Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “STORIES FROM AN FBI DIVER: Serial Killer Israel Keyes, Laci Peterson, & TWA Flight 800.” - with Bobby Chacon

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

When you think of missing person cases, you might imagine groups of volunteers scouring fields or search dogs sifting through a forest or even faces on milk cartons from a past life. But not all disappearances are landlocked. Some crimes are buried deep beneath cold water, which is why it takes a specially trained individual to search depths where no one else can or will go. To tell the unique story of these professional divers is none other than Bobby Chacon – former FBI Special Agent, as we...

Warning, listener discretion is advised. In 1996, a 747 leaving JFK and carrying 230 people crashed a few minutes after takeoff into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving no survivors. Then, in 2002, Lacey Peterson, who was over seven months pregnant, went missing. Her body was later found in the San Francisco Bay Shore, along with her infant sons. 10 years later, an 18-year-old Alaskan girl named Samantha Koenig was dismembered, and her body parts were horrifically hidden underneath a frozen lake. The common denominator between all of these cases is that they all required the expertise of the FBI dive team to recover the bodies in any additional evidence. It's a fascinating career that not many people know much about, which is why I asked today's guest to establish the FBI's underwater forensic program. to educate and enlighten us on one of the most unique careers in the world.

He also worked on all of those cases I just mentioned and many others. He spent 27 years in the FBI as a special agent on a variety of assignments from mafia cases to terrorism and forensic expertise. He retired in 2014, but his career didn't stop being cool at all because he's now a technical advisor for criminal minds, along with, yes, our other FBI friend Jim Clementi, who we've had on the show twice. He is a passionate storyteller with a lifetime of adventures to share with us today. Please welcome veteran FBI special agent and attorney Bobby Chaconne to The Spillover. What in the world does it mean, Bobby, to work in aquatics with the FBI, and how did you come to basically establish the FBI's dive team?

Well, what it means, first of all, is if you're familiar with what CSI teams do, like, you know, we've seen on television countless times. We do the same thing. We're trained to do the same thing underwater, which is, you know, there's obviously some challenges in that, and you have to do things a little differently. But how it came about was in the early 1980s in the New York office of the FBI, there was a need for some divers to be, to go in the water and do some stuff for an FBI case that they really was sensitive about and they couldn't let local law enforcement handle it.

That's how it was done previously. the FBI would just reach out and ask, you know, an NYPD or, you know, a small sheriff's office locally to do diving for them. And so throughout the 80s, the FBI started standing up its own response teams, its own crime scene teams and its own. And then in the New York office, we had one small dive team. And then in the mid-90s, I came on the FBI in the late 80s. By the mid-90s, that team, that one little team in New York was getting so busy throughout the FBI that they had to expand. So I was working the mafia and some drug gangs at the time as a regular investigative FBI agent in the field. And so they put out a call for divers.

And this would be what we call a collateral duty. So I would do my investigations and do my mafia stuff during a day. And I would train with the dive team, you know, on the side. And then if there were missions, we would go out on the mission. So that was 1995. And in 1996, the team deployed to Atlanta for the Olympics. And we were diving in Lake Lanier, which was the venue for the Rowing, the Olympic Rowing, and they had these big floating stands, only 20,000 people.

Obviously, you can imagine it went very deep into the lake to support that. And so we were diving under there, you know, and then two days before, I never actually made it to Atlanta. I was scheduled to go on Friday, the opening ceremonies on Friday. And Wednesday of that week, TWA Flight 800, 747 from JFK Airport, New York to Paris. crashed 11 miles off of Long Island, New York. And so all the divers was sent out there. And so that was my baptism by fire.

I was on the team about a year. And I was in the middle of the ocean, we're covering 230 bodies from the ocean floor that perished in TWA Flight 800. So it was my first introduction. I had been to homicide scenes, working gangs and the mafia. But this was the first time we're actually, I was responsible.

for putting my hands on these victims' bodies and putting them in bags at the bottom of the ocean and bringing them back. And we did that and we recovered many dive teams took off the Navy and the NYPD, many, many other dive teams. And we recovered all 230 victims. And so that was kind of the start

to put us on a trajectory that by 1998, the FBI laboratory said, you guys are so busy, we need to replicate what you've done New York in other field offices for the FBI. We need this resource available more because your one team can't possibly support the entire bureau. So I was in the right place at the right time, and they chose me to be the first full-time diver in the FBI history. And that means that 100% of my duties were nothing but diving. And like I said earlier, the collateral duty was usually

what it was. We kind of trained part-time, and then we went out on missions. Now, I was assigned 100% to diving, that's all. And to build not only the New York team, but now build teams in Washington, D.C., Miami, and Los Angeles. And so I spent the next two years doing that, working with the FBI Laboratory in Quantico and then going around and liaisoning with places like the U.S. Navy Dive School in Panama City Beach, Florida,

the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a robust dive program in their dive schools up in Seattle. So academic diving, military diving, scientific diving. I immersed myself in that world and we built this program, the underwater forensic program. It took about two, three years to get all the other three teams online. And that's how the program exists now. We have four dive teams spread throughout the FBI and we cover the globe. Well, when I think of forensic crime scenes on dry land, you know, I imagine blood splatter, like that stays where it is.

if items fall down, if there's furniture that's tipped over in a struggle, like that stays where it is so that when investigators then come on the scene, they can see everything. But when I think of an underwater crime scene, I can't imagine how difficult that is because don't things float around and change? Like, how do you keep track of evidence and things in an underwater investigation? Well, in reality, the underwater world where we have to operate is usually not. not the crime scene. There are some occasions. We do an underwater post-blast investigation course where we map out if something explodes underwater or at the surface of the water and then settles on the bottom, we do map out where each piece of evidence was because later on the bomb technicians

who are reconstructing that want to know how far everything traveled because that'll tell them how much explosives we use and what type of explosives. But generally, for example, our bread and butter if we're looking for a gun that was thrown in the water. That's not a crime scene. That's a disposal site. But we have to recover that weapon in a way that preserves any possible fingerprints, any possible other DNA that might be on the weapon. And so that the people back at the lab can run their examinations and they have tests properly. So we used to see a lot of times in law enforcement newsletters, the diver, the police diver comes up and he's holding the gun, waving it, And that's the worst thing you can do.

You don't want the air starting to oxidize the water that's on that weapon, then you have rust and stuff. So you have to package it underwater. So we worked with our counterparts, the examiners at the lab, the scientists at the lab, and said, okay, you're our clients. How do you want us to package this stuff when we find it? What do we do?

And so we worked with them on the protocols. We established protocols. For example, something as simple as a gun at the bottom of a pond, our divers will take a pre-fabricated container and then scoop that gun with the mud and water that's all around it on what's found. Got it. And then package it and get it to the lab still in the water, still in the mud that it was found in so that they can then maximize whatever laboratory processes they're going to apply to it. So, okay, so you mentioned, you know, you've had to dive for bodies, obviously body parts, firearms. what are some of the most in your career,

random or weird, bizarre things that you've had to dive for? Well, a tooth. Just a tooth. Yeah, just a single tooth that was missing from a skull that was found. It's more like places, for example, we were asked to go down to the south.

I think it was Alabama, Mississippi on a hog farm, and they had this basically a concrete pool that was about 20 feet wide by about 60 feet long and about eight feet deep, and it contained nothing but excrement from the hogs. No, you had to dive in that? No, I actually refused, you know, because it was basically mud at the bottom, gelatinous middle and then a little bit of liquid at the top. And I'm not going to put my divers in there.

And so you can drain it if you want, then you can rake it or whatever. So we did get really weird requests like that. Well, I didn't even think about an FBI dive team. I'm only thinking water. I didn't think like other substances that you'd have to potentially dive in. It was another case that we were asked to go find a pair of handcuffs that were thrown off a bridge off of New Jersey because they were using a kidnapping and a murder. And there was an informant that was telling us we were right about here on the bridge when we threw it.

So we went out there. We spent three weeks diving under that bridge. And we never found the handcuffs, but we found 13 handguns under that. under that bridge. And so we later found out from the local New Jersey police department detectives that that bridge was kind of a favorite of the local mafia gang that would, they would often like if they murdered somebody or did something with a weapon, that's where they threw it off. And so we turned each of those guns over to the local police department for possible use and unsolved homicides and things like that. But yeah, so we searched in St. Louis for a car that had been in the water for 35 years and there was a body in the trunk. Still? It was still in there? Yeah. Well, the skeletal remains, you know. There's a big difference with

water. So at the lab, what we did was we had them dig these trenches. And so we put different types of water. So you have salt water, fresh water, cold water, warm water, moving water, still water, all of those different factors impact how the evidence is going to be treated underwater. For example, I remember recovering four dead Russian mobsters from a deep, deep lake in northern California. They had been in the water six months. And when we recovered them, you could still see, there were three males and a female, and you could still see the stubble on the male's faces because they were almost as fresh as the day they were put in. But I thought when a body was underwater, they like blow up and they look totally distorted and unrecognito. It depends on the

water. So this was a deep water lake. It was about 400. 150 feet. It was cold and it was fresh water, no movement, very little sea life. So when they went down there, they were weighted down with those 45 pound gym plates. So they were going to stay at the bottom. And they got covered with a silt. So when we put our mini robot down and flew right to them, all we saw was like a little something at the bottom, but we couldn't see until we used our propellers to kind of move the silt around. Then you saw the bodies. But they were fresh. because there was no sea life.

It was cold and it was still. You contrast that with the TWA Flight 800 search that I mentioned earlier. And within a week of that, within five or six days, those bodies were being consumed by crabs, lobster, fish. So they were in an advanced state of decay very quickly, whereas these Russians were in the water six months. And it looked like they had been put in there the day before. So really the temperature of the water, the salinity, fresh water versus salt water. whether the water's moving or still, whether this marine life, all that determines, you can't really make assumptions on all bodies in all water.

It really depends on the body, whether there's puncture wounds. If it's a stabbing victim, normally, depending on the stabs, they may stay because your body floats because it's like a balloon and the gas inside will get trapped. If you have puncture wounds, that gas just will off gas out of the body and the body will stay on the bottom. So there's a lot of factors that go into that. Yeah, that is so interesting. I definitely didn't know about just the different types of water, how that would, you know, preserve a body differently, I guess. What was your deepest dive ever? Well, the Russians were 450 feet and that was deep. But we, we, we had a limit of about 2,000 feet, but we had robots that

would do that work. I never sent my divers deeper than, say, 300 feet on some tech rigs. And that was only when we absolutely have to. For the Russians, for example, I sent the robots down to 400 feet. The robot had a gripper arm. We could actually grab the body, lift it off the bottom and bring it up. And then the divers went down to about 50 feet when the robot was up to about 50 feet. And then the divers bagged the body while it was hanging below the robot at 50 feet. And then we pushed the robot away, and the divers brought the body the rest of the way. So depth wasn't really a factor because we would use robots. Anything deeper than a couple of hundred feet, we would use our robots.

Now, was the first high profile case that the public would at least be familiar with that you had in your career, the TWA flight 800 then? 800, yes, yes. Okay, so let's talk about that. So a lot of people that listen to the show are Gen Z, so they may not even know about this case. at all. Right. It crashed 12 minutes after takeoff. This was just, this was a flight that had like you said, 230 people on board, correct? Coming from JFK that was supposed to be going to Paris. Is that right? That's right. And so they crash immediately in the Atlantic Ocean. How big was the area in the ocean

that you were recovering passengers then after that? Well, it was huge. And ultimately, pieces of that aircraft were covered on the beach, some of it. from all the way from Delaware up to Maine. And that's how it spread out because you have, you know, the Gulf, the Gulf stream there along the East Coast. It was a large, large search area. But it did boil down to two main areas. And what happened was when we first mapped the bottom, Noah brought up a ship that did laser

line scan sonar at the bottom. And it looked like for, it looked like for a minute when we first got the, the data, that the plane had made an attempt to turn around and return to Kennedy Air because the cockpit in the front half of the plane was actually to the west of the fuselage and where the wings were. And if you remember those 747s, they were not really commercially used anymore, but it had that little hump on the top. It would look like a hump and then the fuselage evened out. The plane came apart right at the end of that hump with that hump on the 747 hits the main fuselage. What happened was we later determined it was climbing and because it broke off right there, the cockpit and the first

class cabin went this way down. And the rest of the cabin was open now and it had the wings and the four engine still running. And so the rest of the plane actually kept climbing about another thousand feet. With half of it off. With about a third of it off. The first third of the plane. So they're just sitting there. The plane is going up and you're just sitting there with half the plane chopped off. Yeah, you're looking into the sky, into blackness. And there's obviously a rush of air coming in. And then after about a thousand feet, then it actually went nose down and it crashed pretty much intact. And so when the plane broke in half, did people have any idea, okay, something is wrong or was it like out of nowhere in your flight?

Well, the engineers tell us it happened very quickly. It was a catastrophic failure. It was as if a bomb went off, but it didn't. It was an explosion, but it wasn't a man-made explosion. It was an explosion because of somebody. faulty wire in an empty fuel tank. So 230 people is only half the plane. That's a big plane. So first of all, airlines always operate on the least amount of fuel as you can to make it to your destination because that's where the cost comes in and they save money by flying with less

fuel. What happened was there was 230 people is only about half a load of that plane and they only use the fuel tanks in the wings. So they left the center fuel tank, which is the big one, empty, because they didn't need that much fuel because it was light load to get over. what an empty fuel tank does is it has fumes in it. A full fuel, a full tank of gas or fuel is less explosive than an empty one. Because fumes under pressure are what caused an explosion. And so what you had is you had this big empty fuel tank with nothing but all these fumes in there. And then there was wiring harnesses that was running through that big, big tank because of engineering, that's the way it was worked.

That plane was delayed about two and a half to three hours on a very warm, lie night in New York City, very humid to keep the passengers comfortable while they were waiting. They had the air condition is really pumping and pumping and pumping. So there was an overheat of the system at about 11,000 feet and a spark happened in that wiring harness in the middle of that fuel pressurized fuel tank, which was filled with pressurized fumes. And it was basically like a bomb going off. And you guys investigated it to see if it was a bomb or terrorism. But like you said, it was just a total freak accident with the mechanics. It was not a bomb.

That's right. That's what the engineers had determined later on. Now, there are many conspiracy theorists out there that believe it was a bomb or it was a Navy, U.S. Navy ship shooting it down. All of those have been debunked. See, I always assumed in a plane crash that people would just disintegrate in the air. But you were, this is what's fascinating to me, Bobby, is that you guys were able to recover every single body. How?

Yeah. or DNA, at least, of every single body, because some of them were consumed. The longer it took us to get them, the more sea life consumed them. But no, bodies don't just disintegrate. Now, that happened in Flight 93, Pennsylvania on 9-11, sure, because that plane went straight down, nose down, into the ground at such a high velocity, that that's what happened. Those bodies all simply disintegrated. But in a regular plane course like this, where it landed in the water, those bodies were

very intact. Most of the ones we, you know, there were body parts towards the end, but in the beginning, we were getting whole intact bodies. They were all, some of them were still strapped in their seats. Some of them had the oxygen mass on and things like that. So yeah, so closer to the blast site, the engineers tell us and the medical examines tell us that those people might have died right away from a, from a neck, a whiplash, from a broken neck. But certainly other people in that plane probably survived for a little bit. It's just unfathomable to think of you going to work and what your day of going to work looks like. And that took four months. We were diving every day for four months on that on that site. And, you know, by the end, we were just, we were more interested in, you know,

because we had gotten all the bodies back and we were more interested in parts of the plane. And then the FAA, we built that plane or the NTSB actually in the museum. And, uh, you know, we were more interested in Washington, I think it is. It's in two separate hangers. The fuselages in one and all the seats are laid out in the other. And so it was part of their museum. I don't know if it still is, but you could actually, people could actually go see the records that was recovered. I think they said over 91% of the plane was recovered ultimately. Well, just to piggy back off of plane crashes, I have to ask you while I have you here. For anybody who's forgotten in 2014, Malaysia Flight 370 was flying from Malaysia to Beijing that had 239 people on board, it completely vanished.

So what do you think happened to Malaysia Flight 370? Yeah, that's a tough one. I've, you know, I don't want to propagate any conspiracy theories, but. Oh, that's all right. You can do that on this show. That's a tough one. I personally, and then again, this is someone that I don't know a lot of privy to the inside investigation.

But to me, one of the pilots deliberately took that plane off course for a while, because we have had, we've known, not in this particular state, but we have others that are known pilot suicides, right? We had German wings and we had the Egypt air, both of which we know the pilots were committing suicide because we could hear them talking on the cockpit voice recorder. And so those are, those are at least two that I know where the plane crash was pilot suicide. There are some theories out there that MH370 was that, was a pilot suicide. He took the plane off course, and then he might have lost the nerve to crash it himself, but simply put it on a course that it knew he would run out of fuel, and then it would just simply go into the ocean. And the ocean is vast enough that, I mean, there was an Air France. I'll give you an example. There was an Air France plane.

It took up at a Rio de Janeiro. I think it was 2010, 2011, headed for Paris. And it crashed about three miles out into the ocean. And when it first crashed, they actually had some bodies on, about 50 of the bodies were on the surface. So they knew exactly where that plane had impacted the ocean. So they had a very good idea where it was. It still took them two years to find that graph. It took them two years.

It took the French to send a Navy submarine over and to go down deep because the water was much deeper over there. So even though they actually had a very good kind of last known position, which is what we rely on in my business, even though they had that, it still took them two years to actually find the plane and recover the rest of the bodies that weren't on the surface initially. So the ocean is vast. And even in lakes and rivers and ponds and searches that I was involved in, my job in the beginning of anything like that is always to narrow down the search area as much as possible. possible because we because the water is always pitch black. And so if you're off by three feet, you can miss it. So you have to know, you have to establish your search area as best you could define what you're looking for. We went up to Northern California search for Lacey Peterson. Oh yeah. I have tons of questions for you about for a month. And and and and so we didn't find,

we were looking for pieces of parts of her that were missing when, when her body was found. And, And, you know, I'm convinced that we were, we were searching in the wrong place, so we would have found her. We searched for the shuttle, the shuttle Columbia that crashed in 2003. We searched when we found some important parts of that crash on the Louisiana, Texas border there. So we were, you know, it's all a matter of looking in the right place. Picture yourself in a denim jumpsuit, healed cowgirl boots, screaming USA at the top of your lungs, with thousands of other conservatives as Chase Rice walks out on stage. This is, of course, after seeing freedom-loving patriots like Tucker Carlson, Ali Stucky, and Charlie Kirk, tear up the stage right before.

This is an actual event, and it's called America Fest, hosted by Turning Point USA in the stunning and beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, December 17th through 20th. See the biggest speakers and personalities in the conservative movement during the day and then by night. The stage turns into conservative Coachella with acts like Chase Rice, Riley Green, Ray Lynn, Nicole C. Mullen, and more. Come worship, party like it's 1776 and plan to save America at America Fest this December. Get tickets before they sell out at AMFest.com with code poplittics for 25% off. AMFest.com with code poplittics for 25% off. I can definitely tell talking to you that you're a New Yorker through and through. I mean, your accent is apparent to me.

Where were you when 9-11 happened? I was on United Flight 91, lifting off at a Newark airport. I was about two Nautical miles from the towers, and I was watching the first plane hit the North Tower as we were taking off at Newark at 946 in the morning. And so as an FBI agent, I mean, what are you hearing? What are you doing? Are they asking you to help or what happens?

Well, at that point, United was one of the airlines that if you were like on, I think it was Channel 9 of their in-flight audio, you could actually listen to the cockpit. talking and so I'm listening for that. I'm in a window seat facing east and I'm watching the lower Manhattan. I'm a New Yorker and my brother was NYPD. My dad was already retired for the NYPD. I had three other armed FBI agents on board with me. They were divers. We were on our way to Michigan to do a dive for the Michigan State Police. And, you know, I saw something hit the tower and I just saw sparkles and what looked like flame and some smoke. And I kind of looked at the seat,

you know, one of my comrades was a couple of seats behind me. And we just kind of shrugged our shoulders at each other. We were just climbing out of Newark. And so we were flight 91, Newark to Chicago. We were connecting in Chicago to go to Michigan to go further up in Trevor City. And United 93 was our sister flight, one ahead of us in the flight path. So they were Newark to San Francisco. And so we were at the same planes and both 757s. And the pilots, of our flight had had coffee with those pilots that morning in the United Pilots Lounge talking about the path and the weather and things like that because we were following the same path. They were up until Chicago.

Then they kept going to San Francisco. So the pilots, when we fly on, the pilots always know where we are sitting. And so the co-pilot shortly after came back and kind of signaled the four of us to meet her in the back alley. And so just to pause you, when you're being signaled by the crew on this fly, after what you just saw, which was kind of weird, in the Manhattan skyline, what's going through your mind as you're getting up out of your seat then to go talk to the crew? Well, you know, I had heard the pilots talking and then they were, you know, then they were

kind of using cryptic language on the audio and then all of a sudden channel line went silence. So I thought that was odd. And I thought whatever they were talking about that just happened in New York, they were talking about to each other and then they turned off the radio. So, you know, wire away, I don't know, you know, I'm a New York. I remember years ago when a small plane crashed into the Empire State Building as a, I'm considered, I thought it was an act. It could have been an accident. Although I didn't actually see the plane, you know, your memory placed strict.

I saw something moving into the building, but then I was like, was that an explosion from the building or what was happening? Because I didn't actually see the plane. I just saw the hit and the explosion. And I, you know, I think I see something moving into the building. And so I knew something was up because we very rarely, you know, I traveled with my gun, my whole career since 1987. So I'm used to being on a plane with a weapon, and it's very rare that they ever ask for your help. And so when she got all four of us in the back, you know, and it was, you know, the terrorists chose a Tuesday morning because it's the least travel, was the least traveled day of the week.

And off flight, like all the flights are only half empty, more than half empty. Nobody was in the back of the plane. The last 10 or 15, 20 rows were empty. So she's telling us in the back alley what she knows. knows. Remember, this is the opening minutes. So there's all kinds of misinformation, right? So she's telling us that there's a couple of dozen planes, 24 planes missing, unaccounted for planes are being flown into buildings all up and down the eastern seaboard. So we're getting all this stuff. And so, you know, we decided we had to keep at least our plane safe. And so I went

into the cockpit to talk to the pilot with the co-pilot. And then I had a couple of my guys stand in the alley right outside the cockpit. And, you know, I could hear the pilot trying to raise in United 93, United 91, this is 93. And so I guess we were point to point. We were the closest. We were supposed to be the closest to them. And I said, well, I was talking to the co-pilot as he's talking or trying to raise 93. And I said, you know, where are they? And she said, well, there's supposed to be one ahead of us, but they're not there. And I said, well, how do you know they're not there? She goes, well, they shut their transponder off.

And I said, why would they shut their transponder off? And at that point, I think the pilot kind of was listening to us with one ear and he kind of barked back. He said, they wouldn't. And then I left him alone because he was tense. And so I said to her, what's happening here? You told me they just a transponder off. And he just, I said, what does that mean?

And she, I could say, I could tell she was getting. a little upset and she said that means they're not flying the aircraft. And if you know aviation policies and procedures, you know, throughout the 70s, we had a rash of political hijackings and things and the pilots were always instructed and always taught to take the people where they want to go. They want to go to Cuba, take them to Cuba. They want to go to Angola, take them to Angola, wherever they want to go. Get the plane on the ground safely and we'll negotiate for the safe return to the passengers and crew. That's, that was what everybody was instructed to do. Never give up control of your aircraft.

Get it on the ground safely. And so she knew that if they were not in control of that aircraft, they were probably dead. And they were probably removed by force and killed. And so I could see that in her eyes. She didn't say that to me. I just could, I could see that. I could feel it.

It was palpable. So do you guys have to immediately land the plane? No, that was up to them in the FAA. Everything was going crazy. We never made it near Chicago, which was our destination. We ultimately landed. in Detroit. They actually didn't know where they were going to put us. It was such chaos. And then we were one of the last planes to land in Detroit. And I looked out the window imagining I was

going to see Detroit on the downtown Detroit on fire in the distance. Because at this point, I think we're under attack. I think this is red dawn. I think this is a coordinated, huge attack. And, you know, I didn't see that. But we didn't have a gate. So they got one of those stairs to come and get us down. And we have to wait for a luggage right there on the tarmac. And, um, As with, you know, I could hear people talking about the towers being down. And as a native New Yorker, I almost, not that I feel guilty, but I almost, I've mixed feelings on it, but I remember thinking, almost inside laughing at these people, but the towers fell, I'm thinking these are out of town, these country folk, they don't understand, you know, those towers can't fall. I watched those towers get built when I was a kid. I've been up in those towers.

I was up in those towers three weeks earlier. There's no way they can fall. are massive buildings. These are probably people from the Midwest, never been to New York, don't understand how big these buildings are and stuff. And so I'm walking. And so we got our luggage and we're walking through the airport. I know all the rental cars are gone. We got to get back to New York. The four of us are all New Yorkers. We got to get back. We don't know how many of our colleagues or family has perished. And so there was a time right as we're walking through this crowded terminal. I remember a bar, had one of those big old big screen TVs and the crowd was around it.

And that's when I first saw the towers actually falling, probably on repeat. It wasn't happening at the time. And I just, I just was in shock. The four of us didn't say word. We were just in shock. And then I just had to snap in to get us a vehicle. I called the FBI field office in Detroit. They were like, okay, you're in lock.

We don't have any vehicles for you. But Ashcroft, the attorney general, was supposed to be in Detroit that day. He stayed back in Washington, obviously. But his advance team was there the day before. And they have two 15 passenger vans because the AG, and his entourage were on the way, they never got off the ground, but they have an extra van. If you want it, you can take it. They're driving back to D.C. I said, I want it. Tell them to stop by the airport on the way out of town. So they came screeching up. They gave us the 15

passenger van. The four of us threw our luggage in there. We just started to drive back to ground zero. And it was a very solemn drive. This is what was I was curious about when, you know, they say that on 9-11, if you weren't born yet and you're listening, that was when the world stopped. And so I wondered for people like you, FBI agents, you were supposed to be going to Michigan to work a case. Did you just not do that? Like you just went back to New York, you know, what ended up happening? Everything stopped. Like every FBI office in the world, remember we have worldwide. We have 90 offices overseas. Every FBI office stopped everything they were doing. And this was the only priority. And so I knew that the Michigan thing could wait, you know, they knew. They weren't going to be mad at us for, you know,

And we all had different jobs to do once we got back to New York. But that drive back to New York was a pretty solemn one. There wasn't much said between the four of us, although we did kind of start talking about how many people we think were lost. All of us would New York is I know those buildings. I know the subway station under there in the mall. And I think out of the four of us, it was a morbid predictions. But I think the lowest prediction was 30,000 people died. That was the lowest of the four guesses that we were just going.

Oh, my God. and like how many people do we know that died, right? I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey right across the river looking at Manhattan. You know, we knew our office colleagues would be responding to it. And, you know, it took a while for them to fall. So, you know, it was a miracle that that few people died. And every one of those is important. I don't discount that.

But, you know, it was really a shocker to me. My guess was probably 10 times that amount would have perished, you know, that day, knowing those buildings and knowing that that area. And I did have some friends that we lost. And I did, you know, obviously I had some colleagues that we lost from the FBI in the New York office. And in Hoboken, in my building, I lived in a five-story apartment building. And we lost six people from my building that lived in my building. And so, yeah, it was we got back to New York. It was late at night because we had to stop at Newark Airport and get our cars out of long-term parking. then to get into Manhattan, it was like an armed camp.

I remember New Jersey State Troopers with M16s and stuff, getting through the Lincoln Tunnel with a Holland Tunnel. You know, lots of checkpoints. We had, you know, we ID ourselves. We were all in separate cars and got to Ground Zero, you know, parked and then had to walk in a report for duty. I think I got there. It was dark, probably around midnight, maybe.

I don't know, maybe even later. Time, for those of us that were there and working time, just didn't really see. We didn't have a sense of time. You just, you work and too retired. I would drive home. I lived in a home open five minutes away. I would collapse in a cloud of dust.

My wife is the executive producer of the Olympics. She was in Salt Lake City producing the 2002 Winter Olympics already. So I was living, you know, she was already out. And luckily, because I was a zombie, I would get home and I would collapse and I would wake up six or eight hours later, shower, put my flight suit back on and go back to ground zero and continue working every day. And it was tough. It's a blur now.

My memory's kind of come and go from it. But, you know, I remember going a lot of funerals. Every couple of days we would get notices, okay, this group goes to this funeral, and you go to that funeral and firemen, police funerals, FBI funerals. We lost one agent, active duty. And then, of course, John O'Neill, who was our boss who had just retired two weeks earlier and took over his head of security for the World Trade Center, perished in his office in the South Tower.

And so, yeah, I actually wrote and produced an audible docu-series that went out last year on the 20th anniversary called After the Fall, and it documents the FBI's investigation into the 9-11 attacks, which was the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. It's an excellent, excellent, excellent show. I listen to that. It is so good. Yeah. You hear directly from the people that were there. It's in their voices. they tell their stories.

And it's a myriad of stories from the investigators who went overseas, tracking the terrorists, to the guys who worked at the morgue, to the people down at ground zero, to battle the landfill. You'll hear everybody's story to the people who dealt with the victims and victims' families. You know, I wanted to produce a project that you heard directly from the people telling the stories. Some of them had never told their stories before. It was only because I was a colleague that they even opened up. And I wanted to pay tribute to a lot of them who had done incredible work on that case.

And yeah. This is a random question. Speaking of 9-11 and all this, do you, are you familiar with the story of Tanya Head, the woman who wasn't there? She claimed to be a 9-11 survivor and the whole thing was made up. I was just curious with you being in New York, FBI, if you remember them investigating that case. But she did all this fraud telling people she was a survivor and stuff. It's fascinating.

That was just a side question. Okay, so at the very end, a little over a year after that, end of 2002, the biggest story in America was the Lacey Peterson case, which you mentioned. And to make a long story short, Lacey was seven and a half months pregnant. Eight and a half months. Oh, eight and a half? I think she was, yeah, I think she was really close. Yeah, she was almost due. She was living with her husband, Scott Peterson, in Modesto, California.

One afternoon, she goes missing, right, a couple days before Christmas. And so what can you tell us about the lady, the Lacey Peterson case, what you remember? And your thoughts on Scott Peterson still to this day maintains his innocence that he did not kill his wife. Yeah. So, you know, it was a weird story that was he was having an affair. And she was very, very pregnant. It was Christmas Eve. They have a big fight.

And he says he goes fishing on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. And then, you know, fishing is two hours away in Richmond Bay, which they don't live. live near the water. So he goes fishing and, you know, then comes back and his wife's missing. Well, then four months later, mysteriously, his wife's body surfaces in the place where he said he was fishing. You know, you don't have to, you don't have to be a genius to, you know, put that together. And so, you know, a lot of people who murdered, maintain their innocence, that's not really surprising to me. But he changed his appearance and, you know, he dyed his care, getting a lot of weight, and he was headed from Mexico when he was arrested down in

Southern California with a big amount of cash on him. He was clearly trying to get away. But he knew charges were coming, so maybe that's why. But no, but so Lacey and Connor, the baby, washed up about a mile apart from each other in Richmond Bay on the shores of Richmond Bay. Connor looked like he was just born. So the theory, the theory that the medical examiner told us is that he was probably still in her room the whole time. What we know is that Scott had made an attempt to make anchors with those clay pots you get at like Home Depot or something poured concrete in there, put anchors in there. And then in my opinion, he tied one on each wrist, one on each ankle and one around her neck, put her in his boat and sunk her in the water. While she's still alive?

No, she was dead. And he killed her at the house and then drove the two hours to the bay. There is a park ranger on one of the little islands. He actually beached it on one of these little islands out there. didn't know the park ranger on the island and then he for some reason decided not to do anything there that park ranger saw something under a tarp didn't see what was under the tarp that tarp was found about a mile down the beach somewhere um my theory is the shit that with her anchor you know her body was only in six or eight feet of water with the tide action her body was doing this and over the

months the the salt water was wearing away at her whatever was was tying her to those weights so the wrists, you know, all your joints are the weak points, right? Because they move around. And so I think that it wore down in the wrists and the ankles and neck. And then there was a big storm came through and her body was discovered the next morning after this big storm. Now, there was a laceration in her room. And so Connor was probably ejected while her body was rolling on the bottom because he was pristine. And he was not found with her. And so her hands, her head and hands and feet were missing. So they called us in to search for that.

And so we worked with Modesto PD and with a lot of other Alameda County, all these other Costa County, all these other dive teams were out there when we spent three weeks diving, looking for the anchors and the hands, feet, head, but we never found them. Why were those body parts dismembered? It just happened in the water that they just came apart. Yeah, because like, so she's anchored down and through tight action, this is happening.

So this is weakening. He's moving. He's showing you not watching. He's moving the, you know, like how you float and water. Yeah, float and then sink, float and sink, float and sink over and over four months twice a day with your tie tables. And so the salt water is acting as an abrasive. And so ultimately those things will weaken and deteriorate. And then the storm is the last thing.

That's storm surge just pushed her and broke or broke her free from her constraints. Now, the way that I came across. you Bobby and your name was actually recently in the last couple weeks, I was reading a book called American Predator, which is all about serial keys. And he killed several people, but the victim that ended up really resulting in his capture was Samantha Koenig. She was 18. She was abducted and killed by this monster in Anchorage, Alaska, 2012. You were in charge of the dive team that helped recover her body parts from a frozen lake. Could you tell the story of this case and why this case was so extraordinary for the FBI

compared to other serial killers? Just why he was just his MO, everything was so different than anything the FBI had ever dealt with. Yeah, so is real key. So I got a call. I was driving home one day on the four or five freeway in Los Angeles. And I got a call from my program manager in Quantico saying, hey, Alaska needs your Anchorage. Anchorage Field Office needs the dive team up there. they've got a victim of a serial killer under a frozen lake north of Anchorage.

And I turned around immediately, got back to my warehouse where my dive team was based and called the guys in, the men and women that worked for me. And we flew up there. And so Keyes had abducted her, kept her in a shed, murdered her, raped and murdered her the first night, but kept her in there. Then went on a cruise with his girlfriend and his daughter to Mexico. And it was February in Alaska. so the body froze out pretty good. And he's ultimately, he uses her, long story short,

he uses her debit card and then makes a ransom of the man. So we stop putting money on her debit card. And he's withdrawing money. So we're watching his withdrawals. All of the United States in the bottom. Well, the first couple are in Anchorage. And then all of a sudden he's in Arizona, New Mexico. And there's actually a trail.

So he's heading for Texas. We know that. We can kind of see his trail. So, you know, our Anchorage office is doing a fantastic, job of communicating to all the offices along this trail, and they send all the information down to Texas, because that's where he is now. And on one of the, he was very careful. Whenever he used the ATM, his face was covered, because you know, everybody knows the cameras at the ATM. His face was covered in the park far away. But one analyst, one FBI analyst,

and reviewing one of the transactions, noticed a car in the distance right in the corner, up in the corner of the video. And then they analyzed that, and they said, this is like a, whatever, a 4th, or whatever kind of car it was, white and everything. So they put a Bolo, what we call Bolo, which is beyond the lookout for. And so some very sharp deputy down in Texas is reviewing his morning papers and he sees this beyond the lookout

for this white car. Sure enough, he sees the car parked in a motel, a transient motel parking lot. He sets up on it. Keys comes out, gets in the car. They do a car stop. They search his trunk and Samantha's belongings are in there,

including her debit card. So he's done. He's in custody. They transfer him back up to Anchorage, where they say the Anchorage PD detectives and the FBI agents, again, do a masterful job at starting to interrogate keys. And he gives it up. He gives up where Samantha is. Because he wanted, this is what's also weird, is that he had a daughter, a little girl,

and he knew he was probably going to get the death penalty. And he actually wanted to die. but his whole thing was, I'll tell you where, not only where Samantha is buried, where I have bodies buried all over the United States and all these different areas, I have killed kits set up in the United States so I can go and kill more people and all this. I'll tell you where everything is, but my demand is I want an execution date. I want to know when you're going to kill me because he, and he also said, and I don't want the news about all this really getting out too much because I don't want it to ruin my daughter's life. And so the FBI was dealing with this, okay, we need. to find out where these bodies are, but we also are struggling with getting him an execution date because there was just some stuff going on with the local police and stuff, right? Well, I mean, that's just not how the system works. We can't say, okay, well, execute you. There's a process. The judge has to be adjudicated guilty. There has to be a process of death penalty cases last for years on because there's so much that they have to do with them. And so,

but we had to play the game. We had to, if he wanted a Snickers bar, we had to get him a Snickers bar. Not me. I wasn't involved in the interrogation, but the agents and detectives were doing a masterful job at keeping him talking because that was the most important thing, keeping him talking because other than Samantha, we really didn't know about any of the others. So he was giving us those. Now, he gave us Bill and Carrier up in Vermont, and I flew up there with the dive team, and we found the gun that he used. The bodies were never found. But the gun was right where he told us it was. Samantha in that lake was right where he told us she was. I mean, his memory and his recall were excellent. And so over the couple of months there after his arrest, he was opening up and we had to play this game with him to keep him talking. And he admitted to 11 homicides. He'd probably done many more than that, but he admitted to 11. And he, and he, but he was, you know, like you said, he had buried Kilkets around the country and he would fly, like when he did the murder in Vermont. He didn't fly to Vermont. He flew to Chicago, rented a car, and drove from Chicago to Vermont. He was very good at randomness. He,

knew, you know, when I took a homicide course years ago, there's two things. When you drew your Venniogram, it's, it's you have to stay random to the person and then random to the location. If you can do that, you're going to really have success in not being found. So, so because when we start a homicide, we look at the world of the victim. Who's in this victim's world that would have done this? Or if it's a random victim, who knows this area, who frequents this area that could have come across this victim in this area. He's new to stay random to both. So he, so he would drive hundreds of miles out of his way to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, he would, you know, he pick the, his downfall was, he violated his own rules on, on the last kill. He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,

knows that. He actually, he actually, he actually see some of his interrogations on YouTube, because we released all the videos, um, after he took his own life in jail. And so, um, he, he, he, he, he you know, you can see in chilling detail how how casual he discusses killing people and how this was all a game for him. And this is why it was different because he was so conscious. And then he would talk about it to us. And then now you can actually see the videos. So that's why he was different. He didn't have a victimology.

When we talked to profile, FBI profiles will tell you, they often focus on victimology. It's a type. Somebody has the type of person. or they have a type of location they like to hunt. He didn't have any of that. It was completely random. And that's why he got away with it for so long. Well, and he dismembers her and disposes of her body in this frozen lake.

In Alaska, everybody goes ice fishing. So he gets a little ice fishing hut, drills a hole. And so you guys have to go to this frozen lake. And isn't the ice like 20 inches thick? It was thicker than that. It was almost four feet. See, this is crazy. So this is what's scary because ice fishing is freaking.

And a lot of people die by accident ice fishing because you slip through that little hole and you're just done because you can't find your way back out. So explain the process of when you guys dove for Samantha, how that works going underwater in a frozen lake to find her body parts. Yeah. Once the ice gets over 10 inches thick, it gets really strong. I mean, I've driven trucks out in the middle of frozen lakes because I knew the ice was that strong. So we had an idea where he put her body parts. And so we used a three-step process. So first thing we do is put a sonar down. What I want to do is I want to limit the amount of time my divers have to spend

underwater always because look, I'm putting people in an environment that's hostile to human life. They have to be wearing life support equipment so they can breathe there. So I want to limit the time they have to spend there. So I put my sonar down. We drill a small hole about 10 inches. in diameter. We sink a cylinder, which is a sonar, and we start sonaring the bottom. It's about three feet off the bottom. And we start seeing sonar are like shadowy targets. It's not photographic.

It's more shadows. So shapes and sizes we can tell. Well, it's a very clean bottom on this particularly, and we start seeing five distinct things. And we know that Samantha isn't in five different pieces. And so the next part, we move over. We keep that in place. We drill a bigger a little bigger hole and we put on a small little robot we have different sized robots we put a small little we call rov remote operator vehicle which has a tether and we fly that down to these different five different targets that has a camera on it we get on the bottom we settle it and we turn on its video camera and then we can actually determine this whatever we don't know who it is but this is definitely human remains this is a foot this is a hand whatever and so we could see that we keep that in place now we

move over to a third hole and we we we drill a really big hole for the divers and that's when i select my two diaries that i'm going to send in the water and and we send them down to recover Samantha and the whole dive took less than an hour once we knew where she was um it was a beautiful day clear blue sky the scenery was just beautiful and as we as we brought samantha to the surface as she got to the surface we all looked up and there was this huge bald eagle flying and circling over our heads. And everybody kind of took, we did a moment of silence for her. And everybody looked up at that eagle and said, well, that's got to be like a sign from somewhere because it was just amazing. So the dive, that particular dog was not that technical. It was under ice.

But we use surface supplied air. So our divers have a big umbilical to the surface. So they don't, they'll never run out of air. Oh, that's good. And then they can always find their way back to the hole because that's where their umbilical is running out of. Have you ever been in a dive where something goes drastically wrong? Yeah. Yeah, in Long Island Sound, we were doing a dive on an espionage case, actually. And at about 60 feet, me and my partner completely ran out of air. And we were looking up at the surface.

And, you know, we have small bottles on our back that are what we call bailout bottles to go to. We went to our bailout bottles really quick. But running out of air at 60 feet is a little bit. And it was human error. It was the operator of the compressor up top, let it get down too low and the compressor kicked off. And we only had the length of the umbilical, the air in our umbilical. When we used all that up, it was gone. And so we went to our emergency procedures and we were able to breathe until they got the compressor kicked back on and stuff.

But it was a little unnerving. Yeah, it was a little unnerving. There was a small plane at the bottom that was being used to surveil some targets. in New York. And we needed to get down there and get the captain's logbook and stuff. And so, yeah, so about 60 feet, we're on our way back up, but you still have decompression issues. So you can't just shoot to the surface. So it was pretty unnerving. But, you know, it was nice to know that we had our emergency procedures. We went to our bottles, our bailout bottles. And we had, at that point, you have about 20 minutes, 30 minutes of emergency air for

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But every child that we've ever recovered, I have never forgotten. Joshua and Clemson, South Carolina, Chelsea and San Diego. Yeah, they all stay with me. I don't ever forget the children, an 18-month-old thrown in the river by our mom, the dad who killed a seven-year-old boy. You don't, you don't, the children don't leave you. they sometimes come to me in my sleep. And my wife will tell you that there have been times when I've

woken up screaming and cold sweats because those those are hard images to ever forget. And I really sympathize with, and two or three weeks to go at a school shooting in Texas, I got a dozen appearance. I do a lot of news appearances on different things. And I got a dozen appearances that day and the next day. and I turned them all down. I've done one appearance just recently on it.

And I first, obviously, always think of the victims, but I also think of the people that had to go into that classroom and provide, you know, life-saving care if they could or recover those children and even those teachers. They're going to need help getting over that. There's no, you know, children or children. When I work gangs, I would be at homicides in New York with gangbangers and mafia guys and stuff,

and it's different. when an innocent child is murdered violently and you see it. And as divers, we're the first ones to put our hands on this child since the murder did. And sometimes the fear in their faces is frozen on there. And, you know, you bring them home. You bring them home to their family, but then you bring them home to your home as well in a way. And so there's not a child that we recovered in 19 years. that I can't not recall.

I mean, I remember every one of them. And, yeah. So, but the first one was kind of tough because it's like, you know, when you, you know, when a parent murders their own child, it's very difficult. No, it's unfathomable. When you see like a Chris Watts in Colorado who can kill his two little girls and put them in those oil tanks or whatever, you just, it's just. So that's an interesting case that you bring up.

So the, that case in Colorado, so would that of required divers, because they, They were in the tanks? No. I mean, usually with tanks like that, you just generally see if you can drain them. And you can drain them into a truck and then refill the tank and stuff. So, I mean, you could. I mean, there are divers who make a living going from water tank to water tank in the Midwest and diving doing inspections because those tanks have to be inspected routinely.

And so there are divers who actually, that's their business. They go into, they climb up those really tall water towers and they go into those tanks and they do their inspections. and then they certify them off and stuff. So yeah, divers do go into tanks like that for that purpose. But in a case like that, I think there was actually oil in those tanks. So I think you would either drain the tank and then refill it. Or you can use certain tools that can kind of comb the water or the oil,

depending on how deep it is. And you can kind of come across any foreign objects that were there. You'd certainly hit a body like that and then be able to bring it up that way. Did you have to train at the body farm? I didn't. And, you know, before I left, I actually wrote up a proposal for an underwater body farm. I just don't know. Yeah, I just don't know that it would work.

It would never got instituted. And I don't know if it would work because of the degradation, the bodies would just constantly be in a sedative decomposition. And you'd have to do it really quick. But no, but I worked with so our warehouse where we had our guide team was split in half. And the other half was our, what we call our. ERT, which are evidence response team, which most people know is CSI. And the FBI, it's called ERT. Now, some people may not know what the body farm is, Bobby. So you might have to do a quick

summary. Well, the body farm, the most famous body farm is at the University of Tennessee. And it is cadavers. It is cadavers that have been, you know, donated. And they put them in different states of, you know, they'll put, they'll bury them in mud. They'll put them in a dry climate. And the body farm does decomposition studies and teams come to learn how to recover, you know, decomposing bodies. It's almost like an archeological dig. There are tools that you have to know how to use. There are certain techniques that you have to employ to really maximize the benefit of

recovering that body. It trains tons of law enforcement officers and stuff. And you can donate your body to science when you die. You can say, I want my body to be donated to the body farm. And now there's a second one, I believe, in Massachusetts. So the most famous one for years has been the only one in Knoxville. In Knoxville, the University of Tennessee. Now I understand that might be a second one at a university in Massachusetts somewhere,

but I'm not sure about that. Because it was so crowded, you could not get a class at the body farm. It took you, it could take your years. Jeez. So, so sorry. So I wanted you to explain that. But then so you were thinking maybe we should have an underwater body farm to train people. Yeah.

Because the laboratory, you know, because again, it's the more. things you can do to simulate real life, the better. So we had the lab actually dig six trenches and put guns in it and certain items of evidence to see how long an item could be under water and you can still get a fingerprint off of it, say, or DNA. And I think we're up to several months. You can have a gun in the water for several months and still get a fingerprint off. See, I bet a lot of criminals do not know that. Right, right. And again, it depends on the water. You're not going get a print after a couple of months if it's salt water and it's moving, it's tidal, or there's a current, because, you know, a fingerprint is just oil, right? Oil our body leaves behind and

in the shape of our fingerprint. So imagine salt water rushing over that gun. It's going to wash that way, that oil away eventually. But if it's cold water and it's still water, or if it sinks into a very silty bottom, a muddy bottom, it could be preserved. So you have to be very careful when you recover that stuff because there always is a chance that DNA or fingerprint can be obtained off an item, even underwater. I just imagine like an aquarium, basically, but it's just for FBI agents to do diving and you have cadavers in the in the water of this aquarium is what I imagine. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it would be all laboratory. And yeah, I did have several proposals, you know, but it's just an expensive endeavor and you have to hit it right when the funding is available and stuff. But we were

always very, very, very well funded by the laboratory. They always treated us very well. Of all the things I worked in the FBI, the FBI laboratory, the way it funded and supported the die program was absolutely stellar. It allowed us to be the best in the business. Before you die, what unsolved case do you really want to see solved? You know, I get that question a lot from TV producers. They're like, they were. Maybe I was just lucky that I solved all my cases when I was working. I don't have a famous thing. You don't have like a fascination with like the Zodiac or something. They're like, I'd love to see you that is.

I really don't. I mean, I was an investigative so long. I, you know, investigations are just investigations. You just do it. I mean, I'm glad like, I'm glad they found that DeAngelo, the, uh, golden state killer, you know, because I want, I want it for the victims. I mean, I really wish that the jail where Israel Keyes was housed would not have let him commit suicide. I mean, he was on suicide watch. I think somebody mistook that to me and watch him commit suicide.

No, it's literally the most frustrating. When I was reading that book, American Predator, if you're listening to this and you haven't read it, you have to read it. It was fantastic. But just so many problems with that case. It was frustrating as a reader. Have you seen any of his videos on YouTube?

I haven't watched those yet. Yeah, they're chilling. Yeah, I mean, I was very frustrated when I got the call because I knew he liked water. And so I knew that he would be keeping me busy for the next couple of years. We were going to recover more weapons and more possible, more bodies. And when he took the coward's way out, he hung himself in jail. And I got that call. And I was just so frustrated because I knew there were families of victims out there. Like Bill and

Lorraine Currier in Vermont, their family, they had a security earlier. Well, he said they were in like a giant landfill and you guys had searched and just couldn't find it. Do you believe that they really were in there? And it was just, you know, he left him in a old abandoned farmhouse. That's what he left them. That's the last. The trash got picked up from this old band of farmhouse. Actually, the house got raised. It got knocked down. It was condemned.

And it got knocked down. And they were supposed to go in and check it. And the inspector that went in got halfway down the basement stairs. I think he smelled the dead. And he thought there was a cow dead down there or something. And he laughed. And he just signed off on it. They raised the building, which means bulldozers came in and knocked the whole house down in on itself.

And then they scooped everything up. And they carted it off to a landfill. Nobody sifted through that stuff. So we found the landfill where it was taken. and we kind of knew the area. And so, but I think it was like 10 weeks. It was a couple of months. There's no way.

But the, but the thing is that the detectives in Vermont had no idea about Keyes. It was only when he gave us the information. They said, do you have a couple that's missing? And they go, yeah, we, we have them as missing persons. We don't even have them as a homicide case. And the family had no idea. They just vanished. There was no evidence of anything.

What is so freaky about a serial killer like Israel Keys is that there are so many missing people all over the United States that really could be attributed to him and we'll never know. That's right. And if you know the case of Samuel Little, right, that man, he admitted to like 99. And we went and he would sketch them and we found them. I think he's had that potential because he had a mind for details. He knew where these people were. He could have put us on a bunch of more victims.

And that's really my frustration. If I had to look back on my career, that's the case. That happened about that case was about three years before. before I retired. And really, it frustrated me to no end because I really wanted to help more families get their victims like, like the courier's family, finally knew what had happened to them. Because it's terrible, you know, for somebody to disappear like that and you have absolutely no idea what happened. The only thing that they knew was somebody smashed in their back kitchen door. So they knew something, you know, untoward happened to them. But they had absolutely no

idea who did it or why they did it or what. And so I think that, you know, I don't know. I've dealt with a lot of families of victims. And, you know, more often than not, they say I'd prefer to know. And so, you know, that's what I wish we could have given people, more people like we did to the Currier's family because they deserve to know. The families of victims, they deserve to know what happened to their loved ones. And that was probably the one that still haunts me. Is it mostly men that dive with the FBI or are there women on the team as well? Absolutely. When I had retired all four FBI die teams had women divers on them. It's a reflection of the, probably the ancient population at large. Yes, it's a predominantly male, predominantly white workforce. But that's changing. Director Comey, when he got in, had a big push for diversity hiring and stuff. And so I, during my 27 years, I saw more women, women are as being coming inages all the time. And so my longtime dive partner for many is Brenda, she, you know, she was a, she was a crimes against children.

an expert. She did child pornography and child abuse cases, but she also did the dive team. And so her and I were kind of dive team partners for many, many years. Yeah, so we did have a perfect mix. There were every different type of person on the dive team. But certainly plenty of women on the diet team. When I left, I retired in 2014. I think the LA office out of 15 divers had three female divers. But yeah, they're there. So what sorts of quality should a candidate looking to have a career diving for the FBI possess. I'm assuming you can't be fat. Well, you say that, but we don't, you know, like a lot of people don't, we don't do a whole

lot of swimming. We go to the bottom and we stay there and we work. That's our workplace. That's our office. We're not winning any swimming competitions. We're not moving around a lot of them. You might drag yourself along a search line on your belly very meticulously, very slowly. It's methodical.

It's slow. I always say about searching, particularly searching underwater, you can be fast or you can be thorough. You can't be both. So we chose to go slow. We were slow and methodical. It drives people crazy. That's why like if the guy was in a Navy seal before it came in the FBI, I'm like, you're probably not going to want to do this kind of diving because we go under order to stay there and to do a job. And it takes a lot of patience and stuff like that. So the main thing that I looked for was we often deploy, like you said, to Alaska. I deployed with a team to southern Iraq and we were diving in 130 to be temperatures.

And so when you're living and working in such austere environments, I looked for qualities of people like we're going to be able to get along with other people and to be able to work as a team. My first dive team leader, when I first got on the team as a rookie, I remember his words and I will change his words a little bit because of the audience. No, you can say whatever. We'll beep it. He said, he said, I don't care what you're diving skills and level.

law. I can teach you to be a good dive. I can't teach you not to be an ass to be. And if you are, you are and you're going to infect the team. You're going to be a cancer on the team. He says, because our diving is different. Guaranteed, if you come out of the recreational diving world or even some of the military diving, you probably haven't done this type of diving. And so I can teach you that. But I, you know, the FBI has a little older workforce. And most of the people coming on the team are in the late 20s, early 30s. So if you're a jerk at that point, you're, you're a jerk. your life, I'm not going to be able to change you. And so know what I want to take the time to do that. So in the trial process, we lengthen it. We do a lot of things other than diving in the pool.

Of course, we put them in the pool. They have to swim. They have to tread water. They have to go underwater. They have to do a lot of in-water exercises, no doubt. But we also monitor them as they move from station to station. We monitor them at their breaks. We monitor them during their meal to see and watch for that quality in a person that's going to be able to get along with other people as a good team member, not necessarily a good diver because we can make you a good diver. If you have those in-water skills, the basic skills, we can make you a good diver to do this type of diving. But we can't change you if you have a personality that's just going to be grading on other people and aggravate other people because we often deployed for weeks at a time

and we were living together, eating together, working together, spending more time with each other than sometimes you do with your own families at home. And so it was really important for me as as an evaluator to find those skills and those qualities in people that I knew were not going to be destructive in the team environment. Now, I asked Jim Clementi this in past episodes of the spillover, so I have to ask you, Bobby, do you feel like the FBI today is the same FBI you retired from? Oh, no, no, of course not. And I think that the FBI I joined in 1987 wasn't the same FBI as the FBI that my older, old-time guys on my squad, you know, when I joined, there was a bunch of old-timers who came on in the late 60s. They got their credentials directly from Mr. Hoover.

And so, no, it's not the same. The question really is, I think that most people are asking when you ask that, is this is it better or worse? I think that's the real question. Times change. It isn't the same because when I went to my first squad area in New York in 1987, there wasn't a computer on the desk. There wasn't a phone that wasn't attached to the desk. We didn't have computers. We didn't have cell phones. You know, and so it was very different. You know, I learned to do an investigation very different than most agents learned to do it today. Most of them sit behind on computer probably more times than I did. So the FBI better or worse than when you came on then? In the field, they're better. But FBI headquarters, you know, it's it allowed

itself, at least for a period of time. I don't know right now, but it allowed itself for, you know, obviously a very famous period of time to become very political. And I knew some of those people. I didn't respect them when I worked with them. And I certainly don't have much respect for them now, knowing how they behaved. But they made it political. In my 27 years, I always stayed at the working agent level. I never even became a supervisor. Jim retired at what we call an SSA, a supervisor, which all, he didn't really manage, but that's all profilers. They get that. But I was a GS-13 field-level street agent my entire career. When I left Quantico as a new agent, that I'm going to retire as a street agent.

I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to be a boss because there's not, first of all, there's no financial incentive. And if you're just going up the ladder for power, that's scary to me. And so there's no financial incentive in government to go up much. By the time I was retired, I had so much time on the job that my bosses had less time on.

I was making just as much money as them because I, which because I had the seniority bumps. And so I think that the FBI instituted a couple of years ago, a what we call a seven up and out policy where you can't be a supervisor of more than seven years without going up or quit or going back down to the street days. I think it destroyed the Bureau because it rewards ambition over experience. One of my first supervisors had been a supervisor of 15 years. And he knew how to work squad. He knew how to get people that work well and stuff. And all these people that I saw come in, they always wanted to rise to the top. They wanted to go to

the top pass. In my 27 years, I spent a total of two or three hours in FBI headquarters, total. 27 years. I didn't like the place. I didn't. I generally had an aversion to FBI management and I see these guys on the news now and they have their little lower thirds. Mine says retired FBI agent. There's this, you know, former executive director or executive assistant director of the FBI. That's great. But that means they spent a very minimal amount of time doing investigations before they went up into management and they made budgets and they pushed paper around a desk. That's great. But don't come in and start talking about an investigation that I did for 27 years that you did for maybe five, you know. And so I don't really have a great love for FBI headquarters. I think it's

political. It was political then. It got more political, obviously, and it's made a series of blunders and a series of mistakes. But I think one of the things they could have done, and that I wish you would have been done with the last FBI director is stop pulling FBI directors out of the Department of Justice. That's where Mueller came from. That's where Comey came from. That's where Director Ray came from. not saying he's a bad guy, but the Department of Justice has a different mindset. These are not FBI agents running the FBI. These are Department of Justice career lawyers, career bureaucrats. And we need a law enforcement person who has carried a gun on a badge to be in charge of the FBI.

And I hope the next director, and there's plenty of former FBI agents that were FBI executives that could run the FBI in a way that a Department of Justice career lawyer shouldn't be running the FBI. Straight fire. Yeah. Straight fire, Bobby, from you. So good. Okay, so people want to learn more about you. They want to see more about your work. What projects do you have going on? Where can they find you, all that? They can find me at bobbychicone.com. It's really easy. It's B-B-O-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-H-A-C-O-B-B-H-A-C-O-N at F-E-ROTR dot com. No, no, it's Bobbychicone. Sorry, it's Bobbychicone. And then on YouTube, just search my name. Search my name with FBI, because if you just search my name, there was a championship boxer named Bobby Chacon. And YouTube will have all of his own fights and stuff. But if you

search my name with that, like I was on a, I was on H-L-N on Sunday night on a, program called Very Scary People with Donnie Wahlberg about the Israel Keys case. I'm on court TV, probably two or three nights a week discussing investigations for court TV. I'm on law and crime network sometimes. So you'll see me in front of the cameras. I'm mostly behind the cameras these days. I'm writing and producing a lot. But when I'm in front of the cameras, I usually put it on Bobby Chaconne.com and I put it on

YouTube. Not every time because, you know, it gets to be a lot. Sometimes, like, you know, if there's a major event, I'm doing two or three, for news hits a day on different networks and stuff. So it's hard to keep up. But yeah, you can go to bobbogiccone.com. You can go to Audible and look up after the fall. Listen to that.

It's, I think, 17 episodes. I think, you know, most people like it, leave us a good review. And there's talk about making that into a scripted series now. So hopefully, you know, we'll get some traction there. Cool. Yeah, and I'm writing. I wrote for Criminal Minds with Jim. Actually brought me on Criminal Minds just before about the last two or three seasons.

So I wrote with him. and I've been writing some of the prime shows as well now. So, yeah, you can just look out for me. I'm on Instagram. It's Bobby Chaconne, FBI. I usually try to put my stuff on Twitter that I'm going to be on a certain network or a certain show, covering a certain case. And then people can tune in.

Well, these are my favorite types of episodes because I am a true crime fanatic. So to just talk to somebody as yourself who has, you know, dealt on the front lines with this kind of stuff is fascinating to me. and I love especially just learning about unique careers. So it is really an honor to have you on the spillover. Thank you so much, Bobby. Thank you, Alex. It was an honor to be here.

I hope you check the woods near your house for Kill Kits tonight. You never know. Next time you're flying, you might be seated next to a serial killer on his way to hunt for humans. The stuff doesn't even seem real, and yet it is. And how cool is that the Bobby Chaconne and his team are some of the people on the ground diving for victims of predators like this that you and I couldn't think up in our worst nightmares. It's men like Bobby Chacon that give me a glimmer of hope when it comes to those who work for our three-letter agencies.

I said a glimmer. But still, he's an awesome, conservative man, and this episode deserves a five-star review from you and a subscription, so you never miss an episode and can help support us. If you enjoyed this episode, you will really like both episodes I did with former serial killer profiler with the FBI and writer for criminal minds Jim Clementi. That was in seasons one and two of the spillover. Next week is for the pro-lifers, an extraordinary story surrounding abortion, and also the men who are impacted, which no one ever talks about.

New episodes post every Thursday night at 9 p.m. Pacific or technically Fridays at midnight Eastern time. Also, subscribe to Poplittics on YouTube to watch every episode of The Spillover and see episodes of my daily show where I cover daily poppublic. culture news from a conservative perspective. I'm Alex Clark and this is the spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.