BOOK CLUB W
OVER his 30-year police and forensic psychology career, Dr Kris Mohandie has come face-to-face with kidnappers, serial killers, stalkers, and terrorists. Drawing on his expertise, Dr Mohandie analyses the thought processes that motivate the most dangerous people who have ever walked among us.
This is the first-hand account of his work, covering shocking cases like the Columbine shooting and the O.J. Simpson case.
OJ. SIMPSON
O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson had divorced in the early 1990s after he pleaded no contest to a domestic battery charge. Nicole sought out police at the time, saying Simpson had hit her, kicked her, and threatened to kill her. She said she had suffered beatings and emotional abuse for years at the hands of the former football great. It was finally enough. But over the ensuing years, Simpson couldn’t let the relationship go.
Everything culminated on the night of June 12, 1994.
Nicole’s friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, had just arrived at her home to return glasses that had been left at the restaurant he worked at, when an unknown assailant ambushed them. Both were stabbed to death viciously outside her Brentwood, California, condominium.
At 8:30 in the morning on Friday, June 17, 1994, police called Robert Shapiro, one of O.J. Simpson’s attorneys. They said his client needed to surrender by 11:00 a.m. to face murder charges. But Simpson wasn’t ready to turn himself in.
The time came and went, and he was now labelled a fugitive. What happened next is among the most surreal moments in criminal history: the white Bronco chase, broadcast live on television stations around the world as news helicopters followed Simpson’s car on a wild ride across Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, with police cars with flashing lights close behind. I was the on-call psychologist for the LAPD tasked with responding to barricades and consulting with the negotiation team but was unaware of what was happening at the time.
At home in Pasadena when it was all going down, I was aggravated that the rock-and-roll music I was listening to on the radio kept being interrupted by news of some freeway pursuit. Then I realised the news was about O.J. Simpson.
I called the SWAT headquarters and asked if we were being called in to help. I was told to go to Simpson’s home. Simpson was despondent, armed with a handgun, and threatening suicide in the Bronco. I slipped on a bulletproof vest and was escorted through the backyard past two fullsize statues of Simpson. SWAT officer Pete Weireter was already negotiating with Simpson from the doorway of the residence. I slipped in beside him and validated the themes. Simpson was worried about his reputation being damaged, his loss of status. I could see the shiny gun held to his head... I suggested we use what we had, the crowds: “Look at all these people. They still love you.”
A short time later he surrendered, collapsing safely into an officer’s arms, deflated. He wanted to use the restroom, call his mom, and get something to drink. All of which happened.
But it took some time to get him the drink. I learned a short time later that was because one of the cops was looking through the fridge for orange juice.
“O.J., have some orange juice.” Juice for “The Juice.” Cop humour. Gotta love it.
COLUMBINE
“Isn’t it fun to get the respect we’re going to deserve? We don’t give a s**t because we’re going to die doing it.”
It was a chilling postscript left behind on videos recorded in the weeks leading up to what would become a horrendous watershed event in American history – the Columbine
High School massacre on April 20, 1999.
Seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had prepared for months. They stockpiled firearms and ammunition. They made crude bombs from gasoline, propane tanks, and metal pipes. They would be ignored as outcasts no more. They live – and die – in infamy.
“Directors will be fighting over this story. I know we’re gonna have followers because we’re so f ***** g God-like,” Klebold said in one of the videos... Thankfully, I don’t think any directors did.
Harris and Klebold shared these fantasies with each other, bonded by a phenomenon Dr. J. Reid Meloy refers to as “clandestine excitement” – the thrill of a forbidden secret, another layer of control woven into the power-driven idea of “If you only knew.” Their only hope was to achieve immortality through violence and death.