Michael McKee's Ego vs. The Evidence — Can He Beat The Tepe Murder Charges?
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Surveillance footage. A ballistics match. A cell phone that went dark during the murder window. Years of documented threats. Michael McKee looked at all of it and pleaded not guilty. He waived his bail hearing but reserved the right to revisit it. That's not desperation — that's calculation.
Shavaun Scott wrote "The Minds of Mass Killers" and has spent thirty years evaluating violent offenders in forensic settings. She explains what's typically driving a not guilty plea when the evidence looks this strong — legally, psychologically, or both. There's a personality profile that consistently shows up in defendants who treat prosecution as intellectual competition rather than moral reckoning. Bundy performed. Peterson observed. Watts calculated. The quality of detachment in the courtroom isn't random.
McKee is a surgeon. Over a decade of elite training. He's operated on human bodies under extreme pressure. Scott analyzes whether that professional background feeds into the kind of compartmentalization that allows someone to sit calmly while facing murder charges. And she addresses the theory that won't go away: the detachment that lets someone appear unaffected at trial is the same detachment that allegedly allowed them to pull the trigger. If other people aren't fully real to you, neither their deaths nor your accountability for those deaths carry the weight they should.
#MichaelMcKee #HiddenKillers #ShavaunScott #MindsOfMassKillers #NotGuiltyPlea #NarcissisticGrandiosity #TepeMurders #ForensicPsychology #TedBundy #CourtroomBehavior
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Bruske, Stacey Cole, and Todd Michaels. |
| 0:09.2 | Michael McKee pled not guilty to two counts of aggravated murder. |
| 0:12.9 | The state says they have surveillance footage, a ballistics match, a cell phone that went dark during the murder window, years of documented threats. |
| 0:19.8 | McKee's response wasn't to negotiate. |
| 0:22.3 | It wasn't to collapse. |
| 0:23.6 | He waived his bail hearing, but reserved the right to revisit it. |
| 0:27.8 | A chess move, not a surrender. |
| 0:30.7 | There is a type of defendant who treats the courtroom like an arena, not a place of |
| 0:35.9 | accountability, but a final stage to prove what they've always |
| 0:39.9 | believed about themselves, that they're smarter than everyone else in the room. |
| 0:44.3 | Ted Bundy represented himself and cross-examined witnesses. |
| 0:48.5 | Scott Peterson watched his own trial like a spectator as someone else's tragedy. |
| 0:53.6 | Chris Watts tried to con homicide detective days after his family was dead. |
| 1:01.0 | What connects these defendants isn't just what they allegedly did. |
| 1:04.9 | It's how they process being caught. |
| 1:07.8 | Chavon Scott is with us, author of The Minds of Mass Killers, to help break all of |
| 1:13.7 | this down. Let's get into this a little bit deeper on the forensic side of it. You've evaluated people |
| 1:20.3 | who've committed various types of serious violence when someone faces substantial evidence and |
| 1:26.8 | pleads not guilty anyway. |
| 1:29.3 | What's typically driving that decision? |
| 1:31.5 | Is it legality, psychology, both? |
| 1:33.8 | Are they just along for the ride at this point if they know they did it? |
... |
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