L.O.G. 193 Homicide is a fact of life

Homicide is a fact of life

Okay, good morning, Greg. We're going to jump into a few cases today and kind of bourbon. Okay, okay, yeah, no, certainly it's only, yet again, it's only 5:00 a.m. here. I'm going to wait until about 9:00 a.m. for that, so that means a single malt Scotch. Yeah, maybe just a morning beer, right? Remember, remember God, remember Gunny up in the IIT? That's where I got that term from. Oh, that's a great morning beer anyway.

So, a few things that I—the Kohberger case, of the Idaho school murders, a few others that I see in documentaries—we've had a couple conversations about this. My thing is either we're obsessed as a society with these true crime cases and these documentaries that show everything, and I like watching them to see how they portray it. Some of them are good. I just wish they, to me, they're just too slow because they've got to build up and get people hooked, where I would rather just read the caffeinated in a linear, logical fashion, hook people in and get them going. But there, you know, we have this weird obsession with it. So that's kind of one thing I want to discuss. We get a lot of things wrong when we talk about it, and we bring that up in different cases.

But there's a few. There's the hatchet-wielding one on Netflix. I already forget the guy. I called it whatever it was (referring to "Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker"). But where he, you know, was this drifter, and then he—the guy was attacking a woman after a car accident, and he killed him with a hatchet. And her defense, and this one guy got it on record—him explaining the story. And then he was the only one who got the story, and then the guy just kind of walked off. Well, obviously, there's a whole lot behind it, and I won't ruin that for anyone, but the idea is you just go watch the preview, and it's him getting interviewed and he's like, "Yeah, man. And I saw that, so I just pulled out the hatchet, and I was like, 'Yeah, whack!'" So he kills this guy, right? First, he hits him with the hard side, the flat side of the hatchet, as this man was attacking a woman. He was trying to kill her, basically, so he saved her life. But then on the third blow, he turns it around and hits him with the blade. And so, also, he was riding in the car with that guy who then attacked the woman. So there's this whole backstory behind it.

But you guys are, of course, like, "Well, it's kind of odd how he was just explaining how he just killed a man, you know, but he was such a genuine person, he was so nice and he just wanted to help, and then he walked off." And you're going like, "Oh my God, this is all wrong." So there's that part of that story.

And then the other one that was on was about Bernie Madoff and the whole big Ponzi scheme that he had. They talked about it, but or, I guess it wasn't a Ponzi... Yeah, so he had that going, but how he had a legitimate side of the business for a long time and this kind of shady business, and they grew over time. So he did a lot of legitimate work, but it was funny because in one of the episodes, they were interviewing all these different people involved, or some that worked with him, someone that he took their money from, or an investigator, or whatever. And they all came down to this one thing: they were like, "Well, we did think it was odd. He had this old dot matrix style printer that he would print these reports out on. It was kind of not the best paper and shitty ink, and no one did that anymore." And they all randomly had mentioned it at some point. And you're going like, it's such a glaringly obvious thing. And then when anyone would want to ask questions about it, when people were thinking about investing their money with him, and they would start digging in and trying to do some due diligence and ask questions, he would just turn it around and go, "Hey, you know what? I understand if you don't want to do it. I don't need your money. I've got plenty of people lined up. You can find somewhere else to invest," and would push them away. So then that would obviously psychologically kind of be like, "Oh my God, we've got to get in on this."

But I watch all these, and then see how then the Kohberger case plays out. There's going to be the same thing on this eventually. After the trial, they're going to write all the documentaries or the movies, and it's going to be like, in the old days, they would wait until somebody died, or they would wait two years, you know, for social media to come. This is going to be out next year. They've probably already got someone lined up to play him, and then they're already prepping for the role. But, you know, the idea is this stuff is out there, and it keeps getting played over. And I watch him and I go, "It's the same fucking thing every single time!" There's always some misindicator. There's someone who knew, someone didn't put the pieces together, or they were absolutely obvious. There's all kinds of different reasons we talk about why people don't notice that stuff. We don't need to get into that, but there's a lot of psychology behind this on why we're fascinated by this stuff. You know, just the chilling nature of it because we don't understand it, and then the media sort of sensationalizes it.

And so I wanted to talk about that with you, and then you sent me some other cases to compare that against. But that's sort of the central, I guess, focus of the discussion is, you know, why we get obsessed with this stuff, why it hooks us in, why it keeps happening, we keep missing these things, the common things with all of them, and how we break it down. Because we talk about things like access and organization and sophistication and terms and ways to look at these situations. So I can find themes common to all. So now I need to look for those common-to-all themes versus some unique little piece of evidence. Does that sort of make sense, at least?

You're exactly right. And I would ask you for permission to use the standard transmission and shift from high gear back down into a lower gear for just a few minutes, just to set a precedence so people can take a look at how you and I would look at something, right?

So, yesterday at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, a female was tackled. There was live feed from a phone. I don't know what they call it; they don't call it video anymore when you're filming it, you're recording it, it's streaming it, right? Live. And the woman was running around spraying people with a fire extinguisher. The person that was recording it, and remember if you can record it, you can stop it...

Yeah.

And the person was laughing, and all the other people weren't. And then the woman shows up after getting tackled with a black eye and all this stuff, and things went just haywire, right? Meaning that the story went everywhere, and people were commenting on it until they even saw the full video or read what happened. So what happened? What precipitated events? And we'll put it in episode details, if we have to do your gosh damn homework, folks.

What happened is the woman was confronted while she—she's having a manic episode. She's got mental health problems, clearly, when you see her for just the first minute. And she's walking away from not paying for a meal inside the airport. Inside the airport! So, Hartsfield-Jackson is a public place, and now she's in the concourse, right? So she walks away, and a person comes up and says, "Hey, listen, you didn't pay for your meal." So she's looking for an exit and continues to back up from the person that's talking to her. Clear sign something's wrong, at first, because normal people would say, "Hey, you're confronting me, I'm going to turn and orient towards the—" Orientation is huge, right? But what she does is she continues to back away and walks up to a secure area door. It ends up being a door that goes below the wing, if you're in the industry. And the idea is that she tries to push against the door, not because she's trying to create havoc, she's trying to get away. You get what I'm trying to say? She's trying to say, "No, that wasn't me." Then she starts seeing that the door is secure. She walks away from the door, and two people come up and confront her. And now she's trying to get away from them and says, "Somebody else paid for me." And now she's walking away, and she's becoming more and more boisterous. Why? Because this is not normal. This doesn't happen at an airport. Where's the security, right? And so the person starts filming more earnestly now, trying to attract a female. She goes over, gets a fire extinguisher, starts spraying at people. Why? One, she doesn't want to go to jail. Two, she doesn't want people touching her contact. Number three, she's got mental health issues.

Well, Brian, when you show just a piece of that video with her with the fire extinguisher inside an airport, it's titillating. It's so interesting. I have to stop what I'm doing and go, "Well, you don't see that every day."

Yeah, it's novel.

Okay. So, homicide happens every day. Thousands and tens of thousands of homicides happen every day all over the world. So now, how do you get somebody to pay attention outside of Philly, outside of Chicago, outside of Detroit, Brian? Well, you...

They happen so often for people who know about that, and they're not surprised by it. But then most people don't ever see it. They don't ever see, you know, the yellow tape or know someone in their neighbor. And if you don't ever know it, it is new. It's, "Oh my gosh, this is something that you, you don't, you have no—"

You just hit on it. Sorry. You have no comments—no, you have no reference point for it because it's not some—it's so unfamiliar to you. So what we have to do as journalists, what we have to do as social media people is say, "Small town USA, kids in school, living in an apartment complex together, and brutally murdered with a fixed blade knife. Four killed." Okay? So we have to sensationalize it. Kids die in the inner city every day, every single day, but the news media doesn't sensationalize it because we're used to it.

Yeah. Right. So you've got to get that's where those things happen. Yes, yes.

And so now all of a sudden, if you're in the middle of No Name, Oregon, no offense to anybody, you guys did a great case for Kohberger. What happens is the people get scared. So now people are scared. "That's the Boogeyman!" They'll say, "I can't believe that happens here. Well, they're not going to solve it. Our cops aren't ready for this."

No.

Yeah, that undercurrent is what we saw foment. And as soon as we saw that, we started talking and going, "These people are idiots." Yeah, because they don't know, first of all, Brian, how long did it take you to read—you know, it's a rhetorical question—but you know that we've got the unredacted arrest warrant. We've got the search warrants for two different residents. Anybody can look them up online. Takes you a while to read them. Do you think that anybody that was a pundit that started talking read any of those documents?

Yeah. They're reading stuff on social media. "I'm reading something you posted about this case." So that's not even hearsay.

Yeah, that's not even third hand, but I'm willing to take your word for it and comment on it because I don't want my emotions to be stunted by your facts. Don't, don't, don't interrupt this paper.

So there is that. There is that immediacy that everyone wants, or, you know, people want to get the information out. It's just like when anyone has some good gossip and they want to share it. That's basically what it is at that point. And I get that. Good news travels fast. Bad news, right?

Exactly. Right.

So, you know, but and that's the typical sort of reaction we see. And which is why we either sometimes either don't comment on ongoing cases unless it's just so blatantly obvious, or you know, we say, "Hey, why don't you wait until it comes out and then we discuss it?" And some are good to discuss, some are not.

So how should—how should I look at these things, right? When that comes out, what should—what should I look for? Or how should I look at it? You get what I'm saying? Whether it's the documentary I'm watching, or that breaking news story, like, how should I look at those things?

So that's why I brought up the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson tape, Brian. Yeah, because if you watch the tape and then you watch the news, you'll see that there's a glaring disparity between the facts that they use and how they edited the tape. So that will help you spank yourself for drawing an unreasonable conclusion, right? Because sometimes when we hurry to a conclusion, Brian, it's unreasonable.

And so I'll give you a way to do that by giving you a caper that happened six or eight years ago in Pike County, Ohio. Okay? Little rural area in Ohio. And I remember the day coming up and saying, "Hey, there has been a mass murder down here." And I'm thinking, "Oh, another shooter, this and that." No, what happened is the coppers got a call from a person that was bleeding to death. They didn't know it at the time. They had been stabbed and were bleeding to death. And that person says, "Hey, I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe it's carbon monoxide poisoning. I see my girlfriend, she's laying over there."

And so the coppers show up. Now imagine that, a 911 call from a victim that doesn't even know that they're a victim. So the first coppers come, and there's multiple people dead in this home. They go across the street to see if the people saw anything, there's multiple dead in that home. There's a total of eight people in three different crime scenes, if I recall the caper, that are all gunshot or bludgeoned or stabbed to death. And it's a horrific scene, right?

Now, close to that, you've got all of these small towns responding because they want to chip in, Brian. These are people we know. That's how they work. That's what happens in a small town, right?

Yeah, they're bringing other resources, usually.

Yeah. Hezekiah and I are going to work with you to raise the barn. So he knows their family, brings a lunch to the church. So what happens now is everybody is thinking, "Who could have done this?" And the first unnatural response they come to is, "It couldn't have been us. Couldn't have been somebody in this community." When you and I both know that the facts are that you're most likely going to be killed by somebody you know, and even more so, that somebody you know intimately, a family member, a very close relative, right? So they go off the rail because they say, "Nothing like this has ever happened in this small community, and certainly not in Pike County. So, guess what? This has got to be an outsider. And Brian, it's got to be a serial killer because nobody could be this heartless." And now we start building that.

So guess what happens over the next couple hours? They're going house to house, shed to shed. And what do they find, Brian? They find—you remember the marijuana grow operation? Yep. Now, it has nothing to do with the case, but it spirals out of control because now it's that Mexican drug cartel operating under our very noses. And what does the community say? "The boogies will never solve this. The Boogeyman." We have to create the Boogeyman, Brian. We talk about this all the time. And it's, I will tell people, if you want to understand how powerful the Boogeyman is, there's a video online that you can find, and there's a string in icy water. And the string in icy water starts getting more and more ice, and because the current of the water makes it move, it looks serpentine. So it's going back and forth.

Yeah, there's more and more ice. I see, yeah.

Every single show that I've seen hosted by William Shatner or some other boob says, "Look at the sea monster! The Chinese call it this and that." And everybody speculates, and doctors are speculating, "It's a string in the water." And if you saw the size comparison, you would feel like an idiot. Well, that's what happened in Pike County, Brian. And you've got to think, if it can happen in, let's say, 2014, 2016 in Ohio, it can happen anywhere.

So, Kohberger. Okay, Kohberger is a demented little motherfucker that was waiting for—he's an airplane waiting for a crash landing, right? Just happened to have a crash landing where a place that he's familiar with. What does that give? That gives him access. Okay? He's going to go in and he's going to do something. Well, let's see. I can have a low level of sophistication and likely get away with it, or I can have a high level of sophistication, like the gosh damn Ocean's Eleven movie. You get what I'm saying? And there's so many parts that can go wrong. And I'm a highly organized guy in my own mind. I plan when I take a poop. I plan my social media post. I'm deviously thinking I'm smarter than the average bear when I'm writing, you know, ransom notes and stuff, right? And what happens, Brian? That gets ahead of you.

You—how often have you seen, and if you're a copper listening to the broadcast, you know what I'm talking about, when a person uses a blunt weapon, or they use an edge weapon, they don't even think that they've cut themselves or injured themselves while they're murdering the other person. And now when you have multiple, when you have four, okay, even if it's ambush style, you get cut and you get high velocity blood spatter on you. And you get the—

Right. So no, there is evidence. Brian, yeah, it's entertaining, and but there was like, you know, a murder mystery type thing. And there were, it was funny because on the girl's shoe, there was like a small drop of blood, and sort of all this ridiculous plot line and how these things could happen. Blah blah, it's so ridiculous. And so, like, you know, of course, because like, "Is this how things happen?" I go, "The only realistic part of this movie is that drop of blood on her shoe. That's the only thing that is realistic." Because those things happen all the time, and then people don't—the whole big, "I'm going to do this at this exact time." And, you know, I think that's ridiculous. That shit doesn't happen.

I go, but I do not want to say the name. I do not want to say the name of the street or the name of the city, but I'm on a homicide scene, and the very first thing is the garage door's open. Then the garage door to get into the house has the handle that's completely broken off. Okay. Then you go in, and the house is a mess, but things in the house, like the lamp was knocked off the table, but the light bulb wasn't broken. Okay. So there's incongruent signals that the door handle was broken off, but the door to the garage was unlocked. And think about it: how many people do you know open an electronic garage door then go through the garage to rob a house, right? To burglarize or to do an armed home invasion? So I'm no genius, trust me, you've worked with me before, but even me, something's going, "This doesn't smell right."

So while the guy's talking—the guy that's in the house, his wife is laying dead on her back, face up in the living room, a wonderful old lady—and the guy is talking to us, and he's got a typical for Detroit white T-shirt without the sleeves, you know, the T-top or tank top or whatever they call that. Yeah, it's a worker, right? He's got the pants that you send off to the worker cleaners if you work at GM or one of the plants. He's got his hard shoes on and everything. And I'm looking at this guy, and the washer and dryer are going in the other room. I'm going, "Well, that's not the first thing I would do if my wife was murdered in this armed home invasion." And he's got his glasses on, Brian, and there's high impact blood spatter on the glasses between his eyes and the glasses. Well, there's only one way that could have got there.

Yeah.

Is that you were in close proximity when this incident occurred? "No, I came home to find this." "Are you sure?" "Yeah." "And why, well, were the washer and dryer going?" "I don't remember." Of course, you don't remember.

I wonder what's in that lint screen.

Exactly, Brian. What happens is we want to think like a book or a Hollywood movie. What hooks us with Harry Potter or gosh damn Jason Bourne, right? Is that there's an intrigue that goes along with it. The actual answer is, "You cheated on me, kiss my ass, my French fries are cold," bang bang. Well, boom. And it happened so quick, that doesn't make a game. I can't write a whole script off of that.

No, exactly. I can't make an hour-long show in the morning with Paul Azan on those facts.

But what you see in Pike County and what we saw in Oregon is devious intent. What do I mean by that? A person took time. There was a plan.

Yeah. Right.

It ain't easy to kill eight people in three different dwellings along a county road right in rural Ohio. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So the idea here is that what stunned people about Kohberger was that there were four people dead, and they were young people. No offense, but if that was a homeless person, you get what I'm trying to say, in Wichita...

Yeah, it would never make the—no.

No, it wouldn't make the news. Yeah. So why do we have to sociologically, we have to say, "Not in my community, not in my backyard. This never happens around here." Why? Because I've got to live there, and I've got housing values, and I've got to have my kids in school, right? The church has to have something to talk about every morning. And we live in The Andy Griffith Show. We live in Mayberry. We don't want to contend with that. And psychologically, we've got to say, "It's a Boogeyman because my kid couldn't do this. I don't know anybody that could do this." When in fact, you're sitting across from an omnivore. Do you get what I'm trying to say? That survival instincts will kick in, and they will fight and kill you. And if you were in a plane crash in the Andes, they'd fucking eat you. Yeah.

So why do we say that it's not going to happen, Brian, when the historical perspective—pardon the French, folks, it's Friday, and I'm a little drunk in the morning.

Exactly. If you just stay up and don't go to sleep, you won't get hung over.

No. Why do we continue to read about homicides and shootings and all this horrible pedophilia stuff and then we believe that it can't happen in my backyard?

And there's, there's a number of reasons for that, right? You know, when we get that information from Hollywood, too, we don't want to believe it would be someone close to us. There's a bit of a denial. There's some, there's some, there's, you know, the fundamental attribution here. Well, wait, he was a nice guy and had a good job and dressed well and went to church. In fact, he helped out at church. It's like, yeah, I know that's called Dennis Rader. He's BTK, you know.

Yeah. How do I get close to here? I had the nice foundation for all these troubled kids. Yeah, that's called access.

Yeah. The thing is, Jared from Subway. That's how he got access to it.

Exactly. Right.

But we, we don't look at that. Nobody goes to the creepy house. I learned that in Scooby-Doo. It's never, you know, it's, it's, it, but but you know, and that that obviously causes errors in judgment and a lack of critical thinking because we, we think it has to fit some prototype. So then what the problem with that is then we don't see it when it's right in front of us. And then we attribute all of these different, you know, these different values to someone for no reason, right? It's the, "Well, they're dressed that way, and that's how people dress in movies that are gangbangers." It's like, okay, that's also how people dress in that neighborhood where that person lives, so that doesn't mean anything.

And so, you know, you have to go off that, well, if he fits something that I see and, well, they're good, upstanding members of society, they would never do something like that. Then the problem with that is then people go the opposite direction and think everyone could potentially be a killer or a pedophile or this. And you're like, "Jesus, that's just not possible." Like it's literally, it's not possible. It's statistically, mathematically, it can't happen. If that were the case, there would be no more society left. Like that would have weeded itself out there'd be a line many years ago. Right. But, but like, the idea, and so, so you have to balance that out. And it's, you know, our thing is, it's actually a lot easier than you think, right?

So what I love watching about all these documentaries, it kind of goes back to this, like, every single person can tell you what that indicator was that gave them sort of an option afterwards, right? Because they don't attribute value to it in the moment, right? And there's a lot of reasons, you know, all the different cognition biases, mostly, of why we don't do that. But the idea is attributing value to those seemingly odd observations is the most important thing. That's your environment screaming at you. There's something in the environment, something with that person screaming at you going, "Hang on, there's something odd here." Now you may not know what it is, and you don't want to jump to an unreasonable conclusion, but that's what you have to investigate. That's the point to go, "Hang on, you know, that's where you start about that person. What could it likely be? What else is there?" You know, and those simple questions, right?

So, anytime I have a friend or someone ask me about something, and they call like, "Hey, I've got this weird thing," I go, "Look, man, I don't know because I'm only getting so much information from you, and you're putting this—"

Get them, get it, yet. What do we say? Get a yellow pad out. Write down what...

Yeah.

And why you thought that was strange, and just go down the list, make a whole list of everything you think it is, then come back to me with that list. And by the time they come back with that, they're like, "Oh my God, it's Colonel Mustard in the study with the pipe wrench!" You know what I mean? They, they already sort of, I think, they solved their own situation.

Of course, right? Look, I, I want you to take a look, first of all, folks, we should be getting paid by the gosh damn yellow pad company because we tell everybody to do that. Yeah. The second thing is, do your own homework. So go look at the Pike County case. I'm not going to—well, I'll remember one thing because it was years ago. I'll put that in episode details, but yeah, that's a good one. But we're working from our memory, I don't have the caper in front of me here.

Yeah, yeah.

But I do remember this: when they started looking into the Wagner family, which was the one, the four people that they've indicted, and they're going through trial, and some are already in—yeah, this is so, so the idea was that the youngest boy, the boy that plotted and planned and then carried out these murders with these other people assisting, wanted the two-year-old daughter. Wanted full custody, did not want to share custody. His background, okay? And look at the case because I'm paraphrasing, folks, but the facts are very close, I'm sure, when you do the research, was that there was an alleged sexual assault, and he had a marry a 13-year-old girl that ended up having a child. Okay? So look, Brian, that's short of an anomaly.

Yeah, yeah.

So the idea is if you were going to make very small concentric circles, imagine a 33 and a third RPM record, an old vinyl record. Look that up and followed those grooves out from the center. There's only one groove, Brian. No matter how many songs are on the album, there's one groove from the outside, goes all the way to the little nib that's in the center. So that's what you do. It's your yellow pad. First thing that you discount is that there's four murders or there's eight murders. Okay? That doesn't matter. Okay.

Now you say, "Well, the mannerism," okay, "they were all bludgeoned to death." Well, that may be nuanced, but disregard that for a minute. Start thinking about this: was this sexually motivated, or was this money motivated, or was this a domestic situation that spun out of control? Why? Because those are things that are going to start taking you to the right direction, Brian, because when we start saying like a forensic analysis is going to say that there's fiber evidence or there's lands and grooves or there's transfer, I love that, but don't start there. Let those people magic because they're subject matter experts. You look at where is my first glaring error in human behavior, you know? And that's what I would...

And part of that's, you know, simple is looking at just literally, like, what was the manner of death? Okay. If they were found, their bodies were found in a, you know, 55-gallon drum decomposing in acid. Okay. Yeah, there's your cartel connection, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's that's different. You know, barbed wire. Which is, which is very different because most of them, obviously, it's some sort of kind of domestic violence issue, which this sort of was in a sense, meaning not between like a husband and wife, between two families, some emotional, whole response to this with how, even just how it was done, you know what I mean? You can look at that and go, right. Well, was it, got to be someone in that circle. And, and, and you, you know, what gets talked about is, is, it's the reason why it bothers me so much is because it takes away from people learning about, you know, what, what's really important with this, so that you can then use that information, right? To, to maybe prevent something in the future. And that misunderstanding is what causes all this stuff. And then people want to go down the rabbit hole with the psychology behind the person and the way they were thinking and psychopathy. And you're like, "Come on, man, this stuff is not as cool as you think it is!" If you had ever met Bryan Kohberger, I guarantee you'd be like, "Hey, this dude's a little odd." You know what I mean? I, I guarantee, like, you would, especially with everything he was studying and doing and looking and researching and saying and writing, and, yeah, within all that, you'd be like, "Hey, this guy's kind of an odd guy." You know?

No, no, no, you can't make that quantum leap of logic. So, there's a homicide investigation going on East Coast. They just hooked the guy because they can't find his wife. She was supposed to go...

Yeah, briefly talked about it. The car was there, but she never took the flight.

Yeah, I don't want to say the neighbors, I'm not sure, but I'm sure it's a caper that you're talking about. But he used his kid's iPad, his son's iPad, to look up, "How long before our body starts to smell?"

Yeah. Okay. Ryan, I've known you for forever, and I've known people who have known you even longer than that. Okay. When have you ever looked that up? That's why I actually don't need to open up, but yeah, exactly. But I know how long it takes, but...

But nobody ever thinks, yeah, when they're doing it. Now, does that make this guy a murderer? No. Cheating on your wife, making a murderer? No. But I'll tell you what, circumstantial evidence than any other form of evidence, if she's, if she's dead by manner of homicide, then it's a good place to start. You know what I'm saying?

So you're right.

So, so look, let me, let me take you back to the late seventies, early eighties. Our karate dojo in Detroit, we were popular with coppers and first responders and paramedics and firemen and just lay people.

Where was that? Where was it in Detroit?

Yeah, my brother Brian's basement. By the way, he's still a little buddy. But he got all my gear. He got, remember, he got all the cool pads and the tatami. I'm sure.

Yeah, all the, the, I'm sure. Right, yeah.

At 65, he goes down the basement, shakes his fist even today.

That's so funny, man. You set me up! Well, he was so angry. He was like, "He's like, 'You know that shit's true. You know how I know? Because it was mine!'" But listen, he met you in California, and I wasn't there, so, you know it was the true story. Right.

So, so listen, one, one of the things that was happening in Detroit during the time—and remember, I was a copper, my brother Jeff was a copper and a fireman—and what was happening is there was a lot of these fires, and some were from arson because people were poor and pissed and, you know, just like today. And what happened is kids were dying in the fire, and the kids were continuously found under the bed. So we were starting to talk, and there's got to be approximate, because why were the kids under the bed?

So we worked with Detroit, Sterling, Warren, East Detroit, those five fire departments, and we said, "What is it?" So I want to take you back to I'm a huge Luc Besson fan. You remember The Fifth Element, Multi-Pass, that, that movie, the space movie with Bruce Willis? There's a part at the very beginning, Aziz light, where these creatures from space come down, and there are these huge awkward walking robots with bright lights that come on. Yeah. Now parallel that with a fireman in their bunker gear. Fires are loud. Fire scenes are scary. Yeah, they're, they're frightening. The firemen coming in with a weapon and being this huge thing with their bunker gear and their Scott Air-Pak, yeah, making noise. So they sound like Darth Vader. So we opined that this was scaring the kids, and the kids were more afraid of the firemen and hid under the bed than they were the fire.

Now, we still, the outcomes are mixed because it wasn't a scientific experiment, but I will tell you this: what we did is we had the firemen that were in our class, when we went around doing these elementary and junior high schools, we had the firemen come up and start talking to the audience and then slowly put their bunker gear on, right? And then they went, and they kept talking until they turned on the "bing bing bing" the alarm with the Scott Air-Pak and everything else. And we saw a marked difference between kids being frightened by the Scott Air-Pak and not because they understood the genesis of where—what's the pedigree of this creature that's in front of me? So, so if we stop looking at Kohberger and say Kohberger is unique and he's different, now he's one of us, he's just a broken one of us, right? Then you get my parallel here.

Yeah.

The idea is that we have to deconstruct something to learn about it. We have to deconstruct it and set it on the table. And guess what? When we put it back together, Brian, if we have extra parts, or we're missing a couple of parts, that's your psychopathy. That's your socio-apathy. Right? So, remember the game with the ant, the buzz, where you had to take the bones out of the, the... yeah.

Operation. Operation. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. No.

And you've got the caper and, and that specific one with it, with the kids, perfect, because you're taking the fear out of it because they're just saying, "Oh, okay, this big scary thing," which would be well when, when seen in the out, when seen for what it is, when, when deconstructing those elements and letting me touch it and hold it and see it and put the jacket on and put the helmet on, well, that's not scary anymore. I get it now. I understand it. It's different. I still don't, I, it doesn't make me a fireman, I don't understand it. Right. But, but...

Right. But I don't need to, at that point. Exactly.

Exactly. Look at your kid. You're going to have, there are people that are going to have boy and girl children over the next couple of years. Okay? Yeah. But, but think of Halloween, Brian. When you see a certain age kid, that's that two to four, and they've got their mask of Batman or Spider-Man, and they've got it up on top of their head. Have you seen that before? Okay. So it's on there and they tip down, and everybody laughs about it. I remember seeing Nico, and Nico wanted this mask. But when we showed Nico the mask, he was petrified, a little scary. Tipped it up and said, "Hey, it's just me." It was okay. So even he scared himself with the mask and tipped it up. So we want to be there and we want to be close to the flame, but we don't want to be so close that the flame burns us or scares us. So what was that information that I almost accidentally dropped? Yeah, Brian, does it have to do with Marlon Brando in any way?

But if you're, if you're talking about that, that I have a, you know, a son on the way, due in June. So yes, I'm very excited about that. But it, it that...

Brian's penis works. I'm so proud of you. So what's the connection? I'm not taking that.

Like Brando's, and who's going to ask me to be the Godfather? Reagan is trying to self-appoint himself as the Godfather to little Max. I don't think it works that way, Greg.

But you know...

To go back, he should understand your, your mask with the Halloween reference for a child is good because that's sort of, you know, it kind of brings back to what I brought up at the beginning about these different documentaries. That's what we're doing with these. Yes. Right. We're, we're intrigued. We're a little scared. And so I want to watch it, and I want to under—but like, it is in the facts. Yes, we're changing the timelines, or it goes to the, "Oh, I get it. He's a psychopath." It's like, "What the fuck does that mean or matter?" Like, most politicians are psychopathic. Yeah, you could be diagnosed. Leaders, CEOs, all that stuff. So it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't mean I want to kill anybody or, or it just means they're probably not going to be fun to be in a relationship with. How does it help us? It doesn't help us help us catch Kohberger. It doesn't help us catch the criminal.

Okay. So here, here's two parallels. You know how I like to put things parallel so people at home can solve for X and they don't need us. Okay? So, so you've got the, the one of the most prolific serial killers, Bundy, in the world. Okay? And Bundy drove a very distinctive white Volkswagen. And you remember when they were looking for him in Oregon and Washington, and he's coming to Colorado, that that one detective—and I'm going to be off on the number, it doesn't matter, it's the principle of the thing—the one detective said, "Do you know how many white Volkswagen bugs, buses or, you know, vans there are in California and or Oregon?" And that the one guy said, "Yes, 1,700." And they said, "Yeah, well, what are we supposed to do?"

And here's the thing: even if it was 17,000, that's where you start, Brian. This is what we're talking about. And they, what did they do with Kohberger? They looked at Kohberger and they go, "Well, how many of those vehicles are?" And it came out to be 25,000 or whatever else. You know what they started doing? They started looking for those damn vehicles. That's tap work. Good, basic police investigation starts with very, very simple thinking, Brian. What's the unsophisticated answer here? How organized was my criminal? Do you get what I'm saying? And where did they get access? Did they have to make access? Did they find access? Did they exploit access? If you can start thinking there, you're going to solve more crimes because what, what happens in a bad detective office? They go, "Oh, you know who that is? Yeah, that's Jimmy John's." Sounds...

Yeah, come on. Yeah.

No. And, and the other thing is the traveling serial killer. And now we're hearing, "Well, Kohberger is likely killed before because this demonstrates the evidence." Well, no, I'm saying, I'm saying that because of his personality traits. Stop! Shut the fuck up, Brian! When I hear this personality trait thing, I sent you one yesterday. Did you read the five traits that they thought, you know, every visionary is one of the following: they're a time optimist or an isolationist, a hero, a dreamer, an interventionist.

Yeah, that was, I was fucking rolling on the floor laughing when you sent me that. I was like, "Oh my God!"

I've ever seen. People are paying for that, Brian! Yeah. People are paying for that. People are doing a psychological profile based on what? Now, if it's based on statistical analysis and algorithms, you can—I'm more likely to take a look at it. But that doesn't mean anything.

Well, there's, there's, you know, the, the, the five-factor psychology model is one that's that kind of just—there's been so much data and research to put you in little buckets. But that's what it's for, it's descriptive. It's to give you better insight. That's great because you can kind of do that, but not that little button.

Exactly, exactly.

And, and the reason we say that it doesn't take into account, no. And be, but, but it's, it's there's been so much study over so many, so much time that it's, yes, it's an effective thing. But he, you know, any of that stuff is, is, is not what...

Yeah, well, that's the whole point, is what's it used for? But the other thing is, I think a lot of times, people just want reassurance, you know, if, if...

Of course.

Or they want to feel better, or, or want being told like, all right, let's say if you have some issue, some pain that you're going to the doctor for, and you've had it for a long time, and you've been dealing with it, the just finding out what it is is huge, right? It's psychologically, it's like, okay, even if it's something like, "Hey, it's something serious," or, "It's bad," or, but, no, no, I have a diagnosis, so I have something I can work towards. So that's why people love them so much, but they're mostly junk, I will tell you. Okay? And anyone but host, fire is saying junk. I say that they're an analytic that people are going way too far with. Well, because they don't show what they're demonstrating. Their confirmation.

My problem is they're horribly inconsistent. If you're horribly inconsistent, like if I have a great day today and all this good stuff is happening, and I sit down when I take my personality test, that's going to tell me one thing. If I have the worst fucking day of my life, and I got a shitty hangover, and this has happened, like, guess what? That's, I'm going to fall into completely different categories. So they're completely inconsistent. And then anyone who legitimately studies trait theory will tell you that understanding trait theory is, or, or trait theory or personal, like, traits are not a good predictor of any type of behavior whatsoever. And that's where we draw the line. Because the idea is, why do we conduct analysis? Because the pattern tends to show something.

Yeah.

So we take the pattern, and we do the analysis. What does it tend to show? And we only have two gating, two gating mechanisms. It shows nothing, okay? So that's a most likely course of action, which we don't care because people repeat behaviors all day long, and it's fine. But we do pipe up when it's a most dangerous course of action. So people that repeat behaviors that come into the MD KOA pop hot on our radar, and we spend more time with them. It's a simple algorithm. I mean, anybody can do that at home. Anybody that keeps going back to the combat hunter thing and saying, "Oh, combat hunter, combat hunter," it was for a very specific lane, Brian. It was for an exit on the freeway that we haven't seen in 12 years, 15 years, right? So the idea is to use that going forward as my model to baseline the behavior that I'm seeing today. You can't do that. What do you got to baseline, Brian? You've got to baseline the here and then now. What are the nuances of this environment that I'm seeing, and what's impacting? What are the social, geological, or the financial issues? What are the—you get what I'm trying to say? So if I, if I go, "Well, back in Fallujah," well, okay, hold on a minute. Yeah. All right. You're not, you're not, you're comparing apples and lawn chairs here.

Yeah.

And that's what they were doing with these pundits. The pundits go, "All murders are murders." No, they're not. Okay. Then they say, "All psychos are psychos." Well, no, they're not. They're not. So if you start there, Brian, you get what I'm trying to say, your information, your foundation, your fundamental theorem is, is flawed. And that's what we, I, I personally give a fuck about it because I hear people that are supposed to be self-proclaimed, I guess, subject matter experts, and they chime in on a caper where they're not an expert. I don't care that you're a lawyer. If you're a lawyer and you're not a homicide detective, how can you talk about strangulation? "Well, I've, I've, you know, prosecuted a bunch of capers." It doesn't mean you've investigated one. You see what I'm saying? And so, so that's where I hate the bias that a person that's at home going, "Well, I feel that this person did it." If you don't base your statements, stay off the social media.

Yeah, that's the, that's, that's the issue is, well, we, and a lot of times there's people wanting an answer or to understand or get rid of that. Yeah, but you don't get an answer. No.

To get rid of—people don't like uncertainty, right? We don't like uncertainty. We want to know things. And so even if it's wrong, I'll just say, "Well, we, I, this is why it occurred." And now that's, that's what I, I think it's simple, it's low calorie, I can move on with my life. I don't have to put any more thought towards that.

I agree is what I, I think because I love where you're going, but I think you've got to take a step back and watch how most humans would react to this. Do you remember the uncomfortable time when you found out that the chicken you were eating was the chicken you were playing with when you went to the petting zoo? The uncomfortable time when you saw the cow and you understood that the stuff you were drinking as milk came out of those teeth? There is a learning curve, right?

Yeah, I get it. But there, you know, to be absolutely serious, there's a learning curve when we find out that these things come from other things. So when we find out the first time about procreation, you have that sex talk and you go, "No, I don't, that thing is for, yes!" Okay. So that level of disbelief, if you start there, you're not going to be open to the idea that these things happen all the time. Once you think that homicide, Cain and Abel, do I have to go further? Yeah, it's always going to be around. It always has been around. So what we've got to do is we've got to do that, that, that search, right? And we've got to search in close to what, and we've got to take a look for incongruent signals. Anytime we get an incongruent signal, we've got to be suspicious. Now, not all of them will lead us to Mr. Bond, you know, or the bald-headed criminal with the white cat. But, Brian, that's a safe bet that if we start there, we're more likely to get the answer.

And I will add this to you: you talked perfectly about the one-hour drama. All movies are the same way. "Hey, this guy's the murderer." So you're going to walk you through how he did it. There's not a lot of people are going to stick around in the theater. You know?

Yeah. No, I don't know. There's X-X-X, a funny one out on Netflix with Rob Lowe is the host of it, and they go through all the Hollywood cliches and why they work. And, you know, every single one they go through from like, you know, the guy standing alone looking at the, at the, at the tombstone in the funeral. These, you know, the, the, all of these archetypes that that are in there. And all of them, they make fun of it. It's funny, you know, they just talk about it, and they go, "Look, there's..." Right, because there is an algorithm, it works.

There certainly is life. It is Hollywood.

Hollywood even does that. It was the what, I forget the guy's name, something scream. It's a scream that came from the 1950s movie, and where he gets shot by an Indian with an arrow. And they use, like, that... Yeah, yeah, it starts, but I can't remember. But they, they, they go through each movie where it's in. And then it became an inside joke in Hollywood, where even in Star Wars they were doing it. Even Spielberg does it because they're like, "Hey, let's put that screaming right here." And like, so there's all these little elements. But all those elements are just, they, they're, they're consistent throughout because they play on our emotion and what we expect. I need to have a little bit, I need to, I have to be able to have some idea where this story's going even if I'm not sort of consciously aware. Right? There has to be a little bit.

I totally agree.

There has to be a little bit of predictability. And then what the good ones do, and there's anything, even this is what comedy is one when there's some irony or there's something that, that the opposite of what, what happens is what I expect to happen is when the opposite of that happens, now I'm intrigued and my brain goes, "Oh my God!" I either laugh or I cry or I jump or whatever it is. And so that's what, what plays with our emotions. So we, if we don't, our brain's constantly trying to finish the sentence, right? We're trying to finish our sentence, finish your sentence as you're talking to me, finish the situation. We spend more time doing that. Yeah. Formulate our response than we do listening. And so our brain wants to know where this is heading, and it needs that.

Exactly. So they want to anticipate. Right. So these stories fill that. Right. It fills that. The, the way it's portrayed on, on a news cycle, no one wants to go, "Hey, you're going to have to wait until we gather all the evidence." We don't, we don't want that. I don't want to hear. Nobody wants to...

I want the answers.

Yeah, exactly. So I, I know you remember the story, and you know it's a true story. And one of my former friends and colleagues and his wife and Shelly and I went up to Vail, Colorado to see The Sixth Sense on its opening night.

Oh, yeah.

And Vail, Colorado theater is very different. You can have wine or a bourbon, and you're sitting in reclining seats, and it's, it's really like being in your room. You don't know, yeah, you know. And, and this was new. This was a long time. I don't know how old The Sixth Sense is, but we were sitting there, and I remember Shelly's sitting next to me, and then that person's wife and they were sitting there. And we watched, and it was the very beginning of the film. And so I look over and I go, "He's dead. He's the guy that's the thing." And Shelly says, "Yeah, and this guy, this is the one that killed him." And so we're like three minutes into the film. Do you get what I'm trying to say? The gunshots not happening. I hate to spoil it, folks. I should have said spoiler alert. But the idea is we called it. Why? Because we're profilers. We see human behavior. We understand the nuance of it. We understand that we've got to interject something up front and then bring it back. And so it wasn't fun to go to movies like that. Why? Because they thought M. Night Shyamalan thought he was being clever, but the idea was, look, you're being heavy-handed, like the use of red throughout.

Yeah.

And what it indicates. Go stop for a minute. And so, so with me, Brian, you know me, I'm an idiot. Okay. I, I am a functional illiterate. I'm not a very smart person at all, but there's one thing I'm good at, and that's sensing bullshit. You get what I'm trying to say? And wonder why somebody's throwing up that wall of bullshit. And, and so in those movies, I can get there quicker. Why? Because the plot has to. But reality is very different than that. Kohberger likely planned this for a good long time. That's going to come out. He likely conducted surveillance over a protracted period of time. That's going to come out. It's in, in spontaneous homicides are much more likely. "Hey, listen, you can't unring that bell when you pull that trigger." That's what happens in inner cities a lot. And that's why it's not a big story. You know, some poor young kid pulls a trigger, and some poor young kid is killed. And, and everybody goes, "Yeah, okay." Well, other than the Elvis song, we don't want to hear that, right? That's why it's not news. You know, that's so, and I'm sad too, because that kid's value is just as much as it's four kids that got killed in Oregon, but we're never going to know about it.

It is. And, and there's, there's, you know, when we continue to get exposed to stimulus, it's no longer novel. So when it's something that happens all the time, we start to accept it as part of the, of, of the fabric of society. Oh, it's just how things are. And, well, you know, and, and we don't, we don't, yeah, well, it's the wrong answer and the wrong response to it and how we allocate resources to what, where and why. But, but there's, there's a lot there. There's a lot in there. And, and of course, this makes headlines because, "Oh my gosh, you know, it doesn't, that those things don't happen here." It's like, one, yes they do. And two, everywhere. They happen everywhere! Like that, that's the issue. But, but, um, you know, and, and there's, there's a number of other, you know, reasons for that.

And it's going to cost somebody a million dollars to change the door locks, then they're going to put in security systems, then they're going to put in, you know, parking lot, whatever.

Well, the, the time because they create, and then it creates this, "Well, nowhere is safe and the world is—" It's like, no, it's not, man. The world is like very, very, very, very, very safe compared to... It's so statistics.

Exactly. So do you remember, Brian, our, our, Bill Murray is kind of a freak, but do you remember our, our favorite Hollywood film, Scrooged, at the very beginning where they go, "Toxic waste!" Yeah, yeah. And destruction. Well, that's why people are turning into the new movie, "I've been here, Ebenezer!" Yeah. You know, because they show all the death and violence and people screaming. People, people get hooked by that, Brian. We all know that, that life is a fatal disease. We all know that we're not getting out of here alive. And we're fascinated by death. And, and so it becomes, by, look, Día de Muertos. Okay. We're fascinated. Now, a horrible specific, Brian, you can't look away from a car crash. Why? Because somewhere corporeally, somewhere inside of you, you know, that could have been...

Well, we know because we don't, we don't understand death until we're dead. Right? I mean, this one is that before as humans, there's ways to explain it, right? But everyone, you know, has their different ideas of what happens, but it's a novel thing to go, "Man, what happens when, when you, when you die?" You're like, "What, what? Right? Do I have a soul? Do I go to heaven? Do I use this?" Everyone has all these different stories, but, but no one knows what actually occurs. So it's, it's, it's ingrained in human DNA to be fascinated and, and obviously scared of, of dying, you know? That's the point is to survive and in, in survival of species as well. But, um...

And thrive, I agree. So we, we covered a bunch of different cases, and, um, you know, brought up some of the kind of psychological elements of this and, and, you know, how we look at things. And, and this is right. Part of the reason why we talk about all these cases is that to go look at the organization level, look at the sophistication level, look at the access, look at, look at how things were done, how, what, what occurred. And then you can sort of work back from there because it's, it's a better way than to, um, sensationalize things or misunderstand them. Because if I start to see those key elements in all of these situations, it's much easier. It gets easier and easier to solve that or to understand why these things occur or see it in your own personal life to go, "Hey, wait a minute, these are one of the things I've seen before in these other situations. Is this likely going to be one of those cases where the guy ends up killing a bunch of people?" I mean, that's what we're talking about, is identifying this.

Exactly. Early on, because they're screaming at you. And there always are. And every single one of these stories, it's always, "Well, you know, I thought it was odd." That's every single story. Right. There is no, "The person was just, you know, an upstanding person, and it came out of nowhere." There's nothing that comes out of nowhere. I mean that, that's, that's no point.

So, yeah, that's my weather analogy. You know, you see this happening off the coast of California in Nevada or Colorado, you can start planning that you're going to get snow or rain or wind. So life is much the same way. And, and that's how you determine when you're looking at your kid if your kid might be deaf before somebody tests them and figures it out, or that your kid has a vision issue, or that your child may have some sort of, you know, but why? Because they don't interact well with the other kid. Now, does any of that mean that you're going to end up being a serial killer later in life? No. So stop, so stop thinking that. But what you've got to do is you've got to look, and you've got to say these certain things, like, like, I love FBI profiles because they're on the right track, like arson fires, or abusive animals, or, you know, bedwetting. Those things tend to show up in more than others.

Yeah. Okay.

But, but guess what? I'm dealing with the person now that's standing in front of me that's 26. Yeah. And I'm interviewing him for a job. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know any of that.

Go with what you do know. Go. Exactly.

So, so don't, ends justified by playing armchair quarterback. Take a look at the situation that you've got, and take a look at what's most likely happening. Almost always Occam's Razor. Almost always what's happening is going to be the simplest answer. And, and this is no different because homicide is a fact of life. Yeah.

Wow. That's the title, is that the title? Is that the title of this episode? "Homicide is a fact of life." Um...

Exactly. Maybe. Or the Godfather says so. Everyone listening to normalize, and what he does is now he'll just keep saying that over and over and over again to everyone to the point where everyone just assumes that this is how it is.

Exactly. So you're very, very... Nobody wants me as the Godfather of their child. And you guys, you guys have a bias against, against me because I'm, I'm, I'm without parents. You're not an orphan. You could adopt me. I'd be your son's brother.

That's not how, that's how that works. That's not how that works. Is that how any of this works? I think what was that song? All right.

"I am, I am your own." You know, "I Am My Own Grandpa" with Tom Arnold or something. I don't know that one. I don't know that one. But, yeah, it was a good discussion. Look, episode details. I'll send you, I'll send you, yeah, I can, I can find the, I'll put the Ohio thing in, in the episode details. And then, of course, we cover a lot of this stuff more on the Patreon side as well, if you're interested, folks. You can check us out. That's, find the link in the episode details as well. And then we answer some, some listener Q&A on there as well, on the Patreon side. So, send us your questions. That's the thing too, folks, for listening. Please, if you have topics or something that you're interested in covered, we do it. Yeah, we've done it, dozens of episodes where that started with listener questions, and then we frame it how, how we would look at it. So, please feel free to reach out and, and of course, share it with your friends. Fashion tips. Okay, we can things like that. I don't know, that we'll kind of be taking the show a different direction, but that's really not a good one. But, all right. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.