Missing Plane MH370 Mystery, Horrifying Chris Watts Case, D.C. Sniper Saga - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to today's bonus Sunday True Crime episode.

We've got some news coming in in the world of MK True Crime, more on that next week. So all month we're going to be bringing you a Sunday mega episode featuring some MK show True Crime coverage. Today's includes in-depth features on the missing plane MH-370, the horrifying,

“horrifying, Chris Watts case. Once you hear about that case, you never forget it,”

and the DC sniper saga. All right, here it is. Hope you enjoy the program and we will see him on day. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show and the final day of our hot crime summer week. Today we investigate the mystery of MH-370, the missing plane. You may think you know this story, but you do not know it like this. Oh my gosh, we're going to take you from takeoff to the controversial search and investigation with famed writer,

author and journalist William Longovisha. In addition to a journalism, he's also an aviation expert. He was a professional pilot for many years before turning to journalism. And he has researched and investigated the MH-370 findings more than pretty much any other journalist, including those involved with that recent Netflix special, and we're going to get to that too. We will try to get to the bottom once and for all about what happened, where that plane is, and we will get into

the head of that pilot. Set the stage because I watched this whole special, you know, on Netflix about what happened to the plane. I was excited. I was like, okay, I want my answers. I walked away frustrated and kind of angry that I had been led down a bunch of paths that seemed equally unreasonable and led to trust people who turned out to be to me kind of quirky and didn't get any answers. There wasn't an answer. So is there an answer? I mean, is there a better place

“to go for what, not definitively, but most likely happened to MH-370?”

Yes, there is completely an answer. It's into the sputable. In fact, the answers in the sputable, the motive is a different question. The why is the question the what is in the sputable? So let's start there. What happened to MH-370? Well, this airplane took off. It was in 2014, March. And at night, just after midnight, out of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, so Air Malaysia, they were going to Beijing,

about a six-hour flight straight on up the coast of Asia, basically, to Beijing. And after about,

you know, after leveling off, a few minutes after leveling off, I got over with the South China Sea, disappeared from radar. This is occasionally happened. It usually means that there's a crash, which happens immediately. In this case, there was no crash. It disappeared from radar. And for reasons we can discuss, we know that it kept flying, not toward Beijing, but essentially 90 degrees to that path. And then roughly opposite direction toward the South Pole, out over the Indian Ocean,

four about seven hours. And that doesn't fit any profile that any of us have ever seen before with an airplane accident, whether it's a terrorist act or explosion or a system failure. This appeared after a very, very strange flight, an enigmatic flight that was we were able to piece together, however, conclusively. And at the end of that flight, it ran out of gas and went into the deep ocean in a remote part of the Indian Ocean, and has not yet been found, period.

It basically was on its way northeast toward Beijing. It turned around. It crossed back over and then it went south over the Indian Ocean. This is what you say happened. And there are data points

“that support that theory. The most important being the MRSAT data, right? Can you explain what that is?”

Yes, I would say that the most important initial data points is primary radar, right? So

either military radar or just raw radar. That's the, and that showed within a few days. It's clearly showed that the airplane turned west across the the melee peninsula and then went

depths of the Indian Ocean. It was on radar for a long time after making the first turn.

Was there was that? It was there was not. It was. It was okay. It was it was not a prime, it was on primary radar. It was not on normal air traffic control, computer enhanced a transponder based secondary radar, which is the normal air traffic control radar carries a lot of data with it. It was on a kind of radar that the military uses for air defense reasons and also the lies underneath a normal air traffic control radar. So it was an unenhanced raw target.

“And that is it was the first thing. No matter what, it stayed. I think I'm going to say it's”

it was in the air being seen by some form of radar for about an hour after making the first crazy silent turn off course from Beijing. As they proceeded then around the top of Indonesia, it then disappeared from radar range, normal radar range, both tie and Indonesian, let alone Malaysian military. And then the but at about the same time that that occurred that it was being lost from normal radar. It's a complicated to explain this, but a series

of electronic hand shakes began. And these hand shakes are related to an obscure communication device in the ceiling of the cap and of the triple seven. This was a triple seven Boeing that is responsible for some forms of communication largely entertainment stuff. And other things reports to maintenance. So satellite based and those hand shakes who are either the airplane or the ground based satellite, the ground base of the satellite

system was trying to establish communications always unsuccessfully. But the attempt to establish communications carried with it whispers of content with hints of location and of direction. And in the end of a final violent dive, that the use of that information which was basically interpreted

in London in Marsat as the company was revolutionary. That information never been used before.

There were two forms of it, these hand shakes. And they were able to in Marsat and London

“they specifically were able to derive distance from the satellite. And there were I think seven hand”

shakes that and they'd be a little wrong and that but roughly seven hand shakes. Each of which gave it give a distance from the satellite and an arc. And then also through a Doppler effect, if you know what I mean, the distortion of frequencies. And I'm simplifying it a little bit related to the speed of the airplane and problems with the wobbling satellite, they were able to in Marsat was able in London to derive

directional information or at least turn information. So the turns were seen because it worked sort of like a train going by a Doppler effect. It worked the signals and a train going by I'm talking audio a train whistle or anything like that. That's of course the famous Doppler effect we all learned about it in the high school. But it was happening electronically out

over the Indian Ocean. This was never, this is revolutionary stuff and it was it was out of desperation

that these brilliant people in London realized they had real information that could go back into the records during those hours and derive from that satellite, a lot of information of where the airplane

“was at any given time or at each given handshake and where it was turning. So that's what I'm talking”

about. That's fascinating. So let's start back at the first kind of radar that you said picked up the plane. You said it wasn't the normal air traffic control radar. Now why do we know why that was that it wasn't being picked up on the normal air traffic control radar? Well because the airplane's transponder was turned off. If we're talking about a simple single failure, this is not uncommon. It's why airplanes typically have two transponders.

I mean, transponder failures are not uncommon and you know, it's not very exotic technology.

easy pass or something like that. So the transponder transmits all kinds of information

“about the airplane, the flight number, where it's going, etc., altitude, piggybacks on the”

data coming in with raw primary radar. So we know that the transponder turned off. Did it turn itself off or did someone turn it off? Well, given that it's totally unrelated to

communications, it happened a second after communications stopped and given that it is totally unrelated

to which way the airplane's lying. It happened at the same time that the airplane made its first radical crazy turn. We know it was turned off. It didn't turn itself off. These are independent. These would be independent issues. So yeah, that's a logical deduction. What about the second transfer? Turn off. Were they both, were they both turned off? Because you say there's a backup.

“Were they both, were they both been turned off? Well, they weren't. You can't turn off the primary.”

I mean, the primaries with the military uses to see pieces of metal in the sky, right? They don't rely on transponders to say when the enemy is invading their airspace. So primary transponder, you can't turn it off. It's going to pick you up. In fact, the Malaysian air traffic control has a baseline a primary radar, but they didn't look at it. We're talking levels of incompetence here, right? What's the part of this story of what happened here in terms of the

disappearance? The military, very quickly said admitted at basically out of panang on the peninsula

there where they have a fighter base. They were watching it. They said they were watching it. They should have been watching it. And they said, well, we knew it was a, we knew what the airplane was. So we didn't bother to make anything out of it. We didn't send any interceptors to find out what's going on because we knew it was MHV-70. So who cares? Well, that falls apart and I heard it because the search, the initial search took place in the south China Sea, totally the wrong place.

Is it the airplane had gone down on course for Beijing and the military? So that was just

completely not believable. It very quickly was obviously a cover-up which is completely believable

in Malaysia. Yes. When bears meant corruption, brutality, whatever, dysfunctional government, dysfunctional military, they were either asleep and there's some indication they may actually have been asleep or they were just incompetent. The military was in one way or another was tracking this thing right along and didn't do anything about it. Why? Ask them. I've tried. You don't get very far with that kind of question in Malaysia. So the primary radar was showing it

and it was, let's say it was both the military radar and the civilian primary radar. The military fasted up a lot sooner than they civilian did. Do having had primary radar on this machine on the airplane, but they can't have a whole lot of crazy excuses why they didn't do anything about it. So we don't know. Truly they could have been asleep. Is there a record of it? So we know it

“did in fact appear on the radar and the real question is just why didn't they do anything about it?”

They were asleep. They didn't care. They were incompetent. But do we know it did in fact appear on their radar? Yeah, we do. I mean, the images exist and not the full radar record, but they certainly exist. And they were pretty widely disseminated. Yes, we do. There it is. They provided images that showed it, but then provided false explanations for their inaction. Got it. And this is all relevant to what I think is your belief as to why this plane did what it did. And that relates to the pilot.

And that explains if it relates to an intentional decision by the pilot, why there might have been a cover up, why the Malaysian government might have misled us. I mean, it really does explain a lot if this was an intentional downing of an aircraft by the pilot. But to this day, the Malaysians are saying, that's not what this was. That wasn't it. So let's talk about before we get into the pilot. Let's just talk about the end of the flight so we can take the viewers and the listeners there.

seen of the retrieval efforts they did make. The Australians did. The Chinese did. There was it. There were a few efforts to actually see if they could find debris someplace in the Indian Ocean. And three and three is more than three years of efforts, primarily by the Australian hands

and a hundred million dollars under it. And we've got some video tape of those boats out there

trying to do it. And it was just to it was chilling to me because the waves they dealt with like that is a scary ocean. And they were on it for a long time. And that's where we believe this aircraft wound up. But one of the mysteries is in this post 9/11 world in which this plane may have

“been taken down. Why wouldn't the passengers have fought? Why would they have allowed?”

Somebody might have realized at some point it was making weird turns. They were well past the number of hours that would have taken them to get to Beijing by the time we believe the plane went down. So what happened to the passengers? What do you think? It's no one really knows, but it's because of the amount of time that transpired. It's likely that they were incapacitated in one way or another very early in the events.

Right. So after right after the first left turn, the turning away from Beijing,

we know the airplane climbed to 40,000 feet. It had been a 35,000 feet. 40,000 feet was the pretty much the ceiling of the airplane performance ceiling at that time. That weight that night. So they climbed as high as they could go. And I think there would be general agreement. Well, there's a lot of disagreement here because people have all kinds of crazy theories. But reasonable people think that the passengers were incapacitated and actually probably killed

by depressurizing the airplane. Very easy to do. You depressurize the cabin. The people basically go to sleep. And you know, it masks fall, but then they put them on. But they're no good at that altitude. Those are masks that are good. Only for writing a short descent down to higher pressures in the lower altitudes. At 40,000 feet, the mask is really not going to do you a normal mask. But in the cockpit, there are four pressure masks, which are different.

Right, they pressurize the oxygen flow to the lungs. So you have a sort of a mini pressurized airplane. If you put that mask on, they're quick nonning masks. So you slap those on depressurize the airplane. Everybody in the back dies within minutes. A peaceful death. Not screened. How, how would it be a peaceful death? Well, because the people go to, it's extreme hipopsy. People go to sleep. They don't, they're not

gasping for breath. They don't feel that they're suffocating. Yeah, hipopsy. Yeah. So it seems, I think, many people would agree that the airplane was depressurized. We're off the same time that the entire electrical system was shut down, which is

another matter. And this is all very closely associated with the first left to turn away from

Beijing and a short, tight turn, high g-load turn, and a climb to 40,000 feet.

“If you were going to depressurize the aircraft with a switch, why would you need to go up to 40,000 feet?”

You don't. So, you know, that's like overkill. But it makes it happen faster. So, yeah, and you also don't need to make such a tight turn. We know that that initial turn away from Beijing was not flown on autopilot. It was too tight for an autopilot. It was flown by a band. And it was somebody was flying that airplane that made that turn. It was a tight turn. Steve, Steve Bengagal. High Bengagal. High g-load. Why would that be the choice?

I don't know. I don't know. That doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything. Not entirely rational, obviously. So, then we go out over the Indian Ocean and we go south. For how many hours was it over the Indian Ocean? Well, the whole flight lasted, what? Seven hours, six hours. I think probably five hours over the Indian Ocean, something like that. I'm going to guess. I have to go back and look at my

notes and all that. That's going to long time for me. But let's see if I have several hours. Actually, over the Indian Ocean. That's a long time by the way.

“Right. So, is there anything to be gleamed from that?”

No. I mean, why would if a guy is suicidal and intent on killing himself and all his passengers,

which is nothing, nothing at all solid, is that the, the, if indeed the captain did this.

“And I think he did, okay, why waltz around this. His name is Zahari. He may have”

having committed to this flight path that he presumably actually had thought through an advance and practiced on a flight simulator, that he, that he, he found himself in a quandary, that he actually, knew he couldn't turn back. For one thing, he probably killed entire plane load of passengers. And also, it just deviated, you know, from the course to Beijing, that he couldn't go back home ever again. He knew that he had to die. But, but, but he didn't want to die, maybe, or he was

savoring the last moments of his life. I don't know. It's always struck me is that that long flight,

the length of that flight, after he made that last turned up over the Indian Ocean, and then flew pretty much straight for five hours, let's say, that he was in a, some kind of an emotional or philosophical quandary. I, I want to, I don't want to, I want to, I don't want to, and it just went on to the ground out of gas. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it. And finally, he let it do it

“to him. But I, I don't know that, and I think I know that nobody knows that, that that's why”

would he take five hours when I just do what every other suicide oil pilot does. And they're quite a few have been around, you know, just a fairly standard, not standard, but in occasional occurrence, you push the airplane to the ground right away within minutes. You don't wait around. So he waited around for five hours. So I cannot explain that. It's incredibly eerie to think about that man up there, potentially flying that aircraft with dead bodies filling up the cabin,

dead at his hand. He's a, the door shut. He doesn't need to worry about that. He knew is my point. He knew it was on the soul. It was on the wall conscience. Well, what about the pilots to this theory? Well, now you're bringing that up. So, yes, it's inconceivable that the copilot was involved in this. He was a young man. He was getting married. He, he was 24 years old. 27 years old. Faric, I mean, he, he, he was riding high because to be

a copilot, a first officer on a Boeing triple seven in Malaysia in Malaysia, it's a really big

deal in society. So he was just riding his highs. You can ride almost in Malaysia. And he was about to get married and all this. He was not political. He was not religious. He, there was no motive conceivable for this guy. We know he was not involved in this. So we know that that he had to be eliminated. One way or another, the obvious one is to lock that the captain locked him out. We've seen this before in the German wings accident in Europe. The copilot locked

the captain out when he went to the toilet. When we seen variations of the lock out theme, where you get yourself alone in the cabin, and then you crash the airplane. If that's your, you know, desire, I, I don't know how long we can go on this, but after I wrote this piece, a man approached me, a man I've known for a long time. I guess I should not name him, but he's one of the preaminent human factors accident investigators in the world. And very well known and very respected and had a

private conversation with me. And he said that he was doing studies on, he was doing studies on

“voice analysis of the radio transmissions. Now remember, the cockpit voice recorder was never found.”

So all they had to go on for human factors with voice were the radio transmissions. I had noticed, and I wrote about the fact that the captain, he was handling the radio and the copilot was handling the flying of the airplane or managing the copilot, the autopilot and totally normal on departure from Kuala Lumpur. But the captain, Zahari, his radio transmissions were weird. He was making

but from the transcripts you could tell. What do you do that? This is reporting level when

“he shouldn't have reported level, reporting level again when there was no reason he hadn't”

changed his altitude. He was just, and then, and blowing some, the final response where he should have read back a frequency and didn't do it. Why? I made a note of that, and that didn't have an answer when I wrote the piece. This highly respected man approached me a little bit later, and he had been on the associated with the investigation in Kuala Lumpur. And he said that he and a partner were having been doing studies for years about measuring stress in people's voices. And it

largely with either cockpit voice recorders or with radio transmissions. And I'm going to get this wrong. So don't quote me on this. But he said to me, and I have every regions believe him, a very, very sober guy, is that they know they have found that as people's stress goes up in airplane accidents, and also in shipping, sort of shipping accidents, that you can measure changes in the, the timber,

“I think is the word, the tone of the voice, it gets higher. Okay, as the stress goes up. And also,”

that the, the language becomes more and more confused. So the first level is normal, say baseline,

normal radio transmission. The second level of you, it's getting a little bit higher. The level it's called that level two. The third level is it's getting higher and also confused or medically confused, like they're not really talking in normal sentences. And the fourth level is something. And the fifth level is just howling screams as people are dying. This guy is listening to more people dying on tape than probably anybody worldwide. And he, he also told me that it was, that it's

90% of pilots who die in a cockpit are screaming when they die. 10% aren't. So, and they, he doesn't know why, but 10% stay cool. And I owe certain situations, certain Brazilian flight, for instance, where the Brazilian pilots just stay cool, cool, cool. But most of them scream and in the very end. In this flight, he measured and he had a graph and showed me the graphs. The changes in sawari's voice and radio transmissions from the ground where he was talking

to ground control at the airport through the takeoff to the point of leveling off to the first

unnecessary transmissions that I noticed were strange. But okay, I don't know why he, maybe he was getting sloppy. And it went up the scale. It got to level, you know, three or something. He was, he was mixing his language, his voice was really high, is a harry. And it peaked right after, soon after the initial level off at 37,000 feet. And then, as the minutes went by, there were another seven or 10 minutes before the airplane turned and disappeared. His subsequent radio

transmissions began to descend, that began to normalize. Never got normal. On the basis of that,

though you can't prove it at all, he believes that what happened to the copilot was that the captain attacked the copilot right after living off. Now, there are various ways that you can kill a guy sitting in a cockpit with you, including, you know, crash axes and whatever it was. So he believes that he had has audible evidence of an attack that occurred in the cockpit. I don't know if that's true. He doesn't know if that's true. He's a sober guy. I'm a sober guy. So it's interesting. It does

make sense. We don't know exactly what happened to the first officer of the copilot. But we do know he wasn't up there sucking his thumb. When the other guy was flying for seven hours,

“like that. I mean, he was incapacitated too. Did the captain send him back to the bathroom?”

Did he go back by himself? That would be unusual because they had just taken off from calling port and they would have been the air very long and get locked out by the captain.

pressure, pressure, oxygen. He would have didn't just like the passengers in the flight attendants

“susceptible to depressurization. We don't know. All I needed to do was come up with some excuse to”

get him out of the cockpit and then he would have been just like the other passengers. Can I just clarify something? William, did you say that this gentleman picked up on radio transmissions that happened after they signed off, you know, Malaysia flight 370, good night. They happened after that. No, before before. Good night. That was the last radio transmission. These are radio transmissions that started on the ground called that baseline normal and ended with the final sign off and they

peaked in their strangeness and the stress level that could be measured in the voice and the changes in the voice right after the airplane leveled off at 37,000. Wow. So he could have, it's possible under this theory that he could have killed the copilot before he even signed off with air traffic control.

“Yeah. I'm not tabloid. I don't think you are either. And so, you know, we veered too easily”

into the tabloid territory here. But it is a possible explanation. And I, I, I've been mentioned it because I have such deep respect for the guy who wrote it up to me, who made it special, tripped the scene to explain this to me with evidence. And I, I have long, long known and respected him and you can't get more sober than this guy is. He's not a crazy in any way. He's very, very serious. Let's talk about possible motive and what they found at Zehari's home,

because the flight simulator made a lot of news. The picture of him sitting in front of his home flight simulator and they did find a route on there that looks like this one I'm told, but they also found routes, you know, hundreds of routes on there. And, you know, there's a bend and debate about how much we can really tell from the fact that that one route may have been on his flight simulator. And also, what was going on in his life? You know, the Malaysians would tell us this is a happy

man, well adjusted man. This is not a depressed guy. There's no reason to think he had it in him to kill 239 passengers just on a whim. So, can you speak a little bit about what we know of him

outside of the aircraft? Let's take the simulator first. We know that he had the simulator. He was a

simulator buff. He was an airplane buff. He was also an internet buff. And he was in chat groups and social media and bubble ball. But he was running hundreds of flights. It was the Microsoft simulator, but a fancy setup wasn't a full motion simulator, but it was a pretty fancy setup. That's the thousands of dollars into this thing. He played with it a lot. So, there were hundreds of flights, as you say, that were recorded by that simulator and then rather clumsily erased.

But they were all kind of all over the map. And then there was this one flight, which was also erased with the other flights. And this flight eerily duplicated the turns, the irrational turns, the flight path with no reason, and no destination, no landing airport that actually did occur. That's number one. Number two, and I initially initially put no weight in this thought. This is but there are other aspects of it, which amount to, of all those flights,

“this was the, I think I'm right about this. I could be wrong. But of all those flights,”

this was the only one that was flown in a very particular way. Whereas the other flights, he would essentially turn on the autopilot and let the simulator fly for hours and run the entire flight smoothly, start the finish, or maybe he'd stop it and didn't go get a cup of coffee and forget it. But this is a flight in which he advanced the aircraft along that path manually. So it is the only one. So it was a different approach this flight. So he was, as if he was impatient. So he's

pushing it forward, pushing it forward, pushing it forward by hand, basically manually. And then

also I think subtracting a few of my impression is that the fuel subtraction was not happening automatically. So he had a bunch of few keys and take out some fuel to establish the actual fuel exhaustion point. So there is that which is odd. And the, the other thing about the simulator

simulate this? And that's the, the other side. Like maybe this, maybe that's totally by chance,

because if I wanted to figure out how to have a crash in airplane, I know how much fuel I've got on board. I know where I want to go down if I want to run it a gas. And I just go to Google Earth. I mean, you can do the same thing on Google Earth. So, you know, you don't need a simulator for this.

“It's a Google Earth. Why? Why? What do you mean? What do you mean? What's the answer to that, do you think?”

I don't know. I mean, is it possible? It was, it was a message. People say that. And that he was leaving a message, a goodbye. It's a really bizarre goodbye. As he erased it, along with the other stuff, and he would then assume that the FBI and others would come in and find it and pull it out of the memory. And, and that's a really, really obscure way to say goodbye. Was he trying to sew a confusion? Well, it didn't sew much confusion.

I have no idea. And see, unlike many observers of this accident, amateur observers and I'm an amateur observer, I don't claim to know everything. There are things about this accident that are unknown

and will probably always be unknown. What about his mental state? Was there

evidence that this is a depressed guy or his life wasn't going well? Yes. When I was in fall of poor on this assignment for the Atlantic Monthly, I spent a lot of time on that because it was so obvious to me, it became obvious really quickly that the airplane didn't fail that the pilot failed, that this was an intentional act. And it fit a pattern of other intentional acts suicide murders that I've written about in the Atlantic over the years.

So it wasn't extremely surprising to me that a guy or pilot would do this. It does very rarely, but it does occur. The list is, yeah, I can name them on, you know, it takes to break two hands to name them. But, so I was immediately, you know, not immediately, but the father got into this in qualifying for wondering about what was deal with this guy? Well, the Malaysians were putting out a story that everything was hunky dory. He was sort of in a way like

the copilot who was indeed hunky dory, or he was the see-on guy getting married. But the more I talked to people, the more I looked around, the more obvious it became to me, that he was despite what the Malaysians were saying, despite what their god-awful police report just completely corrupted police reports said, they couldn't paint at him as a model citizen. He was deeply, deeply disturbed. He was going through, you could say, an intense midlife crisis.

You know, that's a polite way of putting it. He was 53. His wife had left him. His children were grown and had left also out of the house, normally, normally. But he was alone in the house, big house.

He had two houses. His wife had moved into another house. And the first sign of trouble, I noticed

“was that his wife was saying, I think one of his daughters was saying, that everything was”

normal. Daddy, he's such a nice guy. Everything was fine. He was happy. He wasn't fine. His wife had just left him. And I don't know how soon before the accident. That's some time before. And then other things began to appear about his mental condition. He was obsessing about some cute little internet models, their twins, far beneath his age, you know, like professional versions, right? He was just writing the messages and they were, you know,

whatever the word is for that. But they were making a splash in Malaysian society, but being cute little, clean-cut girls. And it was like really inappropriate for this guy. What is he doing?

“He's he's he's he's 53. And they were, I think, in their 20s. That's weird aside of mental”

distress. And then there were other things that began to add up to to point to a very unhappy man.

became apparent to me that the wife and daughter recovering up for him and the reputation of their husband father. And also the Malaysian government was covering up for him because they didn't want to be embarrassed. And that's really typical for a country like Malaysia or the say for Malaysia. It's very typical. It's all about face saving, covering up dishonesty, corruption. It's a very dishonest place on some level. When you say so, when you say there's something more

“that you don't want to talk about, can you give us a category like sexual or sexual sexual sexual?”

Yes, sexual. But again, I know quite a bit about that now. And I never wrote about it.

But it does explain to me, when I was in Malaysia, I really wasn't so interested in his motivations, his motives, because I became apparent to me that he had done this. And if he had done this, well, what gain would there be in finding out exactly why he'd done what you're going to get to the airline population globally and try to weed out people who might do this for those psychological reasons. Well, we like to tell ourselves that, you know, we like to tell ourselves

that because we want like to think we have some control over stopping the next guy, you know,

that that one you mentioned, the German pilot who flew that plane into the side of the mountain

“was just unforgettable and such a mystery to the rest of us civilians, like how, what, you know,”

why didn't they see the signs? And you think if you can figure out what are the signs, then you can prevent the next one. Well, in that case, there was a fairly long track record of psychological problems, the German guy. And the, you know, Lufthansa should have known, he had a real psychological problem going on with depression. And, and, but in Zahari's case, no. And it's a, it's a famous problem in aviation is you, as globally, as an airline, or as a,

aviation regulatory agency, or as the passengers, you really cannot predict who is going to crash your airplane. It's been a problem since the beginning of aviation. It remains a problem today. It's very, very difficult to do if I would say it's impossible. You really can't do it on the

“basis of flight hours, of licenses, of, you know, exams. It's a very stubborn problem. Now,”

it's very rare that airplane, the airline pilots crash airplanes, very, very rare. But when they do,

it's almost always a big surprise. And that's not because people are asleep at the wheel.

It's, it's the, it's the reason is that, uh, it's just about impossible to predict. So who, so to go into, call them poor and really go to ground on what his motivations were. I thought at the time, was not worth my time. I mean, I, I was more interested in what was the evidence that existed, and still exists to what went wrong. And it was any possibility of a technical failure. And there is no possibility of a technical failure. No conceivable possibility of combinations of

technical failures could have caused the airplane to do what it did before it crashed. There's nothing on earth that could explain that. It has to be human intervention. And it's pretty inconceivable that it would be anybody other than, so hurry. Let's talk about some of the other theories that are out there. Um, one that was explored by the Netflix documentary was, they, they had a woman. I'm going to go through a few of them. So they get more, they get progressively outlandish.

We'll start with the one that's perhaps the least outlanded in the land. There had a woman who said she was an expert, that really. She was like a home amateur who had become what she felt with someone of an expert in detecting debris in the ocean via satellite images. And she felt very strongly that she did find said debris over in, was the other ocean. Um, on the South Chinese station on the, which would have been, no, not in the Indian Ocean. She said she felt debris floating

away. The French, the French, she's French. No, the French lady blames us, the Americans. No, there was a civilian woman in this documentary who said, I can see the satellite images debris in the, in the South China Sea that is very consistent with airplane debris. And the plane went down on its way to Malaysia. I mean, to China after Beijing, just as it was supposed to, it didn't make a turn. And why don't they just go and search, just go and search,

did go down on course? Well, if it did go down on course, you'd have to explain the fact that

“it's significant amount of debris to wash up in Madagascar on the other side. How do you, how do you”

get there from from the South China Sea? You don't get there. So it's, you don't have to go below a Singapore and come up to the Malaysians. Well, no, they're theory would be that wasn't, that wasn't MH370 over on the other side on the west side in the west side of the south. You know it was MH370. We know it was MH370. Some of those things are unmistakably MH370, because of serial numbers. Some don't have serial numbers, but we're off of triple sevens

unmistakably, well, take an inventory of the number of triple sevens that have crashed in the Indian Ocean. So, you know, this debris that was found was either ambiguous. Okay, some of you really couldn't tell. Or it had serial numbers that's totally unm ambiguous. That was MH370. Or it was unmistakably as triple seven without a serial number, but it was found in the Indian Ocean. So forget it. Okay, but could it have been messed with? There's a suggestion in the movie that debris

found that would be consistent with all this happening over in the west and the South Indian Sea and the Indian Sea the way you're explaining. That might have been dropped there. There could have been the Malaysians interfering, right, that they they intentionally drop something there or some other actors, maybe the Russians, to make it look like MH370 went down in that ocean, but really it didn't. It wound up in Kazakhstan or it went down on its way to Beijing

“over on the east in a different ocean altogether. What do you make of that theory?”

Inspiratorial fantasy. I mean, you know, I make it. I what I make of it is not total and pludder nonsense. And it's over overly embroidered unnecessarily complicated. Requiring a level of conspiracy that doesn't exist can exist in a country like Malaysia or any other country for that matter. You know, what can come out will come out? And that's not where it's at. It's just this amateur amateur stuff.

I mentioned Kazakhstan because there is a man named Jeff Weiss who features prominently in this stock, I don't know, I don't know if we should call it a documentary, but this film. And he's featured prominently quite a bit. He's been all over the news since his plane went down offering different theories. And one of his theories is that the plane may have been hijacked potentially by the Russians. Somebody may have gone down into the belly of the aircraft via a hatch

that would have been right in front of the first class department and messed with the signaling

such that it would have thrown off the MRSAT data that says pretty definitively it went south over the Indian Ocean, not north toward Russia, towards Kazakhstan. Here's a little bit of Jeff Weiss offering some of some of his theories from the film. A modern commercial jetliner is in communication multiple ways with the outside world. All of them went dark at the same time. Why? The most obvious answer would be

catastrophic failure. Like the plane blew up, it impacted the ocean, it suffered a fire, so intense that it just destroyed all the equipment simultaneously before anyone could just make a call. But the plane's debris was still not found underneath the spot where that disruption and communication occurred. If it wasn't catastrophic failure, what's option two? The only really obvious possibility is that somebody onboard the plane deliberately turned off its electronic

communication signals. And if that's the case, the question is who?

“So he goes on to say, if you want to find links between the Russians and this plane, he's not”

taking it to the pilot. He's taking it someplace else. There were three Russians on board this plane and some one of them could have gotten down into that hatch I mentioned, messed with the comms and the other the other tech that was down there and thrown everybody off perhaps the plane is sitting to this day, someplace in Kazakhstan or elsewhere.

Well, I happen to know Jeff Wise. He's a friend of mine. Let's say that I have always

respectfully and sort of vehemently disagreed with him and I've always told him that he

it's not in the realm of reality. So yeah, that's what I can say. He's a great guy.

“Well, the question is for what, you know, who would have had the sophistication to get down there”

and the ability to get down there right in the middle of the other passengers and then had the sophistication to turn off, you know, communications equipments and throw off the MR set data. I mean, that is one that is next level sophistication by a potential hijacker. And then the hijackers typically when they hijack, they want something as a result of their feet and they usually

claim credit, you know, none of that happened here. Of course, you're absolutely right. I mean,

I mean, that's number one in all of this theorizing that this was the hija, it's not a hija,

“it was not a hijacking. And also it would that particular theory required a level of sophistication”

in terms of understanding the handshakes that we were talking up before that even in Marsat didn't have when the airplane went down. So how would the the the the functioning of these two forms of audio handshakes on that audio electronic handshakes? Was not known that really anybody for analysis. So if you don't know it in order to analyze it, how does somebody else know it in order to hijack an airplane? It's the hoax theory, right? So it's just inconceivable. It delivers a level

of expertise into the Russian hands when they can't even keep quiet enough on the front

“and you crane to get off their damn cell phones to keep from getting hit by drones and missiles.”

Right? Spot it is not the huge level of sophistication going on in Russian culture and science. And this would require some huge level of sophistication beyond anything to pull that off no way. And for what reason, as you say, but also no way. It's just inconceivable. But, you know, the music there when you play that clip, you know, the drumming, the ominous drumming and all that. That helps. Yeah. I guess the drum up. Well, here was the biggest shock and to me disappointment

of the film. They hold in a band this French journalist who pops up every once in a while and she's built up as a credible source who's probably got the answer as we spend time with Jeff Wise's theory and with the satellite woman who's analyzing the debris over in the South China Sea. And they keep sort of teasing the French journalist as somebody who's going to be the

straight shooter who might have really answers for us. And then finally, they let her tell us what her

theory is. And her theory is we the Americans did it. We downed the plane intentionally because it had some sort of goods in the cargo, lithium batteries, other things, perhaps something relating to tech at a Singapore. We don't know that we needed to get rid of. And here's a bit of this woman in the big reveal from the one they built up more than anybody on us and our role in it. It's sad too. So at 19a.m, MHV70 is requested to change over to the Vietnamese airspace.

Captain Zahari signs off with his now in famous good night. And this is the perfect moment for an interception to take place. So it's possible. And that moment, the two USA works move into action and chant MHV70. Making it disappear from the radar, maybe it receives another from the pay works to go and land somewhere nearby when Captain Zahari receives the order. It's possible that it says no.

Who does not accept this order? He is still need to stop the plane and his precious handle to arrive

The theory there being, this is as she says it, the cargo, others say, inside MHV70's cargo were

“two point five tons of electronics, including lithium batteries, walkie-talkies and accessories,”

that the cargo was loaded without being scanned, which caused this journalist, Florence Dischanger, to believe that the cargo contained highly sensitive US technology and these two US AWAC planes, which are military planes, spotted it, and that she says they were also spotted near MHV70 in the air. They asked him to land, so they could inspect the cargo, he refused to do so, and then they shot down MHVV70 over the South China Sea.

You know, conspiracy stuff like that demands belief in the perfection of government agencies,

also evil intent and desperation. It's just nonsense, nonsense, and also by the way, how do you explain the debris then in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the movie. It's just fake because fake news. You can't don't mention that, but it's it's a yeah, fake news. It's um, it's it's not sense, obviously, and you know, if you look at the history of airplane accidents, airline accidents, rare is the airline accident, where somebody doesn't come up with a reason that

it was either a bomb or shot down, preferably by the American military, and I know of only one case where the US military has shot down an airliner, and that's the Iranian airbus,

“and they I believe this the the ship was a the stark and believe mistook it for an Iranian war”

plane coming at it and shot it down in full of passengers. That that was a truly horrendous mistake, and it was and but typically, how long did it take for that to get out a few hours? You know, you don't keep secrets like that in the US military, the US military leaks like Sith, so no that didn't happen. Yes, every time and not every time, but many times when airplanes go down, people come out of the woodwork to say it was a missile, it was a bomb, you know, and it

sometimes is, but very rarely. I mean, we know the Russian shot down the Korean Airlines, believe 747, that's straight over their territory way back when it's closing days of the 83 of what this of the Cold War. Well, there was one more reason. There was there was a the Russian shot down MH17, not long after. Oh, that too, was it after this one? Absolutely, that too, that too. But again, it wasn't any big mystery about what happened there. It's like you don't kind of

secrets like that. And the Russians say, we didn't do what they did. We didn't do it. We didn't whatever, you know, yeah, you shot it down. And it was a mistake. Almost certainly was a mistake in this case, and that you crane. So, you know, they didn't tend to shoot it down. So, they have an intentional shoot down of this Malaysian flight. No, sorry. I know because it had one of the embattories on it. We didn't want the Chinese to get the lithium batteries, so we killed

230 million. It doesn't really sound like us. Yeah, we know where. No, it doesn't. It's completely

“unrealistic. I think she's, I don't know what motivates her. I think she probably believes what”

she says, most of these people do. You know, that's the fever. You know, you get into that, you get that fever. You start believing it. And that's, you say, the fever, the rabbit hole. Thank God, I'm not in that category. But I think frankly, I haven't thought about this life, you know, for a few years. Well, the article is something spectacular. So, so walk us through what, what, what happened with the investigation? Why, you know, we had the one guy, he was featured

in the film as well, who was out there finding all the debris. He had asked oceanographers, like if a plane went down in the Indian Ocean, tell me what the currents were with the debris wash up, and the guy then went to those places. And sure, and if he started finding debris, which, as you point out, some had serial numbers, some didn't, there were questions about whether he was

the film portrays him. Oh, really? Yeah, Gibson. Yeah. You know him, I think, sure. Yeah,

“I think you may mention him in your article. That's why it's really unfair. You know,”

the plane is a very complicated guy. And, you know, the idea that he would make an effecture this stuff in order to gain publicity for himself is ridiculous. I know that from deep experience with him, he's complicated, and he has obsessive in life, not just with MH370. He goes from one obsession to the other. He's an adventurer. He's a world traveler. I think he's gone to 180 countries, or 190 countries, and that's his goal in life. He's complicated, but he's not a

he's not a cynic. In fact, he should be more cynical, more doubting. So, if the press is following him, which I didn't know, but I don't doubt that he showed up with some press and toe, but the idea that that would be his motivation is wrong. It's unfair to him as a person. Now,

“what he did is I think it is hard to believe. Sorry, go ahead. It's much less significant than what”

he thinks. The finding of that debris. Other people, the first debris that was found was not found

by him was found at Rayneon, the island of Rayneon, the French island of Rayneon, by a beach cleaning crew. And that we had a serial number on the flapper on and was off that airplane. So, and that's the debris that was then analyzed by the French and the American NTSP got involved in North Apparise at the Labritte French Laboratory. That's a serious piece of debris and evidence, and it was not playing Gibson and found it. Playing Gibson did find debris that

is either certainly assignable to MHV-70 or likely to be MHV-70, along with a lot of other debris

that turned out to be a fishing boat called on fire, that kind of stuff. And he never claimed to

know the difference really. So he, I like him a lot, actually. There's room in this world for

“all kinds of eccentric people. He's one of them. What happened to the rest of the debris?”

That's one of the questions so many people are asking, and why they spent three years in the Indian Ocean looking for something, luggage, human remains, the rest of the plane got willing the black box recorder. You know, all of that stuff, it's hard for some people to wrap their arms around the fact that it's all gone. We only have little pieces, like where's the main debris? Well, you know the answer to that is it's at the bottom of the ocean, probably in some deep

canyon. It's a very deep ocean there that has been searched, at least once maybe twice, and missed, because searching of the deep ocean, that ocean there, where it went down,

then the first thoughts of vast areas, you said, it also hadn't even been mapped, essentially,

at least in a non-classified way. So, it's lying at the bottom of the ocean in pieces, because we also know that it didn't hit, this was not a water landing that occurred, right? This was a high-energy, high-energy impact, and the airplane shattered, as airplanes do, they had the water at high speed. So, it's little pieces, probably the most intact pieces are parts of the engines, but you know, try to find a couple of mediums, I mean, big engines, big jet engines,

and that big compared to the size of the ocean, and a depth of the ocean, and the irregularity of the ocean, in that part of the world, it's not a flat plane, ocean that's cut by canyons and mountains, and you can drag devices across it, and you'll easily miss things down there, the size of skyscrapers. So, it's down there somewhere. The question is, why, and I came to this very early on, like, why are they doing this? Why, it was ongoing,

when the search was ongoing, when I was writing the piece, basically, and I said to many people, why are you doing this? If you're not going to find anything, I mean, if you do find anything, it's not going to matter, because the black box is going to tell you anything you don't already know, the cockpit voice recorder is a two-hour loop, and so you hear the cockpit, and that's

would not, and the system recordings, the flight data recorder, it's not going to tell you really

very much of inference. It'll tell you what you're changing to quit first, which ends with second,

some stuff about the fuels, some stuff about the final speeds, that's a longer loop, but

“it really wouldn't say anything, but we don't already know, so why are you spending all this effort?”

All this money to drag the ocean in the hope of finding this thing, and in my impression that the time was, if you find it, so what? And I think that became the overall conclusion. It really didn't matter to find it enough, enough is enough. It was driven as many in many cases, driven by political pressures and the families of the dead. That's hard to get up and think. I mean, people don't want to just walk away from their dead loved ones and say, "Oh, well,

you know, we'll ever find them." So there's a huge amount of political pressure to be compassionate, and I understand it completely, but from a logical point of view, strictly logical point of view,

it didn't make any sense, and they finally say, "Okay, enough is enough." Who's funnier than that?

Do you think that there's, what? That there's a, there's reason to believe that he downed the plane there, knowing that it would be impossible to retrieve the remnants.

“I think so. Impossible to retrieve the remnants, at least put a big hurt on the search.”

But I don't know how much he knew about the nobody knew that much about the sub-surface ocean in that place, and he probably didn't know exactly where he was going to go down and did the airplane.

We know pretty shortly and it went down because it ran out of gas. One engine went first,

the other engine went second, and then the APU jet engine, the back jet in, cut out. If that was all sort of, you could tell from the satellite hand shakes, what was going on, not in an approximate way, but he wouldn't have known that in advance, and a simulation wouldn't had told him that. It wouldn't have seemed like that to that degree. So, you know, what were the winds? Well, so I don't, I think that he wanted to bury himself and bury the memory of what he did

or was doing and bury and bury his life. I mean, he did a very, very bad thing, and he wasn't the very, very bad person. He went, "Hey, where?" And how soon before the flight he went, "Hey, where?" There's evidence that he was going, "Hey, where for weeks before?" Oh, I forgot to mention to you that the, though the wife and the daughter were originally saying he was a happy, happy guy, well, it just did, and that's what they were maintaining when I was in

qualifying for, and I said, and there's no, this is not true, this is this. He was not adjusted, well, they then came out, I don't know how long afterward, and have since said to newspapers, I think in Australia newspaper, that no, he was very, very unhappy. Well, no kidding, of course he was unhappy, you know, that, so he was very unhappy. Midlife crisis. Hmm, my God, I mean, 239 dead, think of how we think about Jeffrey Dhammer, Charles Manson,

Ted Bundy, they don't hold the candle with this guy, like there's, this name does not yet

“kill the name for me. Say again? Think about the children that were on that airplane, and that's what I think about”

the children, you know, I mean, it's, in this book, in this book could be evil, a terrible, terrible thing. Yeah, awful, and it's just a thing about an airplane, it's more than most modes of killing, it lends itself to mass killing, because they're big airplanes, they carry a lot of people. Now why if you want to kill yourself, you don't just go out and kill yourself, I don't know, most people do. They don't take others with them.

And when they do that, of course, they, they commit enormous violence on their friends and families, suicide does, and it's enormously selfish, and they should be, you know, ashamed, but in, in this case, and we've seen these cases before, they decide they're going to take

Can you explain to us the Malaysian government's role in this remaining quote, unquote, a mystery

“for so long? What was it? They were just embarrassed that their pilot appeared to be suicidal and”

committed this terrible act, and so they did everything possible to cover it up. Yes, and, and again, it gets into some sexual stuff, it gets into, you know, really deep political stuff in Malaysia, and I frankly have not attracted because it doesn't interest me. Malaysian politics, that's the one subject that really does not interest me, but it's certainly played a role here. He was a politically active, he was a partisan, political

partisan, and there were, you know, his, the man he was in favor of, his prime minister,

was in jail, and blah, blah, blah, and then out of jail, and yeah, the Malaysian government, whether on a political level or on a bureaucratic level, right, the staff, the deep state,

“is scared, they're afraid, and they're afraid for their careers, they're afraid for the”

reputations and a small society, they're placed in a big country, but we're very few people will actually run it. Their friends, their careers, their reputations, their ability to make money, steal money, that is, that's Malaysia. It's a rough place, you know, you don't, you can go to Malaysia as I've done a few times in the past, for the Atlantic, on different subjects, piracy being one, and you find that it's, you know, you can see why they're tourists there, especially along the

coast, there's a beautiful beaches and resort hotels, and the quality of poor can be, you know, a shopping center city, whatever, but you scratch beneath the surface there, you start poking around areas that they don't want you to poke around, and you're taking your life in your hands and there's no question about that. People disappear off the streets, they do now, they did then, and this is not something you just approached casually, and I have said, you know, blame if he, if he wants

to really get at this and have a real adventure in life, go back to Kuala Leport, start asking questions, but, you know, he's, he's rather paranoid and frightened, and to some extent for good reason, he worries about being killed and assassinated, or, yeah, basically, not arrested, but just taken off, taken out. And what about the Chinese? Why aren't the Chinese? Like, the plane was filled mostly with Chinese citizens. So why wouldn't China be putting its foot down and saying,

we will find out, we will figure this out, we do think it was your pilot, you know, why would they be so hands off on, on getting to the real truth here? It's a version of Malaysia, I mean,

and it's kind of, it's a more advanced, more populated version, more powerful version of Malaysia.

I mean, it look at how they responded, the COVID thing, you know, I mean, they, they, they, they, but they in this scenario don't have anything to cover up, that this isn't their sin, we would think they'd want to real answer. Now, I'm not sure of that, because they don't want their citizens making trouble. So I, I can't speak for what the Chinese authorities, I do know for sure that the Chinese authorities, after a little bit of sympathy told me, shut up and expressions

of sympathy or demands for further investigations that happen in China were absolutely shut down and no one said in terms, when that started to happen, I don't know, but it was a few months after the accident, initially the Chinese were on the side of right, you know, this, this fine, that would happen, it wasn't one of their plans, but there, their citizens started making too much of a fuss and the Chinese don't like fusses. So I think that's pretty much why, you know,

they did that, I don't think they felt any way responsible for this, but they just don't like,

“you know, rebel rushing, they need to keep things calm, keep a lid on it, and that's what they did,”

they put a lid on this. That does sound like them. There's been so many theories, I remember being on the air when this happened at Fox, and it was such a mystery, you know, right from the beginning, it was very confusing because nothing made sense to us civilians right off the top. We've covered a lot of airplanes going down as news anchors, but nothing here was familiar or made sense.

it swallowed up the airplane. So there was a lot of non-based questioning going on out there,

“not well-founded questioning going on out there. What do you, what do you think,”

you know, has been missed? Like, how, how, I guess I'm trying to ask, the fact that most news anchors and new journalists have no background in aviation seems to me to have been a real handy cap in covering this story well, and some being sucked down conspiracy, rabbit holes, and so on, as somebody who's both a journalist in a form of pilot, what's been your impression? Well, aviation lens itself to ignorance, because it does require

experience and education. It's a little bit mysterious, not very, but it's a little bit

mysterious, and you know, reporters aren't pilots or engineers and all of that. So it's basically that.

I mean, especially in a case where you don't have the NTSB, NTSB was there, but they,

“you know, they basically fled the investigation in Malaysia. They would not say that, but that's what”

happened. That's why, because the airplane disappeared, and the lead leaves, as I said, I don't really watch television, but I would expect that to be the case in this case. On the other hand, I who have covered major airplane accidents ever since the value jet thing and the Everglades, and you're France and you need Egypt there and things in Brazil, I've been all over the world covering. That's not what I really primarily do, but it's what I've been assigned to

do at the request of my editors for years. So I've been to many of the really big airplane accident investigations. I know that I normally don't even start into them until a year has gone by and let the crowd wander on and then I come in with a very long article and very knowledgeable because frankly,

“I grew up around airplanes and my friends are my deep friends among accident investigators who”

talked to me both in Europe and in United States. They trust me because I don't write nonsense.

On the other hand, on the third hand, I had an early experience with the value jet accident in the

Everglades where a DC-9, an airplane, you don't see it anymore, built a twin jet, belonging to value jet went down in the Everglades and it was a turn out to be a cargo fire, oxygen cancers, really interesting story. I went down to Miami for that for the Atlantic and this is a long time ago and I was holding myself to be superior to these reporters who were around. These are, you know, television reporters, national and local reporters, normal reporters and I was naive and

kind of snobby about it within my own mind and make that clear to them. But I thought, you guys, you know, I know what this was. This was an electrical fire. I know that because I, as a cargo pilot, had had a series of local fires that looked a lot like the fire that took the airplane down. And so I thought, yeah, you guys, whatever. Well, it turned out they were right and I was wrong. So now it was easy for me because I didn't have to write anything about it for a year. So I ended up

not looking like a fool. So I earned an early lesson to respecting the non-technical aspect of normal reporters, the ability of reporters to get to a story that they are not experts in and actually maybe do better than an expert like me. I am an expert in aviation, much as I sort of regret it. They did a better job that I did and for me was a profound lesson. So I'm the last person who's going to denigrate. I don't know what they're saying about

image 370. I don't watch TV. I don't know. But I will never denigrate.

Of course, plus I spent 3 years in Baghdad, where I watched my closest proximity to the normal reporters, which I'm not, was I came away from that. Well, very early on, I developed a deep respect for the reporters, ordinary reporters, Chicago, to Vietnam, New York Times, the blah blah, TV reporters, CNN. They were around me that I never really been around these people before. I watched them almost as much as I watched the war. And I came away from it with a deep respect

for their courage, for their intelligence, for their ability to learn quickly. And again,

they had it all. They knew exactly what was going on. Very early, they knew we were losing the war.

“And they had a problem in transmitting that information to the American public.”

Because they had to be filtered by the institutions that sent them there. The editors and have readers and so forth. But the reporters were incredibly smart, dedicated, brave beyond belief. And so I'm a fan. Ah, well, let me ask you this, as somebody who has had lengthy experience reporting on these many accidents. I mean, to someone like me, it affects me as a journalist. It affects me as a mom, as a human. And as an airline traveler, because I'm not

the strongest, most secure person when I'm up there. I definitely have a fear of flying. And

things like this are very scary. You know, the stuff you were saying about how he could just depressurize the airplane in a couple of minutes, you'd be dead. I realize how incredibly rare this is.

“But just a word from you in parting on the safety of air travel. And what people like me should”

be remembering when we go up there. Well, I mean, it's often said and usually believe, but the airplanes are very, very terrifying travel is very safe. And that is correct. I mean, statistically, you just, this cannot be denied. So being afraid of flying on the airlines

is sort of like being afraid of crossing the road. And you would, of course, I mean, I would,

and do willingly send my small children. I got small children and older children. As well as to get on the airplane, no problem, whatever. No problem. I don't think about it. Like, who's flying the airplane when I'm not flying the airplane? You know, who's in front of me flying? And a lot of them are not very smart people. But the system is so

“monitored and independent on teamwork and training and this and that, that it turns out to be”

very, very safe. And it's become that way, largely through engineering, and we're starting starting with the advent of the jet engine in the 1960s. And the airplane, the job got more and more boring and more and more safe, right? So that's number one. It doesn't take much to fly one of these airplanes. And you got two guys or women and a man or woman, whoever who could do it in the front. That's number one. And we're two, if you look at the, the thing that seems to scare people the

most from my casual observation and conversation around dinner table, it's turbulence. And I know that dominates in a terrible way the lives of airline pilots. They go around a tiptoe around the, the passengers' fear of turbulence. It's terrible because they only have one life. And the passenger's threshold for turbulence is ridiculous. The airplanes can handle a whole lot more turbulence than the passengers can. There's no problem with the, when I get in severe turbulence

and I had a job, my last job is flying and hunting severe weather, right? So going into severe turbulence and up there forms of severe weather. On purpose for a few years, I did that. And it's, I was transitioning to journalism. But you know, we hunted the worst weather nationwide in the U.S. nationwide and flew into it for days on end. And for technical reasons, it was a job. But point is, we were flying into conditions that no airliner ever goes into,

ever, ever, the, you, you get a few little bumps, which would, which would be not even worth thinking about for a pilot and people are writing letters to the senator and the congressman. And they think they're dying. That's a big problem. And it's totally unnecessary. The airplanes are extraordinarily strong and giving an example of what we would find a turbulence that would so rough that you couldn't see the instrument panels, right? The shakens are hard. And also that

would depending on the design of the seat belt and so forth would bruise your thighs. You know, you have a show on it too, but you can go away from it, bruised, physically bruised. The airplane didn't care. It's fine. But tell that to the passengers. So if there's one thing you can say very specific, other than check the statistics, it's safe globally and safe for a reason. Then you can say very specifically, learn about turbulence. You know, don't be afraid of turbulence.

I think we could have had a assignment from Vanity Fair. After the Atlantic was working

with it. And I was supposed to unsafe airline in the world and fly with them. And I found them in

contrast. That's a terrible assignment. What did they do to try to kill you off? It was great. No, that was great. No, it was great. No, I was great. I had a great big time. And up in the cockpit of these old Soviet turboprops flying around Congo and just like 'cause it's really autumn. But anyway, these airlines are blacklisted, right? You can't pick them anywhere out of Congo and they crash all the time. They're not like airlines here. They don't crash.

They're hardly ever crash. Those guys, they crash them all the time. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they don't. Usually they don't die. But I went, and I truly had a great time doing that for a

few weeks with these pilots. Why? How was that a great time? You're a crazy man. I would say yes

“to that. Who would say? No. How was that fun? The point is, that's how safe airplanes are.”

You know, they don't crash. And if they do crash, they're probably not going to kill you. And whatever, it's fine. And by the way, everybody does sometime. Oh God, that is of no comfort when you're up there and thinking it's this time. It's right now. Yeah. But I think else you said. That was a soothing bomb. I'm going to be thinking about that story about going into the bad weather and the plane can take a lot more than we allow it to. You know, it's in it. All you need is just the jolly

word from the captain. That's all. I would bear out the turbulent ride. If you know, just a few nights have the pilots are like, oh, no extra charge for the fun ride, something like that. Keep us going. You can hear there's no panic. If you look at the air traffic control conversations, the percentage of those are right, whether known as ride reports. So they're seeking from air traffic control, ride reports from airplanes that are going ahead of them. And it's a lot of rider reports,

a rider reports, a rider reports, it's really awful. It's awful for the lives of the pilots.

“And so if you put you put you in a bad mood, every time you get in turbulence, you have to”

excuse it to the passengers and makes you really surly in a hurry because it's such not a problem and it's messing with the lives of the pilots. Okay. Well, that that also makes me feel better. I mean, we need we need to be a little tougher. Because they do. I mean, I appreciate when they tell you it's going to be bumpy. Okay. It's fine. It's going to be bumpy. But they need to be saying it's going to be bumpy and we're going to be fine. You don't have to worry about the bumps. I mean,

like, that should be the second part of the message, which it isn't. Yeah, people don't believe it. You have been wonderful. Well, I'm gosh. It's so nice to meet you and have such a clear thinker and researcher and talker on the show and something this complex. What a pleasure. Please come back.

Thank you very much. Oh, what an incredible story. My gosh, just a sad, strange mystery

“that may never get fully, officially solved, but really get you thinking, right, in a perfect way to end”

our hot crime summer week. I want to tell you that I am off next week, spending some time traveling with my family for our summer vacay. We will be back with you on June 26th, live to talk about all the news. Have a great, great week and I'll talk to you soon. Hey, everyone. I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show and to the first day of our hot crimes summer week. Yes, our hot crimes summer series was so popular. Last year,

we are bringing it back by popular demand and we kick off this week with a case that has haunted me and so many for years. I just, I cannot get over it. I need to understand it and that is the case of Christopher Watson. In August of 2018, Chris Watson murdered his pregnant wife, Shanan, along with their two little girls. The murders were gruesome and seemingly out of the blue, the disturbing details of this murder and the lack of red flags leading up to it

has haunted me. It makes it so hard to understand, but I feel like we must, we have to try. Here to help us dig into the details and to answer my questions is retired FBI Profiler, Mary Ellen O'Toole. Throughout her career, she has helped capture interview and understand some of the world's most infamous criminals, Ted Kazinski, the Unibommer, the Green River Killer, the Zodiac Killer, and many more. She also worked the Elizabeth Smart

and the Natalie Holloway Disappearances, the Columbine shootings, and many, many other very high profile cases, she's the perfect person to help us break down this case.

I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm so glad to have you here. This case has been haunting me as of late.

I got onto the Chris Watts story because of the Alec Murdock case and the use of the term family annihilators and then we did a whole show on family annihilators and we mentioned Chris Watts, but I just can't get past it and I needed to spend more time on it and I'm so glad to have someone with your expertise here to help walk us through it. It's just one of the most disturbing prime cases I've ever seen and I'm into crime. I follow crime, but this one is just unforgettable

in its awfulness. You've lived your life fighting crime and trying to figure out criminals professionally.

“Is it as bad as I say? As somebody who's seen a lot more crime than I have, is it a standout?”

Well, I think it's definitely a standout and I'll tell you why when you have a case like this,

where the parent, especially the biological parent, goes after their own children, it really causes the case to stand apart from other crimes. I can understand domestic violence, which is a partner, kills another partner. That's actually fortunately very common, but when you see someone going after their biological children purposely, that makes it extremely egregious and then the manner in which the children were killed here and the manner in which their bodies were

disposed of and such a callous and cold-blooded way, it's really disturbing. So let's go through the story. When these two met, they seemed very much in love.

“Shenan was larger than life, very strong personality, but had been going through a difficult time.”

She'd been diagnosed with lupus and this woman documented her whole life on Facebook. So we have a lot of video tape before. You makes you feel like you kind of knew her. Here's a little bit of Shenan sharing the story of how she increased what's met. My friend sent me a friend's suggestion for him. It was actually his cousin's wife and I deleted it. I was like, I'm not interested. I don't want to meet a guy. Bye-bye.

So I deleted her friend's suggestion for him. I was diagnosed two months later and I went through one of the, I would say, darkest times of my life because things just got scarier. Got a friend's suggestion. Friend requests from Chris. I was in a really, really, really bad place. And I got a friend requests from Chris on Facebook and I was like, oh, what the heck?

I'm never going to meet him. Except. One thing led to another and eight years later, we have two

“kids. We live in Colorado and he's the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Do you think there's any connection between the fact that she was in a dark place physically and mentally when when she met this guy and the ultimate fate that she met? Could have been. Sometimes our judgment is colored or flawed by our own emotional experiences like for health. So certainly could have been their personality seemed diametrically opposite. And when you go back and you look at how people pair up, you wonder how much somebody

really is aware of the other person's personality and how much they're really aware of how that person is going to handle life and the stressors of life and all the things that that life brings in terms of challenges and so forth. And my experience over the years is that we really don't read people very well. We oftentimes read what we want to see and that may have been impacting the relationship here. And again, it's really very common.

They met in 2010. They got married in 2012 and she was killed in 2013. I mean, it all happened so fast. And look, I met my husband in July of, I'm sorry, okay, so it was 2018 that she was killed sorry. But I met my husband in July of '06 and we were married by March of '08. So I'm not saying it can't happen quickly and work out wonderfully. But I do think there's just a little bit of a warning here where if you meet your partner and it very low time in your life, take the time to

make sure you're not for emotional or other reasons overlooking potential warning signs of a problem. I agree with you. And that's certainly one of the things I cover with my students in class when we study violent crime is what are all of those characteristics that confuse us, that impact our

look at that really don't tell us the potential for dangerousness and what should we be looking at

“in terms of personality traits? And again, I think it's really very common, but we're not raised”

and we're not trained to know what to look for. They had a baby pretty soon into the marriage. Again,

married on November 3rd, 2012, December 17, 2013, first child Bella was born. And then they suffered

a bankruptcy and 2015, so two years later, their second daughter, CC, her name was Celeste, was born. So two babies in a couple of years, flash forward to three years after that, and she's pregnant with their third child, a little boy. Now, anybody who's had two babies in two years in the marriage, it's stressful. And then they have a bankruptcy in the middle of it. That doesn't make you kill anybody. That doesn't turn anybody into a murderer. So as you look back at this situation,

knowing what Chris Watts would ultimately do, do you have any thoughts on those years, any red flags, anything jump out of you? Well, I started to look when the case even happened, started to go back and look at when did the stressors really start? These are not cases where someone just snaps, and they decide one morning, this is what they're going to do. They're going to annihilate their whole family. There's thinking about it beforehand. There's planning about it beforehand, even if they

don't admit to it. So when did the stress really begin? And it probably really started to compound about the time that they filed for bankruptcy. And then when they started to have the children, we know that those are very stressful times in relationships, especially depending on the person's personality, if they have a very, if they have a difficult time dealing with the idea that we have one more baby, we have one more pressure in my life, especially with those kinds of thought processes,

that can be very stressful. So now you've got a second child, and then you have surprisingly,

“now you have a third child. And so I think the stress and possibly the resentment”

had been building actually for years. It didn't just happen days before Chris committed the murders. They in June of 2018 is when everything started to take a turn for the worst. That is when he met the woman who had become his affair partner. And it is when Shenan told him that she was expecting a third child, which he very clearly did not want. She of course put the clip on Facebook, where she told him the news and any outsider could see the guy was not thrilled.

Notwithstanding what his words were, here's a bit of that. She's wearing a shirt that reads, oops, we did it again. He walks in. That's like that shirt. Really? That's awesome. So pink means, that's just the test tunnel. There's just the pink is going to be girls. I don't know. Just the chest. That's awesome. Yes, I guess when you want to. That bit at the end there, right? That bit at the end.

As he's looking at the pregnancy test. And not to mention, that's awesome. That's something

you say when your kid is like, you know, I got on first base. You know, if you're having a child,

it's tens to be in a very emotional, very moving moment, none of which was present there. No, but you know, I looked at that again. I remember seeing that years ago, but I also looked at his

“confessions. And he is one of the most subdued, low-key people in those confessions. So I think that's his”

personality. He's not going to be extremely expressive. It's just not part of who he is. And so that reaction to the news that Shannon is going to have a third baby is, you know, it's pretty much in keeping with his very low-key, almost at times depressive personality. It's the, it's the common at the end when he says words to the effect, something about when you want something, meaning when she wants it. He did not make a comment about what he wanted. So I thought the

effect was keeping with how he is. But it was the final comment that was telling to me.

affect as a default? Like they have difficulty feeling emotion. They have difficulty feeling

emotion, whether it's great love or great hesitancy in committing a murder. You know, they're not built in a way that is necessarily safe. Well, that's a good point. But I think with the whole idea

“of being able to understand your partner or your family members, you know, you have to really”

look at them and be a pretty good judge of character on a daily basis and not just every couple of months or something like that. So I think it's important to look at whether or not they're becoming more depressed. Are they talking about suicide? Are they talking about leaving the family? Are they talking about not wanting to be a part of the family again? So for me, there are a lot of

puzzle pieces that are likely missing from this family that were never posted on Facebook

that would give us more indications that he had started to check out. But with that checking out was there any indication that with that decision to no longer be really an emotional part of the family could that have meant that that anger towards shenan was building and building and building because looking at Chris, you don't see an angry man, but that means he's internalized it. But what did she see on a daily basis? What did she see that many of us would have just looked at and said,

he's just having a bad day and sometimes that's the case, but sometimes it's not the case. And those are the kind of indicators that you want to look for. To me, everything seems to go downhill as soon as he meets the Southern woman. To me, based on her Facebook, based on the Netflix documentary, which is very worth your time on this whole show. It's called American Murder, The Family Next Door. He was kind of the beta in the relationship. I mean, she was the alpha

and in control about most of the decision they were making. And then he met this other woman and really started distancing himself and started, I seem to me like a hatred started to brew for shenan. The other woman's name is Nicole Kessinger. She worked like he did at this petroleum company that we're showing a picture of her on the board now. And I mean, they met in June of 2018, it was August 13th 2018 that he committed a triple murder, quadruple murder of his entire family.

“I mean, two months, Maryly, how do we even start to understand that?”

Well, his girlfriend, the woman that he met and started to have the affair with, she was the kind of the condo it. He was already in that emotional state. My sense is that

he was already feeling incredible animosity towards shenan and she didn't realize it. Then she

meets this woman and it could have been Susie Smith. It could have been Anne Jones. But he meets her and she responds to him and they begin to have that relationship. I don't think it was specifically her, but I think he was ready at that point. So I think it had been building up. That's interesting. So could have been anyway, because we'll talk about her, but she's been very demonized by most people looking at this case. And there are questions about whether

she did something intentionally to encourage this.

“Well, I think I would be really careful as a pro-filer to credit her with any involvement in this case.”

Until I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to her and look at her background, look at her personality, look at the kinds of things that that kind of really made her tick on a daily basis to see whether or not her personality lends itself to be in co-opted like this. Because if it did, we have to look at and say they just met. She starts to have this relationship which she's probably very excited about. She's even looking at wedding dresses and then to jump to the conclusion that

now she morphs into this co-conspirator to help him annihilate his whole family is a little bit too much from me at this point. I think she got caught up in this in the excitement of having this relationship. And it really is hard when something like this happens, just like Scott Peterson, not to say, oh, she had to know or she had to encourage him. That is a big step to say that the partner encouraged Chris in something like this. I'm not sure that that's there. And we know that in Scott Peterson

all, had no idea. And as soon she found out she went to cops, work with them in his part of the

“reason he is now in prison. She was a good guy in the whole thing. This woman, I don't know.”

And she definitely misled the cops. She tried to tell them, oh, I didn't know he was married and then they found Google searches by her. You know, like, does the mistress ever get them in? I mean, she knew. She knew that he was married and downplayed her knowledge with the police. It doesn't mean she encouraged a murder, a triple, a triple, a triple murder. But it's one of the reasons why this woman has now had to change her name. She's effectively in witness protection because people blamed her.

So at the same time, we see that lackluster, I'm having the third baby reaction.

Shannon posted one of many videos of the daughters talking about their dad, Chris, on Facebook. And I mean, you could find any number of these. But every video between him and the children showed a loving interaction, what looked like a loving interaction. This is one that, you know, no, he pulls on the heartstrings because you know what's going to happen to this young girl. But here's Bella, on June 14th, 2018, so four years old at the time, singing a song about

how much she loved him. Oh my God. I don't, this is why I'm so obsessed with this case. How does someone who we have to acknowledge is a human being? Who has seen that video and has created and loved that child for four

“years, within two months of that, kill her, murder her and dump her in an oil tank. How? How?”

Well, a couple of things I think probably are going on. I think he likely didn't respond the way most people would have to that video. The video probably added more pressure to him to feel that he needed to stay with the family when in fact he did not want to stay with the family. He may have even resented that video, seen that because he was ready to go. He was ready to start life over again. He had new plans. So he was emotionally separating

himself from his family at a certain point. When you do that, to be pulled back into the family, once you've decided, I'm done, it's over. I'm just going to wrap it up. That can also contribute to the anger. With somebody like with Chris who internalizes that anger, it's really hard

“to measure it because usually people express their anger that yell they scream their face gets red.”

That doesn't seem to be the case with him, but I'm also not sure that he wasn't looking at those videos thinking, "I'm separating enough with this. I'm moving on with my life. I'm starting over again." So looking at your kids may have been certainly a part of that. This is interesting because this is in no way to blame shenan for anything that happened to her, but there is a chance it wasn't emotional manipulation by her. The affair started in June of

18. That's when this video was made and posted. There was another video posted by Shenan right around this same time talking about how you're like, "You're a rock. You're the great." I did wonder, is it any accident she's trying to build him up in this way right around this time? Hold on a second. We have it here. It's a father's day message. Okay, and in it, she's saying, "Chris, we're so incredibly blessed to have you. You do so much every day for us. You take such great

care of us. You're the reason I was brave enough to agree to number three from laundry to kids,

showers. You're incredible. And we are so lucky to have you in our life. Happy father's day.

Now to me, Mary, on this suggests, this is over the top. This is just over the day. It's sound like she's trying to prove something or maybe manipulate a bit. Or maybe in her way appeal to him. So for example, if you're in a relationship with someone and you try to have a conversation with them, let's fix things. Let's make this better. And your partner shuts down on you. They won't talk, or they'll just answer in one or two words. So you can't have a conversation about it.

They just emotionally turn off. When that happens, you have to have an outlet. You have to have a

probably feeling at that point. She was losing Chris and he wasn't talking to her about it. So I could

“see where she would naturally put something up on Facebook and try to appeal to him that way.”

But you're right. It does seem over the top. But she may have been kind of at feeling that her last resort was to get his attention. And hey, please listen to how we're feeling about you. We don't want to lose you. For the next two months, she would ramp that up as any spouse might. You could tell that Chanel and felt him distancing himself from her. She wound up taking a six-week trip to North Carolina where they were from and brought the girls home to the grandparents and was

getting frustrated that he wasn't even texting or calling to check in on his wife and two daughters.

And she was pregnant. You know, weeks were going by without him seeming to give a damn about how they

were doing or trying to reach out. And you know, she would do what any spouse would do, which is like, thanks for all the calls. What's going on? Right. In retrospect, how do you think like, would he have received that in the same way you're saying he might have received the my daddy is my hero video. You know, like, I don't need this pressure. I'm trying to get out of this thing. I think that's more than likely how he responded. I'm done internally mentally when you have a

case like this, at least in the cases that I've worked or been aware of, there is a mental break where the person says, I'm done. They don't necessarily tell their partner, I'm done,

but they're done. And they make the decision to move on. And again, they don't have to tell anybody.

They just do. So any efforts to reel them back in will just upset them and make them angry, but their partner doesn't know it. So that failure to communicate is a huge problem when you're dealing with someone that throws up these emotional walls and internalizes how they feel and how they feel is they're getting angrier and angrier and angrier and shenanme not have seen that. She may not have been aware of that. That's his personality. That's not something that he just

“started once he married her. That's how he was. He just internalized his feelings. He has very flat”

affect. I think he's his ability to empathize with her. It's really very low. And even his ability to empathize with his kids. It's really pretty low. And when you compound that with, he's made the decision now to move on with this new girlfriend. That's a serious issue. Again, if he keeps getting angrier and angrier and angrier, so we know that was happening. We know that because we'll get to this, but the letters he wrote some woman from prison where he talked in great detail about the

night of the murders are absolutely horrifying. His coldness, his lack of empathy, his the how he described, especially the murder of his wife and how little he felt for her. All of that is building over this two-month period for sure and you're saying it would have been longer than that. But here's how he was responding to her. It's such a juxtaposition. The Netflix documentary does a great job of laying out her texts to him and then his responses. And she is, and I understand I'll be getting

a little bit more aggravated, but she's not, forget the term, getting like bitchy. She's just like, hey, you know, what's going on? And instead of being like, I've got something that I need to discuss with you when you get back or like, I'm not in a good place right now, which would be what an honest person might say. Here are some full screen quotes showing how he was responding to her. You're right. I didn't see these face times and I'm sorry. I missed those calls. I'm very,

very, very sorry. The face time went through on my work phone and then here's another one where he's trying to appease her saying, I know and I will face time, Bella and CC as soon as I wake up from now on. I'm extremely sorry. I feel like a jackass, please be okay. So Mary Ellen, when you hear him talking like that, again, he seems like whipped. He seems like sometimes I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't, I feel like most of us wouldn't look at that and be like,

that guy's about to murder his family. No, I don't think most people wouldn't look at it like

“that, but I think what he's doing there, I think he's buying time. I think he's buying time,”

so he doesn't raise her suspicions any higher and her suspicions are being raised. She starts to doubt what he's saying to her. She's starting to doubt whether or not he's being loyal to her. She's starting to doubt whether or not he has a girlfriend and he's trying to delay that. But what we don't know is at what point in their relationship in the past and this becomes important because past behavior can predict future behavior. At what point in the past had Chris

How did he retaliate against her? What, and what had he done in the past to demonstrate his anger? We know at a certain point he started to spike her drinks with oxycodone. So had he done that in the past and was she aware of that? So that behavior seems to be probably the loss with time.

We won't know that. But again, this probably wasn't the first time that he behaved like this,

but it was the first time he acted out in such a lethal way. Is the inability to express anger a warning sign? In combination with other things, it could be a warning sign, especially if the recalliation in those circumstances

“is really excessive. That's what you have to look for. It's one thing to be shy. It's the one thing to”

be quiet. It's one thing to be more introverted. But when you're angry and somebody has making you angry, how do you act out? What do you do? Do you go into the room and take all

their clothes and throw them out the window? Do you destroy something and then leave it for them to

clean up? What do you do when you're really angry? But you're a person that internalizes thing and have a little empathy for your partner with all. He has a cluster of traits that I think we're very important. But that resistance to sitting down, having a conversation, expressing himself, showing his anger, expressing his anger in a way that is proper and acceptable. What had he

“done in the past? And again, that's what we're missing here. We don't know what how he did that in the past.”

Another thing I can't help with feel and I realize people have affairs all the time. They don't wind up killing their spouse. But a fair was so dangerous here. It really was the spark that lit the fuse on this keg of dynamite. And as you see him starting to pull away from shenan and the girls, you see fire between Chris Watts and his affair partner Nicole. You see she's texting him nude photos of herself. He seems to be becoming near obsessed with her. He's got to see her

more and more. As soon as shenan goes out of town, he's going out with Nicole. He's trying it

first to cover up the bills because they don't have any money on the bank statement. But then

eventually he stops doing that. And shenan is indeed watching the bank statement and seeing, you know, he said he went to this restaurant, but I can see the bill is double. What it should be for one guy. And so she's getting on it. But like to me, I can't help feeling like you are playing with fire when you have an affair outside of your marriage. You don't know what you are starting inside of yourself or someone else or your spouse. Yes, certainly can be. It certainly can be

dangerous. And I'm my sense of this point is that Chris is not happy with his life. And he's not really blaming himself. He's blaming shenan. He may be feeling very trapped, very backed up in the corner, may feel like he has no control. So there are other feelings that he's that are going on. It's just not as inability to express himself. So he's now engaged in this behavior where it's almost escalating to the point where he's rubbing it in her face. He's not responding to her communications when

she's back here on the East Coast, trying to communicate with him. He is taking his girlfriend out. He's spending time. He's probably extremely distant from her when he is home. He's probably very short tempered with her. So, you know, again, those are things that become kind of that slow, evolving snowball that is rolling forward. But a lot of it has to do with him thinking that the

“only way out of this relationship. The only way to move on with his life is to annihilate his family.”

But that means you have to get to the point where you develop hate for them. And hate is not anger. Hate is a very cold blooded emotion. And it takes a while to develop that. But to be able to carry out something so cold blooded and so heartless, you have to blame people for what they've done to you right around. You have to blame them. And then you're only way out of your life is to destroy them. Who's mind goes to murder? You know, there's, there's good old fashion divorce.

that logical step to file for divorce, get custody of the children, do it in a very pro-social way. And why people choose to behave like this is just astounding to think that this would be a way out. And to think like that also makes me think that you know, your sense of, you know, what is pro-social versus what anti-social has to be a little flawed as well.

You can't get away with something like this. Who's the first person you look at

“when a partner is murdered? Who's the first person you look at when young children are murdered?”

You look at the partner, there's surviving partner. So there's, there's no even good sense in commune of crime like this. So that's one of the things that you don't marry. He's so dumb. We now know thanks to, again, these letters that he wrote. He was planning this crime. He was not spurred the moment at least so he would later claim. So who, he's not a complete moron. Maybe he is. Maybe I'm overestimating his intelligence. But who that's planning to annihilate

their family? Doesn't come up with a sound plan to explain where they went. You know, who leaves like the wife's purse sitting there and the key sitting there and her shoes sitting there and her car sitting there and just wants people to believe she just walked away with their two young daughters while she was pregnant. Shoes, purseless, keyless, phoneless. It was so dumb. It was so predictable that he would get caught. Well, the other thing that I thought he did in addition to

everything that you've said to leave those things behind and knowing that his wife would never leave

the house without, without her cell phone. That seemed to be, you know, tied to her side. When he gave that TV interview where he stood there with the emotion that he did have and he had a smirk on his face. And he talked about wanting to see his children again. And I looked at that when I watched it the first time, it was pretty clear, at least to me, this man is responsible for having murdered his entire family. The moment I saw that, again, I thought of

Peterson. And when he gave his interview right after his wife went missing. But Chris talked about wanting to see his kids and his wife again. He didn't say he wanted them back. He said, I want to see them. So he was very guarded in what he said. But that was one of the stupidest things that he could have done was to attempt to do that TV interview and expect that people believe him.

“So I don't think this person was very sophisticated when it came to criminal behavior. And I think”

that accounts for it was there also some narcissism there where he's smarter than everybody else. Yeah, that could have been there too. But I think that there is just a naive day about thinking that he could get away with this. I mean, I'm going to ask you the same way we get to the polygraph. Like who that knows he's done this sits willingly for a polygraph

and an interview with police. Hello, you can always say, I'm going to have a lawyer. I don't feel

comfortable. He didn't. And it's what led to his confession. Here is a bit of that television interview to which you just referred. Hello, I left work for work early that morning. Like five, 15, five, 30. So like shoot, barely would mean she barely got barely gotten into bed pretty much. No, this might be a tough question. But it was like an argument. Yeah, emotional conversation. But I'll leave it at that. But it's, I just want them back. I just want them to come back.

And if, if they're not safe right now, that's what's that's what's tearing me apart. Because if they are safe, they're coming back. But if they're not, this, this, this has got to stop. Like somebody has to come forward, shenanne, Bella, Celeste, throughout their just, just come back. Like if somebody has their just, please bring her back. I need to see everybody. I need to see everybody again. This house is not complete without anybody here. Please bring her back.

Oh my god. And I'm like, it's all about himself first of all. Like if you were actually missing

“your spouse and your children, I think you'd say, I am so terribly worried. Please, where are you?”

You know, I'll do anything to find you. This is how you can reach me. This is how we, this is where we are. What are you, you bleed to the kidnapper? He's like, if they're not okay, this needs to end. I mean, this has been a lot for me. You know, crazy. Yeah. And I, and I think with, with a number of these family annihilators, it really is very selfish. There are approach to what happened, their description of what happened, their, their amount of commitment, their investment of emotion

Doesn't make or a strong emotional investment in the interviews. And I've done hundreds of

interviews with people. Some guilty, some not guilty. But you see generally a tremendous amount of

“emotion with him. It's just very flat. You don't see it. Again, and I, I think he's just, it's all”

about him. And again, I think that's very consistent with someone who does annihilate their entire family. It is, the meanwhile, the, the neighbors knew enough and, and Shenan's friends knew enough about him to suspect him immediately. God bless her friend, Shenan's friend, another Nicole. This one was Nicole at concern, who was all over her disappearance, like, white on rice. I mean, she was, like, she's pregnant. She has a doctor's appointment today. We were just on a business trip. I

dropped her off here at 2 a.m. She should be here. She was going to the doctor. She's not answering

her phone. That's not like her. And she's the one who called them on one, just here's a flavor of that. It's Nicole calling them on one soft floor. I learned about a friend of mine. I dropped her off at her house at 2 a.m. on the morning last night, because we were out of town together and threw out the way back to the air cooler. Issues, and she's pregnant. And I haven't been able to get a phone for this morning,

and I've gone through her house and her car is there and stuff like that, but she won't answer the door. She won't answer phone calls. She won't answer text messages. And I'm just really, really concerned, and she had a doctor's appointment this morning, and she didn't go to it. And I'm just, I don't know what to do. I've called him and talked to him, and he said that she went on a plate eight with her other two daughters, but like if she went on a plate eight,

they're both in custody. So good. As somebody who's devoted her life to law enforcement, Marilyn, we're just keeping, what's the lesson there for concerned friends, concerned family members? Is this woman to not wait two seconds? Oh, absolutely. When you suspect that there's something going on or that you're really worried because there's not that typical pattern that you expected. Somebody doesn't show up. Somebody doesn't go to an appointment. Don't worry about

embarrassing yourself or bothering the police call reported. Make sure people know about it. Check with others. Find out. Don't just let it go and say, I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure that she'll show up somehow someplace. Don't do that. Be very proactive, which is what happened here.

“And I think that made an incredible difference and how this case was ultimately resolved and how”

quickly it was resolved. And it was good to have to say for Shannon to have shared her concerns about her marriage with, you know, a couple of close friends because they then knew when she went missing, we think we know what's going on here. I recognize at a respect for your marriage. You're not running around to everybody saying, we have this argument. We had that argument, but this was getting to a point where Shannon was getting really worried. And I mean, there's a lesson there,

too, like do confide in at least a friend or two. I think that was very impressive here that a friend realized pretty much right away, something was wrong. That suggests to me that the friends did not see Chris the same way that Shannon did. And it would have been interesting if this did go to trial, what would this friend have testified to? What had she seen? What were her instincts? What had she overheard? Were there examples of domestic violence in the household? Nice to expect that there

were. They may have been a little bit subdued, but I suspect that there was domestic violence. And so these friends may have been telling Shannon, leave him. There's something wrong with this guy.

“You need to get away from him. But to make a phone call that quickly and to be that concern,”

that suggests that they knew more than what it would appear. Like just kind of living across the street, they were more aware of the dynamics of that relationship. Definitely. And we'll talk

about the actual murder in a second, but the other neighbor while we're on the subject of the

neighbors in the friends. The other neighbor was great. He had a camera out in front of his house for security purposes and he pulled up the footage. And this is all from the police body cam. We can see he's like, he had his truck in front of his house this morning at 5 a.m. And then, and Chris is Chris Watts is in there. He's in the guy's house. And then as soon as Chris Watts walks out, the neighbor's like, that's not normal. He's not a talker. What's happening? We have a little bit of that again from

Netflix. Here it is. So, in last day full, right here, but I would have caught the walk-in down.

No. He's not acting right. He said he's not acting right. He's rocking back and forth. He's not acting

“right. And that guy, as he's describing what his cameras may or may not have picked up on,”

there he's not talking about Chris Watts's truck pulling up. He can see Chris Watts, like the hands are on the head, like you can tell he's stressed out. I don't think he realized the neighbor has cameras. He probably wasn't aware of that, but you know what it also tells me is that these neighbors were suspicious of Chris before that morning. When they saw that behavior, they interpreted it correctly, but they were suspicious of him before. So, my question would be, if our interviewing

them, why were you suspicious of him? Why were you so able to zero in on that behavior and interpret

it correctly? What did you know before, and that would be helpful to understand how this relationship unraveled? Good point, because you know in a lot of these cases, you see the neighbor saying,

“"No, I could never have seen him do with this." These neighbors and friends were like, "It's the”

husband. This isn't normal." They did right away, right? Yeah. So, let's talk about the crime. It's the reason why this case became such a national story and haunts us still. She comes home from the business trip to in the morning, two plus between two and three. She had told her friends that she was on the business trip with. I'm going to talk to him about what I saw on the receipts, but the credit card and my fear that he's having an affair. She had already been

texting about how he wouldn't touch her. He knew she wanted sex and he didn't give it to her and it's not normal, and she felt him distancing from her. So, she shows up, and she said, according to that friend who had called 911, Nicole Atkinson, she had given Shannon a ride to her home,

“and she said that Shannon had planned on giving a speech, I guess. One of the friends said,”

Shannon had read me or sent me a draft of a speech. She planned to give to Chris when she arrived, saying, some did this effect. I tried to fix things and make them better. This is making me crazy. I need you to give just a little bit of what I did or didn't do. So, I'm not going crazy in my head to figure it out. I know I can't fix this by myself. We are going to have to work together. Chris would later tell investigators that she got home around 148 in the morning and that

she, Shannon, initiated sex, and that then they went to bed. He claimed that then he murdered her. He claimed that initially that he killed her and then killed the daughters, and then he would shift the story as time went on. No, I'm sorry. Let me correct that. He initially claimed that he killed her because she killed the daughters. That was his first confession. We have it on tape. The police were interrogating him and before, let me set it up like this. Before they got

him to confess, they sat down with a polygraph and the polygraph operator, Mary Ellen. She was,

I thought she was amazing. She's super casual. We're just going to ask a few questions, you know,

everybody does these polygraphs in line, you know, whatever. He doesn't actually confess here, but this sets the table for the confession. Here's a bit of that. So he sits for the polygraph. They ask him all the questions, he denies having anything to do with it, and then they come back to him. She and a male colleague, and they start really pressing him. Like he didn't tell the truth. We know the truth. And then they bring in his dad. His dad is the one

who gets the confession out of him and hears a bit of that. She's mothered and he asks, "Choke them?" I didn't hear anything. I didn't hear anything. They're gone. I don't know, I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them. I don't know about that.

I don't know, I don't know about separation, I don't know about. I didn't tell them. I don't know, like, what else? I didn't tell them.

Those are my kids.

So what do you make of all of the how the police handled the interrogation, the polygraph,

and then bringing the dad in? I thought it was impressive. And just to start off with the woman interrogator, she says something very effective. She said, "If you had anything to do with this, you shouldn't be sitting here talking to me." In other words, only sit here and talk to me if you're innocent.

Giving him an out. And she did that purposely.

“So I think the way that she did that, and also did it in a really pretty low-key, easy-going way.”

I thought that was really very effective. And during the polygraph, again, you get more out of trying to build rapport with people and not yelling and screaming at them. So I thought that they did really a good job and excellent job as a matter of fact. And I was amazed when I saw them bring in the father. This shows me that they were very flexible to try whatever they had to try to get to the truth.

You typically would not bring in a parent or a spouse into an interview. Just wouldn't do that unless you felt it was completely necessary. So they probably brief the father. They probably explained what they had in terms of evidence, explained what they have, in terms of the facts of the case. And they brought him in after they went through the briefing of the father. And that worked extremely well. And the father didn't

extraordinary job of showing his son love and care, putting his arm around him,

and getting him to explain what happened, even though it wasn't the truth the first time around,

but still it got the ball rolling. So that says a lot about the investigators and how they operated that interview. I can't help but look at that and say that seems like a loving dad, seems like a responsible man who would go in there and do that. How does a man like that have a son like that? I know he seemed very he seemed very kind and very loving, but from some of the information that I read, I don't know that he had that kind of relationship with his daughter-in-law,

“but nonetheless, you can not like your in-laws, but you still don't kill them. But I think the father”

fulfilled the fatherly role. He wanted to emphasize with his son how important it was that he told the truth. He could see the father knew just what the repercussions were going to be. And he played the role of the father extremely well. He didn't play the role of an attorney. He didn't play the role of a negotiator. He went in there because he cared about his son. It doesn't mean that his son is exact and the exact likeness of him. It just means that he did

his job really well. Parents that have kids that act in a very violent way, in a very brutal way, they have a difficult time seeing it. They have a difficult time understanding how the heck did you get to be like that. Can any of us raise a killer? Do you know if you're raising a killer? Well, number one, I think it's possible for families and parents to raise someone

that could ultimately act out in a way that ends in somebody else being murdered.

“But you have to look at what were the circumstances of the murder. And in this case,”

very cold blooded. In this case, it was planned. In this case, it involved the biological children. In this case, it involved a triple murder and the spouse, Shanan, Celeste, Bella, were treated like objects. That's very different than someone that murders in a really impulsive way or someone that murders because they've had too much to drink. So in this case, I'm sure the family is really struggling with what the heck happened here. How did this, how did this

happen? Do you think there'd be signs, Marilyn? Doing what you do? Do you think if we got that dad on camera and he was really honest about raising Chris Watts, he'd have stories of like whether it's animal torture or lack of empathy, you know, are there usually? There are red flags along the way, but I'll tell you this and I've seen it over the last, I don't know, 40 years, whatever, but it's so difficult for family members to look at a

loved one and say, there's a problem. You have a problem how you get along with people, how you interact with people, the rage that you show or that you don't show, but it's there. We know it's there. It's so difficult for family members to see that. And really, that's part of the reason

The warning behaviors are really designed for the family to see. And then once you analyze one of

“these cases, the family said, well, I didn't see anything. So I've just seen this and heard this”

over and over again. When you love someone, you just don't see what's there oftentimes, that can be dangerous. As you point it out, even if you're the wife versus the neighbor versus the friend, you know, it could be go beyond that sort of blindness, the parents and this person who's a family and I later benefits from that blindness from the people who love him most. He confessed there. He tried to blame the murder of the children on Shenan. That wasn't true.

He later told the truth that he killed all three of them, including his unborn son, which makes it for. And later, he would write in a handwritten letter from prison to a penpal, Sherylon Ketel. And he

would detail how he claimed he first attempted to kill the daughters before he killed Shenan.

Now, I don't know what to believe. I don't know whether this is true, the order in which he did the murders, but this is what he wrote. I went to Bella's room, then CC's room, Bella was the

“older, CC was the younger, and used a pillow from their bed. That's why the cause of death was”

smothering. After I left CC's room, then I climbed back in bed with Shenan in our argument ensued. He said he told Shenan about his affair with that woman Nicole and said that their marriage wouldn't last. That Shenan replied, Chris would not see the kids again, and then he strangled her to death. He then wrote, after Shenan had passed, Bella and CC woke back up, woke back up. I'm not sure how they woke back up, but they did. Bella, who was for, came in and asked what was wrong

with mom. And Chris said he then wrapped Shenan in a blanket, carried her to the truck, put the two daughters in the back seat, and drove to the oil site where he worked, where the oil tanks were. Before we get to that stage, there's so much in here. You won't see the kids again. Chris Watts wouldn't have cared about that. He didn't want to see the kids again. I'm not sure why he's even offering that detail. But why is he saying he tried to smother the girls before he killed Shenan,

“and then later he will change the story, I think. I'm not sure. Later, the story is simply,”

I smothered them at the oil site. Right. Well, if we're to assume that what he wrote in the letter to a female pen pal is true, then he had to have a motive for wanting his two baby girls.

Killed first, and that may have been, so they didn't interrupt him when he was killing Shenan.

If we were to assume then, however, on the other hand, that he said that for other reasons, and they weren't true, but he wanted to impress this pen pal, then that would be very telling about some serious issues with his personality. My sense is that may have been true. That he went in and attempted to murder the two girls first. That was the first time he attempted murder. He was not successful, and that the reason may have been because he knew it was going to

be more difficult to kill his wife. She could make noise. She could scream. She could fight him, and he did not want the baby girls to come in and interrupt him, because then it would be difficult to carry out the murder of Shenan. My sense is that's probably the sequence of events, and the reason that he would have done that. He didn't do it successfully, and so when he gets to the site where he is already buried his wife, now he's got to look into the eyes of his

daughters and kill them as they sit in the truck, which is almost worse than killing them while they're semi-esleep. Yeah, it is worse, and if you can get worse, it is worse. He, this is a viewer warning. I mean, this is genuinely disturbing, so I want to let the viewers know. This is dark, dark, dark stuff. I'm about to read. In more letters to this catal, he reverses his claim to the police earlier that the murders were spontaneous. He writes August 12th when I finish putting the

girls to bed. I walked away and said, "That's the last time I'm going to be tucking my babies in."

phrasing. I did nothing to stop it, as though he knew it was somebody else who was going to do it. Later, he said, "Shenan, isn't it weird how I look back?" And what I remember so much is her face getting all black with streaks of mascara, all the weeks of me thinking about killing her, and now I was faced with it. I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nicky. They asked me why she couldn't fight back. It's because she couldn't fight back.

Her eyes filled with blood as she looked at me and she died. I knew she was gone when she

relieved herself. And then he goes on to talk about the daughters, which we can talk about in a second.

But that this poor woman completely helpless several months pregnant, dying on her bed, at the hands of the man she loved, and was building a family with. And he can talk about all I know. Isn't it so weird? All I remember is the streaks of mascara. The coldness in humanity.

“Yeah, that's what I mean. There's just a cold blooded aspect from beginning to end about all of this.”

And what he remembers about what her face looked like, what he remembers about the blood in her eyes. That's not somebody that truly empathized with her, that loved her. That's really someone

that had great hatred and disdain for her. So the hatred, and again, when you see hatred in a case,

it takes you down a different path. Because there's only two things you can do when you hate another human being. And hatred takes time to develop. The only two things that you can do is you can destroy them or you can remove yourself completely from them. hatred gives you very few options. If that's how you feel about another human being. And what he's describing is almost, he's describing someone that's not human. But what it's his wife. It's the mother of his children.

And yet he's describing her as someone that's almost a monster. Yes, because he goes on in this letter, he dumped his wife's body in a shallow grave that he dug at the oil site. And he writes, he says, when I dug the hole, it seemed a lot deeper than it was.

“As I pulled on the sheet, she rolled out into the hole. I think she had given birth.”

She landed face down. I remember being so angry with her that I was not going to change how she landed. This is the same guy who wrote those texts a few weeks earlier. I'm so, so, so, so, so sorry, you know, the sweet compliant, docile Chris. This is that guy who loads her so much. He murdered her. He couldn't be bothered to flip her right side up and talked about his dead baby as if it was an absolute nothing, a piece of trash.

And, and basically his words really defy him. That's exactly what it was. And he hated her

meaning shenanne so much that he wouldn't lean over into the grave. He dug for her and turned her over and he commons that he thinks that she gave birth. This is he's speaking about somebody that's a nonhuman object. He's not, and that nonhuman perception of somebody is consistent with hatred. So, again, we see the same very cold blooded features as he's reliving, having putting her in the grave and and seeing, you know, the fact that she's rolled over and she's probably given birth already.

And then he covers her up and walks away. It really doesn't get any more hateful in that. And that really goes to that lack of feeling and emotion and that ability to to empathize. It's just not there. It's just not there at all. How is this person walking among stress and society and not and people aren't knowing he's this man? How does this person go to the CVS and collect his prescription from the pharmacist or interact with a male man or have any friendly relations in life? You know,

how is it not that like we have a sea of people coming forward to say he's a psychopath and we all knew that like we all said this guy's going to snap. He's a bad guy. That's not what happened. No, it's not what happened. He did not snap and I don't think that this man meets the features of psychopathy. They're not there. I didn't think that they were there at the time because that, but it doesn't mean that he can't have this cold blooded side to him where he's made the decision

“that this woman is ruining his life and the only way to regain control is to kill her and to kill”

the two babies. So he's able to reconcile that this is what he has to do. But I think walking around

People that will describe him will say, yeah, it was a nice guy didn't know him very well. He kept

him in self. He was kind of quiet and that's by design. That's by purpose. But when you're in a really intimate relationship with someone like that, it becomes really important, no matter who they are, to realize how do they handle what's going on in everyday life? Do they engage in domestic violence? Do they engage in acting out in violent ways or really passive aggressive ways? Really becomes important to try to understand that and to measure that. The murder of the daughter is almost

“unspeakable. I don't know that we can ever understand it. That's what I'm trying to do. That's my”

feudal mission to understand. He says in the letter that his daughter's walked in on him as he was wrapping shenan in a bedsheet that he drove to the oil site where he buried shenan and it was there

that he smothered CC first the little girl and then he went for Bella the four-year-old.

Forgive me. This is so dark. Again, an audience warning. He writes little quiet Bella had a will to live out of all three. Bella is the only one that put up a fight. I will hear her soft little voice for the rest of my life saying, Daddy, no. She knew what I was doing to her. She may not have understood death, but she knew I was killing her. I can't, I can't reconcile the fact that

“there are people like this on this earth sharing space with me, my family, my audience, you. I can't”

reconcile it. I can understand Charles Manson. I can understand Jeffrey Dahmer. I see them. I say lunatic. Got it. I would notice to your clear. This guy is kind of a good-looking guy. He had a decent job. He had a beautiful family. He didn't have some history that we knew of hurting people or animals. How can this monster? Monster? How can I spot the next one? I guess is what I'm asking you, Mary Ellen. What good can come from this that can prevent this? I can't live without an answer.

Let me say it this way. We cannot look at somebody and just tell that they are going to be dangerous. We just can't do it. You can see people on the street that are scary looking, but unwashed hair or front-be-close living on a homeless lifestyle does not correlate to being violent. It just doesn't, but we grow up thinking that we can look at someone and we can just tell they're going to be dangerous. If someone has a good job, if they go to church, if they like animals,

if they have children, those are all features that we believe make them safe, make them harmless. That couldn't be further from the truth. The whole idea of the potential for dangerousness comes from within their personalities. If they get trapped or feel they get trapped or feel angry and begin to develop hatred, that's all done internally. It depends on the right set of circumstances. Let's go back with Chris Watt. If Chris Watt's life was based on a different set of circumstances,

he may never have murdered anybody. He's not a serial killer. The right set of circumstances came

“together, and he decided that this was the only way that he could deal with it. And the only way”

was to, in my opinion, he was blaming Shenan for a life that, in which he was miserable. But if those circumstances didn't exist, if he had never gotten married and lived alone somewhere, don't think he would go on to commit murder. The question about the daughters is, of course, why? We understand sort of why the wife, you know, yes divorce, but spouses killed their others bow sometimes. Why? Why the daughters? The only one that's really going to know that

is Chris and wouldn't you love to have the opportunity to ask him? And with the hope that he would be candid and truthful with you. So the only thing that we say in cases like this is we have to look at the behavior. These little girls were not a threat to him, these little girls were not going to be dangerous, but he killed them anyway. And he killed them by looking in their eyes and smothering

drops them in. He basically wants to destroy them as though they never existed. So think about that.

He wanted them as though they never existed. That tells me, if I were talking to him, Chris, you didn't never you never wanted to be a dad. You never wanted those responsibilities. You didn't want a life like the one that you had. And is it true that you felt once you could get rid of every memory of those girls and who they were, you could get back some control of a life that you wanted. That may be the approach I would take with them because he was trying to destroy them physically,

“take the life away and that's the way to do it. That's what he did. Yeah, that's interesting.”

So the discarding the way in which he discarded the daughter's bodies, which is one of the most

gruesome parts of the story, dropping them in these neighboring oil tanks talking about how he could he could hear the splash when the body's hit. And that that told him how how much oil was in that each tank, not even together, not even in the same tank, shove them through this little hole. I mean, she's shoving his dead daughters. It's just it just shows you. Yeah, the the level of calluses. This is not, this is not I snapped. You know, I found out my wife was having an affair and I shot

her. Not excusing that, obviously. This is something, this is just a whole mother level of evil and

anger. And you're saying, same as we interviewed another great great expert who is also saying,

“he, he doesn't look like a psychopath. And that's, that's what's most terrifying. So it's hatred.”

It's loading of the life that you're in. And we may not have a bunch of red flags, other than maybe he doesn't express his anger. Maybe he's got controlling behaviors, possibly domestic violence that you may or may not know about. God, that's not much to go on. No, not as observers from the inside, outside looking in. But if Shannon were here with us today, certainly want to ask her questions about that some of that behavior that kind of evolved

over the years that they were married, it seems pretty clear to me that he saw Shannon as the enemy. She was the cause for his being miserable. She was the cause for his feeling trapped. He,

“she was the cause for how he viewed life is true. Of course not. He's an adult male.”

But the way he viewed it is, is I think that that component, you know, had to be there. And those children were anchors around his neck. In order to move forward, he had to start over again. I remember you, I had cases where the spouse would take the other spouse up to, like to a mountainside and then they would push the spouse over and those were really hard cases to to really investigate. But as you begin to unravel that and it was different from this, but still

some of the components are the same. As you begin to unravel it, you see the same kind of emotional changing. They started to live their life over again. They started a new life. They no longer were married to this person. They no longer were in a relationship. So mentally, they checked out months before they murdered their spouse. And so the murder was almost anti-climactic because they needed to get rid of the person that made their life miserable. They needed to be gone. Completely

gone, not divorced, not live in another city. They needed to be gone. He raced, right? So he winds up pleading guilty. I mean, of course, they had him. And that spared his life. He was given five life sentences. And even the judge, Marcelo Copcal, was absolutely horrified by the circumstances of this case. I mean, I know a lot of judges and in front of a lot of judges of the course of my life. It's very rare that they offer this strong, a personal opinion on a case. Here's just a little bit

of the judge during the sentence and hearing November 19th, 2018. I've been a judicial officer now for starting my 17th year. And I could objectively say that this is perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime that I have handled out of the thousands of cases that I have seen. And nothing less than a maximum sentence would be appropriate and anything less than the maximum

You know, usually we have the death penalty in part because we want to deter, you know, we want to punish. We also want to deter other criminals. Does does this sentence fit the crime? And do you think it effectively deterers the next Chris Watts?

“In my opinion, it fits the crime. Do I think it will deter someone else from doing this again?”

No, I don't. I don't see that happening. But in a case like this, I always think about that when

a person gets a sentence like this sitting in prison, your young man still you are in prison for the rest of your life. You're never going anywhere. I mean, that is a profoundly negative, profoundly impactful sentence. And and the certainly the judge thought it was consistent with the incredible damage that he did. But will it, will somebody else stop and think about Chris Watts? If the right set of circumstances exists for them tomorrow, will they think about Chris Watts

and say to themselves, I better not do this? And I would say to you, I don't think so. That's not how the criminal mine works. The line and his letter to the pen pal that I just read saying, I knew if I took my hands off of her, she would still keep me from Nikki. She would keep me from Nikki. He needed to be with the affair partner. He felt it on some sort of primal level reminded me of the last line of the movie, presumed innocent. Spoiler alert. If you haven't

seen presumed innocent or read the Scott Toro book, tune out now, because it's a great, great,

powerful last line there. The circumstances of whom we're murdered, whom we're different. But he

said the following, this is a husband writing about his affair, with all deliberation and intent, I reached for Carolyn. I cannot pretend it was an accident. I reached for Carolyn and set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another, set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another. I'm not saying you have an affair and you're going to become a murderer, but as I said earlier, you are playing with radioactive materials,

so many cases, for one of the spousal partners has an affair, ultimately lead to some sort of marital violence, including murder. How many times have you seen it, Marilyn? A lot, a lot. And then you include in that just the emotion that exists in a relationship, emotion that if you compound it with the person has weapons in the house, the person has children in the house. Now you've got an incredibly explosive situation, incredibly explosive, and depending on the personalities of the people involved,

“it can become exponentially explosive. What happens to the people who were friends with Chanel?”

I mean, I feel like we know what happens to her family members. They try to move on with their lives. I don't know how you do it. As the mother, as the brother, the dad was at the sentencing hearing with heartfelt remarks as well. You're so angry, called Chris Watson monster. But what about the other victims? You know, like the best friend Nicole,

called 911, how did what happens to them? I would say this, they'll never have closure.

The C word does not work in a crime of violence. You just never have closure. I would say there's going to be a certain level, a certain level of guilt that exists for the rest of their life. They would go through the stages of death and dying, and that's pointed out beautifully by

“Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross years ago who wrote about the stages of death and dying. And I think”

they wake up some mornings feeling very guilty. Why didn't I do war? Then the next morning it's sadness. And then the next morning it's anger. Eventually, if you can get to the level of acceptance, that's where you want to be. But I find most people don't get there. Most people struggle, which should they have done more, could they have done more? Could they have stopped it? In family members, go through similar feelings of just being on that roller coaster,

where every day it's different. And Dr. Ross says, we need to get to the level of acceptance. But I can tell you, in a case like this, there's no one that will get to the level of acceptance of what happened. You are someone who has worked on so many of these big murder cases from the Zodiac

Disappearance. I mean, you've dealt with evil professionally your entire life. So how do you

walk the streets? How do you laugh? It's silly jokes. How are we as humans to compartmentalize this into the right box so that we can go have dinner with our families tonight and laugh and be joyful and understand how to categorize evil? The way that I was really trained to do it, I'm actually a mental health counselor by my training. But going through the FBI, we learned to become, we had to become desensitized because of what we saw. You just couldn't do your job. And I hear

“people talk about doctors and nurses that work in emergency rooms. And I think to myself,”

oh my god, how do they do that? They see people come in. They have to sew limbs back on and I don't know the how they do that. I found the perfect job because it lets me get into the criminal mind and and explore and understand behavior. I find it not upsetting but very challenging. And I think that perspective has really helped tremendously. If this bothered me, if this was something that hung on to me seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I could tell you that I could not do it. I just couldn't.

And I also think the way that I was raised has been really helpful. We were raised in a family that having a really solid, good sense of humor and pulling away from things, knowing when when the time was right to pull away from things has been really helpful. But I'm just really challenged. I'll think tonight about Chris Watts. I'll think about where I would love to talk to him

someday. I'll think about more reasons that this happened because I'm always in searching for

why people behave the way that they do, especially in a case like this. You're now walking around thinking potential killer. There's another like, you know, I think I'm going to get eaten by a shark every time I go on the ocean because I'm in news. And so this is just, we, you know, we covered these stories. You're not thinking that way when you're just walking down the street. If no, I'm not, and I'll tell you why. Because when you look at somebody, I just know you could

be wearing a beautiful suit and leather shoes and a leather briefcase and the thoughts that are going in your head on and somebody's head could be as frightening as anything in the world. We cannot tell just by looking at someone that they're not going to hurt us. So I watch behavior. I can sit for hours

“and just watch human behavior in a restaurant or in a train station. That's what gets me interested.”

It's not how they look. It's how they behave. Do you think if I gave you 10 people and I let you watch them each for two hours in a train station and a restaurant, whatever they're setting or do you think you'd be able to say these at the top two candidates for crime for murder? No. I don't think I could do that. I would probably be able to tell you more about their personality, but I think I would need more opportunities to see them in different contexts and

see how they interact with people. They didn't know strangers and then people that they were in their close circle. Profoters get the kind of the the wrap that we can look at people know what's going on in their head, but we have to study their patterns of behavior over a lifetime. So two hours wouldn't be enough time. Do you have any kids, you're married? What's your, I don't know if you reveal that publicly, but I'm just wondering, what do you tell like your kids or your nieces or your

friends kid, like to protect themselves? It's really funny because I have nieces and nephews and they don't really want to know a lot about what I know. And so they don't ask me questions and I don't force my information on them. My students ask me a lot of questions. So I'm very sensitive about letting people know as much as they want to know. Every once in a while, it gets the

“better of me. And if somebody I know is about to engage in behavior that I think is really risky,”

I'll tell them, but I understand too that they probably won't listen and they'll go forward and have to see for themselves what will happen. I'm like, I only extroverts in my life from now on. If you're not a talker, if you can't express anger, you're out here. You got to laugh, right?

Because it's just this stuff is so dark, but I'm always looking for the lessons, you know,

just whatever lessons we can find to make our society a little safer, our kids a little safer, and just to just to wrestle with the basic question of good versus evil and when evil is in front of you, how do you spot it? And you don't just see it the first time. And extroverts tend to be

you really do have to look at people's behavior and see how they treat other people. See how

“they happen to react when they're angry, when they're stressed out. What do they do? You really”

have to understand the behavior. And that's just not one sit-down session. That's just not one time where you go out to dinner. If you're going to let somebody into your home, if you're going to let somebody into your comfort zone, you really have to do an analysis of their behavior over time and place in distance and with different people. And you know what else? I will say this rounding back to the affair. If you think your partner's having an affair, I'm sorry, but especially

if you're the wife and this is the, and it's a man cheating on you. Be careful. Be careful about the confrontation. Be careful in general. The odds are, he's not feeling all warm and fuzzy toward you. There could be hatred as Mary Ellen points out, there could be hatred for you growing. It might not just be an innocent Dalians. Like you're in a danger zone there.

“Well, and I think the research is certainly going to back you up on that because”

the time for a spouse to be really at highest risk is oftentimes when they say to a cheating spouse, I'm leaving you. You're not going to see the kids again. That can really ignite and are ready in send the area situation. So,

understand domestic violence, that is really critical. Be aware that you could unknowingly

incite a worse situation. So, you're absolutely correct. Take precautions. You can deliver news like that in the presence of a loved one. Someone who could protect you, can have your ex-applan and should have your ex-applan all laid out. There are these small, but meaningful things that we can do to just, just in case, just in case. Mary Ellen O'Toole, it's always fascinating talking to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being one of the good guys and helping put guys like this

behind bars and helping us figure out what makes them tick. So, we can hopefully prevent the next one. So, good to talk to you again. Thank you for having me very much. All the best to you. Thanks for joining us today. Our hot crime summer week continues tomorrow with an in-depth look into the Jodi areas case with my pal Mark Eiglarge. Talk to you then. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. Today we are looking back at one of the

most chilling shooting sprees in our nation's history. It was just over one year after 9/11 and for three weeks in October of 2002, the DC area was under siege. No one. No one. It seemed was safe. A tax targeted people from every walk of life doing the most common of tasks, pumping

gas, shopping, mowing the lawn, just walking, walking down the street. At first law enforcement

thought the shooter was likely a white, older man, perhaps with military experience. But as they pieced together the clues, the reality was much different. Today we are going to take a fascinating look into the Beltway sniper case and we are thrilled to be joined by someone who was working for the FBI at that time. Jim Clementi is truly a living legend whose own personal story is also fascinating. He's a former FBI pro-filer who went on to bring his expertise to the small screen

and now has a number of exciting projects that we'll get into in a bit. Jim Clementi, welcome to the show. Oh, Megan. Thank you for having me. It's very great to be here and I really

appreciate all the work that you do getting out of all this amazing true crime. Oh, Jim. Thank you

for saying that from you. That's a great compliment because I know you've put it your life to catch and bad guys and talking about it and helping people understand the process and how it's done. I've learned from you and our listeners and viewers are about to as well. If they haven't

“caught your work yet, this case, I remember this so well, I was just about to move to the DC area.”

And so was watching it with great interest and thankfully had not yet gotten there but the thing that was just so terrifying about it was there was no way of preventing other than staying in your house all day and not doing any of the normal things you would do. There was absolutely no way of preventing it from happening to you because like I say, it could literally have been you were just walking down the street that there was no method it seemed to how they chose

their victims. Yeah, there was a very random process going on and with snipers, that's generally the case. snipers will actually have absolutely no relationship to their victims. They actually choose a method of operation that distanced themselves from their victims. They want to feel like

just happened into their purview. But in that case, when that was going on, there were so many people

who were putting up double blankets over all their windows in their houses, who were when they went to had to go to the grocery store, were pulling up right next to the front or actually crawl walking into the grocery stores or while they're getting gas. It was a terrifying time in that whole Washington DC area. It's not like today, you know, when post-COVID ordering your groceries is not uncommon. People know how to do that. They know how to do most things without leaving their house. The world has

now been set up to allow that back then. You had to leave the house. You had to go outside. You know, and it was like places like Michaels, you know, who hasn't been to Michaels, you know, to go get

whatever a baking tray for the holiday cookies. Your home deep home. Home Depot, exactly. Or

“your gas. You know, it's like I read too and I didn't remember this from the time, but they”

some gas station owners were setting up big tarps around the area where you'd pump your gas so that you could feel confident no one would shoot you that it was a month of hell. It was. It was the most direct, horrific, terrorist event since 9/11. And it was seen as since it was within a year of when 9/11 happened. It was seen as potentially an extension of 9/11. People thought that this could be some outside terrorist who was running a muck in the Washington DC area, particularly

because DC is such a political place. And all these shootings happened right around DC and and even right into DC. And those things got people worried, especially people in the FBI. Yeah, I remember it was like the three things not to not to compare because 9/11 is in a class of its own, but we had suffered that terrorist attack. Then the anthrax scare came and then within 12 months or so, we're looking at the DC sniper attacks, these app seemingly at random.

And you know, people may remember 10 people died, but 20 people were shot. I mean, the team as part of that one month, but it actually wound up going well beyond that, which we'll get to. Well beyond. So it truly was terror, events of terror back then. And people wonder why, you know, now the benefit of hindsight, we submitted to the security state, you know, the expansion of all these programs and spying and so on. We were scared. Yeah, well, we were vulnerable. And we had to

do something as a country to sort of counteract that. I think 9/11 taught us not only that we were vulnerable, but that we were extremely lucky because that attack could have killed upwards of hundreds of thousands of people. And to lose 3,000 lives on that day was horrific. And

“I'll never, I'll never forget it. But the fact is there were 150,000 people working in the world”

traits that are alone. And if one of those towers had fallen sideways instead of just collapsing on itself, we don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people could have been killed. Hmm, I just gave me the chills. You're so right. But I do remember that feeling of being terrorized. And in a way, the DC sniper brought it out in people even more than 9/11. Like 9/11 seemed so extraordinary. I don't know that we were worrying that that would happen

regularly, you know, as such an extraordinary attack by this man. We understood far away and cave in Afghanistan or took an extraordinary amounts of planning and so on. But the DC sniper was getting person after person, after person day, after day, after day. And very, very few clues to go on. It's not like we think we got him or there's someone in custody. It took almost the whole month before it was like, okay, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning.

The first, and we can then go back, let's just do the ones that we experience as a nation together.

Those 13 shootings, 10 of which resulted in fatalities first. And then we can go back and take a look at what was happening prior to that spree, which helps put everything into perspective. Okay, I'm trying to get my dates in front of me. The first one, October 2nd, 2002, 55 year old James D. Martin, a program analyst for the National Oceanic and atmospheric administration is shot in the

“parking lot of shoppers food warehouse in Wheaton, Maryland. Now, at that point, what did we know?”

Do we know this is like a killing for joy? You know what I mean? Did we do we think he had enemies? What was known? At this point, it was there was obviously a big question mark. Was he

And because of that, we weren't sure whether this was a politically motivated attack or whether

“it is a personal attack. Right? In the beginning, we don't know. We have to do a deep dive on”

victimology. We have to understand who this person is. And right at the beginning, his job stood out as something that could be related to some kind of terroristic government attack. As it turns out, in a very short period of time, all hell would break loose. And it was soon become clear.

We're talking about a small town, you know, in a county that that literally never sees this kind

of of violent crime when when basically in one day, their their murder rate is multiplied by 50%. Yeah. Their entire year, they get in in one day. So in the beginning, you're thinking like you say, is it something to do with his job? What is it? Let's look into all of that. But that lasted about 24 hours as far as I can see. I mean, it was less than a day before the next crime took place. That was of a 39 year old man landscape or named James L. Buchanan. Police were

called to the crime scene. They found him. He'd been fatally shot while mowing a lawn at a commercial

establishment near a rockville, Maryland. So now, I mean, at least one of the other clues here is

this isn't about class, right? Now you've got somebody who's probably more professionally educated. Now you've got a different guy who's most lawns for a living. Both men, one's almost 41's 55,

“and not, I don't know, but rockville, Maryland versus Wheaton, Maryland, not too far away, right?”

They're not too far at their neighboring towns. But the thing about it is that we didn't know right away that these were related. We had to, I mean, ballistics is what actually created that connection, but it took a little while to get the bullets from both of these victims and to match them to the same being fired from the same weapon. The fact is that when Buchanan's body was found, it looked like it was an accident. He was mowing lawn. It looked like

maybe a rock kicked up or some glass kicked up and struck him, but then it was determined that he was actually shot. And so now we have two shootings within a fairly short geographic distance in both in towns where there wasn't a lot of shootings. So there's, there's some connection being drawn at this point. The FBI is not involved at this point yet. It's a local police matter. The Montgomery County Police Department, or Montgomery County Sheriff's Department,

“was brought in immediately. And at that point, they were, they had, I think, they had just a”

handful of detectives working for them. And of course, these detectives would have to go from one scene to the next. And of course, normally they would get one shooting every several months. And now they have two shootings within 24 hours. 27 hours, maybe. Do you remember whether there were eye witnesses this early? You know, I imagine they'd be asking, did anybody see anything? Did anybody see anything? Did anybody have something to report on how it went down?

There were a lot of, uh, there were a lot of people interviewed. And the, the problem here in this case at this time is that whoever the shooter is is a ghost. Nobody sees him. Nobody heard exactly

where the shot came from in the case of the second shooting. They didn't even know a shot went off.

So there was some confusion at that point. Of course, there are people who who were interviewed and this is something that we have to deal with all the time. When people are interviewed about something as, as horrible as a murder, sometimes they will sort of fill in blanks that they don't really have in their memory. They will do this either intentionally or unintentionally. And this can cause an investigation to go off on tangents and actually really impede a thorough and

quick investigation. And we will start to see that very shortly as these shootings keep continuing. I'm recalling this story of a law school professor who got to class late said, "So sorry. I had a road rage incident, lunatic on the street. I'm fine. Let's move on." About 10 minutes later, somebody shows up frothing at the mouth at the classroom door,

Mrs. Beck, when I was in law school, so, you know, early 90s before we were, you know,

it's crazy about, you know, Matt, this is a mass shooting. There's a mass shooting. There's a mass shooting. Pulls out of gun. Everybody says, "Ah, some people get down. Some people cover people's cream before everybody had a cell phone." And the professor keeps yelling that guy runs out, the, you know, the intruder runs out. The professor goes to run after him. Comes back into the classroom, minutes later, hands out a form to everybody in the classroom

“and says, "Right down everything you remember about the intruder." It was all a farce.”

And today you would get sued by every single student in that class. Today you would, but it's a great teaching experiment because it's a social experiment, really. But what it is trying to demonstrate the fallacy that I witness testimony is actually accurate. We do exactly the same thing in the FBI Academy and the FBI National Academy. We actually staged the actual bank robberies, for example, for our students to witness and they are there on site. And you'll have

50 students, either new agent trainees or advanced police trainees, who are witnessing exactly the same event. And then we do sort of a chart, a flow chart of all the different answers. How many shots were fired? What color was the vehicle? How many people in the vehicle? How long

“were they in the bank? How long did they shoot when they came out? How many shots were fired then?”

All of these details. And you will see that they're all over the place. Right then. But then we teach people these people who professionally have to be able to recount details very well, how to focus and how to weed out all the other aspects that can distract you. Because when you're involved in a life situation and then a violent crime happens in front of you, you didn't expect it to happen. You were expecting to take notes or to go to the store or to

pick up your daughter from school and something else intervened. But all those other things are still distracting you. Right. So that's the next level for anybody training to be

basically in your job, which is to learn to use all that adrenaline for good to pay,

hyper-attention. Yes. I remember my colleague, we went up practicing a lot together and she used to be a nurse before she went to law school. And so this has happened to her and her law school. And it was great because somebody else was there who had witnessed her behavior and they were telling me that she, her name was Sandy, unlike virtually everybody in the class, having been a nurse, was used to trauma situations. And so while like some of the big male burly guys in the class were

underneath their desks, she was like, you over there, there was a guy in a wheelchair near the front door. She's like, get him away from that front door. You move there. You move this. She totally took a command. It's just, you know, dominion. It's like she had special forces training. If she just, she'd been through trauma. And of course, the point of the story is, their eyewitness identifications were horrible, horrible. You know, it's like man wearing a big yellow, Morton salt jacket,

man wearing lumberjack, you know, shirt, a woman. Some people said it was a woman. It's so unreliable. So yes, to your point, the eyewitness IDs, you can't put that much stock in them, unless you get the miracle of holy cow. They're all identical. They really did get a look at this person. Well, and again, it's going to be a filtering out process. And that's what we do when we do all these mass interviews when we're, when we're doing sort of neighborhood campuses and so forth.

We want to ask exactly the same questions. And then we can measure the answers against each other. If you don't have a form for that, and every officer is out asking different questions,

you can never really find out which people are telling the truth and which people aren't. And again,

it might be unintentional. In other words, some people believe that they are actually recounting what happened. But what happens is memory is not a digital video of this event. Memory is stored in several different areas. Each one of your senses has the ability to store information from a

“memory in a different part of your brain. In order to remember it, you have to pull those pieces together.”

If there's a piece missing, if you don't remember what it sounded like or what somebody looked like or how tall somebody was, your brain will fill in what you expect. And if you're focusing

pointing at them. And it focuses your attention on that and away from the features of the person

“that are right in front of you. But we've developed ways of actually maximizing the ability of”

somebody to recall things. We've developed cognitive interviewing. And basically, it's a way to

get people to relax and to put themselves back into the situation in a non-threatening way. And then we engage all of their senses, not just their sight and sound. Most people will recount events through sight and sound. But they won't tell you what the temperature was like on that day. What smells came into their nose while they're back. But if you bring those things back, it's like linking up chain, a chain in your brain to all the different parts of your memory and pulling

you can pull them out more easily. So we tried to do that without any suggestion. But we do certain techniques to get people to think about it. And one of the ways is to get them to tell us what happened

the first thing in the morning and go detail by detail what they did that morning. So by the time

they get to the event, their brain is already used to recounting a lot of detail. And again, getting all that sensory information involved just ramps up the ability of somebody to remember something. For example, if I said, "Tell me about Thanksgiving at your home when you're a kid." The first thing you'll remember is the family being together, the smells of the turkey cooking, everybody being together, the mood, the ambience, the how people were situated in around the table,

all those kinds of things will help you have a much more rich experience when you try to recall that.

“And that's what we try to do about crimes too. That's good stuff. I mean, who hasn't had the experience”

of you, they're out of your deodorant when you're at the store so you get something that's a one-off. And then when you put it on, you're like, "Huh, summer 1986." You know, it's like you don't necessarily know the date, but you know you've had it before and then just the smell takes you back to that place. Yeah, your smell, your sense of smell is the most directly wired to your brain. There's only one synapse between the nerves that end coming from your nose and getting to your brain.

So because of that, it's one of the most incredible ways to recall something just by smell.

No, this is a fascinating side journey. We could do a whole show just on this. All right, so back to the DC. Yeah, back to the DC sniper. So you mentioned ballistics. So how long does it take to get the bull? I mean, in a situation like that, we're now we've had a shooting on October 2nd and the very next day. James, I'll be kind of the 39-year-old landscape

“or it gets shot. Could you possibly have much information on the ballistics that quickly?”

Not yet. First of all, they're two different towns and then the shootings happen. All the first six shootings happen within 27 hours. So it wasn't literally till towards the end of that 27 hours that we started to get information that these were all. They all seemed to be a ballistic match and then that was confirmed shortly thereafter. But when you start seeing then shooting after shooting, you can start because it's such an anomaly in this area to have

a sniper shooting. In other words, there were shootings in this county. But these shootings were typically with a handgun by someone who was right in front of the person and there is some kind of ongoing dispute or a robbery going back. An armed robbery going back. This kind of shooting where there's a sniper who is completely distanced and invisible to everybody. That is something that's a very unique thing. And just that behavior in and of itself started to link these crimes by M.O.

So we talked about the first two. That October 3rd was the big day. There was just the one on October 2nd though, right before that first killing, there had been a shot fired through a window at Michael's craft store in Aspen, Hill, Maryland, but no one was hit. Okay, so now we have two victims later that same day, October 3rd, Prem Kumar, Walaqar, 52, a part-time cab driver, killed while pumping gas in the Aspen Hill area of Montgomery County, Maryland. Again, that's where the

first, that's where that Michael's was. That's number three. Then October 4, October 3rd again, Sarah Ramos, 34. Now it's a woman. Silver's been Maryland killed at a post office, a witness reporting a white van or a truck speed away from the post office parking that immediately

October 3rd still, Lorian Lewis Rivera, 25 again, now the hour on the young women,

“the Silver's been Maryland shot dead at a shell gas station in Kensington, and then number six,”

October 3rd, 2002. This is the only one in Washington, D.C. Pascal, Charlotte, seven. Yeah, 72 years old, shot in the chest as you just walk down Georgia Avenue, taking to a hospital where

dies less than an hour later. That last one, number six, the first shooting to occur at night

the others. I had forgotten about this. We're all in broad daylight. That's crazy. It is crazy. And what it does is it tells us immediately as profilers that the person who did this had a high level of criminal sophistication. And what does that mean? Well, it means he knows how to plan and execute his crimes. Another thing that we saw, now you have six shots, six kills, within 27 hours of very tight time frame. Generally, this kind of shooting would be labelled as

spree. In other words, an offender who is going off and just killing as many people as he or she

can in a row. But generally, when we see that, when we have a shooting spree, we see some level of

decopensation in the shooter, in his skills and his planning, things just don't go according to plan and things start falling apart. He might have to carjack somebody's car to get away. He might have to shoot out with the police or somebody else who pulls a gun on him, none of that happened here. So we felt that this offender while he was certainly in had to be in his late 30s or early 40s, at least that he had some kind of military or police training and experience. It couldn't be

somebody who just learned how to shoot a gun at paper targets. Because when you're shooting at human beings, when you actually take a life, that actually takes a certain kind of individual. And somebody who's doing that and is not rattled by it, that's somebody who's done it before. And like you said about your nurse in the example in law school, she had gone through trauma, which is why she could remain calm. And I mentioned about special forces training.

They put you through every possible horrible scenario and anything that could go wrong and things blowing up all around you so that when you're in special forces and you're in a firefight, you actually calm down. You actually can see things that other people can't even see because they're focused on all the bangs and the bullets and the explosions. While you are focused on

“what you need to do to survive this and stop the threat. So we have just in that first day,”

a tremendous amount of information. One, a sniper. He chose his weapon. He chose this weapon because he wanted to feel like God. He wanted to feel omnipotent. He wanted to feel like he could take a life from afar and above and nobody can stop him and he chooses when their lives ended. And that came out because these random victims who couldn't have been planned. In other words, some of them had just as a fluke set down on a bench or just decided to go to the post office.

That kind of thing, you can't actually know that this person is going to be at that place at that time. And so when we put all that together, the random victimology, the sniper, the fact that he had not decompensated at all, we really thought we were looking for somebody who had to be at least in his late 30s, maybe early 40s and an experienced the line of fire before.

“Why the late 30s and 40s? I understand that you know, possible ex-military, but why late 30s and 40s?”

Well, because the the calm pool collected manner in which he planned and executed perfectly, these crimes, we thought if they were in there 20s or even 30s that that the person wouldn't have had the level of experience necessary to actually kill that many people and never make a mistake

and never be seen. It's weird, it's like they wouldn't have had the maturity, it's basically

insane. Exactly, because what happens is when profiling is nothing more than reverse engineering a crime. And so we look at the behavior exhibited at a crime scene and work backwards to the type of person who committed that crime. Of course, victimology is the first thing we look at.

late at night, street workers, sex workers, drug addicts, runaways, those are easy pickings.

Nobody is looking for them, nobody's protecting them. They're out on their own and they're putting themselves in a very risky situation. I'm not judging them, just telling them how risky it is. But if he's shooting people in the privacy and security of their own homes, as I tell you, he has to have a higher sophistication level. He has to get to people where they are most safe. And he's doing almost that. He's shooting people in broad daylight in the normal

course of their life with literally hundreds of not thousands of potential eyewitnesses. How is he doing that? How is he doing that? And nobody's seen him. And you mentioned the white fan. Yeah, yeah, we hold on on that one for one second. I know that we get, we have more in the

“God to complex later. But what was it at that point that suggested to you that this person may have one?”

The reason why we theorize that he had a God complex is because of his choice of weapon and crime, his ammo screams out God complex. We have studied all the other sniper cases in the history of the

U.S. And we have seen their psychology. And the way I always like to explain it, I break it down this

way that genetics loads the gun, personality and psychology aim it, and your experiences pull the trigger. And that means it's a complicated mix of bio psycho and social that actually makes someone into a killer. In other words, they have to have the genetic pre disposition or at least potentiality to be a killer. They have their own personality and psychology, which is the filter through which they then experience life's experiences. So that becomes the critical part.

Because you develop your own personality and psychology, you start with a certain basis. But you make literally in your life tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of private little decisions in the privacy of your own mind. And those decisions about when you come into conflict with someone, are you going to sort of try to push away from the negative or are you going to embrace the dark side? Are you going to actually just give into it? And in fact, do everything you can

to do bad things for the rest of your life. What happens is these little choices that we make are very young, then become bigger choices. And there are times in your life where you can get off that road and correct. But if you don't, it has this snowball effect that by the time you're in your 20s and if you're impulsive, you may act out very badly. If you're in your 30s, you will think about it more. If you're in your 40s, you will plan it very carefully and execute it very well.

A lot of people can plan things, but they typically fall apart unless you've had a tremendous

“amount of experience doing that thing. So that's why we felt, in this case, that he was older”

and the fact that he chose, and of all the weapons he could have chosen, somebody has sophisticated

his this. He chooses a sniper rifle at a distance because he wants to feel powerful. This

empowers him by taking the lives of others. And this is something that we've learned from interviewing long, detailed interviews with other snipers, people who have been successful and people who have been stopped before they killed anyone. What is it about that kind of a weapon and killing somebody from a distance with a sniper rifle that is meaningful to them? The challenge of it? Well, there is a certain challenge of it, but they see it as a way to be God like, you know,

everybody thinks of God up in heaven and God decides when somebody lives or dies, right?

“So that's what they're doing. They're sort of assuming the role of God. They're superimposing that”

on people. They want to cause the fear and terror that they successfully did in the entire Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, beltway, area. That was his goal. It was very clear. He wasn't he didn't come out with a statement saying, I want this much money. I will stop if you do that.

all the parents will worry about sending their kids to school, all the people that had to go to work, all the people that had to work in outdoor jobs, all the people that had to get gas in their cars, everybody was terrified at that time. When you were talking about how calm how collected one would have to be to execute, you know, this murder spree the way he did, how would somebody being a sociopath factor in, right? Could a sociopath who is 22 have that same calmness that

just a crazed killer might have at age 42? Right. Well, first of all, sociopath is a

“diagnosis. It's a psychological diagnosis. It's in the DSM and you have to actually do test to”

diagnose a person like that. Instead, in law enforcement, we do indirect personality assessments. And we talk about psychopathy instead. Psychopathy, the disorder that leads that means somebody is a psychopath is based on what Dr. Robert Hare put together. He put together the PCR, the psychopathy, excuse me, the psychopathy checklist revised, which has 20 different aspects that make it up. And what you do is you rate someone a zero if they don't have this trait,

a one if they kind of had this trait and a two if they definitely have this trait. And it's things like narcissism and getting in trouble when their kids and things like that. Multiple marriages, a lot of problems in their life. But if you score more than 30, your classified as a psychopath. If you're score more than 20, a lot of people think you're probably there or almost there. But one of the things that one of the most prevalent traits

in psychopaths is a lack of human empathy. Now, what does that mean? What does empathy? It's our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes and feel bad about it. Then when they go through bad things. And it's one of the things that helps prevent us from hurting people and being violent. This is a sort of a survival mechanism that our brain puts in in front of. It's sort of our

frontal lobe. It's our policeman. It basically says stop before you go too far. And many psychopaths

have none of that at all. They are completely devoid of empathy and many of them are completely devoid of human emotion. Now, the smart ones can see it in other people and they can mimic it.

“Learn to fake it. Right. Fake it very well. And that's what they use to manipulate people.”

Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy is a great example. Also, I don't, I don't really love giving names of people that are bad. I, I, I work for the victims, not for the bad guys, but bander slew. The guy who killed Natalie Holloway. And also the daughter of South American racecar driver. And on the five year anniversary of killing Natalie Holloway. Oh, that's right. I

forgot. He killed a second person. Totally got that. She has found out because she read something

on the internet about him on the anniversary. And he ends up killing her. But what he does is he walks out of the hotel room with two empty coffee cups. Goes and gets coffee and comes back to, quote, discover her dead. Immediately after killing her, he recovers, comes up with a plan. If I go out and look and carry two cups, I can say, I thought she was still alive. She was alive when I left. And when I came back, I found her dead. He's immediately trying to build an alibi. Well,

guess what? He didn't realize that there was a camera literally right outside of so tell room door. And nobody went in or out after he left. And so they were very easily able to

“break through that alibi. But the important thing is that psychopaths have the ability to”

recover quickly. They actually live for thrills. So they're exciting people to be around, for example. But in this case, we saw the fact that he was able to do this in a cold, calculated manner as not only confirming that he was probably going to be high on the psychopathy checklist,

We need that checklist posted in the show notes so that young women dating can just quietly drop these questions. Can't do it all at once, ladies. It's too on the notes. But you know, just like over the first date, you could maybe squeeze into, you know, second date have like a friend show up and ask a few, but there must be a way of peppering me.

It's amazing. It's served well. I would be, I would be a little cautious about it just because,

know, people who haven't done this thousands of times can sort of misinterpret behavior. There's a lot of things that people, a lot of little traits or characteristics of psychological disorders, minor characteristics of them that we all have. But people can see those minor characteristics and think it means everything in the diagnostic category and they could be wrong that way. Although we, we just, we actually did a show for audible. And it's like being a serial killer.

I wanted to ask you about that. And believe me, when, when, you know, some of it's kind of light hearted and it's hosted by a comedian. So we try to be get to the lighter side of it, but there was one case in particular where they called me in to interview this woman because I believe she was dating a psychopath. I believe that he was a very dangerous person. And in fact, he did and

“upkilling someone. So my God, you, you should be incredibly careful when you meet somebody new,”

because especially somebody who is charming, charismatic and energetic and has all these amazing

stories, you should kind of dig down and meet their friends and their families. And if they say, "Well, I don't really talk to my family." Big red fat flag. If they say, "Well, I don't have a lot of flat friends." Big red flag. There are, you know, if you look at, let's say the tender swindler, that guy. I mean, when he did his thing, he made women feel incredibly special. He flew them on a private jet. He did all these amazing things. All these gifts. He said his life was totally

consumed by them. Well, it's all a very well planned out manipulation. And you have to be able to, as much as you're feeling great about it. And it's amazing. And it's exactly what you wanted. If it's real, it will survive you stepping back and taking some time and saying, "Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to slow this down. We're going to look into some things. We're going to take some time to actually get to know each other before we make all these amazing moves.

And that will put a wrench in his plans because he needs you to go fast so that he can move on to the next one and the next one and the next one. Maybe it's not so bad to be dating somebody who's a little doll. Maybe you could maybe doll in the beginning is good because it sounds like they don't tend to project doll if they're trying to swindle you or who you or probably just get you under their power." So yeah, okay, that's a good thing to look for. I mean, I'd daily hot but dull.

So consider that, ladies. And we'll continue more of this in a little bit with you because

“definitely want to know more about am I dating a serial killer who doesn't, who wouldn't listen to that?”

Okay, so and by the way, just because you're not a serial killer doesn't mean you're safe. I mean, psychopath, sociopaths, these are all deeply problematic killing animals.

Always deeply problematic and people women overlook it. It's like, "Oh, what do you mean?

He killed the family cat. Oh, but he's so handsome. And he treats me so well. Ladies, pay attention. All right, we'd stand by because I want to get to, I want to get back to sniper and get us through that. So now we move on to the next day and it takes us to October 4th. Another person is shot, though she survives. A 43-year-old woman Caroline C. Well, back to Michael's a parking lot. She's putting her bags inside of her Toyota mini van. You can picture it, can't you? You know,

you can picture yourself doing this. Amazingly, she survives. But the DC virginia, Maryland, sort of area, is absolutely in a panic now. I mean, as we discussed, and here's just a little bit of sound from locals at and around that time, this is salt five. I do walk around my community with a little more caution than I did before.

“That's why they can't go outside and the blinds in the schools are all closed, so it's very much a”

bunker phenomenon, you know, feeling that they're experiencing it. As soon as people get home from work, they stay in. They're not going out. Even the restaurant's there. Nobody in the restaurant. Residents are watching to the face to know a lot of stuff in the last year from people flying airplanes into buildings to the anthrax attacks. We face crazy shooters the most days of the year,

Yeah, I mean, he's your said then done. Yeah, that that man was an anomaly at the time, and I'll tell

you both Tim, my brother Tim was also an FBI agent and I arrived at that Michael's store at exactly the same time because it turns out that it is almost equally distant between our two houses. We literally pulled up, I look over as I'm pulling into a parking space, he's pulling into the one right next to me, and we ran up to the sheriff and we said, you know, how can we help? And unfortunately, I wouldn't say that that the sheriff had been equipped or his department to handle something like this.

“The fact is that all these shootings the days before happened up north of Washington, DC,”

and just touching into the north side of Washington, DC. And now he goes 50 miles south of Washington,

DC, what the hell's going on here? But to me, the first thing that I thought was,

kind of did all these shootings north of DC, working his way into DC, just touching into DC, and then he jumps 50 miles south, why is he avoiding Washington, DC? Possibly because he knows he'd go head to head with the FBI and the other federal agencies in Washington, DC, who have a worldwide network of agents and communication versus the small towns around DC that have access to DC's news, but they don't have the FBI. They don't have federal

“law enforcement. They don't have big city, big police departments. And so he's dancing around the”

biggest media circus in the world, but not dealing head to head with big law enforcement. So you're getting this picture of somebody who has some sophistication for sure, because that's not saying bumpkin. And is thinking about what he's doing and why he's doing it. So he's a planner, he's a manipulator. But Tim and I, we ended up finding out that that the sheriff had let go all of the, all of the witnesses that had been there did not take any names and did not do a

canvas of the area for any forensics. Actually, the media line that he set up had been about 50 feet away from where the van was and what I did was I, I looked at the angle of entry because the bullet went through her and into the back of her van. And so I looked at the angle of entry and then I spotted a sign a few hundred yards away and I started walking off a grid to do a grid search of the area. This is something that I've very experienced in and I walked 87 strides to I found a shell casing

from a two to three. And that was the kind of weapon that was being used. So although the, the press were at 50 feet from the van, this piece of evidence was 87 yards away. So we had to

“contaminate. Well, they could have, but the fact is that this is why I think he chose small”

town law enforcement versus the big guns. And he was very smart to do that. And he would continue to do that dancing back and forth north and south around Washington, DC and not in Washington, DC, probably. Can you explain more about the weapon, you know, in today's day and age, everyone's familiar now with AR15. Less so this rifle. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's a two to three, it is a very bushmaster. It's a bushmaster, two to three. It's just, that's just a brand. I mean,

it's the same kind of weapon that an M 16 would be the shell casing is rather large. And the projectile is rather small, which means it's going to go fast and far. It's a, it's an accurate weapon.

It's very symptomatic. Yes, it's symptomatic. And it's, and it's basically the kind of weapon

that, you know, troops on the ground in military will use because it's so simple. It's very hard to jam. You could stick it in mud and pick it back up and, and still use the weapon. And so it's, it's a very reliable type of weapon and, and certainly functional for this particular type of crime. The troops use machine guns. This is, not that this is. No, this is single, right? Yeah, one bullet right here, one bullet. Right. But so far, that's all he's needed. Yeah, yeah, one shot,

tells us that this person really knows what he's doing. Because in order for him to be invisible,

in other words, nobody actually saw him pull the trigger ever. It means he has to have a really good sniper's perch. And since it's out in public, in the daylight, that means he has some way of concealing himself. And of course, people started hearing, we started hearing about a white band who that sped away from one of the scenes. Well, if you heard shots and you were in a white band, well, it's very reasonable that you might want to speed away. It's also very important to know that a white

sorry, a white commercial band is actually the most common type of band used in in small businesses. And in fact, one of the cable companies, the year before had sold off 1800 of these white bands in the area because they were doing ramping up a new fleet. And so there were, there were over abundance.

“And I think at one of the shooting scenes when, um, when one of the local police officers told my”

brother, yeah, we're looking for the white band. Somebody saw the white band. My brother said, okay, stop right here. We're at an intersection. I want you to count the number of white bands you see right now. And it was nine or 13 white bands that just in their sightline right then. So somebody's

always going to be searching for the white band. If somebody tells you to think about the white

band, you're going to see the white band. I mean, I've told my my kids, like, as you get to be driving age or you're driving with your friends or whatever, do not park next to bands. Do not park next to a band. There is no point. There's no reason. There's plenty of parking spots. It's just bad things happen. It's just too easy for bad guys to reach out and grab somebody who's smaller, weaker, and take them. No question. It's good to be proactive. It's good to be situationally

aware. And in this case, what ends up happening is that the sheriff, when I went back and talked to him, and I said, what have the people said, because Michael's is literally in the parking lot of what's called the Spotsylvania Mall. And I looked around there were at least three thousand cars visible to me at that time. And I said, what what this is? What what have they said? And he said, there were no witnesses, but I said, come on. And I said, come on, somebody, somebody must have

said something. And he said, well, there's this one guy, but he's 18 years old and he uses drugs and he's lied to us before. And he said, and I said, what did he say? He said, he said, it was a

“black guy with an afro peeled out in a dark sedan. And I said, great, did you put out an APB on it?”

He said, no, I put out the APB on the white van, just like Chief Moose told us. Wow. And I just, you know, took in a deep breath, but I also clocked it. Now, this is an unreliable witness who was lied to the police before, who's a drug user. But it could be a lie about this. Yeah, it could be. And the other thing is, our viewers may not have that maybe they I do remember, but there, we didn't have cameras everywhere back then. This is immediately post 9/11. It would take

a while for that apparatus to get up at every corner of America. It wasn't there yet. And not only that, this was a very rural area. This is Fredericksburg, Virginia. In fact, it's Spotsalvania County, Virginia. And it's a tiny little area that has, that happens to have

“some box stores and some mall. But it's generally, it's just a very suburban 55 miles away from”

Washington, D.C. kind of quiet little bedroom count. And the iPhone didn't come out until 2007 as well. So people weren't popping up in their phones and getting the immediate after earth. Sometimes it bears reminders, you know, about how we used to live versus now in these things that we've just become accustomed to. Yeah, we were using pages in the FBI. It's time. Okay, so the next, the next shooting and thing goodness this person survived was of a child,

a 13 year old shot critically wounded outside of the Benjamin Tascar Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. So he was shot in the chest, but he survived. He would later testify at one of the trials. And two days later on October 9th, 2002, keep going. Again, this started as far as we know on October 2nd. So here we are a week into this. A tarot card is found near the scene of that shooting

at the school. And this is a, I would say, first big clue. No? Absolutely. Well, the first big clue

political figures in the area were making at the time. We told them that the sniper has a

“god complex. And the last thing you want to do is challenge that sniper. What you want to do is”

appease them. And then, hopefully, they will sort of lower their aggression and actually start communicating. Instead, what happened was the chief, chief moves made a statement that the streets are safe. The schools are safe. So to prove them wrong, after they called the sniper, a coward going after unarmed people, all this other stuff, person after person was paraded in front of the camera, saying that they wanted to make a statement. And what they did was they shot somebody on their way

into school, this 13 year old boy. And like you said, luckily, he survived. And when they did the search, they found the sniper perch in a patch of woods next to the school. And this tarot card was there. And very, very in alignment with our profile at this point was the statement on the top,

“call me God. And this confirmed, and I think finally, chief moves, listen to us about this sniper,”

it's the death tarot card. And it says, call me God on it. And then on the back is says, this is for you, Mr. Police, no press. And call me God again. And this was a very interesting thing. And as we began to really crunch all this data that we were getting, the information from all the shootings that happened in one day with one shot, one kill, the fact that he's bouncing around to these small jurisdictions, the fact that nobody is actually seen him, the fact that everybody's chasing ghost white vans,

the fact that he communicated with us and call me God. And the fact that he said, this is for you, Mr. Police. Well, that really raised some issues with Jim Fitzgerald, who was my buddy in the

“behavioral analysis unit, and who had started forensic linguistic profiling. And that is using”

the actual content of the words, the construction of the language to tell a lot about the writer. And what we found was a great amount of detail that we would start to think about, but we didn't actually have sort of a, you know, sit down, drag out profile session until a few days, several days later. So the tarot card was big, but the focus on the white vans would continue. For example, the same day the tarot card was found, October 9th, another shooting, Dean Harold Myers 53 of

Gatorsburg, Maryland killed while pumping gas at a station in Manassas, Virginia, a white minivan

seen in the area. His first thought to have some connection with the shooting later, cleared by police

October 11th, 2002, Kenneth Bridges 53 of Philadelphia Businessman killed at an ex-son station just off by 95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia, police and force a huge roadblock trying to find a white van like vehicle with a ladder rack on top of Sarigohed Jim. And let me tell you something about that. That was massaponics, Virginia. It's the exit just south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. So just south of where the Michael's shooting happened, just one exit down the road.

My brother was one of the first law enforcement to show up at that scene. And as soon as he got there, he called his wife. They lived, as I said, just a short distance away. And he said, stay inside, whatever you do, don't come out here. And she said, I just left that very gas station. And she literally had the receipt from pumping gas literally 10 minutes before the shot was fired there. Now, fortunately, she was in a big white van. But it was one of those big 15 passenger

white vans that stands taller than she is. So a sniper would never have had a shot with her

standing next to that van. That was very fortunate. But unfortunately, the man who did stop there, he literally stopped there because he didn't want to have to, he was driving up to Philadelphia believe. He didn't want to have to stop anywhere near DC because of the sniper. He said, I'll fill up my tank here. And then I'll be able to drive the rest of the way to Philly. He was actually on the phone with his wife telling her that when he was shot and killed. No, it's a horrific story.

and I talked about this with our guests on the zodiac hearings in which the people,

there seem to be no motive. You know, the zodiac killer didn't steal purses or wallets or commit sexual assaults. It just seemed to be killing for fun. And so it's like, those are especially disturbing because we like to believe we can find patterns that we can then avoid

“that will keep us safe. And this is, I think it's just a psychological crutch. And this”

is similar. It's lacking any crutch for any sane person to try to use because this could have happened to anyone, a child near a school, a person pumping gas, a person getting groceries,

a man walking down the street. It's like the liquor store, the parking lots. There's just no

stop. Anything you did, however. It was was a risk. Anything you did. And as I said earlier, people were literally putting up blankets over every window in their house. They were afraid not only of going out in public. They were afraid that since so many people were off the street, that the sniper was going to start shooting people in their own homes. This is a, it's a very effective tool when you randomly kill people at will with nobody being able to identify you or stop

you. The terror level just kept rising over these 23 days. It just became unbelievably scary just to live and operate in that area. My brother, to his credit, he ran the SWAT team at the Washington Field Office of the FBI. He had all the SWAT team members out patrolling the area because he started, we helped him kind of profile the kinds of places that, that these shootings were taking place. They were all near good avenues for egress, a highway nearby so they can get away fast. That was

important to the shooter. So he was driving around to small towns, exits around big highways so that he could try to interdict. And unfortunately, he was, he actually heard the shot at the home

“depot. And I think that's the next shooting. You brother did Tim? Yes, Tim did. And he was the first”

long force him to arrive at that scene. And unfortunately, it was an FBI employee that had been shot in kill. Yes, yes, okay. And that was a woman, right? That was a Linda Franklin 47, Arlington, Virginia. This was the 11th victim, though not yet fatality because to the early, to the earlier folks arrived. She was shot and killed by a single gunshot in the home depot parking lot and falls church Virginia and FBI intelligence analyst. And I knew that you and your brother were working this

case, but I did not know that he was the first on that scene, which must have been horrific. 47

is not old and to have it turned out to be someone who's essentially a colleague, even worse. And he just, he just describes, you know, seeing her husband holding her and her dying in his arms and it's just, it was horrific. And this really got him even more riled up. And he knew that that this was a very sophisticated killer and we had been talking throughout this whole process. And at, at about this time, we decided we need to really do a push to try to gather all this

information and get it out to all the law enforcement agencies in the area. And it would be very shortly after that that the Ashland shooting happened. That was, that was even further south away from DC about halfway between Fredericksburg and Richmond, Virginia. So that was October 19th,

“that was October 19th, 2002, five days after one in between there. I can't remember.”

So there's two more. And after Linda Franklin, 47 was killed, the five days later, October 19th, Jeffrey Hopper, 37, shot in a parking lot at a ponderosis daycouse. To me, that is just so- I don't want an Ashland. Yeah, that's the one. He did survive. He survived. But, you know, the ponderosa got, we all grew up going to the ponderosa. It's just like these things that are Americana, you know, there's something about it that's just, it shakes you to the core.

The doctors were able to move the bullet from, from Jeffrey Hopper during surgery and connect it to the others, the Buddhists, coming back from the other victims. And amazingly, he did survive. The final victim was October 22, 2002, bus driver, Conrad, Johnson 35, Okson Hill, Maryland, shot, while just standing on the top step inside of his computer bus in Aspen, Hill, Maryland, he would later die. He was the 13th person known to be shot by the DC sniper. Again,

I was actually in, when the shooting happened in Aschland, Virginia, I was actually in Richmond,

“Virginia at the time. So I came up. My brother got to the crime scene before I did. And he found,”

I'd say a situation in great disarray. And what he did was he was working with the FBI's human-cent recovery dogs. And these dogs were especially trained to pick up the scent and actually

followed the path most recently taken by that human if they're in this area. And it's an amazing

program, but it would take me many hours to actually explain all the things they did. But when my brother arrived, all of the searchers were going in a particular area because the victim said, I heard the shot and it came from that direction. And when they presented the scent pads from the terror card that had been found, and also some of the shell casings that had been found, they were able to, they got a scent. And their dog said that it was in the opposite direction.

“And all the cops said, nah, it's not that way. This is the way the victim said it came from.”

And Tim knew that the guy was standing next to a brick wall. And the echoes that you can get all for a wall of a shot can make it sound like it comes from anywhere. And so the dog takes off in one direction. As soon as they break the line of the woods, he sees an area where it's laid out, it's the leaves are all crushed down like somebody was laying there. And he shines his flashlight up and their tattoo tree is a little baggy, like a Halloween baggy with some pink line,

no paper in it. And he says, well, obviously, they left us another message. Unfortunately, there was a big argument about whether or not they should open this thing. But Tim said, I can read through it. And it says, streets are not safe. Your children are not safe anywhere. He said, there's a threat in this. We need to open it now. We need to get this out to the public. And because it was in a small town and they didn't know who should be in charge,

they decided to hold onto it. It was it was now late late late until the morning. And they wanted to wait till the bosses wait in. So they did not open it in time to get the call that came into that ponderosa at the pay phone right at the front door. That was ringing while they were still on the scene at six o'clock in the morning. And nobody answered the phone. So it was an attempt by the sniper to actually communicate with law enforcement. It's a missed opportunity. And there

would be others. Let me tell you. But the thing that we knew from this letter when we finally got

it open. And we read what was going on. We saw a huge dichotomy between the actions, the planning and the execution of the shootings and then these communications. And you can see it right now. There are those little stars on it. This is the cover sheet to the letter that you just refer to said it up for the cover sheet reads for you, Mr. Police call me God in quotes, do not release to the press. Keep going Jim. Yeah. And you can see there's stars on it. Like,

this was a kindergarten, you know, homework assignment that was handed in and done well. So the

“teacher put little stars on it. That's what it looked like. It was very immature and childish. So”

when we get into the profiling room and we're around our table and we're all arguing about this case and trying to figure out who this sniper is, we had definitely nailed down that this is a very experienced and sophisticated person who's probably now we're thinking in his, you know, early to mid 40s who is police or military trained police or military experience who is who is on a mission. Like he literally has a very specific mission and he's carrying it out

flawlessly. Nobody has seen him yet and and so we kind of nailed those aspects of the profile and Jim Fitzgerald says, guys, I understand exactly what you're saying and I agree with you, but here's the problem. When this guy's communicating with us, I got to say he's immature. He says this is for you, Mr. Police, as if he's looking up to the police. He's writing on, you know,

basically on on on kid school paper and he's putting stars on it, what kind of self-respecting

45-year-old man is going to do this? If this guy is in adulthood, he's just barely adult,

no way that's not possible. It can't be somebody who's this sophisticated can't be that young.

“There's no way it's not possible for them to have done this without police military training”

and experience on the line of fire. And so I said, look, then we have one of two possibilities here. Either we have a situation where we have a 45-year-old man who's incredibly experienced, who's incredibly great at planning and executing these shootings, but he decompensates when

he's communicating with us and he acts like a teenager or for the first time in U.S. criminal history.

We have a sniper team and everybody blew up. No, sniper stone, play well with other each other. They don't, they work alone. Every case in history so far has been like this. You're a fool if you think it's otherwise. And Fitzgerald says, well, it would make sense because I'm telling you, whoever wrote this is like a child. How can he be so sophisticated and be a child? And everybody's telling me, you can't happen. And I said, well, it could happen.

If you have a 45-year-old and you have a 15-year-old and the 45-year-old is controlling the 15-year-old, you said that at that point. Yeah, I did. And I said in my mind, the way he could control him best is to totally control him by sexually victimizing him. And everybody says, oh, you're an expert

“in that field. That's why you think that's happening. They didn't believe it. And I started talking”

them through it. And I started saying, how, how this is a possibility. And in fact, I convinced them there was a probability. And we actually put it in the profile at that point. Totally unconfirmed until 11 years later. But... Well, that one piece of it. But the rest of it would be confirmed within

days. Oh, yes, right. But the part of it about how these two snipers, for the first time in

U.S. history were willing and able to work together. One was training the other. It turns out. And Mohammed was sexually abusing Malvo basically from the beginning. It was unfathomable even to these FBI experts. It took a profile or like you to say, trust me. This is a real possibility. We need to be taking seriously. And yeah, and can you just

“can you speak to also, too, because the other clue that was in this letter was that phrase,”

Mr. Police. You spoke to how it's suggested he was young, but it suggested something else as well. Right. And the another thing that Jim Fitzgerald brought up was the fact that the tarot card plus the phrase, Mr. Police. He said, Mr. Police is actually a phrase used a lot. It's a disrespectful thing, but it looks polite. It's used a lot in Jamaican reggae songs. So he said, "I'm feeling like there's a Jamaican or Caribbean influence in this writer's life."

He said, "I can't say it for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a Jamaican or African American who has Jamaican roots or Caribbean roots." And I said, you know, back at the Michael's store shooting, the one I witnessed that the sheriff told me about, who he thought was a liar because he was a drug user and it lied to the police before. He said, "Right. It was a guy with a big afro, a black guy who peeled out in a dark sedan.

We need to change this profile from a white van, work van to a dark sedan and we're probably looking for two African Americans with some tie to the Caribbean." And that changed everything. Now you've got a different profile and as it would turn out, you've got the right one, but you don't have the guys and you don't have the right car, and you know, still there's... We don't have that. We just have a general feeling and it turns out as they went back and

interviewed people who were around the neighborhood of the first two or three days of shooting.

One of them had also seen not a car racing away from the scene, but a dark sedan slowly pulling away from the scene. That is a smart tactician. That is somebody who knows that racing away is going to raise the awareness and set off the alarms, but slowly driving down a neighborhood street. It probably isn't going to really stand out in anybody's mind.

22nd and within 48 hours, there was an arrest. And in between I should say this, here's

“you mentioned Chief Moose. I mean, right around that time, right before the capture, he had this”

message for the community, which still sounded rather scary. This is sound by one. The person or people have demonstrated a willingness and ability to shoot people of all ages, all races, all genders, and they've struck at different times of the day, different days, and at different locations. We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language in the message that pertains to the threat.

It is in the form of a post-grip. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time. My God, that's not a feeling that. Yeah, that would be pretty scary. And if you notice the

“person standing behind Chief Moose at that moment, I believe was an FBI agent. And what he said was”

basically exactly what we recommended that he say. And I think my brother had a great deal to do

with the fact that that line came out because he was very, very adamant that people should know that the children of this community are being of the entire area are being threatened by these guys so that they would protect their kids so that we wouldn't put kids in harm's way. And what happened was, they wanted to just hide the fact that there was a direct threat in the letter. But we said, it will actually appease the shooter if you continue his line of communication. If you put it out there,

he knows that's going to scare people. He will feel good about it. He might calm down. Because we show the cover sheet to that letter left by the Ponderosa, but the body of it,

this person, yes, reporting at the time, the body of it, read, included a demand for $10 million,

giving the 16 digit account number and to pin that was from a stolen bank of America Platinum credit card. And it included the chilling post group, quote, "Your children are not safe anywhere at any time." So yeah, so the threat had been made. And now, Chief Moose was listening to you, it's pointless to go out there and tell the community that they are safe and that you've got an under control. It's not true. And it's provocative to the sniper.

Right. Absolutely. And so what happens at this point is that, and this is something we were trying to encourage. We were trying to encourage communication from the sniper or snipers at this point. And what happened was, they called the, the, excuse me, they called the hotline. And very unfortunately, when they called, they said, "Call me got." And people on the task force who took that call thought that it was just somebody gaming them and scamming them. And they

actually hung up the phone, they called back again. They actually wrote about this and that note, it was very unfortunate. But eventually, one thing that they did was they called up a priest and they left a voice message on that priest voice recording, phone recording, answering machines. Sorry. Voice mail. It's been so long. It's been so long. It's been so long. It's been so long. I couldn't even remember one of them. Anyway, on his answering machine. And, and in that, they said,

“you should look what happened in, and I'm, and I'm, I'm trying to remember the name of town. It might have been Arlington. Where was that shot”

fired through the, through the, uh, to the apple, excuse me, through the Michael's store. Oh, what are you talking about? Yes,

um, hold on a second. Wasn't that that was a Michael's quote in Aspen Hill, Maryland. All right, um,

that I'm talking about, yeah, before that there was actually shooting in, in, um, Montgomery, Alabama. Right, there you go. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the ones that we hadn't yet discussed. That was on the list. Right. Not attributable to the sniper yet. But, but other murders were happening in the country at, around this time, and one of them was about to get linked in. Right. And so what happened was in the, in the message that was left on this pre-sensoring machine, they said, look at the shooting in Montgomery. And

thought it was Montgomery County, Maryland. But somebody came up with the idea, hmm. Maybe he's talking about

Montgomery, Alabama. It could be. And so they looked at to see if there were any unsolved shootings there. And yes, there was a store. And somebody came in and, uh, picked up a magazine and then left, and then a couple of minutes later, a bullet goes flying through the window, just misses a woman behind the cash register. And in that case, they picked up, they picked up a magazine. And let me just tell you, glossy magazines are the absolute best surface in the world for collecting fingerprints. If you touch that, the oils in your

finger will interact with the photograph that's on the cover. And it actually burns it in permanently,

“burns your fingerprints in permanently into that picture. And if you've ever tried to, that's why”

people who are trying to save magazines will put them in plastic sleeves. So they don't get destroyed that way. Well, they had a perfect fingerprint, which came back to a 15-year-old named Malvo, who they were then able to track to a relationship with an older male, Muhammad, back in the state, who was from the state of Washington. And they found his car. He had a caprice. They got his license plate.

And they went, and the FBI went to his place in the state of Washington. And basically did a search

warrant. They found a tree stump in his backyard. They literally excavated the tree stump, shipped it to the lab. Took out lots of different bullets from it and matched them to the shooting

“the shooter in the DC sniper case. So we knew then who we were looking for. And when that APB had”

gone out with the profile and everything mesh together, then within 24 hours, they were actually spotted by a trucker at a rest stop sleeping in the in the caprice. And the FBI's HRT team moved in. There were hundreds of other law enforcement and truckers actually chipped in and held blocking off roadways and the escape routes so that they couldn't get away. And they were taken down without anybody, any further law supply. Jim, why did they call that in? It was in a way a confession

to say check out that the shooting in Montgomery. I don't know that they knew that they left a fingerprint. But they must have known it could potentially be tied to them. He felt omnipotent at

“this point. He felt like there's no way. He felt law enforcement was so stupid. They would never”

catch him. He was bragging. He was trying to get people to realize that he was even better. And he'd done much more than they thought he did. And now it actually gets track back to a number of other crimes that occurred in a spree that had gone all the way across the U.S. where Muhammad was training Malvo how to kill people. Right. And that's the category that we left out of the initial discussion. But I said it was at least 20 people that they shot. 13 we went through.

But there were at least seven more in the month leading up to the DC sniper spree as he was training this young teenager. They met as I understand it in the Caribbean. Malvo's mother was not the greatest and somehow allowed. Yeah, she allowed him to be just kind of turned over to this guy and and Muhammad started training him to kill and Malvo went along with it. Right. Well, what ended up happening was it wouldn't really come out to 11 years later when Malvo spoke publicly.

And he did this to his great, I don't know, detriment because speaking about this in Jamaica, which is an extremely homophobic place to this day, they consider if you, if you're Mal and you're sexually victimized by a Mal, they consider that homosexual activity on the victim's part. I mean, it has nothing to do with the victim's sexuality has to do with an older person taking advantage of a younger person. But Malvo came out and said that when Muhammad picked him up out of

this shelter, basically he was homeless, his mother had abandoned him, his mother had abandoned him,

several times already in his life before the time he reached 15 years of age. And his father was completely absent in his life. He, Muhammad came in and said, I'll be your father for you. You know, I'll train you all. I'll make you a man. And he slowly was grooming him into this sexual

And then it evolved into human murder. Second, the the car, can we talk about it because once you guys got to look at the car, things would become much more clear about how they were getting

“away with this, how they were approaching, can you talk about what the car told you?”

Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, the car was a very old caprice, but one of these large

oversized cars that would never make it today because it's so big and it's a gas car,

but what they did was they cut a little hole out in the back by the license plate so that you could basically fold down the seats and lay inside and stick just the point of the rifle out of the rifle barrel out of that hole. And there was enough room for you to see the sight to sight your target. But you can also see how it would limit them from shooting very high or very low because you have a very limited entrance where the gun barrel could be protruding from. So most of the

“sound of the shot is going to be contained within that trunk. If they weren't wearing headphones”

in there, they would have blown there. Their ear drums out if they kept firing that weapon

in such a close face, but we understand that a number of the shootings were done by Muhammad and some of them were quote training shots done by Malvo. Wow. That may have been the ones that people survived because it's very difficult for us to think that that Malvo at such a young age would have been able to carry out the shootings that happened in the beginning and at least at least in in one of the cases we know that that somebody saw Malvo driving away

from the scene. That was the spots of any more Michaels. And they also had he's spoken about how

he admits to killing people himself. But he also says he was the lookout. He would make sure that

there was no one in the line of fire, not for that person's protection, but just so that they didn't have that many witnesses and it was a clear shot. So one would scout and the other one would kill and they had done something with the back seat to make it possible like as to lie down from from the back seat straight into the trunk. So I assume on your belly you can you know be in shooting position. Yeah, absolutely. And but what was even more disturbing than everything that had

been that had come out was when we found out that that Muhammad's actual motive, although he said what he was doing is training Malvo to be a killer and that he wanted to create a school for kids, his age and he would train all of them and he'd form an army to just take over and fight the oppression that that he grew up in and that kind of stuff. That was all just garbage. What it actually was was his wife had gotten custody of their children. He was pissed off and he was going to

kill his wife so that he could then regain custody of his children. And what he did was he made this whole plan up so that he could kill a whole bunch of people and then shoot his wife as part of this hoping that it would just be seen as one of the random victims and nobody would suspect him. Guy of all of them. He would be awarded his children back. Here is Muhammad's ex-wife on how she found out that he was the suspect and and what she thought this saw three. The way I found out that it was

John was when ATF knocked on my door and said that they were going to name John as to sniper. And so they asked me, well, do you think that he would do something like this and I was like, well, I don't know. Yeah. You say, well, why would you think that? I say, well, he said he could take a small city terrorize it. They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be me. I mean, I wonder Jim, was did anybody ask her? So when we had a sniper

“problem on our hands, did you ever think that could be my ex-husband? I don't I think in general people”

when things terrible things happen, generally people in the community don't think it's going to happen to them. We still feel like this distance. I think in this particular case, I've spoken to her personally about this. I think she was, she was not at all, especially the white van

specifically tell her that he would be a sniper, but he did say he could terrorize the town and

kill a bunch of people and then kill her and everybody would think it would be all part of that same plan. So what about Malvo? Okay, but I don't think she knew either. I just I just wondered if you know, it occurred to her after that threat. How do you take a, you know, not well-treated, I guess, not well-raised, but not terrorists, 15-year-old boy, and turn him into what he calls a monster. Malvo is still sitting in prison. I'll set it up with this sound bite from him. Not long ago,

this is sound bite six.

“That was him speaking to the Washington Post in 2012. I think what happened was a combination of”

remember I talked about the genetics loading the gun personality psychology aiming it and the experiences pull the trigger. I think in his case, because he was born in a situation that was not only poverty-stricken, but, you know, he himself had been taking advantage of a number of times and,

you know, not just sexually with Malvo, but other things that had happened to him and he was basically

booted from place to place and living on the streets, scrapping for himself. He didn't feel connected to society at all. And the fact that Malvo was sexually victimizing him, which is manipulating him and grooming him both as a sexual abuse victim and as a killer, what he did was the choice of weapon, the separation between the shooters and the victims, gave Muhammad the ability to tell, to teach Malvo, that they're nobody. You don't know them. They don't know you. There's no connection

“here. It's easy to do. And I think just it was a perfect storm, both the needs that this kid had”

and he had to have the potentiality. I mean, I don't know how much anger and rage had built up inside

of him, but certainly being victimized over and over again by Muhammad. And the same person that you looked up to, the same person that you thought of as a father figure because you didn't have one. This is what he was searching for in his life. It was a really, it was a deadly combination. My God, he starts hurting you and he starts making you hurt. Others, here's a little bit more of Malvo recounting how it was that Muhammad took hold of him, so it's not seven.

Even though the consistent thing was madness, he was consistent. He gave me his time.

“Well, his time, Muhammad's time ran out on November 10th, 2009 when he was executed by lethal”

injection. He declined to make a final statement. He was 48 years old when he died. He was 41 years old at the time of his arrest. And the courts and the legislatures, the Supreme Court, have gone around and around on the younger of the pair on Malvo because the Supreme Court would eventually rule that it is unconstitutional to, in 2012, they ruled to, to pass down mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders that it violates the 8th Amendment prohibition

on cruel and unusual punishment and therefore what to do with Malvo. So he'd been tried in a couple of different states and in Virginia, they did change the law to not allowing life without parole sentences for juveniles. So he can't have a life sentence without parole right there right now, but if he were parole from Virginia, then he would have to begin serving his Maryland sentence and there's a question about whether he could ever get out or whether he would just be in jail

in perpetuity because one state after the other would start executing their sentences against him. I don't know. You tell me because Malvo's attorneys are right now are seeking sentencing release or release or release, which seems that seems impossible to me. Well, I don't know. I'm not sure what's going to happen. I will say this. I mean, Malvo was

when he was in his cell. Some of his statements at the time were very, very negative. He had been

really pushed over to the dark side. I mean, I'm not saying that he didn't make choices, but he made 15-year-old choices. And sometimes that can be reversed. When you hear him speak today, he says a lot of the right things. He may one day be able to convince a parole board that he's been rehabilitated. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I do think that the way, at least the way the law is right now, if he does get released from Virginia, he will be serving time in Maryland.

“And I don't see that he'll be able to ever get out. Yeah, I don't. I think even our current”

soft on crime policies don't go to the likes of the DC sniper. Understanding of the two, he was not the most culpable, but you don't, you can't kill it and terrorize that many people

and walk free again. He did get married in prison. It always never ceases to amaze me. Never ceases

to amaze me. Gem these women who married prisoners. I don't know what. Oh, you could do a whole profile on them. I'm sure. This woman, she started writing to him, then she went in. They said it was beautiful. They were allowed to hold hands. The institution was very accommodating his state prison in Virginia. He's enriched her life as much as she is enriched his. I mean, I don't know what that says about her life. And one of his original trial attorneys comes out and says he's

met the bride. Very impressive young lady educated. Her eyes are wide open, close in age to Malvo

“who's now 37. And they are, quote, soul mates, according to the lawyer. Well, I think there's,”

there's a lot involved in that psychology and it happens very often. I mean, it happened with

Ramirez here in California. I mean, they made him into a rockstar. All these women were, were literally throwing themselves at him. It was really... Wait, which guy was that? Remind me? Racinders? No, Ramirez, the night stalker here in Calvary. Yeah. He, he, he, he, he killed a lot of people who's very brutal. He was very bloody. It was, I mean, some of the stuff I can't even recount or that, what he did. But one of the problems is that I think the women that typically will do this.

Some of them are very religious and they feel like they are, they have a mission to save these people. Others feel so insecure and insignificant in their own life that they want some connection

“to something famous or even infamous. And it's actually kind of safe. You can be next to a serial”

killer, but be safe because that serial killer is imprisoned for the rest of his life. So you can maintain this connection, have this proximity to fame and yet not have the risk. So it's a very, very strange psychology that that puts people in this place. But as you said, it happens so often and so many of these killers who I like to forget the names of actually end up getting married to to mainly women on the outside who who have this kind of complex. Yep, it happened with

with Eric Menendez too. Somebody married him. I just get like these women who would spend their lives like that when, you know, it's not like every man's a peach, but at least the ones who, you know, you can actually touch might be a more fruitful place to cast your your rod and reel. I don't have a lot of sympathy. I have to say, I don't think that they should let this guy to jail. I will say that as now the Virginia law has been softened consistent with the U.S.

Supreme Court ruling, they're now looking at getting the sentencing release from Maryland, which would be next up to hold him and we're told a decision in Maryland could come this month on that. So it's a, it's a timely discussion we're having. I don't think the odds are in his favor. I mean, Maryland is pretty blue. Even Virginia is these days, but not that blue. And I got to leave it on this note, Jim, because you spent a lot of years at the FBI. I know you

brother did to thoughts on the difference. Then and now the way we look at our FBI the way America thinks about its FBI, you know, the partisan politics that have been on display out of that organization of the past few years. And I know you're retired now, but how, how you think about it. Well, I certainly still know a number of people who continue to work for the FBI and, and we have sort of a lift surb that that we correspond all the retired agents together and, and to a

man and woman, everybody's very upset with the image of the FBI now. And, and unfortunately,

against the FBI was was the lack of involvement in the NASA investigation. But I think a lot

of the political things that have happened are happening way, way, way up here. But the agents, the street agents, the people who dedicate their lives and careers and put their lives on the line, not the administrators, not the, the leaders of it, but the people who put their lives on the line, they have remained absolutely the same throughout all of this. And they will continue to,

“and I think that's the saving grave grace for the FBI. You don't, you don't become an FBI agent,”

because, you know, you do it for the money. You don't become an FBI agent because you're lazy and you can't find something else to do. FBI picks, and I'm not trying to be, you know, self-grandizing here. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to become an FBI agent to work there for 22 years, but the FBI picks people. There are hundreds of thousands of people who apply to the FBI and not that many get picked up every year, maybe a thousand every year.

And, and the fact is, there's only about 14,000 agents in the whole country and around the world. So it's a very picky job and it's very difficult to get in. It's very difficult to maintain your job there. And part of that is the excellence that they demand for me. And I think that that excellence has not changed and it is what's going to save the image of the FBI because literally the people who have laid down their lives for people in the FBI. And we lost quite a few agents in the last few

years. Some of them were first responders on 9/11 and got cancer and others, there were two agents that were killed in Florida, just executing a child sex crimes weren't at a house. And it's a dangerous job and the people that do it are good people. Unfortunately, I think when law enforcement officers

are agents get involved in politics or political decisions, it can never go right.

Yeah, it brings shame upon the whole organization. To your credit, I should point out, you obviously were an FBI supervisory special agent, a pro-filer, 22 years with the FBI, investigated all sorts of cases, bank robbery, serial killers, public corruption, sex crimes, abductions, homicides, onocos. But there are only 25 pro-filer at a 14,000 FBI agents and you are one of them, very competitive. So to your credit, you had an amazing career with them and continue. And now, speaking about these

stories, you have a production company, XG Productions. We talked about amygdading a serial killer,

“which you can find out audible if you want to hear more about that a different host, but she gets into”

it. And then another one called Best Case Worst Case. That's unspotifying apple. And you're in that one. And that seems to be kind of what we're doing here. Taking listeners behind police lines, giving them unparalleled access to law enforcement, looking back at some of the most memorable cases that they were on, sounds like you've got a bunch of episodes. Are they out now?

It sounds as though we have over 300 episodes. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. And basically,

Frenzy Hakes, who's a former state and federal prosecutor, she and I host Best Case Worst Case. We talked to cops and lawyers and related law enforcement professionals about their careers. And what's the best case and the worst case that they remember from their career? And what that does is shows people what the spectrum, the continuum of the kinds of cases that law enforcement has to live with. And also the kinds of people that make up law enforcement.

There's 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States over 500,000 officers and agents and they're very diverse group of people. But only a few make the bad choices that make the headlines. The rest of them dedicate their lives, literally put their lives on the line and many of them lose their lives over the course or get injured over the course of their careers. But they are a good group of people who are trying to do good and help people stay safe

and stop crime. And that's a, that's a really laudable thing. And that's something of which the public needs to be reminded. Those of us on our gal have very close connections, family connections

“with law enforcement. Try to remember that in all of this madness when the reporting hits that's”

dishonest and politically driven. Thank you for your service and to be continued. I will thank you for doing this. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Well, want a story, want a case. Thank you all for joining us today and all week.

for free and check us out on YouTube. Go over there and subscribe to our channel. YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly. And we would appreciate you smashing that like button and keep on coming back for more great content. We appreciate it.