Hi, I am Elle, and this is episode 2 of Quid Pro Quo, your friendly neighborhood forensics-like podcast, working to better the world through the power of morbid curiosity. The Quid Pro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes. Listener discretion is advised. Today's episode, Fool Me Once, part 1, true crime and craft time.
I am a multitasker with a true crime television addiction. I do a lot of handcrafts in my spare time, so I like to put on shows which I don't have to watch really closely, or stop much to fiddle with the remote. I prefer binge watching true crime TV series for this, but watching is kind of a misnomer as it's fairly rare that I even look up. I've well exceeded my lifetime share of 90's-tastic Canadian-produced crime reconstructions, and I already know the plot of every episode anyway.
It's kind of like playing clue or watching Game of Thrones. Someone is going to be murdered, it's just a question of who, and where, and with what. Earlier this fall, I realized I had burned through every binge watchable show on Netflix and Amazon Prime, so I started digging through the documentaries, which is where I came across, a wise fool from TH Walker Productions. After Byline calls it, a documentary examining the true events where four teens made a calculated choice to bury a couple alive.
Death Row inmate Michael Jackson shares the premeditated details of this heinous crime. The twist at the end may challenge everything you believe. The primary site for the documentary is the Facebook page, a wise fool doc, and they provide various links for purchase and streaming options there. While I watched, it occurred to me that the twist at the end challenged nothing about what I believe.
If anything, it represents a perfect example of something I had specifically been taught in my psychological schooling. My reaction to this documentary was so strong it is directly responsible for the existence of this podcast. The majority of the film seemed to be the typical after-school special fare, using a specific crime as an example to warrantines away from high-stakes lifestyle choices that lead to parasitic crime. Since the production company has a heavy focus on faith-based programming, the end of the documentary switches to a discussion of the current spiritual status of the acknowledged ringleader of the crime, Michael James Jackson.
This Michael Jackson was born the same year as the album Thriller and now sits on Death Row into Valkown, Florida. He has a tattoo on his neck with the word wise, hence a wise fool. The film primarily uses interview footage featuring Michael himself and a woman named Pranda, who is the daughter of the victim, Carol Sumner. The interviews also include Michael's co-conspirator Bruce Nixon, and finally Michael's grandmother.
They focus in on Michael's culpability in the crime, his initial denials of involvement, the devastating aftermath for the families of both Murdered and Murderer and Jackson and Nixon's reactions to prison life. Part 2, The Murderer. The rough-case details are that Michael James Jackson and his girlfriend of the time, Tiffany Cole, roped acquaintances Bruce Nixon and Alan Wade into a premeditated plot to abduct, extort, and kill a retired and severely ill Jacksonville couple named Reggie and Carol Sumner. The attackers managed to get the Sumner's financial information and then tried to kill them.
When poisoning them with their own medication didn't work, the force them pushed the couple into a whole-day hit-dog in the Everglades several days beforehand and buried them alive. After leaving the woods, they began to drain the couple's bank accounts via the stolen financial information, the bankroll a multi-day binge of partying and drugs. Michael's family noticed the couple's disappearance and the suspicious financial activity and the case eventually blew open with a confession and cooperation of co-conspirator Bruce Nixon. All four were convicted and Nixon was the only one to escape the death penalty due to his cooperation with the police.
I'm not going to rehash the finer details of the case any further. It's a well-known case and the presentation in the documentary is pretty straightforward. Though notably cold-blooded, these details are not actually my focus. Part 3, My Observations.
I was pretty well on board with the documentary for the first two-thirds. Straight up to the point where the focus switched from detailing Jackson's poor choices and manipulative behavior to discussing his post-incarceration, spiritual redemption. The filmmaker as well as Jackson's grandmother and even Carol Sumner's daughter had all concluded that Jackson had found God and that, quote, this was not a jailhouse conversion because he had nothing better to do. But of course, I think that is exactly what it was.
I will even go as far to say that not only does he have nothing better to do, but for someone with his apparent worldview stuck in his position, it is in fact the very best thing he could do. I actually am all for the idea that someone who regrets their actions could choose to change their path in order to redeem themselves. But there are a number of factors about this case that make me extremely dubious that atonement is Michael's ultimate goal. This was not a crime of passion or a momentary whim.
This is a person who had blown his second and third chances to escape a life of crime. He masterminded this crime from beginning to end in a matter of months after parole from a recent set of felony charges. When Michael decided he wanted more money to party, he picked out a pair of particularly helpless victims who had opened their home to him as a guest in good faith. He decided that they were going to die, recruited others to help with the grunt work and prepped a remote dump site for the bodies which would not have been found without Nixon's confession.
He then extracted financial information from his victims, participated in an exceptionally cruel double murder, and finally helped one of his conspirators call the victims bank to a lay suspicion about the strange withdrawals. This was an extensive multi-part plan. As a result, he lost his freedom and exhausted his appeals. He was in jail, he was going to stay there, and now he knew for sure he was going to die there.
He is on death row and all he has left to control in his life is the way he is regarded by the people central to his last days. Part 4. The Psychology Please note that I am not diagnosing Michael James Jackson. I did not find much discussion of his mental status since his psychological state was not relevant to the trial itself or discussed in the sentencing portion.
There was no question of fitness to stand trial and the insanity defense doesn't figure into cases where the defendant denies being involved in the first place. I don't know whether he has been diagnosed as having anti-social personality disorder, and since I do not have access to him or his records, I do not have the necessary tools to diagnose him. But I can say that this specific set of interviews perfectly displays a pair of hallmark psychological symptoms known as glib, superficial charm, and shallow affect. These terms are commonly associated with anti-social personality disorder, which is the proper term for the diagnosis most people are thinking of when they use the term psychopath.
There is a lot of debate around the term psychopath, but it's widely familiar and has been in use for a long time in the field, so I'm leaving it B for the moment. I promise we'll come back to it in a future episode with some definite attention to the BBC's current version of Sherlock, the high functioning sociopath. The Hair Psychopathy Checklist Revise, or PCLR, is one of the standard and likely most influential modern measure of the traits we commonly call psychopathic. This test was developed by Dr.
Robert Hare in the 1980s and calls for a semi-structured interview and careful review of records to rate them on a series of 20 symptoms. These symptoms include factors such as pathological line, cunning and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt, as well as our symptom focus here, lip and superficial charm, and shallow affect. The average, perfectly normal person may display some of these symptoms, but in order to get a diagnosis, you have to display a significant pattern of these symptoms over your lifetime and it has to disrupt your function in society. In short, as much as the media has popularized the idea of the psychopathic next door, it's really not enough to be a jerk.
You have to have a long-term history showing that you are poisonous, self-interested, actively destructive jerk. Again, diagnosis isn't the focus here, but I think that understanding these symptoms will be particularly helpful when looking at Jackson's words and intentions in this documentary. Glib and superficial charm have been described by Hare as the tendency to be smooth, engaging, charming, slick and verbally facile. Shallow affect is a bit of a tricky term to sum up as it has many facets, but here I'm focusing on the idea of somebody having a limited range or depth of feelings.
This combination creates what you could think of as the evil twin of self-confidence. A healthy, self-confident person knows that they have what it takes to earn and keep your trust and approval, seeks these connections out and continues to act in keeping with that knowledge in order to maintain that relationship. In contrast, a person displaying this type of psychopathic behavior often presents as a very charming person, but there's no substance to it. They will say anything to keep the surface interaction going the way they want because, frankly, they don't really care how it ends.
They will not get tripped up by the anxieties and fears related with social missteps, and so they come across as extremely self-assured and they even be dynamic and compelling in the short term. They are not concerned that they can't back up what they are offering, and they don't care that the fallout of their actions may hurt you or turn you against them. Your opinion of them is only as important as what they can get out of you. At best, they are taking what they can get and getting the hell out of dodge.
At worst, they will continually test you to see just how far they can push your goodwill before you push back. They are very good at talking the talk, but in the long term they don't even bother to walk the walk, and thus tend to leave behind a long wake of disappointment. 6. Michael From the St.
Augustine record, May 4, 2007 Nixon and admitted drug user said he went along because he needed money and checks and promise they could get away with it. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. I listened to him because he was the one with the plan. Michael displays this faked self-confidence in spades.
He has the quick, easy, disarming pattern of a salesman. He is animated, affable, makes all efforts to pleasantly engage with the people he is talking to and has a quick answer for any question. His interviews with police are not surly or argumentative. They are closer to the shocked and hurt denial of a child who swears up and down that they did not eat any cookies.
Michael's one consistently referenced personality trait is a willingness to twist words to get what he wants. The victims explicitly discuss Michael before and after his inversion. There's an entire several minute long montage of people talking about how deceitful he has been throughout his life. Jackson's grandmother says, the flim flam is what I call it.
Jackson himself says, I was so arrogant I actually thought I could con all of these people. Rhonda, daughter of the murder victim, Carol, says of him initially. He's a manipulative person who just thought he could do whatever he wanted to do and get away with it. She discusses her shock at his complete lack of emotion during the trial, even when faced with the pictures of his victims.
But then he has a literal come to the light dream and finds religion. Jackson clearly knows how to say the right words. He sounds contrite about his actions and expressive about his conversion. But then again, he always did.
His body language and patter is not one iota different from all of the police interviews where he acts shocked and hurt and swears up and down that he was utterly innocent of burying a disabled couple alive. The documentary shows this footage of Michael both before and after conversion. And I suppose the idea was to show us how much he's changed. But all I could see was the clear parallels in his behavior.
In every single interview with him, there is no eye contact, there is no emotional connection, there is no warmth. There is absolutely no expressed emotion of guilt regardless of what he's saying about his guilt. He is smiling, fast talking and matter of fact regardless of the subject. He says, I would give my very life to bring theirs back but that's not going to happen.
Easy words considering how little he has to lose in saying them. Michael has no options for his own freedom left, so now I think he's taking what he can get and what he can get is sympathy. What better solace is there for a manipulative person who doesn't actually feel guilty about what they've done than to make the very people he has hurt the most actually feel bad about his punishment and flock to him in solidarity and companionship in his last days. His grandmother who raised him as if he were her own child said, and it took me a long time to see this because I thought it was another flim flam, another con, and I'm happy to say it isn't.
She tearfully goes on to say, I knew the Michael before and I know the Michael after and he's a different person, a person I'll never get to bring home. Rhonda who lost her own mother and stepfather to this man says, I know that when he gets to go to heaven, mom and Reggie are going to be there to welcome him in. He's my brother. And Michael certainly seems to be flourishing under this tension.
He says, as far as forgiving myself, I can say that yes, I've forgiven myself, but I won't forget it, but I think that's a healthy thing. With Miss Rhonda forgiving me, that was huge. That was more than anything that I ever expected. Part 6, my conclusions.
I find the sheer audacity of Michael's deceit to be staggering. I was left feeling intensely sad and frustrated for all of the people who lost so much because of this man, only to be manipulated by him yet again. Michael claims to have found religion, but what if instead what he has found is an awfully convenient way to shift the focus away from his wrongdoings. His very punishment for hurting these people now becomes a reason for them to support him, and still worse when he is executed it will be yet another devastating loss for them.
And all it takes to achieve this is another easy lie in a long string of all two easy lies. The classic phrase is full me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me. I do understand the dilemma in this. What do you do when your worldview asks you to look for the best in someone, but what you are faced with is the very worst.
Let's go back to that quote about forgiving and forgetting for a moment. In light of what we have seen of Michael, does that really sound like the contrite words of a man who has changed his ways and embraced his guilt? Or does it make more sense when you reframe it in context of the rest of his actions as the cavalier words of a man who has demonstrated a continuous tendency to use the people around him? Is this a wise fool, freed by his newfound faith, or a trapped manipulator jumping at the ability to pull this one last flim flam?
To make the people he has actively trapped in this tragedy inclined to be that much nicer to him. And someone who has demonstrated a text book example of what it is to have depraved indifference and who loses nothing in telling you what you want to hear suddenly starts saying things which contradict everything you know about them, which sound too good to be true, and which tie you emotionally to his well-being, it's worth it to keep your guard up and ask if what you are doing is really any different. That said, remember that this is not a diagnosis. This is an observation of behaviors which I feel are the perfect example of a particular aspect of a diagnosis.
This is my own interpretation of how behaviors which are viewed as positive change by one set of people can be functionally reframed as just another selfish act in the light of a person's history. I can only hope for their sake that this conversion is real, it plays out as best it can, and that it gives the people now forced to move in parallel with Michael James Jackson. So much needed peace. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, my reaction to this documentary was the irritating little bit of grit around which this entire podcast is built.
I ended up chatting about my impression with friends and writing a review for the film. At that point it finally hit me that though I had not done anything meaningful with my site degree in many years, it had never been far from my heart. I had been interested in the idea of podcasting recently, but could not come up with a topic that really sang to me. Those forensic sick years are clearly still grinding and this documentary provided the Eureka moment to combine that long-term calling with my new interest in podcasting.
If you have watched this documentary, are familiar with the case, just want to weigh in, or if you have other questions about true crime and forensic psych, seek me out at quid, pro, quo, cast on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, at the dot com and wherever fine internet are sold. I am currently the most active on Twitter. Quid Pro Quo is now available on iTunes and Stitcher and should be on Google Play by the time you hear these words. Your ratings, reviews and shares are greatly appreciated.
Writing and editing of Quid Pro Quo by Elle. All rights reserved.