Original subtitles

[sinister tones playing]

[theme music playing]

[man] The thing inside of me,

it's like...

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

feeling the hunger.

[reporter] 43-year-old Mary Fowler of Greenville

and 44-year-old James Dobson of Easley were found

on the side of Interstate 85 between Anderson and Townville

around 6:30 on the morning of Christmas Eve.

A passerby says he saw Dobson's arm waving

from the shoulder of the southbound highway,

while Fowler was unconscious.

[uneasy tones playing]

[Dr. Saraiya] Villarreal is coming out of the gate,

kind of building an alternative theory of the crime.

He's got an agenda.

He's got a story that he wants to put out there.

He is starting out trying to sort of cast suspicion

on somebody else.

A lot of times, the psychopathic individuals

feel pretty self assured.

They're pretty confident that

they're the smartest person in the room.

You can see the gears turning, and he feels like he's got

a shot at outsmarting the detective.

[Dr. Sahni] The assertiveness that Villarreal shows

speaks to his narcissism.

And when the detectives start to push him on this friend

that he describes as being like a sister to him,

he has to correct the record.

He has to continue to be this important person

who's socially competent.

He has just not girlfriend, but a fiancée.

And the fact that she's 17, the fact that they met online,

the fact that he's never actually met her in person is

an inconvenient reality.

And when he's confronted with that, he can't adopt

that reality.

His narcissism is injured, his ego is injured,

but he also can't accept that his view of the world is

incorrect or somehow fantasy-based.

Because this is a kid who lives his entire life in a scripted,

fantasy fashion.

[Dr. de la Torre] It's important to make a distinction between

psychopaths who are actually intelligent

versus those individuals who are pseudo-intellectual.

The intelligent psychopath is constantly setting up

test balloons.

He's constantly thinking about,

"What's the next thing that I can say, that I can manipulate others."

Whether they're successful or not, that's up

to other people.

But what we see with Villarreal

is that he's so unsophisticated in his thinking.

He wants to be the smartest person in the room.

And in doing so, you just kind of feel put off.

You kind of feel as if he's the phony.

A poser is probably the best word to describe

anybody's interaction with him.

[somber tones playing]

He's trying to take control of the situation here now.

He's decided, you know,

"I'm gonna be the one who tells the truth.

"And then I'm gonna sort of humble myself before God

because that's what one does."

With the idea that this is gonna evoke

some kind of empathy.

But I think there's some of that, like,

teenage boy kind of wanting to sort of pump his chest

in front of these, you know, actual detectives,

these actual grown men, and sort of try

to kind of be on the same level as them.

[soft eerie music playing]

When we think about failures, just overall,

we usually attribute them to some external force

or some internal force.

Now, as a typical human,

you want a kind of mixture of both.

With the psychopath, though,

everything is attributed to the external.

It's a lot easier to blame other people.

Failure to him is never failure about himself.

Failure to him is an opportunity

to become better.

And that's the concerning part,

because if he's allowed to become better,

I think he learns how to become more sophisticated

so that he doesn't get caught.

This is the most intense emotion we've seen from him.

Right at the point where he's recounting and reliving

the details of when he overtook

and gained control over the vehicle and the victims,

and he started shooting them.

What we see is somebody who's titillated by his actions.

He's excited by them.

He's reliving an entirely second adrenaline rush.

And this is that thrill-seeking behavior that we talk about

with psychopathic individuals.

What we don't hear from Villarreal is regret.

We don't hear remorse.

We don't see a stress response.

We don't see anything but callousness and grandiosity.

So when we take a look at his description of

what James Dobson could be doing in terms of,

"Well, maybe he has a gun."

Could there be a sort of self-defense motive

associated with that,

that "I needed to shoot Dobson because I knew he had a gun?"

Maybe.

But I think it was more that he understood that

there was a way in which

you have to take out your targets.

It was more about recognizing the threat level.

He wanted these investigators to believe that the sign,

the Marines on his T-shirt, was more indicative with how

he saw the world.

The truth is, is that he didn't have to engage

in any of these behaviors. He just wanted to.

He's playing out this fantasy.

I mean, you could see he's had this, he's imagined,

you know, what it would be like to do this so-called

wet extraction.

He's thought through these kind of, some of them being

mundane details, like a spy in a movie.

There's definitely a fantasy there about killing.

Villarreal is really showing us the depths of his confusion

of what's real and what's fantasy.

He's just going through the motions as if he's been

in training as special forces in how to do an extraction

of a high-value asset.

And yet, this is a 22-year-old scrawny kid who's struggling

in a man's body to be an adult.

He's patronizing, he's grandiose.

What we're seeing is his psychopathic narcissism.

He doesn't even

recognize the ridiculousness of what he's saying

and who his audience is.

It's all just a facade that he wants other people,

but more importantly, himself, to believe about who he is.

But it wouldn't have taken very long for him to plan out

another kill.

It was never going to be the wet extraction

that he planned. It was never going to be that.

Because that takes a level of effort that he is not

capable of engaging in.

It always needed to be a startle response.

[Dr. de la Torre] So he says the quiet part out loud, right?

That's what every psychopath thinks when they enter

into the interrogation room.

Got a 50-50 chance of getting away with this.

He thought he could get away with it.

And if it weren't for these police officers,

he never would have admitted to it.

There's nothing about him that is actually contrite.

He doesn't actually believe

in the deity that is God.

All he believes is in the rote, mechanistic jingoisms that

he reads online, and he will use whatever one that he needs

to use in whatever situation he finds himself in.

A hitchhiker will spend life in prison for a series of crimes,

including a deadly shooting on the side of Interstate 85.

[Judge] How do you plead to the offense of murder?

Guilty.

[reporter] In addition to the life sentence,

the judge also sentenced him to 60 years

for attempted murder and carjacking

and five years for a weapons charge.