THE VIDEO STRANGLER

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
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 (00:30):
Welcome everybody. Today we're going to be learning about the
Saint Louis video strangler Maury Travis. And before we get started,
if you want to share and subscribe, make sure to
support us. Make sure you're share subscribe. Yeah, it backwards
so well. Maury Travis was an American series killer who
committed suicide in the Saint Louis County jail to being
arrested for murder. Travis murder at least twelve prostitutes and

(00:52):
claim to have killed seventeen, all in separate incidences between
two thousand and two thousand and two. He was born
in October twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five. Now, some reports
of his background are a little suspect, we'll see, because
he was one of the most vile predators of the
two thousands. Because we'll talk about a little bit later

(01:13):
about his two year Achilles pre He brually, tortured, raped,
and strangled upwards as twenty women, according to some other accounts,
mainly marginalized, he preyed upon the marginalized and impoverished communities
of Missouri and Illinois, specifically talking targeting sex workers or
prostitutes and women of color. Maury Travis was himself a
man of color. Maury Travis was born I'll get into

(01:34):
October twenty fifth in Saint Louis. His parents divorced me
he was just a young boy. Despite this, though, they
say Travis had a fairly normally will adjusted life. He
was quiet and withdrawn in high school. But again, folks,
most a lot of people are quieting, with drawn in
high school. They don't become serial killers. That don't have
become psychopaths of any nature. Maybe you've been called that.
It's a very common trait. So sometimes they're just trying

(01:55):
to make it even more sensational, right, it's more interesting.
Seemed to hear about a serial killer who was just
normal who then goes crazy, So just be careful with that.
Upon graduating high school, he had served two years in
the art of the Army Reserve and eventually went to
attend Morris Born College. Now, the problems after that, and
when he was about twenty four, he started getting addicted
a cocaine and this seemed to have led through several

(02:19):
robberies for Travis. Maury Travis, that is, and that could
be a problem because it's hard to determine what was
it was really the drugs that led to this behavior.
Now he said in an interrogation later on that he

(02:44):
was he always thought these thoughts, these violent, sexual violent fantasies. Again,
I remember Mary Travis was a sexual sadist, just by
the nature of his crimes and how he committed them.
These individuals tend to have these sexual violent fantasies for years,
usually an adelet essence and before they have a lot
of times they can't get sexual gratification without this expression

(03:06):
of violence and making these fantasies come to life. Unfortunately,
um he was a hotel waiter when he was on
parole for nineteen eighty nine robbery. And at the time

(03:26):
of the murders, they claimed that Travis claimed that he
murdered seventeen and again we said, some authorities are doubtful
of that fact. They don't know if that's true or
just made up. Sometimes serial killers will make up how
many they have killed. They'll say more, they'll say less.

(03:47):
Really depends on what they're trying to get two women.
At least two women survived encounters with him. One was
brain damage though, and the other declined to press charges
when police were called on the charanaut of his home screaming.
His victims ranged in age from thirty six, forty six,
fifty thirty three nineteen, and several other unidentified women that

(04:13):
he targeted. But we're gonna take a little deeper look
now at Marey again. We know the history, right. A
lot of these individuals, especially sexual says a lot of
high proportion of them have been sexually abused themselves or
exposed to devian sexual behaviors such as parents having sex
in front of them, bathing them naked. Like Gary Widgway,
the serial killer. His mother used to bathe them naked,

(04:35):
and he used to bath them. I think when he
was older, like ten or eleven years old, she would
bathe him and she was naked as well, have appropriate
conversations with them. So we don't know what's kinding on
with Morien Travis. He says he had a normal life,
so who knows. In that sense, we don't really know.
But he does have an interesting case of how they

(04:56):
discovered him, which was a fascinating turn of events. At
least I think it was fascinating turn of events. And
twenty two, nineteen ninety seven, he enrolled in Morrisbourne Broun
College with some two thousand students. It was about the

(05:17):
time he would tell a judge lately he became addicted
to cocaine. In March nineteen eighty eight, while home and
Ferguson on a college spring break, he ran headlong into
serious problems with the loss. He was about twenty three
at the time. Hooked one. He described as a three
hundred a day cocaine habit. Short in cash, Travis r
robbing shoe stores. This eventually led him to being arrested.

(05:38):
Travis politic guilty of the robberies in nineteen eighty nine,
tell in the quarry here used a plastic coi toy
gun to steal money to pay for drugs. He told
the judge he was so strong out that he barely
remembered the robberies. At the sentencing hearing six months later,
the judge set whose support seemed to indicate the crime
spree was an aberration in your character resulting from the
drug habit. Travis told the judge he had gone through
a drug rehab program was clean. I got that all

(06:01):
out of my system, says Maury Travis. Another person a
letter from a former US representative Congressman, I have known
mister Travis and his family for years, and he feel
he's deserving a special consideration. An age weel did it
since nineteen eighty eight. In January nineteen eighty mister Travis
has conducted himself and such as manners to pose no
threat to society during his congressional career. Clay later defended

(06:28):
himself by saying he sent thousands of similar letters. On
July nineteen eighty nine, the judge sueddens Travis to fifteen
years in prison. He was four months from his twenty
fourth birthday. Two months later, Travis wrote a three page
letter to Goldman, carefully hand printed on a yellow legal paper.
The letter pleaded with the judge to reconsider the sentence,

(06:48):
and it wasn't actually too long after where he was.
Travis was paroled after five years and three months behind
bars for the robberies working in the prison's janitorium food
service area. Shortly after he was paroled and June fourteenth,
he moved into a duplex. The Reverend Linda Harrison, whose
home shared a common wall with Travis, said there was
not the tiniest of problems while he was there. Once

(07:10):
she said she was in the basement of the building
doing washed when he surprised her coming down the stairs,
and he was very apologetic after that. Each time Travis
came down to the shared basement, he would bring into
a hummer song to let her know that he was coming.
And the years that followed between two more prison stents
on drug related charges, Travis worked several restaurant jobs during
the summer though two thousand and two thousand and one,

(07:30):
he was a waiter at the restaurant the Mayfair Hotel.
A coworker remembers Travis counseling him on the dangers of drugs.
He told me that crack and heroin were the worst
thing that God put on the earth. So at this point, folks,
he's about now thirty five years old, and as we know,
he hasn't killed anybody yet, So this is a little
bit more different. This is a little bit different than
other serial killers that we've talked about. Now, of course,

(07:53):
we don't know if he has we don't know if
he's raped anybody. He just may never been caught. His
co worker told said, Sir Travis had also talked every
day about his two thousand black eclipse. He told me
how to wax my car Wooker. The co worker called
Travis Carr, his pride and joy. Once his co workers.
He told Travis about a friend whose car was still

(08:14):
and they have found burning in East Saint Louis. Moowie
told him that East Lewis was a good place to
dump things because there's not many police around. But it
was a conversation between Travis and the co worker Julie
that continues to haunt the co worker. The co worker's
name by Leys Dave. Dave said she was working as
an intern or Julius says she was working as an
intern for KADNL Channel News. When Travis asked if my

(08:36):
station he had done a story on prostitutes getting killed,
He said he had friends who knew about bodies getting dumped.
Julie says she pitched this story to her boss, but
it went nowhere. After they could find no information about
serial killings of prostitutes. It would be three months later
before police would say publicly that a serial killer may
have been praying on local prostitutes. Oh my god, said

(08:56):
Julie when she realized that Travis was When Travis was
a right said, he told us all about it. You
know why we are here. When police with a search
were and finally banged on the door of the one
thousand and one four Drive the morning of Friday, June seventh,
Travis was still sleeping. He met them in his underwear, groggy.
He was not a particularly imposing guy. He seemed wiry,
but still strong. This was the investigator's commentary. The detective

(09:26):
would still with Travison and teleragation room for the next
three hours until almost two pm, trying somehow to work
his way into Travis's mind. Sachs the detective asking them
about girlfriends. Travis said he had dated. He asked me
about prostitutes, he got paid for them. He said he'd
never been abused as a child. He asked about other

(09:49):
issues that may have happened in his life. Travis said,
He said, I would never under understand he was born
like this. He said he'd been like this since he
could remember. So that's kind of leads me to believe
that he was sexually abused more than likely. Of course,
it could be organic issues, right, There could be a
tumor some part of his brain, abnormal hormone response, environmental

(10:10):
toxins that could have contributed to this, imbalanced, a lot
of other factors that it could have been in conjunction with.
But it seems something was kind of bizarre about Travis,
at least at that point. But again just because nobody
knows anything to a lot of people that we've met
over the years that have had sexual abuse, and nobody
knew again his parents were divorced he was about thirteen

(10:34):
and then divorced though, and he returns. The first murder
was in two thousand. It was the body of Mary
Shields was found in Saint Louis Police no Aboli Sheia
had been Travis's first murder, and then November was the
next one. Travis return Actually he returns to prison a
second time. He was released from prison in March of
two thousand and one, and then in April he goes

(10:54):
and kills the body. I mean that kills Alyssa Greenwaye
who's thirty four. Then in April fourth, three day later,
he kills another person, and in May fifteenth, a month later,
kills another woman, Teresa Wilson, and then it starts adding
up every couple of weeks to a month to a
couple of months. Between August and October, he had a
couple of months span. So let's take a look at

(11:16):
one of the some of the murders that he actually committed,
and so you got to get an understanding of what
type of murderer he was. So again, very unusual upbringing.
So what Travis would do. He began he would lure
victims to his home under the pretense of sex. Once
inside the house, Travis would tie up his victims, faking

(11:36):
interest in BDSM. He then hold the women in hostage,
sometimes for days. During these twisted torture sessions, Travis would
beat and rape his victims repeatedly, all the while documenting
his attacks on video. By the end of two thousand
and one, Travis had brutally slain seven women. Despite Travis
ever expending lists of victims, the murders had garnered very

(11:56):
little media attention. Police were reluctant to entertain the idea
that aossible serial killer might be a large The victims
were classified as higher risk by law enforcement because most
of the women were involved in prostitution and in varying
degrees of substance abuse issues. Remember we talked about this before.
Serial killers tend to target those individuals just because of
that fact. Travis was unsatisfied with the lack of immediate attention,

(12:18):
so he sent a note to Bill Smith and he's
getting member, he's getting engaged here into the investigation. Typical
organized defender, and closed with the note as a map
pinpointing the exact location of an unidentified woman's body, who
Travis claim was the seventeenth victim. Now this is interesting
because of Pon reviewing this note, Smith contacted law enforcement

(12:39):
the local reporter who then, with the assistance of the FBI,
launched a full full scale investigation. After recovering the body,
police took a closer look into who the killer might be. Fortunately,
police didn't have to look too far. After a closer
examination of the map, police realized it had been downloaded
from Expedia. They contacted the website and obtained the IP
address of the person who had printed off the map,

(13:00):
which was Maury Travis himself. On June seventh, Travis was
arrested and charged of murder. FBI agents and local police
officers did an exhaustive search of Travis's home, at which
point they came across his collection of home videos VHS
tapes was seemingly innocuous. Titles like Your Wedding Day were
littered throughout Travis's apartment. On these tapes document us off

(13:22):
torturing and killing his victims. Again, another organized killer. You
can see it won because he wanted his victims alive
and he tortured him. He wanted to see the satisfaction
of giving them playing pain. This is a classic sexual sadist.
That's how they defined the clinical diagnosis, someone who actually
gets sexual gratification by inflicting pain or humiliation or shame

(13:43):
on a non consenting individual. These videos were sort of
disturbing that see, the police chief ordered mandatary a counseling
for those in the department who had watched them. With
Travis behind bars, Saint Louis residents could finally arrest easy,
but just days after his arrest, Maury Travis committed to
a side while in custody at Saint Louis County Jail.
I mean the suicide was a preferable choice over life

(14:06):
imprisonment or receiving the death penalty. He was thirty six
years old. When he died. So again an interesting twist
because the Internet actually led to his demise as lack
of technology knowledge. But typical things here. We don't get
a lot of background on the Saint Louis video strangers,

(14:26):
so I apologize for that. There wasn't a whole lot
of data on him. But again we can extrapulate some
of the information because of the typical characteristics of a
sexual sadist. So again, a lot of them tend to
come from these type of broken down homes. A lot
of the times they've been abuse sexually or a large
percentage of them could be from the parents, it could

(14:47):
be from somebody else, It could be inappropriate behaviors, really
sexually deviant type of behaviors. The investigators so they never
saw any kind of signs of wet bedwetting or animal
cruelty or any like that. But again you're talking about,
you know, maybe he got under the radar, maybe nobody
ever reported it, maybe he hit it really well, who knows,

(15:09):
a lot of people just don't know. It doesn't always
have to be there to have those characteristics, but they
were cofound in a large percentage of serial murderers, So
there is some kind of pattern there, because it tends
to evolve. Right they started doing it, It started having animal
cruelty bed wedding usually because of nightmares and other issues,
and this also causes more shame and humiliation, which then

(15:30):
they hold it and repress it, and then they manifest
into anger later. Also, he was quiet and withdrawn, so
he had anti social tendencies already. So we can kind
of decipher who this individual is by the characteristics that
we've hurt. Very small snapshots of Maury Travis. We don't
have a whole lot of information, but interesting. Nonetheless, thanks

(15:52):
for listening everyone,