AUTOMATED VOICE: Thursday 2:19 a.m.
MAN: Minutes before she was kidnapped,
Morton used a cell phone to report
someone had just rear-ended her -- police found her car
running, her purse inside,
but they did not find Morton.
[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: Amanda's family contacted news media Thursday morning
and gave them Amanda's picture.
Investigators got their break when a motel owner in
Camden County saw her picture on
the five o'clock news and called police.
He said Amanda and a man in a pickup checked into his motel.
That led police to St. Clair County,
to the home of David Zink.
BERRILL: He can play the easygoing nice guy.
He uses that kind of calm, cool persona to move
his plans along and seems to do so with pretty good success.
SAHNI: Amanda just happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have no doubt that he lulled her
into going with him, because he was charming.
We, as humans, are socialized to believe that people who
are humorous are likeable, and people who are likable
are trustworthy.
So it's a really unfortunate reality that
he was able to exploit as a psychopath
that assumption we make as humans.
DERIGHT: He is not perceiving people as other human beings.
He's seeing them as objects, in this case,
that are in his way -- to me,
the Zink case is all about self-preservation.
He's gonna do whatever it takes
to preserve himself being out of prison.
Assuming this did actually happen,
it gives you the sense that he was not in any way afraid.
He was not in any way unsure about what he was doing.
He was making jokes with the cashier.
He's self-assured, he keeps his cool,
he's got the persona down pat of being, you know, like a good
old boy, and everything is under control,
and that's -- that is spooky.
She's in the office with him, which I find more incredible.
Like, here's this girl, and she doesn't flip out
and say, "Call the police."
So she obviously, on some level, must have
trusted him or didn't see him as a threat.
This just really illustrates how he manipulated her
or, you know, lied to her.
WOMAN: Little did she know, he was a killer.
Zink kidnapped her,
took her to a motel near Camdenton, where he raped her.
He's a psychopath who is lying his way through
this portion of the interrogation.
Zink's DNA was found on Amanda's body.
There is no doubt that there
was some sort of sexual interaction.
BERRILL: It's a little odd -- Killing someone's okay,
but don't think about me as a rapist.
There are a lot of crimes you can commit to wind you up
in jail, but sex crimes are seen as sort of the low man on
the totem pole, because sex crimes make you
a target in jail.
If you're a rapist, everyone will say,
"Well, I have a sister or a wife or a mother,
so you're a piece of garbage," and if it's a kid, forget it.
They emerge in prison, at least, as likely targets for sexual
abuse themselves, and he doesn't want to be seen that way.
Zink has a strange disconnect in his thought process
right now, because on the one hand,
he's saying he has no intention of going back
to an incarcerated life.
But on the other hand, he's sort of giving into
the simplest, most obvious solution,
which is also the most ridiculous,
the most anti-social, and the most violent.
But for Zink, it isn't as much of a leap.
He has a problem to solve, and this is a logical solution.
Zink underwent psychological evaluations as part of
his court cases, and they really
give you a sense of how his psychopathy manifested
from an early age.
The report reads, "Zink was afraid of his mother,
"who suffered from depression and was impatient,
"nervous, and irritable.
"She was very harsh with him and often yelled at him,
"grabbed him, and talked down to him.
"She provided little guidance or discipline.
"She would get drunk a lot and would get angry.
Zink hid from her."
And here's what Zink says about his father.
The same report reads, "When Zink was four, his father
"was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for
"several months -- His father often talked of
"suicide or engaged in suicidal behaviors,
"even in front of Zink and his two sisters.
Zink saw his father take a gun and threaten to shoot himself."
I don't think they're necessarily modeling
psychopathy here,
but they are modeling violent behavior.
So he has whatever genetics are there.
He has this upbringing where he's neglected.
This is the recipe for psychopathy here.
BERRILL: If you're talking nature versus nurture,
I really do think that,
you know, there is some temperament
that you're born with.
For example, if you're a high risk taker, and you're fearless,
maybe you become a firefighter,
or, depending on the environment
you grow up in, you become a bully,
or you become someone that engages in criminal behavior,
but the environment will lead you down a path to
acting that temperament out in some fashion.
We know he's a risk taker.
So if you grow up in a house where there is violence,
it does set the tone, perhaps, for becoming
the kind of person he became.
BERRILL: There's some amusement he takes
in the fact that she's not getting it.
She's essentially being escorted to her death.
He's not telling her the truth about what's gonna happen.
It's all sadistic, uh,
but he doesn't want her to panic,
so he's staying cool.
DERIGHT: To him, it's extremely logical that she
should be using common sense at this point,
when nothing about this invokes
the idea of common sense -- To Zink,
all of these pieces do connect in a very cohesive way,
but they don't.
It's part of the narcissistic tendency to feel like you have
everything under control and figured out.
WOMAN: About six hours later,
at 4 in the morning, investigators recovered Amanda's
body from a shallow grave in this cemetery.
MAN: She'd been strangled and stabbed.
BERRILL: His description of the murder is highly sanitized.
The fact that they found dirt in her mouth or seminal fluid
in her anus would suggest that, uh, there was
a deeper level of psychopathology taking place
that he cared to discuss.
In looking at the court records
and psychological evaluations that were available on Zink,
here's an excerpt that gives us some of that information.
"By the time he was 10, Zink was placed in foster care.
"Within a few weeks, Zink ran away.
"Around that time, his foster mother found
him making a noose out of a rope."
He had an emerging obsession and fixation or focus on
strangulation from a very, very young age.
Clearly, there was a willingness to
start to skirt the idea of death,
the idea of violence,
the idea of strangulation.
BERRILL: The fact that he had rope in his car,
I don't know if that's just a coincidence.
You don't have to tie a dead body to a tree,
but you do have to tie a live body to a tree
so that they can't struggle.
It raises, I guess, deeper concerns
about how savage he really is.
DERIGHT: We'll never know if those were actually
her last words, but in one way or another,
he wanted you to know that there is some connection with
his mom in why he's doing this, too.
The connections between Zink and his mom were
really apparent in the court records, as well.
The court records say, "Although the foster family
"wanted to adopt him, he always
"fantasized about going back home -- at age 14,
"Zink asked to move home, but his mother refused,
devastating him."
The thing that really pops out to me here is this
element of maternal rejection, which in the psychopathy
literature, is very prominent.
And this is not an everyday maternal rejection.
This is mom gave him up,
but it is not inevitable that anyone who is rejected
by their mother is going to be a psychopath.
It is one piece of the very,
very complicated puzzle that goes into creating a psychopath,
and it is not an excuse for
what he turned into and what he did.
DERIGHT: This is the kind of statement that
gives you this icky feeling that you're --
You just shouldn't be hearing something like this.
We see that he was torturing her, he was beating her.
He was playing with her as an object,
and it takes it to a whole other level.
SAHNI: And unlike some other psychopaths,
he doesn't really even make an attempt to pretend
that he feels bad.
He doesn't try to pretend that he has emotions
or that he's even really bothered or disturbed by it.
SAHNI: He's not panicked. This is just a normal day,
like it's no big deal.
And that really I think sums up a lot of how Zink,
as a psychopath, sees his crimes.
He's just really not broken up by them.
One thing that's really notable from Zink's childhood is
that he seemed to have a pretty severe case of meningitis,
and the results of his PET scan were consistent with some
of the brain abnormalities that
we know about psychopaths in the literature.
For example, he had less activation in the amygdala
and the cingulate, both of which
are very important areas in the brain involved in
fear and emotional response.
So the fact that these areas are under-activated
in psychopaths and in Zink is not surprising.
He is not afraid at all of the consequences.
After his arrest, Zink exchanged letters
with a local TV news journalist.
Uh, here are some excerpts from it.
"I've secretly always wanted to be a serial killer.
"Your preconceived idea
"that this is a crime motivated by some type of
"sexual perversion -- You don't even come close.
"There's no sex in the world that can
"give you a pleasure of taking a life,
"watching their eyes, and knowing that I have
"the power to give or take that life.
"I hope that you would just put this letter in the trash.
"Nothing good can come from selling death.
Have a good day, David Zink."
It's almost his manifesto in a way -- he wants to control
the narrative and say, "Hey,
put me on TV, and this is the story I want you to tell."
BERRILL: But you heard none of that kind of talk during
his interview, nothing even remotely like that.
He's kind of a liar, and he's playing games to sidestep
the whole notion that he's driven
by perverse violent sexual fantasies.
There seemed to be a multitude of risk factors here,
where he has these biological variants
and his tumultuous upbringing that all come together here
and really create a recipe for a psychopath.
Mr. Zink, would you please rise?
We, the jury, having found the defendant,
David Stanley Zink guilty of murder in the first degree of
Amanda L. Morton,
now assess and declare the punishment at death.
MAN: The Morton family says they will now move on
and try to come to grips with what's happened.
What will you tell Amanda in your prayers tonight?
We got it for you, baby.
As well as we can do, we got justice for you.