Adopted Son Used Axe to Kill Mother | The Interrogation Room hosted by Vivica A. Fox | Forensic Files

(intense music) - [Vivica] Observing the signs. - [Parm] He's in a state of shock
at finding his mother like that. - [Vivica] Detecting changing stories. - [Robyn] There's this big breathing moment. (exhaling)
- [Robyn] And then comes the new version of events. - [Vivica] Spotting when to hold back.
- [Vivica] And when to close in. - People who lie, love to create. And that's what you're looking for in an interrogation.
And this is a moment of creation. - I'm Vivica A. Fox. I'm about to give you exclusive access
into the secrets of the interrogation room. See how the world's finest detectives,
armed only with their wits, hone in on their suspects, break down their lies, and expose the shocking truth.
We'll examine the signs a suspect is lying and reveal the expert techniques that result in an all-important confession,
while getting justice for the victims and their families. - Internally, his emotions are beginning to unravel.
There's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye. (intense music) - [Vivica] Citrus County.
17-year-old Carlos Hallowell has been brought to police headquarters while authorities arrange for him to be taken into care.
Just over three hours earlier, at 6:15 p.m., he made a frantic 911 call. (phone rings)
- [Vivica] Carlos was relaying a horrific scene. His mother, Denise Hallowell, lying in bed
with an axe embedded in the side of her head. (dial tone) - [Vivica] Police and paramedics arrive
to find Carlos in a state of severe distress. - [Vivica] His mother, Denise, was unresponsive
and pronounced dead 6:50 p.m. Denise Hallowell had adopted Carlos, a Guatemalan-born orphan, in 2006,
when he was just four years old, and raised him as a single mother. Fast forward some 13 years later,
with Carlos almost 18 years old, on July 13th, 2019. Denise and Carlos attended the funeral of a family friend
in nearby St Petersburg. After returning home to their secluded lakeside house,
they sat in the kitchen table and ate apple pie together, then both retired to their rooms for an afternoon nap.
Three hours later, Carlos was calling 911. - [Vivica] Denise was lying face-down on her bed, dying.
- I know. - The case is automatically a homicide. In order to track down Denise Hallowell's killer,
the cops race to gather the critical evidence quickly before the trail goes cold.
- So this is a 17-year-old child who's found his mother, who is dead, with an axe embedded in her skull.
This is more trauma than most people have in their lifetime. - There are implications of interviewing a 17-year-old,
because they're under-age, they're under 18. But, at the same time, you've got to balance the needs of that 17-year-old
against the needs of this investigation. There's a person running around who's just committed murder.
- We'll try to interview anybody that could possibly be a witness or involved with the case, right away.
If they were traumatized by it, we don't go into a really detailed interview because victims that have been traumatized
may not memorize as well, right there and then. So we'll usually wait several days,
but we'll still get a baseline of what happened and get their story or their version of what occurred.
There could have been somebody that was loose that we don't, know another killer.
We didn't know at the time. We didn't have any facts yet, because we hadn't done all our investigative stuff yet.
- [Ciolino] You know, when you're dealing with young men, their frontal lobe in their brain
is not fully developed till they're 24, 25. Physically, you look like you're talking to an adult male.
But you have to remember, you're dealing with a kid. - At this point, the detectives don't know what's going on.
They need to find out what happened in that house as quickly as possible. At the same time, the detectives are gonna tread really carefully
to ensure not to further traumatize this young child whose mother is dead. - Despite detectives needing to
treat the traumatized Carlos with care, he is still the last person to have seen his mother alive.
They need to push him for as much information as they can at this crucial stage.
- [Vivica] Carlos remains extraordinarily calm for someone who just found their mother dead
with an axe in her head. Is this the result of trauma, or could this be a red flag for detectives?
- Everybody reacts differently to trauma, so we don't go just based on how their reactions are,
but more of their statements and what they're saying occurred, if it makes sense or not, and if it's plausible.
- [Vivica] Certainly Carlos's body language could be enough to rule him out as a suspect.
- Looking for the baselines, breathing nice and calm, you know, lots of good eye contact,
normal sort of gestures with the hands, quite animated, wasn't looking to shift his posture,
no signs of deception. You know, this is somebody that could be innocent. - For now, the cops focus on the facts
and work through Carlos' version of events in fine detail. If his story can be verified,
Citrus County police will have the confidence to focus elsewhere. Coming up, inconsistencies are revealed.
- [Vivica] Detectives confront Hallowell. - [Vivica] July, 2019, 17-year-old Carlos Hallowell's mother, Denise,
has been brutally murdered with an axe. As the last person to see her alive, Carlos has been assisting Citrus County detectives
in the hunt for her killer. - He's almost like painting a picture, this idyllic picture.
Him and his mom, they went out for the day. Okay, they did go to a funeral in the morning,
then they went for pie, she got him his treat, then they came back, had a little rest.
And this is terrible, we're in our own home and somebody has attacked and murdered my mom.
- [Vivica] But from the outset, there are details in Carlos's story that are just not ringing true.
- I saw the injuries that this woman sustained. There was no breathing after she got her head caved in
with a five-pound axe, okay? And so Carlos is creating, all right? And people who lie love to create
and that's what you're looking for in an interrogation. We want them to create, and this is a moment of creation.
"Well, when I got there, "I think she was still breathing." Really? Really, Carlos, you think WE believe that?
No, but they play it cool and they don't confront him yet. - Instead, the detectives asked Carlos
for a detailed description of the hours leading up to his mother's horrific murder.
They want to see what other lies he might create. - So I mean, Carlos's got superhuman hearing, right?
And the detective catches onto this pretty quick and he's trying to backpedal. He's trying to back out of this story
when he understands and realizes, "Ah, well I got my TV on, she got her TV on,
"and I'm telling 'em I didn't hear anything "but I actually heard her TV through two closed doors."
So now the story's starting to get weak. It's like a table with three legs, it's starting to shake a lot.
- [Maleary] About 50 minutes into the interview, both the detectives get up and leave the interview room,
leaving Carlos Hallowell on his own. This would've been a tactical ploy. There could be a tactical advisor sitting outside
listening to what's going on. It may be something around the evidence that they had available,
so they could drip feed it into the interview. - [Vivica] The detectives return
after gathering more background information. They start a new line of questioning.
- [Maleary] Despite the way that Hallowell describes his idyllic life with his mother,
what he failed to mention that on a previous occasion, he'd assaulted her and broken her arm.
- [Vivica] Carlos starts to open up, claiming his mother would punish him physically.
- But he said at the time that it was self-defense. As a result of it, he then left the home
and was staying with friends for a few months. And it's when he started to calm down,
take medication for his depression that she allowed him back in the home. - [Vivica] Carlos claims
he and his mother patched things up and he was welcomed home with open arms. In reality, Denise was scared.
- His mother had CCTV installed because of his behavior. The fact is that she didn't trust him,
and he had a very sinister side to his behavior. - [Darren] That becomes a bit of a tipping point with Hallowell
because that's when we begin to see, you know, these increased signs of anxiety.
Lots of anger micro-expressions, lots of prolonged eye contact, which we've not really seen before, with the officer.
And as we know from experience and research, that prolonged eye contact is not only to try to sell a lie,
that's the first level of aggression. - [Vivica] As the cops continue to probe,
it dawns on Carlos that he's become a prime suspect. - No, I did not do it! I did not harm my mother, right?
So Carlos might be watching some TV and getting a few hints from that, or read a book in the library about interrogations,
but it's all false bravado going on, okay? Because he's not emoting anywhere else.
Now you've accused me of something, I'm gonna emote a little bit. But he should have been emoting all day.
- [Vivica] Carlos is upset, but the detectives aren't buying it, and decide to push harder.
- If we're not getting a lot of stuff that makes sense or we're trying to get some kind of reaction out of him
to see if he flares up at one end or another, or whoever we're interviewing, sometimes we will do stuff like that
to see what kind of reaction we get out of it. - [Vivica] Carlos' mother Denise
had reported her son's earlier assault to the cops. At the time, the investigating officer
had expressed concern about his psychological profile. - Hallowell didn't like the fact that
he was being labelled. It's very, very strong, to go into a 17-year-old with these comments.
However, the officer, I believe, carried out this line of questioning in order to get a reaction.
He wanted Hallowell to show the true person. - Now, sociopaths have no feeling,
they have no moral obligation, they have no empathy. So from that point, then I began to think, ah,
there's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye. - [Vivica] 17-year-old Carlos Hallowell
has been held at police headquarters for over six hours. (intense music) - [Vivica] The police don't have enough evidence
to hold Carlos any longer. As a 17-year-old minor, he is released into the care of the Department of Children and Families.
- Questioning has revealed inconsistency in Hallowell's account. Is he a young man in shock, grieving for his mother,
unable to remember things clearly? Or could it be that Carlos Hallowell is a sociopath
capable of killing his mother with an axe? - This detective really don't wanna believe this kid did it.
Trust me, none of us want to believe a 17-year-old's capable of doing this act.
- Only more time in the interrogation room will tell. Coming up, Carlos claims he blacked out.
- [Vivica] But first come the flashbacks. - In Florida, 17-year-old Carlos Hallowell
has been released by police after being interviewed on the night of his mother Denise's brutal murder.
However, with the history of violence toward her, he is quickly becoming their prime suspect.
- [Ciolino] He doesn't have any kind of alibi. He's in the house, he's present,
but "I'm a deep sleeper" is basically his alibi. You know, "When I go to sleep, that's it."
This violent, and I mean really violent crime occurs and Carlos has no idea what's happening in that home.
None, zero. So right away, the police are like, "Carlos, you're number one with a bullet, my friend."
And they really don't look any further than Carlos. - We didn't have enough at the time to prove he did it.
We were still very early into it. So letting him go and still watching him and making sure he's being supervised,
that was our best course of action at the time. - You do have to get all of the evidence gathered.
And that would mean forensicating the scene, getting any sort of evidence from cameras, phones together
before they put that to Hallowell to say can you explain how this happened? And we've got evidence to support THIS version of events.
- [Vivica] Nine weeks after his mother's murder, Carlos is invited back to the interrogation room.
The Citrus County Police want to show him what their investigation has uncovered.
Detective Holloway interviews Carlos for the first time. - The detectives are now going to
start to confront Carlos with the evidence that they have against him. - And they start by letting him know immediately
that there's an inconsistency in his story and that his phone is telling them what was going on.
- He's been told about what's called cell site analysis, which is the ability for law enforcement
to say where you were and what you were doing on your phone, which not a lot of people realize that we can do.
And those challenges then, you know, created this internal sort of what we call cognitive dissonance.
This incongruity, now he realizes that his account and all of his efforts to come over being super cool
are really not working. - [Vivica] Although he denies it, the cell tower records prove
that Hallowell walked to the lake behind the house to call 911. Why? Detectives may already have the answer.
- [Maleary] In the interview, you can clearly see the new detective bring out a box of evidence.
Now, this would've been really impactive for Hallowell. Hallowell be thinking, "What on earth have they recovered?"
- [Chris] It was a tactic to get him talking more because we had that evidence. I don't think he had an idea of what we actually had,
and he may have thought we were bluffing on what evidence we did have. So it was a tactic more to let him know
we actually have him, we know he did it. - [Vivica] After their previous domestic dispute
when Carlos had broken Denise's arm, she had installed security cameras both outside and inside the house.
(intense music) - [Vivica] Detectives have discovered Denise's CCTV cameras that had been disconnected, and then disposed of
in the lake behind the Hallowell home. But that's not all. - [Robyn] "What else do you think
"we would've found in the lake?" Carlos immediately says, "My mom's phone." The only person who's gonna know that
his mom's phone is in the lake is the person who put his mom's phone in the lake.
- [Parm] The detectives then put the fact that when he was making the 911 call, he was by the lake,
which is why they had searched it in the first place. And at that point, you can see Hallowell's demeanor changing.
- The detectives are talking to Carlos about trying to find justice for them, his mom,
they've been working endless hours, sleepless nights. And they would assume that,
you know, he wants justice too. And you can actually see Carlos take, like, this breath. (inhaling)
"Actually..." and he starts banging the bottle on the table and he's, like, made a decision, okay,
they have this evidence, I need to change my story. I need to change my story.
So I'm gonna give them a new version of events. - As it becomes apparent to Hallowell
that the police have got a lot more evidence than he originally thought they had,
or that they would ever get, he starts talking about having a blackout and he can't remember anything.
- The murderer will always come up with these excuses, I don't remember, I don't recall.
I blacked out, I fainted. I can't remember anything that happened in that time period.
I don't know what's the matter with me. I'm just putting it out of my mind or whatever.
When you hear that, the confession's not far behind, usually. - [Vivica] Detectives now reveal that Carlos's cell phone data
shows that he never took a nap, despite that being his initial statement. With his whole story now dismantled,
he decides to start speaking the truth. - Every time Carlos changes his story,
he always has this big breathing moment, like... (inhaling, exhaling) And then out comes the new version of events.
- At this point, Carlos has stopped disagreeing. Yes, there's no doubt that I did this.
The interview's changed to the affirmative. I'm responsible for it. Where are we going from here?
- The detectives do say, "Well look, you can tell us, tell us what's happened."
And they do use the silences as well, to give him time to reflect and to answer the questions.
- Little by little that he finally admits that he killed his mother. - [Vivica] Carlos has slowly inched his way to a confession,
but his casual demeanor is starkly at odds with the horror of what he has done.
- [Darren] To penetrate the skull to such a depth would've taken, I mean, just a massive amount of anger.
Most people probably couldn't summon that anger. And the innocuousness of the way that Hallowell was speaking about, you know,
finding his mother, et cetera, et cetera, it was almost like he was making dinner.
You know, there was no emotion attached to it. - Carlos Hallowell had taken an axe from the shed,
sharpened it, and then carried it into the room where his mother lay sleeping, then swung it, with full force,
deep into the back of her head. - [Vivica] While Carlos has admitted to the murder,
detectives still need a motive. What would drive a 17-year-old boy to violently slaughter his own mother?
Coming up, Carlos claims he had a good reason. - [Vivica] And he remains hopeful of a bright future.
- I mean, it's all good. It's all good in the hood for Carlos. - Carlos Hallowell has confessed to
the brutal murder of his mother, Denise. To wrap up the interrogation, the cops need to understand why.
When the case goes to trial, explaining motive could be important for securing a conviction.
But understanding the behavior of someone as troubled as Carlos will not be easy.
- [Darren] So when we're looking at someone that's a narcissist or a sociopath, we're looking at somebody that
is not only obsessed with their self image, but also the way they're perceived.
And it's all around control and power. When it's put to him that people have been scared of him,
that's a massive adrenaline rush to his ego and that's why we get these smiles,
because we call that duping delight. It's basically moral superiority. - It's at this point that Hallowell
starts to give a reason for what's taken place. He says that there was an argument
prior to their arrival at home, and it's the first time that there is a modicum of truth
within this entire interview. - [Vivica] According to Carlos, on the way home from a family friend's funeral,
Denise had berated him over his decision not to attend college. - He stated that his mother
had informed him that he was worthless, that he had no credibility, that he was a person that
really was never gonna achieve anything. - [Vivica] Carlos went on to describe his mother, Denise,
as being consistently abusive toward him. - [Chris] I don't think he was abused.
I think his mom was trying to be strict with him to make him actually be responsible
and take responsibility for his actions, what he was doing and not doing. I think he didn't like being told what to do.
- [Maleary] In his version of events, Hallowell would explain that on previous occasions where he'd argued with his mother,
he would attack inanimate objects. - [Maleary] Considering how Denise Hallowell met her demise,
this account is very, very chilling. - [Vivica] Although Carlos has explained why he killed his mother,
he still seems disconnected with the severity of what he has done. - [Chris] I think, besides the immaturity,
he just thought he was entitled to do what he did because his mom abused him. I think he thought he was just gonna get a little slap on a wrist
and everything was gonna be okay. - The most important thing, for me, is that Carlos doesn't think that he's done anything wrong.
He knows that he committed a crime, he knows that, but he doesn't think that he was wrong.
- He starts talking about continuing his education and going to college. It's almost like the facts haven't sunk in
and the enormity of what he's done hasn't sunk in. - "Man, I'm done. I told him what they wanted to hear.
"We're good, it's all good. "No one liked her anyways, right?" This is how he's thinking.
I did everyone a favor, killing her. I go off play baseball, drive her car, and spend her grocery money now.
I mean, it's all good. It's all good in the hood for Carlos. - I don't think he really grasps the fact that
he's going to jail for the rest of his life. - [Vivica] Carlos Hallowell was charged and tried
for premeditated first-degree murder. - He was not eligible for the death penalty
because of his age. But he was tried as an adult. - [Vivica] In July, 2021, Carlos Hallowell was found guilty of first-degree murder
of his adopted mother, Denise, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Although their investigation had taken over two months and many hours of interrogation,
the detectives had been able to bring justice for Denise Hallowell. They had found a way to get inside Carlos's sociopathic mind
and deliver the truth. - [Maleary] The officers successfully empower Hallowell. And by that I mean that he was able to
deliver his true feelings about his mother. It just showed that he had no love
and no respect for the woman that adopted him at the age of four. And the officers didn't close him down.
They allowed him to display his true feelings. - And he does talk about loving his mom,
but I'm not sure that he actually showed any remorse or regret for what happened.
And I thought that was really sad because she had taken him in, she'd adopted him, looked after him
for the whole of his life, and he had repaid her with an axe in her head. - Her whole life was about Carlos.
She put most of her life on hold to raise Carlos. When he was getting older, she wanted him to be a responsible adult,
and the best person he could be. And she definitely did not deserve anything that happened to her.
(intense music)

When 17-year-old Carlos Hallowell calls 911 to report that his adopted mother, Denise Hallowell, has an axe embedded in her skull, he never imagines that police would pinpoint him as their prime suspect. As Carlos claims his innocence inside the interrogation room, shocking revelations of this murderer’s past come to light. Hosted by Vivica A. Fox, THE INTERROGATION ROOM is a brand new true crime series that brings viewers behind the scenes, where real-life murderers and detectives play cat and mouse. Behind every shocking crime is a detective racing to uncover the truth, and it all comes down to the wire inside the interrogation room.

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Brief Summary

Carlos Hallowell confesses to murdering his mother after a tense interrogation revealing his violent past and lack of remorse.

Key points

The Horrific Discovery. Carlos calls 911 after finding his mother dead with an axe in her head.
The Interrogation Begins. Detectives start questioning Carlos, the last person to see his mother alive.
Inconsistencies Arise. Carlos's story begins to unravel as detectives confront him with evidence.
The Confession. Carlos admits to killing his mother, but his demeanor remains unsettlingly calm.
Seeking Motive. Detectives probe Carlos for a motive behind the brutal murder of his mother.
Carlos Hallowell's Mindset. Carlos believes he did everyone a favor by killing his mother.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

There's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye.

Vivica hinting at Carlos's complex character.

1:32WatchJun 20, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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