Oxygen: Series premiere of Violent Minds: Killers on Tape features Ted Bundy
By Carla Davis
Oxygen is rolling out a new true crime series called Violent Minds: Killers on Tape, starting in April. The series will take a look (and listen) at the recordings taken by psychiatrist Dr. Al Carlisle.
Carlisle recorded his conversations with notorious serial killers, and most of those tapes were thought to be long lost. They give insight into the dark obsessions that drove the killers and contributed to their psychopathic instincts.
Violent Minds: Killers on Tape will make its premiere on Oxygen True Crime on Sunday, April 2, 7:00 p.m. ET. with two back-to-back episodes. You can also stream the entire series on Peacock.
The two-part opener features the recordings Dr. Carlisle made of his conversations serial killer Ted Bundy, which were taken in 1975 in Utah. Bundy had just been arrested, and was charged with the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. DaRonch was fortunate enough to escape Bundy after he attempted to handcuff her inside his car. After she escaped, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Debra Jean Kent on the same day.
Carlisle took his time interviewing Bundy, and even had recorded conversations with the killer’s friends, mother, girlfriend and ex-girlfriends. Keep in mind, this was before criminal profiling was a thing, so Carlisle was definitely ahead of his time.
Violent Minds: Killers on Tape will also include Carlisle’s recordings with other killers.
After Dr. Carlisle died in 2018, his family members found more than 650 hours of his conversations with notorious killers such as Arthur Gary Bishop, Manny Cortez and the Hi-Fi Killers.
His goal was to try to understand how some human beings made the shift to becoming cold-blooded killers. He believed that if we were able to understand how that shift is made, we might have to ability to stop the crimes before they happen.
In part one of the series, Dr. Carlisle is asked to perform a psychological evaluation on Theodore Robert Bundy, who would go on to become one of the most notorious American serial killers of all time. This is what began Carlisle’s fascination with trying to figure out what goes on in the minds of violent killers.
In part two, Dr. Carlisle begins to work on development of his theories regarding people with violent minds. Meanwhile, Ted Bundy manages to escape from prison and makes his way to Florida, where he kills three women (one of them a 12-year-old girl) and seriously injures three others.
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