Serial killers: answering your questions about how they think

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can serial killers ever learn empathy? Is their psychology similar to mass shooters? Why are they almost always men?

Welcome to All in the Mind’s first ever ‘mailbag’ episode!

These are just some of the many questions you sent us after our recent episode on serial killers, called Where have all the serial killers gone?

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee is back on the show, answering these questions and a whole lot more.

And can we ask a favour? As this is our first mailbag episode, we’d love to know your thoughts. Do you find this kind of format useful or interesting? Would you be keen to hear mailbag episodes more regularly? You can reach us at [email protected] if you have any feedback.

Guests:

Dr Rajan DarjeeForensic psychiatristClinical Director, Forensic Behavioural Assessment and Consultation Services

Credits:

Presenter/producer: Sana Qadar
Senior producer: James Bullen
Producer: Rose Kerr
Sound engineer: John Jacobs

Transcript

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0:00.0	ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and more.
0:07.5	Hi, I'm Dr Anne Jones from What the Duck and what is Australia's most underrated animal,
0:13.5	the koala, the wombat, the echidna, no.
0:16.7	Australia's fauna is so much more than what you can find on the back of the coin and
0:20.7	What the Duck is featuring 10 underrated Australian animals, like the marsupial mall.
0:26.7	It looks like a party-sized sausage roll with a blonde wig on, and it lives under sand dunes.
0:31.2	That's got to be underrated.
0:33.3	Search What the Duck and hear it now on the ABC Listen app.
0:37.7	Hey, I'm Sana Khadar. This is all in the mind. Mailbag edition.
0:44.2	It's a version of the show where you send us your burning questions on a topic we've covered,
0:49.4	and we put them directly to an expert. And this week, we're talking about serial killers.
0:56.5	This is our very first attempt at this mailbag format. It's a different style to our main
1:01.4	show, as you'll notice. And we're pretty excited to try it out for a few reasons. One being
1:06.7	that a couple of months ago, you might remember we ran a listener survey, and quite a few of
1:11.8	you responded, thank you for that. And a lot of you said we should try out a mailbag format,
1:16.6	because it's really popular with other shows, and often our episodes leave you with a lot of
1:21.9	follow-up questions. So that's one reason. The second is we recently wrapped up our series on criminal psychology.
1:29.5	It was very popular, and our final episode in that series was on serial killers, a topic
1:35.1	that seems to endlessly fascinate.
1:41.5	Ivan Malat.
1:43.3	You cannot have a discussion about serial killers in Australia without talking about this man. And so we thought this would be a discussion about serial killers in Australia without talking about this man.
1:48.1	And so we thought this would be a good time to try a mailbag episode.
	...

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