My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Presents: Wicked Words - Dr. Katherine Ramsland: BTK Killer Dennis Rader

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

My Favorite Murder introduces the first episode of Tenfold More Wicked Presents: Wicked Words. In her new true crime chat show, host Kate Winkler Dawson interviews forensic psychologist, Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who spent years interviewing BTK Killer Dennis Rader in prison. Find out what he taught her in this fascinating episode. Listen and Subscribe to Wicked Words on the Tenfold More Wicked feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, we are sharing the first episode of Tenfold More Wicked presents, Wicked Words, a new podcast on Exactly Right. Wicked Words is a companion chat show to Tenfold More Wicked, where hosts Kate Winkler-Dawson interviews journalists and writers about their best true crime cases. Guests include the filmmaker who investigated the Long Island serial killer, the forensic psychologist who spent years exploring the mind of BTK killer Dennis Rader, and a New York Times bestselling author who went to school with a serial killer. You'll hear candid insights revealing details never before published, while discovering

intriguing facts that would otherwise be lost to history. These are the stories behind the stories. Plus, if you haven't checked out Tenfold More Wicked, dig back into the feed to hear seasons one through three of the critically acclaimed podcast. And enjoy the premiere episode of Wicked Words here, and then head over to the Tenfold More Wicked feed for a brand new episode out today. New episodes drop every Monday. And subscribe to the show on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

If you like what you hear, please write a review. And follow them on Instagram at Tenfold More Wicked, on Twitter at Tenfold More, and on Facebook at Tenfold More Wicked. Enjoy and goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. This story contains adult content and language, along with references to sexual assault.

Further discretion is advised. You can't see this, but I'll describe it. This is one that a psychopath named Dennis Rader came up with. He calls this cubing. And so in my hand, I have a cube. And on each side, there is a label, like church leader, employee, family man, serial killer. And that's what psychopaths take advantage of.

They have no roots in any of these. All of them are part of their identity. They can pivot quickly to whichever one works for them in any given situation. I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the Historical True Crime Podcast, Tenfold More Wicked, on Exactly Right. I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've interviewed some people in person and some from my home studio over Zoom.

And they are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true crime stories. And now we want to tell you those stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make, good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories. I'm Catherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology and the author of Confession of a Serial Killer,

what I call a guided autobiography of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer. Dr. Ramsland had unprecedented access to one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. She's a real life mindhunter. She spent years working with Dennis Rader to figure out his psyche, why he became a killer. It wasn't just Dennis Rader talking about himself in any which way he wanted. It was me guiding him toward the end of benefiting criminal justice, psychology and law enforcement

so that whatever we were doing would end up providing insights and also the proceeds benefit the victims' families. Before we get started, let me tell you the story of Dennis Rader. Rader killed 10 people in Kansas over 30 years before he was finally caught. BTK stands for Bind Torture Kill. One of the things that was so frightening about Rader is that he seemed relatively normal. This is from her book. Through jailhouse visits, telephone calls and written correspondence, Catherine Ramsland

worked with Rader himself to analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews and Rader's unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man's motivation to stalk, torture and kill. Dennis Rader grew up an all-American boy in Kansas, the heart of America with religious values and intact family, etc. And yet he developed the idea that he wanted to be famous. He got attachments to serial killers he read about as a teenager in true detective magazines

and girls made him feel uncomfortable and off-balance. So he began to put those things together as a way to keep women under control and to become famous was to become a serial killer. So his fantasies began to form around that notion and then he just identified with one day he was going to be as famous as Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy or any of the other ones and he said about to do that. What is his childhood like though? Is this someone who has a normal childhood?

Because we often hear obviously people who are serial killers come from bad backgrounds. He did not come from a bad background and why I like this case is because he is an outlier and he shows us that we cannot make formulas that will help us predict and understand serial killers because there will always be somebody who just doesn't fit. And we have to be very careful about how we try to box these things up. Serial killer is simply a description of behavior. You've killed at least two people in two different incidents. It's not a criminal type.

So we have to beware that we're not trying to formulate it so that we feel safe. And I think Dennis is a very good example of somebody who had a perfectly ordinary childhood. No abuse, might have had some head injury. We haven't been able to document that but he was in a car accident and his mother dropped him on his head when he was a kid. But he doesn't really show most of the impulsivity and other kinds of behaviors you expect from head injuries. He became a serial killer through a very active and very strong and intense fantasy life.

So earlier you called Rader a psychopath. But would he have been diagnosed with something like antisocial personality disorder as a child even if someone suspected something was wrong? We don't put the label psychopath on someone below the age of 18. So that's the first thing. However, we can see psychopathic tendencies in children as young as three. So we talk about them as being fledgling psychopaths or children at risk for psychopathy. We do have programs for males who are at risk of psychopathy.

Not a lot of them, but there are some. There's one in Wisconsin at the Mendoza Juvenile Center and they're having success, meaning they're identifying, and usually it's in their teenage years or just before teenagers, they're identifying young men at risk for becoming adult psychopaths, working with them in terms of their thought processes and behavioral accountability. And they're finding success with that when they're released, the rate of them repeating any offense they might have committed to get in there is lower than those same population being released and not going through the program.

Okay, so what does all that mean? So that tells us perhaps when we catch them at a young age and can identify those at risk for developing into adult psychopaths, that girls are just as amenable to this treatment as boys. So in that case, identifying them at a young age, whether female or male, is important. But nobody recognized that with Raider, right? And so he proceeded with his life, he got married, and then something really changed with him.

He got angry one day because he'd been laid off from a job he really liked. His wife was now the breadwinner, which, you know, there again, we have women in charge of his life, which he couldn't stand. And he broke into a house and he really liked the feeling of being in control of somebody's house, nobody was in there, but he just liked that, began to fantasize about kidnapping young women and putting them in what he called girl traps and making them do what he wanted to do. So it started with fantasies when he was young.

And now as an adult, these fantasies began to escalate. And then he just one day decided he was, you know, he saw a woman and her daughter, Julia Otero and her daughter walking and he just followed them to where they lived and his fantasies began to be more like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. That was 1974 in Wichita, Kansas, and it was January 15th. His wife went to work and he got up and he went to the Otero house and he broke in and he murdered four people. Doesn't that seem like a big jump to you to sort of being someone who is living in a

fantasy world, but then to killing four people, including a man, right? Yeah, but he didn't expect the man was home. So what happened? So he shows up in the house. He shows up in the house. He's actually, he's in the backyard, he sees that they have a dog and didn't realize it. He's in the backyard and he's not so sure that he's going to go in, but the little boy came out to call for the dog and it was over.

He knew he had to go in. The boy had seen him. Once he was in the house, he realized he's now got a father, mother and two kids. He's got to deal with all of them because they're witnesses. And it really wasn't well planned. He did not expect Joseph Otero Sr. to be there, but he had been in a car accident and so he was home recovering. So this was just not something that, it's not a jump for, this is a guy who wanted to

be a serial killer and so he goes and kills four people, it wasn't that. He thought he was going to maybe encounter the two kids that he knew he could get rid of the little boy quickly. I know that sounds cool, but that was in his mind, that he was going to abduct the mother and daughter and take them to a barn because barns figured big in his fantasies and none of it worked out the way he wanted it to work out. So he just tied them up and strangled them. How was he able, I mean, this is not from what I've seen, not a big guy necessarily.

I mean, how was he able to overcome four people? I mean, I can't even deal with my twin daughters at the same time. How do you wrangle four people? They had a gun and he made them believe, and here's the psychopathic part, he had this idea that if you make people feel safe and like nothing bad will happen, they relax, they're guard. And so he pretended to be a fugitive, oh, all I need is your car, I just need some money, I'm not going to hurt you if you do what I say, but I'm going to have to tie you up.

And once he, once he has them under control, he's not the only one, there's quite a few people manage this all by themselves, you make people scared enough and believe that as long as they obey you, it's all going to be okay. That's what they want to believe. And that's what psychopaths take advantage of, and once he had them all tied up, there's nothing they could have done. Did he kill the dog? I know that's a weird question.

Did not kill the dog, he liked dogs. Okay. Just to make it clear, you've spent time with Dennis Raider. Yes. It was interesting because it actually started with someone else who had approached Raider when he was, and he got away with this for 30 years. He wasn't arrested till 2005 after he'd killed 10 people, and once he was arrested, another person wanted to write a book with him, have him tell his story.

And she wrote him for five years, but didn't produce a book. And I saw her on Facebook and I asked her whatever happened to your book, because there were newspaper articles about her. And she begged me to take it over. She didn't want to do it, and she wanted someone else to do it. So then I had to go through a certain process with the victim's family's attorney before they approved what I wanted to do, but the fact that I wanted to write a book that would benefit criminal justice and law enforcement, they appreciated that.

So you made it clear to them that you wouldn't be exploiting the victims or glorifying him. They knew I could write a book because I've written quite a few, and that I certainly was a serial killer expert, as well as an academic with credentials. So that gave it a seriousness that it wasn't going to be tabloid. So all of that happened. And during that time, Raider and I played chess games in the mail so that we kind of figure out where we're going to go with this, and I was able to take the five years of correspondence between him and the other person to get a start.

And I didn't expect it was going to take me five years to do this. A lot of it had to do with all the back and forth, with all the legal stuff. But during that time, I visited him, and then we began weekly phone calls, and then he started writing very long letters, detailed. I mean, like 20-page letters. So between all of that, and also I was friends with the DA who had prosecuted, so she gave me access to her files. I knew some of the police officers involved.

I talked to some of the victims' families. So between, with all of that, I had a lot of material to work with, but primarily his letters, I would say were the best. The worst was actually visiting him because the guards would hang out and listen. We had to really, he wanted to do this all in code. So that was a challenge. Why in code? He wanted to do it in code for practical reason.

He didn't want the guards to see what he was sending out, but also because he fancied himself a spy. So he liked the idea, and it was a test to me. Would I play? And you did for five years? I did. I played. I played that we eventually used, because you kept forgetting his.

So interestingly, here I am a female in charge, which is what he didn't like. And yet, we worked together very well, actually. So after those murders, what happens? He's gotten away with it, even though it was messy, right? So where is he in his mind at that point? He thought he would get caught. He was pretty scared. He did not get caught, so he felt empowered, and within three months, he had murdered the

next person. But this time, he was more careful, except that he still made mistakes. Like picking the wrong victim? And it was a young woman. He thought he had identified somebody who didn't have dogs or people in her life or men, but she had a brother who showed up with her when he had, and what he liked to do is put himself inside a house and be the boogeyman, jumping out of the closet or startling you, because you're completely off guard.

You think your house is safe. You walk in, here's a man, and it's not like somebody breaking in your house when you're in there, because you can call the police, you can get it gone. This is about him taking you completely off guard. You have no resources. Is this fear for him, is that the real drive, it doesn't sound like it's sex necessarily? Well the two are together, definitely. The fear is erotic to him, making people afraid and feeling dominant over females is erotic

to him. He did not have sex with the victims. So what happened? But he had a highly erotic experience when he was strangling someone. He tried different methods and decided what he liked was strangling people. He liked posing bodies, it was just the idea of handling these female bodies and having complete control over them. It's very similar to what Bundy said when he got caught, Dahmer said about men, they

liked control. Because he lacked control he felt in his life. But he didn't lack control. I mean he was the primary breadwinner, his wife had a job, but he was the primary breadwinner, he had kids. He was at the time the vice president of his church congregation and then became the president, that's when he got caught. How was Dennis Rader able to juggle all of those different roles that he played in his

life? So if for now family man is working, that's what they're going to present to you. But they can quickly change to a different side if the opportunity arises that they consider to be in their self-interest. They're not rooted in identity the way most of us are. So it's hard for us to understand this because most of us who see ourselves in a certain way and want to think there's consistency in our presentation to people and there's integrity in the things that we say that if I said this I mean this and you're going to see me say

the same thing tomorrow. That's not in their thinking at all. They don't really care if they're telling the truth or not. What they care about is to get what they're out for and so they can pivot to the very next thing so fast and you cannot say and even if you have it on record you can be recording what they say. They're not even going to acknowledge it because they know it doesn't matter. If you tell them you just lied, I have you on tape, you lied.

So they'll shrug it off and walk away and maybe they can manipulate you if they can't they'll go into the next person. But they'll take from you everything that they possibly can because they're vampires. If you let them in they will take what they can and then they move on after they've tapped you out to the next person. They don't have to be criminals to do that. They can take all kinds of things from you emotionally, financially. Let's share a bank account and how your money is mine.

There's so many things they can do that don't rise to the level of criminality because they're watching you as predators. You are not going to have the same tools to deal with them as they have to deal with you. So back to the question, how can we spot them? I think you can spot the low functioning ones fairly easily because they make mistakes. That's why they're getting bruises, why they get caught. They're not that bright. You can spot their inconsistencies fairly quickly and sometimes they give off a vibe that you

just think, I don't want to be around this person. But the high functioning ones think you have a very hard time spotting them until you're already in their web. You're already friends with them or you're already in a relationship or possibly married or living in the same house or they're your roommate. You're already in something with them and they've already figured you out before you had a chance to do them. Okay, so obviously he was a good manipulator.

Did he ever lose control at any point? He didn't lack control. There were times he lost jobs and whatnot, but his final job was a compliance officer. He would go in and before that he was installing security systems. I mean, that's not really a loss of control. He had achieved a college degree, so not really a loss of control there for him. Okay, let's go back to 1974 to the break in where Raider thinks the woman will be alone and she brings her brother home.

Catherine Bright, that happened about three months after the Oteros and he thought he had scoped it all out and turns out he hadn't and unexpectedly she brought, she came home and her brother was with her and there was a scuffle and Raider thought he was going to die because Kevin Bright grabbed his gun and he really thought it was over for him, but and he shot Kevin twice thinking he was going to die, but Kevin ran and that ruined the whole thing for Raider because now he had to hurry. This is always what's in his mind. He says things like, I'm unlucky because something always interfered with everything

I wanted to do, you know, bad weather conditions or, you know, somebody was coming, they expected a phone call, so I never got a good shot at all that I fantasized about. Very poor me. It was just very similar to psychopaths. Psychopaths are all about, I'm the victim. They blame others, they feel they whine, the whining psychopath, the whining psychopath. I'm talking with Dr. Catherine Ramsland, who spent five years interviewing serial killer Dennis Raider.

She mentioned this checklist, so we're going to pause for a minute and I'll explain a little bit more about it. It's a criteria that experts use to diagnose a patient with psychopathy. It's called the hair checklist, created decades ago by researcher Robert Hare. It's basically a 20-item symptom rating scale that includes pathological lying, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, sexual promiscuity, impulsivity, just to name a few, but whining didn't make the list and Dr. Ramsland thinks it should have. I once asked Robert Hare, why didn't he not add that to the psychopathy checklist?

Because to my mind, that's the number one thing, is they're always whining about their circumstances. Because it's all about them. It's all about them, but they don't even see that they put themselves in these circumstances. I think he said something like, well, when I had 22 items rather than 20 in the revised version, that was one of them. Well, you shouldn't have taken that one off. That's what I see, no matter what.

I mean, every single identified psychopath who is some kind of public figure, so usually they're criminals, lines about their situation. And it's so hard to have any empathy for them because they have so little insight about how they got in these situations and that they wouldn't have been in these situations if they hadn't committed these crimes or done these horrible things to other people. But they minimize it. Rader will even say, he's a good person who did some bad things. And he's not the only one, Bundy said it, Dahmer said it.

They do see that since my murders are a small part of my life, in terms of how much time I spend on everything else, then you can't really say I'm a bad person because I do all these other things. Like I help my neighbors, I'm a good father. So what, he's giving himself permission to do all these things? They really can't see that the decisions they made to harm others and to not have any feeling for the harm they've done, not just to those people, but all the reverberations into their families as well.

What's uppermost in their minds is all about me, all about me. And if it didn't work out, I was unlucky or something was unfair. I mean, there was a time when Rader's daughter gave an interview to the newspapers about 10 years, this is 10 years after he was arrested. And she talks in a very emotional way about how horrible this was for her and her family and their victims too. And he just doesn't seem to understand how he harmed us. And Rader saw the interview and what he said to me was, do you see I got my name in the

paper? Oh, gosh. And that's the way he was all the time. He never had any sense of the people he harmed. His victims belonged to him. And if he didn't have enough time to do something that he wanted to do to them, it was bad luck and something went against him and whining. It's whining.

The serial killer for my first book, Death in the Air, John Reginald Christie, used to keep photos of himself in his prison cell. And he once pointed to his penis and told the prison guard, this is the reason why everybody is here. I mean, I just thought how incredible this man has never gotten attention at all. He just sort of always blended it into the wallpaper. And that's what I've always thought about, Dennis Rader, just somebody who's never gotten attention and now he's getting all at once everything that he's wanted and how pathetic

that is. Well, but it isn't that he never got attention. He was a person in his church. He had some standing, some authority. He was a compliance officer and people had to obey him when he told them their grass was too long or their dog was running around or something. So it isn't that he got none. He just didn't get enough in his mind.

It's all about their perception. And their perception is filtered through, pour me, pour me, the wine. It's always filtered through that. And the same thing with Eileen Warnows, this, you know, clearly psychopathic female. Wow. Is that ever a poor me, poor me? And yeah, of course, she did have some problems, but boy, did she victimize people and not just the men she murdered.

I mean, she got married to this older, really older guy, a lot older than her and then just spent his money and did, you know, she just didn't care. She didn't care about except for herself. Okay. But how do we even know how to categorize somebody like that? Well, the difficulty with categorizing a female psychopath is that we haven't done that much research on them and the tools we've used have more developed for male psychopaths with the mistaken idea that anything that comes out of research with males will apply equally

to females. And we're finding that that is probably not true. So now we have to rethink the idea of how a female psychopath might operate. And it turns out that a lot of women who are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder might in fact be psychopaths. But we've tended to think of them, you know, borderline as being a female disorder. And we tend not to think of females being psychopaths. And I think this has a lot to do with many of the theories were developed by males who

really did not want to think about women being psychopathic because that's very uncomfortable. The idea of mothers being psychopaths, wives being psychopaths is very uncomfortable. And I've certainly met police officers and attorneys and psychologists even who really don't want to think that women can be that bad. We still have people who don't want to go the distance with this and really believe that this is it could be. I think that when they made the movie of Eileen Warnows, for example, now she does definitely come up as a psychopath on the psychopathy checklist.

However, when they made the movie, they gave her all kinds of excuses. So they bent the facts, they made her girlfriend look small and she wasn't small out of work, but she had a job. So they made it look like the reason Eileen Warnows was so violent was because of all the things that had happened to her and the fact that she had to take care of her girlfriend. And they gave her every out, I thought it was unfair, first of all, to women to believe that they, in some way, can't rise to some kind of criminality that males can rise to. I think they absolutely can and have.

But when I saw that movie, it was clear to me, people just don't want to accept that a woman can be just a coal-hearted, remorseless, angry killer. And she even said that about herself. She said, if you let me out, I'll do it again. And it sounds like Dennis Rader was exactly the same way. Let me just say, so from his success with killing people, he began to, the thing about every potential serial killer is this, at least those who fantasize about it. When they do it, when they actually murder, that is a turning point one way or the other.

It's, wow, this isn't all, it's cracked up to me. I don't want to do this again. Now I have a body and it's icky and I don't want to do it. It wasn't anything like my fantasy and I don't want to do it. And they then do not become serial killers. If they like it, and it is all it's cracked up to be or more, they're set now for I need to do this again. And with Rader doing it again, it did take some time because there was three months between

the first and second, but then almost three years before the next one, because he became a father and he was busy and he did stuff. But in his mind, he's always thinking, this is the heat. This is what matters. This is who I really am, no matter what I'm doing on the side with my social contracts. What I am is a killer. And I want to be acknowledged for that some day somehow. So he's always looking for potential victims and the circumstances weren't always correct

for him to act out, but he was always stalking, peeping in windows, watching for opportunities. So when people say something about Rader and commonly, there's an idea that Rader stopped. That is not what he says, I failed. And so that's what's more interesting, Batman, is that he wasn't always out, like Bundy was out of control. Finally, toward the end, it's just, I just got a kill, Dom or two. I mean, he just accelerated what he was doing, but Rader could keep control over it. But he was always, his real sense of who he was, the heat of it, the beating heart of

his identity was that he was a serial killer. And he wanted to be a famous one. There have been metaphors to try to characterize this sense of when a psychopath has a goal, they're like on a speeding train. They don't think about negative consequences, they're just completely bent on the reward no matter what. So a high functioning psychopath is going to be a little more clever, whether they're IQ smart or street smart or whatever it will be, they're going to realize, I don't want

to end up in prison. So even though I want that thing, and it's against the law, I don't want to end up in prison. So I'm going to find a way to get it that is within legal realms. So I think high functioning is going to just be more creative. He wanted to be a Jack the Ripper. Reaching out to the media. Reaching out to the police.

The media playing the games he was playing and believing that if, you know, he left something behind after he died, somebody would open a safety deposit box or something and go, whoa, it was Dennis Rader and he took great satisfaction in getting away with it. But everybody knowing he got away with it. So that was an interesting aspect of him that I saw constantly coming forward in our discussions and the things that he said as he wanted that fame, but he didn't ever want to really think about emotional or moral consequences. Was there anything that surprised you about him or was that what you just said would surprise

you? Nothing surprised me because I mean, I've studied serial killers, there's lots and lots of them way before him. But he's an outlier and that interested me. It didn't surprise me because I have never been one who likes psychological formulas. I think people are more diverse and more interesting and complicated than most of the formulas allow them to be. So for me, that was intriguing to find someone like him that demonstrates that.

And I think he's a good lesson for us. So let's pause for a moment to catch up. After Kathy Bright, Dennis Rader killed five more people. In 1977, he killed two women and at this point, he became irritated by the lack of media coverage. So he wrote a letter to a local TV station in Wichita and said, how many people do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention than nothing that we know of. He waited eight more years before killing his neighbor in 1985.

And the next year, he murdered another woman. Then his final victim was Dolores Davis in 1991, when he strangled the 61-year-old in her home. He didn't get caught till 2005. He went on to lead a normal life, although he was always watching for opportunities and he had planned another one that didn't come off and he was about ready to retry it when he was caught. And he was caught by something stupid playing this cat and mouse game with police.

What kind of cat and mouse game? What he used to do is he'd send them these things he was writing, these chapters of his story and then he'd go copy them and take the copies and copy them on a different copier until he had several generations of copies so that it couldn't be traced to a copier. And he got tired of that and also didn't have the same kind of time he used to have because he had to report back to his wife. So he asked, could I use a floppy disk instead? He took one that he'd used to take notes for a church.

Had he used a brand new one, it wouldn't have been, I think, as easy for them to catch them as they did. But he didn't. He used one that has a name on it and it was traced back to the church where he had used the computer and as the minister he worked with knew that and they got him. Stupid mistake. And to this day, he knows it was stupid and he kicks himself for it. So Dennis Rader is the guy who craves attention but someone you would never expect to be a

psychopath, right? Someone who ultimately kills 10 people. He just didn't present as one is what you're saying. So these guys kind of sneak up on us. Just about every psychopathy researcher who spends day in and day out on this topic will admit they can be duped by a psychopath. So it would be, it's not really very smart to try to think you've got all the red flags, you know what they are, you're always going to be safe from psychopaths because you're

always going to know because you're not. I mean, they're very good at figuring out how to leverage you. I wrote this one article, the six things psychopaths know about you that makes you unsafe. And it uses common human tendencies. For example, if you're in a new place and you're a little uncertain and they're watching you, they can see you're uncertain. They know you're going to respond to a kind person offering you directions or maybe even hey, hey, you need a place to stay, come to my house.

People do this. They trust somebody who extends a kind hand or psychopaths know that you are going to tend to appreciate somebody who's very confident, who seems to know what they're doing, who has credentials. Well, psychopaths want to hesitate to lie about how confident they are or their credentials because they don't have any sense of truth. They have no commitment to truth. They have commitment only to themselves.

So without a commitment to truth, you're not going to spot that sort of hesitation of, oh, I'm lying. Should I be lying that you can see in people who might have some degree of remorse. So to think that you're going to spot them first, you're wrong. They're the predators. They've been watching you and they know the kinds of things you as an ordinary human being tend to do and what you respond to. And they're going to use that against you in every way that they can.

Before you even think about, could this person be a psychopath? They're going to circumvent that. If they're clever, they're going to circumvent that before you even have a chance to evaluate them. And then they're gone. On the next episode of Wicked Words, there's a soft knock at the door and she's like, I can't keep him out. And he can crash the door down, so she opens it and he says, I'm sorry.

I think you have my t-shirt. So he takes his t-shirt and turns to leave. And before he leaves, he says, you don't know me. I live on the other side of town and leaves. If you love historical true crime, please check out my books, American Sherlock and Death in the Air. This has been an exactly right Tenfold More Media production. Alexis Amorosi is our producer.

Andrew Epen is our sound designer. Ella Middleton is a researcher for us. Curtis Heath does the composition. Nick Toga did the artwork and Ilsa Brink designed the website. The executive producers are Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff, and Daniel Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at Tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at Tenfold More. If you are an advertiser interested in advertising on our show, go to midroll.com slash ads.

And if you know of a historical true crime story that could use some attention from the crew at Tenfold More Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked.com. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.