Face to face with John Wayne Gacy: Dr. Jeff Smalldon Pt.1

Imagine opening your letterbox to a letter from Ted Bundy or a handmade Christmas card from John Wayne Gacy. Forensic psychologist, Dr Jeffrey Smalldon, doesn't have to imagine. He's communicated with some of the most notorious serial killers in American history. In this episode, Gary and Jeff unpack Gacy’s charm and lures, how predators pass as “normal”, the double homicide that changed Jeff’s life, and what decades evaluating murderers reveal about psychopathy, empathy, and survival on death row. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The public has had a long-held fascination with detectives. Detectives see a side of life the average person is never exposed to. I spent 34 years as a cop. For 25 of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operate. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Imagine you open your letterbox to a letter from Ted Bundy, or a handmade Christmas card from John Wayne Gacy. My guest today, forensic psychologist Dr Jeffrey Smalldon, doesn't have to imagine. He's communicated with some of America's most notorious killers, trying to understand them. I found the conversation fascinating, and it gave a surprising insight into the mind of evil. Take a listen.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Dr Jeffrey Smalldon, welcome to I Catch Killers.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Good to be here, Gary.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Well, I'm excited about sitting down and speaking with you, although I've spent the past weekend reading through your book, The Beast Was Not Me. And it's a pretty heavy reading.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I suppose it is. I mean, it's mainly a memoir, True Crime: Second, but it's got some pretty dark stuff in it, for sure.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Well, I think the way that you told the story through your perspective, and there was, I might say, almost an innocence to you at the start, when you were meeting with some of these notorious killers.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Probably giving me a little more credit than I deserved, actually. I was very young and pretty stupid in most ways in some of the early things reported in my book.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, with it, um, like I was a homicide detective for uh over twenty years. And I know what it's like sitting and communicating with people that are evil and or have committed crimes that uh, you know, shocked most people. How did you isolate yourself from the type of people you were uh you were dealing with? How did how did you, from a personal point of view, step back from it and not walk away thinking the whole world's evil?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. You probably learned early on in your career to do the same thing. Uh, and I did too, otherwise I couldn't have done my job. And that's to compartmentalize pretty well. I mean, you have to be a good compartmentalizer. Uh, weirdly, I've I've been asked that question before, and I didn't really bring a lot of it home with me. During most of my career, I had a wife, two young kids. And I, for whatever reason, this maybe says something pathological about me. I don't know, but I never I never had nightmares about, you know, the crime scene photos. And I wasn't the one doing like crime scene analysis like you probably were. But I saw the photographs of some of the most gruesome crime scenes imaginable. I I think I became good at compartmentalizing.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Hmm, I I have a theory on it that uh, I'm talking to a psychologist and talking about theories of the mind. Um, a theory on it that uh, when I went to a homicide scene, I was focusing on doing the work. And I I'm sure that was your focus when you're sitting down, speaking to these killers, consulting with them. That you're focused on your job. And I think that that provides a degree of protection from the horrors that you you see or or hear about and the the people that you meet.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I I think that's right. You focus on what you're doing. This is my job. Uh, and, you know, you just, you you couldn't take that home with you. Certainly not at the level of intensity you experience while you're actually going through the encounter, either with the the suspect or with the crime scene itself. You just, you know, if you were walking around with that in your head all the time, you'd have a hard time functioning. But you did bring up one interesting point, I think, at least implicitly, and that's.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  You know, you deal with these people, it would be nice if they all looked like Charles Manson, because we would all go to immediately turn and run. But most of them don't. Most of them are very well camouflaged. They've got a carefully curated social persona. And I did think frequently over the years about the relatively superficial cues that all of us use every day. And, you know, seems like a nice guy, nothing the least bit threatening, easy to talk to. And a lot of people rely on those cues to put themselves in positions where they would be potentially very vulnerable to a predator, for example, a Gacy or a Bundy.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what you're saying there, the normality of people that have committed horrendous crimes. And it is hard not to drop your guard down because I think it's human nature. And I would often say to people, you lock me in a room with someone long enough and I will develop a rapport. I think it's human nature. And some of those people are very bad people. But you start to, you communicate, you socialize, and it's just human nature, I think, that you make that connection.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And that's certainly how I thought about my interviews with even some of the most horrible people on the planet. One of the things, and not every forensic psychologist would agree with me on this approach, but I always tried to establish a very horizontal relationship with whoever I was talking with. Never wanted to come across as the expert looking down on someone. I always tried to make it conversational. I always introduced myself as Jeff, not Dr. Smalldon. Gave them my business card, they could see who I was. Their attorneys told them, they knew I was a psychologist. I didn't need to tell them that. What I was interested in mainly is making a connection with them.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Right. In your book, you talked about, and we're going to speak about specific killers and people that you met through the course of your career, but just talking in a general sense. I picked up there and I found it interesting, it made me reflect a little bit that a lot of the people you spoke to didn't understand irony. And you've got people that have committed or are in jail or on death row horrendous things, and they're talking about someone else, oh, I don't agree with that type of behaviour. And you raised it very well and quite humorously in your book about, you know, there's a little bit of irony there, given the fact that you're in here for murdering a dozen people. Is that a trait that they've got?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Because I link like irony, maybe they haven't got empathy, they don't understand, but I thought it was quite a revelation to me reading that I hadn't thought about the fact that they lack, don't see the irony in situations.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It's something I often had occasion to think about throughout my career, but I don't know what it is, they just didn't seem to grasp irony. Like one particularly dramatic example of that was, you know, Gacy talked with me for hours on end about how he couldn't possibly have killed all of these boys and young men who he was convicted of killing, 26 of whom were found in the crawl space under his suburban home. He could go on for hours and hours about all kinds of different people had keys to that house, the cops assumed it was like a normal residence, but it wasn't, there were people in, people coming out, and he could go on forever like that.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  But he insisted that the cops really had the wrong guy. But he saw no irony in posturing as an expert about serial murder. He would dress these national FBI conferences, they would invite him to be a guest, you know, through some sort of technology, and he would do it. And I would say, John, what makes you think you have anything special to contribute to law enforcement studying the mind of the serial killer when you insist that you're not one? And he would just pause for, he would just pause for and say, well, I don't know. I just assume that I've got something to say that that is worth their listening to.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  A bit of a flaw in his argument or rationale there. Let's, uh, let's talk about, uh, John Wayne Gacy because I don't know. There's something very chilling about that man and I've read the aspects and your dealings with him in, in the book, but also, uh, know the, uh, I think it was 33 victims that he had. Could you explain to our listeners, and I, I think most people once you start talking about it, remember who he is because it was, uh, yeah, someone that was, uh, just, I don't know. The, the nature of the crimes, it was pure evil. Tell us about the crimes and then how you became, um, connected to him and how you started communicating with him.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know if Gacy's infamy same in Australia as it is in the United States. And even if it was, yeah, I, I talk with a lot of like college age students and Gacy is at most kind of a footnote in their minds. Where for people of my generation, you know, he was one of the truly monstrous, he and Bundy and Manson. But basically, uh, in the 1970s, Gacy had his own business in a suburb outside Chicago, not far from O'Hare Airport. And, uh, it was called PDM, painting, decorating and modeling, I think. Or maintenance, maybe.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  But he had a company and he hired a lot of young boys to work with them. And some of them disappeared under mysterious circumstances. And in the end, he was convicted of 33 murders. There were 26 bodies found buried in the crawl space underneath his house. There were three others buried at other locations on his property. And then when he ran out of space, he started disposing of them in the nearby Des Plaines River. So he threw four in the river for a total of 33. And he was arrested in December of 1978. These killings had begun in 1972. And he, like a lot of these predatory killers,

• 10:47Speaker 01

  he chose people who might not immediately be missed. Maybe they had problems, they were addicted to drugs, they had legal issues. And some of their families inquired, you know, what, what happened to so and so? He was working for you. And Gacy would say, well, you know how hard I was working to get him off drugs and put him on the straight and narrow? And he disappeared one day. I don't know where he went. Um, so there were any number of cases like that where people inquired, but they were relatively quick to believe Gacy's bullshit about what really happened.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And in the end, what happened and got him arrested, it's really a creepy story. And I've been to this location and it was a drugstore, like a chemist back in 1978. Now it's a childcare center. But it's where, it's where Gacy, speak about irony. Gacy wouldn't get that one at all. But where he abducted his final victim, that is drugstore talking the owner about doing some remodeling inside. And he saw a young man and said, hey, I can pay you more money than they're paying you here. Want to talk with me about a, a summer job? And the, the kid's mother was in the parking lot.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And this is a small parking lot. She was there waiting for him to take, take, uh, I think it was her birthday. And he went over to her and said, I'm just going to talk with this guy for a few minutes. I'll be right there. And he's never seen again. And Gacy insisted he had never seen this guy and knew nothing about it. And it was some very good police work that Gacy would never admit that it was good police work, but it was. Uh, they, they tracked down a, a receipt from a photo order at, at the drugstore that a coworker of his had put in a, a jacket that she had lent to him. So that, that receipt ended up in Gacy's kitchen trash bag.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  And the police found it there and did further investigation. And, you know, the gig was up for Gacy in, in December of seventy eight.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  So thirty, thirty-three victims all up. Uh, over what sort of period of time were these murders being, uh, committed?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Seven, seventy-two, nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-eight.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, it's, it's frightening the way that he got away with it for so long. But I think that he had that, uh, confidence to present as a, a decent person. He might have his, his flaws in, in his personality, but people mustn't have suspected him to have that many people disappear around you and suspicion, but he had enough bluff to, uh, get, get through it for all those years.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, very disarming. I remember after the, I spent with him on death row in Illinois back in nineteen eighty-six. Uh, I called my wife from this Fleabag Hotel that Gacy had recommended for me. And she said, my wife said, uh, so what were your impressions of Gacy? And I said, well, you know, he's the sort of guy, if I walked into a bar for a beer and he was sitting there and I sat next to him, within minutes, we would be talking. He would seem totally unthreatening. He would talk about politics, sports. And what, what I would eventually notice before too long, actually, was that he had literally no interest in my point of view at all. It always came back to him.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  He would pause and make a perfunctory, uh, where did you say you're from? Or what do you do? And then immediately it would go back to him. So that would have stuck out, but he would come across as a very normal guy. And he's a world-class bullshitter. I mean, he could just talk and talk and talk. And what happened with these young men. Quite a few of them, he picked up trolling the streets of downtown Chicago. Some of them were, you know, addicted to drugs and into prostitution. Gacy would pick them up, drug them typically, put chloroform over their face in a mask or some, some sort of towel, and they would come to at his house.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And Gacy would say, you know, let me, let me get you a beer or, you know, settle in. After a while, maybe you watch some porn movies and, and then he would say something, you know what? I, I spend a lot of time as a clown. I got a registered clown outfit and I go to nursing homes sometimes and I play the clown at children's parties. I've got a couple of tricks you want to see them? And he said, let me show you the, let me show you the handcuff trick. And Gacy would put the handcuffs on himself and get out of them and say, try it, try it. You can do it too, but you gotta be clever.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And the, the kid would let him put the handcuffs on and then he said, I can't get out. And Gacy would say, you know what the trick is? And then he'd hold up the key. And by that time, you know, the, the guy was disabled by this guy who had seemed not the least bit threatening.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  That's how he would lure them in. Um, was he openly homosexual or was he, uh, because I think he was married, wasn't he? Was he married at one stage?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Twice.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Twice, yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Had a couple of children. And his second wife was actually living with him in the house that he had done some time in Iowa, a more western state, on a couple of sodomy charges involving a teenage boy, served a short time in prison. And then they agreed to parole him to his mother's house in Chicago where he was from. So he went to Chicago and for a while, lived with his second wife and, uh, her, she had two children, I believe, who weren't Gacy's biological children.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  I lived with them and the murders, there may have been a murder that occurred while she was still there, but she divorced him, got out of the picture and that's when the murder, you know, the rate of murders really accelerated.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Once, once she was off her scene. How, how was he actually killing the victims? What was he, did he have a MO in, in the way that he would kill the victims or what happened to them once they were restrained by him?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  He was a sadist. He tortured, one, one of them lived and wrote a book called Twenty Nine Below about his experience surviving Gacy. And interestingly, he's the one surviving victim, I believe, who says, you know, he was half knocked out by chloroform or whatever Gacy had used to knock him out. But he said he saw a second man in the room. That's all the mystery of the Gacy case was that second man, was he hallucinating it or was there really a second man? Gacy had some bad actors working with him and I think the police suspected

• 18:04Speaker 01

  that one of them was involved. But anyway, this person who survived Gacy's torture, he described just a horrible ordeal of being, I think, electrically shocked. He was put in the bathtub for a while. So there were electrical shocks, as I said, chloroform, and he loved tightening a noose around someone's neck and then loosening it and tightening again and loosening it. He enjoyed that, the fear and the power that that gave him. So yeah, sadist and psychopathic killer.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Let's wind it back a bit and we'll get back into Gacy shortly. But tell us about your journey to becoming a forensic psychologist because a little bit, a little bit different. You didn't start out from day one wanting to be a forensic psychologist. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you found your way into the work that you did.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't take any sort of direct passage. You know, some kids say, as a teenager, I knew I wanted to become a psychologist. The opposite was true for me. I was a teenager with no interest in forensic psychology. I couldn't have told you what it was. I thought I was going to be an English professor. And I went to graduate school. I did a master's degree in English. Then I went and taught for a year at my undergraduate school. And then I got a grant to study modern Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin. So I went there for a year. And that was an absolutely wonderful year. When I say that that was the year when I decided not to go on for my PhD and become an English professor, people said, what?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  You spent a year at Trinity College? And what was bad about it? What convinced you not to continue in that direction? And there was nothing bad about my Trinity College experience. It was wonderful. I still love literature, but, you know, I began to think at that time in the seventies, the prevailing mantra in English departments, at least in the States, was publisher perish. You needed to publish a tenure and get a promotion. And I just didn't want to be on intellectual trial all that time and have to prove myself over and over again. So I decided not to do that. But then, a lot of people, this experience where you make a decision

• 20:27Speaker 01

  that seems very underdetermined, like there's not much foundation for it, seems kind of random. And this, and then it changes the rest of your life. And that's what happened with me. And I'll, I'll tell you what happened. And by the way, we need to go back in time to get to the Manson stuff because that's back before this. Talking to my mom one day, I'm in my late twenties, and I said, I have no idea what to do with my life. And she said, well, have you ever thought of hospital administration? And I said, I've never heard of hospital administration. What is it? And she was a nurse at the local hospital. So she said, well, I don't really know what it is either, but there are a couple of nice looking

• 21:09Speaker 01

  young men down at the hospital where I work and I've heard them referred to as administrators. They always say hi to me when I pass them in the hallway. Why don't you go down and talk to one of them? So I had nothing better to do and I did that. He seemed like a nice guy. He seemed to like me and he said, I'll tell you what you do, Jeff. Go to George Washington University, get your masters. That's where he had gotten his. And then come back and work for me. And it kind of sounded like a job offer. And I literally, I applied to one school. If I had gotten rejected there, that would have been the end of hospital administration. But I got accepted and I went there. And then I ended up doing a residency at a hospital here in Columbus, Ohio, where I still

• 21:50Speaker 01

  live and two of my coworkers were murdered at the hospital. But after those murders, I thought, I don't, I don't really want to be a hospital administrator. I never did. So I went back to graduate school with the goal of becoming a forensic psychologist.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Piqued your, uh, piqued your interest. Tell me about the two coworkers that were murdered because that, well, you've just described it, that steered your career, but it had a sort of profound effect on you. And, you know, a lot of us go through life and never knowing anyone that's been murdered. So it, you would have felt the, the pain and it would, the shock that comes with, with a homicide. Tell us about, uh, about that and how it played out in the end, because I think that's very interesting too.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  It is. And then as a homicide investigator, that part would be fascinating to you.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I was at the hospital. I completed my residency here. They asked me to stay on. I kept getting promoted, even though I had no, no special skills as a hospital administrator, but I kept getting promoted. And among the departments that I had responsibility for was this small research lab, that a total of six employees. And it was located just around the corner from the main corridor of the hospital, had a single door that served as exeterence. And the lab itself was probably the size of an average living room, very small.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  For Christmas that year, as the administrative contact for that department, they invited me to their small party. I went. All the talk was of plans for Christmas. Everybody seemed upbeat. And I went home to Western New York, Niagara Falls, where my parents lived, for the holidays. And while I'm there, I get a call from the director of public relations at the hospital. Jeff, I've got horrible news. And my assumption was that something horrible had happened in the mental health and addiction building that I also had responsibility for. So I'm expecting something

• 23:53Speaker 01

  had happened there. And she says, Joyce and Patty were murdered in the research lab Friday afternoon between 4:30 and 5:05. And I said, what? I mean, no news could have shocked me more. I was absolutely astonished. I said, Joyce and Patty? I was just with them. She said, I know. And then nobody has reported seeing anything unusual. Anyone. And right around the corner from the main hospital corridor and right down the hallway from the radiology department waiting room. So it wasn't an isolated, nobody reported seeing anything unusual,

• 24:33Speaker 01

  any unusual people going through that door. The police arrested no one. And as you can imagine, it was bizarre returning to work there. And all of us at work had our favorite suspects, people who we thought might have committed the murder. My favorite suspect was the first person on the crime scene who found the first woman on the floor. And he was off that week, but he had come in to check his phone messages and so on. And he found Joyce on the floor and then went screaming out into the hallway. And a doctor came in and found her dead. And then they called the police and they

• 25:15Speaker 01

  found the other woman in a walk-in freezer. But that incident was so...

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Shocking to me and everyone around me, like Joyce and Patty were both these very nice, very friendly women. Nobody could imagine anybody who would want to kill them. And Patty had a four-month-old infant at the time of her death, and she was, according to what everybody said, happily married, very conservative. So, nobody could imagine who could have committed these murders. And we had a memorial service for the women at the hospital, and I shook the hands of both of the surviving spouses, and they appeared

• 26:06Speaker 01

  bereft and in, you know, in shock. And so, months went by, and there were no arrests. Oh, I was gonna say, this guy who found the bodies was a very hotheaded, very intelligent, pretty narcissistic researcher. And he and I had butted heads. I knew how angry he could get. So, I thought, well, not only was he the first person on the scene, but he's a hothead. Would I ever have said he was capable of a double homicide? No way. But now that there is a double homicide...

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Yes, looking that way.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I'm looking at him, and I'm sitting across my desk from him every day, watching him weep. And I think there's a good chance that you killed Joyce and Patty, not saying that, obviously. So, after about six months, I thought, I'm not gonna do this anymore. And that's when I went back to graduate school. Those murders changed my life. And one of the reasons, maybe, that they changed my life so dramatically is that, I mentioned a minute ago, that the Manson stuff had occurred almost a decade before that correspondence. A lot of members of the Manson family gotten up to my ears in that. But that was, yes, that was almost a decade before. Now, this double homicide, I feel like murder is following

• 27:29Speaker 01

  me around or something. And I thought, well, I might as well embrace and become a forensic psychologist.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Okay, well, different, different reasons. Now, the, the twist or, or the, the resolution of that double murder, it was in fact, uh, the husband of the lady with the four month old, uh, old child. And that played out in dramatic circumstances years down the track. Can you just, uh, tell the listeners how, how it was eventually resolved?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  It's actually officially still a cold case. They've never definitively tied him to the homicides, but

• 28:05Speaker 00

  However.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  However, I, I had lunch with the head homicide detective about, he's deceased now, but about a decade ago, and we talked about this in detail. And he, he, he was the one who went looking for something that would have definitively tied this guy to the hospital murders and never found anything. But what happened is that, like, let's see, the murders were on December 30th, 1983. We're in spring of 1986 now. So two and a half years later, I pick up the newspaper one day. There's big screaming headlines, uh, biggest shootout

• 28:47Speaker 01

  in FBI history. Two agents killed, four, I think four wounded, two suspects killed in the shootout. I'm thinking, wow. And my dad had just retired from the FBI. But as soon as I saw a worse shootout in FBI history, I started reading the article. And I got about halfway on the page and it said that these two suspects had been involved in a series of daytime bank robberies where they would outfit themselves in camouflage and chill up with machine guns. They were suspected of at least one murder. And I get halfway

• 29:27Speaker 01

  down the column and it says the two killed suspects were William Maddox, formerly of Columbus, Ohio, and Michael J. Platt. And William Maddox, not, not that William Maddox, can't possibly be the one with the four month old child who, and what happened is he hooked up with an old buddy of his, the assumption of the He was a sociopath and decided, I'm through with this middle-class life. I'm done with Patty and I'm gonna do something different. He hooked up with an old buddy. They moved to Florida, started a lawn company. He remarried a woman who he met in a church singles group. And

• 30:12Speaker 00

  I pick, yeah, I picked up on that in your book too. Yeah, we won't judge, but yeah, he was a predator in the church singles group.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I mean, he was a predator, but a predator fully clothed in sheep's clothing. I mean, he is outwardly that looked dangerous about him. Another of those cases blended in very well, but was capable of extreme violence.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  But that is, and I think that's a chilling thing for the public too. And you reference Charles Manson and obviously the way he presents, that's what you want a monster to look like. But there's other people that get away with a lot of crimes because they come across, as you said, the cases are still open on the murder of the two women. But there is that grieving husband at the funeral that you're shaking hands with and a couple of years later is in the biggest shootout with FBI agents and multiple people killed.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Can I just mention two little details about that? The crime scene at the hospital had already been processed by the police. It was released to the hospital to have an outside cleanup agency come in and clean it up. But I was one of the few people who had a key to the lab because I was the administrator responsible. And my parents stopped on their way to Florida, like within the period, probably within a month of the murders. And I said to my dad, would you be interested in going over and seeing the lab where these murders took place? He said, absolutely. So we went over and at night where nobody would really

• 31:52Speaker 01

  notice us going into the lab. And my dad, who he wasn't a homicide detective, that's not what he did, but he was a law enforcement officer. And he looked around and he said, you know what? This could have looked at first like a robbery gone bad because some of the women's possessions were taken, but I don't think that's what it was. I think it was staged to look like that, but it was actually something very different. I wouldn't be surprised if the killer could have accomplished his objective with a silencer and two gunshot wounds instead

• 32:30Speaker 01

  of these 25 stab wounds in the upper chest and neck area. I think that was to mislead the authorities. So that was one thing of interest. And the other thing was, not long ago, like, within the last eight months, I was contacted by a former physician from the hospital, who I knew, though not real well. He had read my book, and he was the physician who, when the first person on the crime scene ran out screaming in the hallway, he was the physician nearby who went in and pronounced the first woman dead. So he was

• 33:13Speaker 01

  right there on the crime scene before the police arrived. And he said, Jeff, would you be interested in me writing down memories of that day? I said, absolutely. So he did, and he sent them to me. And I was a long way from being a forensic psychologist at that point. And even when I became one, I was no expert in crime scene analysis. And I certainly didn't see that crime scene. And I didn't even see photos of that crime scene. But his name was Ed Boe. Ed said, you know what? The first thing I noticed when I went into the lab that day is that there were no defense wounds on Joyce. There

• 33:56Speaker 01

  were no signs that she tried to defend herself. And she was positioned on the bottom, on the floor, like in a fetal position. And there were all these stab wounds across her upper chest and neck, like more than 20. And the first thing I thought was there had to have been two people. Somebody had to have held her from behind for all those stab wounds to be made from the front without her struggling and there being signs of struggle. I thought it was a very interesting observation and it made me think really for the first time that probably both of them were there.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  It would, yeah, I think that's a reasonable assumption from the way you've described it. And yeah, the fact that he was running with his mate committing those other crimes, it's certainly something that.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Those came later, but particularly if it was both of them, I still, nobody has any idea how they got in and out of that lab without anybody seeing. They would have had to have had blood all over them, but.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  It's that many stab wounds, yeah, most definitely. Hey guys, it's Gary Jubelin here. Want to get more out of iCatch Killers? Then you should head over to our new video feed on Spotify where you can watch every episode of iCatch Killers. Just search for iCatch Killers video in your Spotify app and start watching today.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Okay, well, that's, that was your shock you needed to find your, find your career and steer you towards your career. We're going out of sequence in, in terms of the people that you deal with, but while we're on the John Wayne Gacy, let's, let's talk about how you got in contact with him. And I know this flowed on after you'd spoken to the, the Manson family. Talk us through the communications you had with John Gacy and your visits with him in, in prison.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Well, I decided to start graduate school and begin work with my PhD in psychology with the hospital murders still very much preoccupying me at that point. They, that they hadn't been solved when I began graduate school. And I thought, and I was kind of a compulsive reader of true crime back then. But I thought, I wonder if there's a way for a more direct avenue of access into the brains of people who kill. And maybe if I could find one, they might improve my thinking about the kind of person who could have killed my two coworkers. That was my thinking.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And so I thought, the first thing I thought was, well, Bundy is down in Florida, serving two death sentences. I'll try to contact him. And that's another whole chapter we've talked about. But I had a brief, very interesting correspondence with Bundy. But it became clear to me that it wasn't going to progress in the way I wanted it to. He wasn't willing to really have a dialogue with me. And I thought, well, who else might I talk to? I knew John Wayne Gacy was serving a death sentence in Illinois, convicted of 33 murders. So I decided to contact him. And I wrote him a letter, told him that I'd read several books about his case. He would have known from reading my letter that I knew quite

• 37:14Speaker 01

  a bit about it. And I said, I'd like to, I didn't mention the hospital murders. I, from that first letter, I just wanted to engage him. And I told him, you know, are you willing to talk with me, have a dialogue through letters? In true narcissist fashion. He said, if you, if you think you know one thing about me from those books you've read, I am sorry to tell you, you're wrong. You don't know one thing about me. Like, he's, he's the black box with all the privileged information. And you can come get it or not, but don't think you're, you found it anywhere else. You need to come to source. And that

• 37:56Speaker 01

  began a correspondence that lasted three calendar years. And he began calling me on the phone once in a while. But he said, after we'd been corresponding for about seven months, why don't you come visit me? I hadn't thought of doing that. It was 450 miles away from where I lived. But I decided, well, I mean, at that, I always remind people when I tell this story.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I was early on in my graduate work. I had never, when I went out to visit Gacy, I had never before been in the same room as someone known to have committed murder, even one murder. That's how green I was. And I drove out there to see him and spent two days with him on that first visit, and then made a subsequent visit where I also spent two days.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  What was your takeaway from him, sitting down and spending those times with him?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Well, quite a few things. You know, I think I said before, he was a world-class bullshitter. And it became wearying at times. You know, a lot of people think, boy, sitting across from a guy who's killed 33 people, you know, your nerves must have been on end, and the adrenaline must have been coursing through you. But it really wasn't like that. He greeted me by said, this is the first day of my first visit there. I extended my hand, and he extended his handcuffed hand. And I said, hi, Jeff. And he said, Jeff, I'm John. Or you can call me JW if you want to. That's what a lot of the guards call me.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  And then the very next he said was, I know, I know, you've come looking for the monster. Well, you're gonna meet the man. That's how he talked. You're gonna meet the man.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I mean, the grandiosity was something, truly. You're gonna meet the man. So we sat down, and, you know, he was, I could just see him working. I could see his mind working, and realize how skillfully he disarmed his victims. He just, for one thing, he just wouldn't stop talking. And he just controlled the conversation that way. He wouldn't stop talking. And, you know, we started talking about mutual interests, football, democratic politics. And he was very easy to talk with, not the least bit threatening. At one point,

• 40:37Speaker 01

  and, you know, this is one example, I think, of how green I was. There are a lot of them.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  He came out on each of the four days that I spent with him, he would come out with his logbook and then usually some photograph albums. He was so compulsive that in this logbook, he registered every, every piece of mail he received, every meal he ate, what time he got up, what time he went to bed, visitors, he was very compulsive. And after we'd talked, I'm trying to think whether this was on the first day, it occurred a couple of different times. He said, we were sitting at a relatively small table in a death row visiting room, either side of the table. And he said, come over on my side of the table.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I remember thinking, I don't want to, I don't want to go over there, but I also won't communicate fear. So I thought, okay, you know, I know, like, you know, in a, and I already knew by the, this time, by the way, that the guards weren't monitoring us at all. I learned that there was a video camera in the room, but we were not being monitored.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  I, I know people often think the, the jail visits in situations like that, you've, you've got a screen between you or the guards are standing, standing around, but you are potentially vulnerable. And I would, and the way you're describing it now, and as you were written in the book, I'm thinking, okay, you're putting yourself out there a little bit. He's on death row. He hasn't got anything to, to lose. It might be his final scalp, taking out this naive visitor that's coming, coming to my cell. What, what's he got to lose? Yeah, that's the reality of it.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's a very good question that you raise. And he still, at the time I saw him, on both of my visits, had hopes of having his death sentence overturned.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  So I think he was, his behavior in the sense, he wasn't going to attack me, or even though while I was sitting next to him, he could just put those cuffed hands over my head and squeezed his massive forearms around my neck. Nothing like that happened, but. What was really sobering for me is some years later, he was executed in 1994. My visits to him were in 1986 and 87, closer time of his execution. And basically, it would have been clear to him that the gig is up. My appeals exhausted.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Run out of all options.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  And this kid who had corresponded with him, his idea was, and he was actually working under the tutelage of a very well-known psychologist. This was like his freshman honors college, or freshman honors project in college.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  And his idea was, I'm going to posture as the ideal victim for a number of incarcerated serial killer, including Gacy. And with Gacy, he postured as a sexually confused product, a dysfunctional family. And Gacy and he began exchanging pornographic fantasies by letter. And then Gacy invited him, come visit me. Young man went on to write a book called The Last Victim, which tells about his time with Gacy. And it was very clear from his description that he met Gacy in the same room I did. The setting was this. And the situation was totally different.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Gacy attacked him verbally, emotionally, threatened to rape him, said, you know, I could rape you on this floor and nobody would come to help you in time. Basically, in so many words, saying, you're mine. And it got very harrowing. Gacy gave him a bracelet, a pair of underwear that he wanted him to wear the next day when he came back. And it got really crazy. And I thought when I read that book. You know, I was in more danger than I realized. It was probably Gacy's hope that somehow he could find relief in all the courts that acted as the buffer between me and this madman.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  It's fascinating sitting down with someone like that and the nature of the crimes, like I can't comprehend. I've sat with many serial killers, but of that nature, the brutality of his crimes and the way he did it, the fact that you have all these bodies buried under your home and still continuing on. It's quite chilling, but it's also quite frightening that he can present for all intents and purposes as a relatively normal person if you took him out of that environment. As you described, if you sat down beside him in a bar, you'd strike up a conversation.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  I think that's the most frightening thing.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I don't the word succeed to talk about predators, but is in fact how they succeed as serial killers because they're under the radar. They come across as normal.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Well, you would know because I'm looking at just the type of things that you've done. It's a consultation with close to 300 death penalty cases, which would be interesting, and evaluated more than a thousand murderers, serial killers, mass killers, sprees, all kinds. So you've really seen it throughout your career. And a couple of things I just want to talk about, because these questions are often asked of me and I'm not qualified enough to say I can speculate, but people often say with killers, are they born, the old nature or nurture situation? What's your take on that with all your studies that you've done and all the work that you've done?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Well. I really can't claim any privileged expertise. I'm not a researcher into neurology and so on. But I think most mental health agree that it's some combination of those things. Something wrong in the hardwiring, though when a radiologist examined Gacy's brain following his execution and found no abnormalities that he... But I think most people agree that there's something amiss in their hardwiring when they enter the world, and then that interacts with their experiences. Could John Gacy have not become a killer? Had he, instead of having

• 47:30Speaker 01

  an alcoholic abusive father, you know, some nurturing teacher or something like that? Uh, maybe. I mean, maybe his course toward a serial killer could have been interrupted in that way. You know, he had a skills. He could have succeeded in business. But there's a book by one pretty well-known psychiatrist. I won't mention her by name, but she has actually floated the possibility that one day we'll identify a serial killer gene and identify serial killers before they're born. I mean, I think that's a very wild... I don't think many people believe that that's true.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, the way the world's going, Jeff, but I don't know what's gonna happen. Are you familiar with the work of James Fallon? I think he's over in California. His take on it was he did some PET scans of brains of some of the US's worst killers to see if there's some pattern he could detect. And to balance that out as a... By way of comparison, he also needed people that weren't notorious killers to get the PET scans done of their brains, of which he did his own brain. And he came up with the same predisposition as some of these most notorious killers. I don't know the details, but it was some...

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Pattern in the frontal lobe of the brain. And he, his rationale was, he's got that predisposition in what he saw in examining the brains, but he grew up in, uh, in those crucial years, you know, from infancy up to sort of three year old. He grew up in a loving, nurturing environment with parents and all, all that. And that's probably if he grew up in, say, a war zone or in a, you know, troubled household, it might've played out, he might've turned out the person he is. So he sort of gives it the combination, not dissimilar to what you're saying. It's probably a combination, combination of, uh, of both that lends itself to it.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I think that's what most mental health professionals would say.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  If they could specify exactly what that weird alchemy is that produces the, the killer eventually.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. We all always say, yeah, well, just in, in the terminology of a psychopath or, yeah, it's easy to label someone a psychopath or a sociopath. With the killers that you've dealt with, do you think that's a proper description of, of the, the people that they are to commit those crimes?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I mean, not, certainly not all of the, the death penalty killers that I evaluated are psychopaths. Uh, I mean, the formal diagnosis of psychopathy comes with the use of Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist. And most forensic psychologists, particularly in death penalty cases, don't use that because if you come up with a number and says, you know, someone's a psychopath or they're not, and to use the, the term psychopath in court is so inflammatory, the thought is that, you know, as soon, as soon as the jury hears that word, they'll stop thinking about everything else.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Most mental health professionals use the only instrument that you really can use to diagnose psychopathy. Typically, if I was a value a death penalty defendant, I would use the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, at least in the United States, that's used for diagnosing all kinds of conditions. And the closest thing in that to psychopathy, though they're not equal, is antisocial personality disorder. And so I diagnosed many people as having antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  In my experience, personality, severe personality disorders were the most common diagnosis among death penalty. You know, some people think, oh, a personality disorder, that's like that guy down the street who I can't stand, he's a jerk. But mental health professionals use the term in a very different way. It speaks to a very calcified, deeply ingrained personality disorder. For example, if one of the characteristics of antisocial personality is the inability to experience empathy, well, it's a pretty big deal. I mean, if you're not able to experience empathy.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a bit of a, bit of a problem, eh?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  A bit of a problem in the social world, and you're likely to get in trouble. So it's not like, in my testimony, I was trying to shield the jury from really damning characteristics of the people I evaluated. But I tried not to use really incendiary words like psychopath.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was listening to a solicitor talk just last night at the university. And talking about come sentencing and the weight that's placed on reports from psychiatrists or psychologists on there. And it made me think about it, you do have to choose your words carefully, don't you? Because you put up there as an expert and the judge magistrate, that's what they've got to, yeah, make reference to. It does carry a, carry a big impact in the court system.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  It does. And that, yeah, that was a big part of my job in. A lot of those death, well, a lot of those death penalty cases pled out before trial, but a lot of them went to trial. At least in the United States, what happens in a death penalty case is there's the first trial, which is, you know, what everybody knows, guilt or innocence. And then if the person's found guilty, which they nearly always were, then the second is the sentencing or mitigation phase. And that's basically where it's the defense's show to put on expert witnesses, testimony from family members, physicians, whatever. And that's where I would usually come in to tell the story that I'd learned as a result of my investigation into this person's background.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Usually involve not, not just multiple interviews, convicted murderer and testing, but interviews with collateral informants like family members, sometimes former coaches, Cub Scout leaders, you know, whatever, to try to tell as complete a story as I could tell. And one of the things I always emphasize is that, like, I, I was never, ever there to advocate for the defense cause. And if it seemed, if it seemed like I was, I would lose the jury immediately. I was always there as an educator, not to try to convince them not to sentence this to death, or just, just to tell a story of what I, what I know based on all my testing and so on.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Present the objective. I'd imagine from a personal point of view, it would, there's a lot of weight on you. You, you're sitting down, speaking, assessing people that are on, on death row. We don't have it here in, in Australia. I would imagine it's a pretty pressured position to be in.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Well, it is. I mean, a lot of the cases I worked on were very high publicity cases. So there was stress when it came time for me to appear at a sentencing hearing, though I got used to that and I think I was a reasonably good witness. But one, one of the best things that ever happened to me in my years of working on death penalty cases is the case of a spree killer in Columbus, Ohio, where I live. This guy had killed four people, including an infant, and attempted to kill many more. And, you know, was just.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  He in holding cell outside the courtroom, he wrote on the wall like scorecard of how many he got. And, you know, like, he was the winner of the competition, incredibly inflammatory. The judge limited it. They only, the judge only permitted one piece of this graffiti. But my point is, this guy was a bad guy and never expressed a scintilla of remorse. And so I testified about him and he had serious mental health problems. I talked about him. But after my testimony, the judge recessed for a minute and the, the

• 56:19Speaker 01

  wife of one of his victims and her daughter, the daughter of the victim up and said, you know, you testified for the defense or the, the defense requested your testimony. We understand that you were just doing your job. We thought, we thought you did a very good job as a witness. And that was a big deal to me to have victims approach me and tell me.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Okay, I can imagine. Um, again, because most people don't get exposed to it. No, I wasn't going to go down this path, but I just a, a, a general question. What are the people like, like, sitting on death row? Are they, you know, hoping? Are they scared? What's, is there a, a thing that you saw? Or if you, you've sat there with, you know, hundreds of people facing a, a death penalty? What, what sort of impact does it have on them?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I think anybody's ever asked me that question. It's a good one.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Well, one example comes to mind. I worked on the case of this guy killed. He was a cult leader. He had killed, executed a family of five, including three young children. And before his arrest, you know, lorded over this group of people who he claimed he was a prophet. They were an offshoot of Mormonism, claimed he was a prophet and so on. And he was the guy with the power and convinced the, this group of people to help him carry out these outrageous crimes.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  And I got involved on his case at the appellate level. I wasn't involved at the trial level. So he was already on death row when I asked to reevaluate him. Went to see him on death row and typically in the sentencing hearing of these cases, the convicted murderer was given an opportunity to make an unsworn statement. And attorneys usually tell them, unless you can muster some degree of sincerity and get up there and say, "I'm sorry," then we're not, we're not going to ask anything of you. In this case, this guy's name was Jeffrey Lundgren. A couple of books have written about his case.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Jeffrey Lundgren, and he had no interest in advice from anyone, including his attorneys. And he sat by witness stand in thunder for more than an entire day about why these murders justified and, you know, it's just an outrageous. And went on and on and on like he was in the pulpit.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could imagine.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I remember I read his whole unsworn statement and he came to the part about killing the children. And he says, "Now we come to the touchy subject, the death of children." And then he justified it with these scriptures he read. So a very bad guy, but my point, I went to see him on death row. I saw him before I met him and he was like lumbering around, just waiting for the next order that he, one of the guards. He looked like he was in control of anything. He had just kind of become this subservient, habituated death row guy.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  I remember this, this is just a funny, I think it's funny. This guy was well known in Ohio because he had been the leader of a insurrectionist group of prisoners at the maximum security prison in Ohio called Lucasville. There was a riot there in 1993 and George, George was like the spokesperson for the inmates. And he was a big career criminal, like his hands were like baseball bats. A very likeable guy, been in prison forever. But I remember this because I went to see George to continue an interview with him the

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  day after nine 11. George, I remember George says, you know what? I'm telling you this, Jeff, and I mean it. If they let me out of here, I will travel to Afghanistan and I will find that effort and I will mess him up. And then I'll come back here and I'll walk right back into the cell. You take my word on that. I just thought, okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  It's bizarre.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  I think different of them adjust in different ways to being a pro.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you've got to see, and you said it, funny story, you've got to see the humor in all the darkness, haven't you? Otherwise you'll fall down that rabbit hole yourself. And at least you can appreciate some irony too. That's a, that's a good thing.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  We might, we might take a break here. When we get back for part two, I want to delve deep into your communications with the Manson family like that, that's, I don't know, something about that whole Charles Manson and the time, the period, late 60s, it's just left an indelible impression on everyone, not just in the US, over here in, in our country as well. We'll talk, talk about that and delve into a few other things. I want to touch on Ted Bundy. I know you had a couple of communications with him. He's one of the notorious people that resonate with all of us over here. We've all heard about Ted Bundy. So let's take a, take a break and we'll be back for part two shortly.