May 12, 2025 • 44 mins
LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard was the voice behind the hit podcast “Dirty John.” And now he has a new podcast that covers crimes in Los Angeles that made headlines, stories like the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer at the hands of a stalker. He tells me about his show, “Crimes of the Times.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I think it's important in doing these cases not to
forget that there are real consequences for the victims. These
consequences last a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. LA Times reporter Christopher Gofford
was the voice behind the hit podcast Dirty John, and
(01:13):
now he has a new podcast that covers crimes that
made headlines in Los Angeles, stories like the murder of
actress Rebecca Shaeffer at the hands of a stalker. He
tells me about his show, Crimes of the Times. So
I wanted you to talk first about the Rebecca Schaeffer case,
(01:34):
and it really piqued my interest because I just a
few weeks ago interviewed Marcia Clark for.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Her new book, which I'm also doing a show on. Yes,
the Barbara Graham Case.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Good oh man, what a case. And she's such a
good storyteller. So I talked to her and I said,
you know, I think everybody knew her from OJ, but
I remember being younger and seeing her and reading about
the Rebecca Schaeffer case because that case was really my
introduction to stalking, and I think it was for a
lot of people. And Rebecca Schaeffer to me seemed like
(02:09):
sort of the quote unquote perfect victim. I mean, I
had never heard anything about her that would have even
been remotely negative. She's sort of this pristine figure. I
loved the show that she was on. You know, of
course there was Reagan and of course John Lennon, but
this was a woman and it impacted me differently. So
why don't we start there? And how did you even
(02:32):
pick her to be your first episode?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, we were looking for stories that had some larger significance,
and this one had a huge effect on the stalking laws,
and in nineteen eighty nine when this happened, stalking wasn't
really a crime per se. I mean, there were civil remedies.
Maybe if you were being stocked, you could file a
restraining order that didn't necessarily always have teeth. But in
(02:58):
July nineteen eighty nine, when she was murdered, the laws
that we kind of take for granted today were not
in effect, and the case had a lot to do
with making that possible. Because of the circumstances surrounding the killing,
a lot of people saw her as just the picture
of innocence and vulnerability. Rebecca Schaeffer was twenty one years old.
(03:18):
She'd been on the show My Sister Sam, a sitcom.
Pam Dauber was her co star, who people remember from
Morgan MINDI. The show ran from nineteen eighty six to
I think about nineteen eighty eight, and this guy, Robert Bardo,
who was a teenager in Tucson and kind of a
(03:39):
misfit who had worked a grill at Jack in the
Box but really couldn't hold down a job, became fixated
on her, and he began sending her letters, and at
some point he received what felt to him like a
personalized response. Was never clear to me whether she wrote
it herself or whether the writing of it was outsourced
to a company. But he received a letter something along
(04:01):
the lines of yours is one of the nicest letters
I've received, and he interpreted it as she's into me.
At least that seemed to help the seed of that
misunderstand and grow, and so he becomes increasingly obsessed with her.
He's got a shrine to her. He takes a Greyhound
out to Los Angeles and he tries to find her
(04:23):
on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, and he brings
a teddy Bear. He's at the security gate and he
very insistently tries to get to her, and the security
guard puts him in his car and takes him back
to his hotel and basically sends him back on his
way to Tucson. Bardo is also obsessed with a number
of other people, like Debbie Gibson. He's obsessed with the
(04:43):
girl who wrote a letter to the Soviet premiere asking
for world peace. He goes to the hotel in New
York where John Lennon was living, seeming to walk in
the path of other Stoker Slash assassins, and then something
changes in him when Rebecca Schaeffer years in this TV
movie called Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,
(05:04):
where she appears in a love scene. To him, this
seems like a betrayal. Some evil switch is flipped in
his brain. He gets on a bus again, comes out
to La and this time he's got a gun. He
finds out where she is because he hires a private
eye for two hundred and fifty dollars, and for that price,
(05:25):
the private eye consults the Department of Motor Vehicles Records
finds her address. This is how he gets her address
in West Hollywood. He goes out there. He's at her
door twice. The first time it's a few words that
are exchanged between them. He goes away. Then he comes
back and by his account, she is impatient with him
and brushes him off, and he says that she's callous,
(05:47):
and he pulls out his gun and he shoots her
and kills her. That day, she was getting ready for
an audition. She was going to audition for The Godfather
Part three with Francis Ford Coppola, and he runs off.
He's got a copy of the Catcher and the Rye,
which I talked to Marcia Clark about on my podcast.
There's this strange reoccurrence of that book in a number
(06:10):
of these cases, including the Mark David Chapman case and
the John Hinckley case, and Marcia Clark, the prosecutor. Her
theory was that these guys imitate each other. It's not
necessarily about the content of the book itself. It's the
fact that it's sort of a token that one guy
has that the subsequent stalkers who are imitating him want
(06:30):
to adopt as their own. And he's found shortly thereafterwards.
I think he's running on an on ramp in Tucson
and he's arrested, and there isn't any doubt that he
did it. But the case that Marcia Clark makes at
trial for first degree murder is challenged by the defense attorneys.
They're saying it's a second degree murder, that he did
(06:50):
it on.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Impulse, he brought a gun.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
He brought a gun. In the podcast, which is the first,
the first podcast of this new series, I'm doing Time
of the Times, she describes how she studied the tape,
the tape confession that this killer Bardo gave to a
court appointed psychiatrist in which she acts out the killing.
He acts out the conversation that they had at the door,
(07:15):
and she studies it and studies it and realizes that
his words are contradicted by his body language and that
he's putting his hand behind his back, and this, to
her indicates that he was concealing the weapon, and she
has the element of lying in wait, which doesn't involve
necessarily jumping out from behind a bush or whatever. If
you're concealing the weapon, it qualifies, and so she successfully
(07:38):
makes the argument for first supree murder and he goes
away for life. And one of the things that this
case really produced was a deeper awareness of stockings, stockers
and their dangers, and California became the first state to
pass anti stocking legislation, and the other states followed suit.
Then there was a federal anti statute, and a lot
(08:01):
of it sprang from this case, as well a few
other awful cases that occurred that year nineteen eighty nine
in Orange County involving stalkers who killed women. So that's
why we picked that case because it has a broad
resonance in terms of how it affected the legal landscape.
In a way more significant in a certain sense than
(08:22):
the OJ case that Marsha Clark did a few years
later that people know we're from.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yeah, I mean that Rebecca Schaefer case. I still think
about that all the time. It was so startling for
me being a young person, you know, as fifteen at
the time, having watched that show over the past couple
of years, and then reading something that terrible happened to
that person. Do you think now that celebrities get lessons somehow?
(08:49):
I don't know if it's from their agents or what
is the advice. This is how you get rid of
all your public information. This is what you change up always,
no matter how small of an actor you are, you
need to change up your routine.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Oh yeah, I think they're much much more aware. One
of the things that Marcia Clark emphasized is how naive
everybody was at the time. I mean even the security
guard at Worner Brothers who sent the killer on his way.
I don't think it rang alarm bells in a way
that it would today. And of course there's a whole
threat assessment industry that has taken off that celebrities use
(09:22):
and high profile people use. So yeah, I think there's
a whole new awareness of the dangers Robert Bardo killed
Rebecca Schaeffer was also taking his cues in a certain
way from an earlier case. There was an actress named
Teresa Saldana. Do you remember A Raging Bull? Yes, she
played Joe Peshi's wife. A few years before this case.
(09:44):
She had been stocked and nearly stabbed to death by
an attacker. She lived, but there was a story about
it in I think it was Time magazine or Life magazine,
in which the writer mentioned how the attacker was able
to find Teresa Saldana and it was through a private eye,
I believe. And it was based on that story and
that clue that Robert Bardo found Rebecca Schaeffer. Another thing
(10:08):
this case led to was a clamp down on the
availability of private information through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That was considered a big victory for privacy at the time,
although now it's almost totally obsolete because you can get
so much with just a click of the button.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Tell me about the threat assessment industry, So is that
an expert who will just sort of look at you
and your lifestyle and how does it work?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
I mean, yeah, they're private eyes who specialize in this stuff,
and they show you how to handle difficult situations, how
to improve your security profile and all that sort of thing. Also,
the LAPD really beefed up its threat assessment unit after
this case, so the changes were significant. Not all the
(10:57):
cases that I'm writing about we're doing podcasts about necessarily
have that kind of long tail, but we thought it
was a good idea to start with one that did.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, absolutely, seeing Rebecca Shaeffer on my sister Sam and
feeling connected to her as a young girl, there's that
part of it, the devastation of finding out what happened
to her. But then when I watched the reaction from
that female tennis player recently, you know, who spotted her
stalker and the audience looking at this young woman essentially
(11:27):
hiding behind someone because she's frightened, that sort of visceral
reaction is the same thing I felt with Rebecca Shaeffer.
I mean, just awful.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I mean, you know, one of the ironies is that
the anti stoking laws that sprang up after this would
not necessarily have kicked in in the Robert Bardo case
because the letters that he sent her did not contain
anything with overt threats in them. They were basically fan
letters and love letters. I mean, it was all going
(11:55):
in one direction, of course, But even her father, Rebecca
Shaffer's father, who was a a therapist in Oregon, read
the letters and did not sense any overt menace. He
read him and said, it looks like kind of a
lost young man. The people who do the most violent
things aren't necessarily telegraphing exactly what they'll do, and in
(12:16):
this case, I don't know. I don't know what the
laws would have done with this particular guy, which makes it,
in a way even more eerie and terrifying.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So now you know, I'm sure celebrities and their representatives
know exactly how they're supposed to respond to stuff like this,
to de escalate something that could be in the works.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I think that's safe to say.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Why don't we move on to another case. I know
that you've done an episode on Patty Hurst, which I'm
assuming most people have heard of, But you know, again,
we have such a younger audience and you really never know.
And this is a true crime story but slightly different
than what we're used to also, so set that up
(12:58):
for the people who don't know the story of Patty Hurst.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So Patricia Hurst was the heiress of the Hurst media empire.
Some of your listeners may have seen the film Citizen Kane,
which was based on the original hearst the newspaper magnet.
Patricia Hurst was a student at UC Berkeley in nineteen
seventy four, and a group of Marxist revolutionary urban terrorists
(13:27):
known as the Symbionese Liberation Army the SLA, decided to
kidnap her. And I interviewed the guy who did it.
His name is Bill Harris. He's still alive, living in
San Francisco. He served his time. He walked me through
how it happened. He sees an announcement in the newspaper
that Patricia Hurst is getting married, and he decides she'll
(13:51):
make a good target. So again her address is public
or it's not that hard to find. He marches on
to the UC Berkeley campus and he opens up ledger
and there's her name, and there's her address. And he
and his comrades at the SLA begin plotting and scheming
the kidnap her, and they survey of her apartment and
(14:13):
one night in nineteen seventy four, they get through her door.
They beat up her fiance guy named Stephen wed and
they drag her down the stairs, throw her into her trunk,
and for months she's kept in a closet which the
SLA euphemistically describes as a people's prison, and she's sexually
(14:33):
assaulted by the leader of the group. And Patricia Hurst's father,
who's a newspaper publisher, very high profile, very powerful. He
agrees to donate something like two million dollars for a
food giveaway, which is the SLA's demand to release his daughter.
He does that, they don't release her, and then the
(14:53):
whole world is stunned to see a photograph of Patricia
Hurst with a machine gun on a surveillance camera in
a bank. She's robbing a bank with the SLA, seemingly
under no coercion, but of her own free will. And
soon after she releases a tape of herself. She's now
calling herself by a revolutionary name, Tanya I believe is
(15:16):
the name, and she's a member. She's announcing herself as
a member of the SLA. So this becomes I mean,
for a while, it was the story one of the
biggest stories of the century, so one of the interesting
things I've learned doing this podcast is how many crimes
of the century are forgotten.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It's the same thing as the world's first serial killer.
Every time I read that, I go, no, I don't
think you're right about that. Yeah, there are a lot
of crimes of the century. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
So it's also interesting for me because I read a
lot about history and true crime, and some of these
details are real sketchy for me. I remember these cases
in the broad outlines, but I don't remember exactly what
happened or what the sequence was. I don't remember the outcome.
Probably I could not have told you a whole lot
about the outcome of the Pattyhurst case before I began
(16:04):
looking into it seriously. But I talked to Bill Harris,
and he described kidnapping her, holding her captive, and he
basically told me that the reason they didn't pursue stronger
charges against him is they did not want Patty Hurst
on the stand so that he would be able to
cross examiner about the activities of her so called missing
(16:24):
year nineteen seventy five, when she was with the SLA
and participated in some of their crimes. So what I
did with the podcast is I tell the story of
this period in history through two men who are at
the center of it. Bill Harris, the SLA kidnapper and
an operative, and John Oapsaw, whose mother was murdered at
(16:46):
a bank that was robbed by the SLA. Her name
was Murta Oapsall. She was bringing donations from her church
to the bank one day and these revolutionaries stormed in
what their guns shot and went off. She was killed,
and her son was at school. He was pulled out
of school and taken to the hospital where his father
(17:07):
was a surgeon, and tried to save his mother, who
died there. So I think it's important in doing these
cases not to forget that there are real consequences for
the victims. These consequences last a lifetime. I think it's
always important if it's possible to get their voices in there.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So tell me what ultimately happens. So Patty Hurst has
taken and she's with the SLA for a year, Is
that right?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
I think it's like eighteen months, and she gives indications
during that time on the run with the SLA that
she's one of them. At one point, she opens fire
on a security guard at a sporting goods store in
Los Angeles who's trying to apprehend Bill Harris, and they're
hiding out in Anaheim near Disneyland. When the Los Angeles
(17:56):
Police Department raids the SLA hide out in LA and
there's this firefight and most of them die, and then
she's with the remnants of the SLA as they're on
the run, robbing banks and trying to stay afloat. She's
ultimately apprehended and put on trial. At first she's holding
on to her urban revolutionary persona. When she goes on trial,
(18:20):
she claims that she was under something called coercive persuasion
and talks about the brutality of the experience of being.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Kidnapped, sexually assaulted.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Sexually assaulted, although the prosecutors at the time challenged some
of what she said. In that area and the debate
that is always surrounded Patricia Hurst is was she a
conscious agent or was she brainwatch? Was she a puppet
of the SLA or was she acting for her own reasons?
Was she acting out some kind of rebellion. That's one
(18:51):
of the interesting kind of unanswerable questions about the whole case.
What exactly was animating her during that period? So she
did served some time, and then she went free, and
she's been free for a long time. She wrote a memoir.
She married her bodyguard.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Is it Stephen Weed. He was out of the picture
once she came back.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, yeah, he I believe he's still alive, but yeah,
he was beaten up. I remember his picture appearing after
he was assaulted by the SLA and he's got bruises
on his face. But I think that ended their relationship. Yeah.
She was very young at the time too, you know,
she was a college student, maybe a little bit sheltered,
(19:32):
but this was a this was a case that really
spoke to the times, and I think she became kind
of the nightmare example for parents about how far youth
rebellion during the counterculture period might go. Your kid is
not only rejecting your values, but actively hostile to you
and everything you stand for. You know, some of her
(19:54):
communicas that she released she called her parents pigs and
all that, fully buying into the the Marxist revolutionary rhetoric.
So when she was convicted, her lawyer, who was Athlee Bailey,
who had represented the Boston strangler, and no J Simpson
later right right right, he represents Patty Hurst, and he
says she was less popular than the Boston strangler Gosh
(20:17):
with the public. So that's another interesting case where the
crime itself becomes a portal into an interesting moment in
American history.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Is the reaction, because this is one of the first
more high profile cases of what we would say is
Stockholm syndrome, right, if that's what we believe. What was
the reaction from the public. Was it this sort of entitled,
rich young woman and acting out or was there sympathy
for her?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
I think it was a mixed bag, but a lot
of people went with the former. I think that's the
impression it made on a lot of people, really, But
I do people are interested in the case. I do
recommend that you read her memoir because it takes you
inside her experience and you really begin to understand the
sense of helplessness that she felt. And you know, there
(21:06):
was a there was a movie adaptation. But I talked
to the screenwriter, Nick z Anne, and I asked him
about the psychology of Patricia Hurston where he came down
on the issue of was she an autonomous agent or
a conscious agent or a puppet? And he said, well,
for the purposes of the movie, he came down on
(21:26):
the side of she is asserting the little bit of
freedom that she has available to her. Right, she's locked
in a closet, she's isolated, she's terrified, she's brutalized, and
the one little bit of autonomy she has left, the
one area where she still has a choice about her fate,
one area where she can assert herself, is by deciding
(21:50):
I'm going to be one of you.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I think, you know, one of the more interesting cases happened,
you know, in the nineteen fifties with Charles Starkweather and
his young, young girlfriend at the time, and there is
still a debate happening. Was she a willing participant? He
killed at least ten people. Was she a willing participant?
Was she brainwashed? What was this? Was this Stockholm syndrome?
(22:14):
And so you know, this is not a new phenomenon.
But Patty Hurst, really, I mean that was sort of
the underline case for me where I really learned about that.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
What's your conclusion, Kate.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I think that when someone is put through trauma, and
what we do know is that she was kidnapped, she
was taken against her will. Right, there doesn't seem to
be any refuting that well, what does Bill say about
the sexual assault? Does he concur with her that that's
what happened.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
His position is that we were a feminist organization or
that we would not have done such a thing. Although
there's a part in her book. There's a part in
her memoir where she says he pressured me and pressured
me and pressured me as a good comrade to have
sex with him, and she did. But she describes him
as the most militant of the SLA members of Vain,
(23:07):
an angry man. So at one point he became very
angry with me during the conversation because I was reading
too on passages from Patricia Hurst's memoir and asking him
to respond to all of the stuff that she said. Yeah,
I didn't seem to like that.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, it sounds like one way or the other, a
series of traumatic events happened to her, and they're admitting
that she's locked in the closet. I mean, just for me,
I would never second guess the way somebody reacts like
that when particularly a woman being intimidated by a group.
Who am I to say how I would have reacted
to that kind of a situation. I just don't know.
(23:44):
I've learned so many lessons about people being wrongfully convicted
because they're put on the stand and they are awful
on the stand. There are people who are just awful
defendants even if they are innocent, and that's happened so much,
and you can't judge someone, I think by the way
they react to a trauma like that. And the truth is,
I don't know the truth, but my reaction would be
(24:06):
to say, this is how she's coping somehow, some way
with that, and this is not some rebellious teenager. But
I also know that the media and the public somehow
want to take wealthy people down by a peg often,
and maybe Patty Hurst was that person. I don't know,
and this was not a story I really lived through,
so it's hard to know.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, I'd love to talk to her, but she's moved
on with her life.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, well, who could blame her, I guess at that point. Okay,
tell me about the Pentagon papers, because I feel like
this is a vague phrase that I've heard in my head.
I think I know what we're talking about, but I
want to hear more obviously.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Okay, Well, this is exactly where I was before I
started reporting on it. Which is why this is fun
to do. So yeah, So the Pentagon Papers were seven
thousand pages of government sponsored studies about the Vietnam War
and all the decisions that went into it, span multiple
presidential administrations, and they document the reasons that we escalated
(25:08):
the war and continued pouring troops in. And in nineteen
sixty nine, a man named Daniel Elsberg, who was an
advisor to the architects of the war, is working at
the Rand Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, and
he's had a change of heart and his conscience is
gnawing at him. He thinks the war is a hopeless
stalemate and he wants to do something to end it.
(25:31):
And so he's got top secret clearance at the Rand Corporation,
He's got a special safe, and he decides he is
going to leak these papers to anti war lawmakers. This
is nineteen sixty nine and Richard Nixon has taken office
promising to end the war with honor. But the war
(25:51):
keeps going on, and Daniel Elsberg decides that he is
going to take measures to stop it. So he smuggled
these seven thousand pages of top secret documents out of
his office at the RAND office in Santa Monica, and
he needs to photocopy them. He wants to get them
into the hands of some elected representatives who might present
(26:16):
them to the American people and let them know what
the Pentagon really thinks about the war, which is Daniel
Elsberg describes as a hopeless stalemate, a war that is continued,
among other reasons, because it would be seen as a
terrible humiliation to an American president to lose the war
(26:36):
in Vietnam. So he needs a photocopy machine because this
is nineteen sixty nine and not every office as a
xerox like we do now. So he turns to a
friend whose name is Linda Senay. She has an ad
agency above a flower shop on Melrose. They go to
a waffle shop and he tells her, listen, I need
(26:56):
the use of your copy machine. This could end the war.
And she agrees, and night after night for weeks they
go to her ad agency, her copy machine, and they
copy all these top secret documents. Linda Seney now goes
by the name Linda Resnik. She's the billionaire businesswoman behind
Palm Wonderful and Fiji Water and all these others, all
(27:18):
these other companies we've heard about, but at the time
nineteen sixty nine, she played a key role in disseminating
the Pentagon papers. So eventually Daniel Ellsberg slips these papers
to the New York Times. They publish a big series.
The Nixon administration is outraged, and Richard Dixon decides that
(27:42):
he needs to plug the leaks, and he launches the Plumbers,
which is the notorious group of operatives that breaks into
Daniel Ellsberg's psychiastris offtist looking for dirt on him. Later,
Nixon's guys, of course, break into the Watergate, and part
of the cover up that wound up sinking the Nixon
(28:02):
administration involved trying to cover up the break in of
Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office. So, in a very real way, the
theft of those papers led to Nixon's disgrace and resignation.
Now a lot of people remember the Pentagon Papers from
maybe the Steven Spielberg movie. Well, he focused on the
(28:24):
Washington Post, although they weren't the ones who originally got it,
But it was about the newspapers publishing these papers and
the fight at the Supreme Court against the Nixon administration,
whof wanted to stop publication. So people remember the case,
especially if you've gone to journalism school, as you know,
one of the landmark freedom of the press cases. But
(28:45):
what people forget is that there was an actual criminal
trial here in Los Angeles in federal court where Daniel
Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo did it with him,
were tried under the Espionage Act. And I interviewed one
of the lawyers who represent at the time, and I
interviewed the man who went on to be a prominent
(29:06):
lawyer who was an assistant at the time helping on
the case. Daniel Elsberg died a couple of years ago,
so I couldn't talk to him. But what wrapped the
case for the government was the Nixon administration attempting overtures
to the federal judge who was presiding over it. Nixon's
men approached the judge, Matt Byrne, and said, Hey, would
(29:29):
you like to be the head of the FBI. And
Ellsberg's lawyers found out about this in front of the
judge who was forced to throw out the case. And
it's incredible that all of this history is somehow now
little known or little remembered. But it's one of the
fun things about doing these stories is one of these
(29:49):
is a portal on history if you look deep enough.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you
was you were I would say, best known for Dirty John,
which was turned into was a series? Right? Was it
a TV series or a movie?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It was a TV series.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, you did a very deep dive on one story.
So is this a big shift for you. I know
that you work for the La Times and you've you know,
done shorter stories before, but for this podcast, now you're
dipping into one story that you have to wrap up
in a certain period of time because you're moving on
the next day.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah. It's definitely a change of pace for me. But
I also like the immediacy of it. I mean I
did three long form narrative podcasts after Dirty John. I
did one called Detective Trap, which I think was five
or six episodes about an Anaheim police detective tracking down
serial killers. And then I did one called The Trials
(30:43):
or Frank Carson, which is about a defense attorney in Modesto,
California who's put on trial for murder and it becomes
one of the longest criminal trials in American history. I
was very proud of that one. But those are all long,
long efforts and long story lines. I think of them
kind of as audio nonfiction novels. Yeah, absolutely, with multiple characters,
(31:06):
multiple plot lines and A stories, B stories, C stories. Yeah,
they're very difficult and complicated to do, and not very
many stories lend themselves to that treatment.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah, you have to be very picky about the ones
that you choose for those and it's not necessarily the
number of murders. It's the quality, not the quantity, I think.
And it's very difficult to figure out what's going to
work over six episodes. I tell my students set all
the time, and they'll listen not to you, but they'll
listen to other podcasts and they'll say, this is ten
minutes too long here or why are they? And I said, well,
(31:40):
six episodes is a lot. And sometimes when you make
that kind of a commitment, you have to figure out
where your music goes a little longer, or your interview goes,
you know, thirty seconds longer than you normally would have it.
So it is a challenge. And I'm sure you do
like the brevity of these stories. You get right to it,
you get the exciting bits. You know, it's one basic
(32:01):
narrative arc, you know, because it's one episode, so I'm
sure it's much easier for you to contain and probably
in a different way very satisfying.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yes, it's difficult in its own way, though, because you
need to find the sources for every episode afresh, and
that's that's sometimes tricky. I'm curious, though, given that you
teach podcasting and you study, you study the medium, in
what ways do you think these long form serials are
going astray?
Speaker 1 (32:27):
What we look at is the victim blaming aspect of it.
We also look at the ethics of concentrating too much
on the killer and glorifying it. I have interviewed some folks,
not on this show, but in other instances where I
sort of felt like they were going a little overboard
(32:47):
on how great the serial killer is, and that really
repulses me. And so we talk a little bit about that.
And one thing that I thought I appreciated about Dirty
John was the balance that you had. You had his family,
but also you spoke of course to Deborah and her
two daughters, and so there's there's a really good balance there.
(33:08):
And I always say that's what we're looking for. Yes,
people come to the show oftentimes to hear what's going
on in this whack job's mind. Who is, you know,
killing people or assaulting people or just creating all of
this mayhem like John did. But at the same time,
we're also trying to honor the victims, who should be
(33:29):
elevated in my opinion, as much as the killer, and
I think we struggle with that in this genre. I
think any yahoo can take a certain amount of money
and put up a podcast and go knock on Gabby
Patito's parents door for a comment when they're not a journalist,
they're not an attorney, you know, they're not a professional.
And I think that's what's really disconcerting to me. We
have a lot of people who don't really have any
(33:49):
kind of training at all about how to handle families,
and then all of a sudden they're handling families and
there's no attorney there, there's no repercussions. And sometimes I
can find an audience that says, great, I'm looking for
that exclusive. It doesn't matter how you get it, you know,
I don't know, do you feel like that or Mike.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Oh no, I mean I agree with you one hundred percent.
In terms of taking the focus off the killers, the
serial killers in particular. I mean I made a decision
long ago that the psychology of sadism was not going
to be my Baileywick. You know, I've met enough of
these guys that they're not as interesting to me as
(34:30):
as they might be to other people. They're not Hannibal elector.
By that, I mean a lot of them just don't
have that much insight into what they do or why
they do it. And they're not particularly interesting in a
lot of ways, right, you know, to the extent they
have reasons. But for instance, the second long podcast I did,
Detective Trap, involves a serial killer named Stephen Gordon. He
(34:52):
abducted and murdered a bunch of women who were involved
in prostitution in Santa Anna and Garden Grove here in
Orange County. At one point is investigator came up to
me after trial and said, Hey, Gordon wants to talk
to you at the county jail. Wants to go see you.
So I went to see him. Of course, it was
a mix up. He actually wanted to see the guy
from the other newspaper. I had a few minutes to
(35:14):
talk to him, and I said, well, maybe I'll find
out something about him, and I asked him why he
did it, and he said, I was angry. What do
you mean you were angry? Why did you kill those women?
I was angry you didn't know them. Why were you
angry at him? I was angry at my probation officer,
my parole officer, because of the restrictions they're putting on me. Like,
what do you do with that answer? Does i't give
you any insight at all into him? Do you want
(35:34):
to spend six hours inside that guy's brain to what end?
For what profit?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Right? I agree? I mean, I've read a couple of
different books from, you know, the FBI folks who interviewed
Bundy and Edmund Kemper, and the things that they learned
from those two men were significant. I remember reading from Kemper,
who was known as the co ed Killer, one of
the worst monikers I've heard. You know, he said that
(36:00):
a lot of killers go back to the scene of
the crime to relive it all. They didn't know that before.
And Tud Bundy said, you know, there are people out
there who are much smarter than I am. You even
haven't you think I'm smart? You should see these other
people out there. You know who you haven't even caught yet.
So I definitely think that there is value, and I
know that's what people are interested in too. I think
(36:21):
there's value in learning about the killers. But like I said,
there's a bounce. Listen. You know, I said I have
had enough. I was talking to someone the other day
and I said, I've had enough of some of these cases.
I mean, I can't even tell you how many times
I've read about John Benet Ramsey and new things. And
then I said to the person, but full disclosure on
the other tab of what I'm watching right now, I'm
(36:42):
going to click over as soon as I'm done with
you and watch the new John Benet Ramsey Netflix. So
what does that say about me? It's a new thing.
I'm going to watch it, just like I watched the
Gabby Patito that came out, and I think, I don't
know if you had watched that story on Netflix. What
blew me away about that case that I wish we
had with all of them was the sheer amount of
information that we have about Gabby Patito. I have never
(37:05):
seen a murder victim who I now feel like I
know so much about because of the credible mass amount
of social media, the text messages, the letters, the family,
everything she posted. I wish we had that about everybody,
and I'm sure you feel the same way too. I
wish we had but material for the victims, because I
do think that would change things in some way. You know.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
So I haven't followed the Gabby Patito case that closely.
What ultimately happened there according to what you.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Know, Well, you know, Gabby Patito goes missing and it
is a massive I think it was twenty twenty one,
summer of twenty twenty one, and it is a massive
social media, you know, explosion because there's this clear and
present danger. She's with her boyfriend, Brian Laundry and they're
you know, driving in a van, and the clear and
(37:54):
present danger is where's this young woman and where is
the van? And he shows up in Florida and he's
not with Gabby, and it all, you know, ends up
coming to a head where ultimately, I believe it's some
folks who are on YouTube who were driving by and
spotted the van and told the FBI about it, and
they were eventually able to locate her. And before they
(38:16):
could even question Brian, you know, he goes into a
wooded area and takes his own life ultimately and leaves
a journal that has a confession of sorts. I would
not call it a real confession, but it's a confession
of sorts, but it created this fervor because she had
so much information out there. You can watch videos. I
(38:38):
mean you really, especially after this series, you really feel
like you know her and you're connected to her. And
I think I wish I could do that with every
single person I talked to, and I'm sure you do too.
And I think you do a great job in Dirty
John where we really do hear from the women, particularly
of this story a lot. And when now I'm working
in historical crime as you are with your series, you can't,
(39:00):
you know, we don't have all of that. So I
think it's interesting how we can navigate that and make
the audience understand how important it is to hear the
victims stories and their family stories.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Right. I totally agree, And for a reporter as well
as for police, social media has kind of been a
bonanza because people are posting their thoughts in text and
on social media messaging. You can chronicle their lives day
by day and week by week in a way that
you could not have twenty thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So will you go back to a long form series
or are you now completely enraptured by the short that's
get it done and be done and move on to
another decade.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
No. I like the long form stuff, but you really
have to find a story that allows you to do it.
My attention span isn't what it used to be. If
you're going to get me to commit to six or
seven hours as a listener, it better be really interesting.
And I'm not going to impose six or seven hours
on my listeners unless I have a damn good story
(40:02):
that has enough going for it that they'll listen all
the way through, and those are few and far between.
They're not that easy to find.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
I agree, and I'm interested in what your checklist is.
I have a checklist for books, specifically, a little list
that has to every little item has to be checked
off in order for me to be willing to write
the book right. One is it's got to be a
time period that I'm really interested in, which for me
is pre nineteen sixties. Essentially. It has to be an
(40:30):
area where I want to spend some time both literally
doing the research and actually digging into the history of it,
people who I find compelling. Of course, the crime that
I find interesting, and certainly that today relevance. Why does
an audience care now about this kind of story. And
the most important thing for me, which is just a
(40:50):
shit ton of sources. I have to have a lot
of primary sources. Even my oldest the book that just
came out for me is from eighteen thirty two, and
I had a huge amount of sources from that.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
What's that one about.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It's called The Sinner's All Bow. It just came out
in January, and it's about a woman named Sarah Maria
Cornell who was found hanging in New England from a
haystack poll on a desolate farm. You know, she had
said to her doctor several months before that she was pregnant,
and she blamed a Methodist minister for sexually assaulting her
(41:26):
and getting her pregnant. And then just this unwinds into
a story of the first true crime narrative book that
was written in the United States, and I'm working with
this journalist from eighteen seventy two about it, and then
it was her story was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter. But a lot of
(41:46):
it is just the heroes in the story are women,
and the villains are absolutely women in the story. Just
her character was raked over the Coles just to get
this guy out of a murder case.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
That is fascinating. We all read the Scarlett Letter in
high school. I actually did not know that there was
a real life case that inspired it.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
And I think that that story, again, the reverberations through
history is what always is powerful for me, because there
are Sarah Maria Cornell's They're pregnant and she ends up
dead after demanding child support essentially from this Methodist minister
in the eighteen thirties, and this is just a story
that happens over and over again. So what is your checklist?
Because I know what mine is. What is for a
(42:27):
long form? What are the things that really make you excited?
Is it that everyone is on board and it doesn't
particularly matter what the murder is or what's your number
one thing? Do you think the deal breaker? If you
can't get it, I'm not doing it.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
You need a story with some underlying questions. It's better
if it's a question you can't really answer, because then
you can have people reflect on the mystery. Maybe it's
a psychological mystery.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And I've written four books, three or four. I think
three of them have been published. It's a big commitment.
It's four years of your life. You have to really
care about the subject. You have to believe in it
when nobody else does. It really has to speak to
some burning curiosity in you. Otherwise it's not worth it
if you add up the advances you get for your books,
(43:15):
at least if you're me and you calculate the hours
that you spend on it. It's not financially that's smart inactivity. No,
But you do it because you have a compulsion and
because you have to, because you can't not do it.
So you got to pick a story that you can't
not need to tell.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them listen if you haven't already. This has been
an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis m. Morosi.
(44:07):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(44:28):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at Wicked Words Pod
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I think it's important in doing these cases not to
forget that there are real consequences for the victims. These
consequences last a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. LA Times reporter Christopher Gofford
was the voice behind the hit podcast Dirty John, and
(01:13):
now he has a new podcast that covers crimes that
made headlines in Los Angeles, stories like the murder of
actress Rebecca Shaeffer at the hands of a stalker. He
tells me about his show, Crimes of the Times. So
I wanted you to talk first about the Rebecca Schaeffer case,
(01:34):
and it really piqued my interest because I just a
few weeks ago interviewed Marcia Clark for.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Her new book, which I'm also doing a show on. Yes,
the Barbara Graham Case.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Good oh man, what a case. And she's such a
good storyteller. So I talked to her and I said,
you know, I think everybody knew her from OJ, but
I remember being younger and seeing her and reading about
the Rebecca Schaeffer case because that case was really my
introduction to stalking, and I think it was for a
lot of people. And Rebecca Schaeffer to me seemed like
(02:09):
sort of the quote unquote perfect victim. I mean, I
had never heard anything about her that would have even
been remotely negative. She's sort of this pristine figure. I
loved the show that she was on. You know, of
course there was Reagan and of course John Lennon, but
this was a woman and it impacted me differently. So
why don't we start there? And how did you even
(02:32):
pick her to be your first episode?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, we were looking for stories that had some larger significance,
and this one had a huge effect on the stalking laws,
and in nineteen eighty nine when this happened, stalking wasn't
really a crime per se. I mean, there were civil remedies.
Maybe if you were being stocked, you could file a
restraining order that didn't necessarily always have teeth. But in
(02:58):
July nineteen eighty nine, when she was murdered, the laws
that we kind of take for granted today were not
in effect, and the case had a lot to do
with making that possible. Because of the circumstances surrounding the killing,
a lot of people saw her as just the picture
of innocence and vulnerability. Rebecca Schaeffer was twenty one years old.
(03:18):
She'd been on the show My Sister Sam, a sitcom.
Pam Dauber was her co star, who people remember from
Morgan MINDI. The show ran from nineteen eighty six to
I think about nineteen eighty eight, and this guy, Robert Bardo,
who was a teenager in Tucson and kind of a
(03:39):
misfit who had worked a grill at Jack in the
Box but really couldn't hold down a job, became fixated
on her, and he began sending her letters, and at
some point he received what felt to him like a
personalized response. Was never clear to me whether she wrote
it herself or whether the writing of it was outsourced
to a company. But he received a letter something along
(04:01):
the lines of yours is one of the nicest letters
I've received, and he interpreted it as she's into me.
At least that seemed to help the seed of that
misunderstand and grow, and so he becomes increasingly obsessed with her.
He's got a shrine to her. He takes a Greyhound
out to Los Angeles and he tries to find her
(04:23):
on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, and he brings
a teddy Bear. He's at the security gate and he
very insistently tries to get to her, and the security
guard puts him in his car and takes him back
to his hotel and basically sends him back on his
way to Tucson. Bardo is also obsessed with a number
of other people, like Debbie Gibson. He's obsessed with the
(04:43):
girl who wrote a letter to the Soviet premiere asking
for world peace. He goes to the hotel in New
York where John Lennon was living, seeming to walk in
the path of other Stoker Slash assassins, and then something
changes in him when Rebecca Schaeffer years in this TV
movie called Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,
(05:04):
where she appears in a love scene. To him, this
seems like a betrayal. Some evil switch is flipped in
his brain. He gets on a bus again, comes out
to La and this time he's got a gun. He
finds out where she is because he hires a private
eye for two hundred and fifty dollars, and for that price,
(05:25):
the private eye consults the Department of Motor Vehicles Records
finds her address. This is how he gets her address
in West Hollywood. He goes out there. He's at her
door twice. The first time it's a few words that
are exchanged between them. He goes away. Then he comes
back and by his account, she is impatient with him
and brushes him off, and he says that she's callous,
(05:47):
and he pulls out his gun and he shoots her
and kills her. That day, she was getting ready for
an audition. She was going to audition for The Godfather
Part three with Francis Ford Coppola, and he runs off.
He's got a copy of the Catcher and the Rye,
which I talked to Marcia Clark about on my podcast.
There's this strange reoccurrence of that book in a number
(06:10):
of these cases, including the Mark David Chapman case and
the John Hinckley case, and Marcia Clark, the prosecutor. Her
theory was that these guys imitate each other. It's not
necessarily about the content of the book itself. It's the
fact that it's sort of a token that one guy
has that the subsequent stalkers who are imitating him want
(06:30):
to adopt as their own. And he's found shortly thereafterwards.
I think he's running on an on ramp in Tucson
and he's arrested, and there isn't any doubt that he
did it. But the case that Marcia Clark makes at
trial for first degree murder is challenged by the defense attorneys.
They're saying it's a second degree murder, that he did
(06:50):
it on.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Impulse, he brought a gun.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
He brought a gun. In the podcast, which is the first,
the first podcast of this new series, I'm doing Time
of the Times, she describes how she studied the tape,
the tape confession that this killer Bardo gave to a
court appointed psychiatrist in which she acts out the killing.
He acts out the conversation that they had at the door,
(07:15):
and she studies it and studies it and realizes that
his words are contradicted by his body language and that
he's putting his hand behind his back, and this, to
her indicates that he was concealing the weapon, and she
has the element of lying in wait, which doesn't involve
necessarily jumping out from behind a bush or whatever. If
you're concealing the weapon, it qualifies, and so she successfully
(07:38):
makes the argument for first supree murder and he goes
away for life. And one of the things that this
case really produced was a deeper awareness of stockings, stockers
and their dangers, and California became the first state to
pass anti stocking legislation, and the other states followed suit.
Then there was a federal anti statute, and a lot
(08:01):
of it sprang from this case, as well a few
other awful cases that occurred that year nineteen eighty nine
in Orange County involving stalkers who killed women. So that's
why we picked that case because it has a broad
resonance in terms of how it affected the legal landscape.
In a way more significant in a certain sense than
(08:22):
the OJ case that Marsha Clark did a few years
later that people know we're from.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yeah, I mean that Rebecca Schaefer case. I still think
about that all the time. It was so startling for
me being a young person, you know, as fifteen at
the time, having watched that show over the past couple
of years, and then reading something that terrible happened to
that person. Do you think now that celebrities get lessons somehow?
(08:49):
I don't know if it's from their agents or what
is the advice. This is how you get rid of
all your public information. This is what you change up always,
no matter how small of an actor you are, you
need to change up your routine.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Oh yeah, I think they're much much more aware. One
of the things that Marcia Clark emphasized is how naive
everybody was at the time. I mean even the security
guard at Worner Brothers who sent the killer on his way.
I don't think it rang alarm bells in a way
that it would today. And of course there's a whole
threat assessment industry that has taken off that celebrities use
(09:22):
and high profile people use. So yeah, I think there's
a whole new awareness of the dangers Robert Bardo killed
Rebecca Schaeffer was also taking his cues in a certain
way from an earlier case. There was an actress named
Teresa Saldana. Do you remember A Raging Bull? Yes, she
played Joe Peshi's wife. A few years before this case.
(09:44):
She had been stocked and nearly stabbed to death by
an attacker. She lived, but there was a story about
it in I think it was Time magazine or Life magazine,
in which the writer mentioned how the attacker was able
to find Teresa Saldana and it was through a private eye,
I believe. And it was based on that story and
that clue that Robert Bardo found Rebecca Schaeffer. Another thing
(10:08):
this case led to was a clamp down on the
availability of private information through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That was considered a big victory for privacy at the time,
although now it's almost totally obsolete because you can get
so much with just a click of the button.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Tell me about the threat assessment industry, So is that
an expert who will just sort of look at you
and your lifestyle and how does it work?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
I mean, yeah, they're private eyes who specialize in this stuff,
and they show you how to handle difficult situations, how
to improve your security profile and all that sort of thing. Also,
the LAPD really beefed up its threat assessment unit after
this case, so the changes were significant. Not all the
(10:57):
cases that I'm writing about we're doing podcasts about necessarily
have that kind of long tail, but we thought it
was a good idea to start with one that did.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, absolutely, seeing Rebecca Shaeffer on my sister Sam and
feeling connected to her as a young girl, there's that
part of it, the devastation of finding out what happened
to her. But then when I watched the reaction from
that female tennis player recently, you know, who spotted her
stalker and the audience looking at this young woman essentially
(11:27):
hiding behind someone because she's frightened, that sort of visceral
reaction is the same thing I felt with Rebecca Shaeffer.
I mean, just awful.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I mean, you know, one of the ironies is that
the anti stoking laws that sprang up after this would
not necessarily have kicked in in the Robert Bardo case
because the letters that he sent her did not contain
anything with overt threats in them. They were basically fan
letters and love letters. I mean, it was all going
(11:55):
in one direction, of course, But even her father, Rebecca
Shaffer's father, who was a a therapist in Oregon, read
the letters and did not sense any overt menace. He
read him and said, it looks like kind of a
lost young man. The people who do the most violent
things aren't necessarily telegraphing exactly what they'll do, and in
(12:16):
this case, I don't know. I don't know what the
laws would have done with this particular guy, which makes it,
in a way even more eerie and terrifying.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So now you know, I'm sure celebrities and their representatives
know exactly how they're supposed to respond to stuff like this,
to de escalate something that could be in the works.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I think that's safe to say.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Why don't we move on to another case. I know
that you've done an episode on Patty Hurst, which I'm
assuming most people have heard of, But you know, again,
we have such a younger audience and you really never know.
And this is a true crime story but slightly different
than what we're used to also, so set that up
(12:58):
for the people who don't know the story of Patty Hurst.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So Patricia Hurst was the heiress of the Hurst media empire.
Some of your listeners may have seen the film Citizen Kane,
which was based on the original hearst the newspaper magnet.
Patricia Hurst was a student at UC Berkeley in nineteen
seventy four, and a group of Marxist revolutionary urban terrorists
(13:27):
known as the Symbionese Liberation Army the SLA, decided to
kidnap her. And I interviewed the guy who did it.
His name is Bill Harris. He's still alive, living in
San Francisco. He served his time. He walked me through
how it happened. He sees an announcement in the newspaper
that Patricia Hurst is getting married, and he decides she'll
(13:51):
make a good target. So again her address is public
or it's not that hard to find. He marches on
to the UC Berkeley campus and he opens up ledger
and there's her name, and there's her address. And he
and his comrades at the SLA begin plotting and scheming
the kidnap her, and they survey of her apartment and
(14:13):
one night in nineteen seventy four, they get through her door.
They beat up her fiance guy named Stephen wed and
they drag her down the stairs, throw her into her trunk,
and for months she's kept in a closet which the
SLA euphemistically describes as a people's prison, and she's sexually
(14:33):
assaulted by the leader of the group. And Patricia Hurst's father,
who's a newspaper publisher, very high profile, very powerful. He
agrees to donate something like two million dollars for a
food giveaway, which is the SLA's demand to release his daughter.
He does that, they don't release her, and then the
(14:53):
whole world is stunned to see a photograph of Patricia
Hurst with a machine gun on a surveillance camera in
a bank. She's robbing a bank with the SLA, seemingly
under no coercion, but of her own free will. And
soon after she releases a tape of herself. She's now
calling herself by a revolutionary name, Tanya I believe is
(15:16):
the name, and she's a member. She's announcing herself as
a member of the SLA. So this becomes I mean,
for a while, it was the story one of the
biggest stories of the century, so one of the interesting
things I've learned doing this podcast is how many crimes
of the century are forgotten.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It's the same thing as the world's first serial killer.
Every time I read that, I go, no, I don't
think you're right about that. Yeah, there are a lot
of crimes of the century. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
So it's also interesting for me because I read a
lot about history and true crime, and some of these
details are real sketchy for me. I remember these cases
in the broad outlines, but I don't remember exactly what
happened or what the sequence was. I don't remember the outcome.
Probably I could not have told you a whole lot
about the outcome of the Pattyhurst case before I began
(16:04):
looking into it seriously. But I talked to Bill Harris,
and he described kidnapping her, holding her captive, and he
basically told me that the reason they didn't pursue stronger
charges against him is they did not want Patty Hurst
on the stand so that he would be able to
cross examiner about the activities of her so called missing
(16:24):
year nineteen seventy five, when she was with the SLA
and participated in some of their crimes. So what I
did with the podcast is I tell the story of
this period in history through two men who are at
the center of it. Bill Harris, the SLA kidnapper and
an operative, and John Oapsaw, whose mother was murdered at
(16:46):
a bank that was robbed by the SLA. Her name
was Murta Oapsall. She was bringing donations from her church
to the bank one day and these revolutionaries stormed in
what their guns shot and went off. She was killed,
and her son was at school. He was pulled out
of school and taken to the hospital where his father
(17:07):
was a surgeon, and tried to save his mother, who
died there. So I think it's important in doing these
cases not to forget that there are real consequences for
the victims. These consequences last a lifetime. I think it's
always important if it's possible to get their voices in there.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So tell me what ultimately happens. So Patty Hurst has
taken and she's with the SLA for a year, Is
that right?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
I think it's like eighteen months, and she gives indications
during that time on the run with the SLA that
she's one of them. At one point, she opens fire
on a security guard at a sporting goods store in
Los Angeles who's trying to apprehend Bill Harris, and they're
hiding out in Anaheim near Disneyland. When the Los Angeles
(17:56):
Police Department raids the SLA hide out in LA and
there's this firefight and most of them die, and then
she's with the remnants of the SLA as they're on
the run, robbing banks and trying to stay afloat. She's
ultimately apprehended and put on trial. At first she's holding
on to her urban revolutionary persona. When she goes on trial,
(18:20):
she claims that she was under something called coercive persuasion
and talks about the brutality of the experience of being.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Kidnapped, sexually assaulted.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Sexually assaulted, although the prosecutors at the time challenged some
of what she said. In that area and the debate
that is always surrounded Patricia Hurst is was she a
conscious agent or was she brainwatch? Was she a puppet
of the SLA or was she acting for her own reasons?
Was she acting out some kind of rebellion. That's one
(18:51):
of the interesting kind of unanswerable questions about the whole case.
What exactly was animating her during that period? So she
did served some time, and then she went free, and
she's been free for a long time. She wrote a memoir.
She married her bodyguard.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Is it Stephen Weed. He was out of the picture
once she came back.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, yeah, he I believe he's still alive, but yeah,
he was beaten up. I remember his picture appearing after
he was assaulted by the SLA and he's got bruises
on his face. But I think that ended their relationship. Yeah.
She was very young at the time too, you know,
she was a college student, maybe a little bit sheltered,
(19:32):
but this was a this was a case that really
spoke to the times, and I think she became kind
of the nightmare example for parents about how far youth
rebellion during the counterculture period might go. Your kid is
not only rejecting your values, but actively hostile to you
and everything you stand for. You know, some of her
(19:54):
communicas that she released she called her parents pigs and
all that, fully buying into the the Marxist revolutionary rhetoric.
So when she was convicted, her lawyer, who was Athlee Bailey,
who had represented the Boston strangler, and no J Simpson
later right right right, he represents Patty Hurst, and he
says she was less popular than the Boston strangler Gosh
(20:17):
with the public. So that's another interesting case where the
crime itself becomes a portal into an interesting moment in
American history.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Is the reaction, because this is one of the first
more high profile cases of what we would say is
Stockholm syndrome, right, if that's what we believe. What was
the reaction from the public. Was it this sort of entitled,
rich young woman and acting out or was there sympathy
for her?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
I think it was a mixed bag, but a lot
of people went with the former. I think that's the
impression it made on a lot of people, really, But
I do people are interested in the case. I do
recommend that you read her memoir because it takes you
inside her experience and you really begin to understand the
sense of helplessness that she felt. And you know, there
(21:06):
was a there was a movie adaptation. But I talked
to the screenwriter, Nick z Anne, and I asked him
about the psychology of Patricia Hurston where he came down
on the issue of was she an autonomous agent or
a conscious agent or a puppet? And he said, well,
for the purposes of the movie, he came down on
(21:26):
the side of she is asserting the little bit of
freedom that she has available to her. Right, she's locked
in a closet, she's isolated, she's terrified, she's brutalized, and
the one little bit of autonomy she has left, the
one area where she still has a choice about her fate,
one area where she can assert herself, is by deciding
(21:50):
I'm going to be one of you.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I think, you know, one of the more interesting cases happened,
you know, in the nineteen fifties with Charles Starkweather and
his young, young girlfriend at the time, and there is
still a debate happening. Was she a willing participant? He
killed at least ten people. Was she a willing participant?
Was she brainwashed? What was this? Was this Stockholm syndrome?
(22:14):
And so you know, this is not a new phenomenon.
But Patty Hurst, really, I mean that was sort of
the underline case for me where I really learned about that.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
What's your conclusion, Kate.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I think that when someone is put through trauma, and
what we do know is that she was kidnapped, she
was taken against her will. Right, there doesn't seem to
be any refuting that well, what does Bill say about
the sexual assault? Does he concur with her that that's
what happened.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
His position is that we were a feminist organization or
that we would not have done such a thing. Although
there's a part in her book. There's a part in
her memoir where she says he pressured me and pressured
me and pressured me as a good comrade to have
sex with him, and she did. But she describes him
as the most militant of the SLA members of Vain,
(23:07):
an angry man. So at one point he became very
angry with me during the conversation because I was reading
too on passages from Patricia Hurst's memoir and asking him
to respond to all of the stuff that she said. Yeah,
I didn't seem to like that.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, it sounds like one way or the other, a
series of traumatic events happened to her, and they're admitting
that she's locked in the closet. I mean, just for me,
I would never second guess the way somebody reacts like
that when particularly a woman being intimidated by a group.
Who am I to say how I would have reacted
to that kind of a situation. I just don't know.
(23:44):
I've learned so many lessons about people being wrongfully convicted
because they're put on the stand and they are awful
on the stand. There are people who are just awful
defendants even if they are innocent, and that's happened so much,
and you can't judge someone, I think by the way
they react to a trauma like that. And the truth is,
I don't know the truth, but my reaction would be
(24:06):
to say, this is how she's coping somehow, some way
with that, and this is not some rebellious teenager. But
I also know that the media and the public somehow
want to take wealthy people down by a peg often,
and maybe Patty Hurst was that person. I don't know,
and this was not a story I really lived through,
so it's hard to know.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, I'd love to talk to her, but she's moved
on with her life.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, well, who could blame her, I guess at that point. Okay,
tell me about the Pentagon papers, because I feel like
this is a vague phrase that I've heard in my head.
I think I know what we're talking about, but I
want to hear more obviously.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Okay, Well, this is exactly where I was before I
started reporting on it. Which is why this is fun
to do. So yeah, So the Pentagon Papers were seven
thousand pages of government sponsored studies about the Vietnam War
and all the decisions that went into it, span multiple
presidential administrations, and they document the reasons that we escalated
(25:08):
the war and continued pouring troops in. And in nineteen
sixty nine, a man named Daniel Elsberg, who was an
advisor to the architects of the war, is working at
the Rand Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, and
he's had a change of heart and his conscience is
gnawing at him. He thinks the war is a hopeless
stalemate and he wants to do something to end it.
(25:31):
And so he's got top secret clearance at the Rand Corporation,
He's got a special safe, and he decides he is
going to leak these papers to anti war lawmakers. This
is nineteen sixty nine and Richard Nixon has taken office
promising to end the war with honor. But the war
(25:51):
keeps going on, and Daniel Elsberg decides that he is
going to take measures to stop it. So he smuggled
these seven thousand pages of top secret documents out of
his office at the RAND office in Santa Monica, and
he needs to photocopy them. He wants to get them
into the hands of some elected representatives who might present
(26:16):
them to the American people and let them know what
the Pentagon really thinks about the war, which is Daniel
Elsberg describes as a hopeless stalemate, a war that is continued,
among other reasons, because it would be seen as a
terrible humiliation to an American president to lose the war
(26:36):
in Vietnam. So he needs a photocopy machine because this
is nineteen sixty nine and not every office as a
xerox like we do now. So he turns to a
friend whose name is Linda Senay. She has an ad
agency above a flower shop on Melrose. They go to
a waffle shop and he tells her, listen, I need
(26:56):
the use of your copy machine. This could end the war.
And she agrees, and night after night for weeks they
go to her ad agency, her copy machine, and they
copy all these top secret documents. Linda Seney now goes
by the name Linda Resnik. She's the billionaire businesswoman behind
Palm Wonderful and Fiji Water and all these others, all
(27:18):
these other companies we've heard about, but at the time
nineteen sixty nine, she played a key role in disseminating
the Pentagon papers. So eventually Daniel Ellsberg slips these papers
to the New York Times. They publish a big series.
The Nixon administration is outraged, and Richard Dixon decides that
(27:42):
he needs to plug the leaks, and he launches the Plumbers,
which is the notorious group of operatives that breaks into
Daniel Ellsberg's psychiastris offtist looking for dirt on him. Later,
Nixon's guys, of course, break into the Watergate, and part
of the cover up that wound up sinking the Nixon
(28:02):
administration involved trying to cover up the break in of
Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office. So, in a very real way, the
theft of those papers led to Nixon's disgrace and resignation.
Now a lot of people remember the Pentagon Papers from
maybe the Steven Spielberg movie. Well, he focused on the
(28:24):
Washington Post, although they weren't the ones who originally got it,
But it was about the newspapers publishing these papers and
the fight at the Supreme Court against the Nixon administration,
whof wanted to stop publication. So people remember the case,
especially if you've gone to journalism school, as you know,
one of the landmark freedom of the press cases. But
(28:45):
what people forget is that there was an actual criminal
trial here in Los Angeles in federal court where Daniel
Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo did it with him,
were tried under the Espionage Act. And I interviewed one
of the lawyers who represent at the time, and I
interviewed the man who went on to be a prominent
(29:06):
lawyer who was an assistant at the time helping on
the case. Daniel Elsberg died a couple of years ago,
so I couldn't talk to him. But what wrapped the
case for the government was the Nixon administration attempting overtures
to the federal judge who was presiding over it. Nixon's
men approached the judge, Matt Byrne, and said, Hey, would
(29:29):
you like to be the head of the FBI. And
Ellsberg's lawyers found out about this in front of the
judge who was forced to throw out the case. And
it's incredible that all of this history is somehow now
little known or little remembered. But it's one of the
fun things about doing these stories is one of these
(29:49):
is a portal on history if you look deep enough.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you
was you were I would say, best known for Dirty John,
which was turned into was a series? Right? Was it
a TV series or a movie?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It was a TV series.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, you did a very deep dive on one story.
So is this a big shift for you. I know
that you work for the La Times and you've you know,
done shorter stories before, but for this podcast, now you're
dipping into one story that you have to wrap up
in a certain period of time because you're moving on
the next day.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah. It's definitely a change of pace for me. But
I also like the immediacy of it. I mean I
did three long form narrative podcasts after Dirty John. I
did one called Detective Trap, which I think was five
or six episodes about an Anaheim police detective tracking down
serial killers. And then I did one called The Trials
(30:43):
or Frank Carson, which is about a defense attorney in Modesto,
California who's put on trial for murder and it becomes
one of the longest criminal trials in American history. I
was very proud of that one. But those are all long,
long efforts and long story lines. I think of them
kind of as audio nonfiction novels. Yeah, absolutely, with multiple characters,
(31:06):
multiple plot lines and A stories, B stories, C stories. Yeah,
they're very difficult and complicated to do, and not very
many stories lend themselves to that treatment.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah, you have to be very picky about the ones
that you choose for those and it's not necessarily the
number of murders. It's the quality, not the quantity, I think.
And it's very difficult to figure out what's going to
work over six episodes. I tell my students set all
the time, and they'll listen not to you, but they'll
listen to other podcasts and they'll say, this is ten
minutes too long here or why are they? And I said, well,
(31:40):
six episodes is a lot. And sometimes when you make
that kind of a commitment, you have to figure out
where your music goes a little longer, or your interview goes,
you know, thirty seconds longer than you normally would have it.
So it is a challenge. And I'm sure you do
like the brevity of these stories. You get right to it,
you get the exciting bits. You know, it's one basic
(32:01):
narrative arc, you know, because it's one episode, so I'm
sure it's much easier for you to contain and probably
in a different way very satisfying.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yes, it's difficult in its own way, though, because you
need to find the sources for every episode afresh, and
that's that's sometimes tricky. I'm curious, though, given that you
teach podcasting and you study, you study the medium, in
what ways do you think these long form serials are
going astray?
Speaker 1 (32:27):
What we look at is the victim blaming aspect of it.
We also look at the ethics of concentrating too much
on the killer and glorifying it. I have interviewed some folks,
not on this show, but in other instances where I
sort of felt like they were going a little overboard
(32:47):
on how great the serial killer is, and that really
repulses me. And so we talk a little bit about that.
And one thing that I thought I appreciated about Dirty
John was the balance that you had. You had his family,
but also you spoke of course to Deborah and her
two daughters, and so there's there's a really good balance there.
(33:08):
And I always say that's what we're looking for. Yes,
people come to the show oftentimes to hear what's going
on in this whack job's mind. Who is, you know,
killing people or assaulting people or just creating all of
this mayhem like John did. But at the same time,
we're also trying to honor the victims, who should be
(33:29):
elevated in my opinion, as much as the killer, and
I think we struggle with that in this genre. I
think any yahoo can take a certain amount of money
and put up a podcast and go knock on Gabby
Patito's parents door for a comment when they're not a journalist,
they're not an attorney, you know, they're not a professional.
And I think that's what's really disconcerting to me. We
have a lot of people who don't really have any
(33:49):
kind of training at all about how to handle families,
and then all of a sudden they're handling families and
there's no attorney there, there's no repercussions. And sometimes I
can find an audience that says, great, I'm looking for
that exclusive. It doesn't matter how you get it, you know,
I don't know, do you feel like that or Mike.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Oh no, I mean I agree with you one hundred percent.
In terms of taking the focus off the killers, the
serial killers in particular. I mean I made a decision
long ago that the psychology of sadism was not going
to be my Baileywick. You know, I've met enough of
these guys that they're not as interesting to me as
(34:30):
as they might be to other people. They're not Hannibal elector.
By that, I mean a lot of them just don't
have that much insight into what they do or why
they do it. And they're not particularly interesting in a
lot of ways, right, you know, to the extent they
have reasons. But for instance, the second long podcast I did,
Detective Trap, involves a serial killer named Stephen Gordon. He
(34:52):
abducted and murdered a bunch of women who were involved
in prostitution in Santa Anna and Garden Grove here in
Orange County. At one point is investigator came up to
me after trial and said, Hey, Gordon wants to talk
to you at the county jail. Wants to go see you.
So I went to see him. Of course, it was
a mix up. He actually wanted to see the guy
from the other newspaper. I had a few minutes to
(35:14):
talk to him, and I said, well, maybe I'll find
out something about him, and I asked him why he
did it, and he said, I was angry. What do
you mean you were angry? Why did you kill those women?
I was angry you didn't know them. Why were you
angry at him? I was angry at my probation officer,
my parole officer, because of the restrictions they're putting on me. Like,
what do you do with that answer? Does i't give
you any insight at all into him? Do you want
(35:34):
to spend six hours inside that guy's brain to what end?
For what profit?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Right? I agree? I mean, I've read a couple of
different books from, you know, the FBI folks who interviewed
Bundy and Edmund Kemper, and the things that they learned
from those two men were significant. I remember reading from Kemper,
who was known as the co ed Killer, one of
the worst monikers I've heard. You know, he said that
(36:00):
a lot of killers go back to the scene of
the crime to relive it all. They didn't know that before.
And Tud Bundy said, you know, there are people out
there who are much smarter than I am. You even
haven't you think I'm smart? You should see these other
people out there. You know who you haven't even caught yet.
So I definitely think that there is value, and I
know that's what people are interested in too. I think
(36:21):
there's value in learning about the killers. But like I said,
there's a bounce. Listen. You know, I said I have
had enough. I was talking to someone the other day
and I said, I've had enough of some of these cases.
I mean, I can't even tell you how many times
I've read about John Benet Ramsey and new things. And
then I said to the person, but full disclosure on
the other tab of what I'm watching right now, I'm
(36:42):
going to click over as soon as I'm done with
you and watch the new John Benet Ramsey Netflix. So
what does that say about me? It's a new thing.
I'm going to watch it, just like I watched the
Gabby Patito that came out, and I think, I don't
know if you had watched that story on Netflix. What
blew me away about that case that I wish we
had with all of them was the sheer amount of
information that we have about Gabby Patito. I have never
(37:05):
seen a murder victim who I now feel like I
know so much about because of the credible mass amount
of social media, the text messages, the letters, the family,
everything she posted. I wish we had that about everybody,
and I'm sure you feel the same way too. I
wish we had but material for the victims, because I
do think that would change things in some way. You know.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
So I haven't followed the Gabby Patito case that closely.
What ultimately happened there according to what you.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Know, Well, you know, Gabby Patito goes missing and it
is a massive I think it was twenty twenty one,
summer of twenty twenty one, and it is a massive
social media, you know, explosion because there's this clear and
present danger. She's with her boyfriend, Brian Laundry and they're
you know, driving in a van, and the clear and
(37:54):
present danger is where's this young woman and where is
the van? And he shows up in Florida and he's
not with Gabby, and it all, you know, ends up
coming to a head where ultimately, I believe it's some
folks who are on YouTube who were driving by and
spotted the van and told the FBI about it, and
they were eventually able to locate her. And before they
(38:16):
could even question Brian, you know, he goes into a
wooded area and takes his own life ultimately and leaves
a journal that has a confession of sorts. I would
not call it a real confession, but it's a confession
of sorts, but it created this fervor because she had
so much information out there. You can watch videos. I
(38:38):
mean you really, especially after this series, you really feel
like you know her and you're connected to her. And
I think I wish I could do that with every
single person I talked to, and I'm sure you do too.
And I think you do a great job in Dirty
John where we really do hear from the women, particularly
of this story a lot. And when now I'm working
in historical crime as you are with your series, you can't,
(39:00):
you know, we don't have all of that. So I
think it's interesting how we can navigate that and make
the audience understand how important it is to hear the
victims stories and their family stories.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Right. I totally agree, And for a reporter as well
as for police, social media has kind of been a
bonanza because people are posting their thoughts in text and
on social media messaging. You can chronicle their lives day
by day and week by week in a way that
you could not have twenty thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So will you go back to a long form series
or are you now completely enraptured by the short that's
get it done and be done and move on to
another decade.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
No. I like the long form stuff, but you really
have to find a story that allows you to do it.
My attention span isn't what it used to be. If
you're going to get me to commit to six or
seven hours as a listener, it better be really interesting.
And I'm not going to impose six or seven hours
on my listeners unless I have a damn good story
(40:02):
that has enough going for it that they'll listen all
the way through, and those are few and far between.
They're not that easy to find.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
I agree, and I'm interested in what your checklist is.
I have a checklist for books, specifically, a little list
that has to every little item has to be checked
off in order for me to be willing to write
the book right. One is it's got to be a
time period that I'm really interested in, which for me
is pre nineteen sixties. Essentially. It has to be an
(40:30):
area where I want to spend some time both literally
doing the research and actually digging into the history of it,
people who I find compelling. Of course, the crime that
I find interesting, and certainly that today relevance. Why does
an audience care now about this kind of story. And
the most important thing for me, which is just a
(40:50):
shit ton of sources. I have to have a lot
of primary sources. Even my oldest the book that just
came out for me is from eighteen thirty two, and
I had a huge amount of sources from that.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
What's that one about.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It's called The Sinner's All Bow. It just came out
in January, and it's about a woman named Sarah Maria
Cornell who was found hanging in New England from a
haystack poll on a desolate farm. You know, she had
said to her doctor several months before that she was pregnant,
and she blamed a Methodist minister for sexually assaulting her
(41:26):
and getting her pregnant. And then just this unwinds into
a story of the first true crime narrative book that
was written in the United States, and I'm working with
this journalist from eighteen seventy two about it, and then
it was her story was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter. But a lot of
(41:46):
it is just the heroes in the story are women,
and the villains are absolutely women in the story. Just
her character was raked over the Coles just to get
this guy out of a murder case.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
That is fascinating. We all read the Scarlett Letter in
high school. I actually did not know that there was
a real life case that inspired it.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
And I think that that story, again, the reverberations through
history is what always is powerful for me, because there
are Sarah Maria Cornell's They're pregnant and she ends up
dead after demanding child support essentially from this Methodist minister
in the eighteen thirties, and this is just a story
that happens over and over again. So what is your checklist?
Because I know what mine is. What is for a
(42:27):
long form? What are the things that really make you excited?
Is it that everyone is on board and it doesn't
particularly matter what the murder is or what's your number
one thing? Do you think the deal breaker? If you
can't get it, I'm not doing it.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
You need a story with some underlying questions. It's better
if it's a question you can't really answer, because then
you can have people reflect on the mystery. Maybe it's
a psychological mystery.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And I've written four books, three or four. I think
three of them have been published. It's a big commitment.
It's four years of your life. You have to really
care about the subject. You have to believe in it
when nobody else does. It really has to speak to
some burning curiosity in you. Otherwise it's not worth it
if you add up the advances you get for your books,
(43:15):
at least if you're me and you calculate the hours
that you spend on it. It's not financially that's smart inactivity. No,
But you do it because you have a compulsion and
because you have to, because you can't not do it.
So you got to pick a story that you can't
not need to tell.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them listen if you haven't already. This has been
an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis m. Morosi.
(44:07):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(44:28):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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