Donald Harvey

And Larry Eiler buried four of his 23 victims under a barn marked with an inverted pentagram.

Nurse Donald Harvey, suspected of the deaths of 47 patients, admitted to a fascination with black magic.

Leonard Lake, who had teamed up with Charles Ng for a series of torture murders, was affiliated with a witch's coven.

One killer targeted homeless men, wringing his victims with a circle of salt.

And Larry Eyler buried four of his twenty-three victims under a barn marked with an inverted pentagram.

Nurse Donald Harvey, suspected of the deaths of forty-seven patients, admitted to a fascination with black magic.

Leonard Lake, who had teamed up with Charles Ng for a series of torture murders, was affiliated with a witch's coven.

One killer targeted homeless men, ringing his victims with a circle of salt.

I could not agree more.

John Douglas, one of my mentors and one of the founders of the criminal profiling program at the FBI, discussed a similar killer, a hospital orderly named Donald Harvey, who claimed mercy as his motive, in Douglas's book The Killer Across the Table.

In Douglas's opinion, medical killers are among the most numerically devastating serial killers precisely because they hide in plain sight where death is ordinary.

Moreover, Douglas dismantles the mercy claim as post-talk rationalization and concludes that the true driver of this kind of killer was power and control over life and death, exercised by a man who felt powerless everywhere else.

And Larry Eiler buried four of his 23 victims under a barn marked with an inverted pentagram.

Nurse Donald Harvey, suspected of the deaths of 47 patients, admitted to a fascination with black magic.

Leonard Lake, who had teamed up with Charles Ng for a series of torture murders, was affiliated with a witch's coven.

One killer targeted homeless men, wringing his victims with a circle of salt.

Our attention continues to be drawn to them.

people like donald harvey who lay it all out and tell the whole story for the world to hear don't tend to draw sustained interest or not the kind of interest that someone like gacy or bundy would and You know, all of those killers are manipulators.

They're liars.

They work hard at curating a public persona because it makes it possible for them to fly under the radar and continue to commit murders.

Dr. Jeffrey Smalden has spent five decades exploring some of the darkest corners of the criminal mind.

As a forensic psychologist, he has interacted with some of the most notorious killers in American history, including Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Donald Harvey.

Now he's sharing those experiences in his new memoir, That Beast Was Not Me, One Forensic Psychologist, Five Decades of Conversations with Killers.

Dr. Smaldon joins us to take us inside those encounters, what he learned from coming face to face with people capable of extreme violence, and the unusual path that led him to a career in forensic psychology.

Definitely.

I'm glad you made it out of there safely.

Let's talk about Donald Harvey.

I do.