The Psychiatrist and the Selfie
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It was a gruesome discovery off a dirt road in Georgia. Hunters had found a body. Was it immediately clear to you that this woman had been murdered? Yes. But who was this mystery woman in the woods? That looks like Mindy. I'm Erin Moriarty, and from 48 hours, this is the woman in the woods. I've never wanted to be wrong like this in my whole entire life. Binge the full series, The Woman in the Woods, wherever you get your podcast. This is definitely one of the stranger cases I've covered. It seems like it comes right out of a novel. On November 12, 2012, Jake Nolan set out to the office and home of Dr. Michael Weiss. Jake had with him a duffle bag with a massive sludge hammer, a steak knife, zip ties, and he's walking through the streets of Manhattan with this. When you walked into Dr. Michael Weiss's office with that duffle bag, with the weapons that were inside, what did you intend to do? You're intended to kill him. This is not a who-done-it. He did what he was accused of doing. But the big question was, why? I saw Jake Nolan brainwashed by Dr. Pamela Buckbinder, an ivory-trained psychiatrist. She's brilliant. I would have done anything for Pamela. It happens so slowly that you don't really recognize this growing feeling inside of you, that one day you wake up and say, "I'll kill for this woman." By the end of this manipulation by Dr. Buckbinder, Jake Nolan had become weaponized. To attack Dr. Weiss, the man with whom she had been fighting over custody of her son, they hated each other, and in turn she made me hate him. Jake Nolan suffered from bipolar disorder. He had these learning problems. He had personality problems. Pamela took someone who she knew was severely mentally ill, and she morphed me into whatever she wanted me to be, and I obeyed, just like a puppet. She used him for her own benefit. She sacrificed him. His office door was open, and I see Michael sitting in a chair. I think this is really when I became fully psychotic. I don't buy Jake's story that he was brainwashed and manipulated. He knew exactly what he was doing. And do you believe that each step of the way Jake could have made the decision to leave? Of course he could have. And Dr. Buckbinder claims that she had no involvement at all in this, that anything Jake Nolan did, he did completely on his own. And what was so odd about this is he didn't try to flee. Jake Nolan starts snapping selfies of himself, covered in blood. I mean, who would possibly snap a selfie of themselves right after they tried to murder someone? [MUSIC] There's never going to be a night I don't fall asleep, feeling awful for what I've done. To this day, Jake Nolan insists his mind was not his own when he set out to kill Dr. Michael Weiss at his office on November 12th, 2012. The knife was in my pocket, and the sledgehammer was over my shoulders. He sees the sledgehammer and charges at me, and I reached for the knife.
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A psychiatrist is arrested.