Mindhunter /// Part 2 /// 869

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Let's talk some true crime.

Continuing on with episode two, we find ourselves at a bar.

This is a Santa Cruz cop bar that is called the jury room.

And we have the main character, Holden Ford.

He's talking with a retired cop or detective, his name Jim Conner.

So, Jim Conner was the, according to the show, the arresting officer on the co-ed killer, Edmund Kemper case.

He says that Edmund Kemper called from a payphone in Pueblo, Colorado, and

calling because there was no manhunt for him.

Basically telling them what he had done and where the cops could find him to locate him and apprehend him.

Then we get back to the hotel because we have our boys are out on the road doing their road school.

We have Bill Tench and Holden Ford.

They're sitting there talking.

Bill is smoking cigarette number seven.

The TV screen in the background, Captain, is talking about, once again, the son of Sam David Berkowitz.

The screen flashes Robert Hager reporting, New York City.

And so I wanted to figure out if Robert Hager was a real person and if, in fact, was a reporter from New York City.

And of course, he is.

He is an analyst and a retired correspondent for the U.S.

television network NBC News.

Hager started his journalism career in radio before moving to network news.

He covered the Vietnam War and other world events before retiring from daily reporting in 2004.

But this

is where the show and the story takes a pivotal turn.

We

know that this is important to the true history of the FBI in the behavioral science unit.

But we have Bill Tench dropping off Holden Ford at the Vacaville facility.

The sign out front reads Medical Facility, California Department of Corrections.

Holden goes in alone without his badge or sidearm per facility rules.

And one part that the captain and I thought was incredibly funny was back at the hotel

when Holden Ford is gearing up to go interview this extra large, as he said,

super king-size serial killer.

And Bill Tench is trying to give him a little instruction instruction prior to going in there and how to handle the interview.

Holton Ford picks up his gun and puts it in his belt.

And Bill Tench says, what are you doing?

And Holton Ford says, well, I'm going to take my gun in there with me.

What could go wrong?

Bill Tench's reply is, he's going to take it from you, kill you with it, and have sex with your face.

Obviously referring to some of the co-ed killers' crimes and the details of those crimes.

When we get our first glimpse of Edmund Kemper, he is at least every bit of a full head taller than the guard that delivers him to the room where Holden Ford is seated.

Edmund Kemper tells Holden that he's been there for five years, saying he applied to the California Highway Patrol and his mother worked to get his record expunged and says, quote, turns out that my record didn't bother them at all.

I was just too tall, which is true.

And I think think what's interesting here is that

this is something that Emmanu Kemper in real life picked up on as being a lie, just another lie that his mother had told him.

And when he's talking about his record,

well, he's talking about that time period after he killed his grandparents and he was released from the mental facility.

He turns 21.

He gets let out because he committed these crimes when he was so young.

And he always, he had a desire to become a cop or be involved in law enforcement.

He wanted to become part of the California Highway Patrol.

And his mother had told him that he couldn't get the job because he was too tall.

When, in fact, we know he wouldn't get the job because he had already murdered two people prior to applying for this position.

Yeah, but kind of shows you how out of touch with reality Edmund Kemper is.

Well, I killed my grandparents, but maybe I could be a law enforcement officer.

Yeah, here's what's weird because

if he has no reason to believe his mother that she gets the record expunged, but let's say that she does.

And on the show, he's saying that they had no problem with my record.

It didn't bother them at all.

It turns out I was just too tall.

And Holton Ford replies with, you know, Kemper's talking about the California Highway Patrol.

This, I think, is to

signify what regard Edmund Kemper holds members of law enforcement, how he thinks of them, and how he holds them on a higher level,

to a higher standard.

Because

Holden Ford says, oh, too tall, I never heard of that.

And he replies, well, they wouldn't lie to me.

Like, you know, the cops wouldn't lie

to me.

Yeah, you've murdered many people.

They do do go on to discuss Joseph Wambaugh, the famous author.

Edmund Kemper says that he got his insights from Wambaugh.

Wambaugh was a brilliant writer who sadly passed away earlier this year, 2025, at the age of 88.

Wambaugh was known for his fictional and non-fictional accounts of police work in the United States.

Many of his novels are set in Los Angeles and its surroundings and feature Los Angeles police officers.

He's actually won three Edgar Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Wambaugh was also a Marine and a 14-year veteran of the LAPD.

We talked about Wamba a bit in our mainline murders coverage, episodes 791 and 792.

That was his book, Echo in the Darkness.

I didn't read that one, but I watched the old TV movie with the great Robert Lozier.

Look, there are some pretty great Wamba books out there.

The Onion Field and more recently, Fire Lover are fantastic, fantastic books.

Great title.

Yeah, but remember, there was controversy with his involvement in the mainline murders, and he did some things that I would say were not on the up and up.

And

especially for somebody that is former law enforcement when he was working to put that book together.

Yeah, but I could see that being an issue

if you're in law enforcement for a long period of time, the criminals aren't playing by any set of rules, but you have to.

Well, so there's there's this thought in the true crime book world, okay, as far as publishers and publishing houses go, where they are far more likely to publish a book that's about a case that has been solved, has been adjudicated, especially the further you go back in time with that.

To me, I've never understood that that because some of my favorite true crime books feature unsolved cases, unsolved serial murder.

And Wambaugh, I didn't want to go too far into this because, again, I think we touched on this in those episodes a bit, but it was later proven they had a suspect, a really good suspect,

depending on who you talk to.

It was proven that Joseph Wambaugh paid, under the table, paid a high-ranking officer to make the arrest official so that he could push the book through the publishing house.

Yeah, which is not good.

Not always a great way to solve your case by paying the officer to...

Look, in the defense of the officer, I'm sure the officer thought the main suspect was guilty.

I'm sure Wambaugh thought he was guilty.

But let's do our due diligence, right?

Rather than just taking an envelope under the table and placing the man under arrest.

I did an interview one time with a a journalist and we interviewed the subject.

And at the end of the interview, I gave him a little money because I thought, thank you for your time and

take your wife out to a nice dinner.

And I appreciate you giving us the time.

And when we're leaving, the journalist said to me,

you're not supposed to pay for an interview.

That's not what journalists do.

And I said, but I'm not a journalist.

I'm a captain.

He He was the journalist.

Last time I sat down with the journalist, I thanked him for the interview and told him I was going to take his wife out to a nice dinner.

So, during this scene, Kemper is talking about Frances Farmer, an actress from the 50s who got a lobotomy, as he says on the show, anyway.

Now, Frances Farmer was a famous actress who was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in her home state of Washington.

But there is much debate if, in fact, a lobotomy actually took place.

Now, regardless if it did so or not, and it doesn't, I don't think that it actually did.

However, Farmer recounted her stay in the state asylum as, quote, unbearably, as unbearable terror was how she described her stay there.

Edmund Kemper says, you know, there are a lot more like me.

That's, that's, I mean, there's so many chilling parts in this series, but this is one of them that stands out for me and one that I don't think I'll ever forget.

He says it so plain Jane, right?

He says it so like, you know, there are many more like me.

Almost like a

like a child would say it.

And you see Holden perk up and he's talking about serial killers.

Right.

And Holden perks up and he he asks, well, how many do you think?

Kemper says it's a guess, but in North America, 35.

But you're never going to find them if they don't want you to.

Which is interesting, too, because that's Kemper's experience.

You know, he turned himself in after he killed his grandparents, and then he turns himself in after the co-ed killings, and then killing his mother and his mother's best friend.

Again, this is part of his delusion, though, because he's assuming that these killers have this same ideology as him, commit the crime and then confess to it.

Where, as we know, most of them are not going to confess.

But I think he has a has a point in the sense of, well, these are probably more random and sporadic because the killer is looking for a window

opportunity.

It's not as simple as I'm going to go kill somebody on Monday and then on Tuesday, I'm going to go kill somebody.

And so because the crimes,

the crimes happen over a time period, you can have all these active killers, but they might not have committed a crime in the last couple years.

Right, which makes a lot of sense when you start comparing terms like spree killer and mass murderer to that of serial killer or sequence killer.

They are, in fact, very similar, but also very, very different in how they operate.

A spree killer is more like a stark weather where he's out on the road and he may he may do just what you said, Captain, kill somebody on a Monday and then kill somebody on a Wednesday and then the next week and he's just out getting victims as he can with quick succession.

Right.

Where with Kemper, yeah, he's trolling and looking for hitchhikers, but

the hitchhikers are very random, obviously, but he's looking for a very specific type of victim.

There's other complications with why it took so long to catch Edmund Kemper.

In fact, him turning himself in.

And what's interesting, too, too, is that as intelligent as Kemper is,

this also seems to signify that he believes that

there are many more like me, that they are very much like him, right?

That you are never going to find them if they don't want you to, which we know that that is actually not the fact.

Most of them do not turn themselves in.

Most of them are identified and then apprehended.

Kemper goes on to say, I am not an an expert.

I am not an authority.

I'm just a highly accomplished killer who managed to evade capture until I turned myself in.

He also refers to killing women as his vocation.

I wonder if his mindset would have changed if he would have actually been caught.

Yes, and to me, killing his mother and her best friend is very similar to killing his grandparents, and he turns himself in after that.

Had he not killed a family member after being released and committing the co-ed murders, I don't think he would ever turn himself in.

Right.

Holden, then in another scene, the next scene tells his girlfriend, Debbie, that Kemper knows more about lust murder than the entire FBI's behavior of science unit.

Debbie asks, why does he hate women?

This seems like such a simple question, but it is so

profound.

This is almost foundational to what they're doing and to the understanding of these very evil men that kill a lot of women.

So I love these exchanges with Debbie as she is asking very simple questions that are not so powerful.

Well, simple questions that are so very powerful and exactly what the FBI needs to be asking.

Now, back at Vacaville, Kemper explains to Holden how fucking a person in their throat is difficult because of all the muscles in the neck.

Ed's mother, he worked at the campus for

the University of Santa Cruz.

Yeah, she was a counselor.

Kemper explains how he was never, so he's talking about the women that he desired were women,

were similar to most of the women that lived on campus or attended the university.

But he explains that he was never going to be with any of those women because according to his mom, he was a fuck-up, a disappointment, a loser.

Yeah, it seemed like she was so upset with Ed's father, and he might have been a visual representation of that.

So, therefore, she ends up taking out all this anger and maybe this hatred just towards men in general on her son.

And look, clearly, he exhibited some very strange and bizarre borderline psychotic behavior growing up, but well before he killed his grandparents.

So, whatever was driving this woman, it's probably a combination of what you said and his, in his behavior as well.

But it's, it's like every, it seems, at least in his mind, every chance she got to belittle him, she did.

Like even going out of her way of saying, oh, well, those might be the type of women that you desire, but you're never going to end up with any of those women.

And here's why.

Yeah.

Rather than saying, hey, you know, tuck in your shirt, get a good job and apply yourself.

And, you know, you could.

You can be whatever you want to be.

Yeah, you'll meet a nice young lady.

No, instead, it's no, you're a fuck up.

You're a disappointment.

A loser.

See you later, loser.

Well, and then he goes on to explain in detail.

which I was, I will spare us that here, but he's talking about how women in general learn to humiliate men.

And then Holden asks, did your mother humiliate you?

And it's no answer, end of scene.

We know the answer.

Wasn't that the

questionnaire that, or isn't that the biggest question?

You know, men are, some of men's biggest fears are to be embarrassed by a woman.

And then a woman's biggest fear is to be murdered by a man.

Yeah, yes.

I'm not going to pretend to understand the psychology of that, but that

seems to be a thought that is out there.

Yeah, I had a friend one time ask me why we covered more unsolved cases than solved cases.

I said, well, some of it is that we're in touch with law enforcement and they need help or we're in touch with the family and they don't feel like they have a voice.

And so if we can shine some details and shine some light on these unsolved cases, maybe it will move the needle.

and then she said, Well, with all your, the work that you've done on yourself through mental health, you'd probably be better off starting a podcast that helped young men with their mental health.

That could be a thing.

Stay tuned.

I don't know.

I don't know if we need more captains in this world.

Stay tuned on that front.

We're garage shifting gears dramatically.

So that's the end of the scene.

The next scene, they are driving back from Vacaville, where Bill is explaining to Holden that Kemper's probably trying to manipulate him.

So, you know, don't believe everything or don't

put

every ounce of thought into every word that he is saying and every statement that he is

saying.

Sorry.

Then we see a montage of the many visits to and from for Bill and Holden on their road school tour.

Cigarettes consumed during montage equal three.

But I think it is fascinating.

This whole

Holden interviews Kemper.

He realizes that his knowledge is extensive, and also

his knowledge is from a viewpoint that would be hard for a normal individual to understand, normal being not a serial killer.

But he's awestruck with his intelligence and the way he views his life and views his actions almost like like he met a celebrity one of my favorite scenes is when he's talking to his girlfriend about how extensive that knowledge is and then he orders like an egg salad sandwich

and she has to say

you don't even like egg salad sandwich

what are you doing and you know what that is

a lot of that rings true still to this day.

When, when I spoke with Douglas on that episode,

when I think I can't remember the question I asked him, but I was asking him to name a specific killer that he interviewed.

Like, who was the most interesting, or who did you learn the most from, or who was the most powerful?

I can't remember my exact phrasing of the question, but his answer was Edmund Kemper.

And he said that it was because Kemper, because of his high IQ,

and part of it too also has to do with, you know, he's like the character says in the show, he's been in that prison for five years.

So he's had some time to contemplate and think about a lot of this stuff as well by the time that Holden Ford is interviewing him.

But just like with Douglas, Douglas is saying, because of this guy's high IQ,

he was able to articulate for us what he did, why he did it, how he did it, much and far better than any other killer that they interviewed over the course of decades.

So the montage ends with our Rhodes School teachers at the Sacramento Police Department, where Detective Roy Carver stops them outside to ask for help.

He was wondering if he could get them to take a look at something a little unusual.

This is victim Rosemary Gonzalez, who is 73 years old.

The victim was beaten within an inch of her life, groped but not penetrated, the detective says.

So survives the attack.

Very brutal attack, but survives.

He says that they found her at the doorway entry to the home, to her home.

Her little dog's throat was cut.

She was in and out of a coma and does not remember who did this to her.

Carver tells them that they need to know just how worried they need to be.

TV's number one drama, High Potential, returns with star Caitlin Olson as the crime-solving single mom with an IQ of 160.

Every week, Morgan uses her unconventional style and brilliance to crack LAPD's most perplexing cases.

It's the perfect blend of humor and mystery.

She's breaking the mold without breaking a nail.

High potential premieres Tuesday at 10.9 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

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All right, we are back.

Cheers, mates.

Talk hands in the air.

Cheers to you, Colonel.

Cheers to you, Captain.

The next scene opens up outside of the motel where

Tench is enjoying cigarette number 11.

Then the next day, they join Detective Carver on a ride out to the neighborhood.

Right?

This is the neighborhood where the attack of Rosemary Gonzalez, the elderly woman, took place.

In this scene in the car, Tench is smoking cigarette number 12.

Then they go and they interview the victim, Rosemary Gonzalez, at her home.

Afterward, they are sitting at a diner.

Holden attempts to...

It's like he's attempting his first criminal profile of the attacker here.

Right.

He's just kind of thinking out loud.

Bill and Holden presumably miss their flights

and they have to stay over till the next day.

So they were planning on going home.

However, they missed the flight and now they're stuck there for an additional 24 or so hours.

And with the extra time, of course, Holden wants to go back and talk to Ed Kemper.

Well, I think he just wants to go golfing.

I think this shows where they're at and their development as a person and their life.

Bill has a home life, so he's more disappointed that he's not getting back to that normalcy where Holden is like, oh, I got more time to talk to my buddy, old Edmund.

Yeah, and I mean, trying to get into the minds of these fictional characters can be difficult

because those minds don't exist, frankly.

But,

you know, keep in mind, Tench was really disappointed in Holden when

they were looking at the Ada Jeffries case, and Holden, his basic stance on it after they spent a good amount of time on it, was to the detective, like, we're in the dark.

We don't have the answers you're looking for.

We don't know what to do.

And that is really to show

how any one of us would come up and rise through the ranks.

And right, you gain life experience.

You're gaining experience in this specific world and realm on the job, where oftentimes it's trial by fire.

You either perform or you don't.

However, you, like any great football coach will tell you, you either win or you learn.

There is no losing if you're a good team and you're a good coach.

And so I think what this is trying to set up here is that Holden Ford, while he might be some kind of

genius when it comes to this stuff, he still needs to get his C legs.

He still needs to get get some actual experience and learn about these killers and learn from the known and identified killers to hopefully be able to identify the unknown and unidentified killers.

Yeah, I agree with all that, but I also think some of this stuff is also a reflection

of

the individuals that these characters are based on.

And I think one of the things, one of the things about John Douglas,

and I think he kind of learned more about this with his book, The Cases That Haunt Us.

You know, he's hired by John Ramsey to try to solve the murder of John Benet Ramsey, and he tells them straight up, hey, you're hiring me, but I'm working for the victim.

So if I think you did it, that's what I'm going to tell the world.

And so I think John Douglas, and

you know this, it's just a human nature.

Some people you meet, they're more guarded or they have a certain decorum to them.

And other people,

there's no filter and it's honest.

It's an honest no filter.

And I think some of Holden's actions are a reflection of maybe what the writers saw in John Douglas's personality.

And Douglas being one of the writers of the show as well.

That's one thing that makes this exercise so interesting to try to figure out and pool from where he's writing from experience in a fictionalized dramatization of some of those life experiences.

During this argument, they're arguing in the car on the way to Vacaville because Holden wants Bill Tench to come in with him.

Bill wants to go golfing.

Bill's smoking cigarette number 13.

But then we go inside the walls of Vacaville and we see Bill Tench wearing his golf clothes inside Vacaville.

And we have Edmund Kemper talking to Bill.

He says, so you're the big boss,

which is interesting because this is where you can see

these guys manipulating Kemper a little bit, right?

Remember, we've already had Tench warning

Holden Ford that Kemper might be trying to manipulate him.

And I like how they planted this seed of, well, Bill Tench is this very accomplished FBI agent.

And while he is the leader of these two,

I just like how they kind of planted the seed that, as Kemper says, so you are the big boss.

Yeah, but he's essentially only the big boss during these seminars that they're doing with the local cops.

But

Kemper doesn't know any of that.

Exactly.

And that's the seed they're planting.

But as far as the behavior science unit, they're basically on the same footing because it's all new.

Yeah.

I mean,

their supervisor looks at

Holden as the underling.

But what I'm getting at here is we,

by this point, what is one thing that they know and understand about Kemper is how he holds law enforcement to a higher standard.

and what he thinks and how he regards people from law enforcement.

Well, now you're not just talking to some young agent who was sent off here willy-nilly to interview you.

No, now they've sent that he, that young agent is back, and this time he brought with him the big boss.

Well, and in his warped mind, he's like the higher level of individual they send to him,

the higher his importance is in the world.

Yes.

And Bill,

to this, his response is, well, I established the behavioral science unit several years ago, but Holden has come in with some new ideas.

Kemper tells the boys, my mother was convinced that I would do something horrible someday.

Like what?

He is asked, and he replies, like rape my sister.

This was when I was 10 years old, he says.

His mother frightened him by making him sleep in the basement.

He says, then he began strangling dogs and cats and burying them in the backyard.

Kemper says he was 15 when he was put away.

He was 21 when he got out.

Adding, while other boys were experiencing their sexual revolution, he was locked up.

Kemper says he knew he was going to kill his mother one week before he actually did.

When he did attack her, he did so with a claw hammer.

He cut off her head and then he humiliated her.

Edmund Kemper says mothers should not scorn her own son.

If a woman humiliates her little boy, he will become hostile, violent, and debased.

Period.

After

we see Bill and Holden sitting together on a flight home, Bill is smoking cigarette number 14.

Oddly, they are sitting right next to one another with an open seat to Bill's right.

My guess is they're talking about things of a sensitive nature and probably want to keep their conversation.

a little bit on the DL.

Now we're back at Debbie's apartment.

Holden and Debbie discuss their mothers.

So this whole episode is moms really dipping into the psychology of upbringing and a mother's influence, even on a subconscious level, for regular people and violent offenders and even serial killers.

Yeah, not to correct you, but I do believe they're in Holden's bathroom, but I could be wrong.

They could be.

Sitting in

his front stoop outside of his house, we see Tench sucking on cigarette 15.

Then Holden and Tench drive back to FBI headquarters, and they tell their boss that they have been secretly interviewing serial killer Edmund Kemper.

This conversation does not go well at first, but Bill manages to smooth things over with the boss.

Their superior allows them to continue their sideshow, as he calls it, but says that no one can know.

They are to relocate their offices to the basement of the FBI building, to which Bill says, basement, I'm 44 years old.

And then we see them going to the dark, dingy basement of the FBI building.

The episode ends with the boys relocating.

Holden's box of his belongings is closed.

So he can't see any of his

belongings that he's transporting with him to the basement to relocate his office.

However, Bill Tench's box is open, revealing a small basketball hoop and several Playboy magazines, which apparently you can read those at the FBI office, according to the show, anyway, or at least you could in the late 70s.

It seems odd choice of reading material, but I wanted to look into some of we know that Playboy magazine has covered true crime throughout the years, but I wanted to find a couple specific articles.

One was titled Serial Murder and Sexual Repression.

So maybe, maybe maybe some form of

research for Bill Tench, but this article,

Serial Murder and Sexual Repression, was from August of 1993, and it's talking about William Herrens, who is actually the lipstick killer, who we've already referenced in our talks about Mindhunter.

But then you take it a little bit a step further, also in 93, you have Kelsey Nicole Turner, who was born in 1993.

And later in life, in her adult life,

she was actually a murderer and a former adult model.

She appeared in magazines such as Playboy, Maxim, and 110.

The song playing to close out this episode is none other than Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads, which is obviously perfect for this episode to close it out for many reasons.

But this first season, again, is supposed to be about 1977.

And the song Psycho Killer debuted in 1977.

But I love the scene where they're talking to their boss because it shows you

basically what they're gearing to is, okay, Holden has these new ideas and has this fresh perspective on how to look at things, but he doesn't have the decorum.

He doesn't understand the hierarchy.

He doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

But Bill sees the importance of holding and what he's trying to do.

So he can play that cards.

He knows how to work the system.

He knows how to work his boss a little bit.

And I think it's very important because I don't think one is more important.

I don't think one

character is more important than the other.

They need each other in order to work the system to

so they can get out of the dark.

So the behavior science unit can get out of the dark and get these answers.

But it's going to take both of them and both of their skill sets in order to move this forward.

Well, and they make each other better, right?

It's

wrestler Bill Tench, who is

older, set in his ways, more experienced.

And then Holden Ford is John Douglas, who comes in there younger, fresher, with new ideas.

And so they kind of, they, they make each other better even when they don't get along, even when they're butting heads.

And this makes a lot of sense when you think about it, because if you review their real life backgrounds, Robert Ressler was

investigating homicides before he even got to the FBI, where John Douglas didn't have any real street experience investigating homicides until he was paired up with Wrestler.

When his early days of the FBI was just like we said yesterday, the reactionary unit, which was mostly bank robberies and extortion cases.

And then he went into hostage negotiation, which,

yeah, there are homicides that take place at some of those hostage situations like discussed yesterday, but you know who did it.

It's not a mystery of who the killer was.

So episode three opens up in Park City, Kansas.

We see the ADT serviceman staring intently at a regular looking home on a residential street.

He is wearing plain clothes, not his typical ADT button-down collared shirt.

He gets into his ADT utility van and drives off.

This is very interesting.

So we have a lot of creative liberties that were probably taken here.

As we know, BTK actually started killing in 1974.

This is when he killed four members of the Otero family during a school day.

So the family was actually a family of seven.

Some of the older kids had already left for school that morning, and then he goes into the home and terrorizes and attacks.

the remaining four, which is

father,

mother, son, and daughter, the two youngest kids.

Raider, we would later learn many years later that he stalked the family for two to three weeks prior to the murders.

Now, this is very,

we like to try to get to the details here because while he stalked this family for several weeks prior to the murders, I don't think that he did so the two or three weeks leading up to the murders.

Because what happens once he gets inside of the home, he surprises this family, but what surprises him is he did not anticipate the father, Joseph, to be home at all when he started off on that attack.

Right.

And we know that from Dennis Rader's own words.

That could have been a big screw-up.

And Joseph Otero,

he was recovering from a surgery or an injury.

Had he been 100%,

man, there's a chance that Rader would have been caught for a B E, that Joseph would have fought him off.

Well, yeah, because what we've learned is most of these killers are looking for easier victims.

I'm sure there is,

but it'd be

an anomaly

to have a killer that's looking for more challenging victims.

So

we could go on and on about BTK, but of course we gave you almost 200 minutes of BTK coverage in a four-part series.

Let's give them 200 more.

Hey, real quick, though, I wonder if this has any

connection

because we know he worked for ADT.

I wonder if that had anything to do with him coming up with his own moniker, BTK.

Probably.

I mean, bind them, torture them, kill them.

is how he described it in one of his letters to

one of the letters that he sent early in his serial killing career, let's call it.

But let's keep in mind,

he also gave a lot of names in that letter.

Like he was starved to have a moniker.

He was starving for them to be calling him something in the newspapers and for that name to make its way to the newspapers.

So while ADT and BTK may line up as far as initials go or breaking it down to three letters.

There were a lot of other

suggestions.

Yeah, a lot of other suggestions that he sent out there.

Regarding this scene, though, too,

keep in mind, we're supposed to be talking about 1977 or beyond.

And we know he can't be looking at the Otero family's home here.

Those murders took place in 1974.

Raider did go on to kill again in April of 74, killing 21-year-old Catherine Bright inside of her home, referring to that victim during stalking sessions and note-taking as Project Lights Out.

Raider did kill twice in 1977.

He killed Shirley Relford in March and Nancy Joe Fox in December.

So I believe that the scene is suggestive of the Otero murders or one of these.

one of the murders from 1977.

At the time, when I was seeing it for the first time, Captain, I thought it was suggestive 100% of the Otero murders because we hear a dog bark as the ADT serviceman BTK is walking back, walking away from the home that he's surveilling and into his van.

The Oteros, as we know, had a dog, but we'll circle back to BTK stuff

later, as does the series.

So then Bill and Holden go to Boston University to meet with a professor.

This is when we meet Dr.

Wendy Carr.

She tells them that she is working on a book that is about to come out that is about white-collar criminals that are not so different than Edmund Kemper.

This surprises Holden, right?

How can white-collar criminals be anything similar to Edmund Kemper?

Right.

Wendy replies that they are all psychopaths and she is studying captains of industry.

Dr.

Wendy Carr is obviously brilliant, and she seems to not just understand the value of interviewing and learning from these locked up killers but she seems to be able to see the full scope and potential for a project like this and she can articulate the mission of this project how to facilitate it and why it would be both useful and rewarding She mentions that maybe the findings could be published in a book.

I love this scene.

This appears to very much excite Holden.

He makes this very strange face like he's trying to conceal a hard on, which is

so that is like kind of funny as Holden is taking notes.

And if you look,

I looked closely to zoom in on his notes.

And if you look closely, he wrote questionnaire underlined, followed by bullet points of personal history, why, arousal, and then the word book written in large capital letters.

Yeah, I thought you were going to say, I looked in closely to see his hard-on.

And it was impressive, Mike.

Very impressive.

Very impressive hard-on.

Hey, that's a very impressive hard-on, you got.

I see why the FBI recruited this man.

So,

of course,

he looks or appears excited, surprised, whatever, at the mention of possibly turning this work into a book.

And we do know, of course, Douglas has, he would go on to write many, many books.

In fact, 17 of them thus far.

We also know that Ann Burgess, who is

who Wendy Carr is loosely based off of, especially her professional career, went on to write books as well.

In fact, John Douglas and Ann Burgess wrote a book together along with Alan Burgess and Robert Ressler.

This book came out in 1992, and it was called the Crime Classification Manual, a standard system for investigating and classifying violent crimes.

So at this sit-down, Bill tells Wendy that they are going to interview Benjamin Miller

at a Boston penitentiary.

This is titled Bridgewater.

He says they're going to go interview that killer later that day.

Holden asked Wendy, do you really think that anyone would be interested in this outside of law enforcement?

Again,

this seems to be on the idea that they would publish a book and that it would be released to the masses, and the masses would want to read it, consume it, and understand it.

Dr.

Wendy Carr, her response is absolutely brilliant.

She says, imagine, like, truly imagine what it takes to bludgeon someone to death.

The lust for control, the feeling of arousal, the decision to rape the severed head of your victim, to humiliate her corpse.

How could you possibly get that from an ordinary police report?

You know why it took me nearly a decade to publish my book?

Because narcissists don't go to the doctor.

Psychopaths are convinced that there is nothing wrong with them.

So these men are virtually impossible to study.

Yet you have found a way to study them in

near-perfect laboratory conditions.

So while Wendy delivers this brilliant speech, in fact, one of my favorite quotes of all of season one, by my humble garage opinion.

Again, look in the background.

If you look closely, so there are several bookshelves behind Dr.

Wendy Carr in the scene.

If you look closely at the very many books on these bookshelves, you will see that one of those books is none other than John Douglas's Guide to Landing a Career in Law Enforcement, which is funny that they snuck that in there for many reasons, but also because that book, as real as it is, was not published until 2004.

Also, interesting to me, because of the character Dr.

Wendy Carr is an academic.

It's an odd book for someone that has no desire to pursue a career in law enforcement.

Yeah, I also think it's interesting, and I'm sure the question happened on would other people be interested in this, but I think it also shows there's similarities with these killers.

Some of these killers want to get recognition for their crimes and be known, and some don't.

And same way in law enforcement.

It's just human nature.

Holden wants some attention.

He wants to

have the spotlight on him a little bit, where I think Bill, I think he kind of care less.

Bill,

and I believe this.

Look, I'll tell you that I know a lot about John Douglas.

I think I know a good amount about Wrestler,

but he's more of a mystery to me than Douglas.

He didn't write as many books.

And we've talked to Douglas.

He is a, I was going to say a spigot of words, but no, he's a water fountain, like a huge fountain of words.

Like he just talks and talks and talks and talks.

So he's very much an open book, where I feel like Bill, at least the character Bill Tench, maybe even more so than the real life Robert Wrestler, but he appears to be more of,

gets a lot of satisfaction out of supporting and aiding and advancing the local law enforcement guys.

Where Douglas and Holden Ford might be more of a Deion Sanders type, Robert Wrestler Bill Tench is

more of a player's coach.

Yeah, I think fill in the blank name.

Holden wants the subject to get attention, but if he gets some in return, not a bad thing.

Where I think Bill wants the subject to get attention, but no attention on him

personally.

And Holden also, I think it goes back to what they're trying to show of lack of experience versus experience with these two characters who have the same job.

It's

Holden wants to learn and wants to, and thinks he can figure out all these killers, where it's almost like Bill Tench is

his resolve that well we can only understand so much of them because they are so different than we are so i'm not going to i'm not going to lose sleep or or scramble my brain trying to figure these monsters out so outside of bridgewater correctional bill and holden are having a discussion bill's smoking cigarette number 15 and he tells holden that you would be less fidgety if you smoke cigarettes once inside they are actually denied access to their subject remember he was Benjamin Miller because Benjamin Miller, the killer, says he no longer wants to talk.

Now, this is a real man.

Benjamin Franklin Miller was arrested for crimes referred to as the Bra murders.

This was a series of murders of five sex workers between 1967 and 1971 in Stamford, Connecticut.

He was actually released after serving 15 years, and it turns out that that was a very controversial case.

In fact, it's actually one that we should probably cover here in the garage at some point.

But that is a real man who was locked up for multiple murders and was locked up at Bridgewater.

Now, back at the office, Bill and Holden are mapping out and naming serial killers that they wish to interview.

And I'll go through the names that we hear them mention in this scene.

First is they say Ristle, which we would later learn is Monty Ristle because they will actually go and interview him on the show.

And they say Monty Ristle is only an hour away.

Ristle was charged with abducting, raping, and murdering five women.

However, because he pled guilty,

he murdered five women between 1976 and 1977.

This took place in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived, which makes sense because it's very close to where the FBI offices are.

So some of the women live very close to him, and he appears to have various motives, but he is plain and short, a very, very disturbed mind.

I was going to say, sorry, Captain, I was going to say because he pled guilty to the murders, I think that they didn't, they ended up dropping the kidnapping and raping charges.

Right.

Then you have Von Greenwood, also known as the Skid Row Slasher.

He murdered 11 vigrant men and vagrant men in

Southern California between November 1964 and January of 1975, in addition to a failed 12th murder that ultimately led to his capture.

Also mentioned here is Herbert Mullen,

who was deeply disturbed and actually very, very mentally ill.

He was in five different mental institutions before he got out and started killing.

So

here's an example of some of his dementia.

And

Mullen believed that the Vietnam War had produced enough American deaths to stall earthquakes.

So he thought that these earthquakes would come as some kind of blood sacrifice to nature, that there had to be some kind of balance and finding that balance between man and nature would come through blood sacrifices, the deaths of

humans,

mass deaths of humans.

And so he thought that because of the Vietnam War, that this was stalling these earthquakes that were inevitable and that would destroy the planet and

mankind.

But

eventually Vietnam, the war starts dying down.

It starts to wind down by late 1972.

And so when that started, that war started to get in the near end stages, he believed that he needed to start killing people in order to have enough deaths to keep those earthquakes from happening.

He later said that for this reason,

he said that his father had telepathically ordered him to take lives.

He would go on to kill 13 people, including four teenage boys that were on a camping trip.

He stumbled across them and shot each of them in the head.

Now, we did talk about Mullen.

We've never done a show or a deep dive on Herbert Mullen, but we did talk a bit about Mullen in our Edmund Kemper coverage because

this was some of the difficulty with apprehending somebody like Kemper or really the investigation at large.

Because

here we have in the Santa Cruz area, you actually, in that general area, you actually had three active serial killers who were operating very differently all at the same time, which this is a new kind of criminal, or at least the understanding of this kind of criminal was very new at the time.

So you can imagine how difficult and confusing that made things for

police in that area of California.

Yeah, some of these killers tell these crazy stories or give crazy reasons why they commit these crimes.

And it's just hard to believe anything that they say because we know that they're killers.

Yeah, and most of them are liars as well.

This is one individual, however, that I will agree with my, you know, I'll go back and underline and echo my statements about him early

that we just said minutes ago.

Deeply disturbed and very, very mentally ill, in my opinion.

Now, Herbert Mullen is also discussed quite a bit in Robert Wrestler

Wrestler's book, Whoever Fights Monsters.

So if you want to learn more about Herbert Mullen, there's a lot of material on him in Wrestler's book, Book, who is a.k.a.

Bill Tench.

They also mentioned the Cincinnati Strangler, Postal Lasky Jr.

We talked about him in our Brica family murders episode as there was some thought that when the Brica family was discovered murdered, that it was the active serial killer that was in the area at the time, which it turns out very likely was not.

the Cincinnati Strangler.

Very different M.O.s, very different types of murders.

They also mentioned Richard Speck

saying he's in Illinois.

Speck killed eight nursing students in Chicago.

He also took drugs to grow boobies in prison.

You won't find that on Mindhunter.

You'll find that from me here in the garage.

I took drugs to grow boobies in the garage, but didn't fully work.

Well,

he managed to grow a full rack here.

Nice rack.

My guy.

Bill Curtis of American Justice.

I feel like we don't talk about Bill Curtis enough.

Anyway, so Bill Curtis from American Justice managed to

get his hands on videos,

videos that were filmed inside of an Illinois state prison, which showed Richard Speck and other inmates drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, doing cocaine, smoking weed, passing money around and engaging in sex with each other.

So at one point in these videos, Speck looks at the camera and says, if they knew how much fun I'm having, they'd turn me loose.

Like, this is his dream scenario.

He's just in there doing, just doing drugs and being as

strange.

Speck was, anyway, all right, let's move on.

Then they mentioned Gerald Schaefer from Florida.

Schaefer is also known as the cop killer or the hangman.

Those are some of his nicknames.

Not the cop killer.

I apologize.

I misspoke.

The killer cop.

And really,

they're rattling through these names, but this is one hell of a list.

With each one of these monsters uniquely evil, with some of them worse than the others.

During this mapping out the serial killer session, Detective Carver calls from Sacramento and informs Bill Tench that there has been another attack, and this time the victim is dead.

The victim is the same age as the previous victim, and she has a dog.

So they fly back to Sacramento.

The victim's name is Laura Conway.

She lived about a half a mile away from the last victim.

They attempt to profile the killer.

They think that he's poor, white, trash, but older than they originally thought.

Remember, Holden was kind of just thinking out loud, giving a very vague, basic profile previous to this.

Bill will add to this thought, saying that the killer is at least late 20s.

They interview Dwight Taylor.

Dwight Taylor is age 23.

They interview him outside of his mother's house.

Bill and Dwight smoke a cigarette while they are trying to break him down.

They arrest Dwight Taylor for murder and attempted murder and celebrate at the police station.

Yeah, this is the one with the, he has mom issues.

And he's sitting outside when they interview him.

And it's really, this scene is very brilliant, how it was put together by the director the writing and the the actors carrying it out because even the way that the you got detective carter carver with our two fbi agents even the way they kind of move around and position themselves differently at different times when they say different words or ask different questions to the subject is is really kind of

interesting not just interesting but very strategic right then our two road feds they go back to interview kemper again Kemper talks about some of his victims, saying he liked Mary the best, adding, I was lukewarm on Anita.

And we know Kemper had 10 victims, seven non-familial victims.

The first of those were Mary Ann Peace and Anita Lucesa.

They were both 18-year-old students from Fresno State University.

Kemper picked them up as they attempted to hitchhike to Stanford University to visit friends.

He dismembered them in his apartment, among other things.

Later, he scattered the remains near

a mountain.

He

tells Bill and Holden that he cut off his mother's head with a hunting knife.

He also admits to putting his mother's vocal cords into the garbage disposal because he wanted to shut her up for good.

He also tells them about how he decided to start burying the severed heads of his victims in the backyard of his mother's home, right outside of her bedroom window.

Yeah, so the victims would be looking at her.

Yeah, looking at her.

After Kemper, the boys get to fly back home, and no flight would be complete without Bill Tensch enjoying cigarette number 17.

Once back at home, the boys are strategizing and waiting for Dr.

Wendy Carr to arrive.

And to pass time, Bill Tench enjoys cigarette number 18 just outside the FBI building.

The good doctor arrives, and then we see the trio walking off together discussing psychopaths.

I want to thank everybody for joining us here in the garage each and every week.

Make sure you go to truecrimegarage.com and sign up on the mailing list.

So much more to get to in this Mindhunter series.

And until then, be good, be kind, and don't literally.

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