WOMAN: Those who knew her say Makia Coney
had an infectious smile and a huge heart.
This is the area where the body was located on Wednesday night.
MAN: I cannot emphasize enough -- anyone who would
commit such a crime
across from a police substation
with a couple hundred police cars...
I am very, very concerned.
MAN: The thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
WOMAN: Parents at University Christian School
can't imagine who could be responsible for
the brutal murder of 17-year-old Makia Coney.
WOMAN: Detectives spent much of the day
here talking with students and teachers.
You can see their crime scene van,
and they looked at every truck in the parking lot.
Here we are in a murder investigation of someone
who Charles Southern had
an on-and-off-again relationship with, and he has
virtually no emotional reaction to it.
It certainly would raise questions of
how could somebody be so calm?
Southern is giving a timeline
and a story that doesn't make a lot of sense.
He's essentially throwing his friend Connor under the bus.
But he doesn't spend much time thinking about
is how those two realities can't coexist.
FOX: Even though police are suspicious,
because those contradictory statements that are being made,
it's not enough for them to make an arrest.
It's just enough for them to keep watching him and try to
find out if there's any validity behind what he's saying.
PRIDGEN: Mm-hmm.
He's distancing himself from the crime.
He's distancing himself from the victim.
Detectives are using their own experience and common sense to
realize that either one or both of these suspects,
Southern, Pridgen, maybe both,
are somehow either involved in
the crime or they know more than they're letting on.
And so now they're challenging him, and Pridgen's got some
decisions to make about how far he goes with these lies.
SAHNI: Teenagers sometimes lie.
Their impulse control is poor.
But what we also see in psychopathic
individuals is this pattern of pathological lying.
There's a compulsive need to lie, filling in the blanks.
It's clear that Makia was shot twice.
She was shot at close range by highly destructive bullets.
The only thing Pridgen comes up with is,
"I only got about four hours of sleep."
Most of us, if we were in this situation
and witnessed something that horrific,
might not have slept at all.
[dial tone]
SOUTHERN: Um...
SAHNI: The two of them are so rapidly and desperately
and impulsively trying to explain away their guilt
that they don't really think about
the consequences of what they're saying, that they're
going to now have to address
the fact that they were each there.
Um...
Yeah.
For no reason.
The thing that he was most upset about wasn't that they
were accusing him of murder,
wasn't the fact that he would be going to prison for the rest
of his life, it's that the detective,
probably accurately, referred to him as a sociopath.
A lot of people will use psychopath and sociopath
interchangeably -- impugning his honor
is almost the thing that got him most upset.
So the story changes again when the two defendants are in
the room together, and you almost get the sense
that they're trying to watch each other and see what
they should be saying and take cues from one another,
but they really fail at that.
They can't quite figure out what
to say after the one just spoke.
And in the end, you know,
they're still trying to point fingers at the other one.
But there are some slippages -- for instance,
whenever he stated that he didn't shoot her first.
So acknowledging, in fact, that somebody shot her,
obviously, a second time.
DET: The second shot killed her.
DET: Mm-hmm.
To the fact that Southern is waving around a loaded firearm,
per his account here, and pointing it at a victim,
a girl that he dated on and off, just shows how he has
no value in human life, and it's rather cold and callous.
It's also very telling, because Pridgen then, immediately
after she's shot, decides to just shoot her again.
Most individuals would check to see if the person would
still be alive, especially if they thought
it was an accidental shooting.
Most individuals wouldn't just shoot the person again,
and the way he described it was with zero remorse.
TUSSEY: If these statements are accurate,
and that was really Southern's impetus for choosing her,
it makes it clear that he was really objectifying her,
that she was really an object for him upon --
you know, for him to use
and do what he wanted to when he wanted to.
But he expected to be free to date whoever he wanted to.
FOX: People with psychopathic traits tend to
be more possessive and jealous than others.
One, because they have this
insatiable need for power and control.
The motive for Southern is starting to shape up here where
we understand this is about jealousy and power
and control over Makia.
He has apparently lost this, and that makes him angry.
But why Pridgen would cooperate and go along with this?
That's still unclear.
DET: So just -- just straight talk.
Both of them had expressed this desire to
kill someone to see what it was like.
It's possible, given their shared interest
in killing someone that there was really
a synergy between the two of them,
and they just fed off of one another.
DET: Mm-hmm.
FOX: He's trying to still downplay his culpability
while letting his true colors show through.
He's admitting that he's just a natural liar.
It's what he does over and over.
Criminal versatility, which means committing multiple
different types of crime and having a juvenile delinquency,
which means committing crimes as a young person under the age
of 18, both are red flags when it comes to psychopathy.
Southern was asked to leave Missouri after he got in trouble
with the law.
He relocated to Florida with extended relatives.
Once he came to Florida, he ended up in a good crowd.
He was on the football team.
He was doing well at this private school.
He had good family support.
But one of the things that we oftentime find with
psychopathic individuals is that they crave a high.
They crave stimulation, they get bored very easily.
What Southern missed was that thrill-seeking
sensation that oftentimes psychopathic individuals get.
And so it was only a matter of time before he was going to
return to his criminal activity,
but he had already done robbing.
He needed something more,
and killing was the next thing on the list.
So Southern felt that his ego was challenged,
his masculinity was challenged, and so to preserve his own ego,
he uses that as justification for why he shot her,
like he had to rise up to the occasion to
prove how manly he was.
Shooting her simply because he didn't
want to be teased or his masculinity to be threatened
speaks to his callousness
and his narcissism.