Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

We conclude the story and life of "Dr. Death", which culminates in, predictably, a lot of dead people.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also media. And we're back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that's about the people who are bad, which is today, this week, Dr. James Grigsden, and the broader industry, cottage industry, he helps ignite of psychiatrists who go to court and be like, yeah, man, absolutely kill that motherfucker. Which is only slightly less direct than the actual job was. With us again, our guest, Stephen Monticelli. Stephen, how you doing?

Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm doing. You're doing? I'm doing. Well, yeah, I'm here. Mm-hmm. What are you doing? We're about to talk about some really, really uplifting, heartening, um, trust-inducing stuff, like makes me really love the system and the medical profession as a whole.

It's good. It's good. I mean, you know, here's the thing. What's frustrating is the medical profession as a whole is trying to do the right thing. here, like, they keep being like, this guy's a crank, this guy's a crank. It just doesn't matter for a long time. This is kind of an early example of the hell we're in now, where it's like all of the people who know anything about, for example, climate or, for example, how infectious diseases work or anything else to do with, like, vaccines and medicine, all of these, like people

who know things. Space travel, people who know things about that are being like, nah, this is all, This is really fucked up. Like you're shooting us in the foot. All of these different cuts to research are horrible. Everything that's being done is going to make life worse for everybody. But the only people that matter are the ones who are saying, uh-uh. And you kind of get an early version. This is like a prologue for all of the hell that we're in right now, this like anti-science

bullshit. Well, I feel like a good psychiatrist should be able to say, oh, yeah, this man is definitely going to kill again because I've diagnosed him with something I believe, thanks to TV, is a real diagnosis. This is our like Star Wars prequel of the anti-science hell that we're all trapped in now. Yeah, the sort of non-expert expert, the person who is more than willing to set aside all of the good things about whatever field they nominally belong to in order to like push some sort of quackery or ideology. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, we've seen it in a lot of fields, unfortunately, into horrible extents, like the Russians with their, was it, Lamarckism?

Oh, God. No, no, no, no. Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism. Sorry, sorry, Lysenkoism. I'm certainly not an expert in the history of genetic research, but I digress. Yeah, really, really horrible person here that we're talking about today. It is interesting to compare it to Lysenkoism, which is like you had obviously actual agricultural scientists in the USSR, and then you had this guy being like, no, plants work the same way we're pretty sure people do, you know? and you can you can like freeze a crop and it'll pass down cold resistance to it's like no that doesn't and there were a lot of people saying no that doesn't work but the the the scientist who happened to be in alignment with the politics of the people you know in charge was the scientist who got declared to be right and damn the consequences and likewise here you've got the whole APA being like at no point should psychiatrists ever do what this guy is doing right but you've got people in texas and prosecutors and the government of Texas being like, no, this is pretty much how we think it should

work. So this guy's right. And he gets to make a lot of money. Right. Conveniently a tool of the state and its interest at the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. So from this point forward in the story, our boy Dr. Grigsin, aka Dr. Death, is going to continue to expand and extend his practice throughout the 80s, while also dealing with constant and mounting criticism from organized psychiatry as a field.

Now, the core of the complaints against him have to do with his continued insistence on using the results of competency tests, which he's not supposed to be doing, right? But there's some evidence that he keeps doing it after he's told not to by the Supreme Court. And then kind of the bigger issue is, again, that he's making predictions about the future, which he shouldn't be doing. Even after being chided by the APA in that Supreme Court case, he continued to rank sociopathy on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the worst. And as noted in an article by the Death Penalty Information Center, he would regularly rank people higher than 10.

Like the 1 through 10 seemed to be like mostly pointless because he would always go above 10, right? And up to 12, 13 and even 14, which is just like, again, like if you're going to go above 10 on a 1 to 10, yeah, you just say like, I'm 11, like a 14. So why even have a 1 to 10 scale if someone can be that high above it? What are you doing? Like, why even introduce that idea from the beginning? I promise I'm not going to beat on that the whole time. It's just very frustrating to me. Now, these numbers are, again, infuriating if you know anything about psychiatry or probability,

but they get even more sickening when you dig into the actual stories of the people that Dr. Grigsen diagnosed as 100% sociopaths who would 100% kill again. He is often saying a 99% chance. they'll kill again. Sometimes he says a hundred percent chance they'll kill again, right? And we know that in a lot of cases he was objectively wrong. And because we have examples, like, and this is probably the most prominent case of him being wrong, the tale of Randall Dale Adams. In 1977, Adams was convicted of the murder of a Dallas, Texas police officer, Robert Wood. Officer Wood was shot to death in late 1976, the same year that Texas finally established its new rules for

deciding death penalty cases. Now, we know who the actual shooter was. It was a guy named David Harris who framed Randall Adams to avoid being convicted of the crime. Adams' conviction relied heavily on testimony from three witnesses who were illegally hidden from the defense until they showed up in court, and said testimony we also know was at least partially perjured. So not only did the defense hide these witnesses when they shouldn't have, but the witnesses were coaxed and bribed into giving false testimony, and we know this, right? So we're already starting with crimes on the part of the prosecution in this case. Now, that begs the question, why are the police, and why is the prosecutor so gung-ho to go after a guy with evidence they know, like, that they know they're

having to cook up, right, that they know isn't true? And you would assume, just knowing cops, it's because, like, you know, police just, for whatever reason decided this was the guy. And we're like, well, we can just kind of coax the truth into making sure that we are able to like make a stronger case and the prosecutor went along with it, right? That's actually not what happened. So what's really going on here is that David Harris, the guy who actually kills this person and this robbery gone wrong, is 16 years old, right? And they know Harris does it from the beginning. He's the first guy they take into custody. They find that he, like the gun that was used in the shooting was his dad's gun that he had access.

to that night. So it's very clear that this is Harris, but you can't give a 16-year-old the death penalty in Texas, right? And it's a cop he's murdered. And so the police, even more than making sure the right guy gets executed, the police want to make sure that when a cop gets murdered, someone gets executed, right? And when it becomes clear, Harris can't be executed. Harris is like, well, I'll give you this other guy who like drove me there, right? And Randall Adams, part of why Adams is a good patsy to pin it on is that Daryl Harris is like a kid. He like lives with his parents. So he's he's someone who has something of like a normal life. And Randall Adams is a drifter, right? He's like doing day labor. He doesn't come from the state. He's kind of, you know, he's, I think he has a car,

but he's essentially a homeless man, right? And so it's really easy to kill him, right? And really easy to like kill him because he's not going to have any kind of money for defense and because he's not the kind of person anyone's going to care about, right? So this kind of fits what the cops want, which is we want to make a show of force against somebody for the death of this cop. Now, there's a lot of fucked up details in the case. Everything that happens here, there's a lot of like rule breaking and illegality. We don't have enough time to go into, but every detail of this case stinks about as much as it's possible for a case to stink from the get-go. In the end, the jury declares Adams guilty after almost no deliberation. And as you know, because we've done our little clinic on how the Texas death penalty worked, the next step is they have to decide should this man die, right?

And this always comes down to will he commit another violent crime if we leave him alive? Determining this case came down to Dr. Grigson and another colleague testifying about whether or not Adams was, in Dr. Grigsin's terms, a maximum sociopath. Again, not a diagnosis. But Grigsden testified that Randall would 100% kill again if left alive. Adams, he insisted, was an extreme sociopaths. We can't even keep his terms straight. Adams is sentenced to die in 1979. And the years ticked by, agonizingly, you know, from this court case, until three days before

his execution, the U.S. Supreme Court stays it, right? They give him a stay of execution because Justice Lewis Powell writes that there is grave concern regarding potential jurors in the case who were excluded for being anti-death penalty, even though they'd promised to follow Texas law if appointed, right? So that's the whole thing that saves his life initially is that there's an appeal based on, like, jurors who weren't pro-death penalty were excluded illegally from service, right? And so that's the only reason he's saved initially. It has nothing to do with his innocence, nothing to do with other aspects of the case.

It's just this issue with the jury. Now, by rights, because this has been found by the Supreme Court, Adam should have gotten a new trial, right? It's been determined that his trial was, like, not valid because the rules were broken here, enough that they stayed as execution. You should have a new trial. But the Dallas DA at the time, Henry Wade. And does that name sound familiar to you, Henry Wade? Yeah, we talked about him. I'm pretty sure Dr. Phillips and I on one of the episodes on It Could Happen here.

Yeah. He's the Wade from Roe v. Wade, right? Like, that's the, and he's on the bad side of the case, right? Yeah. So, Dr. Wade or Henry Wade, not Dr. Wade, the DA comes in and he's like, we don't need to give this guy a new trial. It would be a waste of money, right? And it'll be a waste of money because I'm going to have the governor commute Adams'

sentence to life in prison, right? So he's not going to get killed anymore. So why do we care about giving him a new trial, right? So Adams' people are still like, we want a new trial because he's innocent and he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison. But a Texas criminal court of appeals insists that, like, well, now that he's not going to be executed, there's no longer any error in the case, so it's fine, right? Because, you know, those jurors were just being excluded because of their opinion on the death penalty. No death penalty. Everything's good here. So that's what the court of

appeals decides. God. Come on. And so Adams, a man everyone knows has been railroaded into a guilty verdict, a lot of this is out now, and had been nearly executed due to a crooked case, seemed set to spend the rest of his life behind bars. And this is the case that he stays in until March of 1985. And the reason why he gets another shot and ultimately, thank God, I'm going to spoil it a little bit, gets freed, is because of, we can thank documentary in Errol Morris. So, Errol Morris is paying attention during that 1983 Supreme Court case against Dr. Grigsson, and he's like, this seems really fucked up. Like, this Dr. Death guy seems like a real asshole who's killing a shitload of people. I wonder if we can do anything about that, you know,

me being literally Errol Morris. So he starts working on a documentary that's initially supposed to be primarily about Dr. Grigson. And the documentary that comes out is called the thin blue line, right? If you've heard of that, like that is the documentary that he makes about this case ultimately. So Morris starts working on this case. And that obviously brings a lot of attention to it and, you know, he's able to put some resources behind it. And to talk about what happened next, I'm going to quote from an article by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Morris's intent had not been to question the guilt of defendants in whose cases Grigsden had testified, but only to question his psychiatric conclusions. When Morris met Adams,

the focus of the project changed. Morris learned from Randy Schaefer, a volunteer Houston lawyer who had been working on the case since 1982, that Harris had not led an exemplary life after helping to convict Adams. Harris, which is the guy who gives Adams up, had joined the army and been stationed in Germany, where he had been convicted in a military court of a series of burglaries and sent to prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

A few months after his release, Harris had been convicted in California of kidnapping, armed robbery, and related crimes. So Morris is like, well, the guy who said Adams was guilty in the first place, and had been the initial suspect really seems like the kind of guy who'd murder a cop, whereas Adams doesn't.

And there's a bunch of other irregularities in the case. The more he looks into it, the more he finds. For one thing, it comes up again, that Harris's father had owned the gun that was likely used in the shooting and that Harris had stolen it. Now, this is all looking pretty bad, but what comes up next is even worse. And I'm going to continue quoting from that article. Morrison Schaefer discovered that Officer Turco, who's one of the, the officer that survives, her partner is killed, and she testifies about the murder, that Officer Turko had been hypnotized during the investigation and initially had acknowledged that she had not seen the killer. Facts that the prosecution had illegally withheld from the defense.

Morrison Schaefer also found that robbery charges against the daughter of eyewitness Emily Miller had been dropped after Miller agreed to testify Adams' Woods' killer. The new information, coupled with the fact that Miller initially had described the killer as Mexican or African American, became the basis for a new trial motion, right? So they find all this shit is fucked up. And like, there's not really any evidence whatsoever that ties Adams to the murder. And ultimately, you know, there's a new trial motion. The case becomes a major cornerstone for the death row innocence project like movement, right, for the people who are trying to, you know, especially as forensic science is advancing, we've got DNA now, trying to look at

a lot of these people who are definitely innocent and get them off death row, get them out of prison. So in 1988, during a three-day hearing in a Dallas district court, Harris finally recants and admits that he killed the cop that Adams was convicted of murdering. The judge in that case recommends a new trial for Adams and that Adams be paroled immediately in the meantime. The Board of Partons and Appeals initially refuses to let Adams out, but agrees to a new trial. And then after like a couple of weeks, he gets released anyway, and then a few days later, all charges against him are dropped. And I think this is a case of, as soon as they looked back into it, they were like, oh, there's no case whatsoever without the shit that the cops and the prosecutors falsified.

there's absolutely nothing. We can't even give him a new trial. Like, there's not enough to even try and accuse him of here. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, it's good, right? This is an innocent man gets out of prison after having his life safe. It's ridiculous that had to get to that point.

Yeah. So it's a major win, obviously. Randall Adams and everyone who believed in his innocence, you know, scratch up a W. but this represents a serious problem for Dr. Grigsen because he had guaranteed in court that this man was an incurable sociopath who would 100% kill again. So people start asking him. Like, hey, he said this innocent guy was definitely a sociopath. Were you wrong? And this is part of why I love that vanity fair piece where Rosenbaum spent like weeks traveling with Dr. Death.

Because, you know, this is written in 1990, but it's during a period of time in which he keeps getting questioned about Adams. because Adams is just like freed in 88. So Grigsin is still testifying constantly, and defense attorneys are using this against him. Unfortunately, it's less successful at hurting his testimony than you might imagine. Now, this part in that Vanity Fair article comes after Grigsman has just testified in one of three death penalty cases. He's doing in like a long weekend with the goal of getting three people killed, right? He's trying to kill the most people that he's ever killed in his career in the shortest period of time.

Like, that's what this article is about. he's got like three cases at a couple of days. He's like, can I break my record of, you know, getting people executed by the state? So during one of these cases, he's testifying, and the defense attorney asks, do you recall the Randall Dayle Adams case? The doctor nodded warily and said, I recall it well, yes, sir. Are you as sure about this defendant as you were when you declared Randall Dayle Adams was guilty and would kill again?

Again, the courtroom tensed up. Even out on the prairie, the papers had reported on the Adams case. Looking totally unperturbed, the doctor said dramatically, those people that were involved in the case know that he is guilty. I examine Mr. Adams. There is no question in my mind, as well as the mind of the jury who convicted him, that he is guilty. And did you say of Randall Adams that he will continue his previous behavior? I most certainly said that, the doctor said defiantly, and he will.

Right? So that's two years later. He's like, no, they were wrong. He's definitely still guilty. I know it because of my psychiatry brain. And I guarantee you he's going to kill again, right? It just hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened yet, but it 100% will, right?

Now, Rosenbaum talks to the doctor after this case, which the prosecution wins, even though this gets brought up. And he's like, talks to him about Adams. He's like, it just seems really weird that you're insisting this guy is still guilty after all the evidence that Morris uncovered and the fact that the legal system backpedaled. And Dr. Grigson is like, no, no, no, the guy's guilty. Harris only recanted and took credit for the murder because he wanted to be. jack the system around, right? And in another trial a week later, when asked the same question, Dr. Grigsden continued to insist that not only was Adams guilty, but again, he will 100% kill again, like that I am 100% sure this now free man will commit another murder. Like, he testified that.

So that seems like a pretty good case to judge his credibility on, given that this is happening in 1990, and we have 25 years of additional data into this guy's life, right? Seems like something we should look into, which we will after these ads. Wow. That was so professional. That was a good one. Thank you. I try.

We're back. So you could say, I think it'd be fair to say, that a lot of Dr. Grigsen's credibility rests on the Randall Adams case, right? Because number one, this is a guy he said was definitely guilty, who then got exonerated. And number two, he is now provided in 1990. He said 100% he'll kill again now that he's free. That's a false. viable statement, and we have a lot of time since 1990 to kind of look at.

And about 14 years after he made that statement in 2004, there was a study. I found an article about it based on the study by the Texas Defender Service into the records of 155 convicted killers to determine how often they actually engaged in violent behavior post-conviction and what Dr. Grigsen and other experts had predicted they would do, right? So these guys are looking into like, what can we actually tell based on the predictions made about these convicted killers and what they actually did, how accurate these predictions were. Right? So, you know, that's good. I'm going to quote from that now.

Adams 55 is Exhibit A in a study to be released today that found experts witnesses' predictions of violent behavior were wrong 95% of the time. Oh, God. So that's way worse than a third, right? Exactly. That's like, you know, statistically significant. confidence interval, like you basically can say it's going to happen. Yeah. Like, that is, you would think if you and I were just guessing, if we just got to go

to court and, like, flip a coin and be like, yeah, that guy I'll kill again. Like, you'd expect us to be righter than that. Oh, boy. That's an incredible degree of wrong, right? So of the 155 convicted killers studied, only eight engaged in later behavior that resulted in serious injury. So eight out of 155 seriously hurt. another person after their conviction.

A full 20% of these convicts had zero disciplinary violations while in prison of any kind, and 75% had only minor nonviolent infractions, like owning lottery tickets, right? So, like, yeah, a bunch of them got in trouble after conviction, but it was because they had an illegal lottery ticket. It wasn't because they were killing or hurting anybody. Not one of the 155 convicted killers ever murdered again, right? So very bad, like, rate of accuracy here. Now, it's important to note, this is 2004, which is after Dr. Grigsden dies and well after he

stopped practicing. But it's important to note that even at the end of the 1980s, the early 1990s, there's good documented evidence that not only had Grigsden been wrong on a case, but during his whole career, he'd very likely been wrong on a grand scale. I want to quote from a 2003 article for the Washington Times here. Andrea Kellan, a attorney with the Texas Defender's Service, said she knew of dozens of former death row inmates whose sentences were reduced for various reasons and who have never been involved in any difficulties, though Dr. Grigsden testified they should be executed because

they would likely commit murder again. In 1988, a report compiled by an assistant district attorney in Dallas concluded that after the study of 11 specific death penalty verdicts where the defendant's terms had been reduced, not a single one had been anything other than a model prisoner. Mr. Halperin, in a brief for other prisoners, concluded that despite Dr. Grigson's near identical predictions that each inmate would be on any doubt absolutely, and without any question, commit acts of dangerousness in the future, that prosecution-prepared report proved the psychiatrist was seldom accurate. So a DA report, this is a prosecutor, did a study of 11 death penalty verdicts where Dr. Grigsen said

they will definitely continue to commit crimes if not executed, and these people were not executed. Their sentences were reduced, and none of them did violence again. That's 100% wrong for Dr. Grixon, right? Based on those 11 cases, you know? Jesus. So I'm not overly optimistic that he was right a bunch of the time that we don't have data on based on that and based on the Adams case. So, you know, going into the 90s here, though, despite the fact that there is evidence building that Dr. Grigsden is wrong an awful lot, he is continuing to do a shitload of these cases and to be very prominent in the media. And the Adams case does nothing initially to slow his career or halt his body count. There was, however, a minor uproar as a result of Morris's

documentary and Adams' exoneration. In 1993, the Texas State Supreme Court responded to the epidemic of junk science experts, but only in civil cases. So they ruled that expert testimony could only be admitted if it was proven to be both relevant and reliable, a bar that Dr. Grigsden's work could not pass, if any psychiatrist not named Dr. Grigsen were consulted on the matter. However, this only applied the civil cases, like I said, not capital cases. So there's an uproar, but it only stops psychiatrists from testifying in the cases that Dr. Grigsin isn't testifying in.

Now, there is still an uproar, even in Texas about this. there are a lot of professionals that are angry about what Grigsin is doing. It's just not able to stop things. Like, one of the things I found that was really wild is John Edens, who was a professor of psychiatry at my alma mater, Sam Houston State, said in the wake of this 93 decision of Dr. Grigson, it's hard to imagine this kind of testimony would be allowed. It does not meet the criteria of reliability. There is a known error rate, which is remarkably high. So again, Sam Houston State, not a liberal university. This is the criminal justice, in Texas, right? Like, this is not, it's set, it's located right next to death row, right?

Why is there nothing? Why, why are we just letting this happen then? Because any ruling against Dr. Grigsen could be seen as attempting to, like, slow the death penalty. And it's really popular, unfortunately. And these are, we're coming into the Bush years now, right? Dr. Grigsin is going to be really active during Bush's time as governor. And, And so, like, we're kind of ramping up in the 90s to the period where Texas is, like, considering its ability to continue its death row as, like, this is like something that is really important to the state, right? It's something we take a degree of pride in, like my family did, you know? So it's not, like, the fact that all of these experts are very much saying this guy is not reliable is not hurting his business yet. So crazy.

And it's also prosecutors have a lot of power, a lot of political power. Right. Right. DAs have a lot of political power, and they find him useful. So. So he was too important of a cog and a broader bigger machine. Right. He's really politically useful, and he's useful to all their careers, right?

Because a lot of these prosecutors, part of what they're building their careers on, a lot of them want to go into other politics is like, not only do I have this many convictions, but I sent this many dangerous sociopaths to death row, right? I made our state safer. Yeah, okay. Yes. Yeah. Yep. And it's one of those things where, yeah, if you put numbers up on the board, it sounds good. You can claim that you took dangerous repeat criminals who would have been threats to their communities off the streets. And then if you succeed in actually killing them, you don't face the scrutiny of what you just described of whether or not they actually would live up to that potential future that's been predicted by this expert. Yep. Sheesh. Yeah. Okay.

So this is cool, right? We're happy? Yeah. Works as expected, right? Yeah. The purpose of a system is what it does. Right. And in this case, yeah, the system is doing exactly what the people who set it up want it to do.

Dr. James Grigsden in 1995 was finally drummed out of the APA for his continued insistence on diagnosing subjects without ever talking to them. The next year, the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians expelled him. In 1996, New York University psych professor Michael Weiner wrote this. The problem with Dr. Grigsen was not that inmates were placed on death row, but that he was fundamentally biased in his assessments and was performing cursory evaluations and drawing broad and damning conclusions from only limited information, a problem of credibility and objectivity. And, you know, I would say part of the problem is that people were being placed on death row based on bad evidence, but I think he's making the point that, like, Dr. Grigson isn't responsible

for the way prosecutions work for how bad, like lying about the evidence is incentivized in these cases and stuff, he's responsible for this aspect of it, which is probably fair to say. Now, it is impossible for us to know to a point of certainty how often he was wrong, but something like a hundred of the people he testified about for money were put to death, and most of those cases were never revisited. However, we do have a few more case studies on times when he was proven wrong. Back in 1986, a carpenter named David Wayne Stoker was charged with the murder of a convenience store clerk, north of Lubbock. Five months after the murder, a man described by prosecutors as low-life scum snitched a police that Stoker had done the murder and handed over what he claimed to be the murder weapon.

Well, this low-life scum had the murder weapon and says this other guy did it, that's all I need to know. He's closed. Why would he have a bias, right? So Stoker did have an assault prior, and he had a drug issue. right, and was arrested in short order. Again, it's one of these like, oh yeah, this guy doesn't have any way to fight this. Yeah, let's go after him. Like many such death penalty cases, his was dogged by poor quality representation in a system in

which people like him, who are expected to be guilty, get railroaded through to a conviction. Per an article by the Death Penalty Information Center. Felty, the lead lawyer, the defense attorney, and a former prosecutor, later gave up his law license in the face of disciplinary action. Felty forged the signatures of two clients on a settlement check, then pocketing. the money record show. He also pleaded guilty to felony charges for forging a judge's signature on a court order and falsifying a government document. He was sentenced to five years of community service. So that's this guy's defense attorney. And again, not shitting on the

concept of defense attorneys, but it's a major problem that a lot of these guys in particular, these are like the kind of the lowest of the low and they benefit from the very worst service on average, right? They are very likely to get the defense attorneys who are not competent. It's, as we'll talk about weirdly common for, like, death penalty cases for the defense attorneys to later get disbarred for incompetence or other similar issues. The guy who had snitched on Stoker claimed in court to not have been given anything for his testimony that just like, I wanted the truth to come out. I didn't get any kind of special deal.

But the day he testified, charges he had for drug possession and for, like, possession of a firearm illegally in the next county over were dropped. and he received $1,000 from crime stoppers as a reward for turning this guy in. And further documents made it clear that there had been a written quid pro quo with the DA. For one thing, that county didn't have a crime stoppers program until it was started for this by the DA, and the check was sent to him by an investigator for the DA's office. Lovely stuff, lovely stuff. Not bribery, though.

Not bribery. No, not picking cases that you think can win, even if it might not be the right guy. And certainly, no shenanigans are bribery with regard to acquiring potentially suspect testimony or evidence. Not at all. Absolutely not. No, that would be unethical. There's no gambling in this casino. Yeah.

That's crazy. In this casino. So there's much more that reeks about this case, but things really got nasty once Dr. Grigsman entered the arena. Quote, during sentencing, the prosecutor called Dr. James P. Grigsin, the psychiatrist nicknamed Dr. Death. Though Grigsden never examined Stoker, he testified Stoker was a sociopath who would absolutely be violent again. With Stoker's life in the balance, Feltie put on only one witness at sentencing, Stoker's

mother. She testified briefly about the most superficial aspects of the Stoker family. Feltie, who works as a supervisor at Home Depot, defended his work. When we went to trial, we were a hell of a lot better prepared than the DA's office, Felty said. So, not a lot of winner. He's not necessarily wrong, because the DA's just a lot of, lying and bribing somebody, but also when your lawyer gets disbarred for felonies and winds up

working at a Home Depot, that's not a great sign in terms of the quality of representation you received. Yeah, the look at my lawyer dog. Look at my lawyer dog. I'm getting executed. Yeah, unfortunately. That is just such beautiful shade on that article, too. Just noted that he's working at Home Depot now.

Almost kind of unnecessary, except for the point they're trying to make here. It's good color. It is good color. Now, unfortunately, unlike Adams' story, this story does not end with an 11th hour stay of execution and eventual exoneration. Stoker was executed in 1997 during George W. Bush's governorship when he pushed Texas to execute inmates at a rate not before seen in modern times. Even within the ranks of Bush appointees, though, the Stoker case was looked at as egregious.

Thomas Moss had been appointed by the governor to the Board of Partons and Paroles. And he voted to give Stoker clemency, that he only did this twice in his entire career and once was with Stoker. Because he was like, yeah, this is just too messy a case. This is, you know, a lot kept coming out. The local police chief eventually testified that, no, the crime stoppers group wasn't real. You know, we founded it expressly for this purpose, basically. A DA's investigator made the payment. And, you know, as this stuff came to light, eventually, like, the local sheriff testified that there was no direct tie between Stoker and the crime.

crime he'd been executed for committing. Now, had Stoker been put under life imprisonment, had his execution basically commuted, right, but given life imprisonment at this point, he likely would have lived long enough to get retried, right? That probably would have happened eventually because there was just enough, you know, good evidence on his side of things for this. But Dr. Grigsden helped to ensure that this could not happen, right, by testifying he would definitely kill again. One juror in the Stoker case later said, you couldn't help but listen to what he was saying. doctor. He had a lot of influence on what we decided. And several jurors later said, yeah,

if I'd known these other facts about the case, I wouldn't have voted for the death penalty. So yeah, this guy gets executed, and a big part of why is that Grigsin said he needed to be. And we can say fairly confidently that this was an innocent man who Dr. Grigson helped put to death here. Yeah. Throughout the Bush years and the bloodiest period for Texas's death row, Dr. Grigsen was prolific and influential, even in cases where he personally did not testify. That death penalty information center piece discusses another psychiatrist, Dr. E. Clay Griffith, who often testified along the same lines as Dr. Grigson and had clearly built his profession in the other man's image. Like Grigsin, he used a one to ten scale for judging defendants and regularly went above ten in order to make his point,

as he did when reviewing the 1984 case of David Wayne Spence. Now, Spence, again, was not tied to the triple homicide that he was accused of committing via any evidence, just the testimony of seven informants, all of whom had good reason to lie about what had happened. Several of these people later confessed to being fed information by investigators and being shown crime scene and autopsy photos, as well as being bribed behind bars with privileges and leniency. Like Stoker, Spence was executed in 1987, or 1997. The issues we've discussed in all these cases have been proven via subsequent study to be rampant within Texas' criminal justice system, particularly death row cases. An investigation of the 131 executions during George W. Bush's time as governor showed that in at least 29 cases, the prosecution had presented testimony from a psychiatrist, often Dr. Grigsden, that the defendant would commit future violence.

In most of these cases, the psychiatrist had not seen or examined the defendant. Beyond the issues most relevant to Grigsen, in 43 of those cases, the defendant was represented at trial by an attorney who was later disbarred or suspended. Again, I want to really go into that. 131 executions. Of those in 43 of the cases, the defendant's defense attorney was later disbarred or suspended. That's insane. Yeah. So, like, he not only destroyed people's lives and got them killed, but then he also destroyed defense attorney.

these careers in the process? I think the point, no, this is more a broader point about the fact that most of the people on death row did not benefit from a vigorous defense. You were entitled constitutionally one, and they clearly didn't get it, right? I completely misunderstood that. Yeah, no, no, that makes a lot more sense that just you're dealing with a very poor level of representation where it is clearly falling underneath the bar time and time again at a very large scale.

Okay, okay. And part of the problem is that, because in so many of these cases, is at least 29, Dr. Grigsin and others are testifying, you don't have these kind of checked out defense attorneys don't have the wherewithal and often don't have the funding to properly counter the expert that the prosecution has brought up, right? They also found, this is getting into another set of pseudoscience, but I think it's worth bringing up. In 231 or more, at least of these 131 cases, the prosecution's case relied on the visual

comparison of hairs, which is not real science and has now largely been banned as being wildly ineffective. One study of 62 convictions that were later cleared by DNA evidence found that in at least 18 of those cases, prosecutors had used hair analysis to get the initial conviction. Wow. And this brings me to an important point, which is that while Dr. Grigsin is the most colorful of these experts testifying in favor of the death penalty during this golden age of executing people in Texas, he was not the only or the most obviously fraudulent one. In their review of the role fake forensic experts play in these cases, the death penalty information, Center also cited the case of Charles Lynch. Now, this is an expert hair analysis guy, right? And his

expert hair comparison analysis was used in the cases of two people who were executed under Bush. So he helped with two executions as a result of matching hairs. And this is not a DNA match. I really need to emphasize that. He's looking at hairs and saying, oh, yeah, these hairs come from that guy, right? Like, that's what he's literally doing. So I just have to bring up this one bit. that seems somewhat relevant to how much of a shit show, Texas court systems and criminal law has been for some time. It wasn't until the past like five years or so. I'm trying to remember the exact year,

but very recently that hypnosis as a tool for testimony and criminal investigations was banned. So many people got convicted with that as a factor. Yes. Yes, yes. Someone allowed hypnotists to come in and then do hypnosis as if it were a legitimate, repeatable scientific approach

for acquiring legitimate testimony or uncovering forgotten memories or whatever that is being used for. So, yeah, I mean, that was recently. That was in this century, not last century. No, it took a shocking amount of time for us to be like, no, we shouldn't be doing this. I mean, when did the FBI stop doing that fucking gene pattern thing?

where like they dismayed that FBI, that fucking shit. As we've talked about it, forensic science is rife with bastardy. But I want to talk about Charles Lynch a little more. I want to read another quote from that death penalty information center piece because it's so funny. Again, this guy's hair analysis is used in the case to execute two people. The Dallas Morning News reported that Lynch had been committed in 1994 to a psychiatric war due to concerns about his depression and drinking. Lynch was considered a danger to himself and others, but he was temporarily released to provide in criminal. hair analysis testimony against Kenneth Muth Duff, who was executed in 1998.

The prosecution did not disclose Lynch's status to the defense, even though Lynch's residence in a psychiatric ward might have been used to challenge his credibility. It's incredible. I don't want to, I got people who, you know, wind up in a psychiatric ward, that doesn't mean they can never do a serious job again. But if you probably shouldn't be releasing someone from a ward to testify and then putting them back in because they're a danger to themselves and others, but they're a danger to themselves and others, but they can definitely testify that this guy needs to fry, right? That seems like a stretch.

Listen, you gotta do what you gotta do. You gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, get this guy out. We can't let this guy have his own like fucking butter knife, but let him, let him tell this jury that a man needs to die. Like, holy shit. Insane. That's nuts. That's wild. Just coming across that story like, wow, it really was the wild ass West for a while, huh? You could get away with anything. Boy, howdy. kind of still can. Kind of still can. Yeah. Now, another of Dr. Grigsin's colleagues was Dr. Ralph Erdman, who testified in numerous

capital cases until 1994 when he pled no contest to seven felonies over a falsifying evidence and fucking up autopsies. He had claimed to have examined organs and decedents that had been removed in surgery before their deaths for one thing, right? Like in his autopsy reports, he's like writing about the appendixes of people who had no appendix when they died. despite claiming to be a scientist providing his unbiased opinion, no matter who hired him, a special investigator appointed to examine Erdman found if the prosecution theory was that

death was caused by a Martian death ray, then that was what Dr. Erdman reported, right? Yeah, okay. Which is, you're talking here about the same thing we're seeing with Dr. Grigsin, right? This is a guy who's not doing science. He's coming in and he's saying like, yeah, based on my expertise, whatever the prosecution says is true, right? Now, because Erdman is working in autopsies, he gets caught. But there's no kind of, there's nothing to catch Dr. Grigsin on, really, right? Because psychiatry is largely like, yeah, does the psychiatrist think this person has something?

You know, there's more rigor built that's supposed to be built into the system. But when it comes to the way these court cases are working, it's really just this guy saying, yeah, I'm a doctor, and I say, this is what's going on. It's kind of like the medical equivalent of a mob lawyer that are playing this role that is predefined for them and they know what they're supposed to do and they just go along with whatever the request is, whatever the need is. They'll say, yeah, sure, go for it. I mean, in the case of Grigsin, it seems like, yeah, he may have claimed there were cases

which he was not eager to do so. But I don't know. Maybe he just knew how to pick a winner. Maybe he knew how to pick a winner. And also when he says a third of the cases I didn't take because I didn't think, you know, the person, we don't know, there's no evidence of that. Sure. We're just trusting this guy, you know?

Right. And I don't trust him. Now, Dr. Erdman did have to surrender his medical license. You know, Dr. Grigsden never did. And we're going to talk about what else happens with Dr. Grigson. But first, let's have our second ad break. Okay. We're back.

So over the years when he was pushed on this, he would repeatedly say, hey, I didn't always testify for the prosecution, right? And sometimes I just wouldn't take cases. And we can't back up the latter, but we can back up the amount of times that Dr. Grigsden testified for the prosecution versus the defense. During his career, he testified in 166 capital, like, death penalty cases in Texas. And in nine of those times, he testified for the defense. So I think it's fair to say basically always a prosecution witness. And by the way, we'll talk later about what some of those other nine times would have been, because it's not like he just really thought the defense was right in that situation.

So we'll get to that. During the busiest period of his career in the 1980s, he was making $150,000 a year with this business, which was equivalent to someone making somewhere between $500,000 and $600,000 a year today, right? Wow. Like, he is making fucking bank in the 80s. That 1990 Vanity Fair Peace finds him at close to the peak of his career and his sense of impunity over what he was allowed to do. In thousands of words of recorded conversations, he refers to his colleagues in psychiatry as liberal fool. and seems to take a great degree of joy and, like, righteous pleasure in getting people executed.

His stated goal to the journalist in that article is that he wants to execute, like, three people in three days, basically, something like that, and break his personal record for most death penalty convictions scored in a short window of time. One of these cases was the case of Galen Bradford, who definitely shot and killed a security guard during a robbery, whether this is recorded on video, there's not doubt about whether or not he committed a murder. But once he wasn't in bars, the jail tested his IQ and found it to be 68. The defense psychologist who examined him said it was 75. Either of those, and again, I have my issues with IQ, but this isn't the place to really bring it up. The point is that, based on the way the system works, either of those findings could be low enough to count his diminished capacity and spare him the death penalty, right?

Both of those are potentially low enough to do so. For sure. So during a dinner after winning his first two cases, but before the Bradford case, this is like, like the night before he testifies in this guy's case, Dr. Grigsden, while hanging out with Rosenbaum, that journalist, gets hammered. He has like four martinis in an hour, like celebrating that he's gotten two people killed,

and then he winds up hung over in court the next morning. And he kind of fucks up his testimony in the Bradford case a little, because he doesn't just say Bradford is a sociopath, but he also insists he's of normal intelligence. I can tell. He wasn't even being asked this, but he's like, I know he's of normal intelligence. And I'll guarantee you he's killed more than once.

We just didn't catch him, right? Wow. And then he tells the jury based on nothing, literally nothing. Galen Bradford is one of the most dangerous killers I've ever examined or come into contact with, right? And again, there's not any evidence of this, and he certainly did not do anything that would allow him to determine whether or not this guy was competent to stand trial. He just does not do that work. And in this one instance, the defense attorney calls him out on it. And questions like, well, based on what aspects of Dr. Bradford's personality, since you have not talked to him,

have you concluded all of this, that he killed someone before and is hiding it? And Dr. Grigsden, ultimately the only specific thing he cites is that the guy is a weird haircut with a lightning bolt in it. And the defense attorney, first off, holy shit. The defense attorney, Paul Broccoli, responds, pretty good reason to kill him, right? And there's like this silence in the courtroom. I'm going to quote from that vanity fair piece. The doctor himself was speechless for a moment, something I'd never seen.

before. Then lamely, plaintively, he volunteered, well, I'd never seen a haircut like that. Great medical science. Did you say the defense attorney's name was Paul Broccoli? Yeah, B-R-A-U-C-H-L-E. I don't know how else it would be pronounced. Okay, if I had a different spelling in my head, it's still really funny to think. Browkel, maybe, I don't know. I'm calling it broccoli. Go broccoli, go broccoli. Yeah, I'm going with broccoli. Yeah, for the justification to be, this guy looks fucking weird. like him. Look at his fucked up hair. Yeah. He's definitely criminally insane. Wow. Yeah. Now, the bad news is, again, this guy still gets convicted. James Grigsson in no way pays for his crimes. The best I can say is that

his career does take a hit in the late 1990s, in part as a result of the fallout from the Adams case, and in part out of the fact that he has now been drummed out of every professional organization in his field. Now, another reason why he stops testifying as often is that some of the sad, Xavier, Texas defense attorneys develop a strategy for mitigating the harm he could cause. Per an article by Mike Tolson for the Houston Chronicle. Defense attorneys, fearful of the effect of Grigsin's testimony, began to call him and discuss their clients, with the result being that Grigsin could not be hired by the state in those cases.

I love this shit. Like, well, look, if this guy's talked about this case before being brought on, he can't testify, so let's just call him and talk about it, and then we know he's fucked. It's very funny stuff. Grixon eventually figures out what's going on, and he gets angry because this is costing him money. So several defense attorneys agree to like, hey, what if we just pay you as a consultant as soon as we think we have a case you might get involved in? And that way, you don't have to do anything.

You're not going to actually testify. You're not going to do any work for the defense usually. But once we're hiring you, the prosecution can't hire you, right? And he's okay with this because he's still getting paid. This snowballs into prosecutors adopting a similar tactic out of fear that he might show up and help the defense. So he starts getting hired to not work, as long as like one side can lock him down first, like he spends kind of the latter chunk of his career doing this, like getting paid to not do his job. And, you know, eventually this practice dies out during the 2000s, particularly the practice of bringing in forensic psychiatrists like Dr. Grigsend declines in popularity.

the kind of late 90s, early 2000s. And there's several reasons for this, but a big one is the constant professional animus that Grigsin and others who followed his example started to get, right? Like, this has just kind of been poisoned as a field. Now, another reason that's less optimistic for why this dies out

is that prosecutors realize, we don't need to spend money on these guys. Texas juries love killing people, right? Like, you don't actually need this guy to testify to convince them that someone needs to die, right? The pressing. You know, like, you can usually, just kind of talk him into it, which is less optimistic.

Okay. Yeah. That's less fun. So in 2003, Dr. James Grigsen, a lifetime chain smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. In one of his last interviews, he told a reporter he had zero regrets about his life or career. He insisted he had just been there as a medical professional, separating the truly ill from the fakers who needed to be locked up and executed. By the end of his career, he was just working in civil law. but after his death in 2004, a number of experts came out to state that his impact on the legal system had been far-reaching.

Cynthia Orr, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, told the Chronicle, he had a tremendous impact on Texas death penalty litigation. He really provided ammunition to the state to try and establish one's future dangerousness, when ordinarily it would have been pretty tough to do. He was willing to go further than anyone else. Hmm. Yeah. So horrible.

Yeah. And he ended up just getting to chill? Just getting to chill. And get paid to not work. Get paid to not work. Nice retirement. I hate to say it. Kind of a dude's rock moment.

Yeah. It is the dream, right? He got to die of lung cancer, so that's, you know. He does die of lung cancer on June 3rd of 2004, after what his family described as 72 great years. Right. Yeah. Alas. Now, the nature of the death penalty and the time involved in clearing such cases meant that a lot of people that he had helped to put there,

remained on death row after his death. And in fact, the most recent case I can find of someone he put there, like having, you know, basically winding up in the news, is in 2016, Jeffrey Wood, age 43, was like scheduled. He was supposed to be executed in 2016 over a 1996 robbery in which a man was murdered. Grigsden had testified against him and stated that would be violent in the future. and he obviously did not examine Wood. Now, Wood had never actually murdered in the first place.

He didn't fire the gun in the 1996 robbery that he was being executed for, right? But obviously, accomplices, he was like driving the car, can be convicted of murder. But still, like, the fact that he's saying he'll definitely kill again, well, he never killed in the first place, right? Like, not really. So Wood was supposed to be executed in 2016. The actual gunman was executed in 2002. but Woods case, like, his execution was stayed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because of Dr. Grigsen, right? Because he had been part of getting the guy on death row.

And the fact that he has been so burned, like convinced the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2016, like, yeah, we probably shouldn't execute this guy, right? So the court ruled 7-2 to stay the execution. And, yeah, that just, you know, this guy's impact outlasted him. But it is kind of at least nice that now he has been so discredited that in 2016, a court voted seven to two that like, yeah, we can't execute a guy based on this dude's testimony. So at least he's completely discredited. And dead. And dead.

Yeah, and dead. He innovated in the field, rode the wave, and died before it became fully discredited. Sorry to say, but yeah, he's at least dead. He's at least dead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just glad to hear that we no longer have legal hypnosis as a form of testimony and that quacks like this guy are not being taken seriously anymore.

So I guess there's a silver lining, like you said. Yep. Things are good forever now. We've figured out how to not do bad stuff with executing people. And there's no more longer any problems with death row or capital crimes at all. It's all good now. Don't need to worry about it, kittens. It's all good.

Don't look into it. Don't look into it. Yeah. You got anything to plug at the end here, Stephen? You know, just follow me on Blue Sky or I don't post on Twitter anymore. So don't go there. That's good. Yeah, bad to post on Twitter.

I'm writing for a few different outlets, the Barb Wire, Texas Observer, just had something in MSNBC. Hell yeah. I post all that on Blue Sky. It's probably the easiest way to follow my shit. So go there or go read the literary magazine I publish, Protein magazine. It's got some good shit in it. Yes, Protein has a lot of good shit in it. Stephen, you can also find that it could happen here from time to time talking about Texas,

which continues to be one of the most important subjects in the country. Why is Texas the way it is? What's going on there? Yeah, like, it's been, it was happening there before it's happening wherever you are, odds on. It's been happening. It's been happening. It's been happening. And yeah, if we can figure out what the fuck's going on.

on here. I feel like we could figure out a lot. Yeah. So working on it. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. And you have been listening to a podcast. Shame on you. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.