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How the FBI Cracked the Anchorage Triple Homicide · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine for a second treating a family's apartment like well,
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: an ancient archaeological.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: Day, right, like mapping it out inch by inch exactly.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: You're turning off all the lights, you're sweeping the rooms
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: with military grade lasers, and you're vacuuming up this literal,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: microscopic timeline of a killer's movements, all to.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Hunt down one single invisible human hair.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a hair that will eventually send a man to
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: prison for over three and a half centuries. So welcome
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: to today's deep dive, where you and I are going
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: to unpack a major watershed moment in criminal justice.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: It really is a remarkable case to dissect. We are
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: going to be exploring the nineteen eighty seven Anchorage triple homicide.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: And I mean, for anyone listening who thinks they know
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: the standard rhythm of these true crime investigations, this one
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: completely breaks the mold.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. It's basically a masterclass in how two incredibly
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: distinct disciplines ended up crashing into each other.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: You mean, the microscopic trace evidence on one side, right.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: And the then emerging field of behavioral profiling on the other.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: So our mission for today is to understand how those
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: two things. You know, dust particles and human psychology actually
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: work together because neither side could have caught this killer alone.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: No, they really couldn't have.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. We have to establish the environment first, right,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: because the geography here heavily plays into the psychology of
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: everyone involved.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: It really does. So it's March of nineteen eighty seven.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: We're in Anchorage, Alaska.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Which is not your typical American city.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Not at all. Anchorage in the late eighties had this
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: very specific psychological climate geographically, I mean, it sits right
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: on the edge of this immense, unforgiving wilderness.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: The cold is literal, but it's also like a figurative
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: boundary exactly.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: You feel so isolated from the lower forty eight States.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: And because of that intense isolation, the people who migrate there,
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: or you know, the ones who choose to stay, they're
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: united by this profound mutual respect for self reliance.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: It's basically a frontier town in modern clothing, yes.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Meaning you have to look out for your neighbor because
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: the environment itself is actively hostile. You rely on each
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: other just to get by.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The community is tight knit, strictly by necessity.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Precisely people up there understand the dangers of nature, like
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: the coal, the wildlife, the rough terrain.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: But when a community is defined by its resilience against
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: those external natural elements, extreme violence from within is different.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, human violence fractures their fundamental sense of safety. It
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: feels like this ultimate betrayal of the social contract that
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: keeps everyone.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Alive, which makes the events of Sunday morning, March fifteenth,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven hit this community like an absolute earthquake.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: It really did.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: We have to start with the physical reality of the
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: crime before we can even try to understand the microscopic
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: stuff that solved it, because everything ripples out from a
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: shattered morning routine.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Right, And we begin with Nancy Newman. She was a
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: mother of two, super well known in the community, and
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: she worked as a waitress at a popular local restaurant.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: By all accounts, just incredible, friendly, outgoing, and highly reliable.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: And that reliability is the first trip wire in this
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: whole thing.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's eight am on a Sunday, the breakfast rush
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: is starting and Nancy just isn't there.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Which for a reliable restaurant worker missing a Sunday morning
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: shift without calling in, it isn't just unusual. It's an
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: immediate blaring alarm.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: The shift manager feels that friction right away. They try
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: calling her apartment, but the phone just rings and rings, and.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: They don't wait around, which is lucky. They immediately reach
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: out to Nancy's sister, Cheryl, who happens to be married
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: to a man named Paul Chapman.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: So Cheryl and Paul get this really jarring phone call,
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: waking them up right.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: They're told Nancy isn't here, but her car is sitting
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: right in our parking.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Lot, So they obviously drive straight over to Nancy's apartment
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: to check on her.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And stepping into that apartment is just a masterclass in
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: the uncanny Valley of domestic spaces.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: Well, when Paul and Cheryl arrive, there is no shattered glass,
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: there's no inner door frame, the locks are totally intact.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: But the atmosphere is just suffocatingly wrong.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Oh. I see, like if you think about your own
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: house when you leave for the day, there's a rhythm
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: to the mess.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Exactly, but here the rhythm is frozen right in the
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: middle of a beat. Friday Night's coffee mugs are still
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: sitting in the sink.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: And Cheryl recognizes them because she had actually been over
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: for coffee two nights prior.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Right, But then on the table breakfast is sitting out
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: totally abandoned.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: The human brain is incredibly adept at pattern recognition, isn't it.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: It is even before a pol and Cheryl find anything
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: overtly horrific, their brains are registering these micro anomalies.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: A domestic space communicates.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: It does, and this space was screaming that a routine
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: had been violently interrupted.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: And then there are two really specific objects that stand out,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: acting almost like this breadcrumb trail of intrusion.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: The tip tin and the cigarette.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a small tin where Nancy always kept her
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: tip money from her waitress shifts. It is sitting out
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: in the open and it's completely empty, which is strange
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: enough on it, But then nearby, resting in an ashtray
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: is a brown cigarette.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: And that brown cigarette is such a crucial detail. Early
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: on Nancy was a smoker, yes, but she absolutely did
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: not smoke that brand.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: So it is a foreign object introduced into this closed system.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: It's a quiet alarm. But then Paul Chapman walks down
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: the hallway toward the bedrooms and the quiet alarms turn
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: into a literal waking nightmare.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And I want to be respectful here, but we have
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: to present the reality of the scene so you understand
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the investigation that follows.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: We have to.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Paul finds Nancy in her bedroom. She has been brutally
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: beaten and strangled. She is lifeless on the bed, and.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: The panic that sets in for Paul Chapman in that
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: fraction of a second is just unimaginable. Because Nancy's two
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: young daughters are in the apartment.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Right Melissa, who is eight, and little Angie, who is
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: only three years old.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Paul frantically searches for them. Melissa is found strangled.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: In her room, but the discovery of three year old
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Angie is what completely shatters the first responders who eventually
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: get there.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: It's horrific. Her throat had been cut with this savage,
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: totally uncontrolled force. She was nearly decapitated, just left on
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: the floor of a bedroom among her toys.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: The magnitude of that specific violence is a massive psychological
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: anchor for the entire case.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: It really is. Officer Bill Gifford from the Anchorage Police
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Department actually went on record about this scene later on.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: What did he say?
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: He highlighted a really brutal truth about law enforcement. Homicide
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: detectives build a psychological callous.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: They kind of have to right to survive the job exactly.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: They get used to robbery's gone wrong, domestic disputes that
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: turned lethal. They learned to process standard violence.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: But Gifford made it clear that a callous cannot protect
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: you from a three year old child slaughtered in her
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: own bedroom.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: No, it shatters the shield, and from an investigative standpoint,
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: that is incredibly.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Dangerous because it clouds your judgment.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: Yes, a crime scene saturated in this much visceral rage
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: has an emotional gravity that can literally blind investigators.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: The sheer horror distracts from the methodical procedure required to
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: process the space.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: Right, you want to rush, You want to find an
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: answer immediately, just to quell the emotional sickness you feel standing.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: There, which brings up a massive logistical problem. Put yourself
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: in the shoes of the lead investigator here, Detective Sergeant
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Michael Grimes.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Right, you walk into this apartment. There was blood, there
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: was chaos. There are three.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Bodies, but there is no broken window, There's no obvious
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: murder weapon. Lying in the center of the room.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: So where do you even place your foot without destroying
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: the invisible clues you desperately need.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you process a scene that is a
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: total sensory overload without ruining it?
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: It requires shutting down the emotional processing center of the
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: brain and just letting pure mechanical discipline take over.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: And Grimes's team did exactly that.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: They did. Grimes and this homicide unit recognized almost instantly
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: that Paul and Cheryl Chapman hadn't dragged bodies around or
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: attempted CPR in a way that destroyed the room.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: So the scene, while horrific, was actually for forensically pristine.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Exactly, so, they freeze the apartment. They don't just casually
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: stroll from room to room taking photos like you might
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: see on TV.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: No, they implement a super rigid physical grid system.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: They cordoned off the entire apartment floor plant into tiny
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: three foot by four foot sections.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Imagine dropping a massive piece of graph paper over the
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: entire house.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it was like. They didn't treat the
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: apartment as a single crime scene. They treated every single
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: twelve square foot rectangle as a completely isolated universe. Of
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: potential evidence.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: And they aren't just getting on their hands and knees
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: with a magnifying glass and some tweezers. No.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: To pull the invisible data out of those carpet squares,
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: they used specialized filtered vacuums.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: The physical mechanics of this are so vital to the whole.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Story, very much so. So you take a high powered vacuum,
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: but before you vacuum a single grid square, you insert
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: a pristine lab sterilized filter paper into the section tube.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it catches everything right there.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, you vacuum that three by four area thoroughly. Every
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: skin cell, every fiber, every tiny speck of dust is
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: pulled up and trapped on that specific piece of filter paper.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: And then what you remove the paper, you seal it
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: in an evidence bag labeled with the exact grid coordinates,
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: put a fresh filter in and move to the very
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: next square.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: It's honestly brilliant. If I can use an analogy, it's
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: like they are creating a microscopic fossil record.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect way to describe it.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Like if you look at the dirt in your own house,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: it's literally a chronological timeline of who was there.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: And they were systematically trapping the timeline of that apartment
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: in common household dust.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: And then they layered advanced optics on top of the vacuuming.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: They brought in portable argon lasers to sweep the grid.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Yes, the lasers.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Let's pause on the argon laser for a second, because
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure the physics of this makes
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: sense to everyone. It sounds incredibly high tech for nineteen.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Eighty seven, it was definitely cutting edge.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Why a laser? What does shining a colored light do
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: that a regular flashlight doesn't.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Well, it relies on a principle called the Stokes shift
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: in fluorescence.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Sure, So a standard flashlight blasts every single wavelength of
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: white light at a carpet, which illuminates the carpet fibers
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: that dirt. Everything equally, right, It's just visual noise exactly.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: An argon laser, however, emits a highly concentrated, very specific
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: wavelength of blue green light.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Oh.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: I see when you plunge the apartment into total darkness
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: and sweep this laser over the grid. Certain biological materials
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: like the keratin in human hair or synthetic fibers from
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: a jacket or bodily fluids will absorb those specific blue
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: green photons, and.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: They don't just reflect it back, do they.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: No, they actually absorb the energy, the molecules become excited,
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: and then they release that energy back out as a
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: completely different wavelength of light, usually a longer savelength.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, so then what do you see?
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Well, you look through a special orange optical filter that
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: blocks out the laser's original blue green light.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, it's almost like putting on three glasses at
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: a movie theater.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: That's a great comparison. Suddenly the carpet and the furniture
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: just disappear into blackness. But a single microscopic hair that
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: was perfectly camouflaged against the rug suddenly glows like a
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: neon sign.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: It just pops out of the darkness exactly.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: It filters out the noise, so only the anomalies remain.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: That is wild. And speaking of illuminating the invisible, they
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: also utilized a chemical called luminol to hunt for blood
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: that the naked eye couldn't see. Yes, lunol, which is
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: one of those things you see on every single police
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: procedural TV show, But the actual chemistry is fascinating. It
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: reacts with the iron and hemoglobin.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Right, it does. When luminol comes into contact with the
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: iron found in red blood cells, the iron acts as
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: a catalyst for a chemical reaction that produces chemoluminescence, meaning
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: it glows. Right, It emits a faint, eerie blue glow
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: in the dark.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: And here's the kicker. Even if blood has been wiped
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: away or diluted with water, the trace iron remains trapped
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: in the microscopic of the floorboards or the carpet fibers.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: And spraying luminol led Grimes and his team to a
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: chilling breakthrough, in this case.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: A huge breakthrough. They are spraying the floor in the darkness,
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: and suddenly they see a glowing blue void on the carpet.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Like a shadow.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, it's the exact silhouette of a knife.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: It's a perfect example of finding truth in a negative space.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. During the frenzy of the attacks, the killer set
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: a blood soap knife down on the carpet. The blood
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: seeped into the fibers.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: And then when the killer picked the knife back up
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: and walked away, they left a blank spot, a shadow
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: surrounded by a halo of invisible blood.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: The police photographed that glowing impression immediately.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Then they walked into Nancy's kitchen, found the wooden knife
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: block on the counter, and saw one single slot was empty.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: They measured the neighboring knives, calculated the dimensions of the
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: missing blade and it matched the glowing luminol impression perfectly
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: in both width and length.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Which confirms this was a weapon of opportunity.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Right, the killer didn't bring a weapon. They use what
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: was right there in the house.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: But the blood stained patterns offered an even more agonizing truth,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: didn't they.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: They mapped out the physical sequence of events. A trained
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: analyst doesn't just see a stain, They see velocity, directionality,
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: and movement.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: The drops literally tell a story of exactly who was,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: where and when.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: Stains on Nancy's bed, based on their trajectory and shape,
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: indicated that both Nancy and eight year old Melissa were
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: initially assaulted in the master.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Bedroom, but then blood droplets on the hallway carpeting presented
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: a distinct trail.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it showed that Melissa, who was bleeding from the
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: initial assault, was taken out of her mother's room, forced
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: back down the hallway, and taken into her own bedroom.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: That is where she was murdered. The physical trace evidence
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: showed she was strangled with a twisted pillowcase and her
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: arms were bound with another.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: The methodical reconstruction of this timeline is just harrowing. The
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: Anchorage PD did everything.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Right, they really did. They had the vacuum grid, the
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: laser hits, the luminol impressions.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: They'd reconstructed the what, the how, and the when perfectly.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: But they were staring at a massive, terrifying void regarding.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: The who because despite all this microscopic data, the macro
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: picture made absolutely no sense.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: There was no forced entry, meaning Nancy likely opened the
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: door for them.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: The house wasn't ransacked for valuables, which completely rules out
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: a random burglary gone wrong.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: There is no obvious suspect. They were totally blind.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: And time is the enemy and homicide investigation always the
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: longer a violent offender is free, the higher the probability
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: they will strike again to relieve the psychological pressure they
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: are under.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: So the Anchorage police knew they were out of their
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: depth regarding the psychology of the scene, which.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: Is why they reached out to the FBI's Behavioral Science
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: unit in Quantico, Virginia.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Right enter special Agent jud Ray.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: He is a profiler, which is huge.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Because in nineteen eighty seven, behavioral profiling was still largely
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: viewed by old school detectives as like voodoo.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Oh totally. It wasn't the mainstream science it is today.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Isn't flying to Alaska to look through a microscope. His
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: job is to sit in an office, look at the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: crime scene photos, read the victimology reports, and reverse engineer
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: the invisible architecture of the killer's mind.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: And Ray's evaluation of the anchorage evidence was immediate. The
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: psychology of the scene was screaming at him just as
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: loudly as the physical anomalies screamed to the first responders.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Here is where it gets really interesting. Ray basically builds
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: a psychological portrait of a human being out of thin air,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: based purely on the mess left behind.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: It is remarkable.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: What is the behavioral science mechanism at play here? How
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: does he look at photos of a horrific crime and
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: deduce the killer's age, race, and social status.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: It all comes down to the dichotomy of organized versus
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: disorganized defenders.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, tell me about that.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: An organized killer is often psychopathic. They lack empathy, but
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: they maintain totll cognitive control.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Like they plan things out exactly.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: They stalk a victim, they bring their own weapons, They
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: meticulously clean the scene, and they hide the bodies to
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: delay discovery. The crime scene reflects a highly ordered, functional mind.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: But Ray looks at Nancy Newman's apartment and sees the
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: exact opposite of that.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: He sees absolute chaos. The killer didn't bring a weapon.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: They grabbed a kitchen knife and a pillowcase.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: They left the bodies in plain sight. They abandoned a cigarette.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: This disorganized scene tells Ray that the killer's cognitive load
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: was completely overwhelmed by emotion, panic, and rage.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: And how does that actually translate to the profile?
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: Well, Ray says to them, look for a white male
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: in his early to mid twenties. He is an underachiever
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: with profound low self esteem, someone who feels entirely rejected
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: by society.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: So the behavioral link is inadequacy.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Yes, What's fascinating here is how that inadequacy manifests. A
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: highly organized killer is often functional in society. They might
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: hold out a good job, have a family.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Like BTK or someone right, But.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: A disorganized, impulse driven killer who leaves a frenzied mess
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: lacks the executive function to plan ahead.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: That lack of executive function bleeds into their personal life exactly.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: They can't hold a steady job, They fail in relationships.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: They harbor deep seated resentments because they feel the world
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: owes them something they aren't getting.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: And Ray took it a step further, didn't He He
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: stated emphatically that this suspect would have a history of
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: sexual assault based on the specific degradation found in the
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: assaults on Nancy and Melissa.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: He did. But the most vital piece of Ray's profile,
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: the insight that completely shifted the trajectory of the investigation,
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: was his analysis of the specific violence inflicted on three
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: year old Angie the overkill, Yes, the overkill. Ray explained
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: to the detective that violence is a language.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: That's a chilling way to put it.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: It is, but it's true. And the nearly decapitating force
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: used against a toddler speaks volumes.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Because a random stranger wouldn't do that.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: No, a random stranger breaking into a house might kill
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: a child to silence a witness, Sure, but they do
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: it quickly, efficiently. They do not possess the deep personalized
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: fury required to inflict that level of grotesque overkill on
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: a three year.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Old, So Ray is essentially saying the killer knew this
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: family exactly.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: The lack of forced entry means he was invited in
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: or had a key. The extreme rage against a toddler
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: means he wasn't just killing a witness, he was obliterating
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: a symbol of a family that he felt had.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Rejected him, which instantly narrows the suspect pool from the
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: entire population of Anchorage down to a very small circle
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: of acquaintances.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: It changes everything, and in any case like this, standard
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: procedure dictates looking at the spouse first.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: John Newman, Nancy's husband. I mean, he's grieving the loss
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: of his entire world, but investigators have to check his alibi, and.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: His alibi is totally airtight. He was physically in California
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: attending a training course to become a locksmith.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: So the profile, combined with the geographical impossibility, completely clears him.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: It does. Investigators also looked at a young neighbor who
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: had just moved into the apartment complex a few doors down.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Because he seemed nervous during interviews.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Right, maybe he heard something and didn't want to get
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: but a deep background check proved he had literally never
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: spoken to the Newman family.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: He just didn't fit Ray's behavioral necessity.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: No, the killer had to harbor a personal, festering grievance
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: against the Newmans. A random neighbor doesn't fit the psychology
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: at all.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Which forces the detectives to look uncomfortably close to.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Home, very uncomfortably. They need a white male mid twenties,
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: a known underachiever with low self esteem, someone who knows
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: the family intimately and who recently suffered a perceived rejection
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: from them.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: And sitting right in the middle of the family tree
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: is John Newman's twenty three year old nephew, a man
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: named Kirby Anthony.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: From a profiling perspective, looking at Kirby's life is basically
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: like looking at an answer key.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: The demographic and psychological alignment is chilling. Let's break down
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: his timeline because the friction in his life perfectly maps
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: out the escalation Jed Ray predicted.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's look at it.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: So. Kirby had moved up to Anchorage from Idaho about
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: eighteen months before the murders. He brought a girlfriend with.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Him, and initially they actually stayed with Nancy and John
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: Newman while they got on their feet right.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: They eventually found their own apartment and got jobs working
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: on a local fishing boat. So for a brief moment,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Kirby is actually.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: Functioning, but then his deep seated inadequacies begin to surface.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: According to his crewmates, Kirby becomes wildly erratic. He starts
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: hallucinating betrayals.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: He loudly and falsely accuses his girlfriend of having an
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: affair with the skipper of their fishing boat.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: He becomes super paranoid and intensely aggressive.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: The behavioral tells are just cascading here. He cannot manage
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: his own emotions, so he externalizes the blame.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And the result is totally inevitable. He gets fired from
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: the boat, his girlfriend leaves him.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: He has lost his income, his relationship, and his social standing.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: In one fell Swoop.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: He is a textbook underachiever, feeling entirely rejected. And then
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: in February of nineteen eighty seven, just weeks before the murders,
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: he flies back to Anchorage alone.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: He has no money, no plan, so he takes a
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: taxi for from the airport straight to his aunt and
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: uncle's apartment.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: And he just moves back into the Newman home, but.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: The dynamics have totally changed. John Newman is away in
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: California and he is reportedly furious over the phone that
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: Kirby has reinserted himself into their home.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Nancy, who is left alone with her two daughters, and
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: this erratic, angry nephew, becomes increasingly frightened by his behavior.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: The tension just builds and builds until Nancy finally puts
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: her foot down.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: She kicks Kirby out of the apartment shortly before the
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: murders occur.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Right Kirby is forced to go crash on the couch
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: of a local acquaintance named Dan Grant, and.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: There is the trigger. Jed Ray theorized a profound personal
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: rejection being.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Kicked out of the house by a woman who is
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: successfully managing the family life that Kirby has entirely failed at.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: That is the exact spark that ignites the psychopaths rage.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: So the behavioral profile perfectly frames Kirby Anthony. But here
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: is the massive, seemingly insurmountable legal hurdle, and it's a
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: big one. I want to play defense attorney for a second, say,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: Detective Grimes walks into a courtroom and says, we found
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Kirby's hair on Nancy's carpet using our fancy lasers.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: The defense attorney would laugh them right out of.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Court exactly if the defense would say, ladies and gentlemen
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: of the jury, my client is John Newman's nephew. He
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: lived in that apartment eighteen months ago. He slipped on
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: their couch just three weeks ago.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: Right, of course, his hair is in the carpet. It's
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: his family's home.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: So how do investigators mathematically prove that a microscopic hair
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: was deposited on the morning of the murders and not
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: left over from three weeks prior.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate forensic alibi. Overcoming that defense required
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: a level of scientific rigor that had rarely been attempted
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: at the time.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: So what did they do?
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: The Anchorage police realized their local lab didn't have the
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: bandwidth for this, so they boxed up all the hundreds
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: of vacuum filters, the laser sweeps, and the fibers and
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: ship them all the way across the country to the
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: FBI crime Lab in Washington, DC.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: Enter Doug Didrich. He is a senior hair and fiber
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: expert at the FBI. He has handed a monumental task.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: We are talking about analyzing between three hundred and four
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: hundred individual microscopic items of evidence.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Diedrich understood the defense's argument intuitively, didn't he?
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Oh? He knew simply identifying Kirby's hair was legally useless.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: He had to establish a biological timestamp, and how.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: On earth do you do that with dust?
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Well, to achieve that, he pioneered an analysis using those
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: vacuum filters we discussed earlier, treating them less like dust
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: bags and more like geological strata.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure the mechanics of this are
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: crystal clear. If you think about emptying a typical bagless
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: vacuum at home, it's just a clump of gray dust.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: How does a scientist separate layers of dust without mixing
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: them altogether?
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Well, the FBI's vacuum system wasn't a swirling cyclone bin.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: The filter papers captured the debris and flat compacted layers.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Oh I see, Yeah, presses each new sweep of dirt
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: directly on top of the old one, kind of like
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: sedimentary rock in a canyon wall.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: In a sterile lab us, micro tweezers and microscopes to
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: literally peel back the layers of dust, separating the deepest
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: dirt at the bottom from the freshest debris sitting at
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: the absolute top of the filter.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: And the chapmins actually provided the anchor for this timeline,
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: didn't they They did.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: Cheryl told police that Nancy was a meticulous housekeeper and
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: she had completely vacuumed the entire apartment on Friday afternoon, and.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: The murders happened between Friday night and Saturday morning.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: Therefore, by the basic laws of physics, anything found trapped
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: in the freshest, topmost layer of the vacuum filters had
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: to have fallen onto the carpet after Nancy finished vacuuming
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: on Friday.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: But Dietrich didn't just rely on the dust layers alone.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: He crossed referenced the stratification with the physical anatomy of
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: the hairs themselves.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Yes, he utilized hair morphology.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: What does that mean in this context?
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: He placed the evidence hairs under a high powered comparison microscope,
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: magnifying them up to four hundred times, and compared them
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: side by side with known samples from Kirby Anthony.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: And what does a hair like at four hundred x magnification.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I imagine it's not perfectly smooth.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: No, it actually looks like a tree trunk covered in
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: overlapping scales. Those scales are called the cuticle. Okay, Diedrich
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: knew that a hare that has been sitting in a
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: carpet for three weeks is subjected to environmental trauma.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Like people walk in on it.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Exactly, people walk on it, grinding it against the synthetic
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: carpet fibers, dust might attack it, it gets vacuumed over.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: So at four hundred x magnification, a three week old
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: hair looks pretty battered.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: The cuticles are frayed, cracked, and heavily damaged.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: But a hair that was violently torn out or shed
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: during a life and death struggle on a Saturday morning
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: and then immediately vacuumed up by crime scene investigators on
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Sunday hasn't been subjected to that wear and tear.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Precisely Didrich examined the hares found at the top of
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: the vacuum layers and saw pristine cuticles and fresh root tissue. Wow,
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: he could testify with absolute scientific certainty that these specific
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: hairs were not left over from when Kirby lived there.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: They were deposit during the exact window of the murders.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: But wait, there is another wrinkle the defense could exploit.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: The police found several pubic hares in different rooms of
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: the house, including Little Angie and Melissa's rooms.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Yes they did.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Kirby denied being in the apartment at all. But let's
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: say his pubic hare was found in a child's bedroom.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: A defense attorney could claim, my client never went in
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: that room. The police must have accidentally tracked his hair
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: in on their shoes from the bathroom.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: It's called innocent transfer or secondary transfer. It's a very
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: common defense tactic to claim evidence contamination.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: And Deidrich knew he had to preemptively destroy that argument.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: Oh he knew. And the way he did it is
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: just wild. He literally took his work home with him.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: He took an official sterilized FBI crime scene vacuum to
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: his own personal house.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: He did he designed a rigorous two week experiment. Every
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: single day at the exact same time, he vacuumed four
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: different bedrooms in his house.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: And what did he do with the bags?
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: He isolated the sweepy things day by day and then
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: analyzed them to track the movement of his own known hairs.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: He is literally testing the physics of how body hair
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: moves around a domestic space. What did he find?
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: He definitively mapped the mechanics of secondary transfer. He proved
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: that his own pubicares were migrating from his bathroom into
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: guest bedrooms. He hadn't even entered.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: How is that possible? Is it air currents?
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: It's friction and static electricity. He proved that hares adhere
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: to the fabric of socks or the inner cuffs of
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: corduroy pants. Oh, I see, as you walk through a house,
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: the friction of walking breaks the static bond and the
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: hair just falls off into the carpet in a completely
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: different room.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: And did it prove his layer theory.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, he proved his own stratification theory. When he looked
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: at his vacuum bags. The hares from day one of
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: the experiment were buried at the bottom and showed microscopic damage,
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: while the hairs from day fourteen were pristine at the top.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: So when Diedrich looked at the pubicares found in the
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: newman's vacuum filters, he wasn't just guessing.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: He had empirical data proving that violent movement throughout that
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: apartment had distributed the hairs exactly as they were found.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: The scientific net is closing incredibly tight at this point.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: But microscopic science alone rarely breaks the suspect entirely. You
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: also need the suspect's own psychology to betray them.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: And this is where Doug Diedrich's trace evidence and jud
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Ray's behavioral profile undergo this spectacular collision.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: It really is because while Diedrich is in a lab
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: looking through a microscope, Kirby Anthony is out on the
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: streets of Anchorage behaving exactly how the FBI predicted he would.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: He thinks he is outsmarting everyone.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Let's start with the most damning piece of biological evidence
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: in the entire case. Okay, while examining the evidence from
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: the Newman bathroom, Didrich finds a damp washcloth.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, a damp wash cloth, and clinging.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: To the fibers of that washcloth is a single pubic hair.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: And attached to the root of that hair is a
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: microscopic partial egg casing.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It is the egg casing from a pubic lower genital lice.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: The biology here is crucial. A pubic louse secretes a
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: cement like substance to glue its egg casing to the
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: shaft of a human hair.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Meaning it doesn't just wash away, it is incredibly difficult
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: to wash off.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: And finding this microscopic casing gave investigators an incredible tactical.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Advantage because they don't tell anyone they found it. They
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: keep it a total secret.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: Right. Instead, they approach Kirby, who is playing the role
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: of the grieving, helpful nephew.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: And they ask him to voluntarily submit a blood and
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: hair sample to help them quote unquote eliminate him from
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: their inquiries.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Jed Ray's profile predicted this arrogance exactly. The killer feels
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: a sense of superiority. Kirby willingly gives them the hair
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: sample because he thinks he has covered his tracks.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: He believes cooperating will just make him look innocent.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: But the moment Diedrich puts Kirby's voluntarily supply to hair
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: sample under the microscope in DC, he immediately picks up
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: the phone and calls Anchorage.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: And what does he tell them?
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: He tells them you Kirby Anthony currently has a highly
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: active case of pubic lice.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate microscopic smoking gun.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: The match is undeniable. So the detectives bring Kirby into
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: an interrogation room and they spring the trap.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: They confront him with the damp washcloth, the hair and
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: the licee.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Casing, and you can see his brain scrambling in real time.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: His lies start to mutate uncontrollably.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: First, his story was that he hadn't been in the
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: apartment since Nancy kicked him out weeks ago.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: But faced with his own biology on a bathroom washcloth,
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: he suddenly pivots. He says, Oh, actually, I remember now,
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I went over there to take a shower about a
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: week before the murders.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: And the excuse he gives is almost comical. He claims
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: he went to Nancy's to shower because he didn't want
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: to spread his pubic lights to his new roommate, Dan
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Grant at Dan's house.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: It is an absurd fabrication, and basic physics disproves it instantly. Why,
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: in the dry, heated air of an Alaskan apartment in March,
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: a thin cotton washcloth does not remain damp for a week?
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: Oh right, A damp watchcloth means it was used within
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: hours of the police arriving.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: His timeline is just collapsing, and his alibi for the
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: morning of the murders crumbles right alongside it.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: The medical examiner was able to pin the time of
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: death very specifically between seven am and noon on Saturday.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: And that window isn't a guess. It is anchored by
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: a grim but indisputable piece of biological evidence, gastric emptying.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: The victim's stomachs. During the autopsies, the medical examiner found
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: that eight year old Melissa and three year old Angie
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: had partially digested breakfast cereal in their stomachs.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: And Nancy had consumed coffee.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: Digestion stops the moment a person dies because the human
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: stomach takes a predictable amount of time to empty food
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: into the small intestine. The medical examiner can literally calculate backward.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: You only eat cereal and drink coffee in the morning
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: after waking up. The timeline is absolute.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: But Kirby's alibi for that morning was that he was
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: at an all night drug party.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Right he told police he was drinking, smoking marijuana, and
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: doing cocaine until the sun came up.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: He claimed, You returned to Dan Grant's house at seven am,
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: stayed awake, and then left again at eight forty five am.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: By his own admission, his timeline places him wide awake, mobile,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: highly agitated on stimulants, and completely unaccounted for during the
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: exact window the victims were eating breakfast and subsequently murdered.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: If we pull back and look at the psychology of
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: his changing stories, it aligns perfectly with the FBI profile.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Jud Ray explicitly warned the detectives.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: Didn't he he did. He said, the killer will not
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: be able to stay away. He will interject himself into
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: the investigation.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Ray understood the fundamental insecurity of this type of offender.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Kirby failed at everything in his normal life. He felt powerless.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: Committing this horrific crime gave him a transient, intoxicating feeling
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: of ultimate power.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: He controlled life and death exactly.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: But to maintain that high, he has to know what
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: the authorities know. He has to feel like he is
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: outsmarting the system.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: He does exactly that. He becomes a massive nuisance to
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: the police.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: He constantly calls the station. He asks them what the
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: lab results are showing. He has how the interviews are going.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: He hovers around the perimeter of the investigation, like a
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: moth to a flame.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: But while he is hovering, the detectives are quietly digging
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: into his past Following another one of Ray's key predictions,
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: the likelihood of a prior history of sexual assault, and.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Their background checks lead them to a deeply disturbing revelation.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: In Idaho, where Kirby lived before moving to Alaska, they.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: Uncover that Kirby Anthony was the central suspect in an unsolved,
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: horrific attack on a twelve year old girl.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: The details of the Idaho case are incredibly grim. The
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: young girl was found in the woods. She had been
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: strangled to the point of unconsciousness, nearly killed, and sexually assaulted.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: Tragically, she suffered severe permanent brain damage from the lack
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: of oxygen and was completely unable to testify or identify
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: her attacker.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: The local Idaho police were convinced it was Kirby.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: The circumstantial evidence pointed entire him, but without the victim's
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: testimony or modern DNA forensics, they just couldn't make the
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: charges stick.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: So he walked away.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: From a profiling standpoint, this is a terrifying preamble. It
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: validates jud Ray perfectly, and it demonstrates the classic escalation
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: of violent offenders.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: He strangled a girl in Idaho and got away with it.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: That taught him that extreme violence solves his internal frustrations
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: without consequence. When he felt rejected by Nancy Newman, he
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: simply escalated his proven methodology.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: And that arrogance, that belief that he is untouchable, starts
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: leaking out into public. The Anchorage police don't have enough
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: to arrest him yet, but they have him under loose
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: unmarked surveillance.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: They're watching the bars he frequents.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: And the old adage remains true loose slips sink ships.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: The psychological pressure of keeping a secret this massive begins
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: to fracture his composure.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: Undercover officers observe him sitting in a bar, drinking heavily,
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: and he is writing poetry on bar napkins.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Dark morbid poetry about death.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He passes these napkins around to the people sitting
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: at his table, soaking up their disturbed reactions.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: And then he leans in and tells a woman at
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: the table that Nancy Newman was forced to watch part
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: of the assault on her daughters.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: That is a highly classified detail of the crime scene. Sequencing.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: Only the killer and the investigators who mapped the bloodstains
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: could possibly know.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: That the police had completely embargoed that information. It had
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: never been in the newspapers.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: He literally cannot help himself. He needs the people around
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: him to fear him, even if they don't consciously know.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: Why, and he goes even further. He makes a long
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: distance phone call back to Idaho to his ex girlfriend's.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Mother, the woman whose daughter he had previously accused of
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: cheating on him.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Exactly he calls her up and casually mentions that three
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: year old Angie had been stabbed and that Nancy and
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Melissa had been sexually assaulted again.
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: The police had never released the cause of death for
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: the children, nor the sexual nature of the crimes to
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: the public.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: They hadn't even mentioned it to Kirby during his interrogations.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: He was just bragging about the secrets hed.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: The behavioral tells are cascading, and simultaneously the microscopic evidence
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: is finalizing. Doug Dedrick sends his final report from DC.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: He has positively matched facial hairs from Kirby's beard to
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: trace hairs found on the clothing of all three victims.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: It's overwhelming Didrich found nine of Kirby's pubic hairs buried
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: in the fresh vacuum sweepings from eight year old in
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: Melissa's room.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: He found two in Little Angie's room, one with a
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: speck of blood on it and another with a lice casing.
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: The forensic noos is fully tightened. The investigators now move
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: to secure the physical objects that link Kirby to the
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: crime to establish a motive beyond just psychological rage.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: They start looking for the missing items. Right remember, John
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Newman told police a thirty five millimeter manual camera was
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: missing from the apartment.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: Detectives visit the house where Kirby is crashing with Dan Grant,
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: and they spot a camera matching the exact description sitting
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: right in Kirby's belongings.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: When confronted, Kirby plays it totally cool, says oh, John
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: and Nancy lent that to me a few weeks ago.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: So the detectives use a brilliant interrogation tactics.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: What do they do?
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: They hand him the camera and say, okay, show us
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: how it works. Oh wow, and Kirby just stares at it.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: He fumbles at the dials. He has absolutely no idea
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: how to load the film, adjust the aperture, or take
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: a photo.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Because you don't ask to borrow a complicated piece of
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: manual photography equipment. If you don't know how to use it,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: you steal it to pawn it for drug money.
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: Which leads directly to the missing tip money. The empty
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: tin on the kitchen table.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: The tin that was full of loose coins. The police
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: interview Kirby's friends and acquaintances, and three separate people confirm
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: a totally bizarre detail.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: He saw Kirby sitting around right after the murders, painstakingly
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: rolling massive amounts of loose coins into paper bank wrappers.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: He was then seen around town paying for drinks and
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: small items with rolls of dimes and quarters.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: It is such a pathetic, mundane detail, stealing a waitress's
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: tip money after committing a triple homicide.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: But it grounds the psychology lg in a tangible reality.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: He felt rejected, he was broke, and he took what
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: he felt he was owed.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: And then the final undeniable mail in the coffin. The
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: latent fingerprints.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: Microscopic hairs can be argued in court, but a fingerprint
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: is absolute.
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: Latent prints are left behind by the natural sweat and
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: sebam oils on human skin.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: The Anchorage PD's crime lab lifted a massive palm print
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: from the wall directly above the bed where Melissa was assaulted, and.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: It matched Kirby Anthony perfectly.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: They also found his latent prints covering the empty cookie
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: tin where the tip money was kept. They found his
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: prints all over the kitchen table.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: But the most terrifying print of all was found on
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: the door to Nancy's master bedroom. Its spatial geometry tells
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: a horrifying story.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: The print was located on the back side of the door,
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: the inside face of the room.
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: Detective Grimes noted the terrifying implication of how a hand
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: has to be positioned to leave a print there.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: It suggests that during the initial chaos, someone likely Nancy
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: or Melissa, tried to flee the room into the hallway.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: Herby his hands, already sweating and covered in trace evidence,
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: reached out, grabbed the inside of the door, and violently
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: slanted shut, trapping them inside with him.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: The physical and psychological evidence has merged into a single,
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: undeniable picture.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: They have cleared every other suspect. They have destroyed Kirby's
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: alibis it is time to get an arrest.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: Warrant, But once again the FBI profile dictates the final
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: act of this drama.
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: Jud Ray had given the Anchorage police one final warning.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: He said, a disorganized defender with profound low self esteem
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: cannot handle sustained pressure. When he realizes the net is closing,
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: you will panic and his instinct will be to run.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: The repeated police interviews, the subtle surveillance, the realization that
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: they knew about his pubic lice, it finally shatters Kirby's nerve.
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: He realizes he isn't outsmarting them anymore.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: He goes to his roommate, Dan Grant. He is frantic.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: He tells Dan he's packing his car and leaving town immediately.
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: And he begs Dan, whatever you do, do not tell
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: the cops.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: But Dan Grant is there're a fight of Kirby. He
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: has seen the temper. He knows Kirby was sleeping on
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: his couch while the police investigated him for a triple murder.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: Dan waits for Kirby to leave, and despite his fear
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: of retaliation, he picks up the phone and tips off
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: the Anchorage police.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: But there's a massive logistical problem. Dan was so scared
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: that he waited seven hours after Kirby left before making
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: the call.
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: Seven hours is a catastrophic headstart in a state as
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: massive as Alaska.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Kirby is driving his vehicle straight for the Canadian border,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: which is roughly an eight hour drive from Anchorage, and.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: The highway between Anchorage and the Canadian border is not
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: exactly a bustling.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: Interstate, No, it is hundreds of miles of remote, dense,
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: freezing wilderness.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: If Kirby realizes the police are onto him, he could
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: simply pull over, ditch his car, hike into the woods,
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: and disappear forever. They might never find him.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: The anchoraged police have to act with absolute flawless urgency.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: They can't risk a high speed pursuit on icy roads.
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: So instead they immediately contact us cusstoms in Border Protection
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: at the specific Alaska Canada checkpoint Kirby is heading toward.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: They provide Kirby's physical description, the make, model, and license
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: plate of his car, and they explicitly warn the border agents,
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: you have a highly volatile triple homicide suspect barreling toward
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: your gate right now.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: And the trap works perfectly. Less than an hour after
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: the police make that call. Kirby Anthony casually rolls up
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: to the US Customs gate.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: He is completely relaxed. He thinks he's won. He has
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: no idea his roommate tip them off.
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: The customs agents execute the detainment smoothly. They don't draw
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: their weapons and scream at him, which might provoke a shootout.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: They casually ask for his ID and then inform him
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: there is a minor issue with the suspended driver's license.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: They ask him to step inside the office to clear
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: it up. Once he is inside, they detain him without
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: a struggle, holding him until the Alaska State Troopers can
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: arrive to make the official arrest and transport him back
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: to Anchorage.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: The moment he is handed over to the homicide detective Anchorage,
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: they officially read him his miranda rights and they list
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the charges against him, and his reaction.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: To hearing these charges is one of the most bizarre,
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: psychologically telling moments of the entire case.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: The detective reads the list alout three counts of first
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: degree murder, two counts of sexual assault, and one count
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: of kidnapping, and.
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: Kirby entity irrupts an anger, but he doesn't yell about
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: the murder he jumps up and starts screaming, what is
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: this kidnapping stuff? I didn't kidnap anybody.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: He completely ignores the fact that he is being formally
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: accused of slaughtering his own aunt and two little cousins.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: He is only outraged by the administrative technicality of the
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: kidnapping charge.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: It's astounding.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: Why how does a human brain process that?
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: It is a profound example of psychological dissociation and cognitive dissonance.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: The reality of the murders is so horrific that his
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: fragile ego has likely rationalized it, blocked it out, or
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: blamed the victims for quote unquote making him do it.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: He has insulated himself from the guilt of the murder.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: Right, but the kidnap charge feels like a bureaucratic error
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: to him. Under Alaska state law, if you physically restrain
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: a victim during an assault, such as binding eight year
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: old Melissa's hands with a pillowcase, it legally constitutes kidnapping.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: But Kirby's reaction screaming about a technicality while ignoring a
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: triple homicide exposes his total lack of empathy and his
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: complete detachment from the reality of his own violence.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: With Kirby safely in custody and Doug Didrich's forensic report finalized,
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: the distinctors were finally able to sit down and reconstruct
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: the tragic, minute by minute timeline of those final hours.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: Let's walk through it, because honoring the truth of what
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: happened is the only justice left for the victims.
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: It starts on Friday evening, March thirteenth. The timeline is
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: incredibly normal, which makes the ending so much worse.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: Cheryl, her husband, Paul, and Nancy all meet up for
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: drinks after work at the restaurant where Nancy waitresses.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: Cheryl's teenage daughter Kelly, treats the two little girls, Melissa
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: and Angie, to Hamburgers.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: They decide Nancy should just leave her car safely in
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: the restaurant parking lot overnight and catch a rye home,
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: with Cheryl planning to retrieve the car the next morning.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: They all drive back to the Newman apartment. They hang
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: out drink coffee, leaving those two mugs in the sink
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: that Cheryl would recognize.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: Two days later, around ten pm, the Chapmans say good night.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: Paul tells Nancy to call him first thing in the
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: morning if she needs a ride to work. Nancy locks
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: the door and puts the girls to bed.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: The apartment is quiet until Saturday morning. Based on the
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: stomach contents, we know that sometime between seven am and noon,
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: the house wakes up.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: The girls eat their cereal, Nancy makes a fresh pot
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: of coffee, and then there is a knock at the door.
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: It's Kirby Anthony. Nancy perhaps reluctantly unlocks the door and
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: lets her nephew inside.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: We will never know exactly what triggered the final explosion
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: of violence. Maybe he demanded money from her tip jar
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: and she refused.
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: Maybe he made an aggressive sexual advance and she rejected him.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: Or maybe she simply demanded he leave the apartment because
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: he wasn't welcome anymore.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: But whatever that specifical, the spark was. It hit the
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: powder keg of his deep seated inadequacies, and his anger
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: boiled over into an uncontrollable homicidal rage.
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: The bloodstained patterns and the trace evidence tell us the
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: terrible conclusion. Nancy and Melissa were attacked first in the
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: master bedroom. They were physically restrained.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Melissa, only eight years old, almost certainly had to witness
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: the horrific assault on her own mother.
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: Bleeding from the initial attack, Melissa was then forced out
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: of the room, back down the hallway into her own bedroom,
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: where she was murdered.
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: And then there is little Angie, the three year old.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: The kitchen knife used to end her life was never recovered.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Kirby likely threw it into the freezing wilderness on his
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: way to Dan Grant's house.
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: It is unclear if she was killed first to silence
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: her crying, or last as a final act of destruction,
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: but the savagery directed at her was terrifyingly distinct.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: It was uncontrolled overkill, and it brings back a sickening
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: detail from the background investigation.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: It was reported that when Kirby had previous lived with
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: the Newman's and babysat the girls, he had constantly complained
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: about Angie. He called a three year old toddler a tyrant.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: In his fractured, paranoid mind, the normal demands of a
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: toddler were a personal insult to his authority, and that
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: perceived slight justified and almost decapitating strike.
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: It completely defies all rational understanding. As Detective Grimes noted,
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: you cannot isolate a single logical reason for a man
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: to fly into a rage like that.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: Even Kirby himself, sitting in a cell probably couldn't articulate
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: the true why behind it. It is just an abyss
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: of misplaced anger and psychopathy.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: And the most heartbreaking part is the quiet that followed.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: Nancy never made that phone call the Paul Chapman for
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: a ride to work. She didn't answer the phone when
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: her sister called repeatedly throughout Saturday.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: The three of them lay in that terrifyingly still apartment
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: for nearly a full day before Paul walked down the
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: hallway on Sunday morning.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: The final chapter of this nightmare plays out in an
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: Anchorage courtroom. The trial lasted for eight grueling weeks.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: John Newman, the grieving husband who lost his wife and
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: children to his own nephew, sat in the gallery every
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: single day in stony, traumatized silence.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: Throughout the entire trial, Kirby maintained this arrogant, clean shaven,
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: completely detached facade. He smirked, he looked bored.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: But on June third, nineteen eighty eight, the jury returned,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: and as each guilty verdict was read aloud by the judge,
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: guilty of first degree murder, guilty of sexual assault, guilty
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: of kidnapping. That arrogant facade just disintegrated in real time.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: He physically shattered in the chair. The judge sentenced him
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: to three hundred and fifty seven years in a federal penitentiary.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: His conviction remains a massive landmark in the history of
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: American criminal justice. It is historically significant for two major reasons.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: First, it stands as a textbook example of flawless, ego
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: free cooperation between a local police department and federal agencies.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: If the Anchorage PD had rushed that scene, if they
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: hadn't instituted at that grid and preserved those vacuum layers
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: and peckable Doug Didrich's microscopic magic in Washington, d C
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: would have been impossible.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: And second, it set a monumental legal precedent. This trial
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: marks the very first time in the United States judicial
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: history that the testimony of an FBI behavioral profile or
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: special agent Jed Ray, was officially accepted as expert testimony
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: in a court of law.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: The defense fought bitterly to keep Ray off the stand,
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: calling profiling, witchcraft and guesswork, but the.
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: Judge allowed it because Ray wasn't testifying that Kirby was
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: the killer. He was testifying that the crime scene itself
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: reflected a specific psychological state which perfectly corroborated the physical evidence.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: It proved that psychological profiling was a scientifically valid investigative tool.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: It opened the door for profiling to be used in
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: countless future serial killer and homicide cases globally.
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? We started today by
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: talking about how a medical diagnosis usually gives you a
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: clean white line on an X ray, a simple yes
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: or no.
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: But in the darkest corners of human behavior, that X
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: ray machine is broken. In Anchorage in nineteen eighty seven,
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: the truth wasn't a glowing line on a screen.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: No, the truth was microscopic damage on the frayed cuticle
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: of a human hair.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: It was a partial lice egg casing, completely invisible to
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: the naked eye, clinging to a damp washcloth.
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: It was the terrifying negative space left behind by a
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: bloody kitchen knife on a carpet.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: And it was the invisible, twisted architecture of a killer's mind,
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: perfectly mapped by an FBI agent who had never even
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: met him.
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: They took the absolute smallest, most insignificant physical details imaginable
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: and connected them to the grandest, most cutting edge psychological
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: theories of the era, all to serve justice for Nancy, Melissa,
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: and Angie.
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: It was a triumph of science and psychology. But analyzing
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: this case leaves us with a profound, almost unsettling question
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: regarding the future of criminal investigations.
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: This case was the perfect marriage. The physical trace evidence
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: in the psychological profile aligned flawlessly, pointing at the exact
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: same man.
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: But as profiling becomes more advanced and DNA trace evidence
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: becomes incredibly sensitive, it forces you to wonder what happens
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: in a future case where a brilliant behavioral profile perfectly
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: matches one suspect, but the microscopic trace evidence points to
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: someone else entirely.
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: When the psychology of the crime and the biology of
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: the scene fundamentally disagree, which science do we trust to
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: tell the ultimate truth.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: That is an incredible question and something for you to
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: think about the next time you hear about a major investigation.
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this deep dive. Keep
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: questioning the world around you, look closely at the invisible
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: details in your own life, and we'll see you next time.