48 Hours - A Killers Mind Fifteen

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Was Daniel Marsh a depraved psychopath without a conscience, or was he not in his right mind when he murdered Claudia Maupin and Chip Northup? As Daniel Marsh is tried as an adult, his defense team makes the case he was legally insane when stabbing the sleeping victims. Could his medications be responsible for his actions? But the prosecution argues Daniel knew exactly what he was doing and would have harmed others had he not been caught. It is up to the jury to decide Daniel's fate as Chip and Claudia's family watches and waits. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we begin, just a trigger warning. The following episode contains references to graphic physical violence. Please listen with care. Chris, do you believe that Daniel Marsh was a serial killer in training? Absolutely. Without a doubt that if he had been allowed to keep on going, he actually talked about how he was going to take his next victim. Almost four hours into questioning at the police station,

Daniel Marsh admitted to FBI special agent Chris Campion that he had murdered Claudia Mopin and Chip Northup. But he didn't stop there. Campion learned the teenager was already thinking about his next killing. It was going to basically do the same thing only with a different method. and I was going to different gloves, a different jacket. And instead of breaking in, I figured I'd get somebody when they're alone at night out in the street or out somewhere,

just find somebody alone at night and beat him the death of baseball bat. Okay. Did you have anybody in mind? Oh. And you actually got out looking for someone? Yeah. He was someone who did not have a conscience.

You believe Daniel Marsh is a psychopath? I do. I believe Daniel Marsh is a psychopath. I do. it when he was talking to me, he actually admitted it. I don't feel so few for other people. Campion maintained his composure, and then he asked Daniel a question that I had never heard in a police interrogation. So, how would you kill me? There's a lot of ways.

I mean that you've thought of so far in the time of a couple of hours we've been together here. Um, choking you in a death with your tie. Okay. beating your face into the mirror until it broke and using the glass to cut your arteries, gouging your eyes out and just smashing your face into the wall. Campion had asked, how would you kill me? And almost immediately, Daniel had thought of three different, gruesome ways that he would do it. Nothing personal.

I don't take a personal. What happens when you meet somebody when you're thinking, And there's that time when you're involuntary. It's something that just happens. And I said I didn't take it personally because I didn't. I don't think I did anything to offend him, to upset him. I think he literally thinks about that with anybody he meets. That's what he thinks about doing.

That's his fantasy life. While Daniel was questioned, police had searched his mother's home. There they found writings, drawings, drawings, a knife, duct tape, and clothes. with Chip and Claudia's DNA. Police also searched Daniel's father's home. When he found out his son was being questioned, he said he sent a public defender down to the police station. Authorities finally had a suspect in Chip Northup and Claudia Moppins murders.

And with physical evidence, DNA samples, and a complete confession, it seemed like the case against Daniel was solid. But the fact that the suspect was a teenager would complicate things for the prosecution. I'm 48 hours correspondent Aaron Moriarty. This is 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders. Episode 5, a killer's mind. When did you first hear the name Daniel Marsh? The victim's advocate as well as the Davis Police liaison who was in charge of our case called and said that they had made an arrest. Victoria Hurd had finally gotten a call she had been anxiously waiting for. I just remember shaking my head going, what? What?

That anyone could kill her mother and stepfather was difficult enough to believe. But a 15-year-old? A teenager? Who was this boy named Daniel Marsh? I'm in shock, and then all of a sudden I get a burst of, you know, eldest daughter can do anything. And I said, I've got to go to that arraignment. That arraignment's going to happen within 24 hours. I've got to go there and see this man, young man. Kid.

Kid. But Victoria would have to wait even longer to see him. Because Daniel was a minor, his family. was hidden by a wall at the arraignment. My sister-in-law was with me. I said, I have got to see him. I've got to look in his face and see this man who killed my mother.

Finally, she saw Daniel's face through a TV monitor. He looked like somebody who would be one of my niece's boyfriends. He looked like some hippie kid from Davis. When I was at the arraignment, his father sat in front of me, and I think it was my victim's advocate who told him. advocate who told me that was his father and there was something strange. I didn't like it. I didn't like the feel. Daniel's father is Bill Marsh. We spoke in 2018.

Did it ever hurt to you that your own son could be involved in something like that? Not in a million years. You never saw any sign of that. You never got a sense that your son. If I hadn't had any sense of it, I would have taken action. Bill seemed to still struggle with what his son was accused of. Show me the pictures you have here. Tell me who this is. This is Daniel in 2009, so that would have made him 12. This was about the time when you had the heart attack.

Yes, right. One day in November 2009, Daniel was home with his father, when Bill says he had started feeling dizzy. And I'd gone upstairs and taken a shower, came down, and said, come on, Dan, let's go to the hospital, I got checked out. They got in the car and made it to the corner of their street. Next thing I knew, I woke up and the car ran into a wall, covered in bushes and a tree.

I asked Daniel, how did we wind up here? What happened? He says, I don't know, Daddy. He says, suddenly you just passed out. He says, I climbed into your lap and steered the car into the wall to stop it. It must have been terrifying for Daniel, who started banging on his father's chest. Something Daniel later said, he had seen. seen on a medical drama. It worked. Daniel had saved his father's life.

About a month later, Daniel was presented with an American Red Cross Heroes Award. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a major event. He was all over the media, they were, you know, towning this young American hero, and look at this, he might actually be a future doctor. Sure enough, there was Daniel,

featured in local newspapers, hailed for his heroism. In photos, he looks innocent and sweet, wearing a suit with a rosebud in his lapel, his father proudly standing beside him. The next year, Daniel enrolled in the Davis Police Department's Youth Academy, receiving instruction on crime scene investigation. But while Daniel may have appeared a model citizen on, On the outside, he was also harboring a dark side, something Bill said he didn't notice until after his heart attack. You know that he told counselors that he was actually killing animals before then.

Did you have any sense of that, Bill? No, not at all. In fact, because of all the upheaval and the family and the rest, I had no basis of experience to counsel him. But he told the FBI agent that he had thought about killing your wife's lover. That he thought about killing her. That was two years earlier. As Daniel entered the Yolo County Courthouse almost a year and a half after Claudia Mappen and Chip Northup's murders, a judge and jury were about to decide his fate.

Now on trial is Daniel Marsh, the teenager being tried as an adult. after the gruesome killings that rocked the city of Davis last year. On Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014, the long-awaited murder trial against Daniel Marsh, now 17 years old, began at the Yolo County Courthouse. Daniel had been charged as an adult with two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors concluded that he had, quote, committed a very adult crime in a very very adult manner. And then, just three months before the trial began, Daniel changed his plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity, a clear indication of the defense

to come. Inside the courtroom, Daniel looked noticeably different from the year before when he had first confessed to killing Chip Northam and Claudia Moppin. Gone was the long, scruffy hair. Now it was cut short, neater and darker. He showed zero emotion. He didn't seem scared. He would just face forward. He never cried.

This is Amanda Zambor, the Deputy District Attorney for Yolo County. I spoke with her in two. 2018. At the time of the trial, she was one of the two prosecutors. Had you ever run into a defendant like this? Not in real life, only in books when you read about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, you know, Richard Ramirez, all people that he idolized and studied and identified with. And did that add a whole other, the fact that this defendant was a kid? Yeah, so I was pregnant with my third child.

during the trial and you definitely reflect back and how can a child do this? How can they have such a depraved mind? How do they get that way? Is it possible to change them? Zambor, along with co-prosecutor Michael Cabral, began prepping for the trial as soon as Daniel was arrested in June 2013. Davis Police Department thankfully built a very strong case. Chris Campion from the FBI did a masterful job in his interview of Marsh.

Had Campion not been on that, I don't know that we would have gotten the confession that we did, but they really built a solid case on Marsh from the get-go once we figured out it was him. What about, though, the defense argument that this guy, this young man had a lot of trauma. His mother left the family for another woman. He was in this car accent when his father had a hard. He had to save his father. He was bullied in school. Possible that that could cause this kind of anger and lashing out?

You know, there's no doubt that he had some trauma in his life, but there's how many kids that go through and have divorced parents and they don't kill other people. They may struggle with depression. They may struggle with other things. But there's a lot of people who actually have severe trauma that don't act like this. But Zamborn needed to convince the jurors that Daniel had intended to kill. I mean, he had been fantasizing about it since he was 10, 11 years old about killing somebody.

So it wasn't this spur of the moment murder where he just snapped and went out. He planned and stole items and sharpen the knife and put duct tape on his boots to not leave footprints, which, you know, it just shows how intelligent he is. To put Daniel behind bars, Zambor needed to make the case to jurors that Daniel knew exactly what he was doing, and if given the chance, he'd do it again. And if that happened, he'd be even better at it. I believe he would have gotten away with these murders

if he had not bragged to his friends. If he had not bragged, he would have killed others. He would have. He bragged about going out with a baseball bat in the middle of the night and just not being able to find the right victim. He had plotted and planned another victim for his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and had done reconnaissance on him. And, I mean, knew the pets in the home, the neighbors,

what family members lived there. He had created a Facebook account to get more intel on this family to try and figure out how he could kill them. And he actually went out and waited for him on one night, but he didn't come. In the courtroom, the prosecution questioned dozens of witnesses, including friends of Chip and Claudia, Daniel's former friend, Alvaro Garabé, police officers, and psychiatrists. One witness, a member of the Davis Police Department, helped process the crime scene. He testified that the bloodstained patterns left behind suggested that Chip and Claudia were awake. and had tried to defend themselves against Daniel.

Claudia fought, made him mad, and it just invigorated him to keep going. He describes how her pleas for him to stop, just enthused him, made him want to keep going. These were horrific details. Prosecutors tried to prepare Claudia and Chip's families for what they would hear in the courtroom. So they would brief us before we'd go in and say, okay, now in this next part, you're going to hear some things that you haven't heard before.

Claudia's daughter, Victoria, told me that one of the most painful times for her was sitting in court watching that taped interview between FBI Special Agent Chris Campion and Daniel Marsh. It was really tough for me, especially when he got to the part where he, He talked about killing my mother. And he talked about, he had to keep stabbing her because she wouldn't die. And that she was begging for her life. And that was hard. And I felt, I was sitting there. And I felt like I couldn't stay in the seat anymore.

I felt like it was so real that I was experiencing the death of my mother. He was saying all the details in the interview. And I felt like I was watching the murder of my mother. And I couldn't sit. I stood. How do you describe a person like Daniel Marsh after hearing him talk? My mind can't process that degree of evil. So hearing that was just something that I just can't go there.

I can't. It's so dark. It's just so dark. Adding to Victoria's horror was the score of friends and fans. Yes, fans who showed up to the trial to support Daniel. He had a lot of goth followers. So he had a lot of young women who were following him, acting like little teenage girls, you know, dressed in black and black makeup and all that

and thinking that he was innocent, you know. And if he could have waved at them or hug them or shook them It was like he was a celebrity, like it was the celebrity that he wanted to be. No remorse. Oh, no. He was reveling in his celebrity. The prosecution was convinced that not only did Daniel know exactly what he was doing when he killed Chip and Claudia, but the big question at trial was Daniel in his right mind?

Was he sane when committing the murders? Daniel's defense team intended to prove he wasn't. And this was the man they wanted to help make that case. So my name is Dr. Matthew Suley, and I'm a child forensic psychiatrist. I was hired by his attorney in 2013 to evaluate him as part of his original trial. I sat down with Dr. Suley in 2018 and again in 2025. My job really was to kind of explore his life history, beginning with birth until the day I was meeting him, and try to get a sense of what his life story is, some of his more critical experiences and relationships, history of trauma. And specifically, as it related to the defense, I needed him to tell me about what he did.

And I needed to try to figure out if, in fact, he was, if it was going to be my opinion that he was criminally responsible or not. Suley first met Daniel a few months after his arrest. In 2013, I met him at the Yolo County Juvenile Hall, and he was dressed in, you know, typical juvenile hall attire. He was a different kind of kid. I mean, it does stick out to me that there was a coldness to him. Despite even the number of hours that I spent with him, I didn't feel that, I mean, there was a heart or that there was a feeling in him. In fact, Daniel was still regularly thinking about killing people. He told Suley that he had thoughts of harming his peers

and the people taking care of him in juvenile hall. Then, just like FBI's special agent, Chris Campion, Dr. Suleer found himself on the receiving end of Daniel's homicidal thoughts. I asked him, what are you thinking about? And he said, I'm thinking about killing you. I'm thinking about taking that pen on your table right there and shoving it in your neck. I'm thinking about taking your laptop and crushing it over your head. It wasn't the only time that a patient had threatened Dr. Suley.

So while he took it seriously, it didn't deter him from trying to speak with Daniel again. He was able to go back a week later. Dr. Suley believed that Daniel's desire to kill him and others was actually the result of an obsessive, compulsive disorder. It's my belief that, you know, Daniel wasn't born, a bad seed. I don't believe in that. Daniel clearly changed around the age of 10. By everybody's observation and what we could gather about him, he wasn't a terrible kid up until age 10. But you don't think he was born that way? No, no. I just, the issue of psychopathy, it's clearly something that, yes, there's probably some level of genetic predisposition to it. But he wasn't a bad kid in preschool or kindergarten. There's no evidence of that of any kind.

There's something that was unlocked in him. There were forces, there were things that experiences, things that happened to him that I think made him who he was. Dr. Suley also believed that Daniel didn't want to be this way, that he had wanted to stop his compulsive behavior. In his case, he developed these morbid preoccupations about death, about killing people. But again, the thing that it was important to know to me was that it was disturbing to him. He was going around telling everybody and anybody who would listen to him. He told school, he told a transporting police officer, he told his therapy. He told a psychiatrist. He told anybody that he wanted to kill everybody.

I have these thoughts. I don't want to have them. Ultimately, he did act on him, but the precursor was sadomasochistic sex, gore porn, all these things was an attempt in my mind to diminish the intensity of those preoccupations. And at first, it worked. At first, it would dissolve those thoughts and feelings

about killing other people, but ultimately, that gave out. And it wasn't sufficient. And ultimately, he then, acted on it. But at some point, Daniel seemed to stop fighting his compulsions. The horror he had once felt had morphed into something else. Rather than being repelled and upset by what he had done, when he finally listened to those repetitive thoughts, he was actually excited about it, proud. What does that say? That's disturbing. That's deviant. Again, that's the psychopathy in him, that really lacks feeling.

He just is unable to feel compassion for those that he hurt at that time in 2013. And that's scary. But here's the important part. Daniel might have had strong compulsions to kill, compulsions that he struggled to control. But Dr. Suley concluded that Daniel was not legally insane. what would make him insane?

What are you looking for? Is it like a memory of, does he have all the details? Did he know what he did? You know, does he remember doing it? It is a very high standard. You have to be able to lack an appreciation for what you did. So, for instance, while you're holding a knife, you think you're, you know, holding a spoon

or something that's completely unrelated. And that you really fail to understand the morality of what you're doing, the consequences of what you're doing. It's typically reserved for people that have very severe psychiatric illness, psychotic illness, people that are acting under the direction of delusions or voices. And none of this was true for Daniel. The fact that Daniel actually bragged about what he was doing and seemed to enjoy it, but also covering the bottom of his shoes with tape,

What does that say to you when you're trying to determine whether he's insane or not? It shows that he's engaging in logical and linear behaviors. He's calculating. He's planning in a logical manner. We might disagree with what he's doing, obviously, and it's terrible. But it's not psychotically driven in any way. Dr. Suley was convinced that Daniel knew what he was doing when he committed the murders. But despite Souselier's professional assessment, Daniel's defense team was determined to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

And they planned to prove that the medications Daniel had taken made him that way. The drugs made me do it. Exactly. The drugs and antidepressant specifically. And what I basically told defense is that I couldn't get on board with the idea of the defense of an insanity. particularly I didn't believe that the antidepressants caused him to act in that way or kill. So the defense said thank you, and they went and found another expert. The defense called Dr. James Merakangas to testify as an expert witness. A neurologist and psychiatrist, he interviewed Daniel and his family members several times

and reviewed Daniel's previous medical records and police statements. Dr. Merikangas' testimony focused largely on SSRIs, a class of antidepressants that included medications that Daniel had been prescribed to treat severe depression. According to Merikangas, the side effect of those drugs could include extreme restlessness, outbursts of anger, and increase impulsivity. Daniel, he said, was experiencing those side effects. The doctor believed that Daniel had endured trauma for years, and that had in part made him more susceptible to dangerous side effects. Daniel's father, Bill Marsh, also believed that Daniel's behavior was caused by medication. It turns your world upside down, turns your brain inside out. You think that's the only reason why he killed?

I do, yeah. But isn't it just possible your son is a psychopath? Not in my mind, no. And why? Why are you so good? Because I've raised him. I was around him all the time and he was, in my estimation, a normal kid until they started feeding these drugs. Most important, Dr. Merikanga said that on the day of the murder, Daniel had reported having an out-of-body experience. Marikangas couldn't prove when Daniel's dreamlike state began or how long it lasted. He just knew that according to Daniel it had started sometime that night.

The doctor knew that Daniel, the defendant, had motivation to lie about this dreamlike state. After all, Daniel hadn't said anything about it in his interviews with Special Agent Chris Campion or Dr. Matthew Suley, but still Dr. Marikangas felt that Daniel had been truthful to him in his interview. I just fundamentally don't believe putting someone on an antidepressant generates any level of risk that you're going to go and do what Daniel did. That's Dr. Suley again, and he wasn't convinced that medications could cause legal insanity. There are side effects. It can make you more suicidal, more agitated. but it doesn't drive you to kill in the way he did in such a calculating and callous manner. It just doesn't.

And as prosecutor Amanda Zamboor pointed out, Daniel was having those violent feelings much earlier. When you actually looked at the medical records, he was having these thoughts and fantasies before he was ever on Zoloft. He wasn't taking his Zoloft as he was supposed to. A lot of times he would just not take them. He described selling some of his medications to other people. So really, there was no basis for that. After four weeks of testimony, it would be up to the jury to decide was Daniel Marsh guilty? And if so, did he know what he was doing when he committed the murders?

There was a lot at stake here for Daniel and the community, because one verdict would put Daniel behind bars for the fourth. foreseeable future, the other meant Daniel would go to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Do you have a dark curiosity? Heart starts pounding, horrors, hauntings, and mysteries is a weekly podcast hosted by me, Kailen Moore. Each week, I'll take you on a dark journey through terrifying true urban legends, bizarre true crime cases, chilling tales of backwoods horror and more. So if you're looking to join a passionate community of the Darkly Curious, check out Heart Starts pounding on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay curious.

You know, we felt very confident in the case, in the evidence, but there's always that little bit of doubt. Prosecutor Amanda Zamboor felt she had made the best case she could to the jury. You had mostly women on the jury where you worried one woman might feel sympathy for this young guy. You know, it's always, it's a, it's a, 16-year-old boy at the time. And so you always worry about not just women, but men, that they could see their son and, you know, they feel sorry. Like, how could this child have done this? But nearly two hours after closing arguments, the jury re-entered the courtroom. And the verdict was? Guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt of every single count of all the enhancements of all the special circumstances. Unanimously, the jury had found Daniel Marsh guilty on two counts of first-degree murder,

along with additional, quote, enhancements that increased the severity of the punishment he would face due to the depraved nature of the crime. You see things on TV and you think, well, that's television. That couldn't possibly happen in such a way in real life. but it was actually probably more horrifying. Cheryl Gleason sat on the jury of eight women and four men. She explained to me why she believed Daniel Marsh was guilty. The stacks of binders, of pictures from the crime scene, the piles of evidence that we went through,

hearing the accounts of the story, the more evidence that came out in how meticulous and precise his actions were, how things leading up to that, like going through the junior police academy and how well he did at that. And he was a smart kid, really smart kid. Hearing weeks of gruesome testimony left some jurors traumatized. It had a long-term effect that I wasn't really thinking would happen. To this day, I can I cannot fall sleep without sleeping my face towards the door, the bedroom door. I can't turn my back on the door to this day.

Explain that to me. Because he came through a window that he cut the screen out of through the living room, but then came into their bedroom door. And so I just, I see that as this thing that I have to keep my eye on until I fall asleep. However, finding Daniel guilty was not. Actually, the end of the trial. The jury still had to make another decision. Was Daniel insane at the time of the murders?

While she had been confident that the jurors would find Daniel guilty of murder, prosecutor Amanda Zambor wasn't as confident about the issue of insanity. Were you more nervous about that? Yes, because of that, you know, that immediate thought to see something, this grave, the immediate thought is that somebody would have to be insane to do something like this. They'd have to be out of their mind. But then again, when you go back and you hear him speak

about just how happy and enthused that this made him, that he was laughing the whole way home and giggling and wanted to relive it and kept these momentos and to see it up close is powerful. So, after delivering the guilty verdict, The jurors heard another day of arguments, where the prosecution and defense tried to prove that Daniel was either legally sane or insane at the time of the crime. And once again, it was a quick decision for the jury. They found Daniel to be sane at the time he committed the murders of Claudia Mappen and Chip Northup.

It was just really clear that he was not. insane. So if he's not insane, then what is Daniel Marsh? He's a psychopathic killer. I think if he were let loose, he would be a serial killer. He has an urge to kill. Ahead of the sentencing, the judge heard from members of Claudia and Chip's family who talked about the deep losses they had suffered. Victoria heard detailed the trauma that the family experienced and told the court that her sister Laura had, quote, lost her mind to grief after discovering the bodies and had still not recovered by the time of the trial.

Victoria also recalled having to tell her children about their grandmother's murder and how they sobbed and screamed and heartbreak. Victoria's message to the court, was that, quote, If Daniel is free, people will die. Another son, another daughter, another father, mother, brother, sister,

will suffer as I have. Therefore, in honor of my mother, Claudia Moppin, and the legacy of love that she left behind for us, it is my belief that the loving, compassionate action in this situation would be to request, from the court, the maximum sentence allowable for the torture and murder of my mother and her husband, Chip Northup. And then, the judge handed Daniel a sentence that prosecutor Amanda Zamboor had been working to secure for weeks. The judge sentenced Daniel Marsh to 52 years. Were you happy with that?

It was the maximum that he could have done. Had he been 16, he would have been eligible for life without the possibility of parole. But because of his age, the max he could have gotten was 52 years to life. So we were very happy with that. The prosecution had succeeded in their effort to put Daniel behind bars for a long, long time. When asked for comment on the case and sentencing, Daniel's lawyers declined. While Daniel had been handed the longest sentence possible, he still would be eligible for parole in 25 years. But in the meantime, the victim's families could take time to breathe.

When we received the conviction, it felt healing. Like we could be free. But it wasn't over yet, was it? It wasn't over, Erin. No, it wasn't over. It was not over, not by a long shot, because four years later, Victoria and the rest of Chip and Claudius family would find themselves fighting again as a new California law threatened to let Daniel go free much earlier than the judge had ordered. So if he's out in four years, he knows us. He knows our names. Of course he does. He's seen us in court. The capacity that he could get back on the streets and do what he's done again.

Yes. That fear is overwhelming. That's next on 15, inside the Daniel Marsh murders. This series was reported by me, Aaron Moriarty. Alan Peng is our producer. Mora Walls is our story editor, and Jamie Benson is the senior producer. Megan Marcus is the vice president of podcast editorial for CBS. Special thanks to 48-Hours executive producer Judy Tigard,

along with 48-Hours producers Judy Ryback, Stephanie Slyfer, and Greg Fisher. From Goat Rodeo, this podcast was written and produced by Kara Shillen, Max Johnston, Jay Venables, Isabel Kirby McGowan, Megan Nadolsky and Ian Enright. Additional reporting and recording by Kara Shillen. Our executive producers at Goat Rodeo are Megan Nadalski and Ian Enright. Original theme and music by Hans Nels Shee, with additional music from Paramount. Final Mix by Rebecca Seidel.

Fendell Fulton is our fact checker. Our production manager is Kara Shill. I'm Erin Moriarty. If you're enjoying this show, be sure to give it a rating and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting. If you liked 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders, check out the rest of our 48 hours podcasts by searching 48 hours on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.