May 14, 2025 • 44 mins
Custody is supposed to protect children — not bury them. In this harrowing episode, forensic psychologists Dana Anderson and Craig Wetterer expose the fatal fallout of high-conflict family court battles. Drawing from firsthand experience as a court-appointed evaluator, Dr. Anderson breaks down how custody disputes can spiral into calculated violence. True cases include:
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Forensic Psychology and Child Custody Evaluations
02:09 Understanding High-Risk Parents in Family Court
06:21 Personality Disorders and Their Impact on Parenting
10:38 The Role of Substance Abuse in Custody Cases
15:58 Case Studies: Homicides Linked to Custody Battles
20:40 Evaluating Competence and Risk in Custody Cases
25:11 The Importance of Thorough Evaluations
30:00 Family Dynamics and Violence in Custody Situations
35:10 The Role of Communication in Evaluations
40:18 Concluding Thoughts on Forensic Evaluations and Family Law
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/killer-psychologist--6020549/support.
- A mother who fatally stabbed her son after a court-approved Disneyland trip — then calmly called 911.
- A woman who had her child’s father executed just hours after a judge granted him shared custody.
- A 20-year-old father gunned down in Mississippi over a custody fight.
- A double murder during a custody deposition at a Las Vegas law firm.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Forensic Psychology and Child Custody Evaluations
02:09 Understanding High-Risk Parents in Family Court
06:21 Personality Disorders and Their Impact on Parenting
10:38 The Role of Substance Abuse in Custody Cases
15:58 Case Studies: Homicides Linked to Custody Battles
20:40 Evaluating Competence and Risk in Custody Cases
25:11 The Importance of Thorough Evaluations
30:00 Family Dynamics and Violence in Custody Situations
35:10 The Role of Communication in Evaluations
40:18 Concluding Thoughts on Forensic Evaluations and Family Law
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/killer-psychologist--6020549/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Killer Psychologist. I'm Dana Anderson, a forensic psychologist
and your host of the show. Killer Psychologist is for
true crime fanatics and anyone intrigued with the dark side
of psychology. Welcome to Killer Psychologist. I'm Dana Anderson, a
(00:22):
forensic psychologist who evaluates killers. I'm a killer psychologist, and
today I have with me doctor Craig Wetter, who also
evaluates killers. And today we're going to talk about child
custody evaluations. And Craig, let me read this headline to
you and you let me know what you think. All Right,
(00:44):
dad charged with murdering his daughter allowed to go on
family vacation to Hawaii. Do you have any concerns here
with this at all?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So are you telling me that he's out of custody?
Is that what you're saying is that he's he's no
longer in custody. Is he out on bail and he's
now going on vacation with his family after presumably allegedly
murdering his daughter?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Am I reading that correctly?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
So this just hit the headline? So I look this
case up. It says Christopher Schulti's a thirty eight year
old Arizona man awaiting trial for the hot car death
of his two year old daughter has been granted permission
to vacation in Hawaii with his wife and two surviving daughters.
(01:36):
The incident occurred when he left his toddler in the
car with the engine running while he played video games inside.
So his trial is scheduled to begin October twenty seventh,
and if convicted, he faces life in prison. So some
(01:57):
of these headlines like our public outrage with some of
the questions about the appropriateness for a defendant facing such
serious charges to have custody of their other children. And
that's where we enter family court. So we're going to
talk about these types of individuals who may have criminal
(02:21):
charges so not maybe convicted yet, but there are questions
that are coming up in court, in family court in fact,
about a parenting plan or who should have physical or
legal custody of the child, And so Craig and I
are going to talk about some of those cases. In fact, Craig,
(02:45):
you don't love family law evaluations, is that right?
Speaker 3 (02:50):
That's that is correct, Dana.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
And why don't I generally do child custody evaluations. Well,
it's a risk manager perspective that I take. You know,
it's not that I won't do them, it's just that
they are not evaluations that I generally.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Prefer to undertake.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I would happily evaluate a serial killer or competence or
you know, criminal responsibility. Then I would do a parnal
fitness evaluation or some type of child custody.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Evaluation, only because of what I.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Have seen happen in these In some of these instances,
and I know they're not they don't happen all the time,
but we certainly have a few that we're going to
talk about today that where either the you know, one
parent who perhaps doesn't get what they wanted takes that
out on others, which can include family members, but it
can also include people officers of the court. Those are
(03:46):
the attorneys that might have been involved in the case,
judges in some cases, doctors. So, yeah, and we'll talk
about the personality structure that drives.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
A lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Particularly when we have like a combination of sort of
like the serious mental illness along with personality pathology together,
those dynamics are very dangerous, can be very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, you mentioned this personality architecture. So personality type and
I think a lot of listeners probably are curious about
what type of parents end up in family court or
which ones would be at the highest risk to commit murder.
And I've done a variety of evaluations across settings, and
(04:33):
I know you have, and I can kind of tell
you the ones that fall into family court. I'm talking
about high risk factors. So there's restraining orders. They're not
people that are following court orders. And there seems to
be a theme of taking it's like considering their children
(04:56):
as property and wanting them return to them transactionally, so
that there's like a disconnect from their ability to parent.
But if in fact they feel that the child is
going to be removed from them or is removed, they
are retaliatory.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And speaking of that personality architecture specifically, what you're talking about,
like when you're talking about people who will react in
ways that can become violent, and these are people with
the narcissistic orderline architecture. We've talked about this before in
other episodes, particularly in the narcissism space, because in narcissism,
(05:39):
the excess is grandiosity and entitlement, right, So, like you
just said, these people will lose focus of that being
an actual child, that being an individual, and what they
view their child is as like you said, as property,
something they're entitled to, and that if they fear losing that,
this is where the abandonment paradigm comes in. They will
(06:01):
immediately go into an evaluation phase. So, if you've got
a borderline narcissistic architecture parent with really severe you know,
severe features, that can be very dangerous, right because then
they turn that outwardly, you know, they become outwardly aggressive
and violent and can become violent. And that's something to
definitely pay attention to.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, I've seen people lose their self, lose their identity
through these legal processes where they become so fixated on
gaining control back this loss of control they have. I'll
see when I do the testing that there's some obsessive,
(06:44):
compulsive traits that they keep doing to give them the
sense of power and control. They can spend so much time,
so much consumption, ruminating in their head of how they
want to be and become unhinged, unglued, and they do
(07:07):
think of different ways to retaliate against the other parent.
And this is where when we do these psychological evaluations,
it's really important to do a thorough assessment. Get their
criminal records, get all their mental health records, get it all,
and I do see also antisocial personality construct is in
(07:34):
there too. They will retaliate, and they do rationalize it,
they will consil it, and they will violate the law.
There's usually a trail of criminal charges behind that. They
don't think the rules apply to them. That's a common
(07:56):
theme that the rules don't apply to them. So some
of these situations for family law cases that I'm assigned to,
we do our psychological evaluation, and it's not uncommon that
the person we're seeing is not truthful about the information
they give us.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, and we have ways of figuring that out, don't we,
you know, right, in terms of like, okay, are they
you know again, when we're we do psychological testing, of
course we do, and we're going to be giving sophisticated
tests that will tell us whether someone is trying to
you know, fake good or make themselves look more well
adjusted than they actually are. And we can kind of
(08:37):
see through a lot of that in the testing, right,
So that's one signal or one warning simon. You see
that to some degree, and I think in most instances
when you're in a child custody situation where you're who
are doing testing, I would expect a little bit of
defensiveness by you know, the parents, and also some of
this elevation on scales that you know, measure this over virtuousness, right,
(08:59):
or this like trying to present yourself more favorable light,
better adjusted, all that good stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That's human nature. So I get it.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But when we see it at the extremes, when we
see it at the level to which it's clear somebody
is attempting to conceal some underlying pathology that is being masked,
that's when it could become more concerning, you know. And
again this is where a thorough evaluation by a very
experienced like forensic psychological evaluator is important because again there's
(09:30):
other data sources that we're going to look at when
we see we're trying to conceptualize what's going on with
this one individual, whether it's both parents or you're evaluating
one of the parents, Trying to deconstruct what's really going
on sometimes requires a lot appealing of the onions, so
to speak, because there's layers of things, right that we
have to sometimes uncover to figure out what's really going on,
(09:52):
you know, what's at root cause of like in the relationship,
but also in the individual themselves. Right, So their criminal
history tells of story they If we have that available,
that's critical information that we need because if there's antisocial architecture,
that's again where the violence can be escalated, right where
if somebody doesn't get what they want, they're just going
(10:13):
to go take it, or they're going to find some
way to get what they want, and that can mean
violating any number of statutes or laws or social norms,
that kind of stuff. So it's violating agreements. That's the
big thing that an in asocial is really good at.
They don't keep agreements, They have no honor, and they'll
do whatever they can to get what they think they deserve,
(10:36):
you know, and that's where the entitlement comes in.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah, I've seen some insidious things like breaking into their house,
cutting their power lines, changing the internet, like insidious things
and then making the person feel they're crazy or denying
they did these criminal acts. They're later charged with these things,
but they will deny it. I have cases right now
(10:59):
where they make up false names, false emails, try to
impersonate another person. Then even email me, and I have
that in a couple cases right now, and in one
case the person did it already several times and did
it even again with me. Some of them will impersonate doctors, therapists,
on and on, send me fake letters and deny it
(11:23):
through and through. And they are so pathological and they're
so desperate, so their criminal behavior continues and goes on
and on, and in fact they are not getting custody
of the children back. They just continue to do these
behaviors for many, many years and will dig their heels
(11:44):
in and deny any of this is going on and
then pretend that they're a victim. I'll tell you some
of the construct that I'm seeing and you can let
me know your thoughts on this. But I'm seeing this
a lot on repeat. I'm seeing this in men, and
you can tell me your thoughts on this, but men
who also they're in family court, criminal court too, but
(12:08):
there's questions about sexual misconduct. So when initially they meet me,
they're very histrionic, very superficial, a bit flirtatious, but everything's
very superficial. They'll say, yeah, I don't know why I'm here, man,
Like everything's good, Yeah, everything, you know, I love my kids.
Just everything's chill, like I work out, you know, just
(12:32):
just a very as if nothing wrong is going on.
So there's this histrionic personality disorder in there too. But
as you dig deeper, they also have untreated bipolar disorder,
and there is psychotic features they're not acknowledging that, and
the grandiosity. They also have the narcissistic traits. It's this
(12:56):
combination that's quite insidious, and I would call it in
some cases pathological, meaning pretty resistant to treatment, so meaning
they meet criteria for sometimes two or three separate personality disorders.
So sometimes they'll have narcissistic personality disorder, histronic personality disorder
(13:19):
and could meet criteria for antisocial or have antisocial features,
but also have bipolar with psychotic features, and they insist
on being untreated, not getting treatment, or faking treatment. Notes.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The combination that you describe is a very concerning combination.
And what makes it concerning is that you identify like
three of these we call them the cluster B. We've
talked about these before, the cluster B which are the
dramatic erratics or of personality section in the DSM, but
those three are in and of itself problematic when you
layer on top of that a bipolar spectrum condition, particularly
(13:58):
when somebody you know is untreated and they're they're they're
at the manic pole, so you know, with bipolar disorder,
so that the viewers understand, most people know, but just
to make sure you know, this is a disorder where
people's moods will shift from depressed or depression to we
call the depressed pole up to the manic pole, and
in some cases a hypomanic presentation, which is kind of
(14:20):
a subclinical type of mania. But when they get on
you know, that hypomanic and manic phase, depending on the
type of bipolarity it is. This is where impulse control
can become a problem. Right, So you've got someone that's
antisocial already, so they violate agreements, they're not they have
no honor, no honor among thieves. Right, then they're they're
(14:41):
untreated bipolarity, so maybe they're on the manic pole or hypomanic, right,
and now they've got the energy because when you're manic,
guess what you have energy?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Okay, they don't really need a lot of sleep.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
You got the antisocial piece along with that narcissistic grandiosity,
entitlement and all that fun stuff. And then you throw
a little hiss strionic into that, you got yourself a
hot mess. You got the potential for someone to become
quite violent and unpredictable because there's lots of things going
on in the brain that would take me a long
time to explain, you know, what's happening in these neurotransmitter
(15:16):
systems and these pathways in the brain that are leading
to all these behaviors. But the bottom line is is
that someone like that needs to be on an antipsychotic
medication and perhaps a mood stabilizing medication as well. And
like you said, a lot of times, they're going to
resist treatment. They don't want to be on these medications.
They don't like the side effects. Sometimes people who you
(15:36):
know who they enjoy the mania, you know, they like
it when they're in that stage. So, but that's a
big problem because that puts them at risk for engaging
in something that's going to get them behind bars, which
is when we get to go see them and so
and I see the same thing over It's like you know,
rense repeat same you know, same cycles.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Over and over again.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
You know, we're in the jails constantly doing a voutations
all over the country, by the way, because we do them,
you know, nationwide, And it's the it's a similar pattern,
isn't it. It's like, just today I was evaluating somebody
for criminal responsibility and for confidence, and I couldn't get
my questions in because this individual was so manic that
(16:20):
he would not slow down. And the just the racing
thoughts were just coming out and just just these boom
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
So and I'm like, well, you're not on your medication,
are you.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Well, I don't need to be taking medication right now,
because you know, I don't really need my medication. I'm
feeling great right now. Everything's great. Yeah, everything is great.
But you're you got arrested for you know, a very
a fairly serious you know, offense allegation. So no, things
are not really great right now. Right take your medications.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Oh, I forgot one more thing to add to that list.
So that personality construct there throw in. In my experience,
there's always an underlying substance use disorder, and so typically
they're trying to self medicate. Alcohol is really common to
see in there, but there's usually always a substance disorder.
(17:10):
Hence it's a problem, and the problem when it comes
to court ordered evaluations is that the court can order
them to treatment. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't interested
if the rules don't apply to them, or they don't
think they have an issue, they just conceal their substance
use and don't disclose it. And that is a common
(17:33):
problem that I see. So also do court ordered child
protective services. Those so those are folks that are indigent
and they've had their kids removed. So those some pretty
serious allegations, and for the most part, most of those
cases there is substance use going on.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, we see coomorbidity that comorbidities or well you have
two or more disorders occurring at the same time, and
usually it's a substance use disorder along with a primary
psychiatric disorder like bipolar spectrum, major depressive disorder, or even
a formal thought disorder like you know, schizophrenia, and so
it's not uncommon, Like I would not be surprised, and
(18:15):
I'm not surprised actually when I that people who have
this combination of both personality character logic, you know, pathology,
but also like a primary mental illness as well, are
going to be using drugs, you know, And like you said,
some people will medicate with depressant drugs like alcohol, or
they'll take like benzodiazepines.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
But others that tend to have.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
More of the mood disorders that maybe they're more of
the depressed side, they tend to like, you know, stimulant
drugs or you know, they might they might favor that.
And the problem with the stimulant drugs, as we've talked about,
is you start throwing a drug like methamphetamine into the
mix when you're using math. That really messes up brain circuitry,
especially in the joking system and the brain. But you know,
it causes a lot of problems of you know, for
(18:58):
people if they're using it extensively, which we see quite
frequently as well. So this is why it's you know,
it's so hard when people ask them, why can't people
just get better? You know, like why do we keep
seeing people like they keep getting rearrested or they keep
you know, they keep violating these agreements and you know,
these child cost the agreements, they keep getting rearrested or
(19:19):
the protection orders get get violated. That's because they have
uncontrolled you know, symptoms that are being mismanaged right because
they're not taking medications generally if they're prescribed, you know,
medications which you know a lot of the medications are
are quite helpful, actually they are. And you know, like
the mood stabilizers, I'll tell you what you get someone
even with someone with an antisocial personality architecture. You know,
(19:40):
like we get people at the friends of hospital or
quite you know, irritable and they're very oppositional. You know,
they're angry all the time and they don't really have
a serious mental illness, but they have a personality disort.
We can treat that with a mood stabilizer. We can
give them a low dose antapsychotic. It actually helps because
it dials down the aggress and it can reduce some
(20:01):
of the impulsivity that we see. Not going to change
the underlying you know, character, the traits, but at least
he'll dial down with some of that aggression.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Let's talk about a case that just was in the
headlines recently for a mother who was granted court approved
visit for her eleven year old son where she took
him to Disneyland for three days. So her name is
(20:31):
Siritha Ramaaju. So she took her son to Disneyland and
then after he fell asleep, it alleges that she slit
her son's throat. And so this is after they returned
to their hotel room and Santa Anna and she called
(20:53):
nine to one one on herself. She's been charged with murder, torture,
agriv mayhem. What's the motive? People are asking what was
going on? We only know from you know, what's shared
online right now that there was an ongoing custody battle
(21:15):
that turns homicidal. So while we don't know all the
motivations in this case, these are the types of evaluations
that we get for individuals to end up in county jail.
They're arrested, there's homicide, and we evaluate them and a
lot of times the first step is assessing whether they're
competent to proceed to trial. Do they understand what's going
(21:37):
on now, can they proceed to court, can they work
with their attorney, you know? Or is this an insanity
dy defense? So those are some of the type of
evws we do. But it sounds like in this case
there was ongoing custody and she was granted approval for
a visit. So it brings to my mind our role
because sometimes we are asked about recommendations and I do
(22:05):
some cases and a lot of times I say, no,
this parent has to be supervised by a third party,
neutral person. That has to be documented. They're not going
to follow rules, they're not medicated. It's not safe. I
had an attorney asked me the other day when I
gave him feedback about as client who had bipolar and
(22:27):
several other personality disorders, and he said, well, how would
that be a problem with impulsivity in these charges? And
I said, well, it is a problem because it's not treated,
it's not under control, and that's why we're here. He
hasn't been able to follow rules, which is impulsive, and
he's not showing ability to follow rules. And just a
(22:48):
couple tips for people that are interested in doing these evaluations.
Always get the criminal records and if you can't get them,
something that I have my clients do is provide their
social Security number and sign a release so I can
run their criminal background check and get have a private
investigator that does that for me. It can be very revealing.
(23:09):
I can see, you know, twenty four pages of criminal
acts over time, I'm like, wow.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That's that's that's data you know, and right, they didn't
provide that, but now you have it, right, and that's
not that's irrefutable. Those are public records. Those are court
records that come from you know, they're valid. In other words,
this is good data and it's important.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Well, here's the thing. A lot of times I'll ask
family law attorneys if they know or are you aware
if your client has a criminal history, and they'll say, oh,
I have no idea, so it is something you should
look into. But if you do get a psychological evaluation,
we will get all your criminal records and I will
have them sign a release for their medical records. And
(23:51):
a lot of people are unwilling to do that, but
it is part of the court order. The court is
my client, and I will get them to sign it,
sign the release so the records go to me, not
the client where they can manipulate the records. But typically
there is a lot of information in there. So I
(24:13):
wouldn't advise anyone to skip certain steps in the evaluation,
or if you're a psychologist, don't lowball your price for
these child custody assessments. There's a lot of risk reliability
that goes into these. I charge my full rate and
(24:33):
I do a thorough evaluation. And that's how I do
it because I'm not taking any shortcuts.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Well, I'm wondering about Sritha's case here here, and again
we don't know. I don't know if they've reported this
in the news.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I searched to see if there was any information about
whether there had been any evaluations done of either her
or anybody else.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Did you find anything online? I didn't.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
In terms of like if it doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
But this is where it becomes one obviously, the court,
the family law court, and this is an Orange County
some judge granted this right. Wouldn't want to be that
judge right now, But I mean that's just just from
(25:20):
a you know, I wouldn't want to be in that
judge of shoes at the moment because again I don't
know what information they had or did not have. But
you know, these and again sometimes we can't predict these.
It's not that I, you know, we can precisely predict
when someone's going to be violent, but if there was
any history, if she had any history, at all of
any you know, prior mental health involvement or treatment for anything,
(25:44):
or even in terms of her arrest history, if you
had any prior history of any acts of domestic balance
or other types of instrumental or expressive violence, that should
should have been noted right and taken into consideration. Was
particularly when you've got to rusty battle going on.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, she had a court appearance in April. There's no
further information. We know that she did purchase a large
kitchen knife the day before, which was recovered. Sounds like
she also admitted to ingesting pills afterwards in an apparent
suicide attempt.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
So yeah, in fantaside, and so then you know then
committing suicide afterwards. So again this and again we haven't
evaluated her, so we can't give an opinion as to
whether or not there's any like personality pathology. But it's
just you know, in a hypothetical case where what you
start looking at there as you look at again, you
I would look for evidence again we go to this
(26:43):
cluster b stuff, narcissist borderline architecture, that kind of stuff.
Is any of that present because again, you know, if
someone is if their identity is tied to their children
or you know, their child. That's an existential crisis.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
For someone to lose.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Who's their child if they're so ameshed in terms of
their identities ameshed with that, if they have you know,
some of this severe personality bipology, this is what puts
them at risk for doing.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
This kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
And again we don't know because we have an evaluator
that doesn't there's nobody giving opinions about you know, this
individual's personality style or problems that she.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
May have been having.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
So here's another recent case, and this is Rachel Moore.
So she had her ex murdered after custody was granted
to her ex. I'm assuming it's husband. So this is
an April twenty twenty five, so this is just last month.
She was supposed to share custody. Hours after the judge
(27:51):
ruled that twenty four year old Colby Vinson should have
joint custody of their child, she rooted her stepfather, Jason Curtis,
to carry out the hit. So Curtis ambushed him and
shot him. So it was a murder executed like a
business transaction, so it was premeditated, instrumental.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
So that's a different type. You know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Again, that's that's an instrumental type of you know, violence
right where it's planned. Again, if that's all, that's what's alleged,
right this case probably is still pending. Obviously, this happened
in Florida, so she's in trouble.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
She's in Florida.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
That's gonna you know, if they go first degree with
special circumstances on it, you know what that is, that's
capital murder, first.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Degree premeditated murder, so that life without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Well, it could be the death penalty because again there's
you know, there are special circumstances, especially like this where
it's a it's a calculated hit like that. I don't
have to look at the Florida statutes.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
But they might go death penalty on that. I don't know,
it depends.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
But that's a totally different type of if if true,
if all of those facts are true, in other words,
if she did, if she did order this and all
of that, that's a completely different person we're talking about now,
we're talking about on a social personality right there.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
That's that's quite different.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
So the jury found her, Rachel More, guilty of first
degree murder premeditated murder and tampering with evidence.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
The case already went a trial then.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Okay, yeah, just of this last month, April twenty four,
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Okay, gotcha. Now has she been sentenced yet?
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So it's sentenced to life in prison without the possibility
of parole.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Okay, they didn't do the death penalty. That's that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
So interestingly enough, she gave her stepfather fifty dollars for
gas to travel from Alabama to Florida? Is that all
fifty dollars?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
What happened to the step her stepfather is he obviously
he's been charged, right, where's he at?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
He was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to
life in prison without parole. Their communication was through Facebook messenger,
probably not a great way to communicate about a murder
for hire, and then just venmowing something probably not and
then they deleted the messenger app like thinking it, we'll
just lose the conversation.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Oh, sure, that gets rid of everything.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So I will say that it's not uncommon for family
members to recruit other family members, and it's very it's
not uncommon for me, as an evaluator to have family
members recruited to reach out to me to dissuade me,
or influence me, manipulate me. So one of the things
that I do is I don't take these calls or
(30:53):
respond to these emails. We are clear from the onset
when I'm appointed that the core is my client and
I will not be communicating to these other people. If
there was something they want to put in writing and
submit it to this individual's electronic file, that could be.
(31:15):
But I do have mothers of the accused quite often
attempt to reach out to me. And by the way,
they're typically the ones paying for their son's psyche bell
That is common. They are the ones that pay for them.
And they're also financially motivated. They're not just financially motivated
(31:39):
because their son is costing them a lot of money,
but they have another motive for them to get custody
of the children. So the grandparent all.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Kinds of interesting, you know, motivations to think about here
with you know, these different cases.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, so there was a recent Las Vegas law office shooting.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah I saw that.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, this actually happened at the law office, which is
something I'm sure you and I have feared. Why the
reason we prefer to do remote evaluation.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Yeah, doing a remote evaluation safer. Well, and this was
a deposition though, Right, So the perpetrator right entered the
law office where they were doing a deposition in regard
to that case, and he murdered his former allegedly murdered
his former daughter in law, and then he killed himself. Yeah,
that's another one of these enmeshment things. I think it
(32:36):
sounds you know, these these are you know what I mean,
like the narcissistic rage that comes in, like what you know,
what would the motive be here?
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Money, it's a double murder suicide. So he killed his
daughter in law, turns the gun on himself.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Well again, I you know, we haven't.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Evaluated these people. He's post mortem anyways, he couldn't evaluate him.
But I mean, I just a lot of this stuff
goes you know, when you look at the underlying what
would drive someone to do something like this, It comes
right back to this narcissistic, arcid personality architecture, you know,
where you and again where you get maybe that maybe
(33:12):
he saw himself as you know, the protector and also
the avenger right, because his son right was involved in
this divorce with his his daughter in law I mean,
you know that maybe he couldn't handle that what happened
to his son, you know, with regard to the you
know that.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Prior that prior marital relationship that obviously went south.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
But this is the reason, another reason why when I
started practicing law, I would I back in two thousand
and seven, I said that one type of law will
not practice is family law. I'm just not going to
do family law. And you know, out of all the
different kind of law, you know, you can practice family attorneys,
you know, do have to be concerned about this kind
(33:56):
of stuff. And it doesn't sound like the lawyer got
shot in this case, but their office got shot up, right,
their law firm two people murdered in their their conference room.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Probably, Yeah, So how I stay safe and sane. Also
is that some of this the communication between these pathological
people is that they will obsessively want to continue to
reach out to you with their narrative, and the emails
(34:29):
are over the top. They could go on and on
till the end of time. So you always set your
boundaries really clear, and no direct communications really should be
coming to me. You shouldn't be communicating with me directly.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
At all, nor your a journey.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Yeah, but again they're not rule followers, so the rules
don't apply to them. They don't know boundaries by the
way they do it anyway. But you can set up
your email. I can have all my emails from that
person forward to my assistant. She just puts them on
electronics file and I don't have to read them, because
you could go and saying reading crazy emails all day
every day, that they are manic, the bizarre.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
There you sad me one the other day it was
quite interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Oh that was from my stalker. Yeah, I have stalkers.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, well it's what or they just it's just a
tirade of like word salad where it doesn't make any sense,
like the one I shared with you that somebody wanted
therapy or something and sent some weird email. Nothing made
any sense, and it was like, no, we're not engaging
with talking about communication.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
I have my clients write something about themselves, put it
in a word doc, and we put it in their file.
So you will learn a lot about how someone can
construct a sentence or paragraph, or maybe they can't, but
it could be a twelve page narrative about their ex
(35:57):
and how bitter they are. But then not actually able
to fall the instruction that you told them to do.
And through the writing you can see their delusional, their grandiose,
they're illogical. There is so a lot of things. It's
really helpful because you can diagnose them with all this
content that keeps sending you. So I want to tell
(36:20):
you about a case where child custody. John battigla He
was a former marine living in Dallas, Texas. In two
thousand and one, he was under investigation for violating a
protective order filed by his ex wife, Mary Jean Pearl.
(36:42):
He was angry, vengeful, phil felt he had lost and
was losing control. Court gave him a custody visit of
his two daughters, Liberty who was six years old, and Faith,
who was nine years old. They were allowed to go
to his home, and this was around Christmas time, so
(37:07):
he had the girls call the mother. He handed them
the phone and he forced them to say goodbye, and
he shot both of the daughters on the phone so
the mother could hear them die, and he told Mary
Jean Mary fucking Christmas. He was convicted of capital murder
(37:31):
and he was sentenced to death. Even his last final
words were mocking and defiant.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, I guess what came up, at least from what
I saw in the research that when I looked at
this case, guess what the two he got diagnosed with
narcissistic and antisocial personality traits. It didn't say disordered necessarily.
But again we haven't seen I haven't seen the report,
so I'm not sure whether this was based on testing
or this is just the impressions of the psychologists, psychiatrist,
(38:01):
whoever it was that did the evaluation. But it doesn't
surprise me because that last act, what he did by
putting the kids on the phone there, that is a
retaliatory behavior. Right, He's getting back at his ex and
this is his way of getting back and retaliating against her.
It's a you know, using that child again as a weapon,
(38:22):
right to inflict maximum pain on his ex wife. And
see here the child's the object again, right, No regard
whatsoever for the child as an individual anything, just the
child is an object. You hurt me, you did these
things to me, I'm getting back at you. That's my
interpretation of that.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
The ultimate punishment to take the thing you love the
most and say you'll never have it, right, and I'll
what you suffer.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And that's a psychopathic architecture. We all know that.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
So yeah, I mean that's the stuff that that's right there.
That's what the death penalty's for. Actually, it's for that
type of art personality severe you know, we call antisocial personality.
But the pure evil, the pure psychopath, you know, that
just has absolutely no conscience whatsoever, no regard for human life,
(39:16):
you know, no redemption.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Well, let's talk a little. You can tell me if
this sounds like psychopathy. Let's talk about kindergarten teacher, okay,
from New Jersey, middle class family child clasti exchange. Kathleen Dorset,
so a respected elementary school teacher from New Jersey. Her father,
(39:37):
Thomas Dorset, a former school administrator. So they seem like
a law abiding middle class family. But turns out Stephen Moore,
Kathleen's husband and the father of their twenty month old daughter,
had just dropped off the child when Thomas ambushed and
beat him to death in the driveway. Together, they stuffed
(40:01):
his body and the trunk of the car, drove it
to a parking lot, and set it on fire, attempting
to destroy the evidence. Okay, because someone was standing over
the control of the child. So Kathleen goes from being
a school teacher to being a convicted killer and hiring
(40:23):
a hitman. Okay, So talking about this extreme amashment in families.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah, it's the same thing that's you've got a family
at meshment. You got you know, family system, severe dysfunction
right in this family system.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, so can we talk about who's raising the child now?
So let's just talk about that, not the parents, Okay,
the child's being raised by the parent, old grandmother and
the other family members of serving time. So you won't
believe the links the family members will go to to
(40:57):
help all other family members. And I'm I'm highlighting the emphasis.
I'm emphasizing this because when I make recommendations for who
is going to drive the child from visitation to the
other parents home, or who's going to supervise or do exchanges,
(41:20):
I recommend it being a neutral third party person, and
we really should stay away from these non neutral family members.
Things can happen during these exchanges. Words exchanged over time,
it it's escal emotions are a vote, It's very volatile,
(41:40):
and these things may not be being reported to the court.
And over time, like dozens of instances things are happening.
It's quite shocking. And a lot of these rural areas
where I do some cases, they don't have good resources.
They don't have people to take these jobs to do
(42:02):
these exchanges or have the supervision, or there's not shelters
or agencies, and so it forces the parents to sort
of co parent even though this is not a good situation. This.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yep, resource allocation, that's that's a big problem in a
lot of you know, smaller communities. They don't have the
resources or you know, they there's not allocating properly.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Yeah, there's so many more cases we can talk about.
But it sounds like you and I are going to
be doing another episode coming up on cults and gangs.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, I think so this is interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I wasn't as familiar with this one cult that sort
of that the neo Nazi cult, that gang that's that's
emerged or is now apparently distributed across the country. I
wasn't aware of it.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Okay, Well, I think we're going to have Eric Salayah
and you you guys are going to do some research.
We're going to talk about that. But in the meantime,
if you do need court ordered psychological evaluations. You can
contact Craig Wetter or I I do the family law
evaluations that Craig doesn't love to do, but.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Uh, I would do them.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's just you know, you're the expert, so yeah, you're
better suited to do those.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
You have more expertise.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
All right, awesome, Craig, thank you so much for your
time today, and we'll see you next week. Thank you
for listening to Killer Psychologist. To watch full video episodes
or if you want to interact with me, you can
find Killer Psychologists on YouTube. You can also get notified
of new episodes by signing up in my stand store. Now,
(43:41):
if you want to work with me, you can book
a console. My website is psychologydoctor dot com. That's psychology
dr dot com
Speaker 2 (44:01):
At attend to the att
Welcome to Killer Psychologist. I'm Dana Anderson, a forensic psychologist
and your host of the show. Killer Psychologist is for
true crime fanatics and anyone intrigued with the dark side
of psychology. Welcome to Killer Psychologist. I'm Dana Anderson, a
(00:22):
forensic psychologist who evaluates killers. I'm a killer psychologist, and
today I have with me doctor Craig Wetter, who also
evaluates killers. And today we're going to talk about child
custody evaluations. And Craig, let me read this headline to
you and you let me know what you think. All Right,
(00:44):
dad charged with murdering his daughter allowed to go on
family vacation to Hawaii. Do you have any concerns here
with this at all?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So are you telling me that he's out of custody?
Is that what you're saying is that he's he's no
longer in custody. Is he out on bail and he's
now going on vacation with his family after presumably allegedly
murdering his daughter?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Am I reading that correctly?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
So this just hit the headline? So I look this
case up. It says Christopher Schulti's a thirty eight year
old Arizona man awaiting trial for the hot car death
of his two year old daughter has been granted permission
to vacation in Hawaii with his wife and two surviving daughters.
(01:36):
The incident occurred when he left his toddler in the
car with the engine running while he played video games inside.
So his trial is scheduled to begin October twenty seventh,
and if convicted, he faces life in prison. So some
(01:57):
of these headlines like our public outrage with some of
the questions about the appropriateness for a defendant facing such
serious charges to have custody of their other children. And
that's where we enter family court. So we're going to
talk about these types of individuals who may have criminal
(02:21):
charges so not maybe convicted yet, but there are questions
that are coming up in court, in family court in fact,
about a parenting plan or who should have physical or
legal custody of the child, And so Craig and I
are going to talk about some of those cases. In fact, Craig,
(02:45):
you don't love family law evaluations, is that right?
Speaker 3 (02:50):
That's that is correct, Dana.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
And why don't I generally do child custody evaluations. Well,
it's a risk manager perspective that I take. You know,
it's not that I won't do them, it's just that
they are not evaluations that I generally.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Prefer to undertake.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I would happily evaluate a serial killer or competence or
you know, criminal responsibility. Then I would do a parnal
fitness evaluation or some type of child custody.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Evaluation, only because of what I.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Have seen happen in these In some of these instances,
and I know they're not they don't happen all the time,
but we certainly have a few that we're going to
talk about today that where either the you know, one
parent who perhaps doesn't get what they wanted takes that
out on others, which can include family members, but it
can also include people officers of the court. Those are
(03:46):
the attorneys that might have been involved in the case,
judges in some cases, doctors. So, yeah, and we'll talk
about the personality structure that drives.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
A lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Particularly when we have like a combination of sort of
like the serious mental illness along with personality pathology together,
those dynamics are very dangerous, can be very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, you mentioned this personality architecture. So personality type and
I think a lot of listeners probably are curious about
what type of parents end up in family court or
which ones would be at the highest risk to commit murder.
And I've done a variety of evaluations across settings, and
(04:33):
I know you have, and I can kind of tell
you the ones that fall into family court. I'm talking
about high risk factors. So there's restraining orders. They're not
people that are following court orders. And there seems to
be a theme of taking it's like considering their children
(04:56):
as property and wanting them return to them transactionally, so
that there's like a disconnect from their ability to parent.
But if in fact they feel that the child is
going to be removed from them or is removed, they
are retaliatory.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And speaking of that personality architecture specifically, what you're talking about,
like when you're talking about people who will react in
ways that can become violent, and these are people with
the narcissistic orderline architecture. We've talked about this before in
other episodes, particularly in the narcissism space, because in narcissism,
(05:39):
the excess is grandiosity and entitlement, right, So, like you
just said, these people will lose focus of that being
an actual child, that being an individual, and what they
view their child is as like you said, as property,
something they're entitled to, and that if they fear losing that,
this is where the abandonment paradigm comes in. They will
(06:01):
immediately go into an evaluation phase. So, if you've got
a borderline narcissistic architecture parent with really severe you know,
severe features, that can be very dangerous, right because then
they turn that outwardly, you know, they become outwardly aggressive
and violent and can become violent. And that's something to
definitely pay attention to.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, I've seen people lose their self, lose their identity
through these legal processes where they become so fixated on
gaining control back this loss of control they have. I'll
see when I do the testing that there's some obsessive,
(06:44):
compulsive traits that they keep doing to give them the
sense of power and control. They can spend so much time,
so much consumption, ruminating in their head of how they
want to be and become unhinged, unglued, and they do
(07:07):
think of different ways to retaliate against the other parent.
And this is where when we do these psychological evaluations,
it's really important to do a thorough assessment. Get their
criminal records, get all their mental health records, get it all,
and I do see also antisocial personality construct is in
(07:34):
there too. They will retaliate, and they do rationalize it,
they will consil it, and they will violate the law.
There's usually a trail of criminal charges behind that. They
don't think the rules apply to them. That's a common
(07:56):
theme that the rules don't apply to them. So some
of these situations for family law cases that I'm assigned to,
we do our psychological evaluation, and it's not uncommon that
the person we're seeing is not truthful about the information
they give us.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, and we have ways of figuring that out, don't we,
you know, right, in terms of like, okay, are they
you know again, when we're we do psychological testing, of
course we do, and we're going to be giving sophisticated
tests that will tell us whether someone is trying to
you know, fake good or make themselves look more well
adjusted than they actually are. And we can kind of
(08:37):
see through a lot of that in the testing, right,
So that's one signal or one warning simon. You see
that to some degree, and I think in most instances
when you're in a child custody situation where you're who
are doing testing, I would expect a little bit of
defensiveness by you know, the parents, and also some of
this elevation on scales that you know, measure this over virtuousness, right,
(08:59):
or this like trying to present yourself more favorable light,
better adjusted, all that good stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That's human nature. So I get it.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But when we see it at the extremes, when we
see it at the level to which it's clear somebody
is attempting to conceal some underlying pathology that is being masked,
that's when it could become more concerning, you know. And
again this is where a thorough evaluation by a very
experienced like forensic psychological evaluator is important because again there's
(09:30):
other data sources that we're going to look at when
we see we're trying to conceptualize what's going on with
this one individual, whether it's both parents or you're evaluating
one of the parents, Trying to deconstruct what's really going
on sometimes requires a lot appealing of the onions, so
to speak, because there's layers of things, right that we
have to sometimes uncover to figure out what's really going on,
(09:52):
you know, what's at root cause of like in the relationship,
but also in the individual themselves. Right, So their criminal
history tells of story they If we have that available,
that's critical information that we need because if there's antisocial architecture,
that's again where the violence can be escalated, right where
if somebody doesn't get what they want, they're just going
(10:13):
to go take it, or they're going to find some
way to get what they want, and that can mean
violating any number of statutes or laws or social norms,
that kind of stuff. So it's violating agreements. That's the
big thing that an in asocial is really good at.
They don't keep agreements, They have no honor, and they'll
do whatever they can to get what they think they deserve,
(10:36):
you know, and that's where the entitlement comes in.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah, I've seen some insidious things like breaking into their house,
cutting their power lines, changing the internet, like insidious things
and then making the person feel they're crazy or denying
they did these criminal acts. They're later charged with these things,
but they will deny it. I have cases right now
(10:59):
where they make up false names, false emails, try to
impersonate another person. Then even email me, and I have
that in a couple cases right now, and in one
case the person did it already several times and did
it even again with me. Some of them will impersonate doctors, therapists,
on and on, send me fake letters and deny it
(11:23):
through and through. And they are so pathological and they're
so desperate, so their criminal behavior continues and goes on
and on, and in fact they are not getting custody
of the children back. They just continue to do these
behaviors for many, many years and will dig their heels
(11:44):
in and deny any of this is going on and
then pretend that they're a victim. I'll tell you some
of the construct that I'm seeing and you can let
me know your thoughts on this. But I'm seeing this
a lot on repeat. I'm seeing this in men, and
you can tell me your thoughts on this, but men
who also they're in family court, criminal court too, but
(12:08):
there's questions about sexual misconduct. So when initially they meet me,
they're very histrionic, very superficial, a bit flirtatious, but everything's
very superficial. They'll say, yeah, I don't know why I'm here, man,
Like everything's good, Yeah, everything, you know, I love my kids.
Just everything's chill, like I work out, you know, just
(12:32):
just a very as if nothing wrong is going on.
So there's this histrionic personality disorder in there too. But
as you dig deeper, they also have untreated bipolar disorder,
and there is psychotic features they're not acknowledging that, and
the grandiosity. They also have the narcissistic traits. It's this
(12:56):
combination that's quite insidious, and I would call it in
some cases pathological, meaning pretty resistant to treatment, so meaning
they meet criteria for sometimes two or three separate personality disorders.
So sometimes they'll have narcissistic personality disorder, histronic personality disorder
(13:19):
and could meet criteria for antisocial or have antisocial features,
but also have bipolar with psychotic features, and they insist
on being untreated, not getting treatment, or faking treatment. Notes.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The combination that you describe is a very concerning combination.
And what makes it concerning is that you identify like
three of these we call them the cluster B. We've
talked about these before, the cluster B which are the
dramatic erratics or of personality section in the DSM, but
those three are in and of itself problematic when you
layer on top of that a bipolar spectrum condition, particularly
(13:58):
when somebody you know is untreated and they're they're they're
at the manic pole, so you know, with bipolar disorder,
so that the viewers understand, most people know, but just
to make sure you know, this is a disorder where
people's moods will shift from depressed or depression to we
call the depressed pole up to the manic pole, and
in some cases a hypomanic presentation, which is kind of
(14:20):
a subclinical type of mania. But when they get on
you know, that hypomanic and manic phase, depending on the
type of bipolarity it is. This is where impulse control
can become a problem. Right, So you've got someone that's
antisocial already, so they violate agreements, they're not they have
no honor, no honor among thieves. Right, then they're they're
(14:41):
untreated bipolarity, so maybe they're on the manic pole or hypomanic, right,
and now they've got the energy because when you're manic,
guess what you have energy?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Okay, they don't really need a lot of sleep.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
You got the antisocial piece along with that narcissistic grandiosity,
entitlement and all that fun stuff. And then you throw
a little hiss strionic into that, you got yourself a
hot mess. You got the potential for someone to become
quite violent and unpredictable because there's lots of things going
on in the brain that would take me a long
time to explain, you know, what's happening in these neurotransmitter
(15:16):
systems and these pathways in the brain that are leading
to all these behaviors. But the bottom line is is
that someone like that needs to be on an antipsychotic
medication and perhaps a mood stabilizing medication as well. And
like you said, a lot of times, they're going to
resist treatment. They don't want to be on these medications.
They don't like the side effects. Sometimes people who you
(15:36):
know who they enjoy the mania, you know, they like
it when they're in that stage. So, but that's a
big problem because that puts them at risk for engaging
in something that's going to get them behind bars, which
is when we get to go see them and so
and I see the same thing over It's like you know,
rense repeat same you know, same cycles.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Over and over again.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
You know, we're in the jails constantly doing a voutations
all over the country, by the way, because we do them,
you know, nationwide, And it's the it's a similar pattern,
isn't it. It's like, just today I was evaluating somebody
for criminal responsibility and for confidence, and I couldn't get
my questions in because this individual was so manic that
(16:20):
he would not slow down. And the just the racing
thoughts were just coming out and just just these boom
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
So and I'm like, well, you're not on your medication,
are you.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Well, I don't need to be taking medication right now,
because you know, I don't really need my medication. I'm
feeling great right now. Everything's great. Yeah, everything is great.
But you're you got arrested for you know, a very
a fairly serious you know, offense allegation. So no, things
are not really great right now. Right take your medications.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Oh, I forgot one more thing to add to that list.
So that personality construct there throw in. In my experience,
there's always an underlying substance use disorder, and so typically
they're trying to self medicate. Alcohol is really common to
see in there, but there's usually always a substance disorder.
(17:10):
Hence it's a problem, and the problem when it comes
to court ordered evaluations is that the court can order
them to treatment. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't interested
if the rules don't apply to them, or they don't
think they have an issue, they just conceal their substance
use and don't disclose it. And that is a common
(17:33):
problem that I see. So also do court ordered child
protective services. Those so those are folks that are indigent
and they've had their kids removed. So those some pretty
serious allegations, and for the most part, most of those
cases there is substance use going on.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, we see coomorbidity that comorbidities or well you have
two or more disorders occurring at the same time, and
usually it's a substance use disorder along with a primary
psychiatric disorder like bipolar spectrum, major depressive disorder, or even
a formal thought disorder like you know, schizophrenia, and so
it's not uncommon, Like I would not be surprised, and
(18:15):
I'm not surprised actually when I that people who have
this combination of both personality character logic, you know, pathology,
but also like a primary mental illness as well, are
going to be using drugs, you know, And like you said,
some people will medicate with depressant drugs like alcohol, or
they'll take like benzodiazepines.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
But others that tend to have.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
More of the mood disorders that maybe they're more of
the depressed side, they tend to like, you know, stimulant
drugs or you know, they might they might favor that.
And the problem with the stimulant drugs, as we've talked about,
is you start throwing a drug like methamphetamine into the
mix when you're using math. That really messes up brain circuitry,
especially in the joking system and the brain. But you know,
it causes a lot of problems of you know, for
(18:58):
people if they're using it extensively, which we see quite
frequently as well. So this is why it's you know,
it's so hard when people ask them, why can't people
just get better? You know, like why do we keep
seeing people like they keep getting rearrested or they keep
you know, they keep violating these agreements and you know,
these child cost the agreements, they keep getting rearrested or
(19:19):
the protection orders get get violated. That's because they have
uncontrolled you know, symptoms that are being mismanaged right because
they're not taking medications generally if they're prescribed, you know,
medications which you know a lot of the medications are
are quite helpful, actually they are. And you know, like
the mood stabilizers, I'll tell you what you get someone
even with someone with an antisocial personality architecture. You know,
(19:40):
like we get people at the friends of hospital or
quite you know, irritable and they're very oppositional. You know,
they're angry all the time and they don't really have
a serious mental illness, but they have a personality disort.
We can treat that with a mood stabilizer. We can
give them a low dose antapsychotic. It actually helps because
it dials down the aggress and it can reduce some
(20:01):
of the impulsivity that we see. Not going to change
the underlying you know, character, the traits, but at least
he'll dial down with some of that aggression.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Let's talk about a case that just was in the
headlines recently for a mother who was granted court approved
visit for her eleven year old son where she took
him to Disneyland for three days. So her name is
(20:31):
Siritha Ramaaju. So she took her son to Disneyland and
then after he fell asleep, it alleges that she slit
her son's throat. And so this is after they returned
to their hotel room and Santa Anna and she called
(20:53):
nine to one one on herself. She's been charged with murder, torture,
agriv mayhem. What's the motive? People are asking what was
going on? We only know from you know, what's shared
online right now that there was an ongoing custody battle
(21:15):
that turns homicidal. So while we don't know all the
motivations in this case, these are the types of evaluations
that we get for individuals to end up in county jail.
They're arrested, there's homicide, and we evaluate them and a
lot of times the first step is assessing whether they're
competent to proceed to trial. Do they understand what's going
(21:37):
on now, can they proceed to court, can they work
with their attorney, you know? Or is this an insanity
dy defense? So those are some of the type of
evws we do. But it sounds like in this case
there was ongoing custody and she was granted approval for
a visit. So it brings to my mind our role
because sometimes we are asked about recommendations and I do
(22:05):
some cases and a lot of times I say, no,
this parent has to be supervised by a third party,
neutral person. That has to be documented. They're not going
to follow rules, they're not medicated. It's not safe. I
had an attorney asked me the other day when I
gave him feedback about as client who had bipolar and
(22:27):
several other personality disorders, and he said, well, how would
that be a problem with impulsivity in these charges? And
I said, well, it is a problem because it's not treated,
it's not under control, and that's why we're here. He
hasn't been able to follow rules, which is impulsive, and
he's not showing ability to follow rules. And just a
(22:48):
couple tips for people that are interested in doing these evaluations.
Always get the criminal records and if you can't get them,
something that I have my clients do is provide their
social Security number and sign a release so I can
run their criminal background check and get have a private
investigator that does that for me. It can be very revealing.
(23:09):
I can see, you know, twenty four pages of criminal
acts over time, I'm like, wow.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That's that's that's data you know, and right, they didn't
provide that, but now you have it, right, and that's
not that's irrefutable. Those are public records. Those are court
records that come from you know, they're valid. In other words,
this is good data and it's important.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Well, here's the thing. A lot of times I'll ask
family law attorneys if they know or are you aware
if your client has a criminal history, and they'll say, oh,
I have no idea, so it is something you should
look into. But if you do get a psychological evaluation,
we will get all your criminal records and I will
have them sign a release for their medical records. And
(23:51):
a lot of people are unwilling to do that, but
it is part of the court order. The court is
my client, and I will get them to sign it,
sign the release so the records go to me, not
the client where they can manipulate the records. But typically
there is a lot of information in there. So I
(24:13):
wouldn't advise anyone to skip certain steps in the evaluation,
or if you're a psychologist, don't lowball your price for
these child custody assessments. There's a lot of risk reliability
that goes into these. I charge my full rate and
(24:33):
I do a thorough evaluation. And that's how I do
it because I'm not taking any shortcuts.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Well, I'm wondering about Sritha's case here here, and again
we don't know. I don't know if they've reported this
in the news.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I searched to see if there was any information about
whether there had been any evaluations done of either her
or anybody else.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Did you find anything online? I didn't.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
In terms of like if it doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
But this is where it becomes one obviously, the court,
the family law court, and this is an Orange County
some judge granted this right. Wouldn't want to be that
judge right now, But I mean that's just just from
(25:20):
a you know, I wouldn't want to be in that
judge of shoes at the moment because again I don't
know what information they had or did not have. But
you know, these and again sometimes we can't predict these.
It's not that I, you know, we can precisely predict
when someone's going to be violent, but if there was
any history, if she had any history, at all of
any you know, prior mental health involvement or treatment for anything,
(25:44):
or even in terms of her arrest history, if you
had any prior history of any acts of domestic balance
or other types of instrumental or expressive violence, that should
should have been noted right and taken into consideration. Was
particularly when you've got to rusty battle going on.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, she had a court appearance in April. There's no
further information. We know that she did purchase a large
kitchen knife the day before, which was recovered. Sounds like
she also admitted to ingesting pills afterwards in an apparent
suicide attempt.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
So yeah, in fantaside, and so then you know then
committing suicide afterwards. So again this and again we haven't
evaluated her, so we can't give an opinion as to
whether or not there's any like personality pathology. But it's
just you know, in a hypothetical case where what you
start looking at there as you look at again, you
I would look for evidence again we go to this
(26:43):
cluster b stuff, narcissist borderline architecture, that kind of stuff.
Is any of that present because again, you know, if
someone is if their identity is tied to their children
or you know, their child. That's an existential crisis.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
For someone to lose.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Who's their child if they're so ameshed in terms of
their identities ameshed with that, if they have you know,
some of this severe personality bipology, this is what puts
them at risk for doing.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
This kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
And again we don't know because we have an evaluator
that doesn't there's nobody giving opinions about you know, this
individual's personality style or problems that she.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
May have been having.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
So here's another recent case, and this is Rachel Moore.
So she had her ex murdered after custody was granted
to her ex. I'm assuming it's husband. So this is
an April twenty twenty five, so this is just last month.
She was supposed to share custody. Hours after the judge
(27:51):
ruled that twenty four year old Colby Vinson should have
joint custody of their child, she rooted her stepfather, Jason Curtis,
to carry out the hit. So Curtis ambushed him and
shot him. So it was a murder executed like a
business transaction, so it was premeditated, instrumental.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
So that's a different type. You know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Again, that's that's an instrumental type of you know, violence
right where it's planned. Again, if that's all, that's what's alleged,
right this case probably is still pending. Obviously, this happened
in Florida, so she's in trouble.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
She's in Florida.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
That's gonna you know, if they go first degree with
special circumstances on it, you know what that is, that's
capital murder, first.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Degree premeditated murder, so that life without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Well, it could be the death penalty because again there's
you know, there are special circumstances, especially like this where
it's a it's a calculated hit like that. I don't
have to look at the Florida statutes.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
But they might go death penalty on that. I don't know,
it depends.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
But that's a totally different type of if if true,
if all of those facts are true, in other words,
if she did, if she did order this and all
of that, that's a completely different person we're talking about now,
we're talking about on a social personality right there.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
That's that's quite different.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
So the jury found her, Rachel More, guilty of first
degree murder premeditated murder and tampering with evidence.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
The case already went a trial then.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Okay, yeah, just of this last month, April twenty four,
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Okay, gotcha. Now has she been sentenced yet?
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So it's sentenced to life in prison without the possibility
of parole.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Okay, they didn't do the death penalty. That's that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
So interestingly enough, she gave her stepfather fifty dollars for
gas to travel from Alabama to Florida? Is that all
fifty dollars?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
What happened to the step her stepfather is he obviously
he's been charged, right, where's he at?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
He was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to
life in prison without parole. Their communication was through Facebook messenger,
probably not a great way to communicate about a murder
for hire, and then just venmowing something probably not and
then they deleted the messenger app like thinking it, we'll
just lose the conversation.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Oh, sure, that gets rid of everything.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So I will say that it's not uncommon for family
members to recruit other family members, and it's very it's
not uncommon for me, as an evaluator to have family
members recruited to reach out to me to dissuade me,
or influence me, manipulate me. So one of the things
that I do is I don't take these calls or
(30:53):
respond to these emails. We are clear from the onset
when I'm appointed that the core is my client and
I will not be communicating to these other people. If
there was something they want to put in writing and
submit it to this individual's electronic file, that could be.
(31:15):
But I do have mothers of the accused quite often
attempt to reach out to me. And by the way,
they're typically the ones paying for their son's psyche bell
That is common. They are the ones that pay for them.
And they're also financially motivated. They're not just financially motivated
(31:39):
because their son is costing them a lot of money,
but they have another motive for them to get custody
of the children. So the grandparent all.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Kinds of interesting, you know, motivations to think about here
with you know, these different cases.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, so there was a recent Las Vegas law office shooting.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah I saw that.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, this actually happened at the law office, which is
something I'm sure you and I have feared. Why the
reason we prefer to do remote evaluation.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Yeah, doing a remote evaluation safer. Well, and this was
a deposition though, Right, So the perpetrator right entered the
law office where they were doing a deposition in regard
to that case, and he murdered his former allegedly murdered
his former daughter in law, and then he killed himself. Yeah,
that's another one of these enmeshment things. I think it
(32:36):
sounds you know, these these are you know what I mean,
like the narcissistic rage that comes in, like what you know,
what would the motive be here?
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Money, it's a double murder suicide. So he killed his
daughter in law, turns the gun on himself.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Well again, I you know, we haven't.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Evaluated these people. He's post mortem anyways, he couldn't evaluate him.
But I mean, I just a lot of this stuff
goes you know, when you look at the underlying what
would drive someone to do something like this, It comes
right back to this narcissistic, arcid personality architecture, you know,
where you and again where you get maybe that maybe
(33:12):
he saw himself as you know, the protector and also
the avenger right, because his son right was involved in
this divorce with his his daughter in law I mean,
you know that maybe he couldn't handle that what happened
to his son, you know, with regard to the you
know that.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Prior that prior marital relationship that obviously went south.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
But this is the reason, another reason why when I
started practicing law, I would I back in two thousand
and seven, I said that one type of law will
not practice is family law. I'm just not going to
do family law. And you know, out of all the
different kind of law, you know, you can practice family attorneys,
you know, do have to be concerned about this kind
(33:56):
of stuff. And it doesn't sound like the lawyer got
shot in this case, but their office got shot up, right,
their law firm two people murdered in their their conference room.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Probably, Yeah, So how I stay safe and sane. Also
is that some of this the communication between these pathological
people is that they will obsessively want to continue to
reach out to you with their narrative, and the emails
(34:29):
are over the top. They could go on and on
till the end of time. So you always set your
boundaries really clear, and no direct communications really should be
coming to me. You shouldn't be communicating with me directly.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
At all, nor your a journey.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Yeah, but again they're not rule followers, so the rules
don't apply to them. They don't know boundaries by the
way they do it anyway. But you can set up
your email. I can have all my emails from that
person forward to my assistant. She just puts them on
electronics file and I don't have to read them, because
you could go and saying reading crazy emails all day
every day, that they are manic, the bizarre.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
There you sad me one the other day it was
quite interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Oh that was from my stalker. Yeah, I have stalkers.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, well it's what or they just it's just a
tirade of like word salad where it doesn't make any sense,
like the one I shared with you that somebody wanted
therapy or something and sent some weird email. Nothing made
any sense, and it was like, no, we're not engaging
with talking about communication.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
I have my clients write something about themselves, put it
in a word doc, and we put it in their file.
So you will learn a lot about how someone can
construct a sentence or paragraph, or maybe they can't, but
it could be a twelve page narrative about their ex
(35:57):
and how bitter they are. But then not actually able
to fall the instruction that you told them to do.
And through the writing you can see their delusional, their grandiose,
they're illogical. There is so a lot of things. It's
really helpful because you can diagnose them with all this
content that keeps sending you. So I want to tell
(36:20):
you about a case where child custody. John battigla He
was a former marine living in Dallas, Texas. In two
thousand and one, he was under investigation for violating a
protective order filed by his ex wife, Mary Jean Pearl.
(36:42):
He was angry, vengeful, phil felt he had lost and
was losing control. Court gave him a custody visit of
his two daughters, Liberty who was six years old, and Faith,
who was nine years old. They were allowed to go
to his home, and this was around Christmas time, so
(37:07):
he had the girls call the mother. He handed them
the phone and he forced them to say goodbye, and
he shot both of the daughters on the phone so
the mother could hear them die, and he told Mary
Jean Mary fucking Christmas. He was convicted of capital murder
(37:31):
and he was sentenced to death. Even his last final
words were mocking and defiant.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, I guess what came up, at least from what
I saw in the research that when I looked at
this case, guess what the two he got diagnosed with
narcissistic and antisocial personality traits. It didn't say disordered necessarily.
But again we haven't seen I haven't seen the report,
so I'm not sure whether this was based on testing
or this is just the impressions of the psychologists, psychiatrist,
(38:01):
whoever it was that did the evaluation. But it doesn't
surprise me because that last act, what he did by
putting the kids on the phone there, that is a
retaliatory behavior. Right, He's getting back at his ex and
this is his way of getting back and retaliating against her.
It's a you know, using that child again as a weapon,
(38:22):
right to inflict maximum pain on his ex wife. And
see here the child's the object again, right, No regard
whatsoever for the child as an individual anything, just the
child is an object. You hurt me, you did these
things to me, I'm getting back at you. That's my
interpretation of that.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
The ultimate punishment to take the thing you love the
most and say you'll never have it, right, and I'll
what you suffer.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And that's a psychopathic architecture. We all know that.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
So yeah, I mean that's the stuff that that's right there.
That's what the death penalty's for. Actually, it's for that
type of art personality severe you know, we call antisocial personality.
But the pure evil, the pure psychopath, you know, that
just has absolutely no conscience whatsoever, no regard for human life,
(39:16):
you know, no redemption.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Well, let's talk a little. You can tell me if
this sounds like psychopathy. Let's talk about kindergarten teacher, okay,
from New Jersey, middle class family child clasti exchange. Kathleen Dorset,
so a respected elementary school teacher from New Jersey. Her father,
(39:37):
Thomas Dorset, a former school administrator. So they seem like
a law abiding middle class family. But turns out Stephen Moore,
Kathleen's husband and the father of their twenty month old daughter,
had just dropped off the child when Thomas ambushed and
beat him to death in the driveway. Together, they stuffed
(40:01):
his body and the trunk of the car, drove it
to a parking lot, and set it on fire, attempting
to destroy the evidence. Okay, because someone was standing over
the control of the child. So Kathleen goes from being
a school teacher to being a convicted killer and hiring
(40:23):
a hitman. Okay, So talking about this extreme amashment in families.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah, it's the same thing that's you've got a family
at meshment. You got you know, family system, severe dysfunction
right in this family system.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, so can we talk about who's raising the child now?
So let's just talk about that, not the parents, Okay,
the child's being raised by the parent, old grandmother and
the other family members of serving time. So you won't
believe the links the family members will go to to
(40:57):
help all other family members. And I'm I'm highlighting the emphasis.
I'm emphasizing this because when I make recommendations for who
is going to drive the child from visitation to the
other parents home, or who's going to supervise or do exchanges,
(41:20):
I recommend it being a neutral third party person, and
we really should stay away from these non neutral family members.
Things can happen during these exchanges. Words exchanged over time,
it it's escal emotions are a vote, It's very volatile,
(41:40):
and these things may not be being reported to the court.
And over time, like dozens of instances things are happening.
It's quite shocking. And a lot of these rural areas
where I do some cases, they don't have good resources.
They don't have people to take these jobs to do
(42:02):
these exchanges or have the supervision, or there's not shelters
or agencies, and so it forces the parents to sort
of co parent even though this is not a good situation. This.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yep, resource allocation, that's that's a big problem in a
lot of you know, smaller communities. They don't have the
resources or you know, they there's not allocating properly.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Yeah, there's so many more cases we can talk about.
But it sounds like you and I are going to
be doing another episode coming up on cults and gangs.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, I think so this is interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I wasn't as familiar with this one cult that sort
of that the neo Nazi cult, that gang that's that's
emerged or is now apparently distributed across the country. I
wasn't aware of it.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Okay, Well, I think we're going to have Eric Salayah
and you you guys are going to do some research.
We're going to talk about that. But in the meantime,
if you do need court ordered psychological evaluations. You can
contact Craig Wetter or I I do the family law
evaluations that Craig doesn't love to do, but.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Uh, I would do them.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's just you know, you're the expert, so yeah, you're
better suited to do those.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
You have more expertise.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
All right, awesome, Craig, thank you so much for your
time today, and we'll see you next week. Thank you
for listening to Killer Psychologist. To watch full video episodes
or if you want to interact with me, you can
find Killer Psychologists on YouTube. You can also get notified
of new episodes by signing up in my stand store. Now,
(43:41):
if you want to work with me, you can book
a console. My website is psychologydoctor dot com. That's psychology
dr dot com
Speaker 2 (44:01):
At attend to the att
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