A hot ticket, a reluctant expert

When a producer for the National Public Radio podcast Serial called to ask for an interview, Professor Charles P. Ewing said no.

She persisted; he resisted.

When he finally agreed to the interview, “I still didn’t know just what it was about,” says Ewing, a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and a sought-after expert on the psychology of homicide.

Turns out that Serial, a spinoff from NPR’s popular This American Life series, is the hottest podcast on the Web. Its inaugural season, which ends Dec. 18, broke the iTunes record for reaching 5 million downloads and streams in the shortest time. A second season has been announced.

The first season of Serial follows the case of Adnan Syed, a young Maryland man who was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend in 1999. Both were seniors in high school at the time of the killing; Syed has been incarcerated ever since, and his case is now on appeal. Producer Sarah Koenig investigated and re-reported the crime for the podcast, highlighting interviews with former friends, audio from the trial and recorded phone calls with Syed. The trial hinged on the fact that Syed couldn’t account for his whereabouts on the day the victim went missing.

“I listened to four or five of the episodes” in preparation for the 90-minute interview, Ewing says. “It’s a fascinating case.”

In the interview segments used in the podcast, Koenig asks Ewing about the sometimes gradual process by which an average person can become a killer. “When they think of impulsive killings, people often think that the offender snaps all of a sudden,” Ewing says. “There are plenty of cases where there’s a final button that gets pushed, but the thoughts build up for days or weeks.”

The podcast also includes his comments on the laws defining premeditation. “The law on premeditated murder is very harsh,” Ewing says. “Courts have held that premeditation can occur in a matter of seconds. All it means is you gave it an instant of thought.”

As for the popularity of the podcast, Ewing says he realizes there’s a generational divide at work. “I had no idea of its popularity,” he says. “I learned that the episode with my interview aired because so many of my kids’ friends contacted them about it.”

“Most of the thousands of killers I’ve evaluated have been pretty ordinary people. For the most part, people kill not in a premeditated way; they’re not evil, they’re not sociopathic, they’re not psychopathic. They kill because something happens that pushes them over the edge.

“People sometimes lose it, and when they lose it, it’s not always all at once. There are a lot of cases where people have, over a relatively short period of time, nursed feelings of rejection or anger or hostility. Those feelings simmer for a while, and one of their thoughts is, ‘Maybe I should kill this person. I’m not going to kill this person, I don’t want to kill this person, but what if I did?’ And the person thinks about it and then maybe confronts the other person, the person who’s the object of the frustration and the anger. At that point the victim says or does something that provokes the ultimate killing.

“People can go into a dissociative state, where they’re psychologically not where they are physically. Probably half the people I’ve evaluated for killing other human beings have some degree of amnesia for what they’ve done. It’s not total amnesia, usually. But it can be ‘I don’t really recall the details, I don’t recall doing this.’

“It doesn’t last forever. It’s very difficult to maintain that kind of facade. Over time people do recover traces of what happened and they know what happened. But I’ve also seen people who have genuinely snapped and committed a homicide and then realized what they’ve done, and the immediate reaction for most people is, ‘Oh, my God, look what I’ve done, and what am I going to do about it? I’ve got to figure out some way to cover this up.’ ”

The Serial podcast series is available at www.serialpodcast.org.