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

Long ago, Missy thought abortion was the right choice, but she was misinformed about what was really going on. God healed Missy's heart, and today she's a pro-life advocate, and Focus on the Family is equipping her to help others. I want other women who are sitting like me, sitting in church, or dealing with that shame and secrecy to know that there's hope in healing. Jesus actually came and died on a cross to pay the price for your bad behavior, for all the sins you've committed, so that the Christian response to guilt is forgiveness through the cross.

The Christian response to shame is a new identity in Christ, where there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. That's former cold case homicide detective J. Warner Wallace with some really interesting observations about the truth that we can glean from humanity by looking at crimes. He'll inspire us with the truth of Christ and God's love on today's episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller. John, it was really interesting last time.

We talked about the big questions of life, like suffering. I mean, who would think that a criminal detective would be thinking about those bigger things? But it's the attributes that he saw in these criminals that really got him to thinking about what is being said here.

I think if you missed last time, certainly go and you can do that through the app download or go to the website and you can get a copy of it. But the core thing was just those behaviors that criminals tend to go after what they want in an illegal way, and the rest of us are trying to do it in an illegal way. You know, go to school, work hard, get the cozy things that we'd like to live by, a house, a nice car, whatever.

And they're trying to achieve those things through ripping you off. And what's that mean right at the base of it all? So I'm going to really look forward here to talking to Jim Warner Wallace on day two to talk about how he has gone about doing this as a detective and how he applies it to Christianity. Yeah, Jim's cases have been featured on NBC's Dateline and on TruTV and others. He's a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He's an adjunct professor of apologetics at Biola University, and he's written a number of books. He's been a frequent guest here at Focus on the Family. The book kind of forming the foundation for this conversation, part two, as you indicated, Jim, is 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 this great book at the website.

The link is in the show notes. Jim, welcome back. Thanks for having me. It was good to have you here. It's always so interesting and what God has allowed you to go through and do and the way you applied that.

For the new listener today that didn't hear last time, again, we want to encourage you to go listen to it, but you were an atheist. You got into detective work in Southern California. You were part of the gang investigative unit. That had to be really interesting. I mean, just from a work standpoint, that's probably where all the actions are, right? Yeah, it seemed like it was. And it just teaches you a lot just about young people, because most of the gangsters you're meeting were significantly younger than me.

Yeah, no kidding. In that case, Javier was somebody that you made contact with as a gang member. Describe that interaction. How old was he and what did that lead to? Well, a lot of times what you're doing is you're just making sure that you know everyone in your city who's claiming the affiliation with gangs.

And that means that before there's ever a crime, you're spending time just getting to know young people. And I had a younger partner at the time, and he wasn't married. He didn't have kids. I was married.

I had two boys. And I was thinking – I watched him with these gangsters. He had such a relational approach. I mean, he knew what music they were listening to.

He could talk the talk and walk the walk. And he just felt like when he walked in – and we would often just drive through the city. If we see a bunch of guys standing around, we'd just stop our car, get out and talk to them, make sure we knew who everyone was, right? We know them by name.

And for the course of a couple of years of doing that, you will know everyone by name. But my partner could get out and really just act – Go with it. Yeah. It felt like – I just watched him, and I thought, okay, there's no way. I was already, I think, in my – you know, 10 years older. There's no way I'm going to be able to do that.

I felt like a fool trying to do it. So for me, I realized from the get-go, if I'm going to work with these young men, it's going to have to be a very paternal relationship, right? They're going to have to see me in a different way.

I'm going to have to be the old guy and just embrace it. So I just tried to do that, and that opened up relationships with one of these guys named Javier, who I can sense that he was a thinker, and it was helpful. He originally was involved in a pretty active gang, not in our city. His parents or his mom sent him to live with his maternal grandmother in our city because she felt it was a little bit safer. Kind of get him out of the neighborhood? Trying to get him out of the neighborhood. And to be honest, what happened was he pretty much drew that click into our city because they would come and visit him there.

And so then we started getting reports and complaints from neighbors and things like this. So long story short, we started to develop a relationship, which was just conversational. But I could sense that in the end, look, we're all the same human being in different settings.

And what he wants out of life is also what we all want out of life, although he may think there's a different way to get it. And I remember my partner at the time, he watched a movie that had just come out, just hit the theaters, and it was called Boys in the Hood. And he said, Jim, you should watch this movie.

And I'm like, this is what we do for a living. I'm not going home and watching. It's great.

I'm sure it's great, but I just don't think I'm going to probably on my day off sit with my wife and watch this movie. He says, no, no, you need to watch it because there's some truth in it that you need to grab. So he was senior to me, although he was younger than me.

I came on a little later in life and so he was younger than me, but he was my senior officer. So I said, I should probably do this. So I watch it so the next time we would work together, I can at least answer his questions.

Right. So so I watched this movie and it struck me. It was really a great story. It's a great movie. It's not it's an R rated movie, so I'm not going to say it's a movie of your watch. But for a gang officer who at the time was pretty accurate.

Yeah, it was I felt like because here's what I noticed. We had such diversity in our city in terms of the kinds of kids who are involved in gang activity. We had multigenerational Hispanic gangs. We had African-American gangs, Korean, white.

We had all kinds of different gang members living in our city. And what was interesting about it was they didn't seem to share anything in common. Certainly it wasn't race. It wasn't even their backgrounds in terms of like what their family structures were so much. Like it wasn't about their economic status for sure. Some were driving really nice cars, living in nice parts of the city.

Some were not like I'm trying to like as an investigator, I'm just trying to fit. What's the common denominator here? Well, after watching this movie, it's like a light bulb goes on. The common denominator for all of these diverse groups is really simple. It's lack of dad.

It's it now. Lack of dad looks different depending on the group. Some of these kids didn't know their dad because they mom never introduced them to dad. Some of these kids didn't know dad because he's been locked up almost all their entire life. Some of these kids were living with their dads, but they were drunk or unavailable or disinterested or abusive or abusive. Some of them were workaholics who were making great money, great income, living in great neighborhoods, but were never home, had no idea what their kids were doing.

So lack of dad looks different depending on the setting, but it almost always produces the same kind of problem. At least it was in these gang groups I was working. And I was a guy who was working a ton of overtime.

I had two young boys, they were like maybe two and four at the time, maybe three and five, something like that. And I remember thinking, I'm never home. I mean, this kind of a job is like, you know, it's 24-7. If something occurs tomorrow, my agency is going to call me and say, yeah, it's a gang crime. You need to come in and work it.

So we're going to go in. I was never home. And I thought to myself, my version of lack of dad is no better than any of the versions of lack of dad that I'm seeing on the job. So it was a wake-up call for me. So you were able to internalize what you were seeing and make some application at home.

Whatever happened to Javier? Well, what happened was, you know, it turns out that you can overcome lack of dad. We can help this situation with lack of dad if we could just provide a certain kind of paternal mentoring. And I just tried to come in and provide that. To be honest, I thought it was the only way I had him with this kid because I don't know what this kid knows about how he's living.

I'm not going to be able to pretend I do. But I could be dad in this setting. And what I saw was is that he then, look, we model things that our kids want to grab. You know, I'm Jay Warner Wallace because I had a grandfather named Warner who changed my life.

That guy. So I know you can model. Even if you're not dad, you can model. So, yeah, no, I had that same experience with a football coach. And it's amazing the appetite that we have as young men trying to find that. Oh, absolutely.

It's almost like somebody who's thirsty being drawn to water. But, look, we have been sold the bill of goods that any structure, family structure, any form of family will suffice. As long as you love. Well, that's true in some sense. You certainly don't want to be in an abusive.

No one's been to more domestic violence calls than I have, okay? But, I mean, in this room at least. But we have to be honest about the roles that we play. We're different. Parents are different biochemically.

And our biochemical differences produce certain kinds of responses. And if you're raising boys, they need to see an example of what it is. What will I look like 15 years from now?

What does it look like 10 years from now? And I think we have to provide that modeling. So we can't, not to overestimate, of course, but most of the kids I knew, they had an active mom in their life. What they didn't have was an active dad.

Yeah, it's such a wild card. I wrote about that in the book called The Good Father. And I talked about that at length. And, you know, back to your comment about the data. All social science is proving that an engaged father is so critical to the well-being of a child, especially boys.

But girls do for different reasons. And there's no dispute now. We have secular social scientists who are coming to that same conclusion.

Melissa Kearney from MIT who's written about the privileged two-parent family and the benefits that it did. Well, yeah, so this is to say the controversial thing that focus on the family has stood for and been saying for years. It's where we're at.

Here's where it is. The data shows this over and over and over again. If you want your kids to flourish, kids who are raised by their two biological parents in a low-conflict setting thrive. A loving setting, yeah. It's as simple as that. And that's how they typically will say it. Now, I wasn't raised that way. My parents divorced when I was three, so I did not have my dad at home growing up. So I wasn't raised that way. Can you overcome it?

Of course. But you're probably going to need a surrogate. And that's what I had. I had a guy who I didn't even get to see that often, but his influence was so powerful. You might think, well, yeah, I can't be the grandfather who is going to step in and be an everyday mentor to my grandkids. That was not Warner's role in my life. I probably saw him three or four times a year. Right. It was the power he had when I was in his presence that made me want to be him even when I wasn't with him.

So you don't have to do this every day to have that kind of impact. The ribbon on this was Javier's voicemail. I think he left you.

I don't know how many years later, but what was the voicemail? Years later, he came to the chief's office to kind of say, hey, you just want you to know I'm doing good. I'm married.

I've got kids. And I thought and I could see that was in his future. He was the kind of person who was contemplative enough.

He thought about the things that we had to raise our kids to be thoughtful. Yeah. You know, it's not it's not a coincidence that Romans 12 to it says it's the renewing of your mind. That's the beginning of all transformation. It's not the renewing of your emotions.

It's not the renewing of your will. It's we have to rethink. And so we have to help. The first thing I'm going to do typically, if I'm going to mentor anybody, is to help them start rethinking their view of the world.

That blind segment and ray thing we talked about in the first day we were together. That kind of stuff is we have to start to rethink that. And we have to I think if you raise thoughtful kids, they eventually will want to know, well, why is that working? You're right.

Because all of the data now, unless they're twisting the data intentionally, demonstrates that that structure, that family structure leads to the highest level of human flourishing. And what did he say on the call? Well, he says he wanted me to know that, yeah, I'm married now and I've got kids. And it turns out that the things we talked about on that porch for years earlier actually ended up coming true. Wow. And I thought, OK, now, does every one of the kids I worked with in those days turn out so well?

No, they aren't. But mentoring means you're going to find those places where you can make a difference and you're not knowing the outcome. That's right. And you're going to lean in. And that's going to work for some and not for others. But if you don't identify who it is in your life that you can mentor right now, then if you aim at nothing, you hit it every time. So we have to aim at mentoring somebody. So ask yourself right now, who would you say is your mentor? Because it turns out good mentors are mentored. And if you don't have a mentor who's mentoring you, you're probably not mentoring anybody else very well. So ask that question first. Then ask yourself, OK, now that I've been mentored and I've got somebody I can lean on, who am I doing that for?

And if we just did that one up and one down, we'd change the world. Jim, in the book, you have a story of a guy you called Randall King. It's kind of a shocking cold case. Describe what happened and who was this guy and what was the outcome? Well, what's interesting about Randall King's story is that he's like a lot of these guys we've worked where we finally get to trial and we're talking to the defense attorneys and the defense attorneys are so sure.

This is a cold case murder and there's no way my guy did this. I've had defense attorneys tell me this. They say, oh, you know, I've worked a lot of guilty folks. You have to do that in this job. I get that.

I want to do a good job even for those who just need a good defense. But this guy, you're wrong, Jim, about this guy. This guy's not guilty. Well, the same kind of thing happened here with Randall, that he had this unbelievable pedigree in the Marine Corps that people who knew him said there's no way a guy like this could have done that 30 years earlier, 25 years earlier. There's no way he could have done it because they knew the man. They thought they knew that man for all those years.

And this is always the case. I don't work serial killers. Serial killers are weird. OK, you knock on the neighbor's door after you arrest a serial killer and they're probably going to say something like, hey, I'm glad you took that guy to jail because that dude's weird. Everybody avoided him.

He's up all night. He's a weirdo. But cold case murders are different. You knock on the neighbor's door after you arrest somebody for a cold case and they'll say, no way. That dude watches my kids when I'm gone. He's the best neighbor I've ever.

He's the deacon at our church. That's what you hear because it turns out that the people who do cold case murders are not doing serial crimes. They did one murder 30 years earlier. Right. And they spent the last 30 years covering it, living entirely differently as often, reaching heights.

I've arrested fire captains. You know, these kinds of things are are just in our nature. And it made me realize how in the world is it that we're capable of such altruistic goodness, the same person, yet also could be capable of a murder 30 years earlier or 30 minutes from now? Because we have a sense that, oh, he's not necessarily. So what was Randall King's deal? Well, his deal was that he had done such great success in the Marine Corps and such a servant and such a hero that when we finally took him to jail, we're just doing closing interviews. We're just talking to the people who know him.

Sometimes I'll give you a little pieces that you think, oh, that's actually a tell. You know, but no, this wasn't the case. This guy we talked to was his commanding officer.

He's like, no way. This guy, there's no way this guy could ever could ever do such a thing. And what had he done? He had done a murder. He had murdered a guy for almost nothing, really, if he honestly just kind of provoked his pride at a job 30 years earlier. Went right into the Marine Corps afterwards.

And so he was kind of off the grid for that period of time. And like everyone else I worked in, all these cold cases, they all say the same. I had one cold case, for example, where the victim was this guy's wife. His family didn't believe he did it, of course, but her family 30 years later did not believe he did it either. Wow.

Because he'd been such an exemplary model of citizens for the last 30 years. So it made me think, you know, this is something that's very biblical in the sense that we have to kind of, what is the nature of humanity? Like, what does biblical anthropology say about who we are?

Are we people? Basically, there's two ways of looking at the world. One is that humans are innately good. They are born innocent.

They are corrupted by their families, their environments, the governmental systems that surround them. And so we have to change the systems and families and environments because people would stay good if we wouldn't corrupt them over time. The other view is, no, humans are actually deeply fallen. And because of that, we will corrupt families and governments and systems and communities because of our fallen nature.

Which of these two things is true? And so, by the way, our kids need to know that because if you're innately good, your sense of self is different than if you know I have to guard against my innate fallenness. Am I capable of doing good? Yes, this is called the enigma of man, and scripture describes it. Creating God's image, capable of doing amazing godly things, yet deeply rebellious and fallen from the fall, so often don't do those things. This enigma of man is described in scripture, but I think it's confusing for a culture that looks at us because they have taken, for the most part, humanism elevates humans. And it thinks very highly of humans, and it usually sees humans as innately good and corrupted by systems.

And we see this language all the time right now. So this guy, Randall King, he kills this guy years ago because of bullying that he expressed or something like that. What did you find in Randall's house that kind of tipped the scale for you and went, oh, this is interesting? Well, I remember when we did the—I'll never forget the search warrant because we walk into this guy's house, 30 years upstanding. Nothing to tip his hat that he had been involved in. What a tough job you have. This is always the thing that is, to me, the most—I want to spend time.

When you do a search warrant, you can usually spend a little more time because people are searching, and you're the investigating officer. I'm just kind of recording it in my mind, you know? Well, in his kitchen, he had a virtual laboratory of alcohol. He had all of these canisters that were set upside down, all the bottles with canister tops.

And so it looked like you could walk in and make any kind of mixed drink you could think of from any version of alcohol you could possibly. And I thought, wow, this is interesting. But in his living room, he had bookshelves that were so crowded, some of them like temporary, almost like if you were putting like a temporary bookshelf in a library that's made out of wire or metal. And he had Bible studies. So he had like his Jekyll and Hyde kind of two sides of his character.

And you just picked up on that. Well, of course, I'm looking at, okay, so when did he become religious, I'm thinking? Because I'm always looking at it from the perspective of is there evidence in this room?

And sure enough, you can see there was one passage that occurred right after the murder where he's journaling in his Bible studies, and he's giving us little tells about his behavior, about kind of researching the life of David and kind of seeing himself in David's world. I can reconcile goodness and evil within the same person because this is the enigma of man that Christian scripture describes. So having a correct view. By the way, if you think you can be very easily fooled if you don't hold the correct view of humans. And one thing you can't be is when you're doing investigations is easily fooled.

You want to be in a position where you think, well, yeah, okay, that's great. I understand what he's saying, but this is still well within the range of possibility because this is who we are as humans. You also had a story about Wesley Myers.

It kind of connected to the shameless idea, which is really good because, again, what we're doing here, you've identified characteristics of the criminal mind. Yes. And these are spiritual things. Yes. Shameless. Yes. Guilt. Yes.

All these things. How did Wesley Myers fit into your analysis? This was a guy who did a horrific murder, and I don't even go to all the details in the book, but I remember when we got to the point of convicting him, we were getting ready to go to trial, and it was going to be a death penalty case, and so he didn't want death penalty, so he was willing to take a plea for life in jail without the possibility of parole.

We call that an LWOP, life without the possibility of parole. So he was willing to do that. Now, what that meant was we would always say, okay, well, what's in it for us? Yes, we're going to not have to go to trial, but we want you to record an interview with us on video in which you tell us how you did the murder. Often we'll do that because we are looking at the crime scene, and we've made certain assumptions. We want to see if we're correct. Kind of a learning experience. Yeah, it's a learning experience for us, and so we do this interview with him, and I'm telling you, it was the most... My partner and I, we walked out of there, and my partner says, wow, that was like chilling.

This was like I've never sat in front of anybody who's so unashamed, and I thought, yeah. So it started me thinking about the difference between... because he had a wife, this killer had a girlfriend at the time, kind of a live-in, and sure enough, she was feeling deep shame, and I thought, okay, why is she feeling shame over what he did? It started me thinking about the relationship between shame and guilt, and I think in culture, we've kind of confused those two terms.

We either use them interchangeably or we mistake one for the other. There's a difference between shame and guilt, okay? Guilt is when you feel bad about something you've done. Shame is when you feel bad about you. Guilt says, I messed up.

Shame says, I'm a mess up. Now, it turns out that the studies on this in the secular side show that one of these is an adaptive emotion. Guilt's adaptive. Shame is maladaptive. Guilt actually leads to good stuff, because when we know we've done wrong, we often want to make it right, and we know we can, and it leads us to do things that are altruistic and to do the right thing.

Yeah, it's kind of conscious. It's our character. But shame is like a corrosive acid. If you feel like, I can never do anything right, then you'll stop trying, and so we have to distinguish between these two, and she had no way to distinguish between these two. It turns out that there's a Christian view of this, and when she started attending church, after this whole thing went down, she started to learn that difference and learn that her value… So here's what I would say to young people. If you're struggling with guilt for things you've done, welcome to the family, because before I get out of the state today and get back to California, I'll have done five or six things I will not feel good about, because this is the nature of being a human.

It's back to that enigma of man thing. But if you're feeling shame, this Christian worldview offers a solution to both. So what Christianity says about guilt is that Jesus actually came and died on a cross to pay the price for your bad behavior, for all the sins you've committed, so that the Christian response to guilt is forgiveness through the cross. The Christian response to shame is a new identity in Christ, where there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. So it turns out that our worldview offers a solution to these two things.

This is what we were talking about before. We have to teach our kids that we are raising you within this perspective of our view of the world, which happens to be true. I can make a case for that evidentially, but beside that, if you compare what our worldview does, the resources offered by Christianity compared to the resources of secularism, you'll want to be over here, because this isn't just true, it's good for us, because it offers a way out of your guilt and shame, that you'll be in years of therapy and hoping to achieve the same. Jim, right at the end here, and that is a great point.

I mean, I often think of that. Why would people reject this? What is in them that they're saying no, because it's so beneficial? Okay, so you know what it is, Jim? It's humility. So this is the one chapter there, the one thing that would change your metric, that increases every aspect of human flourishing at the highest level, from the depth of your relationships to the much money you're going to make to the longevity, mental health, physical health, is this thing we've been studying for 35 years in secular studies called humility. It turns out it's an ancient principle. It's only offered by one worldview.

Why? Because any worldview that says you must do something to earn a result does not develop humility. That develops pride. I had a friend, Mike Adams, who used to say all the time, I wrote a book, Jim, it's called How to Become Humble in Ten Easy Steps and How I Made It in Eight.

Okay, well, there's the problem. If you think you can do it by pursuing it, you're going to do just the opposite of it. But there is a worldview that says nothing you do is going to earn your salvation. No Ten Commandments, no Five Pillars, no Four Noble Truths, no Karma Yoga, none of that's going to, it's done for you. It's not a doing worldview.

It's a done worldview. It actually can develop humility. We have to show our kids that the reason why the other side doesn't want to bend its knee is because I want to be God. The first step of humility is there is a God and I'm not him. Right. And until you get to that point of humility, of surrender, you will never embrace this.

As long as you want to be in control, you'll never admit that somebody else is. Well, and the added comment is that I'll need to bend to God. That's right. God doesn't bend to me.

And the culture is full of examples of we're trying to have God bend to what we want. That's right. Jim, this has been so good. Thanks for being with us. Your book, The Truth and True Crime.

Another great read from your experiences as an investigative detective and cold case detective. Great application to faith. 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.

If you could do that monthly, that's really great. And know that Focus on the Family is here to be a lifeline to you. One of the things I say to the board and to the donors I encounter is this place is bursting with content.

I mean, it is a content treasure trove. And don't hold back. If you're struggling with your marriage, you're struggling in your parenting, you know, we're here for you. Those are the core things that we do each and every day. And we have caring Christian counselors who can talk with you, supply resources to you, give you a recommendation for a Christian counselor in your area. There's just so much here.

There's no excuse not to get help when you call Focus. Yeah, Focus on the Family has so much to offer. And this reminder to our donor community, when you contribute today, your gift is going to be doubled dollar for dollar. There's a matching gift campaign because of some generous friends who said we'd like to match everybody's contribution. So please donate today and see that contribution effectively doubled when you call 800 the letter A and the word family. 800-232-6459. Or you can donate online and request your copy of the book, The Truth and True Crime by J. Warner Wallace.

We've got all the details in the show notes. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for listening to 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. If the fights with your spouse have become unbearable, if you feel like you can't take it anymore, there's still hope. Hope Restored Marriage Intensives have helped thousands of couples like yours. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.