Canadian True Crime - Chat about William Fyfe with a forensic psychologist

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

Make sure you listen to Episode 79 first!Find Lili Knighton:Website: www.LiliKnighton.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knightonmentalhealth/Approximate timestamps:0.00 Lili talks about her background including trials of Paul Bernardo and Bradley Edwards (Claremont Serial Killer trial)4:00 Serial Killers and their motivations10:00 Was Fyfe really determined to avoid the spotlight?11:45 Serial Killer “patterns” and escalation from break and enters to rapes and murders (re Golden State Killer)15:45 What if he hadn’t left that fingerprint - was he in a frenzy at the end?17:30 He was said to have committed up to 25 murders – if this was true, why did he only confess to four additional?19:45 Fyfe’s abusive childhood – how did it come into play with his later crimes?21:45 Fyfe’s son “the only thing he found precious”BREAK (note timestamps are very approximate after this depending on where you live and what ads you hear)24:00 Necrophilia and sexual assault motivations29:00 Why was the media so reluctant to report on the more “gruesome details”?31:45 Plumber Rapist profile vs William Fyfe34:00 Hazel Scattolon – the first crime he confessed to was just as bad as the last one. Why? And did he know her?All credits and information sources can be found on the page for this episode at canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi friends, as I mentioned, this is a bonus episode with my conversation with Lily Knighton, a Canadian forensic psychologist who's worked in Australia and is currently based in New York City. I had a bunch of questions after covering William Fife and since I'm a rank amateur, I wanted to speak with a qualified professional. There's approximate time stamps in the show notes with the list of questions and please excuse some of the digital noises that you'll hear. Hi Lily, how are you?

I'm good, Christy. How are you? I'm good, thank you. Before we started, I wanted to know if you would be willing to tell my listeners a little bit about your background because it's super, super interesting and it involves like three different countries and a few serial killers. So yeah. Sure.

To my interest in forensic psychology started at a young age. I grew up in Toronto, Canada at the same time that Paul Bernardo was the Scarborough rapist and in my high school, we had to take self-defense classes instead of normal gym to protect ourselves in case, you know, we were the next victim. That sparked an interest in me, especially when the young women started going missing on the other side of Toronto because they were about my age and I always wanted to know what happened, who could do this to them. When I was in college, I came back to Toronto to sit in on the Paul Bernardo trial for a

day. I studied psychology in university and after university, I moved to Perth, Australia to study forensic psychology there. And while I was there, there was another serial killer in Perth at the time. The Claremont killer who we now know is Bradley Edwards. So that was just two serial killers in my life growing up. From there, I was on contract with the Ministry of Justice at the time, now it's called the Department of Justice, and I worked with offenders who were on probation and parole, providing

them psychological services. I also did a lot of pre-sentence reports for offenders who were going to be sentenced by the courts, recommending if they needed sex offender treatment or psychological services, that type of thing. I also helped out a little bit with the sex offender treatment unit, writing reports if I felt somebody would be a good fit for that program within the jails. A few years later, I graduated and moved back to stateside, I guess, and I ended up in New York City.

I was working for a mental health clinic in the Queensboro of New York City, again as a forensic psychologist, mental health counselor. Again, a lot of referrals from the courts and probation and parole, I started an anger management program there, and a social skills group, so that they would be able to interact better if they wanted to get a job when they were done with their sentence. And since then, I've also worked for local county governments, and I now am in private practice. And you went back to Australia for the trial of the Claremont serial killer, Bradley Edwards?

I did. I did. I'm still quite close with many of my friends that I went to school with there and my former supervisor, and when he was on trial, I went back just before COVID-19, actually. I was really lucky I made it, and yeah, I got to go, yes. And I got to go, I think, two or three times I went to the trial. So amazing to be able to go back after all that time and see that case closed out. Absolutely.

And I was, of course, in my mind comparing Bradley Edwards to Paul Bernardo, who I also saw at the trial years earlier. I bet. What are your notes about that? So Paul Bernardo, keep in mind I was much younger. I wasn't a forensic specialist yet at that time. But what freaked me out the most about him is when he came into the courtroom, he turned around and it was almost as if he was trying to make eye contact with everybody in the

public gallery, whereas Bradley Edwards was much more passive. He didn't look at any time I noticed at the public gallery and just basically sat there. So you are in a pretty unique position to be able to answer a bunch of my questions when it comes to William Patrick Fife, the, I want to say, little-known Canadian serial killer. Yes. Yeah, I hadn't heard of him. Yeah, man. I hadn't either.

And it's crazy. I don't know if it's because it was so concentrated in Quebec, even though there was an Ontario portion, but there's just not the range of information out there that there is for some other killers, even at the time. As you're a forensic psychologist, I wanted to ask you what you thought of some of the original psychologists who were quoted by the Montreal Gazette at the time. And I was going to include these quotes in the episode, but I felt like because it was in 1999, the information may be a little bit out of date.

But one psychologist at the time said, these kind of killers are well-organized. They have a world in their heads that they won't show to anyone else. They're adept at arranging things so they can continue to commit their crimes by leading what looked to be a normal life and acts like those committed by William Fife for demonstrations of power and control over women, which we know, obviously. But with these people, there is a type of pressure to commit these acts that starts as an idea and becomes more and more obsessive. What kind of updated information or theories do you have about this case?

Some of his crimes seemed organized and others were more opportunistic or crimes of opportunity. But I agree with him that there was some level of interpersonal intelligence in William Fife. There was planning and forethought. So he, in some of the attacks, he planned by wearing a uniform or the excuse to go to homes and say, you know, management sent me that type of thing, knocking on doors too to see who was home. And he knew to pick women who lived alone. So I wonder, he must have been watching these women for a while to know that they lived

alone. I mean, without having interviewed him or knowing much about him, he does seem to fit the, you know, of having antisocial personality disorder. And there's an interesting theory. I wish I could remember who came up with it off the top of my head. But, you know, we often think of serial killers as scary, big, tough guys. And their crimes are absolutely scary. But often they are insecure because of things that happen to them because of their past.

And that is a big motivation for a lot of them. Their fear of rejection or wanting to lash out because they had been hurt. Oftentimes, these motives are really hard to determine. And I don't think the person themselves even knows the exact motivation. But I think it's interesting that in the personal lives of somebody who is a serial killer, there will be somebody who will describe them as having a temper or an anger issue. It might not be everyone, because I know William, a lot of people thought, yeah, he had an anger issue, but he was basically, you know, just a guy.

Rape and sexual assault can be motivated by power and or their sexual needs. Another interesting theory that is used in forensic psychology is geographical profiling. And, Christy, that looks in part at where the serial killer or more generally, because we use it in lesser crimes as well. The offender lives where they work, basically, maybe where they had lived previously, but basically anywhere that the offender feels comfortable. So what stood out for me in learning about William Fife was that all his crimes were very close reasonably together and seemed to be in areas that he knew well.

And there was one crime I can't remember off the top of my head who it was. But even after he had moved to Innisfil, he drove back to commit the crime. It's very much where, you know, you know, sort of the lay of the land, the theory is that we, you know, you know where people are going to be, you know, the routines, you, you know, think about your own neighborhood. You basically have a good understanding of, you know, how to get around it and things like that. It's much less likely that somebody will commit a crime in an area that they're completely

unfamiliar with. And the theory behind this is that that can be just as important, if not more important, than actual sort of personal motivations for a crime. So one of the things that that struck me was Commander Bouchard of the Montreal Police saying that William Fife, unlike most serial killers, was determined to avoid the spotlight, which led this commander to believe that William understood that what he did was wrong. And he's saying as evidence of this, that the interview was not made public at

William's insistence until he had been flown out of town, which Commander Bouchard suggests demonstrates that he wanted to avoid being a celebrity. Personally, given everything that I know about serial killers, which is nothing at an academic level, I don't, I don't, I don't agree with this, but I'm no expert. So I really wanted to ask you about this. Yeah, I'm with you. I disagree with the commander on this. My initial thoughts when I heard that was that he didn't want to get attacked in prison.

If the news came out and he was in jail or prison, the other inmates may have taken some sort of jailhouse justice out on him. What I'm getting from Mr. Fife is that he is selfish and looking out for himself. He's not a humanitarian who knows what he did was wrong. The celebrity angle, though, is interesting. It reminds me of Clifford Olson. He loved using the media and using his crimes to hurt the parents of his victims

and things like that. And I wonder if sort of jetting out quickly was him trying to be a celebrity, using his crimes as celebrity to get out quickly. Why did he start off doing break and enters to fund a drug habit? But then he kind of switched to raping and murdering. And then sometimes he did not rob the victim. So it seems like he had two separate M.O.s with some kind of escalation, but no relationship between the two.

Do you have any insights on why that might be? Well, I'm thinking most recently to Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State killer. And he started out as a, I'm going to butcher the name, but Vassalia Ransacker and then went on to become a rapist and eventually a murderer. It does seem on the face of it that his motivation may have changed. Maybe he was always going to become a rapist and murderer, but at first his motivation was getting money for his drug habit. So his motivation may have changed.

It could have been a type of escalation that we, because we don't have a lot of details on this crime, we might be missing a couple of steps. That's just my initial thought. The other thing I wanted to talk about, Christy, is, you know, all of us who are into true crime and definitely forensic psychologists, we want to find patterns and how somebody gets from point A, you know, some robberies to point B,

being like in this case a murdering rapist. And many times that said, we do see a clear progression, you know, it's sort of like if you're looking at a graphic going straight up from something very basic to the crimes that we know them for. Other times, though, we don't see these patterns. The escalation in this example is not there or it seems like a huge jump. So it, it doesn't make as much sense to us as when we see that gradual escalation that we're used to.

And I just want to add to more recently, we've learned that serial killers don't follow the patterns that we've always believed that they do. People always sort of saw as almost like a law of serial killers that they would never stop killing. If they did stop, it meant either that they had died, that they were in jail for a different crime, or they had moved to a new location and were killing there.

But in recent years, we've learned that this just isn't true. For example, the Golden State Killer, Joseph DiAngelo, he stopped for a while, BTK stopped for a while. And, you know, the guy I just saw, Bradley Edwards, the Claremont Killer, they all stopped for significant periods of time, at least. Some went back, some didn't. Oftentimes, this break is due to a major life event. In some cases, somebody gets married or there's the birth of a child

and they're busy with other things. Now, if we think of it as like a compulsion where they have to keep killing, it's very hard to understand that. But if we look at the compulsion as their energies are diverted to something else huge in their life, it doesn't mean that they're still not thinking about it or reliving it. But we've seen in several examples that serial killers can stop. What do you think would have happened if he hadn't left that fingerprint at

Mary Glenn? So that was the final of the cluster of four that led to his arrest. I feel like he was entering some kind of Ted Bundy frenzy phase. You know, he's like, he can no longer take control of his urges and is just doing it more. If he hadn't left that fingerprint, do you think it would have escalated even further? Again, I'm harking back to this whole patterns thing.

I'm sure it's very 1990s, but what do you think? Well, that's when I started reading True Crime 2. So it's in my background too. But yeah, yeah, it's very possible. I wonder if in that case, that was the one where she tried to get away from him, isn't it? Yeah, yes, yes. And I wonder if that angered him and flustered him and he made the mistake

of leaving a print. But yes, he could have been entering a frenzied phase two. The amount of attacks that he had done, it was definitely a spree. And I don't necessarily think or adhere to the idea that a serial killer wants to get caught, but they tend to make more mistakes as they keep committing crimes and getting away with it. They're emboldened. They feel grandiose, that they're getting away with this.

And they often do make mistakes. And the fact that he was in this spree of so many rapes and murders, he probably was a lot more, you know, not paying attention as much. So I've read a lot of media reports that say police believe that William Fyfe committed up to 25 murders. If this is the case, why would he or someone like him confess to just four more and not all of them? Like what would be his motivation for only confessing to a portion of the

total crimes that he committed? Yeah, it can be, you know, confusing because you figure somebody's locked away now. Why wouldn't they just, you know, admit to all the crimes they've committed? But a lot of offenders will downplay the number of offenses they've committed. And there's a variety of reasons for that. Some of them just don't want to admit that they're, you know, this huge serial killer for whatever reasons.

Sometimes they think they can leverage it to get out sooner if or move to a better prison if all their crimes aren't out in the open. And a third reason could be that he doesn't see himself as this huge serial killer. While other serial killers, I'm thinking of Henry Lee Lucas, for example, will confess to many more crimes than they actually committed. And it's obvious they're lying. I think Henry Lee Lucas at one point confessed to 600 murders. And yeah, it's just not possible given, you know, the years he was active.

It's, yeah. So you've got these big serial killers like Ted Bundy who are trying to act like they haven't killed as many people as they have or possibly William Fife. And then you've got these other people who want to appear even worse than what they actually are. Yes, exactly. So if we're going back to William's childhood and here's the abuse that he experienced at the hands of his own father, although it's only documented

vaguely by police records, why do some people who were abused as children or as young people go on to become abusers themselves while others are able to break the cycle? Well, one of the first things I learned early on in my career was that there's a very fine line between offender and victim. And I'm using this as an explanation and not as an excuse for their crimes. But so many offenders had horrific childhoods or found out a terrible secret about their life that, you know, later on in life, they found out that

their mother wasn't who they thought was their mother, wasn't really their mother. And I personally could tell you horrible stories of clients that I've worked with who have been abused or treated horribly by an adult who they trusted. And while many go through similar things and never end up becoming killers or perpetrating violence towards offenders, towards others. OK. And while many go through similar situations and never grow up to become serial killers or even perpetrators of violence towards others, these offenders do. I wish we knew why this is, but what I do know is that we need to make

the prevention of child abuse, child rape and other adverse childhood experiences a priority. And for those that we can't prevent, we need to make sure that there are adults who can be a role model, who can help these young people address issues at home and issues with mental health and by providing them a positive view of what their future could be. Will that stop all crime? No, but it will reduce it and it will reduce things like youth suicide and mental health issues in our young people.

And I would love to see in my ideal world, we would have social workers and mental health professionals at every school and normalised talking about what's going on from a young age. So speaking of children, I wanted to talk a little bit about William's son. Yes, it would be helpful if we had more information on his marriage and his son, but we don't. And I know that was it one of the police detectives who said it was the only thing he found precious? Yeah, yeah, because he refused to talk about his son.

It could be the thing I noticed, though, is that there appeared to be again, we don't know all the details of the crimes, but, you know, I spoke earlier about serial killers taking breaks from their crime. And it seems like William took a long break during the time of his son. Perhaps on some level, he wanted to protect his son from things he had done. You know, unfortunately, we'll never know. But, you know, there's I'm just thinking in my head, all these possibilities, like, yes, you know, thinking my son has nothing to do with this.

Don't talk about it. It's a sore spot for him because he did find his son precious or he wanted to protect him in some way. I, you know, we don't have the answers, but it's so possible. Yes. After this quick break, Lily and I chat about the whole necrophilia thing, the plumber rapist and more. Do you have a passion project that you're ready to take to the next level? Square Space makes it easy for anyone to create an engaging web presence,

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of the victims were who were sexually assaulted. It happened after they had passed away. This I find to be super interesting. Do you think that this had anything to do with something that happened to him in his past? That's a really good question. There's two big motivations. I mean, there's tons of motivations for serial killing and

sexual serial killing. The first is that rape and sexual assault is all about power. Other times with serial killers, it can be about. It's still about power, but it's about getting their needs met that they can't get for whatever reason elsewhere. So did he, looking at the sexual assault as power, did he want to overpower his victims sexually because of something that happened to him in the past?

Was he perhaps sexually abused or in a position where he wasn't allowed agency of himself? It's very possible. Now, necrophilia is a very sort of niche area, and it's not necessarily my area of expertise. But I recently read an article by Jack Pument that gives a great thumbnail on this topic. Now, necrophilia is what we call a paraffilia or an abnormal

sexual desire. And a forensic medical doctor, Dr. Agrawall has come up with a classification system for necrophiliacs, and it helps explain like their motivation for it and why they, I guess, commit these crimes. What are they getting out of it? And some of it, it looks at simple things like touching a dead body provides sexual pleasure to some people, and

it goes all the way to wanting to kill somebody just so they can have sex with that dead body. It also looks at different things like the mental illness aspect that is tied to necrophilia in different ways. The big one would be like antisocial personality disorder or what we sort of colloquial call psychopathy, a psychopath. We have the more common thoughts that a perpetrator who commits necrophilia, you know, when we're talking with our friends and

that kind of thing, it's they can't perform with a living victim. What keeps coming to me is the Golden State killer and his preoccupation with this former girlfriend. And it seemed like he was taking out all of his rage towards his former girlfriend, Bonnie. Like one of the things I was I was thinking about is, could this be him taking out his rage that he's felt with some

other other female? But again, how does the necrophilia come into play? But exactly, exactly. And that's why I really like the article that I was in the classification system I was talking about. Unfortunately, as you said, we don't have a lot of information on William. Yeah, it's a shame.

I know that there have been some other killers and who have buried a body, and then we'll go back later and dig it up and have sex with it. Bundy? Yes. And I don't know if that's like ownership. I don't know. Or wanting to relive it.

Yeah. One of the things that struck me was some of the victims were sexually assaulted and then others were not. So again, it's kind of hucking back to what was his motivation for these attacks. So there's a lot of possibilities here. Some of the more obvious ones that I would look at would be, was he interrupted?

Maybe he couldn't become aroused at that moment. He couldn't get it up, if you will, after having to. I know some of the women he had to chase. They got away from him at first and maybe that he no longer could continue with the sexual assault. So what's also interesting is some of his crimes seem more opportunistic and others are clearly planned with the victims in the neighborhood.

He watched people before the crimes. And I think you had mentioned that he was seen knocking on doors in neighborhoods. So to me, that sounds like he wanted to see who was home alone, that type of thing, who was around during the day. Other ones, for example, like the day he got out of jail seems more like, I saw somebody, I want to go attack this person. Why do you think the media was like so reluctant to report on

the sexual assault components of the crimes and especially not that they might have been post-mortem? Like a lot of them said that they just reported on, quote, gruesome details, but didn't actually include any of the details. And that kind of strikes me as odd, like all of it, because nowadays, like all those gruesome details make it into news reports with a trigger loop. Yes, yes.

And I, my initial thought to that was maybe it's a Canadian thing. I remember when Paul Bernardo was first caught, they didn't release, they had a publication ban, actually, on all of the details. And I believe it was the same with Clifford Olson, though he's a bit before my time. The one thing about those crimes, though, are the victims were children. So I don't know if that was a difference. I know they did that as well in Australia, most recently with Bradley Edwards.

We didn't know specifically how he killed the victims. Whereas in the United States and more recent crimes, we do get all the gory details, even if it was against a child, unfortunately. And sometimes, though, that can be at the detriment of receiving a fair trial. I know that in the States, particularly, they often have to change the location of the trial because the media has gotten, you know, that area has gotten all the media blitz of what's happened. So I don't know if that's part of it in Canada.

Yeah, it is, for sure. Yeah, that it's weird that, especially with this case, there doesn't appear to be a publication ban. I couldn't find any, any reference to it. Or why that hasn't come out in the years since, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, sure. At the time with Paul Bernardo, Carla Hamulca, yes, the details were sealed,

but they did eventually come out. They were reported in US publications as well at the time. Yes, it's crazy. I mean, it's not like I want to know all the gory details, but I guess it would be helpful for kind of analysis and getting to the bottom of the why, I guess. I don't know. So one of the big things in this case was this whole plumber rapist, which is the person who posed it as a handyman and would be let in and would

sexually assault someone and then he would flee, but would not murder them. And obviously they, these women got a good look at him. And this was right in the point that he committed his, what he says, was his first serious crime. That's the murder of Hazel Skatolan in 1981. Now, what do you think about the possibility of him being the plumber rapist? No one has ever been able to pinpoint it for him. But do you think even though the plumber rapist only raped these women

and Hazel Skatolan was right in the middle of it and she was raped and murdered, do you think that there is a possibility that he could like, given his profile? Yeah, you know, I looked a bit at the plumber rapist, M.O., and it is very similar to Mr. Fife. It's, and it's within the geographic location. He was in the west side of Montreal, which is very close to where he was, you know, around during that time. The thing is, though, I don't know and we can never say for certain

because DNA wasn't collected. And I'm a bit surprised by that because even though, you know, we didn't have the advances with DNA back then, they typically took swabs from rape victims to at least determine the blood type. And I feel like at this point, the question would have been so easily solved if they had done that. It's just as possible. Unfortunately, there was another person out there raping women around this time.

Unfortunately, this M.O. isn't uncommon. There was, you know, the Boston Strangler, several others who use that excuse of, oh, I'm a handyman, or I just need to read your meter or whatever to get into somebody's house. But, you know, given the location and the time, it's very possible it was him. So speaking of which, Hazel Scatola, he says, was his first serious crime

when he was 25, and that was a full murder and sexual assault that with a shocking crime scene. And it was just as bad as his final murder, the murder of Mary Glenn. So I find it interesting that he went from zero to 100 that that very first time, that very first serious crime. Normally, there is more of an escalation. Well, that's where it does seem to lead to the idea that he was the plumber rapist that would fit the pattern of the escalation.

There's also a possibility he was doing things that were never even reported or he had escalated in a way that, you know, didn't come on the radar of the police. Christy, I was wondering if you found during your research for this, if he had known Hazel before the crime. I know that she was the mother of a friend of his. Yes. Well, he went to her house and did some painting at her house. So, so, yeah, the guy who called Hazel's son knew him because they played hockey together, but he also did some handyman services at her house.

So it is it's not known that they met each other, but it's highly likely since he was painting at her house. Yeah, I'm I'm what's interesting to me is did he know that she was the mother of his hockey friend? Right. Yeah. And that's a whole other can of worms that I could, you know, open up. But I would be really interested to know that. So, William Fife, have your lawyer call me and we can meet and I can do a psych report for you. I, too, would be interested in this.

Well, thank you very much, Lily. It has been wonderful having you on. And hopefully you will come back at some point when I have another case that I want to offload all of my questions. Kristi, thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure and I would love to come back. Is there anywhere that my listeners could find you online? Yes, I am on Instagram at Nighton with a K, so it's K-N-I-G-H-T-O-N mental health.

And my website is lilynighton.com. Thanks again to Lily Nighton. I hope you enjoyed our chat. I'll see you on New Year's Day with a special episode. And until then, I hope you and your loved ones have a wonderful holiday season.