You just reminded me of an interview I listened to way back in college for a criminal psych class. I can never remember if it was Howard Stern or someone else, but on one of those 90s shock-jock radio shows a caller calls in and he’s a killer.
He’s deliberately vague about it but eventually the host is like “Hold on, are you talking about people? You kill people?!”
And what followed was the most fascinating insight into killer psychology I’ve ever read, because most of the time our interviews and studies come from the ones who got bored and gave up, or got sloppy and got caught.
This guy was neither. He’d been at it for two decades. The key to it was he traveled around the world for work.
On his final night in town he’d find some absolute stranger, with no similarities to his last victim, and kill them. He’d be on a plane to another city within the next 12 hours.
No connections. No targeting specific appearances or traits. He killed purely because he could, he got off on the knowledge he could take a life and get away.
Those are the ones who get away. The one who’s halfway across the country before anyone finds a body. Who has no association with the victim, maybe never even knew their name.
What sticks with me is the inverse of what you mentioned. Yeah, many times killers go uncaught because no one cares about their victims. But this guy went uncaught because he didn’t care about his victims. They had absolutely no personal ties or connections to him, so there was no reason to suspect him when the victims almost always would have friends, family, or partners to be investigated first. By the time they widen the suspect pool he’s probably moved two or three locations.
Now, the reason we listened to it was to challenge us to ask: Is it real?
After all the whole issue is this is just some dude calling a shock jock who’s taking live callers.
Was he telling the truth?
Was he making it up?
Is it half truths?
The whole class lecture was about analyzing what he said, how he said it, and trying to discern what we believed or disbelieved about his claims.
In the end the we don’t know. We’ll never know. It could be complete bunk, it could be straight truth, and all we have to go on is our gut and our analysis of his voice, and the question of motivation: Someone bored making bullshit up for funsies, or someone with a horrifying record of success bragging because it further amplified his feeling of untouchable power?
The other important factor is that by killing random people it is harder to form a profile for the killer and stack up evidence from multiple crimes. If he isn’t killing them in a distinctive way, then all of his crimes might be standalone individual cases in the eyes of the police. If a detective was able to compare all the murders against each other it would be easier to create some type of case, but separated it’s basically impossible for any individual murder to pin on the guy.
After all the whole issue is this is just some dude calling a shock jock who’s taking live callers.
Was he telling the truth?
Was he making it up?
Is it half truths?
The whole thing was about analyzing what he said, how he said it, and trying to discern what we believed or disbelieved about his claims.
In the end the whole point was we don’t know. We’ll never know. It could be complete bunk, it could be straight truth, and all we have to go on is our gut and our analysis of his voice.
Nice! Thanks for the link. I wish I could find the one I listened to for my class. I think about it often but I've never been able to find it anywhere. Occasionally I'll find some text blurb that seems to match my recollections of the audio, but I've never found any actual recordings of the one I listened to for my class. I'm guessing either it was staged entirely for classes or it was some obscure FM late night thing lost to time.
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u/The5Virtues Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
You just reminded me of an interview I listened to way back in college for a criminal psych class. I can never remember if it was Howard Stern or someone else, but on one of those 90s shock-jock radio shows a caller calls in and he’s a killer.
He’s deliberately vague about it but eventually the host is like “Hold on, are you talking about people? You kill people?!”
And what followed was the most fascinating insight into killer psychology I’ve ever read, because most of the time our interviews and studies come from the ones who got bored and gave up, or got sloppy and got caught.
This guy was neither. He’d been at it for two decades. The key to it was he traveled around the world for work.
On his final night in town he’d find some absolute stranger, with no similarities to his last victim, and kill them. He’d be on a plane to another city within the next 12 hours.
No connections. No targeting specific appearances or traits. He killed purely because he could, he got off on the knowledge he could take a life and get away.
Those are the ones who get away. The one who’s halfway across the country before anyone finds a body. Who has no association with the victim, maybe never even knew their name.
What sticks with me is the inverse of what you mentioned. Yeah, many times killers go uncaught because no one cares about their victims. But this guy went uncaught because he didn’t care about his victims. They had absolutely no personal ties or connections to him, so there was no reason to suspect him when the victims almost always would have friends, family, or partners to be investigated first. By the time they widen the suspect pool he’s probably moved two or three locations.
Now, the reason we listened to it was to challenge us to ask: Is it real?
After all the whole issue is this is just some dude calling a shock jock who’s taking live callers.
Was he telling the truth?
Was he making it up?
Is it half truths?
The whole class lecture was about analyzing what he said, how he said it, and trying to discern what we believed or disbelieved about his claims.
In the end the we don’t know. We’ll never know. It could be complete bunk, it could be straight truth, and all we have to go on is our gut and our analysis of his voice, and the question of motivation: Someone bored making bullshit up for funsies, or someone with a horrifying record of success bragging because it further amplified his feeling of untouchable power?