Christine Reveals How Samuel Bateman Confessed On Her Camera, And Cops Ignored It

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
Christine Marie had the tape. She had the man on it. She had a local sergeant who watched her footage and admitted, yeah, that looks real. And for a long time, that wasn't enough. Nothing happened. The man on the tape kept doing what he was doing, and the people sworn to protect the children around him kept sending Christine home. This is the part of the Samuel Bateman case that should make you furious. Not what he did, but what the people who knew didn't do. Christine is the cult psychologist at the center of, trust me, the prophet on Netflix. She lived a double life inside the home of a self-proclaimed FLDS prophet who was taking spiritual wives, some of them children. This segment is about how she finally broke the case open. She joins myself and retired FBI special agent and chief of the counterintelligence behavioral analysis program, Robin Drake, on the program. I want to talk about the local police in Short Creek. I want to talk about them a lot because the visceral reaction I had watching the local officer talk about all his soft heart or whatever BS he was spewing to explain his inaction for very obvious problems makes you want to scream and throw something at your television repeatedly.
But I don't, I want to get your take on this, obviously retrospectively as we're looking at this.
Why?
Why did this officer not look into this deeper? I know the excuses he gave you, it was presented in the documentary. To me, none of them check out. When you talk to attorneys, they don't check out. It's inaction for a reason. It's either he's lazy, incompetent, or protecting a system and a community in a way that only the local police could, in a system that seems to be shielded from the outside world or accountability in certain ways, shapes, and forms. What's your take? Why?

**Christine Marie** (2:41)
Okay, so I have a number of things to say. So interrupt me so I don't talk too long.

**Tony Brueski** (2:46)
Yeah, go, go.

**Robin Drake** (2:48)
Don't take them all.

**Christine Marie** (2:49)
First of all, the local police are not FLDS. The entire police department was replaced under a court order. So one of the...
So there was a big raid in 1953 where the state of Arizona came here and arrested all the polygamists and that has had intergenerational trauma. I mean, they still talk about that raid. So they want to be sensitive to any kind of raid. Plus with all the bad press with Warren Jeffs and everything else, the town wants a new image for the community.

**Tony Brueski** (3:25)
Predator Paradise?

**Christine Marie** (3:28)
That's what they don't want.

**Tony Brueski** (3:30)
That's what they're called, that's what they're crafting.

**Christine Marie** (3:33)
Yeah, exactly. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is that he had said to me, he's sorry that it took so long, but they have been investigating another case.
Okay. But the other thing is that he... I know what you're thinking. What could be bigger than this?

**Tony Brueski** (3:57)
Well, it's not one at a time here either.

**Christine Marie** (4:02)
Right, right. But another thing was that he took my... I had a USB stick with that audio on it, and I handed it to him, and he sent it to the FBI Forensic Crime Lab to make sure there was no malware on it. And so that apparently created a delay for them to even be able to listen to it. Then the final thing is that he was doing what the chief said. These weren't his decisions.
He said, so he's taking a lot of heat covering for his chief, I think. Sure. So he said that after listening to the tape, the chief did not think that there was enough evidence and so on. Now, I was very frustrated by that because I said, how can you say that there's more evidence in this? Because there's more than you saw on the documentary about what was on that tape. Then I had to literally read the Arizona law on human rights and how that matched. He was like, you're right. But in spite of all that, they wanted a victim.
I guess, to be fair, many police departments would have wanted a victim as well. So I think that this lack of a victim willing to come forward, yeah, there were victims on the tape admitting they were victims, but were they willing to speak against the perpetrator?

**Robin Drake** (5:36)
So on that victim one, and Christine, I totally get when I, when you see both sides of it, understand what's going on behind the scenes, the bureaucracy, manpower issues. I'm not getting this, send it away to the FBI lab for malware stuff.