[theme music playing]
MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
filling... the hunger.
♪
MAN: Deafening music coming from this Joppa townhouse on
the same day that
a boarder renting a room inside, 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie,
was last seen alive.
Uh, I heard loud music, like, really loud, and that's unusual.
MAN: Police flooded the neighborhood, searching for
evidence that Kodie had been murdered.
♪
BERRILL: Out of state.
Why did he choose out of state?
He's play acting.
He's playing the card of, you know,
I don't know what you want from me.
Misdirection can sometimes be useful,
but it comes across as lame in a way.
He's not particularly believable.
He's detached, his facial expression and voice are
not appropriate for what's
happened, and that's also true of his body.
He's stiff, he's cold, and he's numb.
MORGAN: His story isn't plausible.
I just can't believe for a minute that the brother would
come down the stairs
and mistake a human skull and hands in baking trays
for road kill.
The officer didn't ask him about skulls.
So he chose to interject the notion of a skull.
And there's your tell.
♪
BERRILL: Why do you say a prayer for him?
One suspects that, you know, references to angels of death
and saying prayers, that somewhere in his head
is this kind of religious delusion.
This is highly ritualized and reflects a lot of very...
discombobulated thinking and perverse thinking.
In order for you to commit such a violent crime
um, and then to continue with it,
you have to completely dehumanize the victim.
The callousness, that's the core of psychopathy.
I'm sure, from his perspective,
the heart is symbolic of something.
It's kind of in a perverse way, like a mythological power move
and sort of like from a warrior's perspective,
which is what I -- I think he likens himself to on some level.
You are robbing your victim of his essence.
It's certainly not anything that
people believe in contemporary societies.
I don't know why these rituals would
be important to him, but that's typically anthropologically
and historically what these things signify.
♪
[Kinyua chuckles]
MORGAN: I believe there is a religious aspect to him
consuming Kujoe's heart -- in the history of cannibalism,
in these religious practices where people were consumed,
it was really important to assimilate the life, the soul,
the energy from the other person.
But what we're seeing here is a contemporary manifestation of
it in a person who's -- Who's delusional.
RAGHAVAN: Criminal cannibalism is extremely rare.
One of the biggest taboos in modern life
is the consumption of human flesh.
And this is pathological, meaning
it's linked to something that's not part of a ritual,
that's not part of a system, that's not part of a society.
[Kinyua laughing]
BERRILL: He laughs when he's talking about it.
It's grotesque in a way that leads
one to thinking that he really is psychotic.
♪
Kinyua is amused and smug,
and there are two explanations for this.
It's actually very common for schizophrenics
to laugh heartily while describing something
not at all funny, and part of it, of course,
could be attributed to the callousness that you see
in psychopathy, so perhaps it's a blend of both.
He's not disturbed by the killing.
That's the psychopathic element.
The driving force for that may be delusional.
In his mind, it all makes sense.
They're still shocked by it, as we are when we learn about what
he did, but in his mind, that's what was necessary to do.
♪
The guy's paranoid, and that's the message
that he's broadcasting is that no one is really safe.
So that must mean
he thinks things can happen to him, too.
This is a social media post that Alex Kinyua
posted about six months before he committed the crime.
"Never forget the Virginia Tech massacre students.
"Take note of a problem, solve that [bleep].
"Event for Spring 2012 coming up.
Prevent another university shooting."
He would view us as the problem,
that we who don't take action are the problem.
He is the solution.
He was in Maryland, and that's right next door to Virginia.
So I think, you know, there's certainly a proximity,
maybe a fear,
but if you're paranoid, that proximity gets closer
than it really is.
You get a sense of Mr. Kinyua's life
that there was always some kind of threat lurking.
Mr. Kinyua was diagnosed formally as
paranoid schizophrenic.
It's important to note that most paranoid schizophrenics
are not remotely violent,
but paranoid schizophrenia with psychopathic features
and violence are an extremely dangerous combination.
♪
BERRILL: Let's not forget that he's already dead.
It's really not consistent with --
With anything that we typically think of
in Western culture
after, you know, someone has died,
that parts of their body pose a threat.
It can seem pretty demented if you're a normal person.
If you happen to be paranoid, it absolutely makes sense.
He's seeing plots and evil intent in things that
you or I might look at and say, "Wait a minute.
They're not necessarily connected."
This is part of the delusion and worsening that he --
The family's under threat,
they're being annihilated by an outsider -- as the delusions
get deeper, so does the psychopathic process.
BERRILL: He seems
proud of what he did, it was like a feather in his cap
that -- that, you know, he could, uh,
wield this much power.
This isn't about having a trophy.
Like, look what I've got -- This has a much deeper meaning,
perhaps something of a religious significance.
There is a ritualistic component,
uh, to what he's describing.
So he would fall into our category of
a visionary psychopath.
He's completing a mission that he believes in, and this gives
him permission to do all these things and feel no remorse.
BERRILL: Bringing this dismembered body to
a church ties into his delusional system.
You know, this kind of religious idea.
♪
Ancient justice.
This can feel pretty cold to the rest of us.
This view of the other person as a non-person
and not having feelings or remorse is a sign of being
a psychopath.
BERRILL: It's funny to me that he says, "I'm not insane."
But the truth is, there's no really good reason
for this crime to have been committed other than paranoia.
WOMAN: 21-year-old Alexander Kinyua,
who was indicted in June on first-degree murder,
has been undergoing a competency evaluation at
a maximum security psychiatric hospital
in Jessup -- the court recently received the report from
the hospital stating
the Joppatowne man should be found incompetent to stand
trial without a hearing.
♪