Interview with Jim Smyth: Colonel Russell Williams Interview Interrogator (2021)

today we're gonna do something a little bit different a couple of weeks ago we did the interrogation of colonel russell williams and we were so taken by the interrogator he did such a great job we were flabbergasted we decided we want to talk to him so we sort of put the word out we want to get a hold of him and greg got a hold of him on linkedin and they talked back and forth and now he's going to be our guest this week so we're going to get to talk to him jim smith master interrogator oh the canadians and the blazers yeah what is yeah what is it what is it with uh at least we don't wear ties anymore at least we've given that up i just took my tie off i thought oh exactly there you go so jim tell us about what what do you think about all this uh getting would you have geeks like us getting a hold of you going tell us about you you know how does that been has it been pretty weird being internet famous from doing this oh yeah yeah it's been it's been interesting i mean it's it's opened up a lot of opportunities uh in terms of law enforcement training we've been we've been all over the world talking about uh not just this case but you know interview strategies in general so um you know even with uh even with all the covet issues we're still we're i'm working with the uh the european union right now uh with their policing mission in the ukraine so we're teaching ukraine officers over skype so which is interesting i mean you got all the translation issues but uh but yeah it's it's been a little bit weird but i mean this uh this case happened 10 years ago so gradually you kind of get used to it so yeah yeah so jim what i i'd like to know as your background how did you get to there what training and you know we all get here from different ways and we'd love to hear your story yeah okay so uh well i started as a police officer back in 1989 uh and after a bit of time as a uniform patrol officer uh my first uh sort of investigative role was actually in a child sexual assault unit where we were focused on child sex assault cases so i think that's really where i wanted to focus on honing my interview skills because when you think about a case like that a lot of them are you know the child comes forward to a teacher or somebody they know and they talk about something that happened to them could be months or years ago so really what we're left with is we have a child telling us something happened to them and we have no other evidence other than their statement so it became very critical in our view in our unit's view to focus on giving that interview of the suspect our best effort obviously and making sure that we conduct the interview in a way that it's going to be admissible and hopefully we get the guy to tell us the truth so we can avoid this kid having to be in court uh testifying so as a unit we're really focused on our interview skills that way um and then after that i developed uh an interest in you know the whole behavioral aspect of interviewing and i ended up going into a behavioral sciences section within our organization so we worked closely with the fbi and a number of uh state police agencies and uh i went through a certification process and then uh became a criminal profiler in 2006 uh i completed our forensic polygraph examiner's course at the canadian police college in ottawa and so i kind of took those two skill sets and put them together and then focused on you know high-end uh high-stakes interviews for lack of a better term uh travel back and forth across the country assisting uh you know mostly violent crime investigations with uh with difficult interviews uh and that's what i spent most of my time doing in the last 10 or so years i've moved into more managing investigations and managing people so right now i look after a region uh basically central ontario uh about a thousand officers uh criminal investigators and a number of different support teams well yeah that well thanks for everything you're doing for starters but yeah all of that behavior stuff is what we all have a passion for chase i know you're you're chomping at the bit to ask about specific training yeah so uh jim what was the specific uh methodology i guess uh for lack of a better term that that you went through well i got to tell you uh my first real training uh like a lot of police officers in in my generation was uh the re-technique uh so that was my first real exposure back in the you know late 80s early 90s um and then and then going on along those lines and um i'm sure you're all familiar with the read technique it's probably the most well-known uh interview technique out there um but we've we've certainly developed over the years uh you know you look at when that technique was was created and and uh built you know 70s 80s when really that technique was only really known and taught to uh law enforcement so there was no real awareness out in the general public about what was going on with that technique and um but now you look at 2021 and you can watch uh you know crime documentaries and listen to podcasts 24 hours a day so there's a real awareness about what the police do and how they do it and so people are a lot more sophisticated now i think in terms of what to expect from a police interview so you know the example i always use is you know my first uh course that i took they taught me if somebody was making denials i should put my hand up you know right almost right into their face and that'll stop the denials but you quickly learn that it doesn't just stop the denials it stops the whole conversation and the whole point of the interview is to keep people talking you know we they whether they're telling us the truth or not is is often besides the point it's we want that information flow and that that conversation to happen so um there's certainly a lot of things that i learned 20 25 years ago that i would never teach officers today um you know the reality is uh in canada i think it's the same as in states uh if we're going to interview somebody that we suspect of a crime it has to be on video you know there's no real excuse anymore for us going to a judge and saying hey you know i talked to this guy about something and uh and he confessed and well where's the video well he just told me off video it doesn't fly anymore in canada and i don't think it flies in a lot of places anymore so um you know everything we do now is on video and available to be scrutinized and picked over by juries and judges and defense lawyers so we're really focused on uh training officers to conduct an interview in the fairest way possible so that anybody watching you can say you know that officer was was doing a fair job and and giving the person a fair opportunity to have their say versus you know trying to control them and trying to control the interview with uh you know some of the techniques that we may have been taught 20 years ago you know so yeah i remember that hand technique it was hand up and say john i know that's really important to you and i promise we're going to get to that but before we do i'm going to keep going it destroys your board loses all your opportunities yeah yeah yeah and that does work it does work with certain people and with certain officers but sometimes what happens is you you know an officer takes the course and they just go in and they they they use the technique in a different way they were trained and now that's a an important statement that gets played in court and and then the technique gets attacked right i'm sure it's been attacked and distinct it's like it has in canada so for sure yeah big time scott how do what what is the way scott what's the way that you do the uh denial handling what i just i always go come on man hang on i do sometimes when i say hang on but it's more of a wave away than a stop you know not this it's more of a wave then you know hang on man and then go for you can't see what hang on and then go from there yeah i don't right yeah yeah i never got the i never did the whole stop thing but that's the way they i don't think they're still doing it that way now though i think they they've changed at this point i believe i could be wrong because it just doesn't make any sense that i haven't been there in a while but i've still got all the old books where they do say to do that but i'm sure maybe they've changed that by now i would assume you know yeah i think they have refined things a bit too so it's uh but there's you know there's different methods out there i mean this this interview is a perfect example when when this was in the media um you know after his guilty plea uh there was a lot of different articles and people contacting us because i'm sure you're familiar with uh you heard about the peace method uh it's very popular in britain actually it kind of started there and it's uh it's been brought to canada and in a lot of places in europe but it's it's it sort of bills itself as the anti-reid technique um it but when when the williams interview was in the media um we were reading articles and said this is a perfect example of the peace method and then some other people would say this is a perfect example of a read technique i'm sure we all know uh those of us have been doing this for a long time is that you know we never walk in a room saying okay today i'm going to use this technique because really exactly your direction where you're going to go is dictated by what that person is doing in the room yeah it's like a surgeon you never know what you're going to find once you once you get down in there i always say the intelligence because in intelligence interrogation often we use something called source directed interview which means you have no idea where you're going you listen to what they say you pick up on their source leads and you follow it and i watched you do that with him very effectively here whether you call it that or something else you picked up on his and and followed his words and used what i would call approaches from my sheriff intelligence background and beautifully so nice job on all that i always look at the real technique you always explain it like it's um it's like a muscle car you can put whatever wheels you want on it you and with your with your themes you can you can paint flames on the side and be dragging it down the beach with chains you don't have a picture made of that whatever you want to do you can if you look at it like that you can soup it up you can keep it really calm you can make it look real mousy or you can make it really loud and put like one of the greg's in the cars all that junk you put on the top that sucks in air and makes it do everything flames coming out the side so that that's the way i see it i like it because you can you can use it anywhere but as long as you use your you don't just go i i personally don't just use this strip to go right down the you know one two three four five six seven another because you change things change in there like yours did you know yours as you approach things would go over here and you'd scooch it back over this way god was beautiful man and so you did such a great job with that it's really uh yeah that was impressive it really was because this guy's did you realize that he'd been trained in uh resistance to interrogation because that's what greg used to do and uh i expect he would have been um what are the challenges we had and uh um i think i think you guys might be the only impression we had a whole uh a background on him uh but we didn't uh the challenge was that uh we first became aware of him on the thursday night and that was one week after jessica lloyd went missing and the evidence from that crime we knew that jessica had walked out of her house uh with the offender under her own power so there was a there was a real concern that she may be still alive somewhere we knew probably she wasn't just from our experience with violent crime but we were still treating it as a fairly extreme investigation because of that so um when we found out about him on the thursday night we were actually already engaged with uh with military investigators because of his first homicide he committed a few months earlier with murray franz cuomo who was a corporal on his base so they were assisting us for that investigation they were great people good investigators but our case manager who was managing all this chris nicholas i think made a good call because his concern was we could ask these guys to go find out about colonel williams but we knew his rank was so high we just didn't know what information that would trigger we thought this guy is so high up that if people start asking questions and gathering information for us he's going to become aware that something's happening so the decision was made we're just not going to go there we're just going to assume that you know because of his rank he's had some training along those lines but we uh we actually didn't have a detailed uh background on him at the time of this interview so when you did a great job of i i say we know all we know all means stop short that's a intelligence interrogation approach where we we allude to what we know based on the security clearance and then he made the mistake of saying that out loud about security clearance now you can allude to that did a great job with that and when in all my years of teaching i would say it takes a lot of smarts not to just say the wrong one more piece of information and go from we know all to we don't know so that was beautiful to watch and mark we're interrogating aching on here and i'm sure you got a question for john yeah so you know as you well know there was a lot of rank around williams not only within uh the the forces but the fact that um you know the trenton base is the start of the highway of heroes essentially and and and that's where the canadian forces start to celebrate uh you know the unfortunate soldiers coming back who haven't made it all the way home essentially so there's huge cultural um deference around that base and him especially and so when you talk about difficult interviews there must have been that difficulty of status which he immediately plays at the at the start of of that did anything really surprise you about what happened with with him was it surprised because he goes from this high status to somebody um you know shaking your hand at the end for for helping him out of this mess by confessing what surprised you along that route well i mean after the the portions that you guys watched um obviously he confesses and one of the things that he did was he still viewed himself as a very respectable person a proud military person uh so once he said i did it um he was an open book um we probably interviewed him for more than 40 hours over the next couple of weeks and months about a variety of issues and so he made that uh commitment to me that he would tell us everything and even once i think it was about two days later uh at the behest of his wife he retained a very uh accomplished lawyer in ottawa uh and you can imagine the lawyers gonna tell him as they all do keep your mouth shut moving forward uh and what he told the lawyer we believe uh or he inferred to be anyway was that i'll take her advice because you're my lawyer but i've also made a commitment to the police to cooperate so he would he would consult his lawyer his lawyer would obviously tell him stop talking but he would come and talk to us anyway because he wanted to be that person who kept his commitment so i found that interesting that even even after you know getting some very strong legal counsel uh he continued to uh to speak with us because he wanted to make sure uh one he wanted to make sure that this was over with as soon as possible he pled guilty to all of his charges uh as soon as he could and uh he wanted to protect the military and he wanted to protect his wife as much as he possibly could so he still saw himself as a man of honor even though he'd done these terrible things so i'm curious about about that because what do you think it is about the the character or mindset of somebody that goes from that that high status right at the start to by the very end shaking you by the hand and and you know thanking you for being part of this process of admitting to these crimes and then i guess having more responsibility towards talking to you than maybe even his own lawyer like i i i find it hard to square what's what's happening there so give us some insight into that well i mean i think i think that issue was he he believes he's somebody who keeps his promises right so he promised me he would keep talking to me he promised his lawyer he would consult with him before deciding whether to talk to us again so in his mind he's keeping his promise to his lawyer his lawyer is telling him don't do it he's saying i get what you're saying but i have to keep the promise to the police so that's that's kind of his mindset he uh he he he took the legal advice but he he continued to uh to speak with us and uh i think really a lot of it was uh obviously the media attention was was huge um every time an article came out or uh uh you know tv news uh covered something about the case it was another embarrassment to him and it was another embarrassment to his wife in the military and i think he was trying his best to just get it over with um i'm not sure how much you guys know about the evidence that was discovered after this interview but uh it was very damn evident see you know photographs and videos there was really no way for him to get out from under uh what he had done and uh from that point on he was just trying to get it over with and get it out of the media spotlight i think you did a great and beautiful job of yes there's a camera right there and then never mentioning it again i always am amused and amazed that you can have people feel like it's an intimate sitting and there's cameras and everything everywhere you want to talk for a minute about that because i think that's a beautiful one yeah i mean we we obviously let people know that things are being recorded but then we leave it alone after that and uh i found over the years even when you know cameras are pretty good now they're pretty small but years ago that camera was was front and center in the room right it was hard to avoid we used to have ones that you would actually wheel in on those big carts uh you know like the tvs you would watch in school kind of thing so it's right there in the room um but i mean you guys you guys hit on some of the things that he was going through like anybody in his situation be going through he's so focused on what do i do how do i handle this next question how do i manage uh and keep all my my lies straight to convince this person i'm i'm not worth looking at uh it's that camera becomes uh i think within a couple of minutes people just forget about it they're just so focused on on the person they're trying to convince they're not responsible for this so let me ask you this in your folder when you came in with your with your notebook and the folder and we're showing those pictures what all was in the folder how much not much there was a pad of paper i mean it was it was designed to look stacked um to make him think that we had a lot um we we had it was a good investigation and we were definitely moving towards him with or without this interview he would have been caught and convicted uh you know this interview was just really part of it that sped things up a lot for us obviously but the investigators were all over this thing and uh you know the forensics were they were all coming they just weren't there yet so uh we definitely had a lot of information to play with and uh you know as you guys know uh on a big case like this um you know i'm the face on the camera but there's there was i believe a half dozen six or seven really experienced investigators on the other side of that camera um two of them with uh they do the same job i do uh another criminal profiler the lead investigators there um they are and they're running through ideas and coming up with themes and and uh so you know to me that gives me a lot of confidence you know you're not there on your own you're not trying to come up with ideas on your own all the time you can step out of the room and they've got ten things that they want you to hit on right so you can go back in there and only have a good hour or two of material if you need it so that's that's huge for me yeah chase now that we talked that he brought up or jim brought themes as well why don't you explain what a theme is for the uh panelists watching this so a theme has some uh essential stuff in there and it's uh i i kind of categorize it into four things we minim we minimize rationalize project and socialize and maybe as a fifth thing emphasize the truth so those those are kind of the five key elements we have for most interrogations it doesn't matter what system you're looking at we want to minimize the seriousness of the crime project the blame and that's as an interrogator uh especially with jim uh it didn't happen in the in the williams interrogation but uh that's one of those things as an interrogator where you're talking to people who've done some really bad stuff and you may have to temporarily blame the victim to get that person to to agree with you or to get on that person's side and say well you know she shouldn't have been wearing that she she wanted sexual attention or she wanted whatever and it is nauseating uh especially when you're first starting out as an interrogator to say things like that and then we're projecting uh like you're not responsible for this you have a moral compass problem or you weren't you weren't in your right state of mind you had 35 beers or all that kind of stuff then we're socializing it say how are people going to see this i think your friends are going to understand i want your family is going to see you as an honest person you know whatever this person is looking for and emphasizing the truth and we're developing that rapport maintaining rapport and saying i wanna my only job here is to figure out either a why this happened or you know i i need to get the reason that this this instance occurred so those are kind of that's what a theme would be but it's kind of a monologue uh and in interrogation schools you'll hear the theme described as a monologue but in reality there's interruptions all throughout a theme because somebody's jumping in somebody's chopping in there and that's there's more denials coming in but a theme is is basically a monologue uh with some interspersed dialogue and if you build a story around that theme or the theme is basically a story with all those things put in there yeah so coming back dialing back a little bit we're gonna say greg yeah i have a question for you jim so i always teach people that a good interrogator looks like a swan floating nicely on the water but underneath the water their feet are paddling like hell we all have been there where you get to a point where you go down the wrong path and you're like oh oh i hope you didn't catch it did you have one of those or more than one of those in your interrogation with him you know i think we're all our own worst critics uh you know as a as a police officer you generally what will happen is uh you know just i'm sure most people are aware of this but you'll take an interview like this and then two years later you're getting ready for the trial and you're watching that same interview and now you have two more years experience under your belt and you're watching that going why did i say that why did i put it that way i mean i i tell people when i teach i think i make a mistake about every five minutes uh on average in an interview and the things that i pick up on but maybe other people wouldn't but uh or an area i started to go towards but i realize it's premature or it's just not clicking the way i wanted it to so you have to back off and divert to something else uh but yeah certainly with uh with him um you know we had to be very careful because we didn't we didn't know a lot we knew he had some kind of connection to all four of the victims that we were primarily concerned with um we knew he had the right make and model of tires on his truck but thousands of people had those make and model of tires on his truck so i was when i walked in the room with him i i was probably 50 50 on whether he was our guy or not uh we've we've all been investigations like this where you know things are looking really good this looks like the right person we're moving in the right direction and then they say hey last week when that girl went missing i was on the other side of the country and here's all the evidence that proves it and you're back to square one so but uh so your guts if you you just weren't sure you're 50 50 going in huh yeah and i think maybe that calmed me down a little bit because you're thinking oh you know it's it's one thing when they say okay this is definitely the guy and you got to get him to tell us that a lot of pressure right oh yeah but when you're starting that sort of exploratory interview let's just find out what he has to say then you can go a little slower you can you can uh you don't feel as much pressure but certainly when he started to make comments uh you know uh jessica went missing the thursday night previous and he says to me uh you know about 20 minutes in i think that that's friday the next day he's at home with a stomach flu so he's got no alibi so things like that are starting to build where you're realizing okay this guy's not giving us anything to clear him right now and most of what he's saying is starting to build towards us believing he's he's probably the person responsible so when did when did it hit you when did you say okay this is it i got him i got it okay oh when i knew we we had the right guy yeah yeah where in the interview was that oh i i'd say probably the most glaring part was when we put the two uh the footwear comparison in front of them and when i said your boots went to the back of her house and here's a colonel in the military who i've now basically said i believe you abducted a girl if he was innocent he should have been jumping out of his chair saying how dare you accuse me of this i came in to help you find this girl and this is what you're this is what you're saying to me um you know he has that level of life experience and confidence that he'd be comfortable saying that to me you know some people when they're talking to a detective they may not have that level of confidence or self-esteem but he certainly did and for him to just look at that and say nothing so those were real prints jim yep yeah he walked uh he walked through some snow uh it was february so he walked through some snow um now when i say to him these are identical uh i think most people would look at those two because we basically just took the foot uh the shoe off his foot maybe 15 minutes before that confrontation and you know put on a photocopier we didn't have anything more sophisticated than that available to us at the moment and we just eyeballed it ourselves uh but but he knew he was he knew those were the boots and uh you know it's one of those things when you think about how people think uh i called him at two o'clock in the afternoon he walks into the police station at three he's got about a 25 minute drive from his house to the police station so he had about 35 minutes once he hung up the phone to figure out what the heck he was going to do and so his mind is racing he's got to deal with this interview he's got to convince me that i'm not he's not worth looking at and he just simply didn't think about the footwear he was putting on his feet so in my world i would call that giving him homework right you give him homework to work on on his way on the drive yeah yeah no he was spinning right and uh you know of course he saw how he walked in the room right he's trying to be mr helpful i i you know i just want to help the police find this girl because her disappearance was very high profile and he wants to set an example for all his troops and he's doing the right thing and uh so you know that was an advantage for us with him is uh quite often people say well why why did he even come in and talk to you in the first place well he's a colonel of a base he's he's commanding 3 000 people and when the police ask him to help he's got to set an example and say yeah we should be helping in this case so he's really got no uh no way to convince me um that he's not going to come in you know whereas we deal with other people sometimes so you know gang members things like that who never talk to the police it's a lot easier for them to say talk to my lawyer yeah but he's got to look like that upstanding citizen who just wants to help right so so jim if he's if he's being mr helpful who are you being generally in an interview oh it depends on who i'm sitting across from uh for him i think uh you know it was it was helpful for us i think you saw with the uh the interviewers i'm i'm one of and i didn't really say how many other people but uh i wanted him to believe that i'm just following up on a task uh he's on my list of things to do and i'm giving him a call because his names come on my list and if you could meet up with me i got some questions for him and you know he basically said sure i'll do whatever i can to help and uh so yeah i i certainly generally don't put myself out there as the as the major decision maker or the lead investigator i'm just somebody who's collecting information and i'm going to pass an information on to the decision makers and they're going to come back and send me back to deliver the message they want me to deliver so columbus are you kind of a light a light bureaucrat of some sort just just you know a light just collecting a little bit of info nobody particularly important essentially exactly yeah exactly i think that i think that you know and it sell it sets people at ease like even an innocent person um i find they're more comfortable uh believing that they're just speaking to a peripheral investigator on a on a case versus the lead investigator because you know we do deal with innocent people quite often and uh we're trying to set everybody at ease not just russell williams because we think he's responsible but um you know we need the innocent people to talk to us too because quite often that they're willing to talk to us even if their lawyers told them not to the information they give us allows us to clear them and move on to somebody else but you say this is situation dependent so so if you're not being kind of the the pleasant bureaucrat who's just kind of getting through the day what are the other situations you end up in that you maybe have to take a different role and what would that role look like well there's some videos out there me being a little bit more assertive yeah yeah and they're uh they're dictated by the attitude of the person we're dealing with right and the level of crime we're dealing with um i think it was scott was talking on the on the on the show that i watched there about the uh you know the guys who want to grab that uh pad of paper and just get rid of it because they they just hate the fact that it's there um so we've we've been in those situations too i've been one you know one uh that i use for training where uh it's actually a laptop computer where i'm playing a an interview of a witness who's who's pointed the finger at a gang member for a murder and he doesn't want to listen to it so he just throws the computer off the desk and i put it back on the desk and it keeps playing he throws it off the desk again i put it back on the desk the screen breaks but you can still hear the voice and you know it's sort of his last sort of tantrum uh to try and get me to just give up and leave and uh you know it's a good training video for us because it shows investigators that if you can work through that seemingly uh you know strong wall that this person's putting up you know this particular guy he has that tantrum but he realizes that once he realizes that i'm not going anywhere uh he puts his head down on the table and you know 20 25 minutes later he's starting to tell the story and you know pinning it on somebody else which is what we want to do keep talking right so that's that's what i call the caesar milan approach [Laughter] you just stay there and stay consistent uh the entire time and you get it and cesar milan had a quote which i think is one of the best ever he said humans are the only only creatures on earth that will follow an unstable leader which really shows how powerful stability is especially environments like that and i have a quick aside question for you jim that i think our subscribers which we refer to as panelists so for the panelists watching this have you had an unusual encounter where somebody recognized you from the internet like out in public or something it's like oh hey you're that you're that guy uh yeah a few of them um i'm i'm a pretty non-descript looking guy so i usually get away with with uh not being recognized but uh usually it's uh it's police officers that will recognize me because they've seen the videos they've seen the training and uh uh but yeah i can't think of one where just somebody's come up to me out of nowhere uh but you know i've got i've got two young sons uh well they're not young anymore they're in their 20s and uh they both thought a lot of world traveling and uh my one guy talked about being in a in a bar in uh in chile and uh telling him from canada and you know the guy starts talking about watching this the video of russell williams and so you know that was kind of cool for him he's going well that was my dad on that video of course the guy didn't believe him but well have you ever walked into an interview room and and the and the person there's gone hang on it's you all right i i i i did it i'll cut to the chase has that ever happened ah you know i don't think it's ever been that clean but uh certainly the year or two after uh after this um all the media hype around this case uh i had other investigators say well you could talk to me or you can talk to the guy that interviewed wrestlemania it had a positive effect it worked the way i wanted to work so yeah darth vader suit jim how do you think being an interrogator has helped you the most with your kids like raising kids as they were growing up oh man i i've always said that they're the only two that can probably get away with lying to me and i can't figure it out but uh you know they're they're good guys and uh they've um they've been they were really exposed to all of this uh you know when they were only uh 12 13 years old this was all happening out in the media and uh and so you know they would go to high school law class and be watching this this video uh with their classmates so it uh it certainly impacted them and um they've always kind of blamed me about maybe maybe they would have had more friends come over to the house if i wasn't their dad you're sort of the justin bieber of interrogation that's what it looks like millions of views fans both are canadian what i always find funny is that people think that you're going to be a heart it's going to be hard like you said you can scream and yell and do all that and then when you're not at home especially when you meet new people they're always afraid you're going to be doing this to them how do you deal with that because i'm sure especially with your your level of of popularness at this point or renown that anybody you meet is going to be going hmm that's that guy yeah yeah it's it's i mean my friends are my friends right i mean my neighbors and uh so we joke a lot about it right if only people really knew what you were really like because you know they they talk to people and they say that they know me or they're my neighbor and uh but they know who i really am and uh so it's it's it hasn't really affected my personal life that much um but yeah it is a bit odd as a police officer to have your work uh out there in the public public realm like that uh in canada anyway this was one of the first cases where um a judge approved the release of this type of evidence to the public realm so um you know there was obviously a lot of media interest and so these clips that you see on youtube were the same clips that were played in the sentencing hearing and as a result of it being played in open court uh the judge ruled that they're now public property and they can be given to the media and put out there so it wasn't something we even expected to happen uh because it was one of the first cases where there was enough interest that it got released um so yeah it was it was odd to go from you know somebody who uh you're just kind of doing your thing and you know working away like you know tens of thousands of other police officers in the country and then all of a sudden you're all over the front page and on news shows and you know over and over again so uh that's it's it's been hard to get used to sure you are to us you know so here's an opportunity for us jim to get some get some feedback because you know we're able to take that footage we're able to do our analysis of it make a show out of it but was when you watched you know our analysis was there anything there that you kind of went hang on what is that english guy talking about is nonsense is there is there anything that we really uh got wrong don't you can pick on me because i'm asking the question we don't have an ego about it yeah so you know what what did we get wrong if anything there nothing really uh nothing really significant guys i mean uh i know you're you're obviously looking at it and trying to uh surmise what's happening um i think you had a lot of uh things that were going on in his mind his body language was was bang on um i got to tell you though like my my uh conduct in that room i think a lot of it is subconscious when you've been doing it so long you know you don't say okay now i'm gonna roll closer to him i'm gonna back up you don't have those conscious thoughts you're just sort of doing it because it just feels right at the time and uh i gotta tell you like i was when it was three o'clock in the afternoon on super bowl sunday when this interview started but i i was exhausted you know when the interview started because uh i've been called on the friday morning you've been stopped on the thursday night obviously the alarm bells went off and and uh you know the the major case manager said we gotta we gotta look at this guy um but they had been already going for a whole week um looking for jessica so they're already exhausted now they've got me there now we're working through all the issues about how do we best approach this so you know three long days and and when you're looking for somebody who you're worried is maybe still alive somewhere even when you put your head down for a few minutes you're not doing anything close to getting meaningful sleep so you know that when i offered him that coffee uh at the beginning of the interview i really needed that coffee but yeah i mean i i don't i didn't see anything you guys said that really set me off as far as oh they're way off base there and and really i mean that's primarily why i decided to reach out to you because i i thought that you guys were doing a good service and uh you know you obviously have a lot of skill and knowledge yourselves and and uh i thought it'd be great to have a conversation with you so i just want to follow up on on that because because it's interesting for me you're saying you know it's hard to get sleep when you've got that pressure off there's somebody out there that you could still you know help discover just give me some insight into that because you know again we're just analyzing a film that's that's over you're living that that moment what is that kind of pressure like and what is it what does it do to you in the room what are you having to handle in the room knowing that there's that pressure out there well i i guess you kind of get used to that kind of pressure i mean that's really what my job was at the time i was uh you know almost 10 years into doing this kind of work so most of the time when i'm going into a room it's because i'm dealing with somebody who they just haven't been successful with yet i mean in this case it was our first interview with him they knew right off the bat this is going to be a challenging interview but quite often i'm called in to interview people or my colleagues are called into your people that have been interviewed two or three times already and they just haven't gotten anywhere and they don't have any other significant evidence to help them move their investigation forward so there's quite often a lot of pressure on us to to come through with with something meaningful out of the interview it doesn't always have to be a confession but at least let's get this person talking so they can give us some information that we can go out and investigate and decide if it's true or not um so yeah the there's pressure there but uh you know go back to what i said a couple minutes ago that pressure is really relieved by the fact that i know i have two three four sometimes uh people that are are just as highly trained as i am out there to come in and take the reins if i run out of things to say and that happens quite often um you know there's times where you know i went from beginning to end with this guy but there's times where i'm a few hours in and whatever's happening the relationship's not building the way we think it should um we're just not making the headway we think we should and it's time to come out and and regroup and try another angle yeah when you when you as you're going through there i said this guy looks like an accountant he looks like he's getting ready for your taxes did you go that did you or did that i didn't mean to buy me out of that as a respectful thing because you went in and you look you did not look aggressive at all with this guy who's somebody who can you know obviously you know he's he's ready for war he could he you know he kills people for a hobby so it's one of those things where you uh or did i hope you weren't offended by that because i didn't mean that to be mean i mean no no not at all i mean that's the goal right to keep them in the room yeah so exactly our job i love i i love the fact you went in with an approach meaning in your mind how you're going to be in that whole demeanor and keeping that demeanor and you know giving him pressure and i i think i'd ask you to talk a little bit about when you run out of things to say to him where did you hit because we we could see a couple of times where you were just like man this guy needs we could tell you're right on the edge and you could feel it what were those cues for you to tell you i need just a little more pressure well i mean the obviously i think for all of us we could understand how difficult it is to let those silences happen right um you know we when we hire police officers we we hire people that we expect to do a number of different things you know one of the things we expect to do is to run into dangerous situations that everybody else is running away from so you're looking for that type of personality in somebody and when you i'm a good example of it it took me a long time to not fill those awkward silences when they happen but again when you when they're happening you know i'm trying to think of the next thing to say to him that's going to cause him to consider uh you know talking further to me um but i'm also not wanting to say the wrong thing and i don't want to interrupt what his thought process is and so it's it's tough for i think for most police officers to allow those silences to happen and to give him the time to think and mull over what his next step is or what he should be doing is is difficult so um so yeah there's there is definitely times during those silences where i'm like should i say this thing now that i want to say or should i just let it go a little bit longer um so it's their judgment calls right you're trying to figure out you know what's actually resonating with him and uh you know the night the nice thing about this particular person uh and his approach to me was he just came out and said it at some point you know i'm concerned about my wife and i'm concerned about the reputation of the military so he just he just laid them out these are these are the things that i'm worried about and all i had to do was try and figure out how to help him mitigate those concerns and let him know that we were going to work with him on those issues and i think that you said that i like that you said what are we going to do russ yeah and as a team from a team perspective i think that really maybe i think that was one of the things that might have helped him start moving i think so yeah letting him know that i'm i'm there to to get him through this and and you know as much as we want to make sure he's convicted and held responsible for the horrible things he did is that is part of our role is to help him work through that process of telling us what happened uh so yeah it is you know i i would never want to think that i'm part of a team with russell williams but uh when you're in those interviews you are working together to try and get that information out there as uh as succinctly as you can so was there any point at all you thought this guy's a psychopath what did you how did you approach that with him from a person from his personality type from that perspective going in did you think he was a psychopath did you think he was just a malignant narcissist did you think he what did you think when you were going in there what was on your mind we thought he probably wasn't a full-blown psychopath he definitely has psychopathic traits to do what he did so we knew he had a side to him that wasn't purely uh selfish and psychopathic that there was there was other issues going on there um and that's why i think the the approach where you see on the video talking to him about you know you don't want to be the next bernardo and i think mark explained everybody who paul bernardo is to canada everybody knows who who he is he's you know he's he is a pure sadistic psychopath and uh you know and that's what i wanted to make him aware of i wasn't seeing him that way that we we had an awareness that as bad as what he had done was we knew he could have done worse and he had opportunities to do more horrible things that he chose not to so uh i think letting him know that we had that awareness um you know kind of continued to build that rapport that we were giving him a fair uh you know a fair shake that we weren't trying to make him even worse than he was so excellent who's next well i'm kind of interested in in in where you see yourself going now because uh you know here you are with us um we're not looking for a fifth member right now but you know who knows who knows we'll let you we'll let you know this isn't an interview of any sort but we'll let you know but what you know you've got an incredible uh history an incredible renown now i i you know i don't know when you plan on retiring and what you what your world is at the moment but but where do you see yourself going i'm just fascinated with that well i do plan on retiring actually i'm uh i'm probably going to retire in the fall okay but uh and i love teaching i mean uh okay the days that go fastest for me uh you know i do a lot of teaching to to uh police officers now and when you talk to police officers about what they want to learn more about it's how do i communicate with people how do i get that conversation going so i can get information to uh to find out what happened no matter what it is it could be a shoplifting a stolen car whatever they're looking at so when we sit in a in a classroom and talk to uh police officers about both the things we're talking about today they can't get enough and we end those days and they're saying when can we come back and do this again because it's uh it's their bread and butter that's what they do every day trying to get people to talk to them and and give them you know reliable truthful information so um it's uh it's pretty gratifying so that's right that's that's an amazing um an amazing thing for for canada and i get i guess you'll you'll travel elsewhere as well you know you've got an audience in front of you now what would be your number one thing for getting somebody to to talk to you just you know for the general the general watcher out there the panelist out there what's the number one thing for getting somebody to talk [Music] just respect i mean and showing genuine respect right no matter what they're you want them to talk to you about uh everybody wants to be respected right and uh and when it comes to my line of work uh when you're dealing with people uh you know whether it's a victim a witness a suspect um you know the suspects know they've watched you know all the all the tv shows out there they know what a stereotypical uh police interrogation looks like so um you know i've i've got tons of examples where people are just so surprised about how the interview actually went uh you know we talked about a case where you know sort of died in the wool hardcore street gang member um that we believe was involved in a homicide and uh wasn't a coffee that time it was uh he was hungry so we got him a a big mac from mcdonald's and uh you know that's how we started off the conversation and that was a very difficult interview went on for a long long time much different than russell williams and uh you know eventually he does give us information and does admit his his involvement and i always like to debrief them uh right after you know once they've got it off their chest and they've told us the truth um then i like to go into that conversation you know what made you decide to tell us this today what about our interaction here uh made you decide to talk to us and uh you know that guy when i asked him that question he said nobody's ever bought me a big mac before and he's been interviewed by the police you know some simple things you know it's just uh just trying to treat them like they're you know no matter what they've done that they still have uh you know a right to be treated with respect and um you know even when we're dealing with people that have committed crimes like williams has at the time we're dealing with them they're not convicted yet they're still you know relatively free people i mean obviously we're going to arrest him and he's not going to be free anymore but um you know we try and portray that as much as we can that's funny it's rather like you get a very high net promoter score which is when somebody says would you recommend me to a friend it's like would you would you recommend jim smith to other perpetrators that you you know they're like yeah 10 out of 10. jim's the guy you know you get a you get coffee you get you get you get a a big mac it's it's a great experience everybody should have it is there a book in your future because i'd love to have one on my shelf back there me too i don't know i don't know i uh you know i think one of the things we talk about now is that uh you know when you look at um technology that people have access to now that they can communicate with i mean uh back when i started in policing you know we didn't even have cell phones right we so the you were hiring people that were used to communicating face to face and having difficult conversations face to face and now we're seeing more and more people in society in general that if they want to have words with somebody if they're upset with somebody they'll text them you know they'll email them they'll they'll choose that that less uh personal uh conversation so when we hire them as police officers they may not have that life experience that allows them to be comfortable having those face-to-face difficult conversations so we're really putting an emphasis on you know seeing those people and realizing that they may not have that life skill to the level that you know somebody their age may have had 20 years ago um you know yeah i'd covered into the mix um and just the fact that everybody's staying apart from each other right you lose that ability to have those uh you know you know more intimate conversations and uh so we're we're focusing on those issues to try and see how we can overcome that because there's really no way you can interrogate somebody you know by a text message you have to sit down with them face to face and if they're not used to doing that it can be challenging yeah and jim i will tell you it's not just police work it's corporate america it's you name it it's the same problem because altercation is not a comfortable space for people the capability so i think there's certainly room for a book in that today yeah i've certainly got clients at the moment who you can who i'm saying to them uh you you you have employees now who have never had a face-to-face conversation with anybody else in the organization never been face to face with a customer and some of them have have never even been face to face with anybody yet they've come straight from you know straight into their first job and no experience of being in the same location as somebody on in in a professional manner so i can i can totally see what the the the force is up against there in terms of getting in the right material essentially yeah yeah and we're hiring a lot of smart people they have all those other skills but they just haven't had that exposure to uh you know and then as soon as they're a police officer that's that's like i said that's their majority of their time is speaking to people face to face and and often difficult circumstances right it's uh and uh they're right into the fire so chase has disappeared somewhere i'm not sure i'm not sure he'll be knocking on the door to try and come back in but listen seriously thanks for being here with us we really do appreciate man we were so excited we could hardly stand it and we're and so we really hope you'll come back and talk to us again well i i really had a great time guys i appreciate it thank you do you think you'd want to be you think you would be a guest panelist on here with us one time and do what we do with us oh yeah that'd be good that's uh well that's your call i guess it would depend on what we're talking about and uh but yeah i'm open for sure you could pick what we talked about if you wanted to yeah you know if it came down to it well whatever it is yeah i always say we cover we cover murderers politicians and other liars all right well sounds good yeah well we'll stay in touch for sure let me know what you're working on and maybe we can do something again okay thanks so much man wonderful all right all right you guys thank you thanks jim [Music] thank you is

Channel: The Behavior Panel

Views: 102,020

Rating: 4.9605641 out of 5

Keywords: ontario provincial police, russell williams, police interrogation, true crime, russell williams confession, russell williams full interrogation, col russell williams, russell williams interview, colonel russell williams, col. russell williams, police interview, real crime, interview, forensic psychology, interrogation, interrogation confession, body language analysis, the behavior panel, adrian humphreys, interrogations, jim smyth interrogation, jim smyth, crime talk, crimetalk

Id: 9e8s4iZIPy8

Length: 56min 35sec (3395 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/uncleprankgonesexual]

Got a map?

[u/peetxp]

Call me Russ.

[u/monkongo]

Dude! Thank you! I did t know about this YT channel.

[u/cheap_sunglasses_NYC]

This was insightful — loved the episode, also, got a map?

[u/Dodgy-Bob-McMayday]

Heyyyyy! Big Jim Smith! What an amazing guy.