[singing]
[man] The thing inside of me, it's like...
The appetite, it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
[Sahni] Sheila LaBarre is a 47-year-old widow,
and she's inherited this farm property and this farmhouse
from her late husband's estate, Dr. LaBarre.
What the community does know about Sheila LaBarre
is that since she became a widow,
she has this revolving door of young males
that come up to the property either to do work, or for companionship.
LaBarre has set her sights on Kenneth Countie,
who's only 24 at this time.
And is somebody who's functioning,
perhaps like a younger individual, according to his mom
given his history of learning difficulties, et cetera.
It is alarming.
She's manipulative.
She's every boy mom's nightmare.
So the police have gone to check on Kenny
and they find him at LaBarre's property,
and he's seemingly fine and he's an adult,
so there's really nothing to do about this.
And they leave, but LaBarre is enraged by this.
And so she contacts police and is threatening toward them.
She's so grandiose and narcissistic in her comments, you know.
"Don't I pay your salary?"
Basically, "You have a job because of me."
It's just really a lack of respect for law enforcement
and a sense of entitlement that's really shocking.
Interestingly, she initiates a phone call
to the Epping Police Department,
lets them know about this recording she has,
where she self-appointed law-enforcement,
has begun to interrogate Kenneth Countie,
and he has admitted, supposedly, on this audio tape
to crimes that his mother has committed,
as well as crimes he's committed.
It should be noted and clearly stated
that they have absolutely no information
or credible data to support that there's any truth
to the claims that LaBarre is making
about Kenny Countie or his mother.
[Tussey] It's possible she's laying the groundwork
that if it gets exposed, that she was the one that killed Kenneth,
that somehow that will be forgiven or justified
because, you know, he looked like a pedophile.
"So I would be doing everybody a favor if I ended up killing him."
[male reporter] When officers arrived at LaBarre's,
they went past the gate blocking the public road leading up to her house.
They walked past two burn piles in the front yard.
In one of them, they saw bones sticking out.
No one answered the door, so they kicked it in.
But before they could get inside,
LaBarre appeared, eventually kicking them out.
[Sahni] Once the police explain to her
that they're concerned about Kenny's whereabouts
and they're just trying to locate him,
what we see is a woman who is emotionally up and down,
she doesn't know what to think about Kenny's disappearance,
but when they ask her directly where he is,
she says he's in that bag as if it's a matter of fact thing.
She talks about how she was cremating a rabbit.
She has lots of rabbits and animals on the property,
and when they pass away naturally,
that's how she disposes of them.
It seems reasonable that not only does she know where Kenny is,
but that Kenny is not alive anymore.
Most humans cannot fit in a retail bag.
And so he's not only dead, but he may not even be in one piece.
[Sahni] LaBarre is starting to play this cat and mouse game
with the police,
and that kind of zigzag approach
to how somebody answers questions,
that doesn't make a whole lot of sense,
they're talking out of both sides of their mouth,
it's something we commonly see in psychopathic individuals.
[Rosenberg] When they speak to her,
LaBarre becomes hysterical and very defiant.
And to me, this says,
she's lost control of the situation,
and she's now going to try to use theatrical displays of emotion
to kind of diffuse responsibility and control the conversation
because it's hard to continue with the line of questioning.
[male reporter] The lane leading to this Epping, New Hampshire, farm
has been blocked off with police tapes since Saturday.
The grounds turned into something that resembles a crime scene,
all part of a massive effort to find 24-year-old Kenneth Countie.
But New Hampshire authorities refuse to say
whether they believe a crime has been committed here,
despite the signs around the property owned by Sheila LaBarre.
While detectives may be quite sure at this point
that Sheila LaBarre has likely killed him,
and they likely have his human remains in this bag
that was found on her property,
it's not helpful to them unless they can get a confession from her.
[Rosenberg] She immediately changes his name
and kind of subsumes his identity
and exerts full control over his movement.
Almost like when you get a pet, you name it.
One thing that that keeps coming back to me
is that the rabbit trapped in a cage on the floor,
in her complete control, is almost reminiscent of the MO of her crime
'cause she's trapping men in her property
and then taking full control and ownership of them.
At one point, she takes the rabbit out of the cage
and she has the rabbit on her lap.
And she's petting him, and kind of treating him tenderly.
And it's chilling, because she's already mentioned
that she's regularly incinerating rabbits.
The rabbit in the room, this is almost as a metaphor
for how she treats the men.
This is very consistent with what we would see
with a psychopathic individual who is often proud of their behavior
and want people to take notice.
All these behaviors are consistent
with a lack of regard for human life
and an absence of empathy towards others.
[LaBarre crying]
[Sahni] What we sometimes see more often
in female psychopathic individuals
is this willingness to turn on the waterworks,
just start crying, It comes out of nowhere,
and as spontaneously as it happens,
and as dramatic as it is,
it spontaneously dries up just as much as a drought.
At first she's mentioning again pedophilia,
but it doesn't seem like
the investigators are biting, really.
They don't seem to be that intrigued by that,
so LaBarre just keeps piling it on.
Okay, he is going to rob her also.
And, "Oh, and by the way, he also does heroin."
It's like everything she can do to create this impression of him.
She's really trying to paint two pictures, I think, at once,
and that is of him being a bad person,
and her being superior to him.
It's consistent with a psychopath.
She's lying and misrepresenting and being very deceitful
in the delivery of information,
to paint the picture that, "Oh, this person deserved it."
Or to shift blame off of herself onto him
and almost to paint the picture
that maybe she's even a hero.
That she was able to stop an individual
from doing future crimes
or engaging in kind of improper behaviors.
What we start to see with LaBarre
is this overfocus or preoccupation with sex, with sexuality.
And an interesting interaction between that and violence.
And when we start to think about how those thoughts bleed together,
the urges to be violent, and when she's talking about sexual topics,
you have to wonder if there is a presence of sexual sadism
or sadistic tendencies within this person.
[all laughing]
I have my card, there's only one...
Kenneth and Sheila were seen at Walmart.
And what witnesses describe
is that Kenneth Countie looked green, he looked sick, frail.
He was being pushed in a wheelchair by LaBarre,
and he looked bruised and battered.
She just laughed it off and minimized it and said,
"Oh, we were just playing around with the wheelchair for fun."
She becomes very glib about the whole thing,
and what we don't ever see is any real emotion.
It paints the picture of some sadistic tendencies
on LaBarre.
It makes you wonder, you know. Was she torturing him?
What exactly was she doing to him?
And then to parade him around at a Walmart or anywhere, it's pretty brazen.
You know, you know you're going out in public,
and you know there's surveillance video,
but there is also this sense that she doesn't care.
[female reporter] Authorities in Epping have confirmed
that they've discovered human remains on the LaBarre property.
A search of the burn piles has turned up hedge clippers and a knife.
[Sahni] What they also find inside the home
are multiple sources of blood.
Some at different stages of decomposition,
which suggests that, clearly, that home is a crime scene from multiple time periods,
some of which clearly predate her contact with Kenneth Countie.
[Tussey] I mean, not all of this blood was fresh.
Which really begs the question that if she killed Kenneth Countie,
then who else might she have killed?
[man] It would be premature at this point,
given the stage of the investigation we're at now,
to talk about foul play.
[Tussey] In these recordings,
it seems like LaBarre is just torturing Kenneth Countie.
He's answering these questions usually with one word answers.
It makes you wonder. Is she standing over him with a weapon?
She talks about how her life is valuable and his is just a game,
so therefore, it really doesn't matter.
And it exemplifies the psychopathic trait
of having this callous disregard for humanity.
When we think of the grooming process,
it involves an individual kind of establishing trust
and a secure relationship with someone
so that they feel that they're looking out for their best interest.
In this case, we know that Kenny suffered
from very significant cognitive deficits
that interfered with his judgment and decision-making,
and that he was very susceptible to the ideas of others
and could be very easily manipulated.
[Michael] 2004. This tape is for my mother.
You really messed me up.
And if it wasn't for Sheila, I wouldn't know half the things I know.
[Sahni] What was known to authorities at that point
is that Michael Deloge had been missing for some time.
He was homeless.
He was recovering from some difficulties
with mental illness and addiction.
But the last time he was seen alive was on LaBarre's property.
They find audio recordings and video that LaBarre has created of Michael Deloge,
and it seems eerily familiar to the audio
that they listened to between LaBarre and Kenneth Countie.
[Rosenberg] We're seeing LaBarre
coerce a false confession out of Michael.
We can only presume how she did that.
But based on the physical injury
she inflicted on Kenneth Countie,
you can imagine that physical violence was involved.
This is where I live.
This is what we do.
We go around picking up sticks,
and before you get into some tangent
about my scratch on my face, this is how it happened.
[Rosenberg] It seems like she gets gratification
from almost psychological torture and from harming other people.
It seems to me that she equates love with sex and violence.
The pattern that starts to emerge
with Sheila LaBarre is a predatory offender
who looks for particularly young and vulnerable males.
She lures them in.
When people think about sadistic offenders,
most often they think about men.
But the reality is paraphilic or deviant interests
can pop up in men or women.
And in the case of LaBarre, based on what we know about her history,
there are some good indications
that she has a strange sexual arousal pattern
that may have to do with violence towards men.
And it's a slow buildup for her.
It involves a coercive relationship, and fear, and threats.
And when she's done with them,
the ultimate climax for her, the ultimate moment of arousal for her
is the process of killing them.
[Sahni] Dr. LaBarre tells her,
"Over my dead body is when you're going to get your name on the deed."
She adopted and assumed his life,
and his home, and his property.
And shortly thereafter, he died,
and she ended up staking claim to his entire estate.
Her arrogance and narcissism,
and belief that she's smarter than everyone else
continues to be her guiding post.
Sheila LaBarre presents as someone who's pretty cold, and callous,
and manipulative.
[Rosenberg] It's really relevant here to consider the fact
that the way that they met is through a call girl ad.
LaBarre was, I believe, in her 20s or 30s,
and there was maybe a 40-year age difference in the two,
and he was relatively wealthy.
And you have to wonder, you know,
was this a purposeful plan that was designed to entrap a wealthy man
who could then provide for her
and give her a sense of security?
I see her as somebody who's always thinking out her next step
of how can she take advantage of somebody to satisfy her own needs?
[Tussey] Interestingly enough, she was married to at least one other person
while she was still in a relationship with Dr. LaBarre.
And her ex-husband that she was married to
while she was still in a relationship with Dr. LaBarre
has come forward and said that she actually asked him to murder Dr. LaBarre.
[male reporter 1] The human bones, blood, and DNA
found at Sheila LaBarre's Epping farm,
is known to belong to Michael Deloge and Kenneth Countie.
The fact their bodies were burned is clear.
[male reporter 2] Investigators digging up the septic system
uncovered more evidence
including toe bones that do not match either man's DNA.
[male reporter 3] Sheila LaBarre,
the woman suspected in the murders of at least two missing men
in Epping, New Hampshire, is in custody
after authorities received a tip
that she'd been spotted in Revere, Massachusetts.
According to police, she had tried to change her appearance
and was using an alias when she was finally caught.
I think her level of narcissism and arrogance is so significant
that Sheila LaBarre really thought she was above the law,
she would never get caught.
If she just kept burning her victims,
nobody would ever catch her.
And what I think is more likely
is that she has a sadistic preoccupation with sexuality,
with child sexual molestation.
[female reporter] The LaBarre trial
is not about whether she murdered
Michael Deloge and Kenneth Countie,
but rather her state of mind at the time.
[male reporter] The jurors will decide
was LaBarre insane at the time
she admittedly killed her boyfriends Kenneth Countie and Michael Deloge?
I want you to think about a woman who truly believes she is an angel.
A spirit walking amongst the living,
who has returned to Earth for some special purpose.
[male reporter] Her attorney said LaBarre thought
that being a notary public gave her special powers.
And she believes those powers
gives her the ability to become judge,
jury, and executioner.
[Rosenberg] LaBarre made statements that she was sent from God
to be some sort of vigilante, angel, religious figure
who was responsible for killing or for vetting out pedophiles.
So that, to me, is a delusion
that I think is born out of a serious mental illness.
But ultimately, in doing these evaluations,
we're looking for evidence to suggest that they knew
what they were doing was wrong.
She doesn't call the police.
She lies, she lies, and she lies.
She conceals evidence and then she leaves the state.
And that indicates that she very much knew
that the behavior she engaged in was wrong.
We called her Crazy Sheila.
I think being sexually abused by her father
created this like fusion of love, and hatred, and sex
that really plays out in her adulthood.
I think she has some perversions, maybe even a paraphilia,
where anything related to that content is arousing.
[Sahni] While we do sometimes see,
in cases of psychopathic individuals,
early trauma, extreme violence,
extreme sexual assault, extreme neglect,
sometimes contribute to that psychopathic personality.
And it's also really important to note
that the vast majority of people who experience
child sexual abuse, child physical abuse,
neglect, while growing up,
do not go on to harm other people
and do not go on to develop into psychopathic human beings.
[LaBarre] ♪ I guess you had it coming ♪
♪ If I had to choose A punishment for you ♪
♪ I guess you had it coming ♪
♪