RETIRED FBI AGENT JEFFREY RINEK DISCUSSES ONE OF HIS MOST TOUGHEST CASES

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome, Welcome to Inside the Criminal Mind podcast, where we
analyze some of the most notorious criminal cases with psychology
and criminology combined. Here's your host, doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome back everyone. We have another great guest, retired Special
Agent of the FBI, Jeffrey Reinick. He served thirty years
with the FBI, primarily investigating cases of missing and murdered children,
and is internationally renowned for obtaining a surprise confession from
a serial killer named Carrie Stainer. We're going to be
talking about that case and a couple other ones, and

(00:53):
especially about his book. It's called In the Name of
the Children and FBI agent's relentless pursuit of the nation's
worst predators. I'm telling you right now, folks, I just
finished reading this about a day ago. It's a super,
super intense book, but it's a must read. It's a
reality that many of us don't see or hear, and
I get it, but it's definitely something you need to

(01:13):
know if you have children. I highly highly recommend it.
If you like any of the books that you read
from John Douglas and mind Hunters, In the Name of
the Children is for you again. Now Jeffrey Rennick was
in the Sacramento office of the FBI. He was responsible
for assisting police and sheriff's departments throughout northern California and
active and cold case investigations involving missing children, child kidnappings,

(01:35):
and the abuse, expectation and murder of children. You're going
to see the psychological toll this takes on these agents.
This is some things you don't normally see. I know
you may be a Criminal Minds fan, but you're only
getting thirty seconds and this has much more of a long,
longer impact on these individuals. We're going to talk about
that as well throughout the show. Before we get started, share, subscribe,

(01:55):
hit that I like button. You know we like it,
so let's not waste any more time. Welcome to the show.
Agent Reinick, thank you, thank you very much. As I
mentioned before the show, thank you very much for your
service as well.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, you know, that's the intense part about this book.
When I was reading, I did a podcast last year.
I started on homicide detectives and it's really amazing sing
what they see every day. And I remember just talking
to them and going, Wow, how do you process this stuff?

Speaker 4 (02:24):
Day?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
In and day out, and then I was reading your
stories and the way you wrote the book was brilliant
because you start off gradually, going from one case to another,
and it seemed like even the cases were getting more
and more intense each and every one. So let me
do this and start off with this. What motivated you? Well, actually,
you read the book, you'll find out what motivated you.

(02:46):
What motivated you become an FBI agent.

Speaker 4 (02:48):
Well, I've always always wanted to be an FBI agent
since I can remember. I was born with a defect
on my left side, and as I grew up, I
was bullied a lot. And my father was a funeral
director in Philadelphia and one of the funerals was for

(03:09):
a you know, a mob guy, and I saw the
FBI agents there and they just really impressed me. And
I felt like, if I could do anything, I would
want to be an FBI agent. I never thought it
would be possible for me, but I worked real hard.
I was able to get into agents class in nineteen
seventy eight.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, you have an amazing story. He's really just touching
the tip of the iceberg. Folks, when you read that
story and see how much he accomplished on that was.
You know, I always like to ask have another podcast
in Special Forces always intrigued me because a lot of
these guys got motivated by the Green Beret or Rambo
actually one of them. Anything like that ever happened to you?
Is it the Untouchables? I don't even think they were
around back then.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
No, I don't think it was any one person in particular.
I think it was you know, I was like every
family around that time, where on Sunday nights we would
watch the FBI and that really impressed me. And then
once I became interested in the FBI, I started reading
and of course it was the FBI with James Stewart.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
So I always wanted that, you know, I just always
wanted to do that.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
That's the way I saw myself, although I never thought
with my medical issues, I would ever be able to
achieve it.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Now you're taking me back. Now that was a long
time ago. Yeah, those are classics. They didn't even have
comic books for the FBI.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
I don't remember if they did. I never saw them.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Amazing stuff. We'll try to keep it light in the beginning, right, Yeah, yeah, thanks,
So I know we're going to go right into the furry.
First case. You talked about Jeffrey in your very first
coection after very first case was different. Frankie was your
very first case. Yes, tell us a little bit about

(05:01):
that case, and then we'll head over to Carrie Standers.
I know a lot of the book is about Carrie Stanner,
but tell us about Frankie.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Well, Frankie was my first experience working abductive children, and
it happened here in Sacramento, and I was assigned. We
had a seven month old baby that was abducted in
an armed home invasion in South Sacramento. I was sent
down by my supervisor to work with the Sacramento Police Department.

(05:34):
And you know a lot of local law enforcement does
not like the FBI to show up or to be around,
and it was no different.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
They weren't needing us, they weren't wanting us. But I was.

Speaker 4 (05:46):
Able to make contact with the case detective, a guy
named Greg Stewart, and I told him, you know, we
had polygraph, we had all kinds of resources that were
available to them, and so at that point, Greg Stewart
and I started working together on this case and we
developed a very close friendship. We're still friends to this day,

(06:08):
and we were able to recover Frankie four days after
he was abducted.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Oh that's good news to hear. Now, there's a lot
more to that story. There was a lot of ups
and downs, and you'll have to forgive me some of
the stories were blending in together in my head. I know,
I just read it. There was one that kind of
threw me off. The way you wrote it was great.
It was just like I was reading a movie and
it was tragic as it was a real story. And

(06:36):
there was one where I think they broke into the
house on a home invasion. It looked like it was
going to be a home invasion of robbery, and that's
what it looked like initially, and then it kind of
the story starts changing and it really threw you guys off.
It sounds like in the beginning of trying to do
this investigation, because you're like, well, nobody really got harmed.
They came into the house and then they took the child.

(06:59):
What's happening here? And there was a lot of twists
and turns in that story. What story was that?

Speaker 4 (07:03):
That was Frankie. That's the one we're just franking about. Okay,
and yeah, and it was. It turned out to be
a situation where we had a girl who had lost
her own pregnancy, and sometimes women will want to replace
the baby they losed, and in this case, the girl

(07:25):
convinced two of her friends that Frankie was actually her
daughter that was taken from her, and these guys believed
that they were rescuing the baby, when in reality they
didn't know.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
The true story.

Speaker 4 (07:39):
And Carylos, I don't know if it will help your listeners,
but this book, I know, this book is different. The
New York Times commented that it had a different type
of voice to it, and I want your listeners to
know that after I retired from the FBI, the emotional
impact of the cases had really affected me and in

(08:02):
turn had affected my family, and my wife asked me to.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Write my story for my sons.

Speaker 4 (08:10):
So what I did was I spent a winner here
at Sacramento where it's raining, and I literally cried and
type my story from the beginning until the present. And
it was done for my sons, for my wife, And
that is what your listeners would be reading because after

(08:33):
it was done, my wife, Laurie, thought that it might
help other responders, investigators even victims. And she has proven
to be absolutely correct because we've gotten a multitude of
calls from responders, from investigators and from victims. Some of

(08:53):
the people that are actually reviewing the book are people
that are from the book that are complimenting the books.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
So it's been it's a.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
Very very personal work that I did it from my
heart thinking it would be for my son's only.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
No, and you can definitely tell because I could you
express a lot of your feelings throughout the book and
what's going on in your mind as with handling the cases.
And that's it's a great piece of work because I
know a couple of agents that I know currently that
I was still active. They're working human trafficking. They had
an incident a while back ago and it really affected her.

(09:30):
I mean, you know, she had to take a couple
of days to try to regroup well she saw it
and what had happened in the case. So I'm sure
she'll benefit a lot as well.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
No, it's it really isn't in the tense book, folks,
But like Jeff was saying, it's you'll definitely get a
lot of the the emotional component of it. What an
agent goes through and what they see, because it's not
what you see in the new in the movies, and
the movies that kind of treat you as an automaton.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
To you know, the goals for my sons to understand
why their lives were affected by my being exposed to
these cases. And it was a real surprise for me
to learn that my sons themselves had been carrying around
a little three by five cards that are generated when

(10:19):
a child goes missing. There were some that they still
carried with them. So to realize the hardship that I
brought upon my family by working these cases was a
difficult thing.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think you even mentioned one part of the book
where you had said something to your son it was
too young of the age, and then you realize I
shouldn't have told him that.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yes, yeah, remember that. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:42):
And my younger son, now who you're mentioning, is now
a police officer.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Doing really well in that job.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
And so it's an honor to me that he chose
that profession.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Absolutely absolutely, I'm glad he's doing well too.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
And it's tough because sometimes we're so afraid of them, right,
but when you have little ones, you want to just
be able to tell them, be careful of the boogey Man,
be careful of this and that. But then they're so innocent.
You don't want to ruin their view of utopia.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
I guess exactly.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
And in the book, the chapter entitled Michael, even to
this day, Laurie is very guarded about letting our grandchildren
wear any Batman clothes because Michael was wearing a Batman
T shirt when he was abducted and murdered.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
I didn't know it.

Speaker 4 (11:31):
At the time, but she went through the house and
guided up all the Batman apparel and you put it away,
And even to this day, that case still rides with
me and as a result, with my family.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Absolutely, I can imagine so tough stuff. Tough stuff. And yeah,
children are interesting, I know. I sometimes talk about this
in lectures and stuff, and their innocence when they're so young,
the world is so perfect and they think, they think
the parents are going to live forever. And I remember

(12:07):
seeing for the very first time a seven year old
when they realized that Dad wasn't going to be around forever,
and just to notice that, and they didn't know what
to do with it, and they kind of moved along
and it wasn't supposed to be pushed anywhere. But yeah,
when that reality gets they mature a little faster all
of a sudden.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
A law enforcement chaplain told me that our child victims
are the most innocent and the most valuable, and I
found that to be very accurate, because they are, like
you said, they're the most innocent, they don't understand, and
they have value by the virtue of what they're bringing
to society and making us all better.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Absolutely absolutely, I know we're gonna shift over to Carrie
Stainer now, okay, and this is a very different case
for you, because you found a lot of things in
this case. I think you were surprised about. Tell us
a little bit about this case.

Speaker 4 (13:03):
Well, in February of nineteen ninety nine, there were a
mom named Carol's son, her daughter Julie's son, and a
friend from Argentina named Silvina Ploso disappeared from a small
town outside of Yosemite called El Pertal And at the
time they disappeared, it was wintertime, so it was difficult

(13:27):
whether driving conditions were very dangerous and the first dilemma
that the Mariposa County Shrif's Department had was trying to
determine whether their status of being missing was due to
a car accident or something worse. And they did a

(13:47):
wonderful job, you know, working the case. And it wasn't
until the end of the week that they went missing
that a insert from Carolson's wallet was discovered in Desto,
and because the insert of her wallet showed up about
sixty miles from where they were last seen, it was

(14:08):
then treated as if it were a criminal matter, which
was a good choice. And that's when the FBI was
requested to join in, and we did, and I, because
of my experience, was selected to be the case agent,
even though the case occurred out of our Modesto office,

(14:32):
and I was sent down to Modesto to handle the case.

Speaker 3 (14:36):
And that's how it started. What year was that again,
nineteen ninety nine. It was actually February fifteenth.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
So this is just prior because I don't know some folks,
Paul might be aware of this. But the collaboration between
local and funeral law enforcement wasn't always great before nine
to eleven. They got a lot better after nine to eleven.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
That's true.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Our director in the nineties was Louis Free and there
was the head of our behavioral science unit was a
guy named Bill Hagmeier, and Bill, working through Lewis and others,
was very instrumental in getting the FBI to become involved
with cases involving children and to bring our resources to

(15:21):
play in those cases.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
And it had a.

Speaker 4 (15:23):
Very marked effect in the sense that when we started
working these cases, we were successful at helping local law enforcement.
And for me, from that point on, most of my
time was spent working with local law enforcement. I'm proud
to say that when I retired, you know, fifty percent
of the people that came to my retirement were from

(15:46):
local law enforcement. And yeah, you're right though the FBI
isn't always welcome, welcome in places, but I think once
they get used to dealing with the agent in their
office that they're dealing with, that's not always the case.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
No. I know, because when I studied serial killer's, one
of the interesting things about the older ones it was
the lack of communication between departments. So like the Golden
State Killer, right, he was killing inside Diego, La, up north,
and they weren't communicating. They just thought it was another homicide.
They're trying to figure it out, and it was. They
didn't have the systems as they have now, a codas

(16:23):
and things of that nature. So it's a very different world,
I guess, even for you. So what was the first
thing you encountered when you started the Stainer case?

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Well, the first thing with me because of the training
and the.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Exposure I had to our behavioral science unit, and.

Speaker 4 (16:45):
I developed just a personal strategy with these cases, starting
where the victims were last seen.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
The overwhelming percentage is.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
That where your victims are last seen is going to
be where whatever happened to them happened. So we started
at the Seer Lodge in El Pertel, and we started
by interviewing there was a maintenance man that had changed
the locks on their doors, and we started interviewing the
different maintenance people there and working our way through.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
There because that's where they had last been seen.

Speaker 4 (17:22):
As we were working the case, the head of our office,
the special agent charge, became more personally involved and started
taking the case over himself.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
How did that was that okay for you?

Speaker 4 (17:35):
Well, it didn't work out real good for me because
I didn't agree with this strategy and I was shortly
later removed as a case agent.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
But strategy of my boss was to follow the trail
of failed polygraphs, which I don't believe in that. And
then in terms of as we were recovering the victims,
the victims were recovered quite a distance from where they
had disappeared, and of course there was an issue over

(18:10):
where the crime had occurred, whether it was where they
were staying at the Cedar Lodge or where they were
discovered near Sonora, California. Myself and the older agents believed that.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
What had happened had occurred at the Cedar Lodge, but
we were you know, we didn't have the command. So
the case was worked from the perspective of what happened
to them happened near Sonora. And then the management of
my office had identified a group of men and they

(18:42):
started working them to the exclusion of all other leads.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
That's tough.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
If I remember this was the case too. That was
this the case where you ended up going with somebody
else to meet a police officer, right right.

Speaker 4 (18:57):
He kind of helped out as my as my boss
was removing me from the case.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
There was a.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
Young agent who had a lead down a Modesta, who
couldn't get anyone to go with her, so I volunteered
and then that day the two of us worked the
lead into two subjects named Michael Lorowick and Eugene Dykes,
and they turned up to be good suspects. We were

(19:29):
able to get a hold of their prison records and
their criminal history, and everything about them showed them to
be good contenders for being involved in what had happened
with Carol and the girls. But it also turned out
that Eugene Dykes, his name was rufus was his confessions

(19:53):
were not as specific as one would expect from a
person who committed the crime, and some of his statements
weren't consistent with what the evidence was.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
And my boss just kept.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
Persisting with these guys, even to the point of announcing
to the media that they were responsible for what had happened,
And so it caused a lot of.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
It caused a.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
Lot of confusion, And even in July, when our fourth
victim was abducted and murdered, my boss came out and
had said that the murder in July and the murders
from February were not related, when in fact it turned
out that they were.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
Oh man, was that Do you think it was political
pressure or societal pressure?

Speaker 4 (20:45):
No? I think that many times, in many law enforcement agencies,
we see people that will promote off the street, maybe
a little prematurely, and they don't get the street experience
they should get, and as a result, when they get
into a management position, they're also in a position where
they can make life and death decisions about cases.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
And I think in this case, we had a guy.

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Who didn't have the experience, who sensed the attention the
case was getting internationally and felt this would be good
for his career, and because he didn't have previous experience,
he made some decisions that I didn't agree with. And
as a result, for the beginning period of the case,

(21:32):
from February up until July, these false suspects i'll call them,
were the ones being focused on.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Now, that's one of the things about the book, if
I remember correctly, towards the end of the book, towards
the last third or something, was the focus of your
interrogation skills. I guess you're interviewing skills, right, So you
were ready. We started seeing some of your skills set
already by noticing the inconsistencies of their stories.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Did they ever plead guilty?

Speaker 2 (22:02):
They didn't plead guilty to they.

Speaker 4 (22:04):
No, they never pled guilty to this because they didn't
do it. But Carrie Stainer, he pled guilty to his
federal charges and got life without possibility parole. And then
he because the state charged him with a death penalty case,
he went through a full trial in the state and
received a death penalty. He's on death row now at sandpoint. Yeah,

(22:24):
we're gonna get to carry now because it's interesting. I'm
not sure if you're familiar with it. My area of
expertise is criminal psychopathology is what I teach. So when
you were talking about Robert Hare in his book and
psychopaths and things of that nature, I was reading Stainer
and trying to really I was like, oh, well, he
seems to be checking off that PCL pretty well. And
the PCL, folks, is the Psychopathy Checklist, and.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
I think Hair was cralezy with the creator of that.
And it was interesting. I was reading the book and
I'm going, Oh, okay, Stainer, this is interesting. As we
continue on, so tell us this what was like? It
wasn't like the first time you met Carrie Stanner.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
Well, myself and two of my partners, John Bolz and
Ken Hitmyer. On Saturday morning, July twenty fourth, nineteen ninety nine.
We were sent to a newdist colony and in just
south of Sacramento.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
You know, I actually forget the name.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
Of the news colony now, And we were there to
pick up Carrie Steiner. We had no idea who he
was or why we were there to pick him up.
There was a command post set up in Yosemite where
the case of Joey Armstrong was being worked, but the
information at the command post was kept at the command post,

(23:46):
So the three of us going down there.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
Really didn't know.

Speaker 4 (23:50):
I knew Krry Steiner's brother, Steven he was, but outside
of that, we had no idea that Kerry Stanner was
a suspect.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh wow, I had to had to apologize. But I
remember when you talked about the newdest colony thing. It
reminded me of Clues Out and the Ping Panther when
he had to go to.

Speaker 4 (24:11):
The I think it was called Laguna del Soul. Yeah, yeah,
that's exactly when I went down there. That's exactly what
I was thinking as Peter Sellers and in the movie.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
And uh, believe me, it was nothing like it.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't. No guitar for you. So
what was it like when you when you actually had
him in the room to interview him?

Speaker 3 (24:33):
Well, it actually, Carlos.

Speaker 4 (24:35):
What happened was we because we didn't know who he
was in terms of the case, and we really didn't
know why we were there with him. We were dependent
upon instructions coming from the command post, and eventually it
filtered down to us that they wanted us to try
and find a way to get him to come back

(24:57):
to our office in Sacramento where he could be interviewed.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Is that norma not to tell you, guys, what's going
on like that?

Speaker 4 (25:05):
That's pretty I had never experienced that before that, guys.
And it was a Saturday morning, you know, and my
sons were away for the weekend, and my wife Laura
and I were anticipating a good weekend together. So on
one hand, you know, I was I always want to
do my job, but on the other hand, I wanted
to get home. And what we ended up doing. I

(25:28):
told Carrie that we didn't know why we were there.
I was very honest with him, and that we were
being requested to bring him back to our office in
Sacramento to be interviewed and if he would agree to that,
I offered to give him a ride back to our office,
and then after the interview, I offered I would bring

(25:48):
him back down to Laguna del Soul. So he accepted
that offer. And then John Bowles was my partner and
he was following me in another so together Carrie in
the car with me, and I drove a two door car,
So in that situation, I put Kerrie in the passenger seat,

(26:12):
handcuffed because I didn't know anything about him, and then
belt it in and John Bowles followed me for security.
And it should have been a forty five minute ride
back to the office, but it turned out to be
ninety minutes because there was road construction, and during that time,
Carrie and I just got to know each other, just talking.

(26:33):
We were two guys thrown in a car for reasons
that we weren't sure of, or at least I wasn't
sure of, and we spent the ride back just getting
to know each other and talking. I had asked him
if I could ask him about his brother, Steven and
how it affected his family, and he had agreed because
I worked those cases and I wanted to know what

(26:55):
law enforcement could do to be better, and I thought
he would be a good person to tell us, you know,
what law enforcement did with his family that was good
and what they might have done that was not good
and throw And so for that ride back, we talked
about Steven. We also talked about Kerry Steiner in person

(27:17):
looks very much like a movie character named billy Jack.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
There was a movie named billy Jack. You're right exactly.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
The stars Tom Laughlin and Billy Jack was kind of
like one of the first martial arts movies, and it
was I love that movie. I watched it over and over,
and while we were driving back, I kept saying, you've
ever seen billy Jack?

Speaker 3 (27:37):
And He's like, I never saw it, never saw it.

Speaker 4 (27:40):
But then as we were pulling into the parking lot
of our office, he recited for me one of the
classic lines from the movie where billy Jack looks at
the antagonist and says that he's going to take his
foot and hit him upside his face and there's nothing
to do about it.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
And so so we.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
Both laughed and I realized, you know that in some
way he was telling me that, you know, he was
okay with me.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Do you know how strange it sounds that you were
writing with in a car right next to a serial
killer without you knowing.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
It wasn't no idea.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
That's blowing to me.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
When we got him back to our office, because he
wasn't under arrest and we were told that he was
a witness.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
We uncuffed him.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
We put him in a interview room, unsecured with the
unlocked door, and told him that anytime he wanted to
end it and come home, go home, we would do
that for him. And then, because we had no information
about what to do, we were asking we didn't know.

(28:44):
My boss, his name was James Maddock, was at the
office when we brought carry Stainer back and he told
us that Carrie Stainer was a witness and he considered
interviewing him himself but needed to go decided you need
to go to the semity because there was a press
conference going on there, and asked me to interview him.

(29:07):
I had no idea what to interview him about. So
what John and I did We called our polygraph examiner
and had him come in because as part of the
polygraph he has to do an interview and he might
be able to get more information to do that interview with. Also,
we had taken Carrie Stainer from his breakfast, so I

(29:30):
ordered in a pizza forest. At eight o'clock on a
Saturday morning, I ordered him pizza, and then the pizza
arrived and our polygraphic examiner arrived at the same moment,
and John Bowles came into the room where we were
with Carrie Stainer and told them that the pizza was there,

(29:51):
the polygrapher was there.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
What do you want to do first?

Speaker 4 (29:55):
And then Carrie looked at me and said, well, let's
skip the polygraph. I'd like to speak to Jeff alone.
And that's kind of a standing joke with the people
I worked with at the time, because I would always
fall into these confessions, so to speak, and people would
confess to me frequently, and a lot of times when

(30:17):
a polygraph was scheduled, that's how it would happen. They
would say, you know, I want to skip the polygraph
and talk to Jeff. So as soon as he has
to speak with me alone. Because we had no information
about the case, we had no idea what he wanted
to talk to me alone about. But through a couple
you know, times going in and then coming out seeing

(30:38):
Ken Hitmyer to get advice, it came out that he
wanted to talk about the Joey Armstrong case, which we
were the one that was the one we were concerned with,
and it sounded like from what he was saying that
he was the person we were looking for for that murder.
And then he also indicated that he had more or

(31:00):
to tell us and eventually sort of indicated it was
going to be about Carol's son, her daughter, and Sylvina.
But before he did that, he wanted he tried bartering
with us for child pornography. He was willing to confess
to all this, and all he wanted from us in

(31:21):
return was the ability to look at child pornography, which
ironically he didn't call it child pornography.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
He called it pictures of children.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
And of course the FBI in the United States Attorney's
Office would never let that happen because.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
You can't commit a crime to solve a crime.

Speaker 4 (31:41):
So we ended up moving Carrie up to a room
that we normally do the polygraphs in that had was
audio video monitoring, and we did an interview there. John
Bowles was there with me. It was a six hour
interview and by the time of the interview was over,

(32:05):
he had confessed to the murder of Joey Armstrong, along
with Carol's son.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
Her daughter, and their friend, and it was pretty striking.

Speaker 4 (32:16):
He also agreed that the next day he would take
us to retrieve evidence, which he did.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
But I learned.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
Later on when the trial was happening for his death penalty,
and I was cross examined on the stand quite a
bit by the defense, and I learned during the cross
examination that at the time I was told that carry
stander was a witness, there was enough institutional knowledge to
arrest him for the probable cause of the murder.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
So that was a little bit of a surprise to
the system.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Man, that's a sense in six hours too well.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
I do my interviews differently. It's not something that I learned.
It's kind of what I fell into to people, except
for the psychopaths. According to doctor Hare, I believe that
most people have value and have things in them that
make them valuable.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
And I seek that value.

Speaker 4 (33:16):
And so I believe, for instance, when you're talking to
a person that's committed.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
A crime, if they have a conscience, they.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
Know they've done something wrong, and if you give them
the ability to try and deal with it and in
turn to cause the pain of how others feel about
them to dissipate. A lot of times people will go
for that, and that's exactly what I do. So in

(33:46):
Carrie Stainer's case, I knew that there were times where
he became very emotional, crying over one of the victims,
and I knew that didn't really fit with us psychopaths.
So from learning more about him, I believe that his
quest in his crimes was to try and gain intimacy

(34:11):
with a woman, which he was unable to do.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
It sounds more like a either an anti social personality
disorder with or a sociopath, because he definitely had the
glibness about him, the way he toyed around with the wording,
and how he kind of played with you a little
bit in the sense of Billy Jack and kind of
giving a little subtle hint at the end, and it
was interesting about those things.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
Well.

Speaker 4 (34:34):
A friend of mine observed it, said that in his
crimes he had prepared for everything except me, because with
me comes an emotional.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Approach, and the way I do my interviews.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
Is and in his case, what we did was, first
I have him go through and describe to me exactly
like a narrative of what he've done, like an outline,
and then using that narrative or outline, we go back again,
and this time I want him to describe to me
exactly what he sees, what he smells, what he senses,

(35:14):
describing it to me from his point of view.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Then we go back again.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
We do the same thing, but this time, because he's
the last person to see the victim, I want to
hear what the victim experience, what the victim felt. It's
very important to me personally to hear these things to
try and understand what happened. And then we go through
one more time, where this time I'm standing in the

(35:40):
room with him and he's describing to me what he's doing,
why he's doing it, how he's doing it. And then finally,
if the interview goes well, I ask him to write
a letter of apology to the victims. In his case,
he would only write a letter of apology to Julie's
sund the other confessions I've gotten, I get the letter

(36:04):
of apology, and the letter of apology will always show
something with me that I had missed in the interview
or didn't get. So the letters of apology or are
very important and so that's that's andy. It takes a
long time to do it, but at the end, I
think you know, as much as can be known is known.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
It's extremely clever, yeah, because you're tapping into the empathy
aspect of it when you're talking about the victim, which
of course we know psychopaths e very little of any
depending on where they score on that PCO. And that's
very clever. And the apology, you.

Speaker 4 (36:43):
Know, Carlos, it's not meant to be clever. It's not
meant to be manipulative. It's just who I am and
what I do and what has developed within me through
the years. For instance, the letter of apology.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
I learned that from Stewart when we did the Frankie
Procter case.

Speaker 4 (37:03):
And I was in another case where we had a
little girl who fell into a rice silo. She had
her friends with her, and her friends were afraid to
say what happened. It was an accident, and so they
reported it as as an abduction, which it turned out
not to be. But one of the friends, when we

(37:23):
were interviewing the friend and asked him to do a
letter of apology, he drew himself hanging. And so we
learned from that that he was going to be a
risk to himself and needed help dealing with what he.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
Had seen and experienced.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
So I believe that everybody lives with a sense of value.
I think we all try and find value. We all
want to feel good about ourselves.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
And that's value.

Speaker 4 (37:51):
I think bullies are successful when they can convince the
victim that the victim has no value, and the bully
takes that value from them, does it for the purpose
of showing others. But I believe that we are all
value motivated. And of course that doesn't apply to a psychopath.
But and that's how I do my interviews. My interviews

(38:14):
are not real successful with a person who's a psychopath
and has just killed someone and going out for lunch afterwards.
But sometimes you know, you never know. I mean, people
are unique and different, and I just know that what
I do, I've developed and I do it all the time.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
It might be great to maybe bring you back another
time to talk more about the interview process, because I
think a lot of agents would learn. I mean, we
have to be careful. I mean, you would know better
than I. We don't want to let the other guys
now the criminals know either, So I don't know how
that would work out.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Now, I don't there's no secret sauce to what I do.

Speaker 4 (38:53):
Carlos basically well. I said to Kerry Steener during his interview.
He was reflecting on himself that he was a bad person,
he had done bad things, and I said to.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
Him, what I believe.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
I believe that many times good people do bad things.
It doesn't mean they're a bad person. It means they're
a person that did a bad thing, and we need
to understand it, to understand why that happened. One of
the frustrating things for me is because my confessions are
so successful, people will assign this manipulative value to me,

(39:31):
or this strategic value.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
It's not that at all.

Speaker 4 (39:36):
All I try and do is find an emotional door
and go through it.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
And for the most part, I've been successful at doing that.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Thank goodness, you're on our side. That's the good thing again.
The name of the book is called In the Name
of the Children and FBI Agent's Relentless Pursuit of the
Nation's Worst Predators. The author is Jeffrey L. Reinick Rin
E K. I could keep you here all day, Unfortunately
running out of time, Okay, and it's too short. I

(40:05):
tell you, I definitely want to bring it back if
we can. And absolutely I think we have a lot
more to chat about about these cases. We didn't take
a deep dive, and maybe that's okay in regards to
how it impacted you're and your family, and we can
talk more about that. Sure, we do part two about that.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
That's fine.

Speaker 4 (40:26):
One of the important things that I've learned, and I
learned it from my wife, is that the emotional impact
on me then had an impact on my family, and
that was something I never expected or anticipated, and it
disrupted us.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
But I looked at my I.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
I reached the point where I believed the dead children.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
Were calling me and waiting for me.

Speaker 4 (40:55):
I started looking at things as if death were a
way of getting out out of the anxiety, and unfortunately,
I tried a couple of times to take my life.
But from doing that, I learned how selfish it is.
And I've been fortunate and that others that have felt
similarly have contacted me because of the book, and we've

(41:16):
been able to help them.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
That's great, that's great. That sounds like you're calling right there. Yeah,
And by the sound of it, it sounds like your
sons as well as your wife. No that you love
them very much. I do absolutely wonderful stuff. Thank you
so much again for being here.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Okay, Carlos, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Expect another email O, folks, jeff Ryannick the book again
in the name of the Children and FBI agents relentless
pursuit of the nation's worst predators. I'm telling you, it's
a fabulous read.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
Folks.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
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