Detectives with the major case squad
tell me that 68-year-old Daniel Taylor was murdered.
Police are confident that he knew the suspects.
[theme music playing]
MAN: The thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
MAN: We're learning new information about
a suspicious death in Collinsville, Illinois,
when the major case squad was called in to
investigate after an elderly man
was found dead inside of his home.
Heisch is doing something we call impression managing.
She's taking control of the narrative.
She's trying to control the outcome of
the investigation, but what she's also doing
is trying to manipulate the investigators.
She's trying to build a bridge with them so that they
see her as this innocent individual
who's just trying to be helpful.
HEISCH: Yeah.
DETECTIVE: Mm-hmm.
HEISCH: Uh-uh.
Eva Heisch he has been not cooperating for a month.
This person that she was friends with,
she went to his house, and yet there's really no indication
that she's sad about his death or curious about his murder.
She does have an interesting insight into his finances,
which most people wouldn't know.
DERIGHT: That's a red flag, because it's giving them
a sense that she knows
when he has more money and less money,
and she's paying attention to that.
The investigator is asking Heisch, you know,
there's no reason why we would find any of your fluids there,
right, and her answer is not, "No."
Her answer is, "I don't think so."
She's leaving the door open a little bit later just
in case she needs to tweak her story a little bit.
Here, she's just describing all these,
what she describes as really traumatic experiences
that she had with hardly any questioning at all.
She's just freely offering this information, and that's
so unusual in someone who's experienced a real trauma.
She's offering up this information to
really have a sympathetic view of herself,
to say, "I've been traumatized by murder before.
"I'm not someone who could possibly commit a murder.
Don't pay attention to me."
SAHNI: Eva Heisch is someone who's been
around law enforcement quite a bit.
She has a very lengthy criminal history that
dates back to her childhood and her adolescence.
This is a woman who knows the legal system,
she knows the criminal justice system,
she knows cops, and she knows how to manipulate cops.
Her choice of the tone
she's using, the little girl semantics and body language,
she's turtled in on herself physically.
She looks like someone who needs protecting.
TUSSEY: She's hiding her face, and you can't see if
she's crying or what sort of emotional expression she has.
And it's interesting that she points out
that there's no stopping Jessie when he's mad.
But, you know, why was he mad?
They supposedly just went there to get gas money
from this victim, according to her side of the story.
So there's just a lot of parts of her interview
that aren't really adding up and making sense.
People that are psychopathic, people like Eva Heisch,
have a high need for control -- Heisch is in damage control mode
and she's in panic mode, because now she's losing
control of the situation.
But the part that is pathological lying and is
compulsive is the part of her that just continues
to tell them things and fill in gaps without thinking about
the fact that they can be verified.
Now she is using, "I blacked out.
I don't remember," as a feigning of something very convenient to
make blame go away from her, and when she's backed
into a corner like she is right now,
she's instead just trying to shut down and say,
"I have no information for you. I have no lies for you."
She contradicts herself in these statements
in that she says, "I was tortured by him,"
which suggests this is someone who is well aware
of his potential for violence.
But then she says that she had no way of knowing he would
react to the victim the way he did.
To the rest of us who live in the real world,
who are not out to lunch, who don't double down on lies,
this is not even believable.
She's even saying, "Hey, help."
Basically, "Listen to me.
"Don't you want to hear about my story and how I'm not really
the perpetrator of this?" And when they're not listening,
she becomes enraged.
And that's something that we see in individuals who
have psychopathic traits,
is this inability to control emotions in
the appropriate way
and instead lash out, especially when they're losing
control of the situation, and she's losing control.
What we see with Heisch not getting her way in this
interrogation and picking up chairs
and screaming like an out-of-control two-year-old
in the size and power of an adult body
may be some of what Danny experienced
before he was killed.
He didn't have any money to give her, and Heisch didn't get
her way, and we see what happens
when Heisch doesn't get her way.
But in the end, this is somebody who doesn't
value human life.
She values her ego.
And ultimately, that is the biggest wound
for her is that this isn't working.
People aren't seeing what she wants them to see.
People aren't doing what she wants them to do.
And Eva Heisch doesn't know how to interact with
anybody in her life except when they're compliant with her.
TUSSEY: Danny Taylor was a 68-year-old man
who lived alone, and he had health issues.
Eva Heisch seemed to know this about him.
She knew that he had enough money,
at least, to go to the strip club
however often he went.
So he was a very vulnerable but perhaps ideal
victim for her, because, in fact,
he was older, and he lived alone.
DERIGHT: Psychopaths are often going to go for
what's most readily available in their environment,
the easiest thing they can think of.
So if there's someone who is vulnerable and weak in
their environment, they're gonna capitalize
on that and have no empathy.
They're not going to feel bad about what they did.
They're just gonna take what they need
from the weak person and move on.
DETECTIVE: Okay.
DETECTIVE: Mm-hmm.
The credibility of Jessie Werley's
story at this point makes sense.
It not only fits the data that's available,
but most importantly, he's implicating himself in
this crime -- he's not backing away.
With Heisch, every version she gives is set up
and designed to make sure she has no blood on her hands,
figuratively or literally -- had Eva Heisch
not ever gotten this idea in her head to go rob
an innocent vulnerable person
and do it at any cost, including killing him,
There's no way that Jessie Werley would
have ever found his way to Danny's doorstep.
More that night?