True Crime: Learning About Life Through Studying Death (Part 1 of 2)

For more than 25 years, Monica suffered from an addiction to drugs and alcohol, fueled in part by her painful and shameful past. The thought would come to my mind that I had had these abortions.

I would not want to think about it because the pain was just too real. Thankfully, God healed Monica's heart and today she supports Focus on the Family's pro-life ministry. I want to support a ministry that can help change the trajectory of people's lives that are contemplating abortion. I can't go back in time and change my life and change my decisions, but I can support a ministry that can help possibly change someone else's.

I'm Jim Daly. Let's save babies and give families hope today. Donate and your gift will be doubled.

Call 800-AFAMILY or visit FocusOnTheFamily.com slash gift. What does God do with suffering? What is the place of suffering in a larger story? What chapter does it fill?

And after she was able to kind of re-navigate that, she found herself thriving on the backside of it. Well, that's former cold case detective Jay Warner Wallace and today you'll hear about what we can learn about human nature and how to thrive in life through studying crime. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller. John, have you noticed kind of the fascination with these crime TV series now? TV and podcasts.

It just seems to be everywhere. Jean kind of fell in love with a couple of them. She watched, just really intrigued. I think it's her science background that she loved these shows because, you know, they do a lot of the forensics and all that. I think it just caught her attention. So I would get through those programs as a faithful good husband.

Showing your love to her. So good. But, you know, from a Christian perspective, when we think about crime, we get a glimpse of the soul and the clear reminder that we're born with sin. I mean, if you're going to see sin, you're going to see it in criminal activity. And our guest today, Jay Warner Wallace, has studied crime and human behavior for several decades. And I can't think of anyone more qualified to have a discussion on this topic. You might be thinking, okay, how does Christianity, the family and crime come together?

Well, sit back, get a cup of coffee and let's listen in together. Yeah, this is going to be fascinating. Jim's cases have been featured on NBC's Dateline, TruTV and Fox News. He's still occasionally asked to consult on cold case investigations. Jay Warner Wallace is a senior fellow at the Colston Center for Christian Worldview. He's an adjunct professor of apologetics at Biola University, former youth pastor, and he's the author of a number of books. Today, the book we're going to be covering is called The Truth in True Crime, What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life. And you can find out more about our guest and his book by clicking the link in the show notes. Jim, great to have you back at Focus.

Well, thanks for having me. You're right about the fascination with true crime. Isn't it true?

And you realize that like 80 percent of true crime fans are women. Oh, that's interesting. Why do you think that is? And your story kind of like said that, right?

Yeah, Jean's into it. Yeah. And so why is that the case? Well, one author was writing about this and thought, she was thinking that perhaps it's because so many of the victims you see in these true crime shows are women. And so it's almost like every one of these is a cautionary tale.

Yeah, that's true. For those of you that maybe aren't familiar with your story, you've been here a couple of times. We talked about it's always fascinating. You once described yourself as an angry atheist. So for the, you know, the non-believer who is listening in and we do have many that do listen in. Last year, we had one hundred ninety three thousand decisions for Christ.

Wow. So I know you're there and this might be that opportunity. I don't know that you're angry, but in terms of being an agnostic or an atheist, that's where you were at, Jim. You saw the worst in mankind. How did that factor into your journey of embracing Christ and believing? Well, I think one of the things that delayed it was that so many of the people we would take to jail would tell us that they were believers.

And I thought, OK, something's not connecting here. And then the few Christians I did know on the job and it's not probably if you're in a law enforcement agency and you're a believer, you probably sense that you're in the dramatic minority of your agency. I felt that way about the believers we had in our age.

There's only a couple that I could really identify that were Christians in my agency. And those guys, if you asked them, like, why is this true? Although they were so evidential about everything else that they would talk about. You know, if we're making a case on somebody, I can give you the 15 reasons why we can win this in trial.

Yeah, because you got to build that evidence for the court. But they couldn't do this for Christianity. So it's felt to me, and I know this isn't true, but it felt at the time like there were two kind of groups within the church, those who really could not defend what they believed. So in my sense, as that was in my thinking, it was because it wasn't true. And the other group were the people who thought it was true, but didn't behave as though it was true. And of those two groups, do you want to be part of that group?

I don't want to be part of that. So what made me angry about it was that I kind of saw that hypocrisy that probably a lot of non-believers see in Christians in general, because let's face it, we're all, this is one of the chapters in this book, we all are a mess. We're all sinners, saved by grace.

Yes, this enigma of man, this idea that we are a mess is an important issue to cover with our kids, because they're going to see this in others. You know, drawing on your experience as a detective and your knowledge of Scripture, which came later, I mean, obviously you embrace Christ and, you know, in other discussions that we've had with other books, you talk about the evidence, you know, leading up to the crime and how you applied your detective skills to proving the life of Christ is real and true. And people can look in the archives for that or reference the other books. But today we do want to drill into kind of the behavior of the dark side, if you want to call it that, the criminal mindset, and we'll get into that. But your knowledge of Scripture, combining that with your detective work, you've observed some fascinating things about human nature and what allows us to thrive in the context of healthiness.

Just what's the overall premise of the book then when it comes to criminal behavior? Well, I've written books, you know, that make a case for why Christianity is true. And I think as a boomer, at my age, that was important to me. I was 35 when I first started investigating the case for Christianity.

Susan and I were together already 18 years. So there was not, you know, it's like we're already pretty far along on this journey. And I needed to know, is this true evidentially?

So I spent the time to make the case. But I think that my grandkids probably won't be as focused on that side of it. Is it true? What they really want to know is, is it good? Because they're surrounded by a culture which is really kind of more of a negative perspective on Christianity now than ever before. And the argument is that every ism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, whatever the thing is that the culture has said, you ought not be that.

They're pointing to us and saying, well, you're the reason why people are that way. Christianity is where all that stuff comes from. I think that my grandkids are going to want to know two things.

Is it true? But also, is it good? Does it help us to flourish? So this book kind of takes a sideways look at that. What this does is it gives us, I think, 15 rules for life. And these are 15 rules that the secular research demonstrates. So if you didn't know anything about Christianity and you just wanted to thrive, you could find these in the secular research on human flourishing. But it turns out these are ancient principles.

They're all in Scripture. And so this kind of provides evidence. If Christianity is true, it ought to explain us the way we really are. And it turns out that it does. So it's just another piece of a larger cumulative case that demonstrates that Christianity is not only true, it's good. Because it turns out that if you would simply, if you don't believe the Christianity is true, if you lived as though it was, you'd flourish.

Yeah, you'd have a flourishing life. That's so true. In that respect, you have examples of criminal behavior.

I think greed is one of them, obviously. How did greed overtake the life of, I think it's Jackson Kelcher. And one of the things I so appreciate, Jim, about the book, you've taken these real life examples. I'm sure the names have been changed to protect the innocent. I took that from a movie once. Or the guilty.

Or the guilty, right. But what was Kelcher's thing and how did greed become illustrated through his example? Well, look, there's only three reasons for any misbehavior.

And I think we talked about this once when I was here before. And that's just sex, money, and power. That's it. There's not a fourth motive for murder. There's not a fourth motive for any crime. Those are the things that drive us to misbehave. And once you know that, you can kind of rein that in on your own.

You can say, look, if I'm going to go sideways on any particular day, it's going to be in one of those three areas. So I now know what to guard. But I met this kid when I was working much earlier in my career.

And he was a gangster at the time. And I remember telling him, hey, you know, you want the same thing in life. You want the security of a place to live. You want to build a car you can trust. You want to have a love interest that you can live with. All the same things every human wants.

The only difference is how we get those things. And I remember having a long conversation with about his... Because, you know, he'd basically steal these things and then spend five years in jail. And I thought, you know, he would argue... And you're the detective booking this guy.

Yes, and I'm just a guy working gangs who was booking him the first time. And I remember thinking, hey, you know, there's a better way for you. He was like, well, why would I want to go to school and do all of that? He thought we are both going to spend some time doing something we don't want to do in order to get this. I'm just doing mine in jail.

You're doing yours in college. That was his view. That's an interesting approach. Yeah, so I thought, okay, well... So I had this long conversation with him. Years later, he's doing a robbery series.

Now I'm a detective and now I'm arresting him in this capacity. And I remember thinking, trying to remind him of this conversation we had earlier. How many years before? Oh, it had been probably eight years or something before. And it basically had no impact.

Nothing I said had any impact on him. But I realized in that interim that what he is looking for is something that he could have achieved, right? I always say it this way. Financial independence is not the ability to buy anything. It's the ability to buy anything you want. In other words, if you can change your wants, you could actually become financially independent. So, for example, if financial independence is not the ability to buy anything, but to buy anything you want, and I no longer want all those things, then I could be financially independent today.

Another way of putting it is this way. If there's something you think would make life meaningful, something you want to have, something you want to buy, well, you could spend your whole life just trying to get it. Or you could decide today that what you have makes you happy.

One of these two ways makes you happy today. The other might be a pursuit that never ends for you. And so this young man continued to kind of struggle with what does it really want. It turns out that he was doing this because he had a friend who was also involved in a very similar robbery series, and he was just looking over there and seeing what that guy was getting. The other guy. The other guy. In kind of a dark context.

Yes. And so, so much of how we identify ourselves is not really based on us alone. It's us compared to somebody else. It's not about whether I'm rich. It's about whether I'm richer than you. It's not about whether I'm smart. It's about whether I'm smarter than you. And he was doing this.

He was coveting something he didn't have and trying to figure out a way to get it. And it turns out there's such great value in work because I think there's an embedded difficulty. Sure. Work is hard. Yeah. Yeah. And it turns out it produces character because it is hard. You speak about the issue of suffering, and you have a story in there about Kelly Winston, whose sister, I think, was murdered.

Right. And what did you observe about Kelly and the family that gave you an insight on the issue of suffering? Well, sad but true, most of the victims I've worked, if you look back at the course of their life, you can see all of the dominoes that fell that got them into the situation that night that led to their death.

And so part of what we're doing to solve the case is to retrace all of those dominoes. And sometimes it's because you're dating the wrong person. You moved in next door to something.

You're hanging out with the wrong people. There's something. But this particular murder was a murder in which this young girl did nothing to even put herself in a position. She just happened to be working that night when a guy came back to her business and ended up killing her.

And she did nothing to – there's nothing she could have done differently, let's put it that way. So the family, when they experienced this, they were so utterly shocked by this young innocent, did nothing to precipitate this, contributed in no way, and here she is, that they were shook so deeply that they were kind of frozen in time. No one in that family moved. The parents, of course, she was in her 20s when she was killed. The parents were older. The stress killed one of them. The other wallowed and didn't really – didn't celebrate holidays, didn't really do much of anything. The sister was the younger sister at the time, just adored her older sister, was so deeply shaken by it that she wasn't dating.

She was just frozen. And so when I reopened the case, I remember being very careful about making that first meeting because I don't want to give anyone a false hope. Just because the case is being reopened doesn't mean it's going to go anywhere. And it's years later. It's years later. It's probably 20 years later.

Wow. So now I'm reopening the case, and I could see that the – she had hope. I wanted to kind of temper it because I didn't want her to think, hey, just because we're reopening it, we're going to solve it.

We may not. There were lots of cases we reopened we never got to solve. They just weren't solvable cases. So I wasn't sure where we were headed with this, but I remember her description of how she felt like a family could just not move on.

And she was a believer. So the question becomes – the idea of suffering and how we engage trauma became really important to me. Well, in fact, you said there were three outcomes that you wrote about in the book. What were those three outcomes?

Well, okay, so let me back up for a second. So trauma, if you think about it, is that we have a view of the world that is entirely shattered. Our expectations of what we think is going to happen in life are absolutely shattered. We think, oh, I'm going to be a happily married person with kids, and then you're divorced or you lose a kid to an illness. These kinds of things shatter us because they defeat our expectations.

This is what happened for them. They had an expectation that life would be a certain way, and then this terrible crime occurs that entirely shatters their expectations. And people have studied this, and we see this in also the lives of officers who have been critically injured in critical incidents, that they don't think this is ever going to happen to them, and then it does, and now what do I do? And if you stay in that depressed response where you can't get back on your feet, if you stay down there, we call that PTSD. If you just get back to where you were functioning before the incident occurred, we call that resiliency. Here's what she basically did.

She said, you know what, maybe I've thought about this. Maybe my worldview as a Christian did not allow for this murder to even be possible. God should have stopped it. Why would a good God who loves my sister allow this to happen to someone who did nothing to precipitate it?

How could I even reason that? So we had to spend some time. She found out that I was a Christian, and we started to walk through why God would allow any suffering. What does God do with suffering? What is the place of suffering in a larger story?

What chapter does it fill? And after she was able to kind of re-navigate that, she found herself thriving on the backside of it. And her family started thriving and started finding, you know, celebrating holidays again.

And then she was married within a year. And I thought, wow, isn't that amazing that life just took off because you had a script for what you thought God does in the world, but the script was wrong from the beginning. It's kind of like Job's friends. I remember just studying Job at the time because, you know, if you think of Job's friends, he suffers twice. He suffers from all the lost, and he suffers from bad friends who have bad theology, right?

Because their story isn't correct about how God works in the world with suffering. And so she just needed to have a story that was actually a correct story of how the world really works. Well, you know, again, for context, I mean, she had gone 20 years wallowing in this situation, which is, you know, reasonable emotionally when you don't have that bigger story.

So I want a little more insight, Jim, with Kelly particularly about how she climbed out of that hole because it's so instructive to many who are living in that hole right now. Well, here's sadly. Sadly, here's what I would say.

It's sad that she had been active in a church for all that time, but it did not find a way to get some of the answers she needed to re-navigate her story, which I think we need to do a better job of that, certainly for our kids. So here's what I basically said. Okay, look, so I can think of maybe five, six, seven reasons why a good God would allow something bad to happen to us. And if there's a reason why God might allow it, that would cause you to rethink what just happened.

So here's the first one I said to her. I said, look, if there's a God and if Christianity is true, you have to stop living like you're an atheist. As an atheist, I believe all satisfaction, all justice, all pleasure had to be satisfied in the line segment. That was my geometry. From birth to death, as a non-believer, this is why I thought I had 90 years clean, hopefully.

You had dropped dead in your sleep after a big dinner, right? That was the goal. So 90 clean years.

Well, I tell you what, if something happens during your 50s and then you die early, you're going to be upset. That's evil because you expected 90 clean because you have an idea of life that's a line segment. But what if you're wrong about your geometry? What if life doesn't start at birth and extend to death and it ends right there, but it actually goes through that point into eternity? That's called a ray. That's not a line segment. If life's a ray, now everything changes because there are people you know who had terrible surgeries in their infancy. Yet by the time they were three, they don't even remember the surgery. All evil has to be measured in the context of your lifespan.

So here's what I mean. If the ray is correct, a thousand years into the other side of the second dot into the ray, that 90 years is really small by comparison to the thousand. A million years into the other side of the second dot, now that 90 years is a millisecond.

You could have 90 terrible years. But if the Christian worldview about life is true, God's not interested in your line segment. He's got you for your life.

And the minute that ray starts for you is when you accept Christ as savior. So in that context, you would say that even as evil is expressed in this life, God will bend that for somebody's good, somebody in that sphere, or many. So let me say something controversial. Is God ever the author of suffering?

I'm going to let you jump out and suggest what that might be. Yes. Is he the author of evil?

No. When Satan author is suffering, he authors it to destroy you. When God author is suffering, he offers it to shape you, to build you, to give you something even better. And so he will allow us to suffer.

For a bigger purpose. What father doesn't discipline his children, author of Hebrews says. Okay, in that context, going back, one of the biggest, the biggest question people will ask is, how can a God that's loving and kind allow a child to suffer and die? Because that child is not living in the line segment.

That child is just like you and I. He's part of the ray. He's alive right now. So there's much more eternal life after this.

Yes, he's alive right now. See, we think of death because we think of it as a line segment. That second dot is final for us. But as Christians, we ought to know better than that. So here's what happens. We're Christians who live as though life's a line segment when life's actually a ray, according to our view.

One more thing. A good God who's all loving, I suspect, would want to create a world in which love is possible. How could you call him a good God if he creates a world in which you can never love anybody? But here's the dangerous problem with that. If you want love to emerge in this world, you have to create the thing that love stands on, which is dangerous.

It's free agency. There is no love without freedom. I can't put a gun to your head and say, do you love me? You'll say, Jim, you'll say yes.

You'll say yes. But you don't mean it because you're being coerced. It turns out I have to give you the dangerous thing first, the free agency thing.

That means you have to have the freedom to hate me in order to truly love me. So you want that dangerous thing called free agency? Well, yeah, God's going to throw this knife at you, but he's called free agency. But he's not going to tell you.

He's going to tell you how to catch it by the handle and not the blade. Here's what he's going to do. I'm going to give you a rule book, a guidebook that will tell you how not to abuse your free agency so that you can have a world in which you can do the thing that everyone values more than anything else.

Atheist or believer, everyone values love as the highest principle. You can't have it without the free agency. I'm going to help you not to abuse your free agency. Oh, you won't read that?

That's not on me. I've given you the book so you won't abuse your free agency. And when you do it, though, this is the price we pay. It is logically impossible for God to create a world in which love exists without free agency. Yeah. So if you want one, you're going to have to have there's no way to create a world in which love exists without free agency. But that means you have to have the true freedom to do something that happens to these victims.

Yeah. But if life is a ray and not a segment, I got you. I got you. By the way, all of you unsolved people in crimes or all your crimes have been unsolved, relax, because it turns out I don't have to work within the 90 years to get that crime solved either.

I don't have to work within the 90 years to satisfy all justice, to satisfy every desire you have. That guy who's stealing to get those things met, it turns out you might become a Christian and never experience all the delight you thought you were going to experience in the lion segment. But it's okay. It's a ray. I got you covered.

It's on the other side of the second dot. So as for her, she just needed to kind of get a sense of what would be the good reasons. Look, you know suffering is necessary to character building. All the things that atheists love the most courage, compassion, charity, you think those things are a switch you flip?

No, they're all responses. They're responses to hardship. You can't have courage without danger. I can't just say, oh, you're courageous now.

No, you didn't. It's how you respond to danger that makes you courageous. So if you wanted to develop courage and compassion and charity and forgiveness, you'd have to design a world in which there is danger and suffering and transgression and poverty. These are the things that provoke the responses that actually even as an atheist, I would have said, yeah, I want a world that has those. But see, what we mistakenly think is I can get that world by just flipping a switch. No, those are things that are absolutely responses to hardship.

Yeah, I mean, this is it's right where we're living. I want to end here for that person who is suffering and can't get through this. Going back to Kelly's story that, you know, she hasn't had that encounter yet to think differently. Sitting in church for 20 years. That person is still there. And I'm kind of curious what you think the percentage of people in this life are sitting in that spot. 80 percent that have had hardship.

That's 100 percent. The question is how we respond. So what do you say that that person, Kelly, who hasn't had that encounter with you to get this kind of input, who hasn't received it at church, perhaps. Or many of the Christians around her, even being a Christian, have not been able to explain this adequately.

What do you say to that person? Well, first of all, I think we're living in a world right now where almost no one has an excuse to not have information. We're in the information age, right? So it turns out, like, for example, if you didn't know how to replace the headlights on your 1994, you know, whatever, you could go on YouTube and there's five videos of guys replacing the headlights on your 1994. I mean, anything you could want is out there and available to you.

And it's available. We've written about it extensively on our website. There's a ton of material right here on the focus and the family interviews, podcasts of people who are trying to answer the question, how could a good God allow evil? And that's an important question that we have to answer.

That's one of those questions we're talking about with kids. We're looking at and saying, well, look, I need to be able to make a case for why this is true and good and why there isn't. By the way, all of us have to explain evil. You did the explanation on the atheist side is any better than ours, right? Do you think there's any more comforting than ours? Do you think there's any hope in the atheist explanation for the problem of evil?

There isn't. We all have to offer a solution. The question is which solution actually comports with the evidence and is the most satisfying. It's the best inference from evidence. So for me, it's about really if you are struggling right now and you're wondering, look, there's two ways we struggle with evil.

One is intellectual, but the other is emotional. So if you struggle with evil, my case for why God would allow this is meaningless to you. There's a season in which her family just need to be held, just needed to be to be sat with, just needed to be. We call this a ministry of presence. Just be present.

You don't need to offer answers. But for your kids who haven't yet experienced evil, it turns out that's the time to inoculate them with the right thinking. So there's the intellectual case I can make, but for people who have just suffered evil, I'm not sure how satisfying that is ever going to be.

There's going to be a season in which you just need to be held. So if evil is in your rear view mirror, that's a different approach. But if evil is still through your windshield, and that is probably the case for most young people, we need to start talking about these things with them right now because it can inoculate you from suffering at an even deeper level.

Not only that, but it's appealing. I mean, if you think about it in the way that you've described it and given an answer, yeah, being that ray, the extended being that we're created to be, living for eternity with him, that this is a blip. And these, you know, these evils that we experience in this life are to help train us in the suffering, to help train us to be better and more like him. We talk about all the time, does God care more about my comfort than my character? No.

Not if you're talking about comfort in this life, in this side of the second dot. If you're in the line segment, that's the time in which... Do you remember when Tim Keller was dying of pancreatic cancer? They asked him, how has life changed for you, Tim, now that you've got pancreatic cancer? He said, well, two things. I need to kind of readjust my time. I don't have the time I thought I had. But two, he says, I realize I'm not ready to do what God has for me next.

And I need to use this time to get ready for what... So when I stand before God, I'm ready to do what God has for me. And I thought, wow, there's a guy who gets the ray. Yeah, totally. Well, Jim, this is a great start. And we've scratched the surface of the truth in true crime and kind of discovered the attitudes and the value proposition that these people live by. And of course, you as a detective, the things that you brought to those cases, a great start. So we want to make sure that we offer you this book like we normally do. If you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry.

And you can do that monthly. That's really helpful to us. We call it Friends of Focus on the Family. That's how Gene and I support the ministry.

I think you do, too. And I'd encourage you to do that right now. Donate today, strengthen marriages, reach people who are in a crisis and they're struggling with suffering. Help families with challenges on the parenting front.

There's so much that Focus on the Family is doing. And when you donate today, your gift will be doubled dollar for dollar because of some generous friends of the ministry. So donate today. Make that donation effectively doubled when you call 800 the letter A and the word family. Or you can contribute to the work here and request your copy of the book, The Truth in True Crime. We've got all the details in the show notes. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. It is. I don't trust everyone to tell me stuff. And I don't have time for that 500 page book either. But I do have time for Focus on the Family's weekly age and stage e-mails that have tips for intentionally raising my son at his age right now. It's super easy. Go to my kids age dot com. Put in your kids age and get parenting advice you can trust.