Case Explained: Dr. Casey Jordan ’86, ’92, ’97: Criminologist, Professor & Podcaster – Legal Perspective

John Jay Degrees: M.A. in Criminal Justice, M.Phil in Criminal Justice, Ph.D. in Criminal Justice
Law Degree: J.D. Quinnipiac School of Law (2004)
Current Role: Justice & Law Administration Professor at Western Connecticut State University, Criminologist, Podcaster, Media Professional
Mentors: Barbara Raffel Price, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Women’s and Gender Studies; Bernard Cohen, Ph.D., former Adjunct Professor, John Jay, former Associate Professor Sociology, Queens College
Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma

What was life like before John Jay College? 
I grew up in upstate New York. So, I always considered myself a Northeast girl. We were never a family of means. We were a very working-class family. My dad was a mechanical engineer and we went wherever the work took him. My mother was mentally ill. She was what we now call bipolar, but we didn’t know it back then.

When I was 10 years old, my dad got transferred to Tulsa, Oklahoma to work on an oil rig. The change was difficult for me, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, but I tried to make the best of the situation. Then, when I was 13, my dad left us for a job in Saudi Arabia and we became a family of five living on $6,000 a year—$500 a month that my dad sent us, $220 of which was for the mortgage. I knew the exact figures because I was the one paying all the bills. 

To make ends meet, my siblings and I took up work wherever we could find it—babysitting, leaf raking, and lawn mowing. When it was time to attend college, I wanted to go away to an Ivy League school like Yale, but I had trouble coming up with the funds and filling out the FAFSA forms because my mother hadn’t filed her taxes in years. When I was 21, I actually saw a lawyer to see if I could sue my mother and make her file her taxes. He didn’t think it was a good idea, but recommended I apply to the University of Tulsa. I had a friend who was two years ahead of me at the University of Tulsa, so I took his advice. 

Why John Jay? 
In 1985, I moved from Oklahoma to New York City. I had earned my B.A. in Political Science and Law & Society from the University of Tulsa, and I had a partner who was a cop and wanted to get his master’s degree at John Jay. At the time, I had been accepted into the master’s program in foreign relations at the University of Stockholm—I wanted to be a Middle East terrorism specialist. So, my partner and I made a deal, we would go to New York City first, and he would get his master’s degree. Then, we would go to Stockholm where I would pursue my master’s degree. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my time in New York, so I looked into John Jay’s programs. I’d never had a criminal justice class before, but it looked fascinating and felt relevant to the terrorism studies I wanted to pursue. I had nothing to lose, so I applied. Unsurprisingly, the relationship with the cop didn’t last, but I really enjoyed what I was learning and earned a master’s degree in criminal justice in three semesters. After we broke up, I completely shifted gears and didn’t look back. I had fallen in love with criminal justice and criminology, very specifically. I went straight into the doctoral criminal justice program at John Jay.

How did your mentors help shape your education?
Bernard (“Bernie”) Cohen was an adjunct professor at John Jay in the Ph.D. program, and he also taught full-time at Queen’s College. He was a very famous criminologist and he pushed me through no matter what obstacles came my way. He always praised my writing. One time in class, he said to me, “Your writing is so good. You should think about writing articles.” Nobody had ever said that to me before. Once, because he was going to be away for several weeks, he had me substitute teach for him at Queens College. That’s when I realized how much I enjoyed teaching. To this day, because of Bernie, I’m still in touch with one of the students I had in that first class back in 1988, and that student went on to become an FBI agent.

Why did you go to law school after earning your Ph.D.?
I always wanted to go to law school after undergrad, but I was fully aware of how expensive it was and worried that law school would be all about memorization and regurgitation. But, because of a lot of the injustices I witnessed in my childhood, I had an intense interest in justice. It deepened from a desire to learn about criminal justice to social justice. That’s why I never gave up on law school. I knew I wanted to get my Ph.D., but in the back of my head, something kept nagging me to go to law school. 

When I asked the chair of my Ph.D. program for a letter of recommendation for law school he actually said, “I’m curious, why would you want to go backwards? You’ve earned a terminal degree.” I didn’t look at it that way. I told him I wanted to practice law and make a difference by being a licensed attorney. And, for five years while working on my Ph.D., I had been a guest on Court TV. That came about because one of my students worked there and gave my number to the producer. I was a recurring guest on the show, but to be an anchor on Court TV you had to be a lawyer. It might sound like a ridiculous reason to want to become a lawyer, but it was part of it.

How did your career in criminology media start?
I love analyzing crime in real time. It’s a skill that is so important to me. Teaching actually helped me develop that skill because when you teach you have to think fast on your feet. One summer, while I was teaching as an adjunct at John Jay and working toward my Ph.D., I got this call at my office. A reporter, Glenn Thompson from WPIX, was looking for a criminologist and asked me if he could interview me. Since it was the summer, not too many people were around to field the call. I explained to him that I was an adjunct working toward my Ph.D., but he still asked if he could come over and interview me on camera. It turns out the police had just caught a serial killer in Long Island named Joel Rifkin and they wanted commentary. This was a big case because Rifkin was a serial killer who had killed at least nine women and was found with the head of a dead prostitute in the back of his pickup truck. Ten minutes after his call, Glenn showed up to my office at John Jay with a cameraman. Then I started talking about serial killers, explaining what type of person would do these horrific acts. I was crazy nervous, but a few days later, Glenn sent me a handwritten note saying, “You’re an absolute natural. We’ll call you again.” That’s the moment that it gelled for me: I can teach the masses. Later, CNN put me on salary during the DC sniper case and the killing of Gianni Versace. All of that started with a call at John Jay.

Some people in the criminology world might look at what I do on TV and say, oh she’s just a TV criminologist, she doesn’t publish any real work. But, from the minute I started doing the DC sniper coverage, I realized that the snipers were at large and probably watching me on TV. There was a tremendous responsibility to get that live coverage right. Being a crime expert doing media on television not only shapes our understanding of crime and criminology, but it also shapes the behavior of the criminals. For everyday people watching it, it’s like going to my class, but for free.

As someone who interviews suspects and criminals, what interactions stay with you?
One of the most heartbreaking stories I covered on my podcast, Criminal Appeal with Dr. Casey Jordan, is the case of Linda Bigazzi. She was 70 years old at the time and I was called in by her legal team. She was accused of killing her 84-year-old husband and putting his body in the basement of their home. I had covered Lorena Bobbitt and Betty Broderick on Court TV, and they wanted me to be an expert on battered spouse syndrome, answering the question: Did she have it? I mean, who beats a 70-year-old lady? What was the 40-year marriage like? How did dementia and isolation play a part?

Linda was terrified of going to trial. She didn’t want to go to prison. She believed it was self-defense, but when you put your husband’s body in the basement for seven months, it’s hard to convince anybody that your story is true. There was no proof that he was attacking her, but she told me that she defended herself when her husband was swinging a hammer at her. She said she got the hammer away from him and hit him back. I told her team that I’d be happy to testify that she suffered from battered spouse syndrome when she killed her husband. But Linda ran out of money and her defense team said they didn’t think the case would go to trial. At that point, she was 76 and they were going to send her to prison for 12 years for a crime that should have been considered self-defense. I found out later that on the eve of taking a plea bargain, Linda drank antifreeze and killed herself. Her lawyer was on my podcast and he told me that Linda didn’t trust anybody, but she trusted me because I believed her story. I always wondered if I could have done something differently on that case.