Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 1: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind of a Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: We're joined today by ABC News legal analyst and former
Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy, here to talk to
us about his fascinating career and his new book, The
Book of Murder, A Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death. Matt,
thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2: And although our podcast is not a visual medium. We
do need to report that Matt is in his car
like a true angeline now and we saw palm trees
a moment ago. So it's all there. You just have
to picture it.
Speaker 6: It's where everybody spends half their life. If you live
in LA, in your car, grabbing around.
Speaker 4: Matt. Start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess, starting with LA. I grew up here
in California.
Speaker 6: I went to UCSP for undergrad went down to San
Diego for law school, and then I spent twenty six
years as a deputy DA in Orange County, California. I
did four years in the sexual assault unit, that's seventeen
in homicide, so twenty one years and what's called a
vertical unit. Orange County does things a little differently than
most DIA's offices in America.
Speaker 5: What they do is you get assigned cities.
Speaker 6: So the typical model of a prosecutoral agency is you'll
have the police will investigate a crime and then they
put it on the desk of one deputy for review,
and they decide what charges are going to be filed.
Somebody else appears at the arrangment. Somebody else does the
preliminary hearing or the grand jury indictment, and it goes
up this ladder, almost like an assembly line, and it
finally winds up on the desk of the person who's
going to try it. And that works fine for misdemeanors
or sort of low grade felonies. But in Orange County,
what they did is they thought it would be a
lot better for the specializing units, like the homicide unit,
if you got the prosecutors involved from the very beginning.
So you get a patch, you get an area of
the county assigned to you. So my cities were Coast Mesa,
Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and Irvine, and any murder that
happened in any of those cities was automatically mine.
Speaker 5: They's cut out the middleman.
Speaker 6: I'd get the call in the middle of the night
from the detectives, and you work with the same detectives
over and over again. You're able to develop a relationship
with confidence and trust, and I'd roll out to the
crime scene with my assigned DA investigator and you follow
it all the way up. You're there, oftentimes before the
body is even been moved. You're there to advise, not
to control the investigation, but to offer help to review
search warrants, and sometimes you can offer a little bit
of advice to steer it into safe procedural or constitutional grounds.
In other words, you can, if you're there early, you
can protect the rights of a criminal defendant to make
sure there's no issues with the case.
Speaker 5: And yeah, and you follow it all the way up.
Speaker 6: You you decide which charges to file, you meet with
the family, you present the preliminary hearing, and then you
do the trial. So I present evidence in front of
the juries and I keep the case all the way
through sentencing. And it was fascinating. I did it for
a long time, and is as much as it consumes
your life, I still miss it every day.
Speaker 2: How does that system work, Matt, Who actually tells you
have a new case assigned?
Speaker 5: Do they call you or detect texture? Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, the detectives themselves, the police department will they've had
my personal cell They call me right after the murder
happened and let me know. And it's a little individual
like some people in the unit. There's only eight of
us eight prosecutors in the homside unit at any given time.
In Orange County, there's about population about three million people,
so we saw it all when coastmas of Laguna and Newport,
those are all pretty small agencies and small departments. They
might have I don't know, maybe hundred and fifty sworn
officers at any given times. You're working with the same
detectives over and over and you so I'd get the
calls from the detectives because you get to know them.
When you last serial killer case I tried, for example,
we were in a trial on that for six months.
So you'll have the investigator sitting right next to you
during the trial, and so you're there that night with
the detective and the detectives there with you all the
way up through trial. Yeah, they call you because they
know you better than anybody else anyway. And yeah, it's
a better mouse drop. I really believe it's a better
way to do it.
Speaker 4: The book was absolutely fascinating, Matt I sped read it
in two days. I had so many questions about the
inner workings of this system. You just explained it beautifully.
I'm curious, other than the structure of the system in California,
what aspects of your job as a prosecutor do you
want people to understand by the time they're done reading
the book of Murder, I.
Speaker 6: Hope the takeaway is some credit for all of the
people behind the scenes, as the da who's in there
in the courtroom with the cameras on me microphoned up
for dateline or twenty twenty or whatever it is. You
tend to get a lot of the glory from other
people's hard work. When you go to one of those
crime scenes at three in the morning, you see this.
First of all, you see the worst thing that a
human being can do to another, and you see the result.
There's some poor person with a who's been shot or
stabbed or strangled or whatever. You see them on the
floor of the ground, that ditch whatever. And then you
see this legion of really hard working, dedicated professionals who
have dedicated their professional career to in essence, getting justice
for the victims family. I can't tell you how many
times I was there at three in the morning, out
the side of some murder scene, waiting for the night
judge to sign the warrants, freezing cold, and nobody's complaining
about anything. I might have been bitching myself blooming fits
about how cold there was. I never, in seventeen years
heard a single complaint from any of the women and
men who were the police officers or from the crime lab.
They're just there, ready to do their job. And I
hope that's one of the big takeaways that people have,
that they understand that they're such hard working, dedicated pros
involved in those murder cases that never get the credit
that they're due.
Speaker 2: I think this is the first time I've ever heard
the expression night judge. So are there judges who are
assigned to the second and third shift.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you need to judge who's ready to take calls
in the middle of the night, and.
Speaker 5: So they will.
Speaker 6: You'll have either judicial magistrates, spirit court commissioners, or actual
full blown judges that are on call at night and
they that's their job is to take those calls in
the middle of the night and to serve a warrant
at night. There's different criteria than a daytime warrant because
it's all about reasonableness and protecting the constitutional rights of
criminal suspects, which is critically important for a variety of reasons,
and so you got to have a judge make sure
that all those criterias are met and for certain things
can wait until daytime, which is considered constitutionally to be
a more reasonable time to serve a warrant, but certain
things can't. And when you've got a murder with the
killer often on the loose, that's an exigency that you
need a judge to review, because if you go into
that house and you get a cornicopia of evidence and
it's not lawful, your whole case may fall apart. On
the murder, it may get away with it. So you've
got to be very careful. And yeah, there's judges that
if they got a call from me in the middle
of the night, they're never liking that because that means
they're up for the next couple hours.
Speaker 5: But they always answer the phone.
Speaker 4: One of the things that I like best about the
book met is it's a very approachable introduction to the
ins and outs of the criminal justice system from a
side that a lot of times people maybe don't spend
a lot of time thinking about. We've got a ton
of books out there about profilers and csis, FBI agents,
but we don't nearly have enough about the side that
you work on, prosecuting defense attorneys, various other things. Do
you feel like you're breaking new grounds with this book?
Speaker 6: I hope so there are some really good books out
there written from the inside. I think Mindehunter with John Douglass.
I even talk about that in my book. I think
that's excellent. I've met him and he's a very nice guy.
Helter Skelter written by Vincent Bugliosi, also a really good
one like Helter Skelter, and that was written by the
prosecutor and he Boogliosi passed away a few years ago,
but he was the real deal. He was a prosecutor's prosecutor,
but he wasn't in a vertical unit. Like there are
sides that my colleagues and I got to see that
ledas just don't really typically just because and it's not
from lack of professionalism by them, it's just they utilize
a different system.
Speaker 5: So I hope.
Speaker 6: So what I would really dearly love is if there's
some DA's out there, maybe elected DA's or DA's in
smaller counties anywhere in the country, who see the benefits
of doing vertical homicide prosecutions, because it's just it's far superior.
The first thing I would do after filing charges on
a case is I would sit down with the victims'
family and give them a face and a phone number
that they could use, and that was a I think
that was really important, and that consistency is very important.
So the family have somebody to talk to as opposed
to just that assembly line version where they got nobody
to call it. They have to bond with the detective,
and that's never good because as a prosecutor, especially on
the really heavy stuff, you're going to be calling them
at some point, they're going to be your witness, and
having a relationship with them where they trust you is
way better when you go through each step that with them,
as opposed to coming in the ninth inning, so to speak,
and hey, I'm the trial lawyer and you have no.
Speaker 5: Relationship with those people. I don't know.
Speaker 6: Hopefully some people read it that have some power to
maybe try that as a system, because I guarantee it'll
work better.
Speaker 5: Is that something that's.
Speaker 2: Unique to California or to Orange County, Then.
Speaker 5: It's not unique.
Speaker 6: I just think I think Orange County has taken it
to another level with their vertical units.
Speaker 5: So there are other places that do it.
Speaker 6: LA has a couple of units that do a similar approach,
but it's not exactly the same.
Speaker 5: Like the Newport Beach, for example.
Speaker 6: My predecessor, Debbie Lloyd, had that assignment for twelve years
and I did it for seventeen. So what is that
for twenty nine years that department had two criminal prosecutors,
two deputy das they had to deal with. And there's
a level of consistency there which is incredibly valuable. Like
when I took over Debbie's case when I got rotated
in a homicide, first thing she did is say, Okay,
you need to look at this case in this case,
and I think this one solved. And she gave me
that sort of institutional memory that you just don't get otherwise.
And one of those was the Bill McLoughlin case I
write about in the book. You know that it had
been a cold case for well over a decade when
I rotated in. Because of Debbie's encouragement, right when I
took the baton from her, we put that together as
a cold case. We saw that we convicted both of
them the killers in that thing. And that's really because
of the system, I think. Plus it's hard to get
to the homicide unit in Orange County, which is also
a way better way to do it. I mean, I
had eight over eighty. I think eighty jury trials under
my belt by the time I touched my first homicide.
And there's a lot of like courtroom skill and experience
that you gain that anybody would trying eighty cases, and
you developed reallyships with the judges who start trusting you
more on evidentiary calls and things like that. So you
Orange County is very well served by that system, and
I hope other jurisdictions start using it.
Speaker 2: Those eighty cases were they while you were in the
sexual assault unit?
Speaker 6: Seventeen of them more were sex cases, But you start
out in mismeanors. I did thirty seven misdemeanor jury trials,
so back then, not so today, but back then, the
philosophy of the Orange County Gaze Office was it was
a trial office and they wanted to teach their prosecutors
the craft of trying cases. So there was a real
premium on that. They encouraged us to go watch the
very experienced deputies in trial and try to learn as much.
Speaker 5: As we could.
Speaker 6: So I did thirty seven misdemeanors before I did my
first felony, and then I did probably one hundred bench
trials in juvenile court without a jury, but learning how
to examine witnesses and learning how to do crosses. They
are all in front of a judge, and then yeah,
thirty seven mismeters. Then I went to the felony panel
to twenty four generic felony jury trials. That's like fourth
time DUIs or generic drug sales. It's non specialized felonies,
generic robberies. And then I went to sexual assault for
four years, and then homicide for seventeen.
Speaker 4: The stories that you offer in this book are absolutely stunning,
and most of them were things that I had not
heard of before, setting aside Rodney Alcala, which of course
I was familiar with. You offer your readers some truly
egregious cases that have stayed with you over the years.
What would you say if you had to narrow it
down to one case that you have never been able
to forget or let go of. What is that one
back of your mind case that just stays there always?
Speaker 6: Oh gosh, it's like that scene in Spinal Tap, remember
that where he's talking about his amplifier and this one
goes to eleven and he's like, why doesn't it just
go to ten? This one goes to eleven? It's the
same in homicides. There are so many that are elevens
it's really hard to pick just one. And there's different
types of murders, so you've got conspiracies to commit murder
for financial gain are considered unique. It's a unique level
of diabolical evil for lack of a better term. There
it's people, and there's nothing wrong with the moral compass.
They just want to take a shortcut and they put
together plans to murder somebody for money. That was Daniel
Wosnak was that, which was an eleven.
Speaker 5: It was horrific.
Speaker 6: Then you got Tom and Jackie Hawk's out of Newport
with Skylar Daily Owned also an eleven. But then you
switch over to like the serial killers. Rodney Alcala, I
had the Joseph dangel a Golden State killer. I don't
write about him in this book and write about him
in my next one. Actually, there are there are some
absolutely Like it's kind of like which is the best flavor,
which is the worst flavor? Like it's the equal elevens
on so many. Rodney Alcala, the Dating Game killer. That
that one really bothers me because the State of California
caught him in nineteen sixty eight, he raped and kidnapped
and raped an eight year old girl that was in
a coma for thirty two days and would have died
if it wasn't for the heroic efforts of a LAPD officer,
Officer Camacho, who kicked the door in and literally saved her.
But he got a life sentence in nineteen seventy one
and they paroled him in thirty four months, and that one,
that's when that will always kind of hat my nightmares
because he killed probably one hundred people after he was
released by the State of California, and then they violated
his parole when he was with a thirteen year old
girl giving her drug in Huntington Beach.
Speaker 5: They paroled him again.
Speaker 6: That guy they parolled again, and then he got arrested
for a rape of a fifteen year old named Monique Puoit,
brutal rape and near murder of her. And he was
arraigned on that and in front of a judge in
Riverside County, who had a legal obligation to presume that
the charges were true, lowered his bail so he could
get out, and he committed at least two more murders
that we know of while he was on bail. That
case haunts me because California, we're not even drifting, we're
sprinting back to that revolving door criminal justice model.
Speaker 5: That just it keeps me up at night. So Alcala
is definitely.
Speaker 6: One, and D'Angelo the Golden State killer that haunts my dreams.
And then there's the Samantha Running case, which is another
one that was a five year old girl who got
kidnapped by a guy named Alejandro Avola, and he was
on He was tried for two child molests. We call
him two eighty eights in California penal conseection two eighty eight.
Speaker 5: He was acquitted of that.
Speaker 6: The jury found him not guilty and then he went
out and the lesson he took away from that is
if you let him live, they might just turn around
testify against you. So he wasn't going to do that again.
So he killed his next victim. And that was another
one that they had him and they blew it in
my view, and I don't want to throw anybody under
the bus, but come on, you get a double He
had a double to eighty eight with two separate victims,
and you know, jury and Jeezon. That's one that really
and G means not guilty, and that's one that just
haunts me.
Speaker 5: So I guess I'm haunted by a lot of them.
Speaker 6: It's hard to put a one gold medal winner on
the diabolical awfulness of those guys.
Speaker 2: On the Rodney el Calla case. How does that end up?
That case stretches all the way back into the seventies,
How does that end up back on your desk in
two thousand and three?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that went up he was convicted and tends to
death in essentially nineteen eighty and that went up to
the Calivern and Spring Court with our old Spring Court Justice.
Chief justice was a woman named Rose Bird. It was
very controversial in the state of California, and she proudly
reversed every single death penalty that wound up in her court.
So it got reversed once, it was retried again, and
he was since death again in nineteen eighty six then
and it went up, got past muster with the California
Supreme Court, went up in front of the Ninth Circuit
the next time and they reversed it. So it went
up on my desk for the third retrial. No sooner
was the ink dry on the return of permitted or,
which is the official order saying you must notice your
intention to retry or release this man. We started getting
DNA hits out of Los Angeles County.
Speaker 5: We got three out of LA County, and then.
Speaker 6: He was suspected of a fourth, the murder of Jill Parento,
that we also I decided that I wanted to take
a run at him for that one as well, even
though all the evidence had been thrown away or almost
all of it, and we convicted them of that case too.
The thing about those is when we meet with the
victims' families, you see this multi generational thrief that follows
these poor people after their loved one has been raped
and murdered by a serial killer. That's actually where a
lot of the lot of the internal pressure comes when
you're trying those cases, because you just know if you
blow it on a if you blow it on some
dispute between neighbors over a fence where somebody gets drunk
and kills their neighbor, you're probably never going to see
that guy again. If that guy were to get out,
like he's probably not going to go kill his next neighbor.
But if you lose a serial killer or a serial
rapist or a prolific child sexual abuser, you're guaranteed that
somebody is going to die in the future. And that's
where a lot of the that's where a lot of
the internal pressure comes. Unfortunately, on that one, we convicted
him and he went up dying in prison. We convicted
him and he was sentenced to death for the third time,
and eventually I think Alzheimer's was his official.
Speaker 5: Cause of death, but he died a couple of years ago.
Speaker 4: Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. What I really liked
in that chapter about alcohola is you talked about the
fact that psycho pass, like Rodney Alcola and Ted Bundy,
cannot resist this opportunity to grandstand, which is why they
often act as our own attorneys. So you watched Rodney
i'l khala act as his own attorney in court? Was
he able to capably present a legal defense? Like?
Speaker 5: So, how did he do? Yeah? So, look, it is
a fascinating component of these guys.
Speaker 6: And I really am writing another I'm going to at
least I'm going to try to another write another book,
writing another proposal, And I want to focus it on
exactly that sort of thing. The mind of the serial
killer is a mesmerizing thing. And one of the things
that they all seem to do is they keep some
sort of trophy of their kills. It's almost like they
can't resist doing that. And another thing is they love
to represent themselves. And I think it's a power and
control thing where it's like, if they have the power
of being a lawyer, they can subpoena people, they can.
And it was amazing, I mean, watching Rodney, I'll call
it do that. So Number one, the guy had a genius.
He had a genius level IQ. He had a documented
mensa level genius IQ. And he graduated from uclod Fump
School and he was almost done with NYU Film School
because he was graduated from there too. After he fled
the the Tally Shapiro case, he moved to New York
and with a fake name. So he was a highly educated,
very intelligent guy, and he did a very technically competent job,
Like he understood how to ask a non leading question,
and he understood how to do a competent cross and
like on a very like lost student technical check the
boxes sort of way. He was totally competent in defending himself.
But what's fascinating from Bundy to Alcala to another one?
I did this guy Douglas Hopper, who I talked about
a little bit in the book. He was a serial rapist,
which is basically the same guy he just didn't kill.
They can't read the room. Whatever separates them from humanity
that makes him get off on inflicting pain also seems
to they can't read the jury. So he he was
at that podium asking very competent questions on cross examination
of Robin Sampso was his final victim, the twelve year
old that he murdered out on huntingmach his mother, who
had to go through this two times before and the
entire reppellate process and it destroyed her life this case.
But he's up there firing away on questions with inconsistencies
between now one word she used to describe something in
nineteen seventy nine versus her testimony thirty years later. But
all the jury saw was this creepy guy calling the
mother of one of his victims a liar. So it's
a fascinating thing. And it was the same with Ted Bundy.
He got up there like he was a law student. Technically,
it was great, technically, he was doing everything right. But
beyond the technical form of questions is the way that
presented to a jury was you've got an absolute sadistic
monster calling somebody else a liar.
Speaker 5: And it was fascinating in the alcoholic.
Speaker 6: Case because there's a great Napoleon quote, never interrupt your
enemy when he's in the process of making a mistake.
So I didn't interpose a single objection when he was
doing that because I could look over and see the
jury and they were just repulsed by that. And yeah,
it's a fascinating thing about those guys, and they really
do have a lot of these common threads, which is,
I think something that is worthy of another book.
Speaker 2: Did you find the judge looking at you, expecting you
to object at different points and you just sat there
and let him.
Speaker 5: Wait destroy himself. That is a great question. That is
a great question.
Speaker 6: Okay, And the answer is on a call at the
answer is no, because the judge was a guy named
Francisco Bersano, who if the universe worked the right way,
that man would have lived to be a thousand and
he would have been a superior court judge the entire time.
He was so masterful in the way he handled Rodnel
call it. He just passed away about six months ago,
and the world is far worse off about him. He
was fantastic. So he knew exactly what I was doing.
And I'd done two other death penalty cases in front
of him already who had attorneys, and he knew what
I was doing, and I knew he knew what he
was doing, and it was like I would get out
of his way and he would let me try my case.
And it was you talk about the behind the scenes heroes.
That judge was as good as they come. So he
he wasn't he wanted to let me do my case
and he knew what I was doing, or he didn't
want me to interrupt all call it in the process
and making that mistake, I think because he saw the
same thing that I saw. And plus you got to
be it's better on appeal. And it sounds strange to say,
because this guy was one of the most vicious, sadistic,
and prolific serial killers in American history. In fact, Anna
Kendrick has a new movie coming out this week on
Netflix called One min.
Speaker 5: Of the Hour about all calla but you at.
Speaker 6: The same time, as a prosecutor, you're ethically bound to
treat them fairly. And it's way better for appeal if
I don't object, especially in a case that's been reversed
twice already. So I don't want to put Persenio in
a position where he's going to make a ruling off
the cuff based on a courtroom objection that he might
regret later. So it's far better for the purposes of
appeal to just let the psycho serial killer asked the
questions he wants to ask, and then we will. It's
just it's cleaner that way, and I figured I could
argue through it at the end, which is what we did.
Speaker 4: The real WTF moment for me reading that chapter was
when you said that he called himself to the stand
as a witness. I did not know that was procedurally
something you could do. Can you actually call yourself as
a witness.
Speaker 5: If you are representing yourself, you can?
Speaker 6: And I threw this in there in the book because
there's an adage that you learn in law school. And
depending on who which professor you're hearing it from, it
was either Abraham Lincoln or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson,
and I tried to find it. I don't think any
of them actually said it, but it is absolutely true. Nonetheless,
anybody who represents themselves as the saying go as a
fool for a lawyer and a jackass for a client.
And so yeah, he called himself to the stand and
it was absolutely surreal. So he was sworn in, and
it was he read questions from Rodney attorney Rodney Alcala,
who witnessed Rodney Alcala in the third person, and it
was the way he answered it. He would read it
into the record and be like okay, and it was
everything but saying and that's an excellent question, and may
I comment about how handsome you are today?
Speaker 5: Thank you? He was absolutely surreal.
Speaker 6: And again I'm not going to object to a single
second of that because the jury is looking around going
what is going on right now? And Brasenio is there
very properly presiding over it. I'm not objecting. Gina is
not objecting. My trial partner, Gina Satrana from the LED's office.
I love and we're just we're letting him, We're letting it,
We're letting it happen because case got reversed twice on appeal. Hey,
we're not going to object, you know, we're going to
create no appell of issues and anybody's gonna have a
problem with On one hand, it's horrible, but on the
other it is awesome because it is he was losing
the jury with every question when yeah, I let them
marinate in the absolute absurdity of that. And yeah, and
it didn't have much trouble convicting him or recommending a
death sentence.
Speaker 5: All good.
Speaker 2: What's that clash song about? Give him enough rope? It's
unbelievable that it just sounds so completely bizarre and insane
that the guy is literally asking himself repeated questions in
two different roles almost oh yeah, you know, as if
he was a split personality or something.
Speaker 6: But remember, as he's doing that, I got to cross
examine him. So once he was done with this yellow pad,
then I got to go. So I'm just sitting there
licking my chops. And at the same time, there's there's
different styles, and every young lawyer who's trying cases who
wants to learn it. You really, you become far more
effective when you find the style that matches your own personality,
and there's I would train our young proskeutors for years.
Speaker 5: We do training for the incoming.
Speaker 6: Class of the new Fires, and I always tell him
there's that staccata aggressive kind of angry cross examination really
works well for some people, but it probably doesn't work
that well for you, and it certainly didn't work out
very well for me. I really like this sort of
the Ashok's approach. Forgive me, mister Caul. I'm totally confused here,
And can you go back to that other thing or
you said you weren't in Huntington Beach when we have
your your photographs here taking the show Huntington Beach and
them from the days she went.
Speaker 5: Like that sort of stuff.
Speaker 6: I like that style a lot more, just almost making
it conversational and very friendly and like, huh, that's sure boy,
that you know like. But closing argument, by the way,
is not that same town closing argument. I pretty much
lit him on fire in the courtroom, and don't regret
doing it.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors, We're back here at
mindover Murder.
Speaker 4: I was going to say, Matt, you just mentioned Woman
of the Hour, which is Anna Kendrick's new film, which
I'm very much looking forward to watching, And you had
mentioned in your book that you felt it was a
very good example of Hollywood telling crime stories the right way.
What are some other series or movies that you would
hold up as examples of Hollywood doing the right thing
in the way that they're telling a story or the
way that they are shedding light on the victims or
the killers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll tell you one that was outstanding. It was
a Bravo series on another case that was mine. That
was the Dirty John series with Eric Banna and Connie Britton,
and Eric Banna did a masterful job of portraying John Meehan, who.
Speaker 5: Some of your listeners are proa familiar with the Dirty
John series.
Speaker 6: It's a podcast, multipart podcast, Yeah, with the La Times
and my friend Chris Gofford, who I had lunch with
after We're done with that one, and I finally cleared
Tarra of all criminal wrongdoing at lunch with Chris, and
I'm like, dude, you have got to take a look
at this one. And I figured he'd write like a
Sunday expose on it. I had no idea that he
was going to turn it into Dirty John. But that
was excellent because it's very easy for us to Monday
Morning Quarterback Prime victims. We all do it's and I
think it's a psychological thing. We want to look at
a case. And that would never happen to me because
I'm not in a gang, or I would never date
anybody that's out obnoxious, or I'd never get in the
Serial Killers car.
Speaker 5: But the way Eric.
Speaker 6: Banna I want invited me to the premiere of that,
and I he had such a long receiving line. I've
been a fan of that guy on so many different
movies and I never even got a chance to compliment.
But his portrayal was outstanding because it was it's this
really endearing charm that a lot of psychopaths happened. Same
thing with Rodney. That was one of the most fascinating things.
When he went pro per. It's like, how are all
these women getting in the car? How could they be
so stupid to meet him for a model and shoot
out and then let me tell you, talk to that
guy face to face for five minutes and it's, oh,
now I get it. He was handsome, he was charming,
he was smiling, he was quick with a joke. That
guy won the dating game because he was charming and
because he was funny, like that is the fascinating thing
about certain criminal defendants. So that's an example of Hollywood
getting it right.
Speaker 5: I really, I really enjoyed.
Speaker 6: And there's it's a historical fictional thing that women of
the Hour, the she's they're great about portraying I'll call it.
And I think the I think the actor that portrayed
Rodney was fantastic because and I've seen it. I'm one
of the few people that has seen it. He just
does such a great job of switching from charming to
monstrous and he this guy friggin nails it. So but
I really liked Once upon a Time in Hollywood because
the Quinn Tarantino changed the ending of the Manson Murders,
and I just it's just just such a better way
to end it. I wish that it had ended with
a heroic stunt man Brad Pitt. Given those guys, they're true.
But you know, that was really well done. I'll tell you,
I'll tell you a thing that's out right now. I
don't think Netflix will appreciate me saying this. But where
I think it's an example of Hollywood getting it exactly
wrong is this New Menendoz thing.
Speaker 5: You get all these gen zers going, oh, look at this,
it's so terrible what happened to them.
Speaker 6: Everything in that series is based on what they said
in their defense. And I would love an opportunity one
day to I mean, I'll debate anybody any time anywhere.
Speaker 5: It wasn't my case.
Speaker 6: I don't know every detail, but I followed it pretty
closely as the young DA And you get a bunch
of people that watch this this Netflix special, this this
series and they're like, my god, they need to be free,
and it's hey, guys, TV is sometimes what we call
make believe. That's one that really frustrates me. They shotgun
murdered their mother and then said that she was sexually
abusing them. It's the It is the ultimate example of
victim blaming. I don't believe the veracity that new letter.
And if it and even if it's true, if financial
game composes only a small portion of the motive to
murder something, the under California law, that's still first to
get murder for financial gang like they like, there is
no convenient place that actually fits, and it's like, what
Eric forgot.
Speaker 5: That he wrote that letter like they was the biggest
case in America.
Speaker 6: There's I have so many problems with what they're doing,
and I think Netflix blew it on that one. Personally,
They've done great stuff, but not I'm not a fan
of that show.
Speaker 2: You can see the sympathy growing for the Menendez brothers
since that series has hit. People are saying, oh, they
were wrong, they were abused, et cetera.
Speaker 6: Yeah they were yeah, except that they weren't, except that
they literally lied to everybody. And look four years and
sexual assault guys, I can tell you right now, I
never had, nor did I ever see a.
Speaker 5: Bio mom, a biological mother.
Speaker 6: Now boyfriends stepdads every block every day, you get jaded,
like there that is. It's so ubiquitous in the world,
as far as sexual abuse of children by soccer coaches
and youth ministers and as we know, Catholic priests, and
the instance of biological mothers sexually abusing their own teenage
boys is almost for whatever reason, and I'm happy to
chalk it up to like superiority of women, whatever we
want to call it. It never friggin happens they women
will certainly be. There's certainly women who commit sex crimes,
especially in the context of some of these teacher cases.
Those are all real. I prosecuted a bunch of those.
I prosecuted mothers, biological mothers molesting their own teenage boys
like they described. I don't believe the kiddy Menendez did that.
Everybody wants to forget about that. I couldn't stand the
series far enough to even see if they left those
allegations out or if they included that.
Speaker 5: I don't believe that.
Speaker 6: And it's incredibly rare, and you're talking about two men
when they committed that murder.
Speaker 5: These guys.
Speaker 6: Look, these guys reloaded the shotguns. They reloaded to shoot
their mom in the head. The reason we learned about
it and the reason there's a case called Terosov where
the therapist patient privilege is suspended when there's an incredible
threat of somebody else getting hurt. And they were thinking
that Lyle was going to murder Eric's drink because Eric
confessed the.
Speaker 5: Murderer, but he didn't he never said the reason why.
Speaker 6: So, so imagine that you're in therapy, you feel really
bad about killing your mom, and you forget to mention
that the reason you killed your mom is that she
was sexually abusing you, Like I'm sorry, it's just that
it doesn't pass the smell test on so many different levels.
And even so, but the way the law works and
has for going back to the code of Hamarabi, Okay,
there are.
Speaker 5: Very few murders that have pure motives.
Speaker 6: So let's get into Let's say, for the sake of argument,
it's true number one. Having prosecuted conspiracies to commit murder
for financial gain for seventeen years, I can tell you
that when you're planning a murder like Eric and Lyle did,
they planned it for months. Right when you've got a
letter written to a cousin by Eric. Remember, this isn't
a video that shows jose and Kinny Menendez sexually abusing
their boys. This is surely from one of the killers
who already lied to everybody.
Speaker 5: They lied to everybody.
Speaker 6: They lied to the nine one one operator, the responding officers,
the detectives, the jury in the first trial, the judge.
They presented demonstrable falsehoods concerning the circumstances.
Speaker 5: Of that murder.
Speaker 6: And now there's a letter thirty two years later that
supposedly pops up, which I'm dubious of in the first.
Speaker 5: Place, but it was written by Eric, was written by.
Speaker 6: One of the guys, that he's one of the guys
who got his mom in the head and then went
and spent their parents' money. And it's oh, now we
found something that Eric in the weeks leading up to
the murder. We have to we believe him now. But
let's say that's all true. Okay, these are not only
adult men. Eric was a professional athlete. He was a
professional tennis player back then. The idea that they under
California law, when you're talking about motive to commit a murder,
you often have mixed motives like on my Daniel, I'm sorry,
I'm my Bill mcgloffin murder, Eric Naposki was convinced, I believe,
by Nanette Johnston that Bill mcloughin raped her. Okay, so
she manipulated Neposki into committing this murder for the purpose
of avenging her honor. But he also knew that she
stood to gain financially from that. Under California law, part
of the motive is financial gain. You are now on
the hook for murder for financial gain. So that's one
of those things that's okay. So let's say that's all true.
So this was over revenge killing where they know they're
going to take their parents' money.
Speaker 5: That's called first of your murder for.
Speaker 6: Financial gain in the state of California if it only
composes a small percent of your motive. Because if you
have a dispute with a neighbor over a fence at
the Fourth of July barbecue, if it's you really hate
this guy and his son is about to start dating
your daughter and you might be able to buy the property.
You can have twenty different reasons to want to kill somebody,
but if any of those reasons are financial gain, you're
on the hook for financial gain.
Speaker 5: Because it has to eat ale.
Speaker 6: If and the idea of philosophically, going back a couple
thousand years here is if people get in disputes all
the time, but if ninety percent motivation to murder somebody
doesn't give you to that hundred percent point where you
actually pull the trigger, then let's keep it at ninety percent,
you know what I mean. Like it's that's why it's
any of those motives are sufficient in and of themselves
to satisfy the special circumstance. So like, in other words,
if you kidnap a kid for ransom and you also
want to molest them, and you're going to burn the
house down in the process, any one of those is
good enough to satisfy the special circumstance of murder with
one of those special circumstance allegations.
Speaker 5: Does Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm
it does so? So great that's true.
Speaker 6: Let's say that these two adult men, because they were
were sex used at some point by their mother, which
I do.
Speaker 5: Not believe, and that's why they did it.
Speaker 6: They were still planning and taking that money, and if
that composes part of it, they are guilty of exactly
what they were convict it of. So I don't know
what they expect to do with this letter. I don't
know is that And this wasn't something that was ever
withheld by the prosecution, by the way, which is another
thing that's very important. The cops didn't hide it. Nobody
sat on it. This came from the defense. So Eric
forgot apparently that he sent this letter to his cousin.
That's on them that it popped up thirty two years later.
He wrote it, I don't believe anything that guy says,
and then he knew that he sent it to his cousin,
so now it pops evidence. Oh, it's new evidence. New
evidence is DNA, guys. New evidence is a witness who
comes out and says, I saw the whole thing, but
I was afraid to come forward, and that guy didn't
do it.
Speaker 5: That's new evidence. This is a new evidence.
Speaker 6: This is evidence that the defense knew about if it
was real and if it existed. This is something that
Eric Menandez knew about the whole time because he wrote
the friggin thing.
Speaker 5: So sorry, I don't buy it.
Speaker 6: I think that anybody that does is being manipulated by
two guys that shotgun murdered their parents death for money. Yeah,
zero sympathy and gen Z love you Wake up the
TV isn't always real.
Speaker 2: As a former prosecutor, now, though, does it cause you
concern that a Netflix production all these years later could
help turn around public sympathy and have people talking about
the Menandez brothers were railroaded? Does that?
Speaker 5: Yeah? No, of course it absolutely does.
Speaker 6: It does in the sense that what gives me real
concern is how gullible people are, and also It's almost
like true crime tourism in a way. It's like they
know nothing about that case, but they watch, Oh I
watched the Netflix thinging, Oh those poor guys, and sexual
assault is bad, and they say they were sexually assaulted,
so we've got to let them go. It's if that
is the future of American jurisprudence, where there's no critical
thought put behind it, we are in huge trouble as
an issue. Kim Kardashian, who's only famous because her father
attempted to free another famous murderer. Sorry, but that's the
that's how they became famous. Like she has an opinion
on this and the great legal scholar. We've got to
follow her and I've got nothing against her. Stay in
your lane, Kim, like.
Speaker 5: Stick with beauty products, like literally.
Speaker 6: Nothing about that case and also nothing about sexual assault.
Speaker 5: And all these people coming in.
Speaker 6: It's like, guys, I dedicated my professional career second to
the victims of sexual abuse.
Speaker 5: And I do pro bono work.
Speaker 6: Now, the idea that those two guys are tapping into
public sympathy for very real sexual assault victims that are
ubiquitous in our society, that really do have it hard,
that really do survive horrific experiences at home. That's not
what Lyle and Eric went through. And even if so,
you don't get to murder your parents for money and
throw your mom under the bus saying it's like the
only thing worse than shotgun murdering your mother is then
shotgun murdering her and then blaming her saying that she
sexually abused you when there's literally no evidence to support
that other than what you claim.
Speaker 5: No, it's deeply concerning.
Speaker 6: I'll tell you another thing it's deeply concerning is I
don't trust our current DA, George Gascon in LA.
Speaker 5: Not to screw that up.
Speaker 6: That's where you get paid the big bucks, and you
need to step up and say, hey, we're looking at
this with a critical eye and sorry, we don't base
our decisions on what the Kardashians think we should do.
And I don't trust him for a variety of reasons.
I don't trust him, but I don't trust him to
do the right thing on that. And public safety in
my hometown of Los Angeles.
Speaker 5: Has suffered greatly because that.
Speaker 6: Guy has been our DA, and I don't I definitely
worry about that. The only good news is that they
spent thirty two years richly deserved in custody, and if
everything goes wrong from here on out, at least that family,
the ones that think right got it, you know, got.
Speaker 5: Some justice out of it.
Speaker 6: But I mean, you know, I will debate anybody anytime,
anywhere about the Menendez case, and anybody who thinks they
should be released needs to friggin think real hard before
they publicly advocate for that, because that is a very
slippery slope.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I really like this concept that you just brought up, Matt,
and I think it actually helps me define something that
I can sometimes see, like in my own students who
are reading true crime are just people who are taking
a momentary interest in a case. This true crime tourism.
I love that expression. I feel like that is definitely
one of the downsides of this seemingly insatiable appetite that
the public has for true crime content. Suddenly everybody becomes
an expert just on the virtue of I watch the
Netflix series. Can you think of any other downsides of
this appetite that everybody constantly has for crime?
Speaker 6: Okay, so one thing, I think that the vast majority
of people that are into it, it's their motives are pure,
and I think that the true crimes phenomenon, if we
can call it that or interest right now, is genuinely
very good because by watching the shows, people educate themselves
about it, and if they're interested in DNA, they learn
about how it actually works and that stuff. Educating the
public is hugely important, especially when you're talking about forensic science,
because the more people understand DNA, the better we all are.
And understanding the forensic application of it. I put a
whole section in my Ale College chapter on how it works,
and it's so I think generally it's very good. There's
another thing that is disturbing to me, like in this
coburger case, that case out of Idaho, I personally, again
not my case.
Speaker 5: He's presumed innocent.
Speaker 6: I have to say that as an attorney, but I
believe the evidence against the defendant in that case is overwhelming.
Between the self on tower pays, the video of his car,
and that DNA on the sheath for the k bar knife,
it is very clear in my mind what happened there.
Speaker 5: But the online.
Speaker 6: Saluths decided, a group of them decided that a professor
at that school was one that actually did it. Before
they got Coburger's DNA. And I feel terrible for that
innocent teacher at that school because if you google his name,
which I won't even use, it pops up. So you
can destroy somebody's reputation very easily by weighing in and going, hey,
I bet it was this guy because of whatever reasons.
And it's almost like the in a way, it's almost
like a shooting. The conspiracy theorists like you you can
get there's a lot of people that there's that old
adage we've all heard of if you were really crazy,
how would you know? I think it's even more applicable
if you were stupid, how would you know? And they
loved they want to be the smartest ones. And that's
one of the things about mendous stuff. I watched the
Netflix series, so everybody else was an idiot. The jury
were idiots, the judge was an idiot. The prosecutors were like.
I knew David Kohane. I had a case with him.
He was the leda that successfully prosecuted them in the
second trial. That guy was one of the smartest lawyers
I've ever met, and a dedicated professional. There's no big
or motivation for a prosecutor to ever convict an innocent person,
and it's like that, just that sort of that armchair quarterback. Oh,
I watched this for fifteen minutes on a YouTube channel,
so I know everything, but really happened.
Speaker 5: And look, we saw that with OJ and a lot of.
Speaker 6: People bought into that, Oh it must have been these
guys or this person. We heard all all of those
conspiracy theories, and then a rational jury got ahold of
the case, the civil jury, and found that he was
civily liable.
Speaker 5: They basically found that he did do it.
Speaker 6: So I don't know, there's definite busses and minuses to
the true crime stuff, but the vast majority of people
that I've encountered in the true crime world want to
do right. They're interested in it for the right reasons.
They have a tremendous amount of sympathy for the victims,
They want to learn more, and look, nobody hates a
bad cop more than a good cop, and they're open
minded to the case has gone wrong too.
Speaker 5: And I look, I sit on a board for the
Purdue University that.
Speaker 6: It's what we do is we help people that were
wrongfully convicted in the state of Indiana readjust to civilian
life after being released from prison, sometimes after decades in prison,
and the good detectives, good judges, good jurors. Nobody wants
to convict somebody who's innocent, and so this thing like, oh,
they were sexually abused, so everybody's an idiot. It drives
me crazy. And having been the guy in that meeting
on so many of those cases and knowing what really
goes on with the friends and profess essonals and the
detectives and the good prosecutors and the good juris and
the good judges, it's Yeah, so some Netflix producer figures
that are going to get more clicks by buying into
the Menendez defense, and now everybody wants to let them go.
Speaker 5: Is it's scary to me.
Speaker 2: We both obviously so enjoyed the book of murder. You
referenced perhaps writing a second book tell us a little
bit about what you're thinking about in terms of what's
next for Matt Murphy.
Speaker 5: Thank you for that question. So, yeah, we got a
proposal that we're about to do.
Speaker 6: There's a I want to focus it more on serial killers.
I prosecuted thirteen that satisfy the FBI definition, But I
really I think there's a lot of meat left on
the bone there. I go into it a little bit
of my book, but it's just such an interesting area
of criminal law, and I think that they deserve additional
conversations and study, and there's a ton of myths out
there about them.
Speaker 5: So the working title and this is cool.
Speaker 6: I just did a book signing for the book Murder
in Utah and there was a man who attended my
presentation who came in and he said, Hey, I got
to I have the title for your next book because
it's a line from the Book of Murder where you
say your best.
Speaker 5: Witness is always dead.
Speaker 6: And I thought as a working title, so your best
witness is always dead, and it'll be about serial killers
or what doctor von kraft Ebbing that I talked about
in the book, who's a contemporary of Sigmund Freud back
in Germany. He called them sadistic lust murders, which I
think is far closer to the mark than what we
call them as serial killers.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of things that.
Speaker 6: Don't that technically meet the FBI definition of quote unquote
serial killer that have nothing to do with the guy
we're talking about. It's like it's defined as two or
more murders committed by the same perpetrator at different times
and events. Right, that's every gangster that can shoot straight
eventually they can.
Speaker 5: Shoot two people if they're active enough.
Speaker 6: Or medical personnel that are doing mercy killings for terminally
ill people in states that don't allow assists in suicide. Like,
there's so many different There's armed robbers that you will
kill people if they're three long enough, you know what
I mean. I mean the real true Blue, the Ted Bundy's,
the Rodney Alcolas, the BTK killers, Jack the Ripper, those guys.
Speaker 5: There's the sexual component to that.
Speaker 6: And so I really I want to get I want
to do a much deeper dive into that. I want
to do a chapter on Rex Huerman, the Gilgo peach.
Again presumed innocent, but he's absolutely fascinating to me because
he may represent the next wave or the next realm
of serial killers, the guys that are doing it with
a mind to defeating the forensic science. And because they
think he killed nineteen and they got him with MITO DNA.
They just found a couple of hairs from his arm.
They think, so he's he figured out a way to
defeat fingerprints and nuclear DNA, and I think we're going
to learn a ton in that case. So I wanted
to get into all that in the next book, and
I think it'd be an interesting read. And thank you
so much for the nice things that you said about
my book. I've never written one before and I didn't
know what I was doing. The fact that anybody liked
it is always harwarming for me.
Speaker 4: His style is wonderful, and Bill will tell you I
read a ton of this stuff, but I really enjoyed
Book of Murder in a way that I haven't enjoyed
a book in quite a while. You've just got a
very approachable, easy, occasionally funny, but always very heartwarming and
touching the style.
Speaker 5: Hats off to you, Matt.
Speaker 4: It's terrific.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much.
Speaker 6: The Audible for some reason, this is a mystery to
me because I can't stand the sound of my own voice.
But the Audible is also doing really well, so for
any of your listeners that want to listen on their
commut or whatever it's available on Audible. I narrated it
myself and it seems to be gaining popularity.
Speaker 5: So thank you so much for the kind.
Speaker 4: Words, absolutely, And will we be seeing you at Crime
Con in Denver. You've been a crime con fixed here
the last couple of years. We love seeing you there.
Speaker 5: Yep. I will be there with the book. I will
be there to sign copies for anybody who wants to
sign copying.
Speaker 6: And I'm actually Kelly mcclear, who's basically Kelly and Kevin
run Crime Con. I've surrendered to the idea that I
just need to do at Kelly tells me to do
at all times. Since they've also got me going on
a cruise, the Crime Cruise we go in November. I'm
going to be on that and it is going to Haiti,
no joke. We're going to Haiti on the Crime Cruise.
I'm getting on the boat. I think that'll be a
lot of fun. Maybe not the Haiti part, being on
the boat, everybody will be fun.
Speaker 5: Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4: The book is The Book of Murder, A Prosecutor's Journey
through Love and Death by Matt Murphy. Matt, thank you.
You've been a splendid guest with us today.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 4: And that's going to do it for this episode of
Mind Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.