The 48 Hours Between Mica's Divorce Papers and Her Death

0:00This is Hidden Tillers Live with Tony Brusky and Robin Dree. Michael was found dead from a gunshot with just 48 hours after serving J.P. with divorce papers, instead of interesting coincidence. The day after her death J.P. held a bizarre church service. A year later, he married Susie Skinner, a woman from his church whose previous husband died in a tragic pool accident, a quadriplegic that somehow wheeled his way into the pool. If that was on purpose, or an accident, well, it's been deemed an accident. That's where it sits right now, as of right now. No one's been charged and it has a murder, but again, little weird. Just a little. Shavon, the thing that I think strikes so many people, this man who apparently had this fervent, I don't know what it called, love. Obsession with Micah and all the horrible things he was doing to her leading up to her

1:00death. But also, he cares about her so deeply. He goes to such lengths prior to her death and then she's dead. He's able to just start a church service. He's joking at the beginning. He does a parody song to Billy Joel's in the middle of the night, the river of dreams. And he yucks it up on stage with one of the congregants. Does a whole sermon, doesn't mention anything about Micah until the very end and then suddenly, suddenly the lights go down and by the way, she's dead. Don't talk about it as you leave. Have a nice day. It's like, what kind of compartmentalization is going on here? I mean, I think the first thing anybody thinks of is, you know, you can take a breath if your ex-wife or your wife dies at circumstances like this. You know, I think everyone understand if somebody else took the reins that morning and did

2:03the show and did the church service. That wasn't what happened here. He was able to be very composed on stage there at the church and deliver really, I guess, one would consider a normal service until the very end. And even that was not, I would say, I don't know what normal is when you're describing something like that. But it didn't seem, I guess, cohesive to reality. What the hell was going on there? How would you describe what you saw in that? Completely bizarre. That was, you know, when we were watching on YouTube, the different clips about this story when it first happened. That was the weirdest thing. I mean, there have been so many weird things about this. But that flies in the face of everything we know about how people process emotions. Yeah. Don't just get up and give a sermon. If he had genuinely had any kind of loving attachment with her, it makes no sense at all.

3:09And again, you would think the congregation would go, well, this was a little weird, but these folks apparently didn't. It's completely strange. And again, with the kind of histrionic personality, they can, when they do the big emotions, like, oh, how much I love her and I want her back and I'm trying so hard to get her back, it's about this deep, you know, it's not real. None of that caring about her was real. She was an object to him. And this, you know, yeah, I don't even know how to describe it other than it's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen and witnessed. And it seems he really had to tell the narrative that she was crazy. I mean, that seems to be the underlying thing. That was the theme. The whole time. Anytime he talked about it, like, well, you know, she's mentally ill. It's not, I mean, I think like a healthy person who has someone like that in their life that is trying to care for them and try to help them. When you're talking about them, that's not necessarily the thing you bring up into

4:12everybody. It's like, yeah, they're doing good. You know, like, and their bad shit fucking crazy, you know, I mean, they're not listening to me. They're not listening to me. I mean, it got real like the pathology, everything, like he was really, he was getting into her pathology with anybody and anyone who would listen. How important was that for somebody like that to basically, she's crazy. So anything that comes out of her mouth that's going to talk about me and my crazy, it just, he was a giant veil for covering up his shit. It seems like. And I mean, how much fear is going on there when she serves the divorce papers that I'm going to be exposed? I mean, the divorce papers get issued two days later, she's dead. I'm not saying he did it, but the narcissistic injury that I'm sure that caused was pretty deep and how he lashed out again, I'm not saying he did it, but how he then presented all of this out there was very much, you know, it's not about me at all. He's the second one.

5:12Let's talk about that. Yeah, always. That was his agenda and he brought it up over and over and over and you know, she's on meds, she's not taking her meds, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we have no way of knowing the truth about any of that and where any of the meds appropriate would have been needed if she was not with him, which I think, I think is a really strong possibility. But yeah, it's all self-serving, it's the story he's telling to make himself look like, look, I'm such a wonderful guy and she was crazy. And if that's not gaslighting, I don't know what is because he's playing a game on everybody and trying to manipulate and control the narrative to make himself look good. Yeah, I tell you, it was really, I mean, it was skillful manipulation because he's seen controlling narratives before with these controlling freaks. And he was definitely attempted to control the narrative, but his ability to do that so far in advance by laying the groundwork of her being crazy and him saying, please take

6:19the meds, he's laying up that, in other words, he can actually always preempt all of her actions or after the fact respond to her actions no matter what they are because he set it up months and years ahead of time with, well, she must be off her meds, I told her to take her meds and so no matter what she does, he's got the narrative under control. Even though he probably couldn't predict the future, no matter what, so he intuitively, it looks like control set narrative preemptively with the people that he wants to bring into a circle. He gains these levers of control over them. Yeah, it was just, I mean, it's, you could write a book on how to be a narcissist. Yeah, I mean, how, talk about this for a little bit, like how frequently in practice do you see this sort of thing where you have a couple and they need some help, they need some direction and they're coming to you and it's this sort of a dynamic, not to the extreme where somebody's getting murdered, but where one is going to control the whole narrative of what's going on here, she's crazy or he's crazy and here's why when it really

7:22is the other way around, but it's being presented in such a way and they really think they can sell it to everybody. I mean, is this, you know, how does, talk to that of your experience? Yeah, it definitely does happen and that's when we can go back to the good old acronym that's so popular, Darvod, deny attack, reverse victim and offender and a guy that comes in like that will always present himself as a victim. And that's why my style with couples is to see them individually before I see them together because I want to hear really from their point of view what's going on and you pick up on a lot of this stuff that way and then see them together and interestingly enough, a guy like this often, it's right out there and they start immediately telling the therapist, well, this is what's wrong with her and that's what's wrong with her and none of it fits the person that I met individually.

8:24And then I've even had them call me on the phone, which is quite interesting and leave a long voicemail about, let me tell you what I think about her and what you need to do with her. And it's always way off base, but it's this, you know, people like this really believe they can manipulate the therapist too. And it's, yeah, prognosis is not good. These are the ones, what is treatment goal here? How per se she needs to get away from him, you know? And sometimes it can go the other way with gender, you know? But when people come to marital counseling or couples counseling often they come in with the agenda, we just want to make this a good marriage. We want to transform this. And when you have this kind of abuse going on, they just need to get away from each other. And that's one of the reasons at this point in my long career, I prefer not to do a lot of couples just because I end up so much of the time saying you just need to get away

9:29from him. Yeah. And nobody wants that. They're coming in for help and you're like, fuck it, run for your life. And sometimes they just need the validation. And those are the people that come back to me 20 years later. Sure. And say I just want to thank you so much for helping me see that I needed to get away. So what you typically do in those situations, Shavon? Because I'm sitting here thinking myself, I've always thought of, I would have liked to have done that going into counseling. I didn't have the 50 pound brain like you do for her. But thinking I'd love to go in there and help be a resource for people moving forward with healthy relationships. Well, when you face complete nutters that are so entrenched, like one like this, I have such good healthy relationships in my life now because I see people's red flags so far in the distance that I just, I can say so far away. But in this case, it's right in your face. And so do you, I mean, what do you do? Do you just say go away or do you encourage them to, or do you take them on and try to fix

10:32them? Or do you just say, do you, you two just need to get away from each other? Well, I try to, I try to be a little less direct than you need to get away from each other. Probably not in the beginning what they want to hear. But I do, I'm confused a lot. And I'll say, okay, John, you say you love Mary, but X, Y, and Z happened. And just in front of me, you just said these really incredibly mean criticisms. How is that love? Can you explain how that's loved to me? And then he'll go into his self-justification and then I'll say, okay, that sort of sounds like control. And can you see things from her point of view he never can? And so there's a lot of questioning and confusion. And then somewhere near the end of the visit, and this is often in one visit, I'll say, you know, it sounds like you're very happy with who you are.

11:35And the only thing you see here is that you want Mary to be submissive and to, you know, agree with everything you want. Are you happy with how you are? Do you have any goals to work on yourself other than come in and sit here and point the finger at Mary? And he doesn't. And he'll say, no, I think I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine. And then I look at Mary and say, Mary, are you hearing this? He is fine the way he is. And often I get this surprise look. And that can be the place where you intervene and where you see a shift. So it doesn't know either that way, but that's my very own goal. And you call an Uber for one of them so you don't hear like about. And then they drove directly into an 18-wheeler on the way home. You know, because I mean, I would be, I mean, honest, I've been with an ex. I've been in a session before where it was just like, you know, things were brought to

12:35light where it was uncomfortable for her of like, and then, and unfortunately, we drove together and she was driving us and trust me. I was gripping the like plea, like if I have to go and grab the real wheel, really quick because I think she might be a little uncomfortable with what was revealed about her psyche here today. One more thing on this, just over a year later, JP married Susie. Skinner, we talked about that a little bit. Shockingly Susie's previous husband died in a mysterious pool accident. And JP had officiated their wedding too. It is with this guy officiating people's weddings and then sleeping with the bride. And then, I mean, this is like, what are the odds here on this? I mean, I mean, statistically, I can't imagine there's a lot of people who've officiated two weddings for people, eventually married them and then have like two rather shocking deaths connected to said person or person's partner shortly thereafter.

13:36I mean, that to me, red flag. I mean, I think legal England is what it is. I mean, I guess what it just, I mean, I don't know what the question is, but what do you make of that pattern that we're seeing here with JP? Another bizarre thing. Another bizarre thing. He does one weird thing after another. And you almost get the sense it's, it's look what I can get away with, look what I can do. And he's attracted to that sense of power. It's, yeah, there's just every which way with this guy. It signs of toxicity, narcissism, histrionics, mockification, he's manipulative. Yeah. He's the full old country buffet of cluster B. Like, what do you want? I'll go to the cluster B bar over here. It's right next to the salad. Looks delicious. It's got this little dirty over here. So one more shivon. If we have a second. So we haven't really talked about what makes someone like this yet.

14:38Because we talk about those arcs. I love talking about those arcs because they're so predictive. Passes, prologues with these sorts of things. And it's easy to talk about psychopathy because that's a lot of malformations, brains. And then some part of how he grew up as well, it might throw some cares. Someone like JP, what kind of, is there a typical upbringing that someone has or a typical background that they have that creates this sort of super uber, controlling nutter that wants to sexually abuse people and get all conjecture. But from what we saw from the special, what makes that nut? We love to have the exact template, right? Best guess is, we know a lot of personality traits are inherited. We understand that far more than we used to. He had a dad who was apparently very sexually compulsive, very manipulative, very similar, also a pastor who did terrible things. So my guess is there's a genetic component to the personality and then he was raised by

15:43someone that he modeled after. And if we got enough into his childhood, what kind of kid was he? He was probably weird in elementary school and a lot of this stuff was going on. So. Well, that would be interesting. That would be a, that's the sitcom, right? A dark sitcom, JP in elementary. As a child, yes. As a child, I can only imagine the horror stories. Child piano prodigy turns into complete nutter creep. If I had an extra day of the week, I'd be like trying to find like the yearbook and reaching out to the classmates that went to school with them. That would be a very interesting. You might find it was only three of them that they were in a classroom or a room together in someone's house coistered. That's true. That might be what we find. You're exactly, yeah, I'm going to dig. I'm going to dig a little bit. Hard to imagine him in public school and making it through, but maybe. I don't know, I don't know, maybe, maybe he's on the playground like doing like preaching

16:45as a child or something. He's got a little cult started in third grade. All right, your thoughts in the comments section, substack and YouTube. We'd love for you to weigh in. Of course, going to keep following this as it continues to go forward. There's so much more to this case. I'm so happy Netflix finally brought it out into the ether beyond just the handful of us who've been reporting on it. And then John Paul attacking everyone who does in a very coercive controlling sort of way. Sorry, John, it's out for Netflix now. The world's coming for you. Have fun, JP. All right. All right, your thoughts in the comments section until next time. For Shivan, whose latest book is right here in Nightbird, you got it right here, check it out wherever you get books. Robbins got master class. Robin. Yes, become the person that everyone trusts. That's a great thing for everything we do every life. And yeah, you get it on masterclass. You go to masterclass.com, backslash, RobinDrieck, my name. That's it.

17:47Good times together. There you go. Links in the description as well. Go and check that out. Until next time for Robin, Shivan and Todd, I'm Tony. We'll talk again real soon.