Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Girl shot in head, left in ditch by teens “annoyed” over her Snapchatting

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

A 14-year-old girl shot in the head and left for dead says she's "tougher than a bullet." Police say two other teens tried to kill her because of annoying SnapChat messages. Nancy Graces digs into the case with Los Angeles psychologist Dr. Bethany Marshall, criminal profiler Pat Brown, Crime Stories contributing reporter Bobbi Maxwell and cohost Alan Duke. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. February 2004, Maura Murray empties her bank account, drives four hours from school, crashes her car, and vanishes. Join the search as an investigative reporter uncovers new evidence, interrogates new witnesses, traces down new leads in this riveting new investigative series the disappearance of maura murray saturdays 7 6 central and 9 8 central on oxygen the new network for crime crime stories with nancy grace on sirM Triumph, channel 132. He is accused of having tried to kill Desiree Turner. Prosecutors say she was the victim of a vicious robbery at the hands of two teen boys.

According to court documents, the teens planned to rob and kill her. Desiree's story is one of survival. She was found laying in a ditch with a gunshot wound to the head. She works every day to gain as much quality of life as she can, but her life will never be the same. I am so thankful to be here wound to the head. She works every day to gain as much quality of life as she can, but her life will never be the same.

I am so thankful to be here today to be alive. Desiree Turner chose this shirt to reflect how she felt as she was minutes away from walking out of Primary Children's Hospital. This is happy on it, and I'm happy to go home. I told my dad that I am tougher than a bullet. A 14-year-old little girl thought they liked her. A 14-year-old little girl thought she was having fun on Snapchat with two guys a little bit older than her. So when they asked her to meet up with them after school, she thought it was a great idea.

She was reported missing that afternoon after school when she never came home. She was found shot in the head, bleeding out in a gully. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. Needless to say, I want justice. I am talking about a beautiful little girl, Desiree. She's absolutely precious. Dark brown hair, big eyes. And I'm trying to imagine this girl. I see the pictures of her in life when she's whole and healthy. I'm trying to imagine her face down in a gully, a dried out ravine full of mud shot in the back of the head. And I'm trying to figure out why. reporting now is that the boys were sick of her snapchatting them they were quote annoyed in fact as they planned her murder ahead of time they texted each other saying things like let's get this done, bro. Joining me right now, psychoanalyst from LA, Dr. Bethany Marshall.

High profile criminal profiler, Pat Brown with me. And Crime Stories investigative reporter, Bobby Maxwell. Let's take it from the top, Bobby, starting at A, the beginning of the story. How did this go down? How did Desiree end up face down in a muddy ravine? Well, Nancy, it all started on Snapchat. She was expecting to purchase a knife from Coulter Peterson and Jason Decker. Sorry, but that's not where it started.

It started with them Snapchatting and having this relationship. They live in the same small Utah town. True, the boys are older than her. They're 16 and 17. She just turned 14. But they all knew each other. I mean, in a town that small, like the community where I came from, you know everybody.

These were her friends. So they Snapchatted and texted and all that. And it was just a good old time until they say, hey, we got a little pocket knife. We know you want it. Come meet us at this canal after school. Okay. Take it from there, Bobby. I want to establish these three were friends before the pocket knife came into the scene. Go ahead. Well, they actually met on Snapchat, and Desiree considered the boys her friends. They Snapchatted a lot, as many teens do, and the boys, one of them in particular, Colter Peterson, said that it got to be a little bit too much. She was annoying by Snapchatting them.

I want to go out to Pat Brown, criminal profiler. We have got two guys. We've got Coulter Danny Peterson, 17 years old. You know, he's about to graduate from high school. He is a couple of months shy of being a legal adult. Then you have the 16 year old.old. The 16-year-old is, to me, part and parcel of the whole thing. Now, that guy, Shazen, Shay, as everybody called him, was in it just as much as the now 18-year-old. Tell me about that dynamic. Pat Brown. Well, Nancy, usually what we have when

we see a duo get involved in something is we do see a stronger one of the pair. And I do believe that is Peterson. So we have somebody who was really coming up with the idea and somebody who's willing to go along with it because it's pretty cool. And he's going to be buddies with them. And they're going to have this exciting time together. Obviously, either one of them could have said no. Either one of them could have backed out. But the fact that they actually thought about it for a period of time and then planned it and then went through with it pretty much means that you have two willing people. So I want to go, I want to move forward. Dr. Bethany Marshall, before I continue with the facts, the power play here between a 17-year-old now turning 18-year-old and a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old little girl

just turned 14 that seemed to idolize these two. What's the dynamic there? Well, it's so interesting. Pat Brown took the words right out of my mouth that when boys kill, often you see two males acting in concert and you see a stronger, sometimes older male who has more sociopathic tendencies. That male then recruits a weaker male. And I think the dynamic between the three of them is that the weaker male complained to the stronger male that Desiree was bothering him. Now, knowing how teenagers talk, I saw right through that to, I like her, we're texting, we're Snapchatting, but I don't want you to know how much I like Desiree. The older male seizes upon this in a cruel, malicious way and says, hey, bro, I can take care of her for you. The weaker male then says, well, to himself,

maybe this is sort of unconscious internal dialogue. Well, I like her. She's cute. But I really want the admiration, the affection of this older guy. What am I going to do? And the evil side wins out. He allows himself to be drawn in and groomed into becoming a perpetrator. And so slowly over time, these two males romanticized the idea of cruelty to the point where they even contemplate slitting her throat, Nancy. This tells me that the older male really had all these fantasies of inflicting cruelty, and this is his M.O. in the world. You know, I was wondering if you two were going to seize on that. The idea, the first mode

of killing the 14-year-old little girl between these two guys was to slit her throat. Now, Dr. Bethany, Dr. Bethany Marshall, joining me, psychoanalyst out of L.A., and renowned criminal profiler, Pat Brown, along with Bobby Maxwell.

Dr. Bethany, when you slit the throat of a victim, that is an entirely different psychological event than shooting someone at 30 feet. Completely different scenario. Why? Absolutely, because there's the infliction of pain and cruelty. This is not just wanting to snuff her little life out. This is not wanting to shoot her in the back of the head so she does not know what's happening. This is wanting to look the victim in the eye and her to know what's happening to her. See, so one of the things we know about cruelty and sadism with sociopaths is that the infliction

of cruelty is very linked with sexual excitement. For boys, aggression, sadism, and sexual excitement. Dr. Bethany, no offense, but ever since I've known you, somehow everything has to do with sex. I know, but seriously, seriously. Cruelty, sexual excitement. No, I mean, how can that, how can everything be about sex? Okay, because I don't believe that. It's hard to imagine. Nancy, I've gone through all the literature.

For those of us that have full-time jobs and nine-year-old twins, it's really hard to believe that everything is about S-E-X, but go ahead with your theory, Dr. Bethany. Okay, and it's not just mine. This is really based on extensive research, and there's a psychoanalyst psychiatrist, Reed Malloy, out of San Diego, who writes really beautifully about this, that with sociopathy, there's a lot of inner deadness, there's boredom, that that's... Okay, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Okay, I'm just a trial lawyer. When you sling around words like sociopathy and sadomasochism, blah, blah, blah, you got to break it down for us, okay?

Now, what did you just say in speak in regular people talk? Okay. The sociopath, it's a spectrum disorder with narcissism. The sociopath is a more intense, severe version of a narcissist. The essential feature of which they cannot attach empathically with people around them, and they cannot feel happy and stimulated in life. They can't feel joyful simply from their own thoughts, their own creativity, their own feelings. Or if you hurt

somebody's feelings, you might obsess on it. Sometimes I'll say something to a patient or to a friend and afterwards I'll think, oh, did that hurt their feelings? Maybe they thought I was critical of them. We human beings care about others, and we have a great emotional life that dictates that we care. But the sociopath has no emotional life. They are completely empty. They are completely dead. That's why part of the description of the disorder, we read this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is that they have a proneness to boredom. And that's why we have a saying, and Pat Brown, I'm sure has heard about this a lot, thrill kill. It's when the MO, the modus operandi behind the killing is to have

thrill-seeking behavior. So if we go back to the soothing of the throat. Okay, guys, you'll just have to excuse me because we're having a powwow here. I've got Pat Brown, Bobby Maxwell, and Bethany Marshall, and I could listen to each one of them all day. Pat Brown, I think I get what Bethany, Dr. Bethany, Psychoanalyst out of LA, is saying. Pat Brown, when she says thrill kill, when I think about this 14-year-old little girl, I wonder, I think maybe she had a crush on these guys and

was like totally thrilled that they would have anything to do with her at all. And to think that she could be an object of a thrill kill. What is that, Pat Brown? You're the criminal profiler. Well, let's take a look at regular life and then we can move it on to sociopaths, what I call psychopaths. But Bethany's right. It's kind of a continuum. So take a look at any imbalance of power. For example, our recent stuff we're hearing from Hollywood, right? So you get a producer, a television producer.

He's got the power. And then you've got the young ingenue, and she goes to Hollywood. And she is just absolutely thrilled, isn't she? She's so excited she's young she's naive she sees this big guy oh my god he represents the movies i can be in the movies she is such putty in his hands and he gets his thrill out of being able to control and manipulate and have power over her and so the two of them come together and each one of them gets their thrill in their own way.

And unfortunately, the man with the power has more of the control. So now we move on to this particular incident. We have a similar situation, except with an extreme psychopath. Of course, we don't know. Some of the Hollywood guys are pretty psychopathic themselves, but perhaps not violent, but very psychopathic. But here we have this Peterson and his buddy and this young girl. And, of course, you remember back to being 14 years old, how giddy you are when you're 14? You know, everything's so exciting, everything new, especially guys.

And the other thing, Pat Brown, at 14, you would never think, wow, maybe I shouldn't go meet two guys alone at a deserted canal space. But you know what? Kids do it all the time, though. They do it all the time. Yeah, they don't they don't stay behind the school to meet at their friends houses. Most of the time they come home. You know, they're just having fun with what they consider guys that are just a little bit older. Pat, even I at my age, I will say be out of town traveling for work. And I go, Okay,

I'm going to go jogging now. And I'll jog, I'll end up completely alone somewhere totally unfamiliar. I'm like, Oh, I'll just go 10 more minutes before I'll jog. I'll end up completely alone somewhere totally unfamiliar. I'm like, oh, I'll just go 10 more minutes before I turn around. And I think, what the hay am I thinking? Hey guys, hold on one moment. I want to pause very quickly and thank our sponsor, our partner who is making our program today possible as we look for motive and understanding in the shooting of this 14 year old little girl, it's LegalZoom. As a business owner, you know how important it is to keep moving forward. But things come up that take your time and permits, LegalZoom.com can simplify your life. LegalZoom has helped over 2 million business owners easily and affordably navigate the legal system with confidence.

And you never have to worry about an attorney's billable hours stacking up. LegalZoom's not a law firm. Instead, you get the advice you need to answer your business questions at fixed rates through LegalZoom's nationwide network of independent lawyers. So go to LegalZoom.com now to take care of business before the year winds down. And for special savings, be sure to enter code Nancy in the referral box at checkout, LegalZoom.com. And live back to Utah, where now we learn that one of the young men, the soon-to-be 18-year-old, admits shooting a 14-year-old girl in the back of the head, quote, because she was annoying him on Snapchat. And Bobby Maxwell is joining me, Crime Stories investigative reporter, along with profiler Pat Brown and Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst out of L.A.

Bobby Maxwell, this was a very well-planned shooting of the 14-year-old girl, Desiree Turner. They planned this far in advance. What facts lead you to believe that, Bobby? Well, they actually had, they were playing games, video games, when they were making the decision. One said they were annoyed with Desiree, and Chazen said, well, we can easily get rid of her. So it took several days. The first wanted to do it with the slashing of the throat. And they thought actually shooting her would be less noise or less distraction. So they actually went through those different steps.

So you're right. It wasn't just like an instant thought. They calculated and planned this all out. Not only that, they actually go to one of their older brother's room and steal a.22 caliber gun out from under his mattress. You know, Pat Brown, criminal profiler with us, that is cold and calculated. And not only that, after they shoot her and leave her to bleed out, a 14-year-old little girl just turned. They steal her iPhone. They steal her devices.

They steal her backpack. And I think she had $55 on her. They steal all of that, taking what they want out of it and discarding some of it in a dumpster. I mean, that is incredibly telling. When asked, one official said the motivation was greed. Well, you know, I don't know that I buy that particular motivation at all. I mean, first of all, we cannot believe anything that Peterson says. Let's look at this ridiculous Snapchat claim. Oh, she bought she was bothering us on Snapchat. So that's why we killed

her. Okay, this is called blaming the victim. You know, Snapchat, you can just block somebody. You know, so first of all, they could have done that. And secondly, even if she was annoying on Snapchat, of course, this isn't really a reason to kill somebody. So I don't believe that for a minute. You know what? When I don't like somebody's emails or texts, I just don't ever answer. I don't even read them.

I just keep going. I've got about 3,000 unread right now on my iPhone, FYI. So, you know, kill her. Shoot her in the head, Dr. Bethany Marshall, because they are, quote, annoyed. That's their word, not mine. And leave her to die. And Dr.

Bethany, to steal her stuff, to steal her backpack, steal her iPod, steal her money, the little bit of money she had on her, and then take what they want out of her backpack and throw her stuff in a dumpster? What does that say to you, Bethany? It tells me they wanted to degrade and to humiliate her. When they say she was bothering me, not only is it minimizing the crime, minimizing their heinous actions, and as Pat said, blaming the victim, but they're trying to imply that she was coming after them in some way, that she wanted them. And so in that way, they're trying to humiliate and disgrace her. The idea of just taking her iPhone and the $55, it's as if she's their toy, their object.

She's bending to their will. They can do whatever they want with her. And Nancy, at the beginning of the show, you talked about her lying face down in the gully and trying to imagine what that was like. They walked away from a 14-year-old lying face down in the dirt, bleeding out. This shows utter contempt for the victim. And the fact that they planned and schemed while they were playing video games tells me that this was a joke to them. This was a game. They enjoyed this. How does it get to be that life means nothing? I mean, how does a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old, they've gone through regular school,

they had a nice school, they had a home, they had a family that took care of them. It reminds me a little bit of the Columbine shooter because it was a middle class, upper middle class area. They wanted for nothing and life meant nothing. It was like a video game to them. I hadn't thought of it that way, to shoot this girl over Snapchatting. Bethany? And I keep thinking, when you say it was a game to them, we think about the Menendez brothers, Columbine, DC Sniper. Again, all these cases where men act in concert, where an older, stronger male recruits a younger male, what we do see is total inconsideration towards life. It's as if people do not exist. And the excitement of just picking people off is the MO. And one

thing that all these crimes have in common is the humiliation of the victim. I mean, the victims. I'll never forget Jose and Kitty Menendez, how the Menendez boys said that the father molested them. I mean, they basically made the worst accusation they could towards their father to cover up their own heinous crime. And now in their own like picky uni, small town, small minded kind of way, these two boys are saying, well, Desiree bothered us. It's always the victim's fault. And they always claim that the victim wanted them, not the other way around. Well, Desiree was texting us.

She was Snapchatting us. She was bothering us. When you know full well, they were obsessed with her. It was the other way around. You know, speaking of what happened to the girl, a.22 caliber weapon was stolen from one of their older brothers out from under his mattress. If he knew about it, if he gave it to them, he's in trouble too. But the fact that he stole it from under the brother's mattress indicates to me,

if that's true, that the brother did not know about it. The bullet was lodged in little Desiree's brain with several other fragments still in her head when she was found. And another creepy fact that just makes my blood boil is that the second one, there's Coulter Peterson, and then there is the other one, Jason Decker. Decker wanted to ask, he asked if he could keep the bullet casing as a memento, Bethany. And the bullet casing was found, actually found on his windowsill.

I mean, in my children's room, they have their soccer trophies. They have little mementos about Harry Potter and Disney. They have their wands, of course. Photos from school, class photos. That's what they have on their shelves. This guy has a bullet casing, Bethany. Help me. Well, you know, when I read that, the fact that he kept the bullet casing as a memento

I thought about what we know about serial killers that often they keep a trophy you know there's a lock of hair there's an item of clothing there's a photograph remember with the BTK killer he had he had made that tape he had all these mementos of clothing. And it made me wonder if these two boys had not been caught, if they were on their way to becoming serial killers. I know that the surface, but you peek beneath the surface, and there's all these aberrant, deviant, bizarre behavioral patterns, like keeping the shell casing. And you begin to think, what would the trajectory have been if this person had not been caught? What other mementos? What other victims? Because he seemed to take such great pride in this crime. You know, Alan, do you, that is, hold on, I've got to bring Pat Brown in this crime. You know, Alan, hold on. I've got to bring Pat Brown in on this. But Alan, before I get Pat Brown in on keeping the 22 shell casing, that's exactly how Tara

Grinstead's killer went under the radar for so long. We're talking about the hometown beauty queen in Osceola that was kidnapped and murdered years ago. Her body has never been found. I'll never forget the chill that went down my spine when I went through her home with her mother. The guy that killed her was one of her students, high school students, years before she went missing and stayed under the radar and nobody suspected him. And what Dr. Bethany's saying is if these two had not been apprehended, what would be next, Alan? What about Tara Grinstead? The suspects in the Tara Grinstead killing stayed under the radar for about a dozen years while some other people probably knew about it. These guys just went undetected and

it is the same thing could have happened with with these young men. Well, and also in Tara Grinstead, Alan, they were willing to let somebody else, i.e. the boyfriend or the principal or whoever, take the fall for Tara's kidnap and murder. That was fine with them as they sat back and had a beer on the sofa. You know, they didn't care. Somebody else could have definitely gone down for murder. but that did not bother them. So, Pat Brown, you are the world-renowned criminal profiler, and that's a fact. Pat, what do you make of these two and the one asking to keep the bullet casing after the bullet goes into this little girl's brain? Well, you can see how this has been like the most exciting,

amazing thing he's ever done in his life. And that is the problem with serial killers and why we tend to not understand that when you cross a line like this, there's no going back. And I've always argued against the FBI's original statement where their definition, a serial killer is a person who has committed three kills with downtime in between. So they did not actually label somebody a serial killer until they'd done that. Or if they found, let's say, a woman who'd been raped and murdered and thrown in the bushes, they'd go, oh, we don't know if it's just a one-off killing. And I would think to myself, wait a minute, who does this? Who steps over the line to grab a girl off the street and rape and murder her except a serial killer? So you have someone, if they did it one time and loved it that much, they're going to do it again if they have the opportunity.

So I'm all good. I'm okay with one pretty much will tell us where it's going. So the problem is catching them before they do it two or three or four or maybe 30 more times. So we have these two young men. This is not normal. I mean, people say, well, maybe they had some problems. Problems? Yeah, some people have problems. They might go into the room and slam their door. They may yell at their parents. They may not want to do their homework. But to decide, well, let's kill somebody. Hey, let's kill this girl we know. Let's think about it. Let's plan it. Let's go do it.

When you're like that, you're psychopathic. And you've crossed that line, and you are extreme danger to the community and should never be out in the community again. You know, Pat Brown, you were talking about you do it once, you get away with it, and you do it again. I've got a comparison. I remember the first time I was in front of a jury and I had to tell them an opening statement. What the defendant said, what the defendant had stated to police.

And it was full of curse words. Every slur on women, every curse word you can think of, they said it. The P word, the F word, the C word, the S word, everything. And I remember the moment, and I'm kind of feeling it right now, that I stood in front of the jury and I told them that and they were shocked and it felt, it tasted bad coming out of my mouth. I had never said those words before. Guess what, Pat? The next time I had to do it, by the end of that trial, it was just coming right out rapid fire. It didn't bother me anymore. And I saw that happening. It happened to me. And I had never cursed before that.

And then suddenly it got really easy to do. Now, once the twins were born, they're about turn 10. I said, that's it with the mouth, because I don't want to hear that from my children. I won't have a leg to stand on if I say it, and I can't fuss at them for doing it. And it's not becoming. So that's just a tiny, silly little example. Once you do something, it's easier to do it the next time. Then the next time, you don't even think about it anymore. Especially if the results, you know, the results, when you cross a line and the results make you happy. In the case of a psychopathy, when they cross the line to be able to manipulate somebody, to get power over somebody, to abuse somebody, to come out the winner, because that's what it's really about.

Psychopaths have always felt like they didn't win enough when they were little. They couldn't get over on people. They couldn't get the responses they wanted. They didn't come out to be the superhero. So this is their way of having that moment in the sun. Same thing we see with mass murderers. That's their moment in the sun. Why do they keep mementos?

And I've seen serial killers that keep, for instance, the victim's underwear. Everybody keeps mementos. If people get married, don't they keep the piece of that wedding cake and the flower and all that stuff? Don't you go on a trip and bring back garbage from some other country and stick it on your wall? Or your little ashtray that says Santa Fe, New Mexico or whatever. People always want mementos of their life because those are the special moments and they're special moments. You know, we don't get mementos for no reason. They're the special tokens that when we look back at them, you know, one walks to their

house and they can see those things that were saved from that special day. It gives us that extra moment of pleasure to be able to relive that wonderful moment. So for a serial killer, you know, keeping something where you can go, yeah, I remember when I killed that girl, it was great. You know, that is their big,

huge achievement and it'll give them that thrill over and over. Guys. I know that hearing much of this, it's hard sometimes, but the only way to fight crime and to fight injustice is to tackle it head on. And that's what we are doing today on Crime Stories. Desiree's father says that his daughter right now should be practicing her karate. She should be riding her horse. We're from a very small town in northern Utah, out in the country, beautiful countryside.

She should be living like every other farm girl in this country. Instead, she was shot in the back of the head and left to bleed out and die by two callous teens approaching adulthood. Take a listen to this. I am so thankful to be here today to be alive. I want to say thank you to all the doctors, nurses, techs, and therapists and staff who have took such good care of me and helped me get this far. I also want to thank all of the people who have helped take care of my family, especially my mom and my dad while I have been in the hospital. I have been working really hard and still have a lot of work to do. I told my dad that I am tougher than a bullet. It is still with me today

but I am here and I get to go home today people all over the world have been praying for me some of them I know and some I have never met and they have never met me but they cared for me and they care for you. I would like others to know that people are kind and they do care about us and are concerned about us even when we may think no one is there. I will always be grateful for the kindness that has been shown to me and my family. Thank you. Desiree, the little 14-year-old girl, was put into a medically induced coma. It was too dangerous to remove the bullet from her brain or the fragments of bullet around it. So she will live for life, the rest of her life, with that in her head. If you were to see her right now, she is either in a wheelchair or walks with a cane. Her father broke down as he described her riding horseback, trying to practice her karate, what her life would have been.

Now he says through his tears, and he actually apologized for breaking down crying, which was so poignant to me that Desiree's father apologized for crying. And he said, it's all about trying to give her quality of life now. That's all it's about. Instead of horseback and karate, she's just trying to learn to move her fingers right now. To Dr. Bethany, I remember, and you lived through this with me, Bethany, when John David, my baby boy, one of my twins, had a horrible head injury.

And we were in and out of doctors, in and out of the hospital. I would sleep with him in the hospital bed. And I wondered what was going to happen. And how could I help him? How could I help John David have a normal life? Well, I was blessed. He was blessed. He's perfectly fine now. But I remember those nights in the hospital, laying awake, hearing the next shift of nurses come on, wondering about what would happen with John David. What would happen after I was gone? Who would take care of him? What would become of him?

I can imagine that's what's going through Desiree's mom and dad's head right now, Bethany. Well, Nancy, you were preparing for him to have a major disability to be a special needs child, such a horrifying thought. And thank God he's perfect. But Desiree, as you just said, she's struggling to move her fingers. She's struggling to be able to walk. Just getting through the day is a major effort for her. So she has a major trauma from this incident. Not only is she traumatized, but now her story is exposed to the nation, which is good for victims everywhere. But she has to deal with social humiliation, social exposure. And the trauma is not just for Desiree, it's for her entire family, and not just worrying about what happened, but as you so beautifully suggested through your experience with John David, now they have to worry about her future, her financial survival,

her psychological survival, her physical survival. You know, Pat Brown, criminal profiler with me, I wonder if ever perps that do things like this I wonder if it ever dawns on them the wake of pain they leave behind oh no

no absolutely not you know that's the whole thing is that for a psychopath who commits a horrific crime to injure or kill someone the simple fact that they could do it in the first place

means they don't have any concern for that person's feelings or their family's feelings. I always remember the serial killer. I'm going to blank on his name now. But he was asked by the detectives if he would tell the parents where their children were buried because they hadn't discovered some of the bodies. And he said, you know, so he can give the parents some ease of mind.

And he's the serial killer, the detective, and he said, well, if I cared about the parents, I wouldn't have killed their children. Well, touche, exactly. So that kind of a person just doesn't care at all. And what really offends me right at the moment is that Peterson's lawyer right now is whining that his lovely boy who committed this horrific crime, he's doing really well supposedly in whatever, wherever he's at right now, doing some studying and all that. He's saying he's doing well, well in his life. It's improving. And you think, really? You know,

do we care that he, this is essentially a killer. He just, he botched it, but he was, it's essentially a killer. That this killer is getting better. His life is getting better when this poor girl is going to struggle all her life with the damage that he did to her. I mean, it just makes me ill. I kind of wonder then when the lawyer says that, whether he has any empathy either. I'm just listening to you and I remember so many times, Bethany, sitting in court, especially in murder cases or child abuse, rape cases, I would sit, I would never do it so the jury could see me do it, But I would look at the defendant

and just wonder, do they have any idea what they've done? Because so many people for the rest of their lives are going to be flailing, like jump off a cruise ship and you're out in the middle of the ocean, you're flailing as giant waves rush over you, flailing to just get through it. And I think Bethany, and again, you've lived through this with me, the years after my fiance's murder, just flailing, trying, trying to hold on sometimes just one more day, trying to get through it. That's what's happening here. And you know, Nancy, I want to talk about an aspect of the flailing. You described it so beautifully, like being dropped in the middle of the ocean. When somebody experiences trauma like you did, like this family has, anything in the present that remotely reminds them of the original trauma will put them right back into a flashback as if it's

happening again. Like I imagine if John Paul even bumps his head or falls down, you think he's injured as he was in the original injury. Or when you read about these crimes, it's as if you're right back in it again, losing your fiance. Oh my stars, Bethany, Bethany. He got it in his head he wanted to do lacrosse. Okay. I thought I had scared him away from football. But some kid is a star at lacrosse. I'm like, when I grew up, I didn't even know what lacrosse was. Okay.

Anyway, so, you know, I go to Dick's. I want to be normal. I get them all, and I'm buying this pad and that pad and this pad and something for the mouth and something for the head. And then I stand on the sidelines watching him. I mean, he kicked butt on the lacrosse field. But, you know, when he came off, and I was sitting there trying not to break into tears because, I mean, I knew, now see see this was like two or three years after the

head injury. And he came out of the field at the end and he done really well. He said, Mom, you know what, I want to play a sport where you don't have to wear all the stuff. I don't like it. And I turned around, I looked up at this guy said, Thank you, God. It was just like you said, Bethany, it was horrible. Well, so Nancy, that's the flashback. You know with PTSD, they say that the victims have flashbacks as if it's happening again. You probably were in the middle of a flashback when John David was playing his sports. And that's what's going to happen with this family. Let's say this little girl gets her iPhone back and somebody Snapchats her. Can you imagine how they're going to happen with this family? Let's say this little girl gets her iPhone back and somebody

Snapchats her. Can you imagine how they're going to feel? They're going to imagine there are perpetrators at the other end of the phone Snapchatting her. They are going to have panic attacks, anxiety, depression, tearfulness, isolation. These are not just fancy words from the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These are not just fancy words from the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These are very real syndromes. And Nancy, you know, because you have experienced it yourself. It's as if you're back in the original trauma again. Well, I was going to ask you something else, Bethany, because when that happened with John David, and I remember when it happened, I don't know how I did it, because then he already weighed, I forgot how much, I couldn't get an elevator fast enough to

get him to the hospital. And I carried him four flights of stairs in my arms, four flights of stairs, wooden stairs in my arms with me screaming. I don't even know who could hear me. Did somebody help me get my car so I could wait on an ambulance? And when he was out on that La Crosse field and when I was in the hospital, it felt like Keith was getting murdered all over again. So I don't understand what triggers that. But I'm thinking about these parents of this girl, every time her phone goes bling, they're gonna think she's gonna get shot in the head again.

So what triggers it is that anything that is even slightly similar to the original trauma, that's why we have the term cumulative trauma. It's when one bad thing happens, then another bad thing happens that reminds you of the original trauma. So like you said, just her cell phone going off, that could send them right back into it. Like for you with John Paul with the head injury, you had already had experienced your fiancé being murdered. So loss of life, that's similar. Potential damage, loss of an attachment system that's important to you. It's all these similarities that stir up the anxiety of the original event.

Bobby Maxwell, crime stories investigative reporter. The only thing that I have known to do other than to try to save the twins from anything that could hurt them, is to fight. I don't know if that's normal or not, but to fight in court, to fight crime, to take the abuse, take the heat, keep going, blah, blah. What is happening now with these two perpetrators? Where does it stand, Bobby Maxwell? Well, just a little over a week ago, Coulter Peterson actually pled guilty to attempted

aggravated murder. They are not going to give him a sentence until after Chazen Decker's trial, which starts in February. A big concern is they want to move them to separate facilities so they can't have a conversation about backing each other up or whatever. So they're afraid that too much information could be passed. So they're trying to separate them. And at this point, the next thing will be Chazen's trial in February, and they'll both get their sentence. Yeah, what they're doing right there, Pat Brown, is they have let one of the guys plead, and that would be Coulter Danny Peterson,

the one who's turning 18. He's pled, but his sentence has been withheld. Part of his plea arrangement was that he would testify truthfully in the trial of the co-defendant, Jason Decker. So if he gets up there on the stand and BS's and lies, bye-bye guilty plea and sentence. He's going to trial and then he'll get the max. The max, which is probably life plus 20, would be my guess to run consecutively. So we'll see how this shakes out.

Jason Decker, the one who kept the shell casing as a, quote, memento of shooting a child in the back of the head, that one won't plead. He's going to make everybody go through a trial. As I referred to them on Daily Mail TV, minions from hell, Pat Brown, minions from hell. Oh, absolutely. And unfortunately, I think what happened with the plea deal is Peterson just may not get that much time, which is really frightening because if they lower that time, I've heard even down to something like six years possibly, which is terrifying because what's he going to be, 23 years old, a psychopath back out on the street, a violent psychopath, a killer?

Oh, 23 years old, as, now I wouldn't say this, I'm simply quoting, at 23, a 23-year-old man straight out of jail, he'll be full of piss and vinegar, ready to go. Uh-uh. Well, you know, that's one of the problems when we have people thinking that they're going to do their time that's good enough and somehow it's going to change them. When it comes down to a psychopathic, as you pointed out, probably serial killer if he had that opportunity,

the only amount of time that is good for them is all time. In other words, these are people you can never release back into society and have them be safe. What is really scary is when they're in prison and when they deal with going through psychotherapy is they learn more tricks. Learn more tricks how to get over on people. Learn more tricks how to get away with crime. So you put these people back out on the street again and you're just, you know, it's like ticking time bomb and it's really ridiculous to release them back into society. It simply is. You know, I don't think these guys think about their future, like what is going to happen to them. Like, let's just say they ain't going to go to an Ivy League school and get their MBA at Wharton.

Okay, let's just go with that for now. But speaking of the future, Dr. Bethany, I have got to think of something good. I have to think of something good because I have to think of something good. Because I think that's why the state never has to prove motive in crimes. I can only stay in their heads for so long. And then I just want to run out and howl like an animal. Give me something good, Dr. Bethany. Tell me that this girl can start her life over again.

Tell me there is a way. Well, what I think is good is that human beings are remarkably resilient. They really are. And we hear the doom and gloom side of victims of sexual abuse and trauma and sadistic acts such as this. We look at the dark side sometimes in the field of psychotherapy. But we also are trained to look at the bright side, which is the human spirit is indomitable. Look at your relationship with John David and him being on the lacrosse field and you being so proud of watching him. Sure, you were frightened and traumatized when you saw him, but on the other hand, everybody has survived and you're leading a beautiful family life together. This little girl, Desiree, has a

father who adores her. His life is devoted to her now. Did you see the little sister who is pushing her wheelchair? She's surrounded by family who loves her. And in the end, love really does conquer all. It's our attachment systems in which we feel safe and secure and we know that we're loved. That's what causes healing. You know what, Bethany? You're so right. When I see the family surrounding this girl and I hear her say, I'm tougher than a bullet. You know what? If that little girl, Desiree Turner, can get up on her cane and say, I'm tougher than a bullet, then so can the rest of us. And with that, I'm signing off. Goodbye, friend. If so, join the CrimeCon Cold Case Club and work alongside experts and fellow crime sleuths to help uncover new leads and theories in the cold cases they adopt.

Their first cold case focuses on the mysterious disappearance of nursing student Mara Murray in 2004, and it's free to join thanks to Oxygen. Sign up now or find more info at club.crimecon.com. That's club.crimecon.com. This is an iHeart Podcast.