The gang explores the insanity defense and the biochemistry of psychopathy as observed through functional brain scans. We look at mental illness in several notable serial killers who are near and dear to our twisted little hearts to get down to the root of it - did their brains make them do it? At what point does one bear responsibility for their own actions, and how can that be litigated in terms of the death penalty?
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
The gang explores the insanity defense and the biochemistry of psychopathy as observed through functional brain scans. We look at mental illness in several notable serial killers who are near and dear to our twisted little hearts to get down to the root of it - did their brains make them do it? At what point does one bear responsibility for their own actions, and how can that be litigated in terms of the death penalty?
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
My brain made me do it
[00:00:00]
Carrie: Tonight we're going to be talking about a sensitive subject that is serial killers and mental illness. Becca is going to do us a summary on the subject so that we can kind of have a jumping off point for tonight because we've got a lot to talk about.
Becca: We do. It's an interesting topic and it continues to get more murky and also more complex as we start to see more and more functional brain imaging scans to see what the decision-making process functionally looks like in the brain. So just a disclaimer that having a mental illness does not make someone violent. There's plenty of people with all kinds of mental illness that don't hurt others, that don't like behave in ways that harm others, that aren't criminal. We don't want to give the idea is that a diagnosis dooms you to be a terrible person, because that's a hundred percent not true. What we're talking about tonight is the legal definition of insanity and what that means in terms of how to have an insanity defense basically.
Like when did your brain make you do it? When were you out of control? And the interesting thing about the insanity defense is it usually comes in the sentencing phase, not in the litigation phase, it's more of a mitigation particularly in the context of death penalty cases. And so the legal definition of insanity is when the defendant can't tell the difference between right and wrong; when they're so disconnected from reality they acted with intent knowingly and intent, but they couldn't discern right from wrong or lawful from unlawful at the point in time when they committed the act. Less than 1% of all cases in the US attempt to use insanity as a defense and have all of those cases less than 25% are successful. So it's a very, very, very low it's…it's unusual.
Recently, Dr. Joseph Wu, he's a psychiatrist from the University of California, Irvine has started using pet scans as a forensic tool in criminal cases often when there's the possibility of a death penalty, as a mitigation.
Basically one of the cases that we're going to be looking at tonight is when the defense attorneys used an insanity defense, and they used Dr. Joseph Wu as an expert witness with his PET scans. Their defense was that the defendant couldn't tell right from wrong because he was a psychopath, and that because he was a psychopath, like his brain made him do it, and this was a mental illness.
The way that this shows up in a brain scan is that there's abnormal communication between the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is the rational verbal part of the brain where the biological experiences of empathy and guilt come from. The amygdala is the gland that regulates fear and anxiety in the brain.
When these parts of the brain don't have healthy communication, the process of experiencing empathy or guilt and guilt are not fully developed. Physiologically people with this brain and normally don't experience the anxiety and fear components of guilt, nor do they experience, the physiological component of empathy.
So psychopathy, from this, clearly has a physiological component. But at the same time, the issue here is that psychopaths can discern the difference between right and wrong. Even if the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex aren't communicating. There's still that discernment aspect. They just like don't physiologically give a fuck. Because of that, psychopaths are 20 to 25 times more likely to end up in prison than non-psychopaths. It's like a huge percent of the prison population. And it's very difficult to treat psychopathy. There has been pretty much like one instance in which psychopathy was successfully treated, and that was using the decompression model. And it was conducted at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in 2012 where 300 juvenile subjects who scored a severe on the psychopathy checklist were tested using the decompression model, where they were rewarded when they displayed behaviors that were empathetic or compassionate. Of the - and then the subjects are tracked over the next four years.
Only 60% of the test group that received the treatment were arrested again. This seems like a high number, but 98% of the control group were arrested again. So that's like 64% versus 98%, which is definitely significant. Of the test group subjects were 50% less likely to commit a violent crime.
In the control group, 16 members of the control group committed homicides over the next four years and not a single member of the test group that did receive the intervention did. The decompression model is an example of something that could work to intervene in psychopaths becoming violent.
But of course the decompression model was people that were identified early and the experiment was carried out in a very controlled atmosphere of the juvenile detention center. We're going to look at some circumstances where the people that we're looking at, do actually thrive in a highly controlled environment.
It's going to be an interesting topic tonight because obviously mental illness is huge. With the advances in technology, we're able to see what is going on in the brain physiologically and, you know, if this means that we need to adjust what a legal - at what point are people held responsible for their actions becomes a pretty murky question.
Krista: It does.
Becca: The two serial killers that we're going to talk about tonight are Stephen Stanko of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Keith Jesperson of - where is he from?
Carrie: He's in Oregon.
Becca: In Oregon. And these two serial killers are very near and dear to our hearts.
Carrie: I did a dissertation on Keith.
Becca: I wrote a banned book about Stanko.
Krista: And my love of serial killers started with the book about Keith Jesperson called “I: The Creation of a Serial Killer.” 2002, it started. I spiraled. Thank you,
Becca: Keith.
Krista: He taunted the police. He taunted. He liked the recognition.
Carrie: He was mad is why he taunted the police.
Krista: Yes.
Carrie: That a woman got a man in trouble and thrown in prison. That's how mad he was. That's why he turned himself in you guys, in my opinion. Not just mine, others as well. It was because that girl lied and said her boyfriend did it, killed Tonya Bennett.
Krista: That's the definition of spite.
Carrie: It too like three years to get out of jail even after he confessed, because they had spent a ton of money on that case, the police. And they were livid, dude.
Krista: He was actually a family man. He has children. He was also a cross-country trucker.
Carrie: Wife's name was Rose.
Krista: I forget what his daughter's name was.
Carrie: Melissa. Got a huge podcast called Happy Face that I was at a couple of episodes. It was really well done. It dug into everything they could; the brain scans, the the father being horrible.
Krista: Victim's children and families.
Carrie: It basically boils down to brain damage in some form. He fell in high school from the rope when you're climbing the rope, got to the top, it broke. He received $50,000. His dad made him spend it on all kinds of other stuff.
I think Keith, that's kind of where some of the money came from for the motorcycle because everybody was set and he could get a motorcycle. When you listen to Keith, he's very organized, very well thought out process when he's going to talk to you. And he can scare the heck out of you just by talking to you. He's scary. He's six foot eight.
Krista: He's scarily big.
Carrie: Was it eight?
Krista: Some places it says eight plus.
Carrie: Becca, he started killing 40. A lot of people don't buy it. That's what he's told us.
Becca: He said that he killed up to like 185 people, but only like eight of them were confirmed. He went on and said, I remember him talking about, “Oh, I think like eight is the perfect number of people to kill because like, if you don't kill the eight, you're not really a serial killer, but if you kill more than eight, then you've got a problem,” one of those like serial killers that was like, I'm an expert on serial killers. You're just like an attention whore. Krista: He did like the attention, but then he also started killing after his family kind of dissolved.
Carrie: Tonya Bennett was a waitress at a cafe.
Krista: She did not have a very high IQ either.
Carrie: No. She was slow. She wasn't stupid or anything, but she wasn't…so he's tells her, can we go out to dinner after you get off work? And she says, sure. And says something like, Oh, I forgot my wallet at the house. I don't know why she went into the house. And he got her in the house. They started whatever. She was not interested. He had locked the front door and she told him the wrong thing. She told him to get it over with and he beat the living shit out of her to where he felt he had to kill her to put her out of her misery.
Krista: She was his mercy killing.
Carrie: Now, this same experience is reported by a lot of people who are serial killers that the first one was an accident. I didn't mean for her to fall off the thing, or I didn't, you know, there's always some kind of, some little excuse. What happens after that first kill, and what I've talked about with several others, is that before you kill somebody, you might think about it or before you raped somebody, you might think of about it, but you don't have the smells. You don't have the color. Like you don't know what the color of blood is until you really see the color of blood dude. Okay. And you might see a little bit, we've seen a little bit, but I mean, a lot of blood it's a different color. And the smell you don't get that. And so, even though you don't think anything is going to change; oh, I can [00:10:00] stop. You now have a new thing in your, in your music repertoire.
Now you've got the smell of the blood, the color of the blood, the smell of the fear, all these other new things that you didn't have before to fantasize about. It might take you years to act on it, but you would have never had those things had you not accidentally, quote unquote, killed someone to smell that smell, to be in that room, to have that atmosphere around you, the fear, the pheromones. There's a thousand things going on that they're recording with their bodies that they don't even know. When they put themselves back in that mindset, they feel it. This person was a good example of that.
Krista: He did like control. He did. He enjoyed it. And then he was a cross-country trucker. He was pretty good at it. I mean, he met his deadlines, but he also liked to pick women up along the way. Prostitutes. Hitchhikers. And they got away with it for so long because he would kill them in one state, keep them in his cab, dump them in another. It's hard, especially if they were a prostitute because as we, as people have now finally started to realize is that these people are usually doing it willingly. So they're already kind of off the grid and you know, not out there. And if they do have an ID, it's probably not the actual person. He was smart, I guess, for him though. I mean, killing people is not a smart thing to do. Don't do that.
Carrie: Killing was reactionary. Because he would be with some women and they survived just fine. He didn't do anything to him. It was the women who he felt embarrassed him or shunned him or talked back to him in some way. There was something that triggered. It was almost like part of it was his dad came out, and it was his mom he was dealing with. You know, and Rose really didn't know how to handle him, his wife. She just wasn't into sex either. There might be some excuses why he started killing later than others. There's definitely proponents on both sides of that issue. Like you said, Becca, it was 185 that he said maybe, but others are like no eight probably, but I'm kind of in the middle.
I don't think he started killing people at just 40. He killed too many animals when he was a kid. He believed it spirits. I had to do some research and I was trying to find out what he was talking about with ghosts in particular, for a show. And I couldn't find it. And the reason why is because he didn't call them ghosts, he called them forces.
One night, Melissa said, his daughter, said that she couldn't sleep. Something was touching her in her room. She was under the covers and it was grabbing her feet and grabbing her hair and she'd look up, give, come around and she wouldn't see anything. So she went down into the hallway and crawled into a little ball and slept in the hallway outside of her mom and dad's room because when she actually went into her mom and dad's room, like a normal kid would to go sleep when she went in there, she had a weird feeling, more weird feeling in that room then she did in her room. So that's why she ended up in the hallway sleeping. The next morning, Keith comes out and he finds her on the floor and he's like almost trips over. And he's like, what are you doing there? And she says, there was ghosts last night trying to get me.
And he's like, Oh, you'll get used to him. So he did have something else talking to him or influencing him and his thought process is that was separate a little bit.
Krista: There would have to be because, I'm a very, very firm believer that, there are external forces that we do not see that do affect our moods, our actions, our thoughts, and you know, it all just depends on, how receptive you are. Or, as some people would say, like your level of vibration to be able to pick up on those and maybe he vibrated extremely high.
Carrie: Well, and his dad was such a jerk. I mean the poor kid didn't really have a chance to know how to vibrate high ever.
Becca: Stanko is a similar case with, his dad was in the military and ran like an incredibly tight ship and like nothing was ever good enough to like live up to his expectations.
Carrie: Stephen Stanko you want to give us a little brief rundown on our boyfriend? The little…
Becca: Oh, Stephen. Yes. Let's talk about him. So me and Carrie Anne were introduced to this story working on a book about this woman in Myrtle Beach who hired him to be her attorney. He was not an attorney, but he knew his shit. And she ended up becoming the most controversial witness in his murder trial.
Basically what happened with Stanko. He's born in Guantanamo Bay. He's in the military family. He's got two brothers. One of them got murdered, right? Or died when he was young?
Carrie: Yes.
Becca: Yes, so he's pretty above average, like performing in school or whatever. And he really, really wants to be in like the Air Force Academy, like his dad when he graduates high school, but he doesn't get in. And he starts to spiral and like running cons and stealing cars and gets in trouble. Just can't hold down a job because he like would lie about what position he was in, do substandard work, just do manipulative things to like take money from his employer to steal.
Krista: So like a conman too.
Becca: Yeah, just general conman. In 1992, he's in Goose Creek, South Carolina, and he meets this woman named Liz. They're working together. They ended up in this like tumultuous relationship for four years.
So him and the neighbor decided they're going to start a used car lot and he's working at a used car lot now. He decides that he's going to sell used cars that he steals from the used car lot that he works for and ends up getting in trouble for it.
Krista: And like…VIN numbers or anything?
Becca: He's smart in some ways, but not in others. And his main thing is he would let - he's the King of overstaying his welcome. He'd like pull a con, fuck you over. But then he lives in your house and doesn't leave. Liz comes home and him and the neighbor in the back of a squad car, talking to him about these stolen cars. And Liz is like, what the fuck? This is after she paid for a lawyer for white collar crimes. He like pawns stuff from her house, stole checks from her checkbook. He'd do this thing where he get fired from a job, but not tell her. He'd get like dressed up for work every day and then come home late at night and then she'd find out that he'd been fired.
They get into this big blowup fight and he's like, I'm leaving for good. So she goes to sleep and then she wakes up to him holding this washcloth filled with Clorox and 409 over her face. She kind of gets him off of her a little bit and he liked ties her to the toilet and takes a shower. And then he's like, “I did some bad things, I got to go,” and leaves. And then she calls the police, and he ends up doing eight and a half years of a 10-year sentence for kidnapping an aggravated assault and some concurrent civil charges for the cars he stole.
So while he's in prison for like the first time in his adult life he's starts kind of kicking ass. Like he studies law like obsessively. He writes a book about the prison system from the inside with these two experts in criminology and sociology. So he comes out of prison a published author with all this knowledge and…This is in 2004 and he ends up in Myrtle Beach. And he's really nervous about being on the outside and expresses this to his brother who's living in North Carolina. Or I think it's North Carolina.
But so he's in Myrtle Beach looking around for like work and stuff and decides he’s gonna…it's hard with his felony record cause he's got like crimes of moral turpitude, he's a registered sex offender, he's got this ankle monitor. So he's like, I'm going to write my next book. He goes to the Socastee Library where Laura Ling is working. And he tells her he's a lawyer, he's writing a book. So it's like, all of his lies are based in like a kernel of truth, so that's the kernel of truth that he based it on to strike up relationship and by April he murders her.
Basically he pretends to be a lawyer and she refers people to him because she believes him. And one of those people was the coauthor that me and Carrie Anne were working with, who was trying to sue a doctor that assaulted her for medical malpractice. So the judge that presided over the first trial that she had, Stanko added him to the witness list when he was playing lawyer. And for the most part, I mean, he was like filing papers. He was given her like legal advice, but he would always be like, Oh, my office is under construction. Let's meet in your yard or just weird shit like that. And just kind of be like, Oh, I'm in like Charlotte or Charleston and then he'd like show up at her house like 15 minutes later. Just kind of upsetting just to like, let her know that he could be anywhere.
And then it got really, really weird. And she was, something's up with my fucking lawyer, but he was doing a better job than anyone else she'd worked with. So…
Carrie: Nobody else would do anything.
Becca: Right? So he's doing this lawsuit and part of this lawsuit is a bit of a cover up. Basically, the doctor that assaulted her, his brother was working for the County solicitor, which is another word for the district attorney. So there was some like sketchy business going on there and she'd accidentally been given records, depositions, forms and stuff from her former lawyer that she wasn't supposed to have.
Stanko had these and he basically was like, I can use these to blackmail my parole officers and the people that I'm responsible to you. Meanwhile, he's on parole pretending to be a lawyer and his girlfriend catches on. And they have this [00:20:00] big blowout fight and then he murders her and rapes and attempts to murder her 15-year-old daughter. He doesn't manage to. But he thinks she's dead. And as soon as he leaves, she calls the cops. But after he does the murder-attempted murder, he goes over to this friend of his, his house who's the 74-year-old man, kills him, steals his car and his gun, goes down to Augusta, Georgia by way of Columbia, South Carolina, where he like parties and has happy hour.
So now he's down in Augusta and he's pretending to be a professional golfer. And schmoozing and starts seeing this woman who takes him to church. And then they're all looking for him and he shows up on TV at church and that kind of goes over their heads. But he’s seeing this woman that he meets down in Augusta and then this, we're looking for this guy. He just killed the ton of people and ran away if anyone has any information. So one of the women, a friend of the woman that he was seeing down in Georgia called her up and was like, Oh shit. Like, is that your new boyfriend? And she's like, Oh no. So she like turned him in and that was his, you know, his, his go of it.
Basically what ended up happening is his defense attorney, Bill Diggs - he had two Gerald Kelly and Bill Diggs. Gerald Kelly's the man. His testimony in the appeals case, he's just, I love watching him talk. He's such a badass. But Bill Diggs decides to go for the insanity defense, which as we've learned is mostly for mitigation. He is now on death row. Stephen Stanko is now on death row. His defense attorney was like, I'm going to call in Dr. Wu and have these functional brain scans taken of Stanko which showed that there was like a lack of communication between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. And his thing was basically like, It's not his fault. His brain made him do it. He's a psychopath, you know, like Ted Bundy and John Wayne [00:22:00] Gacy. Obviously that's like not a great defense. He ends up getting convicted and he's sentenced to death. Recently he had a retrial in 2019, basically that he didn't have competent counsel because they tried his defense was like, you're a psychopath. And then in 2020 in January he was granted a retrial based on that. But the thing is, there's kind of a story behind the story here. The judge that presided over his case that sentenced him to death was the same judge that presided over the case of the women that he was representing when he was pretending to be a lawyer, and he had added this judge's name to the witness list. So the judge was supposed to recuse himself, but he didn't.
Carrie: That's still an issue, is that correct?
Becca: It isn’t being talked about at all. As soon as I saw that there was a retrial, I was like, oh, that's the thing that they're not saying.
Krista: His appeal recently denied in August. I believe so. In August of this year it was denied.
Carrie: I did not know that.
Becca: I did not know that either.
Carrie: I've been trying to keep track of that.
Becca: The reason he hasn't been executed yet - I mean, there's a lot of reasons there's death row sounds like a fucked up place where it's, it's just seems terrible to like have your date changed, just all the shit, you know?
Carrie: Okay, they got it good on death row. They get better food. It's quieter. People don't mess with you. There's people that have tried to get on death row.
Becca: Just to get a break. Basically, they didn't have a working electric chair and the company that made one of the chemicals that goes into the lethal injection stopped producing it. There hasn't been - the people on death row don't have like a means to be…
Krista: He’s like totally cross-eyed.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. The way that our, our the coauthor described it as like having shark eyes, just really dark eyes where there was like nothing at the bottom of them. Yeah.
Krista: Yeah. So on Post and Carrier, they updated August 20th, 2020 his appeal death to have his death sentence appealed was denied. He was interviewed and so was his father. His father was interviewed in that book and they kind of go back and forth between him and his father and kind of time lapse.
Carrie: But they didn't write it. Someone else wrote it.
Becca: The other thing about the insanity defense. So in 2019 at the retrial, Dr. Wu came back and said that he was mistaken about psychopathy and that the brain scan showed that there were these temporal lobe seizures that he was having where instead of regular seizure symptoms, it's spacing out and that these seizures can induce a psychotic state. But then subsequent studies of TLE and extra TLE showed that the seizures didn't produce new psychopathic tendencies and they didn't exacerbate psychopathic tendencies. He'd be backed into a corner of his own lies and once he couldn't get out of them he'd lash out violently where it was excuses, excuses, excuses, and then he'd lash out violently. And that came with when he was conning someone he'd move in with them or like…he wouldn't get away from his mark. It would like lead to him being backed into a corner where he'd lash out violently.
With his first attack he was specifically not charged with attempted murder and he obviously was attempting to kill her.
Krista: He told her that, didn’t he? He said, I'm gonna kill you, showered, like a weirdo. Like I must be clean. Then somewhere in between the tying to the toilet and the cleaning he decided…he switched back to, Nah.
Becca: Something about like taking a shower, just makes it all that much worse and like humming in the shower.
Krista: Someone's like crying, tied to your toilet. Yeah. That's my normal Tuesday.
Carrie: They're everywhere.
Krista: Everywhere. Compared to some people who end up to be serial killers or attempted serial killers, their childhoods…
Carrie: Keith's was screwed up. And weird-mean. He beat the mom. I mean, he drank, he would lie. He made Keith take the blame for stuff. Like they had this trailer court. They were digging this thing out and his dad hits something and totally screwed up the utilities in this trailer court. And blames that on Keith. Keith has to take the blame and Keith's a kid. Just mean stuff.
Krista: Yeah. It was very much as his father scapegoat for a long time.
Carrie: Every chance he got in his dad was just a jerk.
Krista: It wasn't normal by any means.
Carrie: No. They weren't living in a hovel with a dirt floor either.
Krista: No, but others would look at them and say, I wish that was the worst thing that happened to me today. And that, everybody processes their traumas differently.
Carrie: Having a military dad, could be quite traumatizing. I have a friend who always called her father Sir. Always
Krista: I had a grandfather that was a general.
Carrie: Did you guys call him Sir?
Krista: I didn't, I was the granddaughter. But his name was Walter. I have this picture of him. He looks like the grumpiest, old, just surly, just mad. They have expectations. Some military people are absolutely bat shit crazy too.
Carrie: Correct.
Krista: And that's one of them, the reason why they joined the military, because you can almost kind of get away with being an absolute psychopath in the military. I'm not saying that the military doesn't do great things.
Becca: But there’s lot of serial killers, they're just, you know, state-sanctioned serial killers.
Krista: There are. And unfortunately they use war as a reason. I can only imagine all that's going to come out if war ever stops, which it's not going to, but you know, we'll see what happens. They're odd. Stanko is just weird. He craves the structure and when he's on the outside, he didn't get in.
Becca: As soon as he got out he was like right back to conning. And it was really interesting because it seemed to them like he was studying to be a serial killer. Kind of like, I fucked it up the first time and I ended up in jail. I'm not gonna fuck this up again. Just obsessively researching serial killers. But none of the interesting ones, like all that kind of thing, classic ones. Like there were no deep dives. It was just like maybe Bundy, Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Yeah, we all know them. They're the three stooges on South Park.
Carrie: Becca, wasn't he fascinated by the Green River Killer in particular?
Becca: Yeah. The Green River Killer was a fave. He really, I think he really wanted to identify with Ted. Gary Ridgway was a big fave of his. But yeah, they were like, it seemed like he was setting to be a serial killer and the notes that he was taking and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, weird, weird stuff. He's an interesting character. It's interesting again, that people that have covered him try to make him more than what he is. He killed two people. Of all people that he tried to kill, he killed two successfully. Our coauthor, he tried to kill her a lot.
Krista: So that's, another turning point with his relationship and also how he performed in the school because he, when they talked about him being in the school he was very smart. They pictured him doing great things and doing all of this stuff. And then there was a huge switch. His brother died and he started taking shit personally and then failed getting into the Navy.
Becca: Air Force.
Krista: And then spiraled into being an awful fucking conman. He had some shining moments.
Carrie: He really wanted to be in the military. And I think he really wanted to be the shining star of something. I don't know what, but I feel like that's probably why I kind of feel like he might've had something to do with his brother dying [00:30:00] because the brother was the older brother and was the star I'm sure. And something happened. I don't know. Or at least the family might've thought it.
Krista: And when people talk about their family, they say that they weren't a very happy family either. They weren't not the normal American, whatever you see. But just their vibe wasn't very vibalicious, you know. Like, yeah. And dad, you know, had all say. It was the end, all say all. And then you fall down and crazy shit happens. Certain situations where there is a trigger that changes your personality completely and totally. But I do feel like just some people are that way and some people obviously have better control than others.
But I really do feel like some people, I mean, look at all the damn torture devices from the Medieval Time. Like tell me a psychopath did not create that shit. Like come on. Like, Oh yeah, no, I'm a God-fearing person, but I'm going to create this thing that I'm going to sit you on and pull your legs down and see how long it takes to cut you in half. It was torture, but don't, you cannot say that some of those people did not have like raging boners while they were doing it. That's maybe harsh, those types of people were revered. And there is also something to say about genetics and things being passed down in genetics. It's a very teetering line and I think it is still, it needs more research. It needs more time. And the justice system does need to catch up to some of it.
Becca: The big question is should psychopathy be considered insanity and should the definition of insanity change to accommodate brain abnormalities like that.
Krista: But that's, that's also a hard line because if you do clearly know right from wrong…
Carrie: So cold-blooded killing versus hot blooded killing first.
Krista: Like a passion killing, emotion driven.
Carrie: So those two insanities are different. And like we learned from that woman Jane Andrews in England.
Becca: Yes.
Carrie: That she's not gonna stop. I don't think, I bet.
Becca: Oh, no, if she's in love with you, like you will marry her or she will kill you.
Carrie: I think the only reason why she hasn't done anything are they are watching her so closely with like every social worker England has.
Becca: It's like a Jane tracker. It's like a doppler.
Carrie: There's a doppler.
Krista: Yeah. Well, they watch Karla Homolka too. She has since changed her name, but they definitely watch her after they saw those tapes.
Carrie: I would, you know.
Krista: I don't know. I'm willing to say.
Carrie: I can't believe she got out involvement, was a little…
Krista: Not a little, a whole lot more, but she depicted…bitches talking about her sofa that her sister wanted then…but they're watching her too. She would do it again. If she found the right person. I think she would do it again.
Carrie: And so that's not cold-blooded murder. That's hot-blooded murders.
Becca: Yeah. I think this is a good segue into what Doc, our friend on the other side, said about the Ted Bundy in the hallway.
Carrie: Ted Bundy's in Utah in court and he's getting ready to defend himself. He has a psychological assessment that's going to be presented to the court that day, and he's trying to figure out how to win the case that day. So he's in the hall with Doc and he says to Doc, so do you really think I killed all those girls? And Dr. Al Carlisle knows that if he says no, that Ted Bundy will go into court and say, Dr. Carlisle just said in the hallway that I was incapable of doing this. If Dr. Carlisle said yes, Ted would go back into court and say, he's prejudice against me. You have to throw this assessment out. Instead, Al says, “I don't know if you killed all those girls, but if you did, I think you'd do it again.”
Becca: That's the gist of it with what we're looking at and what what's considered insanity. There was one Mendota Juvenile Detention Center instance where there was a successful intervention and successful intervention means that only 36% committed a violent crime in the future. More and it's all kind of training these people to associate self-interest with acts of empathy. It's definitely like learning how to - compassion is a learned thing. It's only learned in the context of it's good for me to show compassion.
Carrie: It’s gotta be altruistic. And I believe that that's, that's a really good thought process. We're going to have to go on that on another show because compassion, if compassion is learned, then that means, you know what we all are when we start out then.
Becca: Can we teach a robot?
Krista: We can teach it to mimic.
Carrie: Might be in it’s best – might be in its best interest to make us love it. So it won't, we won't turn it off. We won't destroy it. Won't recycle it.
Becca: Well I think that's a big thing about like why Stephen Stanko did so well and he was a model prisoner, great behavior because he didn't want to fuck with anyone.
Krista: But at the same time, he could see them coming from either side because those eyes are really, those eyes…
Carrie: Dun-dun, dun-dun…
Becca: Like, Oh my God. He's got like eight rows of teeth.
Krista: They're interesting characters. And another one of the serial killers that I find quite interesting is Albert Fish. He was born in 1924. He is notorious for writing letters about killing his victims. He would swindle people and convince them to let him take their children. He wrote a letter to Grace Budd’s parents describing how he roasted her behind and continued to eat it for four days.
Becca: Damn.
Krista: At the same time, he would punish himself for indulging in carnal sin. It forced, like it was some weird Bible - and he was also a Satanist, but towards himself and he would shove needles in his penis and whip himself. He would give himself pittances with whips on his back. And his children knew about it. Before the killing stuff, like they knew like the weird shit that he did. And somehow he had six children and all of the women would leave him with those children. Knowing what…
Becca: They’re like you’ll be safe here. It's fine.
Krista: But it's like, was he, he just like, did he just have some weird stuff going on in his head that at that time they couldn't quite figure out or was he just one of those? Was that more of a compulsion? Because then you look at HH Holmes and his wasn't a compulsion. His was thought out and processed and planned.
Becca: Oh my God. Right? He built that entire murder hotel by the age of 25.
Krista: Let's say Albert Fish was schizophrenic. Okay. Or had, severe ADHD and maybe some weird epilepsy stuff. Let's say that was going on. Okay. So you have compulsion issues. Whatever. But he was also organized enough to even put ads in the paper to find people to come and work at his farms. You know like, some of his things were thought out very, very well. I'm not saying he wasn't disorganized because I mean, at some point, all serial killers get disorganized and just, I think it's just a natural degression…
Carrie: That we know of!
Krista: You know, just…
Carrie: And we don't know if they've been able to keep it together. We would love to catch one of those would.
Becca: We got some insight into that from Doc as well where, you know, serial killers, people that use this kind of stuff, like have a very strict, like there's a line that they won't cross. It's like seems pretty arbitrary, but it's like a very strict line for them where it's like, okay, as long as I like, don't do this, I'm not a monster. And ultimately that line gets crossed at some point and then they start to lose their shit.
Krista: It's so scary at the same time, because if it, if it is as easy as just flipping that switch, like what, does that mean?
Becca: Be aware of boyfriends who pretend to go to work with don't, and…
Krista: Or, or if they tell you they're an author, like cool. Look up the book, but also look at where they were when they wrote the book. Like, yeah he wrote a book, what is it about? Okay, he wrote a book about prison. Why did he write a book about prison and being on the inside with somebody else? Those are just things I think of, but that's just me.
Becca: Any closing thoughts?
Carrie: What would be our group assessment of serial killers and mental illness in general? Does it affect the outcome or is it simply a switch and some of these behaviors - I mean, there's a lot of people that's got ADD and ADHD and they're never going to kill anybody.
Becca: Yeah, or no one’s actually dead.
Carrie: A lot of mental illnesses we've been talking about kind of our super powers, you know, in a way, at least from our point of view. And so [00:40:00] looking at it from that perspective all serial killers have something wrong with them mentally that's wrong. But is it a prerequisite? No, because each one has been a different progression. Each one found the path that they wanted to go down and went down at, on their own by their own free will. Whether their psychopathy drove them to go down that path, that's the question. Is the entity or the voice, is the mental illness or is it just the trigger was pressed, like you said, Krista, is it that simple?
Let's be honest. We've got people pop off and kill people that we haven't had any mental illness history on them at all. Not to say that they didn’t have it.
Becca: I think a big thing that this sheds light on is the whole you know, since insanity is often used as a mitigation against the death penalty it really calls into question the whole… Because the idea is that it's cruel and unusual punishment to put someone to death for an act to that they couldn’t control doing to whatever extent. If you're seeing these functional brain scans that are showing a breakdown of communication between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, or like other things you are seeing a physiological reason. It doesn't make the person any less of a threat to society. It's a knock against the death penalty for sure. You're going to put someone to death because their brain made them do it?
Carrie: It is a damaged brain. Something like that. I mean, so,it's not like they…I don't think that a damaged brain is the same thing as a mental illness. However, it can act in the same way because it's, you know, a damaged brain. And so you really, really do have to, they have to dig in there, do some brain scans. I think it's definitely the wave of the future to try to figure out if that had something to do with it.
Becca: And we're just starting to learn, like brain scans are just starting to become like forensic tools. So it's going to be interesting to see like how deep that rabbit hole goes. And as we learn more and more about the brain.
Krista: I just thought about this. What about like gang members that have killed multiple people? Wouldn't you consider them serial killers?
Carrie: Correct. The FBI's definition is three or more, but I believe two or more. Because it's cold-blooded. If it's cold-blooded, if it's not someone, you know, then that's a cold-blooded murder. Okay. That's it serial killing if you do more than one. So that's two, so that's a serial killing.
Krista: So then gang members, let's say an enforcer for a gang, whether it be the mafia, the Irish mob, the, you know, the Creo-friggin-don't-mess-with-the-swamp-people enforcers. Wouldn't they be considered serial killers? And how many of them are just walking around right now?
Carrie: And they are the ones that are probably getting away with it.
Krista: Yeah, for sure.
Carrie: Because they have backup. Now a regular lone wolf serial killer is doing it all by himself. Gang members, mobs, all that - we've got buddies to help us. But the kills are sanctioned, generally.
Krista: Yes. But even still wasn't…
Becca: Right, they're within that code. So I think they can continue to be like organized because they're within the code of like what's acceptable.
Krista: Okay. So it's okay. I didn't cross that line. This is my purpose.
Becca: Right? So they can… Like, I'm not a monster. I didn't cross this line so they can continue to like, act in an organized way.
Carrie: I'm just trying to do my - I'm just trying to do my job here.
Krista: So like what every Nazi said. And people in Rwanda and things like that. Like, there's so many serial killers out there and so many different forms, people. So is it really - I think it's just the way some people are.
Becca: And sometimes you find an outlet for it, sometimes you don't. Well, and if Stanko had gotten into the armed forces, he may not have been different, but things may have been different.
Krista: Yeah. He still might have found some type of thrill of killing people in a weird way, but it being within the code of being in the military.
Carrie: That guy in Canada that rode with the queen on her plane and stood by her and everything and he was raping people and stealing panties and killing them in Canada. He looked fine. That's what reminds me of Stanko a little bit. Maybe if he got in the military, he would have been like that guy.
Becca: Yeah. I mean, I don't see him not being a con artist and not being like, you know, putting himself into situations where he's fucked people over to the point where he can't talk his way out of it and he'll have to lash out violently.
Carrie: Exactly.
Krista: Well, you know, I mean, even one of my children at one point said, my brain made me do it and he wasn't wrong. You're not wrong, but you're still in trouble because you, in some capacity, do you have some control of your brain? So yes, your brain said, Hey, you should do that. But there's two sides of your brain.
Becca: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like there's the side of your brain. That's like, let's do this. And then there's the side of your brain where you're like, no, that bitch is crazy.
Krista: Let’s pump the brakes on that. Let's think about it. This needs to be like a cartoon. Like I'm just imagining like this cartoon drawn with brains…
Becca: There's the shoulder angels or whatever, but one of them is Jeffrey Dahmer and the other one's Ted Bundy and Jeffrey's all like eat ‘em! Eat ‘em! Eat ‘em! and Ted’s like rape em then eat em,and like, Dahmer's like, yeah, that's a great idea. And then,
Krista: Okay, I’m working on it. We'll have to find one person that's a nurse or something who did like mercy killings and stuff. There's a lot or, well, what they thought like, I, my favorite ones are the lesbians that thought by killing people it would strengthen their relationship and they've been together forever. They should've just called it what it was: blackmail. But then they just really liked it and did it together,and look, like, are they crazy?
Carrie: Bored Americans.
Krista: There’s that, there's that. Some folks are ornery. Some folks are ornery.
Becca: We'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this. So let us know. Did your brain make you do it?
References:
Dalton, Rex. “Controversy Follows UC Irvine Scientist’s Brain Scan Testimony.” Voice of OC. April 3, 2014.
Devinsky, Orrin. “Is Behavior in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Different than in Other Epilepsies? The Jury Is Out.” American Epilepsy Society. July 7, 2007.
Kiehl, Kent A. & Hoffman, Morris B. “The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics.” US National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health. June 16, 2014.
“Psychopaths’ brains show differences in structure and function.” School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison. November 11, 2017.
Moore, Melissa. Happy Face Podcast.
Schouten, Ronald, M.D., J.D. “The Insanity Defense: An Intersection of Morality, Public Policy, and Science.” Psychology Today. August 16, 2012.
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