Pod Insights All In The Mind Where have all the serial killers gone? About this episode The backpacker killer. The Claremont killer. Ted Bundy. The crimes serial killers commit linger in our memories for decades.
But when was the last time you heard about an active serial killer in the news?
In our final episode of Criminal Psychology, we probe the lead-crime hypothesis, find out about 'chemical castration' and ask — where have all the serial killers gone?
And a heads up that this episode explores some heavy themes including sexual assault, child abuse, suicide and murder. It also contains the names of Aboriginal people who have died. Please take care while listening.
If you've got more questions for our forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee, please send them to us! We're going to make a special mail-bag episode featuring your burning true crime questions. Get in touch by emailing us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] with the subject line "criminal psychology question".
Guests:
Dr Rajan DarjeeForensic psychiatristClinical Director, Forensic Behavioural Assessment and Consultation Services
Dr Xanthe MallettCriminologistAssociate Professor of Criminology, Central Queensland UniversityCo-Director, Queensland Centre for Domestic and Family Violence ResearchPodcast co-host, Motive and Method https://www.instagram.com/motiveandmethod/?hl=en
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Emrys CroninMore information:
The lead-crime hypothesis: A meta-analysis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667Support resources:
Beyond Blue https://www.beyondblue.org.au/Lifeline https://www.lifeline.org.au/ 13 11 141800 Respect https://www.1800respect.org.au/
Transcript 5,313 words · 13 speakers
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0:37 Speaker 02 A quick warning before today's show. This episode is about serial killers, so it does get a bit dark. We touch on some heavy themes like sexual assault, child abuse, suicide and, yes, murder. It also contains the names of Aboriginal people who have died. Do take care while listening to this one.
0:58 Speaker 02 So a bit of behind the scenes backstory to begin with. This is our final episode in our series Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind. And we, the team here, we hesitated for a while on whether to do an episode on serial killers. Like, we thought, hasn't enough been said? Haven't the plethora of true crime pods and documentaries and YouTube videos covered it all? So let's get into the murders.
1:24 Speaker 03 You know, why, if he had two kids, I mean, how could he be a serial killer?
1:27 Speaker 04 We can look at one of Thailand's earliest known serial killers.
1:31 Speaker 02 Like, is there anything new left to say?
1:34 Speaker 05 He was ashamed because his mother made him feel shameful. Most serial killers suffer from some kind of personality disorder, usually psychopathy.
1:42 Speaker 02 And depending on just how obsessed you are with the true crime genre, the answer might be no. There is nothing new to say here across it all. But as we mulled over this topic, we wondered, why are all the serial killers we talk about, like Ivan Milat, the backpacker killer, Bradley Edwards, the Claremont killer, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy in the US? Why are they all from decades ago? Like, when was the last time you saw a headline about a killer actively stalking a suburb or a patch of rural land?
2:15 Speaker 06 Their bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest in the New South Wales southern Highlands. Bundy, a former law student, conducted his own defence.
2:23 Speaker 02 So, are serial killers disappearing? And if so, why?
2:28 Speaker 07 My job as a forensic psychiatrist is to make sure the people I work with don't hurt people, and that's my primary responsibility.
2:36 Speaker 02 Today, from the lead crime hypothesis to chemical castration, we find out where all the serial killers have gone and what they might be doing instead. You know, they are the worst of the worst. They are the bogeyman that we all fear. I'm Sana Qadar. This is Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind.
2:58 Speaker 02 So first off, I can confirm, we're not imagining this trend.
3:03 Speaker 07 The number of serial killers is definitely going down, or number of serial killings is going down. And we've seen that pattern in North America. We've seen it here. We've also seen it in places like the UK. So it looks like serial killing peaked in the 70s and 80s and has been going down since then. And certainly it's at a lower level now than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago.
3:30 Speaker 02 This is Dr Rajan Darjee.
3:32 Speaker 07 I'm a forensic psychiatrist. I'm based in Melbourne and I'm the Clinical Director of Forensic Behavioural Assessment and Consultation Services.
3:42 Speaker 02 He has dealt with serial killers in his work, as well as killers he suspects would have gone on to become the serial variety if they hadn't been caught.
3:50 Speaker 07 I would say, just in terms of the people that I've seen, probably about one or two a year where I think the person would potentially have killed again. And that's because there's been something about them that drives them to kill, usually because they take pleasure in killing and it meets the need for them. But also they have this profound lack of empathy.
4:15 Speaker 02 He says it's interesting to think about why there might be fewer cases of serial killers now, because it's not like those two characteristics have disappeared or even diminished.
4:26 Speaker 07 And so there's two things that I think is important in their makeup. One is... Having the desire to kill.
4:32 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
4:33 Speaker 07 But having the desire to kill isn't enough. You have to also lack empathy. Because empathy is the thing that puts the brakes on us doing things that might hurt other people or things that might get us into trouble. And the things that lead to those things are things like psychopathic personality traits. So that's what leads to a lack of empathy. Now, that's probably no more or less common now than it was in the past, because that's largely due to inherited genetic factors and early upbringing. And in terms of the desire to kill, that's can be based on all sorts of things. So about 50% of people who commit serial murder, the desire to kill is based on sexual fantasies of killing.
5:18 Speaker 02 What was the percentage you said?
5:20 Speaker 07 About half of people who commit serial murder, it's sexually motivated.
5:25 Speaker 02 As for the other half, Dr. Dargi says a number of motivators can be at play. The person might get a thrill out of killing and a sense of power, or they might be a hitman, so it's part of the job description. But to come back to the sexual motivation.
5:40 Speaker 07 So, and actually, having a sexual desire to hurt other people probably isn't any more or less common now than it was before. So what you're probably looking at in terms of why we have less serial killings now is things that mean people get caught after one murder.
6:02 Speaker 02 The obvious factors are advances in DNA science, advances in surveillance technology and CCTV, better policing. But Dr. Dargi says there are some less obvious factors at play as well.
6:15 Speaker 07 So, for example, if you look at what we've been doing since the 1990s, we are much better at actually how we treat and manage people who've committed offences. And I think we'd be much more. I'd call it evidence based, but we're doing it based on what we know about patterns of behaviour. The other thing is, I think, society in general, you know, we always talk about a good old days, but there's no good old days.
6:42 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
6:42 Speaker 07 Uh, if you look backwards, every period before has been worse than now in terms of violence and abuse. And, you know, we've got things in society we just didn't have in the seventies and eighties when I was growing up.
6:54 Speaker 02 Like, what do you mean by that?
6:55 Speaker 07 Things like, we actually have fairly well-developed child protection systems. We probably have a society where we're more willing to help each other. But also, and I think we have to be careful about this, we're, we now live at a time where we're probably a bit less relaxed about letting children go out. We're probably a bit more cautious in general about how we go about our lives. And I think all of these things make it more difficult for people who want to target victims to be able to target victims.
7:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've read about things like how, you know, in the sixties, seventies, hitchhiking was very common. And so that lent to a lot of, you know, people falling victim. People were more likely to leave their doors unlocked, kind of thing. So do you think that, yeah, that all plays into the fact that they were much more cautious now? Actually means there's less opportunity to be a victim of a serial killer?
7:48 Speaker 07 Yes, absolutely. You know, this idea that it was, you know, people left their doors and windows open in the past, that was not a good thing. You know, because people kind of say, well, I used to leave my doors open because things were so, so much safer. They weren't.
8:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:02 Speaker 07 It's just because people used to do that. And therefore, it just means people have got access to you if they want to harm you. I mean, hitchhiking was fairly common. I remember actually going hitchhiking myself in the UK back in the eighties, just because you, you, people hitchhike. It wasn't seen as a big deal, but I don't see people hitchhiking these days at all. And hitchhiking makes people vulnerable. And we saw that with the Ivan Mallett case.
8:34 Speaker 02 Ivan Mallett, you cannot have a discussion about serial killers in Australia. Without talking about this man and his devastating crimes.
8:42 Speaker 08 The police are anxious to make this search exhaustive, so they might be here in the Belanglo State Forest for some time.
8:49 Speaker 02 Between 1989 and 1992, Milat kidnapped and murdered at least seven young backpackers, aged 19 to 22, whose bodies were all found in the Belanglo State Forest between Sydney and Canberra.
9:02 Speaker 09 Today, police confirmed the skeletal remains of the second body found in the.
9:06 Speaker 02 They were British backpackers Caroline Clark and Joanne Walters, German backpackers Gabor Neugebauer, Anya Habshide and Simone Schmittl, and Melbourne couple Deborah Everest and James Gibson.
9:18 Speaker 10 Police found a bag containing five lengths of rope in Ivan Milat's garage, similar to rope used in the Neugebauer and Habshide murders.
9:27 Speaker 02 They'd all been hitchhiking when they were picked up by Milat.
9:35 Speaker 02 Okay, so in terms of why there might be fewer serial killers now, it's a confluence of factors. One is surveillance is better than it was before, we have DNA science, people are behaving differently, we're more cautious. But you also mentioned treatment has improved.
9:51 Speaker 07 Yeah, absolutely. I think if you kind of think of people who might commit serial murder, they might start by committing, say, violent sexual offences, they might move on to committing a homicide. And then if they were left to it, they would then go on to repeatedly do that. But if we're able to intervene earlier with people who commit violent rape offences or after they've committed a first murder, then we're less likely to have people who go on to commit a series of murders.
10:19 Speaker 02 And so how do you possibly treat these people? Can they be rehabilitated?
10:23 Speaker 07 Yes, I think they can be. But, you know, my starting point, if I see someone who's committed one murder and there's aspects of them that makes me think they've got a potential to commit another murder because, for example, they're sexually sadistic or psychopathic, then my starting point is to say, okay, unless we've got good evidence that we have managed to ameliorate what's going on with them, it's probably not going to be safe for them to be back out in society. And then you have to think of, okay, what are the things that are driving them to hurt and kill people? And you have to look at what you can do to actually change those things.
11:08 Speaker 07 So, example, and this would apply to, I think of three people I've met in three different jurisdictions that would fit this picture. So all three people I'm thinking of have been in prison for about thirty years.
11:20 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
11:20 Speaker 07 Uh, they've been model prisoners, that's how they've been described. There haven't been problems with their behaviour in prison for the last two decades. And people are saying, okay, they've been in prison for a long time now, we need to think about parole. And the thing is with those individuals, all have had sexual fantasies that have led to them doing what they did. One of them killed a child and two of them killed women.
11:43 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:43 Speaker 07 And so, the, the thing is, although they were model prisoners, the question I ask myself is, okay, how do I know you haven't still got these sexual fantasies? Now, one of them was saying, I do have these fantasies, please help me.
11:57 Speaker 02 Hmm.
11:58 Speaker 07 And he was tortured by them. One of them said, oh, I occasionally have these fantasies, but most of the time I don't. And the other one denied having these fantasies altogether. And my view in all of them was that we had to be sure that they weren't having these fantasies. These fantasies led to them killing people. And so what we did in all three cases is we offered them treatment with injectable, long-acting antilabidinal medications.
12:22 Speaker 02 Like chemical castration?
12:23 Speaker 07 Yeah, that's what some people call it.
12:25 Speaker 02 Right.
12:25 Speaker 07 But um, I, I don't like to call it that because um, it, you know, there's kind of moralistic overtones and people can get a bit kind of um, a bit punitive about it. I, I see it as a treatment that can offer people the opportunity to not have these fantasies and urges.
12:42 Speaker 02 Hmm.
12:42 Speaker 07 So the drugs that we give by injection, what they do is they, basically, they down-regulate the system in the body in men that is to do with testosterone. So it reduces testosterone to the level of a man who's been castrated. And what we know is you have to have testosterone in your brain to have sexual fantasies and urges. And if you can take that away, then you're taking away the thing that motivates them to take pleasure from killing. And if they haven't got something that motivates them to take pleasure from killing, even if they still lack empathy. They're not going to seek pleasure from killing people. Now, it's not quite as simple as that because you want to make sure that you've
13:26 Speaker 07 done other things, like all three of these individuals I'm thinking of all ended up being released to the community and they had a high level of monitoring and supervision by correctional services, police. There was lots going on around them. This isn't a case of, you know, you have the treatment, you're good to go.
13:41 Speaker 02 Right.
13:42 Speaker 07 And getting on with your life. But they are people who've managed to be in the community with support and monitoring without hurting people. And if it wasn't for the drugs, in none of those cases would I have recommended that we even tried that.
14:02 Speaker 02 There is another theory for why we have fewer serial killers now and fewer violent crimes in general that has nothing to do with treatment or surveillance or DNA or a more cautious approach to strangers. It's called the lead crime hypothesis. It goes something like this. Before the 1980s, there was lead in gasoline, in water pipes, in paint, all over the environment. And exposure to lead, especially in childhood, has been linked to aggression and antisocial behaviour. But since lead was phased out of fuel in particular, that has coincided with a steady decline in violent crime across the Western world. It's been most pronounced in the US,
14:45 Speaker 02 where the homicide rate has halved since the 1980s. It's a compelling theory and a new book called Murderland from Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser dives into it in immense detail. But compelling as it may be, Dr Darje isn't convinced.
15:04 Speaker 07 I think that if that has contributed, it's going to be a relatively minor contribution in the overall picture. You know, you can't take one factor like that and say, that's the magic bullet. So, you know, it probably is a good idea that we don't get some degree of lead poisoning now. And it's probably a good idea that all sorts of things that are toxic are less likely to be things that we consume. And that might have an impact. But I don't think, you know, the fact that we've got less lead in our pipes now is probably a major factor in reducing violence and reducing serial killing.
15:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was sort of looking into the research around this. And I found, you know, there's one meta-analysis that was published in 2022 that led the researchers to estimate that the reduction in lead pollution might be responsible for seven to 28% of the decline in homicide in the US. So, you know, a small portion, although if it's if it's the upper bound of 28%, that is a sizable portion.
16:05 Speaker 07 I didn't know about that specific research. But, you know, it's it's interesting to think about that. Yeah, it might contribute. But the thing is with any kind of association like that, it's very difficult to know what's causing it. And I'm sure they took into account things that might confound that relation to some extent. But with something that's environmental like that, it's very difficult to take into account all the confounding factors.
16:33 Speaker 02 We do know that lead is related to like aggression, though, in children, isn't it?
16:37 Speaker 07 It it may be, but again, it's not, you know, as a forensic psychiatrist, I it's not a factor that I I have in my head as one of the major factors. I think, you know, being exposed to alcohol at a young age is going to cause problems with brain development.
16:53 Speaker 02 Right.
16:53 Speaker 07 And may potentially lead to some people being aggressive. So there's all sorts of things that can be toxic to the developing brain. And, you know, that that can potentially lead to aggressive behavior.
17:07 Speaker 02 So not a whole lot of buy-in from Dr. Darjee, at least, on the lead crime hypothesis. But I'll just mention that meta-analysis from 2022. It looked at 24 studies. And despite finding that seven to 28% of the reduction in homicide in the US might be down to the decrease in lead pollution, it also noted there is a strong bias in the literature, meaning studies that show a strong correlation between lead and crime are more likely to get published than those that find a weaker correlation. If you want to find out more, we'll link to that paper in our show notes.
17:47 Speaker 02 Okay, so we've been talking about why there seem to be fewer serial killers out there these days. You don't really hear stories about active serial killers. And one of the reasons is they just get caught earlier now, after their first kill, whereas in previous eras, they might have gone on to become serial killers. But while there aren't any active cases in Australia in the news right now, that doesn't mean there aren't any serial killers out there at the moment, somewhere. Of course, a negative is very hard to prove, but consider what criminologist Zanthie Mallon has to say.
18:24 Speaker 02 I'm wondering, do you think there are still serial killers out there who are managing to go undetected?
18:30 Speaker 11 Yeah, I certainly do. I mean, if you look at Bradley Edwards, he went unidentified for decades.
18:34 Speaker 02 Bradley Edwards, I'll just explain briefly, is the man you might otherwise know as the Claremont Killer in Perth. He wasn't convicted until 2020, but his crimes were primarily in the mid 90s, when he killed 23-year-old Jane Rimmer and 27-year-old Kira Glennon. Both women had been enjoying a night out when they disappeared. He was also suspected in the murder of another woman, 18-year-old Sarah Spears, but her body was never found, and so there wasn't enough evidence to convict him of that crime. And his conviction took so long because of a series of convoluted events involving contaminated DNA, before there was a DNA breakthrough, leading to his arrest in 2016.
19:18 Speaker 11 And I don't want to cause any, you know, I'm not saying that we're running rampant with serial killers. Fortunately, we haven't had that many in Australia. But certainly, you know, people do disappear. They are still traveling around Australia. There is a lot of outback out there. And so, yeah, I do think there will be possibly one or two active serial killers, you know, in Australia that are currently unidentified.
19:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:41 Speaker 11 And the patterns haven't been recognized.
19:43 Speaker 02 And I do wonder if there are these people going undetected at the moment, if it's because they are perhaps targeting people that society seems to ignore. So like, sex workers, Indigenous women, people struggling with addiction.
19:55 Speaker 11 Absolutely. That's exactly where I was going. There may be people already vulnerable. They may be suffering homelessness, or, as you say, sex workers. And certainly Indigenous women are vulnerable. So, yes, and I think as a society, we... We weight life, don't we? We value life differently. And you only look at the Barrowville killings. You have three children under sixteen murdered in a small place in Barrowville. Now, if that had been on the eastern suburbs of Sydney, three little Caucasian children, it would have made news headlines around the world. But in Australia, it's like, you know, the detectives couldn't get any media interest because they were, and I don't mean this, but just indigenous children.
20:36 Speaker 11 And that's horrific that we could have a serial killer picking off children and nobody cares.
20:43 Speaker 12 The bodies of four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and sixteen-year-old Clinton Speedy were found in bushland.
20:50 Speaker 02 The Barrowville murders happened over a five-month period back in 1990 in the town of Barrowville on the mid-north coast of New South Wales.
20:58 Speaker 12 Colleen Walker, also sixteen, is still missing, presumed dead.
21:02 Speaker 02 All three children knew each other and all disappeared after attending parties on the same street in Barrowville. The youngest victim, four-year-old Evelyn, disappeared after being put to bed at her grandmother's house. But when the families reported the children's disappearances, local police suggested some of them had gone walkabout.
21:22 Speaker 11 Police were ready to end their search. Then, the grim discovery yesterday of a child's skull. You know, this investigation was very poor initially. There was a very poor relationship between the police and that indigenous community. Eventually, new officers did come on board and they really did push to solve that case.
21:41 Speaker 02 A local man was the prime suspect for a number of years, and he was charged with two of the murders, but then later acquitted. And so in this case, no one has ever been caught.
21:52 Speaker 11 And it's heartbreaking that those three families still don't have answers all of these years later. And I've met Evelyn's grandmother, and she's a beautiful person, and she still suffers to this day as a result of not knowing who is responsible or nobody being brought to justice.
22:14 Speaker 02 You're listening to Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar.
22:23 Speaker 02 If we go back to our original premise now, that there are fewer serial killers in general than there used to be, the question I have is what are these people doing instead? Now that they're not serial killing? Like, are they all just sitting in jail? Well, some of them are sitting in jail, for sure. Or have some people been deterred by how much harder it's become to get away with this kind of crime?
22:46 Speaker 07 I don't think deterrence works for these people.
22:48 Speaker 02 Forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee again.
22:51 Speaker 07 I mean, there's actually not much evidence that deterrence works, full stop, in terms of, if you look at the criminalological literature, it certainly doesn't work for people who repeatedly commit offences, because if you look at people who commit serial murder, they go out of their way to plan, to control their victims, and they show a high degree of forensic awareness. So, we looked at serial sexual murderers in Australia and New Zealand, compared them to one-off sexual murderers, and as you'd expect, a very high level of planning, precautions, and forensic awareness in serial sexual murderers compared to single sexual murderers. So, you know, I don't think deterrence necessarily works for these individuals.
23:35 Speaker 07 And then you think about other things. Are there some people who have the same developments, but they decide not to enact this in reality? And that might be the case. You know, we know that, for example, just to skip across to another type of behaviour, there's less contact child sex abuse now than there has been over the last 30 years. At the same time, there's been an escalation in online child sexual abuse material offending. You know, one hypothesis, and I'm not saying this is proved, is that there are a number of people now who are living out their fantasies online, rather than living them out in the real world. Now, that doesn't mean that's great, because, you know, to have child sex
24:19 Speaker 07 abuse material, children have to be abused. So, it's still related to children being abused, but you've got a... Potentially different pattern of offending in some of these individuals. And it's plausible, although I don't know how we'd prove it, that some people are moving to kind of enacting their fantasies, because you can do that in more and more real ways in virtual environments.
24:44 Speaker 02 It's all really dark to think about, but I just want to throw one more idea out there from criminologist Xanthi Mallett. It's related to domestic violence, but this idea requires a reframe in how we think about serial killings.
25:00 Speaker 11 People committing domestic family violence. You know, we had some really serious offenders in that group, serial offenders. So one of the things I'm interested in at the moment, I actually work in Central Queensland Uni in a Centre for Domestic and Family Violence Research. So it's a perfect question. One of the things I'm interested in are the serial perpetrators, especially when there's an outcome of suicide for the victim. More people are dying as a result of suicide than domestic violence-related homicide. And they're really hidden victims. So there's no, at the moment, there's no consequence for the person who drove them to it.
25:36 Speaker 02 Hmm.
25:36 Speaker 11 So these women and children are suiciding as a last resort. And so I'm interested in the people who are driving these, usually women, to those kind of lengths. And to me, they're a type of serial killer, because people are dying as a result of their actions.
25:58 Speaker 02 Now, we've mostly focused on a particular type of serial killer in this episode, kind of like the archetype, the person that targets vulnerable strangers late at night or the person who might be sexually motivated. But there are other types as well, like healthcare-based serial killers, sometimes referred to as angels of death. And the one you probably can think of most readily is Lucy Letby, the nurse who was found guilty of killing a number of babies in the UK. Although it's worth mentioning, there are still questions around her case. Either way, I wanted to ask Dr. Darjee whether those types of serial killers are in decline as well and what we know about healthcare serial killers.
26:40 Speaker 07 I mean, I think all types of serial killer are in decline. When you think about people who do this in healthcare settings, again, there's something about killing that is a need for them. And in many of these cases, it's the need either to have the power of control over life and death. And it sometimes overlaps with something we see in factitious disorder by proxy or Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
27:09 Speaker 02 Just briefly, if you want to know more about Munchausen by proxy, that was the subject of episode one of our series on criminal psychology. Scroll back in your podcast feed to listen to that after this, if you haven't already.
27:21 Speaker 07 Where these individuals create a scenario where someone is close to death or going to die, so that they can get involved in or see what happens.
27:34 Speaker 02 So the drama of it?
27:35 Speaker 07 Yes, to some extent, the drama of it, but also, as I say, that ability to have the power over life and death becomes something that's intensely important in that individual. So it's not a sexual need, it's that particular need. But again, there'll be reasons why these particular individuals lack empathy, so that what they do is they act out their needs, because there's no break on that at all. And that lack of empathy doesn't mean that people have got psychopathy. You know, you can get lack of empathy because you're highly narcissistic, even though you're not necessarily psychopathic. You can have lack of empathy because you're a very detached individual, someone that we might describe as schizoid.
28:23 Speaker 02 One question I want to ask is, you know, you said your job is to make sure people don't hurt other people. I guess over your years working in forensic psychiatry, have you come to any conclusions or reflections on human nature? Like, how do you process these crimes, you know, the worst that humans can do to each other?
28:42 Speaker 07 It's an interesting question, because
28:46 Speaker 07 Look, and I'm trying to say this in the right way. I'm, I don't look at things through framework and morality. I don't think that's helpful. And so I describe myself as amoral, not immoral. Because I don't think morality helps us. And I don't look at things through the view of evil. Because I don't think these kind of religious, superstitious concepts help us. I think it's really important for us to understand people, understand what we actually know about why people do things and how they function. Because then we can do something about it. And perhaps, again, and I don't know whether this is just me or other people who work in a similar field, I think you have to have the right balance of being able to disconnect
29:28 Speaker 07 yourself from what happens, but not lose sight of humans, both victims and perpetrators. And one of the things I always say with my work is I know the victims, I understand the victims, that's why I do what I do. But to actually prevent people being victimized, I have to know perpetrators. And that involves forming positive relationships with them. Because then I can work with them to prevent victims being caused. The why is the victims and the how is by understanding perpetrators.
30:06 Speaker 02 That is forensic psychiatrist Dr. Rajan Darjee. And that concludes our series Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind. Although, it's not all over yet. We thought there are so many angles on the topic of serial killers that we didn't cover in this episode. And there's so many angles left to explore in the other episodes in the series as well. So if you feel like you've been left with actually some burning questions you'd love to have answered, or if you're a giant true crime fan and have always wanted to ask a forensic psychiatrist some questions, we are going to do a follow-up episode, a mailbag episode, where I will put your questions directly to Dr. Rajan Darjee.
30:48 Speaker 02 It'll be our first time trying this format, so please send your questions in. You can send them to [email protected] and put in the subject line Criminal Psychology Question. Again, the address is [email protected] . And I will put your questions to Dr. Darjee in a couple of weeks. And if this is the first episode of Criminal Psychology you've listened to, there are three others. We've also covered Munchausen by proxy, arson and pyromania, and theft and kleptomania. You can scroll back in your podcast feed and find all four episodes. But for this episode, apart from Dr Darjee, you also heard from Associate Professor
31:33 Speaker 02 of Criminology at Central Queensland University, Dr Zanthi Mallett. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, Senior Producer James Bullen, and Sound Engineer Emrys S. Cronin. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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