TEACHER Murdered By HER OWN STUDENT

miss ritzer was a ninth grade math teacher at denver's high school but on one october evening in 2013 miss ritzer failed to return home from work later that evening her brutalized dead body would be found in a woods not far away from the school and the killer wasn't so far away either so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about the murder of colleen ritzer but quickly before we get into the case i do just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible carestify you guys have already heard me shouting from the rooftops about how much i love carestify's phone cases i've been using them exclusively for years now but did you know that case if i do a lot more than just phone cases they also do ipad cases macbook cases laptop sleeves airpod cases and just like their phone cases all of them come in so many gorgeous prints to choose from you can even personalize them get your name put on them you could even get like matching 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and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into this one in this case we will be discussing themes of rape and psychosis so if either of those are things that you don't want to hear about right now feel free to click out of this video i'm sure i'll see you again some other time with a different case but with all that being said let's get into the case colleen ritzer was a 24 year old high school teacher from massachusetts she was born on may 13 1989 the first child to peggy and thomas ritzer she would later get a younger brother named daniel and a younger sister named laura and she was super close with both of them and with both of her parents she was she was a really family-oriented girl right from being young she was she was a homebody she loved her family and she had a super happy childhood growing up colleen was very academic she was very intelligent she always got good grades did really well at school she really enjoyed school as well which is quite unusual for kids her age but she liked learning she loved reading and her dream job when she grew up one day was to become a teacher because when she was young she was so inspired by her teachers she loved her teachers that she knew that she wanted to be able to do that for other kids and so she worked really really hard to get that goal because she knew she needed good grades if she wanted to become a teacher so she did she studied really hard got really good grades graduated high school and then went off to college in college she studied maths maths was always colleen's subject she loved it she was really passionate about it and when she went to college to study this was like a really transformative time in her life i feel like it is for most people that go to uni after school she moved into the college dorms she made loads of new friends picked up some new like hobbies and interests she was doing new things she became a little bit of a party girl as most people do when they go to uni and one thing about colleen ritzer she loved halloween she was super super into it every single year she always had been ever since she was a kid she cared about her costume more than most every year her mother would help her pick out like the perfect costume or help her make her costumes and so this year when she went off to college this was the first year her first halloween without her mum the first halloween that she would be like doing her own thing and for her first halloween away from home colleen dressed up a little bit more revealing this year she wore like a little mini dress a little brown mini dress i think she was supposed to be a bear honestly it really wouldn't be considered revealing by most people's standards especially when it comes to halloween costumes because they can get they can get a little bit crazy but regardless to colleen's mother peggy it was quite revealing compared to all the other costumes she'd always helped her make and buy all her life she was now seeing her baby daughter in this like mini dress going out for halloween and her mum had a sense of humor about it i love this she commented on a picture on social media saying colleen as they get older the costumes take on a different look i just thought that was really funny because like her mum had watched her halloween costumes like evolve over the years and now she was away at college i don't know her mom knew that she was having a great time either way and once colleen finished university she was offered her dream job right out of the gate to be a high school maths teacher at denver's high school in massachusetts it was only about a 25 mile journey from where she lived with her parents so this was kind of ideal she didn't live too close to the school where she'd be like living near students but she didn't live too far away that it was a hell of a commute it just seemed perfect and she felt so lucky to have been offered her dream job straight away and so of course she took it this also meant that she didn't have to move away from her parents because that was what she was worried about i mean she did it for university she moved away for university but now that she'd come back home and she was living there she didn't really want to leave again because she was a homebody and she loved her family they were like her closest friends were her family so yeah this job meant that she didn't have to move away it was good pair it was a good location everything about it was perfect and fun fact about this area danvers where the high school was where she was offered this job danvers is actually salem you know salem from the witch trials well it was renamed to danvers after all of that to kind of disconnect the area from its like negative history i guess um but yeah danvers is salem so yeah colleen starts her new job at danvers high school she's teaching mainly algebra there which is one of her favorite topics within maths she was such a maths girl but specifically algebra so again she was over the moon she settled into this job really really well started making friends with other teachers she was getting on really well with her students in fact the kids loved her she was really really popular in that school i think probably because she was such a young teacher the young teachers are always the favorites because they're like a bit more relatable to the kids you know she was only like six years older than a lot of her students so she would have conversations with them on a level that they wouldn't be able to have with other teachers you know she understood them and they understood her and she always made it very clear to her students that she was more than just a teacher for them she was a friend and if they ever needed to talk about like personal stuff or home stuff not even just their maths homework then she was there she always told them she was available her classroom was a no judgement zone she just wanted everyone to feel like they had someone to talk to her colleen ritzer was just such a kind caring person exactly the kind of person that you would want as a teacher because she saw her students as people as complex individuals with home lives you know she didn't just see them as test scores and stats she saw these kids as young impressionable people that she wanted to make a positive impact on and colleen really went above and beyond for her students like of course during the school day as i've been saying but even outside of school colleen made a public twitter account where she would tweet just like help for her students like help on the homework revision tips any like useful links or websites that she would find she would tweet like little reminders like make sure you're wearing comfy shoes tomorrow because we're going on a school trip like she was just such an angel and her bio on twitter as well was so cute it was math teacher often too excited about the topics i'm teaching in october of 2013 miss ritzer had a new student in her algebra class and he wasn't doing very well she could tell that he was struggling he was like lagging behind all the other students in the class his name was philip chisholm he was 14 years old and he was new to the area because he was originally from tennessee um but his parents were in the middle of a really messy divorce at this point in time his mother had gotten custody of philip and so she'd moved the two of them over a thousand miles away to massachusetts i don't know why she decided to move so far but this was a huge huge change for philip as i'm sure you can imagine for a 14 year old kid to be like up to move to the other side of the country like he's got no friends he doesn't know anyone here new school it was all so overwhelming for philip and colleen because she was so attentive to all of her students she'd noticed that philip didn't seem to be settling in very easily he didn't seem to have like a group of friends that he would like walk to and from classes with or sit with at lunch it just didn't seem like he was finding his feet very quickly he had joined the football team with the soccer team um so he joined this team but again i think they were quite clicky on the football team and they didn't really like welcome philip into their group as well as you would hope but philip was super super talented at football he was really really good even back in tennessee he'd been on his school's football team there and so when he joined this school he tried out and he got on the football team immediately because he was he was really good but even that hadn't helped him to make friends and colleen could tell that he was struggling not only just in general but also with his algebra work um and she just really wanted to help this kid she had a lot of empathy for her students and so she asked him one day on october 22nd she asked him to stay back after class because she wanted to have a bit of a chat with him the school day ended at around 4 p.m and so every single day phillips mother expected him home at about 4 30. you know give him a bit of time to walk home but on this particular day october 22nd 2013 philip wasn't home at the usual time so his mum just hung about and waited for a bit just expecting him to be home any minute maybe he was just taking a bit longer walking on this particular day but as time went on it was getting to like 6 p.m 6 30 and now his mum's worried because she knows that he doesn't really have friends so like who could he be with is he just out by himself for two hours after school eventually his mum got so worried that at 6 34 p.m she called the local police department and filed her son as missing she told them that the last time she'd seen her son was when she dropped him off at school that morning and she hadn't seen or heard from him since and so that's where police started they went to phillips school danvers high school and they started asking around immediately they went to his football coach because i think he was supposed to have football after school that day or like at lunch time or whatever and his coach said that philip never showed up for football practice that day which was really unusual he'd never missed because he was super super passionate about the sport he was good at it he didn't want to miss his football lessons football lessons football practice that's it football lessons so now everyone was even more worried it seemed like no one had seen or heard from philip in a while he hadn't been at all the things that he'd supposed to have been since about halfway through the day so that evening the head teacher sat down and she wrote this big mass email to all of the teachers in danvers high school just basically telling them the situation we've got this new student philipp chisholm he's missing hasn't been seen or heard from since halfway through the day do you know anything have you seen anything and very quickly the head teacher received a response from one of the maths teachers at the school but it wasn't exactly relating to philip chisholm but to something quite similar actually and that was that one of the teachers had also been reported missing that evening it was miss colleen ritzer she too hadn't returned home that evening and when she didn't her parents got worried and contacted the school so the school informed police of these two parallel disappearance cases and naturally police started making connections between the two philip chisholm was in colleen ritzer's maths class and that day they had had a lesson together so they were connected they knew each other was there a chance that they could be together they could be missing together by now colleen's parents had been looking for her for quite some time they'd just been like driving around ringing around all her friends and at this point her dad had driven all the way down to danvers high school as soon as he drove into the car park he saw colleen's car still parked there which really worried him because school finished at what like 4 p.m and it was now 9 p.m what reason would there be for her car to still be in the car park so far out after hours she lived 25 miles away she definitely didn't walk home her parents had already been in contact with all of her friends so it wasn't like she went to meet a friend after work and just left her car there there was no explanation for her car still being there and so her family went up to colleen's classroom to have a look around you know the room that she taught maths in and none of her belongings were there it was as if she had actually left work that day and taken everything with her her bag wasn't there her phone wasn't there jacket wasn't there like nothing everything that she'd brought in she'd also seemingly taken away with her so they're getting some really contrasting confusing evidence here all her belongings are gone but she hadn't left in her car so police got in touch with both colleen ritzer's and philip chisholm's phone network companies and they asked them to ping the location where the last known location of both of their phones the last hit that they got on colleen's phone was from about 20 minutes a 20-minute walk away from the school so really not that far at all and so they started searches in that area just like manual searches people walking up and down the roads looking either for colleen or for this floor and the last hit that police got on philip chisholm's phone was actually in a cinema about half an hour away like a half an hour drive away from the school and so again searches were started there police were sent there to try and find philip unfortunately police had no look at the cinema they also had no look in the general area where colleen's phone was last pinged but they did find something in the nearby area maybe a few streets away from the school colleen ritz's handbag was found just laying on the floor and it was completely emptied everything had been taken presumably her credit cards her id her money her phone everything everything was gone out of this bag as all of this had been going on of course searches had been going on inside the school in colleen's classroom and things like that and police had found something there even more concerning than the handbag so colleen's classroom was on the first floor and on the very end of that corridor there was two toilets boys toilets girls toilets and in the girls toilets at the end of that hallway police found very small red smears on the tiles it looked like blood so police started grabbing all the cctv footage they could from around the school because they wanted to pinpoint the last time that both philip and colleen were seen as they were seen leaving the school that day the first camera that they tapped into was the one from right outside colleen's classroom so it could see their the doorway the entrance to and from her classroom and just from this one camera alone a very clear story starts to emerge the footage that police were most interested in started around 3 p.m which is around the time that colleen ritzer would have asked philip chisholm to stay back after class to speak to her for a while just after 3pm colleen ritzer leaves her classroom and walks a little down the hallway she's smiling everything's fine and then you see a shadow in the doorway of her classroom a boy then leaves the classroom hovers outside for a moment and it looks as though he's looking around seeing who's around and that boy was 14 year old philip chisholm he lingers for a moment watching in the direction that colleen's just walked he's watching her walking into the girls bathrooms at the end of the hallway philip walks back into the classroom just for a brief moment and then emerges again but now he has his hood pulled up and he is walking in the direction that he just saw colleen leave in as he gets closer to the bathroom you can clearly see that he's holding a pair of gloves in his hands and he puts them on as he enters the room where colleen is the cameras then don't catch any more movement for about 11 minutes the area where philip and colleen are in the bathroom is covered it's a blind spot but 11 minutes later the next movement that they see on camera was another student another female student walking into those girls bathrooms she gets in there and very quickly seems to turn around and head straight back out again this was later explained by the girls she said that she walked into those bathrooms she was just gonna use them normally but then she saw one of the bathroom stalls was open slightly and there was a person in there exposed from the waist down she saw like a pile of clothes on the floor and this person was naked from the waist down and so she thought oh my god i've just seen someone getting changed and you know for their own privacy and because she was feeling a little bit embarrassed she just turned and walked straight out she said that was all she saw that's all she thought it was someone getting changed in the toilet very quickly after that the camera catches philip chisholm leaving the girls bathrooms in quite a hurry still with his hood up he walks all the way down the corridor down the stairs and out of the building and he looks like he's in a hurry he's like keeping his head down he doesn't want anyone to see him he runs outside takes his blue hoodie off and then when we see him again he's changed into a red jacket and after that he's just kind of like running around the school it doesn't seem as though he has any like major purpose he's just like running around looking around and bear in mind this whole time colleen ritzer has not been seen leaving the girls bathroom but for about five minutes on the rest of the cctv footage philip chisholm is just running around he doesn't look like he knows what he's doing he doesn't look like he's got any major direction he's like taking his jacket off one minute i think he had it around his head at one minute like he doesn't know what he's doing then eventually after about 10 minutes philip leaves the school again and then he's caught on cameras dragging a wheelie bin back into the school he drags it inside up the stairs to the first floor and drags it into the girl's bathroom he's not seen on camera for about six minutes after that and then when he is seen again he is dragging the bin out of the girl's bathrooms with a mask on now so he drags this wheelie bin again down the stairs and out of the school which i just want to say he didn't get questioned or stopped once which i find insane this kid has just brought a whole wheelie bin in and he's just dragging it up and down stairs as well that would have been noisy it would have been disruptive he didn't get stopped or questioned once dragged it all the way back outside and on his way out philip seems to be noticeably struggling to drag the bin a lot more than he was when he was bringing it in almost as if it was heavier now and a bit harder to control the cameras follow him dragging it all the way outside the school down the street and towards a nearby woods about 25 minutes later philip chisholm comes out of the woods now without the bit colleen ritzer was never seen on any of the cctv again after she entered that girl's bathroom she was not seen leaving again and so this footage of the wheelie bin was insanely concerning because that's the only explanation was colleen ritzer in that bin after ditching the bin in the woods philip chisholm then returns to school for a third time and again he's dressed differently again this time he doesn't have socks and shoes on he's wearing jeans and they're just covered in what looks like bloodstains he just openly walked into school like this when there's students still around and again no one questioned him so now he went into a different bathroom not the girl's bathroom the same one where he was before he went into a different bathroom and got changed again this time into an all-black outfit after that i think he went into the girl's bathroom one last time the bathroom where he'd been with colleen ritzer and then when he came out he left the school for the final time and then he's not seen again on cctv so now police had to figure out where he was the last hit that they had on his mobile phone was at that cinema but that was hours ago and they'd already searched there and he wasn't there now so they had no idea where he could be and they still didn't know where colleen was but they had a pretty good idea after seeing this cctv footage so searches began in that woods just by the school and this is the same night that colleen's gone missing these searches are happening quickly meanwhile other police officers are trying to get some intel on philip chisholm try and find out where he is just after midnight that night police received a concerned phone call from just a member of the public who said they'd seen a young man walking the opposite way down like a highway or something and he had his hood up and he just seemed like he was up to no good there was just something about this guy he was up to no good and so this person called police just to ask them to check on him when police arrived at the scene and they went to go and speak to this hooded man they found out that it was actually 14 year old philip chisholm he'd just been walking down this road and he didn't have his phone on him anymore and where he was found at this point in time was five miles away from the cinema and it's believed that he just walked that whole five miles he'd just been walking since he left the cinema they searched him on the spot and philip was found to have a knife on him a knife that still had dried blood on it but inside of his backpack was even worse they found a box cutter again still with blood on it they found a mask and they found colleen ritz's credit cards and id there was also a pair of women's underwear in that bag and they had a pretty good idea of whose this was a few days later it was confirmed to be colleen ritz's underwear so police asked philip where he'd gotten all these items from and phillip said that he'd actually just found them on the floor outside a shop and he recognized colleen ritzer as his algebra teacher and so he picked it all up and he was thinking i'll just give her it all at school tomorrow of course police didn't believe that for a minute and so they kept pressing philip and they're like come on tell us the truth tell us how you actually found all of this stuff and he was like fine fine i'll tell you the truth i broke into her car and i stole it all of course they still don't believe him they've seen the cctv at this point they're just wanting a confession out of him they know that the car theft story isn't real either and so to be able to try and get these answers out of him because he was just going to keep lying if he was prompted again so to try and get the correct answers out of him they asked him well where's all this blood come from there's blood inside your bag there's blood on this knife on this box cutter whose blood is this and philip just responded the girls so philip chisholm was driven back to denver's police station where his mother met him there so that she could sit in on his interview and police noticed that as soon as he was like reunited with his mother and he was sat there with her he wasn't the same boy like this seemed to have really put a barrier up in how he was talking he wouldn't say much when his mother was there it was clear that this made him quite uncomfortable and actually after a little while he asked if he could be questioned without his mother present which was granted because police felt it would be for the best we'll get back to the like details of the questioning a bit later but right now in the case it's like the early hours of the morning they had been questioning phillip for a little while up until this point with his mother present but he really wasn't giving them much at all he wasn't he wasn't a talker he was a no comment but then just after 3 a.m officers that were searching the woods made a gruesome discovery under a pile of leaves they found the brutalized dead body of 24 year old colleen ritzer she was naked from the waist down and absolutely covered in blood she'd clearly been very savagely murdered there were so many visible stab wounds all over her it seemed as though she'd had her throat slit and there were a lot of smaller like cuts and grazers all over her there was mud all over her suggesting that she'd really fought for her life like there'd been a big struggle here she was trying to save herself and right next to colleen's body was a note and it was very clear that this note had been left intentionally it was right by the body and scribbled on it was i hate you all police also felt as though colleen's body had been left intentionally paused in a sexually suggestive position and she also had a tree branch still inside of her colleen ritz's autopsy showed that she'd been strangled she'd been stabbed at least 16 times her throat seemed to have been slit they couldn't tell if it was like a slit or like multiple stab wounds in the same area because a lot of her stab wounds seem to be like focused chest and neck area they did find evidence of her being raped not only by a person but also with this tree branch that was found still inside of her and the worst part of all of this was that the pathologist thought there was quite a good chance that colleen had been alive through all of this and that she'd actually died from blood loss very slowly after the attack they believed it was likely that she'd just been laying in that woods for quite some time after the attack had actually finished but she was just too weak and injured to be able to get herself up and get some help it's believed that she bled out so slowly because a lot of the stab wounds that had been done were done with seemingly the box cutter that was found in phillips bag because a box cutter has only a really tiny blade it wouldn't make that deep of a stab wound deep enough for you to eventually bleed out if there's enough done but none of them were really deep enough to like sever nerves or veins in fact there were only three veins that were actually severed no three blood vessels that were severed due to what they believed to be the slit on her throat and that was where most of the blood loss came from about 20 yards away from where they'd found colleen's body in the woods they also found that wheelie bin that they'd seen phillip dragging around on the cctv footage and when they opened it there was blood inside and not far away from that there were a pair of gloves just laying on the ground in the woods again with blood all over them another interesting piece of evidence that was found maybe a little bit later on in the night was a couple of drops of blood i think one was on the street that connected the school and the woods and one of them was in the entranceway of the school and so this really helped to like solidify police's theory that colleen ritzer was inside that bin i mean i'm sure they had enough evidence at this point in time but that was physical proof of the journey that her body had taken as she was severely bleeding and they can connect it to the cctv of him dragging the bin so now police had a very clear picture of what they thought had happened fourteen-year-old philip chisholm had raped murdered and robbed his teacher and then ditched her body in the woods before going on the run and going to watch a movie yeah as soon as he ditched the body in the woods he went to this cinema using colleen's credit card paid for himself to go and see a new woody allen movie he then went to wendy's and again using colleen's credit card bought himself some dinner and then he just went for a five mile walk until he was eventually found by police later that evening but why had he done all of this because philip wasn't really talking in his interview so police couldn't understand where this had come from why why had this new student just turn around and wanted to murder his teacher one day police wanted to get a bit of a an idea of a motive and philip wasn't giving him it so they decided to go and speak to anyone else in the school that might have been close to phillip are close to colleen ritzer and they found out that on this particular day you know when colleen had asked philip to stay back after class he wasn't the only one that stayed back after class there was another girl in that room with them a girl called autumn and so she was called in for a police interview as well they basically wanted to know kind of what the atmosphere was like in that room had anything happened in the lead-up to the murder that they should be aware of and some of the things that autumn told them were very very interesting she said that she'd overheard miss ritzer because she wasn't part of this conversation by the way autumn she i think she was just like doodling in her book and she overheard the conversation between colleen ritzer and philip chisholm and colleen was just kind of asking him how he was settling in you know how he was doing and he seemed fine in this conversation and then colleen started asking him about tennessee you know his life before he came here what was it like there you know how was he dealing with his parents divorce things like that she was asking him because she cared and autumn said that it was at this point that phillips energy just completely changed she could tell that he was very visibly angered or distressed by the conversation topic he started getting snappy and moody and apparently colleen picked up on this quite quickly and so she changed the subject really quickly they started talking about something else but phillips mood wasn't picking up colleen was trying she was talking about other things she was trying to jerk with him but no he was in he was in a really bad mood now and so eventually colleen just excused herself and went to the bathroom and that was when we see her leave the classroom and then phillip followed her so could it have been that brief conversation about tennessee that triggered the murder because it certainly seemed to have triggered something in philip chisholm not entirely sure what but he didn't like that topic of conversation and it made him very angry some people think that that is what triggered the murder but i think it's important to remember that philip chisholm turned up to school that day with the following things in his backpack a knife a box cutter a mask a pair of gloves he came with a plan did he not i don't know about any of you but i didn't take half of that to school with me maybe gloves every now and again not a box cutter or a knife don't forget he had like three changes of clothes as well he had like two different jackets an all-black outfit to get changed into like he was prepared does that mean that this was premeditated had he come to school that day planning to kill miss ritzer that or was colleen ritzer always his intended target there's a couple of different theories here could he have gone to school just wanting to murder someone anyone and then maybe colleen ritzer was the one that triggered him with that tennessee conversation was he just waiting for someone to piss him off and was he just gonna kill the first person that that put him in a mood and unfortunately that was colleen or did he go there specifically waiting to target miss ritzer was he just waiting to get her alone and it just so happened that this was the opportunity that he got there was another student that spoke to police at one point a girl called rainier rania um yeah she said that she sat next to philip in their actual maths class that was taught by miss ritzer um and she said that during the whole class philip had just been doodling some really dark drawings i don't know what dark drawings means um but yeah rania said that he just seemed like he was in a bit of a a bit of a mood a bit of a like dark mood you know so maybe he was already feeling volatile before the tennessee conversation with miss ritzer even happened and then that just like triggered him on another level i don't know but we can't forget that he ripped colleen ritzer so a sexual motive is a huge part of this crime he did it twice seemingly and i'm sorry i feel like this could sound quite morbid but he could have achieved that with any female victim so why did he specifically choose colleen ritzer he could have murdered one of his female school mates and done that exact same thing he could have carried it out the exact same way so i wonder why he chose his teacher over any other female victim you know was it that he was infatuated with colleen ritzer did he have a thing for her and did did it manifest in an awful way like this did it was it the opposite did he hate her did he really not like colleen ritzer and want to hurt her or was it not even about colleen but maybe marsa about his schoolwork or his maths work was he struggling in the subject or was she just like a representation of school to him because he was having a hard time at school he wasn't fitting in so maybe he saw colleen as something to take that anger out on she represented school or maths to him maybe maybe that was a factor in it we really don't know because like i said he was not talking to police at all they really couldn't get any specifics out of him but all they knew was that this boy needed charging for murder right now and they had enough proof they had enough proof and they could do it so philip chisholm was officially charged with the murder of colleen ritzer awaiting his trial philip was sent to a youth detention center obviously they didn't want him just i don't know walking the earth at the same time as everyone else that was scary so they sent him to a youth detention center and you would be thinking that as you're waiting for your murder trial you're going to be on your best behavior out yet because you don't want to make things any worse for yourself but no not philip chisholm while he was at the detention center he actually attacked a female member of staff in an eerily similar way to the way that he attacked colleen ritzer he followed this one particular member of staff to a storeroom and then walked inside and attacked her i think he was using a really sharpened pencil that was like the only weapon that he could get hold of he was as well just beating her up with his hands doing anything that he could to this woman without a weapon honestly who knows what would have happened if he had had a bladed weapon maybe that woman would have lost her life as well but luckily she managed to scream for help and other staff came and saved her i don't know if philip saw any extra like charges or punishments for this i couldn't find anything but hopefully you would assume that he would so because philip chisholm was 14 at the time of committing the murder that meant that he would be tried as an adult but first they needed to see if he could trial at all they needed to see if he was fit for trial so they put him through loads of different psychiatric tests psychology assessments all that kind of stuff to see if he had any degree of mental illness the first assessment came back with nothing really to note i mean the psychiatrist acknowledged that philip did seem quite down he seemed a little bit depressed maybe like he wasn't settling in very well but no mental illness that this guy could not anywhere philip did however say to this psychiatrist that he experienced hallucinations quite a bit and from time to time he believed that he was a ninja um but the psychologist didn't think that that was like a mental illness or anything he just thought i don't i don't know i don't know i mean they did give it like a second and third opinion philip went to see a couple of other psychiatrists psychologists and all of them said they couldn't see any mental illness in this guy he was deemed fit to stand trial and the insanity plea was out of the window because he was perfectly sane at the time that he did this so at the end of 2015 philip chisholm's trial began and he pled not guilty to the murder of colleen ritzer and although he couldn't exactly use the insanity plea to get away with murder his defense team still did try and say that his mental health was the main factor in why he did this that he had really really poor mental health after the divorce and after the move and his family had a history of poor mental health as well but like so do most families and that's not an excuse for murder it's not even a reason they were basically just trying to say that he was like a teenager acting out after his parents divorce but i wouldn't say rape and murder is exactly acting out after your parents divorce that would be like getting into a fight at school not raping murdering and disposing of your teacher's body and his defense team even tried to blame colleen for her own murder saying that because she brought up tennessee in a conversation with him it triggered him and that's what led to her murder it must have sent him into some sort of like psychotic episode they believe although he he was never diagnosed with anything but they think that this conversation was the trigger the prosecution came back and said that this was a sexually motivated homicide that philip chisholm had planned and premeditated proving that he knew right from wrong they even had all of the psychologists and psychiatrists that had tested him and assessed him stand up there in court and say yeah no he's got nothing wrong with him we didn't diagnose him with anything he was of sound mind at the time of the murder one of them even said that his symptoms of like hallucination and thinking that he was a ninja were inconsistent aka they think he faked them at the end of the trial the jury went and deliberated for two whole days and eventually came back and found philip chisholm guilty of the rape murder and robbery of his teacher colleen ritzer he was however found not guilty of the second rape charge pertaining to the tree branch that was found still inside colleen's body when she was found and this is really really frustrating but the law in massachusetts at least at the time i don't know if it's still like this but it required that a victim of sexual assault had to be alive at the time that they were sexually assaulted otherwise that's just like abuse of a corpse otherwise and the coroner said in court that they couldn't determine whether colleen was alive or dead when she was assaulted with that tree branch there's no way for them to know and so for that reason he can't be found guilty of sexually assaulting her with that tree branch because technically we don't have the proof that it fits that criteria does that make sense and it's equally as frustrating because for that same reason they can't find him guilty of abuse of a cops either because they can't prove that she was dead when he did that so basically they know that he did it but he can't be found guilty of anything because we don't know if she was alive or dead at the time that it happened thank god he's got all those other charges and been found guilty of them because if it was based on that alone there would be riots because i think that's crazy but anyway as all of the verdicts were read out loud in court philip literally just sat there with the most blank stare on his face no emotion no guilt no remorse he was just staring straight forward just hearing that he was guilty because he was so young his sentencing was going to be a little lenient meaning that he couldn't get whole life in prison or the death penalty the highest amount of well the highest minimum that he could get in prison was 40 years so he is going to serve a minimum of 40 years in prison the soonest that he could get out on parole is 2055 when i think he'll be in his 50s but yeah that is all i have for this case thank you so so much for watching thanks again to caresta 5 for sponsoring this video remember you can go to casetify.com forward slash eleanor to get 15 off so many different cases airpod cases phone cases macbook cases ipad cases laptops sleeves anything all of them a huge thank you to all of my channel members for supporting the channel and helping me decide the cases that i cover all of my tier 2 members are on screen right now so thank you so much if you want to become a channel member you can click the join button down below but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed this video please leave a thumbs up if you want to subscribe you can click this circle right here or if you want to watch another one of my videos you can click this link right here 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,663,908

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, true crime, solved, documentary, serial killer, podcast, true crime podcast, netflix, 2022, phillip chism, phillip, chism, colleen ritzer, colleen, ritzer, teacher, student, the teacher murdered by her own student, cctv, school murder, teacher murdered by student, teacher killed by student, schoolboy killer, murdered at school, murdered in school, student kills teacher, high school, full cctv, camera footage, bathrooms

Id: TwPDZYUFwPE

Length: 42min 31sec (2551 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022