Forensic Psychology

Jana Monroe, the first female FBI agent in the Behavioral Science Unit, spent her career applying crime-scene analysis and victimology to roughly 850 homicide cases — work she describes as systematic suspect-pool reduction, not psychic access to a killer's inner life. This episode unpacks that distinction and why it matters, since decades of television have trained the public to expect a kind of certainty profiling was never designed to deliver. It's a grounded look at the actual methodology behind forensic behavioral analysis, straight from someone who built a career practicing it.

On May 20, 2012, a gang fight inside a privately run Mississippi prison exploded into a multi-hour riot that left the facility in chaos. Twenty-four-year-old Senior Correctional Officer Catlin Carithers, called in on his day off, was cornered and beaten to death on the roof after inmates used food carts as a makeshift ladder to reach him. This episode walks through how the riot escalated, what happened to Carithers, and how prosecutors later held accountable the men who took part in the attack and destroyed evidence in its wake.

In part two of their look at vigilantism, Carlos and retired FBI profiler Andrew Bringuel dig into what actually motivates someone to bypass the justice system and act on their own. Using the PEPS model — personal, economic, power/political, and social motives — they break down real cases, including the Bernhard Goetz shooting, to separate the myth of the vigilante from the psychology behind it. The conversation also turns practical, weighing what "good" versus destructive vigilante behavior looks like when communities feel the system has failed them.

The legend goes that gangster "Machine Gun" Kelly coined the term "G-Men" when he begged federal agents not to shoot during his 1933 arrest — but the real story is a lesson in institutional myth-making. This episode traces how J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau and a cooperative press turned a routine capture into a branding coup months after the fact. It's a case study in how authority, narrative control, and media complicity combine to shape public memory long before anyone had a Twitter account.

A billionaire’s son gets caught in a trailer park sting. The league says it is reviewing the matter. This is what happens when the story a man tells himself finally meets the version everyone else can see. Every case has a moment before the moment. A man sits in an SUV at a mobile home park in East Palestine, Ohio, waiting for something he told himself was one thing while some other part of him knew it was another. That is where this story starts, not with the arrest, but with the choice that made the arrest in...

Nine years after Belgium, in the English countryside, a military-trained parachute instructor jumped from four thousand feet with both her main and reserve chutes disabled — and lived. Behind it sat a husband, a life insurance policy, and a marriage already in freefall long before she was. This part covers the near-impossible survival, the motive, and what two cases a decade apart reveal about this method of killing.

In 2006, an experienced Belgian skydiver stepped out of a plane and discovered mid-air that neither of her parachutes would open. What looked at first like an unthinkable equipment failure turned out to be something far colder — a killing engineered days in advance by someone who never had to be in the room. This part covers the jump, the investigation, and the rival who built a death out of patience.

Bank robberies in the United States have plunged to historic lows, yet the patterns of when and where they occur still reveal surprisingly suboptimal choices by perpetrators. Drawing on the latest FBI Bank Crime Statistics and regional breakdowns, this episode revisits classic insights about morning versus afternoon yields alongside current numbers showing a sharp national decline concentrated in certain areas. Listen for a clear-eyed look at risk, reward, human habits, and how the crime itself has changed.

1997, a fugitive con man who had stolen over a million dollars in religious artifacts while posing as an Anglican priest sought refuge inside a Benedictine monastery in Massachusetts. This episode examines how Michael Dongarra exploited the psychological architecture of trust that monastic life depends on, and what his case reveals about the blind spots built into institutions designed around faith rather than suspicion. We explore the intersection of psychopathy, religious performance, and the human need to believe in redemption, even when redemption is the con.

Mexican content creators are being killed in real time on TikTok and Instagram as rival Sinaloa Cartel factions settle scores in public. César Gastélum's murder outside a fast-food restaurant is only the latest in a string of more than a dozen influencer killings tied to the Chapitos-Mayos split. This episode examines why narco groups now treat social media stars as both propaganda tools and disposable liabilities.

In this episode, leading forensic criminologist Dr. Eric Hickey joins us to analyze the psychopathological profile and behavioral mechanics of Roger Kibbe, the I-5 Strangler. We examine how underlying sexual sadism, fantasy ritualization, and paraphilic fixations drive repetitive violence and victim selection along transport corridors. Through clinical analysis of offender motivation, power-control dynamics, and post-arrest behavioral patterns, we uncover the psychological signatures that separate opportunistic predators from methodical, high-rate serial killers.

In 1999 a father named Henry Masuka walked into St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto carrying his infant son through an asthma attack and walked out into a police shooting that ended his life. This episode traces the desperate arithmetic of a parent facing a locked door between his child and care, the systemic wait times that turned panic into crisis, and the strange cultural echo that later linked this tragedy to a Hollywood film. We sit with the psychology of threat perception, institutional failure, and the myth of the reasonable man under pressure.

On the opening day of Florida’s lobster mini-season, a heated dispute over a diving location near Fisher Island escalated when a man allegedly swam over and deliberately shut off a surface-supplied air system while an 18-year-old diver was underwater. The captain of the victim’s boat pulled the gasping, disoriented teenager to the surface after the air was cut. Miami Beach resident Michael Joseph Simpson now faces an attempted murder charge in a case that highlights how quickly territorial arguments on the water can turn life-threatening.

This episode explores the psychological profile and behavioral motivations of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, analyzing how grandiosity, ideological radicalization, and anti-social traits fused to create one of history's most notorious militants. Through the lens of forensic analysis, we examine the dynamic shift from his early operations with the PFLP to his later self-aggrandizing campaign of mercenary violence. The narrative dissects how severe narcissistic features, externalization of blame, and the psychological impact of decades spent as a global fugitive ultimately shaped his trial behavior and lifetime incarceration in France.

Two elderly women in California befriended homeless men, housed them, and took out millions in life insurance policies naming themselves as beneficiaries. After waiting out the contestability periods, they staged the men’s deaths as hit-and-run accidents. This is the story of Helen Golay, Olga Rutterschmidt, and the calculated killings of Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid.

In late September 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide. The bottles had been purchased from ordinary stores and the capsules tampered with after they reached the shelves. The case remains unsolved and permanently changed how over-the-counter medications are packaged and regulated in the United States.

In the first half of 2026, U.S. homicides fell 18 percent, putting the country on track for its lowest murder levels in more than a century according to White House and independent data. This episode examines the numbers from the Council on Criminal Justice, the multi-year decline after the pandemic-era spike, and the range of explanations offered for the trend. Hosts discuss what the data show, what remains uncertain, and why the story matters for public safety and policy debates.

In May 1992, the body of unhoused 45-year-old Nancy Hernandez was found beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled in a utility corridor off Hang Ah Alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown. More than three decades later, DNA evidence linked the crime to Ricky Dawson, a man already convicted or connected to similar sexual-assault murders in Florida, Colorado, and Washington. This episode examines the Hernandez case, the pattern of violence that stretched across four states, and how modern forensic work finally brought charges in the California cold case.

In the 1960s, London’s East End was ruled by a singular, terrifying force: identical twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who seamlessly blended brutal gangland violence with West End celebrity glamour. This episode tears down the mythos of "The Firm" to examine the volatile psychological cocktail of Reggie’s controlled sociopathy and Ronnie’s escalating paranoid schizophrenia. By analyzing their most notorious murders, we explore how a symbiotic twin dynamic transformed a childhood bond into a lethal, co-dependent criminal empire.