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Hi there, it's Deborah Roberts. I want to tell you about a special series that you can listen to right here. It's called Inside the Midnight Order, and it's a companion podcast to the free-form true crime documentary series, Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order.
Over the next few weeks, you'll be able to join a team of young women as they use their investigative skills to reopen cold cases and tackle one of the biggest murder cases in North America, the case of Robert Pickton, a pig farmer who claimed he killed 49 women. Join Dr. Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order as they follow the evidence wherever it leads. Here's the first episode.
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Hey, everybody. I'm ABC News correspondent Kena Whitworth. And I'm Nancy Schwartzman, the director and executive producer of Sasha Reid and The Midnight Order. From ABC Audio and Freeform, this is Inside the Midnight Order.
In this companion podcast, we'll bring you along with us as we dive deeper into the work of Dr. Sasha Reid and her team of investigators. You'll learn more about each member of the Midnight Order, what motivates them, and how they approach their cases, including one of the biggest and most horrifying murder cases in North America. ♪
And so, Nancy, why don't we start by recapping what we learned in episode one of the show? Absolutely. In the first episode, we meet Sasha and the Midnight Order, her team of young women with expertise in data science, criminology, and psychology. This is a team of young women that are dedicated to solving crimes that they feel have been overlooked, especially when there's the possibility that a serial killer could be responsible.
And so, Nancy, in this first episode, they are presented with a really unique case. Tell us about it. Yeah, they spend this episode looking into a case that was sent to them by a woman they call Veronica. They're using that code name to protect her identity and also as an homage to the Archie and Veronica comics. Veronica suspects that her ex may be responsible for several unsolved murders and asks Sasha and the team to look into it.
This is the first case the Midnight Order takes on together. So it's a way for them to really hone and develop their investigative process. It's fascinating to me that you were able to be a fly on the wall as the Midnight Order takes on their first case together. How did you find out about this project? How were you drawn to it?
Yeah, I was so interested really in finding female investigators who work outside the system. So often when we're looking at crime, it's always through the lens of law enforcement. But I wanted to find people working outside the system. And these women really lent their unique observations and talents to crime solving and brought this humanist lens to the complex issues that surrounds and also enable crime.
I learned about Sasha early on through her work on the Bruce MacArthur case in Toronto.
and discovered not only, you know, is Dr. Reed a visionary in her approach to developmental psychology and data, but she's also a mentor. She was actively teaching and paving the way for young women to join her and form the Midnight Order to follow their passions and talents into the crime space. Her work as a mentor clearly plays a role throughout this entire series.
It's almost like you're watching her develop the next generation of not just true crime enthusiasts, but potential crime solvers themselves. I mean, absolutely. Sasha herself is a scholar. She has two masters, a PhD, and she just graduated top of her law school. And every girl in the Midnight Order has felt encouraged by
by not only Sasha's path and her career, but they go to her for questions with their thesis, they change majors, they now pursue criminology and forensics. All of them have been empowered to step into what it is they are obsessed with and become the next generation of crime solvers. Clearly, we have so much to learn, not only about these young women, but also about the cases themselves.
And so for more on that and Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order, including why the team was even started in the first place and how they approach investigations, we'll talk with Dr. Sasha Reid herself about how she built two unique databases and uses them in her investigations. And later on, we'll hear about the genesis of the Midnight Order. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Do you have a point of sale system you can trust or is it
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So Sasha, tell me about your background. What inspired you to study psychology? For me as a kid, I was surrounded by this deep, dark forest. And for me, this forest was everything. Growing up, we didn't have sports for girls or clubs for girls. And so I had the forest and my imagination. And I spent a lot of time in there just thinking about it.
and running from or towards, depending on the day, monsters. And so my interest in the study of psychology, I think, is innate because I've always been focused on the deeper, darker side of not just humanity, but all things. Wow, that's so interesting. You earned a master's degree in applied psychology and then a second one in criminology and law.
Why did you decide to change your focus to serial homicide? So in my master's degree in applied psychology and human development, what I was doing was studying children and human development from conception until death. And I started that program thinking, maybe I want to be a teacher. But within a year, I got so bored, I almost dropped out.
And one of my program supervisors, I went to her and I explained, and she said, well, what interests you in human development? What interests you in the work that you're doing now? And I said, well, one thing that really fascinates me is these sad children, these children for whom
Life has been troubling and horrible. Or the kids who are labeled bad and troublemakers. And she said to me, Sasha, how could you ever hope to understand deviance without first understanding human development or child development? So I stayed in that program. And so in order to pass the time, I started studying psychopathy. And then serial homicide is just a natural thing.
natural transition from that. Wow. So really looking at those kids that don't fit in or that are labeled as deviant and then really diving in to the furthest extreme, right? Which would be serial homicide. It comes from somewhere, right? And I remember there was this one kid and in class he was labeled as the troublemaker. And one day out on the
And what happened is when we came back into class, all the students had to sit around in a circle and say one thing that they didn't like about this kid. And it broke my heart. It broke my heart because there's a reason why he was acting like that. So I just, I think I just wanted to better understand these individuals and help people to better understand where this behavior comes from.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So your experiences in your academic program affected you, but your upbringing also did. How did your ties to the indigenous community inform your studies or your work?
I'm Métis myself, and I have obviously a ton of friends and family who are Indigenous. And you just hear these stories. You hear stories about disappearances, and you hear stories about the police not taking your cases seriously. And sometimes you come across stories that seem so outlandish. They seem like that can't be real. That can't happen. There's no way that an entire system or structure is ignoring you.
But it is, and I think you almost have to have that lived experience just to understand how bad the situation is. And one of the women affected by this was your friend from high school. In 2016, you found out she went missing.
What was it about her disappearance and later death that made you think creating a database would be important? I'm in my PhD. I'm studying serial homicide day after day, hour after hour. I'm reading about homicides and disappearances and just the horrors that are inflicted on people by serial killers. And I've read so many stories about disappearances and murders and the pain that has been inflicted.
And then when finding out that she had died, I think I was just stuck with all of these feelings, so many feelings. I thought it was important just to find the best way possible to quell those feelings. And for me, in the midst of studying serial homicide and putting together a database, the best way I knew how to regulate the shock of all of this was to put her name down. Just write down her name, put it in an Excel file to start writing.
And it's gone from there. How many people are in that database now? The database is a living, breathing thing. Every single day it grows. And today we're up to 12,082 individuals. Wow. That's, it's so remarkable. It's,
So sad and also incredible that, you know, this is a volunteer effort. This is done out of care, really, you know, to really catalog and track and name and document Canada's missing and murdered people's.
Before you created the Missing and Murder database, you had the Serial Homicide database. Tell me about that and how it led you to Bruce MacArthur. I saw this cluster of missing men from Toronto's gay area.
And I don't like immediately jumping to serial homicide because usually there's, you know, a million different reasons why people might go missing. But I thought, you know, this is a really interesting opportunity. I've got this database with a huge amount of data, and then I've got the serial homicide database, which has so much information on serial killers. I wonder...
I wonder if I could build a profile. It was pure curiosity at that moment. And so what I did is I took all of the names of the individuals who'd gone missing from the gay village and
checking the chronology of their disappearances, checking their age, their stories, their lives, where they work, who they interact with, whether or not they have pets. I narrowed it down to a small group of men. And what I did then is I switched databases. I went over to the Serial Homicide Database.
And in that, all I did was use a very simple filter function. It's likely a male who's committing these offenses, right? And so I filtered out all the serial killers and their data by mail. And then I, again, looked to the victims and I said, well, these are all gay men. And so go to the victim characteristics in the serial homicide database, filter by gay men.
And I just continued to go through this process until I got to the very end of my filters and had developed a profile. Nowhere else.
in my mind, had anybody created such a large database on serial homicide and a database on missing murdered people. Two databases that you can use together in tandem to identify suspicious disappearances and murders and then to utilize a serial homicide database to create profiles.
Yeah, that's so fascinating, especially the points that were just so accurate that Bruce MacArthur was a landscaper and was –
you know, keeping the victims in landscaping pots and on the properties that he worked on. But initially, you know, you took a really bold step, right? You made this call to law enforcement with your findings. And what was their initial reaction? So this was a very terrifying moment for me because again, all of this I was doing within the mindset of I'm an academic, I have information to share. They didn't brush me off.
They didn't say, yeah, thanks, no thanks. They listened. I just don't think they knew what they could do with it. It stood out to me that, you know, you had access to process and information that was just like sort of outside the usual investigative models. And that was really compelling. Of the 637 markers of serial killers in your database, what was the most compelling?
What are some, you know, name two or three that surprise you the most? Okay, so 637 markers is just the pure variables. We have nested variables. So nested variables are like variables inside of variables. So there's actually 1400 different things that we're looking at in terms of development for serial killers in this database. And the most frustrating thing in the world was...
this final revelation that absolutely not one thing, not one thing stood out as being statistically significant in the development of a serial killer. So whether you grow up rich, whether you grow up poor, whether you're abused as a child, whether you're not, whether you go to university or not, it doesn't matter. So people always list, you know, bedwetting, fire setting,
And animal abuse, the triad, as this collective of risk factors that potentially can lead to a serial killer. And it's well referenced everywhere. I think it was 1% of serial killers had the triad. So for me, I think the biggest shock was recognizing that across 1,400 developmental, potential developmental factors, not one of them
stood out as being developmentally relevant, not on its own, not even in combination. But to me, the most fascinating thing was the fact that serial killers, one thing, the one thing that really stood out as being not predictive in developmental psych, you never want to say predictive, but the one thing that really can indicate, you know, some trouble brewing is
is the way that the individual thinks about themselves and the way that they kind of situate themselves in the world. Serial killers tend to kind of adopt a victim standpoint where they can do no wrong, where they've done no wrong, but all they experience is harm. How does this change, you know, how society should think about serial killers and how to possibly identify them and prevent them
People do bad things, and yet we still have this belief that they have to somehow be so different, that these people couldn't have just emerged from a regular home. People almost have to hold on to that in the hopes that, you know, they'll be able to identify risk. And the thing is, these people do come just from regular homes. They look just like you and me. And that's terrifying.
but it's real. These people come from every community imaginable. Can we stop them? Maybe. There is one thing that we can do in order to protect ourselves and protect our communities, and that's, you know, studying victimology. We're looking at communities that are impacted. We're looking at people that are impacted, and we're trying to better understand why this community, why this person. Serial killers, by and large,
take advantage. They take advantage of systemic gaps and they utilize police indifference to their own advantage. And I think by holding our police accountable and making sure that we're seeing victims as people, right, really seeing people as people, that's probably our best defense. More with Dr. Sasha Reid after the break.
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You don't do all of this alone. Bring me back to the moment you decided to create The Midnight Order. I was, in my very first year, 2018, teaching in the psychology departments and the sociology departments at the University of Calgary. And I could see in the eyes of my students just so much joy and excitement for, you know, learning these things, learning about criminal psychology, but not knowing where to go.
And I understood that. I understood the lack of mentorship. I understood the challenges of being able to find somebody to help you along the way. And so I thought, okay, let's create a group. More and more women were learning about what we were doing. More students were reaching out saying, I'd love to learn more. And so at a certain point, you know, we had a really decent group of people who
And I asked, you know, what do you guys want to do? What do you want to learn? I tried to give them everything that I would have wanted from a mentor in this area. And then one day, a woman reached out saying that her husband was a serial killer. And I thought, finally, like a real opportunity for these girls to just
put all of their skills into practice, right? At this point, we'd learned criminal profiling and we'd learned about, you know, database development. Now we can actually utilize all of our skills and try to solve a case.
And why did you choose The Midnight Order as a name? Remember, The Midnight Order was what I had hoped for in a mentor, something that I never had. And so I want somebody to be dark and mysterious and fun with it. I went back to my roots, which is scary things happening in a forest. And scary things happening in the forest in the 90s was the show Are You Afraid of the Dark?
And they had the meeting of the Midnight Society to tell scary stories in the dark. And I thought, well, why don't I just combine order with midnight? Midnight order.
That sounds cool. That sounds exciting. I mean, that's something I would have liked to join. I love it. So at the midnight order, give me the top three elements a case must have in order for you to take it and consider taking it on as a group. What are you looking for? You need to have tangible evidence.
proof of something, right? Whether that is a victim and some news clippings and an actual connection, a real story to tell. Two, timeline would be helpful. And then three,
I would say verifiable data. It has to be something tangible. It can't just be, you know, a series of cryptic poems. Is there kind of a typical person who reaches out to you about cases? Are you noticing patterns in the kind of, you know, calls for help that you receive? When we first started, I would get a lot of emails from women saying that their husbands were
are serial killers. Now it's not just women, now it's men who are emailing as well, mostly with tips. Some individuals have provided very concrete details about what's going on in their areas and they want people to check up on it because police aren't following up. So I would say today, the most common email that we get is, there's something very serious happening. I've alerted the police. They're not following up and we need help.
So it seems like we need something like the Midnight Order. And as we mentioned at the beginning, one of the unique tools that your team has at their disposal are these two databases. Why are the databases you've created so necessary today? I think today we live in the world of big data. It's not all going to be solved by...
Like it's just not. Statistically, it's improbable. And so having a database allows you to have this really important data that you can then open up to other agencies or other individuals, other investigators, other people who can do something. Basically, we're democratizing data in a way that can help to lead to case solutions. And I think that's really important.
That was Nancy's interview with Dr. Sasha Reid. We'll be back next week, digging deeper into the surprising end to the Veronica and Archie case with two other members of the Midnight Order. Morena is the aspiring crime analyst who lives what she calls a double life. And Florence is a triple threat with a background in criminology, linguistics, and psychology.
Inside the Midnight Order is a co-production of Freeform and ABC Audio and a companion podcast to the Freeform true crime documentary series, Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order, now streaming on Hulu. Soundtrack available July 19th on all music streaming platforms. I'm Kena Whitworth. My co-host is Nancy Schwartzman, director and executive producer of Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order.
This series was produced by Camille Peterson, Meg Fierro, Amira Williams, and Jalyn McDuffie, with assistance from Freeforms, Katie Celia, and Megan Watera. Susie Liu is our supervising producer. Music by Nick Sena.
Special thanks to ABC Audio's Liz Alessi, Josh Kohan, Madeline Wood, and Ariel Chester. And Freeform's Amanda Kell, Allie Braman, Lindsay Chamness, Jasmine Karamzada, Heather Taylor, and Mike Wong. Laura Mayer is Executive Producer of Podcast Programming at ABC Audio.
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