INSIDER SESSION | Maternal Manipulation: The Craigslist Killer’s Calls to Mom

Hello everyone, I'm Carol Costello. This is a God Hook Inside Session. A lot of you ask about the jailhouse recordings between Richard Beasley and his mother Carol. There's a lot going on there psychologically. The conversations are sometimes mundane, creepy, but fascinating in a macab kind of way.

Hi, honey. Hi mom. Richard, before I say anything else, I just want you to know you're not too, to reply in any way to what I'm going to tell you or to say anything on the phone to anyone or anyone around you. Okay? Did you hear everything I said? Yes. Okay. Well, the news is plastered and the headlines and the beacon today saying that they found a body in Caldwell County. I mean, what to tell you. I would say I'm kind of in shock. I know, honey. So will we

With me now to do a deep dive on the psychology behind these conversations is Dr. Volkan Topalli, a criminologist and a psychologist. And of course, Emily Pelphrey, who, as you know, prosecuted the murder case against Beasley. So I asked you to listen to the jailhouse conversations, at least some of them between Richard Beasley and various people. And I just wondered what your general impression was. First off,

The general impression is he strikes me as someone who understands that he's probably being heard and listened to and it's very performative. And I got the impression that at times the audience was shifting around that sometimes the audience was the person he was speaking to. Sometimes the audience might've been somebody who was perhaps listening in that he would've expected. And sometimes I felt like the audience was himself, that he was actually speaking to himself, sort of trying to convince himself, almost say things to himself that he wished other people would say to him about perhaps how good a person he actually was or how strong a person he actually was. Those kinds of things.

I wish somebody would write and say, look, rich Beasley was on staff of COPE Ministries for three years and he helped other people, his house on Yale Street, he was given food out to 50 to 50 families a month, every month, all out of his own pocket saying he taught a Bible study of the house every week.

They find that people who have very high opinions of themselves, narcissistic types, tend to spend a lot of time engaging in self-talk when the feedback that they're getting from others isn't sufficient to make them feel the way that they want to feel.

Emily, I mean, you listened to those jailhouse recordings for far different reasons. Did you have that he was being performative and did you get anything out of it as a prosecutor?

I think definitely performative to his mom. I think that he was definitely trying to portray something to her, which again, I can't get inside the mind of his mother, but I'm sure she wanted to believe him.

So I don't have children, so maybe I don't understand a mother's love for her child. But wow,

The recordings between he and his mother, it's this really interesting dynamic. The two of them are sort of almost on one level, I think you want to believe that they're having a genuine conversation with each other, but I feel like they're actually speaking to versions of each other that they wish existed. I think she was speaking to him as though he were innocent and a man of God and someone she could be proud of. And you can see that she's feeding justifications and excuses to him that she's affirming a lot of the opinions he has of himself. She's adding color commentary to what some of us might refer to as delusional thinking on his part. I don't think it was delusional. I think it was purposefully obfuscation and lying essentially. And I think he was having a conversation with her. And it's odd in a way, he's clearly manipulating her to have her say the things that he wants her to say about him, but also probably to have her say things that he hopes will go on the recordings and serve as exculpatory in some way on his path. But I think there's also, to me, as I listened to it, it seems like he was looking for that kind of approval affirmation, positive feedback from his mother, from a parent,

Something. Here's what it comes down to. I got $125,000 settlement, much bet every penny of it on other people. Every penny I bought very little. The only thing I did for myself, it wasn't for myself, is I took my daughter on vacation.

So there are all these layers of deceit that are going on in the conversations between the two of them. And some of them are, I think, understandable from an emotional standpoint between a mother and a child, but some of them are kind of nefarious at the same time as well. She's diluting herself and him, he's egging her on to dilute herself and sort of support the things that he's saying. So it's a really, I think listening to them more than once, you really start to see the layers of what's going on between the two of them and keeping in mind that these are two people who've known each other for his entire life. So there's all that history between the two of them that's at play when they're having conversations with each other that those of us listening in can only begin to sort of understand when we witness those conversations.

Well, we'll see what happens. Anyway. Okay, let me see what else is going on. Yeah, definitely nothing from Gentlemen's Quarterly.

That was a new one.

Make sure you get a business card from him. There'll be more. I got some from Indigo Films. I turn that away. They want to do a movie on you actually. Oh, there'll probably be movies on this. There'll be movies and books, multiple movies. Well, especially once Truth comes out. Again, I'm not giving details of the case, but I'm just saying they're so far wrong, Mary, like such idiots in court. This is the kind of stuff I could end up being a millionaire from this month. Why? Who? Yeah, that'd be nice.

I thought it was strange, Emily, when you told me that his mother was in court every single day and sat in the front row and

She was there, she was polite, she was quiet, unassuming, almost kept an eye on him the whole time. And if he would look over at her quite often during the trial, I wouldn't say that any kind of body language necessarily changed when he saw her in the courtroom, but I think that's because he was performative as soon as he got into the courtroom. I mean, he turned into this suen malaise, nothing like the guy that everyone else during the case saw that was a victim or ran into him. I mean, he just turned into this almost, I don't want to say blob because that doesn't sound right, but I mean, he just was sad. He looked pathetic, but still he had a grand presence about him. But I think that he was just trying to show his mom like, whoa, look at me. I'm hurt. The bed in jail is uncomfortable. That kind of thing.

It's interesting because that's performative on more than one level, right? He's trying to engender some sort of reaction or response from his mother

Of sympathy, but I think he's well aware that they're in a public form where he's being judged. And so in some ways, I don't want to psychoanalyze this too much, but there is a certain extent to which you're eliciting a kind of response from your mother because you're aware that the people in the court are not just observing you, but they're observing your mother as well. And she serves as a kind of a sympathy lightning rod to people who are in the courtroom. So if he can look at his mother with these forlorn kinds of looks and what you might call puppy eyes and then elicit from her an emotional maternal response, there's part of that is communication to the rest of the people who are in the room. Was it a jury trial?

It was, but I think what you're saying too is just another interesting layer of a trial that I don't think that people pay too much attention to is you'll see it every once in a while, but the layers of people that are involved, what's the bailiff doing? The jurors are constantly watching, the cameras are picking things up. Are you nodding your head too much? Are you're playing with your hair? Are you smiling? All of that plays

Into it's all impression management, right? Managing everyone's impression of him.

So he was aware that his mother could somehow maybe sway the jury as far as the sympathy factor goes? I would think so. I would

Think

So. Oh yeah,

For sure. People do this all the time.

In psychology, we call it impression management where you're managing someone else's impression of you, and we usually think of it as a one-on-one interaction between two people, but actually in group settings, you can engage in much more complex forms of impression management. So for example, you can intimidate somebody in front of somebody else as a way of sort of surreptitiously intimidate that person as well. And this is the same kind of thing, mom is kind of a prop here, in a sense. Someone who elicits sympathy perhaps in a way that he knows he can't himself. So why not use that to your best advantage, especially if there are women on the jury or there are women in the audience, that kind of thing where whether you have children or not, kind of a maternal instinct can kick in and sort of you identify, oh, this humanizes him essentially. And especially for someone who has done some pretty inhumane kinds of things, that's really important as a tool of manipulation. So it wouldn't surprise me what Emily's talking about having observed in the court.

So you both said he was performative when he was talking to people on a recorded line in the Summit County Jail. So Emily, how did that help you as a prosecutor when you knew that?

Well, I think it's all in how you frame what the jurors are going to hear. And so if you're already portraying this narcissist who does perform, and we played him off, the theme of our trial was that he was that man. So if you frame it and you let the jurors know that you're approaching these phone calls and what he's saying as someone who's conning, it plays right into everything that he's saying. You're like, Hey, he's even trying to his own mom. So we would take control of the narrative as soon as we could, and then it's up to the defense to kind of beat that down with a stick. And it's hard to do it when the cat's out of the bag at that point. We've called this guy a conman, he's an actor, he's playing his own mom, and then his mom is sitting there and the jury can see all of this.

So Vulcan Beasley talked a lot about clergy visits and praying, and was he ever sincere in any way when he talked about those things?

It's really difficult to know. I mean, that is one of the, as Emily said, getting into the mind of the individual. And I can only go by what he was saying. So I think it's possible. I keep saying that there are layers to these things, and I do think it's possible for people to have a genuine belief in God, but still engage in a manipulative process. At the same time, that's actually a hallmark of people who are narcissistic, that they actually believe they can manipulate God into forgiving them, for example, that they're playing. They can even play God, so to speak, really?

They think they can manipulate God. Oh,

Yeah. Yeah. I actually conducted research a few years ago where we interviewed hardcore violent street offenders about their beliefs, and most people thought that they would say that they were atheists, that they didn't believe in God at all. And actually all of them had a very strong belief in God. But it was manipulative. It was, well, if God didn't want me out there robbing and shooting people, he would've stopped me by now. Or God knows that I'm doing these things because I have to. He knows what's in my heart. So no, I'm not going to end up in hell. I'm definitely going to heaven. It takes a lot of manipulation to take what you've learned in mainstream society about what religion teaches you about behavior, and then turn that into a justification for really horrible behavior. So in a sense, believing in God is actually part of what helps keep someone going in some cases. And in this case, it's actually encouraging rather than discouraging the bad behavior. And it's possible that he saw himself as someone like, Hey, maybe God wants me to be doing this, or maybe God's okay with me doing this, or maybe I'm so important, so special that I can keep on doing this despite what God expects of other regular people.

I know Emily, when you called him a wolf in sheep's clothing, he was very offended. That was even in his appeal, he was offended by that more than being called a murderer or a human trafficker. That's what got him.

Yep, it is. But I think at first when the quote came out, it wasn't necessarily, oh, I'm going to quote the Bible in my opening statement. It really was, and I say it was a historical lesson for me because I'd always use this, and I didn't know that it was from the Bible, but I think in some way when he sat and heard it, and I talked to my co-counsel before and we had said, is this something I can say? And they're like, sure, go for it. And they knew that it would irritate him. I think it was just like, Hey, I see you. I see your con. I'm going to play it right back in your face. And I think that even coming from a woman probably irritated him even more that I was there. I saw who he was, and I'm like, that's great that you can quote the Bible. I'll go ahead and play you out as this lying, deceitful, faux religious man in front of this jury, and I'm going to do it while carrying a baby. So I mean, Emily was pregnant

During the trial.

I was pregnant during the trial, yeah.

Wow.

So I think that in itself probably just did annoy him because that was the one thing that, at least the way I saw it, is that he felt that he controlled the narrative on him being a preacher. He controlled the narrative on him being this chaplain. So when that was kind of pulled back and thrown back in his face, oh, he was not happy at all.

Yeah. Well, that's his domain, and I mean domain in the kind of almost the quasi-religious sense that his domain is the Bible, the word of God, and then how dare you step into his world and use the trappings of religion to actually turn things around and demonstrate his hypocrisy, which in the Bible hypocrisy is of course considered one of the worst sins that you can engage in. Exactly. And so it's like it's got this multiple layers. Again, I can see how phraseology that would really get under his skin. For sure.

I was proud of it, and it stood up in appeal, so I'm fine. So

Drew,

So I wanted to

Also ask you, actually, I'm just going to ask you this. I'm curious. Prostitution in the Bible is really weird. It was legal then in those biblical times, prostitution, and I guess you weren't supposed to partake, but then Jesus, I don't understand how that was really viewed and whether that played into what Beasley chose to do with these women, because he never admitted any guilt to that either, or why he wanted women in his halfway house. That was stupid.

There's definitely ego involved in that. His knowledge of the Bible, his understanding of it, and has sort of elevated him above other people in a lot of ways. And when you elevate yourself above people, then you can do things that other people aren't allowed to do. And it's almost like a demonstration of your legitimacy. It's allowed to do these things. I'm allowed to treat people this way. There's a grand larger plan that I alone am part of. And so it's not that hard to see. I mean, there's a lot of confirmation bias that's involved here because the more he was able to get away with it, the more he believed he was supposed to be able to get away with it. And so when you're talking about prostitution, you're talking about young women in his domain, so to speak. Every instance where he's successful is just more encouragement for him to continue doing these things because affirmation that he is as important, as powerful, as strong, as knowledgeable, as legitimate as he thinks he is.

Ew.

He did create a kind of bubble within which he was able to engage in all these kinds of behaviors, and I use the term very loosely, but a kind of safe space for him where it's like I create the parameters for what is and isn't allowed. Of course, I'm the reference for that. And so therefore, anything that I do is legitimate and no one's going to complain. No one's going to buck up against me because I am who I am. So my sense is that the prosecution was an affront of sorts to him that he couldn't even believe that. How dare they treat me like this. You

Said something interesting to me before about when he took Amy, the sex worker to church with him and introduced her to the judge and what that said to you, that behavior.

Yeah, I think that it's thrill seeking behavior. It's taking it so far that you're right on the edge of getting yourself caught. And there's a thrill that comes along with that, which can be very addictive because it's getting away with something, but it's also confirming your power or your legitimacy or whatever it is that he was getting off on when he did these kinds of things. But the fact that he could do that, that he could take her right up and know that she wasn't going to say anything to the judge, that gives a certain sort of confidence to a person. It builds their confidence up over time. And you find that many people who engage in these kinds of behaviors, the kind of stuff that they're doing right before they get caught, most people on the outside would look at and say, wow, that is so reckless, what they're engaging in.

But the fact of the matter is that every time you get away with something, you continue to do it at a more extreme level. It's almost like addictive behavior. And so of course, eventually you are going to get caught because you're going to outstrip your actual ability to keep things quiet, to get away with things, because you're becoming more and more bold over time. It's just a matter of time before you get caught. So that incident to me was really telling because it basically is an indicator of how much confidence that he had in himself and how much he was willing to push the envelope to see how much further he could take it.

Wow. So Lieutenant Pasco, the detective who investigated the prostitution case, you probably didn't like him very much. He was the fly in the ointment, although I guess you could argue that Beasley kept getting out of jail. He went to prison for burglary charges in his twenties, and then he was convicted again a couple years later for gun charges, but she should have gone back to Texas then, didn't go. He served his time, got out, lived in his mom's basement, I don't know, and then did the whole chaplain thing. Then he went back to jail again and made bail, went back to jail again, and made bond and then disappeared.

Well, that's his interpretation of it, which is kind of interesting in and of itself, the fact that most people would see somebody who was repeatedly getting arrested and going to jail as unsuccessful. That's not a successful offender, and a successful offender is one who stays out of jail, and yet he keeps getting caught, keeps going back in, but he's reinterpreting it the opposite way, which is, yeah, they put me in jail, but look, I got out each time, and I'm sure that there's a narrative in his mind that every time he went in and got out, that it was sort of a learning experience for him. It was something that was strengthening him in some way. He found ways to manipulate the interpretation of these events in a way that sort of served his ego rather than the other way around. He didn't see himself as a five times loser or a six times loser.

What he saw was, I got caught, I got out, and there are guys that are still in there. I walked out of there with guys still in there watching me walk out of there. That can be a very powerful, it's almost an aphrodisiac for someone who's getting out of prison. And when you talk about recidivism, this is one of the biggest problems is that when people do recidivate, it's clearly because in some cases just addictive behavior and stupidity. But in other cases, it comes from a kind of an arrogance that builds up over time by reinterpreting the events in a way that makes you feel better about yourself.

So Beasley gets out on bond for that last time. He's not even charged with prostitution yet, but he gets out on bond and he skips his court date and disappears. And that's when he engages this young accomplice and starts to plot this bizarre plan to assume the identities of these men, which I don't know, Emily, did that ever make sense to you? But you had to make it make sense for the jury, but that makes no sense to me. That whole plot made no sense.

No, and I think that that's when we tried to put ourselves into the minds of someone who's thinking of these crimes, and we try to understand why they did it and what their rationale was. And I don't know that that's something we could ever figure out. We just had to explain how he did it. For me to sit and think, okay, I'm going to go find someone who looks like me, who's down on their luck, and then I'm going to kill them. I'm going to assume their identity and then come up with this whole next scheme where I'm playing myself off as now this dead guy that I've murdered and then go murder more people so I can get their things and make money. That's just not the thought process that a normal person. So I think that when we try to figure out why it is that they did something, I think I always would try to tell jurors, we don't need to figure out the reason why they did it. It's just I have to prove to you that they did do it, or I'm going to have to prove that the evidence shows it. If the evidence doesn't show it, then you find the person not guilty. But you can't try to put yourself into the mind of the person who's coming up with this crime,

But you as a criminologist sort of try to figure that out. Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's what I, said's actually really important is that motive in the legal sense is not the same as motive in the criminological sense,

And the motive can be very simple. He wanted a new identity so that he would be able to keep on offending. He wanted to keep offending so he could get money. And I think speculating on why he thought this would work is very, very difficult. It's elaborate. It's almost cliche in some ways. It sounds like something you might see on a Netflix six part mini series or something like that. And we hear these kinds of stories a lot in crime novels and everything. And it seems to me that he thought, I'm ready to move up to the next level essentially. And the reason why I say that is skipping on the court date that's kind of saying, I'm ready to move on here. I'm done dealing with these petty court dates and going in and out of jail. I don't have time for that. So it's kind of disdain for the court and the legal system.

I'm above that. I'm beyond that. And now I have this very elaborate kind of plan, which of course I will get away with because I'm brilliant. I'm smart. God is on my side. God's not just on my side, but I've got it over on him as well. I mean, I think there is some of that mixed up in it. And so when you have these belief systems, these kinds of plans, although they may look to the rest of us, they don't make sense or that, boy, there's no way this guy's going to get away with this in his mind and anyone's mind, things always turn out differently than what you may imagine. You can sit there, close your eyes, imagine how a date is going to go, or imagine how a conversation with your kid is going to go. Or imagine how asking your boss for a race is going to go.

We do this all the time. We play out something in our minds, assuming that the other person is going to respond in the way that we expect them to. And I think he was doing the same thing. It was a chain of very unlikely events. First, I'm going to kill that person first, then I'm going to take their identity. Then no one's going to be able to figure out who I am. Then I'm going to be able to commit more crimes where I'm also going to be able to get away it because I'm so brilliant. And this identity thing has worked out so perfectly, and you're imagining success at every moment as you move forward this, and you have a chain of these extremely unlikely events that are going to come together. And it's no wonder that you get caught in the end. I'm sure he was almost, I'm sure he was surprised that he actually got caught because

He didn't even leave Ohio.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean for him to have not left Ohio says I, and I think we talked about this before, that the fact that he didn't leave Ohio is partially because there's a comfort there. He knows that he's got Ohio license place, he's got an Ohio's driver's license. He knows the state very well, et cetera. So there's a certain kind of comfort level there. But at the same time, you also think to yourself, if I was trying to get away with these kinds of offenses, there are certain things I just wouldn't do. I wouldn't drive a car from Ohio, for example, that could be easily traced back, that kind of thing. So I saw that elaborate. It was just wishful thinking that all of this would go through. But I'm sure he had a huge amount of confidence that it was going to work. And Emily's probably seen this many, many times where individuals who have committed a certain level of offending and gotten away with it for a while, so they suddenly try to move up, and that's where they get caught because it doesn't work out the way that they think it's going to work out.

So Emily, when you were investigating this to prepare your case, did you think to yourself, oh my God, this is such a dumb thing. I mean, did that enter your mind?

No, quite honestly, I thought the amount of thought that went into it. Again, I'm a Gen X kid, so I have a lot of stupid movies in my memory bank, but I would be like, oh my gosh, this guy is like Dr. Evil. But the fact that there was so much work and effort that went into this plan, it was a job. I don't know that at any point I thought that they were necessarily dumb. I thought these guys spent a lot of time and effort putting thought into it. The fact that they went and interviewed other people that responded to this ad, they came up with a fake application, all of these things, they thought this was all real. So I thought going back to the what awesome powers, Mike, he was an evil genius.

That's a great way to put it actually. I do think he thinks he was an evil genius. The problem is there's so many variables

To control with something like this, and you do have to be a genius to anticipate all of them. And he did put a lot of work in, but there's no amount of work that you can put in to get away with something like this unless you've got a massive amount of support and planning and skills and a knowledge base of the law and how evidence works and all these other things. So is he smarter than the average bear? Of course, without a doubt. But again, I just think there were too many variables that he didn't anticipate. And some of that is due to his own sort of arrogance that I've figured out all the variables. I'm Sherlock Holmes, I know everything I've anticipated, every eventuality, that kind of thing. And of course, that's not the case.

I was also intrigued, Emily, that Richard Beasley came up with this elaborate complicated plan, and his accomplice was like a teenager.

The teenager. I mean, he looked like a small, I shouldn't say small man. I mean he didn't look like your average 16-year-old. And again, I think that we have to start looking at why it is that someone like Richard Beasley would choose an accomplice or choose people to be around him. I think in some way, he wanted to be able to control them. So in this case, he had a history with the family, and it just happened that this 16-year-old was looking for somebody to cling onto. That was a strong, solid figure. And I think that Brogan's father was a good guy. I think that we talked about a parent wanting to see their child do well and to not be a criminal Brogan's father was cooperative and was like, what did you do? And really kind of held his feet to the fire. So I will say that for that part of the investigation, I respected him, but I think Brogan was a smart kid too. I don't think that he was a dumb kid. I think he was a lost 16-year-old just looking for somebody to take him under their wing. But still,

Teenagers aren't really that dependable. So I'm just thinking, is it possible Vulcan that if Richard Beasley took this kid under his wing when he was nine, and then had continued interaction with him, introduced him not only to the Bible, but to the criminal element on the streets of Akron that he could have brainwashed this kid into being like a mini me?

Yeah, I mean, some of this is when you read about the case, you listen to the conversations that he was having. I keep going back to the narcissism thing, and a lot of that has to do with wanting people around you who see you a certain way and not much tolerance for people who are too smart for you, or they can figure out your shtick, so to speak. And a 16-year-old kid, a smart one, a capable one is still a 16-year-old kid and can be manipulated, and it's an audience of, it's the beginning of a cult in a way. You've always got to get that first acolyte, so to speak. And so I think it's less an accomplice and more of an admirer on hand for that ego boost when you need it, someone who's always looking up to you, someone who's always there at your beck and call so that you can tell yourself the story that I have a person or people who follow me and listen to me. And you're not thinking to yourself, how much of an ego boost is it really for a grown man to manipulate a 16-year-old kid? You're really just thinking about the fact that you've got somebody who's listening to you doing what you say

Besides your mom.

Yeah, besides your mom. But that's important because it's not enough to just have one kind of person in your life who gives you that affirmation. When you're a person like Beasley, you need different kinds of people. So of course, mom is important in her own way, but again, mom has to love you. She's mom. But if I can get a total stranger to also give me that kind of affirmation and love and respect, then that's another demonstration of who I am and what my power is. So there's definitely a kind of an emotional component to this. And there's also, I'm an important person. I need an assistant. I need a helper to do the things that I don't feel like doing, and that's another kind of ego boost that I've got someone who will go fetch things for me, run errands for me, those kinds of things. So I think that the kid was really serving more than one sort of role in that respect.

So when Richard Beasley would bring Brogan to his Yale house, which was really allegedly a house of prostitution, and Brogan would witness these things, or Beasley would say, your mother's a prostitute. I'm going to show you where she hooks on the corner. He was trying to turn Rogan against his parents or protect Rogan from his parents, or

I think he was just trying to break him down emotionally and sort of part of domineering another person is to break them, their ego down, so to speak, and sort of identifying your mother is this kind of person, I'm the one that's showing that to you, but still I care enough for you to keep you around. That kind of thing. So I think that's part of you're disrupting another human being's ability to engage in a logical thought process essentially. So keeping someone off balance essentially so that you can continue to domineer and dominate with them and be confident that they're going to be there for you and that they're going to do your bidding when you need them to. So a lot of this is about psychological manipulation, which people in positions of power do all the time, of course, but in this case, it's really got this sort of nasty streak to it.

So Emily, can you describe what Brogan looked like as a 17-year-old ms? Very

Tall. Even though he was tall, he looked like a linebacker, but there was a quiet presence about him. He almost had the face of a young boy, but the body of a man. He did have a domineering presence about him, so he was a big, powerful physical. He was, yes. Yeah, soft spoken. But then you listen to some of the interviews that we played in court or that were part of the investigation. You can sit and read through some of the things that he said to investigators and his descriptions of certain crime scenes, and it comes across a certain way when you read it, but until you hear him describe it, some of the jurors after trial said that hearing him describe things in his own voice was absolutely the thing that put them over the edge when it came to signing the guilty verdict, because they had sympathy for him because even though he was big, he was a 16-year-old boy, 17-year-old boy with a baby-ish face, but the voice and the description of the crimes that took place, there was such a coldness and emptiness. It was kind of like the crime scene. You have to see what the crimes happened. To truly understand how far out you were, you have to hear his voice to understand the coldness and the emptiness that existed within this manchild.

It was truly chilling. As I listened to it, it was weird because he called the victim's Mr. And then he would describe taking the clothes off a dead man's body and taking change on pockets.

Right. Disassociated. I mean, he was

Disassociated

The hallmark

Of somebody. Yeah, disassociation is a good way to put it. It's the hallmark of someone who's been broken down by somebody else, which is necessary. If you need someone to help you do these horrific kinds of things. They can't be panicking. They can't be losing their emotional control over things. You need someone who's really under your control and dominated. So I could see how it'd be very unnerving to hear a kid speaking about those kinds of things. We all know that someone that age should be horrified and terrified and scared of everything, and that's part of, I think what probably people found so objectional about Beasley in the end was that he had not only done these horrific crimes, but look what he had did to this kid. He essentially inured this kid to the suffering of others, which I think is a pretty unforgivable act for an adult to engage in with

Man of God. Right?

Yeah. Ha. That just makes it that much worse. Right, exactly.

Emily, I know that you have suspected that Richard Beasley may have committed more murders. Can you get into that?

Of course. There's no part of the investigation that showed that it's hard to think that someone can progress with these kinds of crimes at such ease that this is the first time that it happened, and there was such precision in, and I didn't know Richard Beasley to be a hunter, but the precision with which the bullets killed the victims. The first two were just very precise. There weren't a lot. Now then you get to the third victim that passed Tim Kern and the pattern of bullets and the number of bullets that it took to kill Tim was different than the others, which is why a lot of the jurors speculated that it was not Richard Beasley. That was the one that pulled the trigger for Tim Kern. But I've shot a gun before. I don't know that I could have done so with such precision and done dead,

Dead. He's deep in the woods. The person this victim is following Richard Beasley into the woods, and then Richard Beasley cons them into turning around and he immediately shoots them in the back of the head. So he is shooting a moving target,

And he's not exactly spry. I mean, he's not this in fit kind of guy who you see like a murderer in the movies or like a James Bond kind of guy. So the precision probably comes with practice, not Braun. What do you think

Volcan? Because the turning point from running girls on back page to intricately planning murders of people to allow yourself to remain on the run from a law is quite a turn in my mind.

It's hard to say. I mean, it may have been a turn that was more gradual for him in his mind, but we don't see the evidence of that because we just see the evidence of what he did. So it looks like he moved from one thing to another and that there was this acceleration, so to speak. It was next level, but my sense is that near the end of the kinds of offenses he was committing before he started doing these really elaborate homicides, he was probably thinking about doing them for a while, and it is the case that individuals like this will fantasize about doing something bigger, better, better in their mind over time before they actually engage in it. And there is a certain extent to which, and I go back to this idea of it being an ego boost form. There's a sort of diminishing returns of engaging in the same type of offense over and over again, right?

You become habituated to it. You don't get quite the same thrill or the same ego boost or the same. It's not as interesting anymore, and you're starting to think about moving into the next phase consciously or unconscious. I think it starts unconsciously and then moves into something that's conscious, and then there's that first time that you do it. I mean, first time that you commit a murder that would, for most of us be a major jump. It's hard to go from one to the other without seeing it as a major jump. I don't think it was a major jump for him. I think it was something that he had sort of been contemplating for a while, and as the effect of the previous types of more mundane offenses started to wear off quicker and quicker, he was probably more and more drawn to doing something a bit more elaborate, a bit more fulfilling.

I think too, there were other people that talked about the fact that he bragged about whether it be in Texas or the rumors with some of the other sex workers. There were rumblings and things that he'd been involved in other things, but we didn't go down that road. We didn't have any proof of that. So it would all just be mere speculation.

One of my last questions for you is the sense of desperation to me. As I listened to Beasley in jail, he's becoming more and more desperate with each conversation. Like police shut down his halfway house and he had to sell everything. He didn't have any income. He knew he was going to go back to a Texas prison cell. No matter what happened. He knew he was not going to make bond to me. He's now reached this place where he's so desperate that it makes sense to me that he skipped his court date. Am I assuming too much or is that your sense?

I think that there must have come a time when reality started to really close in around him, and no matter how delusional you are, matter how narcissistic you are, there's a point at which you start to realize, I am not going to get away with this. And I think that when you're not getting bond, you're not getting released. All the things that used to happen, all the breaks that you used to get aren't happening for you the way that they were. We talked about this before, the fact that he got released, he was accused of this, he got out. He was suddenly saying, wait a minute. Isn't this around the time when I'm supposed to be getting out so I can go back to doing what I was doing and suddenly it's not happening? At some point we'll start to sink in. And that reality breaking through that there's a point at which no matter how intelligent you think you are, how important you think you are, how much you think you're above everyone else, that there is a point where you're about to really feel the wrath.

I think that can be a moment of panic where you make a move and still making the move thinking that, okay, this is a test. I'm being pushed, but I'm going to take my shot here and you know what? I bet I'm going to get away with it. That's part of the impetus for moving forward. A lot of people, what they will do is they'll fold and they'll say, I'm not going to pull any more fast ones anymore. I'm going to throw myself on the mercy, so to speak of the court, or now do the, I'm a good person. I'm going to behave, and all that kind of stuff. I think he just decided, no, I can't do that. I've got to move forward. But I do think that this was reality kind of closing in on him, and that's a very harsh breakthrough psychologically for people who are narcissists to handle. It can be extremely disruptive to their egos and their belief systems about themselves to suddenly see the reality of what's happening that, oh, I guess I wasn't the one that was going to get away with this. There are now forces at work that are going to do things to me that I can't control any longer. So yeah, I could see that being a moment of panic.

To me, his motive always was, I'm not going back to Texas, so I'm going to go out and kill people.

I don't know. I go back and forth. I can say that his motive was that he didn't want to go back to prison, and I think that certainly was a way that we could describe it. This is the thing that set him off. He just didn't want to go back and he would do whatever he had to do to not go back. But then there's part of me it's like, but for someone who had gotten away with so much before, whether or not that was the break that he realized, wow, things have caught up with me and I'm not going to get out of this. Or is he just thinking, I'm going to continue getting away with things and still no one's going to catch me, so it doesn't matter if I do this here? Because what gets me though is he didn't leave the area. He gets out, he gets that break, and then he literally goes down the street to commit a murder. It's like, why are you leave the state, go someplace where nobody can find you, but instead you're committing these crimes in the backyard of the place that just let you out where you're probably going to get back in and then go back to Texas.

I wonder how much he sought Ohio as a safe place for him, and Texas was sort of emblematic of, oh, that's where I get caught. That's where I get punished. As long as I'm in Ohio, no one can touch me. I mean, it's kind of a warp way to think, but it could be something along those lines.

Isn't that possible? Because he really insinuated himself with judges and bailiffs and lawyers, and so maybe he really did think that he had the power. Maybe he did think that judge let him out because he was chaplain rich.

Well, too, in Texas, the people that he had been there with weren't there anymore. So if he did have some kind of a gang that existed in Texas, they weren't there. So he would've been all by himself. There's no family in Texas. It would've been just him.

Ohio was his fiefdom, and I think Texas was just trouble for him and unfamiliarity and a more dangerous place, and Ohio was his comfort zone.

Thank you, Dr. Topalli. Thank you, Emily. I know this was a lot, right, but how fascinating. The good news Richard Beasley is behind bars forever. He is not getting out. He will never be able to hurt anyone else ever again. As always, thank you for listening and for supporting the God Hook. And if you have any questions about this case or anything else legal for that matter, go to my website, Carol costello presents.com/contact and ask a few questions and I promise we'll get to them. Thanks so much.