In part one, documentary filmmaker and Mindhunter author Mark

Olshaker traced how he walked into Quantico and began a 30 year

partnership with FBI pioneer John Douglas.

Now the serial killers who hid in plain sight, whether these

monsters can be predicted and the case,

Mark says was never going to end well.

The other interesting thing about Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, is

that contrary to what I think John Douglas and other profilers

believed about serial predators, most

of them would be single, would be loners.

In his case, he was married with a family and yet compartmentalized

somehow that part of his life and the

Lutheran church presidency part of his life.

And then he had this serial killer part of his life.

I mean, how do you explain that?

And that's just amazing.

Well, first of all, a lot of them, a lot of them are loners.

You know, a lot of them do follow the sort of profile of the 25 to

28 year old nocturnal single male, you know,

loner without an important job and all that.

But a lot of them don't.

Dennis Rader, as you say, he was president of his church.

He was a Boy Scout leader.

He had a wife and two children.

He had a job with the county.

And in those cases, you're looking right through these people.

In fact, before that, before that, he had a job working for a

security company that installed security systems houses.

What could be better for somebody who wants to break into a house

than to work for a security company?

But the important point, Craig, is that regardless of family,

regardless of job, regardless of anything else, what Dennis Rader

called his projects, what these people call their crimes is the

most important thing in their life.

They're thinking about it all the time.

They're often on the hunt nightly.

And when they can't be on the hunt, they're scoping out potential

places where they could find victims.

They're thinking about it.

I mean, the whole idea of a serial killer, as Bob Ressler defined

it to begin with, is somebody who commits a violent crime, then

they have sort of a cooling off period, and

then they want to do it again and again and again.

So yes, you're looking right through some of these people because

they do have a complete other life.

But what they what they want to do most, what's most important to

them, what's most obsessional to them are these crimes.

And the big mystery about Dennis Rader, or what the BTK before we

knew who he was, was there'd be long

periods where he wouldn't commit a crime.

And they thought, well, he's either been killed, he's in prison for

something else, and he's never admitted it,

he's gone to another jurisdiction or whatever.

It turns out in at least one of these two interregnums, probably

both, his wife found him in an auto erotic asphyxiation situation,

dressed in the clothing of some of his victims.

And she was totally freaked out.

And she didn't associate him with the BTK strangler.

But what she said, she was a, you know, a

simple, very devout church going young woman.

And she said, if I ever catch you doing this again,

I'm leaving you.

And that was enough to scare him off as long

as he could, as long as he could be scared off.

But again, with BTK, it was not only doing the things that he did,

but he also wanted the recognition, which is why he kept

communicating with the police, with the media.

And as you said, Craig, that was ultimately his undoing.

Right.

I remember what John Douglas, when he profiled that case, he

thought that if he was married or had a girlfriend, she would be

very passive and probably not go to the authorities or not confront

her husband or even suspect him, perhaps.

And I think that turned out to be the case, that she actually found

him on two occasions in that, you know, situation where he was

dressed in his victims underwear, bra, panties, unbelievable stuff.

Hey, one of the things that John

said that he would be based on the drawings that he that he drew of

the crime scene, John thought that he would probably be a police

officer, a retired police officer,

somebody in some position of authority.

And what he was is he was an enforcement officer for the county.

I mean, he was the kind of guy who had a reputation for going

around and saying, Your grass is too long or your dog is running.

Code officer.

Yes.

So as he couldn't.

Yeah.

So I mean, so he wasn't up to being a cop, but

he certainly got off on this petty authority.

Power trip.

That's that's another commonality, seemingly with these serial

predators is they like to hang out with cops.

I know in Kemper's case, going back to the serial killer, Ed

Kemper, who tried to turn himself in after

he kills his mother and all these other women.

They didn't believe him at first in part

because he was friendly with a lot of the cops.

He would hang out at cop bars and restaurants.

They got to know him.

They got to like him.

And there's just no way they could

believe this guy could have been the killer.

The same thing with Arthur Shawcross in Rochester, New York, who who

raped and murdered prostitutes and street women who he found.

He hung out at cop bars and he bought them donuts, you know, the

old cliche coffee and things like that.

And it was first of all, because he liked the milieu and second of

all, because he wanted to be able to keep

up on what the investigations were showing.

He wanted to.

I could I could see that.

I could see that makes sense.

I mean, he's trying to stay one step ahead of the of the game.

But I don't know, you know, like for me and so many of my cop

buddies, you know, you always have this

feeling about people in this perception,

you know, and it's and there's always

something that triggers you about things.

I mean, clearly some of these people, despite the fact that their

psychopaths are maniacal, they're pretty

damn smart because they got away with this.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you would probably

know more about this than me, Bill.

But I would maintain that anybody who rapes or murders an innocent

person in cold blood has some mental illness.

They are not there.

They are.

They are mentally ill.

But that does not mean that they are incapable of knowing the

difference between right and wrong.

Right.

This goes back to the McNaughton case when Daniel McNaughton in

England tried to assassinate Sir Robert Peel, the the prime

minister who was responsible for

the first London Police Department.

And they're modern policing.

Yeah.

And he was he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

And the test, which, you know, for all the different incarnations

we've had since then is still basically the same, which is, do you

understand the difference between right and wrong?

And are you able to conform your your behavior to that of society?

I mean, you all know very well the old cliche, if you will, the old

saying about the policeman at the elbow, which is if you are going

to commit a crime and you see a uniformed policeman standing there

and you still commit the crime, then you

probably really are pretty far gone mentally.

If you don't commit the crime at that point, then you get it.

You understand.

So I hope for you.

So I mean, almost almost all of the predators,

that's who we mainly deal with predatory type crimes.

I mean, not the kind who you probably saw every day.

There are the kind of felony

murders and injuries and things like that.

But when you have a predatory crime and and you, you know, you do

know what you're doing in most cases.

The one case that we found where somebody

probably didn't was a guy named Richard Trenton Chase.

And he killed young women, which is pretty bad in itself.

But he did it specifically to be

able to drink their blood to stay alive.

And now I haven't done it personally, but I have it on good

authority that anybody who can drink blood without totally

retching, it's probably a very unusual person.

It's not a pleasant experience.

And so it's not on the menu today.

Even after he was caught and convicted and put in prison, he

couldn't get the young girls anymore.

But he would, any animal that would come into his cage, mainly

birds, he would snap their neck and drink their blood.

Wow.

Eventually committed suicide.

Isn't that a vampire?

Well, exactly.

Yeah.

So the point is somebody like Richard Trenton Chase.

So I would say, yeah, he was by definition insane.

Yeah, for sure.

So insanity is a legal concept.

It's not a, it's not a medical concept.

But a question that was just brought up kind of in this discussion

that that occurred to me, is it possible to spot these people?

I mean, again, that is there some predictive way to say, yeah, it's

that one or no, it's not this one.

It's this one based on all this stuff that

you guys have that you and John came up with.

Sometimes.

How can you do it?

Sometimes.

John has always, you know, he's often asked, well, if you see a, if

you see a young boy in school and he's displaying, let's say the

homicidal triad, which is cruelty to other younger kids or animals

bedwetting at an inappropriate

age, starting fires out of curiosity.

Could you predict whether this kid

absent some serious intervention, right?

Could could become, you know, a criminal or a dangerous adult.

And John's and John's answer is yes.

And I often can, but so can any good elementary school teacher.

Ah, that's an interesting point.

You know, David Berkowitz, I think the son of Sam is a great

example of what you just alluded to.

Before he started killing people, as I understand it, he actually

started approximately 1000 fires and would stand a ways away.

He would masturbate watching the fire and then he would masturbate

again when he saw the fire fighters show up out the fire.

And then he recorded these fires in a diary, which apparently is

another commonality among serial killers as

they create these diaries and keep records.

Yeah, some diaries, some take souvenirs, whether it's underwear or

something with the image on it like a driver's license.

But if you look at the evolution of the son of Sam, David

Berkowitz, you see these fire start fire

starting and being getting off sexually as a result.

It's the power.

It's the getting other people to do things.

Then when he evolves into the 44 caliber killer, going to these

lovers lanes and shooting people who

he, again, he didn't feel adequate to

be with, with this powerful charter

arms, 44 caliber bulldog revolver.

And again,

it's not up close and personal.

It's that it's some remove.

So he is not physically attacking these people.

He's shooting them from a distance

and getting off on it the same way.

So it's in a way an evolution of the

fire starting because it's still power.

And he really got off, as you all know, on being able to terrorize

the entire city area in the mid 70s.

Yeah.

And I think in a way, the public imagination has kind of evolved

from serial killers into mass murderers.

And of course, they're, they're

very different kinds of personalities.

I mean, they still have this sense of inadequacy, this sense of,

you know, being outside of, of the norm.

But I think the difference is serial killers expect to get away

with it and they keep improving their MO so that they can.

And by definition, a serial killer is a successful killer.

If he's a serial killer, he's killed more than once.

It means he's gotten away with it.

Whereas from my experience and, and, and our research, these mass

murderers, whether it's in school shootings, whether it's, you

know, the one in Las Vegas, whether it's the one in, you know, the

tree of life synagogue, wherever these people are on an end game in

most cases, they want to go out in a blaze of glory, either they're

going to commit suicide at the end of their, at the end of their

murder spree, or it's going to be suicide by cop.

But one way or another, they don't expect to get away with it.

This is so this is kind of a different, different.

It's completely different circumstance because

someone just wants the notoriety of it as well.

Right.

And in a lot of cases,

you know, the DNA doesn't help us because this is a one off.

And so by the time we know who it is, the damage is already done.

And, and Bill, I would be interested in your opinion, but I would

think the more we have of these, the

more they kind of feed on themselves.

And so often when we finally investigate a school shooter, we find

that he's got pictures of previous school

shooters, you know, up in his room and things like that.

Yeah.

And that's just the thing.

I mean, we always talk, we had a guest on recently that's that's

doing some real cutting edge work with new technology.

And it's trying to identify these people through social media

circles and associations, you know, to prevent this and to catch

them prior, which is, which is tough.

Yeah, it's very tough.

And, you know, so often, even if you have the warning signs and you

call the parents into the school has happened several times, the

parents will say, well, they weren't serious, you're just

stigmatizing my child, I'm going to get a lawyer,

I'm going to, I'm going to sue the school board.

And so it's a very, very tough situation.

And, you know, I know, you know, when I was in, in school, a long

time ago, I mean, we didn't even think about this kind of thing.

Oh, now, I want to share, I want to share a

story because this reminds me of something good.

And it also involves pretty much everybody

here, because we all know Drew, that works with us.

So this is my experience, my one and only experience during my

whole career with a serial killer.

And Drew happened to be with me and was riding with me that day.

I think you guys may know this story.

Anyway, we're watching this, this drug house, and car pulls up.

And my recon eyeball guy is up in a tree.

And he calls out the car.

And we run the license plate, and the license plate comes back,

it's a stolen vehicle out of Daytona

Beach, Florida, wanted in a double homicide.

So now, now we're not just trying to catch the dopers.

Now we've got a murderer.

So we wait for him to buy his dope,

gets into his vehicle, exits the location.

We've got about 1015 cars and we're

going to box him into traffic, we box him in.

He doesn't have a chance to really get away.

He tries to run tries to fight us.

My sergeant and I grab him and, you know, we had to tune him up a

little bit because he was resisting.

And so he wasn't too happy with me.

So anyway, we're getting him back to the

station, we put him into the interrogation room.

More information comes in.

Now he's wanted for five or six other homicides out of Kentucky.

And the Kentucky State Police are now calling saying, you got to do

whatever you can do to get this guy to give you a confession before

you take him to jail, because it's going to take us, you know, a

day or two to fly down from Kentucky to interview this guy.

So nonetheless, we get him to the station and

he's in the room and I start talking to him.

And this goes to your point

earlier, Craig, about how they may look.

This guy's about, you know, this case was 25 years ago, probably

anyway, blonde hair, blue eyed, 25 year old,

good looking kid, looked like a surfer preppy boy.

Like you'd never you would never think this right, that he's killed

seven or eight or how many people it ultimately was.

So he's looking at me and I'm trying to establish a rapport.

And he's not happy.

He's not happy with me or my sergeant

because, you know, we had to tune him up a bit.

And he, you know, he'd sit there and he calmly talked to me and

then he looked at me and he go, you know,

why don't you just take those handcuffs off?

I just want to fucking kill you, you

know, and it was like so, so dead band.

And I look at him and go, come on, man, you don't want to kill me.

I'm a decent guy.

Look at you.

You can't be that bad.

You know, I'm trying to shook and jive with

this guy to try to get a rapport and to get in.

So he wouldn't talk to to me.

He wouldn't talk to Al, the sergeant,

so now he wanted to coke in some chips.

So we get him some coke and chips.

This is so like TV show stuff like, oh, we're going to get him a

cigarette, you know, like, so he wants some coke and chips.

We step outside.

Drew's talking to him now.

So Drew's talking to him and all of a sudden Drew gets this rapport

because they're about this, you know, closer in age.

All of a sudden the guy starts talking

to him and bragging about killing people.

And I was like, what?

So now he's telling Drew this stuff.

And so ultimately the guy writes a written confession for us.

And it was all because of Drew.

So we called Drew, Detective Drewby.

He took detective Drewby was

essential in getting this guy to cop to us.

And so the funniest part of this whole story now is we're going to

take he's got to be transported

down to the Dade County jail in Miami.

And so I tell Al the sergeant, I

said, why don't you take Drew with you?

Because it might be interesting

for him to go down and see the jail.

And you know, he's been part of all this.

It's interesting.

And I got a lot of stuff to do.

I got to make these calls to Kentucky.

La di da di da.

So the kid says, my last request is could you

guys please, please, please just take me to Wendy's.

I want to get a frosty.

It'll be the last chance I ever have in my life to have a frosty.

So they took a marked car.

So they've got the cage divider there to put him in the back.

So they pull up to the end.

This is you can't make this shit up.

They pull up to the drive through.

They order they pull up to the girl at the window.

She's curious because she sees that

there's a prisoner in the backseat of the car.

So she's she's peering out looking into the car.

And you know, so Al puts the window

down so the guy can say something to her.

And she and and she says, Oh, what happened here?

And Al, the sergeant looks at her and goes, you know, you should

talk to him because he's got a killer personality.

It was just, I mean, Drew told me he goes, he goes, I was

embarrassed for the guy in the back because I was crying.

I was laughing so hard.

And the guy just lost it.

So the murder suspect, the serial

killer, he's dying laughing in the back.

And it's just a very bizarre story.

Now, I will say, Billy, you have a lot of

stories that may be about the most bizarre I've heard.

I don't think I've heard that.

Come on.

Detective.

I want to say something else about that,

though, which I think Bill can confirm for me.

There is this myth in serial killer fiction.

And of course, there's a lot of it now.

When you have a character like John Douglas, or the one in Silence

of the Lambs, that he has this rare gift, or is it actually a curse

that he can put himself in the mind and think like the criminal?

And I would say,

this is kind of basic stuff.

If any police officer or police detective can't think like a

criminal, he's in the wrong

position where she's a little like this.

This is not unusual.

This is basic to be able to do the job, I think.

Mark, two final questions from me.

I think we're nearing the end of the interview for time reasons.

But number one, I wanted to close the loop.

You said something earlier.

You said that most serial killers, virtually all serial killers are

males, very few female serial killers.

I think we've seen one or two in recent times.

Why is that?

Yes, exactly.

Tell us why that is.

Tell us about Eileen and why she was the rare exception.

Well, there are a lot of theories about this.

One is that almost all predatory criminals are committing their

crimes on drugs, and that drug is testosterone.

But we think, from everything we've seen, that boys who become

teenagers and men who lash out in this

way, they tend to be more aggressive.

They tend to show their frustration through aggression.

Why, you know, probably men are better at sports.

They're stronger, for one thing.

Women who may have suffered the same kind of abuse or worse, they

tend to take it out on themselves.

They become much more introspective.

They become self-punishing.

They tend to often be attracted to men like their abusive fathers

or uncles, or whoever, because they don't feel they're good enough

because of what they've been through.

So a lot of it is the inherent more aggressive tendencies of men.

I mean, look, go back to prehistoric times.

It was the men who were the hunters and often the gatherers.

They were stronger.

They were more aggressive, sometimes braver.

Women tended to be more nest

building, more interested in the home life.

So that, we think, is the primary reason.

Women, obviously,

will aggress if they're attacked.

Aileen Wuornos, as you say, was an unusual case.

She had a pretty tough life.

She was out on the street in the prostitute and all that.

When you find women who do commit murder, it's often either with a

gun because they happen to have it, or it may be poison.

It may be something like that.

The one instance we find where you sometimes do find female serial

killers is in what we used to call the so-called killer nurses,

where they may try to harm their young patients or even older

patients, either so that they can be the hero heroine and bring

them back to life or because they just resent them or have this

kind of resentment or aggression.

So you do find that from time to time.

We found a couple of cases in England not too long ago.

But generally,

I would say at least 95 percent of predatory criminals are men.

And look, let's just be honest about it.

Because of our physical strength and our biological equipment, it's

easier for men to commit sexual assault than it is for women.

Right.

For sure.

Interesting.

Last question.

Nancy Guthrie case.

It's on a lot of people's minds right now.

You have studied this issue of criminal

profilers, John Douglas, many people you associate with.

I'm sure you have some theories about who

is this person that abducted Nancy Guthrie.

This is a tough case, Craig, because it doesn't really fit into

many of the brackets or the sense of things that we have.

First of all, kidnapping by itself is a very dangerous crime.

It's not quite as dangerous as it

used to be because of cryptocurrency.

But up until now, this is the crime where you had to have as the

criminal, as the offender, you had to have some contact with the

victim's family and the authorities to get the money.

So this is a very, very difficult crime to pull off.

And people don't realize how

difficult it is often to control a victim.

So what I wonder is,

could the offender have maybe been from Mexico, south of the

border, where there is more kidnapping for ransom?

And clearly, this didn't go well.

And I just thought right from the

beginning, this is case is not going to end well.

The result, because it didn't end well, because of what I think

happened, because of Nancy probably being killed either

inadvertently or because of an exigent situation for the offender,

that's why it hasn't been solved.

That's why you haven't found the body yet.

And I'm afraid, please God, I'm wrong.

But I think it's overwhelmingly clear that she's no longer with us.

And it doesn't fit the normal pattern of any kind of crime.

And that's why it's such a tragic case.

But again, it's not a normal kind of

crime, not a normal kind of scenario.

Yeah,

tough, tough case.

I have one last question.

You're very generous with your time.

One last question.

You guys are great.

Well, that's what I was going to ask you.

Will you come back?

I think you've wet the appetite of our audience, Mark, would you

agree to come back and dig deeper into some of this stuff?

Would you do it?

I mean, we can do whatever you want.

I mean, one of the things that people always want to know is, okay,

I say, I think we know who, and the

police knew who Jack the Ripper was.

How do I know them?

We can take a deep dive.

I mean,

great case.

Just on what I know about you, and I know

Craig knows a lot more, we could go on and on.

But today, I'm going to say to you, thank you.

I also want to give you an opportunity.

What if someone just heard about you and your work on this podcast?

What book, you have numerous books.

Is there one book you would say to get a real

sense of what you've been talking about here today?

Is there one over all the others that you would recommend?

Well, yeah, I'd say start off with Mindhunter, the first book that

John and I did together that gives you

orientation and all the books we've done subsequently.

And I think there have been about 10 altogether deal with different

aspects of profiling, criminal investigative analysis.

And Dennis, you said thank you to me, but I want to take this

opportunity before we leave to say thank you to Craig, because he

has done an amazing job of making the public aware of the

contribution and the sacrifice that law

enforcement officials have made over the years.

The museum that he got going in downtown Washington is fantastic.

The National Memorial that he got going is every bit as important,

in my view, is the Vietnam Veterans, Vietnam Memorial.

And so I think everybody in law enforcement owes a debt of

gratitude and admiration to Craig.

You know, this wasn't his field originally, and he really threw

himself into it and made it his own.

For sure.

And I want to second that.

I mean,

Craig Floyd has spent his adult life in one mission, and that is to

honor and support the men and women of law enforcement.

And he continues to do that today with Citizens Behind the Badge.

And Citizens Behind the Badge is the organization that Billy,

myself, and Craig formed in what, almost six years ago, I guess.

And our sole purpose is to be the leading voice of the American

people in support of the men and women of law enforcement.

So Craig keeps on giving after founding the memorial, after

founding the museum and founding and

funding, the funding part was the hard part.

And has a book coming out soon.

Yes, he does.

Which I like.

The manuscript of which I'm reading right now.

Good.

Well, I have read it as well, and I'm going to tell you something.

If he doesn't get that going pretty

soon, I'm going to send some thugs.

Billy's going to send some thugs over there to get him going.

And I know you know the right people.

Billy definitely does.

Sure, yeah.

Thank you, guys.

Well, again, I want to remind our viewers, our listeners, if you

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