The interview you're about to watch, we will be visiting the mind of a murderous malignant narcissist.
But there are many other types of killers.
There is, for example, the sexual sadist.
This is the kind of murderer that you come across in horror movies, in TV series, on Netflix, in HBO.
The sexual sadist kills because he, and in the vast majority of cases it's a he, because he is incapable of true intimacy.
He is incapable of what we call object relations, the ability to relate to other people.
Killing is the ultimate intimacy.
The act of killing constitutes the equivalent of sexual union in healthy people as far as the sexual sadist is concerned.
During the process of killing the victim, the sexual sadist experiences merger and fusion, recreates a womb-like symbiotic state with the victim.
The victim becomes an integral part of the sexually sadistic killer.
They merge.
It's a communion.
And there is a sense of, there's an oceanic feeling, a sense of belonging, total acceptance, and unconditional love, even as the victim rides and dies slowly under the observing gaze of the sexual sadist.
The sexual sadist interacts with the victim the way a child interacts with a toy.
He dismantles the victim and looks into her.
He collects trophies, elements or mementos of the victim and the act of killing, embedding it in some kind of personal history, an autobiography of intimacy thwarted.
And the pain, all this, the intimacy, the communion, the transubstantiation, the victim becomes miraculously and almost religiously into a figment of the killer.
They become inseparable in death as they should have been in life had the victim been healthy.
And so throughout this process, the mediating emotion is pain.
Sexual sadists are incapable of experiencing love, of course, or any other positive emotion.
And so everything is mediated through hurt and pain and shame and rage, anger.
These negative effects, these negative emotions imbue the sin and the act of killing and the aftermath.
And yet at the same time, the serial, the killer, serial or not, the sadistic killer, sexually sadistic killer, experiences the whole event as a positive, as something that had contributed to his own growth and evolution and perhaps apotheosis, converting himself into a god.
Now don't misunderstand.
The sexual sadist is capable actually of twinges of guilt and a hint of remorse and regret.
But usually these are directed at the act and art of killing, something he should have done differently, the less than perfect state of the victim or the less than perfect execution of the plan.
But all in all, the sexual sadist comes alive, revives, experiences his own existence in vivid colors only during the act of killing and through the agency of the victim.
So the sexual sadist in a way is grateful to the victim for collaborating with him or colluding with him in this trajectory of self-discovery and self-exploration.
And equally, he's pissed off, he's very angry, full of rage if the victim is perceived as frustrating, withholding, avoiding, negating.
So in the deluded mind of the sexual sadist, the act of killing is a co-production, co-production to him and the victim.
They're on it and in it together, they're creating something beautiful with the victim's life, taking away her life, imbues the sexual sadist with life.
It's a transfer of life.
And in this sense, the victim's body, again, is the equivalent of a toy to be dismantled and studied and reassembled in a different way.
And it's also a transitional object because the sexual sadist is incapable of relationships with proper, healthy, normal adults that is incapable of what we call object relations.
The sexual sadist uses the victim's body as a transitional object.
Now, we know children, for example, they carry around tattered, mutilated teddy bears or quilt or a blanket. These are transitional objects on the way to interacting with other people from narcissism to object relations.
The sexual sadist is incapable of traversing this gap between narcissistic investment in the self, narcissistic libido in psychoanalytic lingo and object relations.
So he remains stuck and he needs to consume and he needs to study and he needs to subsume victim after victim in a desperate attempt to somehow separate, individuate and become available and able to have a life with someone else who would remain alive.
This never happens in the vast majority of cases.
This is the sexual sadist.
The psychopath kills because the psychopath is possessive and vengeful.
Any hint of autonomy, independence, agency, self-efficacy, any decision making by the victim, let alone any challenge, any disagreement, criticism, the psychopath perceives as an insult, a damage to his omnipotent self-image.
And so the psychopath is a control freak in which is to possess the victim.
Only psychopaths kill only at the tail end of a relationship. They don't stop by killing like the sexual sadist.
And so the psychopath develops the conviction that he is the owner and the possessor of the other person in his life, would be an intimate partner, be a friend and that any defiance. I'm sorry, I get excited when I talk about psychopaths and he defines by the victim.
Whenever the victim disagrees to collude in this dance macabre to fit into the fantasy of being possessed, this is perceived as a slap on the face.
And psychopaths are very vindictive. They're very vengeful because it's all about power.
That's a concern mostly about power.
And so they strike back, they write the balance, they restore cosmic justice. They don't regard killing the adversary as something bad. They consider this to be an inevitability. They blame the victim. They say, "She made me do it. She should not have behaved this way. She provoked me. She, on purpose, frustrated me. She drove me to kill her." And this is a typical landscape of psychopathic killings.
And last but not least are impulse killings. In some cases, crimes of passion, grim depassion.
In other cases, killings that are the outcomes of, for example, fights or brawls, killings that are the outcome of neglect and so on and so forth.
These types of killings do not have a common denominator, psychologically or psychodynamically speaking. They are random. They are situational. They are circumstantial. And they are not indicative of any underlying mental health pathology in the killer.
They are the outcome of a lack of impulse control, perhaps, in some cases. They are usually the perpetrator regrets the killing bitterly, would like to reverse to time travel and undo what has happened.
And so they don't fit into psychopathic killing, sexually sadistic killing or malignant narcissistic killing.
However, the term crime of passion is an oxymoron. Passion is about life. Passion is about thriving. Passion is other directed. Passion flourishes and blossoms when the parties are somehow compatible and contribute to the passion.
So, a crime of passion is a contradiction in terms. A crime of passion is usually the outcome of vengefulness, lack of impulse control, fear of abandonment, separation in security and must involve a modicum of psychopathy or more likely malignant narcissism.
And with this, let us transition to the interview.
So it's a real delight to welcome Professor Sam Vachlin, who is author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
I'm going to let you say more about your vast career and all your various expertise.
But right off the start, I want to say a disclaimer that I'm not going to be going into the specifics of this case with you.
In fact, you know virtually nothing about it apart from, I think I've said that the accused killer Kit Harrison is a scientist, he's an above average intelligence and that's about it.
The reason being that I'm not going to ask you to do that nor would you be willing to is that you need to do a face-to-face diagnosis including the PCLR, which is the psychopathy test and you can only really do that by studying someone and being with them.
But in which I'm not qualified to do, I'm not a diagnostician. I'm a teacher and professor of clinical psychology, but I don't do diagnostics. I mean you need to be a diagnostician, it's a profession.
Exactly.
But what I am going to do is we're going to talk about some of those personality types, so psychopaths, narcissists, borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
And I will put perhaps some scenarios relating to this case to you because I think it'd be really good to get your take on what you think could be going on, which will help educate the audience.
And I think this is the most sensible way for us to go forward without creating, as I said to you before, something that's not accurate or true or sensationalising something.
Now, before we start, just introduce yourself in a more expansive way than I did.
Well, I've been studying narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines for well over 30 years.
I revived the topic of narcissism starting in the late 1980s. So I'm the grandfather of the field, in a way, the field of narcissistic abuse, I mean, in a way.
I coined most of the language in use today, including narcissistic abuse, somatic narcissists, rebel narcissists, you name it, hoovering, ghosting, I mean all these.
So I coined most of this language and I've written about a dozen books on the topic.
I'm a professor of psychology in several institutions and so on and so forth.
And so this is my background.
I've also interacted with well over 2000 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personalities, but mainly narcissistic personality disorder.
I've interacted with all of it, well over 2200 actually, by now.
And they've subjected themselves to a questionnaire and then there were follow ups, annual follow ups and so on.
And so by now I have one of the biggest, to my knowledge, the biggest database of information about these type of people.
So this is in a nutshell.
And it's not just the researchers you say is actually interacting with these people.
Yes, I've interacted with them.
I've administered a questionnaire and then we corresponded and then there was annual follow up, well over 70% of them.
Annual follow up for well over 20 years.
So it's a longitudinal database and it's rare. I'm not aware of anything remotely.
Take into account, for example, that most studies involved five, seven, 20 individuals is considered a massive study.
So 2200 is a treasure in terms of these disorders.
Absolutely so.
Now, I'm just going to pick up on that one word narcissism, which I feel is a more contemporary and overused word. I believe the population of that's made up of narcissists plus psychopaths and some of those other personality disorders is 15%.
If we look at the amount of accusations of people being narcissists, it's not, they might have some of the characteristics of a narcissist, but they aren't absolutely narcissist.
So could you just break down for me a little bit about what those different personality types are and how each of them differ and how we can get confused between them?
First of all, we believe that about 15%, one of every seven people has a personality disorder, not only narcissism and psychopathy, but one of the 12 or 15 personality disorder.
So that's a total number.
As for narcissistic personality disorder, we believe that anywhere between one and 3% of the global population have narcissistic personality disorder and about one to 2% have antisocial personality disorder.
And here the story becomes much more complex.
Antisocial personality disorder has variance and intensities.
The most extreme form is known as psychopathy, but psychopathy is not an accepted term in, for example, in the diagnostic and statistical manner.
It's an antisocial exactly like narcissism has been mutilated by media hype and online nonsense and misinformation.
So there's quite a bit of a mess there.
Let's try to make some order.
First of all, we distinguish between personality style and personality disorder.
So for example, narcissistic personality style would be an a-horn or a jerk.
That would be someone with a style.
But the disorder is much more pernicious, is a lot more complex than the style, involves multiple psychological processes, involves distortions and dysfunctions, every conceivable level, cognitive, emotional, otherwise.
So disorder is not the style writ large.
The disorder is not an exaggeration of the style.
It's a totally separate clinical entity.
And so we're talking about narcissistic personality disorder.
Someone with a narcissistic style is extremely unlikely to be violent, is usually relatively pro-social, collaborates with other people on obtaining goals, for example.
It's likely to be abrasive and unpleasant and obnoxious even, but it's not likely to exceed this.
So we are accustomed to coming across people with narcissistic style.
The disorder is much more dangerous and much more insidious.
And as I said, the narcissists.
So disorder involves behaviors which are essentially antisocial.
It involves a cognitive distortion, a misperception of oneself and of reality and of other people.
It involves envy and other negative effects such as rage.
So we have a lot of negative emotions sloshing about, which is absent in the style.
People with style are mildly envious and get angry from time to time, but this doesn't become a determinant of their personality.
So what is it about the disorder?
One could adhere to the list of nine diagnostic criteria published in the fourth edition and fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
And that would be a seriously bad idea because the knowledge embedded in this criteria is at the very least three decades old.
I started my work.
And so today there is something called the Alternative Model of Narcissistic Personality Disorder published in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
And it is far more descriptive.
It's far more dimensional.
It's reminiscent of literature.
It could have been lifted off Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or something.
It's not a list.
It's not a Buddha points that you have to somehow satisfy in order to qualify for a diagnosis, but it's a description or a holistic description of the narcissist.
So the Alternative Model is a step in the right direction, but it is still 20 years behind the International Classification of Diseases, which is a book published by the World Health Organization.
And the ICD is far more accurate.
Now in the ICD, there's no such thing as Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
There's no such thing as Psychopathy.
There's actually no Personality Disorder whatsoever.
There is a single diagnosis of Personality Disorder.
And then each person manifests this diagnosis, each patient manifests this diagnosis differently.
So for example, if you are De-social, if you have traits of De-sociality, you are likely to be what used to be called Psychopath and perhaps Narcissist and so on and so forth.
It's a lot more flexible, influx kind of thing.
And any practitioner would tell you that a typical patient is a narcissist on Wednesday, a Psychopath on Friday if you piss them off, and a Borderline on Sunday because they've been exposed to strength and anxiety.
This is nonsense.
All these distinctions are nonsense, counterfactual nonsense.
So what is it about these people?
Forget for a minute the diagnosis.
There's a huge debate about diagnosis.
For example, we have a debate whether overt grandiose narcissists are actually Psychopaths and not narcissists at all.
The normal, the whole field is in flux.
I wouldn't rely on anything right now.
But what is common to all these people?
First of all, the inability to perceive other people as separate and external.
The narcissist, for example, cannot conceive of you as being outside himself, as owning some kind of personal autonomy or independence or agency.
He cannot conceive of this.
Why is that?
Because he doesn't have the tools or the instruments to regard you as external to himself.
So what he does, he creates an internal object, an avatar, what I call a snapshot of you.
He internalizes this photograph of you.
Then he photoshopes it.
This process is known as idealization.
And then he continues to interact with this photograph, not with you, never ever with you.
Never.
He does not accept you as a separate entity with its own wishes and dreams and hopes and fears and desires and emotions and cognitions.
No way.
You're not separate.
You're not external.
You're just a figment inside the narcissist's mind.
A figment that is manipulable.
A figment that can be idealized and devalued and then idealized again.
Reidealized.
A figment that in short is an extension of the narcissist, an integral part of the narcissist.
If you dare to show any signs of independence and personal autonomy and agency and self-efficacy, you threaten the inner stability of the narcissist's mind.
You're actually broadcasting to the narcissist the way you perceive people is wrong.
Or wrong, which in the narcissist's mind, it translates into narcissistic injury, a challenge to his brandiosity.
But you're also telling the narcissist, you can't control me.
You cannot own me.
You cannot determine the outcome of this interaction.
I am capable of abandoning, separating from you because I am an external.
So any transmission, any message or any signal that you are not a part of the narcissist would provoke aggression.
And if the narcissist is antisocial, it's a subspecies of narcissist known as malignant narcissist.
It's a delectable combination between psychopathic narcissist.
If the narcissist is of this type, then it's likely to culminate in violence.
And if you insist on your separateness and externality, the narcissist would seek to annihilate you, eliminate you and eradicate you because you will have become a constant source of frustration and a challenge you're undermining the twin pillars of the narcissist's mind.
Number one, everyone is me.
Everyone is internalized.
Number two, I am godlike and grandiose.
This is an intolerable thing.
You're threatening the narcissist's life, at least mental life.
He can, he can devolve into psychosis if he doesn't take care of you.
And the only way to take care of you is to eliminate you simply.
Now some narcissist eliminate you, the vast majority of narcissists would eliminate you by converting the internal image that represents you in the narcissist's mind, by converting this image into a devalued version.
We call it the secretary object.
In the narcissist's mind, he will have avenged himself by degrading you and debasing you somehow in his mind.
It's all happening in his mind.
But again, there's a tiny percent, about 3% of narcissists who are psychopaths as well.
And these narcissists are very, very bound to be violent.
Absolutely.
And they're very bound to escalate.
So at first they would beat you up, but they are likely, I mean, they can end up murdering you just to get rid of the dissonance, the clash between who you truly are as an external object and your representation in the narcissist's mind, which is obsequious and submissive and obedient and you have to conform to a shared fantasy.
The narcissist creates a fantasy which involves himself and you.
And within this fantasy, you're allocated a role and you have to adhere to a script.
You have to follow a script.
And if you don't do this, you're malicious, you're malevolent, you're aggressing against the narcissist.
It's a conspiracy.
The narcissist becomes paranoid, paranoid ideation.
He becomes hyper-vigilant.
He then becomes violent.
That's a sequence more of it.
Some of the things you described there sound like some of the behaviours that we might see in coercive control or more, I don't know if this is the right way to say it, but more sort of general domestic violence as well.
Would you say that, I mean, this is maybe too broad a question, but that it's likely that usually men who act in that way in a relationship, for example, may have those personality types?
No.
Actually, studies have demonstrated time and again that the majority of abusers, especially abusers in domestic violence situations, family violence situations, are not abusive because they suffer from a personality disorder.
They may have a personality disorder, but that's not the cause of the behaviour.
It's more about control.
It has to do with the... The reason for the confusion is that all these behaviours, coercive control, marital battery and violence, I mean, familial battery and violence, all these behaviours are common in relationships with narcissists and an integral part of narcissistic abuse.
They are also common in relationships with psychopaths, but their existence does not necessarily prove or denote this disorder.
So, every narcissist and psychopath is abusive, not every abuser is a narcissist or a psychopath.
Now, the mechanism that underlies all these, whether personality disordered or not, the mechanism that underlies all this is known as separation insecurity.
These are people who have failed as children to form a healthy attachment with significant others, especially parental figures, especially the mother, but not only.
Parental figures, influential peers, role models, even teachers.
Children who have failed in the critical formative years between zero and, should we say, six at most nine, they failed during this period to create an attachment which would be rewarding, an attachment which would lead directly from emotion to action, an attachment that would not be conditioned on performance or on some qualities and traits that the child possesses, some kind of unconditional love, an attachment which would not deny the child its emerging boundaries, an attachment that would encourage a child to separate and become an individual.
The kind of attachment that feels safe, indeed the clinical term, is secure base.
So, all these people, without exception, failed to create secure attachment styles because they didn't have a secure base.
They had a mother, for example, who was abusive and traumatizing, or on the other end of the spectrum, a mother who was absent, emotionally neglectful, or a mother who instrumentalized the child in order to realize her unfulfilled dreams and wishes and fantasies, or a mother who parentified the child.
And I'm saying mother because in 80% of the cases the damage is maternal.
And so these people cannot develop something very important which is known as object constancy.
Object constancy is the belief that other people are going to be there for you and have your back even when they are physically absent.
And then a lack of object constancy, known as object inconstancy, not surprisingly, leads to separation insecurity which colloquially is known as abandonment anxiety.
The clinical term is separation insecurity.
And separation insecurity consists of the unconscious belief that things are going to end badly.
There's an association between love and intimacy and ultimate pain, abandonment and desertion, betrayal.
So, things are going to end badly.
And the only way to make sure they do not end badly, only way to secure a favorable outcome, only way to guarantee self-efficacy in relationships is to utterly micromanage and control the partner.
Then she won't be able to cheat.
She won't be able to betray.
She won't be able to steal your money.
She won't be able to abandon you.
She won't be able to walk away.
So the control is twofold.
It's emotional.
There's a variety of mechanisms that are used, like trauma bonding, like intermittent reinforcement and so on.
So there's emotional control and there's physical control.
And its epitome, the exaggerated form of physical control is known as coercive control, which is a crime in some countries.
Coercive control is a crime.
But all this is a child's defense against hurt and against abandonment.
The abuser is a terrified child, child in panic, not only reluctant, but horrified by the prospect of reenacting and recreating early childhood experiences known as adverse childhood experiences.
So these are children.
And one of the major mistakes we make in clinical practice is when we try to treat these children as if they were adults.
We strike a therapeutic bargain or alliance with them.
We agree on treatment goals within a treatment plan, which is ridiculous.
These mostly men, not only men, of course, but mostly men are children.
They're four years old.
They're two years old.
They're six years old.
We need to use child psychology to work with them.
We need to help them to develop object constancy, the perception that intimacy could end well and that love is possible.
In other words, that they are lovable.
Because another thing they have is a bad object.
A bad object is a clinical term for constellation of voices, internal voices that keep informing the individual that he is unlovable, that he's unworthy, that he's bad, that he's inadequate, that he's a failure, ugly, stupid, etc.
So abusers typically have these bad voice recordings, if you wish.
And then they say to them, and so it's very simple because they say to themselves, "I'm unlovable.
Why would she love me? I'm unlovable.
This is the bad object.
Why would she love me? She's about to abandon me.
They catastrophize.
She's likely to abandon me.
I can't let that happen.
I will die.
It's a child.
I will die.
So I need to control them.
And if she does abandon me, she's a bad mummy.
She you know, I'm a child and she's malicious.
She's malevolent.
And I wish she were dead.
I wish she were dead, you know, which is a child's home alone.
So and you probably saw me smiling a bit there.
The words you use there are in letters that were read out during this court case.
Quite a few of them, the ugly, the thing about the child, the, you know, internal, the insecurities, and then ultimately talking about rages as well, which she was afraid of.
Just on that subject that, you know, not to simplify as sometimes we do is, it's just because of a parent that they then end up doing this.
But there are triggers for people doing, they're not just murder, you know, born a killer.
We're all capable of murder.
I truly believe push the right button.
And I've sat through many a murder trial and seeing something unfold, you know, reverse engineering it, then understanding how something happened.
But with a situation like this where there was triggers and I believe a decision was made because then there was planning, meticulous planning.
And I've heard you talk about this.
It's almost like the art, the artistry of committing the murder.
That's how much planning goes into it.
And I believe that was the case here.
So I've kind of ended up with two things there.
One is the trigger and then the next would be the artistry.
But I know I said I'd avoid kind of going specifics, but I can just briefly tell you trigger of everything you've described about the needing to control, needing to have as an object.
And she was excelling more in her career as a geneticist.
He was a biologist.
She left him and she was seeing other men.
So all the kind of that might be viewed by him as abandoning him in every way and excelling and being better than him and living her life where his life got smaller.
I guess that for me, in my view, be the trigger.
I don't know if that's how you could use a possibility.
And then the planning part.
I haven't really asked your question here.
I've just sort of said lots of things, but do you have anything to say in response to that?
I always have something to say.
So that's my brandy of the two.
So start with the trigger.
The whole thing I've described in my previous answer is known as repetition compulsion.
It's important.
Both words are important.
There's a compulsion to repeat.
There's a need to reenact and replay early childhood conflicts with the implicit or unconscious hope of a different resolution.
Hello.
Sorry.
That if we can you hear me now?
I can hear you now.
Sorry.
What has happened to the recording?
Yeah, it's I think that I don't know if it was my wife or yours, but you disappeared for a moment.
Would you mind if we just take that from the top again?
So you said about the repetition and then go from there if that's OK.
So this the whole thing I've described in my previous answer is known as repetition compulsion.
Both words are very important.
There's a need to repeat a compulsive need to repeat or reenact early childhood conflicts, presumably unconsciously with a hope for a different resolution this time.
Of course, it never happens.
That's why it's a repetition compulsion.
It has to be repeated time and again until the narcissist or psychopath dies.
But in order to efficaciously repeat the early childhood conflict, one needs to select either a specific type of partner or coerce the intimate partner to play a role to adhere to her part of the script to be a bed mother or a dead mother.
Yes, dead, metaphorically, dead mother.
Some abusers select intimate partners who would recreate the bedmummy parental role.
So for example, promiscuous women would do this for them.
Promiscuity would justify jealousy, romantic jealousy would justify the control.
You can't be trusted your promiscuous.
And then the shared fantasy is perfect because there's a bed mother, there's a child, but this time the child is in control.
And so this is go for a different resolution.
A child favorable resolution.
The other option is when the intimate partner does not conform to the bedmummy stereotype.
She actually loves the narcissist or the psychopath.
She's scary, she's compassionate, affectionate, helpful and so on.
So then the abuser would use something known as projective identification.
It's a defense mechanism.
He would behave in ways which would force his intimate partner, coerce her into becoming a bed mother.
In other words, he would trigger her and provoke her to abuse him.
This is known as reactive abuse.
So he would shape her or shape shift her to become someone she's not.
And many of the victims describe a feeling of estrangement or alienation.
I didn't recognize myself.
It wasn't me.
I don't know what has happened to me, what came over me.
It's a dreamlike or nightmarish feeling of having lost yourself essentially, because you're playing a role in someone else's script.
And these are the two possibilities.
I don't know what has happened in this particular case.
But someone with this profile, a bit on the psychopathic side, the little that I gleaned, would tend to choose a foreigner.
He would choose an intimate partner who would trigger him multiply.
So for example, he is extremely likely to select a mate, mate's affection, who would be unusually promiscuous, out of control, promiscuous.
So as to be treated and justify the environment, the coercive and abusive environment that he creates, the shared fantasy, because he would say, well, she is like that. I'm not imagining this.
This is not crazy. It's not even crazy making, but she's simply out of control.
And even he would cast it in altruistic terms. She is harming herself. I'm helping her to become better or to heal.
So does the guru, teacher, savior, rescuer, fixer thing? I'm helping her to heal.
So this is element number one, the repetition compulsion involving five constant intimate partners who would fulfill the role of a bad mother.
The second element is the grandiosity.
And so the control and the ability to manipulate a partner and mind snatching of the partner known as in training clinical terms, all these elevates the part of the abusers self-esteem regulate his sense of self-worth. He feels gold-like. He feels grandiose.
Now, when the grandiose it is challenged, as I said, when the partner is independent, autonomous, successful, and so on, it would trigger the narcissistic and psychopathic abuse.
Absolutely.
Because it's a challenge to his grandiosity.
Similarly, should the abuser decide to punish the intimate partner, to put her back in her place to reduce her to size or to eliminate her altogether, he would do it in a way that upholds and buttresses his grandiose. He would feel very smart about having gotten away with it. He would create, he would commit the perfect crime. He would leave telltale signs in the scene that he knows can be useless, are useless, at least under the circumstances of that time.
But it would aggrandize him.
Those fools, those police fools, I left them breadcrumbs and they couldn't follow the truck. Why?
Because I'm infinitely more intelligent than they are.
So yes, there's a lot of grandiosity involved in the very act of murder and so on.
And this is common to all murders, by the way.
Even murders of passion, which ostensibly are situations where one loses control, they involve the implicit assumption that you have a right to take life.
Pretty grandiose assumption, one would say.
When I interrupt you again, I just want you to reassure the people listening or watching this that I have not told you about this case because some of the things you've just said again, absolutely.
The planning part in that the murder was committed, planned, executed and the behaviour afterwards was so transparent, travelling to different locations, knowing that he could dispose of evidence.
There was an incinerator at a university to work at. He went to a shoe shop and bought new shoes, went and got the watch, all the things that it was circumstantially so obvious.
It was daunting.
It was absolutely daunting.
And of course, it has now formed part of the circumstantial case of the crime.
It was literally he drove back after this bizarre journey and then got back home and got arrested as soon as he arrived back home.
It was like, what?
And that... There's a developing, incrementally developing sense of immunity.
The first reaction is invariably panic. Invariably.
I mean, there's no exception to this.
Even the most hardened psychopath is the reaction of panic.
But then as time passes, the grandiose element says, you shouldn't have panic. You're infinitely superior. Your intelligence isinfinitely superior. There's no way these mere mortals are going to catch you.
So there's a sense of developing immunity, which is justified in most of the cases. It's not counterfactual. It's rational and reality based.
There's a vast majority of murderers do not get caught.
It's pretty factual, especially if they're intelligent and so on.
And almost didn't.
And I think due to the scientific knowledge, that's how he almost knew how to carry out the murder.
Having an advanced knowledge for the capability of DNA.
They didn't have DNA profiling then.
But he would have had a knowledge of that.
And then also, not a single fingerprint.
But the absence of any evidence showed the regular, if it'd just been a kind of break in and brutal murder by someone else.
They wouldn't know how to not leave the evidence that forensically they could then find later on.
Also I think something else I think I'd like to ask with regards to the taunting potentially, but it also moves into the trophy element.
This person held on to evidence, which had actually been seized by the police.
Very common.
He'd managed to get it back because there was an investigation back in the 70s and then nothing until he got arrested in 2020.
Apart from me confronting him 20 years ago.
He'd heaped it all in the evidence bags.
When the police raided his home, they couldn't believe it.
It was like a time capsule.
And they then were able to seize this back and it hadn't been touched.
They actually then used it against him.
And also keeping a property, he didn't really have a connection to the city it happened in.
I've moved there for the marriage for her job and did leave a year after.
Never got rid of the house and then quite an old age moved back to the city.
And again, that was I think the taunt to the police where they thought, do you know what?
We're going to go for him now.
And if he'd stayed away, they might not have done that.
So is there something that you can give us an insight into why they want to keep things or stay associated with the property?
Is it part of the obsession with their idea that it was art that they'd got away with it or what drives that?
It's a tangible reminder, tangible reminder of their days of glory and how they got away with it.
It's grandiosity handled, it's kind of handled.
You see, memories dim all the time.
It's more and more and more difficult to elicit the original sense of exaltation and, you know, an apotheosis like becoming a god.
The very act of killing something is arousing.
It's arousing and this is something that is politically incorrect to say, but it is arousing.
I happen to know I was a soldier for three and a half years.
Even in war, even in conflict, killing someone is an arousing experience.
At the same time, you have the social aspects of killing which take over.
And so you feel regret and remorse and shame and you feel horrible that you've killed someone and so on and so forth.
But somewhere back there, it is arousing because it's as close as you can get to God.
You become godlike for a split second.
You take life.
But it tends to fade, this memory, this elation, this mental orgasm tends to fade.
And you need to remind yourself of it.
What better reminders than tangibles?
So soldiers as well take trophies, not only serial killers.
Soldiers take daggers and belts and helmets of the people they killed.
Ask any soldier.
So the trophies of death, the reminders of death, the remainders of death are there to remind us that we have survived.
In any encounter where you try to kill someone, you might well end up being the victim.
Even a woman, even a helpless woman, even a drunk woman, you know, you might be anything can happen.
And yet you have survived.
So sometimes the survivor guilt, like I shouldn't have killed, it's not okay, thou shalt not kill, so on.
But there's always the survivor elation.
I'm the one who made it.
This encounter of two, I'm the one who made it.
She's dead.
And I need to remind myself that I'm alive every day.
I'm the one who is alive.
Because when you kill someone, two people die, the victim and the murderer, they both die in different ways, of course, one dies physically and one dies mentally.
The taboo is so ingrained in us that even in the most hardened psychopaths, it has an impact.
And so you need to revive yourself, resuscitate yourself, resurrect yourself, if you wish.
And resurrection is intimately connected to death, not only in the New Testament.
Many serial killers, for example, or killers, go through a ritual or a ceremony after they kill, they cleanse themselves with water or whatever.
They I don't know, to take for long showers, there is there's always a ritual or a ceremony after the killing.
And this is this is the equivalent of a religious experience.
It's not an accident that most primitive religions were associated with human sacrifice.
It's essentially a form of ritualized murder.
So it's very primordial, it's very atavistic, this encounter between killer and victim, killer and victim.
There's the element of predator and prey, which is animalistic, special.
There's the element of human sacrifice.
There's the element of survivor and the survivor.
She didn't make it.
There's the element of what God like I've taken to life.
There's so many layers involved, even in the most primitive killer, even intellectually challenged killers have described these emotions.
When somebody put all these together, you discovered that it's actually a form of sex.
I know that everything I'm saying is pretty shocking, but it's well founded.
It is a form of sex.
It's all the astic and orgasmic.
I heard your interview when you you know, you described the the people's dilating, etc.
on and the breath that there's things that are mimicking an orgasm, but also the ultimate power over a person as you say, God, and they are the God and that person's life is in their hands and there's an intimacy with taking that life.
Obviously, this is something very upsetting if any families are listening to this, but I do understand it.
It's logical aspects.
The victim perspires, the smell, the fluids.
We can't avoid this.
These are two animals in battle.
On that subject, there is suspected that there was a sexual element in this crime and there was sperm found.
Which is exactly what I just said.
Yeah, at the location.
But now whether or not he ejaculated somewhere else because it was no found ejaculation site.
But that's another thing that you say that rape or sexual assault isn't usually about sex. It's about the power.
It's absolutely not about sex.
There's no exception.
There's no rape which is about sex.
Rape is absolutely about power.
About the power of symmetry.
It is power of symmetry that arouses not the actual penetration.
And actually, majority of rapes do not culminate in penetration.
Sexual assault, I'm sorry.
Majority of incidents of sexual assault do not culminate in penetration.
It's not about the penetration.
What arouses is power of symmetry.
Back to the trophy element.
Is there a part of that as well that's the risk of holding onto it?
Part of the taunt, part of the cat and mouse of the police that it was... The way I was imagining it when you were describing to reconnect was almost like smelling salts to remind them.
Because the memory had faded to be closer to that, to be the proximity to be back living in that property.
But as I say, if you'd sold a house, got rid of the stuff, moved away, never came back, might not have ended up in court.
Do you think there's anything you could read into the point of moving back so at such an age he was, well, charged when he was 79.
So I don't know how many years, probably a few years before that, had moved back.
Do you think that might have been wanting to get caught or that final, "Do you know what?
I'm just gonna go for it.
I'm just gonna live on that." No, no, no.
Killers don't want to be caught.
This is a common nonsensical myth online.
It's clear only, and the media, because it looks good.
And we want to believe that people are essentially good.
And if they've done something wrong, they would like to be punished.
Because this restores the justice and structure and order of the universe.
But not one killer wants to get caught.
They don't get caught.
Their confidence increases.
They taunt the environment.
Like Jack the Ripper taunted the police.
So they don't want to get caught.
They're playing a game.
It's a mind game.
It's a mind game.
They want to claim the authorship, if you like, of it.
Yes, exactly.
It's a mind game.
They become overconfident.
They want to get credit for the work of art.
Absolutely.
Why do you keep a diary?
You keep a diary because that's your handle on yourself.
That's your only communication with yourself.
The trophies, they are a form of diary.
This is journalling.
He's journalling with objects.
So he's journalling with objects.
And it's a reminder of his moment of glory.
Killers, murderers, serial or not.
Even in crimes of passion, glorify the moment.
They recount it endless times.
They embellish it.
They dwell on it.
They revisit it.
That's why murderers revisit the sin of the crime.
It's a police trope that happens to be true.
Because this is the way to capture their lives somehow, to document their lives, to render their lives objective.
They have a problem with subjectivity.
They are not fully in touch with themselves and so on and so forth.
They need proof that they had existed.
These people don't exist.
They are an emptiness.
They are in absence pretending to be a presence.
And so they need the outside environment to confirm their own existence.
That's why narcissists seek narcissistic supply.
Attention, adulation, admiration.
It tells them that they exist.
It informs them that they exist.
They exist in a version of themselves that they would like to exist.
But it's about existence.
This is the same with a killer, especially a serial killer, especially this kind of killer, premeditated and so on.
He wants to prove to himself that at one moment in time he had existed and he had existed in the most existentially meaningful way.
He had existed by communicating with another, exchanging life with another being.
In the killer's life, the act of killing, the moment of killing is the most meaningful, most meaningful moment in his entire life.
Everything before and everything after pales in comparison.
This is it.
This is the technical moment.
All the rest is black and white.
All the rest is blurry and fuzzy and deep.
This stands in sharp relief.
This is where he existed to the very endings of his raw nerves.
And in a way, it was a collaboration, a joint effort, a collusion, if you wish.
The victim was, he, the killer and the victim were working together to produce this outcome of unmitigated existence.
And so he harbors positive feelings about the victim.
He feels that the victim was kind of therapist.
The victim gave him a therapeutic moment.
The victim has transformed him or the killing has transformed him.
That's actually the victim.
The victim has transformed him.
He bonds and binds with the victim.
He gets attached to the victim because she's the only one who succeeded to touch him in a meaningful way.
The only one who actualized him.
Think of the killer as a form of ectoplasm in spiritist meetings.
The ectoplasm.
He was a ghost and she converted him into an ectoplasm by dying.
Her dying breath became his breath.
Breath of life, which he's never had before and after.
So having experienced this apex moment, this hyper-intensive second, he wants to revisit him.
It's addictive.
He feels dead.
He is felt dead before the killing and he feels dead after the killing.
He wants to revisit the killing.
It's the only moment that he felt alive.
And that's why we have serial killers.
So all these killers are potentially serial killers, but luckily for us, there are numerous circumstances, psychological and other, which prevent them from going on.
I believe in this case, not to suggest that he would have done that, but quite soon after, ended up with a new partner who apparently looked quite like her, but perhaps she performed the role that he wanted her to perform.
And that's why.
Moving on to the, and I'm aware of the time and how much time to- No, don't worry about this then.
But the getting caught part and what we've witnessed in probably, no, it is, it's the most fascinating witness box testimony from an accused that I've ever experienced because of his, I would definitely say there's a grandiosity there.
There's extreme detail and embellishments of stories.
You know, they say it's easy to spot a liar if there's just too much detail there.
He does have apparently a newer photographic memory, but the reaction to begin with that being told was, "This is ridiculous.
This shouldn't be happening.
I've answered all your questions a long time ago.
We've been here before.
What are you doing here?" kind of thing.
But then of course, then when we get to the point where he has to answer, sorry, he's advised to say no comment throughout the entire close interview.
He gets three in and then he has to start talking.
And they know what they were doing.
They were asking about his academia and as soon as anything started appealing to his ego, he became extremely, he started cracking jokes and stuff.
You wouldn't think it was a murder interview.
And then of course, once we then get to the court case, when he then knows what all the crown evidence is, the stories that we get are just something else.
Is there an element that would relate to any of the personality disorders?
We've discussed narcissism, psychopathy, borderline, and social that fits in with the elaborate lying and the stories.
And I'll give you one example.
She'd had a scar on her head, which he told everyone he'd thrown a book at her and she'd had to change her parting.
When he's asked about his court, instead of just saying, "No, no," she banged her head on the boot of the car.
He went into a huge story about she was a member of a cooperative and what the weather was like one day and the street that she drove to to go to this cooperative and putting the goods in the boot of the car.
And, "Oh, silly her, I must have bumped her head." It was so specific, that kind of thing.
So what is the question?
Which kind of personality disorder?
Can you link what I've just described to you with any of those personality disorders, the overexplaining, the...
Yeah.
So first of all, it's important to realize based on facts that people with borderline personality disorder are likely to act out, they're likely to aggress, they're likely to break objects, like throw objects around, physical objects.
They're likely to beat you up and so on, but they're very unlikely to kill.
Similarly people with psychotic disorders, schizophrenia and worse, they are extremely unlikely to kill, actually, contrary to the image that we have of them. They're not dangerous, actually.
Narcissists are very... Are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to likelihood of killing and narcissists are second.
And especially psychopathic narcissists.
So we're very likely talking about the psychopath or a psychopathic narcissist.
Premeditation, careful planning and so on and so forth are strongly indicative of a psychopath.
A narcissist is much more reactive, much more impulsive, engages in rage and so on.
So a narcissist is far more chaotic than a psychopath.
A psychopath is goal-oriented, is an optimizing machine. A psychopath is also likely to believe his own charm. It thinks he can charm everyone away and it thinks by sharing or actually oversharing, because it's a phenomenon you describe, it's going to charm people. It's going to create instant intimacy.
If you share it, the more you share, the more intimate you are with whoever it is you're talking to, even a police officer.
So this creates intimacy and there is a belief, the psychopath believes, that he can sway people's opinions or people, he can sort of charm them to the point that they would lose independence and independent kind of judgment and decision making and would be under his spell.
He can charm them in the old sense, in the atavistic sense. He can cast a spell, a spell on them. It's kind of black magic.
This is a form of something known as magical thinking. Magical thinking is a pathological feature of personality disorders, especially cluster B, the erratic, dramatic personality disorders.
Medical thinking says that if I only wish for something to be true, it would become true. My internal processes of thinking, cognition and emotions, they have an impact on the outside world.
So today we have all this nonsense about if you just want something hard enough, you're energetic. And if you put your mind to it, there's nothing you cannot do. This is a magical thing. It's very sick, by the way.
All this, the secret and law of attraction and these manifestations of sickness, absolutely mental mental sickness.
So the psychopath engages in this. He believes that if he were to inundate you with, for example, details, he's going to make you an ally. He's going to convert you into an ally. You're going to see his point of view. You're going to suddenly be charmed by him and you're going to understand him and then you're going to collaborate with him and so on and so forth.
So this is the oversharing aspect. The premeditation, the post-facto analysis, these are all typical of a psychopath, actually, not of a narcissist.
So the little that you've told me, and I made it a point to not read about the case before we spoke, the little that you told me strongly indicates a psychopath, actually, not a narcissist.
Now the source of confusion is this. You find many sub-styled experts online who would constantly say all psychopaths are narcissists.
That is, of course, expressly untrue.
There is a very small minority of psychopaths and narcissists and an even smaller minority of narcissists are psychopaths.
But all narcissists and all psychopaths have one thing in common, grandiosity, the grandiose.
But grandiosity is common also in bipolar disorder. Grandiosity is common in borderline personality disorder, in paranoid personality disorder.
So grandiosity is not something unique to narcissism. It's a trait and psychopaths have it.
So I suspect that little that you told me that this person is a psychopath and by virtue of being a psychopath is grandiose.
I think you're absolutely right.
What I do know of psychopaths and some of that has been through what I've helped sort myself through the media, but I know, for example, that things that we would describe or think as being someone's personality, for example, charm and charisma is not.
That's actually a characteristic of their psychopathy.
It's a tool they use to manipulate.
And without doubt, even me with I've had a 20 year history with this case and I knew stuff that the jury did not and sitting there with a clear idea of this man is guilty.
Listening to him, I got you get whisked away in his storytelling and his and exactly what you said, the matter of I'm going to just see how it is and where everyone's good.
And I actually thought, oh, no, the jury might actually, as you say, come on board with it and collaborate with him in his story and his narrative.
And it's it's fascinating to see that manipulation that there was a psychoanalyst.
His name was Bruno Bettelheim.
Bettelheim lied about his credentials.
His credentials were fake.
And yet he became one of the leading psycho psychoanalysts in the world.
And he wrote a magnificent book about enchantment and fairy tales.
And so the psychopath tries to enchant you, to drag you into his alternative reality, into fairy tale, into fantasy.
And the minute you succumb, the minute you give in to this charm or to this alternative reality, virtual reality, then you play by the rules of that reality.
And everything you begin to see everything from the psychopath's point of view.
It's extremely difficult to extricate yourself.
You begin to doubt yourself.
The process known as gaslighting.
To begin to doubt yourself, your perception of reality, your judgment.
You say, I thought he was guilty.
I thought he was guilty.
But now that I think of it, maybe he wasn't.
Begin to doubt yourself, not him.
He shifts the locus of doubt from himself to you.
Discrete something called external locus of control.
He begins to control your thinking processes from the outside.
So gradually you begin to vanish.
Since you doubt your reality testing, you doubt your capacity to gauge reality properly, you give in to his reality.
You say, unconsciously you say, it seems that I'm not gauging reality properly.
But luckily there's this guy and he gauges reality properly.
I'm safe.
If I were to succumb or accept his perception of reality, I would be safe.
But if I were to insist on my perception of reality, I am not safe.
That's very, it's very low level.
It's very reptilian.
It's a stem cell, stem brain thing, not a neocortex.
When we have a herd of animals and one of them leads the way and is confident and knows what seems to know what he's doing.
We all follow that animal to the cliff.
To the cliff.
I propose Donald Trump.
We are the sheep.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there.
And also by us believing his narrative makes the world feel better because how could this man age 82 at the time of the trial?
It was a difficult thing to kind of connect to.
I first met him in his 60s, but it occurred when he was in his 30s.
And it's interesting how we associate someone's appearance.
And there was one point, he was actually out on bail during the trial.
And I found myself having at times to open the door for him or hold it for him.
My brain was like, hold on, this is a bit politeness overtakes, particularly being British.
Here you go.
There's no way I would slam it on someone's face.
Your brain wanted to believe that this extremely well spoken, highly educated, academic, well dressed man, everything that you would, if you pass them in the street, you would never think those things.
So our brain wants to go to that safer thing.
It wants an explanation.
It wants that doesn't seem so bad.
Just the way we need to believe two things.
We need to believe that the world is structured and essentially just.
And we need to believe that people are good.
If we were to accept that people are essentially evil, the quiddity is evil, the evil, the exceptions are when people are good, but most people are even most of the time.
And that the world is totally random and chaotic and disorderly.
We would fall apart.
We wouldn't survive 24 hours.
We need to lie.
We need these self-deceptions.
And another famous self-deception is known as empathy.
It's also a self-deception, of course.
Empathy is not about other people.
We have no access to other people's minds.
We rely on self-reporting, people's self-report.
We just extrapolate from there.
Empathy is about us.
It's not about other people.
It's a form of self-deception that allows us to somehow survive as a social species.
We steeped in self-deception.
And what the killer does, he rages apart these self-deceptions.
He opens a window to reality.
And we don't want to look through them.
We don't want to look through this window because what we are bound to see there is the outer darkness.
The killer brings us face to face with this abyss.
We don't want to look into the abyss.
Nichy, you know, if you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you.
So it's very primordial, very atavistic, these interactions with killers.
Very.
Even for someone like you.
You don't feel it.
You think you're doing something essentially structured and rational and it's also a form?
What I do is, and it's too much to go into at the moment, but I don't pick cases that don't have something that's going to move something forward.
So whether it's solving or resolving, I've done multiple series of documentaries and unsolved cases, and this is one of them, which helped shine a light.
So it's people who they are left stuck looking into their abyss because they've lost their loved one and there is no answer, no perpetrator, no closure.
There's never a closure with murder, obviously.
But so I don't think it's only, allow me to interrupt you.
I don't think it's only victims and their families and so on.
Look, for example, go online and observe the amazing phenomenon of thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people saying that Chris Watts is the victim.
His wife was the abuser, implying that he was right to kill her and the two daughters, no?
Because the country is the abyss.
Sorry.
Yes, I said victim blaming is a sport.
I think actually this point that you've just made brings us nicely to sort of the conclusion, which is really what you're talking about and not wanting to look through the killer's eyes or, you know, is we are watching this real life crime, true crime, which we get muddied up with entertainment to sometimes make ourselves feel better about our own lives.
Like we're going to watch this, whoa, that's scary.
Why feel more alive?
Because you get close, you know, we all know you never feel more alive than when you're close to death, as is often quoted with regards to wars.
But it's almost that that's possibly why there's such this explosion of obsession with true crime and particularly among women.
I do think there's an element of as well of us pre-planning and problem solving how we would get out of a situation, what we'd be do.
But I think a big part is what you're saying there about we don't want to face the horrors.
So we face the horrors with a detachment, the same way of watching the news with a detachment.
And then, you know, when we do feel for things when they first happen, there's the empathy, then the empathy fatigue is you and I discussed earlier.
But I think that's I think there's a quite a poetic end that this is why people will be listening to this and fascinating by this.
I make just two concluding comments.
True crime is nothing new.
In the Middle Ages, the evil times, we had what was called at the time morality plays.
Morality plays were good versus evil.
Now, in many of the morality plays, the evil guy was the devil, Satan.
But many evil people believed that the Bible was history, was true, was real.
They regard the devil as an absolutely existent entity, not as a metaphor, not as a some morality plays with the equivalent of true crime.
The devil committed a crime against God and then Spanish and so on and so forth.
So morality plays survive to this day and age where we demonize criminals and we the second thing, the second trend that feeds into all this is victimhood.
The famous sociologist Bradley Campbell said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood.
I would add that we have transitioned from a reputation to age of victimhood.
Victimhood is the organizing principle.
Victimhood makes sense of our lives.
Victimhood imbues us with purpose and direction.
Victimhood explains what is happening to us in a long, random manner.
So if you put together morality play and victimhood, you get today's environment, contemporary environment.
And this is where we're at.
As victims, we're always angelic.
We are blemishless.
We are flawless.
We're victims.
We're entitled.
We're great.
Victimhood is a form of narcissism.
And the other party, the devil in the morality play, which happens to be your killer, whoever, he is of course totally demonic.
He's totally bad.
And this is known as splitting.
Spinning is an infantile defense mechanism where the child divides the world into all bad and all good, all black and all white, and so on.
And as a civilization, we have regressed to infancy.
And today, everyone in this dog is a victim.
And they are in search of abusers, in search of victimizers, in search of killers, in search of the devil, in search of the devil.
It's just a modern rendition of the medieval age.
Nothing has changed.
It's a witch hunt.
Some of the witches are real.
And I'll give you that.
But the motivation is 17th century Salem.
Nothing more.
Wow.
Well, thank you so much.
What a fascinating insight.
And there's just so much you've said there.
Give me pause for thought as well.
And everyone listening has learned something.
And just the complexities, the layers, and actually reversing the end there is that there is a lot of gray areas in the middle.
It isn't just black and white.
And it's a complex situation.
Thank you so much for your time.
And I really appreciate it.
And yeah, I'll just check that's all recorded now.
Hold on.
If you've recorded the whole thing, it would appreciate if you could send it to me somehow.
I'm afraid I'm afraid I may have not recorded the whole thing.
I'm not sure.
I may have.
But just to be on the same thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I've got a fairly massive cloud recording.
It'll tell me what it's doing.
Yeah, I can send it to you and I can edit off us weathering.
We transfer or find one of these transfers now.
Yeah, we transfers quite good.
So thank you.
And I'm going to put this out in the audio only.
And I will do the video.
I actually don't really utilize YouTube very much.
I notice you do.
I need to do that more.
But I'll put out a video version as well.
I've got a release form for my podcast.
I'll maybe just have to stick the word in video as well if I'm going to put out as well.
And I'm assuming you're maybe wanting to put out in your channel too, or it's up to you.
So I'm happy to do that as well.
I'll email it to you afterwards. It's a pretty basic thing just with the name of it. It's a storyteller.
Naked Villainy is the name of the series. And all mine have Shakespearean titles related to the actual crime.
And this one certainly does.
I don't know if you know the line off by heart, something like, and thus I clothed my naked villainy with odd old, outstolen out of holy writ and seen the same way most I play the devil.
It's the academic dress and described multiple times as Jacqueline Hyde.
So anyway, thank you again. Really appreciate it. And I will definitely bear you in mind for future things because this is kind of my life, this stuff.
And it's so great to get a really thorough insight in the way that you've given.
So thank you.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you for your time. You've given so much, but I appreciate it.
I can.
Thank you.