Sarah Koenig

Like that part feels real too, is what you're saying?

You think a person can sort of contain both those things inside their personality?

This is Charles Ewing.

He's a forensic psychologist and a lawyer.

He teaches at the SUNY Buffalo Law School.

He told me he's evaluated several thousand criminal defendants and testified in more than 700 trials as an expert witness.

Mostly, lately, homicides committed by people in intimate relationships and homicides committed by young people.

Ewing had listened to about half the episodes of the show.

And obviously he can't weigh in on a non-psychological health.

That'd be ridiculous.

But I want him to find out what's a valid way to try to understand what's going on when someone kills someone else.

What's the range of options here?

Ewing said most of the time he's doing insanity evaluations, or evaluations for extreme emotional disturbance, and usually in cases where there's not a question of whether the defendant did it, more a question of why.

And again, most of the people he's evaluating are pretty ordinary.

In other words, murder isn't usually, strictly speaking, a planned event.

A lot of people who know Adnan, they can't get their heads around the idea that Adnan planned to kill Hay.

I hear it all the time.

Here's his old Woodlawn classmate, Peter Billingsley.

No, that doesn't fit at all.

But I don't, yeah, I know it doesn't fit.