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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- Well, I know a lot of our listeners are also "Dateline" murder mystery people and so on-
- Yes.
- And you're kinda living the life there, helping people solve these crimes and helping your students learn how to do that. Talk about the cold case project you're working.
- We came up with this wonderful idea where we could bridge our two groups together and use my best students as interns to help them work on real cold cases.
- My name's Kelly Damphousse. I'm the president here and I am the host of "The Current," and today I'm really excited about having my friend Jaymi Elsass join us. Jaymi is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. Thank you for joining us.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Now it is associate professor?
- Of instruction.
- Of instruction. Very good. So glad to have you here. So we're excited to have you talk about some of what you're doing in the classroom, but also what you're doing for research. But before we get there, I always wanna know about people's Texas State stories. So let's start about where Jaymi started and then how you got here. And then we'll talk about what you're doing. So tell us where you grew up first.
- Absolutely. So I grew up in a small town in South Texas, outside of Corpus. And I graduated from high school-
- Okay. What's the small town?
- Ingleside.
- Okay. What's the mascot?
- The Mustang.
- The Mustangs. Okay. Very good, all right.
- Graduated from here-
- Were you involved in like athletics or?
- Yes.
- Extracurricular stuff?
- It's a small school, so we did-
- Everybody has to do everything.
- All the things, right. Correct. And then graduated from there at 17 and went to University of Texas at Austin for my undergraduate career. Did four years in sociology. There is where I actually met Dr. Mark Stafford for the first time.
- Sure.
- And he, you know, I just really built a really strong friendship and relationship with him. Looked up to his research and eventually followed him to Texas State for both my master's and my doctorate.
- Now are you thinking about going to graduate school when you first went to college or it just kind of happened?
- Absolutely not. I was thinking about going, first, I've thought about going into medical school 'cause my entire family is in medicine. Fell in love with sociology. Took a class on a whim.
- Why not, right?
- Absolutely.
- I think you're the first sociologist on the podcast, by the way, except not counting me.
- Right, right. Yeah, and then thought, okay, well I guess I'll go to law school maybe 'cause I'm interested in the criminology point of this. And then fell in love with research. Through working with Dr. Stafford and now we went through, as I said, he moved to Texas State, he's now here right at the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology. I came and got my master's and my Ph.D. under him. And then was hired out of our Ph.D. program in my final ABD, my final semester to become full faculty here at Texas State. So it's been my home for a long time now.
- So when did you finish school? When did you graduate?
- I graduated in 2015 with my Ph.D. But I've been at this university since 2008.
- So quick question. What was your master's topic and then what was your Ph.D. topic?
- Yes, my master's topic is on deviance amongst juveniles, particularly-
- Same with me. Same thing.
- Love it. Particularly of court and case precedent. And then my Ph.D. really focused on outliers of juvenile behaviors, mainly non-conformists. So high-rate offenders, and then those interesting people who never offend or maybe only offend later in life.
- Yeah, I think we've talked about this before, that my master's thesis was on youthful involvement in satanism. It was like, I think the title was, "Did the Devil Make Them Do It?" Or something like that. But then, you know, start talking about like offshoots of that. Like how did law enforcement, you know, manage occult crime back in the '80s and '90s and the development of moral panics, which is an area of interest for yours.
- Absolutely.
- For you as well. Talk about, what is a moral panic?
- Yeah, so moral panic is really interesting because when you look at research, typically we only know they happen after they've already occurred. They typically have this historical view. And so we see media involvement, we see public interest that heavily, heavily focus on one really scary thing, whatever that scary thing may be. We see a public concern, you know, ramp up very quickly. We see disproportional outpouring of concern or response to whatever that scary thing is. And then we tend to see these wane off over time. So as you said, Satanic Panic is a well-studied moral panic. But we also see moral panic historically about drug use and abuse, the crack cocaine epidemic. And in my research, I look at the moral panic surrounding mass shootings specifically.
- Yeah. Well the interesting thing is that crime tends to be relatively stable. And sometimes you'll get peaks here and there, but when the media gets attention, pays attention to something, then the stories start to feed off each other that they start telling the same story. And then the public starts thinking, oh my goodness, there's all these satanists everywhere. And so that was actually the stimulus for my thesis was, I was in church one day and the pastor said, man, there's all these satanists all over Texas right now. I said, well, there's a thesis topic. And turns out there weren't any more than there were before. But there was this story that there was, and the story kind of escalated and that created this kind of moral panic. We call this Satanic Panic in the 1980s and '90s. So it's really interesting. And so your area was in mass shootings.
- Mass shootings, correct.
- Now, mass shootings have been increasing over time, or?
- They have, but not as much as you would believe. We still have just over 22 incidents a year around there that fit our definition of mass shootings. And so while we do see them increasing, in fact, I work with the Rockefeller Center Group Against Gun Violence. And so one of the things, the research on gun violence, and one of the things that we do is track these over time with the blog coming out later next month. That's looking at our data set and tracking these over time and what we can tell about them.
- So you've been studying this area and then your dissertation was on, remind me again?
- My dissertation was on outliers of juvenile behavior.
- That's the outliers thing. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's really interesting. So what was your data?
- We used ad health to look at what kinds of people are on the outskirts of behavior because most juveniles commit minor offenses. And so what I was really interested in, not necessarily those high rate offenders, those ones who commit lots and lots of crimes. But I was very interested in the juveniles who are different in that they rarely commit crime or never commit crime in their lifetime, or abstainers, if you will, or pure conformists. And they're very interesting to me because usually when we see them commit crime, finally later in life, we have a tendency for those crimes to be more serious than this minor offending that most people desist out of naturally as you know, rambunctious kids getting into trouble. So they're kind of different. And I think it actually may have a bleed over into my research on moral panics and mass shootings later on.
- Well, what's interesting, you oftentimes hear about a shooting incident, for example, that involved a young person. They go, he was the quietest person. Like you never would've expected this in a million years and something happened.
- Right.
- And I always wonder, and I think we all wonder like what happened to get someone to go from here to there where you're conforming, conforming, conforming, and we spent our whole lives learning how to conform and then all of a sudden something happens and they don't just deviate a little bit, they go all the way and do something that is unimaginable.
- Right, and what's interesting about that is that they're actually not conforming as teenagers because the normative behavior is deviant.
- Is deviant, that's right. Yeah.
- It is, criminal behavior is minor, but it's normal. It's, you know, minor shoplifting, it's experimenting with alcohol, it's things like that. And these people aren't doing that. So we're actually seeing them not conform to their peers-
- So they're super conforming beyond-
- To society, but not to what's normative behavior for peers. And we actually have two groups of conformists, those who are conforming because they're kind of that stereotypical all-American kid who is getting great grades and top of their class, that kind of thing. And then we have these others. They're not failing, but they're not doing great. They're not involved in anything. They just kind of fly under the radar and they never break the law. And that's really interesting.
- Wow. That is interesting. And again, the question is, you know, what is the trigger for that?
- Right.
- And I think it is actually interesting. When I first started studying criminology and deviant behavior, it seems like early crim theories were about why do people deviate? And I actually aspire or think more about why do people conform? Because the natural impulse is to deviate because we're, you know, we're selfish beings by nature.
- Right.
- And it is normal, as you say, to deviate a little. And until we get socialized, not to do certain things. But then in cases you're talking about, they have become so over socialized perhaps that they're, you know, tamping it all in. And maybe that's part of the issue, right? Because they're so socialized that when, that there's no relief to whatever anxiety they're facing, that it just comes out in an extreme at some point.
- Yes. It's really, really interesting. And just like you, I have the question of what makes people conform.
- Yeah.
- And so flipping that on its head gives you a whole new perspective on this kind of life course trajectory of deviance that we've always accepted, right? Through life course theories.
- Is there two pathways to adult criminality? Is it people learn how to engage in deviant behavior and they kind of carry that onto adulthood? Or is it also common to have late onset?
- Neither one are common. The most common, right, path is that then the vast majority of people commit crime normally as juveniles and they naturally desist from crime as they age. However-
- 'Cause we're not, eventually, we're not all committing crime.
- Right.
- The conforming is the most common response when we become adults.
- Absolutely. Absolutely. We do have-
- I'm not gonna judge anybody else, but that's typically what happens.
- Yes, yes.
- You might speed.
- Right.
- You might do something else pretty small. I mean you might fudge on your taxes or something like that, but you're not robbing banks and so on.
- Exactly. And you stopped doing those crimes without anybody teaching you through therapy that you needed to stop or without being locked up. The majority of people desist naturally. They grow up, they grow out of it.
- And the question is what you grow out of it. But what else might cause you to just stop doing those things?
- Typically we see things like, you know, you have more to lose. Maybe you are going to college or you're in the military, you have a job, you have a house, you have a wife or husband or kids, right? You have more to lose if you get in trouble. And so as we age, we gain more stature in the community, we gain more relationships and reputation and we have more to lose.
- You've got these social bonds that you've created. And you don't wanna lose your job or your prestige or whatever.
- Right.
- There's a level of maturity as well too, I think maybe losing a sense of narcissism or gaining a sense of other people are valuable.
- Absolutely.
- They shouldn't just take their stuff.
- We know empathy develops later in life.
- Empathy. Yeah. But so what about the other case though?
- Yeah, so on one end of the spectrum then, if you think about it as like kind like a normal bell curve, right, on one end of the spectrum, we have high rate offenders who are committing crimes and a lot of crimes and a lot of different kinds of crimes as juveniles. And they're more likely to carry that behavior into adulthood and become adult criminals.
- Because that becomes kind of their personality, their social milieu, it's just who they are.
- Absolutely. And on the other end, we have about 10% that we've known this since the 1950s. 10% of people who do not break the law as juveniles at all. So they're already rare, they're not engaging. Now we don't know if it's because they don't have friends, they're quieter, they don't have opportunity for behavior because we know juvenile crime, right? Delinquency is group behavior typically. And so we don't know if it's because of that or some other reason. But for whatever reason they're not breaking the law. Of that 10%, we have two distinct groups. We have a group that are choosing, right. To not break the law. It's a conscious choice to not engage in those behaviors. We typically see them as kind of your all-American kids stereotype, right? The kind of kid we all want our kids to be. And the other group, as I said earlier, they're not getting great grades, but they're not failing, they're not involved in any activities. They're just the person who flies under the radar. When I talk to my students about this, I say, those of you who are from small schools, you look back at your high school yearbook and you think, I don't remember that person, but you are with them for years in school because they just kind of flew under the radar. Those are the ones that are very interesting to me about what criminality looks like and other forms of deviance for them later in life.
- Yeah, in my satanism study, I interviewed I think 120 or so kids that said they were involved in satanism. And the common trait was being a loner, but also being very intelligent. 'Cause you have to read a lot of these books that kind of get you involved in it and so on. And being, and have really so low self-esteem. Like they don't like themselves, other people don't like them, which leads them to becoming loners and so on. They're searching out for people who will accept them and they found a group that would accept them. And so they went from just being someone that nobody knew about to all of a sudden doing things that are, you know, things you wouldn't believe they were doing.
- Right, right.
- In addition to your research, you're also doing something I think is really cool and actually something that can have a huge impact on the state of Texas. And that's something that we think is really important at Texas State. That we are not just teaching people, but we're actually engaging in a process of making Texas better by educating future workforce, but also about improving the lot of our people's lives. And so talk about the cold case project you're working on.
- Absolutely. So it starts with me becoming the coordinator for the internship program for the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology three years ago. I took that program over at both the undergraduate and the master's level. And during that first year, I built a strong relationship with the head prosecutor for the Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit at the Texas Attorney General's Office. And through offhand conversations over dinner, right? Things, that's how a lot of work gets done, right?
- Yeah, exactly, the networking part of this.
- Absolutely. We came up with this wonderful idea where we could bridge our two groups together and use my best students as interns to help them work on real cold cases that the Attorney General's Office has been given from other agencies. So it's very interesting. The Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit wasn't developed at the Attorney General's Office until 2021. So it is a very new unit and it's small, less than 15 people in the entire unit. And that includes administrative staff, that's everybody.
- And that's the state level.
- That's the state level.
- Are there cold case units in city police departments and things like that?
- There are in large departments. But the problem is is that most of Texas is rural. We're talking small departments and they just don't have the resources or the background for these kinds of difficult cases. Additionally, they don't have the finances to have a full-time cold case detective. And then things like forensic testing are just cost-prohibitive. They just don't know what to do.
- And many times they're not used to dealing with a murder scene and may not have collected really good data on it. And so the evidence is scant and so, yeah.
- Absolutely. And so what we do is we take on the cold cases that get referred to us by those agencies. And so the Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit, when we got to talking we realized there are over 20,000 unsolved homicides in the state of Texas alone. And that number's five years old now. So it's surely gone up, over 300,000 nationwide. This is a huge issue. We just don't have the resources and manpower for it. And I thought, I have some incredibly bright students with wonderful skills who can help. And we built this internship program and so now they go on a year-long internship. I have four students working over there. They were split into two teams, each given a case with all the raw material under the guise of an investigator. Right, or the helping hand of an investigator and said, go.
- Wow.
- And they have done amazing work, actually sat in on their presentations this morning before coming here.
- I'm guessing some of the cases were just a body was found and just identifying the body's the issue.
- Many times, that's what the CCMPU is dealing with, yes. Now for my students, each team got cases that they've just been referred to the Attorney General. As I said, they're not of an original jurisdiction. So agencies, smaller agencies are reaching out for help. Both of those cold cases are from the mid 1990s. One has multiple victims, the other has a single victim. But both those cases have gone cold because all leads have been exhausted. And now they've reached out for the Attorney General's Office for help and they said, "Hey, these are great cases for your students to work on." And they have made amazing progress. I was blown away this morning.
- So they're potentially solvable.
- Absolutely.
- With some time and some effort, maybe new technology that's being discovered and being implemented.
- Yes, absolutely. And both of these cases have DNA. So we have the-
- Ah, yeah.
- Things that can be retested for DNA because there's been quite a bit of DNA testing in both, but both will have some retesting as well as some opportunities for the growing field of forensic genealogy.
- I want to talk about that because I think that's the most exciting advancement in science and criminology is forensic DNA about how you can use someone's DNA-
- Track their family tree.
- To to track them.
- Yes.
- So talk a little bit about that.
- Yes. So both of these cases that my students are working have the opportunity for forensic genealogy and to use DNA that's found at these crime scenes to turn into something like GEDmatch where we can look at these cases and maybe we can't find the perpetrator themself, but we can find someone who's related to the perpetrator. And then we use family trees, documents like marriage documents, birth and death documents, to build these family trees and whittle things down till we have a suspect.
- I did 23andMe 'cause I'm adopted and I was like trying to track down who my family was and I just thought it would tell me. I wasn't trying to track down my family, but I was trying to figure out who I was.
- Yeah.
- You know, genetically, and I thought it would just say, well you're from this part of the country. And I did that and I said, or from the world, and I did that and I didn't like scroll down to find out that you could like click on a link and it would take you to like who you're related to.
- Right.
- Until last summer, I ran into someone who told me through 23andMe, they had tracked down their family and she said, "Haven't you done that?" And I said, "No," so I went back and I had to change passwords and so on. But I finally got back and I've discovered a woman who's, her mother and my birth mother were sisters. Now they've gotta be like 85 years old or something like that now. And I want to get into it. But it was amazing. I can look at the tree and I can see this. And so if you got a piece of DNA, you can find out maybe the person who is somehow in the registry or who's related to that person. And say that's a second cousin or a cousin perhaps.
- Absolutely.
- Or a brother or sister. That's how that all works.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah.
- Yes. It's just amazing. And you know, support for this program, when we started it, it has just exploded. So when we first opened this up, I had over 100 applicants in a two-week period. And we whittled it down to choose four really bright, amazing students. And this year, we're just finishing up our first year, so our pilot year is done, we're starting our second year and we've had just as much interest. And so we're in the process now of the second group. But another thing that this has done is it's led to broader conversations with the Attorney General's Office about what else we can do to help cold case. And so we are in the process of the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology of developing a center for cold case investigations and a cold case professional association, neither of which exist at this point, which will allow practitioners and researchers to really work together on things like best practices. Right, and connect networking these smaller agencies with experts in the field who can help them solve these cases that they otherwise would not have access to. And I just think it's a huge for Texas State to be able to see this gap and say, we can help here. We can fill this problem.
- Making Texas better, right?
- Absolutely.
- So I know it's pretty new, but success stories yet?
- We do have some interesting developments. I'm not able to say much, but I can tell you that we have been absolutely blown away by the work these students have done, how far they've pushed these cases forward. And while we haven't solved one yet, success looks like so many things with cold cases, right? It can be excluding somebody who's been a suspect for years.
- How great is it to have that burden off your shoulder?
- Absolutely. It can be finding new evidence, right? And so we have all of this really interesting stuff that they've done, but I unfortunately to have to be tight-lipped at this point.
- Yeah, well it's exciting to see Texas State kind of like leading the way in this area and to see our students getting real-world experience. We often talk about, you know, learning in the classroom and how valuable it is. But there's something to be said about what you can learn outside the classroom as well. And in this case, you're connecting them with police officers, investigators who are, you know, giving them this hands-on experience that will ultimately lead to a, you know, they gotta get a job when they graduate. And this would be a great one to get.
- It is, and you know, we're seeing this, of course we're working heavily on investigations. We have Dr. Kim Rossmo just published a new investigations book and he launched a new master's and Ph.D. level cold case investigations course. So we're putting a lot into investigations, of course that's, you know, in addition to his Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation Center here that's already here at Texas State. But we're doing the same thing in all areas of CJ. So we created the new Texas Crime and Justice Center, which focuses on solving problems and looking at best practices for Central Texas criminal justice agencies. So that's a really exciting development. We're also are creating a new scholarly journal that focuses on criminal justice case studies and that doesn't exist at this point. So that allows us to further bridge that gap between us and those practitioner boots on the ground. We've got the Texas Justice Court Center, we've got the Texas Municipal Education Center. Right, we've got all of these incredible initiatives to put our students into the field. Not only get them to learn hands-on because as you said, there's something great about learning hands-on out in the field, but to also help them start networking and to teach them to give back, right? They're already helping the state of Texas in our communities before they ever even graduate. And that buy-in is so important for the long term. 'Cause you know, criminal justice has high burnout 'cause it's a hard job. So the more we can get buy-in and get them to love what they do and give back early, the longer they stay in the field working to better our communities.
- Well, I know a lot of our listeners are also "Dateline" murder mystery people and so on.
- Yes.
- And you're kinda living the life there helping people solve these crimes and helping your students learn how to do that.
- Absolutely.
- Oftentimes, we're talking to alumni or we're talking to faculty members and in this case it's a double dip. We get alumnus who's doing great, we're so glad to have you here at Texas State, and we're so excited to see what you're doing here and how you're helping our students get a really special experience. So thank you for doing that.
- Thank you so much.
- Alright, Jaymi, now we've got something kind of fun to do. Every week we ask listeners to send us a question that you get to ask me. So you get to be the podcast host.
- I love it.
- I'm gonna give it to you.
- Okay.
- And I never see the questions in advance, so it's always cold, and so-
- I love this question. It's, what's one thing that you are deeply grateful for?
- Oh, I'm grateful for everything. I lead a life of gratefulness because I didn't expect to be where I am. And when I get a chance to talk to young people, they always like, how do you become a college president? And I said, don't do what I did because I didn't know what I was doing. But I always share about the fact that there are people in my life who were standing at a fork in the road and my inclination was to go to the left. And they said, no, you should go to the right. And sometimes they were very insistent on me going to the right or to the left, wherever this direction they thought I should go. And those people changed my life forever. And so you talked a little bit about networking, the importance of that. Sometimes young people don't think about, you know, the importance of networking or it sounds like kind of, you know, like you're using people to gain advantage, but it's important not just who you know, but who knows you.
- Absolutely.
- When opportunities kind of open themselves up to people, I say, "Hey, I know a person that might be a perfect fit for this." And so my thankfulness is those people that invested in me that I would like, sometimes I feel like, why do you care about me? Like, I don't know why you did this, but it reminds me then about my responsibility that I have responsibility to pay them back.
- Right.
- And so my thankfulness turns into an opportunity to invest in other people like I was invested in. What about you? What are you thankful for?
- Yeah. I think I echo a lot of what you say. And then also I'm very thankful for such a strong husband at home. I have four small children as I mentioned earlier. And so someone who has been my biggest cheerleader and supporter through all of this, those five people, my four kids and my husband are my reason why.
- Your people.
- They're my people.
- You know, I think people forget that other people have lives. I remember thinking the first time I saw my teacher in a grocery store, I was like, Mrs. Johnson, what are you doing here? You should be in the classroom waiting for me to come back. And I think people say, oh, there's a professor at the university and forget that in addition to doing that and you're doing a lot of things like just not just teaching. You got research, you got this cold case deal you're doing, but you also have a life out there, right? And you have to balance all those things. Or try to manage the imbalance, so.
- Yeah, I'm grateful for a strong partner that helps me do, my husband helps me do all of it.
- Well, thanks so much, Jaymi for joining us and thank you for joining us as well. This is always a great time for us to learn from our faculty, staff, students, alumni about what's going on here at Texas State. Also, especially cool when you got one of our alumni who is also a faculty member to share about the great things happening here at Texas State. Join us again next time at "The Current," when we come back to learn more about what's happening at Texas State University. States Up everyone.