November 13, 2025 • 16 mins
George Noory and author Rachel Corbett trace the origins of history's most infamous serial killers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ted Bundy was a monster, murdered dozens of women and girls.
Born in Vermont, finally captured in Florida. What do we
know about him?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Well, Ted Bundy is one of the most famously charismatic
serial killers. He got away with it for so long,
largely because he was handsome, very normal guy law student.
He would just walk up to women in a broad
daylight and ask them for help getting into his car,
where he would wear a fake cast or something, and
then he would have ducked them and no one would
(00:36):
know anything about it. Very brazen, very narcissistic, pretty psychopathic,
you know, and he killed dozens and dozens of people.
He's someone who really did shape the future of criminal
profiling because as he was rampaging the country from the west,
(00:57):
from Seattle to the down to Florida, police weren't able
to link the crime. So he would kill someone in
one state and then he'd move on and kill someone
in the next state, and the police in those two
states never spoke to each other about it, so it
it just went on for years without any leads, and
(01:17):
so when the FBI behavioral Science unit got involved. They decided,
you know, let's link, let's start to create more information
sharing across states so that the jurisdiction is clear and
we can all share information and try to catch this guy.
And he really put that unit on the map.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Tell us about Dorothy Lewis.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Dorothy Lewis is a child psychiatrist who's at Yale.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
She's now in her eighties, but she was really a
pioneer of the study of violence when she in the
nineteen sixties, she studied juvenile offenders and tried to identify
whether there were biological or neurological processes involved in criminals
and violence. And she went on to evaluate some of
(02:04):
the most famous serial killers in history, including Bundy and
many others that you would know.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
And she was really trying to.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Create a case that showed that there are many factors
that make someone extremely violent, like Ted Bundy. It was
for her it was a mix of biological processes like
a brain injury. For example, maybe you got into a
car accident or hit during if you were a child
during abuse and you injured your amygdala, and that could
(02:36):
cause you to lose impulse control. Plus that alongside usually
a childhood trauma such as you know, abuse, and then finally,
there's often.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
A psychiatric disorder involved as well.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
There could be schizophrenia, it could be paranoia, it could
be a number of things, and when you put all
these these factors together you could get a very toxic trifecta.
This could really this is the kind of situation where
you are at risk of potentially becoming a criminal. Of course,
you could also have all those things and not be
a criminal, but this was what she set out to prove.
(03:08):
And this was at a time when society was really
more interested in just calling these people evil and not
really trying to understand them, but saying, let's just let's
just get rid of them, let's put them to death,
and let's get them out of society, which is, you know,
in some ways very understandable. But Dorothy Lewis really wanted
to understand what made them tick, and so Ted Bundy
(03:32):
was her kind of her lifelong case.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, I'm convinced something has happened to these people when
they're kids, aren't you.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yes, I think that's I mean, that's pretty much universally seen.
Bundy's interesting because he claimed there was never any abuse
in the home. It was a perfect model family, Christian
loving but that turned out not to be true. There
started to be cracks in that story, you know, with
Dorothy Lewis and Bundy. She she came to believe that
(04:03):
perhaps he even had multiple personalities. He was bipolar, she diagnosed,
because in the courtroom he would act really manic sometimes,
you know, he was. He would put himself on the
stand and he represented himself.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
So he would he would cross you know, who would
call himself as a witness, and it was very bizarre.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
And he would even ask his girlfriend to the courtroom
and ask her to marry him. She said yes, But
all of this behavior, so she came to believe that,
you know, there was really a.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Lot going on with Bundy that was more than me eye.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And even long after he died, she continues to study
him and she thinks that, you know, the way he
talked about himself and the third person sometimes he described
himself as having an entity and that the entity would
do things that were evil. So all of this Ted
Bundy is really a fascinating kind of ongoing mystery, and
(04:55):
Dorothy Lewis is someone who's still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Did he have guy friends.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
That's a great.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Question, you know, as much as I you know, I
really they haven't come up in my research. He you know,
he had girlfriends, he was able to sustain a long
relationship with a woman. I don't recall hearing about him
really sustaining any male friendships.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Actually, everything I've seen or read about him, he was
never around other guys. Was always women.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
You're right, you're right.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And even his friend, you know, and rule the crime
author was a woman. One of his few friends that
he's he had.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, Now what do we know about the FBI's Behavioral
Science unit and what does that have to do with Bundy.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So in the nineteen sixties, Howard Teaton was was he
was a forensic scientist, forensic expert. He worked on crime scenes,
and he started to think that maybe there was more
to murder than we typically thought. He thought, you know,
not just a practical thing that you know, something that
(06:02):
people do when they are robbing someone trying to get money,
or they're jealous and they kill somebody, some man or something.
And he said, there must there are other psychological factors
going on, and perhaps these these cases are really beyond
what we imagine.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Perhaps murderers are really sadistic, they really have no empathy.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Perhaps there's these other attributes that you could identify by
looking at the crime scenes.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
And he started.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Then he joined up with Patrick mulaney and they began
teaching courses at Quantico in psychology and criminal psychology.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
And this just just took off.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It for years, it didn't take off, but it was
popular among the agents in the FBI who would who
wanted to take these classes, And it wasn't until the
until Bundy's cross country killing.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Spree that they started to really get a tension.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
The FBI was in this period kind of doing damage
control for all of the wreckage that Jaggar Hoover had
left behind.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
You know, it was it had it was.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Its reputation was in shambles, Its funding was slashed, so
they decided to kind of drum up this idea of
the serial killer epidemic. There was Ted Bundy, and soon
after that there was John Wayne Gacy and then there
was the Atlanta child murders, all kind of happening around
the same time.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
So they went to.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
The media and they they really exaggerated how bad this
crisis was. They said they were four thousand to five
thousand people killed by serial killers every year, when in
reality the number was more like four hundred to five hundred.
But no one corrected this, and so they went on
they had to kind of create this problem, and then
they presented themselves as the solution. They said, we have
(07:54):
this elite team of guys working in the basement and
they have the ability to get into the minds of
murderers like no one else can.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And the public was so terrified.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
They were very happy to hear this, and they thought,
let's let's fund these guys, Let's get them whatever they
need to stop this terror gripping the nation.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
And so they presented them in the press the mind.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Hunters or you know, these were the FBI profilers, and
they were then able to get more congressional funding, they
were expanded their jurisdiction. So it really wasn't an incredible
pr case for the FBI that the that the profilers used.
And Ted Bundy was the poster boy of this. You know,
if we had these profilers, we could have caught Bundy.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Richard. What about the farmer ed Gean? He was whacked out,
wasn't he.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah, ed Gan is you know, really in the in
the news again because of the Netflix show Monsters, right,
And he's interesting because he was really the first kind
of celebrity serial killer, the first serial killer in America,
I should say, who was who was really well known
and he was from Plainsfield, Wisconsin. He was lived on
(09:07):
a farm. His father was very abusive, and his mother
was a real religious fanatic who hated women and and
really thought all women were demonic. And she instilled this
in ed Green from from his whole for his whole life.
They lived in this rundown farmhouse that was kind of
a horder situation, and as he grew up and became
(09:29):
interested in women, she would would ridicule him sexually. And
when she died it was this it Geen was was
was was stunned, and he was he couldn't function really
after that. He he needed his mother and he began
to do very weird things. He began to dig up
(09:50):
the graves of women and snatched their bodies and he
would go home and he would skin them.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
He made furniture out of the skin.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
He sometimes made suits out of their skin and wore them,
and he kept.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
The bones and things like that.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Well, he made bowls out of the skulls. I mean,
it was just a whole house full of this horrific stuff.
And he also killed a couple of women directly. He
admitted to two, at least as far as we know, and.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
You know, he was dying.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Don't you have to kill more than two to be
a serial killer?
Speaker 3 (10:24):
I think maybe it's just more than one, but I
don't know. Good question, that's a good question.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
He might there may have been more.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
He admitted it too, but there were other cases in
the area that they believed might have been linked to
him as well. But he you know, so he was
he was caught and he was you know, diagnosed with schizophrenia,
and he was sent to a mental hospital where where
he lived at the rest of his life because he
(10:55):
was found guilty.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Not guilty bearers into insanity.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So you know, Ed Geen has now gone on to
influence so many films and some of the biggest characters
in pop culture. He was Norman Norman Bates in Psycho
Hitchcock Psycho and he was leather Faced and the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, and he came back as you know, a
(11:23):
buffalo bill and silence of the Lambs and all these
different characters he's reinvented. So this was somebody who before
ed Geen, horror movies were really still about monsters like
ghouls and ghosts and that kind of monster.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
This was Norman.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
When Norman Bates was created in the in the model
of ed Geen, that was really when we started having
the serial killer as a monster, a human monster for
the first time, and that.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Has really stayed throughout history.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
And this show in Netflix really looks into that his
role in pop culture and how he's been reinvented over
and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Did he help the FBI find Ted Bundy?
Speaker 4 (12:01):
So this is a piece of the show that they
they suggest they that it's not true.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
The short answer is that it No, it's not true,
but you know it's it's it's Bundy did offer to
help the FBI in other crimes, and I think that's
where this rumor stems from. You know, he he but
Bundy offered to solve the Green River killer case, the
who was the serial killer Gary Widgeway. You know, he
(12:32):
told detectives that he could be going back to the
sites where he left the bodies and you know, taking
taking trophies or revisiting them, and that he alone could
understand the mind of a serial killer. So that is
true in a sense, but it's not true exactly with
Ed Gene.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Now, who was Henry Murray with the CIA.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
So you know, we think of profiling as the FBI,
But in my book, I really look further back and
I look at how the CIA has used.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Profile in its own way.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So in the nineteen forties, when the CIA was still
the OSS, they hired Henry Murray, who was a Harvard psychologist,
and they asked him to.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Write a profile of Hitler.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
This had not been done before, this idea of profiling
someone that you never met, trying to predict his future
moves based on what you could deduce about his personality.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
So Henry Murray was eager to join. He actually wasn't
a psychologist.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
He he was a physician who talked his way into
heading the Harvard psychology clinic.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
He was a pretty weird guy himself.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
And he wrote this profile of Hitler and he predicted
some detailed.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Aspects of his behavior.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
He predicted that correctly, that he would commit suicide before
he would ever surrender, and he got a lot of
things wrong too, and he got very involved in svculating
about his sexuality and his parents and things that weren't
necessarily so useful to the OSS at the time.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
But this is this is now something that's done commonly.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
It's today it's called, you know, things like leadership profiles
or or when you basically when the CIA profiles a
foreign dictator, someone who they want to have to have
some knowledge of Vladimir Putin. We've done it with in
Saddam Hussein, but the Hitler profile was really the first.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Pretty dramatic, isn't it. Yeah, tell us about your website, Rachel.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
It's Rachel Dashcorbett dot com and there's links to the
book there and much of my other writing as well.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
You had mentioned that serial killers seem to be diminished
nowadays because of DNA. Are we catching them faster?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yeah? I think that's right. We're able to.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
You know, the cell phone towers is another thing that's
really broken up in a lot of investigations I think about.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
You know, here in New York where I am, we.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Have the Gilgo Beach murder or the Long Island serial
killer as he's known sometimes, who was killing since the
nineties but was only now a suspect was arrested based
on new technology, and you know, I think this.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Is happening everywhere.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
There's more you know, as they say, one and done
killers today than there ever were because.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
It's just it's just hard to get away with it.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
There's also cameras everywhere, facial recognition, surveillance, you know, all
over the place.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
So it's it's it's very hard I think today.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And I think they caught the uh, the Louver jewelry
thing just with DNA, didn't they.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh yeah, that's right, there was just there's just news
of that. Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coasta
m dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ted Bundy was a monster, murdered dozens of women and girls.
Born in Vermont, finally captured in Florida. What do we
know about him?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Well, Ted Bundy is one of the most famously charismatic
serial killers. He got away with it for so long,
largely because he was handsome, very normal guy law student.
He would just walk up to women in a broad
daylight and ask them for help getting into his car,
where he would wear a fake cast or something, and
then he would have ducked them and no one would
(00:36):
know anything about it. Very brazen, very narcissistic, pretty psychopathic,
you know, and he killed dozens and dozens of people.
He's someone who really did shape the future of criminal
profiling because as he was rampaging the country from the west,
(00:57):
from Seattle to the down to Florida, police weren't able
to link the crime. So he would kill someone in
one state and then he'd move on and kill someone
in the next state, and the police in those two
states never spoke to each other about it, so it
it just went on for years without any leads, and
(01:17):
so when the FBI behavioral Science unit got involved. They decided,
you know, let's link, let's start to create more information
sharing across states so that the jurisdiction is clear and
we can all share information and try to catch this guy.
And he really put that unit on the map.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Tell us about Dorothy Lewis.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Dorothy Lewis is a child psychiatrist who's at Yale.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
She's now in her eighties, but she was really a
pioneer of the study of violence when she in the
nineteen sixties, she studied juvenile offenders and tried to identify
whether there were biological or neurological processes involved in criminals
and violence. And she went on to evaluate some of
(02:04):
the most famous serial killers in history, including Bundy and
many others that you would know.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
And she was really trying to.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Create a case that showed that there are many factors
that make someone extremely violent, like Ted Bundy. It was
for her it was a mix of biological processes like
a brain injury. For example, maybe you got into a
car accident or hit during if you were a child
during abuse and you injured your amygdala, and that could
(02:36):
cause you to lose impulse control. Plus that alongside usually
a childhood trauma such as you know, abuse, and then finally,
there's often.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
A psychiatric disorder involved as well.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
There could be schizophrenia, it could be paranoia, it could
be a number of things, and when you put all
these these factors together you could get a very toxic trifecta.
This could really this is the kind of situation where
you are at risk of potentially becoming a criminal. Of course,
you could also have all those things and not be
a criminal, but this was what she set out to prove.
(03:08):
And this was at a time when society was really
more interested in just calling these people evil and not
really trying to understand them, but saying, let's just let's
just get rid of them, let's put them to death,
and let's get them out of society, which is, you know,
in some ways very understandable. But Dorothy Lewis really wanted
to understand what made them tick, and so Ted Bundy
(03:32):
was her kind of her lifelong case.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, I'm convinced something has happened to these people when
they're kids, aren't you.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yes, I think that's I mean, that's pretty much universally seen.
Bundy's interesting because he claimed there was never any abuse
in the home. It was a perfect model family, Christian
loving but that turned out not to be true. There
started to be cracks in that story, you know, with
Dorothy Lewis and Bundy. She she came to believe that
(04:03):
perhaps he even had multiple personalities. He was bipolar, she diagnosed,
because in the courtroom he would act really manic sometimes,
you know, he was. He would put himself on the
stand and he represented himself.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
So he would he would cross you know, who would
call himself as a witness, and it was very bizarre.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
And he would even ask his girlfriend to the courtroom
and ask her to marry him. She said yes, But
all of this behavior, so she came to believe that,
you know, there was really a.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Lot going on with Bundy that was more than me eye.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And even long after he died, she continues to study
him and she thinks that, you know, the way he
talked about himself and the third person sometimes he described
himself as having an entity and that the entity would
do things that were evil. So all of this Ted
Bundy is really a fascinating kind of ongoing mystery, and
(04:55):
Dorothy Lewis is someone who's still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Did he have guy friends.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
That's a great.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Question, you know, as much as I you know, I
really they haven't come up in my research. He you know,
he had girlfriends, he was able to sustain a long
relationship with a woman. I don't recall hearing about him
really sustaining any male friendships.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Actually, everything I've seen or read about him, he was
never around other guys. Was always women.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
You're right, you're right.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And even his friend, you know, and rule the crime
author was a woman. One of his few friends that
he's he had.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, Now what do we know about the FBI's Behavioral
Science unit and what does that have to do with Bundy.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So in the nineteen sixties, Howard Teaton was was he
was a forensic scientist, forensic expert. He worked on crime scenes,
and he started to think that maybe there was more
to murder than we typically thought. He thought, you know,
not just a practical thing that you know, something that
(06:02):
people do when they are robbing someone trying to get money,
or they're jealous and they kill somebody, some man or something.
And he said, there must there are other psychological factors
going on, and perhaps these these cases are really beyond
what we imagine.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Perhaps murderers are really sadistic, they really have no empathy.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Perhaps there's these other attributes that you could identify by
looking at the crime scenes.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
And he started.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Then he joined up with Patrick mulaney and they began
teaching courses at Quantico in psychology and criminal psychology.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
And this just just took off.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It for years, it didn't take off, but it was
popular among the agents in the FBI who would who
wanted to take these classes, And it wasn't until the
until Bundy's cross country killing.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Spree that they started to really get a tension.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
The FBI was in this period kind of doing damage
control for all of the wreckage that Jaggar Hoover had
left behind.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
You know, it was it had it was.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Its reputation was in shambles, Its funding was slashed, so
they decided to kind of drum up this idea of
the serial killer epidemic. There was Ted Bundy, and soon
after that there was John Wayne Gacy and then there
was the Atlanta child murders, all kind of happening around
the same time.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
So they went to.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
The media and they they really exaggerated how bad this
crisis was. They said they were four thousand to five
thousand people killed by serial killers every year, when in
reality the number was more like four hundred to five hundred.
But no one corrected this, and so they went on
they had to kind of create this problem, and then
they presented themselves as the solution. They said, we have
(07:54):
this elite team of guys working in the basement and
they have the ability to get into the minds of
murderers like no one else can.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And the public was so terrified.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
They were very happy to hear this, and they thought,
let's let's fund these guys, Let's get them whatever they
need to stop this terror gripping the nation.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
And so they presented them in the press the mind.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Hunters or you know, these were the FBI profilers, and
they were then able to get more congressional funding, they
were expanded their jurisdiction. So it really wasn't an incredible
pr case for the FBI that the that the profilers used.
And Ted Bundy was the poster boy of this. You know,
if we had these profilers, we could have caught Bundy.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Richard. What about the farmer ed Gean? He was whacked out,
wasn't he.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah, ed Gan is you know, really in the in
the news again because of the Netflix show Monsters, right,
And he's interesting because he was really the first kind
of celebrity serial killer, the first serial killer in America,
I should say, who was who was really well known
and he was from Plainsfield, Wisconsin. He was lived on
(09:07):
a farm. His father was very abusive, and his mother
was a real religious fanatic who hated women and and
really thought all women were demonic. And she instilled this
in ed Green from from his whole for his whole life.
They lived in this rundown farmhouse that was kind of
a horder situation, and as he grew up and became
(09:29):
interested in women, she would would ridicule him sexually. And
when she died it was this it Geen was was
was was stunned, and he was he couldn't function really
after that. He he needed his mother and he began
to do very weird things. He began to dig up
(09:50):
the graves of women and snatched their bodies and he
would go home and he would skin them.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
He made furniture out of the skin.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
He sometimes made suits out of their skin and wore them,
and he kept.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
The bones and things like that.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Well, he made bowls out of the skulls. I mean,
it was just a whole house full of this horrific stuff.
And he also killed a couple of women directly. He
admitted to two, at least as far as we know, and.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
You know, he was dying.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Don't you have to kill more than two to be
a serial killer?
Speaker 3 (10:24):
I think maybe it's just more than one, but I
don't know. Good question, that's a good question.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
He might there may have been more.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
He admitted it too, but there were other cases in
the area that they believed might have been linked to
him as well. But he you know, so he was
he was caught and he was you know, diagnosed with schizophrenia,
and he was sent to a mental hospital where where
he lived at the rest of his life because he
(10:55):
was found guilty.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Not guilty bearers into insanity.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So you know, Ed Geen has now gone on to
influence so many films and some of the biggest characters
in pop culture. He was Norman Norman Bates in Psycho
Hitchcock Psycho and he was leather Faced and the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, and he came back as you know, a
(11:23):
buffalo bill and silence of the Lambs and all these
different characters he's reinvented. So this was somebody who before
ed Geen, horror movies were really still about monsters like
ghouls and ghosts and that kind of monster.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
This was Norman.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
When Norman Bates was created in the in the model
of ed Geen, that was really when we started having
the serial killer as a monster, a human monster for
the first time, and that.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Has really stayed throughout history.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
And this show in Netflix really looks into that his
role in pop culture and how he's been reinvented over
and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Did he help the FBI find Ted Bundy?
Speaker 4 (12:01):
So this is a piece of the show that they
they suggest they that it's not true.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
The short answer is that it No, it's not true,
but you know it's it's it's Bundy did offer to
help the FBI in other crimes, and I think that's
where this rumor stems from. You know, he he but
Bundy offered to solve the Green River killer case, the
who was the serial killer Gary Widgeway. You know, he
(12:32):
told detectives that he could be going back to the
sites where he left the bodies and you know, taking
taking trophies or revisiting them, and that he alone could
understand the mind of a serial killer. So that is
true in a sense, but it's not true exactly with
Ed Gene.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Now, who was Henry Murray with the CIA.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
So you know, we think of profiling as the FBI,
But in my book, I really look further back and
I look at how the CIA has used.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Profile in its own way.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So in the nineteen forties, when the CIA was still
the OSS, they hired Henry Murray, who was a Harvard psychologist,
and they asked him to.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Write a profile of Hitler.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
This had not been done before, this idea of profiling
someone that you never met, trying to predict his future
moves based on what you could deduce about his personality.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
So Henry Murray was eager to join. He actually wasn't
a psychologist.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
He he was a physician who talked his way into
heading the Harvard psychology clinic.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
He was a pretty weird guy himself.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
And he wrote this profile of Hitler and he predicted
some detailed.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Aspects of his behavior.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
He predicted that correctly, that he would commit suicide before
he would ever surrender, and he got a lot of
things wrong too, and he got very involved in svculating
about his sexuality and his parents and things that weren't
necessarily so useful to the OSS at the time.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
But this is this is now something that's done commonly.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
It's today it's called, you know, things like leadership profiles
or or when you basically when the CIA profiles a
foreign dictator, someone who they want to have to have
some knowledge of Vladimir Putin. We've done it with in
Saddam Hussein, but the Hitler profile was really the first.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Pretty dramatic, isn't it. Yeah, tell us about your website, Rachel.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
It's Rachel Dashcorbett dot com and there's links to the
book there and much of my other writing as well.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
You had mentioned that serial killers seem to be diminished
nowadays because of DNA. Are we catching them faster?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yeah? I think that's right. We're able to.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
You know, the cell phone towers is another thing that's
really broken up in a lot of investigations I think about.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
You know, here in New York where I am, we.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Have the Gilgo Beach murder or the Long Island serial
killer as he's known sometimes, who was killing since the
nineties but was only now a suspect was arrested based
on new technology, and you know, I think this.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Is happening everywhere.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
There's more you know, as they say, one and done
killers today than there ever were because.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
It's just it's just hard to get away with it.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
There's also cameras everywhere, facial recognition, surveillance, you know, all
over the place.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
So it's it's it's very hard I think today.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And I think they caught the uh, the Louver jewelry
thing just with DNA, didn't they.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh yeah, that's right, there was just there's just news
of that. Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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George Noory
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