At Orpheum, forensic psychologist looks at external factors that shaped murderers’ minds

“The Psychology of a Murderer,” which comes to the Orpheum Theatre next weekend, is a follow-up of sorts to a tour that forensic psychologist Dr. Rachel Toles had done about serial killers.

“That’s when I was looking at the albino squirrel, so to speak, of the serial killer, and now I’m looking at the everyman killer within us all,” Toles said.

Toles presents cases that made headlines, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, football player Aaron Hernandez and the killers at Colorado’s Columbine High School.

A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Toles first gained attention when her TikTok videos following Netflix’s documentary on Dahmer went viral.

“People weren’t getting the correct information on family systems and how a person could get to this point,” she said. “I started talking in depth about Dahmer, and those videos blew up.”

It is Toles’ belief that any of us could have been killers given the wrong external factors, backgrounds and boundaries.

“It’s a combination of a pressure cooker meets external factors that causes people to snap,” she said. “Unfortunately in our world, we assume that person was ‘always a psychopath and they were hiding it for 33 years until we saw their true colors.’

“No, they snapped,” she countered. “They’re still a human being that has wants, desires, longing for connection like all of us. They made a very bad decision and now they are written off because they have crossed a line. I’m saying they’re still human. Investigating is not excusing or condoning, but we have to find out why these people malfunction in the first place in order to begin preventing it.”

Toles has spent decades studying family systems and believes that they hold the key to understanding the killers in ways others might not realize.

“It’s a unique view because I’m looking at patterns in a way I haven’t seen done before. If you look at any true crime show – I call them ‘Puzzle Piece A’ – which consists of the horrific crime scene, the killer’s been caught, the end,” she said. “I’m bringing Puzzle Piece B in to show the audience what you’re not really seeing.”

Toles said she first became interested in the case of Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991, when she was 14.

“He just doesn’t fit the mold for multiple reasons,” she said.

Toles, who is finishing a book about serial killers, said she wants to show audiences how murderers could be the person next door, or even themselves.

“It’ll be kind of scary, but the hope is that everyone in the audience will kind of see themselves in at least one of these people to say, ‘Holy cow, I could have been that person if things had gone the other direction,’” she said. “Each of them represents a part, if not several of them, of all of us, if we were really honest with ourselves.”

The case that haunts her, Toles said, is the first on the program: Chris Watts, a Colorado father who murdered his pregnant wife and two preschool daughters in 2018, stuffing the girls’ bodies into crude-oil tanks.

“This is a guy who had a perfect track record and then had a brief, five-week affair and then he annihilated his whole family,” she said. “That one haunts me and a lot of people.”

Although not featured in the program, Toles is expecting in her nightly Q&A sessions to be asked about Luigi Mangione, suspected in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.

“Everybody wants to talk about it, so we’ll probably touch on it,” she said.

Toles said she’s been fascinated by death since she was 3 years old and had witnessed someone killed when she was 5.

“I was obsessed with the concept of war and murder,” she said. “I knew I wanted to explore the scariest aspects of life.”

‘THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A MURDERER’

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 16

Where: Orpheum Theatre, 200 N. Broadway

Tickets: $29.50 to $64.50, from selectaseat.com or 316-755-7328