Expect the Unexpected: Stories about unforeseen circumstances

Often, the hypotheses scientists make at the start of an experiment turn out to be correct. But sometimes, the results end up as something completely unpredictable. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories about a time where they didn’t see it coming.

Part 1: While shooting a TV show about the brain, producer Esther Stone gets the opportunity to interview a notorious serial killer.

Esther Stone is a London transplant who fell in love with New York. Switching continents sparked a career change from IT to TV. Now, she is a producer with a wide range of credits including a documentary, The Brain, Mysteries at the Museum, and the ever-popular wedding staple – Say Yes to the Dress. Her work has brought her into contact with royalty, neuroscientists, psychopaths, and lots of white dresses.

Part 2: As someone who’s seen every single episode of Mayday, Sara Mazrouei considers herself an expert in all the ways you can die on a plane until she takes a flight to Australia.

Sara Mazrouei is a planetary scientist, an educational developer, and a science communicator with a passion for sharing the wonders of the universe with the public. Her PhD research focused on the recent bombardment history of the Moon and links to future sample-return missions. Her work has been featured in many media such as the New York Times and National Geographic. Sara is also passionate about increasing the status of women in STEM as well as equity, diversity and meaningful inclusion. Sara uses storytelling, examples including the Story Collider and TEDx Downsview Women, as a method for sharing her authentic experiences and making science more accessible. She is currently an Educational Developer at Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

A few years ago, I made a trip way, way, way upstate into the Adirondacks to a one‑prison town called Dannemora to visit the maximum security prison. It's the biggest maximum security prison in New York.

I was accompanied by a very snappily dressed clinical psychologist and a cameraman whose faded jeans and trainer combo showed a lifelong disrespect for fashion.

When my boss said to me, “Do you want to direct an interview with a serial killer,” I was terrified. So immediately I said yes.

I was scared of meeting a mass murderer, yes, but I was more terrified that I was going to mess it up. It was my first directing job for TV. If you mess up one directing job, it's hard to get another one, so I really wanted to do a good job.

I was doing a show called The Brain and this section of the show was called The Evil Brain. The hypothesis for the evil brain was that psychopaths have very small amygdalas, the almond‑shaped structure. I'm sure all you scientists know this. I'm not a scientist. I think it's about there, not quite sure, in the brain. It's smaller in psychopaths than it is in you or me.

If you put them in an fMRI machine and you show them pictures of cute kittens or you show them pictures of people being tortured, they don't have a very big emotional reaction to either thing, which is what enables them to do the terrible things they do.

For the sports section of the show, we interviewed a baseball player. For the evil section of the show, we wanted to provide a hook. The content, it was a little sciencey. There were some graphics. We just didn't think it was quite going to grab people, so we wanted to interview a serial killer

Esther Stone shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in September 2018. Photo by Zhen Qin.

In America, in New York, actually, it's different in California. You can't interview in prisons with cameras. But in New York, if you have the permission from the governor and you have the permission from the prisoner, you're allowed to interview a prisoner. So I wrote to a serial killer who's in prison and I got permission to go and film.

So, there I am with the clinical psychologist and the cameraman and it took us about two hours to get into the prison, because we had to check everything for contraband. I had the humiliation of having to remove my bra because it has this metal cups kind of wiring to keep it up and it set off all the metal detectors.

Finally, the steel doors open and I enter the prison.

The first thing I smelt was like some sort of mixture between dirty laundry and cabbage. It just didn't smell good. I could hear in the distance like some banging and some shouting. At this point, I'm pretty nervous. My stomach is slurping around like I think I'm going to be sick, but I'm not and I carry on. I'm just thinking about the 3,000 murderers and rapists and other not very nice people that are in this prison.

So we get down to the bowels of the prison and we're waiting there for the serial killer to arrive. I'm sitting there. My nerves are quite high by now.

He walks into the room, I was expecting like leg chains and handcuffs, but there weren't any of those things. To be honest, he looks terrible. He's got a ponytail kind of limping down his back. You can tell his face is pasty and bloated, like a lack of good food and a lack of fresh air. He's definitely put on weight in the 14 years since he's been incarcerated.

So he says hi and immediately puts out his hand.

Now, I don't know if he noticed, because I'm like, “Shit, what do I do here?” But I mirrored his gesture.

His hand felt very warm and big and slabby and, when I took it away, I kind of brushed it off my skirt because I wanted to get rid of the feeling. Because when he killed his victims, he strangled most of them. He was in prison for murdering nine— serving 203 years for murdering nine women. They think that he killed 16.

So I said, “How are you?”

He says, “It's like being a dog in here.” He said, “I spend most of the time asleep and then the rest of the time as frenetic activity.”

I said, “It's a bit like that when I worked at the checkout in my local supermarket,” to which he loved and said, “Yeah, but I think there's more fights than they were at your local supermarket, hopefully.”

And then I laughed and then I realized I was creating this rapport with him. That's my job. I'm a TV producer. That's what we do, but it kind of felt uncomfortable to be creating it with him.

So I said, “Okay. Sit down. We'll do the interview.”

I framed up. The cameraman framed up. I approved the frame. The clinical psychologist starts asking the questions. We roll on the interview.

It's a sad story. He was adopted. Never felt like he belonged. He was bullied at school. He has his arm broken into three places in summer camp. Despite having an IQ of about 144, he couldn't get a job after school, so he ended up doing gardening and spending most of his money on prostitutes and drugs.

The clinical psychologist is asking all these questions about his background because that's his area of interest. I'm sitting there and I realize we've only got an hour for this interview. And I have content that I wanted to get and it's the hook for the show. So I realize the clinical psychologist wasn't getting what I needed.

I didn't know what to do and so I wrote a note and I handed it to the clinical psychologist. He read it and the serial killer looked at him as he read it. I was burning up with the shame that he could see what I'd written on the note because I'd written, “Ask him about the murders.” So he did.

He starts talking about them, how the first person he killed he hit them until his arms went numb and he couldn't feel any more. In one New Year, he wrote a to-do list. He wrote ‘change the oil on the car , fix my mom's windows and stop killing women’.

Inside, the producer checklist in my head is zinging like a Vegas slot machine, because I know I've got the bites that I need to make the show. And so I know that this interview is going to be a success. It's going to be the hook that we need for the show.

The interview finishes and I say thank you. It seemed a bit inappropriate but off he goes. He disappears.

And as I'm walking back with one of the guards, I start making chit chat with him. I said, “Oh, this serial killer, he must get really bored being on his own in that cell all the time.”

He said, “No, lady. You are his entertainment. People like you come and he tells these stories and that's what he gets off on. That's what he fills his hours with when he's on his own.”

Suddenly, I didn't feel so great about what I'd done and what I'd asked for. I realized that in trying to preserve my own reputation, what I hadn't realized I was doing is just feeding his ego. That's one of the reasons I don't mention the guy's name because I don't want to give him any more bumps to his ego than I already did.

And I questioned whether the value of having the show was educational, yeah, but the value of giving a serial killer a mouthpiece like that, whether it was really worth it for the show.

Since then, both our TV careers have flourished. I have seen other interviews with him in the same room talking about the same things.

It just so happened that the next job I got was on a wedding show. I loved it. White dresses, cakes, bustles, brides can be a little crazy, but they're not psychopaths, well, not all. But I thought about it recently. If someone asked me to go and interview a murderer again and ask him about his crimes, I would know that I was going to be manipulated. But I'm not a hero in this story. I would say yes and I would just try and do a really good job.

Part 2

I got married in October of 2019 and I had all these basic girl dreams of a honeymoon in the Greek islands, white houses on the hills, hotels with infinity pools. This is my favorite part of wedding planning because I love traveling, I love getting on planes.

But I should say that as much as I love traveling and getting on planes, I have an unhealthy obsession with Mayday , the airplane crash investigation show. That's why I always pick a seat at the back of the plane because, statistically, you have a higher chance of survival in case of a plane crash.

I've watched every episode at least twice and could tell you all the ways that a plane could crash from pilot error to landing conditions, mechanical problems, even wildlife getting stuck somewhere on the plane.

Sara Mazrouei shares her story at Pamenar in Toronto in September 2022. Photo by Glenn Pritchard.

I'm fully aware of every possible way that I could die in a plane crash. It's totally fine. But being on a Mayday episode as an airplane crash survivor is at the top of my bucket list, which I know doesn't look good coming from a Middle Eastern, so don't tell anyone.

Anyways, as we're planning for our beautiful Greek honeymoon, we get an invite to my sister‑in‑law's wedding in Australia for March of 2020. There's no way that we can afford a honeymoon in the Greek islands and then a trip to Australia, so we decide to kill two birds with one stone.

We would just take a month off, travel through Australia. We would start with the Melbourne area where the wedding was at and then ditch the in‑laws. Go drive through the Great Ocean Road, fly to Sydney so I could see where my husband grew up, and then end our trip in Cairns to see the Great Barrier Reef.

A couple of weeks before our trip, COVID was starting to become a thing. I remember watching the news and seeing like outbreaks in China, but I kind of felt like it was going to be one of those things that we would hear about but it wouldn't really happen here. Kind of like SARS or the swine flu.

So March 4th rolled around and we began our trip from Toronto to Melbourne with a layover in LA. The flight from LA to Melbourne was 15‑and‑a‑half hours long. And what I love to do on long flights is get a window seat, take some meds, knock myself out and sleep for a majority of the flight, but I never miss meal service. I never miss food.

This time was no different. I woke up. I had whatever it was, dinner, lunch, I don't even know. And I put my headphones in and I put on a movie not really to watch the movie but more as like white noise to help me fall back asleep.

Then I noticed the flight attendant walk over with an older lady, like the ones that give you grandma wipes but she's so properly dressed you would never find her dead wearing yoga pants on a plane.

And I'm like is she coming back from visiting her grandkids in LA? Is she going to Melbourne to meet them for the first time or is she just having a late life crisis and wants to cross Australia off her bucket list?

The flight attendant actually helped her to the flight attendant jump seat, which was a couple of rows in front of us, and then proceeded to put on an oxygen mask for her. And I'm thinking to myself, “Oh, my God. Is she out of breath? Does she have COVID? Should I be wearing a mask? What is happening?”

Meanwhile, I still got my headphones in pretending I'm watching a movie but, really, now I've got front row seats to this live show in front of me.

Then all of a sudden I hear a thud. I look over and the lady is now unconscious on the ground. The flight attendants rush over. They raise her leg, check her pulse and, eventually, she regains consciousness. And then they're trying to figure out if she's traveling alone or if she's with someone, and it turned out that she was traveling alone. I kept thinking how scared and terrified I would be if I was sick and on a plane. That’s pretty bad.

And then the flight attendants came on board, came on the intercom. Asked if there was a doctor on board. A gynecologist and a family physician came forward. And just a few seconds later, an ER nurse came by, but the flight attendant was like, “No, no. Thank you. We've got this. We've got two doctors. We don't need the ER nurse.”

And in my head I'm like, “OMG, this is an emergency. Like this would make perfect sense. But, no, you've got a gynecologist. For fuck’s sake, when was the last time that a gynecologist looked at anything other than a vagina? How was she going to help this passenger? But, no, the ER nurse had to go back.”

Then my angry thoughts got interrupted at the sight of these doctors pulling out a defibrillator and starting CPR on the now unconscious woman. They kept rotating doing CPR. A few minutes later, the flight attendant came over, asked one of the doctors if she could go up to the cockpit to update the control tower.

And I remembered from one of the Mayday episodes that if you have a really sick passenger on board, you could have a mayday call and you could have an emergency landing at a nearby airport. So I got really excited. I'm like, “We're going have that mayday call.”

I look over at my screen to see where the little plane is, where the nearest airport is. And as far as I could see, it was just ocean. It's just water, water and absolutely nowhere to land. And it didn't help that we were on an A380, the world's largest plane that couldn't land just at any airport.

That's when it hit me. She was either going to regain consciousness or she was going to die on this flight right in front of my eyes. And then I got really, really scared, almost feeling like I was the unconscious person on the ground.

A good 30 minutes run by. The doctors and the flight attendants kept rotating. They continued to do CPR. I got told to sit back and stop watching but, obviously, I couldn't. Then I saw the pilot coming by and I knew that wasn’t good news. He was there to call time of death.

Then they moved her body and they laid her on a row of seats just a few feet from us, covered her up with a blanket to make it look like she was sleeping and then the flight continued.

Now, for the remainder of the flight, I tried to watch a movie, fall back asleep, but I really couldn't. All I could do was just keep looking over at her white, lifeless feet dangling out in the aisle.

I shed a few tears and then I'm like, “Okay, I'm probably making everybody else around me uncomfortable so maybe I shouldn't cry.” And I just kept playing the whole thing in my head over and over, hoping that it was just a bad dream, which happens to me often when I watched a couple of Mayday episodes before going to bed.

The flight continued for a few more hours. Eventually, we landed. The flight attendants came on the intercom once we landed and asked all passengers to remain seated so that the paramedics could get to a passenger that wasn't feeling well. Not that she was dead. Not that she had been dead for the past few hours. No, she just wasn't feeling well.

At no point during the flight or even when we landed was there a mention of a dead body being on board and it just made me think of like how many other dead bodies had I ever flown with? Out of all the ways that I knew I could die on a plane, I never thought that this could be a possibility, for your heart to just stop beating and for you to just stop breathing while the plane was in perfect condition.

Thank you.