Original subtitles

[police siren wailing]

[man 1 speaking]

[man 2 speaking]

[man 3 speaking]

[man 4] The thing inside of me, it's like...

The appetite.

It's like a wolf that's...

feeling hunger.

[news anchor] A North Dakota Highway Patrol investigation continues

into a fatal crash on I-94.

Officials say 38-year-old John Bridges was driving this van

when it collided with the overpass support column.

First responders arrived.

The passenger, 40-year-old Lee Clay, dead at the scene.

Bridges was transported to a local hospital

and the investigation is ongoing.

John Bridges is talking about

this accident that's happened, and the victim

essentially succumbing to injuries due to an accident

and it's just not believable.

I think what Bridges is showing us is that

he has sort of a disconnect from reality

and what the rest of us would naturally assume or conclusions we might draw.

This is pretty consistent with what we see in psychopathic individuals

where they're not really concerned about fact

or integrity to what they're saying,

or the plausibility of the story.

They tend to come across at times as glib,

and not super concerned about a chronic need to lie,

or pathological lying, that we sometimes see in them.

I think Bridges is starting to make attempts at trying to control the interview.

He is trying to figure out what detectives want from him.

And that chameleon-like tendency that we see in psychopathic individuals

is something that allows them to navigate their environment.

They try to figure out what the people they're interacting with want.

How they want them to react, how they want them to emote,

or show emotions, and how they want them to behave.

So, I think that's really what we're seeing with Bridges,

is he's trying to get a read on the detectives.

Typically, whenever people have been involved

in a fatal accident such as this,

where someone has passed away,

you would expect the person to be emotional,

perhaps crying, screaming, upset,

or almost frozen and unable to speak

because of the shock or the trauma.

Mr. Bridges is discussing this death as if it's just

another day driving on the highway.

He is actually demonstrating the shallow affect that's seen in psychopathy.

He knows he should say he's upset.

But he's not really appearing upset at all.

In fact, he's appearing a bit angry.

He's getting increasingly frustrated,

obviously, by the tone in his voice, his posture,

he's getting increasingly frustrated at the questioning

and, I think, recognizing that he's caught.

And so, he tries to gain control over the interview

by asking them questions, expecting them to tell him. "Well, what did you see?

What exactly are you accusing me of?"

[Dr. Sahni] John Bridges is giving detectives an explanation

of what he believes happened, and it doesn't add up.

A reasonable human being would draw different conclusions.

And what we see is Bridges isn't really concerned about the inconsistencies.

He is talking about demands and says, "That's my only demand."

But really, he is not in any position to make demands at all.

But that's part of what we see in psychopaths as well,

is this, again, this grandiosity.

An inflated sense of what he has the authority to do.

So this grandiosity leads him to believe

that he actually does have the right to be making demands.

When, in fact, he absolutely does not.

John Bridges talks about how he has paranoia,

and he starts to set the groundwork

for being mentally ill or legally incompetent,

and wanting to strategize his legal case by claiming insanity.

And we see this in individuals who are seasoned criminals,

who know the judicial system, know how to navigate it.

The problem we have is that Bridges' description

of how he's experiencing these visions isn't consistent with visual hallucinations.

It's not consistent with auditory hallucinations.

And he goes on to give a fairly accurate accounting that is linear and in order

of what he remembers about this scenario and this out-of-body experience,

which is highly inconsistent with psychosis and paranoia.

When Bridges is describing to police what his steps were

in terms of shopping for these items,

the ties, the knife, the duct tape,

he's describing this all very matter-of-factly.

His affect is somewhat limited,

there's a little bit of glib in what he's saying,

and he's describing this as if it was our grocery list

and shopping list, and he just went to the store to pick up milk and eggs.

[Dr. Tussey] He seems to be enjoying the thrill,

the excitement of having complete domination over the victim

and mentally manipulating him.

"You do what I tell you, and you'll survive.

But if not, then it's gonna be a bad outcome."

And he seems to thrive off of that power.

Blaming the victim is part and parcel of a psychopath's M.O.

It's often someone else's fault.

And in this case, Mr. Bridges is blaming the victim.

"Well, he tried to get out of the zip ties."

And, you know, "He was going to attack me, so I had to attack him back."

Almost as if it's self-defense.

Mr. Bridges uses the words that he was "in the zone"

while he was stabbing the victim. It's typically a term we use for sports,

or something more positive than murdering someone.

For him, "in the zone" perhaps means he was only focused on completing his goal.

[Dr. Sahni] Individuals that are psychopathic

often times do not experience emotions in the same range that the rest of us do.

So often times their highs take more to stimulate,

and their lows take more to pull them out of.

And this may be what we're seeing with Bridges in this moment,

is that as he's recalling the details of what he did to the victim

in those moments when he was physically stabbing him,

he's getting a bit of a secondary high off of that.

It's unclear if there really was overkill, or if it was a response

to the amount of adrenaline he may have been experiencing.

But certainly the amount of violence that he committed against the victim

was far more than was necessary to render him helpless.

[Dr. Tussey] Speaking of Mr. Bridges' long history of deviant behavior,

it's noteworthy that, according to the records,

he had gotten into multiple fights while he was in school.

He threatened his mother with a knife.

Uh, reportedly, at age 15, he disclosed that he wanted to kill someone

just to see what it was like to kill someone.

He ultimately did murder someone by age 16.

There's a lot of red flags for psychopathic behavior starting from early childhood.

Mr. Bridges makes comments such as, "I don't wanna make a big stink of this,"

as if he's talking about throwing out days-old leftovers.

But he's actually talking about murdering someone.

It's yet another attempt of him to control the players in the situation

as if he's a puppeteer and he's directing them to do what he wants.

The psychologist has never seen anyone, to date,

that is as psychopathic or as dangerous as you are.

You, in essence, have viewed people like animals, and you hunt them.

Is that what I'm to take from this?

[judge] It is very clear to this court that...

the only way the public is safe, is for you to not have an opportunity

to prey upon an unsuspecting public again.