Forensic psychologist has one terrifying warning for anyone who enjoys watching true crime
Warning: contains graphic content and discussion of sexual assault, murder, and terrorism
Having binged your way through the latest true crime documentaries or fictional classics like American Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, you might think you have an idea of what it would be like to sit across from some of the UK’s most violent offenders.
But forensic psychologist Dr Ruth Tully, who specialises in the assessment of sexual offences, serious violence and terrorism-related crimes, says the day-to-day of working with these prisoners might be quite different to what you imagine.
Ruth, whose career has seen her involved in several high-profile cases, works directly with offenders in ‘various contexts’, which can include therapeutic treatment, completing psychological risk assessments about life-sentenced prisoners to present to the parole board and providing an opinion on whether someone has a ‘learning disability or other condition’ to present in court.
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“My week is very varied and might involve assessing someone in a prison one day, report writing another day, training professionals, supervising other psychologists, being filmed for a crime documentary, or giving evidence in court,” she tells Tyla.
"One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is giving evidence in court.
"This can be a high pressured and challenging environment and is adversarial at times, but I like to talk about the work I have done and my opinions in the case to ensure all those involved understand it clearly," she continued, adding that she's 'not put off easily by hostile questions' - a trait which, as you can imagine, goes a long way in the field.
Throughout her career, Ruth has been confronted with some of the darkest sides of the human mind, and while you might immediately jump to images of a dead-behind-the-eyes horror film villain, she says the so-called 'intelligent psychopath' trope isn't always the entire picture.
“I think people often assume that any serial killer or someone who has murdered their victim is the stereotype 'intelligent psychopath' like Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs film.
“Often in cases of serial or spree killings, there is some level of personality difficulty or personality disorder present, but this doesn't frequently present like Hannibal Lecter does.
“People who have killed multiple times in my experience have had very different motivations.
"I recall one person who I assessed in prison who had sexual sadism as a motivation; he had killed women. He did present as callous and unemotional at times, but also could be emotionally dysregulated and generally antisocial and so had a range of other criminal convictions and would also lose his temper (unlike Hannibal Lecter, who seemed to be mainly over-controlled). He had a specific sexual interest in watching women suffer.
"Another man who I assessed was offending for financial gain and killed his (several) victims. He had very strong anti-social personality traits, but perhaps didn't have the very high intellect of Hannibal Lecter as the way he behaved after murdering his victims led to him easily being caught.
"The main thing about any offences and offenders is that they are all different. Different people, different personalities, different lives and experiences. They don't tend to fit a stereotype aside for serial killers all clearly being capable of repeated extreme violence," she explained, adding that there also tends to be 'a lot of childhood and adult trauma in the offending population'.
The level of detail prisoners will share about their crimes with Ruth varies, though she did admit many will tell her everything from the get-go, including what was going through their mind at the time.
“It is often the case that the person doesn't really understand why they committed their offence and within psychological treatment, this is often what can be teased out, even indirectly through trying to understand what sort of person the individual is and how their attitudes and beliefs developed."
Ruth has sat across from all kinds of prisoners, including prolific sexual offenders and murderers, in an attempt to understand the why behind their violence - but there's one type of offender that's the hardest to work with, she says.
"The hardest cases to work on are terrorism cases, in part because these are more rare than other general violence cases and so in relation to the science and research done on this group of people, we know a lot less. This also is in part because an extremist mindset can be difficult for the person to make changes to in order to reduce their risk.
"There is also a real risk of 'false compliance' where the person is telling you what they think you want to hear when you are completing specialist psychological risk assessment. Added to this is the fact that a terrorism offence could come in many forms; this could involve inciting others, or could involve direct violence with multiple victims.
"Risk assessment of extremist offenders is hard."
The ins and outs of the criminal justice system has been pushed increasingly into the spotlight as we navigate an era where the appetite for true crime has grown more insatiable then ever.
You only have to scroll on Netflix for two minutes to discover a whole catalogue of documentaries chronicling some of the most harrowing and disturbing crimes across the world.
And that's not to mention the whole load of cold cases at our fingertips, which can see viewers morphing into armchair detectives and taking to Reddit forums to spout their theories of what they believe really went down.
Ruth has noticed this trend, explaining the surge in interest around true crime seems to have been especially prevalent among women during the Covid-19 lockdown.
And it could be serving an important purpose.
“I think one aspect of this interest is that, by watching programmes about crime which on the one hand can scare us, we are also actually seeking to understand crime because doing so can help us feel safer if we know why people are violent and what happened to victims in certain cases.
"So I think there's an element of self-preservation, as well as natural human curiosity and being nosy."
But Ruth warned that those who get too immersed in true crime could trigger a dangerous domino effect if they're not careful.
“There is the risk that people start to take cases into their own hands; this is a problem because often, by necessity, the public aren't aware of the full details of the police investigation and without realising, people can interfere with this.
“Unfortunately, at the extreme, this could lead to the police not apprehending a suspect or if they do, not being able to secure a conviction because the evidence has been undermined by an amateur sleuth."
Throughout her years working in prisons, the NHS and private practice, Ruth has heard a lot of horrific stuff, but one thing her career has taught her is that ‘all people are capable of doing bad things’.
“I don't really think I've ever thought of 'good and evil' in black-and-white terms.
“People are often scared of risky strangers who they think might be ‘evil', when the majority of violence and sexual offending is actually committed by someone known to the victim.
“People who do good things can do bad things. People who do bad things can still do good things. It's a choice.”
If you want to find out more about Ruth’s work, you can visit her website here.
Behind the Crimes is a limited series on Tyla delving into the reality of those who work behind the scenes of crime
Topics: True Crime, Crime
Chloe Jackson