BONUS: Chowchilla Kidnapping w FBI Profiler Jim Clemente

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
My name is Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Welcome to Mind Ever Murder.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
We're joined today by special guest Jim Clemente, former FBI agent,
former state and federal prosecutor, and a writer on CBS's
Criminal Minds. Jim, thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 5 (00:55):
Thank you for having me. Kristen, and it's great to
see you and Bill. It's great to be on Mind
over Murder.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Did I get all of your hats right? You? Have
so many irons in the fire.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I feel like you kind of.

Speaker 5 (01:06):
Gave me more one more hat than I do have.
But I'm not I wasn't a federal prosecutor. I worked
with federal prosecutors, but I was not a federal prosecutor.
But I did become a I did play one on TV.
I think at least once.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
You've also played bad guys and good guys I have.

Speaker 5 (01:23):
Yeah, that's my whole spectrum of acting. Yeah, and I've
become a writer and producer, both of audio and visual projects.
And I really love being able to be creative that
way and to use what I've learned in the real
world to try to educate people while they're being entertained
in the media world.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
And all of your work is absolutely tremendous. We are
big fans for anyone who is not familiar, though, tell
us about your career as a prosecutor and then as
a member of the BAU so that we can all
get on the same page here.

Speaker 5 (01:57):
I started out in the BRONX as a prosecutor for
the City of New York, and I did cases that
you know, everything from extortion to child's x farms cases
and had one attempted murder case, but it didn't go
to trial. Then I became an FBI agent and worked
in violent crimes in the first few years, and then

(02:17):
went under cover as a broker on Wall Street for
three years and actually at the World Trade Center. I
was trading crude all futures on the floor of the exchange.
Then IMEX, and then I did violent crime work and
basically got involved in the Whitewater investigation and then cold
case homicides in Washington, d C. Then I was promoted

(02:38):
to supervisory special agent in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and
my last twelve years in the Bureau were spent working
various cases from serial murder to serial rape, to serial
child abduction and sexual victimization. That's when I basically became
an expert witness in those fields, and I continued to
testify as an expert witness to consulting as an expert witness,

(03:02):
as well as for TV and for audio project like Audible.
Is that enough?

Speaker 3 (03:09):
No, that's perfect? And I feel like I definitely did
not give you enough hats a couple of minutes ago.
My goodness.

Speaker 6 (03:16):
So, Jim, your specialty at the VAU, as you just mentioned,
was child sexual abuse, victimization, abduction, and homicide, And so
we wanted to have you on today to continue talking
with us about the Childchilla mass kidnapping case from nineteen
seventy six. Particularly, we'd like your insights on the effect

(03:36):
of that abduction on those twenty six child victims. So
I'll start with this first question. Children in the Chelchilla
kidnapping case all returned alive. None of them were sexually abused,
but they were all abducted and they were buried underground
for thirty six hours. Can you talk to us about
how children who've been victimized respond to and process their

(03:57):
involvement in a crime.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
Wow. First of all, I have to start with this.
Children grow up in a land of giants everyone. It's
like everyone is bigger than shack to them, so they
don't have a lot of power. And what they're taught
is that adults, the big people are there to help
them and protect them and there to listen to them,

(04:20):
and so forth. When someone who is bigger and stronger
and scary takes advantage of them, takes them out of
what is typically a safe environment, their school bus on
the way to or from school, with their bus driver
who probably is a nice person who you know is
doing the job because he likes kids and wants to
make sure they get to and from safely. When they're

(04:43):
in that environment, and then they're hit with the ultimate
shock of being abducted, of being threatened, and then of
being buried alive for more than a day. For a
day and a half, it had to have been the
most traumatic experience that anybody can imagine. Think about it.
They're little kids, they are without any potential savior, they

(05:07):
are at the mercy of bad people doing bad things,
and then they're covered in dirt. They're literally buried in
a way that they can't see anything. The air is
probably really musty and very hard to breathe. After a
period of time, they're scared, they see no end in sight.
They literally probably see absolutely nothing. It was probably just

(05:30):
pitch black with no hope. So here are these little
people in a land of giants, and these giants have
taken advantage of them. Trauma comes from being in a
situation where something terrible, unanticipated and totally outside your control
happens and you are just literally helpless. This would be

(05:54):
for a child who shouldn't ever have to know any
of those emotions. This would be extremely devastating, and when
they are actually rescued, it doesn't actually cure it because
now the trust that they had, the world that they knew,
is over. They thought that everyone was there to help them.

(06:16):
They thought that everyone was there to be good role model, mentors, teachers, coaches, parents, neighbors,
everybody was there to be on their side. That's what
they were told. That's the sort of fantasy they were
living under, and it became a fantasy and untrue fantasy

(06:36):
when they got abducted, when they just randomly happened to
be on the bus that these guys decided they would
take because they didn't give a damn about what the
ramifications were to the children. So I would say that
traumatic events like that especially sustained. It's one thing if
a child is in an accident, and we all know
accidents happen, and even children can process that even if

(06:59):
bad things happen to them, But when it's sustained, when
for thirty six hours, it is torturous to be kept
in the dark, is torturous to not know if you're
ever going to see your parents again. It's torturous to
know that all your friends are within reach, and none
of you can do anything about it. All of those
things compound the trauma and make it incredibly ingrained in

(07:24):
their brains. We know since then, this happened in nineteen
seventy six. Since then, we've done a lot of study
and work on trauma and post traumatic stress, and we
know that what happens during a traumatic incident, especially somebody
who's young and can't really prepare for it, and certainly
nobody could have ever prepared for this. Your brain says, Okay,

(07:46):
this is a terribly dangerous situation. And there is an
emotional side of your brain and a practical side of
your brain. And at this point, your brain says, I
have to put up a wall between the emotional and
the practical side. I have to deaden my emotions so
I can try to save myself. And what happens is

(08:08):
this barrier between the emotional and practical side remains after
the trauma. It is implanted in your brain, and so
children will have deadened affect. They will either be extremely
emotional all the time. The tiniest little thing can set
them off, or they will be distant and almost catatonic
in their behavior. And literally the entire spectrum in between

(08:32):
can happen. But what it is, what the functional result
of having this barrier in your brain is that you
can't reconcile the two side, and you go through life
then feeling always feeling like something is off, always feeling
like you can't feel, or you feel too much, or

(08:52):
you can't think right or ether you're operating in a
cloud and there's no connectivity in your life. And so
it's a multifaceted, incredibly complex reaction going on in their brains.
And they're so young that their brains are still building pathways,
all right, So our brains people, A lot of people
think of memory and our brains as these little computers,

(09:15):
but they're not.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
They're organic.

Speaker 5 (09:17):
They actually grow pathways. And the more you use a
particular part of your brain, are different parts of your
brain because every sense gets stored, every sense of a
memory get stored in a different part of your brain.
And what your brain does, Let's say you use your
musical artist, so you use the part of your brain
that hears things and knows melodies and all that stuff

(09:38):
and rhythm and all that stuff is all stored in
different part of your brain. But you have super highways
between them because they're communicating a lot. What happens at
this point when you have trauma and this brain has
not fully developed, the pathways that would normally develop through
normal experiences are now blocked, and you're gonna have issues.

(09:59):
There's gonna the issues. You're in a trusting, loving, caring environment,
and then you're not that environment gets violated, there's probably
a wall there. It's going to be really hard for
you to trust people. You're not going to develop the
same kinds of abilities to trust people and to weigh
who's good, who's bad, what I can do, what I
shouldn't do, all those things. It just interferes with almost

(10:20):
everything you do. And that's a real issue for kids
who are developing, who should have a lot of positive
role models, a lot of positive experiences. Now they have
this big blockade that will probably come up in horrible
dreams and horrible waking memories of this completely helpless, isolating,

(10:41):
terrifying event that happened to them. It should never have
happened to them.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
And this all happened in nineteen seventy six, and the
kids ranged in age from six to fourteen, and one
of the things that Kristin and I were both shocked
about when we were doing research for these episodes, was
that in nineteen seventy six, they just didn't seem to
have any thinking about the trauma that these kids had
been through. We both were floored when we found out

(11:06):
they sent them off to Disney World as if that
was going to be the cure for this terrible.

Speaker 5 (11:14):
Nice day, right, Yeah, yeah, they probably didn't really understand
the deep grained traumatic result of something like that, and
the parents who were able to process information and emotions
much better because their adults think they're safe. They're safe,
they're back home, they're in their protected environment, everything is okay.

(11:37):
But the kids, they're still on that incredibly horrific dark
tunnel voyage where they don't know what's going to happen,
and so they don't know if it's going to happen again.
It happened to them once, why couldn't it happen again.
They don't know that the odds of that ever happening
to them are so minuscule that they will never happen again.
They fear that because it did happen in a place

(11:59):
they didn't expect, they weren't it wasn't like they're saying, Okay,
I'm going to jump out of an airplane with a
parachute and it's possible that the parachute doesn't open. They're
not in that kind of environment. They're not taking that
kind of risk. They're literally just hanging out on a
bus with their friends going to or from school, and
that's it. Now, any activity that they do that has

(12:19):
anything to do with being in the public is going
to raise that same specter of something horrible could happen,
and that insecurity will permeate everything in their life, and
they should have been put into trauma therapy immediately. But
I don't think in seventy six that law enforcement, or
even parents, or even the American Psychological Association was thinking

(12:43):
much about that in terms of these kind of events.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Given that information, what needs do children have that law enforcement,
psychologists and other relevant parties need to know about when
it comes to helping child victims recover from trauma.

Speaker 5 (12:59):
One of the things that when the great advances in
law enforcement with respect to crimes against children has been
child the advocacy centers, and of course these are units.
These are organizations that basically are set up so that
children and their needs are addressed during the initial interview process.

(13:20):
So once a child is identified as a potential witness
or victim, they should be taken to a child advocacy
center where a trained child interview specialists will interview them
and it will be recorded, and it will be viewed
by law enforcement and prosecution and hopefully medical and therapeutic people,

(13:40):
so that there only has to be one interview. They
don't have to be dragged through it over and over
again for these different professionals. So that is a huge step.
The thing that they didn't get that they could have
used would have been the ability to address all of
those in a holistic way, all of those issues. They
probably only thought about these younger kids. They're probably not

(14:03):
going to be good witnesses, so we can't really put
them on the stand or swear them. We'll have to
focus on the teenagers. They probably just forgot about the
young kids, and the teenagers who were there who could
probably testify, were just as traumatized. But instead of putting
them through therapy and getting them to a point where
they're not as traumatized, they probably just said, hey, everything's fine,

(14:24):
You're going to be great, and that's a rational thing
to say to someone, and these responses are very emotional.
They're not just rational. It's not just oh okay, it's
not going to happen again. Oh okay. That's just not
how your brain works, especially when it is so young
and unformed. That unfortunately, I'm sure what it did was

(14:46):
it created a situation in which many of these kids
went on to have difficulty intimacy, relationships, trust, probably substance abuse,
and I'm sure some of them even lashed out with
rage and violence because they never got to address these
overwhelming issues that were forced upon them.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
One of the survivors in the documentary said that when
he was waking up with nightmares for weeks and months afterward,
his parents were told by the family doctor, don't come
in and comfort him when he has nightmares. It's just
rewarding the behavior. Let him lie there and deal with
it on his own. He'll be fine. And of course

(15:27):
he said later, I wasn't fine, because I'm still not fine.
He was one of the people who said he can't
even go down into a basement anymore without feeling horribly traumatized.

Speaker 5 (15:36):
Yeah, I can imagine the clusterrophobia that was induced in
that incident, and I have claustrophobia. I didn't have a
problem when I was a kid. I didn't have a
problem through most of my life. But when I got
sick and was stuck into an MRI for forty minutes
where I could barely breathe, I got claustrophobia from that,
and since then it's been very difficult for me, as

(15:58):
an adult, as a rational thing person to go into
a place where I know I can't I won't get crushed,
but I feel like I'm going to get crushed, and
it creates this whole cycle of panic in my brain,
even though I know rationally that it isn't there now.
If I was five or six or sixteen, it would
be even worse. And that's what these kids had to

(16:21):
deal with. It's terrible. It's a shame that some idiot
doctor thought that was the appropriate way to deal with it.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, I was thinking about in that situation, like the
thirty six hours underground in this moving truck is what
they were forced into, which is then buried under twelve
feet of dirt and rock. Ultimately, they dug their own
way out. The oldest kid and the bus driver worked
together with the other older kids who weren't that old, stronger,

(16:50):
and they were able to actually dig their way out,
But the terrifying aspect of being underground. And I've got
a touch of claustrophobia too, probably from my cancer treatment
and writing in those scanning machines which I feel you,
I feel you. I hope to never go in again.
The idea that you wouldn't come and comfort that little

(17:12):
boy who was crying out in the middle of the night,
probably shortly after this traumatic experience is so unbelievable looking
at this with a twenty twenty five lens.

Speaker 5 (17:23):
This goes back to for some reason, it's been ingrained
in us that doctors know best and people don't challenge that. Now, yeah,
they do know a lot, but they practice medicine and
alners get it right, and you gotta be you gotta
be human in that process. And jeez, I can understand

(17:45):
the parents at the time probably believing that they were
going to help their kid by toughening him up. That
would be how he gets through it. But that is
such an overwhelmingly traumatic event that can imagine how much
horror and fear they had in them.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
If a mass subduction like Chelchilla were to happen today,
what would the law enforcement response look like. What sort
of treatment but physical and psychological would the victims undergo
after they had been pulled out of that horrible situation.

Speaker 5 (18:13):
First of all, we'd call Garcia, that's for sure, and
she would tap into the satellites that are roaming around
the country and around the world, and we would definitely
track where they were, all right, that would be the
first thing. And let me just tell you, there are
a lot of things that are let's say, stretching the
truth a little bit about the Garcia character and criminal minds.

(18:35):
Her ability to find information in several little cliques, Yes,
is a little bit exaggerated, let me put it that way. However,
every bit of electronic traffic that occurs in the country,
if not the world, is recorded somewhere, and every probably
most areas of the country are covered by satellites and

(18:59):
whether there are somebody else's, so there is probably a
record of what actually happens that criminals today would be
have a much more difficult time trying to accomplish that
same beat of hiding or making a whole bus of
kids disappear. They it would be a lot more difficult.
Let me put it that way. And obviously the kids

(19:21):
will have well all have cell phones today, and some
of them may even have little trackers, and who knows
how well hidden those things can be. I certainly have
suggested that parents, it wouldn't be bad for parents to
hide those trackers in the kids sneakers or into seams

(19:42):
of their clothing and things like that. Why not be
super safe? No today, I think immediately the first thing
that would be done would be they would all the victims,
when they were recovered, would be put through a psychological
evaluation and treatment mandatory. It would just be up to
the parents. It should be mandatory, because some parents might think, oh,

(20:05):
I don't want my kids to go through that, have
to relive it. They really need to be evaluated to
find out what the level of trauma is. And also
I think it's important that, especially if a child is
going to be a witness in a criminal case, that
process involve months of treatment beforehand and afterwards, because actually

(20:27):
putting a child through that trial process and having to
relive that and to be cross exhemined about it, that
in and of itself is traumatic as well. Jim.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
One of the interesting things that developed in this case
was that these three offenders, all of whom were actually
rich kids who wanted more money. They made a decision
to take a plea and they plant out. They played
guilty to most of the counts that they were charged with,
but they fought against one, which was that they had

(20:59):
created bodily injury in the case of the kidnapping that
could have resulted in them being forced into a life
without parole situation. They fought just that one thing, which
is that we didn't bodily injure these kids. Why doesn't
psychological trauma count as bodily injury in your opinion, I.

Speaker 5 (21:21):
Think it's not whether or not itccounts. It's serious injury,
but the way the law is written, there's an enhancement
if there is physical violence. I think as we get
more and more I don't know educated attuned to the
fact that psychological violence can have much longer ramifications than
physical violence. You break your arm, they can set it

(21:44):
in a matter of months, it has healed itself. That
is not the case with psychological injuries and post traumatic
stress that even with treatment, the trauma can last a lifetime.
Now I'm not saying you're doomed if you go through trauma.
Certainly the three of us have, and we've managed to
live our lives after it. When it's addressed properly, when

(22:06):
it's actually discussed, when it's not tried to be hidden
under a bushel, then and it is dealt with, then
you know you can actually live a great, normal life.
But unaddressed or improperly addressed trauma can actually cause very
long term issues. So I agree with you Bill that

(22:27):
psychological trauma, psychological torture, which that's what this is, should
have just as many enhancements as physical violence, especially when
you're talking about that kind of treatment of children.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
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(23:02):
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Speaker 3 (23:05):
One of the things that I found most interesting in
the documentary was how many of the survivors would later
go on to testify at parole hearings every year for
those kidnappers, and how much trauma that brought up for them,
which I think is not something that necessarily everybody considers.
That you're having to retraumatize yourself essentially every time you

(23:28):
go up for a parole hearing, and you have to
speak to whether or not that person deserves to stay
in jail.

Speaker 5 (23:35):
The problem with that process is that it's basically up
to the victim to keep themselves informed about when it's
going to happen and make sure that they force their
way in because a lot of times they just want
you to send a written document. They won't allow you
to come in person. And as far as a lot
of those parole boards are concerned, if somebody looks good
on paper, yeah, okay, rubber stamp it. It is necessary,

(24:00):
unfortunately in this system for people to yeah, relive it
every time somebody's eligible for parole. And this is something
that I've dealt with very often with cases that I
was involved in or people that I know who are victimized,
who have to go back over and over again every
time that it's the uncertainty of knowing whether this person's

(24:21):
going to get out and whether then their life is
going to change because now they have to worry about
this person being in the public and maybe having access
to them. This is a real fear. It's especially in
violent cases like this man. I wish that the system
was very different. They that basically the parole board had

(24:43):
to bend over backwards to help the people who were
victimized versus just looking at the sort of equity involved
in what the offender is doing or has done while
they're in prison. That's just changing that focus just I
just think it's unjust, certainly not justice.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
We were ultimately reflecting with Matt Murphy last week that
the kidnappers committed this crime in nineteen seventy six, but
they're all out on parole at this point. Richard Schoenfeld
was released first in twenty twelve after serving thirty five years,
James Schoenfeld was released in twenty fifteen after serving thirty
eight years, and Fred Woods, the Mastermind was released in

(25:29):
twenty twenty two after serving forty five years. From your
heart of hearts, as someone who was always there for victims, first,
do you think that justice was served in the Chowchilli case?
Or should these kidnappers never have gotten out?

Speaker 5 (25:43):
Yeah? I do not believe that people who have traumatized
so many people. I don't know how they didn't get
consecutive sentences for each one of those victims. Think of
compounded nature of that crime, how many kids that they affected.
They should have gotten consecutive sentences and never gotten out.
I don't understand the logic of it's not like you

(26:05):
hurt one person, because and you commit you commit one
crime that hurt one person, that person should get the
justice of having you go away for X number of years.
That's what the statute says. Great, but then the next
person should have that same thing, and the next one,
and the next one in the next one, and as
you add these up, it should have been thousands of years.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, you're multiplying those sentences, or you should have been
by twenty six kids and a school bus driver.

Speaker 5 (26:32):
Yeah, that's what I think.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
We're also interested in the fact that fred Wood, the
mastermind behind all of this, He was running businesses out
of jail. He was running a gold mine and a
used car lot from his prison cell. He actually left
prison with more money than he went in with. He
left to one hundred and eleven million dollars worth of
trust funds and a mansion and a wife. We were

(26:57):
astounded by the fact that even knowing all of that,
the parole board still opted to release him. That doesn't
feel like justice to me.

Speaker 5 (27:06):
I think justice means that he should have been paying
for the therapy and all the suffering that all of
his victims had gone through over those same decades, and
the fact that he comes out of a multi millionaire
that's disgusting. That pisses me off. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
One of the things we were shocked by is that,
as we mentioned, these three young guys are in their
early twenties, they actually all three of them came from money.
They just decided they wanted to make more money, and
they were involved in car theft and drugs and other
issues that resulted in them feeling like they were jammed

(27:45):
up financially. But the truth is they weren't. Like in
dire straits. It just decided they could extract at that
time five million dollars from the state of California as
a ransom for these kids. It's shocking the way this transpired.

Speaker 5 (28:04):
Part of it, I think is sort of my mentality.
And you said that one guy was the ring leader
and the other two were the muscle of the followers.
People will do as a group, people will do much
more horrific things than they would do as individuals. Why
did this mastermind need to bring these other two in?

(28:25):
Part of it is practicality, right, you have to control
twenty six kids. There's a lot of moving parts, but
also probably that his psychology was that he wanted to
manipulate other people into doing things. He wanted to feel
more powerful, he wanted to feel like the leader of
the gang. And that's a very self serving role to play,

(28:47):
and it also gives you a window into what kind
of person he was. And it's no surprise that kind
of person would do horrible things to little kids, just
the fear. I just just try to put myself in
the position of those kids in that bus man. It's
just overwhelming, trauma, overwhelming.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
Anybody who's a longtime listener to the show knows that
my two favorite shows on Earth are CSI and Criminal Minds.
And of course it's always a thrill to have you
on because you did work on Criminal Minds and still
can you can you give a rundown for our listeners
about your role on the show.

Speaker 5 (29:24):
I started out Mandy Patinking before he decided to be
on the show. Before the show started, he came out
to the Bau and he wanted to meet profilers so
he could find somebody to base his character on. And
I don't know, they were going around and I got
a call and the guy said, Hey, there's this actor
and he wants to meet somebody. He wants to know
if there's anybody in the FBI with a personality.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
And he said, I have one of those.

Speaker 5 (29:47):
Yeah. Anyway, I met him and we hit it off,
and actually he asked me tell me your best case
and your worst case, and that it would eventually lead
to my podcast. Best case worst case. Yes, I said
to him, I'll tell you my best case, but my
worst case is not for entertainment purposes. And I told
him my best case about this kid, this little five

(30:08):
year old kid who was abducted and we helped save him,
and he immediately called Mark Gordon said I'll do it,
but you got to meet this guy. So they brought
me out there and I met Mark Gordon and I
met Ed Brenia, who's the showrunner. I met the writers
and I started telling them stories and they started writing episode.
So I became the tech advisor. Season two, I asked
if I could write an episode. I did. It was

(30:29):
actually very well received. It was called Lessons Learned and
so to ten and it got really good reviews and
the ratings. And then from that point on I was
still an FBI agent, but I was tech advising on
the show and I was a independent writer, and then

(30:49):
when I retired five years later, I came on as
a full time writer and producer of the show and
went through season fifteen, and then we got canceled because
of COVID, and then we were the most popular show,
the most downloaded show, the most stream show on the planet,
and so they brought us back and we're on Powermount
Plus now with Criminal Minds Evolution, and we just finished

(31:11):
season eighteen and we just got picked up for season nineteen.
Yeah's been quite a ride.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Those five years when you were still on active duty
as an FBI agent and profiler and then you're transitioning
over to being a technical advisor. Was the FBI okay
with that? You were beginning to think about maybe the
next steps in your career. But did the bureau object
or were they okay with it?

Speaker 5 (31:37):
It's interesting because what happened was when I wrote that episode,
pissed off a couple of people because I basically said
what the CIA was doing in certain situations, and it
was about Guantanamo and treating prisoners badly and things like that.
But they deserved it. I certainly watered down what they
were actually doing. But show got such good rating. Is

(32:00):
that the head of the public Affairs, John Miller, he
reached out to me. He said, I have to deal
with these CIA station chiefs all over the world, and
you're making an ardor And then but then he said,
but we loved the episode. Can you write a pilot
for us? So they actually asked me to write a pilot,
and then they actually made me officially the first FBI

(32:22):
agent ever to be tasked with actually writing a pilot,
a TV pilot for the FBI as my official duty.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Wow, oh my god.

Speaker 5 (32:31):
Yeah. So I did that. And the first they didn't
want to let me write, but then I wrote a
legal brief saying that was unconstitutional, and they said, all right, yeah,
they're right, Okay, Oh, they let me write. And so
I was very blessed in how things worked out, and
my legal background certainly helped a little bit. Another thing
that happened and then I think drove the rating so high,

(32:53):
was that the guy at the Bureau who like approves
outside employment stuff, after going back and forth a bunch
of times, he proved it and then wah, I took
two weeks off to shoot the episode, the first episode
that I wrote. I'm in LA. I'm shooting the episode
and I get a call from the guy and he says,
I'm the unit chief And I said, what happened to

(33:15):
what's his name? And he said, oh, he retired and
now I'm the interchief. And he said, why are you
doing that without permission? I said, I got permission from
the inner chief. He goes, not from me. So he
was trying to be an asshole. And so he calls
up LA and calls up there public affairs person and
has them call me to yell at me for being

(33:36):
in LA without permission and all this, and I explained
it to her and after I got done, she said, Wow,
that's an amazing story. She goes, would you mind doing
an interview? And I said no, So she sent out
USA today. They interviewed me and Mandy Patanka, and the
whole front page of the entertainment section, literally from top

(33:57):
to bottom, was about me and Mandy. They had a
big picture of me and man together and it was
about me writing an episode. And then we had two
columns on the next page. And I know Denzel had
a new movie coming out, and they had a little
picture of him up in the top corner. I felt
so bad for Denzel.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
But yeah, his career has gone pretty well.

Speaker 5 (34:16):
But anyway, yeah, he's done okay for himself. He's picked
himself up and done well. We went to Fordham. He
was a couple of years ahead of me, but he
went to Forham, so I was always proud of him
as a Fortum grad. But anyway, the point is that
forty million people read that paper. So what I didn't
know was a little inside Hollywood here. What I didn't

(34:37):
know was that the episode that they gave me was
on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the day before Thanksgiving, which
is the most traveled holiday of the year. Yeah, which
means that it is the lowest ratings day of the
TV year because everybody goes home for Thanksgiving and then

(34:58):
stays at their new homes for Christmas. So they gave
me that episode knowing that it was going to have
the lowest ratings of the year. Nobody wanted that episode,
so I got that episode. You were the newbie, yes
I was, But did you dirty? They tried, but because

(35:18):
of the USAA article, which was also a guy trying
to do meet dirty. Because of that, the cs ABC
and NBC they went down like one or two million viewers.
At the beginning of that time slot, we went up
by a million. Wow. And then they do another take.

(35:39):
They do it like five minutes later, and that was
up another million. So it was two million higher than normal.
And we blew away the ratings for all the other networks.
And it was literally just because somebody was trying to
screw me, and I didn't know anything about ratings at
the time. This is all stuff I found out after
the fact. It was amazing. It was very fortunate and

(36:00):
would helped launch my writing career, which I was I
am continue to be very grateful for.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
That's amazing. I love that I know that One of
the things that you did with the writing and Criminal
mind is you would a lot of times allow episodes
to take cues from actual criminal cases. And before I
reached out to you and asked if you'd be willing
to do the episode with us today, and I'm so
thrilled that you said yes. I reminded myself, I think

(36:28):
there was an episode of Criminal Minds that is based
on childchill On. So I went looking through my multiple
DVDs of Criminal Minds, which are stacked up in my
living room and I found it. It's the eighth episode
of the eight season. It's called The Wheels, and it's wonderful.
I just watched it before we came on air. So
how prevalent was the child Chilla kidnapping on everybody's minds

(36:50):
when they wrote this episode? I know Read referenced it
at least once, like in an actual line on the show,
but was at front of mine for the writer. And
you weren't the right around this one. But I have
a feeling you were probably on set for it.

Speaker 5 (37:03):
Oh sure, I certainly I was involved in every episode.
I've made sure that every episode has at least teaching
points from real cases. And what I try to do
is blend teaching points. In other words, no episode of
Criminal Minds is one to one for a case in
the real world. There's always what we always tried to do,

(37:24):
and certainly what I tried to do was to blend
teaching points from multiple cases into the episodes of Criminal Minds.
Certainly Chachilla was a flagpole event in this case and
in this episode, but there are significant differences and not
only how the case was investigated, but also it changed

(37:48):
for the times, and as well as technology, and as
well as being able to sort of protect some of
the information from the real case and the victims and
their families and so forth, so that it isn't a
one to one comparison. This like all the other episodes
of Criminal Minds, and now we're into the three hundred
and fifties of Criminal Minds. What's important to me is

(38:11):
that there is teaching, learning, education with entertainment as opposed
to just being pure entertainment. So I hope that I've
accomplished that goal and we continue to accomplish that goal.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Before we wrap, Jim, let's just go back over the
things you're working on, which are many, but tell us
about tell us what's keeping you busy or busiest these days.

Speaker 5 (38:38):
We have extray productions. We have twenty five titles on
audible now and everything from The Golden State Killer to
the latest one that Kathy Canning and I did, which
is called FBI Profilers Criminal Archives, where we go through
I think fifteen of the cases that we worked together
while we're in the bau. We really go deep into

(38:59):
the behind the scenes and the analysis of what was
actually going on in those cases. But also we have
obviously my Real Crime Profile and Best Case, Worst Case
podcasts that are weekly podcasts, and we've recently migrated to Identify,
which is an app where we can interact with our
listeners and viewers and q and as and special extra

(39:22):
content and so forth, which is cool. We love doing
that and they suggest topics for us to talk about
and cases and things like that, so it's a really
cool thing. But also probably the most fun I've ever
had in the sort of writing and production arena has
been the audio play blue Beard, and it is based

(39:43):
on a real case. It's very closely ties with reality
because I actually have the original, an original copy of
the actual confession of James Bluebeard Watson, who was convicted
of murdering ten of his wives in Los Angele in
nineteen twenty. He actually had thirty wives and probably killed

(40:04):
sixteen of them. They had not found the bodies of
the other six and this guy was a stone cold psychopath.
Luckily for some of these women. One of his wives,
Katherine Wambacher, who's played by Karen David, she had the
gall to go against her husband and find out and

(40:24):
hire a private investigator to find out if he was
cheating on her and she found out a hell of
a lot more and it's really a great It's a thriller,
but it's also such a Shiro story. The cast that
we got was amazing. Joseph Fines plays Bluebeard and Adrian
Pashtar plays JB. Armstrong who's the private investigator. And Hult

(40:46):
mcleane from Hunter Minehunter, and he's in this new movie
that's just coming out now. It's with Remy Malik, the Amateur. Yeah,
it's just coming out now. And the wholt mcaleney is
that he's a CIA guy and a tough guy. He's
got an amazing voice. He plays the district attorney in
blue Beard. It was the most fun because one you

(41:09):
could write anything and all you had to do was
make the sounds of it. You didn't have to worry
about the budget. That was cool. Yeah, that was really
just you could actually write creatively and not worry about
the budget. So that was cool. And also just the
way we were able to record it. We recorded it
in LA and studio in LA in New York and
my Orca, Spain at the same time. Wow, So everybody

(41:31):
could see each other but on video marters and talk
to each other and they could do it like it
was a real play. That was really cool. And we
had a great director, Greg who basically knew everything you
could know about motion around a mic and setting the
scenes and everything, and everybody was great. And I have

(41:51):
to tell you that Karen David, who played kat Wambacker,
was unbelievably good and she just had so much energy.
She had more lines than everybody else put together, and
she just she was such a trooper. She was such
a delight to work with. And she did two episodes
of Criminal Minds. I think it was the season finale

(42:13):
of season thirteen, the first one of season fourteen, where
my brother played her henchmen I abducted Reed and Garcia
a songe hold in that man. Good lord, he scared me.
This is Tim brother, Tim Clement. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (42:34):
So anyway, it was fun and it is cool, and
please listen to blue Beard. It was a labor of love.
I'm actually writing another another one now with a friend
of mine and Pete mcmcdonald wrote Blueberry with me, but
this one is with Stephen Mills. He's an author and
good friend of mine, and it's going to be it's

(42:54):
going to be very different than Blue Beard. It's going
to be based on our lives and I don't know
it has shades of baby Reindeer in it.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah, And it's amazing, like the parallels in our lives
just unbelievable, unbelievable. That's all I can say is we
could not believe it when we figured all this out,
but hopefully we'll be We'll be getting that out there
relatively soon.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Jim, this has been amazing talking to you. Thank you
so much for joining us to offer your expertise on
child trauma as related to childchilla and forgiving us some
insight on criminal minds.

Speaker 5 (43:32):
We appreciate it, all right, no problem. Thank you for
having me. It's always great to see you. Kristen and
Bill and I hope everything goes well in your lives.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
That is going to do it for this episode of
Mind and for Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
murders on Facebook.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas.

Speaker 5 (44:30):
Five six.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder

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