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 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind Ever Murderer.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas. Welcome back to
part two of our conversation with doctor Jeffrey Smallden discussing
his book That Beast Was Not Me One forensic psychologist.
Five decades of conversations with killers. A number of the
people that you studied, I think that's a fair word,
and corresponded with were on death row and some of
them ultimately were put to death cognizant. Were these individuals
and did they ever reference the fact that they were
facing the death penalty?
Speaker 5: It's an interesting question. But by the time I began
corresponding with Manson, he was no longer on death row
because two years after his conviction, the Supreme Court of California,
following the US Supreme Court, had found the application of
the death penalty on a constitutional and so on, so
he was moved from death row to life. Gasey, on
the other hand, was on death row. Bundy, when I
had my brief exchange with him, was on death row.
Bundy certainly never mentioned death row in his letter, and
I don't Gaysey didn't really talk about being on death
throw either, either when we were meeting in person or
in his letters. That's not something I remember him bringing up.
Speaker 2: And did any of them ever acknowledge the fact that
they were guilty of the things they'd been charged with.
We talked about Manson insisting he'd done nothing wrong. And
the truth is, Manson, as far as we know, actually
never killed anyone. He directed other people to kill. But
did any of these people ever acknowledge that they were
guilty of the crimes they were charged with?
Speaker 5: It was a surreal experience to talk with Gacy about
his legal case, because I knew that he had confessed
multiple times, including to his attorney, to the Dusk Planes
Police in Illinois, but for reasons I still don't understand,
there was never a tape made of these confessions. And
Gacy would say, show me the recording, show me a
recording that documents a confession. You won't You'll never find
it because there isn't one. And he would insist that
he couldn't possibly have been the one responsible for these
twenty six bodies under his house and total of thirty
three that he was found guilty of. And he could
go on and on about how many people had keys
to that house. And it wasn't really what you're thinking
of as a house, Jeff. This is how Gasey put it,
where the wife is cooking in the kitchen and the
father is sitting in the living room watching television and
reading the newspaper. It wasn't that kind of house. It
was like a business house where people would come and
go and other people had keys. You know. When I
wanted to talk with Gasey about the victims, but by
the time I was able to speak with him in person.
I knew enough about him and how incredibly narcissistic and
prickly he was in the face of any and all
challenges that I had to tread carefully when it came
to that subject. But I wanted to talk with him
about it. And I remember I brought up the subject
and I said, first, I said, didn't you confess? And
he said, what I just told you, he said, And
then he said, I'll go this far with you, Jeff,
I know something about five of them, five thirty three.
And I said, let's talk about those five. And he
wouldn't say much initially, but he said, if you come back.
He wanted me to come back. He said, if you
come back, maybe I'll tell you a little more. That
was debaate, So when I went back for a second visit,
I brought these five up again. He described the first one,
which when all the books about gaycy it's described in
much the same way. He described it as a self
defense killing. The other ones. I would say, you know
what about John Bukevich And he would say that Punk
worked for me for a little while. He disappeared, or
his mother wanted me to help him try to get
off drugs, and I said, but wasn't he found in
your crawl space? And he said, I can't get into that.
My attorneys, Well, my attorneys won't let me talk about that,
so he would shut off inquiries pretty quickly. The one
of his five that I was especially interested in was
the final one, Rob Peaste, fifteen year old boy who
he kidnapped under extraordinarily braize and circumstances. I went to
the site of that kidnapping a couple of years ago,
just because I always wanted to see it so I
could envision myself how that might have played out. And
it was a tiny little parking lot outside a pharmacy
that now incidentally is a daycare and preschool, which is
just bizarre. But gay See kidnapped this fifteen year old boy,
and the boy's mother was there in the parking lot
waiting for him. So Gasey and I talked about that
case more than any of the others. There was a
receipt for a role of film that was linked to
Rob Peate, who was found in the kitchen garbage bag
in Gacy's house. I would say, what about that receipt?
How did that get in your house? And he would
just he said, I don't know how it got there.
People were coming in and out of my house all
the time. Anybody could have brought that in there. And
remember I was doing work at construction work at that pharmacy.
I don't have any idea how that got here. And
then they found some of Rob Peace's clothing in his house,
and he said, first of all, those search warrants weren't valid,
and second of all, they say they're looking for whatever.
It was a pair of tan pants and a shirt
I had. There were boys going in and out of
that house all the time. How was I supposed to
know that those things would be an eye? He could
go on and on. He was one of the world's
most vile bullshitters. Obviously. Wow.
Speaker 4: You started the book talking about Manson, and one of
the very interesting sort of through lines throughout the book
is Manson and related subject matter. But the thing that
I found most interesting, the story that I found most interesting,
which I actually messaged you the other day and said,
oh my gosh, I'd forgotten about this woman, Rosy Tate Polansky.
You've always been so gracious about answering my questions, so
thank you for that. I had mentioned that you had
written about the saga of Rosy Tate Polanski, And it
wasn't until I read in your book that I realized, oh,
my gosh, I've heard about this woman before. Tell our
listeners who may not be familiar who Rosy Tate Polanski is.
Anybody who's familiar with the Manson case will recognize those
two names. What is her story or maybe more, what
is her malfunction?
Speaker 5: When I encountered Rosie late during the year two thousand,
I had no idea what to make of her. I
had never heard of Rosie Tate Polanski. Her name was
featured in a column in my local Columbus newspaper, and
the headline of the column was something like, conspiracy theorists
will have to go a long way to top This
story about Rosy Tate polanskire something right away. I heard
those names. I thought this must be about Manson somehow,
and I'm like this Manson case obsessive. So I'm reading
it and the reporter talks about being invited to what
was billed as a memorial service in Lancaster, about thirty
miles south of Columbus for the victims of the Manson
family killings. On August ninth and tenth, nineteen sixty nine,
and it said that it was being held by Rosie
Tate Polanski and William Garretson, who for all students of
the Manson case, William Garretson is like a central character.
He was on the property the night the Charantate and
four others were murdered on August ninth. He was the caretaker.
He had been hired that summer by the property owner,
Rudy auto Belli, to take care of his dogs and
told that he could stay in a guest house which
was located not far from the main house and the
main lawn where these savage murders took place. So everybody
knows about Bill Garretson. The police arrived the next morning
after these murders and found Bill Garretson in the caretaker's house,
and Garretson said he had no idea there had been
any murders. The night before, he'd had hystereoon loud. He
hadn't heard anything that made him think people were being murdered.
So the police took him in the custody formally charged him,
but initially they believed he must have been responsible for
these murders because he was there on the property the
whole night. So later I learned that Bill Garretson was
from Carol, Ohio, which is just south of Columbus. He
was hitchhiking in California when this Rudy alto Belli picked
him up and offered him a job, So that's why
he was there, But he was from Ohio. In this
column in my paper, the guy who wrote the column
said that Rosie Tate Polanski and this is such a
bizarre story I probably won't have time to get into
its nuances. But Rosie, who was living on the East
Coast at the time, saw a rare interview by Bill
Garretson on e Television which ran in nineteen ninety nine,
the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, and she saw
Garretson on TV. Whether she believed her story before then
or created it after them is not entirely clear, But
by the time I met her in Ohio, what she
was saying was I'm Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate's daughter.
On the night of the murders, Sharon Tate was eight
and a half months pregnant. Everybody knows that, but she
says I was cut from her stomach.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, or she died.
Speaker 5: I was cut from her stomach before she died. And
then she talks about this complicated web of Hollywood a
listers who shepherded her from the Tate property, funneled her
through Frank Sinatra's house where she was seen by Frank
Sinatra's personal physician, sent to the East Coast, where she
was raised not knowing who she was by Patty Duke's
first cousin. Patty Duke had become friends with Sharon Tate
during their filming of Valley of the Dolls, So that
was the connection that Rosie was citing. And Rosie said
she didn't learn her true identity until her early twenties.
And of course the first question is, but Sharon Tate's
baby was a boy, Richard Polanski, and Rosie says, no,
fake news. That's part of the conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Around the world. Hear me rolling my eyes.
Speaker 5: In defense of myself, because I probably a complete moron
at this point. Were even agreeing to talk with this woman,
But there are reasons why. First of all, I read
this Kyle, and I thought I need to meet this woman. Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Don't doubt that I.
Speaker 5: Reach out for Rosie, and Rosie agrees to meet with me.
She pulls out.
Speaker 2: Of course, she dies, do me.
Speaker 5: We do meet in Lancaster at a lone star steakhouse
for the first thing that happens, and I hope this
was one of the comicic moments in a book about
other wise serious subjects. We sit down at this high
top in the bar at this restaurant, and Rosie, who
sorry notably homely person, says, Jeff, look at my face.
Tell me I'm not the spitting image of my mother.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: She'd me laugh out loud.
Speaker 5: And Jaron Tay was reputed to be one of the
most beautiful women in the and I thought he was gorgeous.
How am I going to deal with this? This requires
quick thinking that you're capable of. So I need this
lightning scan of Rosie's features, looking very serious while I'm
doing it, including the kind of extravagant updu she has
on the top of her head. And then I moved
my head from side to side and I said, wait,
I see it. Yeah, light lights up.
Speaker 2: She's so happy, world class bs her.
Speaker 4: That was masterful. The way that you handled that.
Speaker 2: I read that.
Speaker 4: I was like, my god.
Speaker 5: Rosie, it looked like I pulled it off. But then
she told me that she had a whole box of
correspondence from Roman Polanski, who of course is in exile
in France for raping a thirteen year old girl. And
she says, he acknowledges who I am, that I'm his daughter,
over and over again. And I said, can I see
those letters? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Really, that's a whole other book.
Speaker 5: And she says, of course you can. Yeah, I'll bring
them to our next meeting. Of course you can, with
no hesitation at all. And then I say, would in
DNA solve this issue? And she's this is totally but
I've got to go by his timing. He wants to
be the one in charge of when it takes place.
And then later on in the book and Christen you
mentioned this. Then this was long after my contacts with Rosie,
and they ended on a not positive note. But years
later I encountered first in the book Restless Souls, ostensibly
was the story of the Tate families experience surrounding and
after the Manson murders, Rosie pops up in that book.
That book was published in twenty twelve, so twelve twelve
years after my contacts with Rosie. But that describes how
years before I met Rosie, she had showed up on
the doorstep of the Tate house and announced to Sharon
Tate's parents, I'm Sharon Tate and they said what she said, No,
I'm Sharon Tate reincarnated, and you get away from our
closed the door. But Rosie persisted. And then much later
after I read that book and encountered Rosie, I encountered
Rosie again in Rachel Monroe's Savage Appetites, which came out
in twenty seventeen. I believe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was a great book.
Speaker 5: Yeah. She talks about these devotes four chapters to different
women who had obsessive relationships with true crime for one
reason or another, and one of them focuses on the
woman who wrote Restless Souls in cooperation with Sharon Tate's
niece Brie. Rosie pops up again in that book. If
you were to ask me, where is Rosie Tate Polanski
in twenty twenty four and what is she doing? I
would say I have no clue where she is. I
don't know what she's doing. And if you said, was
she just bonkers? Was she delusional? Or was this all
a deliberately orchestrated lie. I honestly don't know the answer
to that question. If I had to guess, I would
say that Rosie is a severely personality disordered person, an
attention seeker, and, as Rachel Monroe suggests, someone who created
this identity that closely linked her to an infamous crime,
and it became the center of her life. I don't
think she was truly delusional in the sense that she
believed all of this just one other thing and then
I'll be quiet about this. But back when I was
trying to figure out what the hell is going on here,
it's like I had gone through the looking glass. But
she'd become engaged to Bill Garrison.
Speaker 4: I was about to ask that next part, about to
tell it, say it go ahead.
Speaker 5: So she had appeared on his doorstep in Carol, Ohio
after seeing him on television. They determined together that they
were the Soul's survivors of that night of carnage in
August nineteen sixty nine, and they got engaged.
Speaker 2: Of course they had actually what.
Speaker 5: Else could they do? So and so by the time
I met Rosie, actually they had broken off their engagement.
She said because Bill was so traumatized by all of
his memories related to the Manson murders. She claimed that
Bill confirmed everything. She said, that he totally bought her
version of what happened. Of course, Bill was in his
late teens, I think nineteen, but in Rosie's account, Bill
had actually held her in his arms as an infant
the night of the murders, and Bill claimed to remember that.
So I'm thinking, does he really? But then he said
something that got my attention. He said, I've spent thirty
years trying to remember what happened that night, and it's
so confusing and fragmented to me. But it all began
coming together when Rosie arrived here and started filling in
the gaps for me.
Speaker 2: Of course it did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So Bill was apparently very vulnerable to Rosie's persuasion.
By the time I met him with Rosie, he had
become convinced that her story was the truth.
Speaker 2: By the way, we need to use the power of
the World Wide Web here, Rosie. We know you're out there,
and doctor Smalden wants to hear from you and reach out.
You can reach out Care of Mind over Murder if
you like, and we'll put you back in touch because
this conversation is not over. It's too fascinating.
Speaker 4: So the part about this though, that really it does
upset me a lot because she, if it is in
fact true, that she has got some sort of borderline
personality disorder here, she prayed on a vulnerable, victimized, traumatized person,
getting him to believe that, and I hate that. That
makes me furious. You had mentioned in there that she
had been sending Mother's Day gifts to Doris Tate for years.
That's disgusting. I really, there are very few people that
actually want to reach for the page and punch in
the face, but I really it was very upsetting to
me that she had perpetrated this grift or con or
whatever you want to call it. But it was very
upsetting to read like it's there is a little bit
of we're sitting here laughing about it because it is
in some ways entertaining because it is so obviously absurd,
But it's also really upsetting what she did to the
Tate family by presenting herself in this way.
Speaker 5: I agree to the Tate family and to Bill Garretson,
and I don't think Rosie gave much thought to people
other than Rosie, and she was created this drama for
herself and it had become the center of her life story.
And I don't think she was giving much thought to
the people she was hurting.
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: What would you say are some of the takeaways that
you have gleaned about serial murderers and criminals over your
many years of interaction with them, in your years of experience,
what are two or three takeaways that you would want
our listeners to now.
Speaker 5: Two or three And in some reays they seem so
obvious that they hardly warrant mentioned, but I experienced them
in particularly dramatic ways. One is the capacity for lying.
Most people just don't have much experience with someone who
can sit across from a narrow table from them and
steer them straight in the eye and just lie over
and over again with apparent complete conviction. That's a very
disorienting experience to have. And I'm thinking particularly of Gacy.
I Gaysey could just lie and lie and lie with
a parent conviction, and it's just hard to imagine how
he does that. How he pulls it off. That's one thing.
Another thing is the incredible absence of empathy. It's one thing.
We talk about the callousness of criminals, and they do
things without regard for other people's feelings and cause emotional
and physical harm. I tell one story in my book.
It's one of several that converge around the same theme.
But I talk about sitting across from Gacy and trying
to draw Gasy out about his victims. And he used
to bring out paintings that wanted me to at least
think about purchasing. He said, that's how I paid for
my postage, my envelopes, blah blah blah. And this day
he had brought out a painting he had done of
the seven Dwarfs. And in the painting there like at
the mouth of the mine, and there's a shovel in
the lower left hand corner.
Speaker 4: I'm looking at it right now.
Speaker 5: In your book, Yeah, this is a guy who lived
in a house that had twenty six bodies buried in
the crawl space. That shovel takes on obvious significance. But
Gasey says, you know what, Jeff, And he positioned his
hands like you would position your hands if you were
fanning out a deck of cards. And he says, I've
got pictures of every one of those kids that they
say I killed back in my cell, and I sit
back there and I look at those and he acted
like he was fanning out the collection of pictures. He said,
I look at those kids, and they are no more
real to me than and he pauses for a minute,
I'm not sure how to finish the and then he
looks at the painting of the Seven Dwarfs, which are
cartoon characters, and he says, then those cartoon characters in
that painting, oh wow, And I remember it just struck
me so hard at that moment. That's probably the first
truthful thing he said all day, that they had no
more reality to him than those cartoon characters. So the
incredible lack of empathy is certainly something else. And something
else is how incredibly hard these people work at the
performative aspects of their presentation. They have very carefully curated
personas that they use to interact with other people in
the world, both inside and outside prison. We would all
hope that people capable of the kind of violence these
people committed would look like Charles Manson, because as soon
as we saw them, we would know to turn and run.
But the reality is that they don't. Most of them don't.
They look like very normal people. They're well camouflaged, they
work hard at it, they blend in very well. One
of the serial killers I devoted chapter two, whose case
I worked on during my career, was a serial sniper
here in Ohio. Thomas Lee Dillon and Dylan lived in
a very nice house in a suburban neighborhood. He and
his wife had a ten year old son. He did
the same job with the Canton, Ohio Water Department for
twenty years. He played tennis with a group of his friends,
and on the weekends he's going out in his red
pickup truck and literally picking off strangers. So these people
are very well camouflaged, and that's something that we all
need to remember. I'll just mention this briefly. Anyone who
reads my book will encounter it. Early on. I included
something I called a family vignette early in the book
where my daughter, as she was about to graduate from college, says,
you know what, Dad, I used to wonder back when
I was a kid, what if you were a serial killer?
How would we know it? And I said, oh, that's funny,
No need to worry. I'm not a serial killer. And
she said, but that's exactly what you would say if
you were one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: I said, I'm not, and she said, okay, but I
would That would still be even if you were one.
And then I said, if I ever behaved in a
way that makes you think I'd be capable of killing someone,
and she says no, but so what that doesn't mean anything?
And I'm thinking, that's my girl. Yeah, that is the
danger of it.
Speaker 4: You would know exactly how to act and not call
attention to yourself.
Speaker 2: Much like the rest of the natural world, the ability
to blend in and disguise oneself as a average anonymous
if you will.
Speaker 5: Personally, that's the goal of those people.
Speaker 2: Is to fit right in.
Speaker 5: I was just going to say, it's startling how good
they are at it, or at least many of them are.
Speaker 4: Jeff, I wanted to ask you. I'm looking at the
picture section in the back of your book and I'm
wondering if you can tell us the story behind one
of the gay Sy paintings. So you have several paintings
from Gaysey. He painted you a knockoff of Picasso's John
Quixote drawing, and he put your initials in don Quixote's shield.
Can you explain what made him decide, Hey, you know what, today,
I'm going to paint Jeff his own special John Wayne
Gacy painting, and it's going to be Don Quixote. Can
you talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was, in Gasey's words, a one of a kind. Yeah,
that's what he told me. Anyway, this is a one
of a kind. I'm going to paint this for you, Jeff.
I didn't know exactly what it was going to look
like until I got it. I didn't know it was
going to be called The Quest, and I didn't know
my initials would be on the shield. I've had to
live ever since then with the distinction of having one
of the twentieth century's most prolific liars say that he
put my initials on Don Quixote's shield because he saw
me as a cluster after the truth. So that's why
JS is on the shield.
Speaker 4: Hate to even give him this much credit. It's actually
a pretty good painting. I hate saying that, but it
actually is. It's pretty good.
Speaker 5: He could copy things reasonably well. I always encouraged him
to paint what was in his head, and he seemed
uninterested in doing that for reasons that are probably obvious.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would say, you've got the Seven Dwarfs painting the.
Speaker 5: Seven Dwarfs painting the Don Quixote, and then the third
one is just a weird It's like a seaman captain
of a ship sitting on a dock, looking very contented,
smoking a pipe. Not exactly what you would imagine as
on Wayne Gacy's subject matter. But you also wouldn't probably
predict Gasey's answer when I asked him if he had
any favorite songs. A guy who's just among the worst
repeat killers in modern American history, you know, his two
favorite songs were.
Speaker 2: Then he said, I can't wait.
Speaker 5: The impossible dream and climb every mountain.
Speaker 2: There's the coyote thing again.
Speaker 6: And I will say one thing, getting back to Kristen's
question about takeaways, one thing people don't take note of
often enough, I think is the incredible ambition.
Speaker 5: If I can use that word of these people that
they're not people contend to live their life as a
low level con man on the margins of society. They're
after something much bigger. They pair themselves to other killers.
There's drunk on the game they play with police. They
love it. As it gets more intense, they love it
more and more until they make a mistake and get captured.
But they're interested in making their mark in some way,
either in terms of notoriety or Thomas Lee Dillon's case,
he would say to me over and over again, Jeff,
have you ever heard of a case like this where
somebody he's at home, he's got a wife and a son,
and he goes to work every day, and he plays
tennis with his friends, and he goes out on the
weekend and picks off people he doesn't know. Has there
ever been a case like that? Is this case unique
in Ohio history? Say? He's very preoccupied with kind of
carving out a niche for himself.
Speaker 2: Is there another woman of pride? Would you say when
he's asking these questions?
Speaker 5: Yeah, we talked about a lot of turned out. He
was a walking encyclopedia of true crime cases. But I
remember when you and I were talking about the Leopold
and Loeb cases. Tmplliant young men near Chicago in the
twenties who set out to commit the perfect crime, and
their mistake was leaving behind a pair of eyeglasses. But
Gasey was very interested in that, and I remember him saying, ah, yeah,
murder as a kind of mental game, I can relate
to that. So that was very interesting to him, the
idea of trying to commit a perfect crime doing it
as a mental exercise.
Speaker 4: And it sounds the interactions that you had with them
a lot of times you had to have spent time
playing sort of three D mental chess, trying to figure
out what can I say to get the information out
of them? Did it ever feel like you were playing
your own chess match with them through these letters and
these interactions.
Speaker 5: It did, And I wouldn't claim that I felt that
I was a particularly competent chess player when I was
doing that, but yeah, I was definitely thinking in those
terms and wondering, how will Gasey, just as an example,
respond if I say this in this way? Is there
a better way to send or to say it so
that he might be more responsive or more open to
having a dialogue about it. So yeah, I often felt
like I was in that position.
Speaker 2: This accomplishments idea that you mentioned a moment ago Jeff,
is so striking because it sounds like a number of
these serial killers wanted to accomplish something, but it's so negative.
It isn't like they're going out and doing something that
society would see as worthwhile. The whole thing seems to
be so turned on its head.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I often use the phrase kerdl of ambition. It's
like in Gaysey's case, he said, growing up he could
never satisfy his father. He was no good he was
a faggot, he was this and that, but he could
never be good enough in his father's eyes. So he
was very ambitious. But at some point the ambition hurdled
and he very deliberately chose this career as a serial killer.
That's what he was going to do and for as
long as he could operate beneath the radar and get
away with doing things that satisfied his perverted cravings.
Speaker 4: Jeff, is there anyone that you have wanted to interview
that you have not yet had a chance to. I
mean you've hit some of the biggies, yeah, Manson, Casey Bundy,
Donald Harvey. Is there anyone that you've wanted to talk
to that you've just never had a chance to reach
out to.
Speaker 5: I really can't think of one offhand, Kristen. During my career,
I interacted extensively with extraordinarily violent people who committed incredibly
orrid acts. These would be people whose names are unknown
to the majority of your listeners, but still very interesting
people from a psychological point of view. So I felt
that through my work I was generally able to satisfy
my interest in having conversations with violent criminals whose psychology
intrigued me. I will say that at the beginning of
my career, I was very interested in the quote unquote
criminal mind, and so I was very patient. I think
with the people I was asked to evaluate, I became
less patient over the years, and that's just a reality.
I don't know if Jade it is the right word,
but after twenty five years of being lied to and
attempts to manipulate you, I became less patient. So I
would say, by the time I retired after twenty five
years of practice as a forensic psychologist, my interest in
reaching out or trying to have conversations with other killers waned.
It wasn't the same as it had been when I
was a young man.
Speaker 2: Did any of these killers ever reach out to you,
as opposed to you reaching out to them.
Speaker 5: Oh. Quite a few of the death penalty case defendants
whose cases I worked on carried on and continuing correspondence
with me from prison after they were sentenced to death,
which was always interesting to me. It always spoke to
something about the kind of relationship that I established. Their
world was pretty dark. They had been sentenced to die,
They were sent to death row, and you would think
the idea of writing Jeff Smolden this defense psychologist would
have been pretty far from their mind. But some of
them did, apparently because they had, I don't know, seen
me as a not a sympathetic person, at least someone
who didn't approach them with an attitude of judgment and
worked hard to draw them out and listen to their story.
But I was always interested in that that quite a
few of them reached out to me from death row.
Speaker 2: Is there ever anyone that was so dark or dangerous
that you were unwilling to engage with them?
Speaker 5: No, I don't think there was. Never. Despite the fact
that some of the people whose cases I was hired
to work on committed just seizing children from their beds
and killing them and sexually assaulting them and the worst
things you can imagine. I never said I can't work
on this case because the facts are too horrible. And
one of the things that I knew this would happen,
and it did early in my career, I'm personally opposed
to the death penalty. I understand the opposite position and
respect it, only opposed to the death penalty, And of
course I knew that would come up during my testimony,
particularly when prosecutors were cross examining me, that you're opposed
to the death penalty, why should we accept any of
your findings as anything other than an attempt to save
this guy's life, And then they would typically go down
the road of it. Worked on a case early in
my career of a guy who in an emergency room
at the hospital. A woman went to the restroom and
left her purse sitting on a couch while she was
in the restroom. This guy took her wallet, found out
her address, summoned a taxi cab to take him to
her house, went into the house to steal some things,
and a little a child approached him, not knowing who
he was and being too young to really be shocked
by his presence and asked him for a glass of water.
He gave her a glass of water, she went back
to bed, and then he set the house on fire
and killed killed all to the children who were there.
Speaker 2: Gosh.
Speaker 5: And when I would be testifying in these cases and
I would say I was personally opposed to the death penalty,
they would say, what about the case of pee Wee Garner?
And then they would describe the facts of that case,
and they would usually only get to one or two cases,
and the judge would say, Okay, that's enough of that.
We're not here to try and prejudice the jury by
bringing up the horrible facts of any case doctor Smalden
has ever worked on. But at that point I would say, no,
the facts of the case never stopped me from working
on the case or didn't change the way I felt
about the death penalty. I worked on some cases with
horrible facts.
Speaker 4: I was thinking about asking you about your position on
the death penalty, but I figure we don't want to
get that political at this point in the show. But
it's definitely something I would like to ask about off air.
Speaker 5: It came up obviously during my testimony, Jeff.
Speaker 4: It is a fascinating book, and we can't thank you
enough for take in the time to talk with us
about it. Do you have Is this the only book
that you have in you or are you working on
something else.
Speaker 5: I'm not working on something else right now, but I
might have another book in me. I don't know. I
have some thoughts about it. I haven't begun working on
it in earnest at all if I do. I want
to thank both of you for having me on. I
appreciate you having me as a guest and it's been
a good talking to you.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Jeff.
Speaker 4: The book is That Beast Was Not Me One Forensic Psychologist.
Five Decades of Conversations with Killers by Jeffrey Smalldon and
Jeff Where can people find the book.
Speaker 5: It's easy to get on Amazon or from Barnes and Noble,
or from the publisher Black Lie and Publishing. I want
to encourage people to visit my website, which is ww
dot Jeffrey, j E. F F R E Y smoldon
SMA LDN dot com and on on my website, You're
just a click away from being able to obtain the
book through Amazon or Barnes and Noboard's easy.
Speaker 4: Jeff, Thank you so much. For joining us. We appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me that is going to do.
Speaker 4: It for this episode of mind Over 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.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.