September 21, 2024 • 27 mins
Matt Murphy, former DA and author of THE BOOK OF MURDER, A Prosecutor’s Journey Through Love and Death, reveals his quest for justice through gripping accounts of his investigative work. He offers an honest account of what being a homicide prosecutor demands. Matt also shares his deeply personal story of finding fulfillment and peace in his calling.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Matt
Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and current legal analysts
for ABC News. He spent more than two decades assigned
to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange County,
(00:24):
California District Attorney's Office, where he tried some of the
most compelling murder cases in America. Now in private practice,
he regularly appears as a legal analyst on national television shows,
including twenty twenty, Good Morning America, and various programs on Hulu.
Matt volunteers his time helping survivors of sexual assault navigate
(00:47):
the confusing and often overwhelming criminal justice system. Our guest
today is Matt Murphy, former Senior Deputy District Attorney, ABC
News legal analyst, and the author of the book of Murder,
A Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
How you doing, Matt, Good good, Happy to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
So, maybe for our listeners, you can tell them just
a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Sure, So, I grew up in southern California and I
joined the Orange County DAIS office. I was hired in
nineteen ninety three and sworn in as a young, eager
deputy DA back in the day, and Orange County does
a slightly different structural approach to especially violent crime. They
use what's called a vertical unit system, where once you
(01:32):
go through misdemeanors and juvenile court and you learn a
little bit about like the crafts of trying cases, they
put you through it's called the felony panel, where your
job is just to try one felony jury trial after another,
with the idea of being like, try to get as
skillful as you can in front of a jury. And
so the vertical unit started, like the specialized felonies like
(01:52):
sexual assault, gangs, major fraud, things like that, you get
a police officer assigned just to you in the dai's office.
After the filony panel, I went to the sexual assault
unit and I spent a little shy of four years
prosecuting rapists and child molesters, mostly child molesters, and then
I got the call to kind of go to the
(02:12):
bigs and that was the homicide unit. I got assigned
the cities of Newport Beach, Laguna Coast, Mesa, and Irvine
and any murders that happened from twenty and two to
twenty nineteen that took place in those cities were automatically
mine and I would roll out in the middle of
the night with my investigator, you know, and we saw
a huge array from domestic violence murders to Russian mob hits,
(02:36):
and then we had quite a few serial killer cases
that were assigned us. And then about halfway through my
seventeen years, I volunteered to be one of the cold
case stufies. So then that gave me the I could
go to other cities that nobody wanted to do the
case and dust off old boxes and work them up
with detectives, and that was just really fascinating work.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So you mentioned going into homicide, go into the big leagues,
at least from a detective or a leasing career standpoint
and district attorney standpoint. Was that something that you were
always interested in? What compelled you to take that step
and go into the homicide unit?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So I stumbled into the career of a prosecutor. I
really did I got When I was in law school,
I had a really tempting offer from a civil PLANEFFS
firm in LA and I wonder sometimes how different my
life would have been if I'd taken that you know,
those like crossroads in life. And then at the end
of my first day my junior law clerk summer nineteen
(03:35):
ninety two, I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
It was fascinating and it was a lot of really
good people in the office back then, and I liked
the philosophy of it. They wanted to teach us to
be trial lawyers. And the longer I stayed, the better
it got. You know, the more skill you get. The
I tried one hundred and thirty I think one hundred
and thirty three by the end, one hundred and thirty
(03:57):
three jury trials in about two hundred and fifty cases
to verdict. And with each one you learn things and
you get a little better, and you know, the judges
trust you a little more, and that the cases is
you go up, the ranks get more interesting. You start
out doing you know, do you misdemean or do UI cases,
and you wind up, for me, doing these diabolical conspiracies
to kill people for money, and it just kept getting
(04:19):
more and more interesting. So my three year plan turned
into twenty six years, and now I'm at a point
where I still miss it pretty much every day.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
This is something that I've thought about in the past.
When you enter into a scene of a murder, and
you mentioned it's often at night. You have to get
up hurry out to make sure that you get all
the evidence and everything. Do you have a sense of
propidation or nervous anticipation as you walk into that through
that Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Gosh, yeah, that's actually really it's a great question, Mike.
It's and it's a funny one for me. It's my
very first murder scene. I was so I'm thirty three
years old and I've just gotten promoted into the unit,
and my very first week in home Side, I went
to my first scene. And that's one of the fascinating
parts about working in a vertical system because when you're
when the detectives know who their DA is already, they
(05:06):
need immediate help on things like search warrants, and sometimes
you want to be involved early to make sure that
no fundamental mistakes are made, that the right of investigative
avenues were pursued, and that the defendants' constitutional rights are
strictly adhered to. So I would I wanted to get
involved as early as possible, and my old bosses would
encourage us to go to the murder scenes. My very
first one. I'm driving down there and I look, I
(05:28):
look like I'm twelve years old still, and I haven't
met my detectives yet. It was a Newport Beach homicide
and it looked like a domestic. So I'm about to
go in and see my third dead body I'd ever
seen in my entire life, and the first one is
at a funeral, and I all I wanted to do
was make sure I didn't puke, because if you watch TV,
that's what happens. The new guy to the mergency and
(05:50):
always vomits right. And I walked in and it was
immediately there's a poor poor man have been murderis on
the on his back in the kitchen at the bottom
of a staircase, and it was he had a folding
knife in his left hand, but he had a wallet
chain that went to his right back pocket. And as
soon as I saw him, and I'm thinking, don't puke,
(06:12):
don't puke, don't puke, and I looked down and it
was like, well, that doesn't look right at all, you know,
like why would why would have left he carry his
wallet in his right back pocket? And why would somebody
who if he if he's a righty, why would have
a knife in his in his left hand. So immediately
it jumped out of me. And that's kind of the
job when you when you go in and to look
(06:32):
at it. It's little things like that. And we determined
later that that knife was planted by the killer to
try to justify the fact that she shot him about
a million times. So yeah, there's tons of trumpetitions, especially
at first mine. I didn't want to embarrass myself and
be subjected to hazing for years and years from my
detectives and everybody else. But then some of the other ones,
you know, the scariest part for me over time, and
(06:56):
I must have I had to have been close about
one hundred murdercing so that I personally attended over the years.
The real trupidition comes from when you see family members
roll up to the scene who don't know and you see,
you know, the like a daughter told for the first
time that her mom is dead and that her boyfriend
(07:16):
is on the loose, And that's what I began to
sort of you worry about that moment. And then what
I would always do is once the case was underway,
the first thing I would do is meet with the
family and I would give them my personal cell phone number,
just so they knew that there was somebody that cared.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
One last question on the scene of the murder, is
there a palpable lingering energy or a sense of evil
or something that you can feel.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So I'll tell you what. The very first murder scene,
that same one I walked in, and it was it
was so thick in the air that almost like this
emotional energy, you know, still lingering in the air because
something you could just feel that something horrible had happened there.
But over time, in retch respect, I think I'm looking
through the lens of like the enormity of that moment.
(08:04):
I'm responsible to a large extent for what happened at
this thing, for you know, who we're going to charge,
if we're going to charge, if there's enough evidence. By
the end, I really it became very clinical when you
go in, and I once asked, I had worked with
a wonderful investigator named Larry Montgomery for years. He was
former Irvine PD and he's one of the most experienced
(08:24):
homicide detectives I ever got to work with, and he
was We were signed together for years and did a
bunch of big cases together. I asked him, once here
we get spooked you ever you know, you ever see
And he's a very inquisitive, hyper intelligent guy, and and
he looked me out on every free he said, I've
never felt the thing so kind of interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So tell us a little bit about your new book,
The Book of Murder.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, So basically, I go through some of the highlights
of my career in the homicide unit, and I start
out with some of the basics. I kind of walked
the reader through what I personally experienced on that. I
tell that story about walking into that and that's in
the intro, actually my very first homics i'd seen. What's
interesting about it, like I think, is that we live
in a time, especially with an election coming out, that
(09:10):
we're so divided as a country, and in a weird way,
these cases are almost a refuge for those that are
sort of burned out on politics. I talked a little
bit about how I was really proud about how we
are job as a prosecutors to get totally random people together.
That is in your jury venire right, the jurors that
show up for jury duty that are going to cover
the entire societal spectrum, from the very poor of the
(09:32):
very rich, Democrats, Republicans, independence, every racial category you can imagine,
and getting a group of people to follow the law
hopefully and hear evidence and make a fair decision. It
was strangely restored my faith in humanity a lot over time.
So I go through some of the basics of what
I learned when I got into the the Homsted Unit,
(09:54):
for example, like I watched Silence of the Lambs. So
when it comes to serial killers, I kind of figured
that everybody was like Buffalo Bill, right, Like we all
saw that, you know, the guy who's killing women to
wear their skin, and he lives in a creepy house
on a hill and drives a creepy van around, and
you know, I thought that was what a serial killer
was like. And even though that's based on a real guy,
(10:17):
it's really not. Most serial killers are more like the
true blue guys are like Ted Bundy, who was handsome
and intelligent and had girlfriends and was never abused. Counterintuitively,
and Rex Huherman's Gilgo Beach. He's one of the latest
in the news so far, the background him is exactly
the same, and that I kind of walked the readers
(10:38):
through my own education on things like serial killers or
mafia murders, and also I have a chapter on gang crimes,
and then I get into the really interesting cases, some
of the cold cases we did, which included conspiracies to
kill for money, and I walked the reader through, for example,
the murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks on their yacht
out of Newport Beach. That was one of mine, and
(10:59):
behind the scenes on that, like how we put the
pieces together on that and the detectives that work with
from just top notch. So it's a little bit of
the inside baseball. And you know, they say truth is
stranger than fiction, and the way those cases came together,
it's they're fascinating. It was fascinating to live and it's
almost the stories are almost too good not to tell.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You mentioned sort of different categories of murder, serial killer
or a gang lend hit or something like that. Do
you see similarities between the different cases and the different
motivations and the different types of personalities that are murdered.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
That like, that is a great question and the answer
is yes. So for example, in gang crimes and gang
murders are for me, they were sort of the least
interesting of the different in the taxonomy of murders. You
know you've got a child abuse murder is a completely
different animal than like a gang murder or a mafia murder,
which is again totally different than some tweaker who robs
(11:56):
the seven to eleven and kills the poor clerk, And
those are totally different than the mess violence murders. And
when you start to do enough of them, another one
is a no body murder. That's the motivation can be
sort of domestic violence or business or whatever. But how
to investigate them. Once you try a couple, you get
a sense for what the jury is really going to
look for, and you really you do see patterns. For example,
(12:18):
gang cases, a lot of gangsters love to brag about
what they did, so there's a series of gang tattoos.
One of them is a pistol pointing outwards. Not a
whole lot of creative energy required for that one. But
in the gang world, if you get a tattoo that
you haven't earned, it's almost like a stolen ballor thing
in the military, and it's they can face severe beatings
and even death. If you claim a gang you're not in,
(12:41):
or if you claim to have shot or stabbed somebody
when you haven't like that can be very bad for them.
So when you for the gangsters, there's a lot of
photos taken of those guys in previous arrests. They want
to document the tattoos, and then when there's a brand
new one with a gun pointing out, you sort of
know to look for that, especially if it takes a
little while to put it together. Another thing you see
on the lot to murder for money. Those are fascinating
(13:03):
because especially if it's a couple that gets into it
and they conspire to murder somebody. And I had a
few of these, and they every single time they can't
wait to spend it. So you'll if you look hard enough,
you can almost always dig up some real estate agent
or a car dealer or some business person where they
(13:23):
come in, hey, we're gonna have a bunch of money
after the first of the year. We're gonna want to
invest in your company, or we're looking for a new house.
We're going to move in after the first of the year.
And then it turns out the murder happens around Christmas
and you look into their finances and they have nothing,
So it's like less, they got a crystal ball. They
know something that none of the rest of us knew,
and that is, you know, the source of the money
is about to die for life insurance or whatever it
(13:45):
may be. So it's you really do start to see patterns,
and that's one of them. They cannot wait to spend
the money. So you know, when you when you're you're
doing those cases long enough, you start looking for the
same things.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
When you get these perpetrators and you have them arrested
and they end up going to jail, do they regret
what they did, not regret getting caught, but regret what
they actually did. Do they feel guilty about it? Do
you ever see that kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
In a word? No, there are certainly some Like I
had a duy case. It was what's called a Watson
where I got really drunk and drove recklessly and he
killed the whole family. I think he had genuinely regret.
I had a domestic violence one where the guy finally
confessed after we convicted him at sentencing. I've seen that
as more self serving, knowing that he was going to
(14:31):
get a parole hearing one day and that was that
took us fifteen years to make that arrest because he
covered his tracks well enough that nobody wanted to take
a run on it. For the other ones, no, you
don't see any remorse for the gangsters that kill each other.
They're proud of it. Frankly, Russian mob's. That was my
first trial in the homestead. You know, it was a
(14:52):
Russian mafia killing, and that was basically business. There's no
remorse there. Serial killers are incapable feeling remorse for their victims.
They have a complete lack of empathy, which is scientifically
really interesting. You know, the domestic violence ones, Yeah, some
of those maybe they feel bad, but that's all a
part of their own like toxic cycle of relationship and
(15:13):
they it's it's hard to garner much sympathy for those
guys once they you know, strangle their wife or or
a woman who shoots her husband in a sleep or
something like that. Like I think a lot of times
expressions of remorse aren't aren't typically real, you know, for
the rest of them, I think they really they regret
getting caught. They may regret the act because they've they've
(15:35):
you know, completely screwed up their own life. If they
get if they get caught doing it, but as far
as genuine remorse for victims, it is shockingly rare.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, that's pretty interesting. You know, for the rest of
us in general public that aren't murderers per se, I
think that must count for the fascination that people have
with crime and violent crime.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And that actually brings up a good point. It's a
lot of us. One of the one of the fallacies
we engage in is we project our own moral code
onto people that have already done something horrible. So, like,
you know, you see this, especially in California where I live.
You see well meaning people who sort of put empathy,
you know, spend their empathy on people that are in prison,
(16:15):
and they have no idea how vicious and how nasty
you really have to be to get a custodial sentence
of any length in California State prison, Like you've got
to be. You almost got to work for it. You
or I. If we went to prison, we would sit
there if we ever heard anybody. We would wake up
every day in guilt and go to sleep every night
on a better regret. Right, And that's not how they think,
(16:38):
because if they thought like that, they wouldn't be in
prison in the first place. You know, they are they
they've already justified it in their own mind, which is
why they committed the killing in the first place. And yeah,
it's it's that that's a very common mistake I see
people make, and I mean the California State Legislature makes
it over and over again by you know, making our
sentences for these really some of these really bad guys
(17:00):
lighter and lighter, and you know, increasing their chances of parole.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And so this work must have weighed on you mentally
and emotionally. How were you able to reconcile that and
work through that and live a life outside of what
you're doing for work?
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, yeah, and the answer is not very well. I'm
afraid I was. I was. I wasn't a very good
romantic partner during that time. And when you have to
roll out and you have to go to the scene
to help your detectives, you're on call twenty four to seven.
And I had an old girlfriend. It was her birthday
(17:35):
and she had grandparents who lived in Lakita, California, which
is about two hours away from LA And we went
out there and the planets We're going to spend a
long weekend and hang out with her grandparents and I
get around a golf in and you know, spend you know,
some nice time out there, and I get a call
in the middle of her birthday dinner that we had
what turned out to be a really diabolical murder in Coasta, Mesa.
(17:58):
And you know, it was like, hey, sorry, you know,
put that net to go box because we're going. And uh,
you know, for me, it wasn't even a there was
no question that I had to go. And you know,
not surprisingly, that relationship didn't last very long, but I
tried to surf as much as I could and carve
out some time for surf trips during that that that
(18:20):
definitely kind of centers me personally. But you know, the
the weird part about it is that it impacts you.
But the stress isn't seeing the dead bodies. It's really
the the responsibility that goes along that. Like when you
go to a scene and then you sit with the
family and you kind of explain the process to them
and you see what this poor the poor parents are
(18:42):
going through, or a sister or a brother, and you
see just this apoplectic grief. The responsibility that you carry
on bringing justice to that family. That that's what used
to keep me up at night. Uh, And then I
never I never did get married, I never had kids.
I was really kind of married to the job. And
for the a lot of my colleagues that came into
(19:03):
the unit, there's only eight of us out of for
Orange Counties. So Orange County as a population of about
three million people, and there's only there's only eight doing homicides,
nine if you include the boss, or ten if you
include the the hicular manslaughter position. But anyway, it was
a very small group. And for the people that went
in single, if they if they were single when they
went in, they tended to remain single because it's just
(19:25):
so hard on relationships. And for those that were married,
a lot of them either got divorced or left the unit.
And then there were a couple of very notable outliers,
a couple of my buddies that somehow managers to get
through the unit, being great lawyers, great husbands, great dads,
and some I mean remarkably intelligent people. I personally didn't
(19:45):
have the bandwidth.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I think I know the answer to this question. But
do you think about the victims often?
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Oh? I think about them all the time. I'm in
touch with with quite a few of the families on
my cases, and you know, it takes a long time.
A lot of people have this image of sort of
the on order version of trials, like bad guy caught trial,
you know, right after the the you know the thirty
minute mark in the hour and you get twenty two
minutes to wrap it up with commercials, right, And the
reality is it takes in especially in Orange County, it
(20:12):
takes years for murder cases to come to actually get
to trial. Most of the time I had one case,
it took us ten years from the point of the
arrest of the time that the trial actually went. Because
the judges want to be very careful, especially in capital cases.
They don't want to make any mistakes and doing reversal,
and part of that is giving the defense everything they
need all the time. They want to conduct their own investigations,
(20:33):
making sure that they have all the discovery and ensuring
that it's done right. For no other reason, just to
make sure that the poor family doesn't have to go
through it again. But you want to do right, You
want to follow a law for sure, you want to
make sure that it's fair.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I can tell from talking to you and I know
I've seen some of the feedback in early reviews that
you're really a great storyteller. Where does that come from?
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, thank you, thank you very much. I had to source.
It probably goes back to our Money nine meetings and
fraternity house where we would all stand in a circle
and tell stories about the weekend. Yeah. That I when
it comes to to jury, the craft of trying jury trials,
and I learned from the very best, a guy named
Chris Evans, who is one of the people that trained us,
(21:14):
who's now Spirit Court judge man named Rick King, also
now Spirit Court Judge lou Rosenbloom. I mentioned before, like
these guys are they're just masters at the craft. They'll
walk around the courtroom and they tell the jury a
story like it's a story. They talk about the case
like it's a story. I think that just watching those
guys enough and then you know, seeing what work in
the courtroom over and over again, I think the book
(21:36):
writing is strangely natural, and it was kind of fun,
you know. I got to relive some of these things
and getting into the concept. And I explained to the
reader in my book, how like the you know, first
groom murder is distinguish from a secondar groom murder, and
I use the analogies I would use for juris so
they would understand it. And the truth is, it was
the way I learned it myself in law school to
just trying to dumb it down for myself. So if
(21:59):
I can, I can understand it. Anybody can. So that's
a fun part about writing the book.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Any lessons from your perspective.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Number one, One of the things I learned is the
vast majority of people are good and they want to
do the right thing, you know, So we'll like these murders.
You start out and you see the worst thing that
can happen. You can see. You see somebody that's been
murdered by another human being, and then you go through
this grief process with the family. But immediately after the murder,
you see these crime lab personnel who show up at
three am without complaint, doing their job, followed by detectives
(22:30):
without complaint, doing their job, and then you get into it.
You wind up in front of a preliminary hearing judge
who understands it, wants to do the right thing, binds
them over, does everything right, you know, and then you
ultimately wind up in front of members of the community
arguing the case, and in closing argument, you'll start with
one person nodding, and then two, and then three, and
pretty soon you got twelve bobbing heads. Those are good
people who want to follow the law and do the
(22:51):
right thing, and so your faith in humanity gets restored
a little bit with each one of these. It starts
out taking a big hit with the murder, and then
you see all these wonderful people coming together, whether they're judges, juries,
or police officers or crime lab forensic scientists, everybody coming
together to set things right under the law, which is
hugely important for families. So that's one. Another kind of
(23:13):
scarier one is one of the serial killers that I
did Zam was Rodney Alcala, also times a dating game killer,
and Rodney Alcala was He had a life sentence in
the state of California in nineteen seventy four for kidnapping, raping,
and almost murdering an eight year old girl named Talley Shapiro.
And this was as brutal as a crime gets. That
guy got parolled after thirty four months by the California
(23:35):
Department of Corrections. My lead investigator on. That is man
named Craig Robson, who's now a very distinguished Superior Court
judge in Orange County. And the man is one of
the smartest people I've ever met. He is brilliant and
when you sort of extrap played out, Rodney was released
in nineteen seventy four and he went on to commit
thirteen murders that we know it for sure, but there
were He traveled across country, back and forth. He was
(23:58):
given permission by his role officer to drive back back
and forth across the country. And it's the height of
this killing spree. Robison, Detective Robison now Judge Robison, estimates
it's about one hundred people that were murdered because Rodney
o'call was released in nineteen seventy four, and that, in
my view, is very you know, I never thought we
(24:19):
would see a time where we were returning to that
revolving door model of justice. And I am all for
giving people psychic chances, but there are certain people, psychopaths
in particular, that there's no redeeming those guys. There's no
there's no They're hardwired to do it, they enjoy it,
and if they ever get the chance, they will absolutely
(24:43):
do it again, and it seems like that's a lesson
that we have forgotten.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Last question, what do you have to do these days? No,
you're not attorney anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
No, that's still a journey anymore, not a day, not
a da anymore. I did a bunch of pro bono
work on behalf of a group of sexualis victims that
occupied a lot of my time during COVID, and then
I'm doing some criminal defense, a little bit of Planeff's work,
but mostly criminal defense on behalf of police officers. The
ABC News stuff is super fun. They really are an
(25:13):
amazingly professional organization and they've been super nice to me.
So I'm doing a lot of work out there in
New York City. They bring me in on cases do commentary,
and that sort of keeps me in the game a
little bit. Doing these administrative hearings for police officers. I've
enjoyed that quite a bit, you know. And also I'm
very selective about the cases that I take to do
criminal defense on. I'm not a very good businessman. I've
(25:34):
learned because I've turned down some really lucrative opportunities that
could have paid me a lot of money, but I
just didn't like the case I didn't. I thought they
did it. I didn't. Fortunately, am in a position that
I can be very choosy about which cases that I
take on. But yeah, so it's been a very interesting ride.
I'm looking forward to hopefully writing another book. The next one.
(25:56):
I think we're going to focus it on serial killers.
It's a fascinating topic for me, and I think I
could write it in a way that it's interesting for
other people. I did thirteen murders that satisfied the FBI definition,
and then I did six that are the real true
blue serial killer types, and I only talk about one
of them in this book. I think there's enough there
(26:16):
for a second one. And the history of that, the
study of it, I think is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, the name of the book is The Book of Murder,
A Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death. Matt Murphy, thank
you so much for your insights. Fascinating and I wish
you all the best with the book.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Thank you so much. Mike really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Well, that's all for this week. I'm Mike Christian inviting
you to join us again next week on What's at Risk.
Also check out our podcast at Wbznewsradio dot iHeart dot com.
What's on your mind? Send us your thoughts, comments, and
questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com. That's
(27:05):
one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
A big thank you to our producer, Ken Carberry of
Chart Productions
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Matt
Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and current legal analysts
for ABC News. He spent more than two decades assigned
to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange County,
(00:24):
California District Attorney's Office, where he tried some of the
most compelling murder cases in America. Now in private practice,
he regularly appears as a legal analyst on national television shows,
including twenty twenty, Good Morning America, and various programs on Hulu.
Matt volunteers his time helping survivors of sexual assault navigate
(00:47):
the confusing and often overwhelming criminal justice system. Our guest
today is Matt Murphy, former Senior Deputy District Attorney, ABC
News legal analyst, and the author of the book of Murder,
A Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
How you doing, Matt, Good good, Happy to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
So, maybe for our listeners, you can tell them just
a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Sure, So, I grew up in southern California and I
joined the Orange County DAIS office. I was hired in
nineteen ninety three and sworn in as a young, eager
deputy DA back in the day, and Orange County does
a slightly different structural approach to especially violent crime. They
use what's called a vertical unit system, where once you
(01:32):
go through misdemeanors and juvenile court and you learn a
little bit about like the crafts of trying cases, they
put you through it's called the felony panel, where your
job is just to try one felony jury trial after another,
with the idea of being like, try to get as
skillful as you can in front of a jury. And
so the vertical unit started, like the specialized felonies like
(01:52):
sexual assault, gangs, major fraud, things like that, you get
a police officer assigned just to you in the dai's office.
After the filony panel, I went to the sexual assault
unit and I spent a little shy of four years
prosecuting rapists and child molesters, mostly child molesters, and then
I got the call to kind of go to the
(02:12):
bigs and that was the homicide unit. I got assigned
the cities of Newport Beach, Laguna Coast, Mesa, and Irvine
and any murders that happened from twenty and two to
twenty nineteen that took place in those cities were automatically
mine and I would roll out in the middle of
the night with my investigator, you know, and we saw
a huge array from domestic violence murders to Russian mob hits,
(02:36):
and then we had quite a few serial killer cases
that were assigned us. And then about halfway through my
seventeen years, I volunteered to be one of the cold
case stufies. So then that gave me the I could
go to other cities that nobody wanted to do the
case and dust off old boxes and work them up
with detectives, and that was just really fascinating work.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So you mentioned going into homicide, go into the big leagues,
at least from a detective or a leasing career standpoint
and district attorney standpoint. Was that something that you were
always interested in? What compelled you to take that step
and go into the homicide unit?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So I stumbled into the career of a prosecutor. I
really did I got When I was in law school,
I had a really tempting offer from a civil PLANEFFS
firm in LA and I wonder sometimes how different my
life would have been if I'd taken that you know,
those like crossroads in life. And then at the end
of my first day my junior law clerk summer nineteen
(03:35):
ninety two, I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
It was fascinating and it was a lot of really
good people in the office back then, and I liked
the philosophy of it. They wanted to teach us to
be trial lawyers. And the longer I stayed, the better
it got. You know, the more skill you get. The
I tried one hundred and thirty I think one hundred
and thirty three by the end, one hundred and thirty
(03:57):
three jury trials in about two hundred and fifty cases
to verdict. And with each one you learn things and
you get a little better, and you know, the judges
trust you a little more, and that the cases is
you go up, the ranks get more interesting. You start
out doing you know, do you misdemean or do UI cases,
and you wind up, for me, doing these diabolical conspiracies
to kill people for money, and it just kept getting
(04:19):
more and more interesting. So my three year plan turned
into twenty six years, and now I'm at a point
where I still miss it pretty much every day.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
This is something that I've thought about in the past.
When you enter into a scene of a murder, and
you mentioned it's often at night. You have to get
up hurry out to make sure that you get all
the evidence and everything. Do you have a sense of
propidation or nervous anticipation as you walk into that through
that Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Gosh, yeah, that's actually really it's a great question, Mike.
It's and it's a funny one for me. It's my
very first murder scene. I was so I'm thirty three
years old and I've just gotten promoted into the unit,
and my very first week in home Side, I went
to my first scene. And that's one of the fascinating
parts about working in a vertical system because when you're
when the detectives know who their DA is already, they
(05:06):
need immediate help on things like search warrants, and sometimes
you want to be involved early to make sure that
no fundamental mistakes are made, that the right of investigative
avenues were pursued, and that the defendants' constitutional rights are
strictly adhered to. So I would I wanted to get
involved as early as possible, and my old bosses would
encourage us to go to the murder scenes. My very
first one. I'm driving down there and I look, I
(05:28):
look like I'm twelve years old still, and I haven't
met my detectives yet. It was a Newport Beach homicide
and it looked like a domestic. So I'm about to
go in and see my third dead body I'd ever
seen in my entire life, and the first one is
at a funeral, and I all I wanted to do
was make sure I didn't puke, because if you watch TV,
that's what happens. The new guy to the mergency and
(05:50):
always vomits right. And I walked in and it was
immediately there's a poor poor man have been murderis on
the on his back in the kitchen at the bottom
of a staircase, and it was he had a folding
knife in his left hand, but he had a wallet
chain that went to his right back pocket. And as
soon as I saw him, and I'm thinking, don't puke,
(06:12):
don't puke, don't puke, and I looked down and it
was like, well, that doesn't look right at all, you know,
like why would why would have left he carry his
wallet in his right back pocket? And why would somebody
who if he if he's a righty, why would have
a knife in his in his left hand. So immediately
it jumped out of me. And that's kind of the
job when you when you go in and to look
(06:32):
at it. It's little things like that. And we determined
later that that knife was planted by the killer to
try to justify the fact that she shot him about
a million times. So yeah, there's tons of trumpetitions, especially
at first mine. I didn't want to embarrass myself and
be subjected to hazing for years and years from my
detectives and everybody else. But then some of the other ones,
you know, the scariest part for me over time, and
(06:56):
I must have I had to have been close about
one hundred murdercing so that I personally attended over the years.
The real trupidition comes from when you see family members
roll up to the scene who don't know and you see,
you know, the like a daughter told for the first
time that her mom is dead and that her boyfriend
(07:16):
is on the loose, And that's what I began to
sort of you worry about that moment. And then what
I would always do is once the case was underway,
the first thing I would do is meet with the
family and I would give them my personal cell phone number,
just so they knew that there was somebody that cared.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
One last question on the scene of the murder, is
there a palpable lingering energy or a sense of evil
or something that you can feel.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So I'll tell you what. The very first murder scene,
that same one I walked in, and it was it
was so thick in the air that almost like this
emotional energy, you know, still lingering in the air because
something you could just feel that something horrible had happened there.
But over time, in retch respect, I think I'm looking
through the lens of like the enormity of that moment.
(08:04):
I'm responsible to a large extent for what happened at
this thing, for you know, who we're going to charge,
if we're going to charge, if there's enough evidence. By
the end, I really it became very clinical when you
go in, and I once asked, I had worked with
a wonderful investigator named Larry Montgomery for years. He was
former Irvine PD and he's one of the most experienced
(08:24):
homicide detectives I ever got to work with, and he
was We were signed together for years and did a
bunch of big cases together. I asked him, once here
we get spooked you ever you know, you ever see
And he's a very inquisitive, hyper intelligent guy, and and
he looked me out on every free he said, I've
never felt the thing so kind of interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So tell us a little bit about your new book,
The Book of Murder.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, So basically, I go through some of the highlights
of my career in the homicide unit, and I start
out with some of the basics. I kind of walked
the reader through what I personally experienced on that. I
tell that story about walking into that and that's in
the intro, actually my very first homics i'd seen. What's
interesting about it, like I think, is that we live
in a time, especially with an election coming out, that
(09:10):
we're so divided as a country, and in a weird way,
these cases are almost a refuge for those that are
sort of burned out on politics. I talked a little
bit about how I was really proud about how we
are job as a prosecutors to get totally random people together.
That is in your jury venire right, the jurors that
show up for jury duty that are going to cover
the entire societal spectrum, from the very poor of the
(09:32):
very rich, Democrats, Republicans, independence, every racial category you can imagine,
and getting a group of people to follow the law
hopefully and hear evidence and make a fair decision. It
was strangely restored my faith in humanity a lot over time.
So I go through some of the basics of what
I learned when I got into the the Homsted Unit,
(09:54):
for example, like I watched Silence of the Lambs. So
when it comes to serial killers, I kind of figured
that everybody was like Buffalo Bill, right, Like we all
saw that, you know, the guy who's killing women to
wear their skin, and he lives in a creepy house
on a hill and drives a creepy van around, and
you know, I thought that was what a serial killer
was like. And even though that's based on a real guy,
(10:17):
it's really not. Most serial killers are more like the
true blue guys are like Ted Bundy, who was handsome
and intelligent and had girlfriends and was never abused. Counterintuitively,
and Rex Huherman's Gilgo Beach. He's one of the latest
in the news so far, the background him is exactly
the same, and that I kind of walked the readers
(10:38):
through my own education on things like serial killers or
mafia murders, and also I have a chapter on gang crimes,
and then I get into the really interesting cases, some
of the cold cases we did, which included conspiracies to
kill for money, and I walked the reader through, for example,
the murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks on their yacht
out of Newport Beach. That was one of mine, and
(10:59):
behind the scenes on that, like how we put the
pieces together on that and the detectives that work with
from just top notch. So it's a little bit of
the inside baseball. And you know, they say truth is
stranger than fiction, and the way those cases came together,
it's they're fascinating. It was fascinating to live and it's
almost the stories are almost too good not to tell.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You mentioned sort of different categories of murder, serial killer
or a gang lend hit or something like that. Do
you see similarities between the different cases and the different
motivations and the different types of personalities that are murdered.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
That like, that is a great question and the answer
is yes. So for example, in gang crimes and gang
murders are for me, they were sort of the least
interesting of the different in the taxonomy of murders. You
know you've got a child abuse murder is a completely
different animal than like a gang murder or a mafia murder,
which is again totally different than some tweaker who robs
(11:56):
the seven to eleven and kills the poor clerk, And
those are totally different than the mess violence murders. And
when you start to do enough of them, another one
is a no body murder. That's the motivation can be
sort of domestic violence or business or whatever. But how
to investigate them. Once you try a couple, you get
a sense for what the jury is really going to
look for, and you really you do see patterns. For example,
(12:18):
gang cases, a lot of gangsters love to brag about
what they did, so there's a series of gang tattoos.
One of them is a pistol pointing outwards. Not a
whole lot of creative energy required for that one. But
in the gang world, if you get a tattoo that
you haven't earned, it's almost like a stolen ballor thing
in the military, and it's they can face severe beatings
and even death. If you claim a gang you're not in,
(12:41):
or if you claim to have shot or stabbed somebody
when you haven't like that can be very bad for them.
So when you for the gangsters, there's a lot of
photos taken of those guys in previous arrests. They want
to document the tattoos, and then when there's a brand
new one with a gun pointing out, you sort of
know to look for that, especially if it takes a
little while to put it together. Another thing you see
on the lot to murder for money. Those are fascinating
(13:03):
because especially if it's a couple that gets into it
and they conspire to murder somebody. And I had a
few of these, and they every single time they can't
wait to spend it. So you'll if you look hard enough,
you can almost always dig up some real estate agent
or a car dealer or some business person where they
(13:23):
come in, hey, we're gonna have a bunch of money
after the first of the year. We're gonna want to
invest in your company, or we're looking for a new house.
We're going to move in after the first of the year.
And then it turns out the murder happens around Christmas
and you look into their finances and they have nothing,
So it's like less, they got a crystal ball. They
know something that none of the rest of us knew,
and that is, you know, the source of the money
is about to die for life insurance or whatever it
(13:45):
may be. So it's you really do start to see patterns,
and that's one of them. They cannot wait to spend
the money. So you know, when you when you're you're
doing those cases long enough, you start looking for the
same things.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
When you get these perpetrators and you have them arrested
and they end up going to jail, do they regret
what they did, not regret getting caught, but regret what
they actually did. Do they feel guilty about it? Do
you ever see that kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
In a word? No, there are certainly some Like I
had a duy case. It was what's called a Watson
where I got really drunk and drove recklessly and he
killed the whole family. I think he had genuinely regret.
I had a domestic violence one where the guy finally
confessed after we convicted him at sentencing. I've seen that
as more self serving, knowing that he was going to
(14:31):
get a parole hearing one day and that was that
took us fifteen years to make that arrest because he
covered his tracks well enough that nobody wanted to take
a run on it. For the other ones, no, you
don't see any remorse for the gangsters that kill each other.
They're proud of it. Frankly, Russian mob's. That was my
first trial in the homestead. You know, it was a
(14:52):
Russian mafia killing, and that was basically business. There's no
remorse there. Serial killers are incapable feeling remorse for their victims.
They have a complete lack of empathy, which is scientifically
really interesting. You know, the domestic violence ones, Yeah, some
of those maybe they feel bad, but that's all a
part of their own like toxic cycle of relationship and
(15:13):
they it's it's hard to garner much sympathy for those
guys once they you know, strangle their wife or or
a woman who shoots her husband in a sleep or
something like that. Like I think a lot of times
expressions of remorse aren't aren't typically real, you know, for
the rest of them, I think they really they regret
getting caught. They may regret the act because they've they've
(15:35):
you know, completely screwed up their own life. If they
get if they get caught doing it, but as far
as genuine remorse for victims, it is shockingly rare.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, that's pretty interesting. You know, for the rest of
us in general public that aren't murderers per se, I
think that must count for the fascination that people have
with crime and violent crime.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And that actually brings up a good point. It's a
lot of us. One of the one of the fallacies
we engage in is we project our own moral code
onto people that have already done something horrible. So, like,
you know, you see this, especially in California where I live.
You see well meaning people who sort of put empathy,
you know, spend their empathy on people that are in prison,
(16:15):
and they have no idea how vicious and how nasty
you really have to be to get a custodial sentence
of any length in California State prison, Like you've got
to be. You almost got to work for it. You
or I. If we went to prison, we would sit
there if we ever heard anybody. We would wake up
every day in guilt and go to sleep every night
on a better regret. Right, And that's not how they think,
(16:38):
because if they thought like that, they wouldn't be in
prison in the first place. You know, they are they
they've already justified it in their own mind, which is
why they committed the killing in the first place. And yeah,
it's it's that that's a very common mistake I see
people make, and I mean the California State Legislature makes
it over and over again by you know, making our
sentences for these really some of these really bad guys
(17:00):
lighter and lighter, and you know, increasing their chances of parole.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And so this work must have weighed on you mentally
and emotionally. How were you able to reconcile that and
work through that and live a life outside of what
you're doing for work?
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, yeah, and the answer is not very well. I'm
afraid I was. I was. I wasn't a very good
romantic partner during that time. And when you have to
roll out and you have to go to the scene
to help your detectives, you're on call twenty four to seven.
And I had an old girlfriend. It was her birthday
(17:35):
and she had grandparents who lived in Lakita, California, which
is about two hours away from LA And we went
out there and the planets We're going to spend a
long weekend and hang out with her grandparents and I
get around a golf in and you know, spend you know,
some nice time out there, and I get a call
in the middle of her birthday dinner that we had
what turned out to be a really diabolical murder in Coasta, Mesa.
(17:58):
And you know, it was like, hey, sorry, you know,
put that net to go box because we're going. And uh,
you know, for me, it wasn't even a there was
no question that I had to go. And you know,
not surprisingly, that relationship didn't last very long, but I
tried to surf as much as I could and carve
out some time for surf trips during that that that
(18:20):
definitely kind of centers me personally. But you know, the
the weird part about it is that it impacts you.
But the stress isn't seeing the dead bodies. It's really
the the responsibility that goes along that. Like when you
go to a scene and then you sit with the
family and you kind of explain the process to them
and you see what this poor the poor parents are
(18:42):
going through, or a sister or a brother, and you
see just this apoplectic grief. The responsibility that you carry
on bringing justice to that family. That that's what used
to keep me up at night. Uh, And then I
never I never did get married, I never had kids.
I was really kind of married to the job. And
for the a lot of my colleagues that came into
(19:03):
the unit, there's only eight of us out of for
Orange Counties. So Orange County as a population of about
three million people, and there's only there's only eight doing homicides,
nine if you include the boss, or ten if you
include the the hicular manslaughter position. But anyway, it was
a very small group. And for the people that went
in single, if they if they were single when they
went in, they tended to remain single because it's just
(19:25):
so hard on relationships. And for those that were married,
a lot of them either got divorced or left the unit.
And then there were a couple of very notable outliers,
a couple of my buddies that somehow managers to get
through the unit, being great lawyers, great husbands, great dads,
and some I mean remarkably intelligent people. I personally didn't
(19:45):
have the bandwidth.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I think I know the answer to this question. But
do you think about the victims often?
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Oh? I think about them all the time. I'm in
touch with with quite a few of the families on
my cases, and you know, it takes a long time.
A lot of people have this image of sort of
the on order version of trials, like bad guy caught trial,
you know, right after the the you know the thirty
minute mark in the hour and you get twenty two
minutes to wrap it up with commercials, right, And the
reality is it takes in especially in Orange County, it
(20:12):
takes years for murder cases to come to actually get
to trial. Most of the time I had one case,
it took us ten years from the point of the
arrest of the time that the trial actually went. Because
the judges want to be very careful, especially in capital cases.
They don't want to make any mistakes and doing reversal,
and part of that is giving the defense everything they
need all the time. They want to conduct their own investigations,
(20:33):
making sure that they have all the discovery and ensuring
that it's done right. For no other reason, just to
make sure that the poor family doesn't have to go
through it again. But you want to do right, You
want to follow a law for sure, you want to
make sure that it's fair.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I can tell from talking to you and I know
I've seen some of the feedback in early reviews that
you're really a great storyteller. Where does that come from?
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, thank you, thank you very much. I had to source.
It probably goes back to our Money nine meetings and
fraternity house where we would all stand in a circle
and tell stories about the weekend. Yeah. That I when
it comes to to jury, the craft of trying jury trials,
and I learned from the very best, a guy named
Chris Evans, who is one of the people that trained us,
(21:14):
who's now Spirit Court judge man named Rick King, also
now Spirit Court Judge lou Rosenbloom. I mentioned before, like
these guys are they're just masters at the craft. They'll
walk around the courtroom and they tell the jury a
story like it's a story. They talk about the case
like it's a story. I think that just watching those
guys enough and then you know, seeing what work in
the courtroom over and over again, I think the book
(21:36):
writing is strangely natural, and it was kind of fun,
you know. I got to relive some of these things
and getting into the concept. And I explained to the
reader in my book, how like the you know, first
groom murder is distinguish from a secondar groom murder, and
I use the analogies I would use for juris so
they would understand it. And the truth is, it was
the way I learned it myself in law school to
just trying to dumb it down for myself. So if
(21:59):
I can, I can understand it. Anybody can. So that's
a fun part about writing the book.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Any lessons from your perspective.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Number one, One of the things I learned is the
vast majority of people are good and they want to
do the right thing, you know, So we'll like these murders.
You start out and you see the worst thing that
can happen. You can see. You see somebody that's been
murdered by another human being, and then you go through
this grief process with the family. But immediately after the murder,
you see these crime lab personnel who show up at
three am without complaint, doing their job, followed by detectives
(22:30):
without complaint, doing their job, and then you get into it.
You wind up in front of a preliminary hearing judge
who understands it, wants to do the right thing, binds
them over, does everything right, you know, and then you
ultimately wind up in front of members of the community
arguing the case, and in closing argument, you'll start with
one person nodding, and then two, and then three, and
pretty soon you got twelve bobbing heads. Those are good
people who want to follow the law and do the
(22:51):
right thing, and so your faith in humanity gets restored
a little bit with each one of these. It starts
out taking a big hit with the murder, and then
you see all these wonderful people coming together, whether they're judges, juries,
or police officers or crime lab forensic scientists, everybody coming
together to set things right under the law, which is
hugely important for families. So that's one. Another kind of
(23:13):
scarier one is one of the serial killers that I
did Zam was Rodney Alcala, also times a dating game killer,
and Rodney Alcala was He had a life sentence in
the state of California in nineteen seventy four for kidnapping, raping,
and almost murdering an eight year old girl named Talley Shapiro.
And this was as brutal as a crime gets. That
guy got parolled after thirty four months by the California
(23:35):
Department of Corrections. My lead investigator on. That is man
named Craig Robson, who's now a very distinguished Superior Court
judge in Orange County. And the man is one of
the smartest people I've ever met. He is brilliant and
when you sort of extrap played out, Rodney was released
in nineteen seventy four and he went on to commit
thirteen murders that we know it for sure, but there
were He traveled across country, back and forth. He was
(23:58):
given permission by his role officer to drive back back
and forth across the country. And it's the height of
this killing spree. Robison, Detective Robison now Judge Robison, estimates
it's about one hundred people that were murdered because Rodney
o'call was released in nineteen seventy four, and that, in
my view, is very you know, I never thought we
(24:19):
would see a time where we were returning to that
revolving door model of justice. And I am all for
giving people psychic chances, but there are certain people, psychopaths
in particular, that there's no redeeming those guys. There's no
there's no They're hardwired to do it, they enjoy it,
and if they ever get the chance, they will absolutely
(24:43):
do it again, and it seems like that's a lesson
that we have forgotten.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Last question, what do you have to do these days? No,
you're not attorney anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
No, that's still a journey anymore, not a day, not
a da anymore. I did a bunch of pro bono
work on behalf of a group of sexualis victims that
occupied a lot of my time during COVID, and then
I'm doing some criminal defense, a little bit of Planeff's work,
but mostly criminal defense on behalf of police officers. The
ABC News stuff is super fun. They really are an
(25:13):
amazingly professional organization and they've been super nice to me.
So I'm doing a lot of work out there in
New York City. They bring me in on cases do commentary,
and that sort of keeps me in the game a
little bit. Doing these administrative hearings for police officers. I've
enjoyed that quite a bit, you know. And also I'm
very selective about the cases that I take to do
criminal defense on. I'm not a very good businessman. I've
(25:34):
learned because I've turned down some really lucrative opportunities that
could have paid me a lot of money, but I
just didn't like the case I didn't. I thought they
did it. I didn't. Fortunately, am in a position that
I can be very choosy about which cases that I
take on. But yeah, so it's been a very interesting ride.
I'm looking forward to hopefully writing another book. The next one.
(25:56):
I think we're going to focus it on serial killers.
It's a fascinating topic for me, and I think I
could write it in a way that it's interesting for
other people. I did thirteen murders that satisfied the FBI definition,
and then I did six that are the real true
blue serial killer types, and I only talk about one
of them in this book. I think there's enough there
(26:16):
for a second one. And the history of that, the
study of it, I think is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, the name of the book is The Book of Murder,
A Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death. Matt Murphy, thank
you so much for your insights. Fascinating and I wish
you all the best with the book.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Thank you so much. Mike really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Well, that's all for this week. I'm Mike Christian inviting
you to join us again next week on What's at Risk.
Also check out our podcast at Wbznewsradio dot iHeart dot com.
What's on your mind? Send us your thoughts, comments, and
questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com. That's
(27:05):
one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
A big thank you to our producer, Ken Carberry of
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