Original subtitles

[reporter 1] Have you seen this man?

[reporter 1] U.S. Marshals and local authorities tell News 3

that 30-year-old Cola Beale is armed and dangerous.

[reporter 2] Police in two Hampton Roads cities believe he could be

behind three murders in five days.

[reporter 3] The string of murders all started when a house near

Virginia Wesleyan University went up in flames.

[reporter 3] It's believed that Beale killed his 31-year-old girlfriend

before allegedly setting her house on fire.

The very next day, Beale was connected to another murder,

a 71-year-old man who neighbors say Beale was

close with was found dead from a gunshot.

And then the very latest, just this Monday,

Norfolk Police found a man dead inside of his home

on Sewells Point Road.

[theme music playing]

The thing inside of me, it's like...

the appetite, it's like a wolf that's...

feeling... the hunger.

[reporter 1] A man suspected of killing three people

in Norfolk and Virginia Beach is behind bars.

[reporter 3] Beale is not really a stranger to the inside of a jail cell.

[reporter 3] He has a long criminal history that dates back all the way

to 2005.

[reporter 3] Beale served prison time for armed robbery,

and sexual assault on a child.

And in 2012, Beale pled guilty to several crimes,

including conspiracy and two separate charges of robbery,

including armed robbery and use of a firearm by a felon,

Now, Beale served six years for those crimes,

and he was on supervised probation.

[Dr. Morgan] Cola Beale's history is not that unusual when we put it

in perspective with the histories of other people

with severe psychopathy.

In psychopathy, a person's view is primarily

that they are unconstrained, that if they want something,

nothing should really stand between them, and their idea

of achieving their goal.

They just don't take other people's views

into account, really.

It's all about them and what they want.

[Dr. Tussey] He's angry right out of the gate,

and he's really taking the role of the victim.

He's been falsely accused

of the sex crime.

You know, wouldn't that make you angry?

When you get a flair for his criminal versatility,

his impulsivity, his failure to accept responsibility.

Blaming his girlfriend's parents, her mother,

for having caused him to murder her.

[Dr. Saraiya] He sorts of distanced himself from his own responsibility,

he's just figured out how to deal with that by just sort of

like, admitting it, and then just sweeping it to the side.

There's certainly grandiose things about Mr. Beale,

but this one is definitely a twisted one.

Like the idea that he's the better person

because he actually cared about her in some fashion,

but then her family didn't because it took him

setting her on fire to get their attention.

His resorting to violence, and the direction of

that violence is kind of everybody else's fault.

[Dr. Tussey] According to Beale, he hasn't been heard

much of his life.

And so the fire is symbolic of Beale's life

in some ways going up in flames.

And he acknowledges that, you know, life is over.

It's also, I think, a manifestation of his desire

to be on the front stage in the most grandiose display

of crime and violence.

[Dr. Tussey] Not only am I going to kill people, but I'm also going to

set a fire so everybody can see what's happening.

This is the perfect opportunity for him to,

you know, "be heard."

[Dr. Morgan] It's still all about him.

He's astonished that she would say, "Oh, take me, save the dog."

And his whole point is, she's not even listening to him.

It's not about the dog. It's not about her.

He doesn't want to hear anything that she has to say,

putting the tape over her mouth really quickly, he says,

"Oh, no, no, I didn't rape her."

But I think he was tired of hearing what she had to say.

So she was making too much noise.

And I think that, that, the lack of understanding

is because he does not experience empathy,

like normal people do.

There's just absolutely no regard for a living entity,

whether it's humans or animals.

When you look at Beal's behavior,

there really is an element of sadism to them,

not only in the way he interacts and describes the way that

he murdered his girlfriend, and the conversation

they had leading up to her death and then also to hurt

a completely innocent, vulnerable animal,

is sadistic.

[suspenseful music plays]

[Dr. Saraiya] Moving on to the father figure Clifton Baxter, there's no

longitudinal connection of any kind of relationship.

That regard is absent.

That building of a connection, you know,

the things that enable most of us to build a relationship,

those traits are missing in psychopaths.

Their relationships are transactional.

What can they do for me now?

And that's where he focuses his explanation --

"Hey, in the recent time, whenever I asked for money,

"not only did Clifton Baxter not give it to me.

He lied about it," you know, it's like a double affront.

"This person is a liar who disrespects me,

and won't give me what I want, so I shot."

[Dr. Morgan] I think his theme is "I should never have been accused

of a sex offense, they should have cleared me."

I think he feels that this has ruined his life,

and now he's gonna make us all pay for it.

I think he's being genuine about the idea of no remorse.

There probably was some inherent propensity

towards violence, he was surrounded by violence.

When Cola Beale was a child, his father, Cola Beale III,

actually, tried to murder his mother.

She survived, but now his father is in jail

for having murdered his stepmother.

He's identifying as a killer as well by saying,

"Oh, my father is a killer, too."

And then he talks about having

a higher body count than his father.

We know that with psychopathy, some of the research has shown

there is a genetic component to it.

Not that's the only reason that somebody may have

psychopathic traits, but given his father's history,

it does make me wonder about what might be underlying

from a biological perspective.

So the whole nature and nurture, both of those

factors seem to play a role for Beale.

[Dr. Tussey] These are examples of an individual

who doesn't have that human connection that

the average person does.

And he doesn't seem to feel guilty at all.

In fact, isn't even sure what he should feel guilty about.

You know, her family interfered.

Mr. Baxter didn't give him money when he needed,

and his cousin was talking back, and wouldn't stop.

He really has this very shallow affect in that

he doesn't seem emotionally impacted at all.

For all three of Beale's victims, he has made a personal

connection and justification for why he should murder them.

They all deserved it for one reason or another.

[Dr. Morgan] Cola Beale is a wonderful example,

when we think of psychopathy of someone whose

predominant traits are those of callousness, selfishness,

and the anger component.

When they feel, like, they're not getting

what they want or they've been wronged,

they're gonna make everybody pay.

They really attribute to other people the causes

for why they do what they do, they don't blame themselves.

All they can do is react.

[reporter 1] He confessed to our cameras yesterday,

to committing three murders in the span of just three days.

[reporter 3] Beale told me he was prepared to take

any penalty coming to him from a judge and from a jury.