Original subtitles

[theme music playing]

MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...

the appetite.

It's like a wolf that's...

filling...the hunger.

♪♪

[siren wailing]

MAN: Eustaquio was found shot multiple times

in his Fallbrook home.

His mother-in-law, Cynthia Katherine Cdebaca,

charged with the crime.

We are still currently investigating

what the motive might be.

SAHNI: She's letting the sheriff's deputies believe

that she can't remember her name.

She can't remember her date of birth, her age.

These are things that are not uncommon to

see sometimes when someone has a significant stroke,

however, it seems unlikely against other aspects

of her day-to-day functioning that we know about.

What I think Cdebaca is showing us

in this moment is that she hasn't fully

decided how much responsibility

she wants to take for the crime.

MORGAN: It's bizarre.

Her wailing is a little bizarre.

This looks feigned to me.

She's pretending that she doesn't know anything about

the crime and the scene, and the wail

is a weak imitation of, I think, what she imagines an immediate

expression of sorrow would be.

MUNDY: She goes from pretending to be confused to

pretending to lament his loss very quickly,

and I wouldn't expect to see that.

I wouldn't expect her even necessarily to

understand the news she was being given

if she was anywhere near as

confused or disoriented as she presented herself.

SAHNI: Now, suddenly, she's gone from not knowing her name

to a level of anger,

a level of bitterness, and doesn't sound like a whole lot

of remorse.

Cdebaca feels comfortable pivoting and taking

responsibility and credit for

killing her son-in-law, because the detectives have now

befriended her.

There's some relishment of her actions, and now she's got

an audience that she can describe that to.

For a psychopath,

having an audience that they are commanding, the audience is

looking to them, what are they going to say next?

Even if it's shocking the audience, being in control

can be a very satisfying thing for someone with psychopathy.

[Cynthia sobbing loudly]

She sounds monstrous as she's describing this man's

last words and her desire to continue killing him.

There's a tone of disgust in it, like that

he would plead for his life to her,

and the way she imitates it, she is angry at him.

MORGAN: With psychopaths,

they are often angered and infuriated when people

don't treat them the way they expect

to be treated -- for her,

this is the final offense he can do.

He's humiliating her, and so she's going

to kill him and eliminate the problem.

SAHNI: Was it an overreaction? Yes.

The number of bullets that he suffered was overkill.

Cdebaca's behaviors are ruthless.

She doesn't feel bad about it.

MORGAN: Her expression of emotion seems

to come out of nowhere.

It's sort of like the switch went on,

the switch went off, and this is really common after people

have had a stroke.

What's consistent here, though, when we talk about psychopathy,

is that she's happy he's dead.

MUNDY: The hard part to, like, morally wrap your head around is

that she would make that decision

for so many other people.

They have to live with knowing grandma killed dad.

That's a real just lack of empathy or ability

to empathize with her ostensibly loved ones.

My dad at times, you know, he could be hard, but

he's ultimately fair.

Alpha personalities, you know,

conflict with a lot of other personality types, and she put

on a good facade for years now and, like,

you know, so this is a shock to us,

but it seems like she's been planning this for a while.

On the surface, I wondered how much of

her decision making was impaired by the stroke,

but clearly, there are premeditated steps to this,

and she took the time to pick up the casings.

She took the time to clean up after herself.

Cdebaca is definitely not a confused,

disorganized, unintelligent person.

This was an organized, systematic,

methodically executed crime.

MUNDY: She took his life, and she went to Denny's

and a casino on her birthday --

that's really concerning.

That's a little more suggestive of just that

indifference of human life,

indifference towards her own grandchildren,

her daughter.

MORGAN: That's what we see in psychopathy.

They've taken the law into their own hands, and they've

settled the fantasy in their head

or settled the score, and she feels, I think,

entitled to celebrate.

That lack of remorse is what we see in psychopathy.

[sobbing loudly]

[sobbing continues]

MORGAN: In her behavior, we do see an element of narcissism.

She has to match the fantasy in her head

about how this problem would have to be resolved.

So calling the police was out of the question.

It wouldn't result in his death -- in psychopathy,

people don't believe in adhering to the social rules.

They behave by their own rules,

and they can take matters into their own hands.

SAHNI: She alludes to the idea

that she had a troubled childhood.

There absolutely could have been some of her

early experiences and negative feelings about her own family

and maybe a domineering parent projected onto her son-in-law

that maybe she felt that her

grandchildren experienced their father in a more

domineering and rigid way than he may actually have been.

The overkill that you see in that crime may very well

have been her tapping into rage

that she had about some of her early life experiences.

[loud sobbing]

[both sobbing loudly]

I think it is telling that her daughter was upset.

It suggests to me that her daughter

was in a full relationship with the victim.

She wasn't begging her mother,

please get rid of someone for me

and had emotionally detached from him.

You really see a very good illustration of

how fused she is in her own head,

that what is her reality must be her daughter's reality.

The story she had going in her head is that she was

doing the right thing for her daughter and her daughter would

be relieved.

And it's not really until this moment that you see that

the light bulb goes off in her head

that she's created a real mess with her daughter.

When people are psychologically fused with their children,

there's no room in their reality for

their experiences and the experiences of

their children.

Cdebaca gave herself a birthday gift, and she didn't

consider the consequences that it would have on her daughter,

her grandchildren, the very people that

she claimed she was protecting.

She did what she wanted to do.

There's a callousness, a coldness,

a cruelness about what she's done,

and she's singularly focused.

Cdebaca's personality and behaviors

are consistent with psychopathic behavior.

Cdebaca justifies her behaviors in this narrative

or view that she excised a cancer from the family.

But she is now the one who is the cancer in

the family, and this is something that family may never

recover from.

MAN: Prosecutors called it cold blooded and planned.

This is a case in which

the defendant admitted to planning and premeditating

her murder.

MAN: Cdebaca was in a wheelchair.

She's 65 years old.

She bobbed her head and smiled

as the jury walked into the courtroom.

WOMAN: The jury in the above-entitled cause

find the defendant,

Cynthia Cdebaca, guilty of the crime of murder.