[dramatic music playing]
[Hubers sobbing]
[man 1] The thing inside of me is like...
[man 2] The appetite, it's like a wolf that's...
feeling...
the hunger.
[sobs]
[Nameeta] Hubers has called 911
to report her deceased boyfriend
and that she has killed him,
but what she's also offering the dispatcher is
a level of detail about how she killed him
and a distancing from any aspect of him that's human.
She's referring to him as a dead body,
she's automatically telling the dispatcher she did this in self-defense
and that's a little unusual.
The majority of people would make the decision to get help
if somebody... was shot accidentally.
Your first thought is not to finish the job.
[sobbing]
It's very unusual that she whimpers,
seems distraught for the first couple of seconds,
but then almost, like, [snaps fingers] she switches off
and it's a completely different person.
She changes her demeanor
as soon as the detective leaves the room.
That would not be typical of someone who is...
who just killed her boyfriend
and who's completely overwhelmed
at... at having done such a horrific thing.
[Alexander] Psychopaths, because of their lack of empathy,
essentially they're at the center of their universe,
everyone else around is for their pleasure
or should be eliminated
because they're some kind of roadblock
to what they want to get.
And what we see here is already evidence of that.
I think she's fully aware that she's killed somebody.
She thinks she's smarter,
she thinks she should get away with it,
she should not be held accountable,
"I should be able to walk out tonight
and be done, isn't that right?"
And when it turns out not to be true,
that's when things start to unravel.
[detective] So--
[detective] I know.
[whispering]
[sobs]
[Nameeta] It's important to realize
that she's already asked for a lawyer,
and yet Hubers can't seem to stop talking.
Her need to manage impressions
and to push forward her narrative
is really what's taken over.
[Alexander] Hubers felt relief
because she had enough
and that's very consistent with a psychopath.
Good psychopaths learn how to mimic genuine human emotion.
Attraction, compassion, love, anger, resentment.
And what we're seeing here is her attempt to do that.
She's setting up the story now in even more details,
saying, "I'm remembering things."
Whether it's her arm shut in the door,
whether she's thrown against some bookshelf,
whether she's smashed her head into the TV set.
But at the scene, the bookshelf is undisturbed,
the things are still in immaculate order on the shelf,
there's no crack in the screen, um,
she doesn't have any bruises,
doesn't have any marks on her, um...
So what she's saying doesn't match the physical reality.
[voice cracking]
And what's interesting in this segment of the interrogation is,
she really moves away from any physical abuse
and essentially describes a motive for killing him.
He was insulting her and her family,
how dare he?
Odd to say,
but psychopaths are usually very sensitive people too.
In many cases,
their behavior, their demeanor is born
out of a self-esteem which is very fragile,
which is very sensitive to a perceived insult,
and what happens once the psychopath feels insulted in any way
is a catastrophic reaction of rage.
[voice trembling]
[sobs]
She wasn't gonna give him up to anybody else.
I mean, she shot him right in the face,
that's a very personalized way of killing someone.
She could have shot him in the chest,
or the heart that might be sentimental,
but she shot him in the face.
And I...
She was angry
and she was gonna pay him back,
and I think shooting him in the face was...
was deliberate, yeah.
I don't think it was an accident.
[chuckling]
[whispering]
[sobbing]
That line, "I wonder if anyone will want to marry me,"
it's not the usual line people have
when they're being detained after having shot someone.
So from a psychological standpoint,
we have to take it as a significant indicator
of what's seriously important to her.
I really wanna know
how long this has been an obsession.
If Ryan was saying, "No. I'm not marrying you.
I'm moving on to other people,"
he's thwarting that fantasy,
and now that he's gone, she's wondering,
"Well, I wonder if there'll be another prospect,"
which means that the idea of being married is much more important
than who she's gonna marry.
[Hubers] Yeah.
[detective sighs]
[Nameeta] The narcissism that Hubers struggles with is really seen here
because she doesn't have an audience.
It's difficult to engage in impression management
if nobody's paying attention to you,
and essentially this officer is not paying attention to Hubers.
And what she does is she doesn't tolerate it.
She pretty rapidly asks to have Amber brought back in,
and Amber is this female officer
who somehow Hubers has fused with
and believes might be her best shot
at convincing them that this was self-defense.
[humming]
[continues humming]
[singing]
[whispers]
[pops tongue]
Who sings to themselves after they've killed somebody?
This is like she's finally grabbed the brass ring.
She's almost surprised at herself
that she was able to succeed.
She refers to herself in the third person.
We all have parts in ourselves, right?
The part that is wife or husband
or father or daughter or...
It's all a little bit different.
Sometimes psychopaths don't integrate these parts so well.
So, in order to get through their daily life,
they have to split a part, parts of themselves
and sort of put them in a box
and only let them out
when the opportune time arises,
and I think that's what we're seeing here.
It's her saying to herself, "I'm a killer."
As time has gone on and Hubers is sitting in this room
waiting to be released,
what's likely happening is she's playing back things
that she has said to the dispatcher and to the case agent
about how things happened,
and she's starting to realize,
"The crime scene might not look like that.
My body doesn't look like that, like there was a struggle."
She starts to play back things she said
and tries to plug in holes and gaps.
And when Hubers says, "He isn't alive to remember,"
what she might be telling us is,
"He's not alive to testify against me."
[female reporter] A woman is behind bars tonight.
Shayna Hubers is charged with the murder of her boyfriend.
Highland Heights police responded to the report of a person shot
at 12 Meadow Lane last night around 09:00 p.m.
That's when they found the victim, Ryan Poston.
The 29-year-old had been shot and killed.
Still, no word on a possible motive.
[sniffing]
We can see her start to play every card she can
with this female law enforcement agent.
So, she invokes a God,
she invokes the mother card.
She starts to pull at all of the possible heartstrings,
in her mind thinking, "This is happening," you know,
"This is working, I'm effective,"
and as soon as the officer leaves the room,
she compliments herself on what a phenomenal acting job
she's just done.
Uh, and that's...
truly remarkable.
Uh, truly cold-blooded.
[Dr. Charles] When she says, "Love can turn to hate real quick,"
I believe she's being absolutely correct
that she could be really loving in one moment
and once she finally heard "No,"
that she becomes enraged and hates intensely.
We know that people with psychopathy
don't regulate the emotions
in the same way that healthy people do.
As we mature in life,
we gain in that ability to modulate our emotions
and in psychopathy that's a feature that doesn't really develop.
They flip from one state immediately to the other.
Hubers' confusion around her emotions
and not knowing
which ones to pick out of a jar,
may be a little window
into the fact that she has enough awareness
to know that she doesn't experience emotions the way
the rest of us do.
And what she's really telling us is that,
she's having a hard time figuring out
which emotions she's supposed to mimic.
So, she's now developing the story about...
she has maybe PTSD.
So, she's kind of a heroic survivor of all the abuse.
She is acting.
This is a performance for her.
She doesn't really care about the fact that Ryan is dead,
so there's no genuine grief,
and she approves of herself really highly
and she's giving herself a pat on the back.
She's kind of quite proud of herself.
[male reporter] On the stand, lead investigator Bill Birkenhauer
painted Shayna Hubers as a jilted girlfriend
who could not let go.
Birkenhauer retrieved about 20,000 to 30,000 pages of information
from Shayna Hubers' and Ryan Poston's phone
in the last eight months before his death.
The data detailed an on-again, off-again relationship
with Hubers sending 50 messages
for every one that Poston returned.
[prosecutor] What does she say to her friend
right after she calls Ryan Poston an "evil person"?
She says when she goes to the shooting range with Ryan tonight,
she wants to turn around, shoot him, kill him,
and play it like it's an accident.
It becomes pretty clear at trial
through the testimony of multiple witnesses
that her story, her description of the events,
of the quality and nature of their relationship,
had actually nothing to do with reality.
In fact, this was a situation
where she wanted to pursue a relationship,
he did not.
And she, like a psychopath would, had the thought,
"Well, if I can't have him, nobody will.
And how dare he not want me."
[Nameeta] At Hubers' trial,
what starts to emerge is a pattern of behavior
where Hubers wasn't respecting Ryan's boundaries,
Hubers was bombarding him with text messages,
somewhere along the lines of 50 messages to every one of his own.
She was engaging in behavior
that if the genders, I think, were reversed
and it was a male engaging in this behavior with a female,
we would be much faster as society
to label that as stalking, as harassment,
but because she is this damsel in distress,
young female who looks softspoken and she's pretty,
nobody really labeled it that way until we had...
a dead person.
[female reporter] That someone was Audrey Bolte,
Miss Ohio, 2012.
When Hubers found out
that he was gonna go out on a date
with a former beauty queen,
that became the straw that broke the camel's back.
That was a point she could not let happen,
'cause once he did that, that meant
that their relationship was over.
Hubers' fragile ego could not tolerate that,
and she then went into action,
because as far as she's concerned,
he's an object and he belongs to her.
[prosecutor] Did she ever, at times, laugh
about certain parts
of the incident that happened on October 12th of 2012?
Oh, yes.
Which parts did she laugh about?
...up to the IQ of Einstein.
[female reporter 1] A local breaking news alert now,
Shayna Hubers has been found guilty of murder.
[female reporter 2] Convicted killer Shayna Hubers won't be sentenced until June,
but right now her lawyers are trying to get her a shorter prison sentence.
They are asking the judge
to declare Hubers a domestic violence victim,
saying she was abused during her relationship with Ryan Poston.
Now, if the judge rules in her favor,
she could be eligible for parole in just five and a half years.
[Nameeta] Now that Hubers has been convicted,
her legal team is trying to get the court
to acknowledge that she be handled as a special victim
or a special circumstance,
that she was, in fact, a victim of domestic violence
and that this is a battered women's syndrome case,
or a battered victim's case.
[Dr. Charles] She needs to represent herself
as being having been in a long-standing relationship.
They were stable, they were together,
they're living together
and that she is the victim
of a history of abuse over time.
The challenge for her will be,
it's going to have to match evidence.
When they start looking at the facts,
it turns out they're not living together,
it's not her house.
They're not in a monogamous relationship.
He's dating other people,
she's been seeing other men,
he's been saying,
"It's over. Move on,"
and she's been refusing to accept that.
What I think happened in that apartment
was a little more than cold-blooded murder.
It's probably as cold-blooded an act
as I've been associated with in the criminal justice system
in the 30 plus years I've been in it.
[female reporter] Good evening, everyone.
A young woman convicted of killing
her on-and-off-again boyfriend
will get a new shot at freedom.
[male reporter 1] And it's all because one juror didn't pay child support
more than two decades ago.
[male reporter 2] Kentucky law says you cannot serve on a jury
if you are a convicted felon.
Hubers' belief that seven days...
of waiting to hear from the Department of Corrections
if her marriage will be approved
is somehow them retaliating against her,
just speaks to that sense of entitlement
that the rules don't apply to her.
Hubers is trying to get the audience to believe
that she has this deep love for Unique Taylor
who happens to be transgendered.
She still refers to her partner as "He".
Hubers is not even using the correct pronoun
about her partner who she wants to marry.
And so the fact that Hubers continues to maintain
that it doesn't matter to her,
indicates to us she really hasn't changed.
[Hubers] I think I've--
When Hubers is asked by the journalist
whether she intends to testify in this re-trial,
what she says is, "We'll make it a surprise."
So she has kind of this glib, light-hearted attitude
about what is about to be a murder trial,
and she kind of handles this like a press conference
and like she's celebrity status and everyone wants to know
and so she's gonna leave it as a cliffhanger for the viewers.
Nowhere in this interview that Hubers has with the media
does she show any signs of remorse
nor does she show any consideration
for how Ryan's family is going to be re-traumatized
and re-victimized,
having to sit through this trial all over again.
[male reporter] A big surprise in court today,
as a woman accused of murdering her former boyfriend
takes the stand to tell her side of the story today.
Hubers' decision to testify at her re-trial
when she did not testify at the merits phase of her initial trial,
speaks to her narcissism.
I have a hard time believing
her attorneys advised her to get on the stand.
[Alexander] And I think it's important to say here too
that her history of being abused or bullied at school, if it's true,
is not a pathway towards psychopathy.
A lot of people unfortunately are abused
and are the victims of bullying.
It doesn't turn them into criminals.
So, in her mind, she thinks that
she can blame these individuals,
fellow students, parents, other people in the community
on what she did,
when in fact, it's all her.
There wasn't any data at all
that said that he was an explosive, violent,
impulsive person,
but there was plenty of evidence
that friends testified about that she could be manipulative
and I think even at the gun range,
she joked about, like, killing him.
So, uh... that wasn't gonna work well for her,
at the trial, yeah, given her defense.
[juror] We the jury, find the defendant, Shayna Hubers,
guilty of murder.
[gasps]
Hubers potentially really thought
she might get acquitted the second time,
particularly if she took the stand,
and that detachment and disconnect
from how the rest of the world sees her
is consistent with what we see oftentimes in psychopathic individuals.
There isn't a moment where we see regret,
where we see remorse, where we see empathy,
or where we see Hubers' ability
to think about someone other than herself.
And no doubt, Hubers' decision to testify
may have been part of her undoing
and how she was convicted again,
but also received a tougher sentence.
[snorts]
♪