Original subtitles

[Jodi] I remember feelings, and one of my feelings that I remember

[Jodi] I remember feelings, and one of my feelings that I remember

that was most prominent was

severe mortal terror.

[Nameeta] Manipulation is one of those hallmark markers

when looking at psychopathic individuals.

[Nameeta] When we look at how they use manipulation,

one of those markers is

how they interact with law enforcement.

[Nameeta] For some, it's a tool to gain power and control.

[woman] For others, it's actually about a game.

[theme music playing]

The thing inside of me, it's like...

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

feeling... the hunger.

[Nameeta] Every human being, consciously or unconsciously,

does employee manipulation when interacting with others.

Parents use it with their children when they're

trying to get them to eat something

or to do something they don't want.

Couples use it with each other. Friends use it with each other.

It's fairly innocuous,

and it actually sometimes serves to advance a positive goal

for the person who's actually the "target."

Where manipulation turns dark

and it starts to take us more

into this realm with psychopathy

is when manipulation is incredibly one-sided

and not in that person's best interest.

[Charles] There's a range of kinds of behaviors

that psychopaths will engage in with the police.

It may be to shape the image in the eyes of the police

of them as a sympathetic person,

or as an interesting person,

or as a person who can help them.

It also may be that they're using the interview to satisfy

their own curiosity or to play games with the police.

-[indistinct yelling] -[chair slams]

[Charles] So sometimes manipulation has different faces.

In this hour, we're gonna look at different strategies

psychopaths play.

[suspenseful music]

[Chriscelyn] One of the strategies that individuals with psychopathy

use to manipulate a situation

is pretending to be the helper.

These individuals are trying to manage their impression.

They want to present as somebody who's a good citizen,

somebody who cares about people,

and just wants to help.

So it turns the spotlight away from them.

We've seen this type of manipulation

play out in the Chris Watts case.

[reporter] How do you think the police have responded so far?

It's been amazing. They've been in constant contact --

Frederick Police Department, detectives, officers, sergeants.

They have the dogs coming through to get scents.

I mean, they've been on top of everything,

missing persons reports,

everything's been, they've been...

[Nameeta] Chris Watts has recently admitted to strangling

and killing his pregnant wife, Shannon,

and suffocating their two young daughters, Bella and Celeste.

We know that he hid the bodies in an oil tanker.

But how the investigation began was

Chris Watts inserting himself.

He helps the public

by giving multiple interviews with the media.

He agrees to a polygraph examination.

And again, he allows authorities into his home.

That can't be the actions of anyone but a helper.

And this tactic of manipulation is oftentimes

how it starts for a psychopath.

It allows them to control the narrative

on what law enforcement thinks of them.

Interestingly, we also see the same technique

of being the helper in the case of Melissa Miller.

[eerie music playing]

[reporter] Meyer disappeared in February

after she left work early.

Three days later, she spoke with her mother on the phone.

That was the last confirmed call from her.

[eerie music playing]

The roommate is absolutely

someone we would have liked to have talked to.

Um...that's not an option.

[eerie music continues]

[Chriscelyn] It strikes as a little odd timing

that Annie's body was just found,

and now Melissa Miller has decided to bring it upon herself

to come to the police station just to be helpful.

And she actually uses that word

many times throughout this interview.

You can see here that Miller is eagerly trying

to stay one step ahead of the investigators.

So she knows that there is a body.

She's trying to preempt,

you know, any further suspicion on her by saying,

"Look, I'll be helpful. I actually want to be helpful."

[Nameeta] She wants to manipulate authorities

into believing that showing them a bunch of pictures

of her time with Annie and bringing them a camera,

that that somehow is gonna absolve her

of any guilt for the murder, or that in their mind,

that doesn't make her capable of murder.

[eerie music playing]

[eerie music continues]

[sobbing]

[exhales deeply]

[Nameeta] It's interesting to note that Miller transitions

from one manipulative tactic of being the helper

to this idea of playing the victim.

Time and time again, we see in other cases

with psychopathic individuals,

they're trying to use the superficial emotions

to come across as somebody who's frail,

somebody's who's fragile,

somebody who themselves is a victim.

"I'm the one who's been the wronged party."

Ultimately, it's just another form of manipulation.

I remember feelings, and one of my feelings that I remember

that was most prominent was

severe mortal terror.

[Chriscelyn] Jodi Arias was found guilty

of brutally murdering her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander.

In the early phases of the trial,

we see her embrace this role as victim.

You know, she cited a whole host of explanations

for her behavior, ranging from

her being the victim of interpersonal violence

to her experiencing her own childhood traumas.

And while all of that may have been true,

she attempted throughout that trial to redirect the spotlight

from her, the perpetrator, to her being the victim.

[Charles] That's the strategy in taking on the role

of the manipulator is to shape the public's opinion

and the opinion of the police

so they view the actual victim as the bad person

and they view the murderer as the good person

and the innocent person.

We see this strategy in the Pedro Bravo case.

[eerie music playing]

[Charles] He takes the strategy of portraying himself

almost like someone who suffered, like Job in the Bible.

There's a string of very bad things

that have happened to him in life,

and this is almost like the last straw.

And the strategy, once again,

is to get the spotlight off of him as a perpetrator.

[eerie music playing]

[Nameeta] What's interesting about Bravo

at this point in the interrogation

is that in the process of being so focused on

manipulating authorities and controlling the outcome

of what happens with the investigation

and pulling puppet strings,

he doesn't even realize that he's let leak out

a very obvious motive for harming Christian,

jealousy.

It's as old as time and violence themselves.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Charles] In Pedro's mind he believes

by commenting on the word "suicide"

it's like a trigger word that it should elicit,

uh, thoughts and emotions in the police

that should elicit a sympathetic reaction to him to pity him.

He is the aggressor in the story and he's still trying

to make the story sound like he's the victim,

but he's not.

[reporter] Pedro Bravo has been charged with first-degree murder

in the case of missing University of Florida student

Christian Aguilar, Gainesville police said Saturday.

The teen bought a shovel and roll of duct tape

days before the student vanished.

[reporter] Human remains discovered by two hunters

in Levy County, Florida,

have been identified as those of missing

University of Florida student Christian Aguilar.

[eerie music playing]

[Chriscelyn] In Bravo's case,

we see him manipulating the investigators

by ultimately playing the victim role.

And we see that it also, in some ways,

allows him to control the interview.

And controlling the interview is a very important priority.

And we know that individuals with psychopathy use many

different strategies to manipulate,

and especially in a law enforcement interview.

And we know one of those strategies is by switching

the power dynamics.

So, in essence, they become the person

in charge of the investigation.

They probe the detectives, and then they use this

information as manipulation to help stay in charge.

This is what we call an armchair detective.

[reporter] In hundreds of hours of interviews

with police over seven months,

Gary Ridgway laid out his grisly confession,

hoping to save himself from the death penalty.

[Nameeta] The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, was ultimately

convicted of 48 murders, but many people suspect that

but many people suspect that there were far more

that he was never convicted of.

And once he finally came onto the radar of law enforcement,

he spent months giving them minimal information,

being barely cooperative,

and ultimately used those police interviews

to study law enforcement.

[Gary] I agree to, um...

...plead guilty to the counts that I committed,

not the others.

[Nameeta] Ridgway's goal in the investigation

and any interactions he had with law enforcement

were ultimately to stay one step ahead of the authorities,

one step ahead of the investigation,

always tracking what they knew

and what they didn't know.

And this manipulative tactic of playing coy,

playing the armchair detective,

is something that ultimately

law enforcement was able to use against him.

But we also see that same tactic

in the case of Eva Heisch.

[suspenseful music playing]

Detectives with the major case squad tell me

that 68-year-old Daniel Taylor was murdered.

Police are confident that he knew the suspects.

Ultimately, the goal of this meeting

is just for Heisch to figure out what the police officers know,

what the investigation has revealed so far,

and for her to essentially tell them

in a somewhat authoritative way,

"I'm not happy with where this investigation's going."

[Charles] The beauty of the manipulative strategy is

that it's not always based on facts.

It's creating an impression.

So she does meet with them,

and she's got this attitude of being an equal

and reprimanding them,

"It's affecting my daughter, I'm upset."

But she's not giving them any additional information

that would help them solve the case.

[suspenseful music playing]

If we step away from the interaction,

what Heisch has done

is gotten the detectives to focus on her boyfriend,

Jessie Werley, not her, but Werley.

And in that classic, risky way that psychopathic individuals

are all about themselves,

she's trying to shine the spotlight on him

so that it's not on her any longer.

[Charles] Jessie Werley is arrested on unrelated charges.

And when Heisch hears that he is arrested,

she comes down to the police station

to see what the police know, right?

Remember, when the psychopath approaches the police,

it's to find out what the state of affairs is.

[Charles] She's been pretty cool and calm

and thinks that she's been playing them

and that she's been successful.

And now, the police are letting her know

she's failed to achieve her goal,

and we talked about in psychopathy,

people can experience rage and anger

when they're frustrated in achieving their goal.

They are often very irritable and angry and out of control,

once they realize they can't be in control of something.

[Chriscelyn] In the Eva Heisch case,

we see that she plays the victim.

That's one of her manipulative strategies.

But she also engages in pathological lying,

which is another manipulative tactic that individuals

with psychopathy will embrace.

[Nameeta] What we sometimes see with psychopaths who use

instrumental lies often and artfully,

is that if you pay close attention

to how they answer questions,

they're elaborate, they're very strategic.

The goals are to steer attention away from them,

to steer guilt away from themselves,

and focus away from themselves.

[reporter] Joran van der Sloot apparently admitted involvement

in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.

In a phone interview to the Dutch TV show,

van der Sloot says he lied when he told someone he was

privately involved in Holloway's disappearance.

Van der Sloot didn't identify the person, but said, quote,

"That is what he wanted to hear,

so I told him what he wanted to hear."

[Chriscelyn] Joran van der Sloot was under investigation

for the missing case of Natalee Holloway.

He maintained his innocence, but he was the prime suspect.

He stated that he dropped her off at a hotel.

And despite months of investigation,

he maintained his innocence,

but his story continued to change.

His instrumental lies served a single purpose,

which was just to keep the manipulation going,

to confuse the narrative,

to keep police officers and detectives on their feet,

to continue to distract the issues at hand.

We see the same manipulative tactic of controlled lies,

artful lies, in the case of Nicholas Nigro.

[suspenseful music playing]

When I got here, they were taking out the two bodies.

[reporter] Prosecutors say 21-year-old Paula Mulder

and her 48-year-old mother

were found shot to death in separate bedrooms

of this home on Scarborough Drive

around 3 this morning.

Authorities say they were both murdered,

but won't comment on a possible motive.

[eerie music]

[suspenseful music playing]

[Nameeta] Detectives invite Nigro to theorize with them,

but very rapidly in the interview,

Nigro doubles down on this story,

and he's now talking about it as if it's fact.

He's inserting a level of elaboration, of detail,

that passes it off as these are all the data points

that make this the only plausible explanation.

This strategy of lying as a way of manipulating authorities is

somewhat frequent and common for psychopathic individuals,

and yet, Nigro takes extra steps

to make it believable.

[Chriscelyn] Nigro thought that he had the upper hand.

He thought that he was going to convince them,

"Everything's great, and then this drug dealer came along

"and killed my girlfriend and her mom

because I cheated him out of money."

But when they didn't buy it, he becomes enraged because

he realizes that the impression he was trying to convey

and the shifting of the blame that he was hoping to do

just isn't happening.

[Nameeta] When we look at how Nicholas Nigro chose to handle

his interactions with law enforcement,

his interactions with the entire investigation,

we see somebody who made a lot of attempts

to control the narrative,

to create optics that were not accurate or true,

we see somebody who went to great lengths

to control and contrive.

And that's very different than other psychopaths.

Oftentimes, there's a secondary, more devious goal

embedded in their interactions

with the investigation and detectives,

which is this cat and mouse dynamic.

[reporter] This is the man police believe

to be the Son of Sam,

the.44 Caliber Killer, who has killed six and wounded seven

in a string of attacks over the last 13 months.

He was arrested outside his apartment in Yonkers, New York,

at 10:30 last night and brought to police

headquarters about midnight.

He is David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker

who lived alone.

He was smiling as he was brought in.

[Nameeta] When we look at that cat and mouse strategy

of manipulating law enforcement that Berkowitz engaged in,

what we really see is somebody who's getting sadistic pleasure

out of chasing law enforcement.

Instead of law enforcement chasing the criminal,

they're chasing the crime.

And ultimately, Berkowitz went on to taunt law enforcement

for quite some time.

He went on to very transparently give them

just enough data to keep their appetites whet,

to keep them curious,

to keep them frustrated.

This cat and mouse strategy of manipulation that is reserved

for really some very specific psychopaths

is something that is no longer just about self-preservation.

It's really about the thrill of the chase.

It's about the game. It's about the hunt.

We see the same elaborate strategy in Aubrey Trail.

[reporter] Sydney Loofe was meeting up for a date with

someone she met online, and hasn't been seen since.

She was last heard from last Wednesday

when she sent a photo on Snapchat.

It was captioned, "Ready for my date."

[Nameeta] Trail illustrates this idea of cat and mouse

and the secondary high of enjoyment and amusement

really well when he says, "Let's party."

So he is interacting with law enforcement

for his own amusement.

He is trying to get something out of them,

but there's a component of this that's just

pure entertainment for him.

[Chriscelyn] This interview seems to be stroking his ego,

but he is actually trying to impress them.

He is trying to tease them with some of this

potential data that he has,

this information that he has,

but also impress them with these rumors they've heard

and the wishes he might be able to grant.

He obviously has a very high opinion of himself

and his behaviors.

[ominous music playing]

[Nameeta] He's very transparent

about the fact that he's in control.

And when they're frustrated

because they can't take back that control,

they need him.

That enjoyment, that pleasure, that power is where

the sadistic interest comes in.

[reporter 1] After more than two weeks of endless searching

for a missing Lincoln woman,

her family took to Facebook to announce the news --

the body of 24-year-old Sydney Loofe has been recovered.

[reporter 2] Police say her body had been

dismembered and scattered across multiple rural sites,

a hundred miles outside Lincoln.

Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell are now

prime suspects in her murder.

[Charles] To the armchair detective,

to the pathological lying,

to the cat and mouse game,

I like to think of them as

cards you might be holding in your hand

when you're playing a great game of poker,

where you start looking at the play that's

on the table and decide,

"I wonder which card I'm gonna play."

I think of those manipulative strategies as flexible.

They can interchange,

depending on the psychopath.

[Nameeta] When a psychopath engages in manipulation,

regardless of which of these techniques it is,

they're trying to advance a goal that serves only them.

They're not trying to advance a goal that helps you.

When we think about why is this relevant to the rest of us,

when your instinct goes off

and you feel like you're being manipulated,

don't just ignore that instinct.

Think twice.

Ask yourself, "Why that instinct is kicking in?"

Ask yourself why you're being manipulated.

And if there's any hesitation that there's

harm that could come to you

you may be looking at more psychopathic manipulation.