Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers On....) interview sports writer Dan Wetzel and filmmaker Geno McDermott about their docuseries, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. They'll be talking about Aaron's upbringing, his friendship with criminals like Alexander Bradley, and the murder of Odin Lloyd. This episode will also discuss Aaron's suicide. If you or someone you know needs the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the number is 1-800-273-8255.
Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers On....) interview sports writer Dan Wetzel and filmmaker Geno McDermott about their docuseries, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. They'll be talking about Aaron's upbringing, his friendship with criminals like Alexander Bradley, and the murder of Odin Lloyd. This episode will also discuss Aaron's suicide. If you or someone you know needs the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the number is 1-800-273-8255.
Melissa: Welcome to You Can’t Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix.
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Melissa: I’m Melissa Slaughter, and I am introducing this week’s episode.Here on You Can’t Make This Up, we go behind the scenes of Netflix original true crime stories with special guests. Returning as hosts are Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie of the podcast Crime Writers On… They’ll be talking to the team behind Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. Kevin and Rebecca will be interviewing executive producer and sports writer Dan Wetzel and filmmaker Geno McDermott. Dan and Geno have followed the Aaron Hernandez story for years, and in this interview, they’ll be covering Aaron’s turbulent upbringing and his friendship with criminals like Alexander Bradley. They’ll also tell us more about Aaron’s university experience, the effects of CTE, and the Boston law that reverted Aaron’s conviction of the murder of Odin Lloyd from guilty to innocent.
A warning, there are many spoilers ahead, so make sure you’ve watched all of this docu-series. There will also be discussion of abuse and suicide in this episode. If that affects you, please take care. If you or someone you know needs the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the number is 1-800-273-8255. Now, here’s Rebecca, Kevin, Dan, and Geno.
Rebecca: We’re joined by Director Geno McDermott in LA. Hi, Geno.
Geno: Hi. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.
Rebecca: I’m so glad to be talking to you. And we also have on the line Writer Dan Wetzel in Detroit.Hello, Dan.
Dan: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Kevin: So, Geno, you’ve done a lot of true crime documentaries.Dan, you’ve worked a lot on sports shows, so it sounds like you guys got your peanut butter and chocolate together the right way.
Dan: To say the least, to say the least.
Rebecca: Dan, this is a really fascinating story to me, the Aaron Hernandez story, because we’ve heard a lot, especially in recent years, about, you know, athletes who commit crimes, and they’re like these big splashy stories, but there are so many other forces and layers at work here. Is that what attracted you to writing about Aaron Hernandez and this case?
Dan: Yeah. I mean, initially, it was one of those crimes, although it’s really a crime we’ve never quite seen. This was a guy at his prime, involved, accused, at least present, for two separate murders of three different people, and we’ve never seen an active player accused of that kind of violence and that kind of crimes, so almost initially, it was, why would someone, when they had it all, be involved in this type of stuff?And then you get into this story, obviously, as you watch the documentary, and there’s so many other things involved, the violence of the NFL, the death of his father, his abuse as a young child, the struggling with coming to terms with who he is, all the different things that factor into it. It’s a much more layered story than just the headline of, Football Player Kills Somebody.
Kevin: Now, Geno, this starts off kind of like typical football origin story, you know, kid from a tough neighborhood, he’s a standout in high school. On film, it looks like an eighth grader playing with a bunch of second graders.
Rebecca: Oh, the film is incredible.
Kevin: Yeah, but as Dan was saying, there are different layers here. Tell us a little bit about the early life of Aaron Hernandez.
Geno: Yeah. I mean, you know, Aaron grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, and when we first started making the film, you know, we didn’t know a lot about some of this abuse that he was subjected to, the homophobic nature of his house and his upbringing, so at first, it seemed like it was very much a lily white upbringing for him with, you know, a perfect family, but as we started digging in and talking to people from the town and talking to, you know, players and friends of his growing, it started to paint a picture of what it was really like for him.
And you know, it wasn’t easy, especially when his father passed away from like a routine hernia surgery. For Aaron, that’s really when it changed because, you know, it seemed like his father was a real leader for him, and you know, that’s really when we started to see tattoos and started to see him changing his ways. It’s all kind of like interwoven, and it’s all hard to understand, which is, you know, even to this today, having finished the project, there’s still more to dig into, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
Rebecca: You mentioned his father was somebody he admired tremendously and was a guiding force in his life, but was also sort of the center and the origin story of a theme that comes up, it seems, with Aaron Hernandez over and over again, is that his entire life is built around this like toxic masculinity environment. Is that something that you’re both able to see also when you look at every single aspect of his life, from his time in Bristol, his time in Florida, the Patriot way?There’s so much about it that is repressive and toxic and doesn’t lend itself to someone really embracing who they are.
Dan: Having a chance to sit down with Dennis SanSoucie, who, you know, was basically Aaron’s first sexual relationship growing up, hearing Dennis and his dad talk about their relationship growing up and with Aaron and his father, you know, it is evident there that the masculinity of sports and the expectations of what you’re supposed to be like when you play football, or for any sport—you know, I played lacrosse, it’s very similar there—I think that paid a toll on Aaron and his double life.
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Kevin: Geno, tell me about Aaron Hernandez’s relationship with his cousin, Taya Singleton. I mean, this seemed to be a really deep connection. What do you know about that?
Geno: Yeah, so what’s interesting about Tanya Singleton is basically after Aaron’s father, Dennis Hernandez, had passed away, we found out that not too long afterwards, Terri Hernandez, Aaron’s mother, had started to have an affair with Tanya’s husband, Jeff Cummings, and as Tim SanSoucie talks about, imagine having your father pass away, and shortly afterwards, your mom starts dating somebody else that’s married to your cousin.
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Dan: He had two people who were betrayed and mourning. Aaron had his father die and then his mother immediately start a relationship with another man, which would be just jarring in just the months after their father’s death, and then you have Tanya who lost her husband in that same situation, so these two get together as cousins, and that bond was incredible. She stashed that car from the Boston double homicide in her garage, so Aaron trusted her before any of this was known to stash that car, and then she held on to that loyalty. And I think when you hear on the jailhouse tapes, it might be the truest relationship Aaron actually has with anybody in his entire life. I think Tanya Singleton knew more about him than anybody else, and he seemed to trust and maybe even love her more than anybody in his life.
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Rebecca: I think another really powerful part of this whole Aaron Hernandez story and your series is the look at the sports machine and the impact it has on a young person in particular. A detail that when I first learned it was draw-dropping to me was that Aaron Hernandez, who obviously was an outsized talent as a very young person, but every adult in his life pegged him as being emotionally immature, basically for his entire life, and yet he was allowed to go to college when he should have been in high school. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Dan: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s one of the key mistakes, if you go back. I mean, there’s many reasons, I think, that we can suspect as how we got Aaron Hernandez, but one of the mistakes that was made was here’s someone that everyone knew was immature, everyone knew was at risk, and yet they still put him in that. He shouldn’t have been a candidate for that. At 17 years old, he should have been in high school, not trying to be a freshman in college.
Kevin: And the thing that he seemed to learn at Florida was how to not get in trouble, and that being an athlete comes with some privileges, like you’re above the law in some ways.
Rebecca: Oh, you mean he learns that he’s not going to get in trouble.
Kevin: He’s not going to get in trouble.
Rebecca: He doesn’t learn to not get into trouble.
Kevin: Oh yeah, he gets into trouble, but yeah, he finds he’s not really held accountable. Is that right?
Geno: Yeah, I mean, I think another kind of big picture theme for our doc-series is essentially preferential treatment for athletes, college and professional athletes, in some cases, and I think with Aaron, his ability to be able to work his way through certain things that happened in college, a lot of which are myth and legend—we try and substantiate them, but it’s tough for us to do that—it almost enables him to say, hey, listen, you can do these things in the future, too. It’s fine because you’re going to get away with it. I think that that’s another thing that we want to create a conversation about with this series.
Kevin: So guys, I have a disclosure for everybody. I’m a New England Patriots fan.
Rebecca: Hmm.
Dan: Yikes.
Kevin: What’s with the hmm?
Rebecca: A source of great consternation in our home.
Kevin: So here in New England—and I think probably throughout the NFL people understand this—there is a thing called the Patriot way, and it’s sort of this idea about we’re going to do things differently, and we’re going to be a machine, and I got to ask Dan, what was it about the Patriot way that failed somebody like Aaron Hernandez? Was it the hubris to say, oh, he wrote a letter saying he can be immature, we can work with that?
Dan: Well, the funny thing is that the Patriot way worked for Aaron Hernandez until it didn’t, but in terms of his professional conduct, it absolutely did work. He would show up. He would respect the locker room. He respected Belichick. He respected Tom Brady, and he performed incredibly. I’ve covered the Patriots for many years as a sports writer. I don’t know that the Patriot way ever really thinks they’re going to change your life and really make a better person, although that can come of it, but it’s really about the discipline of being about the team.In terms of his play inside Gillette Stadium, there was no doubt about that. The real person that pushed Aaron Hernandez to another level was Alexander Bradley and his friendship with Alexander Bradley.
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Dan: That did not occur until his last year at Florida and basically the draft process where the two became friends. It was his access with Alexander Bradley that really spun everything out.
Rebecca: I think a lot about—going back to the Patriot way and Aaron’s kind of split existence, we hear a lot about his success there, but he does have this other side, which is complicated and has a lot to do with his upbringing, a lot to do with him, you know, having to repress who he really is in these very structured environments. So part of me, and the reason why I’m curious about the Patriot way, is it’s not very nurturing to the individual. That’s kind of the opposite of what it’s about. So in a different kind of team management environment or different kind of organization, someone like Aaron might have a mentor say to him, listen, you need to bring who you really are to this, and we need to really work with you and help you through your stuff. But the Patriot way is like, you need to put that stuff in a box and shove it under the bed and never look at it again, and Aaron Hernandez’s reaction to that is then to act out on the other side of the wall. Does that make sense to you? Because that’s kind of my working theory around why that maybe didn’t work for him and led to some of the things that happened.
Geno: I think, getting back to Dan’s point about the double life, it felt like he was playing into the Patriot’s way, but after hours, he was looking for, you know, the gangster life, and one thing that we found throughout the making of the doc-series was, you know, all the phone calls that Aaron was making from jail, and it’s just so fascinating to hear how he talks differently to everyone. He really changes the way he talks. If he’s talking to someone that feels like, you know, maybe this is from his gangster lifestyle or his after-hours lifestyle, he has a totally different tone.
He has a totally different slang. He changes himself to fit that profile. If he’s talking to someone, you know, that’s more of like a close friend from growing up or somebody from his family, he talks in a totally different way. So I think Aaron was a guy that really wanted both lifestyles, and whether he was with the Patriots or some other team, there was something about him that needed that fix at night and on his own, to feel like he was rogue and he was able to do whatever he wanted. And again, he was able to break the law, and he would get away with it because he was a professional athlete.
Kevin: Dan, remind us who Odin Lloyd was.
Dan: Odin Lloyd was a landscaper who lived in Boston who had met Shayanna Jenkins’ sister, and they had created a relationship, and because of that, he ended up meeting Aaron Hernandez. They were potential future brother-in-laws, and they were kind of forced into this friendship but became friends. They’d hang out down in—you know, at the mansion in Foxborough, and they shared a lot of things. They liked that he was a former semi-pro football player, which is a very good football player, just not the National Football League level, and became a murder victim of Aaron Hernandez, and the motive of which remains still unknown, which remains one of the many, many mysteries of this thing is the motives of why all these different people were shot or involved in these kind of things with Aaron Hernandez.
Kevin: Yeah. The way the trail of evidence led back to Aaron Hernandez, it was like a comedy of errors.
Rebecca: It was bush league, right?
Kevin: The rental car keys with the body and everything on video, and I guess one thing Aaron Hernandez is not is a criminal genius.
Dan: Aaron was drunk and high that entire weekend. They have footage of him basically sitting in his house, and this crime looks like it. It was a terrible crime. He went—not only is there a text message trail, but he literally picked the guy up in the city of Boston, drove him out to North Attleborough, which is, you know, a fairly distant suburb. It’s going to take 45 minutes or something to drive out there. Maybe not at that time of night, but something close, and leaves him dead in a field basically right near Aaron’s house. Odin Lloyd only knows one person in North Attleborough. There aren’t murders in North Attleborough.When one body comes up, the North Attleborough police are going to treat this like the crime of the decade because it is. So you’re immediately going to connect these two people, where, you know, there would certainly be easier ways to kill somebody and get away with it or at least not be the prime suspect.
They didn’t erase all the video in his own house. I always said, if had just erased all of the footage from his own home surveillance, he probably had a chance, but when you can see a car. There’s a murder at this time, and three minutes later, as he drives back to his house, they pull up. Three guys—you get four guys get in the car in Boston. You see them drive to one spot. Then you see three guys pull up to Aaron’s house. They all get out. You see Aaron carrying a gun around right after. I mean, these things were just overwhelming for the jury. The sheer coincidence that that would require.That’s why there was always speculation that Jose Baez would come in and win the first case, if they could get a retrial. I sat there almost every single day of that and talked to the jurors after. There was no way he was winning that first trial.The evidence was just absolutely overwhelming that he did this, starting with the fact that Odin Lloyd was found dead right next to Aaron’s house.
Geno: It was a sloppy murder because in his mind, it could be a sloppy murder because he had gotten away with so much before, and I don’t think he—in his mind, he didn’t have to plan this very strategic murder, and he could just, you know, do it and get away with it like he’s gotten away with other things in the past, you know?
Rebecca: So Dan, I don’t know, can you address the motive question that I have? Was there a motive for this crime? Is it something that is subtle and we missed it or something inside of Aaron’s head?What was going on there?
Dan: There’s definitely a motive. We just don’t know it for sure. So whatever the reason he decided—Aaron decided Odin Lloyd needed to be murdered that night, there was one. We just never have been able to come up—the police, the prosecutors, really I’ve spoken to just about everybody in this thing on speculation. There’s all sorts of ideas, but nobody has it.But for whatever reason, Aaron Hernandez believed that he needed Odin Lloyd dead, whether that involved the Alexander Bradley feud or not, we don’t know.
Kevin: So let’s jump back to 2012 because while all this is going on, Boston detectives say, hey, there was this really crazy double homicide that Aaron Hernandez appeared near the scene. Now, if we think the Odin Lloyd killing is senseless, are we supposed to believe that Aaron Hernandez killed these two guys over a spilled drink or something like that? Geno, how about you? What do you think about that?
Geno: Yeah, what’s crazy about that—and I’m sure Dan has a lot to say about it, too—is that I had sat in a chair with Patrick Haggan and interviewed him, and what interested me about Boston is that it’s one of the only cities in the state where assistant district attorneys actually go to the crime scene, whereas in many other states across the country, it’s homicide detectives or local law enforcement that are the ones that look at the crime scene, and then they fill out reports and do their due diligence, and then they pass it over to a district attorney who was never there.
So Patrick Haggan himself went to the crime scene that morning when there was a shot-up car, and there was no motive. There was no suspects. There was nothing, and he does recall that they did see Aaron Hernandez enter that club and leave, but there was no thought in their minds that he could be potentially tied to that murder, which gets back to the fact that because he was a professional athlete, you would just never think that he would be a part of something like that.
Kevin: So, guys, talk about CTE for a minute here because it does come into play. Is it the excuse for what he did? Dan, why don’t you go with that one?
Dan: I don’t think that you can make any conclusive excuse for what happened. I think we have any number of possibilities, and maybe it’s just a toxic cocktail that gets made with all these different things. CTE, we have seen some of the, you know, diagnosed side effects of loss of rationality, anger, flying off the handle, that type of stuff, certainly plays into some of these crimes and maybe that it is. But it’s hard to say exactly what it is, but he did have CTE. He did have it at a very young age. He clearly was suffering. When you see those autopsies and you listen to those doctors, he was suffering in a lot of ways from it. So is that the answer? I don’t know.That’s the one thing about this series is no matter how far you go with it, you really can’t tell whether it’s this, this, this, or this. There’s just so many factors that go into this life.
Rebecca: I almost think it’s—you know, CTE is very much like—can filter the way that you see the world. It can contribute to depression, impulsivity, all the things that you mentioned, but also if your world view is shaped by this incredibly toxic and difficult culture where you can’t be yourself, and you know, you might have—
Kevin: You can’t be weak.
Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, you can see how if it contributes to the behavior, how the behaviors might be shaped by the condition. At least, that’s kind of my takeaway around it. Another really interesting aspect of this case, though, is the legal story.Can you talk about the law that ultimately ended up clearing Aaron Hernandez’s name? I remember when that was happening in the news. We live here in New England. It was really a story that was kind of jaw-dropping.
Kevin: He was already dead at the time, right?
Rebecca: Yeah.
Kevin: Who wants to take that? Because I got questions.
Dan: The law says that if you have an open case, so let’s say you’re accused of robbing a bank, and then you die the next day, you are not considered a convicted bank robber because you never had your day in court.So with Aaron and with anyone, they were convicted, but then they appealed. And so because the case was under appeal, even though you have to serve your sentence, you’re considered in every way pretty much a convicted felon, a convicted murderer, technically the case is not totally resolved. And so if you die while that appeal is open, the crime is then thrown out, and you just are dead. I understand the reasoning, and one of it being well, you’re dead, who cares?
But obviously in this case, not only was there some financial incentive of whether he could get an NFL pension or could he get his Patriots’ bonus money back or different things like that, but there’s the pain and the re-suffering of the family, in this case Odin Lloyd or any of the families that this guy is all of a sudden no longer considered guilty. So that’s the basis of the law. Afterwards, Odin Lloyd’s mother, and with great fanfare, petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to change that law, and it was taken out.And so Aaron is back to being a convicted murderer.
Kevin: Guys, as documentarians, what was your biggest OMG moment when you were doing the news gathering for this? Geno, what was the big revelation for you as the storyteller going through this?
Geno: It’s when Aaron had taken his life because you have to remember that when me, Dan, and Kevin and our production team at Blackfin had started making this film, we had no partners. We had no one backing us. We had nothing. We were just tracking this story and trying to get access and fighting and fighting and fighting and thinking that we’re making a documentary series—or at that time a documentary—that will hopefully at some point have access to Aaron Hernandez because, you know, we assumed he was going to be convicted again.
And to have him acquitted, found not guilty, and then days later to take his own life, I’ll never forget waking up that morning and my wife telling me, like, hey, Aaron took his own life last night, and just being in total shock. You know, I felt horrible for him. I felt horrible for, you know, his family and everyone involved. I didn’t know where this would take us. I was like, well, does this mean our project’s over? Does this mean we can still push forward? And that was probably the biggest moment for me, you know, where I didn’t know what would happen.
Rebecca: For people who’ve only followed the Aaron Hernandez story in the news, you know, the stories that have come out locally in Boston and sort of nationally, the driving narrative of it, star football player commits these murders, what do you hope they learn in your series or take away from it that isn’t out there?
Geno: Yeah, so my thing is is that I feel like a lot of people have just read like an article about Aaron Hernandez, and they feel like they know the whole story, and I feel like we tried very hard to tell as many sides to this story in a pure journalistic approach in this series, so we’re hoping that we told as much of the story that we could, and we’re hoping that it’s a full plate for everyone to kind of devour.
As far as messages are concerned, we talked about a couple, one being sexuality in sports and talking to Tim and Dennis SanSoucie and hearing their story and their recollection of their relationships with Aaron Hernandez and his dad, Dennis Hernandez. We think it’s important that we present their stories and what they went through, so that parents in America start having conversations with their children at a younger age, no matter what sport they’re playing in, whether it’s football, lacrosse, basketball, soccer, whatever it is. That’s something that we very much wanted out there and we’re passionate about.
I think there’s also the preferential treatment of athletes, too. It was obvious that Aaron was able to get away with a lot, and unfortunately, because he kept getting away with it, he ended up murdering someone and being allegedly involved in a double murder. That’s another conversation that needs to be had in America about how athletes are being perceived in certain types of law enforcement situations.
And I think the last—or one of the others—that we briefly touched on was CTE. I just want to make it clear, too, that CTE isn’t only just a football issue. I see it as a sports issue because I played a lot of contact sports outside of football growing up, and no one ever at any point had ever sat me down and said, hey, this is what CTE is, and if you hit someone helmet to helmet in lacrosse or if someone’s coming down the right side in soccer and you take them out, this is what could happen to your head and to your brain, so you need to be really careful. That’s even another element to this that we’re hoping is a message for America and the world.
Dan: I hope, too, that people look at it, and it’s an Aaron Hernandez story. Aaron Hernandez is why people pay attention to this crime because he’s famous and he’s a football player and you have all these things, but the number of people that his lives touched and changed and altered because of this, not just his family, not just the different people, but obviously the victims, Daniel de Abreu and Sofia Furtado, these are guys that had come to America seeking a better life.They were trying to make it, and their families that were at that trial in Boston were just the most genuine people, among the many genuine people in this movie, but they cared so much as a family, such tight-knit immigrant family.
And to watch their worlds get blown up—they came to this country for a better life, and then two of their own are murdered senselessly—it was such a strategy and so painful to watch them grieve and then have that case as a loss and know that either Aaron Hernandez killed them, and he was found not guilty, or Alexander Bradley killed them, and he was given an immunity deal.And so no one will be punished for their sons and brothers and cousins. Just the sheer number of people that were negatively impacted by Aaron Hernandez and his decisions, and at the end of the day, there are many reasons that lead into why he did what he did, and we tried to figure those out, but everything boils back to decisions made by Aaron Hernandez.
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Melissa: That was Dan Wetzel, Geno McDermott, Kevin Flynn, and Rebecca Lavoie talking about Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.And that’s it for this week’s episode.This podcast will be back next month with a new true crime series for you to add to your watch list. You can find this show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this show.It helps other people find it, and it gives us hints as to what you want to hear. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Netflix. Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I’m Melissa Slaughter signing off.
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