Original subtitles

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

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

feeling... the hunger.

McAtasney may not have expected the authorities

to show up on his doorstep as quickly as they did,

and it was the middle of the night.

But he's got this very scripted response

that he's prepared for the authorities,

and he's not really showing any emotion.

Most people hearing that a dear friend of theirs is missing,

there would be a sense of panic or worry.

We don't see any of that with McAtasney.

What we also learn very quickly

is that his phone is conveniently missing.

This is a lot of information to be shared

for someone who just in the middle of the night

had his door knocked on

and has just supposedly learned

that his friend is missing.

I think there is an element of victim blaming

in some of the narrative he creates for Sarah.

I think he's still trying to keep two narratives going.

One is that Sarah has committed suicide

and/or that she's run off to Canada.

And he's gotta find motives for those.

In contrast to how he criticizes Sarah

and how he creates this really false narrative

about this strained relationship

and horrible relationship with her dad,

he consistently tries to portray himself

as this really nice and virtuous guy

to the cops.

He wants to be a police officer.

He is doing all these things to manage

their impression of him.

When he's confronted about one important detail,

this trip to the bank,

his answers suddenly become limited,

they're monosyllabic, they're one word,

and he doesn't really provide any details.

He actually rapidly shuts it down by saying,

"I don't know anything about that."

So he doesn't lie to them,

he doesn't miss a beat,

he acknowledges it,

but he doesn't really account for the fact

that he left that omission out

when he was so detailed and specific otherwise.

There's nothing about that question

that seems normal or usual or typical.

It's got to raise flags for law enforcement as to whether

McAtasney is manipulating them,

whether everything he's been telling them

is just a lie to try and throw them off the investigation.

And really, at a minimum, what they're going to start

to look more closely at is his own motivations.

And what he's really doing is trying to kinda

put the pieces together for them.

But what he's also trying to do is see what they know

and what they don't.

He informs detectives that he had had a conversation

with Mr. McAtasney about a week prior to

um... Sarah's disappearance.

And in that conversation,

Liam describes how he would

choke her out and then dispose of the body

by throwing her off the bridge.

A week later, this person disappears,

and her car is found on the bridge.

It's tremendously alarming,

because it seems as if perhaps

Mr. McAtasney was sharing his plans.

It speaks to somebody who is far more calculated,

premeditated, and manipulative.

And while they may or may not have assessed McAtasney

in that manner, they now are quite concerned.

This speaks to not a 19-year-old who just wants

to find his friend, but a 19-year-old

who was calculating in every one of his interactions

with law enforcement.

It's like he's in his element now.

He is coming in, he's kind of smirking a little bit.

He's kind of proud of himself,

and I think he is really, really eager

to tell Anthony Curry what he's done.

On the one hand, it's bragging

a little bit at the beginning.

One of the things that we see here

is this kind of grandiosity,

this sense that I'm so smart,

I'm so important,

I'm such a planner,

that I can do these things and get away with it.

McAtasney is continuing to talk freely with his friend, Curry,

about what actually happened in the crime.

But what McAtasney also doesn't care about is his codefendant.

He now has implicated an additional party,

Preston Taylor,

who was involved in the crime.

And what we also see,

classic to somebody with very superficial emotions

and connectedness to human beings,

is McAtasney has the audacity

to not just talk about the crime so freely and openly

with his friend and to implicate another party,

but he actually has the audacity to complain

about the amount of money he ultimately got.

He thought this was gonna be a big payout of a job,

and it wasn't.

It's absolutely a dehumanizing description.

The strongest emotion I'm picking up

is this sort of annoyance.

The 30 minutes struck me as, um,

as something that I didn't really fully understand.

The idea that he may have been

sort of gathering information for future crimes--

this is not the first time that he was gonna end up

having to do something like this.

It's certainly possible.

The common denominator between McAtasney and Taylor

seems to be their interest in money.

And there's certainly an antisocial component of that,

you know, the focus on the money

and an absolute absence of focus on the person involved

and the fact that it would entail killing somebody.

Hurting other people doesn't seem to be a big reservation

on either of their parts.

OK.

Monotone, even voice, no emotion,

just a flat description, just a narrative.

Truly falls, you know, kind of in line with the way

psychopaths experience the world--

devoid of emotion, just facts, just a narrative.

If you look at the entire sort of crime as a whole,

it was a means to an end.

They needed money, this was a way to get money.

That money was going to run out.

This would have been repeated, had they not been caught.

One hundred percent.

I'm going to sentence Preston Taylor to 18 years

in the Monmouth County, in a state prison,

and that's subject to no early release act,

meaning he will have to serve at least 15 years

before becoming eligible for parole.

I told you when we opened,

weeks and weeks ago,

that it was going to be shown to you that it was fantasy,

that it was an audition,

that Liam McAtasney made it up

for Anthony Curry, the horror film director.

Consistent with what we see in psychopathic individuals,

the failure to take responsibility

for his own behavior.

McAtasney at this point is grasping at straws.

But what we don't see is any humility or shame or discomfort

about how outlandish the story is.

He has zero shame.

He has zero discomfort about this ongoing lie

that he's perpetuating,

and it really speaks to how much he discounts and disregards

other people and their intelligence.