Hidden True Crime - Psychologist Reacts: The Warning Signs Everyone Missed | Marcia Norman Case

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

This episode originally premiered on May 18, 2025, but as the case against Jeffrey Zizz moves closer to trial, it feels more important than ever to revisit. Marcia Norman deserved to grow old surrounded by her family, grandchildren, friends, and the life she built. Instead, prosecutors allege she was targeted by a man she trusted. In this episode, forensic psychologist Dr. John Matthias examines Jeffrey Zizz's background, criminal history, behaviors, and the warning signs investigators say were present long before Marcia's murder. Understanding who Jeffrey Zizz is—and how someone allegedly capable of such violence was able to gain the trust of vulnerable people—is essential to understanding this case. As questions continue about justice, accountability, and what comes next, we believe Marcia's story deserves to remain in the public eye. Sponsors: Q30: For a FREE Q-Collar sleeve with your Q-Collar purchase, head to https://Q30.com/HIDDEN and use code HIDDEN. ASPCA Pet Insurance: Explore coverage at https://www.aspcapetinsurance.com/HIDDEN 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We have him essentially abusing a woman who was a stranger who's passed on. out from alcohol consumption at a bar. He acknowledges that he's aroused by others who were called being physically abused and ameliated. And by the way, I'm not even, I'm not even done yet with this. I was going to say, what else is, right, I know, what else is in his evaluation? Because there was a lot that shocked me as I did research. Yeah, so he also had sex with two animals. He had, he had sex with the dog and with a horse. Hello, Hidden Jems. Today, we explore a chilling case from tonight,

Washington that has left both John and myself in absolute shock. It's the murder of Marsha Norman, a crime unlike any I have ever heard of before. Before we begin, I'm Lauren Matthias, a journalist, and at Hidden 2 crime, we delve into the hidden motives of unfathomable crimes, along with my co-host here, criminal psychologist Dr. John Matthias. We also, side note, happen to be married. And this podcast started because we decided to record our dinner conversations that always included a discussion on crime. I covered this tragic case in detail with an hour-long episode, and we recommend that you listen for full details. A link is in the description of this episode. Please check it out. But for a quick summary, before we unpack this heinous crime,

Marcia Norman was an 82-year-old woman known for her vibrant spirit and deep community ties. And on April 1st, 2025, she had dinner with her handyman and family friend, 47-year-old Jeffrey Ziz. That evening would be the last time her family heard from her. Concerned by the sudden silence, Marcia's family visited her home on April 4th, and they found unsettling signs, untouched medication, dirty dishes, and her personal belongings left behind, fearing the worst they reported her missing. Investigators quickly focused on Ziz. Initially, he was cooperative.

He claimed he left Marcia's home around 9 p.m. However, surveillance footage contradicted his story, placing him at her property in the early hours of April 2nd. Further digging revealed he had constructed a new shed in Olympia shortly after Marsh's disappearance. And on April 9th, detectives excavated the area beneath the shed. there, they discovered Marsha's body partially encased in concrete. The autopsy revealed that Marcia had suffered blunt force and penetrating injuries to the head,

inflicted over several hours leading to a slow and painful death. A search of Zizz's residents uncovered a disturbing five-page letter outlining a planned assault on a customer bearing eerie similarities to Marcia's case. Additionally, Marcia had previously confided in her family about waking up to find Ziz, her handyman standing silently at the foot of her bed, a boundary that she had made clear should not ever be crossed again by him. Ziz, it turns out, was already on probation for a prior conviction and he fled the state but was arrested in Montana on April 13th. He now faces charges of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and unlawful disposal of human remains. A Thurston County judge has ordered him, held without bail, citing the premeditated

nature of this crime. Marsh's family remembers her as the heart of their community, a woman full of life and plans for her future. Her tragic death also serves as this sort of stark reminder of the dangers that can lurk close to home when you invite people into your lives, even if it's just a handyman. And today, as we always do at hidden true crime, we dig into the darkest recesses of the human mind to uncover what is hidden. And how a criminal like Jeffries is, a family man, a pastor, someone that was in the military, served in the military, how could he possibly have committed this most heinous crime, this violent crime with somebody so vulnerable, an 82-year-old grandmother. So I have with me, again, Dr. John Matthias, my co-host, I have so many questions for you

ever since I heard about Marcia and Jeffreys is. And as I have delved John into his history and learned what I have learned about him and his other shocking crimes and also why he was even on probation. I have so many questions, especially because you work with criminals, you have for decades. And you also, well, let's get to it. You have worked with murders, but with a lot of sex offenders as well. And I am just so grateful that you have prepared to help me and all of us here, all of our gems, understand exactly what happened in this horrible, horrible tragedy. Yeah, it's a really unusual crime with a lot of unusual features, and hopefully we'll start sorting those out as we talk about it.

But I think a question people were naturally, are going to be naturally inclined to ask here, is were there any signs prior to this murder? Were there any red flags that would have, if not predicted, would have at least illumined, some of the risks of violence that occurred later. A lot of people are probably thinking, how could something this heinous happen?

This guy had no prior criminal history before 2022 when he was convicted of different sex offenses. And so he had no prior criminal history whatsoever. His sex offenses were basically involved incest, And although people may find this difficult to understand, incest actually is a lower risk crime when it comes to a sex offense than a sex offense involving a stranger. So there's another element here that he had a psychosexual evaluation performed in 2022,

which is actually available from his court records, from Jeffries' court records, and of course, we obtained it. So I was able to look at his psychosexual evaluation. I've done hundreds of these over the years. This was filed at the Thurston County Superior Court in Washington State. So we'll be talking about that a little bit. And some of the information in there is going to be really important in terms of understanding why I think this crime occurred.

whether there were some red flags. So it is difficult for we to understand that about incest. So yeah. Let's dig in. Well, the reasoning is that if you sexually offend a stranger, you're essentially taking more risk. And you're right, like with, with, with, with the, in the case of ziz,

he offended against his daughters. Two of the daughters gave statements. one of them has not disclosed any abuse, although it is believed that he did sexually offend all three of them. The reasoning is, and this is also based on just research that kind of weighs different elements of different crimes, that research has found that sex offenders who commit incest crimes have lower recidivism. And so just looking at the base rates of sex offenses in general, incest offenders tend to reoffend less.

So to put that in layman's terms, recidivism is risk of reoffending. And so you're saying that the risk of reoffending would be lower due to research on this than if it was a stranger. Right. Different statistical methods have found that to be accurate, logistic regression, multivariate analyses, that type of stuff. So factor analysis, they tend to find that incest offenders have lower recidivism rates. Longitudinally, you can look at the reoffence race over time as well. And I think one of the reasons that's believed to be true is because offenders tend to have a little bit more influence

over family members, whereas strangers, if you just abduct a stranger off the street and assault them, you have almost no control over that situation, and oftentimes those types of crimes are going to involve more violence. And they're going to require more attempts to gain the victim's compliance and acquiescence. And so there's obviously not going to be consent in any case, but it's more difficult, I think, to commit a crime against a stranger or it can be.

It really depends too on the victims. So there are some victims and families that are more willing to disclose than others. So a lot of times offenders are very good at picking their victims in terms of knowing which ones are more passive and less likely to report versus maybe there's. some children in the home that are a little more assertive and less likely to, more likely to report. So there's a lot of elements that go into it. But in this case, these are incest crimes. And that would be one element that would, that might lower his risk for reoffence. There are, however, a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of,

of variables here that are real red flags and many of these are talked about in the psychosexual evaluation. Let me just, I'll talk about a few of them. We have, we have Jeffreys' is a psychosexual evaluation. We have a lot of information on Jeffries's. So this is from this. As a parent, one thing that I have learned is that sports today, it comes with a lot more information than when we were kids. I'm officially a soccer mom. And once I started learning more about repetitive impacts in sports, I started paying attention to products that are actually backed by science. This episode is sponsored by Q Collar, the only

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That is, again, Q30.com slash hidden for a free sleeve available in 15 colors with your order. Right. I think we should give a little bit of a trigger warning here that, you know, we're going to be talking about sensitive stuff, sensitive information, just so people know. really difficult things that pertaining to child abuse and sexual abuse and sex crimes if any listeners have any issues emotional issues or traumas around these issues I'm just giving you a little bit of a warning up front here that this is going to be difficult material to absorb so many of these disclosures by the way are for me, and I've done hundreds of these, many of these disclosures are quite disturbing to me and unusual in many ways. And so let's start with one. Do you mean the disclosures that he made to the

evaluator? Is that what you mean? Yes. So in his evaluation, he was given a polygraph, I think, a sexual history polygraph, which is a polygraph basically that examines whether you're telling the truth about certain disclosures you've made about your sexual history. When I worked with sex offenders in therapy groups, they were always required to do a sexual history polygraph so that we knew that they were being honest about their sexual histories and they weren't trying to cover certain things up. You know, one of the difficulties in assessing risk for sex offenders is many of them have crimes, previous sex offense crimes in their past, but they're not charged for those, obviously,

because they're not revealed or known, right? So in order to assess risk for a sex offender, most of the time, there are certain risk assessment instruments that don't rely as heavily on convictions, but oftentimes there has to be a conviction. And if there's no conviction, then you can't really use it to assess risk. at least from an actuarial standpoint. When I say actuarial, I mean from a purely statistical standpoint. So one of his disclosures was that he sexually,

his half-sister, when she was one year old, and he was 11. Now, it's probably unlikely that somebody, that a DA would charge an 11-year-old with a 17-year-old. sex crime, but sexually one-year-old is really unusual because an 11-year-old would be very much aware of the fact that a one-year-old is not going to have any memory of the event, or at least not any long-term memory. They're probably going to have somatic memory. There's probably going to be some somatic trauma, which, you know, per Vandercoq and

the body keeps the score. that type of thing that oftentimes a one-year-old will have trauma from something like that depending i don't know the nature of the abuse here but but but this is unusual because a one-year-old is the most vulnerable helpless right person on the planet like so if you're abusing a one-year-old or thereabouts, that is severe. That's a real red flag. Yeah. And so if I were to start kind of looking at some of these elements from his past

and putting them together and developing kind of a risk profile here, this is a place I'd probably start. Because you see there's some patterns here that might be developing. One is that you have a completely helpless vulnerable individual. You have an 11-year-old that's now associating elements of sex and sexuality with basically a completely helpless child or infant, right? Like, that's going to be a problem. So when we talk later about parapherias,

and parapherias are basically, unusual sexual behaviors. Sexual behaviors are considered not typical or not normal, often rising to the level of of dysfunction in terms of a person's life, dysfunction in terms of that person's ability to have normal relationships. It's, you know, it's so like pedophilia for

example, is a periphylia. Pedophilia is an attraction to young females. Oftentimes, young females, it can be males, but typically young females 13 and under. So puascent females, and that particular, obviously that particular behavior would be considered abnormal, and it would be problematic in terms of developing normal, healthy adult. relationships. So a parapheria is something similar to that, and we'll get into that later. But you see here that you're getting some abnormal or deviant, that's typically a term used in sex offense work, deviant sexual behavior at a really young age that's leaning towards the victimization of an absolutely helpless individual.

So I think this really sets the stage for almost everything that's going to follow. And I just want to say he disclosed this to the evaluator who's a psychologist. And is that normal that he would even share that? He was 11. I mean, I'm glad he did and it's horrendous, but you pointed out that some of the things he was sharing is sort of shocking too. Well, he's he's undergoing a polygraph when he's doing this. So he's probably making this disclosure to the polygraph examiner. And then the psychologist is learning about it later.

So he's in the polygraph examiner's office. And the polygraph examiner has certain questions that he or she is providing to Ziz. And the polygraph examiner is basically trying to get an accurate sexual history. you know, an honest, non-deceitful sexual history. And this evaluation is happening because he's been convicted of the incest crimes and they're going to assess his risk with this evaluation. Sorry, go ahead. I just, I want to make sure I'm following why this is happening.

He may not have been convicted at this point. Sometimes evaluations are done pre-conviction. It's not clear that he was convicted at that point. But the purpose of the evaluation is typically to assess his risk to the community. If he's released on probation, for example, for sentencing, they want to know his risk. And also his amenability to treatment. So if he's, let's say he's low risk and not amenable to treatment, then it's going to be more difficult to release him in the community because he needs to,

in many cases for sex offenders, they oftentimes are required to attend treatment so that they can improve so that they can learn why they did what they did and they can develop some strategies to really contain or prevent or stop their behaviors. So the purpose is to look at risk and it's to evaluate whether he's a good candidate for sex offense treatment. In Washington, there's actually a program called SSOSA, which stands for special sex offender sentencing alternative. And what that means is that presumably in Washington State, if a sex offender is reasonably low risk and amenable treatment, then they would be a candidate

for this special sex offender sentencing alternative and program, which is exactly what he entered. Okay. So you have this disclosure about a sex offense at age 11 with a one-year-old. It's really unusual. It's troubling. But from an evaluation standpoint, it's difficult in terms of using something like this because technically there's been no crime, although there was a crime,

because the crime wasn't known at the time. There was no, right, there were no charges, there was no arrest, there's no record of that crime. So if you're assessing risk for a sex offender, if I am, oftentimes to count that statistically, you need a conviction or you need a crime that's on the record, and here you don't have that. However, in my case, I would look at something like that, and I would be very concerned in terms of, I may not be able to use that in terms of statistical analyses or actuarial risk assessment instruments. But I'll use it clinically.

In other words, like, you don't, when a forensic psychologist conducts a psychosexual evaluation, it's not strictly based. on actuarial risk assessment instruments like the static 99 R which is what the evaluator here used and some other instruments by the way there's always going to be in almost every manual risk assessment manual says that every instrument has to be used within the context of clinical judgment and so when you see a sex offense like this that's so disturbing the issue that an evaluary has is to what degree, to what degree do you weight something like this over other variables like actuarial risk assessment instruments, right?

And I think for me, what I want to see is I want to see if there's some similar elements of the sexual history that might start creating a bit of a pattern. that would allow me to start assigning more weight to those particular incidents, even though they're not convictions or they're not crimes. I'm not, I don't want to undervalue something, you know, these types of disclosures that are so serious. That's Lily Bell back there. And Lily Bell is genuinely one of the best things that's ever happened to our family. She comes to work with us. She sits through recordings or sleeps through recordings, greets everyone like they're her long, lost best friend, and somehow

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Here's another one. Here's something else he disclosed that he had, he was at a bar. apparently, and I don't know the exact circumstances, but he met a woman who was drunk and she was passed out, quote, passed out from alcohol consumption, and he basically... So he meets this woman at a bar, and the language used in the evaluation is that, quote, she passed out from alcohol consumption, and essentially he assaulted her. in that condition. So in other words, you had someone who was completely unconscious and in an unconscious state and he abuses her. So another thing he acknowledges, by the way, during this

evaluation is, and I don't know if this came up from sexual history polygraph, but he acknowledged that he had some arousal to others, quote, being physically abused or humiliated. What? Yeah. So, you know, you're getting you're getting these elements of his history that now, to me, I mean,

so we've looked at two of these elements. He's also acknowledged that he sexually abused his sister when he was 14. She was 10. But that's not as troubling to me as abusing a one-year-old. Any abuse is obviously troubling, but... When assessing risk, when you're assessing risk to re-offend, this is what you look at.

Right. It's all troubling. Right, it's all troubling. So you have these two disclosures where one victim is unconscious and the other might as well be because the other victim is one years old. And now, right, you have two instances of his history that seem to indicate this arousal and desire around harming victims who are basically helpless. Yeah. Very vulnerable victims. There's another element here, by the way, that's really not discussed at all in this evaluation. These two incidents, by the way, aren't really discussed.

They're mentioned, but they're not talked about in any depth. So they're not really interpreted. One of his victims who made a disclosure, this is in the police report. They refer to this victim as AVZ. This is his, go ahead. one of his daughters. One of his daughters. They don't provide her name.

Right. This is one of his daughters. I'm going to read you. So this is known. At the time of this evaluation, this is known. So we have an abuse of a one-year-old. We have him essentially abusing a woman who was a stranger

who's passed out from alcohol consumption at a bar. He acknowledges that he's, aroused by others who were, quote, being physically abused and ameliorated. And then you're ready for this? Let's add this. And again, these aren't really interpreted in his evaluation. They're mentioned, but they're sort of just put, they're placed in the background. A.V.Z said that a couple of months ago, her dad told her that he had also been touching her

while she was sleeping. A.V. Z said, he told her he was sorry. and did not think he was doing any harm to her because she was sleeping. Okay. So let's add a third element to this pattern that his daughter, who by the way, his daughter tells us this particular daughter, this victim, tells us that he was abusing her once a week for two and a half years, every week. A lot of those incidents were when she was sleeping.

So here we have the same scenario. We have a victim who's essentially unconscious, who apparently is not waking up when she's being sex. She is. She's pretending to be asleep. That's a common element among many victims will become, they will awaken during the abuse, but they will pretend to be asleep because they don't want to create any problems. They don't want to stir the pot in the family.

One of the reasons, one of the reasons, by the way, that his daughter's, daughter said they did not disclose earlier was because they were afraid of fracturing the family. So sad. Yeah. So here you have the same situation. So the daughter at this time, this starts with this particular daughter when she's 11. And it goes on for several years, as I mentioned, this is a few months before he, tells an attorney that he's been committing these sexual offenses.

And you have this similar scenario here, right? You have someone who you have a victim that's sleeping, that's basically unconscious. It's not clearly, it's a minor, so there can't be consent no matter what. But can't really, they're helpless. They can't protect themselves anyway. They can't fight back. They're asleep. Right.

They can't run away or scream. Right. They can't run away. Can't scream. So a couple elements of this. You have, now we're starting to see, by the way, this compulsive element. So he does this for years. He does this for almost three years.

He does it when this particular daughter is asleep and can't fight back. And he's unable to stop. He basically says that he says in his interview that he kind of wants to try to stop, or his daughter says he said he would try to stop, but he couldn't. So you have this compulsive element, which means. means that, which tells me that a lot of this is out of his awareness. It's unconscious, right? Like he'll, because he, when he gets arrested and he gets evaluated, he's telling everyone, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm going to change, right? Like, he's, he's making all these promises.

Arrested up for the abuse of his daughters. Yeah, he's arrested after abusing his daughters. I'm so sorry. I admit guilt. Yeah, I'm going to change. His lawyer puts out a statement based on his discussions with the lawyer where they essentially said, so this is a defense sentencing memorandum from October 3, 2022. He says, the lawyer says, quote, Mr. Ziz wants to become a better person and never do this again. He knows he needs treatment and will take the necessary steps to change himself. So you get this a lot. You know, you get this from almost all criminals say something like that.

Oh, you know, I'm so sorry. I'm going to change. I'll never do it again. But then you see, if you look at the behavior, if you look at the compulsive nature of this behavior, right? And if you look at the severity of these crimes and if you look at what is kind of his preference here to abuse helpless, vulnerable children and infants, I think we start moving in the direction of what I referred to earlier as parapherias.

And here's one of the things that I'm going to read from, this is from a, this is from a New York Times article about a topic. We'll, soon be talking about December 8th, 2018, the author is Benedict Carey. He interviews a psychiatrist whose name is James Cantor. And here's what Cantor says about parapherias. He says, quote, there are occasional claims for treatment, meaning treatment of sex offenders. There's occasional claims for treatment, but no one has presented meaningful, compelling evidence that someone with a

parapheria can be turned into someone without a parapheria, Dr. Cantor said. As far as we can tell, it's like sexual orientation. In other words, if someone back in 2022 began to recognize some of these red flags and saw some of this as a possible parapheria and saw how compulsive this behavior was, right, and saw how, saw how, saw how entrenched this behavior was, I think there's a big question here about whether treatment would have been a good recommendation. What do you mean? Like it would not have been a recommendation? Well, you get criminals saying one thing all the time,

but they say, I'm so sorry, I'm going to change. I need to go to treatment. I need to, right? But then you have to look at the behavior and you have to look at the elements of these crimes and the patterns of attraction, right? And you have to assess whether someone like Ziz really is capable of change. And like somebody like Cantor basically says, you can't treat a parapheria. And you can't, I mean, and I don't know if that's true, by the way.

There's some research showing that you can. So let me just say it's not clear cut. There's definitely a gray area. Paraphilias may be treatable. There's a lot of debate about like pedophilia, whether that's treatable. But let me, I'm going to, so let me jump into what, what a possible diagnosis might look like here.

I say possible because, I don't know, you know, I haven't interviewed this guy. I don't know Jeffries is, but. Right. Let's start thinking about this. I'm going to read, this is from an article called blastophilia, raptophilia, insomnophobia, the blurred distinction and comorbidity of sexual,

paraphilia is in a homicidal offender. This is from the Journal of Fringeic Psychiatry and Psychology, 2019, Volume 30, number three. This is the definition of a parapheria known as somnophilia. Somnophilia is, quote, it applies to, quote, those who are attracted to the sleeping unconscious, those who are attracted to someone in a sleeping, unconscious, comatose state who find sexual arousal and others when they are not awake. That's a somnophilia.

Dude. So every... Never knew that before. Never knew that before until today. It's a very unusual diagnosis, by the way. Somnophilia is not a con... In hundreds of evaluations I've done, I've diagnosed it twice. It's not common, and you have to really be on the lookout for it.

But the most common manifestation of somnophilia, by the way, would be the whole notion. I don't know. I'm going to use some language here. I probably can't use. But date. Date are. There's a well, there's a well-known drug called Rhypna, otherwise known as Rufis.

Yeah. That I don't know. it's as popular as it used to be, but, you know, 10, 15 years ago, this was a drug of choice for certain people that wanted to take advantage of other people and they would, right, drug them with roofies until they were unconscious and then they would assault them. Right. And that's a version of somnophilia. You're taking advantage of someone who's essentially unconscious and in a comatose state.

So this whole idea of, um, date abuse is quite consistent with somnophilia. So I think when you start looking at Zizz's past, and by the way, all of this was known prior to his recent crime, right, all of this is publicly known. And so now I think if this is potentially accurate, And again, I'm not diagnosing here. I'm just saying this looks like it might be similar to somnophilia.

If this is, you know, if I'm in the ballpark with this, now we're starting to get a very different perception of or perspective on Jeffries is. Because now you're looking at a guy who has this very deviant sexual attraction and we'll get into the motives, you know, we'll get into why people have this a little bit later. But I think there's so many elements of this that are potentially problematic. To say the least. For future violence. For recidivism, for future violence.

You can see that this man is capable of something more. Yeah. There's some other elements. in here in this evaluation that are interesting. The evaluator administered a personality test and one of the findings there was that he was

quote, punitive with limited warmth to the point where he may make others around him uncomfortable, unquote. Think about that. Punitive. He was punitive. Interesting. With limited warmth. Right? And again,

Again, none of this is, none of this, none of this is being used cumulatively to start developing, to start, you know, looking at a pattern and developing a potential picture, a bigger picture of Ziz here. I guess one argument could be that, you know, obviously I have the advantage of hindsight bias. I'm sitting here after heinous crime was committed and I'm looking back. and finding pieces of the puzzle that make the most sense. So I think it would have been a lot more difficult in 2022 without knowing what the future had in store. It would have been a lot more difficult to predict the future based upon the variables that the evaluator had to work with.

I guess I could argue that. On the other hand, you know, Some of these findings are definitely concerning, and some of these findings definitely probably add up. Look, I'll just talk straight forward. I had to research this crime in depth for our backstory and research in depth what his victims, his daughters, went through. And to hear the psychologist say that he wasn't violent in her assessment after this was really, really. upsetting for me. And I don't think I need hide inside bias to realize

that if he's bringing duct tape into his daughter's room, which I know we haven't even gotten to yet, but it just makes me so angry. That is violent. So I know that you're trying to be careful. I'm not trying to be careful.

What we're getting to is the fact that he was released, thus then murdered Marcia. And I am so upset that they couldn't see all of the red flags and the risk factors of this guy. And they let him out on probation after what he did to his daughter. So keep going.

I know that you're trying to be reasonable. You're a licensed psychologist. But what I saw is just, you know, a couch surfing psychologist, our armchair psychologist was really upsetting. It was very clear to me. It was very violent. This is definitely not an easy situation or something simple to assess. However, you know, there's a lot of red flags here. Let's talk about the one you just mentioned. So that's another element that's available to this evaluator. And that is the evaluator actually says in the evaluation, quote, he engaged in aggressive actions with duct tape. And what she meant by that was that Ziz, two weeks before he disclosed his sexual offenses to his attorney. So that's another thing that I think helped him was that he came forward with these sexual offenses.

He may have done that because he believed maybe his daughters. I think he may have been concerned that one of his daughters was going to beat him to the punch. but he came forward and so I think that's always looked at favorably like oh this is someone who's contried and someone who's owning up to their right to their sins but two weeks before so essentially he goes into his daughter's room

he's drunk this is the other daughter by the way not the one I just talked about he goes into her room with duct tape he says to her quote tonight is the night I take you by will or by force, unquote. That's what he tells her.

So he's not even pretending to hide his motive. He's basically saying to you, I don't care what you think or do. I'm going to assault you tonight. That's what he tells her. And she resists, so he gets in bed with her, lays on top of her.

She resists, she starts screaming, he takes the duct tape. He has a piece of duct tape in his hand. puts it over her mouth. He fails. He's unsuccessful at doing that. He tries to do it, but he's unsuccessful. She pushes him away.

She's eventually able to push him off of her. She runs down the hall screaming into her mother's room, and that stops the abuse that evening. However, there's no interpretation of that event that doesn't involve violence. Exactly. Now, again, like from an evaluation standpoint, that's a tricky situation because technically the DA should have charged him with some type of violence during the sex offense that could have been considered a crime or a separate crime and the DA did not do that. So with first time offenders, a lot of times they might include charges that would be considered violent and then they'll reduce them. So if this was someone who would committed previous sex offenses, they probably wouldn't have reduced the charges.

But essentially, so when you're evaluating someone like Ziz and you're looking at certain assessment, risk assessment instruments, they're going to want to know if there was violence during that crime and they're going to want to know if there was a conviction. So technically speaking, again, from the assessment of a risk assessment instruments, technically speaking, you wouldn't. count that. However, from a clinical standpoint, it's clear that there was violence. And on top of everything else we just discussed, right, on top of the one-year-old, on top of the abuse of the woman that's unconscious at the bar, on top of abusing someone who's sleeping, his daughter who's sleeping, right, on top of this idea that he's, quote, he's aroused by other, who are, quote, being physically abused or humiliated

on top of the fact that he's punitive with limited warmth, when you throw in this incident of the duct tape and the violence involved in the aggression, it's hard to see how that wouldn't factor into some assessment of risk. Right. And it feels like whether or not he had charges by the DA, by the time you get somebody confessing to things that he's done and is doing, shouldn't it be assessed by not the charges?

Because his charges were even lessened. Shouldn't it be by his history and what he says he did? And what the victims say he did? That's a difficult thing for me too. And a question I left actually at the end of this. Risk, assessing risk is so difficult. assessing risk of future sex offenses is very different than assessing the risk for future violence. So one of the things this evaluation did not do is it wasn't really looking at the risk for future violence, right?

I think this could have been a little different if you brought in some risk assessment instruments that were looking specifically at assessing violence. And did that not happen? because the doctor said there was no violence. And you and I have pointed out there was violence. There's no other way to interpret what happened. Well, but it's again, like you need, oftentimes you need convictions. Like if you don't have convictions, then you have, you know, it becomes open to the interpretation to some degree.

The purpose of having statistically based actuarial risk assessment instruments is to leave out all the gray areas. And you're going to have a lot of gray areas if you start arguing about whether this was violence or not. I mean, on the surface or just at face value, yeah, this is violent. But the courts didn't find it to be violent enough to initiate charges around, you know, some type of violent behavior during the offense. You can't, you know, from a scientific standpoint, you can't just, you can't have things being so muddled. They have to be clear cut. And one way to make something clear cut is to say, I need a conviction for something violent during the sex offense.

And we don't have that here. However, as I said earlier, there's always a clinical element, meaning there's an interpretive element where the psychologist has to say, look, there's a pattern here. And it's very troubling. And even if I give, even if all the risk assessment instruments say he's low risk or below average risk, so she gave him below average risk. She actually said he's average risk if he doesn't attend sex offender treatment. He's below average risk if he does. And since he agreed to do that, she considers him to be below average risk. If you just go by the risk assessment instruments, let's say that you just go by those and say,

okay, these all say he's low. A typical strategy in that situation is to say, okay, these show him to be low risk. However, there's this pattern of all these behaviors. And even though he wasn't charged or convicted of these behaviors, they're really troubling. And because the research on all this says this, for example, that somnophilia is potentially, there's not a lot of research on somnophilia, by the way, so it's hard to make, you know, predictions about it and about the risk for future violence. But you can't say that the risk of abusing, this pattern of abusing victims when they're essentially helpless and unconscious is concerning. And it's entrenched in this person's behavior.

It's unlikely to change. You can, an evaluator might say, hey, look, this is, this looks, on the surface, this looks like real risk based on these statistical measures. However, I'm going to kick it up and I'm going to express some concerns because of this pattern of behavior. That's the clinical part. Right, that's the clinical part. And because of that, because of this pattern of behavior, at the very least, we need to keep an eye on this. And we need the therapist to kind of really consider this in some depth and to keep an eye on this. Right?

and we need this guy to talk about this stuff. Like if you look at the recommendations for treatment, they're just standard recommendations like, oh, let's deal with his cognitive distortions. This goes way beyond that. Yeah. This goes way beyond just like standard sex offender treatment stuff. This is about deeply ingrained patterns of deviant sexual behavior

and interests that need to be examined. and explored by Ziz to even begin to get control of it. Yeah. Yeah. So, and by the way, I'm not even, I'm not even done yet with this. I was going to say, what else is, right? I know, what else is in his evaluation? Because there was a lot that shocked me.

Yeah. So he also had sex with two animals. He had, he had sex with the dog and with a horse. So is that odd? like in your evaluations what does that mean yeah it's it's it's pretty unusual um it i don't know the details right so if if if i'm evaluating someone like like ziz i'm going to need to know more details is he doing this as an adolescent right is this part of like some type of sexual exploration is he doing this as an adult because he's he's he's having

compulsive sexual fantasies and he can't find a human being to engage with. I don't, I want, you got, you, you need to know the context, right? But, but, but the problem here is that it, when you, when you look at this type of behavior, what's the similarity to everything I've just discussed is this, I don't know, like literally dehumanization, right? Like for Ziz, and there's no difference between potentially a dog and a one-year-old and a sleeping human, right? Like, in other words, he's objectifying all of these. He's seeing sex as something occurring between him and objects.

Yeah. And not, in other words, there's no intimate. There's no attempt here to develop a relationship, right? Or there's no connection. There's no human connection. I mean, when he's abusing the woman that's unconscious at the bar, it might as well be a dog, right? For all intents and purposes. In other words, it's a real failure of intimacy and it's a real failure to develop any type of human connection.

It's the ultimate and objectification, right? So I've had some situations where adolescents are, they're lonely and they have poor social skills. And it's sort of a really peculiar kind of deviant sexual exploration type situation. Okay. But I don't really think this is that with Ziz. I think, you know, again, if we're going to talk about parapheria's, sex with animals is a parapheria. called zoophilia, right? Makes sense. Zulfilia. There's a lot going on. Yeah, okay. Yeah, there's a lot going on. And as long as we're talking about that, by the way, the research shows that there's a lot of

overlap between somnifilia, which is kind of what I'm proposing here, at least thinking about as a differential diagnosis, and other types of parapherias. And some of those are, there's interestingly enough, there's a parapheria called a gall mataphilia. A gall matafilia is an attraction to dolls or objects.

There was a really interesting movie a while back with Ryan Gosling called Lars and the Real Girl where he basically falls in love with the sex doll and carries the doll around like he's having a relationship with her. And the commonality

there, as you might guess, as we just discussed, the commonality is the subjectification. If you're attracted to a sex doll, you're obviously not having any relationship with that doll. I mean, you might have a fantasy-based relationship. But, right? But you're not engaged in any meaningful dialogue or relationship with a doll.

And so somnophilia, I think, has some overlap with that. There's another parapheria called a beastafilia, and that's basically sexual arousal with an unconsenting person, especially strangers. So we would refer to that basically as the R word. Let's say it. Right. And so it shares some elements with that, and not surprisingly, back in one of the first

people, one of the first psychologists to really talk about somnophilia was a well-known psychologist named John Money, who did a lot of research on sexual issues and sexual matters. He wrote a book called Love Maps in 1986, where he talked about somnophilia as being a predatory parapheria, and it's shared a lot in common with necrophilia. And necrophilia is essentially sexual arousal to dead bodies or corpses. We've seen necrophilia, by the way, with some of the worst of the worst. first serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example. On that issue, by the way, I'm going to read.

This is from a very interesting article called by, this is by Danielle Maffo. The article is called For the Love of Death, Thomnophilic and Necrophilic Acts and Fantasies. on page 878 NAFO says quote it is important here to state the obvious

necrophiliacs insomnophiliacs with few exceptions are males who use female bodies and corpses for their own pleasure unquote right so it gets again it gets to this larger theme

of objectification in dehumanization right if you're if you're having sex with a doll or with a corpse, it really doesn't have anything to do with connecting to a real human being. Or it doesn't, right? It's all kind of, you can see how these all kind of overlap.

Right. Absolutely. And obviously, the larger problem here is that if you lack this capacity for intimacy and you lack this, you objectify human beings in general from a sexual standpoint, you're not going to have healthy relationships and you're much more likely to commit sexual offenses or even violent offenses in the future. Makes sense, including Jeffries is. Right. Including Jeffries is. So there is one more element of the evaluation, I think, that's interesting.

The evaluator used an instrument called the Jeffries. justness inventory revised. It's typically, I've used it, not, I haven't used it very much. I've used it with adolescence. It's usually, it's trying to assess violent behavior or the severity of violent behavior. I think usually with teenagers, but, you know, it was used here. And one of the findings was that there was an elevation on conduct disorder, which again is more of a adolescent. and diagnosis, but there was an elevation and conduct snorder that showed that Ziz had some

repetitive and persistent behaviors that showed a harm to people and animals, not surprisingly, right, that showed that he had some persistent behaviors around harming people and animals and that he believed that these behaviors were, quote, acceptable. Almost others would not agree. In other words, he found that harming people and animals was somehow normal, whereas most normal, most average human beings would disagree with that, and they wouldn't want to harm people and animals. So, again, if we're looking for red flags, like each one of these things in and of itself may not have that much meaning,

but taken together, that, and when I do my evaluations, by the way, you know this. Like, I'm always looking for how these pieces of the puzzle fit. I'm always looking for that pattern that's going to come together and really help make sense of the person and of the risk, you know, the future risk. Right. And I think, you know, for whatever reasons, I think this evaluation was maybe a little too compartmentalized in the sense that it wasn't really considering all the pieces of the puzzle. on the other hand, what's interesting with Ziz is many of these elements we're going to see repeat with his murder. Right. And that's where it's really troubling.

Like this stuff from his previous evaluation shows up again later. Yeah. And so let's talk about that. How does it show up in its worst form? And its worst form. How does it show up? Well, first of all, this victim's son reported. that two months before the murderer,

his mother, woke up one night with Ziz in her bedroom standing over her bed when she was asleep. Right? Like, think about that. That's like, that's like Halloween movie type stuff, right?

That's like, that's like every horror movie where, you know, the, the supernatural creature, Freddie Kruger just appears out of nowhere and is standing over your bed with a knife, right? Can you imagine that? Marsha wakes up. I just want to explain.

Marsha wakes up. And Jeffries does have a key to her house and even has some of his tools in, you know, in an area, in a shop off of her property. She has a very beautiful home, very nice property. And she has allowed him. She lives alone, but she has allowed him to house some of his tools because he helps maintain her house with the property and has a key to her house and then wakes up it is it's like a horror movie and he's just looking at her right he's just staring at her she's asleep and you know

you know what's amazing so the son marcia tells her son this and unfortunately this is not reported to the police right this is a crime number one this is a crime. Number two, somnophilia. One word. Somnophilia. And again, I don't know if that's a diagnosis here. I'm speculating. But let's think about this. What's he doing in that bed? This is a guy who abused a drunk unconscious woman at a bar. This is a guy who abused his daughter for years. when she was asleep, right? Here you have an 82-year-old vulnerable adult sleeping. He's standing over her bed.

Now, if we look at it now, it makes perfect sense. He's having sexual fantasies about her. He's there for one reason, and that is because he's thinking about assaulting her. Wow. Yeah. right that when you put this all together this now goes back to all those past incidents where he's probably fantasizing about his daughter that he abused when she was asleep right he's

fantasizing about he's debating whether he should engage in some type of abuse i'm sure he's fantasizing about that he tells police he tells police that quote he had a quote romantic attraction he had quote romantic thoughts about her, right? So we know he's not in there just to like, he claims he's in there to wake her up. He says he rubbed her shoulder to wake her up. No, I, the guy, you know he was in there for, I don't know how long. Well, just let's talk about how he admitted to rubbing her shoulders. She didn't say that to her son or not that we know. Her story is that she just woke up and he was there. And now he's confessing to, oh, I was rubbing her shoulders. Like we know now that he was touching her,

at least for shoulders. Like, yeah. Right. So this is a really creepy moment, but it's also a moment that ties everything together in the sense that this moment is a sexual moment. This is a moment where he is fantasizing about dominance. He's fantasizing about abusing her

and whether he can get away with it. I'm going to read this. This is from a research article. Fairly recent research article on somnophilia. I said there's not a lot of research on somnophilia, but this is from a 2003 article in the Journal of Sexual Abuse, Volume 35, number three. The title of the article is A Qualitative Exploration of Sleep-Related Sexual Interests, somnithelia and dormophilia.

It's by DeHan and Bartels. On page 304, they say, quote, a desire to dominate someone may be another reason for why sex with a passive sleeping person is appealing. Indeed, a need for sexual dominance is associated with somnophilic interest and is supported by the assuming power sub-theme within the present study. For example, participants in their study refer to dominance control and power as being a sexually appealing aspect of a somnophilic encounter. Here, the sleep state is crucial as it places the person, the victim, in a vulnerable position,

helping to guarantee control over them and perform behaviors that one cannot do with someone who is awake. So dominance becomes a really important theme. There's this desire to essentially overpower a victim. And one way you can do that, of course, is if the victim's unconscious. And another thing I think, and I'm interpreting this, but another element of this, I think, is that there's no risk to the offender. There's no risk of rejection.

There's no threat to their ego or their self-esteem, right? Like, if you have total dominance over a victim when they're unconscious, then you don't have to worry about any repercussions, any type of rejection, any type of relationship, any type of conversation, right? You're in total control. You don't have to worry about intimacy. Right. You don't have to worry about intimacy.

So I think that's an important part of somnephalia. Here's another. I'm just going to quote this quickly. This is from an article in Journal of Sexual Abuse. Also Sexual Abuse is the journal 2021, Volume 33, number two. The title is somnophilia, examining its various forms and associated constructs. It's by DeHanan Bartels, page 216. Quote, in light of these results, it could be argued that non-consensual somnophilia is driven

by an underlying interest in passivity, power, and the elimination in degrees of the possibility of rejection. Wow. Rather than an overt interest in sexual aggression. So I think that's really interesting because they're arguing that a lot of this also has to do not in it's not just dominance it's also this fear of being rejected this fear of having these threats to one's self-esteem or one's ego or one's right pride i know we're still talking about the sexual component because he has these uh he was a sex offender and he wrote this

letter sharing sexual fantasies for an elderly customer but he was also extraordinarily violent and murdered her. And when you just said his fear of rejection, I have to be honest, I jumped to wondering if that had anything to do with the violence, which I know we haven't even gotten to yet, but I have so many questions about the torture and the violence and what he used and the sadistic quality. So he doesn't want a relationship. I get it.

He's dehumanized her. I get it. And I'll let you keep going. but just tell me we're going to get there. Are we going to get there? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So all of these pieces are now leading up to, right. So the question that people probably still have is, okay, great, look, I get the dehumanization and I get the sexual deviancy, right? I get all of that. But how do you go from that? I get the, like, leaning over her bad, fantasizing about abusing her, right? All of that makes sense. but how do you go from that to this brutal murder?

And he kidnapped her too, you know? Yeah. How? Well, there's bits and pieces of it in the evaluation that I just talked about. This idea of being punitive with limited warmth, right? That's what... What does it mean by punitive? Punitive means punishing.

Punishing, harming. Punitive is closely related to what psychologists, this trait that is so common in psychopaths, and you see it, it's one of the biggest predictors of children who later become psychopaths or have antisocial personality disorder, and it's this variable we callousness.

Callousness is often believed to be, to have some genetic components. But this idea of punitive with no warmth, I think it's very, to me, it's a lot like this variable of callousness and unemotional. You know, we know psychopaths tend to be unemotional. And by the way, I'm not diagnosing him as a psychopath. I think it would have been interesting in light of all these issues to maybe have assessed him for psychopathy. I don't, I'm not sure he would have scored very high at the time in 2022.

I'm sure he would score a lot higher today, by the way. You know, the fact that you're seeing elements of this, right, the abuse of a one-year-old, the abuse of a woman that's unconscious and passed out, the abuse of his daughter who's sleeping, there's a real callous quality to that, that you're harming human beings without caring whatsoever. And I think that's going to start getting us closer to how you go from sexual offenses to murder. I'm going to go back to here.

I'm going to go back to the DeHan and Bartles article from 2023. This is on page 215. Sadistic, quote, sadistic fantasies and the need for sexual dominance or, correlated positively with active somnophilia, sadistic fantasies, right? Wow. There's the link. That's the link. Right.

That you have this element of sadism and sadistic fantasies, I think, with Ziz, that he's always had. But somehow, for whatever reasons, Marsha is. is bringing those out to a greater extent. And I don't know why. Like, we don't know enough about this situation to really speculate. Maybe it was something she said to him. Maybe she rejected him in some way. I don't know.

But I think when he's standing over her bed, fantasizing about having sexual deviant fantasies, probably deviant fantasies about her, I think it's fair to say that many of those fantasies involved, dominance, but I think you're probably at that moment, two months before the murders, I think you're now starting to bring in some sadistic elements that you see in the crime that are present in that moment when he's standing over her bed. I think he's starting to fantasize about how arousing it is for him to bring in these

statistic elements. And there's no evidence, by the way, that the murder involved anything sexual directly. But that's not to say that pending, still pending. So they did find a letter, a five-page handwritten letter that was written before the murder that addressed a fantasy with an elderly customer. And police have stated that it does, it is eerily similar. We haven't been able to read the letter yet to what happened to Marcia. But when it talks about if there was a sex crime as well as a murder, they say those results are still pending and have not shared that.

So I think this moment, two months, so this would have been, so the murders occurred in April, the murder occurred in April 2025, go back two months to February, presumably it was sometime in February when he was standing over the bed. I think this is when the sadistic elements start entering the picture and they start becoming somewhat compulsive, I'm guessing, that he starts becoming somewhat obsessed, obsessive about these sadistic fantasies. We've seen, they're already there in his past.

There's already elements of this. But now, for whatever reasons, I think he's got a vulnerable adult. He's now we're not talking about children anymore. Somehow he's shifting this, these, these sexual, this, this, these sexual fantasies of complete dominance over his victims. He's shifting it to an adult, to an older adult, who again, like a child, has a certain degree of helplessness and vulnerability, right? That's why we call them vulnerable adults. And so I think he sees this as an opportunity to switch his MO a little bit, his modus operandi, die towards enacting or reenacting something that's sadistic.

I think he's able to convince himself that that makes more sense with an adult than it does with a child. Yeah. Wow. What about what he did? I mean, this crime is so shocking because of that moment where we learn. likely the weapon used to kill her, a nail gun in her head. Yeah.

A vulnerable adult. It's really difficult for me to understand. I don't know. Do you have? So can we talk about some of the specifics of this crime then? Yes, let's talk about it. You know, full disclosure, if we, Yeah, if we have to censor something, we'll censor it for YouTube, we respect their rules,

but we don't necessarily for our audio podcast, who are a little bit more liberal with what we can say as a true crime podcast. But yes, please, I don't want to censor what happened to her because I want to bear witness to this. She is a victim. Yeah, so I'm going to read directly from the probable cause statement. I wrote it down here on my notes. I'm going to give you, we're going to give you the coroner's version, but I'm going to give you the kind of the more, the G-rated version from the probable cause statements. Quote, wrapped around the victim's wrists and ankles were long black Velcro straps,

as well as evidence that she had been bound prior to death. Cause of death was determined to be blunt force. trauma as well as penetrating injuries to her head. So that's what the charging document or the pre-probable cause statement says. This is how the coroner translates that. The coroner, Gary Warnock, who's the Thurston County coroner, Warnock tells us that the injuries that killed Marsha Norman included, quote, trauma from a pneumatic nail. and, quote, her onset from injury to death was not instant.

It was ours, Warnock said. He said that, quote, this case was the worst case he has ever seen in his career, unquote. So what happened, essentially, a pneumatic nailer, by the way. When I heard this, you and I, I had just talked about, we did a podcast episode on the cat-collar killer. And I mentioned Anton Chigur. Anton Chigur is a fictional character

in a Cormac McCarthy novel called No Country for Old Men. I talked about what I called an Anton-Sugar moment. And, you know, it's funny because here I am again thinking of Anton Chigur. Anton Chigur used what's called a cattle bulk gun

to murder his victims. And again, this is a character, but Chigur was essentially using a pneumatic weapon. Same thing as Jeffrey Ziz to kill his victims. A cattle bulk gun, I think, might be more powerful. I don't know enough about this, but essentially Ziz uses a nail gun. Sugar uses a bolt gun. They're both similar.

They're both pneumatic weapons. Pneumatic weapons are weapons that are operated by air. So typically with a nail gun, you have to connect it to an air compressor. or same thing with a cattle bulk gun. I think it's really ironic that Shiger, who's considered one of the most evil characters in American literature, who by Cormac McCarthy, the author's own admission,

was the symbol for pure evil. And here you have a guy, and I'm not calling Ziz evil. I'm just saying these guys essentially, use the same weapon and it's a really, you can imagine, it's a really painful, horrible, terrible way for a victim to be killed. So you have with Ziz, you have not just the nail gun, but you have torture for hours. You have trauma, blunt first trauma to her head, which could be everything from hitting her with his fists to using some type of object. We don't know. We'll probably learn more.

But just this absolutely brutal, prolonged, murderous spree where the victim is tied up. She's tortured. And he's inflicting this massive pain to her over time. It's just, it's unimaginable. We just don't see this. And you and I cover some of the worst possible killers on the planet. And this is right up there in terms of its sadistic qualities. Of someone so vulnerable.

Yeah, of some, right, exactly. All of it, you know, and again, there's this theme of, that all of his victims, if you look at all his victims, there's this pattern that they're all vulnerable, they're all helpless, they're all weak, their children, they're 82-year-olds, They're just in another, you know, to put it bluntly, you know, John Money, when he first talked about somnithelia in 1986 in his book, he called somnithelia a predatory. He called it, quote, a marauding predatory syndrome.

Think about that. A marauding predatory syndrome, right? What do these victims have in common? They're all easy prey. This is extremely predatory. So why did he do it, though? This is from an article by Bill Halsall, April 21st, 2025. The article is in U.S. News.

The title is suspect used nail gun and killing of elderly Washington woman, coroner, says somebody asked Sheriff Derek Sanders what he believed the motive was in killing. Marsha. And here's what he said, quote, if I had to guess at this point in time, it's because the suspect that we have in custody is a violent person. Right?

That seems, you know, pretty obvious. But I think he's making a good point, which is that there's all this dehumanization, there's all this aggression, there's all this objectification, there's all this stuff in his past, that nobody's really picking up on. And a lot of this starts moving over

into sadism and sadistic stuff. I think especially with a vulnerable adult. I think that's when he starts crossing the line. And so while it's really obvious that this is about violence, I think it's always been there. It's just been missed. It's been overlooked. And also, if it's not obvious,

sex crimes are violent crimes. I think there's a lot of people that sometimes thinks, well, sex crimes aren't, you know, For the groups I did with sex offenders, they'd always say, well, I didn't murder anyone. They'd say, well, I wasn't violent. I didn't murder anyone. I swear to God, they would say that all the time. At least I'm not a murderer.

What they failed to recognize, obviously, and we talked about this in the groups, and other offenders talked about it with them in the groups, is that a sex crime is a violent crime. It involves inflicting incredible harm and pain and suffering on another human being. that often lasts for their entire life, right? In many ways, it's a worse, it's a death sentence of sorts in the sense that victims of sex crimes

live with that pain forever. Yeah. Yes, they do. And so we had evidence of this all along. It was right in front of us, right? It was right there. It's just that nobody, I think, really paid attention. Nobody really saw what this was. nobody picked up on those subtle hues, those subtle red flags that were always in the background.

And yes, you might argue that the murders appear more extreme. But really, when you look at it, I think it's a progression, right? You see the progression. And one of the thing that's incredible here is this guy's on probation. This is the most maddening thing. Marsha would still be alive if he hadn't been put on probation after the violent sex crimes against his own daughters. Well, she would be...

Go ahead. She would be alive if he was placed in prison, which he wasn't. She would also be alive. Think about this. He's on probation, right? If the son, and I'm not blaming the son because he didn't know all this history, If the son knew that this guy was a convicted sex offender,

he probably would have reported it. I'm sure he wishes now that he knew that Zizz was a convicted sex offender. But if that... He was a retired police chief, too. I don't know if he knew that about her son. No, I didn't know that. Yeah. I didn't know that.

But I want to say this too, though, is if he had known that, did he look? Because I have questions about if he was ever even a registered sex offender. And why would he be able to be a handyman going into people's homes if he was a registered sex offender on probation? That would not be a job. A sex offender would be allowed to have or should be allowed to have. Typically, typically the conditions for sex offenders are they can't be around kids. So he can be a handyman as long as he's getting approval from his probation officer that he's working jobs that involve only adults.

Because Marshall lived by herself when she was 82, there were no children involved. So I'm sure if she had her grandkids over, then he would not have been allowed at her house. However, if that moment when Ziz is in her room over her bed, if that gets reported, I think it's highly possible that that would be seen as a violation of his probation. There's no reason this guy would be, there's no reason any human being

would be in the bedroom of a friend who's an 82-year-old in the middle of the night, just standing over her bed, watching her, especially if you know that this guy's a convicted sex offender and that he abused victims when they were unconscious or sleeping, right? Like, if you know that, this guy gets arrested and his probation probably gets violated, or at the very least he has a hearing to determine whether his probation is violated.

And it's entirely possible at that moment that his suspended sentence, which I assume he's getting a suspended sentence because he's in the community, he was originally sentenced to 57 to 75 months in prison. So he's got a suspended sentence. That probably gets revoked. He probably ends up in prison. Marsh is alive, right? And I'm not sure that all of those elements,

would have fallen into place, but they could have. Well, and like I said, you know, I don't even know if they knew he was a registered sex offender or if he had even registered. It was hard for me, as I researched, Tim, to understand if that was even known. If he was even getting the treatment, he was supposed to be getting through this program in Washington State. Yeah. Yeah, it's not clear. It's not clear that he would ever receive treatment for sex offenses. And that, by the way, some of that would be on probation. Probation.

It's up to probation to mandate treatment and to make sure that their clients are attending treatment, right? Like a lot of that has to do with communication between the treatment program and probation and the offender. And a lot of times you'll get signals will get crossed and you won't, the treatment program may not be doing a good job of communicating with probation. and right it's all sometimes that stuff doesn't work seamlessly and I know because I did six seven hundred groups for many many years so um so there could be some of that but it it's it seems to be a question about whether he was attending treatment that's also shocking to me though that you say that about handyman as long as it's an elderly person because it feels like if I was calling a handyman I would want to know if they were a registered sex offender and I would hope

that they wouldn't simply be handymen that I could call or that someone would refer without me knowing. So I understand the whole, as long as there aren't children in the home, but he was advertising himself to many people as a handyman. At what point does he have to tell people that he's a registered sex offender? And how do you know if a grandchild's going to be someplace or not?

It just seems like a job that shouldn't be going on if you're on probation for sex crimes. Again, a lot of that is up to the probation officer. Probation officers want to see their clients work. They don't want, right? They want to see them. They don't want to see them unemployed because that's a risk for reoffense. So some of it depends on the probation officer and whether they're comfortable allowing their clients to work as handyman or, right?

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. It really depends. If they believe that the probation officer believes that some of the, like Ziz is fairly a risk to re-offend, then they're more likely to give him the latitude to work as a handyman. And they'll tell him, you know, the pro-man officer will typically tell someone like Ziz, okay, you can do jobs as long as it's only around, as long as you're only around adults. And yeah, that can be really hard to control. I agree. You know, you can imagine us hiring a

handyman here in our house who comes in in the morning and for whatever reasons doesn't get the job done and then we have to pick up her son and our son comes in and we don't know if we don't know that person's history if we don't know that that's a registered sex offender then we're not going to really think about right a child entering the home and so I think it's it's fairly complex Do you think that he rejected her? Because you said something about when you dehumanize somebody, you don't have to worry about rejection or anything. Do you think that she fought? I said when they're unconscious.

When they're unconscious. But she clearly isn't going to be throughout this entire ordeal. We don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Do I think he drugged her? Probably not. I think he wanted to inflict maximum. pain on her for whatever reasons. I don't know what happened. Maybe he, maybe he attempted to,

maybe he made some sexual advances and she rejected him and he became furious. Right. I can envision that easily. I could see this as being a case of, yeah, I could see this being a case of he admits he has this romantic attraction to her. And so here's a guy who has lost his wife. He's lost his family. He's living on his own. He's not, he's having trouble making ends meet, right? There's some desperation there. He's probably experiencing some depression. I don't know. Like, things aren't going great for this guy. There's an 82-year-old. I think they're going pretty damn great for him. He, he attempts to his daughter and then abuses his daughters for year, confesses to it, gets put behind bars, and then they let him go on

probation and his wife's not divorcing him and he's got a job as a handyman. I think he's probably thinking sweet, I've got a second chance at life. Nobody cares what I just did. But you have to see it from his standpoint. This is a guy that was in the army for almost 20 years, right? He was he was an officer. He probably saw himself as a bit of a big shot, right? He was a pastor of a church. He was a pastor. He was that job after a sex offenses, obviously, because you're not going to have a pastor around kids. Yeah, she said no more. Right. Right. So that ended. I think there's probably, you know, a lot of sex offenders feel sorry for themselves. They, they feel like they're victims. And I think Ziz probably had some of that. And he probably, you know, he probably felt like, look, I had everything going for me. And all of that

changed. And even though he was the one who went to an attorney and disclosed his offenses, he was the one who created this scenario. Because I think he probably felt that he, my guess is his daughter was going to come forward. And he wanted to beat her to that so that he could be looked upon more favorably. But I think there's probably a sense in which he sees himself as a victim of sorts and then he feels sorry for himself. And he sees that he could have done so much more with his life. He's not thriving in the community, right? He's sure he's working as a handyman, but he's not doing particular well by his standards.

Right. They say he's decently smart. The evaluators say he is a decently smart man. He has degrees. He even has a master's degree. He was a pastor. Yeah. One thing I have a question with, too, is I do believe his dad was abusive in my research.

Right. Very abusive. His father, his father was physically abusive, at least several times. He grew up in a home with domestic violence. His father was physically abusive towards his mother. It's not clear whether he witnessed that, although he probably did. You tell me that the crime, oh, go ahead. His father was also a convicted sex offender.

He didn't grow up with a father. because his father's sister. So there is all this abuse in his home. There's domestic violence. There's sexual abuse. There's physical abuse towards him. And obviously that's going to play a role in a lot of this. One could argue that his lack of empathy and his callousness and callousness,

the callousness and his quality and the lack of empathy. A lot of this, I could argue. may have to do with insecure attachments in his childhood and, you know, his own trauma, his own inability to resolve his traumas and how those traumas are playing out with his victims. One thing when he was arrested and interviewed after the abuse of his daughters, he was asked why he did it. That's something that you say you ask every criminal you evaluate. And he said he didn't know.

And you said that's actually the most common answer of a criminal. Why is that? Because again, here's somebody that's fairly smart. He has two degrees. He is confessing to his crimes and saying he doesn't know. And to me, like, that's a red flag. Like, if you don't know, but why wouldn't he know? Most offender, almost all criminals don't know why.

I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions I do with all the time. There's this assumption that if somehow Jeffries says it said, oh yeah, I know why because I was abused and I've got all this pain from my childhood and I'm just trying to inflict that pain on my own victims. Like that doesn't necessarily mean that the abuse is going to stop. And let me quote this. He says, quote, I don't understand how all this happened. That's what he says.

I hear that time and time again. And the reason is because most criminal. lack self-awareness and they lack the capacity to reflect on their lives. They lack what we call metacognition or mentalization. They lack the ability to step back and assess their lives and their values and their emotions and to learn from it. A lot of criminals are very literal and they're very action-oriented and they don't take the time to become self-aware and to really reflect.

on their lives and their values and who they are. And so they don't know. And even like, you know, Ziz is an interesting example of someone who he discloses his own crimes, which leads to his arrest and all the things that have, all these changes in his life. And he's having his lawyer says he wants to be a better person. He's never going to do it again. He's going to change, right? He's expressing remorse.

He's expressing endless amounts of remorse. He's saying, I'm not making any. excuses for my crimes. I'm opening up to this. I can't believe what I did. What I did was so bad. Like, he's saying everything you want a sex offender to say. And this is where I think it becomes really confusing and really hard for people to understand. Like a lot of that is a facade. What you need to look at, and this is where, this is why our channel is called hidden, true crime. You've got to look at what's hidden. You've got to look at what's unconscious. You've got to look below the surface.

Somebody who says all of these things may look like they're going to change. You may think they're going to change. You may think that they're being sincere. But the reality is somnophilia, parapherias run deep. As I read earlier, the quote from the psychiatrist, parapherias don't change readily or if at all. They're deeply entrenched in us or in whoever, in sex. And in some ways, it's understanding that duality, that conflict between what you need to say

and what's conscious and on the surface and the deeper unconscious elements that are kind of driving human behavior. And violence, by the way, is a really primitive, primarial motive for human beings that most of us don't really understand why we engage, if we engage in violence, we don't really understand why. But we know that it's something very primitive. And so when he's saying he doesn't understand, he means it in the sense that he doesn't,

like he doesn't know those deeper motives driving him because he's never really thought about it. That would take a lot of therapy and a lot of emotional intelligence and a lot of self-awareness and a lot of work to get to the point where he can really understand what happened and he can change his behavior based on that understanding. In the meantime, he's just feeding us this gobbly gook about, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm going to change, it's never going to happen.

Like this behavior of his, as I pointed out, he sexually abused his daughters for years. He went into his daughter's room for three years when she was asleep and busted her all the time. that think about how compulsive that is that's like an addiction to fentanyl that's not going to change easily that's going to take some real work like that is deeply ingrained in this guy that's what you need to look at yeah and the forces driving this are much more hidden than they appear to be thank you and if you look deep enough as we've talked about if you look deep enough you get to

these sadistic qualities these callous sadistic qualities that somehow, you know, to fill this guy or give this guy a certain amount of pleasure, right? That's what's going on here. Yeah. Yeah. And no matter what else, like, when you abuse a woman who's unconscious at a bar, right, that's sadistic. When you abuse anyone, it's potentially sadistic, but when you do it when they're unconscious and basically comatose. It doesn't get worse than that. Like the risks of doing that again and again and again have to be high or reasonably high

because that's behavior that someone like Ziz cannot stop. He can't control it. So if you ask me, what is it this guy really wants? I mean, I think like most criminals, I think Ziz wants to be desired. He wants to be loved unconditionally. he wants people to find him attractive and more than anything, he's afraid of rejection

and he's afraid of abandonment. And obviously, like a lot of criminals, he's trying to get that in the most dysfunctional, deviant way possible, right? Like, that's one of the ironies of criminality is that, you know, we all, whether we're criminals or not,

we all kind of want the same things. It's just how we go about it. And Marcia suffered the consequences of someone else. Somebody that can be vulnerable and open, right? Somebody that can deal with intimacy to a certain level is going to go about this in a very different way than someone like Jeffries is. And Otsad is that he victimized that vulnerable, open, healthy, warm person. And that a lot of times that's how it was. works because those people are threats.

To who they're not? Right. If she's holding up a merit in him and saying, hey, look, I'm all the things you're not. I'm loving, I'm vulnerable, right? I'm cooking you a meal. I'm cooking you a meal.

Yeah. Being generous and giving you a shop for your tools. I'm warm. I'm inviting. Right. I can communicate well. all the things he's not. In many ways, I think people like Zizz are threatened by the people that are the opposite

or have those qualities that they don't, that somehow they envy those qualities. Thank you. So anything else you want to say? Thank you so much for helping me to process this case. My heart goes out. My heart goes out to Marcia's family. And we will continue following this case. And if anybody has any more information on this case,

email us at hidden true crime info at gmail.com. We're so sorry for Marcia's family and what they have lost. Yeah, in such a horrific way. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's unthinkable. And I guess we say that a lot. We cover the worst of the worst, I think, and it's just unimaginable. but I guess in the final analysis, somebody like Zizz is absolutely a predator.

He's praying on the most vulnerable, weakest members of the community. And, you know, the problem here is it's not obvious that he's a predator, right? Like he can disguise that. And that's what makes somebody like Ziz so problematic and so scary. right and so

um brightening is because you just you can't it's you can't see it on the surface but when you start uncovering what's hidden you see it yeah clear as day all right sweetheart thank you so much

we'll continue to follow this case and yeah thank you everyone for being here tonight we'll see you we'll get we'll get people updates as it progresses yes we'll see you bye bye Okay, good night.