MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
filling...the hunger.
♪♪
MAN: Around 2:30 Monday morning,
first responders are called to a car fire near
the 22-mile marker of I-96 -- the body of
a 37-year-old woman identified as Lori Marie Vargas,
trapped and badly burned inside.
At first, it seemed like a deadly fiery crash.
But evidence at the scene,
along with the man officers found walking
near the crash, quickly leading detectives
to believe this case was something else.
Police online records show 45-year-old
Donald Spice is being held.
MORGAN: So from a psychological defenses perspective,
we would say that is projection, because he's
attributing to her attitudes that he, in fact, holds himself.
I don't think he really was
totally happy in the relationship at all.
He's very calm.
He refers to it in the past tense, that I was her fiance,
and he's beginning to set the stage that things were kind
of fine with me,
but something was wrong with her.
I didn't believe it, not because he said he cried.
I didn't believe it because he presents Lori Vargas as
this crazy woman who was out of control with her emotions.
He says she's irrational, which many abusive men do.
MORGAN: The technique of blaming somebody else for what's going
on is very common in people who have psychopathy.
This behavior is definitely related to power and control,
and it's related to obtaining their objective.
[knocking noise]
He just says, "I didn't want to hurt her."
I believe that part.
But I think he wanted to kill her.
His own thinking was, "I want to get rid of her,
but maybe I didn't want to make her suffer."
That's what we would call a Freudian slip.
That, I believe, indicates he knew she's already dead.
He's already killed her -- little phrases and lines make it
sound like
in the eye of the investigator that this was hurtful to him.
RAGHAVAN: I'm a little bit speechless
at the pointlessness of this detail.
The story as is told makes no sense.
A woman with no history of violence,
no history of volatility, would not pick up a knife
and threaten a dog.
MORGAN: He's essentially saying she picks up the dog and says,
you know, I'm gonna kill this thing, and --
and then the murder happens.
I think it's all setting the stage for what's about
to come, I think it is manipulative.
MORGAN: You usually say it's love that sweeps you off
your feet, but in this case, it's a hammer.
There is an element of the -- of the dramatic,
but I do think that that's part of what happens when
people are telling a story that's just not true.
In reality, it's very likely she was asleep in the bed or in
a position of helplessness at the time,
But it's implied he's saving the dog from her.
RAGHAVAN: Blood makes a lot of
people with core psychopathic features feel alive.
While he's not visibly showing a lot of emotion,
the kind of details he provides really
makes you feel like he's enjoying describing it.
[loud sob]
SPICE: Uhh.
RAGHAVAN: Why on earth he would put her
in the passenger seat and drive around?
A polite way to put it is it's downright peculiar.
Perhaps he wanted to have a corpse next to him and get
the thrill of driving around
with a dead body -- that would have been no thrill if he put
her in the trunk.
He enjoyed deceiving everybody along the way.
He was able to do that,
didn't seem terribly emotionally distressed over that.
He's describing it with relative calm,
which is all not normal.
Psychopaths don't have the same connectivity to other people.
Other people are objects, they're things,
and they can depersonalize them rather quickly.
And so now that she's dead,
um, she's gone.
I think in his mind, at that particular point,
this was on the way to achieving his ultimate goal.
WOMAN: Donald Spice is so comfortable in a courtroom
he actually stopped for a chat about his case,
the third of his criminal career.
Actually, it's the...
third time of being really stupid.
It was desperation.
WOMAN: Apparently Spice is a pretty desperate person.
He's been here before, though he was a bit shyer six years ago.
This video is from his 1991 case.
Spice was actually on a tether for a previous
B&E when he burglarized the Profile Salon on Alpine.
That same night, spice hit the Alpine Super Wash,
ended up back behind bars,
and yes, the cycle began again.
Spice served five years before getting out last July
and immediately trying to break into another business.
I'm having problems getting money, uh, borrowing money.
WOMAN: But police say it's not about money.
Spice is just addicted to breaking and entering.
No, I am not that -- the police are trying
to make me up to be an obsessive person.
MORGAN: I think he is obsessive.
I think he plans and plots and schemes.
It's a pattern that he will engage in over
and over and over again that he's not gonna stop.
What Donald Spice is obsessed with
is the excitement and the winning.
It's -- it's setting out a plan
and beating other people at something.
There's a progression of the intensity of the crime
so that he could have
more of a thrill and a bigger gain.
RAGHAVAN: Spice was not interested in Lori Vargas
as a beautiful, sensual woman.
I believe he was setting up the murder from the start.
Psychopaths are frequently predators.
And so he likely looked for someone he thought
he could fool,
he thought he could con, he thought he could seduce,
importantly, and then later on,
murder in a way that he thought he could get away with.
MORGAN: Lori Vargas was a mother of two.
She would fall potentially into
a category of people who'd be more vulnerable.
Especially, she's working as a single mother.
That pattern fits a targeting pattern
that many psychopaths and sociopaths have.
The irony is that although they don't attach as profoundly
to other people as healthy people do,
they know who needs to feel an attachment.
MORGAN: Yeah, I don't think he's sorry at all.
Donald Spice is framing his actions as something that
are kind -- "I'm really not a monster.
I do kind things."
I see that as the selfish manipulation of his -- of
the image he's trying to convey to the police officer,
try and get maybe a little empathy.
The problem is, is that he sucks at it.
RAGHAVAN: So he's progressing to the end goal.
But along that progress are all of these little things that
are horrific for us, but that give him pleasure.
So the seduction, the killing, then the staging of
the killing, and then he explodes the car, and he gets
pleasure from probably the sheer violence of it,
but also that's part of the storyline that he's created
for himself.
♪♪
MAN: Today, prosecutors laid out evidence
suggesting the murder was preplanned.
They say, months before the murder, someone used
Spice's credit card
and his computer to purchase a life insurance
policy on Lori Vargas.
They say Spice was listed as the sole beneficiary.
♪♪
MAN: Spice refuted the evidence presented today.
They don't have to prove that.
They have to allege it.
That's it. That's good enough.
I'm guilty until proven innocent.
I'm standing here in cuffs and shackles.
MORGAN: He sounds annoyed.
He sounds angry, which is probably the most
genuine emotion that we have seen from him.
He's even lower on empathy than I imagined.
What we see now is the ruthless planning.
Lori Vargas's murder
is part of a long continuum of criminal
behavior and using other people and taking other
people's things.
RAGHAVAN: And then it escalated to a predatory crime,
where he planned a murder.
And he wanted a big payout where
he could idly and parasitically live off
this insurance -- the thrill of planning
the murder and the thrill of disposing of the body
and the thrill of fooling the police --
all of that is part of the fantasy.
Mr. Spice has all the characteristics
of a classic psychopath.
♪♪
WOMAN: Donald Spice was sentenced to life in prison for
killing his girlfriend and mother of two, Lori Vargas.
Today in court, her two children spoke.
I call him Monster, because he took my mom away from me.
This will affect my life, because I'm
not going to grow up with a mom.
♪♪