48 Hours - The Unlikely Suspect Fifteen

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

The police and the FBI finally meet Daniel Marsh face-to-face. While they have some evidence, they need Daniel to admit to killing Claudia Maupin and Chip Northup. During an hours-long interview, FBI special Agent Chris Campion builds a rapport with Daniel, who describes his troubled childhood, a fascination with violence and a history of self-harm. It all leads to a chilling confession. 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 does include mentions of graphic physical violence and suicide. So please listen with care. Okay, so I have to read this stuff to you. Okay, you understand? All right. On June 17, 2013, almost two months after Chip Northup and Claudia Mappen were found dead inside the safety of their bedroom. Investigators asked the police officer who worked at Daniel Marsh's school

to bring the teenager into the station. You have the right for me in silent? Do you understand? Yeah. Anything you say, maybe it's against you and court. Do you understand? Yep. Daniel would be questioned alone. Even though he had just turned 16, California law states that minors can be questioned without parents present. If law enforcement has, you had to be questioned. reasonable belief that they were involved in a crime. At no point did Daniel request his parents' presence. When the officer read him as Miranda rights, Daniel waived his right to an attorney.

And then, Detective Ariel Panetta began the interview. I'll sit right for you. I'm all right. Daniel was a little scruff. with long, blonde hair, thin and wiry. He looked like a regular teenager, a little jittery and awkward. And students? Yes, at the high school?

What year are you? I'm going into my junior year. Officer Panetta told Daniel why they had asked him to come to the station. You may know, so we have an investigation going on in Davis in regards to murderers and information indicated you may know about it or you have some information as well. So that's why I'm here to ask you

about that. Okay, so... But instead of questioning Daniel about the murders, Detective Panetta started with the basics, school, friends, family. Daniel told the detective that his life was stressful. How have you been able to deal with some of that stress?

Honestly, I smoke pot. Okay. Like, I don't do it for any other reason than to deal with my depression and my anxiety and all the shit that happens. It's just kind of, you know, a little bit of a relief temporarily. Like, for a little bit, I can just relax. I can just say everything's all right right now, you know.

It was actually Daniel who first brought up Chip and Claudia. He was telling Detective Panetta about his parents' divorce. So you did I move down South Davis? House apartment? Yeah, an apartment. Okay. What was he just? I know that it was like, I think there were neighbors with the people who got killed.

Okay. Because I know they were either next door or within like a few houses of there. Daniel told the detective that within a week after the murders, his father had moved out of the neighborhood. Well, it freaked him out, you know. I mean, you wake up and you find like the people next to you are dead. It's like, wow, that could have been us, you know? I guess it's just kind of scary in a way. It's spooky.

Like, you want to just get out of there. That was the perfect opening for Panetta. And you, so you do know about the MERS over investigating it. I mean, it's Davis when something like that happens here, it's like, holy crap. Everybody knows about it. Tell me what you know about it. An elderly couple or something. I know that somebody broke in and, like, stabbed these two people.

But I don't really know anything else. But as law enforcement officers questioned Daniel over the next five hours, they learned he knew quite a bit more than that. I'm 48 hours correspondent, Aaron Moriarty, and this is 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders. Episode 4, The Unlikely Suspect. What was your reaction when you heard that the main suspect was a 15-year-old boy? It shocked me.

Special agent Chris Campion worked in the FBI's behavioral unit. The Davis Police Department had asked for his help the night before their sit-down with Daniel Marsh. About an hour into the interview, Campion opened. opened the door to the room. I walked into the interview room and introduced myself and sat down and started talking to him. Hi. Hi. You must be Daniel? Yeah. I'm Chris Campion.

Nice to meet you. I'm from the FBI. I spoke with Special Agent Campion in 2018, five years after he questioned Daniel. Daniel was no ordinary suspect, and I wanted to hear more about how. how he approached the interview. We had pretty good evidence, probable cause evidence, but certainly not enough to arrest him there and then.

And your then hope is to get him to admit what he did. Of course, that's our goal. At the same time, though, teams are searching his mother's house where he lived most of the time, searching his father's house where he was at some of the time, and some other locations that they were trying to gather other evidence at the same time. Campion started the conversation by asking Daniel about his family.

Dad and mom split when you were pretty young. Yeah. And then mom basically left, abandoned you or your family. Yeah, for like three or four months. And she just kind of randomly turned up again. Campion then got Daniel to confirm something his friend Alvaro had already told the police. Daniel said that his parents' divorce. after his mother had an affair with a woman.

It was actually my kindergarten teacher. Wow. Yeah. In the interview, you're not just asking him about the crime at all. You're starting just talking to him. What's the purpose of the beginning of the interview? Well, in any law enforcement interview or any interview, you try to get some rapport going to make the person feel at ease, right? And so that's what we tried to do in these cases.

And, of course, during that time, you get to know the person a little bit, I like to try to drop a few hints and some themes that I might come back to later on. One of those themes Campion wanted to pursue was trauma. He guessed that Daniel might relate to hearing about how people struggle, like Daniel did, with mental health. Doing the kind of work that I do,

there is, I see a lot of people who have had lives that are just devastated, devastated by all sorts of different things and the refuge is the key and we all do that I mean from combat veterans in Afghanistan and Iraq

come back and they have these nightmares and they're haunted PTSD and PTSD right we see those and we see them do just some horrible things because they just want the pain to stop they want the they need the refuge they need someplace to go where

they can feel something besides what they're feeling. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it's the way to escape, get some temporary relief. Right. The hell that they're living. Yeah.

Does that sound kind of familiar to you? Yeah. Campion spoke gently with Daniel and thought he had struck a chord with the teenager. Daniel perked up as Special Agent Campion talked about the psychology of criminals and his mission in law enforcement to heal people. And not necessarily just the victims,

but the people who do these horrendous things, what the public perceives as the horrendous things. They agreed that people might do horrible things, but that doesn't make them horrible people. That's not what they planned on for their lives, right? But why did you get there? How did you get there? And I ask them,

You know, and they're sometimes very honest. And they say, Chris, it's just, I can't not do it. I can't not have it. It's what I think about all the time. Something like a form of a CD. It's an affection for sure. And it's a compulsion because they can't not do it. Campion's approach to questioning fascinated me.

I asked him, where he's. he was going with it. Well, the biggest theme with Daniel that I suspected is that he didn't feel like anybody else could understand what was going on in his head, that he thought that he was unique, that nobody else felt like this. And so I tried to reassure him that I had talked to other people who have had these kind of very dark thoughts and fantasies, and that I wasn't going to look at him like he was an evil, terrible person that I could understand, try to understand, what was going on in his interior

life, in his thoughts. Daniel was opening up more and more. Campion learned that Daniel's father suffered from back and neck injuries. How does he get along? I mean, that's got to be constant pain. Yeah, not very well. Makes him pretty terrible. Doesn't help with his temper.

But he's on a lot of painkillers. because you look like one of those guys that we have so many in our society right now, Dan, that just are kind of addicted, you know, like Brett Farr, a football player. Yeah. And would you say that that's... I'd say that both my parents are addicted to big killers. According to Daniel, there was one point when he and his sister had to take care of their mom when she was diagnosed with a disease affecting the nerves in her face.

She has fibromyalgia and trigemone or her own. and she might have MS. They're not sure he did. Daniel coped with his parents' behavior, he said, by slowly trying to starve himself. Ultimately, he checked into an eating disorder clinic for 25 days. But after treatment, he still sought other ways to harm himself. I see his car too, there I am.

Yeah. At that point, Special Agent Campion leaned forward to have a closer look. Daniel extended his arm. I've attempted suicide in the past. Those aren't suicide attempts that's all different. I'm not always. It doesn't do that, but it was. No, this doesn't have anything to do with the suicide attempts.

Okay. Daniel told Campion that his parents never found out about those attempts on his own life. At the time of the police interview, Daniel had just turned 16. He had spent much of the conversation with Special Agent Campion discussing the many problems in his life. But he also told him that his outlook on life had started to improve somewhat when he began to take antidepressant and antipsychotic medication. Yeah. kind of the point where I actually wake up in the morning and I want to be alive, you know? Like, I want to experience what life has, you know.

I mean, I'm 16. I've just started and got my whole life ahead of me. I know, experience all the things that they're already experienced. But Campion didn't see this revelation, quite the same way Daniel did. He didn't think Daniel Marsh was actually getting better or he. healthier. Campion had reached a far more chilling conclusion. Well, to the casual observer, you might think he's just, you know, he's getting through his depression and, you know, this is a good thing. He's looking forward to a life of doing positive things. In my mind, as I'm

listening to that, I'm thinking he's looking forward to being a serial killer. You're actually thinking that. And why are you getting that? When I worked with the profilers on analyzing this case, and they've taught this to people such as myself, FBI agents out in the field for years, these people are fantasy-driven. The people who commit a crime, like we saw in the crime scene photos of this double murder, they're motivated by a fantasy. Their interior life is completely obsessed with this fantasy that he has. And Daniels, we find out later, is about death and mutilation and murder and gore. And so I knew that that was going on in his mind. So that's why I felt pretty confident he was talking about looking forward to his future as a criminal.

This is what gave him pleasure. This is what gave him meaning in his life. This is what really thrilled him. And he found that and could leave the depression behind. Daniel had asked, what exactly are you guys trying to get from me? Close to two hours into questioning FBI Special Agent Campion revealed concerns over some of Daniel's online postings. People who are much more tech savvy than me because I'm just an old guy. I don't know anything about anything.

found this thing called Tumblr. Your Tumblr page, is that the right account? Yeah, yeah. Daniel had an account on Tumblr. It's a blogging platform where users can share videos, pictures, or text posts. Daniel's page was public, but under a pseudonym. On it, he had curated and saved a series of unsettling images. There were all sorts of images like Iraq,

war deaths, you know, roadside bomb aftermath, sniper killings, horror movies, you know, Hollywood-type horror movie images, all mixed together, crime scene photographs from different types of violent crimes. So we had a little bit of everything, but it was the common theme was gore and violence and death. How unusual is that for a 16-year-old? Very, I think, very unusual. For any age, quite frankly, it's not a, a focus or an obsession with most people. Campion kept patiently probing. He needed to understand why Daniel focused so much on gore and violence.

I'm wondering if it's a refuge for you, Dave. In a way, Camus, kind of a dark, screwed up sense of humor. and actually a lot of that stuff makes me laugh when I see it and not a lot of stuff makes me laugh and so it's like I like horror movies and it's just it's the same thing as a horror movie only it's real and so I don't have any connection to whoever it happened to

it doesn't really bother me right so it's kind of like the cutting it's it's a feeling Yeah, seriously. Like, it makes me feel something. And I'm just always kind of been into darker stuff. Darker stuff that would spook most people seem to thrill Daniel. I don't know. It makes me kind of, like, shocked and fascinated with anatomy.

And so, like, you know, you can see what happened to them and how warped their bodies are and just kind of fascinating to think, like, what could have done that? How did that happen? Why did that happen? How did this all come to play? And I don't know, sometimes they'll be, like,

in a funny pose or something. It would just look, like, stupid. And so, like, giggle at it. Finally, Agent Campion got to the, point of the long interview and directly brought up why Daniel was being asked all these questions. The tips they received that he had killed Chip and Claudia. That you were there, that you did those murders. Me?

Ridiculous. Well, like, I don't, anyone around me, I'm a compassionate, affectionate person. I care about people. I don't. And I heard them. I mean, yeah, they piss me off sometimes and they do something messed up shit, but I care about people. What were you thinking at that point, I mean, I found him kind of convincing, did you

at all? No, I did not at that point. I mean, what would the normal, innocent person do? Are you kidding me? You think I murdered those people? Absolutely not. That's ridiculous. You really think it's me?

Something like that. The FBI agent had just confronted Daniel with the reason they had brought him in. They had evidence that Daniel committed the murders. Now, Campion had to get Daniel to admit it. I see you as a person who has a need. You have a big need. You have a need for a refuge.

Maybe more than anybody I've ever run across. And at age 16, just 16. Remarkable. I don't know if that's a good thing, probably not, but it is an unusual thing. To meet a person like you, Dan, who is bent through some of the things you have and has this need, the compulsion, I think, the need to do something to feel. Well, yeah, but I don't hurt people. and over again, Daniel continued to deny that he could have killed anyone.

The person who did this, we'll do it again. I have no doubt about it. I can't not. It's the inside of obsession. It's the compulsion. Well, then maybe that's where you'll find your eyes. Sir, it's not me. Almost three hours had passed in the interview room.

It was a standoff. Special Agent Campion stepped out of the room. Daniel cracked his knuckles and wiped his face with a tissue. When Campion returned, he was holding a DNA swab kit. I'd like to take your DNA to check it against things that have been found at the crime scene. Pretty much standard CSI kind of stuff. Any problem with that? Okay.

Special Agent Campion asked Daniel to remove his boots. Then he again asked Daniel about the elderly couple who had lived near his father. Have you ever been inside of that house? No. Either when they were there or when they weren't there. I went in once when we first moved there. Okay. What were the circumstances of that?

Neighbors, me neighbors. It was just going to a welcome thing, you know? Daniel said that he had been to Chip and Claudia's house once when his father first moved to the community. It was just a, quote, welcome thing, neighbors, meeting neighbors. But it turned out that Daniel knew quite a lot about Chip and Claudia's home. He had actually been invited inside with his father two years earlier. They show us around from the living room to their bathroom at one point, I think. I was a long time ago.

He was planting in the contingency that there was DNA evidence there. He was planting the thought that maybe that could have been the reason. As another officer began opening the DNA swab packaging, Campion picked up Daniel's boots and began probing for more information. Anything unusual about these? I don't think so. You ever loring them around blood? Maybe a lot of noticeably is.

So maybe they got on that. But if that was to be the case, it would be your luck. I didn't. We started talking about his boots, which I think he realized were the same boots that he had worn the night of the murders. And he realized he probably didn't clean those to remove all of the physical evidence. We started talking about his cell phone and the fact that cell phones are basically personal tracking devices.

And we could track his movements on particular days and times. So those factors I think started weighing on him that he wasn't going to be able to talk his way out of this and the walls started closing in on him. You guys are threatening me with, what, the truth? With getting arrested for two murders. It's so scared right now. Of course, I'm going to do anything I can to try and say that I didn't do this. That was the first sign that he was getting over that wall,

that he was getting ready to talk to us about what really happened. Do you want to help me? Anything, send me to the psychiatric hospital? backed into a corner. You're f*** either way, aren't they? Daniel Marsh seemed to see that he was trapped. Chris, were you really prepared for what he told you next? Um, no.

Every time I look at someone in my mind, I see flashes of images of me killing them in numerous ways and numerous. It's horrible. It's doing terrible things. I can't help it. It's just what comes into my head when I see them. But I don't want it to. I don't like that. It does, but it does.

Do you have a dark curiosity? Heart starts pounding, horrors, hauntings, and mysteries is a weekly podcast hosted by me, Kailan 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. Daniel admitted to Special Agent Campion that he had spent years thinking about killing people and that he made it a reality on that April night. When was the first time you started thinking about those people down the street? And I just couldn't date it anymore. I just went into the street

which house I should go to. Daniel said he had walked through his father's South Davis neighborhood in the middle of the night. He scouted most of the street and checked out 50 homes. Everyone had blocking their doors and closing their windows until I got. When he got to Chip and Claudia's home,

he noticed that they had left a back window open. So he cut the door. screen and climbed through. I listened for snow and I heard it. Went to their bedroom. I opened the door. They just kind of stood over their bed and watching them sleep for a few minutes.

The body was trembling, nervous, but excited and exhilarated. I was there. He said at that point, Claudia woke up. Started static shape and the husband walked out of him in the neck. And he didn't stop. Daniel Marsh stabbed both Chip and Claudia a combined 128 times. Made sure they were both dead, and then I just kind of kept stabbing their dead bodies, even after they stopped a little bit.

Daniel admitted to all of it. And I just kind of messed around with them. I opened both of their torsosos. You around here, one inside of her, and I put a cup inside the guy. I don't know why. The horrific details Daniels shared match crime scene reports and the autopsies, but what he said afterwards was even more outrageous. I'm not going to lie, it felt amazing.

Special agent Chris Campion never changed the tone of his voice during the hours-long interview. He never reacted visibly to anything Daniel Marsh said to him. But he later admitted to me that Daniel Marsh was the most dangerous suspect he had ever interviewed. With everything out in the open, Daniel was then willing to walk the police through where they could find the rest of the evidence. The ski mask he wore, his gloves, his pants. He had stashed it all in his mother's garage, but he kept the jacket. It's kind of a little momentum in the comfort of the mind of what happened, but can see it.

Daniel knew his admission of guilt was going to lead to an arrest and was curious about what would come next. You get the death penalty? I don't know. I was kind of far-fetched. You were 15, right? You know, I was 15 and psychological issues of a wazoo. There was one moment from Campion's interview with Daniel

that especially shocked me. In my years of reporting on crime, I had never heard anything like it in a police interrogation. For the prosecutors building a case against Daniel, it was just one more example of how dangerous Daniel would be if he wasn't put behind bars for a long time. That's next time 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. Thendell Fulton is our fact checker. Our production manager is Kara Shilley. I'm Aaron 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.