May 15, 2024 • 33 mins
Guest Bio and Links:
Joe Scott Morgan is a former death investigator, forensic professor at Jacksonville State University, and author. Joe is also the host of Body Bags with Joe Scott Morgan.
Joseph Giacalone is a retired NYPD sergeant, author, and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Joseph is also the host of True Crime with Sarge.
Lisa Ribacoff is a New York licensed private investigator and polygraph examiner, known for her expertise in handling sensitive cases.
Resources:
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, Sheryl discusses the profound impact that traumatic cases have on first responders. Joined by Joe Scott Morgan, Joseph Giacalone, and Lisa Ribacoff, they dissect their battles with PTSD, the weight of unresolved cases, and the unseen scars left by their careers in forensic and law enforcement fields. They share poignant stories from the field and offer an unfiltered glimpse into the challenges and mental health struggles that come with their line of work.
This content may include explicit material. Listener discretion is advised.
Show Notes:
- (0:00) Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum
- (1:00) Sheryl introduces this episode as “one for the first responders”
- (4:30) Sheryl introduces Joe Scott Morgan to Zone 7
- (6:00) Joe discusses the last day at his job due to health issues
- (13:00) Sheryl introduces Joe Giacalone to Zone 7
- (13:45) Joeseph shares his firsthand experiences from the gritty streets of New York City
- (17:15) 1985 homicide of two boys is discussed
- (22:45) Sheryl introduces Lisa Ribacoff to Zone 7
- (26:00) Lisa discusses the trauma experienced by polygraph examiners
- (27:30) “I'm trained in identifying deception in handwriting and through stories. So I have to almost re-victimize myself in hearing this. And by the time the exam is done, I know if the individual committed said crime or did not commit said crime.”
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review!
---
Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award-winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, a Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.
Social Links:
- Email: coldcase2004@gmail.com
- Twitter: @ColdCaseTips
- Facebook: @sheryl.mccollum
- Instagram: @officialzone7podcast
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Y'all know when you were maybe a new mom, or
had a new job, or whatever was going on in
your life where you felt like you were the only
person that had experienced something or felt a certain way,
And when you got to the right person who maybe
had a similar story, who felt like you did, it
(00:31):
just helped you somehow, even if that person was a stranger,
just to know you weren't alone, you weren't crazy. That's
how I feel when I have the opportunity to sit
and talk with open my heart to people that I
love and admire and trust, it just helps me, not
(00:54):
just in my career, but every facet of my life.
So tonight we have a very special Zone seven. This
is for those first responders that have that case or
five or twenty that stay with them, and tonight I'm
joined by some of the most stellar people that I know.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Thanks for having me, Sheelah, thanks Mike, thanks for.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Having us, thanks for letting me be here.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I want to thank them all for being here and
being a part of my Zone seven and to share
the cases that haunt them. Y'all welcome and thank you
so much. This came about because Joe Scott and Joe
Jackalone and I did a session at the Hamptons who
done it on this very topic. And here's what happened
(01:43):
to me. I'm sitting in the middle of those two
fabulous men, and I start telling my story and I
think I got as far as It was a Monday,
and we arrived at thirty seven eighty three Adamsville Drive,
and I could see in my peripheral Joe Scott turn
(02:03):
and look at me. And that's when it dawned on me.
I'm telling a story that he was a part of.
This has got to be one of the cases that
haunts him too. But y'all, I was already in it then,
and I thought, man, I'm giving him double extra memories,
extra trauma. But I went on with it because it
(02:26):
is a case that has stayed with me since the
day it happened. And basically what happened in this scenario
is we had three adults and four children murdered at
the same time in the same house, in the same family.
The children were age is I think between nine and eleven.
(02:50):
There was a soul survivor, and that was the eleven
year old boy that played dead for hours. He was
confident he could run and try to go get some help,
and he ran to a neighbor's house. My memory, when
it flashes like those polaroids, it just my memory is
(03:11):
there was just bodies everywhere, There was blood everywhere. It
was horrible. The shooter killed himself at the scene. So
there was never going to be a trial. There was
never going to be any justice. There was never going
to be any answers for anybody. And Grandmama slashed mama,
as the media will do, showed up at the house,
(03:33):
started filming from way behind the yellow tape said we
don't know what all's going on, but it was like
ambulance and fire and police. And then of course the
medical examiner shows up and she's watching it, so she
shows up nearly in full cardiac arrest. So again, as
(03:53):
I'm telling this story, at one point, I just leaned
over and touched Joe Scott on the arm because I
knew I knew what I was doing to him. And
then he had to go next like he's going to
do tonight and share. But again, here's what's important when
we tell these stories. Joe Scott's going to say something
(04:14):
and then I'm gonna be like, oh, I remember that
that was tough, but we were there together. It's like
a battle buddy. And then Sarage is going to tell
a story, and then Lisa's going to tell a story,
and then it kind of starts to have this debriefing
almost like group therapy. And so we may tell some jokes,
we may say some things a little off color, but
(04:35):
again that's how we protect ourselves. Since I started with him,
I'm going to pass it off to Joe Scott Morgan.
Y'all know him as the host of Body Bags with
Joe Scott Morgan. He's a former death investigator. He's a
forensic professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, and he's
(04:56):
an author.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Well, thank you, Mac. It's great to be here, and
it's great to be able to to, you know, kind
of chat about these issues. And Lord, I wish, you know,
looking back over time, I wish that they had provided
something to everyone in my field that would have helped us.
And for those of you that don't know, the last
(05:20):
time I left the Medical Examiner's office where I was
a senior investigator, was in the back of an ambulance,
and interestingly enough, I was loaded into the ambulance on
the same ramp that we off loaded bodies off of.
And a little side note, I was sitting at my
desk I just had I just had lunch with one
(05:45):
of my dearest friends in the world, who is now
the chief of police for the Marta Police Department in Atlanta.
MARTA's the rapid transit system in Atlanta. And we've been
across way and had had an enjoyable lunch, you know,
kind of talked about our current status and life, wife,
(06:07):
kids and all this sort of thing. And when I
got back to the office, I sat down in my
little cubicle and all of a sudden, the room started spinning.
I remember calling out, go God, and I kind of,
you know, came out of my chair, couldn't breathe. I
really thought I was having a heart attack. And you know,
I had my colleagues that were working at that time
(06:30):
kind of surround me, and they went on the loudspeaker
and said, we need a doctor and the last thing
you want standing over you if you're in any kind
of physical distress at all as a forensic pathologist. And
I had like three all gathered around me, and I
was thinking, Lord, don't let this be the last thing
(06:50):
I see because I was sick to my back teeth
of them. I was sick to my back teeth of
my office. I had had all that I could stand in.
The best sound I ever heard was an ambulance and
it hauled me away. And you know, it was a
long journey to that point, a twenty plus your career
of seeing nothing but death day in and day out.
(07:12):
And people, I think they they just kind of expect
that you deal with it somehow, and they don't realize
that people in my field, we're flesh and blood, we're human.
And I've come to the conclusion over the years that
it's not acceptable to be in that field for as
(07:34):
long as I was in, and many people have made
a long career out of it. But after about seven years,
that's pretty much all you can take. Anything beyond that
is very self destructive, you know. Following that, I was
diagnosed with PTSD as I lay, you know, in a
hospital bed in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, and I'll never
forget my wife, Kim Mack you and over very well.
(07:58):
We were pregnant with our son, who wound up dying
not too long after he was born, and I was
like a child, I really was. I was just feeble
because I'd had several events leading up to that last
event where I thought I was having a heart attack
and it was panic attacks, is what it was. And
they told me, your heart's healthy. You don't need a
(08:20):
cardiology and a psychiatrist. And my wife, you know, struggling
with everything we were struggling with, you know, went to
the county at that point in time, and you know,
just begged our office administrators and everybody else please help
us because I'd given a good part of my life
to this place. And what it finally came down to
was the people that administered Fulton County government said, yeah,
(08:45):
he might be diagnosed with PTSD, but it's too easy
to fake it. And so I had to get myself healthy.
I did everything that I could and try to shed
shed all of these cases and in the memories and
all this sort of things like Adamsville back and you
(09:05):
know the horror that you see when you walk into
one of these scenes and you can't shed it, you
can't get rid of it. I still teach it police Capiny.
I do it three times a year. It's something I'm
very proud of. I talked about it all the time.
And one of the things that I leave with I
leave with the cadets is that you're given This is
(09:26):
kind of a metaphor, but you're given. Just imagine given
a big burlap sack when you start working in the field,
and that for every death that you work, you put
a one pound stone in it. You carry it on
your back the entire time. And it doesn't have to
be the most horrible homicide. It's just every death. It's
that essence of death that you see in the medical
examiner's office. There's no rescuing little kids, there's no breaking
(09:50):
up domestic disputes. It's all death, day in and day out.
And I tell them that in police work as well.
You carry the stone on your back for years and years,
and it's really hard, you know, to put that bag down.
You're not really allowed because even if you do put
it down, you'll just be given another back. And lots
(10:11):
of people can't identify with that, they don't understand it.
But you're burying some of the burdens of the real world.
You know, the people that live and die day in
and day out. You see them in the worst set
of circumstances, and certainly their loved ones. So when you
had mentioned Adamsville, yeah, I was there and I worked
that scene and it was horrible and it was bloody
(10:33):
and it was brutal, but you couldn't really take the
measure of it at that moment in time. You know,
looking back now, you know I would I would like
to go back and you know, and maybe handled it different.
I wish I had the tools to dealt with it then,
(10:55):
because I was just one of these big old country boys.
You know that I knew that I could do anything.
There was no task that you could give me and
I would not survive it. I was just gonna put
my shoulder to the stone and day in and dowt.
You go out and do the job, and no matter
what you see as a matter of fact, and on
some levels you wear it as a badge of pride,
kind of quietly. It's like you, you know, you think
(11:17):
you have it tough, you think you have in whatever
your job is. Well, let me tell you what I
saw today. And most people, you know, they have no
response to it, except for one person. At one point
in time when I wrote my memoir and I was
eating lunch, this guy was really wealthy. I was with
my uncle. It is his boss, actually, and he loved
to talk to authors. This guy's a multi millionaire. And
(11:40):
he said, if your nephew's come to town, you know,
hav inghim, I'm going to buy him lunch and we'll go.
And we were sitting there, you know, across the table
from one another in New Orleans at a restaurant and
he said, so, why'd you write your memoir? And I
looked at him and I said, because I was angry.
He said, what the hell were you angry about? I said,
(12:02):
I was angry at death. I was angry at the
job that I had done. And he leans in across
the table and he looks at me and says, nobody
made you do it. And it was at that point
that I was considering driving that fork through his forehead
next to my plate. But you know, there was truth
in that. Sure, there was truth in it. I mean,
I made you know. I believe in free will, and
(12:24):
I was a creature of free will when I started,
when I was very young. And you know, it's one
of these things where you choose to be in that
environment for as long as you can stand it, or
as long as your body can stand it. Or your mind,
and you sally forth after that.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I don't think people understand too. When you first start
these jobs, you think, man, this is going to be
so exciting. It's so much better than any of the
jobs my friends have. And to a large degree that's true.
I mean, you're on the dance floor of the big show,
there's no doubt about it, and everybody wants to hear
your stories.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
So Sarge.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Joseph Jackaloe, retired NYPD sergeant, an author, host of True Crime,
was Sarge an adjunct professor at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice. Why don't you take it from there?
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, we used to call it the front row seat
to the greatest show on Earth, right, just like the circus. Yes,
and yeah, when you're younger you handle things differently. I
mean I started out as a young cop in nineteen
ninety two in New York City and when crime was
still bent out of control, and I was assigned to
the Bronx. And for those that don't realize that there's
(13:40):
five counties that make up New York City, I know,
people think New York City has just Manhattan. There's actually
five Borrows. And I was working up in the Bronx
and you know, by nineteen ninety four, two years into
my career, now you know, we were at all time
highs and homicides, dealing you know, in the daily in
and out of that stuff as patrol cop responding to
(14:01):
these things. And you know, when you're young, you don't realize,
you know, what you're really going through at that time.
And and then in law enforcement and just like every
other job, the dirty little secret is there is no
help for anybody. You could spend twenty thirty years and
it's there's no really where you can turn. There's nothing
you could do. And unfortunately, some people choose the bottle,
(14:21):
some people choose other things, and it's just you know,
and that's just how it goes.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
You know, you have to try to balance your work life,
in your in your personal life. And unfortunately sometimes that
I saw a lot of guys, you know, their their
work life take over their personal life and and marriages
and divorce and and everything else that goes along. And
I didn't want to be, you know, involved in that
(14:48):
per se, so I try to stay away from all
that stuff. But you get kind of pulled into the
daily routine of police work. And when I got promoted
the sergeant. It wasn't much better. I got sent to
the Seven three Priests again Roundsville, which was a one
square mile precinct where you deal about eighty ninety homicides
a year in one square mile, So you're stacking bodies
up on top of these things. And then you know,
(15:10):
finally making into the detective squad as a supervisor and
working my way up there and ended up in the
cole case squad, where every case on your desk or
the desk that your detectives work, every case is a
dead person, every person's a homicide, and every case is
a family member. I mean, you'd walk into work and
you'd see your phone blinking and you knew, you know,
(15:31):
there was a family member. It was going to be
demanding action on a case or requesting information on how
things were going. We had eight thousand open homicides in
the Bronx alone, dating back only into the eighties at
the time, so you dealt with a huge work volume.
But it's like everything else, you had these moments in
time that seemed to stick with you. You know, people's faces,
(15:55):
the children's specifically, the smells, the sounds of the screams
of the family members of the mothers. Those are the
things that you don't get over. And you'll hear those
things or smell those things the rest of your life.
And listen, the general public doesn't understand. Some just don't
understand because they don't understand the dynamics, and the other
(16:18):
half doesn't care. And the issue that you're dealing with
is you are unfortunately responsible for your own mental health care.
And it's just like you know, people and people always answer,
what do you mean you can't go see somebody, what
do you mean you can't talk to Well, if you
go to if you're in law enforcement and you tell
somebody that you're having problems, they'll take away your guns.
(16:39):
They'll put you through all kinds of you know, even
more stressed than you're already under. And you take away
people's guns, you take away their livelihood, their careers, the
chance to make overtime and pay the bills. So these
men and women who really struggle, you know, just keep
their mouths shutting and unfortunately and end up killing themselves.
I mean, one year, I think we had seventeen cops
(17:00):
I think that was the record in one year that
had committed suicide. And you know, the job always says, well,
we need to do better, right and this okay, the
media is out, okay, good, all right, everybody back to work.
It's just one of those things. But you come across
a case one time and it just kind of changes you.
And it was for me. It was this double homicide
(17:22):
of these two young boys. The case was from nineteen
eighty five. I remember the date. It was February twenty ath,
nineteen eighty five it happened. Of course, I wasn't even
working back then, but this isn't the cold case squad.
And you could walk into a room, a storage room
that had old homicides, and you could look at the
case files and you could tell the type of homicide.
(17:43):
It was just by the size of the case files.
When you're looking at the eighties and ninety you saw
one that was about a quarter inch thick, you knew
that was either a drug homicide or a gang homicide.
You know, no white witnesses, nobody wanted to come forward,
no information, no DNA and remember no phone records either
or surveillance video in the day, so it was just
that and you would just kind of skip over those things.
(18:04):
But every now and then you find this box or
two boxes of cases, and there's one case and you
see yourself, my god, this one. There's a lot of
work in here. Let's go pick this one apart. And
it's like one of those things where you say, you
see who the victims are and you're drawn to it
because you see this six year old whose name was
(18:24):
Charles Taylor, and his brother he was step brother. His
name was Stephen Mason. He was eight, brutally stabbed to death.
They were found in two thousand Valentine Avenue. They were
on their way to school. They never made it to school,
and they were found at the bottom of the staircase
of the trash compacted room and the bodies were stacked
(18:48):
upon one another. And we had the fortunate experience that
the Bronx at the time had secured a grant and
they were able to videotape crime scenes back then, so
we were able to get the video from that crime
scene that day. So it's not like the same thing
as being there, but you get a chance in living
(19:09):
color to see what it's like. And it's quite the
advantage for the cold case squad to be able to
actually watch the video of a crime scene when you
don't have that ability just about in every other case.
And we worked very hard on that case, and like
everything else, we know who the suspect is. There was
(19:30):
just every turn we made we were hit with an obstacle.
And I always tell people don't give up, and we
didn't give up. Because here it is now, I've been
retired twelve years and I still look at this case.
The suspect who's still out there, I still you know,
google him every now and then to see where he's living,
if he's living, just to go look through some of
these things, because the issue that comes down to is
(19:53):
when people choose murder as a reason, you know, to
solve their problems, they sit in motion, these wheels that
just can't be stopped in certain people in certain times.
And I always said the Cold Case Squad were a
group of cops that just like that you put them
in motion, they just they just continue to stay in motion,
just like inertia. And we tried to find every piece
(20:18):
of evidence that was recorded, and we couldn't find it.
Things were lost in floods and fires. And you remember,
we're talking like better part of twenty years when we
started to reinvestigate this case and the frustration, and you're
looking at the pictures of the kids, and I used
to have their school pictures on my desk, you know,
(20:40):
because you don't want to remember them how they were killed.
You wanted to remember them what they look like. And
every day when you come into the office, that was
my reminder, like, okay, let's get back into this case,
and let's look at this and let's see maybe we
miss something else. And give the couple of sheets to
somebody else and say here, read this. Tell me what
you think or what do you see in this picture?
(21:01):
Do you see anything else? And they with some certain
things in the photos that we saw that we just
couldn't find in the evidence room throughout, and that frustration
just kind of burned it into your head because you
knew if you could only find that you could put
this case together. And when you go to the district
attorney and you talk to them and you sit down
(21:23):
and say, listen, how do I you know, what's the
only thing we can do with this? This is all evidence,
you know, all all roads lead to Rome with this guy,
what do we do? And then you get that, well,
bring him in if he confesses, great, if he doesn't
well what can I tell you? You know, and that's the game.
So we never did that because we knew once you
did that and failed, it's over. This person will never
talk to you again. You'll never get a second chance
(21:45):
at it. And we just kind of left it that way,
which it kind of leaves you with that, you know,
what could I have done? What could I have What
could we have said? What could we have what else
could we have done? Maybe we should have looked harder
for those evidence containers of it. Just I mean, we
(22:06):
spent sometimes we spent days going through these evidence rooms
just hoping to find it, and and it just carries
on to the day and it's it's just part of
the thing. It's just part of an entire box of
stuff that you end up packing up when you leave
and handing in your badge and gun and walking home
(22:27):
with it. Yeah, you have your personal items, but you
also have this imaginary box or like Joe Tolked, this
burlout bag that you drag home with you and it
just never goes away.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Lisa Rabakov a New York licensed private investigator, a polygraph examiner,
a regular media expert, and she's about to add to
her resume the title of wife, so she's been a
little bit busier than the rest of us. Lisa, I
got to tell you you in your career what amazes
(23:05):
me is and this is terrible to say, but I
have never, until known you and your stories, thought about
a polygraph examiner heaven trauma, and I'm ashamed to say it.
So I want them to hear just part of some
of your stories so that they understand.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
What I didn't.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
This is like a family meeting in the living room,
because yes, it literally is, because for us to be
able to offer them even in person or even something
that is a situation of recording a podcast, just to
have this form of therapy amongst not just friends, but
at this point, like we're family. All three of you
(23:52):
and your spouses are invited to my wedding. Like that
is how close and how much I admire and appreciate
our friendships as colleagues, but people in general. Cheryl's podcast
is called Zone seven where we can go ahead and
have those moments and use that dark humor and some
of those unfiltered off colored comments and jokes to cope,
but we also have the opportunity to help and advise
(24:15):
each other on next steps and how to also take
care of ourselves. Going back to what you had mentioned
about forgetting that possibly polygrab examiners go through trauma, we
one hundred percent do. For those that don't know as
we well, or for those of you do know me
in person, I'm definitely on the younger end of the
(24:35):
spectrum pertaining to being an expert in true crime. I'm
only going to be thirty seven. But I also started
my career when I was twenty three, so it was
very difficult at the beginning stages of my career having
that work life balance because I wanted to go out
to nightclubs and partying and enjoy a good cocktail here
(24:57):
and there with some friends and dating. Doing my career.
It was definitely detrimental, But that's require as a whole
different podcast episode and going exactly nothing like being able
to do a background check and a polygap one after
the other before before a second date, because you've got
to get them to the first just to make sure
that they're eligible for the background. You don't want to
(25:18):
just run it off the start, give them a chance,
just a sliver, but going through the emotions of getting
acclimated and having the experiences pertain into agism amongst working
with different law enforcement agencies, or agism with the examinees
sitting across from me. A lot of the times I
was being told You're not old enough to understand what
(25:40):
I'm going through, or you haven't been around the block,
And every single time I would tell them and say, listen,
I haven't been in the rock. I have never walked
in your shoes. In certain circumstances, I would not want
to walk in their shoes. But other times, if I
was innocent, I definitely would because I would absolutely take
the exam. But I like to tell our everyone that
comes into my office even today, and I've been using
(26:03):
this line for almost fourteen years now, that the polygraph
is the most screwed up form of therapy because you
have the opportunity to sit in front of someone that
is completely unbiased and is only there for you. You
are there as part of their emotional support team if
you refer to them by your therapist, if you are
(26:25):
working with law enforcement, if you are working with a family,
you are there to go ahead and emotionally support them
and work with them through the polygraph process. There are
other times where they're criminal exams, and I'm hired by
an attorney, but I'm also there to be the unbiased
investigator and polygraph examiner here on their side of the story. Now,
(26:46):
percentage wise, I would say for the criminal tests that
I've run, seven out of ten of them are individuals
that are sitting in front of me that have been
accused of a sexual assault against a or a child,
sexual molestation, physical abuse. And again it's therapy, so they
(27:08):
have to sit there and they have to offload, and
they have to tell me every little detail. Sometimes I
even have them write it down. So not only do
I have to process it auditorily, I also have them
go ahead and give me a written statement because I'm
trained in identifying deception and handwriting and through stories, so
I have to almost revictimize myself hearing this. And by
(27:33):
the time of the exam is done, I know if
the individual committed said crime or did not commit said crime,
So I can't go ahead and notify law enforcement and say, hey,
this person should be arrested. I'm also not a mandated reporter,
so if I know that they offend it against the
child and this is like an internal family issue, I
(27:53):
can't call the cops and report it. It's up to
the family members that have asked this person to subject
themselves to an exam to handle it within the family.
So I have to go home at the end of
the day and pretty much eat it and swallow it
because I don't go to therapy, and I would feel
awkward going to therapy to speak to someone about when
(28:15):
they go how is your day, and I go, oh, well,
this is what I did. I went to prison in
the morning to test someone in bother and handcuffs and
shackles in a small little shoe box about whether they
did the crime or not. And then I came back
and I had another person that was accused of sexually
assaulting a family member. And typically, like I mentioned, it's
usually a minor, but I can't say or do anything
(28:37):
about it, and I don't want to risk breaking confidentiality
of my clients by speaking to someone else. So it
then becomes the internal struggle, and especially when I was
in my twenties, of do I rely on alcohol, do
I go ahead and hit the bottle, and do I
make myself feel better? And as both Joe and Joe
mentioned in Cheryl, it's the common theme of what do
(29:00):
we do with our trauma When we leave our offices,
when we push our chairry and we leave the desk,
we turn the lights off and we go home. We
have to sit with everything that we've seen, heard, smelled,
and have to take in. It's a full sensory experience
when dealing with trauma, and it's up to us to
be able to have this zone seven, this network of
(29:23):
family and colleagues, to have these conversations with and say
that I need help. And most of the time a
lot of people don't say I need help. I will
say that the time that I did ask for help
was when I had to test victims of Jeffrey Epstein
(29:43):
as well as Harvey Weinstein. And let me tell you,
as a female working with female victims, I can appreciate
the transparency of them coming forward and wanting to advocate
for themselves, to show the narrative is what happened, and
(30:03):
to go ahead and to put not necessarily their name
because most of the times they were listed in documentation
as Jane Doe's, but to go ahead and put the
truth out there and that yes, they had to revictimize
themselves by sitting through an interview with me and showing
me photographs or videos and providing extensive details as to
(30:24):
what exactly did transpire. And again there were multiple victims,
and at this time I think I had tested about
five or six victims back to back, meaning that over
the course of a three week period, I only focused
on these individual victims that were my clients because I
did not want any outside cases to get in the
(30:47):
way of being able to assist them and their advocacy.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
So by the time I was done.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
With all of this work, I eventually came home and
I said, I'm done. I thought I was going to
walk away from my job. I thought I was going
to be done because the general public only knows what's
out there through court documentations or at the David's or testimonies,
things like that. But to hear it directly from the verb,
like I'm going to use the phrase from the horse's mouth,
(31:15):
they're obviously not horses and they don't look like horses.
But to hear it from a first party primary source,
like going back to school, there's primary sources and secondary insertiary.
Secondary is what you see on the media, what you
read in the media. Primary is the individual right there.
They are the living testament to how they have been victimized.
(31:36):
So for me, I had to endure a whole lot
of trauma and taking that in and not being able
to get it out. So I actually, as I mentioned,
I considered even quitting my job and walking away from
it completely because I didn't know how much worse my
what could be down the road, Like I've already been
through this, knowing how horrible the world is in this
(31:59):
entire situation, how can I handle this moving forward or
what can or what coping skills am I going to
need to be able to address future clients and at
the same time having the balance of hearing these victims
stories and the next time I have a perpetrator or
alleged perpetrator being tested because they want to prove that
(32:22):
they didn't how do I make sure that I'm not
coming to the table biased because what I've already dealt
with in different case. So my solution to that was
taking an extended leaf from work and going ahead and
engulfing myself with my family, my colleagues, my friends, spending
time with my dogs, traveling, and just doing things that
(32:43):
I loved to kind of offset how I was feeling emotionally,
and some people may think I was trying to put
a band aid on it and I was just doing
trauma or trauma healing. But at the same time, I
was doing what I needed to do to survive in
that government.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
If you're scared, we've all been scared. If you can't sleep,
all of us have not been able to sleep. You
feel like you can't do enough, You feel like you
didn't ask the right question. You feel like I know
who did it and I can't get across the finish
line to arrest. We've all been there. Reach out to somebody, anybody.
(33:22):
I'm Cheryl McCollum and this is own seven
Y'all know when you were maybe a new mom, or
had a new job, or whatever was going on in
your life where you felt like you were the only
person that had experienced something or felt a certain way,
And when you got to the right person who maybe
had a similar story, who felt like you did, it
(00:31):
just helped you somehow, even if that person was a stranger,
just to know you weren't alone, you weren't crazy. That's
how I feel when I have the opportunity to sit
and talk with open my heart to people that I
love and admire and trust, it just helps me, not
(00:54):
just in my career, but every facet of my life.
So tonight we have a very special Zone seven. This
is for those first responders that have that case or
five or twenty that stay with them, and tonight I'm
joined by some of the most stellar people that I know.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Thanks for having me, Sheelah, thanks Mike, thanks for.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Having us, thanks for letting me be here.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I want to thank them all for being here and
being a part of my Zone seven and to share
the cases that haunt them. Y'all welcome and thank you
so much. This came about because Joe Scott and Joe
Jackalone and I did a session at the Hamptons who
done it on this very topic. And here's what happened
(01:43):
to me. I'm sitting in the middle of those two
fabulous men, and I start telling my story and I
think I got as far as It was a Monday,
and we arrived at thirty seven eighty three Adamsville Drive,
and I could see in my peripheral Joe Scott turn
(02:03):
and look at me. And that's when it dawned on me.
I'm telling a story that he was a part of.
This has got to be one of the cases that
haunts him too. But y'all, I was already in it then,
and I thought, man, I'm giving him double extra memories,
extra trauma. But I went on with it because it
(02:26):
is a case that has stayed with me since the
day it happened. And basically what happened in this scenario
is we had three adults and four children murdered at
the same time in the same house, in the same family.
The children were age is I think between nine and eleven.
(02:50):
There was a soul survivor, and that was the eleven
year old boy that played dead for hours. He was
confident he could run and try to go get some help,
and he ran to a neighbor's house. My memory, when
it flashes like those polaroids, it just my memory is
(03:11):
there was just bodies everywhere, There was blood everywhere. It
was horrible. The shooter killed himself at the scene. So
there was never going to be a trial. There was
never going to be any justice. There was never going
to be any answers for anybody. And Grandmama slashed mama,
as the media will do, showed up at the house,
(03:33):
started filming from way behind the yellow tape said we
don't know what all's going on, but it was like
ambulance and fire and police. And then of course the
medical examiner shows up and she's watching it, so she
shows up nearly in full cardiac arrest. So again, as
(03:53):
I'm telling this story, at one point, I just leaned
over and touched Joe Scott on the arm because I
knew I knew what I was doing to him. And
then he had to go next like he's going to
do tonight and share. But again, here's what's important when
we tell these stories. Joe Scott's going to say something
(04:14):
and then I'm gonna be like, oh, I remember that
that was tough, but we were there together. It's like
a battle buddy. And then Sarage is going to tell
a story, and then Lisa's going to tell a story,
and then it kind of starts to have this debriefing
almost like group therapy. And so we may tell some jokes,
we may say some things a little off color, but
(04:35):
again that's how we protect ourselves. Since I started with him,
I'm going to pass it off to Joe Scott Morgan.
Y'all know him as the host of Body Bags with
Joe Scott Morgan. He's a former death investigator. He's a
forensic professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, and he's
(04:56):
an author.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Well, thank you, Mac. It's great to be here, and
it's great to be able to to, you know, kind
of chat about these issues. And Lord, I wish, you know,
looking back over time, I wish that they had provided
something to everyone in my field that would have helped us.
And for those of you that don't know, the last
(05:20):
time I left the Medical Examiner's office where I was
a senior investigator, was in the back of an ambulance,
and interestingly enough, I was loaded into the ambulance on
the same ramp that we off loaded bodies off of.
And a little side note, I was sitting at my
desk I just had I just had lunch with one
(05:45):
of my dearest friends in the world, who is now
the chief of police for the Marta Police Department in Atlanta.
MARTA's the rapid transit system in Atlanta. And we've been
across way and had had an enjoyable lunch, you know,
kind of talked about our current status and life, wife,
(06:07):
kids and all this sort of thing. And when I
got back to the office, I sat down in my
little cubicle and all of a sudden, the room started spinning.
I remember calling out, go God, and I kind of,
you know, came out of my chair, couldn't breathe. I
really thought I was having a heart attack. And you know,
I had my colleagues that were working at that time
(06:30):
kind of surround me, and they went on the loudspeaker
and said, we need a doctor and the last thing
you want standing over you if you're in any kind
of physical distress at all as a forensic pathologist. And
I had like three all gathered around me, and I
was thinking, Lord, don't let this be the last thing
(06:50):
I see because I was sick to my back teeth
of them. I was sick to my back teeth of
my office. I had had all that I could stand in.
The best sound I ever heard was an ambulance and
it hauled me away. And you know, it was a
long journey to that point, a twenty plus your career
of seeing nothing but death day in and day out.
(07:12):
And people, I think they they just kind of expect
that you deal with it somehow, and they don't realize
that people in my field, we're flesh and blood, we're human.
And I've come to the conclusion over the years that
it's not acceptable to be in that field for as
(07:34):
long as I was in, and many people have made
a long career out of it. But after about seven years,
that's pretty much all you can take. Anything beyond that
is very self destructive, you know. Following that, I was
diagnosed with PTSD as I lay, you know, in a
hospital bed in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, and I'll never
forget my wife, Kim Mack you and over very well.
(07:58):
We were pregnant with our son, who wound up dying
not too long after he was born, and I was
like a child, I really was. I was just feeble
because I'd had several events leading up to that last
event where I thought I was having a heart attack
and it was panic attacks, is what it was. And
they told me, your heart's healthy. You don't need a
(08:20):
cardiology and a psychiatrist. And my wife, you know, struggling
with everything we were struggling with, you know, went to
the county at that point in time, and you know,
just begged our office administrators and everybody else please help
us because I'd given a good part of my life
to this place. And what it finally came down to
was the people that administered Fulton County government said, yeah,
(08:45):
he might be diagnosed with PTSD, but it's too easy
to fake it. And so I had to get myself healthy.
I did everything that I could and try to shed
shed all of these cases and in the memories and
all this sort of things like Adamsville back and you
(09:05):
know the horror that you see when you walk into
one of these scenes and you can't shed it, you
can't get rid of it. I still teach it police Capiny.
I do it three times a year. It's something I'm
very proud of. I talked about it all the time.
And one of the things that I leave with I
leave with the cadets is that you're given This is
(09:26):
kind of a metaphor, but you're given. Just imagine given
a big burlap sack when you start working in the field,
and that for every death that you work, you put
a one pound stone in it. You carry it on
your back the entire time. And it doesn't have to
be the most horrible homicide. It's just every death. It's
that essence of death that you see in the medical
examiner's office. There's no rescuing little kids, there's no breaking
(09:50):
up domestic disputes. It's all death, day in and day out.
And I tell them that in police work as well.
You carry the stone on your back for years and years,
and it's really hard, you know, to put that bag down.
You're not really allowed because even if you do put
it down, you'll just be given another back. And lots
(10:11):
of people can't identify with that, they don't understand it.
But you're burying some of the burdens of the real world.
You know, the people that live and die day in
and day out. You see them in the worst set
of circumstances, and certainly their loved ones. So when you
had mentioned Adamsville, yeah, I was there and I worked
that scene and it was horrible and it was bloody
(10:33):
and it was brutal, but you couldn't really take the
measure of it at that moment in time. You know,
looking back now, you know I would I would like
to go back and you know, and maybe handled it different.
I wish I had the tools to dealt with it then,
(10:55):
because I was just one of these big old country boys.
You know that I knew that I could do anything.
There was no task that you could give me and
I would not survive it. I was just gonna put
my shoulder to the stone and day in and dowt.
You go out and do the job, and no matter
what you see as a matter of fact, and on
some levels you wear it as a badge of pride,
kind of quietly. It's like you, you know, you think
(11:17):
you have it tough, you think you have in whatever
your job is. Well, let me tell you what I
saw today. And most people, you know, they have no
response to it, except for one person. At one point
in time when I wrote my memoir and I was
eating lunch, this guy was really wealthy. I was with
my uncle. It is his boss, actually, and he loved
to talk to authors. This guy's a multi millionaire. And
(11:40):
he said, if your nephew's come to town, you know,
hav inghim, I'm going to buy him lunch and we'll go.
And we were sitting there, you know, across the table
from one another in New Orleans at a restaurant and
he said, so, why'd you write your memoir? And I
looked at him and I said, because I was angry.
He said, what the hell were you angry about? I said,
(12:02):
I was angry at death. I was angry at the
job that I had done. And he leans in across
the table and he looks at me and says, nobody
made you do it. And it was at that point
that I was considering driving that fork through his forehead
next to my plate. But you know, there was truth
in that. Sure, there was truth in it. I mean,
I made you know. I believe in free will, and
(12:24):
I was a creature of free will when I started,
when I was very young. And you know, it's one
of these things where you choose to be in that
environment for as long as you can stand it, or
as long as your body can stand it. Or your mind,
and you sally forth after that.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I don't think people understand too. When you first start
these jobs, you think, man, this is going to be
so exciting. It's so much better than any of the
jobs my friends have. And to a large degree that's true.
I mean, you're on the dance floor of the big show,
there's no doubt about it, and everybody wants to hear
your stories.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
So Sarge.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Joseph Jackaloe, retired NYPD sergeant, an author, host of True Crime,
was Sarge an adjunct professor at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice. Why don't you take it from there?
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, we used to call it the front row seat
to the greatest show on Earth, right, just like the circus. Yes,
and yeah, when you're younger you handle things differently. I
mean I started out as a young cop in nineteen
ninety two in New York City and when crime was
still bent out of control, and I was assigned to
the Bronx. And for those that don't realize that there's
(13:40):
five counties that make up New York City, I know,
people think New York City has just Manhattan. There's actually
five Borrows. And I was working up in the Bronx
and you know, by nineteen ninety four, two years into
my career, now you know, we were at all time
highs and homicides, dealing you know, in the daily in
and out of that stuff as patrol cop responding to
(14:01):
these things. And you know, when you're young, you don't realize,
you know, what you're really going through at that time.
And and then in law enforcement and just like every
other job, the dirty little secret is there is no
help for anybody. You could spend twenty thirty years and
it's there's no really where you can turn. There's nothing
you could do. And unfortunately, some people choose the bottle,
(14:21):
some people choose other things, and it's just you know,
and that's just how it goes.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
You know, you have to try to balance your work life,
in your in your personal life. And unfortunately sometimes that
I saw a lot of guys, you know, their their
work life take over their personal life and and marriages
and divorce and and everything else that goes along. And
I didn't want to be, you know, involved in that
(14:48):
per se, so I try to stay away from all
that stuff. But you get kind of pulled into the
daily routine of police work. And when I got promoted
the sergeant. It wasn't much better. I got sent to
the Seven three Priests again Roundsville, which was a one
square mile precinct where you deal about eighty ninety homicides
a year in one square mile, So you're stacking bodies
up on top of these things. And then you know,
(15:10):
finally making into the detective squad as a supervisor and
working my way up there and ended up in the
cole case squad, where every case on your desk or
the desk that your detectives work, every case is a
dead person, every person's a homicide, and every case is
a family member. I mean, you'd walk into work and
you'd see your phone blinking and you knew, you know,
(15:31):
there was a family member. It was going to be
demanding action on a case or requesting information on how
things were going. We had eight thousand open homicides in
the Bronx alone, dating back only into the eighties at
the time, so you dealt with a huge work volume.
But it's like everything else, you had these moments in
time that seemed to stick with you. You know, people's faces,
(15:55):
the children's specifically, the smells, the sounds of the screams
of the family members of the mothers. Those are the
things that you don't get over. And you'll hear those
things or smell those things the rest of your life.
And listen, the general public doesn't understand. Some just don't
understand because they don't understand the dynamics, and the other
(16:18):
half doesn't care. And the issue that you're dealing with
is you are unfortunately responsible for your own mental health care.
And it's just like you know, people and people always answer,
what do you mean you can't go see somebody, what
do you mean you can't talk to Well, if you
go to if you're in law enforcement and you tell
somebody that you're having problems, they'll take away your guns.
(16:39):
They'll put you through all kinds of you know, even
more stressed than you're already under. And you take away
people's guns, you take away their livelihood, their careers, the
chance to make overtime and pay the bills. So these
men and women who really struggle, you know, just keep
their mouths shutting and unfortunately and end up killing themselves.
I mean, one year, I think we had seventeen cops
(17:00):
I think that was the record in one year that
had committed suicide. And you know, the job always says, well,
we need to do better, right and this okay, the
media is out, okay, good, all right, everybody back to work.
It's just one of those things. But you come across
a case one time and it just kind of changes you.
And it was for me. It was this double homicide
(17:22):
of these two young boys. The case was from nineteen
eighty five. I remember the date. It was February twenty ath,
nineteen eighty five it happened. Of course, I wasn't even
working back then, but this isn't the cold case squad.
And you could walk into a room, a storage room
that had old homicides, and you could look at the
case files and you could tell the type of homicide.
(17:43):
It was just by the size of the case files.
When you're looking at the eighties and ninety you saw
one that was about a quarter inch thick, you knew
that was either a drug homicide or a gang homicide.
You know, no white witnesses, nobody wanted to come forward,
no information, no DNA and remember no phone records either
or surveillance video in the day, so it was just
that and you would just kind of skip over those things.
(18:04):
But every now and then you find this box or
two boxes of cases, and there's one case and you
see yourself, my god, this one. There's a lot of
work in here. Let's go pick this one apart. And
it's like one of those things where you say, you
see who the victims are and you're drawn to it
because you see this six year old whose name was
(18:24):
Charles Taylor, and his brother he was step brother. His
name was Stephen Mason. He was eight, brutally stabbed to death.
They were found in two thousand Valentine Avenue. They were
on their way to school. They never made it to school,
and they were found at the bottom of the staircase
of the trash compacted room and the bodies were stacked
(18:48):
upon one another. And we had the fortunate experience that
the Bronx at the time had secured a grant and
they were able to videotape crime scenes back then, so
we were able to get the video from that crime
scene that day. So it's not like the same thing
as being there, but you get a chance in living
(19:09):
color to see what it's like. And it's quite the
advantage for the cold case squad to be able to
actually watch the video of a crime scene when you
don't have that ability just about in every other case.
And we worked very hard on that case, and like
everything else, we know who the suspect is. There was
(19:30):
just every turn we made we were hit with an obstacle.
And I always tell people don't give up, and we
didn't give up. Because here it is now, I've been
retired twelve years and I still look at this case.
The suspect who's still out there, I still you know,
google him every now and then to see where he's living,
if he's living, just to go look through some of
these things, because the issue that comes down to is
(19:53):
when people choose murder as a reason, you know, to
solve their problems, they sit in motion, these wheels that
just can't be stopped in certain people in certain times.
And I always said the Cold Case Squad were a
group of cops that just like that you put them
in motion, they just they just continue to stay in motion,
just like inertia. And we tried to find every piece
(20:18):
of evidence that was recorded, and we couldn't find it.
Things were lost in floods and fires. And you remember,
we're talking like better part of twenty years when we
started to reinvestigate this case and the frustration, and you're
looking at the pictures of the kids, and I used
to have their school pictures on my desk, you know,
(20:40):
because you don't want to remember them how they were killed.
You wanted to remember them what they look like. And
every day when you come into the office, that was
my reminder, like, okay, let's get back into this case,
and let's look at this and let's see maybe we
miss something else. And give the couple of sheets to
somebody else and say here, read this. Tell me what
you think or what do you see in this picture?
(21:01):
Do you see anything else? And they with some certain
things in the photos that we saw that we just
couldn't find in the evidence room throughout, and that frustration
just kind of burned it into your head because you
knew if you could only find that you could put
this case together. And when you go to the district
attorney and you talk to them and you sit down
(21:23):
and say, listen, how do I you know, what's the
only thing we can do with this? This is all evidence,
you know, all all roads lead to Rome with this guy,
what do we do? And then you get that, well,
bring him in if he confesses, great, if he doesn't
well what can I tell you? You know, and that's the game.
So we never did that because we knew once you
did that and failed, it's over. This person will never
talk to you again. You'll never get a second chance
(21:45):
at it. And we just kind of left it that way,
which it kind of leaves you with that, you know,
what could I have done? What could I have What
could we have said? What could we have what else
could we have done? Maybe we should have looked harder
for those evidence containers of it. Just I mean, we
(22:06):
spent sometimes we spent days going through these evidence rooms
just hoping to find it, and and it just carries
on to the day and it's it's just part of
the thing. It's just part of an entire box of
stuff that you end up packing up when you leave
and handing in your badge and gun and walking home
(22:27):
with it. Yeah, you have your personal items, but you
also have this imaginary box or like Joe Tolked, this
burlout bag that you drag home with you and it
just never goes away.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Lisa Rabakov a New York licensed private investigator, a polygraph examiner,
a regular media expert, and she's about to add to
her resume the title of wife, so she's been a
little bit busier than the rest of us. Lisa, I
got to tell you you in your career what amazes
(23:05):
me is and this is terrible to say, but I
have never, until known you and your stories, thought about
a polygraph examiner heaven trauma, and I'm ashamed to say it.
So I want them to hear just part of some
of your stories so that they understand.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
What I didn't.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
This is like a family meeting in the living room,
because yes, it literally is, because for us to be
able to offer them even in person or even something
that is a situation of recording a podcast, just to
have this form of therapy amongst not just friends, but
at this point, like we're family. All three of you
(23:52):
and your spouses are invited to my wedding. Like that
is how close and how much I admire and appreciate
our friendships as colleagues, but people in general. Cheryl's podcast
is called Zone seven where we can go ahead and
have those moments and use that dark humor and some
of those unfiltered off colored comments and jokes to cope,
but we also have the opportunity to help and advise
(24:15):
each other on next steps and how to also take
care of ourselves. Going back to what you had mentioned
about forgetting that possibly polygrab examiners go through trauma, we
one hundred percent do. For those that don't know as
we well, or for those of you do know me
in person, I'm definitely on the younger end of the
(24:35):
spectrum pertaining to being an expert in true crime. I'm
only going to be thirty seven. But I also started
my career when I was twenty three, so it was
very difficult at the beginning stages of my career having
that work life balance because I wanted to go out
to nightclubs and partying and enjoy a good cocktail here
(24:57):
and there with some friends and dating. Doing my career.
It was definitely detrimental, But that's require as a whole
different podcast episode and going exactly nothing like being able
to do a background check and a polygap one after
the other before before a second date, because you've got
to get them to the first just to make sure
that they're eligible for the background. You don't want to
(25:18):
just run it off the start, give them a chance,
just a sliver, but going through the emotions of getting
acclimated and having the experiences pertain into agism amongst working
with different law enforcement agencies, or agism with the examinees
sitting across from me. A lot of the times I
was being told You're not old enough to understand what
(25:40):
I'm going through, or you haven't been around the block,
And every single time I would tell them and say, listen,
I haven't been in the rock. I have never walked
in your shoes. In certain circumstances, I would not want
to walk in their shoes. But other times, if I
was innocent, I definitely would because I would absolutely take
the exam. But I like to tell our everyone that
comes into my office even today, and I've been using
(26:03):
this line for almost fourteen years now, that the polygraph
is the most screwed up form of therapy because you
have the opportunity to sit in front of someone that
is completely unbiased and is only there for you. You
are there as part of their emotional support team if
you refer to them by your therapist, if you are
(26:25):
working with law enforcement, if you are working with a family,
you are there to go ahead and emotionally support them
and work with them through the polygraph process. There are
other times where they're criminal exams, and I'm hired by
an attorney, but I'm also there to be the unbiased
investigator and polygraph examiner here on their side of the story. Now,
(26:46):
percentage wise, I would say for the criminal tests that
I've run, seven out of ten of them are individuals
that are sitting in front of me that have been
accused of a sexual assault against a or a child,
sexual molestation, physical abuse. And again it's therapy, so they
(27:08):
have to sit there and they have to offload, and
they have to tell me every little detail. Sometimes I
even have them write it down. So not only do
I have to process it auditorily, I also have them
go ahead and give me a written statement because I'm
trained in identifying deception and handwriting and through stories, so
I have to almost revictimize myself hearing this. And by
(27:33):
the time of the exam is done, I know if
the individual committed said crime or did not commit said crime,
So I can't go ahead and notify law enforcement and say, hey,
this person should be arrested. I'm also not a mandated reporter,
so if I know that they offend it against the
child and this is like an internal family issue, I
(27:53):
can't call the cops and report it. It's up to
the family members that have asked this person to subject
themselves to an exam to handle it within the family.
So I have to go home at the end of
the day and pretty much eat it and swallow it
because I don't go to therapy, and I would feel
awkward going to therapy to speak to someone about when
(28:15):
they go how is your day, and I go, oh, well,
this is what I did. I went to prison in
the morning to test someone in bother and handcuffs and
shackles in a small little shoe box about whether they
did the crime or not. And then I came back
and I had another person that was accused of sexually
assaulting a family member. And typically, like I mentioned, it's
usually a minor, but I can't say or do anything
(28:37):
about it, and I don't want to risk breaking confidentiality
of my clients by speaking to someone else. So it
then becomes the internal struggle, and especially when I was
in my twenties, of do I rely on alcohol, do
I go ahead and hit the bottle, and do I
make myself feel better? And as both Joe and Joe
mentioned in Cheryl, it's the common theme of what do
(29:00):
we do with our trauma When we leave our offices,
when we push our chairry and we leave the desk,
we turn the lights off and we go home. We
have to sit with everything that we've seen, heard, smelled,
and have to take in. It's a full sensory experience
when dealing with trauma, and it's up to us to
be able to have this zone seven, this network of
(29:23):
family and colleagues, to have these conversations with and say
that I need help. And most of the time a
lot of people don't say I need help. I will
say that the time that I did ask for help
was when I had to test victims of Jeffrey Epstein
(29:43):
as well as Harvey Weinstein. And let me tell you,
as a female working with female victims, I can appreciate
the transparency of them coming forward and wanting to advocate
for themselves, to show the narrative is what happened, and
(30:03):
to go ahead and to put not necessarily their name
because most of the times they were listed in documentation
as Jane Doe's, but to go ahead and put the
truth out there and that yes, they had to revictimize
themselves by sitting through an interview with me and showing
me photographs or videos and providing extensive details as to
(30:24):
what exactly did transpire. And again there were multiple victims,
and at this time I think I had tested about
five or six victims back to back, meaning that over
the course of a three week period, I only focused
on these individual victims that were my clients because I
did not want any outside cases to get in the
(30:47):
way of being able to assist them and their advocacy.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
So by the time I was done.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
With all of this work, I eventually came home and
I said, I'm done. I thought I was going to
walk away from my job. I thought I was going
to be done because the general public only knows what's
out there through court documentations or at the David's or testimonies,
things like that. But to hear it directly from the verb,
like I'm going to use the phrase from the horse's mouth,
(31:15):
they're obviously not horses and they don't look like horses.
But to hear it from a first party primary source,
like going back to school, there's primary sources and secondary insertiary.
Secondary is what you see on the media, what you
read in the media. Primary is the individual right there.
They are the living testament to how they have been victimized.
(31:36):
So for me, I had to endure a whole lot
of trauma and taking that in and not being able
to get it out. So I actually, as I mentioned,
I considered even quitting my job and walking away from
it completely because I didn't know how much worse my
what could be down the road, Like I've already been
through this, knowing how horrible the world is in this
(31:59):
entire situation, how can I handle this moving forward or
what can or what coping skills am I going to
need to be able to address future clients and at
the same time having the balance of hearing these victims
stories and the next time I have a perpetrator or
alleged perpetrator being tested because they want to prove that
(32:22):
they didn't how do I make sure that I'm not
coming to the table biased because what I've already dealt
with in different case. So my solution to that was
taking an extended leaf from work and going ahead and
engulfing myself with my family, my colleagues, my friends, spending
time with my dogs, traveling, and just doing things that
(32:43):
I loved to kind of offset how I was feeling emotionally,
and some people may think I was trying to put
a band aid on it and I was just doing
trauma or trauma healing. But at the same time, I
was doing what I needed to do to survive in
that government.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
If you're scared, we've all been scared. If you can't sleep,
all of us have not been able to sleep. You
feel like you can't do enough, You feel like you
didn't ask the right question. You feel like I know
who did it and I can't get across the finish
line to arrest. We've all been there. Reach out to somebody, anybody.
(33:22):
I'm Cheryl McCollum and this is own seven
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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