Original subtitles

[dramatic music playing]

[Hubers sobbing]

[man 1] The thing inside of me is like...

[man 2] The appetite, it's like a wolf that's...

feeling...

the hunger.

[sobs]

[Nameeta] Hubers has called 911

to report her deceased boyfriend

and that she has killed him,

but what she's also offering the dispatcher is

a level of detail about how she killed him

and a distancing from any aspect of him that's human.

She's referring to him as a dead body,

she's automatically telling the dispatcher she did this in self-defense

and that's a little unusual.

The majority of people would make the decision to get help

if somebody... was shot accidentally.

Your first thought is not to finish the job.

[sobbing]

It's very unusual that she whimpers,

seems distraught for the first couple of seconds,

but then almost, like, [snaps fingers] she switches off

and it's a completely different person.

She changes her demeanor

as soon as the detective leaves the room.

That would not be typical of someone who is...

who just killed her boyfriend

and who's completely overwhelmed

at... at having done such a horrific thing.

[Alexander] Psychopaths, because of their lack of empathy,

essentially they're at the center of their universe,

everyone else around is for their pleasure

or should be eliminated

because they're some kind of roadblock

to what they want to get.

And what we see here is already evidence of that.

I think she's fully aware that she's killed somebody.

She thinks she's smarter,

she thinks she should get away with it,

she should not be held accountable,

"I should be able to walk out tonight

and be done, isn't that right?"

And when it turns out not to be true,

that's when things start to unravel.

[detective] So--

[detective] I know.

[whispering]

[sobs]

[Nameeta] It's important to realize

that she's already asked for a lawyer,

and yet Hubers can't seem to stop talking.

Her need to manage impressions

and to push forward her narrative

is really what's taken over.

[Alexander] Hubers felt relief

because she had enough

and that's very consistent with a psychopath.

Good psychopaths learn how to mimic genuine human emotion.

Attraction, compassion, love, anger, resentment.

And what we're seeing here is her attempt to do that.

She's setting up the story now in even more details,

saying, "I'm remembering things."

Whether it's her arm shut in the door,

whether she's thrown against some bookshelf,

whether she's smashed her head into the TV set.

But at the scene, the bookshelf is undisturbed,

the things are still in immaculate order on the shelf,

there's no crack in the screen, um,

she doesn't have any bruises,

doesn't have any marks on her, um...

So what she's saying doesn't match the physical reality.

[voice cracking]

And what's interesting in this segment of the interrogation is,

she really moves away from any physical abuse

and essentially describes a motive for killing him.

He was insulting her and her family,

how dare he?

Odd to say,

but psychopaths are usually very sensitive people too.

In many cases,

their behavior, their demeanor is born

out of a self-esteem which is very fragile,

which is very sensitive to a perceived insult,

and what happens once the psychopath feels insulted in any way

is a catastrophic reaction of rage.

[voice trembling]

[sobs]

She wasn't gonna give him up to anybody else.

I mean, she shot him right in the face,

that's a very personalized way of killing someone.

She could have shot him in the chest,

or the heart that might be sentimental,

but she shot him in the face.

And I...

She was angry

and she was gonna pay him back,

and I think shooting him in the face was...

was deliberate, yeah.

I don't think it was an accident.

[chuckling]

[whispering]

[sobbing]

That line, "I wonder if anyone will want to marry me,"

it's not the usual line people have

when they're being detained after having shot someone.

So from a psychological standpoint,

we have to take it as a significant indicator

of what's seriously important to her.

I really wanna know

how long this has been an obsession.

If Ryan was saying, "No. I'm not marrying you.

I'm moving on to other people,"

he's thwarting that fantasy,

and now that he's gone, she's wondering,

"Well, I wonder if there'll be another prospect,"

which means that the idea of being married is much more important

than who she's gonna marry.

[Hubers] Yeah.

[detective sighs]

[Nameeta] The narcissism that Hubers struggles with is really seen here

because she doesn't have an audience.

It's difficult to engage in impression management

if nobody's paying attention to you,

and essentially this officer is not paying attention to Hubers.

And what she does is she doesn't tolerate it.

She pretty rapidly asks to have Amber brought back in,

and Amber is this female officer

who somehow Hubers has fused with

and believes might be her best shot

at convincing them that this was self-defense.

[humming]

[continues humming]

[singing]

[whispers]

[pops tongue]

Who sings to themselves after they've killed somebody?

This is like she's finally grabbed the brass ring.

She's almost surprised at herself

that she was able to succeed.

She refers to herself in the third person.

We all have parts in ourselves, right?

The part that is wife or husband

or father or daughter or...

It's all a little bit different.

Sometimes psychopaths don't integrate these parts so well.

So, in order to get through their daily life,

they have to split a part, parts of themselves

and sort of put them in a box

and only let them out

when the opportune time arises,

and I think that's what we're seeing here.

It's her saying to herself, "I'm a killer."

As time has gone on and Hubers is sitting in this room

waiting to be released,

what's likely happening is she's playing back things

that she has said to the dispatcher and to the case agent

about how things happened,

and she's starting to realize,

"The crime scene might not look like that.

My body doesn't look like that, like there was a struggle."

She starts to play back things she said

and tries to plug in holes and gaps.

And when Hubers says, "He isn't alive to remember,"

what she might be telling us is,

"He's not alive to testify against me."

[female reporter] A woman is behind bars tonight.

Shayna Hubers is charged with the murder of her boyfriend.

Highland Heights police responded to the report of a person shot

at 12 Meadow Lane last night around 09:00 p.m.

That's when they found the victim, Ryan Poston.

The 29-year-old had been shot and killed.

Still, no word on a possible motive.

[sniffing]

We can see her start to play every card she can

with this female law enforcement agent.

So, she invokes a God,

she invokes the mother card.

She starts to pull at all of the possible heartstrings,

in her mind thinking, "This is happening," you know,

"This is working, I'm effective,"

and as soon as the officer leaves the room,

she compliments herself on what a phenomenal acting job

she's just done.

Uh, and that's...

truly remarkable.

Uh, truly cold-blooded.

[Dr. Charles] When she says, "Love can turn to hate real quick,"

I believe she's being absolutely correct

that she could be really loving in one moment

and once she finally heard "No,"

that she becomes enraged and hates intensely.

We know that people with psychopathy

don't regulate the emotions

in the same way that healthy people do.

As we mature in life,

we gain in that ability to modulate our emotions

and in psychopathy that's a feature that doesn't really develop.

They flip from one state immediately to the other.

Hubers' confusion around her emotions

and not knowing

which ones to pick out of a jar,

may be a little window

into the fact that she has enough awareness

to know that she doesn't experience emotions the way

the rest of us do.

And what she's really telling us is that,

she's having a hard time figuring out

which emotions she's supposed to mimic.

So, she's now developing the story about...

she has maybe PTSD.

So, she's kind of a heroic survivor of all the abuse.

She is acting.

This is a performance for her.

She doesn't really care about the fact that Ryan is dead,

so there's no genuine grief,

and she approves of herself really highly

and she's giving herself a pat on the back.

She's kind of quite proud of herself.

[male reporter] On the stand, lead investigator Bill Birkenhauer

painted Shayna Hubers as a jilted girlfriend

who could not let go.

Birkenhauer retrieved about 20,000 to 30,000 pages of information

from Shayna Hubers' and Ryan Poston's phone

in the last eight months before his death.

The data detailed an on-again, off-again relationship

with Hubers sending 50 messages

for every one that Poston returned.

[prosecutor] What does she say to her friend

right after she calls Ryan Poston an "evil person"?

She says when she goes to the shooting range with Ryan tonight,

she wants to turn around, shoot him, kill him,

and play it like it's an accident.

It becomes pretty clear at trial

through the testimony of multiple witnesses

that her story, her description of the events,

of the quality and nature of their relationship,

had actually nothing to do with reality.

In fact, this was a situation

where she wanted to pursue a relationship,

he did not.

And she, like a psychopath would, had the thought,

"Well, if I can't have him, nobody will.

And how dare he not want me."

[Nameeta] At Hubers' trial,

what starts to emerge is a pattern of behavior

where Hubers wasn't respecting Ryan's boundaries,

Hubers was bombarding him with text messages,

somewhere along the lines of 50 messages to every one of his own.

She was engaging in behavior

that if the genders, I think, were reversed

and it was a male engaging in this behavior with a female,

we would be much faster as society

to label that as stalking, as harassment,

but because she is this damsel in distress,

young female who looks softspoken and she's pretty,

nobody really labeled it that way until we had...

a dead person.

[female reporter] That someone was Audrey Bolte,

Miss Ohio, 2012.

When Hubers found out

that he was gonna go out on a date

with a former beauty queen,

that became the straw that broke the camel's back.

That was a point she could not let happen,

'cause once he did that, that meant

that their relationship was over.

Hubers' fragile ego could not tolerate that,

and she then went into action,

because as far as she's concerned,

he's an object and he belongs to her.

[prosecutor] Did she ever, at times, laugh

about certain parts

of the incident that happened on October 12th of 2012?

Oh, yes.

Which parts did she laugh about?

...up to the IQ of Einstein.

[female reporter 1] A local breaking news alert now,

Shayna Hubers has been found guilty of murder.

[female reporter 2] Convicted killer Shayna Hubers won't be sentenced until June,

but right now her lawyers are trying to get her a shorter prison sentence.

They are asking the judge

to declare Hubers a domestic violence victim,

saying she was abused during her relationship with Ryan Poston.

Now, if the judge rules in her favor,

she could be eligible for parole in just five and a half years.

[Nameeta] Now that Hubers has been convicted,

her legal team is trying to get the court

to acknowledge that she be handled as a special victim

or a special circumstance,

that she was, in fact, a victim of domestic violence

and that this is a battered women's syndrome case,

or a battered victim's case.

[Dr. Charles] She needs to represent herself

as being having been in a long-standing relationship.

They were stable, they were together,

they're living together

and that she is the victim

of a history of abuse over time.

The challenge for her will be,

it's going to have to match evidence.

When they start looking at the facts,

it turns out they're not living together,

it's not her house.

They're not in a monogamous relationship.

He's dating other people,

she's been seeing other men,

he's been saying,

"It's over. Move on,"

and she's been refusing to accept that.

What I think happened in that apartment

was a little more than cold-blooded murder.

It's probably as cold-blooded an act

as I've been associated with in the criminal justice system

in the 30 plus years I've been in it.

[female reporter] Good evening, everyone.

A young woman convicted of killing

her on-and-off-again boyfriend

will get a new shot at freedom.

[male reporter 1] And it's all because one juror didn't pay child support

more than two decades ago.

[male reporter 2] Kentucky law says you cannot serve on a jury

if you are a convicted felon.

Hubers' belief that seven days...

of waiting to hear from the Department of Corrections

if her marriage will be approved

is somehow them retaliating against her,

just speaks to that sense of entitlement

that the rules don't apply to her.

Hubers is trying to get the audience to believe

that she has this deep love for Unique Taylor

who happens to be transgendered.

She still refers to her partner as "He".

Hubers is not even using the correct pronoun

about her partner who she wants to marry.

And so the fact that Hubers continues to maintain

that it doesn't matter to her,

indicates to us she really hasn't changed.

[Hubers] I think I've--

When Hubers is asked by the journalist

whether she intends to testify in this re-trial,

what she says is, "We'll make it a surprise."

So she has kind of this glib, light-hearted attitude

about what is about to be a murder trial,

and she kind of handles this like a press conference

and like she's celebrity status and everyone wants to know

and so she's gonna leave it as a cliffhanger for the viewers.

Nowhere in this interview that Hubers has with the media

does she show any signs of remorse

nor does she show any consideration

for how Ryan's family is going to be re-traumatized

and re-victimized,

having to sit through this trial all over again.

[male reporter] A big surprise in court today,

as a woman accused of murdering her former boyfriend

takes the stand to tell her side of the story today.

Hubers' decision to testify at her re-trial

when she did not testify at the merits phase of her initial trial,

speaks to her narcissism.

I have a hard time believing

her attorneys advised her to get on the stand.

[Alexander] And I think it's important to say here too

that her history of being abused or bullied at school, if it's true,

is not a pathway towards psychopathy.

A lot of people unfortunately are abused

and are the victims of bullying.

It doesn't turn them into criminals.

So, in her mind, she thinks that

she can blame these individuals,

fellow students, parents, other people in the community

on what she did,

when in fact, it's all her.

There wasn't any data at all

that said that he was an explosive, violent,

impulsive person,

but there was plenty of evidence

that friends testified about that she could be manipulative

and I think even at the gun range,

she joked about, like, killing him.

So, uh... that wasn't gonna work well for her,

at the trial, yeah, given her defense.

[juror] We the jury, find the defendant, Shayna Hubers,

guilty of murder.

[gasps]

Hubers potentially really thought

she might get acquitted the second time,

particularly if she took the stand,

and that detachment and disconnect

from how the rest of the world sees her

is consistent with what we see oftentimes in psychopathic individuals.

There isn't a moment where we see regret,

where we see remorse, where we see empathy,

or where we see Hubers' ability

to think about someone other than herself.

And no doubt, Hubers' decision to testify

may have been part of her undoing

and how she was convicted again,

but also received a tougher sentence.

[snorts]

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