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 my never Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley and
now I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by doctor Anne Burgess and Stephen Constantine,
authors of a Killer by Design, Murderers, Mine Hunters, and My
Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. And Stephen, thank you for joining us
in Mind of a Murder today. Thanks for having us, Yes for happy
to be here. Let's go ahead and start by having you both tell our
listeners about your personal and professional backgrounds and so, and I'll start with you
and then we'll flip it right to Stephen. Sure, okay. I am
a psychiatric nurse. I have my doctorate in nursing science. I've been an
academic most of my life and currently at Boston College at the Canal School of
Nursing. I also have a small private practice. Much of my work is
teaching or doing research. I've been at Boston College, you know. I
was at Boston College in the seventies when the project with the rape started with
Linda Homestrom, then went to University of Pennsylvania, and then have come back
to Boston College. Stephen, how about you? Sure? Yeah, So
I do marketing and communications here at Boston College, which is how doctor Burgess
and I met. And my background of writing as I have an MFA in
writing and nurture from Bennington College and Vermont. I think that leads us to
the natural question. So how do the two of you end up as writing
partners? The most obvious thing is we both are at Boston College and the
Canal School of Nursing. So we're housed, if you will, Our offices
are in the same building. In fact, I'm one floor above Stephen.
Stephen had just arrived a little bit. I think I'll let him give you
more of the timeline. But he when he came and he started right off
really getting into the communications and so forth, and actually set up a mind
Hunter had just come out. This was about in the twenty eighteen and mine
Hunter had just come out, and we have invited John Douglas, who of
course is the author of mind Hunter, to come. And I think in
the context of having to work on that project and get it ready for a
very large audience. It's a very large student audience that we had that we
really talked more about the cases that I had done and some of my work.
Ever, so I'll let to Stephen fill in there. Yeah. Yeah,
it was great. We met working on that mine Hunter event that we
held here at Boston College. Douglas was going to come up have a conversation
with doctor Burgess here in front of students and staff and alum to talk about
what it was really like behind the scenes at the FBI developing criminal profiling and
working on some of these cases. But as we were prepping for that event,
I spent a lot of time talking to doctor Burgess to learn about her
experiences. I was just amazed by it, her perspective, the work she
was doing behind the scenes to take the data and to turn it into to
take all this really disparate content and data and to analyze it and to turn
it into a structured methodology for criminal profiling was really interesting, really compelling.
It's nothing that had been shared before. So I started gently prodding her to
get her story out into the world, and she was interested in doing it
in maybe a form of teaching or some online model nuals for students to learn
from, because that's always been very important for her, is using her experience
to teach others. But we eventually wrote a few test chapters together and settled
on the idea of a book, and it just took off pretty quickly from
there. Yeah. The other thing I'd add is it was originally way back
in when we started with the FBI profilers, it was intended to be two
projects, one which we did complete, which was on the patterns of sexual
homicide, and that book did come out, but the second was on the
profiling, and it just I think what happened is so many of the agents
retired and I was moving on. I was at University of Pennsylvania, and
so all of the materials. Luckily I kept all of the materials we had
transcribed all of the meetings and the sessions where they would rate the cases,
so I had all of that, and luckily no rain or how sellers get
it was still pretty much intact. And that's what Stephen asked if you could
see some of it, and I think realized that there was a lot of
very important information that we could use from that. I have been a John
Douglas fan from way back, probably far too early. I started reading John
when I was maybe at fifteen or sixteen, probably way too early, but
I knew that there had been a woman named Anne Burgess who worked on the
profiling project too, and I always wondered, why do we not have her
story yet? So when I saw your book in Barnes and Noball, like
right as it came out, I did a little jump for joy in the
aisle. Very embarrassing of me to have done it, but I was so
excited because I was like, this is the missing piece of the puzzle.
We finally get her story, and so thrilled. What was that seminar like
that you put together the two of you up in front of a group of
students. That must have been amazing. I would have loved to have been
a fly on the wall for that. What was that like? Yeah,
it really was. And I think we had the questions. We had a
moderator, which was I think very helpful to pitch the questions to us.
John was his usual self, vintage John. I calm, and he would
tell some of the stories not so much get there but afterwards, because some
of the stories are pretty intense, so we didn't want to scare away the
audience. And then but John's always been In fact, I went back and
read the inscription that he had put in the book, and he says,
it's about time that you got your story out. I said, yeah,
I'm a slow writer, but than Kevins. I had Steven to help because
it's a very different style then I always used to. I had to do
academic writing, which is very dull and boring. I think just the facts,
and Steven was able to certainly make it become much more alive than I
would have been able to do. You enjoy the writing process, and is
it help? Hate writing? I was wondrous. I hate writing, Yeah,
and yet I did fifteen textbooks before this, and I've certainly done a
couple hundred articles. You have to if you stay in academ you have to
get tenure and all of that. But no, it's not easy. That's
why I was amazed that Steven seems to be able to just because that's his
interest and that's what he was trained for. So do you enjoy teaching men?
Flipping that around, because clearly you've been a professor for all of these
years, and I know your classes are sold out, fully enrolled and are
incredibly popular. Is that where you get more of your enjoyment in terms of
them and your storytelling. Yes, I come from a clinical base, and
so I feel that the best way to teach is through clinical examples. So
it was pretty natural to put the cases on it, and I was teaching
the students as much for what the cases were about it as for prevention.
Because when you hear my husband's a pilot, and so he said that when
they sit around in the hangar, they tell all their war stories because there
might just be something that they remember that gets them out of a tight situation.
That's the mentality that I had is to tell them so that they as
I said, they might not get in the situation or be able to get
out of it. By the way, this amazing event that you had a
couple of years ago with John, the two of you, I can't imagine
what a privilege that would be. Was it recorded, would anybody ever be
able to see it who wasn't there that night at Boston College. Yeah,
we have the recording. We can definitely forward it to you guys, and
you can link to it. Yep. And would that be something that would
ever be shown publicly? Yeah. I think it's on YouTube or vimeo,
so failable. So yeah, we'd be happy to share that. Your audience
can check it out as well. He was great working with Anna's great,
She's fantastic. She's a great storyteller. Amazing experience. And then John is
very much a character. Him being on stage was a lot of fun and
just their dynamic was a lot of fun. So it's definitely worth watching for
sure. We've interviewed Mark Olshaker, who knows Kristen quite well, and he
has also been just a joy for us to be around. I'll let Kristen
tell you a little bit more about that. Yeah, it's hard to keep
up with John, he's always writing another book. He and Mark two coming
out or in the works. Yeah, I said, it's a very high
borrow. I said the seven. We've got to increase our productivity here a
bit. So, Stephen, is true crime something that you've always had an
interest in or did that develop when you started working with doctor Burgess? Yeah?
I think it definitely developed through doctor Burgess. It's not something that I
had a strong interest in before, and even so, it was definitely her
story that was more interesting to me than the true crime aspect. And I
think that's what separates her story from a lot of the agents is there's no
sensationalism. There's no had it gore or anything like that. And one of
the things she made clear to me very early on was it this is a
book that has to keep the victim front and center. I wanted to be
about the victim, and like she had spoken two moments ago, maybe people
can learn something from this if we keep it honest and truthful and with the
victim in mind. I like that approach. It seemed a little bit different,
it seemed very compassionate. So I was really interested in telling that story,
her story as opposed to worrying too much about the true aspect itself.
So it's five years to bring this book to fruition, is that right?
But maybe four? But yeah, it was definitely a long process. How
does your process work? And how did you find the time to do this,
because you clearly both have very busy schedules. COVID came yea, that
is true. Yeah, yeah, And so we had more time because for
one or two semesters we had to do the virtual teaching. There weren't students
around or anything, so we could just keep moving along. I know that
was one of the things. Maybe Stephen has another suggestion of how it went.
I think one of the things that was tricky to begin with was there,
like doctor Versus said, she's held on to all these archival materials from
her work with the BSU, So combing through that and figuring out which cases
we wanted to use to help tell the story of the evolution of criminal profiling,
it took a while to figure that out. So I think that was
a tricky part, is that there was just so much material to just figure
out what the real colonel of knowledge was. And then once we got going,
it was pretty quick back and forth for the first couple of months,
Doctor Burgh said her office was above mine, so she would just swing down.
We would chat about ideas, chat about case, and then we would
send emails of chapters back and forth and keep revising. And then once COVID
not having to worry about a commute and just seeming to have a little bit
more free time, we were really able to dive on in. And then
we found our agent who had some ideas of how to change things up,
and then she got as our editor, who had some ideas of how to
change things up. So there was a lot of people involved, a lot
of evolution to the process, so it tasts longer than you might expect.
Did you then shift over to working virtually with the two of you as well,
so that you were both working from remote locations. Yeah. And I
wanted to ask you something. As the brother of a murder victim, my
sister, Kathy Thomas and her girlfriend Rebecca Asky were murdered as part of the
Colonial Parkway murders, which has been an FBI case since day one. Now,
my experience is obviously not from inside the bureau. It's from outside the
bureau. But we find that the bureau is terrible about information sharing. I
was curious, now here you are. You're coming in and you're being brought
in. I think initially as a consultant, if I understood your history clearly
enough, how is it you still have all of the paperwork and your notes.
It wasn't there anything that the FBI said, Oh, no, this
belongs to us. This is our work product from those studies that you did
in the analysis because it was a study and we had a small grant for
I had a team up in Boston that was taking the data and so it
was an that National Institute of Justice grant and we set it up. Your
cautions is very good. We were very concerned people couldn't get access to all
of these interviews and so forth. That's really how we handled it. So
did the work product belong to you then? As opposed to the Bureau,
because they were usually very big on control, they are very absolutely are,
Yeah they are. Did you have to get permission, for example, to
write the book or use any of the examples from the work that you had
done or was that clear enough in terms of authorship? If? Yeah,
And I think that's one of the advantages that was so far. It was
a good twenty thirty years ago. The first book we did, the sexual
homicide book we did that had to go through there. They take thirty days
and somebody has to review it, etc. Etc. But this is what
we didn't have to because it was not considered a bureau product. It was
considered it just wasn't I know. I had asked John about that, and
he didn't seem to think there was any need to at this point in time.
One element along those lines that we did, they a lot of attention
to you, and it was with the victims who were miners at the time.
We didn't make sure to make their names more ambiguous and to take those
out. So it's not to cause any part or challenges for the families.
I would just go say, I will say that some people did try to
get access to the interviews, but they just nobody could find them. With
these unreal to real tapes back in the day. I'm yeah, they're all
transcribed. Yeah. So then I also wanted to make sure that asked about
the crime Classification Manual. Can you talk a little bit about writing the crime
Classification Manual? I think it's on third edition right now. Do you have
to go back and make changes and revisions to this or how does that work?
Yeah, that was an interesting book because we modeled it after the what's
called the DSM, the Diagnostic and syle Manual, which is the bible so
to speak, of the psychiatric group. And so we broke all the agents
up into groups and they would meet on the various crimes that we had.
We'd divided that if you've looked at it into homicide and rape and child and
arson, the real important thing. Giving the examples we had to have,
again, we didn't get them from the agents. We wrote up cases,
but we really used our own write up of that for that. So that
was interesting because we really wanted to see if law enforcement could classify the crimes
because they didn't have any way of just talking about it like in the DSN,
what is schizophrenia or what is depression or something like that, and so
dividing it into the classifications was that we felt was a major step, and
it did. It was accepted by the agents. Now we're up. You're
right, we're up to the third edition. We haven't done anymore. I'm
not sure I've gone into a different area, So it would be up to
me. I don't know whether John's interested in redoing it, but I think
that's where we're at, so to speak. Were there arguments or intense discussions
behind the scenes, In other words, you had to make decisions about where
you were going to put things. And this was all incredibly innovative at the
time. Yes, and John and Bob Russ are forget Bob was a big
person involved in all of this, and they would be the overall supervisor,
so to speak, with these groups, to make sure that the characteristics and
the search warrant information and all that was as good as it could be.
Now, whether they got into arguments, it's always got into arguments. Let
me tell you that, you've got a group of men that really have some
pretty high egos. So it's always been fun. I always thought it was
fun to see what they would argue over from a professional standpoint, from a
law enforcement standpoint. Your question, I've never heard anyone call him Bob either.
In other words, Robert Wrestler is this Oh yeah, again, incredibly
prominent figure in this world. You know him well enough to call him Bob?
Yes. Oh. We worked hard on that and on the project.
We had meetings down of course, at Quanticode, but they would come up
and we meet in my house. We'd sit around the dining room table and
workout cases there, and they stayed at the house. The government wasn't so
good on giving out much money from their expenses, so we're on a shoe
string. If you want to know, you'd save money by having them stay
at the house. Sure, yeah, then just we eat right through dinner
and keep working. They were very hard workers. Yes, did you have
any sense that you were making history? This unbelievable stuff? The team,
the group of people that worked on this thing, and you have to realize
they were on their own time, which I think was remarkable. They really
were on their own time. The at least Wrestler and Douglas certainly were on
their own time chronicle. Of course, they would come in and the others
would come in, The other profilers would come in, but it was John
and Bob that would come up and they'd come up to Boston City Hospitals where
we had our research groups. So they'd come over there and we'd looked at
the data. That's really awesome. So then at this point, when you
set out to write your book with Steven, had you read Sean and Roy
Hazelwood and Bob Wrestler's books about the days with the BSU. Oh yeah,
I have all the all. They always would give me copies because we stayed.
Yeah, so we and I'd always call them there was a case and
I'd want to know what I should get from them to tell the students they
loved it. It was And in fact, we're still in touch with several
of what I call the first generation profile or several from the second and third
generation. And that's important because they were trained by Bob and John and so
the ones that came after them are more current ones. Not having that training
I think makes a difference. But Wrestler and Douglas were really experts. At
is uncanny how they could go to a front scene and figure it all out.
But yeah, Stephen, did you read all of this too in preparation
or did you want to set yourself apart from all of that subject matter a
little bit of both. One of the great things about working talk to verses
two is that she does maintain all these connections to a lot of these retired
agents into people all over the law enforcement and FBI world. We've had conversations
with some of these people to learn a little bit more about their stories as
well, or they've presoomed into lecture at one of doctor Berg's classes. Definitely,
their input was very helpful, and doctor Burgess sent chapters out to them
as well to make sure everything was as accurate as possible, So that was
a great benefit. Absolutely. Did you find that your recollections and there's were
fairly consistent or were there areas where you were like, I remember it like
this and John was like, actually know it was like this. Were there
ever areas where you argued about this is what actually happened. I wouldn't argue
because they were the ones that were there, and I can't remember. I
actually could say yes to your question because they would have. For example,
when they interviewed the Barry John Simonis, both the Ken Lanning and Roy Hazelwood.
Not Ken Lanning is still alive, and he gave me quite some insight
on that because it was only a twenty minute tape that they made at the
end of eight hours of interview, so he had a yeah, he had
a lot of things to starch about it that didn't make it into the tape.
Their memories are great. I still Judd Ray, for example. They
all did really important things at that time, so I think your point about
they were making history. Judd Ray did one of the first cases on an
Alaska family murder where he was able to get come in as an expert to
talk about it. Not until that time the agents hadn't been serving as experts.
And I'm trying to think of Greg Cooper, who now runs a cold
case foundation and we're part of that. He's a fantastic profiler. You should
get him on one of your times. He had the guy who was a
He had murdered two separate persons, and so he testified the first time and
they won because he was qualified as one of the first times the agent was
qualified. And then on the second one the guy said to him the defendants
said him, not you again coming into He said that right to Greg.
So it was plenty. So they all had important roles to play in the
criminal justice system back in those signs. Because this is back in the nineties
when they were trying to get some of these serial coasts. All of the
cases in the book were from the thirty six we had looked at. We
had an original list I think of some eighty eighty or eighty two, and
we whittled it down to the thirty six that we thought we could get the
agent interviews with. So that's where so many of those cases are in mind
Hunter, and certainly in right Hazelwood's book and Wrestler's books. So it's interesting
to go back and read them after I've read through some of the profiling material
that we had, and so there is all and then if there's some conflict,
I have to go and call them. I have to call John a
lot on the site to see how his memory is on some of these cases,
because it's going back what thirty years? How unusual was it? And
for you as a woman to be working in that field, very unusual.
I will say that people put off by it. Did they think that it
was weird that a woman, even a woman with your professional background, wasn't?
I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so. Because my
field was victimology, and that's why they had invited me down. That was
not their area. Don't forget their investigators. So they're looking for the bad
guy as far as they were concerned the victim. Of course it was victim,
but they wouldn't pay much attention and so bringing in the whole victim aspect
turned their work into That became one of the first things if you read any
of their material, it's who's the victim, why is she there? What
led up to an etc. Etc. And so they start their profiling from
that standpoint of the victim, so being down there, and they knew about
my rape study, so it wasn't that I was in any way invading quote,
their territories, So there was no feeling of that. They might feel
that way with other consultants coming in, But it was because I could bring
them something that they didn't have, and they respected that, and I think
that's why we all got along. So well, 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. Stephen. Earlier, you were alluding to the
fact that you wanted the book to be very victim centric, and of course,
as people who are victim's advocates, and Bill being the brother of a
murder victim, we really appreciated the fact that it is so victim centric.
True crime is a genre where a lot of times there is too much focus
on the killers and there is not enough on the victim. What would you
say, are the things that consumers of true crime need to be aware of
in order to honor the victims and not mythologize the killers and not bring their
bias in. I think that's the problem. So many times they try to
They don't want to identify with the victim. Nobody wants to be the victim,
so they might say why was the victim doing this or why was the
victim doing that? Rather than because the more they could deny that would be
any behavior that they would do made a difference. They wouldn't be able to
understand the victim. So I think that's the biggest hurdle is to confront people's
bias. Might say, also those of the myths that are out there.
But if the victim is found because she was hitchhiking, say back in those
days, that was a big thing, they would blame her. There was
so much of the blame of the victim and not enough of who's the suspect.
Being able to talk about the impact on the victim, we felt was
really important. This is also just that phenomenon of Hollywood lossing over stuff and
making everything into its most consumable and universally consumable form. You see these zerio
killers who look charming on TV, who are handsome, who are real smooth
talkers and all this, and there's something almost identifiable about that, and I
think the barriers become a little bit thin. So that can be a bit
of an issue that people have to pay attention to as well. Yeah,
I think you're sharing the victim stories and they're real people, their families were
affected. It's very traumatic. So instead of mythologizing the killer, but just
showing the victims side of the story as well as important. And with all
the work that you did, were you surprised at how this mythology began to
develop. The thing that Steven's talking about the charming serial killer. Some of
them are charming, but the myth is out there. Yeah, oh yeah,
we're write about that. One of the chapters of the Agents talking about
who's your favorite, say real killer, but they even have favorites, So
it's not just myth, it's reality that they become so fascinated with what these
killers do. How much of that is personality can be a factor if they're
psycho if they're psychopaths, they're going to be very charming. They're going to
try to con and they, I suggestfully do. That's what was good about
the agent going in and interviewing them. I think that is important to say,
because they I felt they really turned into being more victim or re ended,
so when they went in, they wouldn't know the case cold, so
that the inmate couldn't calm them, and they would confront them. I think
he even saw that on Netflix. There's a couple of cases I think with
Brudos Jerry Brutus where he had taken this picture and his picked his face was
right in the photograph and they confronted there. I remember that was one of
the good segments that they did. And they're going in as FBI agents carrying
the authority. I think the other thing is many of these guys we found
in the research had a missing father, the absent father, if you will.
So here these FBI agents that stand for authority, male authority so to
speak, coming in it was high point for them and they could feel some
status among the other inmates. I'm sure that was part of what they got
out of it. I remember a story from John where he was talking about
how Charles Manson got onto a chair but to give himself a little bit more
height over John. When John was interviewing how much established dominance sort of thing.
See, it sounds like you've watched Mine Hunter. Stephen, have you
watched Mine Hunter? Are you a fan? Yeah? I watched the first
season of it. I thought it was well done. They could have gone
a different route with the doctor person's character there, but the cases were really
well done. Yeah, we did want to ask specifically about that. I
Anaturv does play the character of doctor Wendy Carr. I know she is supposed
to be based on you. First of all, did Anaturv actually speak to
you about your work? Have you talked with her as she was preparing for
the role? No, no contact. And John had the same experience.
Yeah, John had the same experience. He was amazed that Mark didn't talk
for some reason. Is a pincer. Whoever was the producer, there was
a very tight role off for what they could do. They never reached out.
That's interesting. David Fincher is the yeah, the key creative person behind
the stories, and I don't know if Kristin feels the same way. It
was actually my favorite television show of the last couple of years. I thought
it was amazing, but I'm actually really surprised that would you have had the
actors portraying you sit down with you. They often do that for film and
television roles. If you notice, they couldn't have gone more wrong on any
of our backgrounds. They couldn't. Maybe they did try to just be absolutely
opposite. I don't know, you'd have to ask them, but they had
it so crazy in terms of Wrestler and Douglas on their backgrounds. Anyway,
they had made a psychologist. If you can believe that, if Fincher never
reached out to you in any capacity, he never talked to you about your
character or wow, that's blowing my mind. I didn't know anything about it.
I'm trying to think of who turned who said to Stephen, who said
that for us to see it? And so I wasn't even sure in the
beginning what it was. And then I started reading going online. I think
you read a news article that mentioned you. Okay, there's a show that
it involves a character based Yeah, but Douglas did consult on the projects,
so he was involved. I don't know to what degree, but he had
a voice in there. At least he did on the cases, and the
cases were good. I agree with Stephen that the cases were well done and
they but they should have been. They had all the script. They had
the script, but what they didn't have was the script on our background.
They really had John as this kind of bumbling FBI knew that the agent right
all into all this female dating and crazy stuff there. And on the Bob
Wrestler they had him having the son that's gonna be a serial killer, that's
really so far out, And they had you as a glamorous lesbian from They
had the Boston part, but the rest of it that was about it.
Yeah, that was about it. Your children had something to say about that
doctor, my son. They said, what had you told us? Mother?
Yeah? Is this you? Mom? So the backstory is for several
of the key characters is just completely made up. It sounds like it is.
Yeah it is. I don't know where they were going with it,
and I think that I'd hurt them second season. I know. I've heard
some of that from some of the people that were more involved, that it
got too wild and too far away from the cases, which was really the
strength I thought of the program. The cases. I would have to agree
and I was very disappointed they didn't bring it back, But I think the
kind of weird backstories weren't really doing it in moving the story forward, because
there's so much really fascinating information that could have been brought out by all of
the amazing cases that you all worked on. They didn't do half of the
cases that we had. Yeah, So if there was going to be a
season three, what are the cases you'd like to see them highlight? But
why that we have in our book? We got some good ones in the
book. Yeah, Hen really Wallace, I know, was of particular importance
and I think that would be interesting to see them highlight a bit more on
the show. The other one is Monty Rissell. I was about to say
that they didn't include him, but they didn't. They just did a short
thing on Monty. Monty is Monty may get out. Hes been a very
good inmate, and he may get out because he keeps going up for Pearle
and he organizes the baseball team and he does all kinds of good things down
there. He's at the Donna in Virgina at Ali the I'm trying to think
of who else Stephen did we simonas and Joebert are both. Yes. John
Joebert a very interesting case. Learned a lot from him in terms of his
really cemented in our early theory that something goes on in the childhood of these
guys that just stays with their heads, stays with them, and it gets
acted out by the time they get up to adolescence and young adulthood. That
such haunting interviews too. After he was caught talking about immediately after killing this
second boy in Nebraska and just going to a McDonald's, washing his hands of
blood in the bathroom and getting some food, having a meal, and then
going home and sleeping it all off. Just the coldness that he showed and
the level of meticulous detail he put into his crimes is it's terrifying. Yeah,
but it has to be they if they ever felt what they were doing,
they wouldn't do it. So for whatever turns them off, turns that
ability off, is really key of how that plays a big role in their
killing. Can you expand on that a little bit, because it seems like
there's this pattern. What do you think it is that creates cold blooded monsters
on some level, it's the killing in them of the feeling of any kind
of empathy for another person. So that has to come from some early experience.
It isn't if you want to look at the nature or nurture. Everybody
says, what's the nature? That it's got to come from somewhere. What
we found was so important is with these men is the early absence of the
father and wanting. And it's true they have a lot of the fractured relationships
between the parents, that parents are always yelling and fighting and so forth.
One of the important things I think in the Joe barcase that the mother told
us is that she knows that her son had witnessed the husband choking her unconscious,
so that I wasn't just a little verbal thing. And she knows that
Jean was there. But when we talked to him, he had no memory
of that. Now he was still a child, he was under five,
but that could have registered at some point because much of his fantasies and his
killing had to do with that. Back to your question, something goes gets
turned off in the normal development. From everything that doctor Burrus shared with me,
including these interviews according confessions, it just seems like there's this moment where
something traumatic happens. As to these killers as a child and they take that
and something strange happens where that then becomes sort of their fuel for fantasy try
and take control over this moment from their childhood where they felt they didn't have
any control. They practice this fantasy. This fantasy gets more and more complex,
and they're the god of this little world that they've created. And then
it becomes so authentic to them that they take this fantasy that's been in their
head for all these years and they acted out in the real world because it
seems more authentic to them than reality itself. And yeah, there's this disassociation.
They disconnect from the real world and they connected this fantasy structure that they
have, and then that's what becomes sacred to them. Camper. That was
a good example if you want to do. One of our friends of the
podcast, just friends in general, Jim Clementi, who was a profiler,
He has talked to us about killing has to meet the offender's emotional needs somehow,
and that sounds a lot like what you're both putting out here about that,
but of course it never really does, or it only temporarily meets that
emotional need because serial killers by nature are out there killing again, So they're
constantly chasing after that, trying to perfect something. But again it's in their
head. It can never really be perfected in the real world. And they
say that the killing isn't they fantasize it, but it's not as good as
they fantasize. It's not perfect, so they have to go and do it
again. So that whole repetitive issue is really important, all the more reason
to catch them as soon as you can. And Joe Bier talked about having
to get it right, having to give the fantasy, and that's why he
cut off a hunk of flesh from one of his victims. Is that didn't
match to whatever his idea of right was. Yeah, he was interesting because
he had these would he called his cannibal fantasies. He wanted to eat his
babysitter from when he was five or six. Now, come on, that's
really young. Gone, Yeah, yeah, either until she was all gone.
One of the things we've seen in recent years in discussing the Colonial Parkway
murders in other cases with current profilers is a modification or maybe a distancing from
certain ideas that seem to come up over the years, which is that serial
killers have types of people that they tac types of victims. They seem to
be really stepping away from that, and they talk a lot more about serial
killers don't just have a single type of victim. They don't just kill non
stop. In other words, they start and they stop. They've used examples
in discussions with us about gaps in serial killers trajectory of murder that they may
stop for months or even years at a time. Do you feel like the
ideas that were generated from the early studies have changed. I wouldn't say they
changed, because I kept up with serial killers in these times and you can
still find many of the concepts that we had. I think there are different
types of serial killers, and that's what I think is important, as you
can't there's not one recipe, but there's a number and Joe bart and you
can ask them the same question. And he just made it clear on the
interview that why did he pick that particular boy, and he said he was
alone. Now we don't know whether there was other of course, this is
six in the morning. This was a little newspaper boy that was delivering his
papers. We also in the end of you fund out he had really been
watching he goes out hunting. A lot of them just go out hunting every
night, and it's when everything is bright is when they strike. So even
though he said, yeah, he was alone, they're just waiting for somebody
to be alone, rather than he was looking. He spotted one and he
might have to go out to night after night usual they do. That's much,
Yes, that's as much they prelude, if you will, the hunting,
absolutely, and we don't realize that. And that's why now I think
that we've educated law enforcement that when you have a victim and they can you
ask them what kinds of behavior have you noticed any odd behavior by anybody prior
to this kind of thing? Obviously not in the murder, but in other
things that engaging in hunting behaviors. Yeah, and try to use that kind
of behavior on some of these awful cases that we have coming up, some
of these shooting cases. And how they how many red flags they leave,
nobody's paying attention to these red flags, it's amazing. So I think that
your question about how much over thirty years has things change. You always are
learning something new, and that's important, absolutely important to do that and to
see how much they do match or do not match? And what other differences.
I'm going to say, the one thing that has really increased ever the
last thirty years definitely has been the school shooter or the mass killer. And
as a high school teacher, that is something that is on my mind every
single day when I go into my when I go into my school building,
is something going to happen today involving a kid with a gun. It was
that something that you all could ever have predicted was going to happen when you
started at the BA BSc back then. Sorry. What was interesting is one
of the interviews with Ed Kemper, he was Who's tired? Never he had
to tell the police that he had killed all these people he had, He
turned himself in and in that later in that interview we found out that he
was next preparing for a mass shooting. He's going to change his Yeah,
he's going to change as m so to speak. Teachers, by the way,
mentioning teachers are so key in spotting troubled kids. Yes, and they've
got to get up to speed on what are some of the warning signs.
They've got to because you look at any of these adolescent kids and they all
left some kind of message I have long advocated that is something that we should
be doing as part of our teacher training is everybody needs to have a seminar
and how do you spot warning signs of these students? Yeah. The other
group are school nurses because a lot of them, what are the school nurse
for things? And she knows the ones that are having trouble and not so
Between teachers and school nurses, I think should be a better training for them.
Yeah, I agreed absolutely. At the end of the day, what
do you both do to separate yourself out from this incredibly difficult subject matter?
Because this has to just be an incredible weight on you. How do you
step away from it at the end of the day. You meanwhile, we
were writing the book because we were more works of course and writing the book.
Yes, I guess we each have our own way. I like music,
I put music on and do something else or teach. I think teaching
is why I like to teach, because I'm getting I feel like I'm doing
something for the next generation to learn. You had said that early on when
we first started working on this, and you started sharing some of the photos
of crime scenes and things like that to work off of I'd said, how
did you deal with this? You've seen this every day, it must have
been really hard, and you were quick to point out that you never lost
your empathy. But you always viewed it as data and something that if you
understood it, if you learn from it, maybe that could help somebody else
down the road. So that was always your motivate And I think, yeah,
and I think that's why detectives do it. You're always looking for something
to explain something. So if you take that kind of inquiry on what this
case is all about and who did it? Or working now with a cold
case group, and that's been very interesting to see people going back twenty thirty
years on a case that never got solved, and you could say, why
do they do it? They want to. It isn't just that they want
to find out who the killer was, but it's for the family because everybody
else has forgotten. It's I know we have with this one case and it's
been a little The mother's nine year old daughter was alive at the time of
her mother's murder, and this was back in the eighties, and so she
went now in her forties, and she said she reached out to us to
say she was so happy that somebody cared about her mother. If you'd ever
want me to talk about the Colonial Parkway murders, my sister's murder and Rebecca
Doowski's that's thirty five years now, and that's been an FBI case since the
very beginning, and the case continues to move forward, but sometimes it feels
like with glacial speed. Is it with your what your agency? Is it
with the BSU? It's with the FBI. It's always been handled by FBI,
Norfolk and Newport News, Okay, And it's been a long yeah,
just slow. And then there are three other double homicides that are considered part
of the Colonial Parkway murders, although nothing in the forensics actually links the other
double homicides. It's just circumstantial couples, cars, isolated rural locations, lovers
lane situations in and around Williamsburg, Virginia. Two of the cases are FBI
cases because they happened inside the National Park the Colonial Parkway, and then two
of the cases are Virginia State Police cases because they happened outside the National Park.
The lack of information sharing between the agencies and the friction back then.
This isn't eighty six to eighty nine didn't help us move these cases forward.
And of course this is before DNA has come out of the lab. Really,
so crime scenes were not secured in the way they would be in twenty
twenty two. So we're challenged with evidence that's thirty to thirty five years old
and wasn't well preserved by contemporary standards. I'm not criticizing, but when you
have first responders climbing into vehicles to examine body, that wouldn't happen if we
had a terrible thing like that happened today. But back then, that was
how the crime scenes were handled. There's always been a sense in our case
by the way that law enforcement or an impostor may be involved because of the
way these couples were approached. We're still finding ourselves in the cold case and
unsolved category all these years later. Have you had a cold case group look
at it. I would love that if the opportunity presented it. You might
think of Greg Cooper because he's a retired FBI and he's he runs the he's
out of Utah and now he's doing one of our cases. We have a
super sleuth group, and he's doing a case from the Netherlands. Wow,
oh wow, we've done it international. Yeah, we're really looking forward to
it. Would want if Greg would look at it, because he's Bureau's we'd
love that we can talk about that. Off are okay? Well? I
was going to say we were told at one point that the BSU did take
a look at the Colonial Parkway murders, but we can't seem to get anybody
on the record about that, so we don't even know which profilers would have
looked at it. I know people have asked John about it a number of
times and he said he's familiar with the case, but he isn't willing to
speak about it. I'm hoping at some point we get a little bit more
information about that, but apparently the BSU has seen it. So your next
book venture, it sounds like you're already hard at work on. Do you
want to tell us a little bit about it, Steve, and I'll start
with you and then you can kick it to Anne. Sure. It basically
would pick up where A Killer by Design leaves off right after the Henry Lewis
Wallace case, where doctor Burge's career starts to shift a little bit towards the
legal side. Of her work as an expert witness and giving testimony on everything
that she'd learned throughout her work studying victims of sexual trauma and developing criminal profiling
for the BSU, And it picks up on all that and then it applies
it to the criminal justice system with some big cases that you worked on,
including the Menendez brothers, the Larry Nasser. There's a lot of great content
there, and it's another one of those instances of trying to take so much
material and wrangle it down into something that's easier to consume when things go well,
which we are sure they will. Any idea when the book would be
finished, I know that's a hard question to answer. It's getting there.
It's not too far off, Steven. We have a good chunk of it
written. But this was a process the first time around where we had more
chapters written than ended up being in the book. As got edited and landed
with its publisher, things just change a little bit. So we've got a
good chunk down and we'll see how much of that lasts. That's fantastic.
The book is a killer by design, Murderers, mind hunters, and my
quest to decipher the criminal mind by Anne Burgess and Steven Constantine. Thank you
both for joining us on mind Over Murder today. 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.
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five six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder. My