Something Was Wrong - S10 Ep7: [Nadia] Something in His Eyes

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

This week, Nadia shares her Aunt Beth's survivor story.In the 1970s, Beth was struck by a drunk driver and was thankfully saved with the help of her friends and a good samaritan named Bruce. Out of an overwhelming amount of gratitude to who she felt was her hero, Beth insisted on keeping in contact with Bruce but as her sister’s become fearful of his “creepy” vibes, Beth’s family learns that her hero is actually extremely dangerous.**Resources: For free mental health resources, please visit SomethingWasWrong.com/Resources Sources:Psychology Today - Serial Killers Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff, 2021 The Chicago Daily Herald: Naperville Police Chief Recalls Finding Killers Body Atop Stabbing Victims By Marie Wilson, 2020. Interview with responding officer Marshall. The Chicago Daily Herald: Suspected Serial Killer Bruce Lindahl stayed under the radar, but how? By Don Babwin | The Associated Press, January 20, 2020 WTTW: Police Suspect Serial Killer Strangled Illinois Teen in 1976Associated Press | January 14, 2020 Stories of the Unsolved: The Disappearance of Deborah McCallBy Stories of the Unsolved Missing Persons, July 14, 2021 Bruce Lindahl victim Annette Lazar describes surviving attack by suspected serial killer, rapist By Sarah Schulte Thursday, January 23, 2020. Interview with Annette Lazar, 2020.  United States Department of Justice: Federal Bureau of Investigation: Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators Behavioral Analysis Unit-2, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Critical Incident Response Group, 2005.  Wikipedia: Bruce Lindal - Serial Killer, 2021**Something Was Wrong’s theme song was originally composed by Glad Rags and is covered this season by Basic Comfort. You can listen to their cover of "U Think U" on all streaming platforms or at https://basiccomfort.bandcamp.com/ Website: Basiccomfort.band IG: Basic_Comfort Twitter: Basic_Comfort  FB: Basiccomfortband

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Something was wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes can discuss topics that can be triggering such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist or a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit something was wrong.com slash resources for a list of non-profit organizations that can help.

Some names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by the guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or audio chuck. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. According to psychology today, a serial killer is an individual who murders a series of victims over a period of time, typically with gaps between each killing. Some serial killers kidnap and or torture their victims prior to murdering them. While it's not always clear what motivates serial killers to commit such heinous acts,

abnormal psychological processes, notably severe antisocial tendencies, are often to blame. In society, serial killers often generate fascination along with fear. Their crimes tend to bring notoriety, media attention, and, quote, fans who study their crimes or, in some cases, form relationships with the murderer. Criminal psychologists, law enforcement agencies, and the general public have long been interested in what motivates serial killers to commit terrible crimes. Because most people could never imagine doing the same, another question that draws serious interest is whether or not serial killers can, can be said to suffer from severe mental illness that severs their contact with reality. But while some serial killers did appear to undergo psychotic breaks that triggered their crimes, overall, serial killers have rarely been found to be legally insane.

Rather, the most consistent psychological feature among serial killers appears to be extreme antisocial behavior. They tend to lack empathy, appear incapable of remorse, show no no regard for laws or social norms and have a strong desire to revenge themselves against individuals or society at large by carrying out violent, terrifying crimes. According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, serial murder is neither a new phenomenon nor is it uniquely American. Dating back to ancient times, serial murderers have been chronicled around the world. Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than 1% of all murders committed in any given year. Attendees at the FBI's Serial Murderer Symposium agreed that there's no genetic profile of a serial murderer.

Serial killers differ in many ways, including their motivations for killing and their behavior at the crime scene. However, attendees did identify certain traits common to some serial murderers, including, Citation-seeking, a lack of remorse or guilt, impulsivity, the need for control, and predatory behavior. These traits and behaviors are consistent with the psychopathic personality disorder. Psychopathy is a personality disorder manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others in order to satisfy their own selfish needs. Although the concept of psychopathy has been known for centuries, Dr. Robert Hare led the modern research effort to develop a series of assessment tools

to evaluate the personality traits and behaviors attributed to psychopaths. Dr. Hare and his associates developed the psychopathy checklist revised, or PCLR, and its derivatives, which provide a clinical assessment of the degree of psychopathy and individual. possesses. These instruments measure the distinct cluster of personality traits and socially deviant behaviors of an individual, which fall into four factors, interpersonal, effective, lifestyle, and antisocial. The interpersonal traits include glibness, superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and the manipulation of others. The effective traits include a lack of remorse and or guilt, shallow affect, a lack of empathy,

and failure to accept responsibility. The lifestyle behaviors include stimulation-seeking behavior, impulsivity, irresponsibility, parasitic orientation, and a lack of realistic life goals. The antisocial behaviors include poor behavioral controls, early childhood behavior problems, juvenile delinquency, revocation of conditional release, and criminal versatility. The combination of these individual personality traits, interpersonal styles, and socially deviant lifestyles are the framework of psychopathy and can manifest themselves differently in individual psychopaths.

Research has demonstrated that in those offenders who are psychopathic, scores vary, ranging from some to a high degree of psychopathy. However, not all violent offenders are psychopaths and not all psychopaths are violent offenders. If violent offenders are psychopathic, they are able to assault, rape, and murder without concern for legal, moral, or social consequences. This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want.

I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is, Something was wrong. You think you know me. You don't know me well. My name is Nadia. I am telling this survivor story on behalf of my Aunt Beth. My Aunt Bath passed away just a few years ago, so she isn't able to tell this story herself,

but I've been told the story by her and by many of our family members. My Aunt Beth was a loving sister, mother, daughter, wife, had a beautiful spirit, could sing like an angel. angel. It's important for me, and I'm sure for her, for our listeners to know that family was everything to her, she had 11 siblings, so a very large family. The matriarch of that plan of 12 was also one of nine. So with hundreds of cousins, literally hundreds, family was very important. Beth's story begins on an evening in 1977. She was getting dropped off by a friend in front of her family's home in Aurora, Illinois. She was leaning into the car, chatting with her friend, waving to some of

her siblings who were out on the porch and in the yard. And while she was standing along the road, just kind of leaning into the car, saying by to her friend, a car came out of nowhere, came speeding up and hit her from the side. She flew up onto the windshield and the car actually just kept driving. She eventually rolled off the car and the car sped off. We later found out, that the driver of that car was so drunk, he didn't know he had hit her. He actually had turned on his windshield wipers because he thought that the blood that was all over his car was just rain. So, of course, with all of her siblings outside, family members who saw this happen were screaming for help. One of her sisters ran inside to get their mom.

They began to call 911. Some of them thought that Beth had already passed away. While the family was waiting for first responders, a man pulled over and just, jumped out of his car to help. They would later learn the man's name was Bruce. He yelled that he was an off-duty EMT, and he came to Beth's aide. He rolled her over. He placed a tourniquet. Thankfully, he knew how to do that somehow. He was performing CPR. He was making sure that they had called 911, and he provided assistance to my aunt until the first responders arrived. Beth was then taken to a hospital, and of course the family members all went there as well,

as did the man who saved her. So the doctors were very grim about the situation. They honestly didn't think she was going to survive. They had requested that a priest come to do last rights. Throughout all of this, my family that was in the waiting room noticed that the man who had stopped to try to save her had stayed there in the hospital with them. By the grace of God, my aunt Beth survived. And the doctors told my family that she would have died, if not for the bystander who, stopped to render aid. Throughout this night, my family kind of got to know this man. His name was Bruce, and he was a hero. So they were thanking him and telling him that he was a hero. And he kind of stayed with the family. As Beth then went home and was recovering at home, Bruce would visit

pretty often. He would come by and spend time with her. As they got to know him, the family learned that Bruce was born on January 29, 1953 in St. Charles, Illinois, making him 24 years old at the time of Beth's accident. He became an honorary member of their family and would often be invited to family dinners and events. Beth's mom even tried to offer Bruce a reward for saving her life. So they were standing on the porch and she handed him a check. And we think it was for about $100, which in 1977 was a lot of money, especially for my family. And Bruce stood there, ripped up the check on the spot, and said, I'm no hero. I was just at the right place at the right time.

I'm just a good Samaritan. And they all remember him saying, I'm just a good Samaritan. He got to know some of her siblings. With 11 siblings, there's a lot of people to get to know, but the ones that were home at the time and not off at college and everything. So one thing that my family members remember is that Bruce had a pet bird. If their memory is correct, it was some kind of hawk. It was a large bird. He would wear this big leather glove and let the bird fly around and land back on his wrist.

And some of Best Sisters were kind of creeped out by that. Despite her sister's feelings about Bruce's choice in pets, Beth began spending more time with him, which they also didn't agree with. Beth sisters didn't quite approve of them hanging out. They always met at night. So Bruce always requested that they meet late at night, 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight every time. So one of best sisters remembers telling her that she didn't want her spending a lot of time with someone who wouldn't make time for her during the day. Another one of best sisters also didn't quite approve of them. This sister was a nursing student at Copley Hospital. And she didn't like the way that Bruce, Bruce looked at her when she would come home from nursing school and her scrubs or her nurse clothes. And overall, a lot of the siblings just kind of got a bad feeling about Bruce. I've heard from multiple of Beth's siblings that it was something in his eyes. It was something in the way he looked at people that they couldn't quite describe or pinpoint,

but it just kind of set them on edge. So my Aunt Beth tried to kind of brush off their feelings about Bruce. to her, after all, he had saved her life. I know that sometimes people bond with others in those types of situations, so maybe that was part of it, but she really liked spending time with him. Eventually, Beth did listen to her siblings, and they grew apart. Over time, Bruce stopped coming by to spend time with her family as well. And that was kind of that.

The family didn't see Bruce that much anymore. Beth moved on. She went on to get married, have two children, have multiple grandchildren. And while not everyone loved being around Bruce, it was known that if it wasn't for him and his heroic actions, none of the rest of Beth's life would have been possible. Everything they thought they knew about Bruce would prove to be false. But then in 1981, the family got the daily newspaper and there was Bruce. So then in 1981, my family got their daily newspaper and they all took their favorite stuff. but one of my cousins looked down and there was Bruce.

Bruce Lindahl was found dead atop an 18-year-old man named Charles Hubber, whom he had stabbed to death near the sliding glass door of a Naperville apartment on Ogden Avenue. Investigators initially thought they had a double homicide on their hands and a killer on the loose, but a coroner's report revealed otherwise. The autopsies determined that Lindahl had, in his... rage of stabbing Mr. Hubber, accidentally severed his own femoral artery and had bled to death laying atop of him. During their investigation, police also determined that Lindahl and Hubbard had met at a nearby bowling alley, then called Galalanes, on Aurora Avenue in Naperville.

Law enforcement also said the scene where the bodies were found suggested that Lindahl may have plan to also kill Hubbard's girlfriend, who was sleeping a few feet away in another room. At the time of his death, Bruce Lindahl was known to various police departments and had been arrested many times. In fact, at the time of his death, he was suspected in the June 23rd, 1980 rape and kidnapping of Deborah Collander. The 25-year-old victim was abducted from the Northgate shopping center in Aurora and taken to Lindahl's house, where he was. raped her. Deborah managed to escape and ran to a neighbor's house where she called 911. Lindahl was charged in Kane County with deviate sexual conduct, rape, and aggravated kidnapping,

then released from jail after posting bail. That summer, Lindahl allegedly told a friend that if Coleyander did not testify, he could get out of it. Police were also told by another friend of Lindalls that he had offered him $2,000, a gun, alcohol, and pills to, quote, get rid of the victim, end quote. On October 7, 1980, two weeks before the trial, coliander vanished after leaving work at Copley Memorial Hospital, where she was a nurse. So this hero to my family was in the newspaper with all these horrible stories around him, and I think it was hard for my family to, reconcile that, someone that they saw as, you know, he saved their sister. And then they find out that other young women and a man from their community had been murdered by him. And that kind of unraveled

this whole other life that Bruce had that my family didn't know about. He had been accused of rape. He had been accused of assault. And they ended up linking him to multiple murder victims. One thing that stood out to our family was his connection to a murder of a nurse at Copley Hospital. That is the same hospital that my Aunt Beth's sister worked at as a nurse. And she remembers how she felt when he looked at her, when she would come home from nursing school and her scrubs and everything. And so the fact that another nurse at her hospital was one of his victims, I think speaks to how close this was to our family. It was happening in towns around where they lived. After the disappearance of Deborah Koliander, on December 22nd, 1980, Lindahl allegedly attacked a 30-year-old woman outside a North

Aurora restaurant after she refused his advances. Police said the woman identified Lindahl from a photograph and linked him to the case months later. On January 28, 1981, Lindahl was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and not having a firearm owner's identification card when he allegedly aimed a shotgun at Kane County Sheriff's deputies who were serving Lindahl with a warrant for illegally recording a phone conversation. In 1982, several months after Lindahl's death, Deborah Coleyander's body was discovered by a local farmer in a shallow grave. An autopsy was unable to determine how she was able to determine how she was, she died, but her death was ruled a homicide. Prosecutors sought multiple continuances while a search

for colander took place, but the murder case was dismissed in 1981 due to speedy trial rights. During the 70s and 80s, DNA evidence and crime data tracking was nothing like it is today. It often took years for neighboring police stations to link crimes committed by serial killers due to these setbacks. As years passed and technology advanced, detectives began to suspect Bruce Lindahl in the murders of several other victims. One of those victims was 16-year-old Pamela Mower of Woodbridge, Illinois, who died a year before Nadia's Aunt Beth was hit by the drunk driver. On the evening of January 12, 1976, high school student Pamela Mower had left a friend's house and was walking to go by a Coke at a nearby McDonald's when she was murdered.

Her body was found the next day by a road crew on the side of College Road in Lyle. An autopsy later revealed that Mower had been strangled and authority said she had been sexually assaulted. Pamela's tragic murder remained a mystery for years. Despite police thoroughly investigating, it would take decades for them to solve the case. Thankfully, detectives who investigated the murder of Pamela Mauer preserved DNA evidence from her body before the technology was available to be tested. And in 2001, this evidence was used to create a DNA profile of her suspected killer. No hits were generated at the time.

Then in 2019, advanced DNA technology helped authorities create a composite of the killer. This resulted in the creation of a snapshot prediction for traits the killer had, such as eye and hair color and face shape. This profile helped detectives link Bruce Lindahl to the case, and on January 13, 2020, 44 years exactly, after Pamela's body had been discovered, authorities announced that DNA evidence connected Lindahl to the 1976 killing. Police later shared they had at,

evidence linking Lindahl to the 1979 disappearance of a missing Downers Grove high school student Deborah McCall. After his death, numerous photos of young women were found in his home. One of them was a photo of Deborah. If she was one of his victims, she's the only victim who remains missing. She was last seen leaving her school. Her DNA and dental records are available for comparison should her body be found. Currently, her case is classified as endangered missing with foul play suspected.

If alive today, she would be 58 years old. Unfortunately, Lindahl's crimes did not end there. Annette Lazare, today in her 60s, is one of Lindahl's living victims. She met Lindahl in 1979 when she was 20 years old

while walking to a friend's house. He pulled up in his car and asked her what she was doing. He then lured Annette into his house by offering to sell her pot. The next thing she knew, he had grabbed a gun and threatened to rape her. Annette told him no, and he put the 9mm to her head and grabbed her by the throat. She then begged Lindahl to take the clip out of his gun before he raped her, and he did. Since Annette could not physically fight back or flee, she switched tactics and he used her fawn response, which ended up saving her life. She flattered and complimented him,

saying that she really liked him and that he was her type. Her quick thinking worked, and the flattery convinced him to let her go. Annette was covered in marks and had bruises around her neck. She reported her sexual assault to the local Aurora police, hoping to save someone else from becoming a victim of Lindahl. Police said the case was investigated and given to the Cain County State's attorney in 1979, but no charges came from the analysis. In 2020, police investigators revealed that they suspected Lindahl may be responsible for as many as 12 murders and nine rapes across Illinois. In 2019, the Lyle Police Department investigators compiled a map showing where the unsolved rapes and murders happened. And the crimes and body locations are all.

all surrounding known Lindahl addresses. For Nadia's family, the news of Lindahl's crimes still shocks them to this day. I believe that the sisters of the 12 siblings of my family all kind of see themselves as survivors in this story because they all had this feeling about him. And obviously, they're glad that they had told Beth to stop spending time with him. So my Aunt Beth passed away a few years ago with cancer before they linked Bruce to more of these murders through additional DNA testing and genealogy analysis. So she wasn't able to share the story herself. But I was happy to share it because she liked to use this story as a learning point for myself and my other younger cousins in our very large family that if it weren't for her sister,

being upfront with her about how they felt about Bruce and about just kind of how he acted around everyone and the times of day that he wanted to hang out. And some of the things that he would say or do, she might have not stopped hanging out with him. And she might not have been a survivor of the story, of being someone that he was interested in. She would use this story to teach us to trust our gut, to stand up to people, to be upfront with our friends and family about how we're feeling, about who they're associating with. So I was happy to share with all of you so that if there's someone that's acting in a way that you don't think is right, it's important to let your loved ones know how you feel and to not be embarrassed to do so. It was kind of a coming of age story. And then with

the recent developments and with more and more cases that he's linked to, if I see something in the news about it, I'll call one of my ancestors or brothers and just kind of, you know, did you see this? And we kind of reiterate to each other. I love you. Be safe. Be smart. But it's not something that we let define us or we talk about a lot because we don't think he's really worth our time at this point to talk about. I think that she would want everyone to remember that family is everything and her sister's being honest with her and pushing her to stop seeing him may have saved her life. And because she loved her sisters so much, she listened to them, even though she really. didn't want to at the time. And our family being so large, we all kind of live in the same

place in Illinois. Not many of us have moved outside of state. All these cases are close to our hearts, because these are people from our community. And my aunt would see them as family as well. For her, family wasn't just the people related to her, but the people who lived and worked in her community. She really loved everyone. So our hearts go out to the families who didn't have this outcome with Bruce and those who were victims of him. So I think she would just want everyone to remember to tell your loved ones that you love them and put family first. Thank you for having me on your podcast, and I'm happy that I was able to share this story and hopefully people can learn from it. When missing person, Deborah, Debbie A. McCall, vanished from Downer's Grove on

November 5, 1979. She was 16 years old. She was 16 years old. last seen wearing a sweater, a beige-hitted zip-up jacket, light brown suede shoes, and a yellow-gold necklace. At the time of her disappearance, she stood at 5'2 and weighed 105 pounds. She had long brown hair and gray eyes. Her upper teeth were crooked and she had freckles. She may have been wearing contacts. Those with information regarding the case are asked to contact the Downers Grove Police Department at 630-434-5600. If you have any information regarding other crimes of Bruce Lindahl, the Lyle, Illinois Police Department urges people with information to call 630-271-4252.

Thank you again to Nadia for sharing her Aunt Beth's story with us all today. Until next time, stay safe. Something Was Wrong is an Audio Chuck production, created and hosted by Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Basic Comfort. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve?