Julie McDonald
Delving into the world of dead serial killers really isn't a job for the faint hearted, especially when you bring in a psychic who is hopping to connect with the dead. One lady was brave enough to step up to the challenge though. Julie McDonald has travelled across America with medium Bobby Marchesso, investigating the lives of those responsible for killing so many. She talks to FemaleFirst bout seances, being locked in isolation cells and visiting killers's places of prey.What have you been up to recently anything exciting? I got married, that was quite exciting! I got married in August which was incredible then we had a lovely really long Honeymoon that was also amazing. We did a road trip in California then we went to Antigua. It was gorgeous, so, so nice and we needed I, we've had a really crazy time but it was fab! So that's been the highlights personally speaking. Work wise I'm just always getting on and off a plane, going to some crazy place in the world. Can you tell us more about Conversations with a Serial Killer? Well the premise is really that myself and Bobby, who is my co-presenter, he is a psychic if you believe in that, and he and I, him being the psychic me the journalist go on a road trip across America focusing on different serial killers and we try to peer into the life and see what extra information we can glean. That can be factually from people who have worked on the cases, looking at case files, news papers, you know general research. Meeting people who knew them, next door neighbours, relatives, people who were around at the time things were happening and we also go to some of their locations were Bobby is able to use his different skills to get more information so it could be...for example we were in Seattle doing Ted Bundy and we went to some of the locations where he actually went to pick up women to kill them and we'd be driving in the car and Bobby would say, we're almost there and we'd jump out and we had a lady with us who knew all the different facts of the case, she was really immersed in it, and Bobby was able to trace the footsteps like saying: "He stopped the car here and this is where he got out. This is what I see happening...she shouted up to her friend at the window and then five seconds later she was dead" that sort of thing. It was pretty powerful stuff. It was really really really interesting. I mean of course I'm sure people think it's absolutely lunatic, trying to contact dead serial killers from beyond the grave. I thought it was lunatic as well when my agent first mentioned it to me! Cause I was like "Hang on a second, I've just been living in the Middle East for two years!" And then it was really interesting and I was very open minded! The only belief that I have strongly is something that they called place memory which is when something happens in a place, it retains some of that memory which you can feel when you go there. So whether that's you go to your friend's house and you just know she's had an argument with her boyfriend because there's an atmosphere, so I believe in that sort of thing but I've never seen a ghost or anything like that so I don't know if I believe that. I'm sure if I saw it I would process it but that's never happened to me. So I was pretty open minded but I was also kind of really skeptical. Bobby and I had lots of arguments because he would say, "This is really interesting look at this" and I'd be like, "Hmmm..I just don't understand it I don't get it!" But yeah it was really fascinating, we did have a couple of things that did happen that I can't explain. I don't want to say to a person that's paranormal but I just know that it was a very very odd series of events that can't be explained by facts. It's amazing. How did you get involved in the programme? Basically it came through my agent, I know that they've been looking for somebody for a long time and I didn't think that I was the right person because I come from a very hard news background so when she told me I was like "You've got to be kidding! I'm gonna be chasing dead serial killers?" And then when I met the team who made they programme they were saying, "We want a really honest programme, we want it really to be about...there's a lot of science in it, we use a lot of groups who have a lot of experience and we don't want people throwing stones at windows." And I think that's what we got. It's quite a lot more documentary than you would see on something like, for example, Most Haunted. So that's how I got involved, when they said "We'd really like you to do it" I thought this is crazy!How did you find working with Bobby Marchesso? We are really different and it's strange. We have one really big thing in common which is, Bobby also works as a life coach, as do I. We just got on really well as people, you know how sometimes you just meet someone and you think you're just gonna be friends. And the other reason that I think we worked really well together is that he is very very plausible and if we go into a place and the light flickers, he'll be the first to say "They need a new bulb"! He's not somebody who's gonna jump around and get possessed and start screaming about demons! So that was great cause then I thought we could really explore it and say, well what about this and what about that. Of course there are times when things happen in your head and you think what does that mean but Bobby's got a very smart head on his shoulders, he's a very smart guy. I think the ladies will love him as well! He comes across really well in the programme! We just got on famously. I mean we did have moments when we'd sit in the car on the way home after a shoot and we'd argue, in a good natured way, because it's like somebody being able to speak in a foreign language and you can't speak it! And sometimes you would sit in a seance or something and everybody around the table would be saying "Oh my goodness, this is really frightening" and I'd be going "I might as well just file my nails now!" So we got on fantastically, and I think it's really important to have that because the programmes about our journey as much as it's about the things that happen. He's brilliant. Really fantastic guy.Which serial killers do you investigate? We did a whole series, there's eight episodes. The first one is Ted Bundy, which is a story I think a lot of people are familiar with. That was fascinating, absolutely brilliant, because a lot of locations for that one we had access to. We went to the boarding house where he lived where he went on a very famous killing spree and we were actually standing in the room which was his bedroom. That's pretty interesting stuff. We did John Wayne Gacy which is another name that will be every familiar to people. In that one it was really interesting because Bobby kept saying, "Oh I see a girl, I see a girl" and I'm saying "I don't understand" because he is well known because he killed lots of young men but it turned out when we looked into the case, when we spoke to some of the detectives that actually there are a lot of people who believed he killed two girls very early on but they didn't investigate every case, so that was really interesting. The most frightening one for me was a guy called Richard Trenton Chase, he's not very well known but he's nicknamed the Vampire of Sacramento and that was just horrible, an horrific episode. The guy who was the investigating officer on that case, we had access to and he cried in the interview. This is a guy who said "I've seen guys in the prison yard get their throats slit but I will never forget the effect this case had on me," and then he just started crying and then of course I cried and I've seen some things in my work and have never felt that level of empathy before so that was pretty extreme. And something really terrifying happens in the seance in that one to me, which is the only kind of really big experience I had in the whole series but it really did start to make me question things. I didn't speak for a whole week afterwards! That was the most fascinating for me. We did Aileen Wuornos from the film Monster which was brilliant as well. What's great about that one is we met loads of people who knew her really well cause it's quite a recent case. We went to a really famous place called The Last Resort which is a biker bar in Florida and the guy who owns it is called Al and he knows her really well. It was brilliant cause we had him around us when we were doing a lot of the paranormal stuff and Bobby would come up with things, and obviously because I wasn't there I couldn't possibly say whether that happened but he was able to say "Oh that's interesting I remember when that happened" and only he would have known that.Did anything you found out really surprise you? I think the thing that did surprise both Bobby and I is that when you start really looking into these people's lives, sometimes, even though they're horrific and horrible people and you can't argue with what they did, most have them have had really bad things happen to them in their lives and you start to feel a slight level of sympathy, in some cases, not in all of them, and I think you carry that around with you. The other thing I found really interesting is that although some people think the whole psychic thing is complete lunacy a lot of the police sources used it at the time and had really good results with it. So sometimes when we talked to investigating officers, you'd be cringing going "What do you feel of the whole psychic thing" and they'd go "Oh we got some of our really good evidence from this person" so that was quite fascinating. Obviously sometimes it didn't work out like that but , they were surprised themselves by the whole psychic element. I suppose that i was quite often surprised by what your own brain can do to you. You can be in a maximum security prison that's totally empty and there's just you in it but you'll hear something and you just imagine all kinds of things. But we really really did try to keep it very straight and keep a lid on it so if something did happen we knew absolutely for that it was not going on in our heads so that was the other thing that surprised me, you can go crazy and think "Oh god this is happening" but actually it's just going on in your head!
Did anything really scare you? There was two occasions, one was nothing to do with the paranormal it was when Charlotte who's this year's producer wanted me to go into the isolation cell in an old prison which is literally like a box of steel with no windows and I'm very claustrophobic and she said "We'll just shut you in there for a while" and I was like "No, absolutely no way I'm doing it!" I've been to all sorts of places in my career that are an awful lot more frightening than that but there was no way I was going in there! I think the other occasion when I was frightened was during the seance for the Richard Chase thing and I was really frightened and I didn't really understand what was happening so I just took myself out of the situation and said "I'm not gonna sit here" and I still don't know what happened but I just put it out of my mind. It was scary. I think if you're a very factual person and you're sitting there thinking, "there's nothing in this room, I know that it can't be happening but it is", then that's very strange. I was very heavily emotionally involved in that episode so maybe it was in my mind, I say that in the programme. I was absolutely terrified!
You visited some places were killers preyed on their victims, how was that? I think you just get a real sense of sadness and I think as a woman, a lot of these people killed women, then you sort of understand what it most of being like for these women. They're on a dancefloor, in a club, enjoying themselves, you've been there yourself, and then they walk outside and their life is lost. So I just feel an incredible sense of sadness and anger a lot of the time because some of these people, their friends, people that they know, we talk to, I wouldn't say they have an admiration for them but there kind of celebrity element, where some people you talk to say "Oh no he was a really good man" and you're like "No. He killed women, that's not a good person." So a lot of time you feel really kind of anger. It's very difficult, you're walking down a path with a police officer and he'll say "she walked here in the same footsteps you're walking in "and it really helps you to build a picture of what happened with these people. It's really really sad.
How did your experience as a journalist help the investigation? My job really was to keep things honest so to try and tease out as much new information as I could from interviewing people and going to places and using your common sense a lot of the time and trying to add value to what we already know. I think that also it helps to balance out with Bobby. He would say one thing and I would ask him loads and loads of questions. We all agree that it's a serious subject and it's a great programme and some people will find it a little bit entertaining but at the heart of it we didn't want to be disrespectful and I think we've done a really honest job.
Sheree Murphy wants to know If you were stranded on a dessert island what 3 things would you take with you? I'd take my husband, an i-Pod with a set of speakers and maybe like some snorkels and flippers and stuff like that so we didn't kill each other! Maybe he could fish for my dinner and stuff like that! Be the hunter gatherer!
So can you think of a question for our next interview? If you could change one thing about your partner what would it be. If it was somebody single, if there's one thing that you really had to have in a person that you would be spend time with what would it be?
Conversations with a Serial Killer, Tuesdays 10pm from 4th November on LIVING
FemaleFirst - Jessica Watson