Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Sebastian Alexander Shaw Serial Killer - The Vietnam-Born Stalker Who Terrorized Portland

Transcript

Sebastian Alexander Shaw Serial Killer - The Vietnam-Born Stalker Who Terrorized Portland · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So I want you to just imagine your normal daily
• 0:02
  routine for a second. Yeah, you know, you wake up,
• 0:04
  you go grab a coffee, maybe you make small talk
• 0:06
  with a coworker, or you just wave to a neighbor.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Walking by, right, just the totally mundane stuff we do
• 0:11
  every single day, exactly.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: But now imagine if one of those completely ordinary people,
• 0:17
  somebody you just passed by, was actually a predator, like
• 0:21
  someone hiding behind a completely totally fabricated identity.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: It's a terrifying thought, and honestly, it's the reality for
• 0:28
  the case we're unpacking today.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. Welcome to the deep dive everyone, Today,
• 0:33
  we are looking into the incredibly chilling and frankly complex
• 0:37
  case of Sebastian Alexander shaw Right.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: He was a serial killer who essentially terrorized Portland, Oregon,
• 0:44
  back in the early nineteen nineties.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: And to really understand this, we've pulled together a massive
• 0:50
  stack of sources. We're talking decades of court records, some
• 0:54
  really detailed criminological profiles, and of course contemporary news reports
• 0:58
  from when all this was actually happening.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Because our mission with this deep dive isn't just to
• 1:02
  recount the crimes. We really want to deconstruct the anatomy
• 1:05
  of a predator.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we want to figure out the why and the how.
• 1:09
  You know, how does a chaotic childhood plus this drastic
• 1:12
  reinvention of identity actually escalate into violent.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Impulses and then how the emerging science of DNA, which
• 1:18
  was really in its infancy back then, finally managed to
• 1:22
  catch up with him, right.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: And I do want to set the tone early on here.
• 1:25
  The details of this case are brutal, they just are.
• 1:28
  But we aren't here for sensationalism.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. The focus is strictly on understanding the psychology,
• 1:35
  the mechanics of the investigation itself, and most importantly, the
• 1:38
  profound lasting impact on the victims' families and.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: The community at large. Really. Yeah, So to even begin
• 1:44
  to understand Sebastian Alexander Shaw, we had to dismantle that
• 1:47
  name entirely.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because for the first twenty or so years of
• 1:50
  his life, Sebastianshaw literally did not exist exactly.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: He was born Chow Kwang Ho. This was on November
• 1:56
  twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven, and he was born in
• 1:59
  the Foot Tweet Province in South Vietnam.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: And that year nineteen sixty seven is crucial context. He
• 2:05
  is born squarely into the absolute chaos of the Vietnam
• 2:08
  War right.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Right, and the source of point out his ethnic background too.
• 2:12
  He was part of the Hoa community, which is the
• 2:15
  overseas Chinese population living in Vietnam at the time.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Which is really important sociologically. The Hoa people faced a
• 2:21
  ton of marginalization and suspicion during and after the war.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: So he's already born into this sort of outsider status
• 2:29
  in a country that's actively being corn apart.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: By conflicts exactly. But the trauma isn't just geopolitical for him.
• 2:36
  It gets incredibly personal very fast. When he is just
• 2:40
  ten months old, his mother dies.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: And I mean from a developmental psychology standpoint, that is massive.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Oh, it completely alters his trajectory at ten months old.
• 2:49
  You're supposed to be forming foundational attachment, right, The.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Whole basis of secure attachment gets shattered before it even
• 2:54
  really starts.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. John Bolby's attachment theory talks about this. A child
• 2:58
  needs a responsive caregiver to feel safe, to learn how
• 3:01
  to regulate their own nervous system, and.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Young Chow had none of that. His father was a
• 3:06
  military man and the home environment just completely collapsed.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: It morphed into profound physical abuse. The records we have
• 3:14
  are just incredibly grim. He was beaten with wooden boards
• 3:18
  with heavy leather belt and we.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Didn't The sources say he was even beaten with rocks.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Yes, rocks, And this was for minor infractions, things that
• 3:25
  any normal parent would just brush off as typical kid behavior.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: That is just it's horrifying. And on top of that,
• 3:31
  because his dad was in the military and couldn't really
• 3:33
  care for him, he was just passed.
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  Speaker 2: Around right bouncing between neighbors and extended relatives, so he
• 3:39
  never had a safe harbor anywhere.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: And then we hit in nineteen seventy five, the macro
• 3:44
  level trauma comes crashing back in with the fall of Psygon.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Chow and his father become part of this massive
• 3:50
  wave of refugees. They're making this desperate escape from a
• 3:53
  collapsing country.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: And they do manage to get to the United States.
• 3:57
  But it's not like they arrived and suddenly had a
• 3:59
  quiet life in the suburbs.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Not at all. The records note that when they arrived
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  in nineteen seventy five, they were living in literal army tents.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, well, at Marine Corps based Camp Pendleton right down
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  in California exactly.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: It was part of Operation New Arrivals. Pendleton housed tens
• 4:14
  of thousands of Vietnamese refugees in these massive tent cities.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Which I mean, think about the refugee experience. You lose
• 4:21
  your home, your language, everything you.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Own, and your agency. You are completely stripped of control
• 4:27
  living in a transient camp run by a foreign military.
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  Speaker 1: And for a kid who already has zero emotional regulation
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  tools because of the abuse.
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  Speaker 2: It just reinforces this internal narrative that the entire world
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  is chaotic and dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: So eventually they get sponsored by a group out of
• 4:43
  Port Arthur, Texas, and from there they end up moving
• 4:46
  to Woodburn, Oregon.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: And Oregon is really where we start to see this stark,
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  highly visible psychological fracture happening in him.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, he develops this intense dual existence as a kid
• 4:57
  on the outside. To the community, he's the.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Good kid, right, he was an ultar boy at Saint
• 5:01
  Mary Catholic Church. He's doing the rituals, trying to assimilate.
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  Speaker 1: But privately the damage is compounding. At school, he's having
• 5:07
  these massive just uncontrollable temper tantrums, and he.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: Also struggled significantly with his weight, which made him a
• 5:14
  massive target for severe bullying from other kids.
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  Speaker 1: So he's navigating this extreme cognitive dissonance. He plays the
• 5:21
  good Catholic boy for approval, but he's just full.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Of rage, immense rage because of the bullying at school
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  and the fact that the severe physical abuse from his
• 5:31
  father was still ongoing at home.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Which leads to this moment when he's about fourteen years old,
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  that just it really haunts me.
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  Speaker 2: The bike ride, Yes.
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  Speaker 1: The bike ride. So the abuse gets so bad that
• 5:41
  this fourteen year old kid gets on his bicycle and
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  pedals thirty miles to a Portland police station.
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  Speaker 2: Thirty miles. Think about the psychological threshold a child has
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  to cross to do that.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, he recognized that his own house was a
• 5:54
  mortal threat to him exactly.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: He is actively trying to use the societal mechanisms designed.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: To kids, but the intervention completely fails. The abuse doesn't
• 6:03
  permanently stop, and he isn't permanently removed from the home.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: Which leads directly to what happens next. During high school,
• 6:11
  his psychological state just plummets and he attempts suicide.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: The sources mentioned it was a reported ASPERN overdose.
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  Speaker 2: Right, yes, and this sequence the desperate plea to the
• 6:21
  police followed by the suicide attempt. It's a textbook example
• 6:25
  of institutional betrayal.
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  Speaker 1: Because he took the risk to ask the authorities for
• 6:30
  help and they basically did nothing right.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: And when that happens, it teaches a developing brain that
• 6:35
  the system is entirely hollow. No one is coming to
• 6:39
  save you, so.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: You have to become the authority yourself, usually by exerting
• 6:43
  dominance over other people.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: That adaptation is really the core mechanism behavioral analysts look at.
• 6:49
  But we have to be careful here.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to push back a little on this
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  for you the listener, because obviously, lots of people experience
• 6:56
  horrific childhood trauma.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Millions of people, right.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: They survive, or they are refugees, They suffer abuse, and
• 7:03
  they do not become violent predators exactly.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: They develop resilience and empathy. Trauma is a risk factor.
• 7:08
  It is absolutely not a destiny.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: So where does the criminological profile suggest that divergence happens here?
• 7:15
  Is it the abuse or the lack of intervention well, it's.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: A synthesis, and it's interesting because he doesn't actually fit
• 7:20
  the classic pop culture serial killer profile.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: You mean the McDonald triad, right.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: Formulated back in nineteen sixty three. It's the idea that
• 7:29
  chronic bedwetting, animal cruelty, and fire setting are the big
• 7:32
  warning signs.
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  Speaker 1: And the sources explicitly state that Shaw did not heavily
• 7:38
  exhibit the full triad.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: He didn't, but modern behavioral science actually debates how universal
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  that triad really is anyway.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Oh, really, they don't use it as much.
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  Speaker 2: They focus more on the function of those behaviors. Fire
• 7:50
  setting and hurting animals are primitive ways for a powerless
• 7:53
  child to exert control.
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  Speaker 1: I see. So even if he wasn't torturing animals, he
• 7:57
  was finding other ways to internalize that need for control exactly.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: His profile aligns strongly with an organized lust killer. The
• 8:05
  divergence point was the compounding effect of rage and systemic failure.
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  Speaker 1: He couldn't integrate pro socially, so his psychology just inverted
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  power meant subjugating others.
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  Speaker 2: Right, and the pressure at home finally just detonates. In
• 8:18
  nineteen eighty five, he's seventeen years old.
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  Speaker 1: There's a vile altercation with his father. The record say
• 8:23
  he was beaten severely with the piece of wood.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: And that is the physical breaking point. He is forced
• 8:27
  to literally flee for his life.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: So he leaves Oregon. He goes down to California to
• 8:33
  stay with an aunt and a cousin, tries to work.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: A bit, but then he makes this highly revealing pivot.
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  He enlists in the United States Marine Corps.
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  Speaker 1: Which is wild. Yeah, he flees a violently abusive military
• 8:45
  father and then volunteers for the Marines.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: The irony is profound, but psychologically it makes sense. The
• 8:51
  Marine Corps offers the ultimate external framework.
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  Speaker 1: Like it dictates your schedule, your behavior, everything right.
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  Speaker 2: It can temporarily contain massive in internal chaos, and subconsciously
• 9:02
  he might have been trying to master the very system
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  his dad used to terrorize him.
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  Speaker 1: He even serves overseas in Okinawa, but the containment strategy fails.
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  By nineteen ninety he gets an honorable.
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  Speaker 2: Discharge, and the reason for the discharge is crucial. It
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  was due to an inability to maintain the military's strict
• 9:19
  physical weight.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Standards, which, if you think about his ego, has to
• 9:22
  be devastating.
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  Speaker 2: It's a systemic rejection, the exact physical trait he was
• 9:27
  mercilessly bullied for as a kid. His weight gets him
• 9:30
  kicked out of this powerful institution.
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  Speaker 1: So he returns to Oregon in nineteen ninety basically a
• 9:35
  rejected man. And this is when he decides to kill
• 9:38
  Chao Kwang Ho.
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  Speaker 2: Yes October nineteen ninety, he walks into a courthouse and
• 9:43
  legally changes his name to Sebastian Alexander Shaw.
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  Speaker 1: Changing that name it feels like an actor putting on
• 9:50
  a theatrical mask, you know.
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  Speaker 2: It's exactly like that. The name he chose is highly
• 9:54
  indicative of his internal state. Chow Quangho carried all the.
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  Speaker 1: Baggage, the traumatized refugee, the abused son, the bullied kid.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: But Sebastian Alexander Shaw it sounds aristocratic. It projects authority
• 10:05
  and dominance.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: By erasing his past on paper, he essentially severs the
• 10:09
  psychological tether to his own accountability right.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: It creates a highly dangerous psychological bifurcation. He builds a
• 10:15
  firewall between his traumatized self and this new public persona.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: But a firewall like that means new Avatar doesn't have
• 10:21
  any moral anchors.
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  Speaker 2: None at all, and we see the behavior of this
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  new persona almost immediately. He gets a job as a
• 10:27
  security dispatcher for Paragon Cable Company, which.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Gives him a little bit of authority just enough.
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  Speaker 2: But his behavior quickly shows the pathology underneath. He becomes
• 10:37
  fixated on a female colleague, Shirley Phillips.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't just a crush. The documents show a
• 10:43
  sustained campaign of severe, inappropriate sexual comments.
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  Speaker 2: Relentless workplace harassment. He was taking this new dominant avatar
• 10:52
  out for a test drive, trying.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: To exert control over a woman in his environment. But
• 10:56
  Shirley Phillips didn't play along.
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  Speaker 2: No, she actively pushed back. She reported his behavior to
• 11:01
  management multiple.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Times, and it escalated to the point where physical warning
• 11:06
  notes were mysteriously appearing on her desk.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Management had to step in, and in early July of
• 11:10
  nineteen ninety one, Sebastian Shaw is fired from Paragon.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Cable, which completely shatters the firewall he spent nine months.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Building exactly The military rejected him for his body. Now
• 11:20
  the civilian workforce rejects him because a woman challenged his
• 11:23
  dominance and won.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: The humiliation just activates all those violent impulses and the
• 11:28
  speed of it is terrifying.
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  Speaker 2: He is fired in early July nineteen ninety one, and
• 11:33
  within days he strikes.
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  Speaker 1: Let's talk about that timeline. July first, nineteen ninety one
• 11:39
  is his first known confirmed murder. The victim is a
• 11:43
  forty year old man named Jay Andrew Rickbeal, and.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: The details of who Jay was really highlight the absolute
• 11:49
  cowardice of Shaw's pathology.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Jay had cerebral palsy. He was actually a quadriplegic.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: He lived in an apartment in Portland, and his roommate
• 11:56
  mc McCartney described Jay as incredibly open and trusted, like.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: A New Age believer right. He loved deep conversations. I
• 12:04
  would actually invite strangers off the street into his apartment.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Which created a highly accessible environment. But for Shaw, Jay's
• 12:11
  physical condition was the defining.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Factor, because Jay literally could not fight back exactly.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Shaw later admitted he picked Rick Baale entirely at random,
• 12:20
  a target of pure opportunity, to vent his rage over
• 12:23
  the job loss.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: So mac McCartney comes home and finds this just horrific scene.
• 12:28
  Jay had been murdered in his bed, his throat slashed.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: And because it was random and Jay had strangers. Over
• 12:33
  All the time, the detectives had almost zero directional evidence.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: The case sat cold for years, but this murder established
• 12:40
  Shaw's m O, didn't.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: It yes attacking vulnerable people in their own homes and
• 12:45
  specifically using a knife to inflict catastrophic neck wounds.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: So he uses this kill as a pressure release valve.
• 12:53
  But that relief doesn't last.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: It never does for a serial offender. The urge bills
• 12:59
  back up and we see.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: That exactly one year later, July nineteen ninety two. The
• 13:04
  leap in methodology here is terrifying.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: It's a massive escalation in his operational capacity.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: He targets a young couple living in a Portland trailer home,
• 13:14
  Todd a Ridiger, who was twenty nine, and his living girlfriend,
• 13:17
  Donna g Ferguson, who was eighteen.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: This isn't an isolated disabled man anymore. This is a
• 13:21
  highly calculated domestic invasion.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: We go from a highly vulnerable man to invading the
• 13:26
  domestic space of a young couple. What did this leap
• 13:29
  tell you about his evolving confidence?
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: It shows he is aggressively stress testing his own power.
• 13:34
  He wants absolute control.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: And the crime scene was devastating the victim's fathers found
• 13:38
  them days later on July twentieth.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Both victors had execution style throat slashes. But the sequence
• 13:44
  of the assault is what defines him as an organized lust.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Killer because he brought restraints with him.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: Yes, telephone cords. He bound Donna Ferguson, and he sexually
• 13:54
  assaulted and raped her before killing her.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: And the detail about Todd Rudiger is just its pure
• 13:59
  cycle logical torture.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: He forced Tod into a closet during the assault on Donna.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: Right, He didn't just kill the able bodied mail immediately
• 14:08
  to remove the threat.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: No, he orchestrated a scenario where Todd was physically restrained
• 14:12
  and forced to listen to the assault on his.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Partner, creating an environment of total terror. How does he
• 14:18
  even view his victims at this.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Point simply as objects to be manipulated for his arousal.
• 14:23
  By controlling what they hear and feel, he becomes the
• 14:26
  undisputed architect of their reality.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And the use of the knife for the throat slashes
• 14:30
  you mentioned, that's tactical.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: Highly tactical. It causes immediate hypolemix shock, a catastrophic drop
• 14:36
  in blood pressure, so.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: It instantly neutralizes any physical.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Resistance exactly, and crucially, a knife requires extreme physical proximity.
• 14:44
  He gets to intimately experience their final moments, which fuels
• 14:48
  his sadistic pathology.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: The brutality of these trailer park murders absolutely shocked Portland.
• 14:54
  You'd think this was the start of a massive spree.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: But the confirmed trail of bodies seemingly stops right there.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Which plunges the investigators into years of agonizing near misses.
• 15:05
  It really highlights the system's failures in the mid nineties, right.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: The years between nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety six
• 15:11
  are this huge gray area.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the suspected crimes, because while he only
• 15:16
  had three confirmed convictions, there's a much wider radius.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: The most scrutinized one is from May twenty seventh, nineteen
• 15:22
  ninety four, down in California, the murder of fourteen year
• 15:26
  old Jenny Lynn.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: In Castro Valley and Jenny Lynn, she was a straight
• 15:30
  A student, a gifted violinist.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: She was sound stabbed in her own bathroom, and the
• 15:34
  scene baffled investigators.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Zero signs of forced entry, no forced.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: Entry, no robbery, no signs of a massive struggle beforehand.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: It's like a phantom just materialized inside the house and vanished.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: There are reports of a man on a motorcycle in
• 15:47
  the area, but immediate physical evidence was incredibly sparse.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: And Shaw was known to be in that broader geographical
• 15:53
  area at the time.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, but the really compelling and frustrating link happens a
• 15:58
  few months later in August of nineteen ninety four.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this nineteen ninety four arrest, because this
• 16:05
  is where the listener is going to be pulling their
• 16:06
  hair out.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: It is infuriating.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: He is pulled over in California driving a stolen car.
• 16:12
  The police search the car and they find a literal murder.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: Kit, a comprehensive kit, ski mask, heavy gloves, duct tape,
• 16:19
  multiple knives, binoculars, handcuffs.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: And a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: Which in the early nineties was essentially a manifesto of subversion.
• 16:27
  It appealed to individuals who wanted to learn how to
• 16:29
  exert destructive control over society.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: So he is caught in a stolen car with handcuffs,
• 16:36
  a ski mask, and knives geographically near the unsolved murder
• 16:40
  of a fourteen year old girl who was killed with
• 16:42
  a knife, and he just walks away.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: He does.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: How does the system fail so spectacularly? Were the legal
• 16:48
  hands of the police just entirely tied they were?
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: You have to contextualize the limitations of the justice system
• 16:53
  and forensics in the mid nineties.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Because it was all circumstantial evidence.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly, having a murder kit near a murder scene is
• 17:00
  incredibly strong circumstantial evidence.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: It requires an inference, right, you're inferring he was going
• 17:05
  to use it.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: But direct evidence links a person directly to the crime
• 17:09
  without inference an eyewitness, a confession, or biological material.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: And they couldn't put his fingerprints inside Jenny Lynn's.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: Bathroom or find her blood on his knives. The Constitution
• 17:21
  protects citizens from being held indefinitely on suspicion.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Alone, even when the suspicion is screamingly obvious.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, the police were legally bound to release him back
• 17:31
  into the civilian population.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: So he just exploits these civilbrities to keep up his camouflage.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: He moves back up to Portland and he blends right
• 17:38
  back into society. He gets a job working at a
• 17:41
  Safeway grocery store, just a.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Normal guy scanning your groceries, right, he was even seeing
• 17:45
  a psychiatrist during this time, which is wild. Yeah, and
• 17:49
  he had some roommate conflicts in nineteen ninety six involving
• 17:52
  a gun, but nothing that gets him put.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Away because circumstantial evidence isn't enough for a murder charge.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: But the urge to hunt doesn't just go away. In
• 18:01
  nineteen ninety five, back in Portland, he makes a crucial mistake.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: He targets an eighteen year old woman named Amanda Carpova
• 18:07
  often referred to as AC in some records.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: It gets into her apartment, violently rapes her and attempts
• 18:14
  to murder her, but.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: Amanda Carpova shows incredible resilience. She fights back with astonishing ferocity.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: She completely disrupts his operational control.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: She survives the attack, which prevents him from executing his
• 18:25
  final stage of dominance.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: But more importantly, she unknowingly captures the exact evidence they need.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Yes, during that brutal struggle, Shaw left behind microscopic biological material,
• 18:37
  He left his DNA, He.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Fled the apartment and blended back in. But this invisible
• 18:42
  biological clock just started ticking down.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: Because the mid to late nineties was a massive paradigm
• 18:47
  shift in forensic science.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about that nineteen ninety eight breakthrough, because early
• 18:52
  DNA testing in the eighties was pretty clunky, right.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Very slow. It required large samples and often only narrowed
• 18:59
  suspects down to a broad percentage of the population.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: But by nineteen ninety eight they had emerging technology.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, PCR, polymerius chain reaction and STR short tandem repeat analysis.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Right, which let labs take these tiny, degraded microscopic samples
• 19:15
  and generate a highly specific genetic profile.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: And Portland detectives had never given up on the nineteen
• 19:20
  ninety two double murder of Todd and Donna. They preserve
• 19:23
  the biological evidence from the trailer.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Park, specifically the sperm recovered from that scene.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: So when the LAP finally had the tech, they compared
• 19:31
  the nineteen ninety two profile against the evidence from the
• 19:33
  nineteen ninety five rape of Amanda Karpova and.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: It's a match. The unknown male who killed the couple
• 19:39
  is the same guy who raped Amanda. Three years later, they.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: Linked the crimes, but they still only had a ghost profile.
• 19:45
  They needed a name, and.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Through their investigative work, Sebastian Shaw becomes the prime suspect,
• 19:50
  so they start.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Watching him intensive covert surveillance. They didn't need a confession
• 19:54
  or search, weren't for his house yet.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: They just needed to wait for him to shed his
• 19:58
  biology in public.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: And it all hind on such a mundane action. He
• 20:01
  was out in public smoking a cigarette.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: He finishes it casually, flicks the butt onto the ground, and.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: Walks away, and detectives immediately swoop in, bag the discarded
• 20:11
  filter and rush it to the lab.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Because when you smoke, the friction transfers your epithelial cells
• 20:16
  directly onto the filter.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: It's an elegant mechanism of forensic collection. That cigarette butt
• 20:21
  was a pristine sample of his genetic code.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: The DNA pulled from that discarded cigarette butt is basically
• 20:27
  an invisible fingerprint that travels through time.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: It allowed investigators to reach back into nineteen ninety two
• 20:34
  and drag Shaw into the light of nineteen ninety eight.
• 20:37
  The barcode matched perfectly.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: The era of the ghost killer was over face with
• 20:42
  the insurmountable certainty of his own biology. His defense collapsed.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: So on February twentieth, nineteen ninety eight, they.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Arrest him and he chooses not to fight a losing
• 20:52
  battle in court for the crimes with direct DNA evidence.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Right, he pleads guilty to the double murder and the rape.
• 20:57
  He gets two life sentences, but the.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: Legal diyrinth wasn't over. They still had his first victim,
• 21:02
  jay Rick Bail, because.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: The DNA from the later crimes didn't automatically solve the
• 21:06
  nineteen ninety.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: One murder exactly. This introduces some really bizarre procedural hurdles.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the prosecution struggled with the rules around prior bad
• 21:14
  acts right, trying to prove character.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: The legal restrictions are tight. The Rick Bail charge was
• 21:20
  actually initially dropped or stalled so they wouldn't risk an acquittal.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: It's that friction between knowing someone did it and actually
• 21:27
  proving it within the strict rules of a courtroom.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: But they didn't let it go. Years later, they retried
• 21:34
  him specifically for jay Rick Bial's murder, and.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: In two thousand and six he is finally convicted. The
• 21:41
  penalty phase is.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Wild, though it really highlights Oregon's specific legal statutes. The
• 21:46
  jury voted nine to three in favor of the death penalty,
• 21:49
  but because.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Oregon law requires a totally unanimous vote.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: For death, he gets a third life sentence instead.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: And throughout all these trials, observers noted his kurt Room
• 21:58
  persona was just completely of humanity.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: The mask of the functioning citizen was totally gone. He
• 22:03
  was incredibly cold.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: There were even reports that he was seen literally dancing
• 22:07
  in his holding cell, completely unrepentent.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Because in his internal framework, the victims were just objects.
• 22:14
  And once he was permanently locked up, he started a
• 22:16
  new psychological game.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: The prison boasts right.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: He starts whispering to inmates and then detectives that they
• 22:23
  only know a fraction of the truth.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: He claimed he had ten to thirteen total victims, and.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: He tried to weaponize them. He opened this morbid negotiation,
• 22:32
  offering details and body locations for a price.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: He wanted to be transferred to a federal prison where
• 22:38
  he was allowed to smoke cigarettes. I mean, holding the
• 22:41
  grief of these unresolved families hostage for a smoking privilege.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: It's the ultimate distillation of his pathology. Even in a cage,
• 22:48
  he's trying to orchestrate control.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: But the prosecutors refused to play ball. They wouldn't take
• 22:53
  the death penalty off the table, so he just took
• 22:55
  his secrets to the grave.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: He died in prison on October third or fourth, twenty
• 22:59
  twenty one, at age fifty three from undisclosed causes, and.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: His death leaves behind this profound legacy of unresolved trauma,
• 23:07
  especially for Jenny Lynn's family.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Right the fourteen year old from California. They've spent decades
• 23:12
  in ambiguity.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Because some authorities now actually have doubts about his involvement
• 23:16
  in her case, without physical evidence or a verifiable confession,
• 23:20
  they just don't know.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: And we really have to acknowledge the human cost here.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, the deep scars left on the families of Jay
• 23:26
  Rick Baale, Todd Rudeger, Donna Ferguson the trauma Amanda Karpova
• 23:31
  had to endure.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: It shatters community trust entirely because he specifically targeted vulnerable demographics,
• 23:38
  disabled individuals, young people, and accessible trailers. It instills this
• 23:42
  chilling cynicism. It forces people to become guarded against the
• 23:47
  very interactions that build a community.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Yet we also see resilience groups like the Friends of
• 23:53
  Jenny Lynn have maintained this decade's long pursuit of truth.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: It reminds us that while serial killers are statistically at time,
• 24:00
  heiny faction of homicides. The devastation is absolute, which is.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Why prevention requires early intervention for at risk youth like
• 24:08
  that fourteen year old on the bike that was a
• 24:09
  missed off.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Ramp, and why forensic investment is non negotiable.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Right as we wrap up this deep dive, I want
• 24:15
  to leave you with a lingering thought. Society really champions
• 24:18
  the idea of a fresh start.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: We love the idea of reinvention.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: We do that you can change your name, move to
• 24:24
  a new city, and build a completely new life.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: It's a very optimistic idea.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: But if that right to reinvent ourselves provides the perfect
• 24:33
  impenetrable camouflage for a predator like Sebastian Shaw to operate.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: Undetected right next to you in a cuicle.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Exactly how well can we ever truly know the people
• 24:42
  we pass by every single day.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: It's a profound vulnerability in our society.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Definitely something to ponder the next time you're making small talk.
• 24:49
  Thank you all for joining us on this deep dive.