but you get three hours with
someone boom, Like this interview we're having with me right now, that's it.
Like how much do you know about me from this? Enough to talk
about Sam let all enough to know I had a fairly unconventional approach to the
endeavor and that's something I really care about. But you'd have to talk to
me for the next three years really good to know me. And that's the
chance I had with Sam. That was what was really remarkable about it.
How many times were you permitted to meet with him? Do you actually know
how many visits? How many hours approximately? I can work it out because
it's all like a million spreadsheets I made other people do for me. Yeah,
we just give us a sense of how long these spreadsheets. There were
maybe ten times before I got extradited and taken to Odessa or taken to Wise
County, Texas for these interviewing confessions he was doing for the Texas Rangers and
the FBI, and I thought that was going to be the last I saw
him. I thought that was going to be the last of my article,
and it was not. I wound up going down the Wise County Sheriff's office,
which, as far as I could tell, had less security than my
local high school. I was like, that's a jail. It was so
wild West and everyone, we're in the real habitt cowboy ants and everything.
You probably fit right in. I think on the second day I didn't shock
them because I can talk to anybody. Everyone's something commons. I was like,
Hi, Sheriff, acin, what's up. I don't think I surprised
them much after the first day, and I think they do take their liberties.
The Texas Strangers speaking about social justice, there's a lot of questions that
the answer was because I'm the best and I wanted to. And then I'm
talking about Texas ranger James Holland, who was the spearhead of the federal investigation
and is well known as being the serial killer whisperer. He got the confession
from William Reese, from Anthony Shore, a whole lot of scumbacks in Texas.
I want to take a second and ask about some authorial choices here that
you made that I thought were really interesting. When you sat down to write
the book, you had some sections where you chose to write from the victims
POV. How much of those are recreations, like based on fact from Sam
Little's memory that he gave you, and how much was you channeling Truman Capote
to do it here? Let me give you the victims POV. They're both
right that they're definitely a hybrid of both those chapters. And what you're referring
to is that I take this sort of audacious I do this audacious thing in
a true crime book, and I write from the perspective of people who there's
absolutely no way you could know what they were thinking at the end of their
lives. I do know what they said, though, because yes, Sam
told me the stories for the most part and also for the victims for whom
I do deep dives. I often had family members who were cooperating with me.
Pearl Unique Nelson as Ottter Nelson's daughter, and I spend hours with her
looking through their photos. Denise Christie brothers, the Christie family was showed me
her hands own costumes from high school in the attic and they were honest.
And deb Duvall Alice Duvall's sisters a very close friend of mine, now actually
counting on her to get my kid into Annapolis. I'm like having to go
around get these recommendations for him, and you have to make friends with congresswomen
and stuff, and I'm just like, come on, I know you can
do it. Your husband's like some kind of whatever you are general huge something
like. It was based on that too, those relationships that I developed,
the things that they showed me, Like when I was fact checking those chapters,
I was, I don't know, how do I fact check this?
Called Jennifer Christie. I called Denise's daughter in law, and we had gone
through her letters together and I was like, what do you think about I
was like, is this right about this guy being abusive? What was our
And she was like, yeah, don't you remember that letter that we read
from her to her mother that was saying, help get me out of here.
And it's that kind of evidence. It's soft evidence, right, soft
but reliable. And also I heard the stories from Sam, all the ones
I did a deep dive and and there's one which I use a particular like
device of magical realism as well. I had sensitivity readers for these chapters because
I was like, do I have the right to appropriate this voice? And
every one of them said, yeah, do you did it well enough?
You can do it? He was very well done. Yeah, But otherwise,
how am I going to get Because my point here is to get you.
I want to entertain you. I'm not necessarily make a smile, but
I want to entertain you. I want to entrance you. I want to
make it so you can't put this book down because I want to make you.
Get to the end of this book and look at the list of the
victims. I have the most the most correct list that I know of.
Even if you look at the FBI, you look at their website, they
only have unsolved they don't have the solved cases. They think that this is
the best when I've seen, but I want everyone to get to the victims
at the end, and I want them to feel it, like I want
them to see the amount of pages you have to page through and to feel
it by then. So that's why, like I said, I've never been
on a soapbox with a book before, not like a message driven writer.
I wrote a lot about just my experience, something that was fascinating and and
also infuriating. But I would absolutely stand on a soapbox in downtown LA and
tell people to buy this book. My boyfriend is not, in any way,
shape or form a true crime reader. Like, he's a little mystified
why I drew this at all. But I handed him this book and I
said, just flip through the victim count at the end. And he was
just flipping and he goes, oh my god, this is one guy.
I said, Yeah. He goes, how the cracked medicals lice? Since
you asked, and then I went into it. I think there's a magnetic
polarity thing because, like my i'd have forced him to read this. I'd
like put postmarks on it, like post it's that's it. It is actually
really important to me that you read it. Did he ultimately, and he's
doing it. He's doing it. He did Okay, he's in the middle.
Okay. One of the things that's very striking to me in learning about
the history of Samuel Little are these drawings and paintings of victims. How did
the drawings and paintings come about and who actually created them? Well, Sam
has been drawing since he was twenty years old and was in the Ohio State
Reformatory and he was a middleweight boxer. There was a guy there who was
really good at drawing, and Sam was enchanted with this, and he said,
I want you to teach me to draw. And this is how this
guy kept himself safe because he's drawing pictures of people's kids for their Christmas cards,
right, And he said, I want you to teach me to fight.
So they traded and that's when he learned, and he's been drawing since
then. The victims specifically, there were drawings, but really he drew them
during the confessions, many of them. I had a few that he had
already drawn when I met him. So he would use these drawings to help
confess, to hopefully help locate these victims, and some of them have been
spot on and you did include some photos of those paintings throughout that center photos
section of the book. Did you end up choosing the photos that were included
in that middle photos section or was that like left your publisher who made the
decisions on what photos you were going to put in and what you didn't.
Everything gets edited, everything gets cut. But I did, yeah, because
I was going through ten more pages if it was up to me, right,
Okay, yeah, I was, Yeah, yeah, I was curious
why you opted for some of them and why others ended up being left,
and obviously you couldn't put all of them in there. I want to give
an idea of the atmosphere in which you grew up, Like to show the
Ohio St. Ja Reformatory, the largest steel cage, the largest freestanding steel
cage in the world, show the map and the front, and show the
victims are the ones that I got permission from the families. That was really
important to me. And also like his cars were his, he called them
his killing field. He mostly murdered women in the car, so I thought
it was important to include that piece of poop pinto I hate that car so
much, it was like it just came up in so many of the murders,
and I also interviewed his surviving victims. Boy, that must have been
an experience. Yeah, I included them. And yeah, there's that garbage
pinto And there's a picture I have in here that is from the Omaha World
Harald in nineteen seventy three, and this was one of the murders that I
solved. I get the White Buffalo. There was just there because I talked
to him for such a long time. There was details that he dropped to
me that he had remembered at the moment, or he didn't feel like telling
didn't like those police, or in any case, he told me that he
her upside down, naked and a barrel behind it abandoned factory and it smelled
bad. And then they find this article, which is so many times how
we've connected it if on this article in November seventeenth, nineteen seventy three,
which a Native American woman was found upside down and naked and a barrel behind
an old tannery. So that was how they were able to connect the dots.
In a situation like that, who do you go to with that information?
It's not like you just call the cops in that particular city and say,
yay, you do. Did they want to hear from you? Did
they say who the heck are you know? So there was because this was
a federal investigation, there was the like high authority, and I would go
to Mita Mitzi Roberts here in the LAPD, or go to Jim Holland or
go to the Department of Jess. That's who I give too. Yeah,
I mean there have been times when I called MIAMIPD directly, and especially after
the article had already come out, and so people knew who I was.
So that gave you a little bit of credibility in terms of initiating that conversation.
You're just not like some exactly. Or even better, get a cop
to call them and provide the I get another cop to call them and say,
this journalist is going to be calling you. She has That's what Rick
Jackson did for me in Long Beach, where it was the case I solved
bottom to top Alice jud And that is very unusual saying if done before by
journalists. So I had Rick, Who's Harry Bosch, who's the real life
Harry Bosch and is retired but has connections and his passion is volunteering doing cold
case work for a different departments while across California. He's amazing. He called
Long Beach for me and said, this is what she found. This is
a credible human. Can you imagine how many cookie tips they can When I
used to joke with Mitzi, you know, because she had the Black Delia
case. That's she is the custodian of the Black Delia case. Every cold
case has a custodian. Sheila just couldn't resist. She loves like historic La
crime. But that's a bad gig. No one wants that gig because seven
people call every day saying my father killed the Black Dalia. So I used
to joke with her that I was just gonna start calling in and they have
to look up every tip. I used to joke with her that I was
going to start calling in I saw the Black Delia shoe in Griffith Park.
But especially with the case like the Black Delia. Though we are going back
decades now, there is that case will never be sold. There's no DNA,
there's no DNA in the stamps. There's no reason to prioritize it other
than the fact that it has a cold Tish following, but yes, so
they get cookie tips every day. So I'm going to call and be like
I soppd a murder. But Rick called and he called me back, and
it was just it was like such a memorable moment in my life. And
he said, are you sitting down? Here's this like a way about him
and my book released part. It was like all the women flocked to Rick
in the corner. My assistant was like, I want to be like that
when I grew up, Like I just stand there and people come to me.
I was like, it's you should probably do some really crazy stuff,
Ben. But he called back and he said he's sitting down. He said,
this case is still open. And I had a name on this one.
That was one thing I had that really made me focus in on it,
Alice, because I always remember her name is Alice. It's a really
pretty name. It is really pretty name, and but he mostly didn't have
any of their name, so it was one of the reasons I focused on
this. And he's there, this case is still open. It is everything
lines up the articles you found, the spot where the body was dumb,
the way it was described. He's like, and her name is Alice Deniece
to Ball and I like, and just so happened. I am also in
a documentary, my book Behold the Monster is coming out. The documentary Confronting
a serial Killer streaming across most platforms now, and they were there for that
moment. They were following me around as I did my investigation, and they
were there for the moment. Sometimes I was just like gos doing documentary.
It's a little rough, like havvy camera up your nose, Like I have
a scar on my face. I was just like, get your camera out
of my scar. It feels really vulnerable. But that moment, like I'm
so proud to have on camera. It was worth the whole thing. I
just look like stunned and I was like, oh my god, I mean
that it doesn't mean that necessarily it's totally solved me and that I and he's
you know what, kiddo, you solved the murder. It was so cool.
It was so cool. And then there were times that I was feeling
really down and I would talk to Rick and he's just don't give up on
me now, and I was like, okay, dude, Like Harry Bosh
says, don't give up, don't give up, Jillian. This is a
hard project to top. Who are you going to take a break from true
crime after this very long and I'm sure emotionally draining project or has this just
made you want to do more? I'm both obsessed and I also want to
take a horseback riding trip through the center of Mongolia where you get to do
falconry, and like, it doesn't get it never gets more boring. So
whatever happens next, I have a lot of fascinating ideas, but I do
think. And when I talked to when I talked to de Duval, Alice's
sister, at one point I said, I think maybe I don't know.
I want to just go do dressage the rest of my life. If I
don't think I can, I don't think I can do this anymore. And
she's we don't always get to decide what we do. It comes to us.
And you clearly have a talent for this, and you have soothed so
many families, and I just what am I going to say to that.
I don't get to say no to her. I don't know, one of
those old babels or something. If you save someone's life, you're indebted to
them forever. I feel like you selve somebody's family murder. You are indebted
to them forever. Oh, it sounds a lot like a calling, which
I think is very interesting. But you're obviously very well suited to it.
So the book is Behold the Monster can friend of America's most prolific serial killer.
But Jillian Lauren Jillen, Where can everybody find the book? You can
find the book in airports, you can find the book in all your favorite
indie booksellers, Amazon, anywhere. You can also get it through my website.
We have some great incentive. We have really awesome I wish I was
wearing, but amazing necklace a friend of mine designed, and other groovy things
you can get if you check in through my website. So that's Jillian Lauren
dot com. Excellent. That's gonna do it for this episode of mind Never
Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our
executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela
Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over Murder is distributed
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on Facebook, and finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill
Thomas. Five six. Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder. H