Ashley | Ep.3

Join Aviture CEO Dmitri Boyland as he talks with HR leaders who are leveraging disruption to stay ahead. Here from the brilliant minds behind the Talent Strategies at IBM, Siemens Energy, Transcom, and many more.

Subscribe now so you never miss an episode.

The Talent Transformation Podcast, redefining Talent, one conversation at a time. This podcast explores themes of violence against women, rape, murder, child abuse, and animal torture. It includes explicit dialogue. Listener discretion is advised.

Please note some of the voices you hear in the series have been performed by actors.

“Previously on Mind of a Monster, The Hollywood Ripper, I think his impulsivity and”

his rage was starting to peek around that age. From ID and arrow media, I'm criminal psychologist Dr. Michelle Ward, at this is Mind of a Monster, The Hollywood Ripper. Chapter 3, Ashley. These killings in Los Angeles wouldn't have happened if he was in prison in Illinois.

I had never ever felt that type of energy before it was cold. It's 1045 pm on February 21, 2001.

Ashton Kutcher is outside Ashley Ellerin's house on Pinehurst Road in Hollywood.

The doorbell's broken so he's knocking hard on the door. There's no reply. Ashden called Ashley a couple of hours earlier to let her know he was running late. He's taking her to the Grammys after party. But now there's no one home.

All of the lights are on inside, and peering through the window, he sees the usual mess and what looks like red wine spilled on the floor. He assumes Ashley's annoyed with him for being late and has gone out. So he leaves and goes to the party without her. Earlier that evening Ashley's housemate, Jen Desisto, had come home without her keys.

I went to the door, knocked and knocked and knocked. I really didn't think anything of it. I didn't. I thought she was getting ready, or she stepped out and just coming back, or I just didn't

really care because I was extremely tired from the day, and I just wanted to go to sleep.

So I gave up, I knocked for a couple of minutes. I didn't really think anything was suspect. I didn't. Obviously again, in hindsight, I wish I had given that more thought. But again, it wasn't striking to me that anything was wrong.

No, of course not. You're not going to door somebody doesn't answer. And this is not a period in time when we were all attached to cell phones. We didn't have smartphones. A thousand percent.

Exactly. So you've left your keys at your boyfriend's house. And then the next morning, you wake up, you have your keys. What happens? Yes.

I wake up. I have the keys. Everything's good.

“So I go to the house, and I remember I was wearing gray pants, and then I forgot it.”

The key was open. So I go up the stairs, and I open the door, and she is on the landing, like covered in blood and blue in the face. My friends' brain can't compute what her eyes are seeing. I don't know for some reason, I thought she was joking.

I don't know why. Ashley was very much a prankster. She always was joking. And our house was a mess. We had been painting, and so stupidly, I went up to her, and I touched her.

And she was like, you know, ice cold, and then everything was just, that's when the shocks added. Yeah. Yeah, I understand. The nominant of walking in and not recognizing registering what you're seeing is absolutely

normal, too. And I've talked to a lot of people about that. It takes a couple of minutes for it to sink in what you're looking at, and that's just, we go through our day on, and there's neurological ways to explain this.

“But we go through our day, a lot of time on autopilot, and that's how our brains can function”

without having to memorize constantly. This is where I put my hand. This is where my car goes when I'm driving. So when something changes, it takes you a minute to process it. But I did see the scene.

I was like, wait, what? That was it. And then like, when I saw how truly violent how many times she was stabbed and everything, I don't, that part to me, and the vulgarity of all of that, and the terrible, terrible physicality of it, I really don't remember.

Thank God. I don't. Good. I'm glad. And I don't think you should be reminded of it.

I honestly, if your brain is protecting you, let it.

Did you ever think that the perpetrator could still be in the house? Yes, a thousand percent. I did definitely think that there was just like, unfortunately, too, there was like a feeling that came over me at that point, and it's that feeling that I have not been able to shake. I don't remember as like exactly what I even saw with her there.

I remember how it felt, I went to the kitchen to get the phone, and all of a sudden, like, a wave of fear just came over me, and I was like sweating, and I thought maybe the person was there. And so I just threw the phone, like, it's the wall.

I ran out, and I locked the doors in the car, and I called Justin first, and I, you

“know, I said, you have to come here immediately, because he lived close by.”

Justin, who's a mutual friend of both Jen and Ashley, dashes over to the house while Jen sitting outside in her car, petrified with the door's locked. So he came, and then I called the police, and then we were just sitting on the street outside, and a police car and a fire truck came, and they wrapped up the house with the crime scene tape.

Now we've stepped into thinking we're in an episode of lawn order. I mean, I feel like you've watched so much TV, the whole thing becomes completely surreal. Someone goes into the house and comes out, and they say, you know, your room is deceased.

I'm in a complete state of shock.

I'm not crying. I'm not anything. Justin and I were just sitting on the stoop, holding hands.

“I felt I was having an out of body experience.”

I really did. I just, I'm in such a state of shock and trauma. I don't, yeah, I just, I don't, it's really a blackout for me at that point. So can I tell you, yeah, it's a blackout for everybody in that situation. You have so much adrenaline and cortisol running through your body.

And one of the things that it does do is wipe out your memory, makes it very hard to think the next day to you can't simple math, simple words. In court in 2019, prosecutor Dan Ackman recounts Michael's movements on the night of Ashley's murder. Within weeks of Gargulo fixating on Ashley, entering her home without permission, surveilling

her home at odd hours, flashing a knife. Ashley, Ellerin, was found stabbed to death in the hallway just outside her bathroom. At this moment, Jen and Justin have no idea that Mike, the furnace guy, is the person who has slaughtered their beautiful friend. At morning, LAPD homicide detective Tom Small is in the office with his partner.

“So how long had you been working homicide when you got the call to go to Ashley's house?”

So I had only been six years as a homicide detective at that time. I worked murders for 21 years, but I was, I think, relatively new.

We just finished our first cup of coffee, it was about 9.915 or so in the morning.

We got a full call from a couple of cops out at a crime scene, says we're out at a pint Hearst and there appears on 187 there, on 187 is a pital code section from murder. So we got some real quick details and then we got in the car and went over there. So I probably got there about maybe 9.25, 9.30 and just got a rundown on the case and then we walked in.

Just subscribe for me what you walked into, what you saw. The location was a single family home, a bungalow and it looked like Fort Knox. Really? There was every single window and door was barred or still had still doors. So I was trying to figure out how somebody got in there, she must either known somebody or maybe she let them in.

We were told that her roommate found Ashley dead on a landing. So you walk in and what did you see? I walked in and Ashley had been doing some renovation. So the place was a mess. Okay. She had ladders and paint cans and brushes and boxes and we had the sidestep through

off the porch into the house, there's four steps up from the living room to where the bathroom and the bedrooms are and there was Ashley's body. And I noticed that there was definitely a struggle because there's closets on either side of where she was laying. And both closets had the kind of acrylic door handle yanked out and they were scattered

on the floor full of blood and there was blood spatter all up and down the doors and the

And the blood spatter if you're looking from the carpet going up it's about five feet.

Oh gosh. What was she wearing when you saw her? So Ashley was dressed. We later discovered she was getting ready for a date. Yeah.

And she had apparently just taken a shower not too long before she was killed. But she was obviously getting ready. Her hair dryer was sitting on the toilet.

She had her clothing out her shoes and things she was going to wear set out.

She was dressed in a Terry cloth robe kind of an aquacolor and she had a camosol and some like pajama shorts underneath the robe.

“Could you describe the scene what injuries there were and how she was positioned?”

She was on her back and her head was her eyes were open. Her mouth was open and head kind of tilted toward her left shoulder and she had a gaping wound that went from her mid-throw it all the way to the back. Tott horrible. So it wasn't just a cut it was you know that type of movement.

And she had what they referred to as a lentil, occipital dislocation and simple terms decapitated with the force employed in her attack and jarred her head right off the spinal column. These are kinds of injuries that you see with very forceful trauma or car accident or maybe a fall from a high object but it can also happen if you're attacked with a big knife

or something like that. And she's a little pro girl. She's not big. That must have been so jarring for you. Later on we learned it was 47 stab wounds and slash wounds.

“There may have been more but I think they stopped counting.”

She was hit in the back up and down her back, center back shoulders, neck, back over head. There were I think three or four stab wounds into the back of her skull. One of them was so forceful that it actually fractured a piece of her skull. She's hit in the back a number of times and then she's turd and now she's being hit in the front and even on her legs and her hands and you can sort of tell on fresh wounds which

ones come first because as people pass and the heart stops pumping the color of the wounds

change so we could tell that and based on her injuries this person spent some time and was really going at it. Tom, this must have been one of the most gruesome scenes you've come across. I've seen as a bad ones but this one, this one I still smell it to this day. Describe that.

Well there was so much blood and all that blood has a certain metallic type of smell to it and she was hit so hard I mean back front legs. She tried to fight I have a daughter I don't she wasn't as old as it actually was at that time she was just a young kid but I can't imagine suffering through that if I'm a parent you know it was it was just evil 18 years later in court Cynthia Elerin relives the moment

her husband revealed that Ashley their only daughter had been murdered. He sat me down on the bed and he said Ashley was murdered and I felt to my ease on the floor and I was like trying to tell my husband to get away from me like stay away from

“me take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it that's what”

I was young. All right I need to take a beat here. This is really disturbing and difficult to fathom but I need to understand it. Michael attacks Ashley with such force that she's virtually decapitated and school is fractured and it's impossible to actually count all of her injuries because there's so many that

they merge into each other. I don't like to think about how terrifying her final moments must have been. Here she is coming out of the shower getting ready for an exciting date at that Grammys after party with Ashden Kutcher but instead she's met with this knife-wielding maniac

did she recognize them as Mike the furnace guy did he wanted to know it was him these are

“things that we can only guess and how utterly traumatic for her house made to insist so to find”

her friend like that to see a body like that period I mean I see it all the time and I don't know those people and it's traumatic but to walk in unexpected see her friend like that and then for her parents for Ashden's parents to have to hear those details. But why did Michael have to use such brutality to kill Ashley from the forensic point of view? This is clear overkill the type of homicide where the number of inflicted injuries vastly

outweighs the number of fatal ones. Michael stabbed and slashed at Ashley Elrin at least 47 times

and often once is enough to kill someone. And this is where it's confusing because this kind of overkill is usually seen when there's some sort of conflicted relationship between the two people this there's revenge there's hate it's usually not people who don't know each other so it kind of makes me wonder is there something else going on here Detective Small gets an early beat on the scene he rules out robbery as emotive Ashley's jewelry hasn't been touched and there's

$300 in cash on the bathroom sink so what are you guys thinking? I'm sure that this thing started at the right at the front door because that's there was also some herbicide there so I think she may have heard something when she was in the bathroom and walked that way and then the attack

“hit and she ran up the steps but didn't make it to any safety place. So you have to go in there”

and stomach not only the visual of this young beautiful woman not just dead but mutilated and then you have to smell this so you know I know you've seen a lot of bodies at that point but does one ever get used to that? I don't know if you get used to it you eat I mean especially in those years because that was going out to homicides every week the initial shock I think would shock the conscience of any moral person. Forensic team seal off the house and start

combing the area for clues like a murder weapon which may have the killer's DNA on it. We couldn't find a knife the size that would have been used we came as that whole area we had officers sweeping through all those areas to look if there was anything in the shrub we had metal detectors and all

“kinds of stuff and we came up with nothing there was a bloody series of bloody shoe prints and those”

bloody shoe prints were all heading out toward the front door and because they were partial prints in other words there was a couple that were the heel of a shoe and then a couple that were the the toe area but they weren't all together so I couldn't get a righteous size and then the other telling thing was when you you see all the blood on the floor and the dripping of what we believed was either from his hand or from a weapon it stopped right at the front door not a

single drop of blood on that porch or walkwear anywhere outside so when he egressed the crime scene and got outside he must have stowed that knife where it couldn't drop and he must he could probably took his shoes off because there should have been blood drops or blood stains from the shoe print but there weren't which that really was a baffling thing no wonder detectives are baffled Michael is the strange dichotomy of killers he's meticulous he doesn't leave a drop of blood or

single hair at scene he's the presence of mine to take off his shoes and stowed the knife again before fling the house and all of that looks like you know our predatory type of killers are our cold blooded psychopathic serial killers to plan things well in advance they're not encumbered by emotion and you know they everything's you know kind of harder to to catch and to to understand but the killing itself that's frenzied overkill blitz type attacks that looks a lot

more like your pulse of type of a killer your killer who is in a fit of rage has lost all control over their actions and their emotions and they behave in a way that they hadn't planned

you and that's more like a second degree type of killing versus a first degree type of killing

and by the way by logically those look very different impulsive type types of killers

prefrontal cortex that area behind your forehead that makes you more impulsive so if you're already

“impulsive and then you I don't know become a boxer or you write him on a cycle and you injure”

that part of your head you become more impulsive now we don't see that in these cold blooded predatory type of killers those are more likely to have differences in their limbic system particularly their amygdala so they have kind of urges to do things and they often don't care about stalking themselves they're biologically different the way the behavior is different the way that they look the crime scenes everything about them is different and yet Michael seems to be both

take us back to that time like the it the further issues you have when investigating a case then

versus now because there's also no ring camera or CCTV footage anywhere correct what is your

initial thought well that particular area there's a certain transient population that hangs around I'm thinking this is a pretty vicious murder and I have to look at you know people that are coming out of prison we had other homicides and rapes in that neighborhood a series of them we've got parole houses when guys come out of parole they go to houses and kind of sprinkled around different areas of Hollywood so I thought well you know I got a lot to look at here plus I had to

track everybody within her circle and work outward that's right and it's a huge circle detective small starts building a timeline of Ashley's movements that night and drawing up a list of suspects he's keeping an open mind but one thought is eating away at him in the back of my mind there was a thought of okay this guy might have done it before maybe he's a serial killer what made you think that I look at cases like that where there's extreme overkill and the thing that

occurred to me was wherever did this must be getting off on killing you don't want to get any confirmation bias but you also want to you want to make sure you have a decent working theory I asked Jen to sister what she remembers okay these are tough questions one was the last time you saw Ashley alive and do you remember what you talked about or what your interactions were so I had actually seen her the day before and I had had a conversation with her in the kitchen where

we liked to talk a chat we were having snacks she was telling me about the landlord guy and that she was hooking up with and how he had a girlfriend and this and that again I know all this sounds like this is crazy when you're very young we all make these like dumb mistakes so of course so she was actually dating that guy that's Mark Durbin yes they had they had been seeing each other that's the

“two is explaining these she was like you know it started out like casual but now I think I like him”

I remember thinking god damn this kitchen is a mess we had never merged like my stuff with her

stuff so the kitchen was just like full of all this different crap we're just like sitting there like you know nothing matters shooting the shit 24 hours after chatting in that messy kitchen Ashley Ellaren is dead and the lives of Ashley's family and friends changed forever my boyfriend picked me up at the station that's when it started to set in and I was just like oh my god it's like holy shit like what the f like I was just in a complete it was really really bad

and then I went home that's when I started to cry and get very scared I never went back there my boyfriend went and got my belongings it was very much a rough time and I lost my job no yeah I ended up moving into like a dormant secure building that my mom helped me with

“like a figure things out and I just remember I don't think I left the apartment for like six months”

it was you know the glory days were done at that time it's no surprise Gentisto is scarred by what she saw that day it was an act of such unspeakable extreme violence in court Cynthia Ellaren tries to put the loss of her daughter Ashley into words that they have her death is heartbreaking you understand the door you go if she could only she could only come through that door I'd give anything I I egg for her I egg to hold her I egg

to hear her voice to hug her the pain in a heartbreak that Michael has inflicted on his victims and their families is unimaginable everyone wants to know how could someone possibly become so evil I need to dig deeper into Michael Gargelo's childhood back in sleepy Glenview, Illinois

psychologist who specializes in child abuse in neglect cases she's the perfect person to help me

“unravel the complexities of Michael's early years and try to get to the truth I got my PhD”

in clinical psychology from Yale University where I was on faculty in the Department of Psychiatry for 18 years grab my career I worked as a clinician a researcher and a child advocate most of my work was with children involved in the child welfare system understanding risk, resilience using tools from neuroscience, genetics, psychology all of the information about Michael's childhood that Dr. Kaufman and I are about to discuss comes from another psychologist

Dr. Vien Castellano she's the psychologist brought in by Michael's defense team when he was on trial for murder and attempted murder in 2019 Dr. Vien Castellano wrote a psychological assessment of Michael after interviewing his immediate family and spending 1,000 hours talking to Michael in prison she testified on behalf of the defense the prosecution and no other parties found any of these details

“these assessments are Dr. Castellano's and hers alone we've contacted Dr. Castellano and”

Michael's family members but we didn't receive a response we have not been able to independently verify the information in her report the account given by Vien Castellano about Michael's childhood is traumatic I don't know how much of it is accurate but it's certainly traumatic let's go through it a little bit your thoughts yeah I'm going to start with just the two caveats that the prosecution

reached okay caveat number one is nothing is substantiated so there was never called child protective

services police never investigated so there's no substantiation and then the other caveat that prosecution raised is that the family may have had kind of a reason to want to kind of tell this story or you know truth or not truth you know he was facing the death penalty and so if there was a history of child abuse that might have you know decreased the likelihood of getting the death penalty in other words the family may have invented or exaggerated childhood abuse with the

aim of helping Michael escape the death penalty to reiterate we have not been able to independently substantiate the account of Michael's childhood that you're about to hear these allegations are solely based on Dr. Castellano's account which was prepared for the defense and used in court during Michael's murder trial in 2019 what was reported was very genius so a number of different

types of acts of child abuse and needlect were reported by multiple family members first between

the ages of two and eight Michael was and we don't know how often but he would be hog tied put in a dark closet and allegedly left there for days not fed food and sometimes his older siblings would do things to try to scare him put masks on and and you know open the closet door did some of these reports from these siblings were these were they admitted that they themselves had done that or were they saying other siblings had done it I believe the mother who was no longer living

at the times of the interview was also involved as well and some of the other siblings as well hog tied left for long periods of time and a closet without food and water have you seen that before I actually was just recently testifying in a similar sort of a case with a horrible situation children but again this came to the attention of authorities this kid was coming to school and

“saying they were hungry and ultimately that's how it came out what was happening in his family”

a little red flag for me is you know I've worked with children who are denied food when it comes to school they are letting everybody know they're hungry we don't have any documentation that he was under wait we don't know that he was coming to school saying he was hungry but it's extreme it's not a common thing okay you know these are definitely extreme things that they talk about tell yeah tell us what happens next what did they say they also talked about when he got

older to punish him they would hold his hands over a flame and burn his hands so again

mine thinking is okay are there any scars but we don't know that first level of torture which I

assume started with the locking him in a closet how did Michael react to that torture allegedly I mean we don't have much I mean what we what they talk about is peeing and defecating himself and when you're locked in room I don't know what else you can do and being terrified when they would you know present him with masks and like so we don't we don't know if it's true we don't know but they certainly are you know he needs acts that are described according to vn he was also labeled

a sissy boy very whiny and needy I know but you're talking about a two year old when this started so hello welcome to having children and you know I mean right he was fifth out of seven children and evidently he was the target is that common to have a family

needs and you know so there can be different reasons why one child may be targeted in a family I mean I can't tell you before you can't tell your dream after the accident

“it's the father he must be alive but when you're dead you have to be a friend of the same”

no you're stupid you have the door to hang up you're a starman I don't know if you're a real the father's name this is not unusual in a family but in court Dr. Castelano claims that Michael's father is quite absent working several jobs and handed over discipline to his wife Dr. Castelano's allegations were not substantiated by the prosecution and she further claims that there was no bonding between Michael and his mom who died in 2006

do you make anything out of the report that he had no bond to his mother his mother was a disciplinarian does abuse aside does that mean anything to you as a clinician? Well I guess we didn't hear that aid a bond to anybody right so you know a bond is a protective factor the absence of a bond is a risk factor but again not deterministic the abuse Michael suffered as a child if true is horrendous and traumatizing

as we've heard Michael did tell a teenage friend that he was bullied by a sibling and that his parents didn't intervene to help him it wouldn't surprise me if his rage was aimed at

“them during the secret recordings made of Michael while he's in jail his cellmate asks”

about his mom and dad you said you said your mom and dad are still back in Chicago my dad my mom passed away and as you know about all this shit again oh he's knowing about other shit for a long time and then you used to harass him bombarded him knock down my parents to work to rush through their house and and find nothing the mom was around followed shit yeah that's why she died share an aneurysm because she was so stressed out all the time I'm blood pressure

from all the detectives that's a revealing snapshot Michael shows no animosity at all towards his parents it's all aimed at the police he even blames them for his mother's death back to those claims of child abuse made in court by psychologists for the defense doctor Castellano her claims were not corroborated by the prosecution and we haven't been able to substantiate themselves let's talk about the effects of this level of torture and you know

not to minimize it if it's true we're talking about you know multiple years of this I mean if we

talk about the effects the bottom line is there's not one you know outcome from having heart

head horrible things happened to you and I guess I wanted to just share a story the very first paper I ever wrote was do abuse children become abusive parents and our paper basically said based on all the literature it's actually about only one in three two out of three break the cycle but what I want to share is after I published that I had a woman who was 70 years old right me a letter saying she felt vindicated when she read our article she had a horrible history of abuse went to therapy when she

was in college and was advised never to have children because it wasn't inevitable that she would repeat the cycle that's such limited thinking right and the point is she followed that advice she never had children but you know reading this as a second year old she felt I knew that wasn't you know and so

that's I mean the reality is a lot of people say you know horrible things happen to me I never want

anyone else you know and so we know you know and again becoming a serial killer is rare you know that's right you know there are millions of substantiated cases of abuse every single year countless others like if this happened to Michael but never come to the attention of authorities and you know a handful of people end up on that cycle that's something that's very important to point out is that we look at this you have somebody's committing heinous crimes the tendency thank you Freud is to dig into their

“past and find a reason for it it's oversimplified and you'll never be able to predict it no so I think”

part of my take home message is there's an inevitable gap in hindsight does it say oh yeah of course

no many other people who went through the same thing would say I never want to heart you know harm

trigger a predisposition you betcha but it's also difficult because you can't isolate the abuse

often more often than not this child is genetically related to a violent abuser so the fact that it's only one out of three is somewhat miraculous you know it's not an inevitability the vast majority of people who's experienced abuse go on to be normal pro social members of our society as far as I can tell by looking through the Glenview Police Department records no one else in Michael's immediate family was in any serious trouble with the law in court Dr. Castelano alleges there's a long history

of mental illness in the Garzula family she goes as far as to say that Michael is the only one out of his six siblings who hadn't been diagnosed with a mental illness this is what Dr. Castelano claims during Michael's trial but remember she is hired by the defense this information was not verified and we have not been able to corroborate these details ourselves so let's talk a little bit about the fact that he's genetically related to complicated people obviously we know he's violent

if the abuse is true that means his other family members are violent but also if there's some mental disorders happening in the in the house what do you make of all of that what does that mean

“for him I think again you know it's imperfect we talk about you know well it's his genetics you know”

our understanding of the genetics of aggression we can't make predictions based on anybody's genes and what we also know is that a lot of the genetics and the biology of aggression are similar to the biology and genetics of suicide so and people talk about turning the aggression against yourself you know for decades everybody's sort of been hopeful we're going to identify these genes and what we've realized is that the genes are not specific for anyone particular outcome we used to

think of genetic effects as fixed into deterministic and we now know environments you were talking about omega-3's food intake and effecting expression and it also varies in every single cell at this young of an age nothing's set in stone for Michael unverified claims are made in court about his family history of mental illness and troubled upbringing but that doesn't turn him into a killer with intervention could the course of his life been changed saving the lives of the women he

killed defend psychologists Dr. Castellano claims in court that there was a missed opportunity again something no one else has verified so something happens to Michael at age 10 can we talk about that a little bit according to Vien he has a trip to neurologist

“yeah so he actually gets hospitalized he did have I think it was fluctuating”

between a hundred three hundred five fever but he had bouts where he didn't recognize his family he didn't recognize his parents he was hospitalized they also did test of his you know nerves everything at first doctor's suspect and cephalitis a life threatening inflammation of the brain but Michael's temperature drops and he comes back around the pediatric neurologist thinks his condition isn't neurological at all but psychological and emotional disturbance neurologically he proved

100 percent fine so Dr. Castellano is saying this is our first episode of a dissociative disorder

the prosecution is saying well we don't know what was fever induced we don't know what it was but he clearly had about where he didn't know where he was didn't know his family members was cognitively intact and then neurologically intact based on you know the assessments that were done let's say for the sake of argument that this was an episode of dissociation could abuse cause that sure abuse causes dissociation children we know with histories of significant

trauma will have dissociative symptoms so could be like trans like episodes not recognizing your family is a little bit more extreme but what is more common is inconsistent knowledge of things the neurologist recommends Michael has psychotherapy Dr. Castellano claims in court

that the Garzulos take Michael home and there's never any follow-up could Michael have been fixed

well certainly if he was subject to that type of adversity throughout a goal would have been you know he those would have been grounds for removal from home and in many many cases when children are removed from home we have added things that we didn't hear about in this family we did not hear

“about drug addiction or alcohol abuse in this family who knows he I think was someone who was”

had strengths he was an athlete so there could have been a different trajectory both in terms of if

some therapy but you know again it's an experiment that will never be done right the reported

“sadistic abuse of Michael at the hands of his family doesn't stop when he's 10 the defense”

psychologist Dr. Castellano claims in court that there were two other types of torture inflicted on Michael as I've mentioned Dr. Castellano's account was not substantiated by the

prosecution and we haven't been able to corroborate it according to her Michael's abuse gets darker

as he gets older another way of terrorizing him again they would tie him in the backyard

“and they would torture and kill animals very bizarre but gunpowder so myster bulls put it in”

the animals in us and blow the animal up so really bizarre certainly not a common form of child abuse torture would have you and then the other thing they talked about also when he was older as a teen again they would tie him up and have him watch grinder movies and movies where women were assaulted and killed and raped and alike so according to what is said in court by the defense psychologist when he's about 13 Michael is tied to a chair and forced to watch

graphic videos of women being violently sexually tortured to quote teach him how to be a man if this is true it's beyond horrifying but Michael is on a terrifying trajectory that could not have come from being forced to watch videos no matter how grizzly he stabbed Ashley to death with a ferocity that is so completely off the charts yet somehow manages to leave no trace behind he's several steps ahead of detectives and is free to kill again

next time on mind of a monster the Hollywood ripper this guy is a freak and he freaks all the ladies out he rarely spent time in any apartment he was in he would sleep in his truck or he'd

“walk the streets at night well I don't think he is necessarily aroused by the women I think he's”

aroused by the kill and all of a sudden he holds a knife up to her throat mind of a monster the Hollywood ripper is produced by arrow media a free mantle company for ID I'm your host Dr. Michelle Ward

you can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts and we'd love it if you could take a second to

leave a sub-stripe review on Apple podcasts