I Am a Killer: What Makes a Murderer: Their Shocking Stories in Their Own Words

INTRODUCTION

When we made the I Am a Killer films, we knew we had more fascinating material than we could include in each episode. We had to be selective, and this meant a raft of interesting interviews, details, and background details regarding the killers and their victims had to be left out.

That’s why we decided to write this book, choosing ten of the most compelling stories featured in the first two series.

Here we can give an even fuller picture, including more of the research that went into choosing the killers. The book also gives us the opportunity to explain the protocols we set up for making I Am a Killer.

From the moment we first talked about making I Am a Killer, we knew we did not want to make another typical true crime, drama series. At our initial discussion, we felt strongly that it had to be different. Most true crime films have a formula, involving the investigator, a couple of journalists who followed the case, a reconstruction of the crime, and a forensic psychologist or criminologist who has no direct connection with the case but who can talk generically about the killer.

We realized that the one person who could tell us what really happened, and usually the last person to see the victim alive, is the killer, and we wanted to talk to them. That raised the bar: we needed a face-to-face interview with the killer, not a letter, not a phone call. Was that even possible?

We hoped that through these interviews we could learn more about the causes and consequences of violent crime, and this has always been our main aim.

We ruled out interviewing serial killers and anyone involved in sexual crimes, pedophilia, or mass shootings. We did not want to feature anything that might encourage copycat behavior. We wanted viewers to see the individuals we featured as human beings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to like them.

Finding the right cases was a massive undertaking. America was the natural place to concentrate on. In the United States, the average time from conviction to execution is about seventeen years. This gives us the opportunity to talk to the killers, and it also means they’ve had time to contemplate their crimes and perhaps to work out exactly what was happening in that one moment that has defined their lives. The United States is also a country where the death penalty is still prevalent, with about 2,800 people on Death Row. The murder rate in the States is high (5.8 per 100,000 people, compared to 1.2 in the United Kingdom), and the incarceration rates are far higher, and with much longer sentences, than in any other developed country.

Crucially, in the United States there is a very strong tradition of free speech and press access, so our film crews were able to get inside the prisons to carry out the interviews.

We started writing to prisoners and the prison services, and we received a flood of replies, several thousand. Many of those who responded insisted that they did not commit the crimes for which they’d been incarcerated, so straight away we were not interested in them. We didn’t want: I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it. We weren’t looking for campaigns to have justice overturned. We had to find people who admitted their guilt, who took responsibility for what had happened.

In order to create a shortlist of the ones we really wanted to feature, several criteria were laid down. All the men and women featured in the series either pleaded guilty or were found guilty at their trials, and they accept their guilt. They are either on Death Row, waiting for their lives to be legally ended, or they are serving very long sentences that will, for most of them, mean they will never again see life outside prison walls.

An admission of guilt entirely removes the whodunnit element. It takes the film away from being purely entertainment. We are asking: Who is this person? Why did this happen? Because we are not trying to prove anything, it becomes a lot more compelling.

The films are not only about the murderers’ version of what happened. Every story is looked at through their eyes, but also from the perspective of others involved in their case, and features the anguish of the victims’ families, the insights of the police, the lawyers, and the jurors, and the pain of those who care about the prisoner. They, the murderers, also have to confront what others are saying about them, often with surprising results.

Like the films, this book leaves it up to you, the reader, to make up your own mind about the killers. We do not know for certain to what degree they, or anyone else we speak to, are telling the truth. Where there is an obvious untruth, we make it clear, and where there are conflicting versions of events, we are careful to illustrate that fact. Otherwise, we allow everybody the opportunity to say their piece, and we leave it to the reader to decide what to believe.

There is no agenda from us as film makers: we are not campaigning; we are not inviting you to share an opinion. Instead, our aim is to lay out the case in front of you, and then it’s over to you.

Most of the cases had never been featured on film before. The killers’ are not well-known names. But every one of them has a compelling story to tell.

Another of the key criteria was: Why would we tell this story at all? What’s the point? We felt we wanted to shine a light on bigger issues, and all of the stories we selected have a larger purpose; for example: studying the effect of childhood sexual abuse and racial and gender discrimination on offenders, and an examination of the law. We never wanted our coverage to be based in mawkish curiosity. We aren’t really interested in the crimes themselves; we only feature them in order to make sense of the stories. We don’t sensationalize them or describe anything vicariously.

The stories may have a binary outcome in terms of innocence or guilt, death or life in prison without parole. But that massively oversimplifies what’s happened. There are other dimensions and complications, and that’s what we wanted to show.

We’re introducing the topic, asking the questions. We feel making documentaries is as much about the questions you ask as the ones you answer. Do we believe our subjects are telling the truth? Do we believe the circumstances the killers found themselves in can be mitigated? Do we believe they have been treated fairly by the law? Quite deliberately, we don’t answer these questions (although we have discussed them endlessly). We want the audience to make up their own minds, because we hope to encourage debate about the issues.

We decided the films would not have a narrated voice-over, prompting the viewers to follow the story in a particular way. It was a huge challenge for us, because the voice-over is normally the Get out of jail free card: if something needs signposting, you just write a line of commentary. But in keeping with the whole ethos we’d established, we couldn’t do that. It meant we had to tell the entire story through the interviews.

For the first series, we narrowed our list down to twenty or thirty strong cases, further whittling these down to fourteen, all suitable as far as we could see from contact with the prisoners. Having chosen our list, we negotiated with the prison authorities, a long process. Then our researchers set out to find other people who could be interviewed about the prisoners’ stories.

It took over a year to finalize all the plans for shooting those ten films. Only when everything was in place did we contact the victims’ families. We felt there was no sense in approaching them earlier, because we did not want to worry them about something that might never happen. But if we couldn’t get their participation, sometimes a story had to be abandoned. Even with everything else in place, unless we could get someone to speak for the other side of the equation, it didn’t qualify as an I Am a Killer film. Although the series gets plaudits for focusing on access to the prisoners, we think its great strength is the other contributors. Without someone to represent the victims, we cannot move forward.

In a couple of cases, an exception was made when, for reasons of personal history, no one could be found to speak on victims behalf. In these cases, we had to decide whether or not we could tell the stories without those voices. In Cavona Flenoy’s case, the victim’s family and friends did not want to talk, and we understood why, given his cultural background. Although nobody directly spoke up for Hassan, we had the testimony of the police and the prosecutor. We always ask: Is it balanced? Are we genuinely being fair to all the parties involved?

James Robertson, for instance, has spent his whole life from the age of seventeen in prison, and there was a real worry that we would struggle to find anybody to speak about him. The director who interviewed him rang us immediately after filming. He told us that the interview was unbelievable, the character was unbelievable, but he was worried about who else we could talk to.

But we persevered, and in the end we found enough people.

We also knew that once we started filming, one or two of our stories would probably fall by the wayside. We were in the hands of the prison authorities, who regarded visitation as a privilege that could be revoked, even on the day of the interview, if the prisoner in question was involved in an infraction or any sort of misdemeanor. There were any number of reasons why they might not be allowed to see us.

Once we started filming, we found everyone, including the killers, was articulate and happy to talk. There’s a social openness in the United States, and this extends to detectives, sheriffs, lawyers, and others in positions of authority. They are less encumbered by process and procedure than their peers in the United Kingdom, for example. You get a very honest take from them.

Sometimes we didn’t have any clue what a prisoner would say. In the case of Linda Couch, there was a real problem with getting letters in and out of her prison, so although we felt there was a story there, we didn’t really know what it was until the director sat down opposite her.

The structure of the films is such that, after the initial interview inside the prison, the opinions and feelings of others involved are explored, often giving a completely different take on what has happened. Then the prisoner is interviewed a second time, with excerpts from the tapes of the other interviews played to them. They are then asked some challenging questions about the original story they presented.

This format came about almost by accident and was born of what was originally a problem. Filming of inmates in Texas was restricted to one-hour windows, and the crew were not allowed to return for another three months. That’s when we quickly realized that this limitation could become our format, giving us time between the two interviews to talk to the others impacted by the crime. It started as a necessity and became an integral part of our process.

Often, the stories we were told by the prisoners in the letters they sent us and during the first interviews were the stories they’d been rehearsing since their trial and through all their years in prison. We sometimes didn’t get much more than that in the first interview, which is why going back for a second time was so important.

In a normal TV format, you are told what the story is in the first minute, as well as what’s coming up, and then you are reminded at different points of what’s happened before. The idea of having someone talk and then not hearing from them again for another half an hour was new. But we felt that we were treating the viewer with respect and crediting them with the intelligence to follow if something they heard in the tenth minute wasn’t mentioned again until the thirty-eighth. From all the feedback we get, that’s certainly the case.

Netflix gave us the freedom to not patronize the viewer, to assume that they can take in a complicated, multifaceted story with no conclusion. It’s a bit like when you serve on a jury: you hear evidence from one side, and you may make up your mind about the accused; then you hear the other side, and your opinion shifts. Nobody recaps for you. Nobody is telling you what it means along the way. You have to remember what you hear from the beginning and weigh it against what you hear later.

For the crews who went into the prisons, traveling beyond the tangles of razor wire, being escorted along sterile corridors with heavy, clanging metal doors and through endless searches and security checks was a new experience. We were entirely in the hands of the prison authorities, and the facilities made available varied from large empty rooms to visitors’ halls in which we had to film through reinforced Perspex screens. It was always a case of making the best of whatever was on offer. It’s gratifying for all of us involved that the series has been a global success. We presumed people in the United States and the United Kingdom might be interested, but we also have a large following across Europe, particularly in France and Scandinavia, and a big audience in Latin America. We have twelve new episodes for 2022, again all from the United States.

Danny Tipping and Ned Parker, senior executives of Transistor Films

1

OVERKILL

DAVID BARNETT

"I agreed to be adopted. I have my own room. I got a summer camp I go to every year. I mean, I was ecstatic. I was overjoyed. I could live, I was doing it right. You always had fun.

But it came with consequence…

Things were finally going right for eight-year-old David Barnett, a troubled child whose early years had been dominated by abuse and neglect. He was going to have a stable life, a future, an education, a comfortable home with his own bedroom. He was moving to live in an affluent area, where the detached houses had neatly mown lawns and trimmed hedges. It was a huge contrast with his early years. David’s mother had abandoned him after his birth in St. Louis, Missouri. He found out years later that she was walking out of the hospital where he was born without him when a friend went back and fetched him, handing him over to a prostitute the friend knew, who was known as Crazy Jane. David was the second of his mother’s six children, and all but one of them would be given away or taken from her. Crazy Jane, in turn, handed the baby boy to another friend, and like an awful game of hot potato, this woman dumped him with her sister, who was living with a man called Rob Biggerstaff. The little boy grew up believing Rob Biggerstaff was his biological father. Rob was an alcoholic and was in and out of prison. David soon learned to fend for himself, often becoming so hungry that he had to get food out of vending machines by using a bent coat hanger. He did not go to daycare or school, and his vocabulary was very limited. His clothes were ragged and falling off him, and he was rarely bathed.

Rob Biggerstaff, David told us, was the only parental figure I had. But while his self-appointed guardian moved from woman to woman, temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation, and was in and out of jail, David was beaten and sexually molested by at least one of the women who casually took care of him. One of Rob’s many girlfriends broke his nose so badly that it was permanently flattened. His overriding memory of these years is of being alone.

I think I was like a stuffed animal that sat on a shelf and when people wanted me they grabbed me, he said. He has few memories, but the smells and sounds of St. Louis are things you never forget.

When he was about four or five, the city’s Department of Family Services (DFS) became aware of his existence, and one of his few memories of this time is the social worker who told him, I’m going to take you away from this.

I still remember that woman to this day, said David, nearly forty years later, talking to us from Potosi Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Missouri where he is imprisoned for a brutal double murder, a shocking crime that appeared at first sight to be without motive.

I don’t remember any of her features, and I don’t know why my mind clouds that. But it was the first loving hug that I had in a long time. Tears welled in his eyes as he recalled it.

After a few days in a children’s home, Rob Biggerstaff had been traced and came to visit (the authorities believed he was David’s father). Left alone in a room with David, he seized the little boy, who was clutching a cuddly toy he had become attached to in the home. An old photograph taken in the home shows David with the white, stuffed cat in his hand.

He just scooped me up and ran away. The last memory I have of that place is dropping that animal in the hallway. He hid me for a couple of weeks in the trunk of his car. I’m cramped in the back of a dark trunk. And this is the only person that I see striving to try and keep me and everyone else not wanting me. So I’m thankful, but at the same time I was scared. I didn’t know what was going on. It seemed like there were thunderstorms every day. I wasn’t being bathed, I wasn’t being fed every day; it was really hard. But a couple of weeks later, the department caught up with him and took me back into their custody, and he was eventually arrested and I never saw him again.

One of the legacies of this terrible time is a lifelong fear of thunderstorms.

David got a lucky break after a few weeks back in a children’s home when he went to live with the Reames family. Rita Reames was a foster carer who volunteered because she wanted to share the love and stability of her home. David joined Rita, her husband Ed, and their two children. It’s challenging to be a foster parent because the children are all going to have some degree of problems because of the background, they’ve had unstable childhoods. David was no exception. He was a challenge in some ways, and in some ways he was wonderful, and I think he would have continued to improve and blossom in a stable family environment, which he never had, Rita told us.

For David it was all a new experience.

I instantly fell in love with that family. Rita was the first female that I didn’t have a bad memory of or didn’t make me feel icky. She was the first one I called mother. I just felt that if you had a mother, that’s who she would be. Ed was a normal dad who went to work and came home. She caught on that my vocabulary was bad and I would communicate with objects. She got me a stuffed animal that was like my security blanket… I wasn’t judged by any of them. They took me for what I was and everything they did was trying to make me better.

David’s idyll ended after six months, when Rita was given the opportunity to study in England and the family made a decision to move to the United Kingdom for a time. Without any legal position in David’s life, and with the authorities still regarding Rob Biggerstaff as his father and therefore as having parental rights, there was no choice but for the Reames family to hand David back into the care system. He was too young to understand why.

They broke the news to me that they would be leaving and that they couldn’t take me with them, and the only thing I thought was that I did something wrong. David wept quietly at the memory of that day.

It’s just hard. So many doors were closed. I just figured that I got beaten and molested for the first five or six years. It stopped and now it’s like they are getting rid of me because I wasn’t doing something right.

He had another short foster placement with a family who made him welcome, but unbeknown to the couple fostering him, a female babysitter molested him while they were alone.

It was the same that I was used to growing up, being touched by other women. I felt I was back into the norm of what I knew.

But once again, life turned around for the better when David was eight, and it looked as if this young boy was going to get his happy-ever-after. He was taken to meet a man called John Barnett, who wanted to foster him. They had a couple of meetings, with John taking him on outings to play miniature golf among other treats, before David moved in with him.

He looked like a middle-aged man. He was single, and he seemed relatively down to earth. He was a charming man, very caring, and the one thing I liked was that he didn’t touch me, like he knew ‘This child’s damaged, I don’t want to push him away.’ I was not taken aback by the fact he was single.

The white clapboard house was in Webster Groves, a desirable part of St. Louis. John Barnett taught computer sciences in a local school, and he was involved in coaching local sport for boys, so David soon found himself on different teams, and he was enrolled for a summer camp to keep him busy during the holidays. Although he had never been diagnosed with ADHD, he says he was a very hyper kid. David loved the family cat, and he went to school with other kids from the neighborhood and made friends. It was a stark contrast to his early years.

I felt I was moving into a different lifestyle, David said. It was clean, the houses were in good condition.

He was soon introduced to John’s parents, who lived a couple of houses along on the same street, and Clifford and Leona Barnett slotted into his life as grandparents.

"Clifford was a little stern. But I had a really good relationship with Leona. I loved her. She taught me how to cook. We saw them on Wednesday nights at church and every other Sunday when we’d have a family dinner.

"John was everything to me. He was like a mother and a father all in one. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. He took me out to dinner one day and he sat me down and said, ‘Would you like to be my son?’ I said I was his son, but he asked if I wanted to be adopted. I didn’t know what it meant and he explained it. I was ecstatic, overjoyed. I wasn’t a sex toy anymore. I could live, I was doing it right. We went to court and that was actually one of my happiest childhood memories—the day I was adopted and I knew I had a parental figure forever.

But only a couple of months later, the vision of a happy future started to dissolve.

"I got worried about who John was. Things started going badly. John expected excellence. He was a very intellectual man. And when it came to sports he pushed me every day. He bought all the equipment and he was out in the yard practicing, and then I started getting hit for not reaching his expectations, which were already higher than for kids of my age. He was forcing me to perform out of my age group.

He would get physical, leave marks, break skin, bruises, welts. And then his comfort was starting to cradle me and hold me closer and start kissing my ears, and that didn’t feel right. That gradually became more and more: every other night, or once or twice a week, to every night. ‘Hey, come and sit on my lap for a while. Give me a hug.’ I was uncomfortable and there was something going on with his body. I was only eight years old. I knew something was wrong, and that’s where the relationship with John started going downhill.

After one beating, the sexual behavior escalated.

He called me into the living room from my room. It was the usual, ‘Come over here,’ you know, snuggles, hugs, this and that. And he touched me inappropriately, genitals, like comfort holding. He’d stick his tongue in my ear. That stuff started to happen for a couple of months. I’d start to almost black out when I sat on his lap. Sometimes I wouldn’t remember what he did, because I told myself if I didn’t want to feel, I had to be numb. I didn’t want his sexual advances, but I kept thinking there was something about me, like the women in my early years, that John wanted. That I brought it on myself. I didn’t know how to handle that.

John capitalized on David’s fear of thunderstorms, bringing the boy into his bed to continue abusing him.

Shortly after his ninth birthday, John asked David if he would like a foster brother, and an eight-year-old boy entered the family and was also adopted by John. David and the new arrival were not close and never discussed life in the family, and his addition to the household did not diminish David’s abuse. (This adoptive brother did not want to take part in our film.)

Soon after this boy was adopted, Eric, another eight-year-old, arrived.

"I instantly liked Eric. He was charming. He was real conscious about these two little buckteeth he had in the front. I really loved him. He was a bundle of joy. And anything I wanted to do, he liked. He thought it was the coolest thing and he would follow me. So I wanted him to be there, but I didn’t want this to bleed over to him. I figured if the abuse didn’t happen to the other one and it was only happening to me, I could bear it. It won’t happen to Eric.

But after Eric was adopted, I started seeing John call Eric out and I felt defenseless. I felt I robbed Eric of his childhood. I’m the oldest and I’m supposed to protect them. But I couldn’t. And at the same time I was glad it wasn’t me. I was too small to do anything.

(Eric did not take part in our film, only finally deciding that he was willing to participate when the film had been completed.)

During his teenage years, David had a best friend, Jason Kingdon, and they, along with Jason’s brother Mike, spent hours together.

Jason told us: At first it seemed like they were this really cool family that had this dad that was a soccer coach and really into kids and sports.

But after knowing David for about six months, he began to realize that the Barnett household was far from normal. Jason took us on a tour of all their teenage haunts, driving us through the leafy, sun-dappled streets of Webster Groves, with roadside signs telling motorists to Watch for Children. He drove us past the two houses, one where John Barnett lived and one where his parents lived, just thirty meters apart.

It’s crazy that the whole backdrop to this is so serene, Jason said, cruising past the immaculate gardens and swept driveways. "It’s tough looking at the house just because I know the horrors that went on in there. The things John did to these boys in this house was a nightmare.

We never went inside that house. David didn’t want us meeting his dad, John. He wanted to come to our house, to be away from his place as much as possible.

Jason remembers seeing water pouring from an upstairs window.

I found out from Eric later that they were so scared to come out of their rooms and be around John that they wouldn’t go to the bathroom, they would open the window and urinate. That’s how much they wanted to stay away from John, how scared they were, how their lives were spent huddled up in their rooms.

By the time Jason was spending a lot of time with David, he was no longer being sexually abused, but he was still physically abused. He turned up for school with a black eye, and once he had a bloody mouth.

The sexual abuse was centered on Eric, Jason told us. So David felt he had to protect him… David would start a fight with John, misbehave to take the attention from Eric. And John would beat David. He chased him down the yard once with a rake.

It was Eric who first spoke outside the home about the abuse, telling a friend, who in turn told his parents, and a social worker from the DFS came to the house. But John, with his polished veneer of middle-class respectability, managed to placate them. By this time David was twelve and Eric and the other boy were both eighteen months younger.

There were other attempts to raise the alarm, more calls to the DFS hotline from concerned parents of other boys. A counselor from David’s school called them, and so did the school principal. Nothing happened.

Eric even took two Polaroid pictures to a local police station, one a photograph of himself naked in the shower and the other of two other naked children. John was interviewed by a rookie cop, who later reported that he was uncomfortable with the situation, but his superiors told him not to pursue it.

None of the boys told John’s parents, their surrogate grandparents, what their homelife was really like.

I was nervous of how Clifford would react, David told us. He said Clifford would give them a clip across the back of the head if they were misbehaving.

He wore the same kind of class ring as John and he’d always catch me with that ring. So every time he hit me it was like John was hitting me again, over and over. So I started seeing Clifford as John, John as Clifford. But Leona would give me a hug. She was the only loving part of that family.

David found it impossible to tell even his best friend, Jason, the full reality of their lives.

"I found it really hard to open up to friends and their parents, unlike my brother Eric. I think Eric knew that what happened to him wasn’t his fault [Eric had been taken into care after his mother died, so for the first seven years of his life he had experienced love and normality]. But I thought it was my fault because