Original subtitles

[reporter] Neighbors at Payson Canyon were nervous Tuesday,

many wondering about their own safety,

after their serene environment was shattered

by the murder of 70-year-old Kay Sherman Mortenson

in his house.

[reporters #2] The killers are then said to have grabbed

a slew of rifles and ammunition from the home.

[man] What kind of a horrible story are we talking about?

This was somebody with some hatred

or problems or something.

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

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

feeling...the hunger.

If the purpose of killing the victim was to make sure

he couldn't identify his perpetrator

or perpetrators, this crime is overkill.

It's particularly violent and gruesome.

It's professionally done.

Nothing about it adds up as a robbery gone wrong

or an impulse kill.

There seems to be either a thrill-seeking component

to it, there's a rage component to it,

but nothing about what detectives understand

at face value is adding up to

the condition of the victim's body.

[Dr. Vienna] The animal cruelty,

the fascination with setting things on fire --

those are behavioral markers that are aligned with

being callous and unemotional.

And then later on in adulthood, Rachel's describing,

you know, some intimidation, some manipulation traits.

And so those traits combined

with the early behavioral markers is

a clear trajectory for psychopathy.

[reporter] November 16th of last year, Kay Mortensen is murdered

in his home in Payson Canyon.

His son Roger and daughter-in-law Pamela

claim they walked in on burglars and were tied up.

Police, though, say there were inconsistencies in

their stories, and in July, both are indicted

on murder charges.

Those charges will now be dismissed.

Utah County authorities today

announcing a tip that led them to Vernal.

[Dr. Fox] Martin Bond.

He sounds completely unaffected by this.

It sounds glib.

All of that, to me, suggests this is someone

who thinks he's one step ahead of the police, is so confident

in his ability to be in front of them.

He sounds like he's almost, like, enjoying this.

You can't see him, but I imagine he's smiling

when he's saying this.

This is, like, Prisoner's Dilemma to the extreme.

It's literally like, I'm now knowing if my friend is

confessing and blaming it on me,

I'm gonna blame everything on him

to the point where it doesn't even sound plausible.

He just stood there while his friend committed every act?

"I did nothing. I'm basically blameless.

I was just a witness" --

is the way he's trying to portray it.

As long as you know it's Ben's fault.

That's the only thing he's concerned about, not the fact

that an innocent man got killed.

Listening to Bond, you know, it sounds very detached.

You know, he has no real expression of emotion.

No, you know, empathy. It's just matter of fact.

And that can really show us that he has some of

these psychopathic traits because psychopaths

have a very hard time actually,

you know, displaying and having the capacity for emotion.

Instead, they sort of mimic what they think should be done.

And so that's why we hear Bond say, you know,

I had mixed emotions, but you don't actually hear

that being conveyed or actually see it.

Martin Bond is saying things that he thinks will gain him

some respect with law enforcement.

That if he acquiesces to reasonable things

that he's guilty of --

he's in possession of the firearms,

he might as well explain that.

He knew the victim, he might as well explain that.

Rettig has hypothetically implicated him, he might as

well explain that.

That somehow those data points, if he admits to those,

that gains him some credibility and some sense of honesty.

All Bond is doing is engaging in impression management.

It's a form of manipulation that psychopathic individuals

engage in time and time again.

While Rettig's goal may have been to gain credibility

with detectives, that if he's willing to admit that

he has thought about killing people,

that honesty would allow him to

bolster everything else he's about to say as truthful.

But what's strange about that is we start to see

how psychopathic individuals don't see the world

the way the rest of us do.

For the rest of us, hearing that statement isn't

just cringeworthy and makes you recoil,

but the detectives are hearing a suspect say,

"I've thought about killing," and we're in here

interrogating you for a violent execution-style murder.

[Dr. Vienna] I think Rettig is trying to purport this situation,

that he was taken advantage of.

He's, you know, just a bystander.

But what he fails to recognize is that, in fact,

he was a bystander that did nothing in the midst of

a horrific crime.

So that in and of itself is very telling.

He's somewhat or completely emotionally detached from

the violence act towards a vulnerable older victim

and the fact that he never got help.

What does that say about a person?

It really highlights his level of psychopathy.

It's important to realize that Rettig is not innocent

in any of this.

Rettig, he was happy to go along with the crime until it

threw him under the bus and Bond threw him

under the bus.

And what Rettig maybe didn't fully appreciate in that moment

was that when you put two psychopaths together,

only one's coming out of the room alive.

Only one of them is going to prevail because their own

narcissism and desire to preserve their own needs is

always what reigns true.

These are not individuals that

have normal connections with other human beings.

Their relationships with others, including their crime mates

and their co-defendants, is transactional.

What's curious about it is that he's acknowledging that

Bond approaches criminality as if it's a movie.

He's looking for notoriety.

The willingness to engage in a criminally versatile way

and do a little of this, do a little of that,

until you hit on something, that is exciting --

that thrill-seeking need that drives

so much psychopathic behavior --

the rest of us don't need so much to be aroused,

to be excited, to feel that rush.

But psychopaths need a high level of excitement.

That's where their impulsivity comes from.

That's part of where we see these extreme crimes.

And we can now start to see that

that may actually have been the bond that tied

Bond to Rettig and Rettig to Bond.

[Dr. Vienna] So police find these letters from Bond to another inmate

detailing Bond's accountability of the offense.

I think that's purposeful.

I think that at this point, Bond knows that he's going down

for this offense.

And I think he wants to now take credit for it.

He doesn't want others to believe that he was

the weak one and he was the one just along for the ride.

But he wants to get the ultimate credit

by other inmates.

That's a level of narcissism that we commonly will see

in psychopaths, you know, that's what --

they try to control the entire situation,

the entire narrative.

It's how they operate in the world.