Documentary Release

The documentary about my grandpa is coming out in less than a month! I’m so excited!!!

I’ve talked about this on my blog before, but my grandfather was a clinical psychologist. He worked in the Utah State Penitentiary in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. He was working there when Ted Bundy was incarcerated in Utah for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. He had already been convicted, so now it came down to whether he should do hard time or go to rehab. So my grandpa and a couple of other psychologists did a 90-day evaluation on Ted. They ran all sorts of tests and assessments, and at the end of the three months, they determined for the courts that Ted Bundy was in fact capable of violence. So he got a prison number and a longer sentence.
When Colorado came down and accused Ted of a couple of murders, he asked my grandpa “Al, do you think I killed those girls?”
My grandpa thought for a minute, then said “I don’t know, Ted. But if you did, I think you’ll do it again.”
Prior to this, no one knew that Ted Bundy was a serial killer. And since he became so notorious, my grandpa did a lot of research, and eventually published a book about his findings. That book is I’m Not Guilty: The Case of Ted Bundy. Grandpa went on to publish three more books, one about Bundy and two about other serial killers he interviewed over the years. And it was phenomenal. No one was actually talking about the psychology of how a person becomes a serial killer. No one was talking about the choices they make, or the addiction to fantasy that goads them further into the darkness. My grandpa was the first.
My grandpa was a revolutionary, and none of our family knew it. When he was doing the 90-day evaluation of Ted Bundy, he called Ted’s family, neighbors, and ex-girlfriends– and no one had thought to do that before! I always thought it was common sense to call the people close to a criminal suspect! My grandpa believed that everyone, even psychopaths, started out good, and that serial killers chose to go down dark paths until there was no turning back, where other people were still firmly entrenched in “well, he’s just born evil” or “he was abused, so of course he turned out bad”.
But grandpa wanted to learn about the development of the violent mind, so that’s what his books were about; how a person gets to the point of no return, mentally and psychologically.

And all of that is a lot of text, but that’s only the beginning of how cool my grandpa was. When he died, my mom and I inherited his literary estate, because we were the only ones who cared enough to keep the books in print. My mom created a small independent publisher, Carlisle Legacy Books, and took back the rights to the books so that she could keep them going.
Well, someone else thought that this stuff was really cool, and word got to Motiv8 Media, and they shopped around the idea of a documentary, because my grandpa worked with A LOT of serial killers throughout his life, and NBCU picked it up.

And now the documentary is coming out on April 2nd, on Oxygen!

Quoted from CLB’s Facebook page:
“Violent Minds: Killers on Tape,” a documentary series based on Dr. Al Carlisle’s research, will premiere on Oxygen on Sunday, April 2 with two episodes on Ted Bundy. There will be a new episode every week for the next seven weeks.

It will then be available on Peacock. (Although it has not been determined whether it will be shortly after or after the series concludes on Oxygen.)

The series includes new interviews and never-before-heard recorded conversations with killers.

We’ve been filming for this documentary since spring or summer last year. And by “we”, I mean me and my mom, doing our interview portions. They interviewed so many people for this series! And there’s dramatic recreations, and you would not believe the tapes we have! There are so many tapes. Seriously. We have not listened to them all. There are too many. We have tapes of a LOT of different serial killers. Some of whom are not even covered in the documentary, like Keith Jespersen.
And~ we made some really cool discoveries while filming! But spoilers, so you’ll have to watch the documentary to see what we found!
Seriously, though, I can’t wait to see the finished product! I may be involved in some of the press stuff between now and the release, but that’s not final just yet.

Anyway, keep an eye out for Violent Minds! (The working title was The First Mindhunter, but I like Violent Minds better, because this has no connection to the tv series Mindhunter. Grandpa was just one of the first people to do some of that stuff, not the only one to do it.)