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 Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. 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 Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas, and welcome to an episode that we're going to call
ruminations. With Bill and Kristen, we're like maybe antifications, I don't know,
Okay, trying to come up I'm trying to come up with the right
adjective and I'm just not sure which it is, but between the two of
us, it could be one or the either of those words. What's the
question we're asking today. The question that we're talking about, it's actually two
questions, and it came as the result of two articles that I saw and
decided to share with you since because they were in my head, it's only
fair that they're in yours, too, fair enough. So the first article
was about national shooter Audrey Hale and about whether or not the manifesto that she
wrote should be released to the public after the behavioral analysis unit is done with
it at Quantico. I do remember initially they had indicated, yeah, we'll
release this, but the article basically said, actually, we're going to maybe
walk back on that a little bit. And the question was should we be
releasing this stuff for the general public to see, Like, of what value
is there to see the I guess in some case rantings or ramblings of someone
like James Holmes or Eric Harrison, Dylan Cleebald, or in the most recent
case, Audrey Hale. And I'm realizing, as I'm saying the most recent
case, that's not the most recent mass shooting, and that's actually really sad
too. Sadly what's happening now is there are so many mass shootings in the
United States, one after another, that I know both of us get confused
in terms of which one are we talking about. And Nashville is not the
latest mass shooting. We've had several mass shootings since there's been an agreed upon
definition that a mass shooting is someone who is shooting four or more people.
And that's happening like every single week here in the US and nowhere else on
the planet. And we have to keep coming back to that because there are
guns around the world, the crazy people and disturbed people and mentally ill people
around the world, some of whom might be violent, but there's nowhere else
on the planet that we have this combination of guns and all of these other
factors which are resulting in a mass shooting every single week. It's crazy.
The question of do we release these manifestos, I think it's a valid question.
I think it's an important question now when we use the term manifesto.
Of course, what I think arises to everyone's mind is the Unibomber Manifesto,
which our good friend Jim Fitzgerald has talked about at length, including a couple
of episodes on this podcast. I know when you and I were talking off
air as we were kicking around this topic we talked about the value of releasing
the unibomb manifesto, largely because it helped to catch the guy. Let's talk
about that for a minute, just as a reminder, the unibomber had been
killing for I think close to two decades, if I'm not mistaken. From
talking to Fits, they were still desperate to find this person, and the
FBI had been attempting to track him four years. The thinking was that in
publishing the manifesto in two major newspapers, The New York Times in the Washington
Post, if I'm not mistaken, the idea was that perhaps someone would recognize
the language, which was very unique within this lengthy, kind of scholarly document
with an anti technology slant. The hope was someone would recognize his language,
and we can't forget this. That's exactly what happened. Yes, now,
Fits and others within the FBI argued in favor of putting out the manifesto with
this goal in mind. Look, if we put this out, there's a
possibility that someone's going to recognize this language. What happens. His sister in
law and then her husband, Ted Kazinski's brother, both read the manifesto after
it's published in major newspapers, and they realized this really sounds like the dissertation
and other scholarly type documents that Ted Kazinski had written. And then they contacted
a lawyer who contacted the FBI as an intermediary and said, my clients think
they know who might be sending out these bombs, and people had been maimed
and killed. So it's I think, very different in some ways. There
was an idea which actually worked, which was we think we might be able
to identify this man and therefore hopefully capture him. That's a little different from
these manifestos. And I put air quotes around it that we're seeing from some
of these recent mass killers. When you look at mass shooters, even as
early as Eric Harris until and Cleve Bald, the Columbine shooters, they had
the Basement tapes, which they were actually really hoping that those tapes would be
released. They never have been. And I believe you said before we went
on the air they'd actually been destroyed, were they not? They were?
I'd heard about the Basement tapes before, which are a series of eight millimeter
tapes they were shot on came quarters. Remember this is nineteen ninety nine,
Little minigaem Yeah, sounds like a long time ago now. Apparently the sheriff
in Colorado made the decision to ultimately destroy the tapes with the support of the
families who had lost loved ones at Columbine High School. Coming up to speed
again on the Basement tapes. Hadn't read about them in a while. These
two morons actually thought they were going to become famous, and they even discussed
on the tapes who's going to play them in the movie and which filmmaker is
going to make a movie about them. I think the last thing we want
to do is be playing into the hands of these nutjobs who think this is
going to be their way of going out in a blaze of glory by killing
a whole bunch of people the idea. When I first read about the Basement
tapes, I was appalled just all the way around. And so you look
at something like the Basement tapes, you look at something like James Holmes writing
James Holmes being the Aurora movie theater Shooter. We get a sense of what
his writings were from Carrie Droben's book Aurora. That also is not something I
think that should be floating out and about in the world. It is actually
you can read, James Holmes. I don't think it's really a manifesto.
I think it's just notebooks. And I looked at the material in preparing for
this broadcast, James Holmes, The Aurora shooter's notebook is just filled with the
ravings of a madman. He's just got the same word repeated over and over
again on certain pages, why thirty or forty times just that word and a
question mark. There are places where he does discuss a bit more kind of
planning of where he's going to lash out and where he's going to kill people.
He considered airports, he considered a movie theater, and then finally he
decided to attack a movie theater because that's much more vulnerable, much less security.
So there may be some benefit to law enforcement. I'm not actually sure
there's any public good though in releasing these manifestos. Yeah, I think that
it is one thing if you're a psychologist or a psychiatrist and you were looking
to gain insight into the criminal mind, and then absolutely the BAU would have
a vested interest in it. Psychologists would have a vested interest in it.
But I don't think that it is something that needs to be broadcast for ever
everyone to see now as humans who are very invested in true crime culturally right
now in the United States, are people going to be interested in what Audrey
Hale had to say and why she decided to shoot up the Covenant School.
Yes, probably people are going to be very interested. But do they need
to see a chapter in verse in what is very likely the rantings of,
as you said earlier, a mad person. I don't think we need to
see that. I don't think we do. Audrey Hale is dead. She
was shot to death by Nashville Betpolitan police officers responding to the mass shooting at
the Covenant School. She's not going to go on trial. In some of
these examples, like James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, he actually went on
trial, and so these materials were introduced as part of the legal proceeding,
which is how they ended up in the public now that you actually don't learn
that much in James Holmes example, and we don't know what's in Audrey Hale's
notebooks. Apparently she was incredibly organized and had all of these files and just
a lot of material. I think that would probably be worth as you said
a moment ago, Kristen, law enforcement profilers, the FBI, the Nashville
Metropolitan Police Department, the Department of Justice, those people studying to see what's
going on with mass shooters of this type, And what was Audrey Hale thinking
before she made the decision to go in and shoot up a school that she'd
actually attended some years before and killed both students and teachers and administrators there.
I'm not sure there's really much public benefit to that. No, I don't
think there is. Again, I think that as a culture, we are
very fascinated, sometimes healthfully so, with what goes on in the minds of
killers. I think that if the benefit is to law enforcement and law enforcement
alone, absolutely they should have access to it. But do the rest of
us need to know the murky, dark things that are happening in the minds
of the Eric Harris and Dylan Cleibolts of the world. I'm going to sleep
a whole lot better if I don't know that, I think. And as
you mentioned when we were off the air too, Kristen, one of the
experts regarding the clear Bold Harris basement tapes had said they didn't want to see
those released, because they also talked in quite a bit of depth about their
planning, what they went out and purchased in order to have weapons and explosives,
what materials they purchased. They even videotaped themselves on the way to and
from the various stores where they bought these things. They were buying civilian items
and then working to turn those into explosive devices with some success. And as
you pointed out, one of the law enforcements experts said, this actually is
a roadmap for someone who might want to commit a similar crime. Yeah,
it's a blueprint for any teenage copycat that decides they want their ten minutes of
fame the same way that Harris and Cleibold got theirs. I don't think there's
any reason why things like that need to be released to the public. Now.
If you read, for example, Dave Collen's Columbine, which is an
excellent book, he does offer excerpts and things like that, and that's fine
because that is it is all part of the narrative. But would I want
to see what they put out there into the world released for everybody to read
it. No, not at all. I don't think there's value to that,
And It is just a it is just a roadmap. Like you said,
it's a blueprint for the next person who wants to have notoriety to pick
it up and go. You know what, that sounds like a great idea,
Let's go. There are transcripts available of the Dylan Cleebold Eric Harris basement
tapes, word for word what was said by these two individuals in the interests
of everyone's mental health, and I'm talking about the collective of the Big WII
here. Yes, I don't know that we really need to see this stuff.
Now. There may be people that are studying criminology psychology, they may
want access to transcripts of this series of eight millimeter tapes that the Columbine High
School shooters made, but they don't need to see the tapes themselves. And
I think what the sheriff was trying to do, and as I mentioned,
he had the full support of the families. They were perfectly fine with destroying
the tapes because who wants to see those two losers forever boasting about what they
were about to do. They shot these tapes over weeks, including just shortly
before they actually committed the heinous as that they brought to Columbine High School that
day. We both know there's so much interest now and true crime. There's
a lot of material that tends to leak, so it ends up just all
over the place. And of course this wondrous tool, the World Wide Web,
that we all use and we're using as we record this podcast, it
also allows for very quick distribution of often extremely disturbing material that most of us
don't need to see. One of the things that I remember very clearly from
one of the crime cons that we went to in the last couple of years,
I think it was New Orleans. They have a tendency to blend together
because they're all action packed and with a lot of information. But what I
do I think this, I think this was New Orleans. It was Chris
Darden speaking. Was that New Orleans? It was pretty amazing, And I
think that was New Orleans. Yes, So I remember that he was doing
his excellent presentation, which really was phenomenally he's a great speed Yeah, but
I remember that in his PowerPoint he included very graphic, un edited crime scene
photos from the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murders, and I remember thinking,
oh, Man, and I never wanted to see those. I didn't
either, and at the same time, I didn't recall those ever being shown
publicly before. No, they weren't. To the best of my knowledge,
they weren't. And that's the sort of thing that there are people out there
who, when they learn about this case for the first time, they go,
oh, let's see if there are crime scene photos, the same way
that there are people who google the manson crime scene photos. And people have
contacted me and they've actually asked me for copies of the Colonial Parkway murders crime
scene photos which were leaked by the FBI about thirteen or more years ago,
and I'm going to share them with oddball people that I've never met. There
are times when I don't know what to say other than no. Yeah.
The number of times we've had that request is a little alarming. It's like,
where do you get that the idea that might be an actual, okay
request to make to the brother of a victim. I mentioned to you at
one point I was contacted by someone who was purporting to put together a museum
about serial killers and they wanted something of my sisters alcatraziast. I think it
was Yeah, why in the world would you think that was an okay thing
to ask, And I've expressed some regret here on Mind over Murder at different
times. We actually didn't end up with very much of the things that belonged
to Kathy. I'm not a big believer that things are important, but there
are times when I think I would have liked a few more little momentos that
would have reminded me of Kathy. And I think in retrospect, we made
a bit of a mistake. We were in a kind of purging, giving
away boxing and ee been shipping it off somewhere mode, mostly driven by my
parents, which I understand, but I have regret now that, for example,
we threw away hundreds of letters and cards that were sent by Kathy's friends,
many of them from the Naval Academy and from the Navy, and they
were lovely and they contained funny stories and things that made them really love and
care about Kathy. And my parents decided we needed to get rid of them,
I think because perhaps they felt that they were too painful. Now my
brothers and I are sorry, because we think it would be really lovely to
have those things. I'm not saying I'd look at them every day or every
week, but it'd be nice to have them in a box somewhere. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's odd and sometimes disturbing the way people will ask
for things that are incredibly personal and often highly disturbing, and expect, for
example, to be a to read the rantings of an obviously crazy person,
or watch these videotapes recorded by these two killers. And with regard to the
crime scene photos, Bill and I have both seen them, they are not
things that we want to see. Again, it's just not. I'm sure
that there are people out there who are like, they're interested in it,
They're invested in the case, they want to know more. Please believe me,
you do not want to see what was done to these victims. You
just don't because once you see it, as you've said a number of times,
Bill and I can say too, you can't un see it. It's
not out of your head ever, It's there. It's there when I close
my eyes, it's on the back of my eyelids. You can't unsee it.
For every person who reaches out and is, hey, can I see
the crime scene photos, it's you don't want to do that to yourself.
You just don't. No, and on some level, I think to myself,
I'm going to give you a polite answer, even though I don't feel
like giving you a polite answer, Because for people to say, oh,
I want to see the crime scene photos because I'm interested, Are you serious?
It would be another thing if it was a law enforcement officer or somebody
in behavioral analysis, someone that had a legitimate reason to want to study the
crime scene photos. But for the most part, those people already have access
to them. And even when you and I started working together, it was
a bit of a balancing act for me to try to figure out, Okay,
what details are appropriate for me to ask and what are not, And
so for the first couple of years, it was always me prefacing conversations with
if you don't want to answer this, you don't have to. But and
it was You've always been very generous. All of the family members have been
very generous about sharing things and insights that are deeply personal. But it was
really only within the last year that I saw those crime scene photos, and
I wish to god I hadn't. I know, they're very disturbing. You're
listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our
sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder. Among the articles that you shared
with me over the last week or so as we were discussing putting this podcast
together was a very powerful article from The New York Times. It was a
magazine story from April twentieth, twenty twenty three. We'll link to this in
the show notes. I urge all of our listeners to read this story,
and of course The New York Times is not behind a paywall, thankfully.
This article is incredibly powerful and moving. It focuses on three investigators who worked
on the Sandy Hook shooting in twenty twelve and Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where
twenty six people were murdered, and it's a very powerful article. I don't
think most of us will be able to get through without shedding a few tears.
Oh yeah. But they talked about the impact that working that crime scene
with twenty six victims, what that was like for these pretty hardened professional people,
but also people with hearts and souls and minds that, like you said,
can't turn the images that they've seen off. They went home to their
families and really struggled. They mentioned that there are fourteen hundred and ninety five
photos. That's almost fifteen hundred photos of the crime scene from Sandy Hook,
most of which are so horrifying they've never been shown to the public, and
they talked about being obligated to show them to Eric Holder, who was then
the Attorney General of the United States, and a group of FBI agents and
behavioral analysis people. Just the reaction of those individuals, and these are trained
law enforcement people who've seen a lot, maybe have seen it all, as
we have said, many of them also had military experience and had seen combat.
A number of people in this article actually said that the crime scene photos
from Sandy Hook were worse than anything they'd ever seen, even in combat.
The slugline for this it's very evocative, and it's just two sentences. They
saw the horrific aftermath of a mass shooting. Should we It's a very powerful
question, it is. It was an extremely powerful article. As you said,
I cried quite a few times quite a bit while reading it. It
does bring up a very interesting point. While we don't want to encourage the
rantings and ravings of people who just want to get true crime famous by releasing
the manifestos of mass shooters, should we be doing more to make sure that
people understand the outcome of mass shootings. There's a lot of angles for this.
Can we do that while still being respectful to the victims? I don't
know. I'm not sure that you can do that when it's something like Sandy
Hook, when you've got twenty six victims and most of them are children.
How do you do that? But at the same time to be perfectly honest.
And I remember exactly where I was when I heard about Sandy Hook.
I was actually in the front office at my school where I teach now,
and I remember thinking, if slaughtered children does not make this country change its
stance on gun violence, I don't know what will. And the answer clearly
is not that I'd have to agree, and my personal access is always going
to bend towards respect for victims. I have a concern, however, and
I think you're touching on this, which is for us as a society,
if we don't actually see the damage and the physical damage that's being done by
weapons of war. And I'm not talking about a standard handgun here. I'm
talking about AR fifteen style weapons or the Bushmaster rifle that was used by the
shooter in Sandy hook. If we don't actually see some of the physical damage,
on some level, we're being shielded, protected from the carnage that's happening
in these mass shootings. I was shocked. I remember this happening, but
I'd forgotten or perhaps blocked it from my mind that sixteen little kids had crowded
into the bathroom, which was three feet by four feet, and we're all
shot to death in that completely confined space. They weren't even able to fall
to the ground. The investigators who had to work that crime scene for days
were so horrified by what they'd seen and what that shooter and what that gun
did to those little children to the point where they weren't even recognizable as human
beings. The level of just shocking injury to these little, tiny kids is
something that is going to haunt these people, all of these investigators, the
medical examiners, everyone that worked this case for the rest of their lives.
I'm actually wondering if there's got to be a way for us to come to
understand how much damage is being done to these victims and to us as a
society by these endless mass shooting. Right after the Nashville Covenant School shooting,
it was either the evening of or the day after. The Washington Post made
what I think was a pretty bold step, and they produced a piece called
the Blast Effect. It shows what AR fifteen rounds due to the human body
when it blasts through tissue, bones, and organs. And they did it
in a way that's very interesting. They did not use crime scene photos,
but they did some like three D modeling, or every time you scrolled up
on the screen, there would be a picture of a just a facsimile of
a human body, no features or anything like that, and it would show
the pattern of injuries obtained by They chose two people from two school shootings.
They picked a child from Sandy Hook and they picked a student who was killed
at Parkland. They had gotten permission from both of these children's parents to use
the injuries that happened to their kids as part of this article. They basically
showed in real time, when a child gets hit with six rounds from an
AR fifteen, this is what happens. And I actually I want to quote
this thing from the Washington Post really because Washington Post printed a justification for why
they did this, and so I want to quote from them real quick.
The catastrophic damage. The bullets from AR fifteen's cause inside human bodies is rarely
made public in detail. News organizations do not generally publish graphic autopsy or crime
scene photos because the images could be viewed as to humanizing, exploitative, and
traumatizing, or could inflict further pain on the families of victims. As a
result, the damaged AR fifteen fire can do to a human body a great
deal more than handguns is not widely understood. When we set out to chronicle
the story of the A fifteen in America, we search for ways to illustrate
the effect on bodies in an unflinching but respectful manner. We recognize this presentation
may disturb readers, but we determine the information it contains is crucial to the
public's knowledge, and then it goes on from there. I like the fact
that they did two things here that they acknowledged. We realize what it would
do to these families to show these crime scene photos, but we also acknowledge
that we have to make people aware of what happens when you hit the human
body with this many high velocity rounds. The story definitely was divisive. I
had a friend who posted it on Facebook, and then she edited her post
to say, actually, you know what, I'm taking this link down because
I don't want people to click on it and be traumatized. But I am
going to tell you why you should read it. So she didn't provide the
link, but she did say here's the information. Here's how you can google
it and find it, but I'm not going to link it because it's very
up like she described how upset she got. It's an interesting conundrum, but
ultimately I think Washington Post deciding to produce that piece. It was upsetting,
absolutely, but it was brave and it was necessary too. I think the
article The Blast Effect ran in the Washington Post on March twenty seventh, twenty
twenty three. Before people complain that the Washington Post is hidden behind a paywall,
this article is available for free on the Washington Post website. I just
reconfirmed that, and the reason that they did that is because they want people
to see this article. Now you can read the material or not, but
we're going to link to it. The information is available, and it is
an extremely powerful and, as you said, Kristen, disturbing article. But
I think this information needs to be out there because for us to go through
one mass shooting after another, particularly now we have this, this whole series
of mass shootings at schools and churches and synagogues and mosques and dance schools and
just on and on, and yet we don't ever see much evidence of what
actually transpired in these mass shootings. We're just seeing articles and we see pictures
of the first responders and ambulances and the fronts of buildings. We see the
Uvalde Elementary School, but we don't see inside, and we certainly don't see
the damage that's been done to the buildings, to the community, and most
importantly to the people. I can already anticipate because we get blowback whenever we
talk about guns and gun violence in mass shootings, and there are people who
don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear it from us.
As a teacher who deals every day with the disturbing realities that come with having
guns in the school and with mass shootings being a regular thing, this is
something that is constantly on my mind. And as Bill is the brother of
a murder victim, we've got a lot of credibility wrapped up in this issue.
When we talk about the idea of authentic reporting and reporting what is right.
We talk about ethics and true crime. I think that not only do
we have a right to talk about this, I think we have the responsibility
to talk about it. Is true crime podcasters is Journalist's friend laughed at me
the other day, he was like, you're not a journalist. Okay,
fine, but I am your podcaster. Yeah, I am a podcaster,
and I have a forum. We have a forum, and we have the
right to speak about it, and more importantly, we have the responsibility to
speak about it. So are we going to get blowback for this episode?
Yet? Probably we always do. I think if anybody has the right to
speak out about it, it's people who live it within the true crime space.
We have always tried to be very respectful of the fact that our listeners
come from a wide variety of backgrounds. First of all, you're all over
the country, you're all over the world. Politically, it's the gamut from
our most conservative friends to our most liberal friends, and lots of stops in
between. I don't even know why I feel I need to say this.
Understand, no one's coming for your guns. We're not proposing that anyone take
away your guns. But if we as a country don't figure out how to
do something, we're headed down a road here that is so excruciatingly painful and
divisive. We've got to figure out a way for kids to be able to
go to school safely. And then, as I was mentioning all those other
categories, and I'm just scratching the surface, you can't go anywhere now without
being worried that you're going to be gunned down by a crazy person with an
automatic weapon. Let me read from the ap for a moment. The US
is setting a record pace for mass killings in twenty twenty three. We're playing
the horror on a loop roughly once a week. So far this year,
the carnage has taken eighty eight lives in seventeen mass killings over one hundred and
eleven days, each time the killers wielded firearms. Only two thousand and nine
was marked by as many such tragedies in the same period of time. Eighty
eight lives seventeen mass killings in the first one hundred and eleven days of this
year. This is insane and we can't keep doing this. We've got to
figure out something. If people want to say that we're falling off the planet
lefty tree huggers. That actually is true when it comes to me, let
me say you are, aren't you. I'm not embarrassed about that. But
at the same time, we understand a lot of the people that we work
with in law enforcement are coming at this from a much more conservative perspective.
I am respectful, and I know, Kristin you are too, of our
friends and family that are coming at this from perhaps a more conservative, perhaps
even pro gun point of view. But I don't think it is bomb throwing
in any way, shape or form to say we have to do something together
to figure out how to address this issue, and arming teachers isn't even a
serious suggestion, so let's not even bother to go there. I do think
we need to take steps and work together. And if people want to say
that we're communists or whatever, quite frankly, it probably means you don't know
what you're talking about. All we're saying is we think we need to do
so thing, and we need to do something now. One of the other
things that also came up when I read this piece, but particularly the New
York Times piece about the incredibly brave law enforcement personnel who had to deal with
the carnage at Sandy Hook. We need to be doing more as a country
to address for the first responders and the famili's victims, helping them get past
the trauma that comes with living with something like this. Whether it's responding to
sixteen young children crowded into a bathroom who have been shot to death, or
whether it's a family member who has lost one person in their family to gun
violence. We still, I think, need to be doing better as a
country in terms of how can we support you, how can we help you?
This is hard stuff to live through, and Bill, I know you
can attest to that. And I never signed on for this. I am
not in law enforcement. I'm not an investigator. I'm not a cop.
I have tremendous respect for our friends in law enforcement that do these jobs that
many of us wouldn't have the heart to do. Me included, I would
not be able to do this kind of gig now, not at all.
And so whether it is all of us maybe learning a little bit more about
trauma response and how to better help people who have been in a traumatic situation,
or whether it's going a step bigger and reforming healthcare in this country so
that mental health is not stigmatized, and so that we have more options in
terms of getting therapy or counseling or whatever the heck else it is that you
need once you've had to deal with this. I think that's another step we
need to take as a country. If we're going to deal out this level
of violence, we need to figure out a way to support the people who
have been impacted by it. That goes from me as someone who has been
a victim of crime. I'm you who is the brother of a murder victim.
I can't think of a single person that I know within the true crime
space who either hasn't been in some way, shape or form touched by crime.
I'm not advocating that we all get together and sing Kumbaya around a fire
or anything like that, but I'm also thinking that probably wouldn't hurt for everybody
to sit down and have a therapy session or something like that. Altogether,
it is hard to deal with. It is rough. The thing that nobody
tells you when you deal with this, And again, I know you can
attest to this bill, especially if you don't sign up for it, is
you don't suffer just one time. It's not something that happens and then magically
you wake up and you're better. You deal with it over and over again
every single day. Your famili's dealt with it for thirty five years. I
can't even imagine. As we steer this episode to a close, I just
want to summarize where I am, and then I'd like to hear Kristin if
you or at the same place or not. We've always committed by the way
that we don't have to agree on every little thing. I like the fact
that we have different perspectives. I'll put this out from my point of view.
Your mileage may vary. In thinking about these two issues for today's podcast,
should law enforcement be releasing manifest those of this type? In thinking about
it, I think the answer for me is no. Interestingly, the related
question about whether or not we should be seeing more evidence of what's happening physically
to our victims in these mass shootings, as long as we can do this
in a way that's respectful of victims and victims families, And I know this
is a hard one. I actually think we may want to be thinking about
finding ways to allow people to see the horrific damage it's being done by these
weapons of war. So I'm actually leaning towards perhaps allowing some limited public and
media viewing of what is actually happening to these victims, because I think people
would be shocked, and what I hope would happen is they would be galvanized
into taking active steps to do something about gun violence here in the US.
I'm with you on I'm like ninety five percent of that. I do agree
that, Yes, the manifestos, the rantings, the rabians, so whatever
you would to call it for mass shooters, we don't need to be putting
that out there. Are we going to be curious about what was at Audrey
Hillsner Books? Yeah? Absolutely? But do we need to see it?
No, If the FBI says, hey, we don't want to release it
because we don't think it's a good idea, and I'll respect your opinion,
we probably don't need to release it. We don't need to see it.
The crime scene photo issue is harder because, as you say, it would
have to be done respectfully. I'm not sure what that would look like.
So I'm always a little hesitant to agree to something without knowing in full how
would this look. I'm all about playing in an organization, and I don't
like agreeing to things if I don't know how it's going to work out in
terms of wake up calls. Might be a good one, but the cynical
part of me is afraid and does not want to see what would happen if
people looked at that and were like, I'd still rather have my gun.
And I know that there would be people who would react that way, and
I don't know if my bruised little heart can take that. I don't know
that I could deal with that, especially from people that I know and love
who are they like their guns, protective of their guns, and I've told
them I'm not the mean liberal here to take away your gun. You can
have your gun, and I'm fine with that. I don't know how I
would feel if someone that I really truly loved saw those crime scene photos and
said, you know it, that doesn't matter to me, because it matters
to me. I find myself in a really weird place right there. The
appropriate compromise might actually be articles like the Blast Effect in the Washington Post,
which managed to be descriptive and informative without necessarily being horrifically graphic. Because they
were illustrations. Yeah, will recommend the New York Times article and the Washington
Post articles as both very much worth our listener's time. I would also add
to that, if you know that this is something that is going to greatly
upset you, then please use your own best discretion and don't put yourself through
something that you don't feel like you have the emotional capacity to handle. Right
then, I definitely wish that I had waited a day or two before I
looked at the Washington Post article. It was very necessary, it was something
that I needed to see, but I didn't have good dreams that night.
It stayed there in the back of my head and all ended up having that
night was gone related nightmares. So know where you're at and where you're coming
from before you embark on these particular articles, and if you need to use
discretion, I would say, err, on the side of using discretion,
I think we should steal it to a close. That's going to wrap it
up for ruminations with Bill and Kristen. We've got to come up with a
better title for this, I think. But I feel like this is what
you would get if you were to ask the two of us to coffee.
We would talk about these things. We would do it with a caffeinated beverage
and maybe a scone or two. But this is what you would get if
you had Bill and I for coffee. Hopefully this has at least been a
slightly illuminating experience for you. As you were saying that, I thought to
myself we could change it from ruminations to disturbing thoughts with Kris and disturbing conversations
with Kristin and Bill disturbing but necessary conversations with Kristin and Bill. We'll figure
out some sort of title for this, but we do hope that you have
enjoyed spending a little bit of time with the two of us today. If
you like what we're doing with the podcast, please do make sure that you
leave us a five star rating and on any of your podcast platforms. Do
you check us out on social media? And we do still have merchandise by
the way over at to Public, Please do feel free to buy some mind
Over Murder merchandise. We love seeing you at crime con in various other places.
In that merch that's going to do it for this episode of mind Over
Murder. 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 McLoud. Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You can also
follow our page on the Colonial Parkway Murders on Facebook, and finally, you
can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas. Five six. Thank you
for listening to mind Over Murder.