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Today, we are sharing the first episode of Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words,
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a new podcast on Exactly Right. Wicked Words is a companion chat show to Tenfold More Wicked,
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where host Kate Winkler Dawson interviews journalists and writers about their best
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true crime cases. Guests include the filmmaker who investigated the Long Island serial killer,
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the forensic psychologist who spent years exploring the mind of BTK killer Dennis Rader,
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and a New York Times bestselling author who went to school with a serial killer.
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You'll hear candid insights revealing details never before published while discovering intriguing facts that would otherwise be lost to history.
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These are the stories behind the stories. Plus, if you haven't checked out Tenfold More Wicked,
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dig back into the feed to hear seasons one through three of the critically acclaimed podcast.
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And enjoy the premiere episode of Wicked Words here and then head over to the Tenfold More Wicked feed for a brand new episode out today.
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New episodes drop every Monday. And subscribe to the show on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
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If you like what you hear, please write a review. And follow them on Instagram at TenfoldMoreWicked, on Twitter at TenfoldMore, and on Facebook at TenfoldMoreWicked.
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Enjoy and goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye. This story contains adult content and language, along with references to sexual assault.
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Listener discretion is advised. You can't see this, but I'll describe it. This is one that a psychopath named Dennis Rader came up with.
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He calls this cubing. And so in my hand, I have a cube. And on each side, there is a label like church leader, employee, family man, serial killer.
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And that's what psychopaths take advantage of. They have no roots in any of these.
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All of them are part of their identity. They can pivot quickly to whichever one works for them in any given situation.
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I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.
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I'm also the host of the historical true crime podcast, Tenfold War Wicked on Exactly Right.
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I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've interviewed some people in person and some from my home studio over Zoom.
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and they are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true crime stories
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and now we want to tell you those stories with details that have never been published.
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Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make, good and bad.
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It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories. I'm Katherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology
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and the author of Confession of a Serial Killer, what I call a guided autobiography of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer.
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Dr. Ramsland had unprecedented access to one of the most notorious serial killers in American history.
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She's a real-life mindhunter. She spent years working with Dennis Rader to figure out his psyche, why he became a killer.
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It wasn't just Dennis Rader talking about himself in any which way he wanted. It was me guiding him toward the end of benefiting criminal justice, psychology and law enforcement so that whatever we were doing would end up providing insights.
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And also the proceeds benefit the victims' families. Before we get started, let me tell you the story of Dennis Rader.
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Rader killed 10 people in Kansas over 30 years before he was finally caught. BTK stands for Bind, Torture, Kill.
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One of the things that was so frightening about Rader is that he seemed relatively normal.
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This is from her book. Through jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence,
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Catherine Ramsland worked with Rader himself to analyze the layers of his psyche.
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Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Rader's unique codes, She presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man's motivation to stalk, torture and kill.
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Dennis Rader grew up an all-American boy in Kansas, you know, the heart of America with religious values and intact family, etc.
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And yet he developed the idea that he wanted to be famous. He got attachments to serial killers he read about as a teenager in true detective magazines.
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And girls made him feel uncomfortable and off balance. So he began to put those things together as a way to keep women under control and to become famous was to become a serial killer.
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So his fantasies began to form around that notion. And then he just identified with one day he was going to be as famous as Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy or any of the other ones.
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And he set about to do that. What is his childhood like, though? Is this someone who has a normal childhood?
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Because we often hear, obviously, people who are serial killers come from bad backgrounds.
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He did not come from a bad background. And why I like this case is because he is an outlier.
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And he shows us that we cannot make formulas that will help us predict and understand serial killers because there will always be somebody who just doesn't fit.
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And we have to be very careful about how how we try to box these things up. Serial killer is simply a description of behavior.
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You've killed at least two people in two different incidents. It's not a criminal type.
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So we have to beware that we not trying to formulate it so that we feel safe And I think Dennis Ritter is a very good example of somebody who had a perfectly ordinary childhood no abuse might have had some head injury We haven been
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able to document that, but he was in a car accident. His mother dropped him on his head
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when he was a kid. But he doesn't really show most of the impulsivity and other kinds of behaviors
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you expect from head injuries. He became a serial killer through a very active and very strong and
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intense fantasy life. So earlier you called Rader a psychopath, but would he have been diagnosed
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with something like antisocial personality disorder as a child, even if someone suspected
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something was wrong? We don't put the label psychopath on someone below the age of 18.
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So that's the first thing. However, we can see psychopathic tendencies in children as young as
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three. So we talk about them as being fledgling psychopaths or children at risk for psychopathy.
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We do have programs for males who are at risk of psychopathy. Not a lot of them, but there are some.
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There's one in Wisconsin at the Mendota Juvenile Center, and they're having success, meaning they're
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identifying, and usually it's in their teenage years or just before teenage years, they're
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identifying young men at risk for becoming adult psychopaths, working with them in terms of their
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thought processes and behavioral accountability. And they're finding success with that when
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they're released. The rate of them repeating any offense they might have committed to get in there
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is lower than those same population being released and not going through the program.
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Okay, so what does all that mean? So that tells us perhaps when we catch them at a young age and can identify those at risk for
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developing into adult psychopaths, that girls are just as amenable to this treatment as boys.
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So in that case, identifying them at a young age, whether female or male, is important.
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But nobody recognized that with Rader, right? And so he proceeded with his life. He got married
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and then something really changed with him. He got angry one day because he'd been laid off from
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a job he really liked. His wife was now the breadwinner, which, you know, there again,
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we have women in charge of his life, which he couldn't stand. And he broke into a house and he
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really liked the feeling of being in control of somebody's house. Nobody was in there,
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But he just liked that, began to fantasize about kidnapping young women and putting them in what he called girl traps and making them do what he wanted to do.
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So it started with fantasies when he was young. And now as an adult, these fantasies began to escalate.
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And then he just one day decided he was, you know, he saw a woman and her daughter, Julia Otero and her daughter walking and he just followed them to where they lived.
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And his fantasies began to be more like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this.
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That was 1974 in Wichita, Kansas. And it was January 15th. His wife went to work and he got up and he went to the Otero house and he broke in and he murdered four people.
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Doesn't that seem like a big jump to you to sort of being someone who is living in a fantasy world, but then to killing four people, including a man, right?
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Yeah, but he didn't expect the man was home. So what happened? So he shows up in the house.
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He shows up in the house. He's actually didn't. He's he's in the backyard. He sees that they have a dog and didn't realize it.
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He's in the backyard and he's not so sure that he's going to go in. But the the little boy came out to call for the dog and it was over.
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He knew he had to go in. The boy had seen him. Once he was in the house, he realized he's now got a father, mother and two kids.
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He's got to deal with all of them because they're witnesses. And it really wasn't well planned.
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He did not expect Joseph Otero Sr. to be there, but he had been in a car accident, and so he was home recovering.
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So this was just not something that – it's not a jump for this is a guy who wanted to be a serial killer, and so he goes and kills four people.
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It wasn't that he thought he was going to maybe encounter the two kids that he knew he could get rid of the little boy quickly.
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I know that sounds cold, but that was in his mind. that he was going to abduct the mother and daughter and take them to a barn
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because Barnes figured big in his fantasies. And none of it worked out the way he wanted it to work out.
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So he just tied them up and strangled them. How was he able, I mean, this is not, from what I've seen, not a big guy necessarily.
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I mean, how was he able to overcome four people? I mean, I can't even deal with my twin daughters at the same time.
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How do you wrangle four people? He had a gun and he made them believe. And here's the psychopathic part. He had this idea that if you make people feel safe and like nothing bad will happen, they relax their guard. And so he pretended to be a fugitive. Oh, all I need is your car. I just need some money. I'm not going to hurt you if you do what I say, but I'm going to have to tie you up. And once he has them under control, he's not the only one. There are quite a few people who manage this all by themselves.
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You make people scared enough and believe that as long as they obey you, it's all going to be okay.
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That's what they want to believe. And that's what psychopaths take advantage of.
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And once he had them all tied up, there's nothing they could have done. Did he kill the dog?
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I know that's a weird question. Did not kill the dog. He liked dogs. Okay. Just to make it clear, you've spent time with Dennis Rader.
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Yes, it was interesting because it actually started with someone else who had approached Rader when he was and he got away with this for 30 years.
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He wasn arrested till 2005 after he killed 10 people And once he was arrested another person wanted to write a book with him have him tell his story And she wrote to him for five years but didn produce a book
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And I saw her on Facebook and I asked her, whatever happened to your book? Because there
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were newspaper articles about her. And she begged me to take it over. She didn't want to do it and
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she wanted someone else to do it. So then I had to go through a certain process with the
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victim's family's attorney before they approved what I wanted to do. But the fact that I wanted
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to write a book that would benefit criminal justice and law enforcement, they appreciated that.
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So you made it clear to them that you wouldn't be exploiting the victims or glorifying him.
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They knew I could write a book because I've written quite a few and that I certainly was
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a serial killer expert as well as an academic with credentials. So that gave it a seriousness
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that so it wasn't going to be tabloid. So all of that happened. And during that time,
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Rader and I played chess games in the mail so that we, you know, kind of figure out where we're
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going to go with this. And I was able to take the five years of correspondence between him and the
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other person to get a start. And I didn't expect it was going to take me five years to do this.
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A lot of it had to do with all the back and forth with all the legal stuff. But during that time,
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I visited him and then we began weekly phone calls. And then he started writing very long
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letters, detailed, I mean, like 20 page letters. So between all of that, and also I was friends
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with the DA who had prosecuted. So she gave me access to her files. I knew some of the police
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officers involved. I talked to some of the victims' families. So with all of that, I had a lot of
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material to work with, but primarily his letters, I would say, were the best. The worst was actually
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visiting him because the guards would hang out and listen. And we had to really, he wanted to do
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this all in code. So that was a challenge. Why in code? He wanted to do it in code for practical
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reason. He didn't want the guards to see what he was sending out, but also because he fancied
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himself a spy. So he liked the idea and it was a test to me. Would I play? And you did for five
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years. I played and I made the code that we eventually used because he kept forgetting his.
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So interestingly, here I am a female in charge, which is what he didn't like. And yet we work together very well, actually.
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So after those murders, what happens? He's gotten away with it, even though it was messy, right?
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So where is he in his mind at that point? He thought he would get caught. He was pretty scared.
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He did not get caught. So he felt empowered. And within three months, he had murdered the next person.
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But this time he was more careful, except that he still made mistakes. Like picking the wrong victim.
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And it was a young woman. He thought he had identified somebody who didn't have dogs or people in her life or men.
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But she had a brother who showed up with her when he had. And what he liked to do is put himself inside a house and be the boogeyman jumping out of the closet.
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or startling you because you're completely off guard. You think your house is safe.
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You walk in, here's a man. It's not like somebody breaking in your house when you're in there
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because you can call the police, you can get a gun. This is about him taking you completely off guard.
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You have no resources. Is this fear for him? Is that the real drive? It doesn't sound like it's sex necessarily.
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Well, the two are together, definitely. The fear is erotic to him. Making people afraid and feeling dominant over females is erotic to him.
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He did not have sex with the victims. So what happened? But he had a highly erotic experience when he was strangling someone.
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He tried different methods and decided what he liked was strangling people. He liked posing bodies.
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I mean, it was just the idea of handling these female bodies and having complete control over
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them. It's very similar to what Bundy said once he got caught. Dahmer said about men,
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they like control. Because he lacked control, he felt, in his life. But he didn't lack control. I mean, he was the primary breadwinner. His wife had a job,
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but he was a primary breadwinner. He had kids. He was, at the time, the vice president of his
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church congregation and then became the president. That's when he got caught. How was Dennis Rader able to juggle all of those different roles that he played in his life?
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So if for now, family man is working, that's what they're going to present to you. But they can
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quickly change to a different side if the opportunity arises that they consider to be
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in their self-interest. They're not rooted in identity the way most of us are. So it's hard for us to understand this because most of us who see ourselves in a certain way
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and want to think there's consistency in our presentation to people and there's integrity
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in the things that we say, that if I said this, I mean this, and you're going to see me say the same
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thing tomorrow. That's not in their thinking at all. They don't really care if they're telling
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the truth or not. What they care about is to get what they're out for. And so they can pivot to the
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very next thing so fast. And you cannot say, and even if you have it on record, you can be recording what they say They not even going to acknowledge it because they know it doesn matter If you tell them you just lied I have you on tape you lied
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So they'll shrug it off and walk away and maybe they can manipulate you. If they can't, they'll go into the next person.
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But they'll take from you everything that they possibly can because they're vampires.
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If you let them in, they will take what they can. And then they move on after they've tapped you out to the next person.
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They don't have to be criminals to do that. They can take all kinds of things from you emotionally, financially.
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Let's share a bank account. Now your money's mine. There's so many things they can do that don't rise to the level of criminality
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because they're watching you as predators. You are not going to have the same tools.
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to deal with them as they have to deal with you. So back to the question, how can we spot them?
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I think you can spot the low functioning ones fairly easily because they make mistakes. That's
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why they get in prison. That's why they get caught. They're not that bright. You can spot
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their inconsistencies fairly quickly. And sometimes they give off a vibe that you just think, oh,
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I don't want to be around this person. But the high functioning ones think you have a very hard
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time spotting them until you're already in their web. You're already friends with them,
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or you're already in a relationship or possibly married or living in the same house or they're your roommate. You're already in something with them,
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and they've already figured you out before you had a chance to do them. Okay. So obviously he was a good manipulator. Did he ever lose control at any point?
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He didn't lack control. There were times he lost jobs and whatnot, but his final job was a compliance officer.
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He would go in and before that he was installing security systems. I mean, that's not really a loss of control.
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He had achieved a college degree. So not really a loss of control there for him.
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Okay, let's go back to 1974 to the break-in where Rader thinks the woman will be alone and she brings her brother home.
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Catherine Bright. That happened about three months after the Oteros. And he thought he had scoped it all out and turns out he hadn't.
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And unexpectedly she brought, she came home and her brother was with her. And there was a scuffle and Rader thought he was going to die because Kevin Bright grabbed his gun.
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And he really thought it was over for him. And he shot Kevin twice thinking he was going to die.
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But Kevin ran. And that ruined the whole thing for Raider because now he had to hurry.
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And this is always what's in his mind. He says things like, I'm unlucky because something always interfered with everything I wanted to do.
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You know, bad weather conditions or, you know, somebody was coming. They expected a phone call.
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So I never got a good shot at all that I fantasized about. Very poor me. It was just very similar to psychopaths.
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Psychopaths are all about I'm the victim. They blame others. They feel they whine.
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The whining psychopath. The whining psychopath. I'm talking with Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who spent five years interviewing serial killer Dennis Rader.
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She mentioned this checklist. So we're going to pause for a minute and I'll explain a little bit more about it.
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It's a criteria that experts use to diagnose a patient with psychopathy. It's called the Hair Checklist, created decades ago by researcher Robert Hair.
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It's basically a 20-item symptom rating scale that includes pathological lying, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, sexual promiscuity, impulsivity, just to name a few.
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But whining didn't make the list, and Dr. Ramsland thinks it should have. I once asked Robert Hare, why didn't he not add that to the psychopathy checklist?
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Because to my mind, that's the number one thing is they're always whining about their circumstances.
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Because it's all about them. It's all about them, but they don't even see that they put themselves in these circumstances.
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and I think he said something like, well, when I had 22 items rather than 20 in the revised version,
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that was one of them. Well, you shouldn't have taken that one off. That's what I see no matter what. I mean, every single identified psychopath who is some kind of
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public figure, so usually they're criminals, whines about their situation. And it's so hard to
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have any empathy for them because they have so little insight about how they got in these
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situations and that they wouldn't have been in these situations if they hadn't committed these
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crimes or done these horrible things to other people. But they minimize it. Rader will even say
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he's a good person who did some bad things. And he's not the only one. Bundy said it.
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Dahmer said it. They do see that since my murders are a small part of my life, you know, in terms of how much time I spend on everything else,
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then you can't really say I'm a bad person because I do all these other things. Like I
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help my neighbors. I'm a good father. So what? He's giving himself permission to do all these
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They really can't see that the decisions they made to hold others and to not have any feeling for the harm they've done, not just to those people,
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but all the reverberations into their families as well. What's up for most in their minds is,
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you know, all about me, all about me. And if it didn't work out, I was unlucky or something was
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unfair. I mean, there was a time when Rader's daughter gave an interview to the newspapers
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about 10 years. This is 10 years after he was arrested. And she, you know, talks in a very
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emotional way about how horrible this was for her and her family and, you know, their victims too.
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And he just doesn't seem to understand how he harmed us. And Rader saw the interview and
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And what he said to me was, you see, I got my name in the paper. Oh, God. And that's the way he was all the time.
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He never had any sense of the people he harmed. His victims belong to him. And if he didn't have enough time to do something that he wanted to do to them, it was bad luck.
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And, you know, something went against him and whining. It's whining. The serial killer from my first book, Death in the Air, John Reginald Christie, used to keep photos of himself in his prison cell.
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And he once pointed to his penis and told the prison guard, this is the reason why everybody's here.
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I mean, I just thought how incredible this man has never gotten attention at all.
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He just sort of always blended it into the wallpaper. And that's what I've always thought about Dennis Rader, just somebody who's never gotten attention.
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And now he's getting all at once everything that he's wanted. and how pathetic that is. Well, but it isn't that he never got attention. He was a person in his
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church. He had some standing, some authority. He was a compliance officer and people had to obey
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him when he told them their grass was too long or their dog was running around or something.
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So it isn't that he got none. He just didn't get enough in his mind. It's all about their
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perception. And their perception is filtered through poor me, poor me, the wine. It's always
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filtered through that. And the same thing with Eileen Wuornos, clearly psychopathic female.
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Wow, was that ever a poor me, poor me. And yeah, of course, she did have some problems.
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But boy, did she victimize people and not just the men she murdered. I mean, she got married to
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this older, really older guy, a lot older than her, and then just spent his money. And she just
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didn't care. She didn't care except for herself. Okay. But how do we even know how to categorize
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somebody like that? Well, the difficulty with categorizing a female psychopath is that we
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haven't done that much research on them. And the tools we've used were developed for male
00:27:00
psychopaths with the mistaken idea that anything that comes out of research with males will apply
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equally to females. And we're finding that that is probably not true. So now we have to rethink
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the idea of how a female psychopath might operate. And it turns out that a lot of women
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who are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder might in fact be psychopaths,
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but we've tended to think of them, you know, borderline as being a female disorder.
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and we tend not to think of females being psychopath. And I think this has a lot to do with many of the theories
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were developed by males who really did not want to think about women being psychopathic because that's very uncomfortable.
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The idea of mothers being psychopaths, wives being psychopaths is very uncomfortable And I certainly met police officers and attorneys and psychologists even who
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really don't want to think that women can be that bad. We still have people who don't want to go the distance with this
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and really believe that this could be. I think when they made the movie of Eileen Wuornos, for example,
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Now, she does definitely come up as a psychopath on the psychopathy checklist. However, when they made the movie, they gave her all kinds of excuses.
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So they they bent the facts. They made her girlfriend look small and she wasn't small out of work, but she had a job.
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So they made it look like the reason Eileen Wuornos was so violent was because of all the things that happened to her and the fact that she had to take care of her girlfriend.
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And they gave her every out. I thought it was unfair, first of all, to women to believe that they are in some way can't rise to, you know, some kind of criminality that males can can rise to.
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I think they absolutely can and have. But when I saw that movie, it was clear to me, people just don't want to accept that a woman can be just a cold-hearted, remorseless, angry killer.
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And she even said that about herself. She said, if you let me out, I'll do it again.
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And it sounds like Dennis Rader was exactly the same way. Let me just say, so from his success with killing people, he began to, the thing about every potential serial killer is this, at least those who fantasize about it.
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When they do it, when they actually murder, that is a turning point one way or the other.
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Either it's, wow, this isn't all it was cracked up to be. I don't want to do this again.
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And now I have a body and it's icky and I don't want to do it. It wasn't anything like my fantasy and I don't want to do it.
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And they then do not become serial killers. If they like it and it is all it's cracked up to be or more, they're set now for I need to do this again.
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And with Raider doing it again, it did take some time because there was three months between the first and second.
00:30:22
But then almost three years before the next one, because he became a father and he was busy and he did stuff.
00:30:29
But in his mind, he's always thinking this is the heat. This is what matters. This is who I really am.
00:30:38
No matter what I'm doing on the side with my social contracts, what I am is a killer.
00:30:47
And I want to be acknowledged for that someday, somehow. So he's always looking for potential victims.
00:30:56
And the circumstances weren't always correct for him to act out. But he was always stalking, peeping in windows, watching for opportunities.
00:31:07
So when people say something about Raider, and commonly there's an idea that Raider stopped.
00:31:14
That is not what he says. I failed. and so that's what's more interesting about him is that he wasn't always outlook like bundy was
00:31:27
out of control finally toward the end it's just i just gotta kill dom or two i mean he just
00:31:32
accelerated what he was doing but raider could keep control over it but he was always his real
00:31:38
sense of who he was that the heat of it the beating heart of his identity was that he was a
00:31:44
serial killer and he wanted to be a famous one. There have been metaphors to try to characterize
00:31:49
this sense of when a psychopath has a goal they like on a speeding train They don think about negative consequences They just completely bent on the reward no matter what
00:32:04
So a high-functioning psychopath is going to be a little more clever. Whether they're IQ smart or street smart or whatever it will be, they're going to realize, I don't want to end up in prison.
00:32:18
So even though I want that thing and it's against the law, I don't want to end up in prison.
00:32:24
So I'm going to find a way to get it that is within legal realms. So I think high functioning is going to just be more creative.
00:32:32
He wanted to be a Jack the Ripper. Reaching out to the media, reaching out to the media, playing the games he was playing and believing that if, you know, he left something behind after he died,
00:32:46
somebody would open a safety deposit box or something and go, whoa, it was Dennis Rader.
00:32:51
And he took great satisfaction in getting away with it, but everybody knowing he got away with it.
00:32:59
So that was an interesting aspect of him that I saw constantly coming forward in our discussions
00:33:08
and the things that he said as he wanted that fame, but he didn't ever want to really think about
00:33:15
emotional or moral consequences. Was there anything that surprised you about him or was
00:33:22
that what you just said what surprised you? Nothing surprised me because I mean, I've
00:33:25
studied serial killers, lots and lots of them way before him. So but he's an outlier. And that
00:33:32
interested me. It didn't surprise me because I have never been one who likes psychological
00:33:37
formulas. I think people are more diverse and more interesting and complicated than most of
00:33:42
formulas allowed them to be. So for me, that was intriguing to find someone like him that
00:33:49
demonstrates that. And I think he's a good lesson for us. So let's pause for a moment to catch up.
00:34:00
After Kathy Bright, Dennis Rader killed five more people. In 1977, he killed two women. And at this
00:34:06
point, he became irritated by the lack of media coverage. So he wrote a letter to a local TV
00:34:11
station in Wichita and said, how many people do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or
00:34:17
some national attention? Then nothing that we know of. He waited eight more years before killing his
00:34:24
neighbor in 1985. And the next year he murdered another woman. Then his final victim was Dolores
00:34:30
Davis in 1991 when he strangled the 61 year old in her home. He didn't get caught till 2005. He went
00:34:39
on to lead a normal life, although he was always watching for opportunities. And he had planned another one that didn't come off.
00:34:46
And he was about ready to retry it when he was caught. And he was caught by something stupid playing this cat and mouse game with police.
00:34:56
What kind of cat and mouse game? What he used to do is he'd send them these things he was writing, these chapters of his
00:35:02
story. And then he'd go copy them and take the copies and copy them in a different copier.
00:35:08
until he had several generations of copies so that it couldn't be traced to a copier.
00:35:14
And he got tired of that and also didn't have the same kind of time he used to have
00:35:18
because he had to report back to his wife. So he asked, could I use a floppy disk instead?
00:35:24
He took one that he'd used to take notes for church. Had he used a brand new one, it wouldn't have been, I think, as easy for them to catch him as they did.
00:35:36
But he didn't. he used one that has his name on it. And it was traced back to the church where he
00:35:42
had used the computer and the minister he worked with knew that and they got him.
00:35:47
Stupid mistake. Stupid mistake And to this day he knows it was stupid and he kicks himself for it So Dennis Rader is the guy who craves attention but someone you would never expect to be a psychopath right Someone who ultimately kills 10 people He just didn present as one is what you saying So these guys kind of sneak
00:36:06
up on us. Just about every psychopathy researcher who spends day in and day out on this topic
00:36:13
will admit they can be duped by a psychopath. So it would be, it's not really very smart to try to
00:36:21
think you've got, you know, all the red flags, you know what they are. You're always going to be
00:36:27
safe from psychopaths because you're always going to know because you're not. I mean, they're very
00:36:31
good at, you know, figuring out how to leverage you. I wrote this one article, the six things
00:36:43
psychopaths know about you that makes you unsafe. And it uses common human tendencies.
00:36:51
For example, if you're in a new place and you're a little uncertain and they're watching you,
00:36:58
they can see you're uncertain. They know you're going to respond as a kind person offering you
00:37:04
directions or maybe even, hey, you need a place to stay? Come to my house. People do this. They
00:37:12
trust somebody who extends a kind hand or a psychopaths know that you are going to tend to
00:37:20
appreciate somebody who's very confident who seems to know what they're doing, who has credentials. Well, a psychopath won't hesitate to lie about how confident they are or
00:37:30
their credentials. They don't have any sense of truth. They have no commitment to truth. They
00:37:37
have commitment only to themselves. So without a commitment to truth, you're not going to spot
00:37:42
that sort of hesitation of, oh, I'm lying. Should I be lying? That you can see in people who might
00:37:49
have some degree of remorse. So to think that you're going to spot them first, you're wrong.
00:37:56
They're the predators. They've been watching you and they know the kinds of things you as an
00:38:01
ordinary human being tend to do and what you respond to. And they're going to use that
00:38:07
against you in every way that they can. Before you even think about, could this person be a psychopath?
00:38:14
They're going to circumvent that. If they're clever, they're going to circumvent that
00:38:18
before you even have a chance to evaluate them. And then they're gone. On the next episode of Wicked Words.
00:38:30
There's a soft knock at the door. And she's like, I can't keep him out. I mean, he crashed the door.
00:38:35
So she opens it. He says, I'm sorry, I think you have my T-shirt. So he takes his T-shirt and turns to leave.
00:38:42
And before he leaves, he says, you don't know me. I live on the other side of town and leaves.
00:38:58
If you love historical true crime, please check out my books, American Sherlock and Death in the Air.
00:39:03
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00:39:14
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