(gentle cheerful music) - Hello and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Mitchell P. Roth, author of "Man With a Killer Smile, the Life and Crimes of a Serial Mass Murderer."

Now, as you can tell from the title of this book, it is a little different than what we normally cover.

It is a true crime story, it's a true crime book, and while we're not gonna cover any gory or grizzly details, I just wanted to to warn the viewers because it is a sensitive topic, so your discretion is advised.

With that said, Mitch, thank you so much for being here today.

- Thanks for having me.

- To talk about this book.

Can you tell us about your background and how you came to be a professor of criminology?

- Well, I took a very serendipitous route 'cause got my PhD and Master's, and undergraduate in history, and then I moved to Texas and I had the opportunity to teach the history of criminal justice.

And long story short, I found that I could make a career of combining inter-disciplinary, history and criminal justice 'cause very few scholars do that.

And so, you know, it really was a great career decision on my part and very happy with the way it's go, but I wouldn't recommend my career trajectory to anybody.

- (chuckles) I think that makes perfect sense with this book because as the title implies, this is the book about a particular criminal and his crimes, but you do a really great job in the book of setting it in time and place and letting the reader know not just about the crime itself, but kind of what's happening in the world, criminal wise, history wise.

Like the context of it, I think, really is helpful to understand it.

- [Mitch] Yeah.

- How did you learn about this case?

- Well, one of the courses I've been teaching for a very long time is the history of murder, which has morphed into the history of serial murder, but over 20 years ago, I had a student that came up to me after class and said, "You know, I had a relative that was electrocuted in the 1920s and he killed a lot of people."

And, you know, it was like, he was very proud, I guess.

And I said, "Do you have any family documents or anything on this guy?"

'Cause usually, it's a story that they can't support.

He says, "Well, actually I had family that went up to the panhandle in the 1980s and interviewed a couple of the surviving jurors and the people that dug up the graves and, you know, it was a great time to be there."

And so they kept a little bit of a record.

And so I used that, kind of, as a template for, you know, how I went about researching.

I found a lot of it was not true, you know, according to that, and a lot of other accounts I found were not true, but it was a starting point.

And the more I got into it, you know, I was unfamiliar with this guy who really has a special place in American true crime history, being not just a serial killer, but a multi-family annihilator, on two occasions, and being a mass murderer times two.

So anyway, I've called him a serial mass murderer, and I got the imprimatur of John Douglas, who's the great serial killer profile.

He says "That sounds right," so.

- I noticed you had a blurb from him on the book, which was very impressive if you know much about criminology.

- Right, exactly.

- He's a pioneer in the field.

- Yeah.

- For sure.

- Can you expand on that manuscript a little bit more?

I find that piece so fascinating.

When you later took it up, 'cause if this was 20 years ago, you later kind of took it up to write the book.

Did you contact any more family members to find any more prominence?

- I tried really hard through ancestry.com and all these, you know, other sites.

And I wish I had had the name of the student who gave it to me, you know, and I could kick myself for, you know, not doing it.

Held onto it for so long because I had all these other book projects I wanted to finish and I was finally at a spot where, aha, I can do this now.

And it was right before the Covid epidemic, I went up to the panhandle on the New Mexico, Texas border, and I got the trial transcripts in Farwell, Texas.

And, you know, talked to a lot of people in that area.

And, you know, I had all the material, so during Covid I could work on it, you know?

It was, you know, perfect timing, I guess.

- I find it very interesting that this family had so much interest in the not so great piece of their history, that they actually went up and interviewed people, and this, you'd think this is something they wanna sweep under the rug and forget about.

But the fact that they went when they were still living people who remember it and interviewed them, I find that to be an interesting- - Yeah, I mean, it's nice when, you know, people kind of are interested in the family history and try and document it, you know, for genealogy or whatever.

You know, I don't know what they were, you know, going to do with it, you know, ultimately.

But, you know, I think they're probably the most noteworthy person, maybe, in the family, and they wanted a little bit more while some minds were still fresh.

- Sure.

Well and it's important to document the good, bad, and ugly of history, your family's history.

So I just, I commend them for wanting to have- - Yeah I would've, you know, loved to have spoken to him, but that's the problem when you're dealing with crimes that took place, you know, a hundred years ago, you know, and- - People move, names change.

And people die, I mean, it's a 100 years ago, yeah.

- I mean, you can go to like, Whittier, California, where he committed his first mass murder and nobody's ever heard of the crime.

And of course in Texas, a few people are familiar with it in the town.

And every time I went to talk to somebody, maybe at a site that was important to the story, I'd say, "Well, I'm here researching a book, you know, on my friend George."

And they said, "Oh," you know, because people wanna come and talk and that's how I found out the antique store was the hospital where he was operated on, when he tried to kill himself, and they still had the operating room, the glass and everything upstairs.

And so anyway, you know, I got in the good graces of a lot of people up there- over time, I'm supposed to go up there, you know, eventually and do, you know, some, a book presentation and, you know, it's such a part of the community DNA, that the high school has a play that they reenact almost every year in October, around Halloween time, about the case.

You know, it's PG, like our discussion here, but in any case, this is, you know, one way of, you know, remembering.

And it's interesting is, you know, communities don't usually remember, you know, the darkest points in history.

I wrote a book about the worst prison disaster in American history, 320 inmates died in a fire in 1930.

I went to Columbus, Ohio where it took place, no one's ever heard of it 'cause they tore the prison down.

So, you know, I try and, you know, find a story that's never been told before and then go into the archives and, you know, fortunately we have a really good archives in Texas.

- Well, you mentioned around Halloween, I imagine this is the kind of thing in a small town that becomes folklore almost, or legend or, you know, people wanna drive past the house and wonder if it's haunted kind of a thing.

- Yeah, well, I mean, especially back when the house was still there, you know, boyfriends would take their girlfriends and scare them, you know, at the windows, at the house and everything.

But, you know, it's been torn down a long time ago.

And, you know, and I still think it's not real well known by most of the people, at least until the book came out.

- Mmhmm, okay, so you have this family manuscript, how do you start researching or how do you separate the fact, and then you mentioned too, in the book, a lot of what we know about his life is from interviews that he gave when he was in jail and we know now, certainly these kinds of people tend to self-aggrandize and make themselves, they wanna make themselves legends.

So how do you go about separating what's true and what's false?

- Yeah, I mean, you really have to go to the historical record, you have to go to documents, you know, not that they can't make mistakes, but you go to ancestry.com and things like that, and see, you know, who was living with whom at a particular time.

See how old everyone, you know, was.

I mean, the archive is really filled in the biggest blank right before I sent the manuscript in.

I knew he killed his second wife and kids, and I knew he killed his third wife and kids, but I knew that he was married a first time and had his only biological child with this woman.

And then she vanished off the face of the Earth.

You know, one would think she was probably murdered too.

Well, this was in the 20s.

And one of the last things that I found in Austin was a letter from 1964 from his biological son to the Texas prison system, asking for more information about his father.

Apparently a lot of it had been suppressed.

And he said in the letter, the reason that we moved away and disappeared, he was trying to kill us.

And he always blamed the breakup of his first marriage for what came after that, the only woman I ever loved, you know, and, you know, but this was such a great find.

And, you know, if I hadn't been obsessive compulsive, going through the documents and going through prison records, you know, he talks about where he was working 'cause he was arrested as a teenager for embezzlement.

And so he worked on a lot of prison farms, and I talk a lot about the prison farms in Texas, and I was trying to get a feel for where he was at a particular time during the two years.

You know, sometimes he was working in Sugar Land, cutting cane and things like that.

And I was actually able to find the record, the dates that he worked in all these locations.

And this is 1916, 1917, 1918.

So, you know, you can't do this, you know, without archival work.

And you know, I think that's the missing piece in most historical research.

A lot of people don't do the archival research.

They just write what someone else has written and embellish it a little bit.

And you know, that's lazy history.

- Yeah, well, we all have those, especially since this came from a family history, those, as they get passed down, they get aggrandized, they get embellished, the fish gets bigger that grandpa caught, you know, I know every family, I'm sure, has stories like that.

So it can be tedious work, but it's so important.

If you're gonna write a history book, you need to do what you've done and go find those archives, yes.

- Yeah, I mean, you know, it just gave me somewhere to start.

And then, what really helps is having access to newspaper, you know, sites online, so you can see how wide the coverage was, if it's a national coverage, et cetera, et cetera, how long it was in the papers, and a lot of times you'll get an interview with a reporter, and the reporter will give his side of the story.

And you can contrast that to what, you know, George Hassel said about the same story.

So you find a lot of contradictions in what he says.

- Mmhmm, mmhmm, and you do a great job of noting where, well, this is the best we can just, you know, it's gray, so this is the best we can- - He didn't leave much of a paper trail, unfortunately.

- Sure.

A lot of, well, all these crimes were committed before we had terms, even like serial, I mean, John Douglas, he coined that term in, I think the seventies.

So the terminology wasn't there, what did the people of the time make of this man and have his crimes, especially in the community?

Like how did they talk about it or relate to it?

- Well, typically they refer to them, you know, as a monster, you know, as, you know, they didn't have the word psychopath really, and sociopath at that time.

But, you know, terminology that implied a violent offender and you know, somebody that's one of a kind, an evil demon, et cetera, et cetera, because, you know, the psychiatric profession was still evolving at that time, and dealing with violent offenders was very different.

They were called alienists at that point.

And really, you didn't have specialties in a lot of these fields.

Like today you have criminology, sociology, you know, and they're kind of all put together, and there wasn't, you know, much graduate work.

I mean, a lot of it was just learning by observing.

But what was interesting is they compared him to like Jekyll and Hyde, simply for the fact that he drank before he committed these murders.

And, you know, he admitted doing that.

I mean, he was almost proud of what he did.

Anybody asked him what he did, he would tell them, in much more detail than I will give today, about what he did.

And so that was his potion, because ordinarily, I mean, he was your, you know, typical, you know, sociopath, you know, he was glib, non-empathetic, he can basically tell you what you wanted to hear, which is a secret of serial killers, you know, getting into your good graces, you know, and capturing you.

And he had the most amazing smile, hence the title.

"The Man With the Killer Smile."

And the funny thing is about that picture, on the cover of the book, is he had taken a picture previous to this, and he was frowning and he used to portray himself as a very happy-go-lucky guy, even though he was on death row and all of this.

And so he, it was a very glum picture.

So someone said, "Come on, George smile."

And he'd get this big smile and they caught him right there, you know, so, you know, it wasn't, you know, look at his eyes, you know, the eyes and the smile sometimes don't match.

- Yeah, and you talk about how neighbors and friends, if he even had real friends, would describe him as being kind of gregarious, but also that there was just something a little bit off about it, which now we would know.

It's because he's not being truthful or real, he's just putting on this mask in this face of whatever these people want.

- Right, I mean, there's a famous book about psychopathy, called "The Mask of Sanity."

And that's, you know, he wore that, you know, better than anyone.

- I wanted to come back to the idea of psychology being a very young science.

You used the term "alienist."

I also think they measured his skull because phonology was still a common practice.

I mean, we still don't necessarily know what to make of these people, but they were just trying everything possible to try to figure out what made a person do these things.

- Right, I mean, you can go back to, you know, the 19th century and Lombroso when he's trying to figure out the criminal man, you know, what does a certain type of offender look like?

And he was able to write a book and show pictures of different types of skulls, shapes, and sizes and all of that.

And, you know, it was, you know, the pseudosciences and, you know, people bought into that at the time.

And, you know, they didn't have much more to go on.

- I'm sure they wanted answers, which is a completely understandable- - Yeah, yeah.

- Mistake to make.

I also wanna talk a little bit about the justice system in this period.

We've always had sensationalized trials, I think as long as we've had trials, there's been who knows how many trials of the century, but this one was probably a pretty big deal in the small town that it took place in.

Can you talk about his trial and- - Yeah, I mean, you know, it seemed like he was being passed around in every jail in the panhandle at one time or another.

And originally they had taken him, they had sentenced him to death, and he was sent down to Huntsville, and then they sent him back because they were supposed to wait a certain amount of time before they sentenced him to death.

Then they sentenced him again, and then they sent him back.

But, you know, the trial took place in the small court house in Farwell.

Today, it looks the same as it did back then, except maybe missing the, you know, some seats, you know, high above the, the courtroom.

And the interesting thing is, one of the first mistakes people made is when they saw him come in, he came in kind of with like a bodyguard, a sheriff or whatever, and he was dressed to the nines.

He looked, you know, really good.

He could be a very handsome man in some pictures.

And so they thought he was the lawyer and the sheriff's deputy was the client.

And so, you know, once they got that straightened out, of course, you know, and there's a picture of him in the book, and he looks like a deacon, you know, almost.

But yeah, but the trial, you know, getting somebody to defend him, you know, think about it, you know, it's a small town, they're not gonna have a change of venue.

It's gonna be done right where the crimes happened.

He only had one family member left that had survived all of his atrocities, and she was there, you know, every day with his child or with a child.

And he basically gave a really detailed confession.

It's interesting reading the trial transcripts because the newspapers didn't, they kind of censored it.

They had put everything in there.

But it wasn't a who done it, it was a, he done it, essentially.

And so there wasn't any mystery to it.

And, you know, he wasn't claiming innocence or anything like that.

It wasn't until later on where he started to know that he's gonna be electrocuted, he started playing the insanity card, you know, which very rarely ever works.

- Yeah, I was gonna ask you about, in the book, you talk about that kind of, the history of the plea and why, I mean, some people might say it, "Well, of course he's crazy, he did this," but a legal defense of insanity is not the same as what, maybe, what we colloquially call crazy.

- Right, I mean, you have to be able to show that he didn't know right from wrong, you know, at the particular time that he did these things.

But if you look all the planning that he did in all of his killings to cover up everything and waiting for one of the other victims to come home, it's clear that he wasn't insane.

I mean, he knew exactly what he was doing all of the time, and he buried all the victims, so that would imply, well, this was kind of an illegal action.

You know, the thing that gets me is, you know, after he had buried the nine members of his second killing, a family, he didn't leave, he didn't run away.

And most mass murderers usually stay where they commit the mass murder, which kind of, you know, falls into play there.

But he gave a farm auction right on top of where the victims were all buried.

The 100 people out there, buying all of his farm equipment and everything.

And, you know, the women from the church giving a free lunch, you know, right there.

I mean, the guy, you know, he was cold as ice.

And you know, today we study heartbeat, we study the brain, impulse control, a lot of other things besides psychology.

Bio-social criminology is now a very important field in studying these types of predators.

- Sorry.

(chuckles) So true crime is a popular, people talk about how it's kinda a popular concept now.

(talking over each other) But if you look across the history of humans, Dateline's been on for 30 years, true crime magazines, detective magazines were popular in the fifties, I mean, even go as far as Jack The Ripper, people were interested in this case.

What do you think it is about this kind of stuff that makes people so interested in these stories?

- Well, I think the genre of true crime really didn't appear in bookstores until after Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

And then Gerald Frank wrote "The Boston Strangler," and these were some of the first, bestseller true crime books.

They were kind of in a, you know, league of their own, essentially.

But over time, you know, we see all these movies, we see a lot of popular culture, we see jokes about Ed Gein, and, you know, from, you know, "Silence of the Lambs" and things like that.

So it's, you know, people are fascinated about it because in many cases, they might be able to relate to these people.

But it gets a little weird when people start collecting the murder memorabilia, you know, people sending, you know, samples of, you know, fingernails and stuff to, you know, letter writers and things like that.

But there's a huge market.

And Andy Kahn, who's a victims' advocate in Houston, he deals a lot with the murder-abelia industry.

And I think he was responsible for some of the Son of Sam laws where they can't make money off of their name.

And, you know, back to that, when Hassel was behind bars, during the trial, he was knitting doilies, and they're beautiful doilies.

I saw a example, I mean, he made like about a dozen or so, and he either gave them away to the jurors or he sold them, so he had money for tobacco.

But, you know, where'd this come from?

You know, this was a guy who was, you know, used to, you know, working with his hands and, you know, digging ditches and he had a career, much like many other serial killers that was very checkered, going from one job to another to another.

And, you know, he was a man of many hats.

- This book also gives kind of a brief history of the death penalty in Texas.

- Right.

- Can you talk about- - Sure.

- I mean, I get it was kind of a localized issue or punishment at first, and then over time it, it is like it is now and it's a centralized process.

Can you talk about that?

- Well, you know, before 1923, there was no death row in Texas.

You know, people were executed in the county that they committed the murders in, and they were convicted and sentenced to death.

So you had gallows all over the state and you know, different counties, jurisdictions.

And so, you know, of course it became kind of a popular event, locally with nothing else to do.

Let's take in a hanging today.

But in 1923, some of the electrocutions that had taken place were, you know, complete disasters because it was implemented at first in New York in 1890.

And over time, you know, they had to perfect the chair, essentially.

And so one of the big problems in the 1920s was the amount of lynchings going on, extra legal lynchings, mostly of African Americans.

But the death penalty was done by hanging, which basically was associated with lynching to, you know, to a great extent.

And, you know, Texas was trying to move away from that image.

And so movement was made in the legislature to, you know, adopt the electric chair, and they began electrocutions in 1924.

But before that, they had to find a model of the electric chair.

They had to build a death row.

So they had to put all the, you know, infrastructure, you know, create all the infrastructure first.

And, you know, and so Texas, of course, has had a long history as being, you know, kind of, you know, the epicenter of the American death penalty, even though it's really not so much anymore, you know, anywhere.

I mean, when I moved here in the nineties, they're executing 40 people a year.

Now if they execute five or six, but it's a big difference, you know, executing someone with machinery, you know, rather than a rope.

Also too, it was private instead of public.

So these are things they wanted to get away from, the ghastly, you know, public executions.

- Try to formalize or make more bureaucratic- (talking over each other) - As you, extra legal to make it somewhat more fair.

Well, we are running short on time.

So in our final two minutes, what do you hope the takeaway is from this book for people?

- Well I'm hoping people, you know, won't judge it by its cover.

I mean, it covers, you know, a whole range of topics about Texas criminal justice, Texas crime and criminology.

And, you know, it shows a lot of, you know, research and no one's ever found this person.

The dean of true crime writers, Harold Schechter, Harold Schechter's written all these compendiums of unknown serial killers in America.

He's not in one of them.

So, you know, I've kind of added him to the pantheon of killers in America, and specifically in Texas, you know, which has its own kind of rogue's gallery of killers.

And when I think about the book, I'm in my office and I know his grave is about a block away from my office, you know, in Huntsville, Texas.

But, you know, I wanted to write a different type of true crime book that was more scholarly and, you know, not, you know, just thrills and chills and that sort of thing, so.

- I will, I would say you succeeded because if you're interested in true crime, certainly it tells a true crime story, but like I said at the beginning, the contextualization, the history, the research, it kind of grounds it and makes it feel more real.

And also towards the end you kind of go back and show the victim's graves that have been, you know, the elements kind of got to their first round.

So the community is still remembering and honoring the victims in the panhandle which I think is nice to remember that it's, you know, it's not just about the bad guy.

We need to remember the people whose lives he took.

- Right, right, that he left his mark on the community.

- Right, right.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Well, thank you for having me.

- That is all the time we have.

The book again is "The Man with the Killer Smile."

Thank you so much for joining us, and I will see you again soon.

(gentle peaceful music)