Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “Inside The Minds Of Serial Killers BTK & Ed Kemper.” - With Forensic Psychologist Dr. Katherine Ramsland

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Sometimes, the best way to understand the mind of a serial killer is to play chess with them. Dr. Ramsland’s job as a forensic psychologist is to develop relationships with serial killers to study how they think. She believes understanding the minds of the most dangerous predators in society is necessary for taking informed, protective measures against this threat. Hear a 5-time graduate student, professor, bestselling author and forensic psychologist detail the deep-rooted murderous fantasie...

The best way to beat the holiday blues this December and the cold is to come to sunny Phoenix, Arizona for America Fest. America Fest is a giant conference and music festival combined featuring the biggest names in the conservative movement. It's December 16th through 19th. See Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, Charlie Kirk, Ali Stucky, Jack Bassobic, Dennis Prager, and more. Over 10,000 American-loving families will be there. That's right. This isn't all-ages events. See your favorite, speakers, shop American-loving brands, and meet all the top conservative influencers that you love following by day. Go to huge country concerts at night. Get a discount on general admission tickets at AMFest.com with code real Alex Clark. That's AMFest.com with code real Alex Clark to attend America Fest in Phoenix, December 16th through 19th. This episode contains graphic

descriptions of murder and torture. Listener discretion is advised. Picture this. Picture this. You grow up in a stable household. Your parents are in love. Your dad dances to John Denver in the living room. He leads the local Boy Scouts chapter, teaches you to fish, is a deacon at church, and takes you and your brother camping. 95% of the time, things are normal and happy. Your dad even cried at your wedding.

Two years later, he's arrested and accused of being one of the most infamous serial killers in America. B.T.K. which stands for bind, torture, kill. Dennis Rader, BTK's real name, was fascinating because he was able to lead a completely normal life while killing women and children on the side. This is what captured the attention of my guest today, who is one of the most revered and well-known forensic psychologists in America.

She's written over 60 books and has more than 1,000 articles online, mostly in the genres of crime and forensic science. She wrote Anne Rice and Dean Kuntz's biographies. While she's a brilliant writer, her most interesting talent, arguably, is that she has interviewed dozens of serial killers, built a relationship with them, and found out how a human being is capable of such heinous acts. Which brings us to our interview today.

This forensic psychologist spent five years getting to know BTK in prison, even coming up with a special code so they could discuss his kills in detail. How can a loving husband and doting father take his daughter camping and wrap her up in the same blanket he killed on? She was bound to find out. Her book on BTK is titled Confession of a Serial Killer, the Untold Story of Dennis Radar, the BTK Killer. This is Five Orange Juicy and a little inside baseball here, but if you're a true murderer, you've definitely seen her in the news because she was the professor of forensic psychology and criminal justice that the Idaho four killer studied under. Many have assumed to learn how to become a serial killer and get away

with it. Make sure you leave a five-star review. Let us know if you love the true crime episodes. You can watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel, subscribe there, here to tell the story of how she got into the field of forensic psychology and discussed the cases of not only BTK, but also Ed Kemper, is Dr. Catherine Ramsland on the spillover. You are the go-to expert for the most extreme, deviant, and disturbing forms of criminal behavior. You've said that as a teen, you hitchhiked across the country and then crossed it again on a 350 Honda motorcycle and, in your own words, became educated by accident. What happened?

Yeah, I was just traveling. I left high school. I graduated five days later. I was on the road. I didn't ever want to go to college. I have now five graduate degrees. So something happened. And what happened is that I visited some friends in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was during the summer. They were going to take a summer course. So I thought, well, okay, I'll take a summer course. And it was philosophy. And it changed everything for me. I loved learning and I couldn't get enough. In fact, one of my degrees I just got last year. Oh my gosh. That's incredible. What was the first serial killer case that you remember, even just in your personal life being fascinated by that prompted you to really pursue a career

in forensic psychology? Well, I wasn't really thinking I would pursue such a career. And it really wasn't about serial killers initially, but the first one I encountered even before I got any education in forensic psychology was when I was a kid in my hometown. There was a killer operating, picking up coeds on his motorcycle, and friends of my brother found the first body on their farm property. And so that was fascinating because as each victim was found, they would list them with their pictures in the newspaper. And the word, the phrase serial killer wasn't even being used at the time. But this was a really unusual kind of thing to happen. So I stayed fascinated with it when a true crime book came out on it. I read it. But I was not in the field of forensic

psychology. And I then also began to correspond with him still before I got any education. The writer or the killer? The killer. Really? He got caught. He got convicted. I wanted to, I mean, I was, I was a kid hitchhiking at a place where he picked a young girl who looked like me, my age, had been picked up the day after and murdered. So it felt very close to me. And I wanted to know more about him. And it wasn't something I was expecting to pursue as a career by any means. It was just a curiosity. And that's how it all started.

How old were you when you started communicating with this killer? Oh, how old was I? Yeah. It was in the 90s, 1990s. I don't know how old I was. And so what kinds of questions were you asking him? Because you weren't even doing this on a professional level. You were just curious.

Do you remember the types of things you asked? I just asked him about, you know, what we had in common in terms of the place. It was Ann Arbor, Michigan. So that was a college town. He said he was innocent. So we weren't really getting talking about the murders so much. Just I talked to him on the phone. I corresponded with them.

It was just sort of what's going on in your prison life today. He would tell me how he feeds birds and, you know, the fights that were going on in the prison. and that's all. We talked about Michigan. It wasn't really very deep or profound. It was just my first encounter with a serial killer. What were your friend's reactions to finding out that you had been talking on the phone to a serial killer in prison? I didn't tell anybody.

You didn't tell anyone? No. So you have this secret hobby going on behind the scenes. It didn't feel like a secret hobby. It just felt like this is something I'm doing and it's nobody's business. So how do you go from that to making it public that this is what you want to do for a career? Because after that, I had been teaching philosophy at Rutgers University, decided to do something else. So I looked into another graduate program, and I saw one at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in forensic psychology.

And that sounded interesting. That's really all there was to it. I applied, got in, and at the same time, I was writing about the serial killer. I was writing for a little website, because again, it's in the 1990s. It's a little website called the Crime Library, and then Court TV bought them. And suddenly I was writing serial killer stories for Court TV, one after another after another to about 225, I think. I ended up writing about, each was about 10,000 words long. So through that, I became a serial killer expert without necessarily guiding my life that way. At the same time, I was taking classes at John Jay College, and then suddenly I had an opportunity

to become a professor and to create a track in forensic psychology. So create my own classes, manage the track, guide the students. It just all sort of came in this serendipitous kind of way without me necessarily thinking, this is what I want to do with my life. But I'm glad that I did because it's very interesting and endlessly fascinating the kinds of people I talk to. My next one actually, when I was just getting into teaching was, Ed Kemper.

There was a woman who was sort of a fan of his who was looking for a missing victim. And at the time, the websites, he had these little guest books on them. So she wrote to me this nasty letter because I had written something for the crime library about him. And she wrote me this nasty letter. And then I just said, well, you know, if he's not happy with what I wrote. wrote. He's free to tell me that. And did he? He did. So he said through this intermediary, he sends me letters talking about the fact that the things that he said on tape during his confession were all sort of posed. There were things his attorney wanted him to do. And it wasn't what he really did, that he hadn't really cannibalized anybody. And all of that was a lie. I said, but I see you on tape. doing this. So I told him that I would give him the opportunity to say it. In print, I would put in it

with my story as being from him and did not count on my editor saying, what are you thinking? So she did not let me represent his voice in my story, which made him furious because he felt like he couldn't trust me, which I understood that because, and actually the way he got involved with me, weirdly, was I had written a biography of Dean Coots. He's a best-selling writer. And one of his books was based a little bit on Ed Kemper. His bad guy was based on Ed Kemper's. The book was called Intensity.

So I wrote about that in the biography. And Kemper, weirdly, was reading books into Braille. And he read that book. Wait, you're joking. And he saw his name. and the nasty things Dean Coots had to say about him. So he got mad at me. I'm just the biographer.

He got mad at me for writing those things. That's how it all started. So he was my second up close and personal serial killer. And so this giant of a serial killer, six foot eight or nine, you know, being angry at me was without me really knowing what to do about it. I thought I was doing the right thing by giving him a voice. But in a way, it kind of shows you the direction I already was taking, was giving these offenders a voice by studying them and seeing what they had to say from their point of view. So, but it didn't work out for him.

Why do offenders, in your opinion, deserve to have a voice? It isn't that they deserve to have a voice. They don't necessarily deserve anything. It's that if we don't study them, in. detail, regardless of whether they're telling us the truth or a lie, manipulates, whatever they're doing, it's all behavior. If we don't study them in detail, we will not understand the developmental aspects of people who go on to become violent people, whether they're mass murders or serial killers or domestic violence or whatever. We don't try to understand their experience from their point of view,

their perceptions, the way they process the world, the way they build anger, the fantasy life that they have. You know, we're just always going to be victims to them. It's important that we learn some things from them for intervention. Now, who was Ed Kemper, the very, very short, summarized version for those who have never heard of him? Well, he was called the co-ed killer. He killed his grandparents when he was 15 to see what it felt like to kill. He was angry. angry guy and he should have been. Both of his parents betrayed him. And he then, when he got out of prison, he was in a sort of a juvenile detention, but it was actually an adult prison. When he got out, he began to pick up hitchhikers, young girls on college campuses, killing them, raping them,

dismembering them, supposedly consuming them, although he told me that wasn't true. And then murdered his mother, who he was really angry at and her best friend. And he's one of the rare serial killers that actually turned himself in. He was about six foot nine. He wanted to be a cop, but he was too tall, really just kind of a loser type of guy, although he's very smart. But not as smart as a lot of people think. There's a myth about Ed Kemper that he's a genius serial killer. But when he was in this juvenile detention, yes, he was bright. but they let him actually administer the standardized assessments to the other inmates. So he memorized the IQ test.

When he went in, he had a much lower IQ than when he came out. No surprise. And what was the deal with killing his mother? Well, she's the one that he blamed for everything. She was afraid of him. She berated him. She made him feel small. But actually his father was the woman who betrayed him the most,

but he never really turned on his father. He just felt like his mother had ultimately undercut him and really turned him into a killer. That's, of course, not true, but that was his perception. Is it true that he had sex with her head after killing her? I think he had sex with her friend's head. He killed his mother, beheaded her, ripped the larynx out because that was the offending,

organ, ripped the larynx out, threw it down the garbage disposal, and it came back up, which he thought was an irony that he couldn't even get rid of it that way. I think he had sexual contact with her body. I'm not entirely sure about the head part, but he also had invited a friend of hers over and also murdered her and did some things to her as well. How does forensic psychology tell us the what's and wise? of the most notorious killers in history? Well, it's really research psychology. You are learning as much as you can

about the details of their life history, what are some of their triggers. And it's obviously going to be different from different people because it's really about how they perceive their life story. Other people with a mother and a father like Kemper might never have become violent or would have maybe committed suicide

or done other things. So it's really about how the individual perceives it and what they think they need to do about it and then how they fantasize, empowering themselves, and then acting out, essentially. So we try to study, and now, not all serial killers are alike. We have documented over 5,000 serial killers, but unfortunately the media likes to focus on very few, giving the impression that there are only these, you know, 20, 25 serial killers out there. There's really a lot of variation, a lot of different motivations, a lot of different developmental histories and mental sets, and not all of them are sexually compelled. They're certainly not all white guys. They're certainly not all males. They're certainly not all loners. So there's been a lot of myths circulated out there, mostly from work the FBI did in the 1990s. in 1980s and 90s, that we are now working to try to dispel.

Like, there's no profile of a serial killer because it's just too much diversity in this population. My current obsession is going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. I try to go to bed between 10 or 10.30 every night if I can makes a huge difference for the amount and quality of sleep that I get each night. I am not a morning person. It is very hard for me to get going, which means I need time to wake up, prepare for the day, eat a little breakfast. It's also important that whatever I put in my body is going to

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Go to shop. Squeezejuice.com. Use promo code Alex for 25% off at checkout. That's a big, Big discount, big boy, thick boy. I recommend the subscription so that you're never without. It's shop. dot squeezedjuice.com. Use promo code Alex for 25% off or find the code in the show notes. Can I tell you what my perception is as a millennial of serial killing? It happened a lot in the 60s and 70s and then kind of fell off and that we don't really have

them anymore. Now, I know that's not true as somebody who loves true crime, but it's weird. why does it feel like, I guess, maybe the media or something, but it just seems like all of these, like every killer I can think of. I mean, Golden State Killer, Zodiac, the Nightstocker, all these people. It seems like they were all like rapid fire right after one another in that timeline. And then they just kind of, we stopped hearing about them. But was that a deliberate thing that the media did to stop talking about them and giving them attention and so that's why I perceive it that way? Absolutely not deliberate on the part of the media to try to diminish the pool.

of serial killers out there. Media prefers clickbait. I mean, I'm not a sociologist. This is really a sociological question. There's a book on it by Peter Bronsky, who gives a very long, involved, complicated argument about the golden age of serial killers, but it goes from the 70s to the 90s. But we have plenty of serial killers. I see killers in the news every single day. And we have a lot in other countries as well. It's what is the media focused on. And if you, You only focus on what the media is showing you. You will believe that's the whole truth about serial killers, but it isn't. So if you were a researcher on this particular population of offender, you would see a lot more cases than you see in the media.

How was the FBI using forensic psychology in those early days to figure out what and who a serial killer was and how they think? Well, they were really looking at extreme crimes that are out of the ordinary type of, like most crime. homicides are situational, at least 75%. That means domestic violence, bar fights, drug kinds of interactions. The stranger murders and other kinds of extreme crimes were not something that most local law enforcement was equipped to handle. So they put together this unit. And initially, it was simply a teaching unit where they would go on the road and they would teach what they could from the cases that they had developed. And they didn't have a database in the early days.

They didn't have a computer, nothing like that. They were just talking about their personal experience. Most of them came in either from Army, criminal investigation divisions, or some law enforcement. So very different makeup from what you see from the FBI today. And so they were able to talk about their experiences and the cases. They started the prison interview program where they, talked to, you know, 36 offenders, 25 of which were serial killers and put together some

ideas from that. But again, they didn't have databases, computer analysis until the middle of 1980s. Now, at that point, they got a computer. They created a program called Bicap, a violent crime apprehension program, and they were able to put much of this material into a database for analysis. You said earlier that, you know, every serial killer is vastly different, why they kill who they are, the type of background they have, are there any common denominators at all between people who become serial killers? What is common is by definition, a serial killer is someone who has killed at least two times unto separate occasions. That's all it is. That's what they have in common, that definition. It's a behavioral definition. It's not about,

traits or motivation or cooling off periods or anything like that like it used to be. It's a very simple definition. So lots of people, lots more people are known to be serial killers who might not have fit earlier definitions. And, you know, if you just have two, if that's the only requirement, then you have a lot of diversity in this population. Are there any common themes in childhoods or anything like that with killers? which type most people think of when they're thinking about serial killers are

usually the sexually motivated serial killers within that population of serial killer you would certainly find people who had you know had injuries who had some abuse or neglect or shaming in their background in a way that made them feel disempowered and wanting to somehow get their power back. You know, so I hate talking in generalities. I know. It doesn't serve any real purpose for, you know, what we need to really do about this population of a vendor.

You've purposely chosen to place yourself in some of the scariest circumstances life has to offer. You've played board games with serial killers. You've spent the night at crime scenes, I believe I read. You dug up graves. What was the scariest experience you've had in your career? We better back up because digging up graves is against the law. So I have been part of an exhumation team.

That is a very different thing than just going out and digging of graves. I've been part of an exhumation team. Not scary at all. Very scientific. The approach was to look at cases that were unsolved or were unsolved or controversially solved to see if we could find something with new, innovative forensic science. tools and techniques and find out more about that person's death. So that's a little bit different from being a grave digger. Yes, it is. So what experience really did rattle you? I don't know that

anything rattled me. You're fearless. I don't know that I'm fearless, but I tend to do a lot of things that most people are scared to do. Like what? Like I rode a motorcycle across the country when I was 19 without ever having been on a bike before. One of the biggest cases that you're known for is your work investigating and building a relationship with serial killer BTK over the course of five years. Why BTK? That was a weird, you know, as everything in my life, it was a weird serendipity. So who's BTK? Let's talk about that first. Dennis Rader is actually named himself. BTCA, bind them, torture them, kill them. He was a killer operating in Wichita, Kansas, between

1974 and 1991. He killed 10 people. The first incident involved four people from the same family, which is very unusual, and not something he planned to do. So 30 years go by between the first incident when he starts playing a cat and mouse game with law enforcement. And it That's how they caught him. He asked if he could send them a computer disc and could they trace him? And they said, no, which of course was a lie. And through that, they got him. So that brings me to how did I get involved?

There was a woman who approached him as soon as he was arrested who wanted to write a book with him. She wrote him for five years. They were going to do this book. I knew who she was and I saw her in Facebook. So he was caught in 2005. In 2010, I said, you know, what's happened to your book? And she begged me to take it over. She didn't want to do it.

She knew who I was. I mean, not because I had written a number of books on violence and all different kinds of killers. And so she asked me if I would take it over. And it wasn't as simple as saying yes, because she had persuaded him to sign his life rights over to this victim's family trust so that anyone who's going to write a book like this with him they're going to have some control over this and they're going to be the beneficiaries for the most part so a writer would have to agree to do that and i was willing to do that because for me it was an opportunity to study somebody it wasn't so much a money-making thing for me all i wanted was

my expenses because i had to travel to wichita do some things um and so that's that's how it happened but it still took a couple of years talking with him playing chess with him doing some some things before we really kind of got it underway so the whole project took five years that was that's a lot of years for me I write two or three books a year and to do one that took me that long was was kind of daunting but it was it really gave me a sense of perspective about him. And I think the fact that I, and I've been talking to him now since since it's been 13 years, the fact that I've spent that much time with him gaining his trust,

looking at his letters, having phone calls, visiting him, going to all the crime scenes, talking to some of the victims, families, experiencing Wichita. And also, weirdly, I was. friends with the DA. Oh, wow. So I mean, good friends before this all happened. And she wasn't so keen about me doing it. But I assured her I wasn't just giving a platform to a serial killer. I do use this. I call it a guided autobiography because I wanted to use it in a way that would benefit criminology, forensic psychology, and law enforcement. So he's going to be answering questions for me

that are going to really help us and not just him talking about whatever he wants to talk about. So without my guidance, he would have never probed some of the things he does probe in the book. And to his credit, he took on some hard projects to think his way through. It wasn't easy for him to do. He's not particularly bright. He was a C&D student in high school and college, but he took it on. and we worked away through it, and I think it really required that long period of time

to thoroughly get involved with this, his case. And so Confession of a Serial Killer was produced, and then we turned that into a four-part documentary for A&E, which is now on Hulu. And I've done another one that's coming out in April with Wayne Henley, who was an accomplice to Dean Coral, the Candyman of Houston, Texas, who murdered 27 young men using two accomplices, and Henley was

one of those accomplices. So with him, for the past two years, I have been trying to understand his experience as an accomplice, because this was a kid who wanted to be a minister. And by the time, he's 15, killing his first victim. By the time he's 17, he's killed 9 or 10. That is, you know, He himself would never have become a serial killer. And yet there it is. He's a serial killer. I'm really excited about that. I had no idea you were doing that.

So that's actually really exciting. I'm very familiar with the Candyman case. So that's really awesome. It's called the serial killers apprentice. And it's already, you could pre-order it already. It's, I actually liked working with him a lot because he's very articulate, smart, well-read. He's taught himself a lot through reading. He's been in prison for 50 years, 50 years.

And the fact is he could have gotten away. He killed Coral. He's the only accomplice to a serial killer who killed the serial killer to end it. He would have looked like a hero because he saved two other kids in the process as well as himself. And then told law enforcement where the bodies were, he said nothing, they would have never found them. Never. Here's my big question. When you are building a relationship with these killers, communicating with them as intensely and as long as you do, do you find yourself separate from

the actual crimes developing a sort of friendship or warmth towards them? It's more of a clinical thing, but you definitely have to build trust. You must do that. And so you're doing, like, Rader and I would watch TV shows and talk about them. It was a metaphor often of his experience because he always wanted to talk in codes. So we use the TV shows to kind of work through his experience. So, you know, when you're doing things together, you are developing a relationship. And currently, he's being looked at for some cold cases. So he's looking to me for some guidance in how to respond to, you know, what's going on.

Yeah, I have a lot of questions on that. So he's trusting me. Wayne Henley is trusting me. Honestly, I'll tell you this about Henley. He's been betrayed over and over by media. So I have been amazed that he was, that he did decide to take this risk for me to lay out a story that's never been told because no one ever interviewed him for it. No one interviewed anyone he knew for it. The two books that kind of framed the case were based on police reports

only, not extensive interviews, you know, and much is missing. I cannot believe he has not been approached to be interviewed. That doesn't make any sense to me. It has been. Oh, okay, okay. But nothing has come out. Well, he did some, he did 48 hours. He did. He did. did Montel Williams. He did, you know, he did some other journalists who came in and videoed him in the prison and then turned on him. Oh, yeah. It made him sound like the world's worst psychopath. But these killers, they must hear through the grapevine that you're almost like a little bit of an advocate for them. You allow them to have a voice that you are trustworthy, that you've done this type of thing before and written books and all this kind of stuff. So do they find out about that?

And they're like, okay, I think I can trust Dr. Catherine. No, I'm not an advocate for them because there are some I wouldn't work with because I wouldn't want to, I don't really care about their experience. I'm not, you know, the Pied Piper of serial killers or the serial killer whisperer or anything like that. I'm interested in certain types. I was interested in a writer because he's an outlier to many of the formulas. Why is he an outlier? Because he didn't have any issues in his childhood. No, no, you know, he had some head injuries, but nothing serious where he was. He was, where he loss his memory or anything. He really formed his life as a serial killer through fantasies. He had intact grandparents in both sides. He had an all-American boyhood. He had family, both of his

parents. He was the oldest of four brothers. You know, nothing that you would look at in his life would tell you this guy is going to become a serial killer. He was a family man. He was the president of his church congregation. He had a stable job. I mean, these are things you're not expecting. So he was interesting to me as an outlier. Who is this person? We need to understand this because our formulas are not right if someone like him can exist. With Henley, I was interested in the accomplice point of view because that has not been really dissected very deeply. and accomplices are all kind of thrown in the same basket, but they're not all alike. And so I used his experience to probe that whole sense of being an accomplice psychologically.

And also to show how even kids today are similarly vulnerable to predators like Dean Coral, because the adolescent brain is one aspect of this neediness. So I go through all of that using Henley as my model. But I wouldn't just necessarily do this kind of thing for just any old serial killer, believe me. I think that's interesting that you've turned down serial killers that have wanted to work with you. And you've said, nah, not you. My biggest life hack for women is to start viewing your menstrual cycle as a gift as opposed to a curse. Our cycle, when we track it and understand the four different phases act as a secret,

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That's GARNU.U.com with code Alex for 15% off or find the code in the show notes. So in regards to BTK then, if he grew up in a totally normal, stable, all-American home and yet became a serial killer, what in the world does he attribute igniting this desire to torture and kill women? That's the book. I can't reduce it down to a simple answer to that question because you have to look at the developmental trajectory of him in terms of the sparks that happened along the way from childhood. And he would bind himself and it felt exciting. He would be a voyeur spying on somebody.

He had these experiences in Barnes. He read two detective magazines and saw an image on the cover that excited him. So it's this swell of things coming together, braiding together in his life that finally, and it was he acted out after he lost a job and he was angry that he had to live off of his wife. And there was. He just decided he's going to do this. Things he had been fantasizing about. So he built a very rich fantasy life off of many of these auto-erotic experiences and the need to put girls into traps because they made him feel off balance and insecure and inferior.

So girls had to be trapped, girls had to be tied to railroad tracks, girls had to be, you know, tortured. And that was an adolescent fantasy. finally when he decided to act there was anger as well and a need to empower himself so you take his development the circumstances his fantasy life you put those things together at optimal times and that's how you come out with somebody who decides they're going to do that now here's what happens with with some people is they have fantasies about what they want to do they kill someone and then go, whoa, this is not what I thought. And they don't go on.

They decide to stop right then and there. And they decide, I don't want to do this. This is not at all what my fantasy told me. In fact, I just posted a blog on psychology today about a guy who came to me and said, after I watched your BTK documentary, I wanted to tell you how I almost became a serial killer because I had all these fantasies and adolescents about murdering men, stabbing them, I bought a knife, I did all these things, in part because his mother was shaming him about his attraction to males,

and he just felt like that was a horrible part of himself. He wanted to kill, and so he held these fantasies, and then he said if I had had access to a car and a way to meet them, I would have started killing them. and things happened in his life that shifted that momentum and made him start accepting himself and meeting people and feeling better about himself and finding other sources of self-empowerment. And so he never did murder anyone. But he said to me, I think I want to tell you my story because that's the point of your work, isn't it?

To see where are the places where people twist toward or away from doing this kind of violence. And we do need more narratives of people who almost got there and then twisted away. Wow. So who was H.H. Holmes and what about him inspired BTK to kill? Well, H.H. H.H. H.H. H.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H.S. a real killer, a very clever in the White City. probably one of the best books on the case. And he would kill people in order to enhance his status or gain money or gain land or get, you know, whatever.

So he wasn't sexually motivated so much as greed motivated. And actually it was greed that brought him down in the end because he cheated on partner and the partner turned him in. So in the end, you know, it got him. But he's famous because he had this hotel in Chicago where he was, you know, tourists were coming to see the World's Fair. There was a lot of also men who didn't have jobs that he would hire to build this hotel and they'd fire them so they'd have to pay them and he'd hire a whole new crew.

So nobody knew quite what he was doing, but he was building these torture cells into his hotel for pretty young women that he wanted to torture. And then, you know, allegedly, because we know, never found actual evidence of this, he would kill them, put them, you know, take them to the basement, perhaps deflesh them. We do know that he put himself through medical school by defleshing bodies and selling the skeletons. So he did a lot of things like that. And because of that three-story hotel, it was featured in a true detective magazine. And Rader read that. And he sort of projected, he took that image of this torture hotel and projected it into a barn in a silo

and in his mind created what he would have in the barn, because he's in Kansas. So what he's having the barns were all these torture implements. Like what? Well, like he really loved the idea of tying females to tracks, to train tracks and having trains run over them. So in his barn, and actually in the silo, he had. had a full-sized train engine on track. But he had wheels that he would tie them to to spin around. He had things like tubs.

He would dunk them in. Yeah. So what you're describing, this part of the book floored me. You talk about how he describes this giant wooden wheel that a woman would be tied to and that as it would spin around at some points, her legs would be up and her head would be underwater and it would spin around. And so slowly she would be drowning. But he never did that to any of his victims. So the interesting part about him is he named himself, bind them, torture them, kill them. And he did bind them. And he did kill them. The torture part, whatever it was,

was short-lived. I mean, I certainly know of other serial cases that were they torture them for long periods of time. And I've seen some of the videos they've made at that. It's horrifying or cut pieces off of them or dunked to them and to their unconscious, bring him back. That's John Wiengacy, then dunk him

again. So he did not do those things and he did very few of his actual fantasy things. Is it possible that the torture part was so short with BTK because he was serial killing on the side of being a family man and he was operating

in a time constraint? Well, he wasn't initially operating in a time constraint because he was taking classes. So it was very easy to tell his way if he was, you know, doing a paper at the library, he was in school, he had plenty of time to do voyeuristic activities and stalking and whatnot. Occasionally, he'd get himself into a bind, a time bind, especially a little later. But no, I think it's that, like when he killed the Oteros, he was strangling them. He thought it was going to go faster, didn't. Let's pause there.

So BTC's first confirmed murder was a family. January 15th, 1974, four members of the Otero family in Wichita were murdered. Who was the Oterra family, their ages, and how did they even end up on BTC's radar? Oh, their ages? I don't know how, I don't know how old the parents were, so I'm sorry, but the Otero, the Otero family was, so we had two parents and you had five kids. Rader had seen Julie Otero, the mother and Josephine, who was 11, and he had a mother-daughter fantasy. So he had followed them and found where they lived, knew that there was also. Her husband was there and a little boy.

He did not know there were three other kids. So when he actually broke into that house, he found out by looking at the bedrooms that there were more kids than he anticipated. He didn't know that they had a dog. You know, he talks about he leaves nothing to chance, but how do you not know that they don't have a dog in January when there's snow and there's footprints and whatnot? He didn't do a good job of really doing his surveillance. He claims he did, but when you look at that crime, he didn't. At any rate, he didn't know that Joseph Otero's senior was going to be home that day because he had been in a car accident, and so he was recovering.

So Raiders' idea was that he was going to grab Julie and Josephine and put them in their car and drive them to an abandoned barn where he was going to then play out the fantasies that he had. about Barnes. And this is a mother and daughter. Mother and daughter, Julie and Josephine. And Josephine was 11. I don't know how old Julie was. And instead he finds four people and a dog unexpectedly. Now, I'm surprised that at that moment he doesn't turn around and say, yikes, I wasn't, you know, there's so many variables that could end up getting me caught. There's way more people to deal with in control. Because they'd seen him. They'd seen him.

He almost turned around when he went into the best. backyard. He almost did not do it, but Joey came out to let the dog out and saw him. And that was the deciding factor. It was very possible that he would have never gone that way. But he did. So once he was in, he had to come up with a plan. And his philosophy was to use a ruse to set their minds at ease. And if they just did what he said, they would all come out of this. He needed money. He needed their car. But their car was out of gas. So there goes that part of the fantasy. He wasn't going to be able take them anywhere. They didn't have much money. And by the end, all the ideas that he had just didn't work out. And so he just simply put them in different rooms and strangled them. And he took

Josephine to the basement and hanged her from a pipe. And at this time in his life, was he married yet and Did he have kids yet? Yes, he was married. He did not have kids at this point. So it's 1974. Was he happily married? He says. He was.

I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. A few months later in April of 1974, he breaks into the home of 21-year-old Catherine Bright. Had he been stalking her for those three months between the Oteros and her murder? Not during the whole three months, but the mistakes that he made with, Catherine Bright, I mean, sorry, with the Oteros, he did not want to repeat. So when he started looking for another place, he wanted to look for something that didn't have a dog, to have a single

female. And, you know, he had criteria for what he was looking at, a good escape route, not too far from the highway. And so when he lit on Catherine Bright, he studied her for her routines. But he still made a mistake. What he did was went into the house to wait for her, and she came on with her brother. So when that happened, now he's confronting another male, and this one is going to fight. Kevin, right, was a fighter. And in fact, he went for, Rader had a gun in his hit kit, and he went for the gun, and they struggled. And Rader actually thought, this is where it ends.

He's going to kill me right here in the house. house, but instead he shot Kevin twice and still Kevin survived and got up and ran out. Oh, my gosh. So that left, you know, Raider knowing, well, I'm going to get this done in a hurry because he's going to bring the police back. And so what did he end up doing at that scene? So he had, again, read a true detective magazine and decided he was going to try using a knife rather than choking the person because choking at that.

taken a much longer time than he had anticipated. And he wanted to see what it would be like to kill someone with the knife. So he stabbed her in the torso a number of times. She was still alive when the police got there, but she died subsequently, I think on the way of the hospital. And he decided that's not how he wanted to kill people. He didn't like doing that. It was messy. there wasn't any sense of when he strangled somebody, he felt empowered and like they were helpless to him. It was one of the things he had an image in his mind from a true detective magazine, from a different serial killer named Harvey Glatman who had posed as a photographer, got women to let him

tie them up, took pictures of them, told them he's going to kill them so he could get their expression of terror. Oh my gosh. And that had imprinted, yeah, that had imprinted on Dennis's mind as a. like a 15-year-old, he wanted to replicate that look on the face of a woman. And so stabbing just wasn't going to achieve that for him. So that was the only one that he did that with. Why didn't BTK sexually assault his victims?

Well, he, I mean, you could say he sexually assaulted Josephine because he masturbated onto her. But I mean, he was not. I think you're asking why didn't he rape them or penetrate that? Well, his story. is that he didn't want to cheat on his wife. And that's so bogus. Wow. It's not that. So then what do you think it is? And why would he keep that from him? Well, I know it's not that because I've gotten him to admit when he was, when he was going around doing security systems in people's houses, he hit on a woman and was, would have had an affair with her if she had said yes. So it wasn't about being faithful. So he, but he didn't. He did not. sexually penetrate any of his victims. Do you think that was in his mind his way of being like, I'm not that bad?

Well, that's always in the minds of serial killers. They always have ways to compartmentalize what they're doing and looking at it and kind of comparing themselves to others and saying, I'm not that bad. I mean, he told me when we started playing chess, don't cheat. Like, really? So they do think that in some ways they're a good person. Well, and when he got caught, he asked Ken Landware, had the task force, why did you lie to me? Like, because I wanted to catch you.

As if the lie was worse somehow than what he was doing. He's always been like that, always. When we talk about some of the scenes he sees on TV, he's outraged at some of the violence. And like, this is fake stuff. What are you so outraged at? You're a killer, but he's always been like that. In March of 1977, Rader killed Shirley Vion while her kids were home. Tell us about what went down that day.

Well, he did not know that there were three kids in the house. So what happened with that particular case, this is when he was completely unprepared for. He had limited, this is one of those where he did have limited time. He was dressed. He was going to be on campus, supposedly. his dress, he had a briefcase, and he had in mind a person that he had seen, I think, at a campus bar, and he knew where she lived, and he knocked in her door, and she did not come answer the door. And here he is, ready, and he doesn't have a victim. So he sees Steve, this little boy on the street, and he walks up to him and pretends he's looking for, this other person, shows him a picture of his wife, and at that point, he has.

has a son. But the ruse is that he's going to follow the kid home because he figures this kid has a mother somewhere. Does not know he also has brother and sister in the same house. So he watches where he goes, goes

and knocks in the door. Little Steve answers the door. And Dennis goes into the house and basically shuts the kids into a bathroom, ties the locks the door, things and makes Shirley lie in the bed where he's going to bind her and strangle her.

And the kids can see it because the door is cracked open and her bed is right up against the door. They can see him murdering their mother. And those kids were banging on the door and making noise and yelling as this is happening? Yes. And was that not distracting for Raider? Apparently not. What happened to the kids after their mother was dead? They got out. I think there was a window in the bathroom, but they did get out of the bathroom and went for help.

But there was nothing they could really do. I was just on a trip with a friend of mine. She was getting in the shower after me. She was like, hey, is there any face wash in there? And I told her, I was like, well, there's some drugstore stuff. And she's like, no, Alex, I know that you've got the good, good. Let me borrow whatever you brought. And she's right, of course. I let her borrow my vitamin C cleanser from Nimi Skin Care, and she was like, dude that slapped, ordering my own ASAP.

Then I had to lock my door at night because I was scared that she was going to sneak in to steal my skincare. Hands off, little lady. If you need help with skin texture, dull skin, dryness, fine lines, or poor size, Nimi Skincare is truly one of the best skincare companies that I've found. They also share my values of faith, family, freedom, and femininity. So many of you have tried Nimi's skin. and I get dozens of DMs daily of cute servatives singing their praises, and I love that for you. The vitamin C line is incredible for brightening and fighting the signs of aging.

Try Nimi Skin Care with code Alex Clark for 10% off. That's Nemeyskinkare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off or click the link in the show notes. The next kill was December of 77. Her name was Nancy Joe Fox, and Rader has described her as a perfect kill because she didn't fight him. Now, if a woman is home alone and attacked by an intruder, I mean, just profiling and talking to these different killers, I guess, is it, in your mind, do you think it's better for a woman to scream and make noise? If she's totally alone, she knows nobody can hear her, or is it better for these guys to be quiet and keep still? I guess I always thought in my mind that if I disassociate, if I act unbothered, they'll be disappointed and stop because they get off on that fear. It depends on the killer.

They're not all alike. They all have different. But that isn't actually why she's the perfect victim for him. Why is she? The reason she was a perfect victim for him was right on. First of all, she was a petite woman alone in a very contained. I've been in this house. It's very contained, small.

He had as much time as he wanted with her. It was a duplex and the other part of the duplex. was empty. So he didn't expect anybody was going to come along with the first time of any of these murders where there wasn't another potential interruption or person there. So all the things aligned and she was the kind of victim that was part of his fantasy life. That's why she was a perfect victim. He was able to do with her what he wanted to do without any fear of disturbance or discovery. A couple months later, he sends a letter to the local local news, taking responsibility for his kills, naming himself BTK for Byn Torture Kill.

Was his thought process behind sending the letter that he was hoping he would get caught, or was it just the tormenting and teasing that he liked? Well, the first letter he sent was actually eight months after the Oteros. So that was in 1974 before Bion and Fox, three years before Vian and Fox. he sent that letter because they had arrested three men that they thought were good suspects for the Otero murders, and he thought they were wasting his taxpayer dollars. You're kidding me. No, this wasn't about I want credit or anything like that.

It was, oh, no, you're on the wrong track. Don't waste your time. And so he wrote a letter, put it into an engineering text, got a reporter to go get it. And it described the Otero scene. And then at that point, he said, I did this alone. He enjoyed having that sense of connection with the press and police. So he subsequently wrote a few more letters after a murders. He didn't write a letter after Catherine Bright because her brother knew what he looked like.

And he did not want that one. He sort of alluded to another murder, but did not claim that one. He did claim the buy-in, and so that he wrote a letter called Shirley Locks, a poem. And then he wrote something about Nancy Fox and did some drawings that he sent. Tell us about Anna Williams, a 63-year-old intended victim who evaded BTK and made him livid. Well, Anna Williams lived in. And he was a complete mistaken idea because he had seen Anna Williams' granddaughter getting the mail out of that house. and he had parked across the street and had watched and thought that's who lived there.

That's who he was going to go after. So he went in the house to wait for her and she didn't come home and he had to leave because he was a family man. He had obligations. And so he had to leave, but he did not like the fact that she didn't realize he'd been there. So he sent her a little package of stuff to let her know, I was here waiting for you. You were lucky. I might strike again. And she left.

She left the city at that point. Was there ever any police record for BTK or run-ins with the law throughout any of this? No, nothing. What was particularly disturbing about 53-year-old Marine Hedges murder in 1985? A number of things. One was that she was basically his neighbor. She was a woman he would talk about gardening with. She lived about five doors.

down from him on the same street. And she was removed from the house, unknown to anyone at the time. Basically, one of the things was that she was removed from the house and then dumped into a, like a ditch outside. But also, now that we know more about what he did, is he took her from the house, he took her to his church. He had prepared a room with black plastic over the windows to make sure nobody could see thing in. And he posed her body with underwear that he had stolen from other homes to take pictures

of her before he then dumped her in the, like trash. So did the church ever know that somebody had broken in and that, you know, BTK had been there? Or they had no clue? The church had no clue. In fact, when he was arrested, they thought the cops have the wrong man. There's no way he's involved. I mean, don't killers usually have a pattern in the types of victims they choose? Because it seems like Raider was all over the place in terms of race, age. Well, that's a myth. Another one of those 1990s myths that they always have the same victim type. A few have had the same victim type, so that like redheads or, you know, something like that.

But for the most part, you're going to find some differences from one victim to another because you're not going to, especially if they're killing is extensive. like Raiders was over a number of years, you're going to find a lot different circumstances. So like Ted Bundy did not pick women because their hair was part in the middle. And even he said, no, that didn't happen. And if you look at the victim photos, you see, they don't all have hair part in the middle. But he did, it was important to him to have a college type, attractive woman because he wanted to feel superior to them. and also that was part of his fantasy life, was a female like that.

But still, he also grabbed a 13-year-old and a 12-year-old. So it wasn't always about pretty young college girls. And, I mean, you can look at all kinds of cases with serial killers and see differences in victims and weapons and methods of approach And it really depends on the killer. Dolores Davis was the last known victim of BTK in 1991. He goes radio silent until 2004, making really the whole BTK case a cold case. How was he able to turn off the killing for so long?

He didn't. He says the way he says it is he didn't stop. He just didn't succeed. He sent me a list of 55 products. of houses he had entered or women he had targeted but it didn't it just didn't happen his life circumstances changed he became father again he got a different type of job as things change I mean look there were there were there are three years between the first set so Oteros and Catherine Bright were 1974.

Bayon and Fox were 1977. Then you get a leap and Marine Hedge was 1985, Vicki Wagonley was 86, and Dolores Davis was 1991.

There's lots of time in there. So between 1991 and 2004, everybody makes a big deal of that time period, but there was a lot of time in some of that earlier murders as well. And he would just say he didn't have the opportunity or he got busy. His life's circumstances changed, but the fantasies were still there. And if an opportunity had presented

itself, it would have gone that way. He had targeted another victim in 2004 that didn't work out because when he got there, after he did all the studying of her routines, there was a street crew in the road. So he couldn't carry it out. How was BTK as a husband in front? Was he a good one? Well, I didn't really interview his wife, so it's hard for me to tell you. It depends on your criteria. If your criteria are that he was faithful, then I guess so. Was he there?

Was he a breadwinner? Yes. What I'd like to know is was he capable of the normal spectrum of human emotion, like empathy, sadness, love? Until I can be inside his head, I wouldn't have any idea about him or you or anybody else. else. All I can do is look at behavior and try to make a determination as to how deeply you feel. If you cry and maybe you feel more deeply than me or maybe you don't, I really have no way to know that. Philosophically, it's a very difficult question to know what does the other person actually feel? We have language about emotions, but how deep does it go? I couldn't really begin to tell you.

He would say he was a good father and a good husband. His daughter used to say he was a good father. She's changed her story lately, but she wrote a whole book talking about that he was a good father. They went to church together. He kept, you know, the house and the yard. They went on vacations. They did normal family things. But the quality of that relationship, I couldn't tell you.

I have no idea. Did BTC's wife or kids ever talk? about the serial killer in town BTK to him without knowing that he was the killer? Marine Hedge was their neighbor. She was murdered. And yes, they were very disturbed by how close that murder was to their own home. And Rader would just say, well, I'll just make sure all the windows and doors are extra locked. And I have a gun. I'll be able to protect you. And he would reassure them that everything would be fine, that they were not in danger. Tell us about the time that his wife saw a sample of BTK's handwriting. He would practice some of these little notes that he was

using to communicate. And at one point, I think she came home and he didn't expect her to, so he sort of stuffed it into the couch and she found it. And so there were a couple of instances. She found it and asked him what this was, he said it was something he was working on for a class. Another time, she saw him writing a note, and she had seen some of the communications from BTK in the newspaper, and she noticed that he misspelled words in the same way as, not the handwriting similar, but just misspelled words. And he said, oh, well, probably we had the same, you know, kind of phonetics classes or, you know, he came up with something. But, you know, it's not surprising because most people are not thinking they're living with a serial killer. And it's much easier to believe the most benign explanation of something than to go, no, that's, you're just lying.

Especially if you're really dependent financially on this person, you have children with them. It's a lot easier to go with what seems. to make sense than to go, yeah, I don't think so. I think we're going to really investigate you. So I really, you know, I don't like talking about his wife because sometimes people will say she must have known or she was, no, not very bright. No, she had no idea. And neither is kids. You know, well, we don't, she's never given an interview ever. Nobody knows one thing about what she's experiencing. so I'm not going to be the person talking about her. Did he ever say, I mean, there was a sexual component to his cases, the fact that he was masturbating at crime scenes.

Did he say that that affected his ability to have a normal sex life or anything? Did he ever disclose anything like that to you? Well, I mean, his fantasy life is the core of the most exciting part of his sex life. life, and that is certainly not what he had with his wife. So it was like a separate person. Yeah, I mean, he called it life frames. He'd live life frames. He'd be what he needed to be in a certain role, but his fantasy was where he really felt alive. And you'll hear that from other killers, not necessarily serial killers. You just hear violence is more life affirming for that. more empowering, more exciting than day-to-day life.

And I don't think anybody is surprised by that. Tell us about the doll that was found with Binds. No, he bought these fashion dolls, dressed them as his victims and put them into cereal boxes to give to the police during his cat and mouse game. So once he was arrested, any dolls that were left over would have been found, but a number of the people, them went to the police and they opened these boxes and found these dolls. Like one, one had a

pipe that was Josephine, dark hair, and she had a little rope on her neck attached to a pipe, like how he had killed her. He had, I think it was Nancy Fox's driver's license was attached to one. So these were dolls he bought as ways to play this game with the police. After a 13-year-old hiatus, I mean, seemingly out of nowhere, the media gets 11 communications from BTK. Why all a sudden did he decide, I'm going to come out of hiding and I'm going to start communicating again? An author had given an interview to the newspaper in 1974 saying he wanted to write a book about the unsolved BTK murders. And Raider was not happy about the fact he knew the guy knew of only seven because he had not communicated in the final three. He did not want a book written about

himself by someone else, especially when they didn't have the whole story. So he decided he would write up his story and he had these chapters that he was putting into these cereal boxes with the dolls one at one at a time. But, you know, much of that came from what we had written on the internet on the crime library about him. He had taken a lot of our stuff. So that's kind of an irony, is he wanted to be the master of his narrative, but he was using what we said, essentially, to do that.

Tell us about the arrest. Well, Rader had been taking these chapters and photocopying them, and then he'd take the photocopies and copy them on another one so that you'd have these various generations of photocopies, not tied to any given machine. And that was time consuming. He knew how to use a computer.

And so he wanted to know. He asked the cyber cop, can they trace an email? And the cyber cop erroneously told him no. So he thought, well, maybe that's the same as true, but computer disks. So he asked the task force, can you track me, put something in the newspaper to the effect that it's safe for me to send you a computer disc. And I will give you instructions from there. And I'm sure they were elated.

They were like, dude, BDK is such an idiot. The idiot part was using a disc he had used in the church computer. If he had used a brand new disc in a library computer, they wouldn't have tracked him. Not so easy. So they pull up this stuff and it says on there, like the metadata or whatever, but it says the Lutheran church that he worked at and his name on it. And the name Dennis.

Not his whole name, just Dennis, because he was. was the president of the church council there. And he had been using that computer for notes. And he thought he could erase the notes and have a clean disc. Now, that's why I say if he'd used a completely new disc and a computer that he didn't use ordinarily, that would have been a different story. Instead, he erased the disc he was using and sent that. So now they had it. They also had surveillance video of a black SUV in a Home Depot parking lot. And when they went to where Rader lived, they saw that black, which was his son's car, they saw the black SUV sitting there. They put together a few other items and realized this is the guy. And so they arrested him.

They actually, the irony is they studied his routines, the way he had studied victim routines. And they figured out he went home to lunch every day from his job in Park City as a compliance. officer, and so they could get him on the way home, which is what they did. Wow, that's pretty poetic. So was anyone home in his family at the time of his arrest? Well, his wife would have been waiting for him for lunch, but I think she was not there because she was coming home from her job. Because the story I'm told, and again, she has never given an interview, but they told her they'd arrested him, and she never went in that house again. What did he say when he was arrested? Did he say anything to the police, like immediately in that moment?

He said, hello, Mr. Landware, because he knew who Ken Landware was, and tell my wife it won't be home for lunch. Do you know anything about what the conversation was like when police had to break it to his wife and kids? Well, Carrie writes about it in her book. The FBI came to her. And that's the daughter. Yeah, she's the daughter. And they had used medical tests to get, you know, to do a DNA. and so they broke it to her.

She lived in Michigan at the time, and they broke it to her. I don't know what happened with his son. You know, I don't know. I wrote from his point of view, so it's hard for me to address what other people think or say. Do you think he was relieved to be caught or upset he couldn't keep killing? He was upset.

He's upset to this day that he made a stupid move. And no, another myth. that they want to be caught because they don't. Very few. There have been a few who have turned themselves in, but very few. And the idea that they have a conscience and really want to be caught and stopped is just not true. In your communications with Dennis Rader,

what was the most haunting thing he told you? Nothing haunts me about it. I don't. It's hard to put anything into what's the worst or the best or the... it doesn't really haunt me because it's a clinical study. And yeah, I don't like hearing what he did to a little girl or to, you know, mother of these three kids or really to any of his victims. Of course, I don't like hearing it. You are able to totally listen to it and take the emotion out of it, it sounds like.

Pretty much. Yeah. And I guess that would, you would have to be able to do that to do your job. It's not like he was the first serial killer I ever studied or talked to. He's just the most in-depth. I knew plenty of stuff from what others had done before I ever met Dennis Raider. So by the time I'm working with him, you know, I have a pretty extensive base of information on what killers have done to victims. He's certainly not the worst by any stretch of the imagination.

After his arrest, law enforcement found photographs of BTK himself at the crime scenes. Some of those photographs have been made public. And to me, they're some of the most disturbing pictures I've ever seen. And I love true crime. I read. I watch it all the time. But these pictures scared the absolute crap out of me. What was he doing in the photos of his crime scenes?

Well, there was kind of an amusing moment during the interrogation. And I have the tape of, you know, all the hours he talked to them, where they ask him, what men did you kill? Because we have these photographs of men being bound. And he goes, oh, that's me. Like, doesn't everybody do this? It was a real odd response. like, oh, that's me. I didn't kill. That's not somebody I killed. And he, from boyhood, he had been binding himself and burying himself in sand and doing all these compression

types of exercises that are part of autoerotic sexual activity. He'd hang himself, he'd sometimes hang himself upside down from a tree, he'd handcuff himself, he'd do all. kinds of things often dressed as a victim, dressed in female clothing or slips or something, because this was a sexual fantasy for him. And he's not that unusual, frankly, and that kind of activity. But he was, he's the original selfie king because he had figured out how to take a Polaroid camera and hook it up to be remote so that he could take pictures of himself doing these things. I mean, he's like hanging upside down. from trees and stuff with ropes and everything, wearing the victim's clothing and everything. It's just one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Now, this August, the Associated Press,

reported that Raider was considered the prime suspect in two killings in Oklahoma and Missouri. Why don't you believe that he did those killings? I'm not taking a stand one or the other, but I do know the Missouri investigators have said he is not their prime suspect. Most of that is coming from the Osage County Sheriff out of Oklahoma who believes he's the prime suspect in both. But I've yet to seem physical evidence that links him. And Raider says, it isn't me and why wouldn't I confess and get more fame?

Because that's what motivates him is being famous far more than. than anything else. But his daughter, his daughter, Carrie, has said that she does think it was him. So it's interesting because he says, no, it wasn't, and I would tell you if it was, but she thinks it is. And you're kind of in the middle. You're like, well, I haven't seen the evidence. I want to see evidence. Every single bit of, every item that's been put forth as maybe this is evidence can be interpreted in more than one way. The only way you're going to break that impasse is get it tested. You're really big on Facebook. Is that you're really big on Facebook, is that true? I'm on Facebook. What do you mean big? Like you post a lot. That's like the social media

platform you use a lot for people to see your work and communicate with you and everything, correct? Right. And where can they find? So what would you be under on Facebook? There's a fans of Catherine Ramsland page. There's a Catherine Ramsland page that I have probably two pages, but most of what I do professionally, I will post on the bands of Catherine Ram'sland page, some kind. I often post the blogs because I've been writing a blog for psychology today for the past 10 years, and I will often post that to usually that's a brief thing about murders or, you know, dark things of some kind or another. Yeah, so Facebook is the medium I use most often because I don't like having to read my phone. You can't post on Instagram without doing that.

I don't like doing that. I'm old. And you are currently a professor and you teach this kind of stuff. You teach courses on serial killing and forensic psychology and things like that, correct? Now, I know that you cannot talk about the Idaho Four case and Brian Koberger who studied under you. Is that because you're currently writing a book about it? Nope. Okay. Well, if you do, if you do ever write a book about it, I hope you'll come back on and talk to us about that. Dr. Ramseland, thank you so much for coming on the spillover.

You're welcome. I know that she said she wasn't writing a book on Brian Coburger, but I don't know. If you've written about all these other cases and a massive case like Brian falls into your lap like that, wouldn't you write about it? Now, she said she only likes cases that are interesting that you can learn from. And I feel like he fits all that criteria, you know, taking her class to literally learn how to be a serial killer. Like, it's too perfect. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see if there is a book that drops after his trial or not. By the way, she, if you watch this on YouTube, real Alex Clark on YouTube,

she totally reminded me of like the Anna Wintour of criminology. Did you get that vibe? Her personality, her haircut, totally reminded me of Anna. Anyway, I have a little surprise for you. Because of the holiday next week, you're getting the next spillover early at 9 p.m. Pacific Tuesday, midnight, Eastern Wednesday. That way you can watch or listen while you're traveling or watch with your family. We've talked so much about the ethics around certain fertility methods. And next week's guest was born via sperm donor to two lesbian moms. He became a Christian

and now speaks to people about evangelizing and sharing Christ to LGBTQ people in your life. His story is fascinating from the faith and big fertility perspective. And I thought that it would be a great episode to drop right before you might be around family with different beliefs than you. If you have anxiety about talking to them despite your differences. That episode drops 9 p.m. Pacific Tuesday, midnight Eastern Wednesday, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Or, of course, you can watch it by subscribing to Real Alex Clark on YouTube. Don't forget to leave a five-star review, especially if you enjoy the true crime episodes. I'm Alex Clark and this is the spillover.

Love you mean it. Bye.