Cycles That Kill

Corey Pujols spent twenty-seven years learning how to regulate his anger, protect his dignity, and take accountability for his actions, until one racist slur from a man with a decades-long history of entitlement and predatory behavior pushed that regulation to its limit. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Corey Pujols and Vonelle Cook case through the lens of racial batt...

Christa Pike entered the world with neurological damage, survived a childhood marked by abandonment, abuse, and repeated failures of protection, and at 18, she brutally murdered her Job Corps peer, Colleen Slemmer. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Christa Pike case through the lens of prenatal maternal failure, disrupted primary attachment, the absent protection patter...

Wade Wilson entered the world through two children who were not equipped to raise him, and by twenty-five, years of identity disruption, neurological trauma, addiction, and escalating violence culminated in the murders of two women in a single night. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Wade Wilson case through the lens of adoptee identity disruption, cumulative traumatic...

Martha McKay spent twenty-four years believing that even the man who murdered her mother could be redeemed, and when he was finally released from prison, she welcomed him back onto the very property where her mother had been killed. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Martha McKay case through the lens of boundary collapse in the name of grace, misplaced grace, traumatic...

All season, Cycles That Kill has traced what maternal failure can let in, what generational cycles can produce, and what they can cost when no one intervenes early enough. In this episode, Dr. Dylesia closes Season 1 with social worker Joe Wilson, LCSW-C, examining the power of community intervention to interrupt cycles that families cannot break alone. This episode is not just about what happens...

WT's attachment to her teenage boyfriend became so consuming that she came to see the people who loved her most as obstacles, and over the course of one week, the two executed five members of her own family. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the East St. Louis Bonnie & Clyde case through the lens of attachment displacement, dyadic coercive control, folie à deux, fla...

The choices parents make can create conditions that allow their children’s violence to reach innocent people. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the cases of Ethan Crumbley (the Oxford High School shooter), the 6-year-old who shot his 1st grade teacher in Newport News, and Robert Crimo III (the Highland Park Parade shooter) through the lens of transferred lethality, willful...

Linda and Charlotte Mulhall grew up believing that protecting their mother was their responsibility. So when their mother asked them to kill the man who had abused her, they did. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Mulhall Sisters case through the lens of emotional parentification, instrumental parentification, the intergenerational transmission of domestic violence, trau...

Susan Smith spent her childhood learning that love required silence and sacrificing herself, and one day, she came to believe that her children were standing between her and the life she desperately wanted. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the Susan Smith case through the lens of loyalty conditioning, betrayal trauma, fear-based bonding, abandonment schema, and image-drive...

Devon Robinson attended a gay party, got his rocks off, left in distress, and returned less than an hour later to eliminate everyone who'd saw. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines what happened during the Memorial Day Weekend that shattered Detroit's LGBTQ community, and explores the deadly outcomes of selfhood and humiliation colliding. This is not just a story about...

Karmelo Anthony turned a dispute over a seat at a high school track meet into a murder case. Vickrum Digwa convinced police to handcuff a dying man after claiming he was the real victim. Ruben Whitworth threatened to kill his roommate over mozzarella sticks, and two weeks later, he did. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines these cases through the lens of hypervigilance, threat...

Taylor Parker didn’t just fake a pregnancy, she manufactured a false identity, and when that identity began to collapse, Reagan Simmons-Hancock and her unborn daughter, Braxlynn Sage, paid the price. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines the case featured in Netflix’s Maternal Instinct through the lens of identity disturbance, emotional dysregulation, compulsive deception, and...

Thirty years ago, 43-year-old Delois Anderson was abducted from her Memphis home, taken to a cemetery, and buried alive alongside her son and his teenage friend. While public attention has focused on the men connected to the crime, almost nobody has stopped to ask about Delois herself. In this episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia uses her clinical framework, Origin Mapping, to explore the inte...

Netflix’s coverage of the Mackenzie Shirilla case, The Crash , left viewers with a big, unanswered question: What the f#@k is wrong with this family? In the premiere episode of Cycles That Kill, Dr. Dylesia examines exactly that, exploring the family dynamics that conditioned Mackenzie Shirilla to commit vehicular homicide, taking the lives of her long-term boyfriend, Dominic Russo and friend, Dav...