-MAN: You murdered this man? -Yes.
-You tortured him. -Of course.
If you had that moment to live over again...
I'd have kept him alive a week.
But you would have still tortured him
and killed him. -Oh, I'd have tortured him
for a week, yeah, instead of three days, definitely.
You believe him? Do you think he really was a snitch?
Oops if he wasn't.
MAN: Are you remorseful?
-Not at all. -Why?
Why would I be?
What's the difference?
Everybody has a reason to kill.
The thing inside of me, it's like
the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
WOMAN: Around five a.m.,
Phoenix firefighters responded to a fire on
the church's property -- while putting it out,
they noticed a badly charred body in a container.
Detectives now say the victim was a white man, 46 years old.
There's a level of violence and sadism
to the crime, and the level of overkill,
the level of torture, that this victim likely experienced tells
us this is somebody we're dealing with
who doesn't have any regard for human life.
This is likely somebody who either had
a level of rage or vendetta against the victim.
He used a wheelchair to get around -- whoever killed him
knew that he was vulnerable,
which made him an easier target, and also likely made it
easier for them to overcome him and overpower him.
MORGAN: She's trying to do image management.
She's gonna look really cold,
like hardened person who can kill people.
So she is concerned with how she's gonna be viewed.
There's a narcissistic element to psychopathy, and there's
the control element,
to be in charge, and she's doing both of those things.
DERIGHT: Simpson is confessing to a brutal murder, and it's as
if she couldn't be bothered with anything in the world.
She's sitting there having a snack,
taking a sip of her soda, as she's admitting to it.
She has a very flat affect.
She's not showing changes in the tone
of her voice or her facial expressions.
She's saying it as if she's telling
you what she ate for breakfast that day.
SAHNI: That ability to change who they are, to change how they
approach you, how they present, how they look.
That chameleon skill is very much a marker
of the type of psychopath that navigates
different environments.
They're able to lure victims in
by studying them, learning what it is
that's gonna be the hook for that individual.
She likely would have been more flirtatious, more cunning,
which is what allowed him to trust her and go with her.
And that is not likely the person
we're seeing in any of these interviews.
SAHNI: There's no evidence that the victim
ever was an informant.
Simpson sees herself as some kind of a vigilante.
It's her job to decide who lives and who dies.
She is firmly convinced that her view is
the reality and justifies her action.
With psychopaths, once they've made up their minds,
there's this narcissistic approach.
Like I know it all, I know what I'm doing.
I don't second guess myself, because I'm right.
They've decided they know what they're doing.
So she was a little more impulsive in that way.
Simpson seems to think of herself as
on a different level than other people,
such that she believes this person
is so wrong for being a snitch,
she acted on something that she had little basis
for knowing.
She thought this person was a snitch.
It didn't end up being true.
She still has no remorse for it, and she
was so extreme in what she did to this person.
Simpson gets a high off these interviews.
She gets to recount the crime.
She gets to remember the most sensational aspects of
the crime -- by putting a mirror in front of him
and showing him how badly beaten he is,
it's deflating to the victim -- victims start to, at some point,
give up hope,
and when an individual is sadistic, and they need that
high, it banks on the victim fighting,
resisting, showing force and fear.
SAHNI: She's referencing a song,
"Show Me How to Live" by Audioslave.
Her decision to throw this idea out there
that she was following the lyrics of a song
I think is just an impulsive response
to the investigator.
She then clarifies that's not actually the lyric,
it should have been the hand instead of the head.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the crime.
She did impale a three-inch nail into the victim's head,
and I think that was a plain and simple decision
to turn the temperature up on the amount of torture
she subjected the victim to.
People with psychopathic traits are apt to target people
that are weaker or vulnerable, because they're easy
to overtake.
They have a strong sense of knowing when someone is going
to be an easier target, and they will prey on them.
It's likely that she thought that, because of his disability,
he was someone that she could more easily overpower
and kill, basically.
She -- she wanted to be able to have someone who
she'd be able to take out without a lot of effort.
SAHNI: He was physically disabled.
Her decision to dismember him and cut into even where he had
had knee surgery really just speaks to
this was a science experiment for her.
This was really no different than how a high school student
might dissect an eyeball of an animal,
a cat, a frog.
This is someone who did not see this as a human being.
This was just for her own stimulation
and benefit and her own curiosity, really.
Simpson's description of the victim and his limbs,
as if it's a chicken carcass being
cut up for a roast and for dinner, really speaks to just
how much she dehumanized her victim,
how her relationship with people is 100 percent instrumental.
It was about getting high -- she took that opportunity to
celebrate her kill, and she was proud of what she did.
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
You see that pride in how she recounts what she's done to him.
MORGAN: She gets annoyed when they're asking --
when she has to explain,
did she clean the walls, did she get rid of the carpet?
And she sees all that as irrelevant.
That's tedious. Those are trivial.
Those are non-important to her.
This is the narcissist response in psychopathy to
being asked detailed questions,
because if she thought they were important,
she already mentioned it, and you see the irritability,
because that's the confrontation
between who's running this thing, and so she says,
"That's irrelevant," and she dismisses it.
MORGAN: I think that she knows this is
shocking to the interviewer.
She's trying to make it funny, and nothing's funny about
what she's talking about,
and so we see this is that superficial and glib humor
she's demonstrating -- one impact of the behavior
is that it controls the interviewer's attention.
It's an emotional lure.
It's playing with the interviewer.
The other one is that it projects an image,
that she's beyond feelings of these things
that we all might find horrifying,
which is a superiority view.
Like, I'm beyond the thing that you might find shocking.
DERIGHT: This seems to be another way that --
that she was celebrating.
It was kind of a victory lap with this chair
that he was presumably known by in the community.
So she feels like she won this battle,
did a good thing, and was showing off, essentially.
This is not someone who did
a terrible thing and is trying to evade capture.
This is someone who is literally
riding around town on the wheelchair.
My view of Simpson's dropping breadcrumbs, hints about other
crimes and things, is her way of
not only controlling the interview but controlling
interest, the emotions, of the interviewer.
She's presenting herself as a seasoned and skilled person
who can kill people, so she's an expert,
right, and stuff doesn't bother her, and she's not gonna
get other people involved, because she can do it.
She's done it before, but we're not gonna talk
about that -- it's teasing.
With psychopathic individuals, when they
have a history of animal harm,
it's not surprising that it starts during childhood.
Oftentimes, they start with small animals, such as birds,
squirrels, hamsters,
the family rodent, the family cat, the family dog.
And the significance of starting with small animals
is that they're easy to overtake.
They're easy to overpower.
It's easy to control them.
When Simpson references that she hasn't gotten an elk yet,
that's both a reference to her being a predator and a hunter,
and everyone else that's living being prey.
[laughs]
MAN: Women generally don't commit crimes
this heinous. -Right.
MAN: You know, this is usually the domain of men.
-That's unfortunate. -You think more women should...
Oh, yeah -- equal opportunity, definitely.
-Will you kill again? -If the opportunity arises?
I hope so.