Original subtitles

[reporter] They say she took a pregnant woman to a wooded area,

immobilized her with a stun gun,

then killed her and cut her baby out of her abdomen.

Her wrists were slit.

She was disemboweled.

The baby was obviously cut out of her.

[theme music playing]

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

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

feeling... the hunger.

[Dr. Sahni] Kathy Coy's criminal history is well established.

She's been involved in forgery. She's been involved in fraud.

She's been involved in domestic violence.

This is a woman who has a pattern of pretending

to be pregnant.

What we're looking at is somebody who's psychopathic,

who has a general sense of callousness,

who didn't hesitate to do what

she needed to do to meet her goals.

[Dr. Fox] Kathy was a woman that both Jeannie and Jamie had trusted

because they viewed Kathy as someone who was just being very

kind and trying to help their family.

She had access to free diapers and supplies.

And as a 21-year-old mother, I mean, I can imagine how just

amazing that would be to have that kind of opportunity.

So immediately, trust is built up.

Why would you ever think

another pregnant mother would ever harm you?

In just two weeks, how close and how deep into Jamie's life

that Kathy was able to get is just stunning.

What a very clever psychopath does is they find what traits

they already have or what skill set they have that they can use

to manipulate other people.

And in this case, Kathy is this kind of unassuming person,

and she finds a way to essentially convince Jamie that

she's a non-threat, she's there to help her, and basically

make sure there's no red flags whatsoever on Jamie's part.

One of the things that I think we see in this interaction is

how she kind of views authority figures.

Anyone that challenges her will be met with not so much

aggression, like physical aggression,

but certainly verbal aggression.

This level of psychopathy is more about

avoiding responsibility.

She wants to try to save her skin, right?

She's willing to say or do whatever she needs to say or do

to make it so that she is not responsible.

One thing psychopaths tend to be wary of is how

they're coming off to other people.

They, of course, think very highly of themselves and they

think that they're doing no wrong, but they at least are

trying to always assess what's going on around them.

How is this reading to other people?

And the fact that Kathy is literally screaming,

she is coming off as very unlikable.

She's coming off as very self-centered and narcissistic,

and frankly, very unempathetic about where her friend is.

[Dr. De La Torre] We're still engaged in this unique

negative impression management.

She wants to maintain the lie.

I think she wants to see how long she can get away with it

and that perhaps maybe she can find a way out

of this scenario.

Kathy is a type of psychopath that is like water.

She can easily kind of maneuver around whatever obstacle is

around her -- she's not so rigid.

"Yes, I did a bad thing, but it's Ashley's fault.

"Ashley shouldn't have sold me that baby.

"But Jeannie and Jamie,

"they're the ones that came to me.

Anything that happened to them, that's their problem."

[Dr. Sahni] When we look at psychopathic offenders,

one of the offender types that we talk about is the helper,

the person who makes themselves the helpful savior.

But Kathy's not helping. She's playing games with them.

She doesn't care what's happened to Jamie.

She doesn't care that Jamie's family is worried sick about her.

What we see are some very clear markers of manipulation,

pathological lying, a lack of regret, a lack of remorse,

a callousness about her actions

that are also consistent with psychopathy.

Here she is basically asking to take a polygraph test,

which most people would think, "Oh, that must be an indicator

of the validity of her story and her innocence."

But the fun fact about polygraphs is they don't

measure whether you're telling a truth or a lie.

They measure the symptoms people have when they're lying.

And if you're a psychopath who tends to have no remorse,

no empathy,

and has that kind of pathological lying capability,

passing a polygraph is cake.

[Dr. Fox] I think Kathy is trying to play on the heartstrings

of the detective because it seems like she's coming around

to the fact that she just admitted to taking a baby

that was not hers, but she wants to make it known that,

even though she did that, it's really a sob story

for her, and she's depressed, and she's a victim,

and she doesn't deserve any punishment.

But depression is absolutely

not linked at all to violent crime.

She's thinking about how to evade punishment because

not taking responsibility for one's actions is a hallmark feature

of psychopaths, so she's thinking,

"How can I basically not be held responsible for this crime?"

That's the only thing she's concerned about.

By the way, Jamie is still missing.

She is not worried about that as much as she's feigning how

sad she feels.

She's only thinking about her punishment

and how she can avoid it.

[detective] Right.

[Dr. Sahni] While there are aspects of Kathy Coy's psychopathy,

the fact that she's now starting to talk to a photo of

Jamie, she knows full well the cameras are on.

This is performative.

She's still trying to get the detectives to let her

walk out the door, to somehow acquiesce that this story

she sold them, that she did buy this baby, but she left Jamie

alive and well that morning, still pregnant.

They're not buying it, and this is her last-ditch effort.

Kathy Coy is very much in self-preservation mode,

and the only person Kathy Coy is concerned about is Kathy Coy.

[Dr. De La Torre] Investigators see Kathy interacting in this way

and saying these kinds of things that is

clearly peculiar.

And so maybe the best thing to do is to kind of feed into

the story that Kathy is saying, but then again, because Kathy

is not sophisticated enough, she then now changes the story

to say that Jamie was in a car with Ashley,

and the investigator's immediate reaction is like

everybody's reaction, which is,

"What? What -- what are you talking about now?"

It's becoming increasingly preposterous,

and so you wonder, is Kathy purposefully being preposterous,

setting up what the next act is going to be,

what the next performance is going to be, or is she just

really that impulsive that she can't think through

a logical narrative?

Maybe it's a little bit of both.

[Dr. De La Torre] So when we think of dissociative identity disorder,

we think the individual has these multiple personalities

and other alters that have been created,

they're not aware.

Essentially, the person kind of blacks out.

That's Hollywood.

That's not the real lived experience of individuals with

dissociative identity disorder.

These alters can know of one another.

Is it more common than people think?

Yes, but here we see the dramatic elements.

Here we see the elements that are clearly far-fetched,

that are clearly derived from nonsense and media.

She doesn't have dissociative identity disorder.

But that doesn't mean that

dissociative identity disorder doesn't exist.

[screaming]

[Dr. De La Torre] Everything that is happening here is performative,

and I think gives us an insight into how

her psychopathy manifests.

They bring up the notion about telling on Kathy.

The assumption is that Ashley is an alter ego and that

the detectives are interacting with Ashley,

with Kathy being sort of some other alter

that's no longer in conscious awareness.

But the reality is, is that Kathy just wants the spotlight.

Everything is just about the performance art that is

this alter ego Ashley, not the reality

of the situation.

Kathy is in complete control of what she is doing.

She's just unsophisticated in how she's going about doing it.

Psychopathic offenders oftentimes have a very difficult time

taking responsibility for their behavior.

They find ways to make themselves the victim despite

having put themselves in their own predicament.

And even after Kathy has now admitted that she is Ashley,

her alter ego, she might still be trying to get a favorable

position when she does go to trial, feigning that she's

incompetent or she's not guilty by reason of insanity or she

needs to be in a psychiatric hospital and not prison.

I think it's more basic than that.

Kathy was just distancing herself from any culpability.

Out of literally thin air, it seems like Ashley, as this

second personality that Kathy has, is such a palpable thing

that she has to deal with all the time, and of course,

it happens right now, so she's really milking it.

I think the detective right now is seeing,

OK, here's her game.

He's observing it.

She's going to confess to this crime, but she's going to try

to use mental disorder as a way to get out of it.

But he really at this moment just needs to find Jamie,

and he wants to know where she's at.

Hopefully, she's still alive, and he's thinking,

"OK, this is terrible acting, I know she's lying,

but I'll play along with it so long as I can get that information."

[Dr. De La Torre] This is heavily antagonistic, and this is one of the few

elements of cat and mouse that we legitimately see

in a sophisticated manner.

In some ways, it comes across as if she enjoys the argument.

Her history to include fraud suggests someone who just kind

of wants to manipulate others, get some monetary object,

and then kind of move on.

But I think she now has discovered a new arousal,

a new element to her psychopathy,

which is fighting.

She's enjoying the controlling elements of purposefully

starting a fight, purposefully being antagonistic,

purposefully being coy,

and then maybe she'll give you what she wants.

We're seeing a side of Kathy Coy that is the most glib

that we've seen so far.

She's messing with the detective.

And it's really important to realize that

Ashley is Kathy Coy.

Kathy Coy is Ashley.

They're one and the same person.

And the most honest view we may have of who Kathy Coy really is

when she's pretending to be Ashley.

Time is not of the essence.

The cat-and-mouse game has to continue.

She doesn't care what happens in this situation.

She doesn't care whether the detectives find

Jamie or not.

She doesn't really even care about the outcome at this point

because she knows the jig is up.

She knows she's not gonna be able to get out of this.

She doesn't have anything to lose at this point.

What's happening here? I think Coy is tired.

I think she's physically exhausted and is simply trying

to get some new attention.

She wants to be in a hospital, not in prison.

She doesn't want to be behind bars.

And so this is her opportunity now to maybe, you know,

"Let's get out of this room for a little bit.

"Let's interact with other people for a little bit.

Let's try to find Jamie."

I think she wants a change of scenery, and she's using what

she has in order to control other people,

in order to manipulate them.

But she's not really giving them the full details.

She's just giving them piece by piece in order to extend this

situation for as long as she can.

[Dr. Fox] Her story is now completely unraveling.

She had told detectives that she has a split personality

and when she's in one, the other one blacks out.

And yet she's presumably in Kathy because she's acting all

weepy and meek like she normally does in

that personality.

But she remembers how she tased her.

She remembers how she cut Jamie.

She remembers where she was left.

So just -- it's all merging together.

It's actually shocking for somebody with such low empathy

to say she cut her very badly.

But it sounds like she's not saying that because she feels remorse.

She's saying it because she knows the detective is

about to arrive on the scene and is gonna be horrified by

what he sees.

It could absolutely be that Kathy had a taser to Jamie

and forced Jamie into the woods.

It could also legitimately be that somehow Kathy was able to

convince Jamie that there was something in the woods

that they both needed.

But what's more important in this situation is that

Kathy is getting Ashley's name back on tape.

She's still trying to plant that seed even deeper that

she has more multiple personalities, and that she was

legitimately insane at the time that she committed this offense,

so she cannot be held responsible for it.

This was all a setup to take that baby away from Jamie.

Jamie was never a 21-year-old future mother.

She was just simply an object that was standing in the way of

the psychopath getting the attention that they wanted,

the psychopath getting the spotlight that they wanted.

And as soon as she was able to ensure that that baby

could be hers

was the moment that she struck to take that baby.

[Dr. Sahni] For Coy's husband, Shannon, to acknowledge that he never

saw her depressed, she never got help for any

mental illness, and what he was able to focus on was

her temper, that this is somebody who goes from

zero to 60 when she doesn't get her way, and ultimately,

no indications of an alter ego or another persona,

that tells us everything it needs to tell us.

Coy's disregard for human life is something that is stunning

to most of us, but is rooted in her psychopathy.

It's rooted in her callousness.

It's rooted in the fact that to her, people are objects.

People are transactions.

People are to be screwed around with and manipulated.

[reporter] Kathy Coy, who agreed to plead guilty but mentally ill to

avoid the death penalty last month, was sentenced on Friday

for the brutal death of Jamie Stice,

the 21-year-old expectant mother, and cutting the baby

from her womb in April of last year.

She is sentenced to life in prison without parole.

[Dr. Sahni] While Coy would have us believe that she's a profoundly

mentally ill person who needs to be in a psychiatric ward,

who shouldn't be punished but needs psychiatric help,

we wouldn't see the kind of organization to her deception.

And while aspects of her manipulations

are superficial,

there's an outlandishness to them,

it's really important to distinguish that outlandishness

comes from her own narcissism.

It doesn't come from a place of being psychiatrically so

impaired that she's confused and she's disorganized

and she doesn't know what she did.

People who are severely mentally ill and engage in

crimes that the public looks at as crazy,

there's a disorganization to them.

What we see in Kathy Coy's behavior

every step of the way is organization.

We see planning, we see motive, and all of her actions

and behaviors are goal directed.

That's not consistent with severe mental illness.