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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, Dck. Every Week,
Speaker 4: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 7: Good Evening. Stephen Singular is the author of twenty five
Speaker 7: nonfiction books, many of them about high profile criminal cases.
Speaker 7: His first book in nineteen eighty seven was Talk to Death,
Speaker 7: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg, which became the
Speaker 7: basis for the nineteen eighty nine Oliver Stone film Talk
Speaker 7: Radio and set the tone for his journalistic career. Since
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety one, Denver native Joyce Jocks Singular has partnered
Speaker 7: with Stephen on eight of the true crime books. The
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety five study of the O. J. Simpson case,
Speaker 7: Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hysteria hysteria surrounding
Speaker 7: these murders and explored the racial underpinnings of the case.
Speaker 7: In their nineteen ninety nine book Presumed Guilty, an investigation
Speaker 7: into the John beIN Ay Ramsay case, the media and
Speaker 7: the culture of pornography. They conducted a similar probe for
Speaker 7: the infamous child killing and Boulder, Colorado in two thousand
Speaker 7: and fifteen the Spiral Notebook, The Aurora Theater Shooter and
Speaker 7: the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth, and
Speaker 7: in two thousand and sixteen, Shadow on the Mountain, Nancy Feister,
Speaker 7: Doctor William Style and the Murder of Asmen's Golden Girl.
Speaker 7: The singulars have an intense interest in the psychological aspects
Speaker 7: of murder, which has shaped their work together as forensic journalists.
Speaker 7: A number of their books have focused on the intersection
Speaker 7: of religion and violence, including their two thousand and six
Speaker 7: book Unholy met Life and Crimes of the BTK serial
Speaker 7: Killer and the Wichita Divide, The Murder of Doctor George Tiller,
Speaker 7: and The Battle over Abortion. Also their books include A
Speaker 7: Killing in the Family, Sweet Evil, and Charmed to Death.
Speaker 7: Anyone You Want Me to Be? The story of the
Speaker 7: internet's first known serial killer, was co authored with John
Speaker 7: Douglas and in two thousand and six, When Men Became
Speaker 7: Become Gods, Mormon polygamist Warren Jeff's His Cult of Fear
Speaker 7: and the Women Who Fought Back. Stephen and Joyce are
Speaker 7: currently working on an mythology about national and international cult
Speaker 7: leaders to be published in the summer twenty twenty. Stephen
Speaker 7: and joy Singular True Crime Retrospective. Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 7: and thank you so very much for this interview. Joyce
Speaker 7: and Steven Singular.
Speaker 6: Thank you for having us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's good to be back.
Speaker 7: Dan, thank you very much. Let's talk Stephen right away
Speaker 7: with what you were doing your work as a freelance journalist.
Speaker 7: We mentioned, I mentioned that you are the author of
Speaker 7: twenty five nonfiction books. Tell us about what happened how
Speaker 7: you came to be the author of Talk to Death.
Speaker 7: Give us those circumstances in which you became involved.
Speaker 6: Well, very quickly. I grew up in rural Kansas, and
Speaker 6: I was very attached to the radio. It was the
Speaker 6: medium that I was most drawn to. In a small town,
Speaker 6: you know, you could hear Chicago and New Orleans, Kansas City,
Speaker 6: all that. So when I moved to Denver nineteen eighty
Speaker 6: one in September, I turned on the radio and I
Speaker 6: heard this and talking very fast and with his nasal voice,
Speaker 6: and he was talking about anti semitism and racism in America,
Speaker 6: which I had always been interested in. But he was
Speaker 6: highly provocative and his name was Alan Berg, and I
Speaker 6: decided I had to get to know who this was
Speaker 6: and maybe write about him. I'd never really had any
Speaker 6: interest much in crime before, but I met him, wrote
Speaker 6: about him for the Denver Post of Sunday Magazine, and
Speaker 6: then in June of nineteen eighty four, he was gunned
Speaker 6: down in his driveway and people thought at the time
Speaker 6: just one enraged listener had probably taken him out, but
Speaker 6: that launched a huge investigation across the United States. And
Speaker 6: right after he was killed, I was asked by Rolling
Speaker 6: Stone I knew the editor there to write about Berg,
Speaker 6: and we were all assuming again it was just an
Speaker 6: individual that had killed him, but his things unfolded. It
Speaker 6: turned out that there was a group from the Northwest
Speaker 6: called the Order, a group of neo Nazis, kind of
Speaker 6: the Grandfather's godfathers to the white nationalist movement today, and
Speaker 6: they had committed two hundred and forty crimes. They had
Speaker 6: stolen about five million dollars, they had killed four other
Speaker 6: people besides Burg, and their activities launched the largest investigation
Speaker 6: into domestic terrorism in American history at that time, so
Speaker 6: it kind of fell into my lap. I'd known Berg
Speaker 6: a bit, you know, when he was living, and then
Speaker 6: I was asked to write about this, and then when
Speaker 6: it unfolded as this much much bigger story than just him,
Speaker 6: I thought, you know, I'd like to write a book
Speaker 6: about this. So I proceeded from there, and it's really
Speaker 6: the story of Berg and the story of the people
Speaker 6: who killed him, you know, doing the work, I thought,
Speaker 6: I really like this. I like being in courtrooms, I
Speaker 6: like watching lawyers work, seeing how the criminal justice system works.
Speaker 6: So it was just a launching pad for doing this,
Speaker 6: you know. Ever since.
Speaker 7: Right now you said it's set the tone for your
Speaker 7: journalistic career in what way in that very first book
Speaker 7: that you wrote through crime book, what were some of
Speaker 7: the things that you learned and in retrospect now you
Speaker 7: could see where valuable and did set the course for
Speaker 7: the tone and the direction of your true crime writing career.
Speaker 6: Well, one of the things I learned, which has echoed
Speaker 6: through some of the other books, is that you have
Speaker 6: when people spew out hateful rhetoric, racist rhetoric, things of
Speaker 6: that nature, they may not be the one who's actually
Speaker 6: involved in the crime, but they that information hits other people,
Speaker 6: and some of those people may not be very stable emotional,
Speaker 6: emotionally or mentally, and that filters out and it has
Speaker 6: very significant consequences. I mean, this has been prominent in
Speaker 6: our culture in the last few years that when people
Speaker 6: do these things and then when bad, you know, bad
Speaker 6: things happen or people get killed, they often say, well,
Speaker 6: I had nothing to do with that. I was just
Speaker 6: exercising free speech. But this occurs in the Burg, in
Speaker 6: the Berg murder, and then twenty five years later when
Speaker 6: doctor Tiller is killed by Scott Rohder in Wichita, Kansas.
Speaker 6: You see the same dynamics in play. You know, Bill
Speaker 6: Riley was going on Bill O'Reilly was going on Fox
Speaker 6: News Night after nine and saying Tiller the baby killer
Speaker 6: and spewing a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, and then somebody
Speaker 6: shows up and actually takes the action. So this dynamic,
Speaker 6: you know, was something that I identified early on, and
Speaker 6: I think it you know, it became an important theme
Speaker 6: in a number of the books.
Speaker 7: Right certainly, now, what is the next book? According to
Speaker 7: what I've seen, is that a killing in the Family
Speaker 7: is the next book? If I'm not correct, tell me
Speaker 7: which book is next? Yeah, and Joyce, by that time
Speaker 7: you have joined his co author with this book.
Speaker 5: Now, actually that book was just about That book had
Speaker 5: already come out, a very interesting story about a man
Speaker 5: in California that the coerced and really persuaded his young
Speaker 5: stepdaughter to kill his wife. And that was made into
Speaker 5: a television movie. And but right when I met Steve,
Speaker 5: that was just coming out onto television, and Steve had
Speaker 5: given me a copy of Talk to Death and we
Speaker 5: discussed his book. I was very interested. I've been interested
Speaker 5: in true crime before I met Steve. I would read
Speaker 5: like The Killer besides me, and you know, we both
Speaker 5: shared an interest in Cold Blood by Truman Capoti. So
Speaker 5: we had a lot in common. We liked, you know,
Speaker 5: we're very fascinated by the psychological elements. What drives people?
Speaker 5: How could somebody that appears so seemingly normal commit these
Speaker 5: types of acts? That's really what you know, we were
Speaker 5: both interested in, not the sensationalistic, you know, gore factor.
Speaker 5: And so when Killing in the Family came out, you know,
Speaker 5: we watched that on television. It was very well done.
Speaker 5: And then what happened was we were by that time
Speaker 5: living together in Denver, and there was a trial going
Speaker 5: on in Colorado Springs, which is just south of Denver,
Speaker 5: and there was a young woman named Jennifer really who
Speaker 5: This is one of those books where religion intersected with violence.
Speaker 5: Basically this long story short. She was married with a
Speaker 5: couple of young children. She got involved with a man
Speaker 5: named Brian Hood who also had I think three young children.
Speaker 5: They started an affair. He told her that it would
Speaker 5: be okay. He was very involved in like evangelical Christianity,
Speaker 5: and he told her, he persuaded her, this is a
Speaker 5: woman that had never even had a parking ticket, very smart,
Speaker 5: intelligent woman, very nice, right to kill his wife. She
Speaker 5: gunned down his wife and dressed up in her husband's
Speaker 5: army fatigues. And he told her that it would be okay,
Speaker 5: that God would forgive her. You know, he wouldn't forgive adultery,
Speaker 5: but he would forgive this murder murderous act if she
Speaker 5: just then repented. So what happened was I started going
Speaker 5: down to the trials with Steve, the murder trials and
Speaker 5: the insanity hearings, and what I noticed, what happened was
Speaker 5: that it happened strictly by accident. I had noticed things
Speaker 5: that Steve wasn't noticing because you know, it was sort
Speaker 5: of like two genders are better than one. And I
Speaker 5: would tell him things about what the defendant was wearing
Speaker 5: to come, you know, to appear more you know, innocent looking,
Speaker 5: and I would tell Steve things that I had overheard
Speaker 5: in the women's restroom, say what people were talking about.
Speaker 5: So we found that, you know, the combination of my
Speaker 5: observations and Steve's observations, you know, started producing like a
Speaker 5: wider perspective of what was going on in one particular case.
Speaker 6: Right, and women were very interested in that case because,
Speaker 6: as joy said, this was like the woman next door,
Speaker 6: you know, never caused trouble, never did anything bad, you know,
Speaker 6: how did she evolve from that into a cold blooded killer?
Speaker 6: So there were lots and lots of women at the
Speaker 6: at the legal proceedings, and Joyce you know, spoke with them,
Speaker 6: and that added ave dimension to the book.
Speaker 5: And later on we in one of the rare instances
Speaker 5: where we were actually able to interview the subject of
Speaker 5: one of the books. We years later after that book
Speaker 5: had come out, we were contacted by a man who
Speaker 5: was in a ministry down in Canyon City, Colorado, where
Speaker 5: Jennifer was then imprisoned in the women's prison, and he
Speaker 5: told us that she wanted some copies of the book
Speaker 5: to send to her children because her husband had told
Speaker 5: her children that she had died in a house fire.
Speaker 5: And then but when the children got old enough, they
Speaker 5: started going on the internet and they saw that she
Speaker 5: hadn't died in a house fire. So what happened was
Speaker 5: we we went down to the prison and visited her,
Speaker 5: and that was really a unique experience for us to
Speaker 5: actually sit across from someone. You know, she had been
Speaker 5: I think it was life without parole that she got,
Speaker 5: so she had no chance of getting out, and she
Speaker 5: wanted to eventually write her own book, and so we
Speaker 5: were able to kind of really ask her about, you know, why,
Speaker 5: how could you have done something like this? Very bright woman,
Speaker 5: I mean, someone that you would have wanted to be
Speaker 5: your friend, so personable, charming, you know, everything you would
Speaker 5: want in a friend. And I remember looking at her
Speaker 5: hands in prison and just thinking that those are the
Speaker 5: hands that actually picked up a gun and gunned down
Speaker 5: another human being in cold blood. Very surreal experience, but
Speaker 5: we found that when we tried getting to the moment
Speaker 5: of committing the crime, that she was sort of in
Speaker 5: denial about it. It was kind of like the devil
Speaker 5: made me do it type of response. And when we
Speaker 5: knew then that we couldn't we couldn't go any further
Speaker 5: with her, She couldn't process it in a normal fashion.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was, but it was very intriguing situation really
Speaker 6: because she still was seemingly a very nice person. So it,
Speaker 6: you know, brings you back to sort of the core
Speaker 6: question around all true crime. You know, what is the
Speaker 6: nature of evil? I mean, how does it work? How
Speaker 6: does it work inside of a person? You know, is
Speaker 6: it just there during the moment and then you know,
Speaker 6: does it go away? So it was a fascinating story.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about Sweet Evil. What was on the surface,
Speaker 7: It seems like somewhat of a routine or somewhat routine
Speaker 7: murder story. Tell us something about sweet evil.
Speaker 6: That is the Sweet Evil book. I mean that the
Speaker 6: story of Jennifer reality is that that story and the
Speaker 6: core question again at the center of it is basically psychological.
Speaker 6: You know, a psychological study of this person who you know,
Speaker 6: came from a very good family, we met her parents,
Speaker 6: wonderful people, all the opportunities in the world, and you know,
Speaker 6: just just the accumulation of bad decisions. I mean, you
Speaker 6: see this a lot in true crime, you know, where
Speaker 6: this man comes along and starts to tempt her and
Speaker 6: and he's a master manipulator at getting her to do
Speaker 6: what thing, small thing, you know, Go get your husband's
Speaker 6: clothes and show them to me. You know, does your
Speaker 6: husband have a gun? You know, could you show that
Speaker 6: to me? And it's he was a salesman and he
Speaker 6: just you know, one of the sales techniques is to
Speaker 6: get people to say yes and yes and yes, and
Speaker 6: then finally you close the deal. And that's exactly what
Speaker 6: he did with her. So her, the character study of
Speaker 6: her at the center of this was was what sort
Speaker 6: of created the mystery. I mean, you knew what happened,
Speaker 6: but you were everybody was groping for the why of
Speaker 6: it because people liked her, but you know, she had
Speaker 6: done this unfathomable thing.
Speaker 5: And if I may say one thing, the title sweet Evil,
Speaker 5: the reason Steve called it that was because that was
Speaker 5: her quote, she said that brian Hood had sweetened the evil.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And then also that was when I started noticing the
Speaker 5: really paying attention to the collateral damage that these killers
Speaker 5: do to the families, to their extent families, to their friends,
Speaker 5: the ripple effect of an act like this for their children.
Speaker 5: You know, it's just it's unfathomable what an act like
Speaker 5: that can do as far as mass damage.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like Brian Hood, the one who talked her into this,
Speaker 6: had three young children, and so he gets Jennifer to
Speaker 6: gun down his wife and then he gets convicted with
Speaker 6: the thirty year prison and something like that, and his parents,
Speaker 6: who are in their sixties. Then you know, inherit these
Speaker 6: three young kids and have to raise them. And again
Speaker 6: it's just the tendrils that come out from a tragedy
Speaker 6: like this. We're very moving.
Speaker 7: You talk about collateral damage, ripple effect, mass damage. One
Speaker 7: of the incredible true crime classics that you have written
Speaker 7: together is Legacy of Deception investigation of Mark Furman in
Speaker 7: Racism in the LAPD. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 7: legacy of deception and really what this story was about
Speaker 7: when you looked into investigated Mark Farman.
Speaker 6: Well, I'll try to condense it. It's a very long,
Speaker 6: complicated story, but again it builds on the first book
Speaker 6: The Brooke Talked to Death, which was which came out
Speaker 6: in nineteen eighty seven. But in nineteen eighty five and
Speaker 6: six I had interviewed a number of people about far
Speaker 6: right groups, many of them in the far West, Neo Nazis,
Speaker 6: fellow travelers in that realm, and I got to know
Speaker 6: people in law enforcement who were investigating those types of folks,
Speaker 6: and so some of those were in southern California. There
Speaker 6: was a very strong group down there called arm Anyway,
Speaker 6: the Simpson case erupts in June of nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 6: ten years almost to the day after the bird killing,
Speaker 6: and about six or seven weeks went by and we
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Speaker 6: Here from somebody in law enforcement in southern California whom
Speaker 6: I had known because of that experience, and basically said,
Speaker 6: you know, would you like to know more about this
Speaker 6: case and get involved in it? And I was like, no,
Speaker 6: you know, there are ten thousand people writing about this.
Speaker 5: Oh, we had no intention of working on that.
Speaker 6: I mean we lived in Denver, you know, yeah, and
Speaker 6: we were watching what everybody else is watching, which is
Speaker 6: a guy going down the freeway who looks like he's
Speaker 6: going to kill himself, and he looks very, very guilty,
Speaker 6: and you know, we just saw what ninety million other
Speaker 6: people saw. And then there was a little persuasion on
Speaker 6: this person's end and said, I will give you four
Speaker 6: pieces of information. This was inside the LA legal system
Speaker 6: that people don't know about, and if you would really
Speaker 6: like to know more, not about just this case, but
Speaker 6: maybe about how you function as a journalist, maybe about
Speaker 6: how your society functions, how your media functions, etc. Etc.
Speaker 6: You might have a very educational experience if you were
Speaker 6: willing to sort of get off the sidelines and get involved.
Speaker 6: And I'd never done anything like this before, so I
Speaker 6: was very hesitant. We were given four pieces of information
Speaker 6: and managed to convey them to the defense team. You know,
Speaker 6: six days after getting the information, I was sitting in
Speaker 6: the LA office of Robert Shapiro, who was Simpson's lead
Speaker 6: lawyer at the time before Johnny Cochran took over with
Speaker 6: the private the head private investigator for their team, and
Speaker 6: a couple of other lawyers, and again try to condense
Speaker 6: this as much as possible. But they said that the
Speaker 6: four pieces of information were all wrong, which I did
Speaker 6: not expect because I was there basically trying to give
Speaker 6: them information that would help their cause. As time unfolded,
Speaker 6: everything we were told turned out to be true. People
Speaker 6: can verify this through the trial. The most important piece
Speaker 6: of information by far was that was that the blood
Speaker 6: that was that was collected from the two crime scenes
Speaker 6: came out of the blood that was drawn from Simpson
Speaker 6: after he returned from Chicago on June thirteenth, the day
Speaker 6: after the crime complicated. But what it means is when
Speaker 6: a suspect is taken into custody, their blood is drawn,
Speaker 6: it is placed in a tube. The tube contains a
Speaker 6: chemical called EDTA. So if you were to test that
Speaker 6: blood later on and it had TA in it, which
Speaker 6: is a preservative, that would tell you that it did
Speaker 6: not come out of the defendant on the night of
Speaker 6: the crime, but it came out from this test tube.
Speaker 6: That means out any doubt that evidence was planted, and
Speaker 6: that throws the whole trial and everything else into confusion.
Speaker 6: Astonishingly enough, I wrote a book proposal about this in
Speaker 6: November of nineteen ninety four, which was three months before
Speaker 6: the trial again, and it was released on various major media,
Speaker 6: The LA Times, in New York Times, all of them neglected.
Speaker 6: It paid no attention to it, just followed the party line. Again,
Speaker 6: if you were to follow all of this closely. It
Speaker 6: came out during the trial in April and May of
Speaker 6: ninety five. When Simpson was easily acquitted of the charges
Speaker 6: in October of ninety five, some of the jurors talked
Speaker 6: about this evidence and some other things that I had
Speaker 6: given it a defense. So it's the completely untold story
Speaker 6: behind the OJ Simpson case. If people would read the book,
Speaker 6: it's called Legacy of Deception. It's available on Kendell, I
Speaker 6: think they would learn some things about this case that
Speaker 6: they don't know. And from a personal point of view,
Speaker 6: it was a profound education in you know how we
Speaker 6: view these things on via the media and how when
Speaker 6: you go below the surface it can be an entirely
Speaker 6: different story.
Speaker 7: Certainly, certainly tell us Joyce about the book Charmed to Death.
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, that was also that one was made into
Speaker 5: a Fox television movie. Very interesting story about a woman
Speaker 5: who allegedly had killed more than one of her husbands
Speaker 5: but was convicted of for sure killing. This one in
Speaker 5: Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is a ski town in the
Speaker 5: mountains west of us. And what happened was she was
Speaker 5: very manipulative, very charming. She moved into this little ski
Speaker 5: town and armed her way with this local. He owned
Speaker 5: a hardware store and it was his name, Jerry Bugs,
Speaker 5: Jerry Bugs. And then she ended up having an affair
Speaker 5: with another man and the two of them conspired to
Speaker 5: kill him. And I covered that trial. It was interesting
Speaker 5: because at that time, this is when we really split
Speaker 5: off to start having to work together for the family business.
Speaker 5: It was really born. Steve was working on the Legacy
Speaker 5: of Deception book and I had to go up to
Speaker 5: the mountains to cover that murder trial. And then you know,
Speaker 5: all put all the notes together that you get and
Speaker 5: then form a narrative, you know, from all the evidence,
Speaker 5: and I brought those back and then Steve wove them
Speaker 5: into the story. And her own son, one of her
Speaker 5: own sons from another marriage, ended up testifying against her
Speaker 5: in court, and you know that helped convict her. So
Speaker 5: now she is in prison for life. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I was also able to get into the jail up
Speaker 6: there and steamboat not long after she was arrested. And
Speaker 6: she had used these various charms. She was married about
Speaker 6: twelve times. The number was a little bit uncertain, but
Speaker 6: several of the husbands, you know, turned up dead, and
Speaker 6: so she was known as the Black Widow Killer. But again,
Speaker 6: she was completely the opposite of Jennifer Reality, who was
Speaker 6: this nice, sweet person. This was a totally manipulative woman
Speaker 6: and you could just tell within five minutes that she
Speaker 6: was capable of, you know, all kinds of things.
Speaker 5: Well, she tried to charm you, didn't she.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she tried to tell me that it was all lies,
Speaker 6: and you know, she'd be out of there in a
Speaker 6: couple of weeks and then she'd tell me the real story,
Speaker 6: and you know, I could see that she'd been wrong.
Speaker 6: So it was it was coming face to face with
Speaker 6: the real psychopath in this particular situation. So, you know,
Speaker 6: one of the interesting things that sort of bounces forward
Speaker 6: from this is that if we're talking about three women
Speaker 6: involved in murders so far, one was the daughter of
Speaker 6: the man in southern California in a killing in the family.
Speaker 6: The other was in Jennifer Reality and Colorado Springs. And
Speaker 6: now we have Joe Cooit in Theeamboat Springs and so
Speaker 6: this plays a little bit forward with the Ramsey case
Speaker 6: where Patsy Ramsey will be accused by untold numbers of
Speaker 6: people of killing her daughter. But we had this prior experience,
Speaker 6: so I think it plays into that.
Speaker 7: You talk about that this the only book to suggest
Speaker 7: something other than the two conventional scenarios one of the
Speaker 7: Ramseys killed a child or intruder. Did it tell us
Speaker 7: more about presumed guilty and the investigation that you undertook
Speaker 7: for this book.
Speaker 6: Well, we again. Joyce has been sort of the one
Speaker 6: to prod me in certain instances, which has been a
Speaker 6: good thing. And because on January first, in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 6: she was watching CNN as the first big Ramsey interview
Speaker 6: of the parents on the case, and she said, you know,
Speaker 6: we live in Denver, so Boulder is about thirty minutes away,
Speaker 6: and she said, you know, we should look into this.
Speaker 5: But part of the reason why I said that was
Speaker 5: because we had a young son at the time who
Speaker 5: was a few years younger than John Maine, and at
Speaker 5: the time it was you know, it was terrifying to
Speaker 5: think that just thirty miles away from you there could
Speaker 5: be a killer on the loose, somebody that was brazen
Speaker 5: enough to break into your home and kill your child
Speaker 5: and then leave your child with a ransom in your basement. So,
Speaker 5: of course, as a new mother, as a young mother, younger, younger, youngish,
Speaker 5: I said, this is a story that we need to
Speaker 5: look into right now. And sometimes Steve has been resistant,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 6: Well yeah, when there are again ten thousand other people
Speaker 6: covering that, I'm like, well, maybe not, you know. But
Speaker 6: we went to the first major press conference on the case,
Speaker 6: which was in early January of ninety seven, and we
Speaker 6: met a reporter there for a local television station in
Speaker 6: Denver and she said, there's something I want to show you.
Speaker 6: You should come to my station the following night, and
Speaker 6: we did, and we went into a back room. And
Speaker 6: now this is early nineteen ninety seven, the internet publicly
Speaker 6: is just a couple of years old, and there was
Speaker 6: a hacker there and he started showing us what was
Speaker 6: available online in terms of child pornography and very very
Speaker 6: graphic stuff being done with children.
Speaker 5: Yeah, young girls that were bound and gagged, much like
Speaker 5: John Benet had been found, you know, with their hands
Speaker 5: tied sort of in bondage type of positions.
Speaker 6: It was by far the closest thing visually to what
Speaker 6: the crime, to what the crime actually looked like so
Speaker 6: number one. You know, that was very startling in and
Speaker 6: of itself, but you suddenly realized there's this whole other
Speaker 6: criminal realm that's being born now with the Internet. I mean,
Speaker 6: child borne was about the hardest thing to move around
Speaker 6: as there was. Now it's bouncing all over the world.
Speaker 5: Way before the Dark Web, we didn't know anything about.
Speaker 6: It, way before law enforcement really understood what was going on.
Speaker 6: So and it was a business. I mean people were
Speaker 6: selling things, and they were buying things, and they were
Speaker 6: trading pictures.
Speaker 5: Of their own that's right. I remember the hacker typed in,
Speaker 5: does anyone have any pictures of John Bna? And there
Speaker 5: was like a feeding frenzy, like sharks at the reef,
Speaker 5: you know, all these hits started coming in like, yeah,
Speaker 5: do you have any get or alive? And the people,
Speaker 5: the few other people besides us that were standing in
Speaker 5: the room, we were just we were just astonished.
Speaker 6: And again, if there's a theme here, and it's certainly
Speaker 6: true in the Simpson case, I think it's true. And
Speaker 6: in some of the other books that you know, you
Speaker 6: just had this media crush saying you know, mom did it,
Speaker 6: Dad did it? Maybe the nine year old kid did it?
Speaker 6: Heraldo Rivera, you know, tries the parents on television in
Speaker 6: a mock trial and finds them guilty. And it's just,
Speaker 6: you know, for anybody with any serious interest in journalism
Speaker 6: or crime, it was just a lot of noise, you know,
Speaker 6: and you want to go behind that noise and say
Speaker 6: is there anything else there?
Speaker 5: But also not just a lot of noise. The local Yeah,
Speaker 5: the local talking the radio hosts were talking about it
Speaker 5: in such a way that you could have been easily
Speaker 5: influencing a jury pool.
Speaker 6: And yeah, and if you examine the three prior women
Speaker 6: or females who committed these murders, you start to investigate it,
Speaker 6: you start to look into it, and you see this
Speaker 6: pattern that leads up to violence. I mean you can
Speaker 6: chart it, you can look at it if you're a
Speaker 6: you know, a reporter who does this sort of thing. So,
Speaker 6: I mean, nobody who has been investigated more deeply than
Speaker 6: Patsy Ramsey by the Boulder Police Department, who also thought
Speaker 6: she was guilty. I mean, there are videotapes of this
Speaker 6: that you can watch. In all of that, there's absolutely
Speaker 6: no pattern of any sort of behavior bad behavior on
Speaker 6: her part. There was never one person who came forward
Speaker 6: with an anecdote about you know, violence against her daughter
Speaker 6: or anything like that. Not a bruise, not a mark.
Speaker 6: So you pull back and you say, well, you know,
Speaker 6: maybe we're looking at something else here. We began interviewing
Speaker 6: pageant mothers in the area.
Speaker 5: Pageant mothers that had been in the same contest and
Speaker 5: that knew Patsy Ramsey and that knew other people in
Speaker 5: that circle. And at this point we noticed since now
Speaker 5: we're interviewing people together. Before it was just Steve as
Speaker 5: the lone male journalist interviewing people. But then when we
Speaker 5: started interviewing people together, especially women, and the women in
Speaker 5: the pageant world in jam Manet's circle, they were pretty
Speaker 5: freaked out about all this, as you can well imagine.
Speaker 5: So what we found and what we noted was that
Speaker 5: now we're a couple with a young child interviewing people
Speaker 5: and there and that sort of opened doorways. People were
Speaker 5: not as suspicious or on their their guard was off
Speaker 5: a little bit. So that that's where we started noticing
Speaker 5: that we were working together as a male and female
Speaker 5: as a couple, really start started gaining entree into some
Speaker 5: of the interviewing.
Speaker 6: Situations, right and what and what all of the pageant
Speaker 6: brothers told us to a person was that following the murder,
Speaker 6: they had been receiving these midnight phone calls from John
Speaker 6: Maine's primary pageant photographer and personal photographer, a man named
Speaker 6: Randy Simons, and he was hysterical. He was crying and screaming,
Speaker 6: I did not kill John Benney. I did not kill
Speaker 6: John Benney. And this wasn't something that other people were
Speaker 6: looking into. So after about one hundred days, when there
Speaker 6: wasn't an arrest, as the media kept saying there would be,
Speaker 6: I went over and gave some information to the district
Speaker 6: attorney Alex Hunter in the case. He was very open
Speaker 6: to receive it, which was surprising, and he didn't know
Speaker 6: who Randy Simons was. I mean, here you have her
Speaker 6: photographer freaking out and the police were so fixated on
Speaker 6: the two parents that they weren't conducting a broader investigation.
Speaker 6: And we told him about the internet activities and the
Speaker 6: images there, and he was very interested and said, basically,
Speaker 6: if you would go look into this and report back
Speaker 6: to me, that would be a good thing. I mean,
Speaker 6: that's just not what you expect the district need to
Speaker 6: say in such a high profile crime. And it was
Speaker 6: of course illegal to go very far down the road
Speaker 6: of looking at child pornography, so that didn't happen, but
Speaker 6: it was a doorway into the case. And so when
Speaker 6: we looked at all of this and basically said, neither
Speaker 6: of the two scenarios really seems to make any sense.
Speaker 6: The media had framed it as either the Ramses did
Speaker 6: this and are completely guilty, or an intruder did it
Speaker 6: and they're completely innocent. But you know what about all
Speaker 6: that space in between, I mean, law enforcement hasn't been
Speaker 6: able to solve this. It doesn't make any sense to
Speaker 6: forensic people. So the book that came out Presumed Guilty
Speaker 6: in nineteen ninety nine essentially said there's a third scenario
Speaker 6: here where the Ramseys could be guilty of something, but
Speaker 6: maybe it's not murder, and maybe this is a far
Speaker 6: more complicated situation than it's really been presented as over
Speaker 6: almost the last three years. A grand jury looked at
Speaker 6: all of the evidence for thirteen months in nineteen ninety
Speaker 6: eight ninety nine, and they came to some conclusions. But
Speaker 6: curiously enough, this district Attorney, Alex Hunter, not only refused
Speaker 6: to pursue what they did, but sealed the documents forever
Speaker 6: and seemingly forever. So we had a grand jury set
Speaker 6: for thirteen months, which is a very long time, cost
Speaker 6: several million dollars to do this sort of thing, and
Speaker 6: then the public has told you don't get to see
Speaker 6: any of their findings. This sets off a whole lot
Speaker 6: of other questions, primarily being why why don't we get
Speaker 6: to know? So anyway, flash forward fourteen years to twenty thirteen.
Speaker 6: The Bolder newspaper sued the District Attorney's office to find
Speaker 6: out what was in those documents, and the him said
Speaker 6: count four of the indictment. The grand juries actually decided
Speaker 6: to indict the Ramseys, but not on murder. Count four
Speaker 6: said they exposed their daughter to the individual that committed
Speaker 6: this crime, and Count seven said then they subsequently were
Speaker 6: involved in the cover up of the crime. So there's
Speaker 6: only been one book written in the many books that
Speaker 6: have written about the Ramsey case that said there's a
Speaker 6: middle ground between total innocence and total guilt, and that
Speaker 6: is precisely what the grand jury concluded. And we could
Speaker 6: talk for hours about why the Boulder legal system did
Speaker 6: not pursue these charges when they had the opportunity to
Speaker 6: do that. In brief, I would suggest that because they
Speaker 6: did not want what occurred in this crime to come out,
Speaker 6: because it would have been I believe, very bad for
Speaker 6: Bolder's reputation and perhaps are its legal system.
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Speaker 6: So again, if you want to go below the surface
Speaker 6: of some of these major crimes, that book is called
Speaker 6: Presumed Guilty and it does not toe the party line
Speaker 6: in any sense at all.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about Unholy Messenger, The Life and Crimes of
Speaker 7: the VTK serial Killer, another again true crime classic and
Speaker 7: also one of the most important cases wellst the most
Speaker 7: fascinating cases that captivated the world's audience. Tell us about
Speaker 7: unholding messengers, Well.
Speaker 5: Tell much till how you got started.
Speaker 6: I again, I grew up in eastern Kansas, in a
Speaker 6: very small town, and in the spring we used to
Speaker 6: go out there with our son after school was out.
Speaker 6: And so in the spring of two thousand and five
Speaker 6: June May, we drove out there and I took my son,
Speaker 6: who was twelve years old, I think, to the gym
Speaker 6: and there was a my old basketball coach was there
Speaker 6: and he said, you have to write about this BTK case.
Speaker 6: And I was again it was like, I just think
Speaker 6: that other people are doing that, and he said, no,
Speaker 6: I'm serious, and he took out a cell phone and
Speaker 6: he dialed a number and he handed me the phone
Speaker 6: and he said, here, talk to my son in law Dan.
Speaker 6: And his son in law was on the task force
Speaker 6: that investigated BTK for the year between when he came
Speaker 6: out of hiding in February March of two thousand and
Speaker 6: four and when he was arrested on February twenty fifth
Speaker 6: of two thousand and five. So here was a guy
Speaker 6: who was on the ground in all the meetings, all
Speaker 6: of the investigation and was actually one of the people
Speaker 6: who arrested BTK. So I took the call and the
Speaker 6: next day I was in front of him, and it
Speaker 6: was a fabulous you know, inside track on how the
Speaker 6: investigation unfolded and what went on and all of the
Speaker 6: dynamics around that. So it was it was a great
Speaker 6: you know, perspective on the situation. I also met the
Speaker 6: pastor of Btk's church, Lutheran church. His name was Pastor
Speaker 6: Michael Clark, and he and Raider Denis Rader BTK were
Speaker 6: very very close. Denis Rader was the president of his
Speaker 6: church while carrying out some of these crimes or plotting
Speaker 6: some crimes, and again, it was just it was just
Speaker 6: a fabulous juxtaposition of here's law enforcement and what they
Speaker 6: went through, and here's this minister who was a very
Speaker 6: very decent and good man trying to come to terms
Speaker 6: with the fact that his president is the most notorious
Speaker 6: serial killer in the history of you know, the whole region.
Speaker 6: So I was fortunate to have those connections because I
Speaker 6: think it makes it a much more intimate book.
Speaker 5: And because you grew up in a town very similar
Speaker 5: to where Raider grew up in, you kind of had
Speaker 5: you know that sense of what the repression was like
Speaker 5: growing up at that time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I grew up in a town about nine hundred people,
Speaker 6: and Denis Rader lived in a town of similar size
Speaker 6: just north of Wichita for thirty year years, or at
Speaker 6: least when the investigation was active. All of the profiling
Speaker 6: was around somebody in which to an urban person, somebody
Speaker 6: who would you know, could not be normal because they
Speaker 6: couldn't possibly fit into the community. That was the whole
Speaker 6: basis of their looking for BTK, And that's why they
Speaker 6: couldn't find him, because here he was living in this
Speaker 6: small town, working for city government, being very normal husband
Speaker 6: and father with two kids, president of his church, and
Speaker 6: fitting in perfectly. So it's in some ways it's the
Speaker 6: most fascinating of the serial killers that we've actually written about,
Speaker 6: because it seemed to me just to be totally psychologically driven.
Speaker 6: In other words, he was he wasn't doing anything for
Speaker 6: money or anything like that. He just said this enormous
Speaker 6: repression inside of himself. Sexual repression, creative repression, are historic repression,
Speaker 6: the kind of thing I grew up around and understood
Speaker 6: very well, and it just would come out in the
Speaker 6: most heinous ways imaginable. So I thought it was a great,
Speaker 6: you know, way to do a psychological study of a
Speaker 6: serial killer.
Speaker 5: And that particular story the BTK. We went to Wichita
Speaker 5: this last fall and Steve was on camera. I was
Speaker 5: a consultant for a CNN program that's going to be
Speaker 5: on I believe maybe in May of this year.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, so it was you know, when you're writing nonfiction,
Speaker 6: it takes you know, a little bit of luck, I think,
Speaker 6: to get to the right people, and we've been fortunate
Speaker 6: enough to do that on numerous occasions.
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Speaker 7: we spoke about BTK being one of the most profound
Speaker 7: and fascinating subjects that you dealt with in your true
Speaker 7: crime writing career up to that point. Tell us about
Speaker 7: the making of anyone you want me to be. Where
Speaker 7: you teamed up with the FBI legend John Douglas.
Speaker 5: Well, I saw a little article. I was reading the newspaper. Well,
Speaker 5: I've always been in newshound, so I was reading the
Speaker 5: Denver Post one day, and I saw a small, little article,
Speaker 5: not very big, just telling about how these bodies had
Speaker 5: been found in these big fifty five was it fifty
Speaker 5: five gallon? See eighty five gallon barrels in a part
Speaker 5: of eastern rural Kansas. And you know, so we contacted
Speaker 5: Steve's ant who lived very close to that part of
Speaker 5: the state, and she had also been, you know, keeping
Speaker 5: clippings about it and saving information about it. So we
Speaker 5: drove out there and we decided that this would be
Speaker 5: our next book.
Speaker 7: He was.
Speaker 5: John Robinson. John E. Robinson, was thought to be the
Speaker 5: first known internet serial killer. Very unusual, and again this was,
Speaker 5: you know, in the early days of the Internet, not
Speaker 5: a lot known this. He was a very interesting fellow
Speaker 5: in that he was very charismatic, charming, had these dual
Speaker 5: life going on where he was a business, fairly successful
Speaker 5: businessman in his own right, and on one side and
Speaker 5: on the other he had this secret life going on
Speaker 5: where he was into bondage and s and M. And
Speaker 5: he started luring women out to eastern Kansas on the
Speaker 5: pretext of giving them offering them jobs. And one of
Speaker 5: the fascinating things about this particular fellow was that just
Speaker 5: the variety of different women that he attracted, from like
Speaker 5: a young college goth girl to the most conservative prison
Speaker 5: library in all different ages. But then and there was
Speaker 5: also another thing about him that it would just make
Speaker 5: your jaw drop. He posed as a as a businessman
Speaker 5: that was trying to help young unwed women. And so
Speaker 5: what he did was he got this one young woman
Speaker 5: who was pregnant, had a child, and he was going
Speaker 5: to offer her, you know, a job doing some kind
Speaker 5: of business work, you know, administrative assistant type of thing.
Speaker 5: What happened he she went missing, He took her baby.
Speaker 5: He sold the baby to his brother and said that
Speaker 5: it was you know, this child that had come up
Speaker 5: for adoption. And then his brother raised this young woman
Speaker 5: as his own daughter, I mean unheard of.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and they didn't and he didn't have any idea
Speaker 6: about any of this until fifteen years later. Robinson started
Speaker 6: out as a petty criminal, you know, stealing stamps, stealing
Speaker 6: a little bit of money, forgery, you know, very simple
Speaker 6: basic stuff. But then he started killing, and as Joyce said,
Speaker 6: he was the first known person who was already a
Speaker 6: serial killer throughout the late eighties early nineties, and then
Speaker 6: just transitioned those skills over to the Internet. So his
Speaker 6: hunting ground, which had been you know, around Kansas City,
Speaker 6: suddenly expanded, you know, the world wide Web, and he
Speaker 6: was pulling in women Fromentucky, in Indiana and Texas, Corney
Speaker 6: in Colorado and Texas, and a number of them ended
Speaker 6: up did and they ended up in the barrels that
Speaker 6: Joy saluted to. So it was a you know, it
Speaker 6: was a fascinating thing of sort of watching how technology evolves.
Speaker 6: I mean he was initially using like fake stuff on
Speaker 6: a xerox machine when that came out, and then you know,
Speaker 6: when the technology got a lot more sophisticated, like with
Speaker 6: the Internet, then he started using that.
Speaker 5: It was a real cautionary tale in that he was
Speaker 5: luring these women with, you know, ostensibly a better life
Speaker 5: or to be their lover, or to offer them some
Speaker 5: sort of job traveling in the world. So it was
Speaker 5: like it was if something appears to be too good
Speaker 5: to be true, it probably is. But in this instance,
Speaker 5: it got these women killed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and again he was posing and you know, living
Speaker 6: in the suburbs, active in the church, cub Scout, active
Speaker 6: in you know, social activities and all of that. So
Speaker 6: you know, it's the evil next door syndrome again.
Speaker 5: And we went to New York to be on twenty
Speaker 5: twenty their news program about this particular case.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was last October.
Speaker 7: That aired so interesting. You mentioned that you don't shy
Speaker 7: away from controversial subject matters, and so some of these books,
Speaker 7: just the tone of them. Let's talk about the witch
Speaker 7: adat Divide, the murder of doctor George Tiller, and battle
Speaker 7: over abortion. Again, you're not shying away from controversial subject
Speaker 7: matters with this book.
Speaker 6: No, And again if one of the themes you'll pick
Speaker 6: up here is that you know, I'm from Kansas. Kansas
Speaker 6: has had, you know, some very notorious crimes, the first
Speaker 6: biggest being you know, in cold Blood with Dick Hycock
Speaker 6: and and Perry Smith, and you know Capote's book about it.
Speaker 6: So we have the John Robinson case, which is in
Speaker 6: suburban Kansas City, the BTK cases in Wichita, and then
Speaker 6: again doctor George Tiller, who is the nation's best known
Speaker 6: abortion doctor, was gone down in his church, his Lutheran
Speaker 6: church on May thirty first of two thousand and nine. Again,
Speaker 6: I had now had a contacts in law enforcement in
Speaker 6: which daw from the BTK case and I was again
Speaker 6: contacted and you know, basically giving an inside track again
Speaker 6: on this particular case. This echoes back if we echo
Speaker 6: back here to the allen Berg case, which we talked
Speaker 6: about earlier, because in this particular case you had I
Speaker 6: believe I mentioned earlier. I mean, you have Bill O'Reilly
Speaker 6: now talking to three point five million people night on
Speaker 6: Fox News and just hammering away at doctor Tiller again
Speaker 6: and again, Tiller the baby killer. All of that. I mean,
Speaker 6: So there's this actual progression from where I started writing.
Speaker 6: And you had a few people in the Northwest Wood
Speaker 6: spouting this anti Semitic, racist stuff that ends in death,
Speaker 6: and now you have somebody addressing millions of people and
Speaker 6: putting out what I think is a very dangerous message
Speaker 6: because in both cases, the person who killed Berg was
Speaker 6: named Bruce Pearce and he was emotionally unstable. Twenty five
Speaker 6: years later, Scott wrote, from suburban Kansas City has had
Speaker 6: an increasing problems with mental health and things like this.
Speaker 6: He becomes as somewhat as a result of that, he
Speaker 6: becomes very anti government, very anti abortion. He joins that movement.
Speaker 6: He's very well aware of all this noise around that's
Speaker 6: coming from the media, and he decides to pick up
Speaker 6: a gun and act on it. So again, I think
Speaker 6: a cautionary tale here is that words matter, emotions matter,
Speaker 6: your involvement matters, how you participate in the media matters.
Speaker 6: There are consequences for these things, especially when they hit
Speaker 6: an at risk population as they do over and over again.
Speaker 6: We will see it again in Charlottesville when the woman
Speaker 6: gets run over by somebody with mental problems, again based
Speaker 6: around some of these inflammatory ideas. So this theme keeps
Speaker 6: surfacing again and again in our culture. But I wrote
Speaker 6: about doctor Tiller's life and I wrote about Scott Wrot's
Speaker 6: life and how they know they collided. It's sort of
Speaker 6: it's called the Divide which ta divide because our country
Speaker 6: is so divided over this, and it's basically the story
Speaker 6: of these two families and how they collide and it
Speaker 6: ends in tragedy. So again, I think it's a it's
Speaker 6: a comprehensive look at sort of the dynamics around the
Speaker 6: abortion issue and what can come from inflammatory rhetoric.
Speaker 5: And this book has just recently been optioned for a movie.
Speaker 7: Yeah that's class. Let's talk about again in religion intersects
Speaker 7: with everything in this particular story when men become God.
Speaker 5: Ye yeah, Well what happened with that one was I
Speaker 5: was watching Steve on he was on Anderson Cooper three
Speaker 5: point sixty, who was doing a one hour program on
Speaker 5: the BTK serial killer. So I'm in Denver watching it.
Speaker 5: Steve's in New York on CNN and at the end,
Speaker 5: and they kept doing these promos and at the end
Speaker 5: of the program they had you know, we're going to
Speaker 5: be talking about Warren Jeffs, who's you know, this polygamous
Speaker 5: leader in southern Utah on the border of Utah and Arizona.
Speaker 5: And I think was he on the FBI's temos wind list.
Speaker 6: This is April of two thousand and six and he's
Speaker 6: just about.
Speaker 5: To go on the So it was a big story
Speaker 5: and it had been brought to light about polygamy in
Speaker 5: this country a few years earlier with HBO's program Big Love,
Speaker 5: which I Steve, I think you watched it too. It
Speaker 5: was fascinating you. But that was a lot different than
Speaker 5: the polygamists that we began researching. Big Love was this
Speaker 5: semi fictional story that took place in suburban Salt Lake
Speaker 5: City with one man that had three wives and you know,
Speaker 5: and it was all very sanitized. But when we drove,
Speaker 5: when Steve came back from New York, I said, you know,
Speaker 5: this story about Warren Jeffs, I think women would be
Speaker 5: really interested in this story. And women sort of drive
Speaker 5: the market in stories like this and in true crime
Speaker 5: and especially when they kept showing the women in these
Speaker 5: long prairie type of dresses with the prairie hairstyle, but
Speaker 5: on cell phones with modern technology. I said, you know,
Speaker 5: I just have a feeling that women are going to
Speaker 5: be very interested in this story. So Steve was resistant,
Speaker 5: and he said, there's already been a book written about
Speaker 5: I think it was Under the Banner of Heaven by
Speaker 5: John Krakauer, but that only went up to the end
Speaker 5: of ruling Jeff's who was Warren Jeff's father, and blood
Speaker 5: atonement and other issues within the community. So I said, now,
Speaker 5: you know, let's just drive down there and drive to
Speaker 5: Colorado City, Utah, and see what's going on. And we
Speaker 5: didn't really have we didn't have any contacts. We just
Speaker 5: had heard about certain people that had spoken out, including
Speaker 5: a woman named Elaine Tyler who ran an organization called
Speaker 5: the Hope Organization that helped women in that community, in
Speaker 5: the Ligamus community escape if they wanted to get out
Speaker 5: of that lifestyle. So, armed with just that one name,
Speaker 5: we threw our twelve year old son in the back
Speaker 5: of the car and drove down And it's a long drive.
Speaker 5: It must have been a thirteen or fourteen hour drive
Speaker 5: to drive down there. So what happened is we went
Speaker 5: to Elaine Tyler and she was fielding calls from all
Speaker 5: over the world because now the story has gone global
Speaker 5: and people are intensely interested in the subject. You know,
Speaker 5: how could these communities be kind of operating under the
Speaker 5: radar in these very isolated parts of the US and
Speaker 5: also Canada. They were branches of them in Canada too,
Speaker 5: And so we went to her. She was kind enough to,
Speaker 5: you know, listen, to have a meeting with us, and
Speaker 5: she gave us the name of a person in Colorado,
Speaker 5: c Utah, a lawman by the name of Gary Engels.
Speaker 5: But she said she cautioned us before we drove into town.
Speaker 5: She said, now when you go into this town, and
Speaker 5: I think it was a community of about what people. Okay,
Speaker 5: she said, really mind your p's and q's. Stop at
Speaker 5: every stop sign. Don't do any traffic infraction whatsoever, because
Speaker 5: all the police in that community work for Warren Jeff's.
Speaker 5: They're all part of the community, so they then they
Speaker 5: do not like outsiders. So we went into town and
Speaker 5: it was a very beautiful, isolated part of the country,
Speaker 5: own about one hundred miles from the Grand canyon, very
Speaker 5: very secluded. I mean, it looks like you're going back
Speaker 5: into biblical times or something. And we drove around and
Speaker 5: the people you could tell we were being watched. People
Speaker 5: would look out the windows at you through the slats
Speaker 5: of their blinds, and it was a very strange feeling
Speaker 5: being in the in our own country, but kind of
Speaker 5: seeing that you were not welcome in a certain area.
Speaker 5: We couldn't believe that this was happening within our country.
Speaker 5: So we went to Gary Engel's office and he had
Speaker 5: a little He was in a like a double ye
Speaker 5: trailer on the outskirts of town, and he offered to
Speaker 5: give us a ride to the town to show us around.
Speaker 6: Well, you have to understand that for fifty years, law
Speaker 6: enforcement had totally left this town alone. There had been
Speaker 6: a raid earlier in nineteen fifty three, and it had
Speaker 6: gone sideways for the government, and they said, we're just
Speaker 6: going to let these people do whatever they want. They
Speaker 6: want to have fifty wives and one hundred children, that's
Speaker 6: up to them. So finally, after fifty years, women in
Speaker 6: the community were so outraged at what was happening that
Speaker 6: a few of them broke off and said went to
Speaker 6: the governor or government and law enfor said, you have
Speaker 6: to enforce the laws here against the ancest underage marriage, polygamy,
Speaker 6: taking girls across state lines for sexual purposes, all of
Speaker 6: those things. So they sent this man, Gary, this one
Speaker 6: man to go investigate, and he was obviously the most
Speaker 6: hated person in the community.
Speaker 5: So so anyway, we got in his suv and he
Speaker 5: was giving us the tour around town. And it was
Speaker 5: amazing because the houses that they lived in were these
Speaker 5: huge compounds surrounded by giant concrete walls. Because there could
Speaker 5: be you know, forty seven children in one family. It
Speaker 5: was beyond belief. So we're driving and immediately we start
Speaker 5: getting followed by I think it was about three vehicles
Speaker 5: with tinted windows. And he said, oh, you know, Warren's
Speaker 5: henchmen are after us. So we're a little nervous. I'm
Speaker 5: sitting in the back seat with my son, you know,
Speaker 5: and seats in the front seat. So he starts driving
Speaker 5: faster and faster. Pretty soon he does this maneuver where
Speaker 5: he turns around and then we're and then we are
Speaker 5: now following the henchmen. And it was and you have
Speaker 5: to understand, the climate was very tense and tense because
Speaker 5: at the time we didn't know, nobody really knew if
Speaker 5: they had stockpiled weapons. There had been some talk, some rumors,
Speaker 5: and not just idle rumors, but people in law enforcement
Speaker 5: thought that maybe they had stockpiled weapons on the outskirts
Speaker 5: of town, and they didn't want another Waco type of
Speaker 5: situation to occur. You know, where the David koresh compound
Speaker 5: was surrounded by the FBI and there's a shootout and
Speaker 5: a lot of people got killed. So the climate in
Speaker 5: that community was tense, to say the least.
Speaker 6: So we began talking with women who had broken away
Speaker 6: from this, which is a very difficult thing to do,
Speaker 6: very courageous on their part. I mean, the subtitle of
Speaker 6: the book is Fundamentalist Warren Jeffs and the women who
Speaker 6: fought back, And part of the book is telling their
Speaker 6: story about their struggle to get law enforcement to actually
Speaker 6: do something against Jess. I mean, he had come in,
Speaker 6: he had now broken up families, he had sent the
Speaker 6: fathers away, redistributed the children to people that he liked, men.
Speaker 5: That he liked better, killed all the dogs and kill the.
Speaker 6: Dogs, decided who could get married and who couldn't. Was
Speaker 6: again taking these girls over the state line. That's the
Speaker 6: violation of federal violation what was called a man act.
Speaker 5: And marrying very young girls to very old men.
Speaker 6: Right. So anyway, that was the basis of the book,
Speaker 6: which was a man hunt for Jeffs, which he was
Speaker 6: caught right outside Las Vegas in late August of nineteen
Speaker 6: or of two thousand and six. He went on trial
Speaker 6: in two thousand and seven. He was convicted in Utah
Speaker 6: of what's called accomplice to rape. A very very courageous
Speaker 6: young woman named Alissa Wall came forward and said that
Speaker 6: he had forced her in the marriage. This was the
Speaker 6: first person who was really willing to take the stand,
Speaker 6: go against her family, go against her community, her religion,
Speaker 6: and take the stand to actually convict Jeffs. He was
Speaker 6: that conviction would subsequently be overturned. But as some will remember,
Speaker 6: in early April of two thousand and eight, the Texas
Speaker 6: authorities raided his new compound down in Texas and near Eldaredo,
Speaker 6: Texas and created just a phenomenal meth that occurred down there.
Speaker 6: Four hundred and sixty three children were taken off the
Speaker 6: ranch and separated from their families. Very reminiscent of the
Speaker 6: Raid of fifty three against the community.
Speaker 5: They were sent to foster homes and that type of thing.
Speaker 6: And so Jess had built this temple on this land,
Speaker 6: this ranch, and they raided the temple and found very
Speaker 6: incrimininating evidence against him of what appeared to be, you know,
Speaker 6: marrying girls about the age of eleven twelve. So you
Speaker 6: actually had visual evidence now of some of the things
Speaker 6: that were going on inside of this community. Again all
Speaker 6: in the name of religion, how they interpreted their religion.
Speaker 6: So he would ultimately be tried in Texas and given
Speaker 6: a life sentence. But Joyce tell them what happened when
Speaker 6: the book came out.
Speaker 5: Well, when the book came out, I asked the publisher,
Speaker 5: the publishing house Saint Martin's Press in New York, to
Speaker 5: send a copy to then Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.
Speaker 3: He was a.
Speaker 5: Converted Mormon, but he had been watching this story closely
Speaker 5: as everybody else was, and you know, he was paying
Speaker 5: particular interest because he was he was not a fundamentalist
Speaker 5: Latter day Saint. He was a Latter Day Saint, which
Speaker 5: you know, he was the more the typical Mormon religion.
Speaker 5: So all this is going on, and they sent the
Speaker 5: book to Senator Read and Steve was down in Eldorado,
Speaker 5: Texas covering, you know, what was going on with that raid.
Speaker 5: And all of a sudden, well I got an email
Speaker 5: saying please call this number, and it was a number
Speaker 5: in Washington, d C. So I called him up and
Speaker 5: I said, I got a message to call this number.
Speaker 5: I didn't know who it was. And the woman said,
Speaker 5: can you please hold the line, Senator Reid would like
Speaker 5: to talk to you. So then comes the Senate Majority
Speaker 5: leader on the phone, and I was I was stunned.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's not every day that you talked to,
Speaker 5: you know, the third most powerful man in the American government.
Speaker 5: And I said, he said, I said what he said?
Speaker 7: This?
Speaker 5: I can't oh, I know. He started making jokes about
Speaker 5: our name singular. He said, singular. That sounds like the
Speaker 5: medicine that I take for my you know, allergies or something.
Speaker 5: So that took me by surprise because he was just
Speaker 5: kind of talking to me in this very you know,
Speaker 5: offhanded fashion. And I said, well, well, what did you
Speaker 5: think of the book? And he said, well, I thought
Speaker 5: I thought it read like fiction. I couldn't believe that
Speaker 5: you know all the details in there. He said, I'd
Speaker 5: like to speak to your husband about this. So I
Speaker 5: gave him Steve's cell phone number down and he was
Speaker 5: in Texas, and the next thing you knew, we were
Speaker 5: invited to Washington to appear in front of the Senate
Speaker 5: Judiciary Committee on hearings associated I think it was polygamy
Speaker 5: Crimes against.
Speaker 6: Crimes associated poligamy, right, So the federal government, over a
Speaker 6: period of time has gotten involved. Jeff's is serving a
Speaker 6: life sentence in Texas. His stranglehold over that community, which
Speaker 6: was very real when we first started to look into
Speaker 6: this in two thousand and six, has broken down a lot.
Speaker 6: People can own their own homes, which they couldn't do
Speaker 6: before was a communal trust. They can own their own businesses,
Speaker 6: They have a lot more freedom. All the strictures he
Speaker 6: put on them have more or less gone away. His
Speaker 6: reign of terror has basically ended. So it's that's there's
Speaker 6: still problems there and he still has control over certain people,
Speaker 6: but there actually has been a lot of progress, and
Speaker 6: I think it all goes back to those handful of
Speaker 6: women you know, who stood up when they needed to.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's almost like a precursor to the Me
Speaker 6: Too movement and just said no more, We're not going
Speaker 6: to take this anymore and force law enforcement to enforce
Speaker 6: the laws down there. And that's a very good thing.
Speaker 5: And that was and that one was made into a
Speaker 5: Lifetime movie called Outlaw Profit, which was the name of
Speaker 5: that's what we originally wanted to name the book, Outlaw Profit.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So again it's again it's another example of how
Speaker 6: people use religion to you know, maintain power over other
Speaker 6: people and commit crimes. And that's run that's ran through
Speaker 6: the Tiller book and the Berg book and the Sweet
Speaker 6: Evil Book and this book is.
Speaker 7: Well, let's talk about something when you talk about Reign
Speaker 7: of Terror, let's talk about the Spiral notebook and what
Speaker 7: did you see? What did you find as authors that
Speaker 7: other people seemingly didn't see or conclude?
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, go ahead, Steve.
Speaker 6: Well, as you know, as an author of these kinds
Speaker 6: of books, what you do essentially is you know, there's
Speaker 6: a crime, usually an arrest, and there are many many
Speaker 6: court documents that are generated from that process, and you
Speaker 6: usually have access to those documents, you know, evidence of depositions, testimony,
Speaker 6: and then the air court proceedings, in preliminary hearings and
Speaker 6: trials and all that. And that's the grist of your mill.
Speaker 6: That's what you sort of used to create the narrative
Speaker 6: that again, like Senator, to read, you hope that somebody
Speaker 6: will say this reads like fiction or like a story
Speaker 6: that's really rolling out smoothly. And that's what occurred in
Speaker 6: every book that we've talked about so far. When James Holmes,
Speaker 6: the Aurora theater shooter, did what he did on the
Speaker 6: early morning of July twentieth, twenty twelve, in suburban and
Speaker 6: easton Right, just east of Denver, immediately there was a permanent,
Speaker 6: almost permanent gag order put on all documents around this.
Speaker 6: So again it was Joyce, you know, you tell him
Speaker 6: sort of how we got involved.
Speaker 5: Well, once again, once again, I was watching television as
Speaker 5: this thing was unfolding on the newshound.
Speaker 6: In the folding about seven miles from where we were.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, even though Steve was, you know, a reporter
Speaker 5: for the Denver Post. I have been a news down
Speaker 5: all my life, and so as this was happening, and
Speaker 5: on Saturday morning.
Speaker 6: Friday morning, was it Friday morning?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I and our son was now in college, first
Speaker 5: year in college, and he was home on summer break.
Speaker 5: He was sleeping in the basement and I told Steve,
Speaker 5: I said, you know, this is the theater that we
Speaker 5: used to go to on occasion. You know, could have
Speaker 5: been us. Of course, I probably wouldn't have been going
Speaker 5: to watch you know, the Dark Night Rises at the
Speaker 5: midnight showing, but it could have been us if it,
Speaker 5: you know, if that person had decided to kill a
Speaker 5: bunch of people in some other movie. And then so
Speaker 5: I said, why don't we just drive over to Well,
Speaker 5: actually James Holmes apartment was not too far from us,
Speaker 5: maybe I don't know, several miles. So at that time,
Speaker 5: the police had these robots outside trying to figure out
Speaker 5: if there were any more explosives in his apartment, and
Speaker 5: indeed there were, and they were trying to see if
Speaker 5: they could go in without setting them off. So we
Speaker 5: got we drove up to where James Holmes apartment was,
Speaker 5: and we started talking to people that were They had
Speaker 5: all been evacuated, even the apartment buildings, you know, just
Speaker 5: to the to the north and the south in the
Speaker 5: different directions of Holmes apartment building, and they were they
Speaker 5: were just in shock. They couldn't believe that, you know,
Speaker 5: this was happening so close to them. You don't you
Speaker 5: magine you hear about these things happening in other places,
Speaker 5: but you never you can never quite fathom it when
Speaker 5: it comes to your community. So we started talking to them,
Speaker 5: getting their impressions. Then we drove over to the actual
Speaker 5: theater and it was all cordoned off. The media had
Speaker 5: to be in a certain area. So we went up
Speaker 5: to where the media were, and they had just let
Speaker 5: out the people that had been in the theater, the survivors,
Speaker 5: and they had put all those people in a nearby
Speaker 5: school so they could interview them and get their reports
Speaker 5: and their you know, their statements about what they had
Speaker 5: seen and heard. And so all these young people were
Speaker 5: filling it, filing out, and some of them came over
Speaker 5: to where the media was and we started talking to
Speaker 5: a young man. He had his ticket stub in his hand.
Speaker 5: He was shaking, he had been up all night, very
Speaker 5: very upset. And we started taking you know, just taking notes,
Speaker 5: and we knew that it was a big story. There's
Speaker 5: no media from all over the country, you know, coming
Speaker 5: this is a huge event. So but but what happened
Speaker 5: was we usually get our information from you know, trial
Speaker 5: trial testimony and documents things like that, but there was
Speaker 5: a gag order put on stee Can you talk so
Speaker 5: I could get some water?
Speaker 6: Yes, So we were presented with an unusual set of
Speaker 6: circumstances and wanting to maybe write about this, but not
Speaker 6: having access to the normal things that you that you
Speaker 6: would good. And then an added ingredient is if in
Speaker 6: the courses conversation we talked about our son being very
Speaker 6: young when when the Ramsey case emerged, we talked about
Speaker 6: him being twelve years old when we went to Utah
Speaker 6: to write about the Warren Jeff's But now he's nineteen
Speaker 6: years old and he is close in some ways to
Speaker 6: the demographic of many of these young male shooters, and
Speaker 6: so we were interested to get his perspective on it,
Speaker 6: and we started talking with him, and it's when he
Speaker 6: kind of you know, stepped into the into the family
Speaker 6: business here. That's part of this whole narrative.
Speaker 5: I remember saying to him, I said, you know, when
Speaker 5: these events happened, what do you what do your friends
Speaker 5: say when these big shootings happened? What do they think
Speaker 5: about it? Oh? Well, you know they might post about it.
Speaker 5: On Facebook for a minute and then everybody forgets about it.
Speaker 5: And I said, well, what do you what do you
Speaker 5: mean that just seems like so? And then he said, well,
Speaker 5: you you didn't grow up the way that I did.
Speaker 5: You don't know what it was like growing up in
Speaker 5: my you know, with my generation, with the Internet, with
Speaker 5: being bullied on social media, with the kind of movies
Speaker 5: we've been exposed to, with all these different facts, with
Speaker 5: the music we've grown up with everything, the video games.
Speaker 5: So you started, you know, telling us. So we started
Speaker 5: interviewing him at length, and then we started interviewing his friends.
Speaker 6: So we thought, you know, well, if we can't profile
Speaker 6: James Holmes, you know, as much as you would like to,
Speaker 6: because you just didn't have access to these things. By now,
Speaker 6: America had seen many, many, many mass shootings at schools,
Speaker 6: public other public places. This was, you know, something that
Speaker 6: had become common in the culture. So what if you
Speaker 6: didn't decide to just profile the one individual whom we
Speaker 6: always call it the aberrant individual who committed these crimes.
Speaker 6: But what in the culture is aberrant? What might be
Speaker 6: influencing these young men to do this over and over
Speaker 6: and over again. And that so we with our son's help.
Speaker 6: He said things to us like, as Joyce said, you
Speaker 6: don't know how I grew up, Well, what does that mean?
Speaker 6: And then he said, I know, I know kids, I
Speaker 6: know guys who could have done this, you know, easily.
Speaker 7: And so.
Speaker 6: We began to explore that what in the culture might
Speaker 6: be influencing people, you know, to to nudge them or
Speaker 6: push them in this direction.
Speaker 7: And what is the.
Speaker 5: Difference between like say, our generation, which is considered the
Speaker 5: Baby Boomers, with his generation, which is the millennials. Part
Speaker 5: of the thing that we were seeing was that they
Speaker 5: grew up with they were always growing up with these
Speaker 5: doom and gloom, apocalyptic types of events happening, for example,
Speaker 5: like you know, Y two K and nine to eleven,
Speaker 5: and you know, it was just like one thing after another.
Speaker 5: And we thought, well, we grew up with the Cuban
Speaker 5: missile crisis, you know, yeah, but they seemed to have
Speaker 5: had it, you know, they were surrounded by it more.
Speaker 6: And you know, obviously a lot of the violence depicted,
Speaker 6: you know, fictional violence and movies and things like that.
Speaker 6: And as I think most people listening to this probably
Speaker 6: no you know, James Holmes had sort of modeled himself
Speaker 6: after the Joker in the movie the Batman movies, and
Speaker 6: you know, had gone so far as to sort of
Speaker 6: dye his hair, I guess, to look like the Joker
Speaker 6: in one of the movies. And I think the movie
Speaker 6: that preceded this one, the Joker had put together thirty
Speaker 6: million dollars in cash and had decided to burn it
Speaker 6: in the movie.
Speaker 5: Now, I think it was in this one, Steve the
Speaker 5: Dark Knight Rises, Yeah, with the Ledger playing the Joker. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but anyway, that to burn the movie to make
Speaker 6: a statement about you know, materialism and.
Speaker 5: You know your values.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Values. So James Holmes, on the afternoon before he
Speaker 6: went into the theater, had put together this elaborate notebook,
Speaker 6: spiral notebook. That's why the book is called the Spiral notebook,
Speaker 6: and he decided to send it to his psychiatrist, who
Speaker 6: was the head of the psychiatric department at the University
Speaker 6: of Colorado. James Holmes also was a PhD student. This
Speaker 6: was not somebody who was not educated or not intelligent.
Speaker 6: He had a three point nine four great average in college.
Speaker 6: He was I believe I made a kappa. He had
Speaker 6: all of these opportunities and he when he sent his notebook,
Speaker 6: in which he knew the authorities would eventually find. He
Speaker 6: had put some burnt twenty dollar bills in there to
Speaker 6: echo what the Joker had done in the movie, to
Speaker 6: sort of say that the whole notebook is about his
Speaker 6: trying to find meaning in the culture, his trying to
Speaker 6: find basically a reason not to become violent. And he
Speaker 6: mentioned some of the cultural influences that we were starting
Speaker 6: to examine.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: For example, our son told us a lot about violent
Speaker 6: video games, which we really didn't know very much about
Speaker 6: because we really didn't have them in the house when
Speaker 6: he was growing up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you knew that they were playing him at other
Speaker 5: people's house. You can't really, you know, guard your child
Speaker 5: from everything.
Speaker 6: That Glmes was watching eight hours of violent videos in
Speaker 6: the run up to the crime.
Speaker 5: And when he did and when he was committing the crime,
Speaker 5: he had this kind of electronic, hard, throbbing, pulsing music on.
Speaker 5: It's sort of like he was in a video game,
Speaker 5: you know, when he was gunning him all down.
Speaker 6: When our son talked a lot to us about the
Speaker 6: prescription medications like adderall that were given to young people
Speaker 6: when they were experiencing psychological difficulty or things like that.
Speaker 6: In the James Holmes story, in the spring of twenty twelve,
Speaker 6: he sought out the head of psychiatry there at the
Speaker 6: University of Colorado. He went in and said that he
Speaker 6: wanted to kill a lot of people. That's pretty much
Speaker 6: a direct quote. He was prescribed these drugs. He came
Speaker 6: back again, he was very tormented, he was looking for
Speaker 6: a connection, he needed help.
Speaker 5: Well, he was prescribed benzo diazepines and also you know
Speaker 5: SSRIs right, but he was.
Speaker 6: In real psychological and emotional distress and he was trying
Speaker 6: to help himself. And the response was to prescribe the meds,
Speaker 6: and then when he came back, the response was to
Speaker 6: increase the dose. And again it just the story becomes
Speaker 6: about something larger than just this one aver individual. If
Speaker 6: you would go through the list of some of the
Speaker 6: most well known school shooters or mass shooters over the
Speaker 6: last fifteen or twenty years, there's a striking sense they're
Speaker 6: i mean, all documented of how many of these people
Speaker 6: were on these medications, the ill effects of that, and
Speaker 6: sort of the inability to deal with whatever was the
Speaker 6: underlying psychological problem.
Speaker 5: Not saying that those medications are not helpful. They certainly
Speaker 5: help a lot of people. But what we were finding
Speaker 5: after talking to a lot of the neuroscientists and the
Speaker 5: different types of you know, the doctors that we were
Speaker 5: talking to, the brain is plastic still at that age,
Speaker 5: you know, between like the teams and the early twenties.
Speaker 5: It's still developing. So you kind of you kind of
Speaker 5: wonder what kind of effect is it having on people,
Speaker 5: you know, has that been studying enough. But one thing
Speaker 5: I'd like to say about working on this book, and
Speaker 5: I talked earlier about collateral damage of seeing you know,
Speaker 5: how families and people are affected by one person's you know,
Speaker 5: decision to kill. But when I had to cover this
Speaker 5: particular murder trial, I have to tell you that I've
Speaker 5: seen a lot in my years of covering murder trials
Speaker 5: from women, you know, from the remnants of the women
Speaker 5: in the bodies and the barrels being you know, shown
Speaker 5: on autopsy photos, you know, from every every kind of
Speaker 5: thing you could possibly imagine. But I've never seen anything
Speaker 5: like what to have to sit there and watch the
Speaker 5: autopsy photos of the you know, the of this people
Speaker 5: that were shot in the theater, including the young six
Speaker 5: year old girl and they had therapy dogs in the
Speaker 5: court that day, and the therapy dogs were for anybody
Speaker 5: that was in the courtroom that day watching, you know,
Speaker 5: and having to sit there through that. I couldn't watch
Speaker 5: all of it. I had to put my head down
Speaker 5: at times. But the collateral damage in this case was
Speaker 5: not just all those families of the and the people
Speaker 5: that were not only killed but maimed forever, you know, paralyzed,
Speaker 5: but our whole community because Denver had had the Columbine shooters,
Speaker 5: you know how many years earlier? Was it thirteen years earlier?
Speaker 5: So that is what gave us the impetus to say,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe we'll start writing some fiction for a while,
Speaker 5: maybe we'll write a screenplay. And we did. We wrote
Speaker 5: a fictional screenplay and that's been optioned by a producer
Speaker 5: in la and we're very happy to be working on that.
Speaker 5: And not to say that we will no, not to
Speaker 5: say that we won't ever work on a true crime
Speaker 5: book again, but that was the turning point for me anyway,
Speaker 5: or a theater.
Speaker 6: So what we learned from writing the book, and we
Speaker 6: would hope that others would learn some things from it
Speaker 6: if they read the book, is that just more of
Speaker 6: a broader examination of some of these things that we're
Speaker 6: talking about, the violent video games, the medications, the joyce
Speaker 6: referred earlier, the bullying, the all of these influences. And
Speaker 6: throughout the book we interview and quote young people, so
Speaker 6: it's not just relying on you know, older I mean
Speaker 6: people our age, but to get their voices and their
Speaker 6: perspectives about who's doing these kind of acts and what
Speaker 6: can we learn from it, And so it became more
Speaker 6: of a cultural examination than just a look at this
Speaker 6: one case.
Speaker 7: We don't have enough time to go into this book
Speaker 7: we have. I've covered this book The Shadow on the Mountain,
Speaker 7: Nancy Feister, doctor William Styler, and the Murder of Aspens
Speaker 7: Golden Girl, but I wanted to mention that it seems
Speaker 7: another lesser theme is the incredible wealth that some of
Speaker 7: these suspects enjoyed and was a factor in many of
Speaker 7: these cases, wasn't it.
Speaker 6: Yes, it is. I mean, money definitely played a role
Speaker 6: in that particular book, Shadow on the Mountain. Money was
Speaker 6: a factor in the John Robinson case. He was killing
Speaker 6: these women and then taking their money. Warren Jeff's was
Speaker 6: doing many different things, some of them illegal to generate
Speaker 6: money for his sex so he could continue to rule
Speaker 6: over them. So yes, it absolutely is.
Speaker 7: I want to thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 7: and talking about this true crime retrospect, and I also
Speaker 7: want to urge listeners to go to the archives and
Speaker 7: listen to the other dedicated interviews that we had about
Speaker 7: each one of your books. Not all of the books
Speaker 7: that we covered this evening, but many of these books
Speaker 7: that we've discussed this evening. I want to ask how
Speaker 7: they may take a look at. Do you have a website,
Speaker 7: Stephen and Joyce tell us how they might take a
Speaker 7: look at all of the books that we talked about today.
Speaker 5: That is called stephensingular dot com. It's s T E
Speaker 5: p h E N s I N g U l
Speaker 5: a r dot com and that has all the up
Speaker 5: to date information and including this new book that's coming
Speaker 5: out in July. I think of this year called killer Cults,
Speaker 5: which there are a lot of parallels between the cult
Speaker 5: leaders and some of the serial killers that we've talked
Speaker 5: about today.
Speaker 6: Right and for those interested in the in the O. J.
Speaker 6: Simpson book Legacy of Deception or the John in a.
Speaker 6: Ramsey book, they're linked. Presume guilty. These are available on
Speaker 6: Amazon Kendall as the books.
Speaker 5: I think there are links on the website too.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, so, and we post on there any time
Speaker 6: we're going to do media things or other event.
Speaker 5: So we'd like to thank you so much Stan for
Speaker 5: taking the time to go through all these books with
Speaker 5: us today. I know it's a lot, but we really
Speaker 5: appreciate your support. And yeah, it's been great being on again.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much for having us on.
Speaker 7: It's an absolute pleasure, and it really is. You are
Speaker 7: two of the most deserving people to talk about these
Speaker 7: These are and when I talk about true crime classics,
Speaker 7: I think people generalize about so many books, but these
Speaker 7: definitely are true crime classics. And just the way that
Speaker 7: you approach each one of these books a thorough, incredibly
Speaker 7: exhaustive investigation, and the incredible access that you have as
Speaker 7: credible and respected journalists brings the listener into a world
Speaker 7: that they wouldn't have otherwise. So I want to thank
Speaker 7: you very much for your complete body of work so far,
Speaker 7: and we look forward to talking to you and discussing
Speaker 7: Killer Cuts in the next following months. So I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much. Steven and Joyce, thank you
Speaker 7: very much.
Speaker 5: Good night, good night,