Original subtitles

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

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

feeling... the hunger.

When Traeger finally makes the decision

to actually report Jeneen missing,

days have gone by, and what raises a red flag

is he spent those four days not looking for her,

not staying at home, showing no concern.

What we know from Jeneen's bank records

is that he was out gambling,

he was out partying, he was out spending her money

and not doing it with her permission.

He's a person of interest

and he's just mocking the entire situation.

What strikes me about this is thinking about the context

of the situation.

His wife is missing, and one would think

he's genuinely concerned about her well-being.

There would be a sort of demeanor and more,

you know, almost impatience with, you know,

"Well, why are you asking me these trivial details?"

But you can see in his body language,

it seems like he's preparing.

He's trying to get the lay of the land,

and he's trying to take in some information

so he can spin a story that matches with what he knows

the circumstances to be.

He's minimizing the toxicity of what's going on, almost as if

he's trying to take some sort of responsibility.

"Yes, I lived in my car because I had a problem,

and I had to take care of myself."

Not that what he was doing was damaging to the relationship

and there was actual arguments and violence going on there.

And that's the reason why

Jeneen kicked him out of the house.

So he's still engaging in this pathological lying,

controlling how police are seeing him,

and really controlling the whole narrative here.

He definitely writes his own narrative

and then tries to force circumstances to match it,

ignoring things that conflict.

And really, and I think this is where he uses his charm

to kind of get people to go along with his narrative

and his description of things.

But he is so confident in his ability to write the narrative

because he just thinks he can,

through force of his personality,

kind of get people to go along and be taken in by his story.

When we evaluate people professionally,

sometimes we think of this as impression management.

This is somebody who is trying to make sure they stay clear.

But what we know is psychopathic individuals are

extremely skilled at manipulating people,

at creating false impressions of who they are.

And Traeger definitely is a very skilled individual

in the areas of manipulation.

The story's morphing. It's getting bigger.

It's getting more elaborate. It's getting more detailed.

And what it's also getting is more focused

on blaming Jeneen for her own absence.

Traeger is going out of his way to give the authorities

a level of detail about Jeneen that,

first of all, is easily disproven,

but casts no blame toward himself.

This person is very selectively choosing

when to give them details

and when to hold back details.

And that strategy is 100% Joseph Traeger trying to stay

in charge of that interview.

For many of the psychopaths, it comes back to that charm,

and it's that they have that ability to influence people

despite external circumstances, and Jeneen's mom captures it.

I mean, on paper, this is a guy

that you do not want to have anything to do with.

But he's so charming, so manipulative,

that he has convinced her that none of this other things that,

you know, you see and hear about me are true.

And that's all the lead-up to, so then they get married.

When police talk to Jeneen's friend,

they start to understand a little bit more

about the depths of Traeger's manipulations--

that he's not just reserving this tactic and strategy

for the interviews with law enforcement,

this is part of how he kept Jeneen engaged

in their relationship.

What it gives us is a very clear understanding

that Joseph Traeger is parasitic.

He lives off of Jeneen,

and because she is his meal ticket,

he does whatever he needs to and will stop at no length.

There's no topic that is off-limits for him to use as manipulation.

What is eerily similar,

but not surprising for us, clinically,

is that, for the ex-wife,

describes a volatile relationship.

This is an individual who doesn't deal well with rejection.

He doesn't deal well with being told no,

with limits being set on him,

with not getting his way.

And that need to maintain power and control,

both in his relationships as well as in his environment,

likely are the trigger points for him.

They are likely the trigger and the powder keg

that cause him to erupt into these extreme levels of violence

that you don't see in the person who's in that interrogation room.

The fact that he's willing to take the polygraph,

that's related to the narcissistic aspect

of his personality.

He always believes that he has the ability

to get over on anyone.

He's the smartest guy in the room.

He can control any situation.

So the prospect of the polygraph,

no machine is gonna beat him.

He's just gonna simply be able to control the situation,

as most of his life experience tells him he's able to.

When Traeger is not really paying attention

and the detective has to point it out to him, that, like,

"Hey, do you even care?

What are you doing? Are you falling asleep on me?"

And that could be a sign of him just sort of shutting down

at this point because I think he's being challenged, you know,

that he's being portrayed as, like, this evil, bad person,

and his ego really can't handle that.

He's trying to control himself not to get into this rage

that he usually will get into when he is challenged.

What we see is the way that Jeneen's mother

described him as a backstreet lawyer.

We start to see that come out,

that this many years later, almost two decades later,

Traeger is still able to quote,

what he believes, the medical report said

about his first wife's injuries,

that minimizing the seriousness of what happened in that crime,

minimizing the facts that are known,

including the medical injuries.

And it's what he does. He blames the victim.

When confronted with facts, he distracts, he evades,

and he tries to take back control.

And that's exactly what he's doing here.

It's interesting, every time

Traeger's presented with evidence to the contrary

of what he's explaining, he discounts it.

And we see other accounts where he's acting as

this sophisticated person.

He's using proper medical language,

proper legal language,

but he can only do that for so long.

And that's pretty typical of a psychopath.

They can only really put on this false sense of self

and false image of this grandiose sense of self

for, you know, just a little while.

Once you go into details, they're gonna fall apart

because really, it's just this big outwardly projected image,

but there's nothing inside.

They set the situation to give Mr. Traeger a chance

to kind of change his story, to rewrite the narrative.

And it seemed to have worked,

because in an off-camera interview,

he then provides additional information.

He says, he claims, that he went upstairs to take a shower,

and when he came downstairs, he found Jeneen on the ground

with her head cracked open.

He says that he thinks that she had a seizure.

And then he panicked

and decided that he's gotta get rid of the body

because the police would never believe him.

So, and that's why he decided to get rid of the body.

And he describes that he placed it in a couple of garbage bags.

He moved the garbage bags into the garbage can

while it was still in the garage.

And then he immediately moved the can out to the curb

so that it would be picked up.

Even if we believe his story,

he finds his wife dead, panics,

makes this decision that he's gotta cover it up,

but then later that day,

spend his time going to the casino gambling.

Our initial reaction is, how could somebody do that?

But the important thing to keep in mind is that

psychopaths don't experience emotions like guilt,

and even fear, the same way that we do.

So it's almost an emotionless narrative.

Did you have anything to do with it?

Absolutely not.

Listen, I've had the police here three different times,

crime scene investigators, they went through the house.

There's nothing, nothing, whatchamacallit,

nothing for me to be suspect of, you know what I'm saying?

Oftentimes, narcissistic individuals

have a difficult time not staying the center of attention.

They have a hard time losing control of a narrative,

and they enjoy being center stage,

even if the attention is negative.

Some attention is better than no attention at all.

And while Traeger could have chosen not to give

any statements to the media, and it's what most people

would choose to do, he can't resist.

And we're all devastated over this.

What did she mean to you?

She meant the world to me.

I've known my wife since we were nine years old, ten years old.

We've known each other for 40 years.

We had financial problems,

you know, so, all marriages go through problems.

Nothing, nothing major.

You're desperate to get her back home.

Absolutely.

What would it mean to you to get her back home?

It would mean the world to me to get her back.

It would mean everything.

At this point, we're starting to see some ounce of emotion,

which we don't normally

think of when we, like, talk about psychopaths.

We're seeing-- it's just his fear of getting caught,

fear of what the next part of the narrative is going to be.

The walls are closing in on him,

and he's gotta think of something new.

It's not a genuine, you know, connection to people,

like, I miss you, I love you.

It's all fear-based, because something's gonna happen to him.

They did something very shrewd by switching gears

and offering to take him to dinner,

so that they could keep him talking.

And because he has this narcissistic belief

that they couldn't possibly be lying to him

and manipulating him the way he's been manipulating them,

he believes them.

He can't possibly envision

that these detectives were shrewd enough

to start the cat and mouse game with him,

to start manipulating him so that he would begin talking,

and that is precisely what we're watching happen--

is detectives have had a lifetime career of studying

psychopathic individuals and they're now using

one of their own tricks against them.

He starts to confess.

He starts to tell them what he actually did to Jeneen.

He throws a few jokes in there.

He continues to act glib,

laughing about the fact that there's nine bodies total.

And what we see is that, again,

Joseph Traeger is 200% focused on himself.

He even goes so far as to say,

"I'm planning to go to work tomorrow."

You can see a frame of thinking where he truly

doesn't see things the way the rest of us do.

Where I think we really see

what we think of as a narcissistic injury,

a wound to his own ego,

is how focused he is on figuring out

how they pulled it over on him,

how they were wearing a wire and he didn't see it,

he didn't consider it.

It never even occurred to him that they might lie to him.

And what you can see is he's struggling to unpack

that reality and understand how he missed the signs

because he's smarter than everyone else.

And that is how a narcissist thinks.

Traeger's wound in that moment is not just about rejection.

It's about losing control.

It's about his gravy train is coming to an end.

So he really had come to the end of his options.

And now she's telling him, "I'm cutting you off.

"You are no longer welcome in my life, in my home.

You no longer have access to my resources."

And what does he do?

Joseph Traeger doesn't handle being told no.

Traeger's description of the murder

is extremely horrendous,

but it really highlights these traits of psychopathy,

like callousness.

He talks about the knife going in to his wife's head

as being like warm butter.

I mean, who describes something like that?

He's almost like taking pride in what he's saying

and he's bolstering himself up like he's just this, like,

you know, macho man, dominant, in control,

and he can do what he wants with,

you know, his victims, being his wife.

This is all his learned behavior.

He's understood, by living in the world,

that you're supposed to care if other people suffer.

And so he's trying to kind of portray the detectives like,

"Hey, look, I'm not a psychopath.

"I care-- I care that she didn't-- you know,

that gives me some comfort."

But it doesn't come across as genuine at all.

Traeger has managed to somehow distort the reality

of who he is and what role he had in that relationship

to a degree that he's no longer in contact, or in connection,

with actual facts.

He's completely dismissive of the fact that

he bilked her out of over $60,000.

He ruined her credit.

He physically harmed her.

He took her life.

Her family will now spend the rest of their lives without her.

After exclusively telling CBS4 News

he had nothing to do with the disappearance of his wife,

deputies put a Sunrise man in handcuffs

and charged him with murder.