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Episode: The Search For Sheree | Talking Cold: When Obscene Calls Escalate | 12

Author: KSL Podcasts | Wondery
Duration: 00:35:14

Episode Shownotes

If you get an unsolicited sexual call or nude picture sent to you, is that a crime? You may be surprised by the answer. One of the suspects in the disappearance of Sheree Warren in 1985 was caught making lewd phone calls to women multiple times. Do these types of

crimes often escalate to other, more aggressive behaviors? Joining hosts Amy Donaldson & Sheryl Worsley for the discussion on this edition of Talking Cold: prosecutor and division director of the Salt Lake County Special Victims Unit Anna Rossi Anderson and former FBI profiler and host of the Killer Psyche & Killer Psyche Daily podcasts, Candice DeLong.Talking Cold is the after-show podcast that dives into the key issues raised in COLD. Follow Cold Season 3: The Search for Sheree on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In this episode of Cold, hosts Amy Donaldson and Sheryl Worsley examine the disturbing phenomenon of obscene phone calls within the context of Sheree Warren's 1985 disappearance. They discuss how such harassment, often normalized in conversations without proper parental guidance, can escalate into more severe forms of violence. The episode features insights from prosecutor Anna Rossi Anderson and former FBI profiler Candice DeLong, who detail the evolution of sexual offenses alongside technological advancements and emphasize the significance of understanding sexual deviance and addressing it through appropriate treatment. The connection between lesser sexual offenses and serious crimes is highlighted, reinforcing the critical need for effective research and training in sexual assault investigations.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Search For Sheree | Talking Cold: When Obscene Calls Escalate | 12) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_05
Hi, I'm Amy Donaldson. And I'm Cheryl Worsley. And this is Talking Cold.

00:00:08 Speaker_06
Today, we're going to explore one of the more unsettling aspects of Cold Season 3, in my opinion, obscene phone calls.

00:00:15 Speaker_05
Carrie Hartman, one of the suspects in Sheree Warren's disappearance, was investigated for making these lewd phone calls to random women that he found in the phone book. But before we start, let's play a clip.

00:00:28 Speaker_02
— I was getting a phone call, probably around midnight.

00:00:30 Speaker_01
— She lifted the receiver to her ear and said a tentative, hello? The word tinged by her distinct German accent.

00:00:37 Speaker_02
voice on the phone said that he wanted to talk to me.

00:00:42 Speaker_01
The voice belonged to a man. He introduced himself and said he was conducting a survey. He wanted to ask her a few questions, like what kind of lingerie do you wear? And are you as good in bed as everyone says?

00:00:54 Speaker_02
I said, who are you? What's going on? What do you want? And he hung up.

00:01:02 Speaker_06
Cheryl, I was curious. Have you ever had an obscene phone call?

00:01:05 Speaker_05
I did have a couple as a kid. I was 11 or 12, and it was a heavy breather. And at 11 and 12, I didn't even realize what was going on. And it happened a couple of times, but that was it.

00:01:17 Speaker_06
They just breathed and then hung up?

00:01:18 Speaker_05
They were just heavy breathing, and I'm like, hello?

00:01:21 Speaker_06
And that was all.

00:01:22 Speaker_06
One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Cold Season 3 was that my mom had a phone call, and she had a few obscene calls, but she had an obscene phone call where the person actually asked her about her, you know, it was a lingerie-type survey.

00:01:35 Speaker_06
Wow. Underwear survey, right, she said, is what she called it. It was this underwear survey where they asked her a bunch of questions, which she answered until she started thinking in her own head, like, this is really personal and really weird.

00:01:45 Speaker_06
Like, why would a... Did it turn sexual? Yeah. I mean, she felt it was it turned inappropriate. Right. And then another time we had I remember my sister answered the phone when someone called and said, hey, is your mom there?

00:01:57 Speaker_06
What color is your mom's hair? And my sister, who was like six at the time, was answering the questions and asked about her pubic hair.

00:02:04 Speaker_06
And then my mom sees my six year old sister on the phone for an extended period of time and said, who are you talking to? And she said, oh, a man. He wants to know about your hair." And my mom, you know, took the phone and hung up.

00:02:15 Speaker_06
And yeah, we, I remember having a discussion, but like at no point didn't our family discussions, did anyone say like, this is a crime or this is like, it was unsettling. And I'm sure it was more so to my mom.

00:02:26 Speaker_05
Did your parents talk to you about if somebody calls like this, this is what you should do?

00:02:31 Speaker_06
Yeah. My dad said, like, if you don't know the person you hang up. I mean, they basically said, don't answer the phone. But we were kids. We were going to answer the phone.

00:02:38 Speaker_05
Of course you do. Because friends are calling It's the only way they can get a hold of you.

00:02:41 Speaker_06
We were also told not to answer the door. We also did that. And usually, I mean, this is back in the day when there were a million salesmen that came, you know, selling all kinds of things. So my parents were like, please don't answer the door.

00:02:53 Speaker_06
OK, but you know, when you're a kid, that's like the most exciting thing you get to do. So I think there was some of that. But like at no point did I think, or did my family think, and we've talked about it.

00:03:02 Speaker_06
This is kind of family lore now, because my dad kind of made fun of my mom as the months went on and years went on. for answering the questions.

00:03:11 Speaker_05
Let me just ask this, Amy. Did you live in Utah at the time of these phone calls? Yes.

00:03:16 Speaker_06
Yes, we lived in Sandy.

00:03:18 Speaker_05
Wow.

00:03:18 Speaker_06
Sandy, Utah. That's why when I'm listening to season three, I was like, wait, oh my gosh, I wonder if These were a common thing if they happened a lot because this happened to my mom. I mean have you reflected on your experience.

00:03:31 Speaker_05
Do you think the call was directed at you. I didn't stay on the phone that long but I you know probably five seconds. But so I don't know if it was intended for me but. But you didn't you don't remember feeling afraid or.

00:03:44 Speaker_05
I was confused because I was too young to understand what the implications were. I mean, obviously, that's a sex-related call, and at 11 and 12, I'm barely grasping sex. So no, it didn't frighten me. It just confused me. I'm like, what? Are you OK?

00:04:03 Speaker_05
Do you need CPR? I'm not understanding what's going on. So yeah, it didn't occur to me that it was frightening enough to even tell my parents about.

00:04:14 Speaker_06
Well, nowadays, it's not like anybody's using the phone book to find people anymore. Technology, cell phones, social media, it's all changed everything. And so probably the way we're harassed has evolved.

00:04:26 Speaker_06
And we want to talk about how technology has changed the way people commit these crimes, the way they harass one another, I guess, and how and if they can escalate into something more dangerous.

00:04:37 Speaker_06
So to do that, we've invited prosecutor Anna Rossi Anderson to chat with us. She's the division director for the Salt Lake County Special Victims Unit.

00:04:45 Speaker_05
So how has technology helped, hindered, or changed sexual assault behaviors?

00:04:50 Speaker_04
So the lewd phone calls, we don't see things like that between strangers very often.

00:04:56 Speaker_04
Generally, when we have a case where usually a female victim is receiving lewd phone calls from someone, it's an ex or someone that she's had a falling out with, a relationship with of some sort.

00:05:08 Speaker_04
Every once in a while, we'll get people that send unsolicited nudes or something like that, unsolicited graphic photos to someone. On the lewd phone call side of things, we have, you know, misdemeanor charges that can be filed for that.

00:05:20 Speaker_04
It's, you know, electronic communication harassment.

00:05:22 Speaker_04
And like I said, that usually occurs more in a domestic violence setting where there's a protective order and someone just can't deal with the fact that there's a protective order and starts making harassing phone calls, whether they're sexual or violent or whatever in nature.

00:05:35 Speaker_04
And that's usually how that comes about.

00:05:36 Speaker_04
I don't think that I've ever had a case in my entire career where someone is just calling, like a victim calls the police and says, this stranger is making lewd phone calls to me and I don't know what to do about it.

00:05:48 Speaker_04
And that may speak more about the technology because I think it does.

00:05:53 Speaker_05
Because our suspect in this case was actually going through the phone book and just picking names, female names, and making calls.

00:06:02 Speaker_04
And now they do it on the internet. So as far as perpetrators go, it's just so much easier to do to commit these kind of non-contact sexual offenses, right? Voyeurism, lewdness.

00:06:14 Speaker_04
And when we go back to the unsolicited nudes, technically, that could probably be a lewdness charge, right?

00:06:19 Speaker_06
Do those mostly come from someone connected to the person, a former love interest or whatever? Or is can those be from a stranger?

00:06:27 Speaker_04
Oftentimes from a former intimate partner, but a lot of times now on dating apps, it just happens through a dating app. You know, you start communicating with someone and it escalates very quickly, unsolicited.

00:06:38 Speaker_04
I mean, that's happened to friends of mine. And that's a crime. Yes. It is technically, right? It is technically if you tell them not to do it, like if you tell them to stop and they continue to do it.

00:06:49 Speaker_04
If it's one unsolicited nude and you say to them, hey, I'm not into this, and it stops, that's probably not going to be charged as a crime. And I don't even know if it would fall under one. That is very interesting.

00:07:01 Speaker_04
Yeah, if you did that in real life, if you were at a store and you just flashed everybody. And you just flashed someone.

00:07:05 Speaker_06
That's a crime. Right. But if you just randomly send your body parts to random people, that's maybe not. If they say, I don't want it, and you stop.

00:07:14 Speaker_04
Yeah. And again, you have to look at the context of the conversation leading up to that point and all those things. Sorry, this is my brain working as to how we can charge that.

00:07:24 Speaker_04
Anyway, so for perpetrators of sexual offenses, the access that they have to people through dating apps and social media and internet chat rooms and all of those things is just, I mean, their world of victims has exponentially grown.

00:07:42 Speaker_04
So it is so much easier for people to perpetrate on children especially who have access to the Internet and then females. And we just we see it all the time.

00:07:54 Speaker_06
I mean we joke that we're all online all the time. But that's how there's just a million ways. It's exhausting trying to figure out how could you keep your kids safe. Yeah. Basically live in the woods with no technology. Right.

00:08:06 Speaker_04
Well, and we have these task forces of officers who will go into these apps and chat rooms and pose as young kids and arrange meetups with adults, right?

00:08:20 Speaker_04
And we have a lot of people who criticize that procedure and that process and say that they're entrapping people and they're trying to trick people into doing things that they normally wouldn't.

00:08:30 Speaker_04
But those cases don't get charged unless and until that adult is arriving at a site with, you know, a glove box full of condoms and duct tape.

00:08:39 Speaker_04
We have proof that that person's intent was to commit a sexual offense with a child, against a child, or against a female, or whatever the case may be. So it makes it that much easier for people just to make those arrangements.

00:08:53 Speaker_04
And for the number of people that are actually intercepted in those communications and in those situations, I am terrified to think of the number that are not.

00:09:04 Speaker_05
It's way higher, I'm sure.

00:09:06 Speaker_04
And that are actually meeting up with people and committing these offenses.

00:09:10 Speaker_05
So you mentioned investigators going on and impersonating children to try to catch these folks. There's technology that is unrelated to trying to catch them in the act. You know, now they can go into someone's phone and see the pictures that they have.

00:09:27 Speaker_04
It has, and that's utilized all the time in our criminal cases. The same things that make it so easy for perpetrators to offend make it just as easy for us to prove it, right?

00:09:39 Speaker_04
So we have perpetrators, and especially when we're talking about voyeurism charges or something where they're surreptitiously recording people in bathrooms or things like that, it's very easy for them to hide those things.

00:09:49 Speaker_04
It's also very easy for them to be found and for us to then use that evidence at trial. We don't have to rely anymore just on someone's recounting of events.

00:09:59 Speaker_04
We have a lot of physical proof in the form of video and audio and chat messages and things like that.

00:10:06 Speaker_04
We can download phones with... We can go back months and months and months worth of messages and deleted photos and deleted messages and things that a perpetrator thinks they scrubbed will not be scrubbed and our investigators will find it.

00:10:21 Speaker_04
So, those techniques and those things that we, that do allow us to bring that evidence to the table have been invaluable in these prosecutions.

00:10:29 Speaker_06
LESLIE KENDRICK Your experience, do prosecutors generally take those kinds of cases, if it's like an internet stalking case or whatever, pretty seriously? Or do you, or do they still kind of get this like, well, but it's non-physical?

00:10:43 Speaker_04
Oh, no. Again, it's a case-by-case basis, right? But if we have someone, especially someone whose behavior seems to be escalating to a stalking-level offense or something like that, they're taken very seriously.

00:10:56 Speaker_04
It requires a fair amount of subjectivity, which can be a little bit tricky depending on, you know, who's sitting in the chair and screening the cases. We, as prosecutors, have a duty to look at those things closely.

00:11:09 Speaker_04
And our number one issue is always public safety. It is always the safety of the community and the safety of victims.

00:11:16 Speaker_04
And if there is a case where someone appears to be a danger to someone, we have to take that seriously, even if it's one message, you know, from one person, one time.

00:11:27 Speaker_04
But the victim in that case tells us a whole bunch of other things that have happened in the past that she's never reported. So we have to look at that in that case as a whole, not just this one incident that's being presented to us for screening.

00:11:38 Speaker_06
Have you personally prosecuted some of these unsolicited nudes or the lewdness?

00:11:44 Speaker_04
Yep. Yeah. A lot of them. We get a ton of lewdness cases. I think that every prosecutor's office in America probably gets a lot of lewdness cases. And we do have a lot of repeat offenders.

00:11:57 Speaker_04
That's a behavior that tends to repeat, I think, a little bit more often than some others. Just the public indecency type stuff, right? The flashers and the people that are, you know, showing their genitalia at Walmart or whatever the case may be.

00:12:10 Speaker_04
But we get those a lot.

00:12:12 Speaker_06
It's actually like sort of horrifying.

00:12:15 Speaker_04
We have tons of these cases. We do. Yeah, we do.

00:12:18 Speaker_06
No, I mean, is there a point at which you say, OK, this is not, we've got to take this one more seriously? Yeah.

00:12:24 Speaker_04
And the law actually provides for that, right? So after a certain number of lewdness convictions, you can be charged with an enhanced level of offense. The statutes themselves provide for ways to view it more seriously as it continues to occur.

00:12:38 Speaker_06
What have we learned about these kinds of behaviors in the last 30 years? I mean, maybe making the phone calls or breathing heavy isn't the most dangerous behavior, but what have we learned about when things escalate, how things escalate?

00:12:51 Speaker_04
Right. So I think that we've probably learned a lot. Okay, so we have a resource, I mean a resource that's available to everyone, called the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

00:13:06 Speaker_04
And there have been various versions of this put out over the past decades. And apparently the DSM-3, which was published in 1980, was the first time the DSM addressed paraphilia, which is any sort of like perceived sexual deviance, right?

00:13:21 Speaker_04
Anything that quote-unquote, normal people think is strange, was essentially listed as paraphilia. In 2013, the DSM-5 changed that kind of subset of disorders to paraphilic disorder.

00:13:37 Speaker_04
So the disorder part is now what has changed it from just, you know, having sexually deviant thoughts to actually acting on those sexually deviant thoughts to the point that they kind of interfere with your day-to-day life.

00:13:50 Speaker_06
Can you give me an example of what would be deviant behavior?

00:13:53 Speaker_04
Warriorism, right?

00:13:55 Speaker_04
So if you have a person who is sexually aroused by watching someone undress in their home, they're outside the window and secretly watching them undress, and that's sexually arousing, that would generally be considered a deviant behavior, a paraphilia.

00:14:11 Speaker_04
But a paraphilic disorder for voyeurism, so voyeuristic disorder, entails more than that. It entails it, you know, being, for lack of a better term, an obsession, right? Something that that person has to do, an urge that they cannot control.

00:14:25 Speaker_04
Or it gets to the point that it involves a victim, right? Like where it's a contact offense or their behavior is escalating or something like that. Then it becomes a disorder.

00:14:37 Speaker_05
So and I think I'm having a problem telling the difference between what what changed between the 80s and 2013 I don't know.

00:14:47 Speaker_04
You mean what changed in the world?

00:14:48 Speaker_05
Why don't what changed? What did they change in the book?

00:14:51 Speaker_04
they changed the the the sort of the definition versus interest versus acting out and Interest. Yeah. Interest versus acting out or interest versus like sickness.

00:15:04 Speaker_04
Like not just like I think it's I think it's sexually arousing if I see my neighbor changing in her window and I'm just going to watch her because it arouses me sexually versus I am going to seek out that neighbor every day because I know she gets out of the shower at 10 a.m.

00:15:17 Speaker_04
and I'm going to watch her every morning.

00:15:18 Speaker_05
But isn't it invasive either way? One hundred percent.

00:15:23 Speaker_06
One is like, no, but I also think though that they've learned more about what kinds of behaviors are, you know, just sort of like foot fetish versus watching, going into people's, trespassing into someone's property and watching them.

00:15:37 Speaker_06
And I'm thinking of cold season one.

00:15:40 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:15:40 Speaker_06
Right.

00:15:40 Speaker_04
You know.

00:15:41 Speaker_04
Well, and it seems to be recognizing that not all sexually deviant acts are criminal and that in order to rise to that level and once we get there, we need to understand whether there is a disorder or whether there is a mental illness or whether there is something that can be treated with forms of treatment for those offenses.

00:16:01 Speaker_05
It feels like the criminality element would include whether or not the sex offender or the person doing whatever, foot fetish or whatever, is forcing that on somebody else in an unwanted way.

00:16:18 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, I think that if there's ever an unconsenting party or a non-consenting party, then there's a criminal offense.

00:16:24 Speaker_05
Right. So if a neighbor happens to see neighbor undressing at her bedroom window and decides to watch, that to me is an offense unless the neighbor is OK with that, right?

00:16:36 Speaker_04
Yeah, and I think that there is, in my mind as a prosecutor, thinking about all the context around that.

00:16:42 Speaker_04
If you're in an apartment complex and you know as the female neighbor that everyone can see into your windows because you all face each other and you leave your bedroom window open while you're changing at night every single night, you probably have to expect that someone is going to see you changing.

00:16:58 Speaker_04
It doesn't make it OK for someone to watch. it makes it maybe deviant.

00:17:04 Speaker_04
But if a person, if then male neighbor is walking by his window and happens to glance over and see female neighbor naked in her window and then glances at her watches maybe for a few seconds and then goes into his room and masturbates, is that a crime?

00:17:17 Speaker_04
Probably not. So there's all of there's a spectrum, right?

00:17:21 Speaker_05
Well, you have exhibition on the one hand. So could be that. You mentioned treatment for sex offenders. So tell us what sex offender treatment looks like.

00:17:34 Speaker_04
So I think that most of sex offender treatment involves psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and whatnot. Some offenders can be treated with antidepressants, with SSRIs.

00:17:46 Speaker_04
And I think in some extreme cases, they're still being treated with drugs that will lower testosterone levels and reduce sexual urges and things like that.

00:17:54 Speaker_04
But the majority of the treatment that we hear about and that the offenders that are sentenced on our cases participate in is group therapy and mental health treatment in that regard. They'll also do one-on-one counseling.

00:18:07 Speaker_04
But some of the problems that we've seen lately and that we've been trying to address on, again, on a case-by-case basis is that if we have an offender whose cognitive abilities don't allow them to meaningfully participate in that kind of treatment,

00:18:22 Speaker_04
We've been trying to kind of craft new arrangements for them. Our defense bar has been wonderful in making this happen.

00:18:32 Speaker_04
If they have an offender who they say, you know, they're not going to be able to do this group therapy, they're not going to be able to successfully complete it because of issue A, B, or C, they will reach out to a therapist, they will reach out to the jail or the prison and us and make sure that that person has a treatment regimen set up that is going to be effective for them as an individual.

00:18:53 Speaker_04
Which, again, at the end of the day is all that we can ask for.

00:18:56 Speaker_05
So do you see treatment as, for someone who wants it, as a place of hope?

00:19:03 Speaker_04
Oh yes, yeah. I think that if we didn't see treatment as a place of hope, our jobs would be hopeless. So we need to trust that that treatment does what it's supposed to most of the time.

00:19:17 Speaker_04
When someone is convicted or is found guilty of a sex offense, they generally get a psychosexual evaluation that looks into all of these different kinds of things.

00:19:27 Speaker_04
There's lots of different measurements and different testing that they do, both physical and cognitive and everything. And those evaluators will kind of put together like a treatment program for that person.

00:19:37 Speaker_04
And that can vary based on the nature of the offense, the level of the offense, the time that the person has been offending, all of those things.

00:19:45 Speaker_04
But our hope is always that a treatment regimen is laid out for an individual that will result in them not offending again. Does it always work? Of course not. It does not always work. But we have to have that hope.

00:20:01 Speaker_06
If you've been prosecuting somebody for one of these lower level offenses, do you think, I mean, is it your experience that it's helpful? Like it does, it does, you do have more success if you catch it early.

00:20:14 Speaker_06
I mean, there's this idea that you're getting treatment earlier in the process, right? If you are, if it is an evolutionary process, does that, is that true? Or is that just something we sort of all sort of see on TV or hope is true?

00:20:26 Speaker_04
Oh, no, I think that that's true. I think that it's not only generally accepted, but also the data shows that early intervention is key for almost every kind of criminal offense.

00:20:37 Speaker_04
Again, we're going to have people who are outliers who just have a very serious illness that we cannot fix with any amount of treatment or any amount of intervention.

00:20:47 Speaker_04
But for your average individual, early intervention, if you have a young person who is caught looking at his neighbor in her window one night and he is made aware very early on that that is not okay, that there are consequences for it, and that there is treatment available if he needs it, those are the cases we hope to get, the ones that we can work that early intervention on.

00:21:10 Speaker_04
In the couple of years that I was out of the prosecution world, I was a Justice Court judge down in South Salt Lake.

00:21:20 Speaker_04
It was really rewarding to be able to deal with people when they are having their first contacts with the criminal justice system and have that hope that what we're doing there will prevent them from going any further.

00:21:31 Speaker_04
And that's the same hope that we have even at the district court level with offenders who are committing more serious offenses. If it's their first one and we can deal with it right away and not see them again, that's the goal.

00:21:44 Speaker_04
Putting somebody in jail for 30 days for peeping on someone in their window doesn't make our community safer for any more than 30 days. We need to ensure that our system is set up to help people succeed and move past whatever issues they may have.

00:21:58 Speaker_04
Everybody wants our community to be safe. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, citizens, we all want that. And these tools that we have are set up to do that.

00:22:09 Speaker_06
How do you talk about these issues and really be honest about them and educate everyone without making people more afraid? Because it's sometimes it seems like not involved in the system. Yeah, I think so.

00:22:23 Speaker_06
I think once you start talking about if you started to tell us about what came across your desk yesterday, we would all feel less safe. We would all be like, oh, my gosh, that's happening. I didn't know that. Right.

00:22:35 Speaker_06
Like covering crime for me made me afraid in a way that I had not been previously. And it's the reason I quit covering crime, because I thought I'm skewing my world. I'm making myself think everyone is a bad person.

00:22:46 Speaker_06
waiting to do something bad to me and my kid, right? So how do you have these conversations that are really honest and helpful to all of us, they're educational, but that don't alarm and raise fear?

00:22:58 Speaker_06
Maybe parents don't know that someone has access to their kid in a chat room, and maybe they should know that, but obviously that's gonna make them more afraid at the same time. How do we balance that?

00:23:07 Speaker_04
I think we just need to ask people to let us carry that burden for them. Because that is, that's how our minds work as prosecutors with, you know, the secondary trauma and the things that affect us as a result of the things that we see every day.

00:23:27 Speaker_04
I honestly don't know what to say aside from that's our every day. It's not everyone else's every day.

00:23:33 Speaker_04
When I was in misdemeanor court in the beginning of my career, I once thought to myself, there are so many people coming into this courtroom every day. I mean, hundreds of people in my courtroom when I was back in the Chicago area every day.

00:23:45 Speaker_04
And I was like, I bet if I worked out the numbers that more than half of the people in this county have been involved in the criminal justice system. I really thought that it was going to be half the people in the county.

00:23:57 Speaker_04
And so I sat down and started running names and pulling numbers, and it was like 3%. It's just not as many people as we think it is.

00:24:06 Speaker_04
And we do read, there are a lot of stories on the news about really terrible things that happen, but it's such a small percentage of the population that are committing criminal offenses at all, let alone very violent, serious ones.

00:24:22 Speaker_04
It's a constant battle and we have to remind ourselves of it every day that most people are good. It's just something that is harder to believe, like as you said, as you work in the criminal justice world for long enough.

00:24:36 Speaker_04
But it's such a small percentage of people that come through this system as offenders. And you just need a reminder, I guess, from somebody every once in a while.

00:24:48 Speaker_05
Thanks for joining us today. Coming up, we talk with former FBI profiler and the host of Killer Psyche podcast, Candace DeLong.

00:25:05 Speaker_06
If you've listened to COLD season three, you know Cherie Warren's story raises issues surrounding both domestic violence and sexual assault, which were all present in season one and season two of COLD.

00:25:16 Speaker_05
Joining us today to dive into it all is retired FBI profiler and host of Killer Psyche podcast, Candice DeLong. Candice, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. And thank you for having me. So, Candice, tell us a little bit about yourself.

00:25:29 Speaker_03
Well, going way back, I started out my professional life as a nurse, a psychiatric nurse. But I did that for 10 years, great deal of the time in maximum security. And that's where I first began interacting with people that had committed crimes.

00:25:44 Speaker_03
Some people on the psych unit, not all people by any means. And then I was recruited by the FBI. I was an agent for 20 years, became an FBI profiler in my fourth year, and retired, and then found myself in the true crime entertainment world.

00:26:01 Speaker_03
And here we are today.

00:26:02 Speaker_05
Candace, we want to start by talking about how some crimes escalate. And to do that, let's play a clip from the show.

00:26:10 Speaker_01
Heidi had shown Carrie mercy after his arrest in the canyon. She had just wanted him to get some help. But that hadn't happened. He was probably just a sick puppy.

00:26:21 Speaker_01
Zimmerman was aware of Carey's connection to Cherie Warren, so he called Roy City Police Detective Jack Bell.

00:26:27 Speaker_01
They began to look at the whole arc of Carey's behavior and saw a clear escalation from that encounter with Heidi in 1971 to where they then stood 15 years later.

00:26:39 Speaker_06
Everything escalates. Yeah. You're right.

00:26:43 Speaker_05
Some of the behaviors that one of the suspects in Sheree Warren's case was exhibiting were things like making lewd phone calls that turned into lingerie surveys that went to an obscene place.

00:26:55 Speaker_05
In your experience, do things like lewd calls and peeping into windows, which he also did, tend to escalate?

00:27:02 Speaker_03
The FBI has done a lot of research on this. In my day, they were called obscene phone calls. And by the way, I got my first obscene phone call when I was 14. I answered the phone. I had a phone in my bedroom. He said something. I didn't understand it.

00:27:15 Speaker_03
And I said, can you wait a minute while I turn down my stereo? And he said it again. Whoops, I hung up the phone.

00:27:23 Speaker_03
Of course, decades after that happened, I'm at the FBI Academy and I'm being trained by the founders of the FBI criminal personality profiling program, Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and they actually

00:27:37 Speaker_03
did research and the first landmark study of serial killers in the United States was done by them. It's now represented on the Netflix show Mindhunter.

00:27:47 Speaker_03
And one of the things they asked them was, before you began killing, were you involved in any kind of lesser sex crime, such as obscene phone calls, peeping.

00:28:02 Speaker_03
Those are called nuisance offenses, or they used to be like, it's not important, it's a nuisance, go away. But one of the things they found out was 25% of serial killers, and it might be a higher percentage, I believe it is, for serial rapists,

00:28:20 Speaker_03
did commit lesser, what are called nuisance crimes, early in their criminal careers. The answer to your question is, it used to be, it was an urban legend we found out, but it was a commonly held myth by police.

00:28:39 Speaker_03
If somebody is a obscene caller, they're not gonna break in and rape someone. If somebody is exposing themselves in the park, they're not gonna progress to rape because they don't want that one-on-one interaction with the victim.

00:28:53 Speaker_03
They just wanna shock her.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
Well, it turns out that's not always true. Overall, how do you think sexual assault investigations have evolved since the Cherie Warren case in the 80s?

00:29:04 Speaker_03
Well, sexual assault investigations started their magnificent evolution in Manhattan. Linda Fairstein, who is now a true crime author, but she used to be a prosecutor, and she saw

00:29:20 Speaker_03
that investigators needed to be trained better, trained how to interview victims. And so Linda Ferristein started the first intensive training to investigate sex crimes in a different way than they ever had before.

00:29:37 Speaker_03
How to interview, how to collect evidence, Interesting thing about false allegations of criminal sexual assault, they get a lot of headlines when they happen, but in fact, it's less than 2%. 2% of hundreds of thousands of rape victims.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
Most women actually are embarrassed to come forward and admit such a horrible thing happened to them. They don't want to go over the details. Oh, and by the way, male victims rarely come forward for the same reason.

00:30:09 Speaker_03
If you think a woman's embarrassed, men, uh-uh. Unless they end up in an emergency room, they're going to take that to their grave.

00:30:17 Speaker_05
Tell us about some of the big cases that you worked.

00:30:20 Speaker_03
The first big case I worked on was the Tylenol murders in 1982 in Chicago. In one week, seven people mysteriously dropped dead after ingesting Tylenol. They didn't know each other. They weren't associated in any way.

00:30:36 Speaker_03
And I was a rookie agent at the time, and I was assigned to work that case. It today is considered one of the most, if not the most infamous unsolved mass murder in the history of the United States.

00:30:50 Speaker_05
That was never solved.

00:30:51 Speaker_03
Yeah. Well, we believe we know who did it. But in the United States, where we have something called evidence and probable cause and the criminal house rights, no, we didn't have enough to make an arrest.

00:31:06 Speaker_03
And then later in my career, I was assigned to work on the Unabom case, but not as a profiler, just as a regular agent. And I was assigned with my partner, John, to go up to Montana. six weeks before the arrest.

00:31:21 Speaker_03
We didn't know when the arrest was going to be. We had information from his brother, but that doesn't mean you can go knock on his door and drag him out and put him in jail. We had to find evidence to support that, and we did.

00:31:34 Speaker_03
My partner and I ran around Montana for about six weeks, and then the big day came, and He was lured out of his cabin by my partners and my supervisor, and he was brought down to another cabin where I was.

00:31:50 Speaker_03
We couldn't take him to jail because we only had an arrest warrant. And so while he was sitting at a

00:31:58 Speaker_03
tiny little pine table in a unheated cabin with his handcuffs, hands cuffed behind his back, other FBI agents, bomb technicians, specialists, were in his cabin searching for evidence that would tie him to any of the bombings.

00:32:16 Speaker_03
And it took about five hours before they were able to identify a chemical that they found in his cabin was identical to a chemical found at the site of where a man opened a package, the bomb exploded and killed him.

00:32:31 Speaker_03
Kaczynski was changed from handcuffs to shackles and let out and to the jail in Helena, Montana. And there's that famous picture that went out all over the world. I was there. I was in the crowd of media.

00:32:46 Speaker_06
Yeah, I covered that case.

00:32:49 Speaker_03
And so that was certainly the biggest day to that point. That was April 3rd of 1996. And two, three months later, I was involved in the most wonderful, satisfying case of my life.

00:33:03 Speaker_03
I was involved in the rescue of a little boy who had been kidnapped by a convicted child molester and was going through San Francisco at the time.

00:33:13 Speaker_03
And I was with a team of agents, and we were at the Amtrak station on a Saturday morning looking for him. All we knew was the offender was six foot four and had copper red hair. And the little boy was 10 years old and had platinum white hair.

00:33:27 Speaker_03
And everybody was spread out looking, and I heard this noise. It was my squad mates going, hey, FBI. And I turned around, and I ran up to what was going on, and I couldn't see the little boy. I could see this guy with red hair, but he had about six

00:33:42 Speaker_03
male agents trying to bring him down and I looked through the arms and I saw this tiny little white arm and I reached in and I grabbed it and I pulled him out. His name is Tony.

00:33:56 Speaker_03
And a few days later, we got him patched up and a few days later I took him home to reunite with his parents.

00:34:04 Speaker_05
Oh, how satisfying, yeah.

00:34:06 Speaker_03
Yeah, that was for the 20 years of my career, that was the moment. And we've remained friends.

00:34:14 Speaker_05
Oh, that's amazing.

00:34:15 Speaker_03
In fact, we have a podcast where he's on the podcast.

00:34:17 Speaker_05
Oh, right on.

00:34:18 Speaker_03
He's all grown up now, 36 years old.

00:34:21 Speaker_05
Candace, thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.

00:34:23 Speaker_03
Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

00:34:28 Speaker_05
Thanks again to Anna Rossi Anderson and Candice DeLong for joining us. You can catch Candice on the Killer Psyche and Killer Psyche Daily podcasts.

00:34:37 Speaker_05
We'll be back with another episode of Talking Cold, where we will answer your burning questions with the host of the Cold podcast, Dave Cauley. Production by Nina Ernest and Ben Kebrick, and mixing also by Ben Kebrick.

00:34:52 Speaker_05
For Amazon Music and Wondery, Managing Producer Candice Menriquez-Wren, Producer Claire Chambers, Senior Producer Lizzie Bassett, and Executive Producer Morgan Jones. Special thanks to Kale Bittner and Alison Vermeulen.

00:35:14 Speaker_00
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00:35:25 Speaker_00
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