A Killer's Mind | Fifteen

0:00Before we begin, just a trigger warning. The following episode contains references to graphic physical violence. Please listen with care.

0:13I mean, Chris, do you believe that Daniel Marsh was a serial killer in training? Absolutely. Without a doubt. That if he had been allowed to keep on going, he actually talked about how he was going to take his next victim. Almost four hours into questioning at the police station, Daniel Marsh admitted to FBI Special Agent Chris Campion that he had murdered Claudia Mopin and Chip Northup. But he didn't stop there. Campion learned the teenager was already thinking about his next killing.

1:05Get somebody when they're alone at night out in the street or out somewhere. Just find somebody alone at night and beat them to death with a baseball bat. Okay. Did you have anybody in mind? No.

1:21Had you actually gone out looking for someone? Yeah.

1:27He was someone who did not have a conscience. You believe Daniel Marsh is a psychopath. I do. I believe Daniel Marsh is a psychopath. I knew it when he was talking to me. He actually admitted it. I don't feel sympathy for other people at all. I don't feel empathy for them.

1:50And whether I like that or not, it's the way it is. It's just like I want to hurt people. Campion maintained his composure, and then he asked Daniel a question that I had never heard in a police interrogation. So, how would you kill me? There's a lot of ways. I mean, that you've thought of so far in the couple of hours that we've spent together here. Choking you to dust with your tie. Okay. Beating your face into the mirror until it broke and using the glass to cut your arteries. Gouging your eyes out and just smashing your face into the wall.

2:36Campion had asked, how would you kill me? And almost immediately, Daniel had thought of three different, gruesome ways that he would do it.

3:01if something just happens. And I said I didn't take it personally because I didn't. I don't think I did anything to offend him, to upset him. I think he literally thinks about that with anybody he meets. That's what he thinks about doing. That's his fantasy life. While Daniel was questioned, police had searched his mother's home. There, they found writings, drawings, a knife, duct tape, and clothing with Chip and Claudia's DNA. Police also searched Daniel's father's home. When he found out his son was being questioned, he said he sent a public defender down to the police station. Authorities finally had a suspect in Chip Northup and Claudia Moppins' murders.

3:50And with physical evidence, DNA samples, and a complete confession, it seemed like the case against Daniel was solid. But the fact that the suspect was a teenager would complicate things for the prosecution.

4:15I'm 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty. This is 15 Inside the Daniel Marsh Murders. Episode 5, A Killer's Mind.

4:40When did you first hear the name Daniel Marsh? The victim's advocate, as well as the Davis police liaison who was in charge of our case, called and said that they had made an arrest. Victoria Hurd had finally gotten the call she had been anxiously waiting for. I just remember shaking my head, going, what? What? That anyone could kill her mother and stepfather was difficult enough to believe. but a 15 year old? A teenager? Who was this boy named Daniel Marsh? I'm in shock and then all of a sudden I get a burst of you know eldest daughter can do anything and I said I've got to go to that arraignment.

5:26That arraignment's gonna happen within 24 hours. I've got to go there and see this man, young man. Kid. Kid. But Victoria would have to wait even longer to see him because Because Daniel was a minor, his face was hidden by a wall at the arraignment. My sister-in-law was with me. I said, I have got to see him. I've got to look in his face and see this man who killed my mother. Finally, she saw Daniel's face through a TV monitor. He looked like somebody who would be one of my niece's boyfriends. He looked like some hippie kid from Davis. When I was at the arraignment, his father sat in front of me.

6:09And I think it was my victim's advocate who told me that was his father. And there was something strange. I didn't like it. I didn't like the feel.

6:20Daniel's father is Bill Marsh. We spoke in 2018. Did it ever occur to you that your own son could be involved in something like that? Not in a million years. You never saw any sign of that? You never got a sense that your son... If I hadn't had any sense of it, I would have taken action. Bill seemed to still struggle with what his son was accused of. Show me the pictures you have here. Tell me who this is. This is Daniel in 2009, so that would have made him 12. This was about the time when you had the heart attack. Yes, right. One day in November 2009, Daniel was home with his father when Bill says he had started feeling dizzy.

7:08And I'd gone upstairs and taken a shower, came down and said, come on, Daniel, let's go to the hospital. I got checked out. They got in the car and made it to the corner of their street. Next thing I knew, I woke up and the car ran into a wall covered in bushes and a tree. I asked Daniel, how did we wind up here? What happened? And he says, I don't know, Daddy. He says, suddenly you just passed out. He says, I climbed into your lap and steered the car into the wall to stop it. It must have been terrifying for Daniel, who started banging on his father's chest. Something Daniel later said he had seen on a medical drama.

7:46It worked. Daniel had saved his father's life. About a month later, Daniel was presented with an American Red Cross Heroes Award. Oh yeah, yeah, it was a major event. He was all over the media and they were, you know, touting this young American hero and look at this, he might actually be a future doctor. Sure enough, there was Daniel featured in local newspapers, hailed for his heroism. In photos, he looks innocent and sweet, wearing a suit with a rosebud in his lapel, his father proudly standing beside him. The next year, Daniel enrolled in the Davis Police Department's Youth Academy, receiving instruction on crime scene investigation.

8:39But while Daniel may have appeared a model citizen on the outside, he was also harboring a dark side, something Bill said he didn't notice until after his heart attack. You know that he told counselors that he was actually killing animals before then. Did you have any sense of that, Bill? No, not at all. In fact, I had, because of all the upheaval and the family and the rest, I had no basis of experience to counsel him. But he told the FBI agent that he had thought about killing your wife's... Lover. Lover. That he thought about killing her. That was two years earlier. As Daniel entered the Yolo County Courthouse almost a year and a half after Claudia Moppin and Chip Northup's murders, a judge and jury were about to decide his fate.

9:39Now on trial is Daniel Marsh, the teenager being tried as an adult after the gruesome killings that rocked the city of Davis last year.

9:51On Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014, the long-awaited murder trial against Daniel Marsh, now 17 years old, began at the Yolo County Courthouse. Daniel had been charged as an adult with two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors concluded that he had, quote, committed a very adult crime in a very adult manner. And then, just three months before the trial began, Daniel changed his plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity, a clear indication of the defense to come.

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11:14Inside the courtroom, Daniel looked noticeably different from the year before, when he had first confessed to killing Chip Northup and Claudia Moppen. Gone was the long, scruffy hair. Now it was cut short, neater and darker. He showed zero emotion. He didn't seem scared. He would just face forward. He never cried. This is Amanda Zambor, the Deputy District Attorney for Yolo County. I spoke with her in 2018. At the time of the trial, she was one of the two prosecutors. Had you ever run into a defendant like this? Not in real life, only in books when you read about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, as all people that he idolized and studied and identified with.

12:12And did that add a whole other, the fact that this defendant was a kid? Yeah, so I was pregnant with my third child during the trial. And you definitely reflect back, and how can a child do this? How can they have such a depraved mind? How do they get that way? is it possible to change them? Zambor, along with co-prosecutor Michael Cabral, began prepping for the trial as soon as Daniel was arrested in June 2013. Davis Police Department thankfully built a very strong case, and Chris Campion from the FBI did a masterful job in his interview of Marsh. Had Campion not been on that, I don't know that we would have gotten the confession that we did, but they really built a solid case on Marsh from the get-go once we figured out it was him.

13:05What about, though, the defense argument that this guy, this young man, had a lot of trauma. His mother left the family for another woman. He was in this car accident when his father had a heart attack. He had to save his father. He was bullied in school. Possible that that could cause this kind of anger and lashing out? You know, there's no doubt that he had some trauma in his life, but there's how many kids that go through and have divorced parents and they don't kill other people. They may struggle with depression, they may struggle with other things, but there's a lot of people who actually have severe trauma that don't act like this.

13:49But Zambor needed to convince the jurors that Daniel had intended to kill. I mean, he had been fantasizing about it since he was 10, 11 years old about killing somebody. So it wasn't this spur of the moment murder where he just snapped and went out. He planned and stole items and sharpened the knife and put duct tape on his boots to not leave footprints, which, you know, it just shows how intelligent he is. To put Daniel behind bars, Zambor needed to make the case to jurors that Daniel knew exactly what he was doing. And if given the chance, he'd do it again. And if that happened, he'd be even better at it.

14:37I believe he would have gotten away with these murders if he had not bragged to his friends. If he had not bragged, he would have killed others. He would have. He bragged about going out with a baseball bat in the middle of the night and just not being able to find the right victim. He had plotted and planned another victim for his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and had done reconnaissance on him and, I mean, knew the pets in the home, the neighbors, what family members lived there. He had created a Facebook account to get more intel on this family to try and figure out how he could kill them. And he actually went out and waited for him on one night, but he didn't come.

15:16In the courtroom, the prosecution questioned dozens of witnesses, including friends of Chip and Claudia, Daniel's former friend, Alvaro Garibay, police officers and psychiatrists. One witness, a member of the Davis Police Department, helped process the crime scene. He testified that the bloodstain patterns left behind suggested that Chip and Claudia were awake and had tried to defend themselves against Daniel. Claudia fought, made him mad, and it just invigorated him to keep going. He describes how her pleas for him to stop just enthused him, made him want to keep going. These were horrific details.

16:08Prosecutors tried to prepare Claudia and Chip's families for what they would hear in the courtroom. So they would brief us before we'd go in and say, okay, now in this next part, you're going to hear some things that you haven't heard before. Claudia's daughter, Victoria, told me that one of the most painful times for her was sitting in court watching that taped interview between FBI Special Agent Chris Campion and Daniel Marsh. It was really tough for me, especially when he got to the part where he talked about killing my mother. And he talked about he had to keep stabbing her because she wouldn't die and that she was begging for her life.

16:56and that was hard. And I felt, I was sitting there and I felt like I couldn't stay in the seat anymore. I felt like it was so real that I was experiencing the death of my mother. He was saying all the details in the interview and I felt like I was watching the murder of my mother and I couldn't sit, I stood. How do you describe a person like Daniel Marsh? after hearing him talk. My mind can't process that degree of evil. So hearing that was just something that I just can't go there. I can't. It's so dark. It's just so dark.

17:45Adding to Victoria's horror was the score of friends and fans. Yes, fans who showed up to the trial to support Daniel. He had a lot of goth followers. So he had a lot of young women who were following him, acting like little teenage girls, you know, dressed in black and black makeup and all that, and thinking that he was innocent, you know. And if he could have waved at them or hugged them or shook them hands, it was like he was a celebrity, like he was the celebrity that he wanted to be. No remorse. Oh, no. He was reveling in his celebrity. The prosecution was convinced that not only did Daniel know exactly what he was doing when he killed Chip and Claudia, but the big question at trial, was Daniel in his right mind?

18:39Was he sane when committing the murders? Daniel's defense team intended to prove he wasn't. And this was the man they wanted to help make that case. So my name is Dr. Matthew Soulier, and I'm a child forensic psychiatrist. I was hired by his attorney in 2013 to evaluate him as part of his original trial. I sat down with Dr. Soulier in 2018 and again in 2025. My job really was to kind of explore his life history, beginning with birth until the day I was meeting him, and try to get a sense of what his life story is, some of his more critical experiences in relationships, history of trauma. And specifically as it related to the defense, I needed him to tell me about what he did.

19:28And I needed to try to figure out if in fact he was, if it was going to be my opinion that he was criminally responsible or not. Suley first met Daniel a few months after his arrest. In 2013, I met him at the Yolo County Juvenile Hall. and he was dressed in typical juvenile hall attire. He was a different kind of kid. I mean, it does stick out to me that there was a coldness to him. Despite even the number of hours that I spent with him, I didn't feel that, I mean, there was a heart or that there was a feeling in him. In fact, Daniel was still regularly thinking about killing people. He told Soulier that he had thoughts of harming his peers and the people taking care of him in Juvenile Hall.

20:21Then, just like FBI Special Agent Chris Campion, Dr. Soulier found himself on the receiving end of Daniel's homicidal thoughts. I asked him, what are you thinking about? And he said, I'm thinking about killing you. I'm thinking about taking that pen on your table right there and shoving it in your neck. I'm thinking about taking your laptop and crushing it over your head. It wasn't the only time that a patient had threatened Dr. Soulier. So while he took it seriously, it didn't deter him from trying to speak with Daniel again. He was able to go back a week later. Dr. Soulier believed that Daniel's desire to kill him and others was actually the result of an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

21:16It's my belief that, you know, Daniel wasn't born a bad seed. I don't believe in that. Daniel clearly changed around the age of 10. By everybody's observation and what we could gather about him, he wasn't a terrible kid up until age 10. But you don't think he was born that way? No, no. The issue of psychopathy, it's clearly something that, yes, there's probably some level of genetic predisposition to it, but he wasn't a bad kid in preschool or kindergarten. There's no evidence of that of any kind. There's something that was unlocked in him. There were forces, there were experiences, things that happened to him that I think made him who he was.

22:03Dr. Soulier also believed that Daniel didn't want to be this way, that he had wanted to stop his compulsive behavior. In his case, he developed these morbid preoccupations about death, about killing people. But again, the thing that was important to note to me was that it was disturbing to him. He was going around telling everybody and anybody who would listen to him. He told school. He told a transporting police officer. He told his therapist. He told a psychiatrist. He told anybody that he wanted to kill everybody. I have these thoughts. I don't want to have them. Ultimately, he did act on them.

22:42But the precursor was sadomasochistic sex, gore porn. All these things was an attempt, in my mind, to diminish the intensity of those preoccupations. And at first, it worked. At first, it would dissolve those thoughts and feelings about killing other people. But ultimately, that gave out. And it wasn't sufficient. And ultimately, he then acted on it. But at some point, Daniel seemed to stop fighting his compulsions. The horror he had once felt had morphed into something else. Rather than being repelled and upset by what he had done, when he finally listened to those repetitive thoughts, he was actually excited about it, proud.

23:26What does that say? That's disturbing. That's deviant. Again, that's the psychopathy in him that really lacks feeling. He just is unable to feel compassion for those that he hurt at that time in 2013. And that's scary. But here's the important part. Daniel might have had strong compulsions to kill, compulsions that he struggled to control. But Dr. Soulier concluded that Daniel was not legally insane. What would make him insane? What are you looking for? Is it like a memory of, does he have all the details? Did he know what he did? Does he remember doing it? It is a very high standard. You have to be able to lack an appreciation for what you did.

24:21So, for instance, while you're holding a knife, you think you're holding a spoon or something that's completely unrelated and that you really fail to understand the morality of what you're doing, the consequences of what you're doing. It's typically reserved for people that have very severe psychiatric illness, psychotic illness, people that are acting under the direction of delusions or voices. And none of this was true for Daniel. The fact that Daniel actually bragged about what he was doing and seemed to enjoy it, but also covering the bottom of his shoes with tape. What does that say to you when you're trying to determine whether he's insane or not?

25:06It shows that he's engaging in logical and linear behaviors. He's calculating, he's planning in a logical manner. We might disagree with what he's doing, obviously, and it's terrible, but it's not psychotically driven in any way. Dr. Soulier was convinced that Daniel knew what he was doing when he committed the murders. But despite Soulier's professional assessment, Daniel's defense team was determined to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. And they planned to prove that the medications Daniel had taken made him that way. The drugs made me do it. Exactly. The drugs and antidepressant specifically.

25:51And what I basically told defense is that I couldn't get on board with the idea of the defense of an insanity. Particularly, I didn't believe that the antidepressants caused him to act in that way or kill. So the defense said, thank you. And they went and found another expert. The defense called Dr. James Marikangas to testify as an expert witness. A neurologist and psychiatrist, he interviewed Daniel and his family members several times and reviewed Daniel's previous medical records and police statements. Dr. Merrick Hengis' testimony focused largely on SSRIs, a class of antidepressants that included medications that Daniel had been prescribed to treat severe depression.

26:41According to Merrick Hengis, the side effect of those drugs could include extreme restlessness, outbursts of anger, and increased impulsivity. Daniel, he said, was experiencing those side effects. The doctor believed that Daniel had endured trauma for years, and that had, in part, made him more susceptible to dangerous side effects. Daniel's father, Bill Marsh, also believed that Daniel's behavior was caused by medication. It turns your world upside down, turns your brain inside out. You think that's the only reason why he killed Chip? I do, yeah. But isn't it just possible your son is a psychopath?