Hidden True Crime - GABBY PETITO: Top Risk Factors for Violent Relationships

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

This episode was recorded on September 21, 2021, but we never shared it until now. Gabby Petito's body was found 2 days before recording this episode. She had been strangled to death. Host, Criminal psychologist Dr John Matthias, has worked for years with victims of domestic violence. In this episode he discusses the top risk factors for violent relationships. Domestic Abuse Hotline: [phone] About Hidden True Crime: What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Read less Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Due to some audio issues, we actually never released this episode until now. But Phil, it is so important. We're going to go over the top risk factors for violent relationships backed by research. We hope you'll listen. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what we're talking about today on your show? Yeah, so I really just wanted to continue the discussion from last week. lot of people ask questions about risk factors over the week. A lot of people asked me, including one of my students that I had in supervision this past week, asked me how I know what I

know. And I mean, that's kind of a big question. But I guess the simple answer is it's a combination of experience and book knowledge or research, reading research, understanding research. So it's sort of a combination, I guess, of book smarts and hopefully to some degree street smarts. And to that end, I kind of want to share some of the research that I look at that helps me understand domestic violence and in the case of like the Gabby Petito body cam footage, you know, how do I make sense of that? A lot of people have been asking me that. Again, I think it's experience and research, understanding the research, you know, but like I give an example of when Brian Laundrie kept apologizing for everything, right? He's like, you know, I'm sorry, this guy is blue.

I'm sorry, I don't have any water. Like, you know, that's, that's experience. That's just noticing that a behavior is unusual. You know, I think that was simply just, you know, as someone who sat in front of hundreds of criminals, that if I was in front of someone and they started apologizing for everything, that would be abnormal. So, you know, that moment actually kind of reminded me of, you know, there's a moment in Shakespeare's Hamlet where Gertrude says something like, I think the lady protesteth too much, right?

It's sort of like that moment. So that's just knowing that something's a little abnormal and then just trying to figure out what is he doing. What does he mean by that? When he's apologizing all the time, like repeatedly, excessively, what does that mean for my experience? And I kind of said, you know, I think some of it's a manipulation, clearly. Like he's trying to put the police at ease. He's trying to present himself as not a threat. But I think it's also one of those Gertrude moments where he is protesting a little too much.

But he's doing it passively. I think he's kind of saying, yeah, I feel a little guilty here. Thank you. Yeah. And one reason we're doing this episode two was because we keep getting emails and questions from people that say, how did you know? Or I didn't know you can read people like Dr. John did in the body cam footage of Gabby before Gabby was found.

And so that is why we've decided to share the research. This isn't just luck or you say, no, I know this or ABC and D. This is well thought out research that you have studied and decades of experience. And so we thought that we would share that. But tonight's topic is the top risk factors. Why don't you say exactly what it is? Yeah. So last week we talked about, we talked a little bit.

One of our listeners asked me to talk about red flags. and I thought that was important. So I kind of talked about some of the more salient red flags I tend to see in domestic abuse situations. But there's a difference between red flags and risk factors. So red flags would be more informal, although there is some relationship with risk factors. But red flags would just be kind of indications that you might be in an abusive relationship or you could encounter abuse. an abusive relationship at some point in the future, whereas risk factors are demonstrated by the research. In other words, they're empirically supported. So risk factors tend to be slightly different

from red flags, but equally or maybe even more important. So tonight I really wanted to talk a little bit about risk factors and delve into some of the research on that. Hopefully, this research, I think is kind of interesting, or at least it is to me. So hopefully it won't be really dry and boring. We'll try to dress it up a little bit and make it dance. I think what we really want to see is you dance. But yes, we'll try with the topic dance tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I'll be dancing tonight. We'll see. We'll see. So why don't you pull up the first study that I want to talk about. Okay. Yeah. Let me introduce this study quickly. The two researchers who conducted this study, they actually actually,

participated in what's called the murder in Britain study. So they're both in the UK, and they went back and reviewed 86 case files of different types of murders, and then they did a lot of research, classifying them and quantifying the data. And they published a number of articles based on that study. This is one of those articles. And I think this is a really fascinating study because they're looking at murders in domestic violence relationships that they classify as occurring out of the blue. In other words, like, so in the Gabby Petito situation, I think Brian Laundry kind of fits this profile of they call them conventional murderers. So let me, I'm just going to read the first part, or we can all read it, you can read it. When a man who appears

to have no known history of violence or any other form of criminal. kills his intimate partner, popular notions and media representations often suggest that the murder seems to come, quote, out of the blue. This notion is usually applied when the man is viewed as relatively conventional because he holds a job, has no history offending, is a quiet neighbor, and is thought to be a good family man. Since it is thought that such conventional men do not use violence and certainly would not commit murder, it is often suggested that the murder is inexplicable. So that's what they're looking at in this study. They want to look at murderers that killed their partners out of the blue versus murderers that had a previous history of violence. And Brian Laundry actually kind of fits this category of out of the blue.

I think one of the reasons this was so fascinating to so many people was because he didn't fit the most, he was the conventional type person they were talking about here. He had no previous criminal history as far as I know or that we've heard. he had no adolescent history that we're aware of. Maybe there's something that's sealed. I don't know. I'm sure we'll learn more down the road.

But as far as we know, this just seemed to come out of the blue. And I think that was one of the fascinations the media had with it. Like they said in the opening sentence here, there's something really interesting, I think, and kind of mysterious and eerie about these types of murders because they seem inexplicable. So Dobash and Dobash wanted to investigate that. And so they dug into the, the, the, case files from the murder and Britain study. They separated the groups into murders that were out of the blue. They called them the conventional group. And then murders that were committed by people that had

some criminal history. So in the conventional category, one of the historical explanation for that is that it's mental health related. Right. And that's kind of interesting because that's how the police saw the situation. They saw them both as being anxious. I mean, unfortunately, they labeled Gabby. is having OCD, which really kind of biased the entire situation. But they also saw him as being more in the category of mental health. So that traditionally, these so-called out-of-the-blue murders are seen as committed by people who snap, people with mental health problems that get in really high-stress situations and they just snap. And for no particular reason, but they tend to kind of overreact and based on mental health issues, anxiety, depression, whatever it is. That's the traditional

explanation for a homicide that gets committed with an intimate partner that happens out of the blue. So Dobash and Dobash wanted to look at that and examine it. And there's a table. So the first group, this is a group of statistics from circumstances at time of murder and murder event. The samples, 104 murderers. The first group here where it says no previous conviction. that would be the so-called conventional or the out of the blue group. And then where it says previous conviction, those would be people with some criminal history. So if you go down a little bit, you can see what I've circled here. Just above what I've circled, it says previous violence offender to victim.

Those are the percentages. So in other words, they looked at the percentage of previous violence that are hurting these relationships, even if in the conventional group, there were no convictions for it. And so you can see the numbers, 45.8% of the conventional's had previous violence in a relationship versus 62.2% of the criminals group. So statistically, it's actually not significant. It seems fairly high, but believe it or not, the difference isn't that great. So one of the things that Dobash has point out is that in the out of the blue group, there actually was quite a bit of previous violence in the relationships

that just didn't rise to the level of calling the police or, right, it never found its way into the system. So what they say about this is that this is providing the first explanation, right, that these weren't murders that occurred out of the blue. These were actually abusers who turned into murderers because there was previous violence, right? So this is the beginning. of an explanation here is that, and I'm sure this is true of Brian Laundry, right? This is what we talked

about in our body cam analysis. This is a situation where Brian Laundry, I'm almost 100% sure, or let's say 98% certain, that Brian was previously violent. So he would show up in that statistic as previous violence offender to victim. It's interesting to note below that, that previous violence victim to offender for the out of the blue group is 0%. And for the criminal group, it's 8%. So it's very low. In both cases, it's actually very low. That when somebody like Gabby is reacting to an abuser like Brian Laundry, you know, it's typically reactive. We've talked about this, but victims very rarely fight back. And when they do, it's usually pretty extreme. So this statistic below that actually shows that most victims understand the consequences of trying to fight back

or to engage in some type of violence. So the numbers are very low. They're lower than I would expect. So if we go down a little bit, circumstances at murder event, this is what I've circled, circumstances at murder event, confrontation immediately preceding murder, 80%, 79.2% for the out of the blue group, 72.2% for criminal, previous criminal history group, about the same, actually a little higher for out of the blues. So that suggests that in cases of murder, and again, this is the Gabby Petito case, there's some type of confrontation. There's some type of argument or disagreement. And obviously, that was something we saw in Moab, but presumably we can infer that when he did murder her, the research shows that there's usually some type of confrontation. And then if you go down to the

next line, conflict at murder, jealousy or possessiveness, that tends to be involved in the confrontations typically. So 24% showed some type of jealousy or possessiveness in the out of the blue group, 31.6% in the other group, the criminal group. That indicates that the groups are similar, but they both show jealousy and possessiveness. And then if we go down to the final one, nature of conflict at murder, separation, 20% of out of the blue, there was some type of separation involved 22.8%. So what this is starting to show, the picture of this is developing is that the out of the blues had previous violence in the relationships, almost 50%. There was some type of confrontation, but before the murder, there was jealousy and possessiveness. And usually there

was some type of separation or rejection going on. And I think all of those come into play in the Gabby Petito situation. So that's kind of setting the stage here. If you go down to the next table. So this is the same group. You'll see at the top, it says no previous conviction. That's the out of the blue group or the conventional group. Previous conviction. That's the criminal group. This is going to develop an even more detailed picture than what we just saw. So there's a couple of things that are really interesting in this table. This table is based upon assessments of professionals in prison and or problematic behaviors in prison. So if you look at the top, it says behavior in prison. model prisoner, 52% of the out of the blue group are model prisoners, whereas only

29.1% of the criminals are model prisoners. That to me is really interesting because it suggests, well, and we'll develop this picture more as we go down this table. This is a really a fascinating table, but it suggests that the out of the blue group tends to be a little more, they tend to be, to conform a little more in prison or in circumstances where their behavior is expected to be good, whereas the criminal group does not care as much about, you know, maintaining social standards and social norms. And again, like with taking Brian Laundry as an example, he would, I think he would kind of fit this profile, you know, that he's someone who's overly compliant around the police. You know, I think without authority figures in the room, he's probably a very different person. But,

model prisoners are able to kind of adjust their behavior when around authority figures. And that's in a significantly different way than the criminals. So that's a really interesting finding. And then if we go down, it says assessments of this is where I've circled. It says assessments of professionals in prison mental health problems. This is in it. This also was interesting that the out of the blue group had more mental health problems, 30% versus 20%. The next one is concerned about risk to public safety, 41.7% versus 41.3,

almost the same. So what's interesting there is that the out of the blues are almost exactly the same in terms of how professionals are assessing their risk. They see them as equally risky to the public. Concerns about dangerousness, 46% roughly of the out of the blue group versus 41% for criminals. So professionals like myself that are assessing inmates were actually seeing dangerousness as being higher in the out of the blue group than for criminals, which is completely antithetical to kind of the norm, that the expectation is almost always going to be that people with criminal records are higher risk. But that's not what they're finding here. So, you know, what's interesting about this to me is that somebody like Brian Laundry or any

that's kind of committing these types of murders, they're in some ways more dangerous than the people out there with criminal records. I mean, statistically, that's not true. They're the same here, but still, like the fact that they're rising to this level of a percentage that's higher than the criminal group is really fascinating. And then if we go down to the next category, orientation to the victim and murder, this is absolutely, this blew my mind. So no remorse. for murder, 44% out of the blue group, 32.9% for criminals. The out of the blue group or the conventional actually had way less remorse than the criminals. You know, a lot of these criminals that are committing these murders are going to be classified as psychopaths. Here you're seeing that

compared to psychopaths, the Brian Laundry type group or the conventional group is actually less remorse, that they're murdering people and they don't care. They're not remorseful. They're indifferent. And if you go down to no empathy with the victim, look at the numbers there. Look at that the second to last line on this chart. No empathy with the victim. The Brian Laundry group, 60%. Wow. 45% for criminals, people with previous criminal records.

So, I mean, it's extraordinary that there's this group of people out there like Brian Laundry, according to this research. And, I mean, that's assuming we can generalize this. But there's a group of men out there, males, that are in some ways worse than psychopaths. They have less remorse, less empathy. They're just as dangerous. They're perceived as a risk to the public.

They have a previous history of violence that's not being detected or reported. But to me, this is a really fascinating study because it shows that I think law enforcement needs to take this very seriously, right? That there's the people like Brian Laundry aren't just these nice guys that are, locking people out of vans and taking away's keys and hitting their girlfriends and they're just going to go on with their lives. They're dangerous or they can be dangerous. And the numbers show it that, you know, these murders aren't occurring out of the blue. They're occurring for a reason. So let's go to the last line because that's the key to this entire study. Problems with women.

So the out of the blue or the conventional group or the Brian Laundry group. They're both called the Brian Laundry group. I'm still the Brian Laundry Group. The Brian Laundry Group, problems with women's, 80% of them have problems with women. Previous convictions are the criminal group lower. 73.3%. So what does that mean? Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stock. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web.

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That means that the Brian Laundry group, their orientation towards women is negative. and that gets reflected in the fact that they probably have a lot of conflict and relationships or broken relationships or a history of relationship problems. But I think that what we're seeing here is if the perception is or has been that the out of the blue group, the Brian Laundry group, are just a group of guys with a few mental health problems and a little anxiety and maybe they just react, you know, they react with a little bit of violence or putting and shoving to their girlfriends because they're having a bad day. We see that's not the underlying problem.

The underlying problem is how they perceive women. And in general, I think there's a tendency here to see women as inferior or to see or to objectify women, to see women as, you know, more like objects. Consequently, that's where the jealousy and the possessiveness come into play. So that you're kind of seeing the root problem there, that it's their perceptions of women that are creating the violence. And it's not the fact that these are just guys having a bad day or that they have mental health problems. So would you say then as far as the top risk factors go for violence and a relationship, it's how they see women as objects. Is that kind of what you're

saying? I think objectifying women. Actually, so if you continue, there's a few more pages. So this is a continuation. This is from the last study. 2009. This is 2011. This is a follow-up study by Dobash and Dobash again. And it's called What Were They Thinking Men Who Murder an Intimate Partner. So what they did here was they actually dug deeper into the case files and did kind of a qualitative analysis to dig a little deeper and figure out in a little more depth what was going on rather than just quantifying or just looking at the numbers. So if you go down, they're going to identify kind of the main risk factors here.

So they're summarizing some of their previous research. So let's start with the biggest risk factor or not, I shouldn't say the biggest, but let's start with the first risk factor they identify. It's history of non-lethal violence to the victim and or previous partner. So we saw this in the statistics where there was a lot of previous violence that wasn't detected. So they say of the 104 men who killed an intimate partner, the case files revealed that 59% had physically abused the women they ultimately killed. in addition of the men who had been in a previous intimate relation,

57% had abused a former partner. And in that sense, they appeared to specialize in use in violence against a woman partner. So if somebody is violent towards you physically at all, that's a big risk factor. And when I say violent, I mean pushing, shoving, hitting, slapping, restraining you, like any of that would be considered violence. Big risk factor.

We talked about that as a red flag, but here we're looking at something even more serious. We're looking at ultimately murder, right? So if there's violence, obviously that's horrible and that's traumatic. But a lot of times domestic violence advocates will talk about that what they do is homicide prevention. And indeed, like studies like this show that domestic violence does lead to homicide occasionally. So in other words, if we have a partner and they push us or turn us, you know, our heads or grab our faces once or slap us once, you're saying. Any type of physical violence one time is sufficient to be considered a risk factor for future violence and even for eventual homicide. So I guess each person individually will have to determine the context of the violence and whether it's acceptable.

But I mean, in terms of how forensic people like myself assess these situations, we know that, yeah, so when he grabbed her face, I'm sure that wasn't the first time he's done that, by the way. But yes, that type of violence is a huge risk factor for future violence. you know, I have familiarity with these types of studies. So an experience with criminals, obviously, hundreds of criminals that I've assessed. So I think that helps me understand the context, you know, that squeezing the face isn't just him trying to gain control of the situation. It's indicative of a deeper psychological state. It's indicative of probably how he perceives women. Okay.

So problems with women in intimate relationships. We talked about this previously. I'll just read it quickly. Men who are violent to an intimate partner often present a general pattern of difficulties and failures in the relationships with women. The men who killed an intimate partner frequently had numerous problems in relationships

of women, including the following, broken relationships, conflicts in relationships, and objections to family and friends. So social isolation. So we talked about this a little bit that if you start dating someone, for example, and they've been married five times, it's probably a risk factor. It's probably a red flag.

So anyone who just can't sustain a relationship for very long has had many divorces or marriages is constantly in conflict with other people or in the relationship or who is trying to isolate you from family and friends because they don't want you to have those relationships. that's all this category. So let's keep going down. So possessiveness, jealousy, estrangement, and separation. This is a really, really important category. I actually refer to this as the,

so interpersonal violence is sometimes abbreviated IPV in the research literature. I call this the IPV tetrad, meaning that these four elements, if these four elements coexist, I would run for the exits. I would not hang around. So they say, dobash and dobash say issues of possessiveness, jealousy, estrangement, and separation seem to be of particular importance.

Heightened possessiveness and jealousy are commonplace in most abusive relationships and frequent temporary separations are relatively common. But evidence from the murder in Britain study and other research suggests this combination of factors may be particularly salient when men kill an intimate partner. So it's not just possessiveness or jealousy or estrangement or separation. If all of these things coexist, the risks are really, really high. And we know from several of Brian Laundries or Gabby's friends actually have come forward and said he was extremely possessive. He was extremely jealous. We know that he was worried about separation. We know that even in the Moab incident, there was.

estrangement, right? They were, he was locking her out of the van. That's estrangement. So the IPV tetrat is what I call it. If any of these are present and they were present big time in the Gabby Petito case, these are really, really serious risk factors and not just for violence, but for the possibility of extreme violence or homicide. And you could see that in the body camp footage, in other words, him locking her out of the van, taking her phone, those were things you picked up on, right? Sort of the possessiveness. You could see the estrangement. You could see the separation issues that he was trying to, he used the term distance himself, right? You could see all of that. The possessiveness and jealousy wasn't quite as clear because the

police officers didn't really ask him questions relevant to their relationship history. But I think you can infer based upon his behavior that there was definitely some jealousy, how Gottman, John Gottman, who's a relationship researcher, a lot of times he talks about leaning in to a relationship, that the key to successful relationship. And that doesn't mean that after there's a conflict that you can't, you know, get some space. What he means is that after you get some space or if that's necessary, that, you know, you try to repair that rift. You try to lean into your partner and really listen to them and really understand why the conflict occurred.

rather than creating distance and walking away from it and never talking about it again. So if things don't get repaired, it's always a problem. So, yeah, so this one is orientations to the victim and the murder, empathy, and remorse. We talked about this, but just to reiterate, 36% of men expressed no remorse and 49% expressed no empathy with a victim, even after they'd spent considerable period of time in prison. Lack of empathy and remorse are associated with a sense of justification. for using violence and as such or emphasizes the professionals work with offenders. So this is a real red flag.

You know, this is a risk factor, a really high risk factor, because if you don't have empathy before the violence, you're not going to have it after. I mean, I should qualify that. I've worked with offenders, mainly sex offenders, some violent offenders. But they do develop empathy, but it takes years. It's very, very, very difficult. But what their research is showing is that men who lack empathy in general are going to lack it all the time. They're going to lack it before they murder, which is probably a contributing factor to the murder, and they're going to lack empathy and remorse after.

So if you, for our listeners out there, if you're going on a date, a first date, and your date does not ask about you at all. or your date does not show any empathy, your date does not try to understand. If you come to the date and you said, you know, I had a really hard day and they ignore you and talk about themselves, I would ask for the check or ask them to get the check right away because empathy is really important in relationships and it's important for repairing the riffs I just talked about. And it's definitely one of the things, if I were dating someone or looking to develop a long-term relationship. I would look really hard, long and hard at whether the person has empathy

and whether they care about you and understand you and can walk in your shoes. Yes, and these people can fake empathy, but after a while cracks do start to show and it's, it's, you know, you have to be aware of that. The fake empathy, that first facade is not the real facade. And I think one way that you saw in the body camp footage, this major warning sign, his life. He's, lack of empathy. He never once asked how Gabby was doing. He never once was worried about Gabby. And so that's a clear, clear thing in this research. Yeah. In fact, after I watched it the first time without you, we actually didn't watch it together until we did that analysis. But when I first watched it on my own, the first thing I said to Lorum was there's zero empathy here.

He does not care about her. He's like only concerned about himself and whether he's going to be charged and whether the police are going to see him as the aggressor. And he never once advocates for her. He never once asks how she's doing. Right. There's an absolute lack of empathy. And again, like knowing this research and knowing how this is tied into not just violence,

but murder. Right. This is tied into homicide. Like that's the worst possible outcome. I mean, people, if someone survives violence, at least they're alive, right? But I mean, like when a partner murders someone, there's no going back from that. And so here it is, right? Here it is in the, you know, the Britain murder study showing those elements, these,

these factors that can lead to possible homicide. I have a question that I want to point out with this. It says a lack of empathy and remorse are associated with the sense of justification. for using violence. I have to ask and wonder, you know, he had a sense of justification for using violence, clearly. Did he feel a stronger sense of justification?

Do you think after the Moab incident? Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, so the lack of empathy is tied in when he says that she's crazy, for example, right? He's dehumanizing her. So that's a great example of, he's justifying his violence. She's crazy.

What do you want me to do? Of course I have to beat her. Right. Yeah. Sadly, I do think that the Moab incident, I think a couple of things probably happened after Moab. I think she may have been seriously reevaluating the relationship and she may have been thinking

about leaving. I think if she expressed that to him, that's where this whole idea of separation comes in, right? Separation and rejection. The IPV tetra that I just talked about. that's a really high risk factor. You know, I think it's possible she may have been thinking of getting out. And, you know, I don't blame her for this.

But if she talked about with, you know, that with him, then he probably became more agitated. Yeah. And he had to have felt empowered, if someone said, before being agitated, he had to felt empowered to feel that way, you know, because he got away with it. Right. He felt empowered in the sense that they called her the aggressor. In some ways, again, like getting back to empathy, it justified his behavior. He was able to provide a rationalization or justification for his violence by saying, look, you're the aggressor. I mean, it's not hard to imagine after they got back in the van, you know, a day and a half later that he was

blaming her the whole time. You know, I can't believe you almost got me arrested. I can't believe you did that. You know, he, I think without a question that he used that against her and it probably did contribute to, her eventual, you know, demise. So I think that's the last, I think that's the last page. Yeah. So thank you for explaining that. That was even helpful to me. Again, people, people ask, well, did you just read body language?

Did you just, how do you know? How do you know? How do you know? And, you know, bringing up and citing some of this research is helpful in what you were able to see in the body cam footage. Some body language experts didn't see it. Yeah. So I don't really follow the body language people because it would be considered, I'm trying to say this politically, I think it would be considered a little bit of pseudoscience. Like you'll never see, you'll never, there's no such thing as a body language class in a psychology department, for example. And there's a reason for that because it's not well accepted that there's no consensus about what. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day.

Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password

manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at ORA.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at ora.com slash remove. Certain body language means. I know that the body language folks would disagree with me, I'm sure. But I think you have to interpret body language within the larger context of what you're witnessing, right?

So, like, for me, it's not just about reading the body language. It's also about the context, the situation, you know, him, Brian, locking Gabby out of the van to start off. Like knowing that, knowing the research on domestic violence, knowing what criminals act like when I'm in front of them. knowing how they, you know, will try to hide or deny or rationalize their behavior way. Like, it's, it's a combination of elements. I think there's so many variables in play. If you just look at body language in and of itself, I don't know if it's going to be that meaningful.

I think you have to look at body language within the context of the story that's happening or the story that's unfolding. And the story that was unfolding there was one of domestic violence. So if you don't understand that, I think you're going to probably miss, you know, you're going to misread the body language because you're losing the larger picture. So, well, let me ask this question first. What if somebody isn't violent towards you, but they said violent towards pets or threatening to hurt you?

Well, first of all, someone who's violent towards pets, that's a risk factor. I mean, I think there's not a ton of serial killers that we can study. So it's hard to make generalizations. But many of the serial killers that we know best were violent towards animals. you know, again, it gets into that issue of empathy. If someone is violent towards animals, you know, they're probably going to at some point extend that to human beings. What type of families do these type of abusive men come from? I'll answer that question in a second, but let me say that in an upcoming episode,

I'm going to talk about the Laundry family, but I want to, there's a book out there called Defending Jacob, which is about this very issue of, you know, how far a parent will go to protect their child. And I think it's a really good question. question. It's something that since this whole situation came up, it's something I've struggled with. You know, you and I have talked about it. But, you know, if our son did something horrendous, I mean, what do you do? What's the right course of action? And so this book has been on my reading list for a long time. And I think there was actually like a series put out. We haven't been able to find it, but there was like a show called Defending Jacob that gets into this. And I really want to read that

book and maybe draw some parallels between the laundry family and what happens in that book. So I'm kind of waiting to read that, you know, to get to the analysis of the laundry family. But so I think people that tend to be violent like Brian Laundry, there is definitely a propensity for them to come from more abusive homes. So what that means is they're in homes where there's violence between partners or parents typically that the children witness. And that's a really important point, by the way. I think it's underestimated how much impact parental violence has on a child. So even if the child isn't being physically abused or abused in any way, parental violence has an enormous impact. In fact, I did my dissertation on that topic, and I found that just witnessing

domestic violence can be as emotionally destructive as physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. So, you know, I was later involved in a project through the Agassi Foundation, and they were trying to affect policy changes in child protection in Las Vegas. And that's what they were trying to do, is they were trying to get child protection to get child protect, CPS workers to go into the homes and assess violence between the parents because it was having such a huge impact on children. The struggle with that project, however, was that child protective workers see violence between parents as emotional abuse. And that's not a can of worms they want to open. If they open that can of worms, then they'll be, you know,

charging everyone with abuse, right? So it's a really, really difficult situation. to address from a policy standpoint because it's really important for CPS workers to address domestic violence at homes because it affects kids hugely. But they have to do it in a way so that they're not, you know, charging everyone with, you know, if parents have a fight and there's no violence between them, so should we charge them with some type of, you know, parental failure? I don't know. It's a really big topic.

But we know that domestic abusers tend to come from abusive homes. And oftentimes that involves witnessing parental violence and or being the victims of abuse in some way, direct way, like physical violence would be very common. We know that they tend to have insecure attachments. So attachments are something that happen, you know, primarily in the first five years of life. So, you know, what happens is the child, for whatever reasons, has a conflicted relationship with a parent or both parents. And they don't really feel safe. if they don't feel secure, there's a general mistrust of the world. And so they're insecurely attached.

And I think with Brian Laundry, again, I don't know anything about his history, but based on what I know about criminals, his intense fear of abandonment would definitely kind of point in the direction of an insecure attachment. And I guess you could make certain assumptions based on that that, you know, maybe his parents were distant or neglectful. I don't know. You know, there's clearly something going on in that family where. They have a child who has these really intense fears of abandonment.

Thank you for sharing that. Somebody asked what you would tell young people as they're getting into relationships. Oh, yeah. That's such a tough one since, you know, you and I are going to have to deal with that. I think I would say, does the person listen to you? Do they respect you? Are they positive with you as opposed to? critical. Do they really seem to care about you? You know, it's, it's a little tricky because,

especially young boys, you know, young adolescent boys don't have the best empathy. The brain of young males tends to develop a little later than females. And empathy is usually kind of a deficit for adolescents. You know, we've talked a little bit about Aiden Fucci in that whole situation. He was 14 when he committed that horrendous murder. And I mean, part of me has to wonder, whether that is related to the fact that his brain is just completely underdeveloped. So, I mean, I'm not excusing what he did by any stretch, but I mean, it's tricky to evaluate. And I think some of the same things we're talking about. If there's possessiveness and jealousy and, you know, I guess as an adolescent,

maybe some of those elements are more common because adolescents are just learning how to date. And they're, right, they're kind of at the beginning of that stage. And so maybe some of that is a little more common. But still, I think it could be a red flag for younger people. So even if you see possessiveness and jealousy and especially any type of physical violence, you know, that's, I think younger people need to run when they see those things. Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything you would like to end with, John?

Just, I think just the thought that this is a very serious matter. You know, I think when the media talks about these types of homicides coming out of the blue, I think they're really not doing justice to a very deep and important subject. And so hopefully, you know, I wanted to talk about this tonight because there are explanations. And we do understand this doesn't know, these homicides don't come out of the blue. There's reasons for these, and I think we would be better off if we understood them. So I just want to say thank you that I know this is a heavy topic and it's difficult, but I think it's important, and I think we need to try to counter this narrative that domestic abuse,

in some cases, just happens and it's inexplicable and it comes out of the loop because it's not true. We can understand it, and we can take steps to remedy it. So thank you all for joining us to address this important issue. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere.

That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker's sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one.

one service. Start your free trial today atora.com slash remove. Protect yourself now atora.com slash remove.