Ep.3: The Serial Killer’s Highway - Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom?

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Speaker 2 Coach, the energy out there felt different.

Speaker 3 What changed for the team today?

Speaker 5 It was the new Game Day Scratchers from the California Lottery.

Speaker 6 Play is everything. Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Speaker 7 Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

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Speaker 11 Picture yourself alone in the middle of nowhere, and there's somebody following you.

Speaker 12 He went on his way, we so thought, and then we went on ours. But in reality, he really followed us up there.

Speaker 11 On Deadly Nightmares, the true crime podcast from ID, listen to real stories of ordinary people stalked by serial killers and attackers.

Speaker 11 Listen to Deadly Nightmares on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 This podcast contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence. Please be advised.

Speaker 14 My initial reaction to the Renee Bergeron scene was very complicated. I knew it was going to be a complicated case because she was found without her head.
That wasn't found for at least another day.

Speaker 14 She was found without her tongue. That certainly meant something.
And the injury to the body, the clothing, she didn't have all of her clothing. She was very clean.

Speaker 14 I knew at the time this was going to be a real challenge to try to recreate what could have happened to this young woman.

Speaker 12 For ID and Arc Media, I'm Sarah Kalen, and this is Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom?

Speaker 12 A podcast documenting my three-year investigation into the 1993 murder of René Bergeron, a murder murder that has remained unsolved for nearly 30 years.

Speaker 12 Previously, on Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom.

Speaker 13 Do you have any knowledge of how Maria came to be dead? No, sir.

Speaker 15 I shouldn't. I'll take a lot of detective tests or whatever.
I have to do it. I have no knowledge whatsoever.

Speaker 16 She was a drug addict and me shit bad.

Speaker 16 I never will forget her. But I call her Maria.
But we found out later her name was Renee Bergeron. But she always be been Maria Martinez to me.

Speaker 17 If this had been a 60-year-old lady that was at a grocery store shopping, I think Cookie would have put more focus on it and a lot more time. I hate to say it this way, but she was just a whore.

Speaker 17 Who cares? I actually feel that's the way he looked at it.

Speaker 12 It doesn't matter what you heard. The least was in her name.
That was her house. She wasn't living off of anybody.

Speaker 12 I think it's important to recognize that there were a lot of tales about her at the time that were not accurate.

Speaker 18 The injuries to the neck, which involved decapitation, meaning that her head had been physically removed from her body.

Speaker 18 These wounds, they're just indicative of someone who was in a state of rage, trying to do as much damage as they possibly could.

Speaker 12 Interstate 10. It runs through eight states from Santa Monica, California to Jacksonville, Florida.
Almost 2,500 miles long.

Speaker 12 It's the fourth longest highway in the country, one of the flagship freeways of the American Interstate Highway System when construction first began in 1957.

Speaker 12 And according to some, Interstate 10 is the Serial Killers Highway.

Speaker 12 Now, there is no official designation. Reasonable, educated people disagree on which exact stretch of highway is the serial killer's highway.

Speaker 12 But the fact of the matter is that I-10 covers a lot of ground.

Speaker 12 It stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Along the way, it hits a number of high crime areas, including brushing up alongside the Mexican border at Juarez as it passes through El Paso.

Speaker 12 And while El Paso is a statistically very safe city, Juarez, with easy access to 10, is the third most dangerous in the world.

Speaker 12 I-10 also hits Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, New Orleans, and Mobile, Alabama.

Speaker 12 Why are highways so popular with serial killers? Logistics. That's the first answer.
It's easy to kill and then disappear. We did see it in the past with trains as the railroads expanded.

Speaker 12 There are a number of unsolved axe murders believed to have been committed by offenders who hopped on and off the trains to kill the same way we think of them doing now on the highways.

Speaker 12 Plus, highways offer anonymity. This is the greatest tool a serial killer has.
Some killers choose the trucker profession specifically because of the ability to move about the country.

Speaker 12 Victims are often dumped nowhere near where they were picked up or killed. This is part of why there are so many John and Jane Does associated with these kinds of killings.

Speaker 12 In 2010, the FBI began tracking serial homicides specifically associated with highways and major roadways.

Speaker 12 When you examine that data, the highest number of murders over the longest stretch of the highway does appear to be across the bottom quarter of the country, tracking along Interstate 10,

Speaker 12 right where Renee's body was found.

Speaker 12 This certainly factors into my thinking when I first see the Renee Bergeron case, making me believe there's a strong chance that it is the work of a serial killer.

Speaker 12 First, of course, it's unimaginably brutal. There's decapitation, mutilation, object rape.

Speaker 12 Not to mention the fact that whoever killed her drained her body of blood and appears to have posed her in that prone position on the grass.

Speaker 12 Which brings me to the second reason why this could be the work of a serial killer. It looks ritualistic, obsessive.
The kind of murder that someone with a sadistic compulsion would commit.

Speaker 12 And third, perhaps most relevant to this part of our story, she was found on a service road just off Interstate 10, unarguably the most popular highway for serial killers in the whole United States.

Speaker 12 Not only did many serial killers travel on highways to commit their murders, many also disposed of their victims' bodies along the highway.

Speaker 12 Keith Jesperson is the most well-known. But there's Richard Rogers, who dumped his bodies at highway rest stops, and Jerry Lee Johns, who left his red-headed victims by the side of the road.

Speaker 12 It is my first impression. It is the very reason I am asked to look at this specific case.
So it is necessary to ask:

Speaker 12 could a serial killer have been responsible for the murder of Rene Bergeron?

Speaker 12 Do you remember me approaching you about the case? Yeah, you

Speaker 14 emailed me about the case, and I was intrigued enough to say, come and let's meet. And so then we did get together when you came up to the to the cottage.

Speaker 12 This is Dr.

Speaker 12 Ann Burgess, a legendary researcher, professor, and consultant in the areas of trauma-informed rape victim interviews, serial predation, forensic psych nursing, homicide investigation, and psychological profiling.

Speaker 12 You might recognize her work as that of the character Dr.

Speaker 12 Wendy Carr in the Netflix series Mindhunter, which portrayed the FBI's behavioral science unit as they basically invented the the psychological profiling of serial killers.

Speaker 19 Dr. Wendy Carr, so you're saying you don't think this us interviewing these killers is crazy?

Speaker 20 Just the opposite.

Speaker 12 I mean, crazy is. Wendy Carr is the fictionalized version of Dr.
Burgess.

Speaker 20 I mean, imagine. I truly imagine what it takes to bludgeon someone to death.

Speaker 12 Now, here is what is so cool about Dr. Burgess.

Speaker 12 She is a leader in two fields critical to solving unimaginable murders like what happened to Renee. Those fields are forensic nursing and victimology.

Speaker 12 Basically, what kind of a person commits this kind of crime? And what clues can a victim and their life offer us about who may have killed them?

Speaker 12 To solve this case, I know that I need to understand both who Renee is and who the person who did this to Rene is. Without either, I'll be as lost as the original investigators.

Speaker 12 Before we can dive into Renee's case, it is important to rewind and give some more context to the work Dr. Burgess did on serial killers, the work that was portrayed in Mindhunter.

Speaker 12 For Dr. Burgess, that work started with looking at sexual crimes.

Speaker 12 Back in the 1970s, Dr. Burgess was an assistant professor of nursing who focused on forensic psychology.

Speaker 12 And as part of her research, she conducted an extensive study with rape victims seeking treatment in emergency rooms.

Speaker 12 From that research she was able to develop a comprehensive study on the impact of rape on victims as well as how best to interview and treat rape in a clinical setting.

Speaker 12 It's this work that led her to be invited to the FBI's behavioral science unit.

Speaker 14 William Webster was the head of the FBI out of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 14 He was new, he was visionary, he was young, energetic, and he said, we will have our agents at the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy to teach law enforcement across the country.

Speaker 14 Not only did he say that law enforcement needed to be trained in the area of rape investigation, but they at the academy needed to do research. And so because

Speaker 14 they had to do research, several of the agents were interested in interviewing criminals. As Bob Ressler told me, how can I teach criminal psychology if I haven't talked to any criminals?

Speaker 12 So the FBI had all of these imprisoned serial killers they could interview, but no system for conducting those interviews.

Speaker 14 They didn't get into talking with the suspects. They usually would usually turn that over, and they certainly didn't understand the victim.

Speaker 14 Victimology was not something in their playbook at that particular time. So I happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Speaker 12 This is where Dr. Burgess came in.
She was a professor and researcher. She knew that the only way this research could be comprehensive and systematic is if they put a methodology into place.

Speaker 14 Well, it'd be nice if you had a set of questions that you asked each one, and then we could take a look at whether that would make some sense. We could do some statistics, etc.

Speaker 14 And that really was how the study got started.

Speaker 12 She believed that the interviewers, that is the FBI agents sitting down to talk to the killers, should ask a standard set of questions to known serial killers in order to build up a database of information.

Speaker 12 Even the order in which they asked the questions was important to how the answers would be compiled and interpreted.

Speaker 12 At one point, she went so far as to color code the questionnaire in order to guarantee that the process was maintained across the board.

Speaker 14 And in fact, the first book we wrote was an academic book for the Theol, so to speak, on patterns of the sexual killing. It's, of course, what it was.
But where do we get our sample?

Speaker 14 Well, I asked Bob Dressler to please give us a list. And he was able to find, I think, 82 serial killers where they thought there had been multiple victims.
And out of that, we pared it down to 36.

Speaker 14 And these were ones that we thought they could get interviews with. We really wanted them to go out and interview these men.

Speaker 12 So they did. And during those interviews, they focused on so many things you've probably probably heard of, probably even know by heart now yourself.
How did they treat animals in their childhoods?

Speaker 12 Did they have a penchant for starting fires? Had there been physical or sexual abuse growing up? Did they choose and stalk victims?

Speaker 12 Or did they simply act on impulse in a momentary lapse of self-control? Did they know their victims or pick total strangers?

Speaker 12 And the men they interviewed, well, you know them too.

Speaker 12 Ed Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck,

Speaker 12 even Mobile's own Thomas Wisenhunt, to name a few.

Speaker 12 But Dr. Burgess had her own focus in those interviews.

Speaker 14 I was more looking at the psychology and the psychiatric aspect, and that had to do with the upbringing, the child development part, what went on in the family.

Speaker 14 And we clearly saw the pattern of the absent father.

Speaker 14 And that always intrigued me because up until that point, they often would talk about the domineering mother and how bad the mother was and she did this and that to the child.

Speaker 14 But they didn't factor in that there's no father around.

Speaker 14 And so the mother was really having to do both the discipline as well as the nurturing part of parenting. But the absent father was important.

Speaker 14 And then the other, I think, important thing that we found out is

Speaker 14 there was something in each one of these

Speaker 14 narratives of a very powerful experience that maybe for other people, other young boys, it wouldn't have mattered, but it had some type of sexual connotation to it.

Speaker 14 And that seems to be what really hooked the young male child in. And it could be as young as five, six, seven years old.
I can remember Jean Joubert was clearly talked about at age five.

Speaker 14 He wanted to, quote, gobble up his babysitter. And if you looked at his crimes, even the ones before he started killing, they would have bite marks that the victims in some way would be bitten.

Speaker 14 And then, of course, in his killing, he had targeted young boys.

Speaker 12 So just to summarize, what Dr. Burgess finds in these studies is important.

Speaker 12 Childhood development and factors in the child's surroundings played a role in sexual homicides. It wasn't just sociopathy or psychopathy.
Nurture played as much a role as nature.

Speaker 12 Remember, at the time of this research, serial killers were on the rise, both in headlines and popular culture, a rise that continued from the 70s on through the end of the 90s.

Speaker 12 At the same time as pop culture was turning our attention to a new swath of slasher flags, the newspapers were filled with more and more stories of horror movie-style killers walking amongst us in the real world.

Speaker 12 It was the golden age of the serial killer.

Speaker 12 There are a number of theories as to why serial killers and serial sexual predators seem to rapidly burst forth from the broader population of your typical rapists and murderers, and why, in particular, we experienced a sort of serial killer bubble in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Speaker 12 Urbanization likely played a role, more people in one place with greater anonymity.

Speaker 12 Lead paint in buildings, lead in gasoline, too, and so much more of it everywhere with that ever-expanding highway system.

Speaker 12 There's also the fact that a whole generation of men grew up in homes plagued by unacknowledged and untreated PTSD and their fathers, veterans of World Wars I and II.

Speaker 12 Plus, true crime and true detective magazines were widely available and very popular, marketed to and consumed by boys in their tweens and teens.

Speaker 12 They essentially were pornography filled with intensely sadistic imagery, linking sex and violence at a critical stage of development in the minds of some young boys who could buy it at will during a time when healthier forms of porn were simply inaccessible.

Speaker 12 None of these things acted on their own, but altogether created a perfect storm of developmental impacts.

Speaker 12 Add that to the important factors of nature, that is, the naturally occurring psychopathy or sociopathy, and the math is simple.

Speaker 12 More developmental impacts on the regularly occurring number of sociopaths and psychopaths in a population will likely create more serial killers versus, say, your garden variety ruthless sociopathic CEOs.

Speaker 12 But this golden age and the newly popular image of the serial killer all led to the government investing considerable resources into groundbreaking research like the research that Dr. Burgess did.

Speaker 12 And that research has proved to be vitally important to our understanding of sexual homicides today.

Speaker 12 What do you wish the broader public knew about serial predation?

Speaker 14 I think the public needs to know how long the surveillance goes.

Speaker 14 how much that the offender gets out of stalking, silently stalking his victim.

Speaker 14 Just take a store clerk, even if that offender comes in every day to buy a newspaper or something, that that can be setting up something.

Speaker 14 And where the, I remember one clerk that would say, smile and say hello every time, and that would feed into his fantasy. But we had seen that in other kinds of cases.

Speaker 14 So I think that it's, you cannot assume that the victim is a stranger to the offender, maybe a stranger to the victim, but that person may well have been watching and surveilling the victim for a while.

Speaker 14 It builds the fantasy. It builds into what he wants to do and how he's going to do it.

Speaker 12 Which brings us to the Renee Bergeron case.

Speaker 12 When I presented the information to you, what was your initial reaction to Renee's scene?

Speaker 14 My initial reaction to the Renee Bergeron scene

Speaker 14 was very complicated. I knew it was going to be a complicated case because she was found without her head.
That wasn't found for at least another day. She was found without her tongue.

Speaker 14 That certainly meant something. And the injury to the body.

Speaker 14 The clothing, she didn't have all of her clothing.

Speaker 14 She had nothing. She was very clean.
There was not like a lot of blood smeared on her. And later determined that

Speaker 14 she had no blood, that something had drained the blood.

Speaker 14 I mean, this was going to be, I knew at the time this was going to be a real challenge to try to recreate what could have happened to this young woman.

Speaker 12 What at Renee's scene to you presents as an indication of a sexual homicide or possibly at first glance the work of a serial predator?

Speaker 14 Well, when you go to a crime scene and you want to look at a particular victim, sell the position the victim is in, the clothing or not,

Speaker 14 any markings on the body, any items that are there and items that are not there that you might not learn until you talk with someone.

Speaker 14 Did the offender take anything off of the body, any markings, any souvenirs, things like that?

Speaker 14 When you only have the victim and you believe that it's a serial killing, and even if you don't, how do you re-establish or re-evaluate the fantasy that was going on in the killer's head?

Speaker 14 That's really the hard thing is,

Speaker 14 and it's easy if it's a robbery, say, because the wallet's missing or items are taken.

Speaker 14 But when there's nothing like a robbery or anything else to explain why the victim was killed, you have to to think about a serial killing.

Speaker 14 There are a variety of indicators that you have a sexual homicide here even without the presence of evidence of that.

Speaker 14 And one of the important things of understanding it as a ritualistic crime is how much time that the offender spent at the crime scene.

Speaker 14 And that could be determined by the various things that are left at the crime scene. Was the victim covered? Was the victim just left without any

Speaker 14 type of attention to it?

Speaker 14 How much time the offender spent at the scene, what he did to the body, why he did the things he did, all would point to the fantasy.

Speaker 12 So in its simplest terms, the murder of Renee Bergeron and the subsequent crime scene I've studied through photos and the medical examiner's report is undoubtedly a sexual homicide.

Speaker 12 And by virtue of how extensive the wounds were, how grotesque they appear to the average person, how long the killer must have spent with the body, they certainly look like they could have been inflicted by someone who had done this before and would likely do it again.

Speaker 12 By definition, this means it could be the work of a serial killer.

Speaker 12 So, how do I begin to investigate whether a specific serial killer could be involved in this? Well, I need to turn to the very data set that Dr. Burgess first helped to create.

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Speaker 2 Coach, the energy out there felt different.

Speaker 3 What changed for the team today?

Speaker 5 It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Speaker 6 Play is everything. Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Speaker 7 Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Speaker 4 Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

Speaker 5 That's all for now.

Speaker 8 Coach, one more question.

Speaker 9 Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

Speaker 10 A little play can make your day.

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Speaker 11 Picture yourself alone in the middle of nowhere, and there's somebody following you.

Speaker 12 He went on his way, we so thought, and then we went on ours. But in reality, he really followed us up there.

Speaker 11 On Deadly Nightmares, the true crime podcast from ID, listen to real stories of ordinary people stalked by serial killers and attackers.

Speaker 11 Listen to Deadly Nightmares on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 In order to find out whether a known serial killer could be responsible for the murder of Renee Bergeron, I know that I need to get access to something called the Radford and FGCU database.

Speaker 12 Basically, the database aims to track every known or broadly suspected serial killer in the world, past and present.

Speaker 12 For each killer and victim, there are 185 possible characteristics, like murder weapon, gun, knife, rope, something else, mutilation and its variations, like decapitation, and any other details relevant to the crime, like whether the victim's body was hidden or not.

Speaker 12 plus all of the other bullet point facts of the case, like where and when it happened and who the suspects are if that is known.

Speaker 12 As you might imagine, this is a comprehensive collection. Because we know serials work in patterns, an extensive record like this allows for comparisons to unsolved cases.

Speaker 12 As soon as I have access to this database, I start scouring for any relations to this case.

Speaker 12 First, I look at the Gulf Coast region, South Alabama, Mississippi, eastern Louisiana, the western panhandle of Florida. What murders show up in this area?

Speaker 12 Then I look to see if any of those murders look similar to what happened to Renee. Are there any other sexual homicides? What about decapitations?

Speaker 12 The decapitation felt like the key to me. Even among sexual homicides, even among murders with mutilation, decapitation is quite rare.

Speaker 12 However, when I look at the data, there are not a lot of matches. But there's one match that looks promising.
A serial killer by the name of Sean Vincent Gillis.

Speaker 12 Sean Gillis is a serial killer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, less than a three-hour drive from Mobile.

Speaker 12 As far as we know, Gillis killed four black women and four white women. He himself is white.
Some of his victims were sex workers. One was an elderly lady living in an assisted living facility.

Speaker 12 One was a 52-year-old stay-at-home mom.

Speaker 12 One was his own housekeeper.

Speaker 12 His choice of victims is obviously quite varied, but his methods and signatures are not.

Speaker 12 All of his murders look very similar, and one of them looks almost identical to Renee's, right down to the position the body had been left in for discovery.

Speaker 12 His MO, or the logistics used to find, capture, and subdue victims, was this.

Speaker 12 Generally, he tried to get women into his car, where he would then strangle them with a zip tie.

Speaker 12 His signatures, or the elements of the crime that brought alive the fantasy and satiated his compulsions, were stabbing, slashing, mutilating, exploring the victim's body post-mortem, and sometimes even necrophilia and cannibalism.

Speaker 12 Gillis is believed to have been active from March 1994 to February 2004, a 10-year run in which he tried to rack up a good number of victims in order to attract local media attention for his crimes.

Speaker 12 He was jealous that Derek Todd Lee was getting more attention as the local serial killer du jour.

Speaker 12 Gillis's murders are not a perfect match for Renee's murder, but they also are not dissimilar enough to eliminate him based simply on scenes.

Speaker 12 Could Sean Gillis possibly be responsible for the murder of Renee? Could she be one more notch in his belt to achieve fame as a serial killer?

Speaker 12 Matt and I decide to call a friend at the FBI to see if she can help us out. Hey, Matt, what's going on? It's Felony Friday.
It is Felony Friday, what you got.

Speaker 24 We're working on a cold case. Okay.

Speaker 24 I think I've mentioned it to you before, that lady in 1993 was beheaded and sexually mutilated, and her body was dumped on the I-10 service road in Theodore.

Speaker 24 We've been working on this case for 16 months now and

Speaker 24 we're leaning, we're not 100% sure, but in 92-93, Sean Gillis out of New Orleans, who is a notorious serial killer, was operating heavily and doing the same things, beheading, sexually mutilating, positioning bodies.

Speaker 24 And he's in prison over there. And we know the FBI assisted with that case in Louisiana.

Speaker 24 And we don't know if we would have or be able to get any access to crime scene photos that you guys took or anything that could help us compare body positions or

Speaker 24 similar characters.

Speaker 25 Yeah, well, absolutely. Let me

Speaker 25 see.

Speaker 24 Ma'am.

Speaker 26 What's the guy's name? The subject's name again?

Speaker 1 Sean Gillis.

Speaker 26 Let me do some digging on this.

Speaker 26 It looks like this may have been shut up to headquarters, but New Orleans is going to have these records and if there's any photographs at all associated with anything that they may have processed

Speaker 26 um i i should be

Speaker 12 just to jump in for a second we say new orleans not baton rouge don't worry this is corrected with a quick email later on perfect and no rush don't don't you don't have to try to push that through today obviously but we just

Speaker 24 his name's coming up just because of his mo and the way this girl was found it's really coincidental

Speaker 26 absolutely Yeah. I mean, how many people,

Speaker 25 that's pretty heinous. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Man, yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 26 Yeah, let me do some digging around. I'll

Speaker 26 get you what we can get you.

Speaker 25 All right. Thanks.

Speaker 10 Have a good weekend. All right.

Speaker 26 You too. You guys have fun.

Speaker 12 So we're now asking the FBI for a favor. Can we find out if any extensive profile of Gillis was ever created by them? Have they gone back and looked at him for anything unsolved?

Speaker 12 Matt and I decide to also speak with the the detectives in the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. They are the team responsible for the bulk of the investigation into Sean Gillis.

Speaker 12 We don't record this conversation.

Speaker 12 According to the detectives, Gillis did not usually travel very far. Going all the way to Mobile would be unusual for him.
This is because Gillis liked to bring his victims back to his house.

Speaker 12 When he killed someone, he typically engaged in the mutilation and exanguination at his own home in Baton Baton Rouge.

Speaker 12 He did this during the middle of the night while his live-in girlfriend was at work as a nurse on overnight shifts. To have done these acts someplace he didn't know or feel safe is extremely unlikely.

Speaker 12 But despite that, the team at East Baton Rouge has a hard time ignoring the ways in which the crime scenes and condition of the bodies were similar.

Speaker 12 The way Renee was found strongly resembled the way one of Gillis's victims, a woman named Catherine Hall, was found.

Speaker 12 Hall was discovered on a remote dirt road almost in the woodline. She was supine, arms outstretched in a nearly identical fashion to Renee.

Speaker 12 She had been slashed on her torso, and she had been exsanguinated.

Speaker 12 Because of this, it's hard to not feel like Renee's murder could be connected to Gillis.

Speaker 12 But as Matt and I dig into this, more and more evidence turns up that makes us question whether Gillis could actually have been involved.

Speaker 12 Yes, the crime scene looked like his work, but the drive between Mobile and Baton Rouge is three hours.

Speaker 12 This meant that Gillis would have to drive to Mobile, murder Renee, bring her back to Baton Rouge, dismember and clean her body, then drive it back to Mobile where he would set her up on the road, a road that almost nobody even knew existed.

Speaker 12 That's at least least six hours of driving and many more hours of work that Gillis would have to do in a pretty narrow window of time between the end of his workday and the time when his girlfriend returned home.

Speaker 12 Also, Gillis tended to fixate on his victims prior to killing them. There is no evidence that Renee passed through Baton Rouge in the weeks prior to her death or that Gillis passed through Mobile.

Speaker 12 Significantly, once he was captured, Gillis confessed to his crimes and provided detail to back up his claims. This is part of his pathology, this desire to have the crimes recognized, even lauded.

Speaker 12 But he's never confessed to killing Renee. If he did kill her, wouldn't he have owned up to it in order to claim more of the glory he saw in the serial murder?

Speaker 12 So, it seems pretty unlikely that Sean Gillis had anything to do with Renee's murder. But if he didn't, who did?

Speaker 12 Could it have been the work of a previously unidentified serial killer? Or could it have been someone else who only committed brutal murder just this once?

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Speaker 2 Coach, the energy out there felt different.

Speaker 3 What changed for the team today?

Speaker 5 It was the new game day scratches from the California Lottery.

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Speaker 7 Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

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Speaker 8 Coach, one more question.

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Speaker 12 We give a lot of attention to famous serial killers, but it is important to acknowledge that the same characteristics we see in serial killings are present in many sexual homicides, is often what defines them as such.

Speaker 12 Someone might have that same fixation, that same obsession with the victim.

Speaker 12 That is actually key to so much of Dr. Burgess's work.
She's focused on the psychology of all sexual homicides, not just the ones from the most famous headlines.

Speaker 12 And that psychology is critical to understanding a case like Renee's.

Speaker 12 Assuming you only know the crime scene and the state of the body, what might you hypothesize about what happened and who might be responsible?

Speaker 14 Well, we certainly know that rage was a part of that. Anger, rage, there was such intensity, if you will, of injury to this young woman that

Speaker 14 you automatically think was conflict, argument, what happened,

Speaker 14 or why was she being targeted? You always want to know why. Why was she at that time? Why did she become the victim? So somebody knew her.

Speaker 14 That is not going to be a stranger.

Speaker 14 I never thought a stranger would just do that.

Speaker 14 He could have just killed her. You know, he didn't have to do all the things we just described.
So

Speaker 14 the challenge was to start trying to recreate it.

Speaker 14 What was near there? Why was she... There had to have been some water because she had been washed or somehow.
So that would be something to look at. What were the buildings nearby?

Speaker 14 Where could this have happened? Because it didn't look like it happened there. So that was not the original crime scene.
That she was killed or something was done to her elsewhere.

Speaker 14 and then she was killed and then she was moved into a vehicle of some type and and just thrown i thought i felt just discarded so the uh not only was it the rage and the anger but it it was the

Speaker 14 misogyny maybe.

Speaker 14 Somebody was really angry at her for something.

Speaker 12 Yeah, the

Speaker 12 in specific object rape with the blade in particular.

Speaker 12 Can you talk a little bit about the indications that gives us?

Speaker 14 Yeah, there was not only there was insertion into her vaginal area, there was a

Speaker 14 marks to her face that there her mouth had been cut and and interestingly enough as others had always said it reminded them of a very early 1940s case the back dahlia out of California but there was such

Speaker 14 mutilation of the

Speaker 14 she was desexualized that's often a

Speaker 14 finding that you make so somebody had wanted to absolutely turn her into almost a mannequin that had no

Speaker 14 person to her.

Speaker 12 That's really interesting. I think that that's actually really key that

Speaker 12 the

Speaker 12 distaste for her sexuality, whether it was through sex work or whether it was her relationship with a black man, that there was something about her sexuality that was particularly offensive. Yes.

Speaker 12 I feel

Speaker 12 validated. I feel like I am at least pointed in the right direction if what I saw in the initial scene was so similar to how Dr.
Ann Burgess would interpret it.

Speaker 12 Imposter syndrome is real, and I struggle with it mightily. But at least for a little while, I feel as though I can handle this case, do it justice.

Speaker 12 Everything I know about this type of crime, I truly believe I owe to the giants, the pioneers of the field who came well before me and made my work today possible, but especially that of Dr. Burgess.

Speaker 12 And that is what gives me even a glimmer of a chance at solving Renee's murder.

Speaker 12 Next time on Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom. And I remember my mom explaining to me the difference of love and being in love.
And I said, so you're not in love with David?

Speaker 12 And she said, no, I just love him as a friend. And it was because she said that he was a good friend and he was my dad's best friend.

Speaker 13 Hello?

Speaker 13 Hey, David. Yeah.
Hey, Detective Peak. How are you today?

Speaker 13 I never did ask her who was looking for her. I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
Man, I've been racking my brain for 25 years trying to figure that out.

Speaker 13 I wish I could swap my life for hers and bring her back.

Speaker 12 Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom is produced by Arc Media for ID. You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 We'd love it if you would take a second to subscribe and leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 Coach, the energy out there felt different.

Speaker 3 What changed for the team today?

Speaker 5 It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Speaker 6 Play is everything. Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Speaker 7 Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Speaker 4 Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

Speaker 5 That's all for now.

Speaker 8 Coach, one more question.

Speaker 9 Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

Speaker 10 A little play can make your day.

Speaker 8 FreezPlay responsibly must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

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