This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske.

Here now, Tony Bruske.

Substance abuse did play a role in his life as well.

We know he was a heroin addict for several years, from what I understand, allegedly, basically,

you know, self-medicating himself.

How does something like that then affect, assuming there's already this inherent thing going on

in his brain, does that exacerbate the problem?

Does it alleviate it for a certain amount of time?

I mean, obviously, a lot of times when people self-medicate, they're trying to alleviate their pain of what their brain is doing to them.

How does that affect what maybe we've seen here?

Yeah, it's hard to say, but, you know, alcohol is heroin alcohol.

These are downers.

These are things that help people relax.

And we can look at two-thirds of the country right now and say they're all self-medicating, if not three-quarters of the country. You know, everybody's having their wine at dinner or their beer after work and everybody's trying to moderate their mood state in some way. So it would make sense that if a person is really tense, really uptight, really has an

obsessive personality, that heroin would feel pretty good to them. And that maybe when he went

off heroin, those obsessions got worse. He became more angry, more agitated, more irritable. And

that's been reported as well, that he had that shift after, you know.

So it's speculative, but it's certainly interesting and complicated to try to take somebody like this apart and make sense of everything that they were experiencing. I don't think

we can say this is a guy who had an abuse history. He seemed to come from a very normal, fine family.

And these folks, what we know about them, you know, the sexually dominating killers, they start

with those kind of fantasies really young in life, eight, nine years old, they're thinking about it.

And even though they don't have a history of violence, usually they don't, these kind of folks.

...