The 1980s had some memorable fads and crazes—hair metal bands, neon leotards, the Walkman… and criminal profiling!
By the mid-1980s, profilers were regularly consulting with the FBI to solve challenging cases and the job was attracting big personalities. Soon after, criminal profiling became a pop-culture sensation, thanks in large part to the 1991 blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs.
One big name, and even bigger ego, in the criminal profiling world, was Richard Walter. Walter had an impressive resume, claiming to have reviewed thousands of murder cases, written criminology papers, lectured at universities, and served as an expert witness on hundreds of trials. Having worked as a staff psychologist at a prison in his earlier years, Walter had a profound understanding of the criminal mind. And he loved telling everyone about it.
In 1982, Walter served as an expert witness on a trial that convicted Robie Drake of second-degree murder and sentenced him to more than 40 years in prison. Walter was able to convince the jury that an accidental shooting followed by panicked stabbing and body hiding was all based on a sexually perverse rampage by Drake in the name of piquerism (the sexual interest in penetrating the skin with sharp objects). What was the end of Drake’s freedom became the beginning of Walter's new career as a criminal profiler. Walter loved nothing more than cheeseburgers, cigarettes, reducing all motives down to sexual perversion, and being the centre of attention.
Toward the end of 1989, Walter befriended Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, and Bill Fleischer, an ex-FBI agent with a penchant for murder. The three of them hit it off and formed The Vidocq Society, named after Eugène-François Vidocq, a 19th-century French criminal turned detective who is considered the father of modern criminology.
Before long, The Vidocq Society was helping the FBI and county police solve cold cases left, right and centre and they were a hit with the media too. There was even a book written about the club, leveraging heavily off Walter’s impressive resume.
One case in the book which Walter claimed credit for solving was the famous Australian murder case of former beauty queen, Anita Cobby. But when lead investigator, Ian Kennedy, was questioned about Walter’s involvement in the case, he had never heard of him.
The same goes for the case of Paul Bernard Allain. Walter very quickly concluded that Allain’s boss had murdered him in a homosexual affair gone wrong. However, even cursory fact-checking revealed Allain didn’t appear in any legal documents or publicly recorded databases. Walter’s rebuttal: “Oh, I work on many super secret, high-profile cases that you can’t find anything out about”.
Also for the record, Walter seemed to have a bit of a preoccupation with linking murders to sex crimes or homosexuality. Homosexual panic was his default motive.
Now, back to Robie Drake. While serving his time in jail, Drake started doing his own profiling on Walter and asked for his case to be reviewed citing numerous lies from Walter about his own expertise. The courts eventually reviewed the case only to find further evidence against Drake (remember, Drake was definitely guilty) and extended his sentence a further 10 years in prison BUT it was discovered that Walter had perjured himself.
This triggered several other cases reliant on Walter’s expert testimony to be revisited. And as of this year, at least three murder convictions have been overturned.
So how much of Walter’s resume was slightly padded versus a bold-faced lie? Why did he avoid detection and/or punishment? How many wrongful convictions and overly severe sentences remain out there? And tell me, listener, have the lambs stopped screaming?
SOURCES:
The Vidocq Society: Murder on the menu Telegraph UK 21 November 2008
Drake a free man after 32 years | Local News | lockportjournal.com By Amy Wallace 6 Nov, 2014
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[00:00:00] Rod: So just before midnight, December 5, 1981, a 17 year old guy called Robbie Drake, he wanders into an area of the suburbs of Buffalo, and this is an area that often has an abundance of abandoned cars. It's just how they roll. So he leaves his house, he's carrying rifles and hunting knives and he's wearing military clothes.
[00:00:16] Will: Rifles?
[00:00:17] Rod: Rifles. It's fine. It's for self defense. He had a goal. His goal was to shoot up some abandoned cars. Oh. So he turns his gun onto a 12 year old Chevy and fires into the passenger side window 19 times. Then he heard groaning inside the vehicle. He'd shot Stephen Rosenthal, 18, and Amy Smith, 16.
[00:00:36] Will: Oh, it was gonna be sad whoever it was, but well, I had a soft spot for Amy and Steve. I thought they were gonna make it.
[00:00:42] Rod: You took I thought for once, these two
[00:00:44] Will: Yeah, I thought High school sweethearts.
[00:00:47] Rod: Did no one say that? They could just be fingering buddies who met that moment.
[00:00:50] Will: Whatever, you know, that's high school sweethearts.
[00:00:53] Rod: That's true actually. This place that where it's got abandoned cars and stuff, it turns out it's also a popular lover's lane.
[00:00:58] Will: Yeah, I hear that now. Is there a street that ends in, starts with an F, like Avenue, Cul de sac? Fairway. Fuckers fairway.
[00:01:06] Rod: Fuckers fairway. Porkers parade.
[00:01:08] Will: Yeah. Porkers parade. That's all right. That's all right. Cause lovers lane.
[00:01:10] Rod: Anal Avenue. More specific.
[00:01:15] Will: And it's also very like, if you drive to anal Avenue with your partner, like you should probably talk about that in advance.
[00:01:21] Rod: What are we doing here? Nothing. Just hoping. I don't know. What do you want?
[00:01:27] Will: Cunnilingus close.
[00:01:29] Rod: Ooh. He hears Rosenthal moaning, the boy, so he stabs him.
[00:01:34] Will: Okay. So I get this, I guess, okay. There is a rumor that policy incentives in a certain country, a country with a lot of people made it recently so that if you accidentally hit someone in your car you are better off. Yeah. Much better off reversing over them to make sure they're dead.
[00:01:52] Rod: You are better off
[00:01:53] Will: Yeah. I dunno what this guy is doing. That suddenly you go, oh, I've accidentally shot someone. I had a plausible story. Now I'm gonna stab him.
[00:02:01] Rod: He was spotted by two police officers who were just patrolling stuffing the body into the trunk of the Chevy.
[00:02:07] Will: So you've gone, I was just here to shoot up some cars and now I'm stuffing a body.
[00:02:12] Rod: Well, in fact, two bodies. So, so Rosenthal.
[00:02:14] Will: Chevys have a big boot.
[00:02:15] Rod: Big by our standards, by American standards. They're like, what? I can only put half my household.
[00:02:19] Will: It's a 1970s car, man. So you could fit a lot of corpses in a boot.
[00:02:24] Rod: You could. Yeah. They catch him doing it. He's obviously got all the weapons on him. These people have been shot to death with a little bit of stabbing in one case. Open and shut case. Yeah?
[00:02:33] Will: Yeah. It's to me. Well, what?
[00:02:37] Rod: So Drake insists whole time, all through the trials and everything. It was a mistake. It was target practice, dude. It was dark. I thought the car was abandoned. But then I panicked when I heard Rosenthal moaning, so I stabbed the shit out of him.
[00:02:48] Will: I panicked and went murder. Yep. That's my panic solution.
[00:02:51] Rod: That's what I do. I'm like, I got a deadline. I'm not going to make it work. I kill someone.
[00:02:54] Will: Yeah. Well, I killed the person that asked for the deadline.
[00:02:56] Rod: Oh no, I killed the nearest person.
[00:02:58] Will: Mine's more effective.
[00:02:59] Rod: Mine's more panicky. Mine's just raw panic. Instant.
[00:03:03] Will: I have filtered panic. I have distilled panic.
[00:03:05] Rod: It's harder for you to claim panic on the stand because it's like you've thought about it, whereas I'm like, nearest person to me. Kill someone. Kill someone. Yep, just kill the nearest person. So it sounded dodgy, of course, this sounds like really dude, but Drake had no other apparent or any apparent motive.
[00:03:20] Will: Okay.
[00:03:21] Rod: Intent matters whether it's murder, manslaughter, etc.
[00:03:23] Will: No, I get that.
[00:03:24] Rod: So the prosecutor, a guy called Peter Broderick, went, huh, I need clear intent to make this murder, and he thinks it's murder. He actually thought Drake may have had a motive, and why did he think this? He thought maybe the faint marks on Amy Smith's body were a sign of post mortem biting and probably evidence of some kind of sex crime. So he brings in a forensic odontologist, that's my third career choice, is doctor, lawyer, forensic odontologist.
[00:03:51] Will: No, I don't want to look at teeth. Whether they're, whether it's dead people or alive people or evidence of teeth marks, it's not my thing.
[00:03:56] Rod: Yeah, I don't want to do that job. Corpse teeth. Fuck yeah. And another thing. So he brings in this forensic odontologist to testify to the effect that this is postmortem biting, but to make the leap to sex crime, the odontologist said, look, I can't make that. You need more firming up on this case. You need a different expert. And so he tells the prosecutor that he just met this guy at a conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
[00:04:17] Will: I got a guy.
[00:04:17] Rod: I got a guy. So the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the AAFS, the man was Richard Walter, who 30 years later would be described in a publisher's weekly blurb on a book about him as a figure who seems to be a contemporary Sherlock Holmes.
[00:04:39] Will: Welcome to the Wholesome Show, the podcast that sees things no one else sees in the whole of science. I'm Will Grant.
[00:04:47] Rod: I'm, I can see you, R. G. Lamberts. Now I want to say before I keep going, the main, there was one monster source for this, so it was an article from April this year, 23, by David Galvey Herbert in the New York Magazine.
[00:04:58] I'm not going to tell you the title because it kind of gives shit away. So who's this Richard Walter guy? So in 82, he'd just become a full member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the AAFS. And this is apparently, according to the article, a powerful credential. It mattered. I'm a full member.
[00:05:13] Will: But you actually have a pretty heavy sway in people getting put away in jail or not. Yeah.
[00:05:20] Rod: Forensic sciences matter. So, yeah, he just got this full credential in 82. So this is basically when the trial for Robbie Drake happens. So he's on the stand at Drake's trial and he's asked to, you know, tell us about your credentials, sir.
[00:05:35] So he relates his resume. Like I've reviewed more than 5, 000 murder cases at the LA County Medical Examiner's Office. 5, 000.
[00:05:41] Will: That's a lot.
[00:05:42] Rod: Adjunct lecturer at a Northern Michigan University. He'd written criminology papers. He'd served as an expert witness at hundreds of trials. So Walter told the jury that Drake had committed a particular type of lust murder because he was driven by a phenomenon known as piquerism, which is an obscure sadistic impulse to derive sexual pleasure from penetrating people with bullets, knives, and teeth.
[00:06:07] Will: I don't want to yuck people's yum. There are some yums
[00:06:12] Rod: we got to spin off podcast. Yuck and the yum.
[00:06:14] Will: No, we don't yuck the yum except for some yums. Yums that involve doing that.
[00:06:19] Rod: Yeah. And I like the obscure sadistic impulse.
[00:06:21] Will: Oh, I want it to be obscure. I absolutely, I would tolerate a world where it doesn't
[00:06:26] Rod: you want rare.
[00:06:27] Will: Yeah, that's true.
[00:06:28] Rod: They're not synonyms.
[00:06:29] Will: Obscure means not talked about.
[00:06:31] Rod: Yeah, not clear, not obvious.
[00:06:31] Will: That means that guy across the street could be.
[00:06:34] Rod: Or someone in this room. So, Drake's attorney, who, you know, trying to defend this, said, look I'm finding it hard to find an expert on piquerism, can I have a bit more time to get one? Judge said, nah, let's get rolling.
[00:06:45] Will: Get the best you got. Get out on the street, give me what you got. I don't want to sit around waiting for...
[00:06:50] Rod: Get me, get a psychologist. Just get a psychologist. Let's get on with it. So Drake was convicted of second degree murder and got two consecutive terms of 20 years to life. And Walter's testimony, Richard Walter's testimony was absolutely key. So he billed the prosecutor 300 bucks, which in 1982, which is a decent week's salary for
[00:07:07] Will: no, I get it. It's a week salary. I think it it's in that bracket.
[00:07:10] Rod: So the trial of Robbie Drake, the end of his freedom from this trial was the beginning of Walter's new career in the fledgling field of criminal profiling. So profiling, a little bit of context on it. In the entire of the decade of the 1970s, the FBI's behavioral science unit and the profilers within consulted on less than 200 cases across that whole decade. By the mid 80s, hundreds per year profiling.
[00:07:41] Will: So suddenly it's become a thing.
[00:07:43] Rod: It really took off profiling early to mid 80s.
[00:07:46] Will: So what is profiling?
[00:07:47] Rod: Kind of, you can characterize, you can look at certain facts and figures or, you know, you can make assumptions.
[00:07:52] Will: So this person died by stab wounds, so probably the killer had blood on him.
[00:07:55] Rod: Left handed with a slight angle, therefore they had an elbow injury.
[00:07:59] Will: But mostly psych, not body.
[00:08:01] Rod: Yeah, more psychological problems. Yeah. It began to attract really big personalities, and there's a forensic psychiatrist who'd been working with the behavioral science unit, these guys, and he said, Look. It really attracts big personalities. Where there are stars, there are wannabe stars. And those with big egos will often gravitate to the centers of narcissistic glory. So it was big. This is big shit. And soon after this, so into the late 80s and early 90s, it became a pop culture sensation, particularly because 1991, Silience of the Lambs.
[00:08:29] Will: Yes. Yes. Clarice, she was a profiler, no?
[00:08:33] Rod: She was, or training to be, but I think actually really Hannibal was the profiler. So anyway that movie pushed it off and the FBI agent who helped Jodie Foster prepare described this period as a quote, very exciting time. They're dynamic people, these FBI agents. So basically the Drake case was like perfectly timed for Richard Walter to be on the crest of the profiling wave. So how did Richard Walter get to become this profiler?
[00:09:00] Will: Reviewed 5, 000 murder cases. I think that's what gets you. So if you listen to 5, 000 murder podcasts, then you're a profiler.
[00:09:07] Rod: So he graduated from Michigan state union 75. He had a bachelor's and a master's degree in psych. At 33, he gets an entry level position as a lab assistant at the LA County medical examiner's office. And he washes test tubes for three bucks an hour. He thought about going into a PhD, but then he got a job in 1978 as a staff psychologist at a prison.
[00:09:27] So that's cool. You didn't need a PhD for that. Masters was enough. And it's fair back in that quite reasonable. So he'd be able to see patients and he wouldn't need to go further with his quals, but apparently he had a crappy rapport with prisoners and he could be really petty and vindictive. So for example, an inmate sued him after he refused to pass along a dictionary that was sent to the inmate by his mother. Because he was in the shits. It also didn't help that he would often conduct interviews through the closed prison cell door. So he talked to them through the door.
[00:09:57] Will: Oh, okay. I ain't a prison psych. So I don't know how easy that job is. I don't assume it's on the Clarice interviewing Hannibal Lecter to your job is reviewing pina coladas on the beach. It's closest Clarice, like it is, but I.
[00:10:11] Rod: Can I mix them? Can I have the pina colada while I'm talking to a cannibal? Otherwise they're too sweet. So he basically, apparently mostly ended up, he'd run intake interview. So we're not talking Arkham here. We're not talking fricking the Joker.
[00:10:28] So, and they're just, it's a standard reasonable prison, whatever that means. And so another psych from the prison system said that what he basically ended up doing was what this guy called meatball stuff. You basically talk to the prisoners for a little while, make sure they're not totally crazy. That was his job.
[00:10:43] That's fine. Yeah, it's a job. You need to do it. You've got to kind of get an assay or initial assessment, but outside of the job, he would tout his unique insights into the criminal mind and say, look, because of this job, the shit I learned about criminals.
[00:10:54] Will: Who's he touting it to?
[00:10:56] Rod: Beyond on the street and beyond, including say, become a regular at the conferences of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. So he's mixing in the circles and saying, yeah, I'd talk to crims all the time and he does interviews them and chats with them and stuff. So this is in It was early 80s. So by 1987, he was telling a prosecutor for a particular case that he was one of maybe 10 or so criminal profilers, only 10 or so, trusted by the FBI. So, you know, he's moved up, doing well. He gives speeches like lust, arson, and rape, a factorial approach.
[00:11:31] Will: You're title's good, but your subheading, you know
[00:11:33] Rod: you're like. Lust, arsenal, rape, stats. Another one anger biting -the hidden impulse. Now we've all had that. Like I've sat in meetings where I've gone, I'm going to anger bite someone.
[00:11:45] Will: I've thought about it.
[00:11:48] Rod: So apparently his audience has really loved his entertaining rise style. And as one attendee at a 1989 conference of the Association of Police Surgeons of Great Britain. \
[00:11:58] Will: Police Surgeons?
[00:11:59] Rod: Police Surgeons. I only operate on cops.
[00:12:03] Will: Or is it cops that do operations? You're under arrest, liver.
[00:12:07] Rod: The Venn diagram is, I am a cop and I only operate on cops.
[00:12:10] Will: I don't understand how many of those there are. This sounds like a made up job.
[00:12:14] Rod: Well, it's england. They're all made up. They have nobilities.
[00:12:17] Will: Yeah, and they got villages called Thumpertybarswald Exactly, but still,
[00:12:24] Rod: So anyway, one person who was quoted as an amused attendee said his story had to be heard from his own mouth. You had to hear Walter himself. If someone else repeated his stories, it just wouldn't be the same. You need to hear it from the guy.
[00:12:36] Will: Yeah, cool. He was the one in front of the prison. Like he, you know, he interviewed Hannibal. He's right there.
[00:12:41] Rod: Yeah. It's like this podcast. If someone else read exactly what we were saying, it'd be different. So anyway, what was his style? He got married in 1963 when he was 20, but then divorced 10 months later because his wife cited mental cruelty. Oh, so this sounds like he might've been a bit of a cock.
[00:12:59] Will: I think he's not a nice person
[00:13:01] Rod: but smart people can be cocks.
[00:13:02] Will: We have talked about assholes on the show before. He could be well in the asshole whilst doing maybe something that's interesting.
[00:13:10] Rod: He's also described as a cadaverous chain smoker with an acid sense of humor and a hard to place vaguely English accent. And I didn't have a picture of him, but there are many of them out there. He is vampiric.
[00:13:20] He is so lean. Like he is gaunt almost. And he boasts about how he survived on cigarettes and cheeseburgers. So he smokes cools. He likes to sip a Chardonnay and apparently he was never photographed in anything or he's still alive, never photographed in anything but a dark suit.
[00:13:38] And according to the main source, a tiny smile, often curling at the corner of his mouth. So he was also known for what one source calls a colorful language. He knew how to give quote delicious cinematic quotes, and he cultivated his eccentricities for journalists and producers. He once yelled at a suspect," I'll chew your dick down so far you won't have enough left to fuck roadkill."
[00:14:02] Will: Like, okay, like, so, you probably can't yell that at a suspect? I don't know.
[00:14:07] Rod: Are you a cadaverous genius who exists on cigarettes and cheeseburgers
[00:14:11] Will: like, like what is the scenario where the rest of the people in the room, the courtroom, the classroom, just look at you and go.
[00:14:20] Rod: Thanks, Walt, we're going to ignore that. What do you do?
[00:14:26] Will: We still kind of need you here, Walt. We can't kick you out. So we need you, but can we just redact that? I'll chew your dick down so much. No, he's workshopped that. Night before he was like, I need an insult. Insult. Oh, you're going to have a tiny dick with roadkill. I'll chew. I'll chew. I'll chew. I'll chew your dick down.
[00:14:45] Rod: Road kill fucker. Close.
[00:14:49] Will: I'll chew your dick down. Yeah. It says something about you that it's like, that's what I'm going to do.
[00:14:55] Rod: Do you know how I'm going to get you? It involves chewing your dick.
[00:14:57] Will: It's a gnawing thing. I'm going to get a gnawing.
[00:15:04] Rod: I know I read that and thought I don't even know what to make of this.
[00:15:07] Will: It's not really an insult. It's not like you're a shit person.
[00:15:10] Rod: It's like, I'm going to do a weird, horrible thing to you so that you can't do a thing you've probably never wanted to do ever. So that you can't do something that probably almost no one in the world has ever even thought about yet yet done anyway.
[00:15:20] Another description of him from 2008, so a bit later, UK Telegraph. He is reluctant to reveal his age. Quote is, that's a state secret. I'm in sixth decade and of course I don't look like it. Okay. He's that skinny. He looks older. The reporter also was told by him, Oh, much of my work is highly confidential so my high profile stuff has been under the radar. It's in the shadows.
[00:15:40] Will: Yeah. That's like my girlfriend in Canada. All of my big cases, I won the Nobel prize in Canada, but it's a unique Nobel prize.
[00:15:46] Rod: You don't know about it. You wouldn't have published it. Cause you've got to be in the elite.
[00:15:50] Will: Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:50] Rod: And he also said, look, I'm always just a consultant because it gives me more freedom. But he says that they say all season, he's not keen on having his photo taken, but there is no other source nor anything else I saw that suggests that's true. Anyway, it's fair to say that he basically stood out and he was into it. So he's cultivating. But of course, being in a, an attention attracting lone wolf, not enough. Got to go further. Let's blow this shit up. So 89, 90, he's at an AAFS, the forensic society conference, and he meets forensic sculptor, Frank Bender
[00:16:20] Will: forensic sculptor. Fuck. Yes.
[00:16:23] Rod: I know.
[00:16:25] Will: And not to say, you know, you're art school people that couldn't make meaningful art. So you just, you know, do murder scenes. It's still fucking cool. Rodan did the thinker and the thinker getting murdered.
[00:16:35] Rod: Like disemboweler and what my stuff is so horrifying., It's impossible to understand. That my friends is art.
[00:16:40] Will: Oh my God. Forensic sculptor. Tell me more about this job.
[00:16:44] Rod: So apparently in the seventies, Bender, the forensic sculptor, he'd done a bunch of night classes doing painting. So he wasn't officially in the uni's in the art school. So he did night classes, but he wanted to be able to see as he put it in the round, like the three D's.
[00:16:56] Will: That's the sculptor. I want to see the front and the back. Exactly. The butt and front butt
[00:17:01] Rod: so he started going to sculpture classes as a result of that. He wanted to see things in the round, but there were no anatomy lessons available to these mere night students. So a friend of his who worked in a medical examiner's office said. Do you want to come in and sit on in some more autopsies? I want to sculpt. No anatomy lessons, autopsies.
[00:17:18] Will: I want to see people all the way around. The only way to see is autopsies.
[00:17:22] Rod: Dead people getting cut up.
[00:17:23] Will: It would be impossible to find another way to see people all the way around.
[00:17:26] Rod: In three dimensions. I know I've never seen one.
[00:17:30] Will: Like, you know, even if you go, all right, clothes obscure a little bit, but you can kind of look at a person like, I can see they have arms
[00:17:37] Rod: but he really wanted to see the person. So he says, I go to the morgue. My friend shows me around, body's been cut up and burnt. I had this one woman, her whole body was decomposed. They didn't know what she looked like or who she was. So the woman had been shot in the head. The bullet had smashed her skull open. Oh. Bender says to his friend as he puts it, just outta conversation, so he's having a chat. I reckon I could show you what that woman would look like. I could use a sculpture and recreate her features
[00:18:01] Will: based on evidence?
[00:18:02] Rod: No, based on using the structure of what's left and then kind of theorizing from there. Five months later, he does this, five months later, they identified the woman. She had gone to Philadelphia to collect money on a property deal that had gone bad, and she'd basically been mafia style executed by a contract killer. And it took another 20 years for this person to get caught, but because of his sculptures, we know who the fuck this is.
[00:18:26] Will: No, that's cool. All right. That's cool. That's cool.
[00:18:28] Rod: Apparently Bender had a gift for facial reconstruction so he was called to work more on these cases. He started to get used by the FBI, federal marshals, et cetera. And he was helping people find criminals. Like he was actually doing shit. So this is Bender. So Bender's met Walter at a conference and Bender goes, I'm going to introduce you to my buddy, Bill Fleischer.
[00:18:47] So Fleischer was already a big fan of the sculptor. And Fleischer himself. So he knew a great deal about murder was the quote. He'd been in the FBI in the early seventies and he worked in an area in Boston that was known as the combat zone. And later he was working on organized crime and he described the people he arrested as characters out of a B grade novel.
[00:19:06] So Bender, Walter and Fleischer will start hanging out and they hit it off. They loved each other. So they started, they cooked up this idea. They said, look, what we're going to do is pull together a bunch of like minded law enforcement types. And we'll meet and talk about murder regularly over lunch.
[00:19:25] The group needed a name, the Vidocq society, V I D O C Q Vidocq named after a guy called Eugene Francois Vidocq, he's a 17th century French criminal who turned into a detective and is considered the father of modern criminology. So at first I would meet for lunch, they'd go to Philadelphia restaurants or social clubs. They talk about historical and cold cases, murder related, always historical cold cases. So early members, they had jobs like customs agents, iRS, Internal Revenue Service Investigators, U. S marshals.
[00:19:53] Will: Oh so, anyone can join. Come on, bring your cold case. Let's have a chat. I get like following through a cold case. Damn, that's cool. It's fascinating. It's interesting. And the idea that you could potentially, oh, it's great.
[00:20:04] Rod: Well, I agree. I agree. So they got a lot of these sort of law ish people and some were a little less credible like they're into polygraphs and. Something called statement analysis. I don't know much about it, but not many had a lot of experience with actual murders, but they were at least in, you know, sort of related cognate fields. So they started talking about cold cases, but soon they start to talk about more recently unsolved murders and they thought maybe we could help catch killers.
[00:20:29] So profiling was popular, as we said, but the FBI didn't want to get a lot of media attention. So these guys kind of went, we don't mind. So they kind of filled this vacuum and they very quickly, they got some, you know, newspaper articles written about them and stuff. And it was very easy because the three founders were summarized like this.
[00:20:47] Walter was the chain smoking genius, Bender was the artist conspicuous among the suits in t shirt and jeans, Fleischer was the teddy bear G man prone to tearing up during presentations. So it's fucking crack, it's media pop culture crack, absolute crack. So of course then TV comes calling. So there's many examples, I'll just give you one.
[00:21:06] CBS, 48 hours. They filmed the society considering a particular case. So Zoia Assur, 27 year old who's found dead in the woods in New Jersey. Fiance is Ken Andronico, he's an ophthalmologist. Fiance said I don't think it was a suicide, I think she was murdered.
[00:21:21] And a friend of his said, I know who to go to help. So they go to the Vidocq Society. So Fleischer gets up at the meeting of the society and says, I'm going to, I'm going to present you the facts. So he presents the facts to them. And this is while it's being filmed by CBS's 48 hours. So the host of the show, a guy called Schlesinger, apparently he races around the rooms immediately after the facts are being presented. He wants to solicit theories. So he runs up to them and says, murder or suicide while they're eating their lunch and a whole bunch of them, they blurt out through their mouth, murder, definitely. And Schlesinger says, you know, with delight, apparently we haven't even gotten to dessert yet and they already know it's a murder. Like how fucking tops is this?
[00:21:56] Will: They don't know it's a murder. They're just saying it over the chips. I mean,
[00:22:00] Rod: So Walter then tells to turns to the camera and says, look, I think Andronico might've been himself the killer. He's playing that high risk game of, catch Me if you Can.
[00:22:10] Will: Told you. It was the boyfriend. It was a boyfriend. It was a boyfriend. Like, like, I'm sorry. But 99% of cold cases.
[00:22:15] Rod: Yeah, it was the loved one. But of course the problem with that was and Andronico was in Florida at the time of her death in New Jersey.
[00:22:22] Will: Oh shit.
[00:22:23] Rod: Oops. That didn't stop the show from airing. So his patients, he's an ophthalmologist. They began canceling their appointments. His medical practice was almost destroyed, even though he was never, ever at all charged with anything. And a retired detective from New Jersey, from that actual County said, look, the Vidocq society never looked at the file. They never had any statements. They never had any medical records.
[00:22:47] Will: It really is like, you can imagine, you know, the best version of these, you know, the modern podcasters is like we go out there and we solve a cold case, you know, we dig up old facts. We put our investigative eye to this. That's never been done before. And there's clearly good examples out there, but you can imagine the other version where a bunch of people just go, oh, I reckon
[00:23:06] Rod: what you mean is, all the other versions.
[00:23:08] Will: Well, yeah, exactly. And just go, yeah, it was this. It was that.
[00:23:13] Rod: This one must be true because it's got truth in it. And the final call from the detective was, I thought it was preposterous. But so what? Fame was growing. That the society was getting famous and Walter is, you know, the man was at the center of all the fame. They continued to meet and then make pronouncements and Walter's career as a profiler grew and grew and grew. Well, fast forward to 2009. So there's an author, a guy called Michael Capuzzo.
[00:23:37] So he was given a apparently unusually large advance to write a book at 800, 000 advanced to write a book because he'd written a book on sharks or something before and people thought it was pretty good. So he gets commissioned to write this book on the Vidocq society and it's called the murder room : The heirs of Sherlock Holmes gathered to solve the world's most perplexing cold cases. And it was published in 2011 the blurb that I talked about at the beginning which was from the publishers led by a figure who seems to be a contemporary Sherlock Holmes It added in the book also Walter's reflection on how Scotland Yard would refer to him as the living Sherlock Holmes. So the book sold or has sold at least a hundred thousand copies and includes pearls about Walter I love these like he is the angel of vengeance. And another one.
[00:24:27] Will: I don't want to be described even positively as the angel of vengeance
[00:24:31] Rod: I'm not going to lie a little bit, but what would I have to do to earn it? That's the part I don't want. So another description that came from this book was he was the, Walter is the ferryman polling parents of murdered children through the blood tides of woe. It's pretty sweet. So the book repeated and expanded on many entries from Walters resume, but it seemed some of these entries may not have been quite true.
[00:24:58] Will: What? No. Why would you tell me about someone who's...
[00:25:01] Rod: It's possible. Here's a big call. This one, I'm going straight to some of the big guns. This is a nuclear. So in the book, it repeats Walters claim that he solved the notorious 1986 murder of Anita Cobby, which is a famous Australian murder. She was a former beauty queen who was, I'm sorry, but gang raped and nearly beheaded. So there's a detective Ian Kennedy who led the investigation.
[00:25:21] Never heard of Walter at all. Never heard of him. Better yet that he solved it. There's another one case of a murder of a guy called Paul Bernard Allain. So this was brought to the Vidocq society by Paul Allain's boss, Antoine LeHavre. So Walter quickly decided that LeHavre had actually, the boss, had actually murdered Elaine because of a homosexual affair gone wrong. Oh, I know what happened. They're actually gay.
[00:25:47] Will: This is the version of profiling where you can go, you know, to a cobbler, the world is a shoe. Yeah. And if you're like, it's all repressed gay sex everywhere. Every single murder is just going to be a repressed version. It's like, you know...
[00:26:01] Rod: It's like you can read through my notes. So, yeah, he said that's what it was, but of course it turns out. So the reporter in this article I've been drawing on, Elaine and LeHavre don't seem to have appeared in any legal documents or public recorded databases at all. So it could be the Capuzzo, the author has changed the names or Walter just made the whole thing up.
[00:26:20] So this links to what you've kind of flagged by accident, a possible, let's call it a strong interest of Walters. He seemed to have a bit of a preoccupation with linking murders to sex crimes or homosexuality.
[00:26:31] Will: Yeah. And clearly some are,
[00:26:33] Rod: Definitely some are. Yeah. Maybe just had a problem with homosexuality in general. It's hard to say. So for example, 2002, a couple of Texas police officers, they asked for the society's help. They had a cold case. So there's a report from 2003 that said that Walter had a private conversation after the lunch with these two officers and he said, Oh, it's definitely a case of homosexual panic, which is one man kills the other one after a tryst.
[00:26:56] Will: I'm feeling patterns.
[00:26:57] Rod: I don't know what you're talking about. This panic theory seems to have come from one of Walter's papers, Homosexual Panic and Murder. Which is a case study based on interviews he had with with an inmate who murdered a dude and then cut off one of the dude's testicles. The whole paper is based on that one case. The guy murdered another guy cut off one of his balls. Homosexual panic. So one of the Texas cops says, look, it seemed like it didn't matter what the case was. He just thought it was something to do with sexual divancy
[00:27:23] Will: but the homosexual panic, like, I don't know what places this is in, but people have raised this as a defense if suddenly the person you're having sex with, you realize is of different gender or is trans or something like that. And there's a panic defense and you're like, Oh, you're allowed to murder them. It's like, fuck you're not, it's a murder.
[00:27:40] Rod: What we know for sure is that shame is a bizarrely powerful emotion. Sure. It can do wacky things to people.
[00:27:44] Will: But yeah, it is. And okay, so you, a bit of your brain snapped. Sorry. You still go to jail. There are people that have used this as a defense where they're like, no, I didn't.
[00:27:54] Rod: I freaked out because I suddenly realized I was banging a dude. Oh, you should have killed him then. You're right. Off you go. But so the cops said, you know, he'd seem to bring all these cases around to this and they disagreed with that.
[00:28:05] But he also said that Walter didn't help them at all and they didn't solve the case. In a testimony about a different murder, Richard Walter asserts the homosexual, not really a man. He is, I quote, a discount person.
[00:28:17] Will: What is a man?
[00:28:19] Rod: Well, not a homosexual according to this profiler and then he goes on from this. He's a discount person. Therefore. This is a direct quote discount person. Yeah, you get five for a buck. Therefore he says if I need to be great if I need to satisfy my ego if I need to satisfy my needs for power If I need to surmount If I need to have a demonstration of my power, well, what better way to do it?
[00:28:42] Okay. Murder. It seems like maybe he has a thing, not, that's not the only thing he has. He's got a lot of things, but this seems to be one of them. So everything seems to come back to sexual deviancy. And I read something that suggested of the hundred or so papers he claims to have written, I'm not sure if he did or he didn't at least a quarter have something to do with this sort of stuff.
[00:29:02] Anyway, so this is all coming out in the book, the murder room book. What did the co founders of the Vidocq Society think? Bender, the sculptor, There are parts of the book that I know are not true. He died in July 2011, so we don't know much more. We're not sure about Fleischer because he was apparently hard to interview, but it seems pretty clear that both of them thought Capuzzo, the author, took a lot of artistic license, let's just say, but Walter didn't give a shit.
[00:29:28] He went off on a nationwide book tour with the author and he was in his element. It was going great. And as there's a great quote here that says Walter says to the listeners of I assume his radio, there's a price to pay, but I'm willing to pay for doing this kind of job. Capuzzo, the author, has not written another book since, and today he publishes a sub stack promoting vaccine conspiracy theories, so that went well for him.
[00:29:49] So let's go back to the beginning. Drake. The original Robbie drake, the original trial. So in 1995, Drake was decades into his sentence.
[00:29:56] Will: So he was convicted in the 80s
[00:29:58] Rod: early 80s. So 1995, he's still got a lot left, but he was at, from prisoners, best he could, digging into Walter, his resume, his background, et cetera.
[00:30:05] Will: Oh, okay. So he's doing research on the profiler.
[00:30:07] He's having
[00:30:08] Rod: a rummage, he's having a rummage. He's got a wife who helped from the outside who helps request documents, who also got in touch with former employers. So it became very clear Walter had purged himself in many ways in the proceedings of this trial. So the one I kicked off with, I started with his list of credentials. So he claimed at the LA counters medical office that he'd done 5, 000 murder cases. Huh. Not one.
[00:30:31] Will: What? What do you mean? No. What?
[00:30:33] Rod: Just not true. Just not true.
[00:30:34] Will: Reviewed. Reviewed means you looked at.
[00:30:37] Rod: This is where he was doing the test tube cleaning. He said he was an adjunct lecturer at Northern, at a Northern Michigan University. At the time, at least, he'd spoken there informally, maybe only just once. Which is not the same as an adjunct lecturer. He talked about his criminology papers. At least at the time he'd not published anything.
[00:30:53] Well, served as an expert witness at hundreds of trials. At the time, it looked like he'd maybe testified in two cases, one about simple chain of evidence and one in a civil suit against a car company. So it's not TOPS.
[00:31:06] Will: Oh, okay. All right.
[00:31:08] Rod: Not TOPS. So Drake appeals, of course, he says, this guy's a fucking maniac, but the court said, no, we deny it. We're not going to even hear it. I don't know why. So his wife then goes on and sends a dossier, 13 pages to the American Academy of Forensic Science. It says here's all the horseshit about Walter. So officials at the organization had some internal memories and they said, look, yeah, we can see that he padded his resume, but look, we don't want to get too deeply into this so the chairman of the ethics committee wrote, we really do have to worry about public appearances.
[00:31:36] Will: Yeah. So look, it's better to keep it all quiet.
[00:31:40] Rod: So 1996, they write a letter back to Drake's wife, the chair writes this and he says, look, most of the issues do not involve the Academy's code of ethics.
[00:31:48] Will: No. Our ethics says make stuff up and that'll be fine. So long as people that look pretty guilty go to jail.
[00:31:54] Rod: Yeah. Look at him. Yeah. Clearly bites people after you stabbed them.
[00:31:57] Will: I'm still not with this drake guy that he did some stabbing after the shooting that might have been an accident and stuff some bodies into the boot, like
[00:32:06] Rod: stay with me. So the committee, this is the final line. The committee has concluded unanimously that there was no misrepresentation and therefore no code violation. So no, he's fine. So it gets weirder though. So even though the district attorney in this case with Robby Drake insisted in a bunch of memos that he was suspicious of Walter.
[00:32:26] He said, Oh, look no. He's this guy's dodgy. Then he learned about the Robby Drake case and he resolved not to rely on him. So he heard about this. He went, no, I'm not going to rely on him, but he still apparently parroted walter's entire theory in his closing arguments is like, no, this guy's dodgy, I've heard about him, but then he still just did exactly what he said. Yeah. I'm going to use it anyway. And also, and you kind of flagged this, it didn't help that like Drake actually had killed two people. Like he had actually fucking killed them.
[00:32:51] Will: Yeah. Yeah. But it could have been, yeah, look, it could have been different ways that killing happened.
[00:32:56] Rod: It could have been, but it's still like, Oh, you actually kill people. And so in the public mind, juries, et cetera, they're Oh, so Drake kept fighting, of course, even though that didn't work. 2003. Federal judge after a bunch of stuff wrote that Walter, the witness, was a charlatan. His testimony was, medically speaking, nonsense.
[00:33:16] Balls, mate. New trial. Prosecutors brought in new techniques. So they got a technique for analyzing bullet trajectories. And they looked at that and went, okay, let's look at the bullet trajectories. It appears from that, that Drake was actually closer to the car than they first thought. So he probably did know the people inside.
[00:33:32] Will: Wildly. Like a long time after the fact to be doing that. But yeah,
[00:33:36] Rod: well, he called for it. This is so 2009. They said, look, this is
[00:33:39] Will: 1981 when it happened. Yeah.
[00:33:41] Rod: Yeah. 2010, a jury convicted Drake again of the murders. So he definitely exposed Walter as a fraud. That was unambiguous. He was a fraud, but the judge said, look, yeah, this guy was terrible, but you definitely did this.
[00:33:54] So his sense was extended by another 10 years. A different TV show, 2020, there was a segment where they came into town, into the town when this happened and the guy the producer said, look, when you show up in a town with a couple of thousand people with a bunch of cameras and stuff, it has impact and it's Oh, maybe we had an influence.
[00:34:11] Anyway, later on, a few years later, another court says Drake's conviction was bullshit because of irrelevant and prejudicial evidence to do with the bite marks and stuff. So third hearing 2014, Drake goes, fuck it. I'm going to plead to reduce charges. Like you're right. I did some bad things. And he was released because he'd had spent a bunch of time there.
[00:34:30] Will: Oh, finally he agreed to it.
[00:34:31] Rod: He'd done some murders, but for reasons that you acknowledge, well. You've done 30 years in jail. Yeah. Off you go, champ. So, but this led to a bunch of other cases because of the Drake thing, a bunch of other cases that Walter had testified in were revisited as you would expect.
[00:34:43] So as of at least this year, at least three murder convictions, which are based a lot on Walter's testimony have been overturned. And there's probably more, like, there's so much more to this story than we can tell in one episode. Like it's fucking rich and crazy. So we're kind of left with a question. Why did Walter do it?
[00:35:00] Apparently money was not the motive. It wasn't about cash because they say, look. As it was put in this main article, his lifestyle had some flourishes, he slept in an antique Chinese bed. He played Tchaikovsky on a 1926 Chickering Grand Piano.
[00:35:14] Will: That's cool. And then smoked a lot of Durries and ate the cheeseburgers
[00:35:18] Rod: and drank the Chardonnay.
[00:35:19] Will: Cheeseburger, Chardonnay and cools. It's not an expensive lifestyle.
[00:35:24] Rod: It's not. And apparently he lived pretty frugally. He drank bottom shelf wine was the quote. Crappy cars. He didn't live anywhere fancy. So it seems that it was about being egotistical, motivated to be noticed. So he loved to play the role of genius profiler.
[00:35:41] And basically people say he cannot be in a social setting where he's not the center of attention, said one of the longtime members of the society. At meetings, apparently he would always speak last and he would render his judgments. Let me tell you what I think he'd bring it on down from the mountain. Why did he keep getting away with it though? Cause it's fucking wacky. There were suspicions all the way along, but people didn't do anything.
[00:36:02] Will: People want to hear this stuff?
[00:36:04] Rod: I kind of feel like that might be part of it. One source, the cases, it's not about an imposter who goes undetected, who's close. A lot of people saw signs, but there was little incentive to do anything. Yeah. Cause like, why do you fucking bother?
[00:36:15] Will: And in many of these, the people that a lot of people saw as the bad guys getting put in a way.
[00:36:21] Rod: Like Drake did kill people. He did. Yeah. He did. So it's like, Oh, it's harder to go, you bastard wrongfully convicted. So no, he was just wrongfully sentenced.
[00:36:30] Will: Yeah. Whether it was a sex crime or he was just murdery. Like it's two different types of murder here, but he did kill people.
[00:36:38] Rod: And there's a great quote, a retired FBI agent who was working with the behavioral science unit that one way back. So they said they once invited Walter to Quantico and ask him questions about inmate behaviors. And the quote is the narcissism I think was obvious. He really thought he knew a lot. The agents learned little and he was not invited back. He goes on. Richard Walter is largely a poser. What I say about Richard is he's an expert at being an expert at playing one and convincing people that he is an expert at being an expert.
[00:37:10] Will: No one does that.
[00:37:11] Rod: No, I would never. So where is he now? As recently as 2019, he was still apparently available for work as a profiler. He was definitely active at the end of 2022 in some sense. So in October last year, he spoke at the North Carolina Homicide Investigators Conference.
[00:37:27] And then the author of this article that I've drawn on a lot, which is actually called the case of the fake Sherlock Richard Walter was held as a genius criminal profiler. How did he get away with fraud for so long? So the author said he tried to contact him to interview him for this piece, which was written earlier this year, all requests were denied and in very weird language.
[00:37:46] So here it goes, you have earned one's distrust that merits severing any contact with you in the future and under no circumstances would himself cooperate in your suspicious activities.
[00:37:56] Will: Would himself?
[00:37:57] Rod: Himself. Writing in the second person.
[00:37:59] Will: Second person is weird. Very weird. Like, that's the weirdest. First person, third person, they're all fine.
[00:38:04] Rod: Second person. You're a fucking psychotic. So, he may be, this is at the end of last year. He may be in some sense active right now and today.
[00:38:15] Will: Can we get him on? Richard Walter? If you're listening. Let's have a chat.
