EXCLUSIVE: Brian Nichols went from college athlete to cold-blooded killer

The following story is told by Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Mark Winne, who spent years working on this report.

ATLANTA -- The voice on the phone sounded softer than one might expect for a hardcore killer of four innocent people in perhaps the most notorious active-shooter rampage in Georgia history.

“You do not deny you committed the crimes of which you were convicted?” we asked.

“Oh no. Absolutely not,” he replied. “I never have denied it.”

Brian Nichols escaped the Fulton County courthouse in March 2005 in the midst of his rape trial, murdering Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Brandau, Deputy Hoyt Teasley and later, while on the run, federal agent David Wilhelm.

The phone conversations culminated months of effort to land the first news interview with Nichols to try to glean what we could about the mind of an active shooter in an age where such attacks have become epidemic.

Through an intermediary, we received word that Nichols would be willing to speak with us, but the Georgia Department of Corrections, apparently harboring security concerns, declined to allow our camera for a Nichols interview.

So we conducted the interview via a series of phone calls through the intermediary, who told us that she is the only non-family member on his small approved call list. She is a crime victim herself, who has vividly described how another killer shot her six times and gunned down her best friend as she cradled a newborn. She told us that she knew Nichols before his rampage.

When Nichols called at a pre-arranged time, she put her cellphone on speaker mode. To stay within prison rules, I asked a question and our intermediary would repeat it or paraphrase.

It was a tough way to conduct an interview; we were not about to coddle a killer, but to finish, we needed to keep him on the line, even to call back. For brevity and other reasons, we edited out the intermediary’s voice in the broadcast version of the Nichols interview.

Before we got to the meat of the interview, he wavered in whether he would follow through.

“In doing an interview with you, there will be nothing that I want from that, really, other than to express my remorse, you know for the things that I’ve done,” he said in the first call.

Some may see such sentiments as self-serving. He expressed them repeatedly in the half-dozen or so phone calls during which we conducted the interview.

In prepping for the interview, I reviewed a script I wrote in 2008, involving interviews I did with Atlanta police homicide detectives who worked on the case. The story included their reactions to the guilty verdicts.

Detective Vince Velazquez said: “He's sorry for himself. I don't think he's sorry for what he did, one bit.”

Nearly eight years later, we asked Nichols whether he was sorry for his victims or for himself. As with each issue we covered, we hope viewers can listen and judge for themselves.

The interview ranged widely. For instance, we asked: “Do you believe you’re going to heaven or hell?”

I’ve covered the case since the first day. I was the first reporter over what became the arrest scene, in Gwinnett County, in NewsChopper 2. I have interviewed and come to know and care about a number of those left behind by Nichols’ rampage.

One of them is Gayle Abramson, the prosecutor on the original rape case that was interrupted by his escape. She told me recently that she missed Nichols in court by "maybe a minute."

One of the most gripping portions of the Nichols interview, to me, came when we sought to ascertain whether there was nearly a fifth victim: Abramson.

As we tried to plumb the depths of his psyche for clues on how his mindset became so twisted that he would kill four innocent people, we wanted to know if his rage was fueled, at least in part, by how little he had accomplished in life, given his intellect, his background as a college athlete, even his status as a ladies’ man.

And his answers concerning one topic proved among the most fascinating and relevant to contemporary issues. It involved his drug use.

"Nobody smoked more weed than I did at the time,” he told me, and much more.

He indicated, at one point, a desire to comment on football brain injuries -- a subject, in recent years, of litigation and voluminous news coverage. So we asked if he would leave his brain to medical science.

We note that two days after the murders, a wire-service story suggested that, even during the era when he was a football player, Nichols had legal problems of the sort one might expect from one with anger problems.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the interview was Nichols’ unwillingness -- or inability, he seemed to suggest at times -- to discuss certain particulars or why he shot specific victims.

He claimed that he was delusional, which, after a review of the trial coverage by my now-retired colleague Jeff Dore, coincides with Nichols’ unsuccessful defense at trial. Interestingly, however, Nichols told us in our interview, “It took me a long time to actually realize that I was delusional.”

In one of Dore’s trial scripts, a member of Nichols’ legal team says: “The delusion in this case was that Brian Nichols was a slave.”

Dore’s script shows a soundbite from one of the prosecutors, Clint Rucker: “He’s not mentally ill. He’s not delusional. But he lies.”

In our interview, Nichols put forth none of those claims about slavery motivating him. In one phone call, I read from one of Dore’s trial stories, about Nichols’ confession to police: "They heard Nichols say he was fighting a noble war against slavery."

My question for Nichols: “Is that true or were you gaming the detectives?”

Nichols said in our interview: “No. That was a part of the delusion. I said a lot of things to justify my delusion.”

If he was trying to run a game on police, it didn’t work, not in terms of avoiding a guilty verdict or life in the super-strict high-max unit of a Georgia prison. He suggested, however, that the delusional claim at trial “was one of those things that was taken into consideration to keep me off of death row.”

Cox Media Group