[eerie music playing]
Every parent's worst fear would be for their child to turn into
a depraved killer.
[woman] He was our much-beloved son, and we can't--
we didn't raise him to be this kind of person.
He said, "I have always been fascinated by
"death and violence,
"and it was something that I wanted to do--
murder, rape, and cannibalism."
[Nameeta] As a parent, when you see a child has an unusual
obsession with violence, you don't often think, is
your child is aspiring to be a serial killer?
[man] I think he was born to kill.
It was just-- I don't know if it's a bad seed or what,
but boy, he's...
he was just totally consumed with murder.
[theme music playing]
[man] The thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
[Chriscelyn] We know from some of the most
notorious serial killers, like
Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Kemper, Ted Bundy, that these
individuals didn't just begin to show traits
of psychopathy in adulthood.
In fact, when we look back at their lives, we know that there
were a lot of red flags from early on in their childhood.
When all of us, as parents, think about raising children,
one of the sincerest goals is making sure you're putting
a good, healthy human being in the world.
How do we really know when our children
are developing properly?
When do we know that our children are safe
as good human beings?
They're on the right track versus maybe something's not
right with my child, but maybe it's a sign of
something larger.
We're going to take a closer look at some of
those early warning signs.
[man] Police have identified the suspect as 59-year-old
Dennis Rader, an animal control officer
who is also a Cub Scout leader
and president of his church.
Rader, who is married with two adult children, lives in
Park City, Kansas, a suburb of Wichita.
[Nameeta] One of the cases that evaded authorities for more than
two decades was the case of Dennis Rader.
BTK was the name or acronym that Rader himself created.
Bind them, torture them, kill them.
Rader's always maintained that he had a relatively
normal childhood.
But what we actually know is that Dennis Rader's obsession
with violence, with torture, with harm began
at the young age of seven or eight.
Rader remembers and recalls in detail having obsessive
thoughts about certain females that he went to school with
and fantasies that he would basically kidnap them,
bind them, torture them, and sexually assault them.
Rader has disclosed that he was always intrigued by serial
killers such as Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper.
And not only was he intrigued by them, he idolized them.
He wanted to become like them.
[Chriscelyn] Rader's fantasies centered around sex and violence.
As a young teenager, he would even engage in
behaviors that he would eventually perpetrate
against his victims.
So, for example, he would bound his own feet and hands and tie
a bag around his head, perhaps engaging
in autoerotica while masturbating.
And we know that this is similar to the crimes that
he eventually did commit.
Individuals who exhibit this fascination with violence,
this lack of empathy for others, can sometimes begin very early
in childhood, and we see a similar fascination
in Brian Cohee, who also idolized serial killers.
[officer] So parents have some concerns
of some stuff they may have found in your room?
-Um, yeah, I believe so. -And what would it be?
A human head and hands.
[officer] And how did you end up with them?
I murdered him.
Cohee's somewhat pridefully talking about how he had always
admired Ted Bundy, the Zodiac killer.
This is somebody who had a deep fascination with violence.
[Charles] In the case of Brian Cohee, there is plenty of evidence
that he had a very dangerous preoccupation with violence.
Certainly, in his mind, the character from
the "Halloween" movies, Michael Myers, the killer,
is someone that he can idolize, identify with.
It's the kind of thinking that we do when we're really little,
which is, if I dress up like you, I can be you.
So wearing the costume helps me become the person
that I fantasized about or idealized.
[Chriscelyn] There are indications that at least some people
saw this coming.
School records have suggested that the psychologist had
evaluated him, and it even cited that he was dangerous.
So Cohee's behavior really didn't just come out
of nowhere.
He journaled about violence and fantasies about crime
and criminal acts that were violent and involved
sadistic behavior.
[Nameeta] One of his parents finds something that they refer to as
a kill kit.
They included weapons, they included tools that would
suggest there was intent to do harm.
Despite the fact that he's outwardly and openly
and transparently obsessed and fixated on violence
and glorifying these serial killers and obsessed with
forensic sciences and things that have to do with
decomposition and very dark material,
his parents essentially wag their finger at him and say,
"You don't do that again."
And it has absolutely zero impact on Cohee.
As we've seen time and time again, in these cases of
budding psychopathic teenagers and children who go on to do
these heinous adult crimes, they don't outgrow it.
They go on to kill people.
[man] Serial killer Ted Bundy is talking, confessing to murder
after murder, giving investigators
grisly details of a decade-long cross-country crime spree.
I think he was born to kill.
[Nameeta] Young children, from the very beginning,
they're learning the value of human relationships.
They're learning the value of not harming others.
They're learning the value of falling within healthy morals
that are consistent with society's value for
right and wrong.
But when somebody doesn't have that developmental process,
and that trajectory is not happening as it should,
they're failing to gain intrinsic value internally for
praise, for trophies, for just being a good citizen.
Even if they're a tiny little human being, we have a problem.
The most notorious serial killer in the nation is
scheduled to die tomorrow morning
in Florida's electric chair.
Ted Bundy is an articulate, intelligent 42-year-old man,
a former Boy Scout, law student,
and Republican Party activist.
Bruce Hall is at the Florida State Prison.
I don't know if it's a bad seed or what, but he is just totally
consumed with murder.
[man] Prior to his execution,
Bundy made a farewell phone call
to his mother. -[sighs] Oh, God.
He was our much beloved son.
We didn't raise him to be this kind of person.
We gave him a good upbringing.
And something has happened to him,
sometime since he left this house,
that has triggered some terrible madness inside of him.
[Chriscelyn] What we know from the records
is that Ted Bundy grew up
thinking his grandparents were his parents
and that his mother was his sister.
And he has talked about how embarrassing it was to be outed
as the child that didn't have a father.
What we know from the research is that growing up in a family
with those sort of dynamics has the opportunity to lead to
a lot of problematic development.
[Charles] If it's true that in his early family that these boundaries
have been broken in the family, and I suspect that there were
other kinds of abuse going on, whether it was emotional abuse
or neglect or physical abuse, that breaks down a child's
perception of which rules are firm, which ones you keep
and which ones you don't, and whether or not people do
whatever they want.
And so if a kid learns that rule early on, that people do
whatever they want, and I don't mean that much to any of these
people, then why would they mean that much to me?
That may explain the longstanding pattern where
there's no remorse and almost a calculated indifference to
his actions in killing people, where he never seemed troubled
by any of it and seemed rather calculating and cool about it.
I have got to keep myself together.
I have got to stay calm.
I've got to keep my presence of mind,
because as long as I do that,
I'm going to beat these people.
[Chriscelyn] Bundy didn't believe that the rules applied to him.
And this acting without conscience seemed to have
started at an early point in his life.
And we see similar tendencies with Michael Swanson.
[man] It all started in Algona, Iowa.
Pretty heartbreaking story and unbelievable.
[woman] Investigators say a man wearing a ski mask walked into
the store and demanded Bowman-Hall put cash
and cigarettes into a duffel bag.
She did, and he shot her.
[Chriscelyn] There's no point, when he's discussing either of
these two store clerks,
that he seems to appreciate the fact that
they're actually human beings with lives, with friends,
with family.
He talks about them, shooting them and them dying,
as if he's talking about an inanimate object.
It's a shocking lack of conscience.
[woman] The state then called a psychiatrist
who interviewed Swanson after the crime.
He says Swanson told him he'd been planning to kill since
he was 13.
[psychiatrist] He said, "I have always been fascinated
"by death and violence,
"and it was something
that I wanted to do-- murder, rape, and cannibalism."
[woman] Michael Swanson stared blankly as his mother described
a troubled toddler.
When he was 11, she said police got involved.
The neighbor came knocking on the door,
and she said that
Michael is running around the neighborhood with a knife,
and he's threatening people, and he threatened her daughter.
What we start to see here is not only that lack of empathy
for the concept of fear and that he's evoking fear in
someone, and he doesn't feel bad about it, where most children's
intrinsic value for social approval comes from doing good,
at a very early age, he might be learning that causing harm
and fear and getting people scared is what pleases him
and keeps him happy.
[judge] Verdict number one, we find the defendant guilty of
murder in the first degree.
[man] Even after a jury convicted Michael Swanson, he smiled.
Psychopathy is not something that just one day a parent
wakes up and realizes, I have a problematic child with
no conscience, no sense of remorse, and who doesn't behave
like most children-- that does not happen overnight.
But when we look at some of our more notorious psychopaths,
in many of those cases, we actually see
early history of animal harm.
That is not a typical part of child development.
[man] Kemper was arraigned this afternoon on charges of killing
six young women, his mother, and a friend
of hers-- all the victims except one,
the woman friend of his mother, were dismembered.
Experts say Kemper's path to torture and murder began early
in childhood when he began decapitating his sister's dolls
and killing cats.
He apparently fantasized about doing this for quite a long
period of time.
[man] As a child, Kemper often played a sick game in which
his sisters pretended to be executioners.
Kemper's obsession with violence and its casual
connection with sex and love was so twisted by age 12 that
when asked why he didn't give his grade school teacher
a kiss, he replied, "If I kiss her,
I would have to kill her first."
[Chriscelyn] Usually, we see more than one trait of psychopathy in
an individual, and these traits can go back to early childhood
and continue to develop as time goes on.
And what starts as a fantasy, a violent fantasy, for example,
often escalates into actually enacting that fantasy or that
violence toward a living creature like an animal.
We know from the records that Kemper's violence began at
least at age 10, whenever he killed a family cat.
He buried the family cat alive, only to then
exhume its body, decapitate it, and put its head on a spike.
Sometime later, Kemper killed another cat.
He actually kept parts of this cat in his bedroom,
and his mother discovered them.
And he provided that explanation that, "Well, I had
"to kill the cat because it favored my sister
instead of me."
So these are alarming behaviors that are certainly not typical
for children to engage in.
[Charles] So in many cases of psychopathy,
we find their fascination with creating and inflicting pain
and dismembering things, whether it's to dissect them
or watch the animal die or enjoy the fact an animal is
dying, I think is a pretty important indication of how
well the person regards other living beings.
[Chriscelyn] When we see this sort of behavior,
it is particularly concerning.
It shows a lack of empathy
and a coldness that we just
don't expect to see in children, to take advantage of
a vulnerable living creature like this.
Another serial killer who has a history of torturing
and killing animals as a child is Israel Keyes.
In the shed is where he sexually assaulted
and killed Samantha Koenig.
[man] Keyes then dismembered her body and dumped her remains in
Matanuska Lake.
[laughs]
[Charles] So he goes out into the woods with friends,
and he has the plan,
because he takes the cat with him and a gun,
and takes great pleasure not only from watching
the cat suffer, but, um, actually derives a great deal of
pleasure from seeing the horror, the emotional reaction,
and the shock that it generates in his peers, and, you know,
his laughter, I think, is-- it's genuine, it's linked to
that amazement, that, "Boy, humans are different than me."
Animals are sort of perfect little victims, right?
They can't talk, they can't go tell someone.
There's rarely someone to come to their defense.
So it leaves the person in charge feeling in control
and kind of acting godlike over the animal.
So in many ways, it's a foreshadowing of what
they would like to do to their victims.
[woman] Bill and Lorraine Currier vanished from their Essex home,
The couple's garage window was broken, and the phone line to
the home had been cut.
Police say they do have evidence the couple
was abducted.
It's like he's planned and is going on these almost
human victim hunting expeditions.
He's identified this couple, and he's going to
enact his plan.
He's almost giddy at containing this information.
It seems to be exhilarating to him to have that
power and control.
[Charles] He wanted her to know
that her husband was already dead and was enjoying that whole
process of letting her know, just more of the power--
he can control the information and then enjoy watching
her suffer from knowing it, which is a bit like
watching the cat, after shooting the cat
and watching it run around and around
and enjoying that, and then enjoying the horror on
other people's faces.
[Nameeta] Most adolescents, while it is normal and typical
in their development to be self-focused and self-absorbed,
still exhibit regular and reasonable attachment
and connection to their family members.
But what we know about psychopathic individuals,
their attachment to others, including
their parents, their siblings, their own children,
is transactional.
[Charles] For psychopaths, you're an object,
and they want you for some purpose.
So they're very quick at studying you and deciding
you're useful or not.
[man] Heather Mack was 18 and pregnant when the murder of
her mother happened in a hotel room at a resort in Bali
in 2014.
Mack and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, were convicted
of murdering Sheila von Wiese-Mack and leaving her body
in a suitcase at the hotel.
When we think about mother and daughter relationships,
it is hard to conceive of a daughter hating her mother
so much that she ends up killing her while on that vacation.
And that lack of attachment towards family members is one
of those significant markers in childhood
and adolescence that we look at.
It's $1.5 million that she would have access to
as a young adult, but not until the age of 30.
For Heather, her mother was the guardian of that account.
To family friends and family members, Heather Mack was known
as a spoiled, out-of-control teenager.
People described her as narcissistic,
manipulative, violent, known to fly into fits of rage.
On one occasion, Heather Mack managed to actually break
her mother's arm.
She showed no real remorse towards her mother,
no caring and connection.
She seemed not only indifferent to her mother's well-being,
she actually seemed to gain pleasure from terrorizing her.
I don't regret killing my mother.
And as evil as that may sound, that's my reality.
[Nameeta] The problem is that Heather Mack, consistent with what
we see with psychopathic individuals, acted out in these
extreme and violent and aggressive ways.
There was a depraved indifference to the harm
she caused to her mother that ultimately led to
her mother's murder.
Another case, maybe less well-known, where we see
a teenager with poor connections to others
and specifically a lack of attachment and connection to
his family, we think about the case of Daniel Petric.
[siren wailing]
When we listen to Petric talk to the police,
those initial statements are really jarring.
It's jarring because there's no emotion.
He's talking about how he had to get out of there.
It was just upsetting.
And so instead of getting out of there and going to
the hospital, going to a police station, he says he went to,
and I quote, "hang out" with his friend Steve.
These are not the words of a caring, concerned teenager.
These are the words of a psychopathic individual
who has no real attachment to these family members.
[Charles] He doesn't even ask, "Did my mom die?"
He's really only asking about his dad.
So he knows for sure mom's dead.
The story he's created for the police is that it was
his parents who were engaged in an argument.
He hears the gunshot, comes running out.
Mom's shot, then he's threatened by the dad,
who then says, "Oh, I'm sorry," and turns the gun on himself.
And then while he's telling this, he's trying to sound
emotionally upset.
What's clear is that he is not behaving like a normal person.
He's not having the basic, uh,
emotions of fear, anxiety, loss,
and concern about family.
Now he's saying they were arguing over the fact that
he was grounded and his behavior
around this video game.
So in less than 24 hours, Petric's story has changed
multiple times.
There's no evidence that there was family violence in this
home prior to that, there's no evidence that his parents were
ever aggressive or violent or overly stern with him.
So the minute his parents do the appropriate thing as
adults, parenting this difficult teenager,
he decides he's going to take a firearm and shoot them both
with the goal of killing them.
That total and absolute lack of caring and attachment for
his parents speaks to very psychopathic thinking
and psychopathic ways of interacting with the world.
[man] Reverend Mark Petric takes the stand in a trial of
his 17-year-old son, Daniel.
Prosecutors say in October of last year, the teenager shot
his father and shot and killed his mother, Sue Petric,
in the living room of their Wellington home.
[Charles] We do know from looking at studies of psychopathy that
many of the signs are evident very early in children's lives,
cruelty to animals and indifference to
the feelings of others, enjoying hurting others
and taking some sense of satisfaction from that.
We've learned from very dangerous serial killers
and psychopaths, most of their behavior
has been long in the works
and has emerged at least after puberty, but the fantasy
material or the torturing of animals has often even been
visible before puberty.
I think not being afraid to look at themes of violence or sex
or torture or sadism when those behaviors are shown in kids,
I think not being afraid to look at it candidly and say,
we need to deal with it, um,
we can't avoid it and wish it away and say it'll just vanish,
because it won't.
[Nameeta] When we think about children and teenagers who are
exhibiting a lack of empathy, their moral development isn't
progressing like their peer group, and they have a fixation
or a fascination with violence,
they're harming animals,
these are very much early warning signs of budding
psychopathic traits, and they warrant
mental health care.
Maya Angelou said it best, "When people show you who
they are, believe them the first time."