Original subtitles

REPORTER: A runner is gunned down

out of nowhere today on the road near Wells Lake.

In custody is one man, 24-year-old John Suleski.

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

the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...

feeling...the hunger.

Going into the interview, the detectives

might have been wondering, given the way that

Brett Morrison was killed, was this a personal vendetta?

Was this some revenge

that he was trying to get against this specific target?

Or was it just completely at random?

If so, what's the reason for that?

SAHNI: The victim was Brent Morrison,

a 44-year-old professional -- he was an avid runner.

What his wife confirms is that Suleski doesn't

really have any friends or a social routine in town,

and so that helps detectives to realize that there really is

even less of a nexus to the victim, and it appears that

this may have been a crime of a complete stranger.

RAGHAVAN: The marriage is failing.

His wife doesn't know what's going on with him.

He's very introverted -- it sounds like

this is not a connected relationship, and that he's

critical of his wife's appearance, and that he is very

focused on his own appearance.

She says he's at the gym all the time,

and he's commenting about her being fat -- speaks to

some perspective that maybe this is where we begin to see

some of the narcissism in Suleski,

that he has an idea of what people should be,

and that most people don't live up to that standard.

Why would you kill someone you didn't know,

and why would you kill him so cold bloodedly?

And one possibility that comes to mind is this is a man who is

completely repressed, he is sort of tightly coiled up,

and he doesn't express himself.

SAHNI: She's just overwhelmed by

the whole situation, but her reaction is also still,

at the same time, somewhat deflated and restrained.

And that restrained reaction makes me wonder

if there is more going on.

She's had concerns but dismissed them, and now, when

you look at those concerns overlaid on this crime, she has

some things she's starting to put together.

Ultimately, for any spouse,

this would be a nightmare situation.

Suleski's ability to stay calm and to stay in control

of his narrative is somewhat striking.

He knows he's committed this crime.

He knows he's given authorities permission to search

his vehicle, and they found the firearm.

He seems to just be

going about business as usual, he wants to preserve the story

that he's telling authorities, and that quality is more

consistent with what we see in psychopathic individuals.

There's a shallowness to their affect or emotion.

There's a lack of willingness to take responsibility

for what they've done.

There's generally a cool and calm about how they handle

stress, and it's their own narcissism to some degree.

They believe and confidently feel they can pull this off.

He's on a sinking ship and he, you know, he doesn't

really know how to create a good story, so he comes up

with a terrible story -- he's trying to figure out how to

get out of this mess.

TUSSEY: So yes, they've searched his car,

they found the bullets, and the best story that he can come

up with is that he was trying to shoot a squirrel.

Maybe he thinks he's so smart,

and these detectives are so dumb,

they couldn't possibly put two and two together.

That sort of grandiosity is also a trait of psychopathy.

They manipulate, they lie,

and they do what they need to, to get out of

the responsibility of whatever it is that they've done.

What's interesting is Suleski's body language

shifts at this point in the interview, and now,

he starts nodding in agreement with the detective in

the affirmative, as in the detective is saying,

"I don't believe this BS story," and he's nodding, "Yes."

In other words, "I agree with you. This is BS."

TUSSEY: The detective said, "You have

a chance to take the floor now." He's feeding into Suleski's

narcissism and grandiosity, basically,

and saying, "Here you lead."

It's like the detectives are baiting him, and he's taking it.

Once he has taken the stage, he literally takes the stage.

He pours on the theatrics, so now we see these shallow

tears, we see him acting like he's overcome with emotion at

certain parts of this, that he can't even tell the story.

Individuals with psychopathy tend to have a callousness

and a shallow affect,

meaning they know what to say or how to act,

but it's not necessarily genuine.

He's saying what he thinks they want to hear.

He's acting upset -- It's unclear

if he's even upset that an innocent man was shot,

or if he's really just upset that he's caught,

and everything leans toward the latter.

Ultimately, it just doesn't hold true that this is someone

who would switch from being suicidal to suddenly homicidal.

We see this in the field often, that somebody, in order to

either gain sympathy from the people who are interrogating

them or to start to lay the foundation for some kind of

an insanity defense, might make a claim of suicidal ideation

or an attempt to kill themselves when, in fact, they were not

attempting to kill themselves at all -- it's nothing other than

another tactic of manipulation, and it's just one of the tools

they use in that toolbox.

We start to see the callousness

with which Suleski engaged in this crime.

He's talking about the victim's reaction after being hit

the first time with this firearm and this bullet, and it almost

seems like Suleski's offended by the fact that the victim

didn't give him a more spectacular reaction, that all

he did was say, "Ow," as if it was a bee or a bug bite.

SAHNI: Suleski shot the victim nine times.

It's such a level of excess violence that he was getting

a thrill out of what he did -- there was no reason to continue

to shoot this innocent individual who never fought

back, didn't even see his perpetrator coming.

You have to just think that not only was he

on an adrenaline high and just kept going,

but he wanted to be absolutely certain he hit his target.

TUSSEY: He's losing control of his finances.

He's losing control of his marriage,

and rather than react in a way a healthy

individual might, by taking steps to improve those

problems, he decides to go to the extreme, and he reacts in

rage toward an innocent victim.

SAHNI: Suleski's decision to shoot and kill

the victim speaks to how he sees people -- they're objects,

they're replaceable, they're substitutable.

It's no different than a person choosing to line up soda cans

or beer cans on a wall and engage in target practice.

That's what he wanted in that moment, and that's what

he decided to give himself.

[sobbing]

TUSSEY: He shot this man, and now he's claiming,

very theatrically so, by the way,

that he wanted to help him with a first aid kit.

It just doesn't mesh together -- using what he knows to try to

manipulate the detectives even more.

He knows he should be upset by this.

That's the right response, to be crying and to

say you wanted to help someone.

[quietly sobbing]

It feels like there's an internal conflict.

He's been thinking of hurting someone,

because he's so angry at himself and the world,

both of these things kind of meshing with each other,

and he snaps, and so there's a suspension at the moment of

the feelings that make us human, that make us be angry

but not kill, that make us, you know, understand what

the taking of a life is, and so in that moment,

the suspension of these feelings led him to act in ways that

were really psychopathic.

[sobbing]

It's possible he is trying to rein himself back in

from the theatrical show that

he just put on, and he's trying to calm himself back down.

It looks as if he's looking up at the camera at one point --

intentionally and thinking, I'm gonna look a certain way.

I'm gonna present myself a certain way here while

the cameras are rolling and no one else is in here, and maybe

this will be helpful later on down the line.

How many times do we all wake up every single day,

we go about our normal routine,

and we have no thought that we're not coming home that day?

You're just out there running on a Saturday morning,

probably before you do laundry, you go get your groceries,

you meet friends for lunch or dinner.

That is what the victim's life was.

And that morning, he never made it home.

You don't see it coming -- we don't expect to run into

a John Suleski.