Last Podcast On The Left - How to Catch a Killer: An Interview with Katherine Ramsland

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Ben 'n' Henry are joined by true crime legend and author of How to Catch a Killer: Hunting and Capturing the World's Most Notorious Serial Killers, Katherine Ramsland for an in-depth discussion on BTK, what it's like to work so closely with a serial killer, and the many misconceptions on just how a serial killer is defined.

Hey, what's up everyone? How are you doing? Ben Kisselier hanging out with Henry Zabrowski. Yes. Thank you all so much for giving to our Patreon without you. We're absolutely nothing. Today we are honored to be with an absolute icon. It's a legend of true crime. Yes, legend of true crime. Dr. Catherine Ramsland. Thank you so much for being here. I know you wrote how to catch a killer hunting and capturing the world's most notorious serial killers along with 68 other books. It's a lot. It's incredible. It is. But I love it. I'm so happy to have all the opportunities. But today we wanted to talk about, because you know that right now we have out a brand new series that we've been working on called BTK Confession

of a Serial Killer. And I watched the first episode of it. And I can say as a group of people that just also wrote a book on serial killers that like it's showing BTK in a way that I have never seen him before and an approach to him in a way that's really, really interesting. A loving kind approach. Sympathetic almost. I mean, Dr. Ramsland, you really do. But you figure out a way to talk to probably one of the biggest villains in American history. Yeah, it took a while. I mean, that's I don't think I've put more time into any book than that one. And that took us about five years. Can you go into that process a little bit about reaching out to somebody like Dennis Rader, Bind Torture Kill, a man who's so notorious.

How did that process even come around? Well, the weird, it wasn't my idea. You weren't like, oh, I hope it is Sicily. Yeah. I wish upon a star every night that BTK shows up at my window and he did. It was an odd convergence of things. I was writing a book that looked back over 100 years on mental health experts who had taken a lot more time to spend with extreme offenders, mass and serial killers to learn a lot more about them. So they'd spend weeks, months, years. So I just published that book called The Mind of a Murderer. And then I saw this woman on Facebook who had claimed in 2005 when Rader was arrested that she was going to be writing a book with him. So I just sent her a message saying whatever

happened to your book with Dennis Rader. And she immediately asked me if I would take it over. She didn't want to write it. Is it just because of the nature of dealing with him? Or is it just because they didn't have the resources or they were like, well, you're the expert. You need to do this. Sort of a blend of those factors. And she had one of my books that she was using as a model and so she knew who I was. But that still wasn't a done deal. I had to be vetted by the victim's families because proceeds from this book go to them. And also they did not want to book about him or with him or by him, but they knew it was inevitable. So they wanted some control over the type of book. So I had a

proposal saying I wanted to write a book that would benefit criminology, psychology and law enforcement. And then other people had approached them, by the way, and they said no. But because my credentials, my intent, et cetera. So then we had to convince Rader to switch out from the first person that he really liked to me. So we ended up playing chess together for about a year before all of this, all the legalities and everything got into place. And so that took a while. And you know, he warmed up to me, but it wasn't like I wrote to him and said, oh, I want to write a book with you. It was this bunch of weird things that all happened at once to turn a book over to me. And then I reshaped it completely from.

I can't, that is like, I can't even imagine sitting across from BTK just playing chess. That's absolutely. Well, it was through the mail. It was through the mail. It was through the mail. He's not good at mail, by the way. He tends to get him caught. It does. But you also like, I think beginning of the show, like I don't want to bust it to, I really don't want to tell too many too much about what happens inside of BTK confession of serial killer, because it's very interesting. But I do want to talk about the main themes,

which is the idea that the extreme offender can be stopped, like it can be prevented, which I think is fascinating. I'm going to get into that. But I also want to talk about the games he started to play in the very beginning. It wasn't just chess, right? Like he literally, he sent you codes to work out. Like the Riddler first, first he told me not to cheat at chess. Oh, I'm so happy. He has more. He has a moral compass. He does.

He does. They all do. John Wayne Gates, he had one too. He just thought, you know, people in America were getting too many divorces. Yeah, there's 26 bodies in your floorboard. But have we thought about the state of marriage in this country? Yeah, seriously. He becomes Steve Harvey. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's part of Rader's story is those life frames, each of which

has its own sense of morality. So he wants me to be honest. He didn't like that the police had lied to him, et cetera, et cetera. And then he, before he would work with me, I had to agree to solve a series of codes that was in part because he wanted to tell the story through some codes to keep prison guards from seeing what he was doing. But also he wanted to see if I would play the game. And of course I will play the game. I want to watch his behavior. No matter what it is, I want to see not just what he's saying, but his whole way of dealing with me and with his subject matter. So the code thing was really interesting.

Well, let's definitely continue on with BTK. But just first, just with the victim's family, because I thought that was really interesting that obviously their true crime can be a double edged sword. And I think sometimes it opens up wounds for people who are already victims. What was one of the things that they told you where they're like, can you just please treat the subject in this kind of way? Like, was there something where you're like, okay, I understand where you're coming from? They did not limit me. Some of them wanted their story to be included. And I said, no, because this is an autobiography and this is not where your stories should be. I just

think you should not read this book. So you should not have your story in this book. Yeah, interesting. The book has a different, it's not a true crime book. It's an exploration of a criminal mind, which is different from the way the story has been mostly told from the point of view of the investigation and the citizens of which it's not from his point of view. So this is from his point of view. But they were fine. The ones that I met with were fine. They did not restrict me in any way from, I mean, they knew it was going to be graphic to some extent, but I didn't put the worst police photos in. And also, I was friends

with the DEA before it ever started. So once I convinced her, this is a worthwhile book, she then had me looking, I stayed with her. She had me look at her whole stash of stuff. And we went over a lot of what she thought would be useful. And so I got a lot of good information from her, from other people. Was there any images that were so shocking? You just said you didn't put the most shocking in the book. Anything that maybe our audience isn't aware of, because I mean, as Henry said, I think he's maybe the scariest. One of the stories, because on last podcast and left, we try to, we belittle serial killers

to humanize them and show people that they are not supernatural creatures, that they're not demons. Because I feel a lot of true crime portrays serial killers as sort of like, truly, they have powers. They can control time and space and they're super clever. And a lot of times the serial killers, we say a lot, are born out of extreme mediocrity. They come from somebody who doesn't have tangible skills and they end up destroying things because it's a little bit easier than building something. But there's something about him, especially because of what he revealed from his childhood, that you really now get to see some of why he did it. I think it's important to look through his eyes, because again, he's one

of the most frightening figures in true crime. And if you're going to try to understand any of them, I think he's the one to try to understand. So any images just like, jump out of you and be like, wow, okay, I'm dealing with someone who is really out there. Well, first of all, the images of himself and self-fondage, there were a lot of them. And they were really interesting in terms of the positions he would put himself in. And then some of his, he sometimes almost held himself captive because he'd lose a key to handcuffs or, or he'd be upside down and a tree and not be able to get out of his rig.

We did a whole bit on stage. I did a whole bit once about him trying to set up the camera while in the bondage gear. Like, I like, how does that work? Like seriously, how does it work? He's the selfie king way before smartphones. Oh my God. He's probably so jealous of all the kids now with their iPhones. If I had that back in my day. Yeah, he's, they have tablets in the prisons now. So, no, he had a remote control thing all rigged up with his Polaroid camera. So he figured out how to do it. So the camera

set up and then he would just use the wire to take the picture. And he had a lot of them. But the, the shotguns of victims families. I mean, I think if you read the descriptions, you can probably figure out what the pictures would be that. Yeah. Yes. They are, the crime scenes are awful. And he did that on purpose too, I imagine in many ways is that he liked leaving an impact. And he liked, do you want, he knew that he was creating layers of trauma too, right? Like he knew that the cops would be fucked up seeing it and anybody else who saw it would see how serious a bad guy he was.

He wanted to terrorize Wichita. He wanted to command their attention. Now remember, 1974, that's even before we know much about Bundy, January 74, not July 74. So we don't really know much of anything about serial killers. It's been the Boston strangler. We've had the Manson and, you know, a few, a few other stories, but nothing like this invading person who's in your home. And he wanted to hold Wichita into terror. He wanted that feeling of domination and control over his immediate town. People ask me all the time, Henry, why do you use Babel? And it's a fairly simple story. Just get in a time machine, go back to 1997, imagine yourself as a 13 year old ginger chubby

boy with a yearning for the stage and the talent to match. A star wrapped in a sex symbol yet to be matured enough to be accepted legally by the American public. And I was in the final rounds for this little film. It was a biopic. I made it through all the dance rehearsals, incredibly impeccably. The acting, I was there. It was for a film called Selena. And then came the Spanish test. And I got to say, I got less than good results if you knew what I'm saying. But nevertheless, it went and became an iconic role for Jennifer Lopez. And good luck to her and whatever the hell she is up to now. But if I just had Babel then, you might be talking to the Polish Selena that the people really wanted.

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to you. What makes you I mean, not to be anything like what what what is the key to you that shows that he's telling the truth or you think that he's telling the truth or do you know that like, well, I don't know. I don't know who I'm meeting here. I don't know I'm meeting a representative or like, or if you know, I mean, like, because he talked about his personality being a cube. All right, so first of all, to this goes across the board to any offender you're going to talk to, but especially ones you anticipate will be manipulative and deceptive and narcissistic. You need to know their story as well as you can before you get to talk to them. So I have corroborating sources. I had the police files. I had their interrogation.

I had things that the people had said about him. I had the DA. I had a number of things that I I would know to some extent, certainly not not completely, but to some extent, when he's not telling me the truth. Okay, to like cross. Yeah, he didn't like that I had some of that stuff, because of course, he wants to spin his own image to me. And some of the things in the like the interrogation went against what do you want to make you think? So, so he I had to call him out a couple of times and stuff. And that's why with him. Yeah, how did that work when you called out one of the most notorious serial killers in history? How did you do that? How does that work?

I think because I have credentials, academic and therapeutic type of credentials, there's a certain aura in that that they think maybe I see more than they than I really do. I don't know. But I know that he he would withdraw. And then the next time we talk, he's got two or three pages filled up of justification or explanation for so I knew that I kind of figured out his pattern when I would say now that that doesn't really jive with what I know. I figured, yeah, he'd get grumpy, cranky. But then he'd come back, he'd think it through and he come back because one of the things about him and Bundy and Casey and a few others that you know are very loquacious who like to talk a lot is they really trust that their

narrative will control the situation. They trust that the language they put out there is going to be the defining thing for everyone who hears it. They believe that. So I I knew that he would always come back with something to respond to this. We never got to the point where he was was really angry at me. I thought that he might be after especially after the book came out and he doesn't get to read it, by the way, but people tell him stuff. And also after the A&E documentary, there were some of his friends would said that I threw him under the bus and I. Oh no, you threw BTK under the bus. I can't believe you would do that. And he immediately said, well, that's her job. And he did not.

So in that capacity, he defended you. He defended me. We still we've been talking up for 12 years. He called me on Sunday. Everything's fine. I really thought sort of thought some of this stuff might get under his skin in a way that he would just decide that said, I don't want to do this anymore. But he hasn't gotten to that point. So he's got such a superiority complex that I do think in a way your it's what you said it's and you say that in the in the show, which I think is really interesting is that you did what I did to get my first LA apartment. I dropped names. I literally was like, this is how I did. Like I knew how to jump in front of couples. I was like, you know, I've done

some work. Like I tried to jump in where like you did the thing where you're like, I am very accredited. This is all of my this is my body of work. And there's something about that why it kind of feels it kind of feels like Dennis Raider is like, well, if anybody's going to throw at me under the bus, at least it's her. Like if he's the one I trust to do it. I like the way you put that. But I do think that also buffers me. Yeah. Because because it does. I'm not a group B. I'm not a he has terms for various types of readers that that write their people who write him. And I'm not in those groups because the credentials set

me apart in his mind. And so yeah, I am not afraid to use that because I need buffering. And I want to keep that level of authority. They're right. Absolutely. That's another thing because some of the people I know who talk to serial killers let them run rough shot all over them, call them at all hours, night and day, make demands of them to keep them on the phone for hours. I make, I set limits and keep them. Yeah, you have to have boundaries. So you mentioned how he was correcting or he was lying basically to you and you had to correct the record. What were some of the things that he was lying about? What were some of the issues that I guess he doesn't like being

true? He really likes to stress how good a dad he was. Like he does like to stress how good of a husband and father he was, which is very interesting to think being like, well, oh yeah, that was one thing. That was one thing. And it took several years to get to this point. And they did not put, they should have put this on the video and the documentary I thought because they wanted something unusual. And this was, he has often said that he was never, he never cheated on his wife. And you know, I stayed faithful as if, however, however, there was a woman whose house he was installing a security system. And he admitted that he

made a pass at her and had she not, you know, fended him off, he would have definitely gone further. And I said, well, doesn't that kind of defeat your idea about your fidelity that you're, that you are a good husband? And he admitted, yeah, yeah. But he has that compartmentalizing thing, right? The cubing thing. The cubing. The cubing is so fascinating. Yeah. Each side of the cube doesn't really care what the other side does. Yeah.

But that was some, that's interesting. So for him, obviously being a good Christian man, he's very pious. So for him, that is a, that's a deal breaker. You don't commit infidelity. That's the psychology is so fascinating with these people because they do have morals. And then meanwhile, they're also doing the most atrocious things of all time. So they have codes. They have codes. Yeah. And going back to that, when you were corresponding with him and you just said you spoke on Sunday, what was that first process like when you received something from him?

Do you feel like there was a certain amount of like energy attached to it? Like, wow, this is, this is coming from a notorious killer. That's so amazing. I just wrote a blog about that very thing yesterday. Nice. Yes. Yes. I still got it. You talked about the aura that seems to transfer when you first, especially the first letter,

the first letter, it really stands out. There's something, this is a serial killer, right? Yeah. And so he's at the first serial killer. And that's the one thing I mean, You've talked to a lot of these losers. Like you've talked about, you know, yeah. The very, very, very first one was over, about 25, 26 years ago, maybe more than that. And the first, and that envelope was really startling. And I was just getting into this field. I had been teaching philosophy at Rutgers. So this was all very different for me. And getting that envelope, it just seemed to have that aura like who sent that one like the telephone

bill. That is an envelope that contains something. And yeah. So with Raider, yeah, I think the first time, because, because as you know, this arrangement was unusual. And so I was awaiting his, I had mailed him first to introduce myself and that I'm the one who's going to take this over. And so the first letter back was obviously momentous. A lot was at stake. He could have said, yeah, no way. I am not letting you do this. Or, you know, but he was very polite. And one thing about him that is different from some of the other killers who I've seen dealing with with associates is he's polite. He does not use vulgar language. He recognizes limits I've set. He always treats

me respectfully. So and that first letter set the tone that it was respectful, appreciative. He wanted to play chess, get to know each other and do the codes. So he kind of laid out the groundwork to see what I would do. But you know, I was game for anything because when you're doing psychology, you want all the layers, all the behaviors, even if it's lies and manipulation, you want all of it. Because there's a lot you can tell from somebody about how they lie, what they lie about, right? Like what how what they how they approach subjects. I have a question that this is a general question. But I want to ask I do again want to get into like what the center of this the documentary is about. But I want to ask a general question

about serial killers that maybe just what your first thoughts are, because when I read about serial killers that have quote unquote, a functioning family life on top of their serial killer activities, especially somebody like Dennis Rader, who had such a deep and intense fantasy life, like you even asked the question, was your fantasy life more real than your real life? And he kind of admitted like, yeah, sort of kind of felt like that. Like in my in my estimation, when I read this stuff, it always kinds of feel like the functional life is the is like how they say like Bruce Wayne is the real is not the real guy. That's the cover and Batman's the real guy. We're like, is Dennis Rader like the family man?

Is that like a sexual game too? Is that another like, look, see what I can do again also control myself enough that I can have all of this right and my dark world? No. Okay. Yeah. Do you think that it's like so it was genuine for him? It was genuine. And also he's falling into place and what he's trained up to do in the mid America's Midwest is you go to church, you get you find a woman who'll make a good wife and mother, you have the children, you get a job, you support them. He was going through the home menu that he was trained that this is what you do. So that and he had just come back from military service met Paula. It was all working. I wasn't a game. And even yeah, I don't think I think the cubing thing

is is a secret to Dennis Rader not not all the gamesmanship. The game is on one side of the cube. Yeah, that's so interesting. So does he do you think he fully understands the difference between these two realities that he lives in seamlessly? Or do you think that he was a little bit surprised by his own actions? Sometimes surprised. He does say something kind of interesting in the book about he's a metaphor where he's he's kind of on this raft pushing himself away from shore, the shore being his his moral foundation. And as he's thinking about and stalking women and thinking about murder, he's pushing away from the shore in his mind, he'll never the shore will always be back there to return

to. And then one day he turns around, it's not there. So that that's kind of a good metaphor of what's going on with him as he's moving in a certain direction without recognizing how much he's changing. That's lost it's dead. So that's really interesting. So all right, so maybe it goes into the core of like your thesis of the docu series, which is this idea that the this can be prevented. The extreme offender can be prevented. Now, what is it about Dennis Raider's story that starts that pointed you towards that? Like these are like, okay, this is this is proven a thing. Like maybe this is what we look for. We're like, what causes someone to kick off from the shore? Well, I mean, in a way, it's a reeducation

of society that as you guys say, they're not these 24 seven monsters that are set apart. We have to understand that there it's a continuum. And that these these kids who are having these spent this fantasy life, there's we have these weird formulas about serial killers that came from the 1980s. So it's very McDonald triad, right? Like all of that. Yeah, it hangs on because it's nice formula for TV and novels. So that's unfortunate, because we're missing the nuances. Humiliation, something understudied. That is a huge role. And so many of these offenders lives as in they were humiliated as children, they were humiliated in a way that they don't forgive or forget. And it stays with them. We see that a lot of mass murders.

That's that's very much the formula that goes into their makeup. But we're not what we have not really looked at it with serial killers. But it does mix in with as they're going into puberty, it mixes in with lust, it mixes in with their fantasy life, and and the decisions they make subsequently. So we have to understand the role of things beyond just outright abuse. You know, we talk about Oh, they've been abused, head injuries, etc. Yeah, you know what, kids who don't have those things also have become serial killers. So we have to look at we watch a kid who might be withdrawing. You know, Rayner would draw his girl traps right there on the blackboard right in front of the teachers, girl traps.

Yeah, like we saw that with Leonard Lake used to do the same activity too. He got obsessed with the that book when he got upset with the collector. And it's weird because it really is out in the open. It was like that that story of the dude, the little kid that the parents gave the gun and he's drawing killing people for days. Exactly. That's a dysfunctional thing. Of course, absolutely. But it's just the kid is telling everybody like, hey, like he's screaming for attention. So what do you how do we change the parameters that we can listen to because we actually said this on our Jeffrey Dahmer episode, we were like this idea that like, if he is a 10 year old boy could tell

somebody, I have these thoughts about sleeping with sleeping people like this idea of like, I like people when they're sleeping still and like, how did we start that conversation? Like, how do you? Yeah, one of the problems is we're uncomfortable. First of all, sometimes we don't observe our own protocols. In the case of the kid in Michigan, they had a team in place for understanding these signals and they did not call them in. Yeah. What's with that? I don't know. Why do you think that is? Why do you think it is so difficult for adults to address these issues and children who are obviously crying out? I think it's uncomfortable. We don't know what to do with a kid who's doing deviant things.

We just, it's weird. And we just think if we put them out of class to our send them home or get them a little bit of counseling, then that's all, all it takes, but it takes teamwork and it takes consistency in a period of time. It's not just Oh, stop drawing that. You know what happened when, when Jerome Brutus, his mother told him to stop wearing high heel shoes. Yeah. He didn't stop. Yeah. He didn't stop. Yeah. He just go, stop. Hey now. Hey, like, but honestly, even wearing heels is fine. It's just the, that idea of like, it's a part of it. I think it's the shame. That's what happened. He shamed him. He took it underground and it became hotter for him as a thing, a forbidden secret. So

now it became a really big deal in a way that might not have been, and she not made sense to think of us and made him feel ashamed. Raiders have ashamed him and several occasions and he stopped trusting women. Right. Hey, what's up everyone? How you doing? Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, it's me, man. Yeah, bro. Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast of the last day. Go out there and purchase yourself some. I hope you enjoy it. We have sativa. We have indica and we have a hybrid and I have to tell you for my personal experience, they are wonderful. Super tasty live resin. You really get the delicious, weedy taste, which is what I like and three different experiences. You

go to your local vape store and get it. Absolutely. Thank y'all so much for supporting the show. We absolutely love you. Can't wait to see on the road and get that vape, put it in your brain and have a good time. And if you want to set your favorite weed store, give them a call and ask for them by name. Last podcast on the left, it's weed. Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail Satan. And do you think it's also, it's got to be mixed with an antisocial kind of personality makeup too, right? Because some of these people, they find it super hot and then they become like shoe designers. I'm certain that happened to Balenciaga. At some point, he got shit and all of a sudden now he's developing shoes. And there's a creative way, but like

it must also be mixed with like this kid also has a bad batch inside of him. Everything is a combination of biology and environment. Everything is. And there's no formula for which one matters more in someone's life than another. Yes, we are finding a lot of research on the brain that tells us psychopathic individuals have different brain disconnects, especially over things like moral processing, focus on reward, long-term decision making, especially in adolescence, for example. So yeah, certainly those things play into it. Absolutely. Are we at the point yet where we can actually anticipate and predict what's going to happen? No, we're not. We don't have pods. We can't go get them and stuff them

in like minority report. We're in no way can we decide what the predictive quality is. But we do know that if someone's brain shows these aspects that they are going to have trouble with consequences of their actions, with decision making, perhaps with hyperactivity, they are going to have some trouble with that. Those are the kids I think that we can build programs around. Taxpayers come into the picture too. So they don't want to pay for those programs. Who cares whether we have well-designed programs or not? They have a great one in Wisconsin for our adolescent boys. They better. That's my home state. Yeah, man. It's where the most serial killers have come out of any other state. They need it. Serial eaters, my friend.

That is Wisconsin. Of course, the education system has been gutted, which has been very unfortunate. So perhaps our audience already knows this, but it's new-ish to me. The McDonald Triad is no longer considered to be accurate, correct? It has never been considered to be accurate until the FBI guys started putting it out there. Yeah. So the FBI is the reason that there's no research support for it. And if you look back to its origins, McDonald, Dr. McDonald, not the hamburger guy, Dr. McDonald was thinking, well, maybe there are some risk factors we can look at. And he had a small group of violent patients under his care. So right off the bat, it's an unrepresentative sample. The sample is too small to say anything.

He didn't even find the results he was looking for. So someone else along the line decided, oh, that looks like a good experiment. They expanded it. They didn't get the results either. But it's a nice formula. So suddenly, people who want to think more simplistically see this as, you know, here's the precursors for becoming a serial killer. And it became part of TV shows, movies, novels, even crime books, crime textbooks. It's unfortunate, but it's not true. There isn't any kind of Triad that will definitely predict serial killers. Animal cruelty, one of the notches of the Triad, yes, lots of animal cruelty in their background. But not all kids who are cruelty animals become serial killers or even offenders, not the

bedwetting. That is no, I know several comedians, professional comedians who went to bed until they were 15 years old. Well, even in the FBI's own small, unrepresentative study, they still didn't find even 50% had all three of those. So how do they end up making these statements? I mean, that's a great question. It's a way to boil something down. It's trying to, which we always talk about in terms on the show, in terms of conspiracy theory, where oftentimes people feel a comfort with this idea of, yeah, it's comforting to feel like, oh, we can figure it out. Yeah, because it's so scary. It's such a phenomenon. And it's also like, especially it's such an American phenomenon, but it makes you less safe to

believe in a formula that isn't true. Right. I agree. What are some of the, is there over your years of work, Catherine Ramsland, that's who we're speaking with. She's a fantastic author and a legend in the field. What's the largest myth that you would like to see busted in your work? 69 books. Obviously, you have a truth that you are trying to tell. What is one thing broad, perhaps, that you really just wish that we could all understand so then we can kind of be on the same playing field when just starting to have these conversations about psychology? Well, I'll tell you the, you know, I write a blog for psychology today. I've been doing it for 10 years and I wrote one called the

number one question about serial killers that I always get from high schoolers all the time. Once a week at least. The nature versus nurture. How much is nature? How much is nurture? Our serial killer is born to which I say you are treating serial killer as a criminal type. It is a description of a behavior. That's all it is. At least two victims and one victim on two occasions. So unrelated two occasions, two victims. That's it. That's a description of behavior and the range and diversity of approaches, motives, weapons, victims, range of activity is so diverse, you can't pack it into a criminal type. So that's one that I don't like the idea that we can find, you know, the few traits and behaviors of a serial

killer is that we understand exactly who they are. That's ridiculous. Secondly, that they all want to be caught. It's just a silly thing. Why would they want to be caught? They want to do what they're doing. Yeah. They're living their dreams. They want to do what they're doing. There's very few who have turned themselves in. Very few. They have or some have committed suicide, but that's rare. And I don't know. I do know it came from a case in the 1940s, the lipstick killer who wrote in the mirror. Catch me. And it's partly too because people want to believe serial killers have a conscience. And so they feel terrible about what they've done. That's a myth. They don't feel terrible because they're why do you feel like it's

also because then Ted Bundy, we bring up this quote quite a bit. I don't know the exact quote, but it's like you spend years properly planning how to do the crime or you plan it and you prepare. And then one day you're just you lose the wrench. You lose the thing you're trying to do. Is it just that the wheels fall off half the time? And does that have something to do with kind of literally their mental illness where they get to a point where they kind of self-destruct because they are so they're following their end all the time? Well, you can ask that of Zodiac, I guess, when did he self-destruct? True. True.

So, you know, there are some there are some who do they we call devolving and Bundy did that. But he's become sort of the prototype. And he's just, you know, but he's only one case of we have over 5,000 documented. We don't even have all of them because who knows what goes on in other countries in terms of documentation and investigation. But we do have a lot that we know about Bundy. Bundy's behavior is not the prototype at all. It's just become the media prototype. And that that's a very different animal. Is there a prototype? Well, he's right. He's right that some it's an age, a lower testosterone, less interest,

less challenged, you know, dopamine in the brain just doesn't come up for it anymore. There's a lot of different things, depending on how old they are, whether they fail that some of it, whether they, you know, something's just dried up and they don't want to do it. But that's again, we have serial killers who are in their fifties and sixties. So, it's going to be different from one to another. It's very hard to generalize that. What is the prototype, do you think? There isn't one. That's right. There's no, there's no portrait of this. There's no profile of a serial killer.

It doesn't make it scary. They say that in their publications of the time when people stop saying there's a profile of a serial killer, there isn't one. Wow. Do you take any of this home? Like, does this screw with your actual personal life, like dealing with all of this, like on some level, like, like having Dennis Rader have your telephone number? Does it fuck with you? No. Great.

Honestly, I mean, you're, because you're, you're, you're facing it in a very specific way. I mean, I guess it would if he made threats or, you know, But you've never had a deal with that in the past, like someone flipping on you. I've had stalkers, but they aren't the people you think they are going to be. No. Yeah, they're, they're true crime fans. No, they're not. They're like an academic team. You would expect the true crime fans. No, they treat me with respect. I've had weird

stalkers that I have nothing to do with any of my work. Oh God. That's even worse. No, it's just even worse because I sleep well tonight, everyone. I can't thank you enough. That is one of the things about the Rader book is that he, he was a person praying next to you, singing, singing church hymns with you, leading your church, your neighbor talking with you about flower gardens. You need to understand these are, this is possible. They

are not monsters 24 seven. They are ordinary people for the most part. And it doesn't mean they're nice guys, but they sure know how to play nice guys when they need to. Yeah, right. One of them is probably hosting the podcast you're talking to right now, but I just, man, I can't, I seriously can't thank you enough for talking to us. This is like, you have done us a great honor to dare and treat our stupidity with your words. Yes. I looked for you guys at Crimecon.

Oh, I can't, I can't wait to go back. Can't wait to go back. Like I want to go back. It's been a while. Like we went to the very first one. That's where Nancy Grace. The biggest one was 5,000. I can't even imagine. I can't honestly. I mean, my God, Catherine Ramsland. Thank you so much for being here. You are a pioneer in your saving lives.

Thank you so much, Dr. Ramsland. Check out BTK, Confessions of a Serial Killer. It's truly good. It's like, like in our audiences that gets exactly, they're going to, it's our group because we are all like just like them. Like we've been consuming, like it's for the people who know true crime and it really is, it's great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Appreciate being there here. Great questions. Thank you, Catherine. Try and do it. That's nice. You said that. We did.

So we try to embarrass us or embarrass you, doctor. And please come back. If you have anything else you want to promote or you're working on, we would love to talk with you again. You are wonderful. I do have another one going, but I can't see you. I assume that you do. We'll bring it right back. Unless you're going to stop at 69 books for some random reason. No, no, man. No, you got to do it. Okay. Keep pushing.

Thank you, Dr. Ramsland. Thank you. All right. There it was, our conversation with Catherine Ramsland. I'm horrified. Doc, she is very, very, like she's very, very... I kind of actually enjoy the idea of answers and what I... Sure. We all do. But those don't exist.

No, no, no. She just basically says what we do. But I honestly think it kind of goes hand in hand with what we do. Like while we try to do, you know, understand that they are not invincible creatures, it's just important to remember like in the fact that that serial killers are human, that means they can be your neighbor and they can't hang around. But I do believe what I had heard about Dennis Rader, which I think is true, is that he was also a fucking asshole. So there is that too. We're like sometimes, which he was also joked about in the show, I'll probably bring it up the next time we speak to her about like, sometimes you do see him coming because they're sometimes because it's the prick.

I love that when there's an interview and they don't say, I never expected Jeffrey. I love it when they're like, yeah, he was a fucking dickhead. And if anyone in this neighborhood was going to be a killer, we knew it was going to be him. Well, thank you all so much for listening. We hope you're doing well out there. Thank you for giving to our Patreon. And yeah, anything else? Thank you for your fucking money. Fantastic. All right, everyone, hail yourselves. No, we'll talk to you soon. Hail Satan, ding yah, fuckers. I'm just kind of bolder. I am. It was amazing. Congratulations, everyone.

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