Original subtitles

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

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

feeling... the hunger.

On the surface, he seems to be a cleaned-up member of society.

He's clean-cut, looks like the boy next door.

And yet, if we just dig, not very hard,

we figure out this is someone who's gotten himself

in and out of trouble.

I think Moulton is somebody who engages in congenial ways

of interacting with people.

It's what we think of in psychopathic individuals

as superficial charm.

He's glib. He's easily relatable.

He talks to people in a friendly way.

And so he can pass in a very chameleon-like way.

He passes as somebody who's a law-abiding,

upstanding member of society when we know that his history

really doesn't support that.

By now, he could easily have just said, "I did this."

"Doesn't matter why I did it. I just did it."

But instead, he is trying to convince other people

that he's not such a bad guy

because it was all of these other

external influencers that were compelling him

to engage in this behavior.

But he was administering his steroids to himself.

He was using drugs himself.

He's just using these things as a way of explaining away

his behavior rather than taking responsibility.

It's just a tool. It's just a tactic.

He knows he's going to prison.

He just wants the least amount of time in it.

When Moulton introduces his son as a concept

in this interview, he's not being asked about his family.

What he's doing is what we call impression management.

Again, as he goes right up to the line with detectives

about this awful, sadistic crime he committed,

he's backpedaling and saying, "But I'm a nice guy."

Like, "You can trust me. I'm a family man."

There's a little bit of self-awareness there,

like where he said, "I had this void."

And that is probably a real reflection

of what he actually feels.

And this is something that has been said multiple times

about the way psychopaths feel when they're actually willing

to state their true feelings.

The void is from not feeling empathy.

If you don't feel close to any person,

'cause you can't feel love, imagine the void you would feel.

Certainly, Moulton would not be the first psychopath that

conveniently found God

as a way of helping to just cleanse themselves

and distance themselves from their actions.

It's a way of saying, "I did this horrific thing,

but you can't think of me as a horrific person,"

which is that image manipulation.

And if I take it and put it behind me on my terms,

I control the narrative,

I control the way this goes down,

and I can probably even control the consequences.

He's talking about squeezing the life out of Nicole,

that she just goes limp.

That is the one time that he's actually being descriptive

without prompting.

That was the piece that excited him the most.

His deviancy is about pushing life to its very limit.

It wasn't about anger.

It wasn't about these crimes-of-passion moments.

It was simply about satisfying and gratifying his own needs

and by taking the life of someone else.

When we look at the different categories of psychopathy,

there's always an element

of boundary crossing and antisociality.

But the sexual psychopath is a little bit different in that

the primary boundary that they're looking to cross

is the sexual boundary.

Other people can certainly achieve their full gratification

just through the act of strangulation itself,

but I think Moulton has progressed in his deviancy

where just doing the behavior isn't enough.

There's a lack of remorse and a shallow affect.

And this is what we're seeing in Moulton,

is that while on the surface it sounds like he's

taking responsibility for his actions

and he's also expressing some very pro-social attitudes,

you know, "I'm concerned for them

and the dangerous people that are out there,"

but if you listen closely to what he's saying,

he's actually blaming the victims.

They shouldn't be getting into cars with strangers,

not, "I shouldn't be out there preying on women."

I want people to understand that the psychopath

can feel fear,

and they can feel fear similar to those around them

who are not psychopaths.

They just can't read the fear from other people.

And so it is a feeling that is wholly unique,

and they're unable to truly deal with

and they mask it with anger and violence, right?

They mask it with drugs and alcohol.

The constant paranoia of having to look over your shoulder.

"Are the police gonna come arrest me now?"

All of these thoughts can kind of rattle in your head,

and maybe those things broke containment and escaped

their compartmentalization to the point where now he has

to reveal this kind of stuff.

The importance is exactly in the point she makes

that he's had a decade to think about this.

And you don't just develop empathy and remorse

over slow periods of time.

You either have it or you don't by the time you're in your 40s.

Empathy, conscience,

that sort of understanding of right versus wrong,

and the concept of consequences when you harm another

human being, most children develop before the age of five.

So if you don't have it by the time you're 10, 15,

20 years old,

you don't just wake up one day at 40 or 41,

pick up a religious text and, "aha," you have it.

The religion is nothing other than a convenient explanation

and a way of trying to minimize the consequences to himself.

For any of us, the reasonable question is,

why would you tell your child this?

It's a completely inappropriate topic to have.

But again, what you hear is, he's blaming

everyone but himself.

He's not taking responsibility for his actions.

And Moulton is in many ways a textbook narcissist.

He's focused on himself.

And his attempts to talk to his son about his crimes

are, again, about impression management.

He's explaining away his behavior.

He's not saying, "I didn't have sex with these women."

He's not challenging in his own head as a parent,

"I have a teenage son who's coming of age,

"and I'm communicating a lot of messages about sex,

sexuality, and how you treat the opposite gender."

But instead, he's just making it about himself.