Original subtitles

Sexual psychopaths, serial killers, often torture their victims first, revel

the power they have over them. Quite often they ejaculate spontaneously

ever achieving penetration.

They are that hopped up by their own evil. They are that hopped up by hands

evil just touching their victims.

Sex is sex.

Everybody wants sex.

The old joke from the 1950s was, I want to find a guy who invented sex and ask

him what he's working on now.

It's the big deal in life.

It is the cause of divorce, the cause of murder.

It is the cause of serial murder.

Homosexual men kill homosexual men. Heterosexual men kill women.

It goes like that.

That's it. You kill within your racial profile. You kill within your sexual

orientation profile.

Hey, pick him up. Let's give him some shit.

Let's fuck with this dude.

Yo, hey.

Come on, man.

Pick him up.

Pick him up. Let him get up here. Go, go, go, go, go.

What's up, dog?

Hey,

I'm rolling back in my picture.

Where are you heading, man? Why is he taking my picture?

Hey,

by the way, you need to put your foot out. Hold it still. Oh, yeah, drag your

feet.

You guys cool?

You guys aren't cops, are you? No. Yeah, we're cops. Look at us. No, we're the

demon dogs, man. You never know.

Demon dogs?

Yeah, the demon dogs.

Yeah. What are you doing? Where are you guys heading? We're going to shoot this

fucking video for this movie.

Independence number, which means no money. Yeah, right.

Oh, look, guys. Get out of here. Sorry, man. Sorry.

We're going the wrong way. Get the camera, man. Chris? Chris?

Okay, Chris, you have fun, man. Good luck. Good luck, bro.

Good luck. Keep your pants on. Boy, that was weird.

are sexual psychopaths who kill for sexual gratification and power over

victims. They are cowardly. They are weak.

They are quite often heedless and tremendously arrogant to think that they

the right to take another human life.

Serial killers are sacks of shit who deserve the very sternest measures that

American punitive system of justice has to offer.

I have cats. I'm James Elroy. I'm a novelist. I'm a journalist.

I'm a short story writer. I'm a screenwriter. And I'm here to introduce

Mead's Bonnaroo film about sex psychopath and serial killer Bob

terrorized Kansas City, Missouri in the late 1980s.

Thank you.

It was from this second floor room that Chris Bryson escaped on the Saturday

before Easter 1988.

He was wearing nothing but a dog collar. He told police of his unbelievable

torture and the worn marks on a steel bed.

You jump from there?

Yeah. I think my leg's broken or something.

And you were there the whole time?

Yeah.

Tell me how you got there.

I was just hanging out at Joseph's down at 10th and McGee, you know, having a

beer.

This guy pulls up in a car.

I start talking to him, you know, he wants to party.

You meet guys like that all the time down there.

Yeah.

So I figure I'll go to the party with the guy. What the hell? Is he marvelous

enough? Catch a good buzz?

Maybe get some cash out of him.

Okay. Have you ever seen this guy before?

I don't think so.

You know, these kind of guys, they come down there all the time.

We get to the house.

Everything seems cool.

The inside was a fucking mess, man.

Shit everywhere.

He had these two big fucking dogs inside there, too.

He asked me if I wanted to appear, and I said cool.

He said we'd have to go upstairs to keep the fucking dogs from going crazy.

I'm not sure what happened next, but I know my fucking head hurt like hell.

Next thing I know, I'm tied to this fucking bed, totally naked.

Goddamn dog collar and leash around my neck.

This son of a bitch was taking pictures of me.

I remember he took a lot of fucking pictures of me.

Shit, man.

What?

He beat the shit out of me.

He put shit in my eyes.

He shocked the hell out of me.

He ejected Drano into my voice box.

He screwed me all the fucking time.

He raped you?

Well, I was drugged and tied up and shocked. Yeah, he raped me.

And when did you meet this guy?

Monday night, sometime after midnight.

Monday night?

Yeah, but what day is it today?

It's Saturday.

Bryson got free by burning his bonds with matches and making a lucky leap

the second floor window, trailing a leash from the dog collar.

Had Bryson not escaped, his fate could have been in the bathroom above the

torture chamber.

Whenever he got tired of his, quote, project, which in this case was

dismembering this young man, he'd just leave it, secure the door, go down and

take care of normal activities and actually come back to it like it was a

Police found two skulls but no other body parts.

Sometimes the job took Verdella to the basement.

He had a drain, a floor drain down here, and what also against the wall there,

there's a shower, there's some plumbing over there, and there's a spigot up

there for his, he could take a shower hose down everything with.

It was a big sturdy table. He could use it for lots of purposes.

Bobby came marching home today, but Bobby was not the same.

Blood on ice battlefields, they messed up Bobby's brain.

Bobby didn't like women, Bobby had no friends.

Bobby prowled the streets all night, just waiting for it to end. He's a

soldier.

Like a tombstone on the road.

Fallen soldier.

His story's waiting to be told.

Fallen soldier.

In the mirror he sees me. Throw away people.

That's the only thing he sees.

Just start talking, because you can edit however you can take whatever out you

want.

Yeah, I was 16, 15, 16 years old. I'd had my first girlfriend.

We'd go to Bob's Bazaar on the weekends.

She bought me my first ring there, I believe. I thought it was pretty cool.

thought Bob was cool.

We were young and dumb, but he seemed exotic.

He seemed like some sort of world traveler, eclectic.

I'd see his masks and his jewelry, and I'd think Bombay. I'd think Africa.

And I guess that's not the story, is it?

I had met Bob before.

I knew our reader who was there.

I contacted Bob, Al Reeder, and said, Al, can I be of help? This is something

that I'm concerned about. I was particularly concerned with the attitude

city took, a lot of laughing, a lot of Berdella jokes, making fun of what he

done, which was one of the worst crimes I'd ever seen in this city or that

anybody could possibly do.

And I felt that something had to be done to call attention to the seriousness of

the crime and to deal with it, to respond to it. And so my role initially

approach Al, said, if I can be of help, let me know. He said, okay, Bob is sort

of suicidal. We want to keep him alive.

We want to understand what happened.

We'll have you visit him once or twice a week, but you have to keep it quiet.

We'll put you in the back door of the jail.

We won't tell anybody you're visiting because you'll probably have some death

threats if anybody knows you're coming in.

It was pretty odd. I mean, number one, it was Easter weekend.

It was on the Saturday before Easter.

So it was not something you were particularly looking for to happen.

It was in the middle of the NCAA Final Four, which was in Kansas City that

And it was in the middle of my reelection. It played into my reelection

the person who ran against me that year kept bringing up the case and using it

in the campaign against me. I think it kind of backfired on her, but it became

part of the campaign nevertheless.

So the timing of it was truly unusual.

I would love to see him executed.

I think what he did is abominable. There is no way to minimize the atrocity of

what he did, regardless of what his demeanor is in the interview. You cannot

minimize the inhumanity that this guy committed on other people.

My initial thought was that it was a couple of homosexuals that had probably

a lover's quarrel and that it would play itself out like many other cases do

that start out in a similar nature.

I was in charge of the fugitive apprehension that handled missing

And at the time, there were... Two missing persons reports

filed.

In both those missing persons reports, the common denominator at

that time was Bob Berdilla.

I was the court's reporter, Jackson County Court, for the Kansas City Times.

And so I heard the announcement. I knew it was going to be coming up on my beat.

Tom Jackman was cops. I was court.

It was pretty much our ballgame.

Bob's base of operations during the day and where he came when he had guys tied

to his bed in his house was right there at the Westport Flea Market Bar and

Grill.

He had this booth called Bob's Bazaar Bazaar where he sold just a lot of weird

stuff.

Shrunken heads, bone jewelry, paintings, antiques.

He considered himself this sort of man of the world.

that was bringing in all these incredible valuables to you, the lowly

And people that shopped there always talked about what a condescending

he could be.

I started collecting and dealing in ethnic folk art back in 71.

And then in 78, I came over here to...

basically temporarily to clean out my basement. I had a basement sale to clean

out my house, and then I came over here to clean out my basement.

Just did very well and started bringing over some of the stuff that I was

dealing in as far as the ethnic jewelry and folk art.

The weekend that Berdella was caught, the NCAA basketball Final Four was being

played in Kansas City. Now, Bob couldn't give a damn about basketball, but he

did want to capitalize on all the hype and all the tourists, so he put four

human skulls in the window there with a little sign beneath it that said, The

Final Four.

I made a mistake.

You know, that's what I thought at the time. I knew that this was for real when

I was up in that bed. I thought it was on my kids.

And I thought about that stupid ass decision that I had made, and that was a

real hard one.

They

were

young, white males who

We suspect most of them were involved in male prostitution.

We don't know that about all of them, but clearly they were, particularly the

ones he picked up off of the street, some of those were involved in male

prostitution.

What's interesting to me is that with respect to all of these people,

vendetta against the individual a vendetta so terrible that it was worth

for uh in it was clear from the confession that he had

sexual designs on all of the people okay bordell's confession

now i want you no around just go in there and take care of it i don't want

around but first of all his name isn't bordello it's berdella It's an Italian

name, shithead. Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry.

Please raise your right hand.

We're going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the

holy God.

Yeah.

I think that he had a long -standing love affair with the male anatomy, and

a little kid playing with an erector set or playing with one of those models of

the human body, he wanted to find out what was inside.

In other words, it's the ultimate objectification of another human being.

We got woken up yesterday at the crack of dawn with the sound of heavy

digging in the yard next door.

And we thought, what the heck is going on? And then it came out in the news

day that they had found scotel remains buried in the backyard of our neighbor,

Bob Berdella.

I don't know. He seemed like a good enough neighbor. He was a quiet guy. But

can tell you from everyone I've talked to, he just always smelled really bad.

My first reaction that this was a biggie.

was when we dug the head up out of the backyard on Easter Sunday. That's when

really first hit me, and I knew then that we had a major investigation on our

hands, and I probably was going to be in the middle of it.

Well, the way I got involved with Bob Berdella is I'd done a lot of

investigative reporting for national magazines, including a book called

Assassination in America, and I was local.

So they were looking for someone with a criminal background, knew how to ask

questions, do that sort of thing, and I was contacted and conducted a whole

bunch of audio interviews with Berdella in the Jackson County Jail as

preparation.

for the video interview that we eventually did with him.

Mr. Bedella, you're sitting here as a man who's going to spend the rest of his

life in prison.

You've confessed to murder of six young men in this city and crimes that

horrified the city and much of the country.

You've confessed to, in various degrees, felonious restraint, drugging people,

sexually abusing them, torturing them, killing them, dismembering them.

And until now, you've refused all interviews.

So in light of all those facts, I have to ask you, why are you here? What is it

you have to say to us? What is it you want to say about yourself in this case?

Well, I've had the media clamoring to get interviews with me.

And after I made my last pleas, I wanted to get at

least part of my side of it out.

I've found it very hard to find any way to do that in Kansas City.

The media has so biased my case, portraying me as being non -human,

and their motivation is no separate

from the way I treated my victims.

I treated them as something less than human, nothing more than a play toy or a

play object.

This is what the media has done to me. It's dehumanized me so that it can

believe, along with the public, that things like human sacrifice, set

demonic practices, are more believable than me being the neighbor next

door who reached a point in his life where he could do monstrous acts.

That's not the same thing as being a monster.

That's preposterous and most convoluted logic and most specious logic on God's

green earth.

He wanted to kill. He wanted to continue to kill. Had he not been apprehended,

had the police been asleep at the wheel when his last victim escaped, which is

what caused him to be arrested, he'd still be out there killing people at 55,

years of age now.

In the 80s, within about a two - or three -year period, he had

been in the emergency room at Truman on several occasions to have the head of

his penis reattached.

It's easy to reattach. You can just sew the skin and maybe some of the blood

vessels, but the nerve endings may not grow through again, so they may not have

the same kind of sensation.

So it's just...

It's just dead at the tip, I would think, at least after two or three tries

this. And so they said it always made me very curious that perhaps the kinds of

things that he had done to these young men were not so much about lust or

sensation as they were simply about power, because I don't think he had that

kind of feeling left on his penis after two or three operations.

I was driving to my flower shop the morning he had been arrested, or at

that the story came out, and I heard that he had been arrested for some

really hideous crimes, and I don't remember how much I heard at the time.

was really shocked.

It was my first thought was that the cops are just out to get another gay

I had been gay bashed a few years previously, and...

And when I went to press charges, the cops told me that I would either, if I

pressed charges, I would be arrested for having propositioned this man.

So I had to let the man go in order to myself not be prosecuted for homosexual

activity. Just all I had done was propositioned him.

And so when I heard about Bob Berdella, my first thought was, from knowing him

and from talking with him and everything, this could not be.

This just simply could not be. They're just out to frame another gay man, and

that that's all it was.

Bob would make these appointments for these boys that he had been made the

guardian for, and they were, you know, supposedly runaway kids, little hustler

problem kids, and he was supposedly trying to get them spiffed up so that

could go out and get a job.

And so he was supposed to be trying to lead him into doing that. Well, so he'd

make appointments for the, Bob would make appointments for the boy's haircut

be done by my friend Larry, who owned the shop, and then he would make an

appointment with me for me to cut his hair. So I would cut Bob's hair, and

would cut these, you know, we would say the little future corpses.

I lived at Burdell's house off and on for about six months.

and I worked for him at his flea market.

He would give me volumes, and sometimes I would ask him for them, but most of

the time I think he was trying to force them to me, and at that time I did drink

and things like that. He never really hurt me that I ever knew of, and he

helped me. There was a picture of me on TV along with a few other men at the

time, and, you know, the victims.

It was a real dilemma for me because I was...

listening to these hideous stories about this man and what he had done.

And this was the man that I had chatted with in my shop, that we had sat there

and talked and talked about all kinds of things and had, like I said earlier, a

real kindred spirit going.

And so he threw me into a real dilemma, the whole experience, in terms of

looking at this man and looking at these horribly villainous acts.

And at the same time, inside myself, knowing that this man was not all bad.

No matter what we told him, you know, he'd want to argue with us. He'd come

down. We told him his Alderney was out once, and he'd come down. He had to

it out himself and wanted to argue with us. So after he did that five or six

times, we ran him off. We got tired of listening to his shit.

Then I used to run into him. I used to eat up at Flea Market up in Westport

fairly routinely, and I'd run into his.

Sick ass up there.

Found out later on what he was doing to them young kids.

My little brother was in the police academy at the time. So we'd get home on

6 o 'clock news. There's my brother digging for bones and body parts in

Berdella's backyard.

I'm glad that sick son of a bitch got what was coming to him.

We're now at 4315 Charlotte Street. This is where Bob Berdella lived and where

at least six people died.

Your prosecutors, and I do want to quote this, when you came to plead,

called your crimes wantonly vile, horrible, or

inhuman.

When was this done? I believe in documents associated with the Sheldon

To repeat that quote from the prosecution, these crimes were wantonly

horrible.

Or inhuman.

Okay. I think if you check with just about any attorney, you'll find that

is the standard clause that's used when they want to build a case for Capital

One with the death penalty.

Without the legalism, would you agree that those crimes are wantonly vile or

inhuman?

I won't disagree.

Well, I could talk about the torture pretty much, because, you know, I was

to most of that.

It's one time when he hooked these cables up to my testicles, and I

was naked, and I'm not aware of what he was doing. He stepped back and he

touched these wires together, and I flipped and flopped all over the bed.

That kind of woke me up. He shocked me. He was electrocuting me.

And at the same time, he was taking Polaroid pictures.

At that time, I just passed out after he turned it off once and he was done. And

then he came and immediately put like a potato sack over my head and kind of

closed it like that. And so my hands were tied here and my feet were tied.

breathed in my mouth, okay. And he already had a war strike in my mouth and

piano bar tied with a piano bar.

And I wasn't able to get no oxygen at all, so I was more or less in a

misposition.

I was trying to rip the potato stacker off, and that's when he came in, and

that's when he flew into it.

He just ripped that thing off, and he came, he jumped on my chest, he had an

iron bar like that, and he just started, he was trying to strike me in the head,

and it seemed like it was for about five minutes.

And, you know, I was like this, and he was trying to hit my head, and I was

or less, I was deflecting him with my hands and stuff.

When he got done with that, he disappeared for a while. He came back

and he started digging his... I thought it was a closing or something. He was

just kind of digging in my ears. He was just stabbing in my ears.

That was one of the scariest things that he had done.

Jabbing in my ears, I didn't get no injuries from that. I don't know how,

then he disappeared again. He came back.

And he ejected a hypothermic needle in my throat, all around the vocal cords,

and the adrenal.

He took some Q -tips, he came back in, and he stabbed him in the eyes with some

bleach. He had dipped the Q -tips with some bleach, and he was stabbing him in

the eyes.

As he did all that, I was pretty much messed up, and I think

he ejected me from the ground and turned me like that.

And during the next couple of days, I was sick.

I was like getting pneumonia.

This is what he told me. I just knew I was dying.

He said he wanted me to put me in a cold bath so I could break the fever and all

this crap. He was injecting me with penicillin in my legs to make sure I was

trying to keep me alive for a while at that point.

His intention with the torture was to break the will.

And, you know, he would just not give me no problems.

The only time I ever got up, he would allow me to get up, was when I had to go

to the bathroom and do your number two, okay?

Healing in the bed, that's what he said.

And when I had to take a bath one time, and he wanted me to shave one time,

okay? My eyes were swollen up like golf balls. I couldn't see out of my eyes,

and I couldn't talk.

And my arms was at least quite the size from being no movement in them, just no

blood flow or nothing like that.

You know what I'm saying? It's hard to be a man and say shit happened to you

like that. So really what bought me a couple times from his sexual shit was

passing out, acting like I was so sick.

You know, I'm not trying to say he had a heart, but, you know, I guess he just

didn't want me to die at that time.

Well, like Joseph Mengele and the people in the concentration camps during World

War II, he was an experimenter. He experimented with caustic chemicals,

young male prostitutes up with Drano and the vocal cords to see if he could mute

them, and he took hundreds of polygraphs of them, Polaroids.

And these were, of course, he couldn't go to your local one -hour speedy print

and get them developed without condemning himself.

But these were there for purposes of favoring and purposes of masturbation,

it gave him a sense of accomplishment.

Also, he knew damn well he couldn't go out and kill every day, that the hammer

would fall much quicker than it finally did. So this was a way for him to

relieve, to relive the torture of his victims.

After Burdella got these guys in his house and in his bedroom, he

had intercourse with them by whatever means possible, and he would at times

photograph himself in the act of having anal intercourse with somebody or

forcing them to give him a blow job.

He sodomized them with his fist, with various, with a cucumber, with a

carrot, and he noted all these things. That's how we know this is because he

made notes in his notes of what position He took when he was screwing them,

whether it was BF for butt fuck or FF for front fuck or SF for side

fuck, CF for carrot fuck or cucumber fuck. It was pretty amazing stuff.

Another report was that you kept detailed torture logs and diaries.

Did you?

I kept sheets of paper that I had made some notations on.

This is between the mattress and springs on my bed. This is one of those

packages containing numerous photographs and what came to be known as

meticulous methodical diaries.

Those pieces of paper in there are these meticulous diaries.

These are the pictures of the more than 200 photographs, some of them of young

men, sexual partners, and these are in some ways...

that we see here are the sheets of paper upon which you made notes. Right.

This is a copy of one of those pages.

It looks like a loose -leaf paper.

It does contain information about amounts of drugs and so on. So

what is your complaint with the police calling these detailed diaries?

By your evaluation, does this look methodical? Doesn't look methodical.

Meticulous? It looks a little sloppy.

They are not the bound in Corinthian leather, written on parchment diaries

that the media apparently tries to describe them as. They're sheets of

They're notes.

Berdella was a homosexual, and he practiced sodomy on his victims with his

and various vegetables.

And the pain must have been excruciating.

And it's, although I don't believe in the death penalty per se, I almost wish

could be stretched to fry guys like Berdella.

Of course, he's dead now, died of a heart attack in prison.

Say like, yeah, I'm glad he's dead. He was a piece of shit.

He was without redeeming social value.

It may be, even though closure is a fatuous concept, it never occurs for any

victim or relative of a victim or loved one of a victim.

I like to think that he's suffering right now and that the Prince of

has a poker straight up his ass.

It's entirely true that Berdella killed marginal people.

He killed people who were vulnerable, who were vulnerable to drugging, who

vulnerable to being lured to a secret spot and then killed.

Had he been a child killer, there would have been considerably more police

attention on this very, very early.

And I think part of the reason that there was no outrage was because the

men involved were, for the most part, male prostitutes.

They were from broken homes. They left home. They didn't have a community

them to protest.

And so the media and the public in general did not attach the same value to

those lives they would if it had been somebody out of an old line Kansas City

Blue Blood family.

If that had been the case, it would have been different.

Different response altogether.

But because they were prostitutes for the most part, because they were

because they didn't have families with any political clout, not a lot of

seriousness, I felt, was attached to the actual crimes.

That's not true.

That's not true.

The two individuals, they were individuals as far as I'm concerned.

They were missing.

The common denominator was Bob Berdilla.

And we tried to go after Bob Berdilla. We didn't sit back because

these people had some kind of history.

We pursued it. And that is a falsehood there. I have never known just

because of their race, sex, their sexual origin, religion, or whatever.

to sit back and say, just throw that on the back burner. That has never, ever

been done to my knowledge.

It was never done while I was there.

I can't think of a thing we would have done any differently.

It would have maybe been easier if they had been people of more prominence

because we would have had privy to more relatives and close associates than what

we did. Maybe people who would have had more background information on them

because a couple of our victims...

we really had no one to turn to as far as trying to find out information from

their past.

None of them came from higher

up on the socioeconomic scale, I suppose to say.

All of them were either from working families.

In this case, Young homosexual prostitutes should have been told after

two victims disappeared, be very, very careful, or better yet, Jesus Christ,

don't be a homosexual prostitute.

It's a losing proposition anyway, as Sly said.

I was not a male prostitute.

I was addicted to drugs at the time.

His line was, you get high, okay?

As long as you get high, I got some values.

At the time, he didn't have cigarette money.

And so I'm thinking, well, what can I do for something?

He looked at Bob Adele. He didn't look gay.

So it wasn't even nothing like that going on. And at that time, I had a

to go.

To get dropped off, maybe, or to go that way.

And unfortunately, I took the wrong way.

Never met the man, thank God.

Never needed to, to write a song about him, at least. I mean, that's what I did

back then. I was a radio guy. I was a disc jockey. I was irreverent. I was

unfeeling. Whatever was funny went on the radio.

How did you feel when you learned that not long after your arrest, the local

radio stations, two of them at least, were running a Bob Berdella parody song

and were asking people to come to parties wearing dog collars?

Well, I think the newspaper article reported that even the families of the

victims were upset by the song.

I have never had a chance to hear the song.

I was sitting at Antoine's on the boulevard, the old Antoine's, and having

and thinking that this was such a huge story in Kansas City that I had to write

something. There was some song in the classic rock era that would fit it

perfectly. And I'll be damned if I, over a little $3 .75 steak lunch, figure out

they call me Bob Berdella. Instead of Mellow Yellow, it became Bob Berdella.

Everything just fit in. I mean, he had everything with the bones in the

and the fluoroscope in the basement and all the Polaroid photographs that he had

and the hitchhikers and the dog collars and the electric shocks and the needles

sticking out of their necks. I mean, you had so much to write from, you couldn't

help but come up with something.

They call me Bobber Della.

That's right.

They call me Bobber Della.

Do it again.

They call me Bobber Della.

Don't take that in.

I had also been told when I first came into jail that the Fox radio station

had run a promo.

giving prizes to their listeners if they showed up at the station in a dog

collar and with a leash on.

The people here in the institution, the correctional officers, the caseworker,

even the psychiatrist, were, I think, surprised to find out that that upset

And it did upset you. Very much so.

I had been in Ethiopia the year before, and I'd gone through the camps, and I'd

seen the dying children. I'd seen death, I'd seen evil in a social sense, and I

had felt that somehow it had a positive impact on me as a person.

So I entered into this arrangement with Bob, in which I met with him for an

hour, hour and a half, twice a week, and I thought I could handle anything.

I didn't realize the impact. I was not able to eat.

not able to have sex, lost weight, became extremely withdrawn because I

was dealing with stuff and then I was told this is stuff you can't tell other

people about because this is pretty, it was not the type of stuff you could go

out and say, hey, you know, let me tell you about what Bob and I talked about

today. You had to keep it under wraps and that was the agreement. So my wife

I did not talk about it. I didn't realize the impact it was having except

period of time, six months, I had gotten down and maybe lost 20 pounds.

and it was just sort of like a castaway that had fallen on

hard times, and it was just skin and bones.

After Berdella went to prison, I got an interview with him. They put me in this

little tiny room with him.

I asked them to take the handcuffs off. I'm not sure why, but I did.

He didn't seem very threatening at that point, you know. It was like all the air

had been let out on him.

His condition was that I bring two tape recorders, one to tape the interview for

myself, one to give him a tape.

I had asked him, you know, how he got by with some of this stuff because there

were plenty of indications that there were some nasty things going on in

Berdella's house. He told me that there were some judges who would send people

to him and that he often bonded people out and that for a while the parole

had considered him someone where they could send.

troubled you and young adults.

I was recording the conversation.

After I left, the tapes were confiscated, and the warden called

me and informed me that something was wrong with my tape recorder because they

couldn't get the tape to play after they'd confiscated it. I went to

Marsha Walsh.

She'd just gotten back from a trip to the Arctic Circle where she had been

saving baby seals.

She really couldn't tell me much about why she thought that Berdella was a drug

counselor or that sort of thing.

You recall we mentioned before that there were reports in the Westport flea

market where you had your shop that people would say, oh yes, I do remember

he had these strange smelling dishes of food, that he had bead bones.

And later on there were speculations, at least in the community and in some

aspects of the media.

that the remains of your victim were somehow being transported and prepared

meals and prepared as jewelry in your shop.

I was quickly able to identify to the police the other dealers in that section

of the market where we rotated potluck rather than eat the flea market food

again.

And that you could question any of these people and they'd be able to tell you

that the food was good.

There was nothing suspect about the turkey or ham or beef that was in these

dishes.

Hey, we're at the flea market by Bob's Old Bazaar Bazaar.

Bob was kind of a thick guy. He got a little too into his hobbies.

Head hunting, cannibalism, and cooking. And I think cooking saved his life,

actually.

One thing to have one guy dabbling in cannibalism in your small town.

It's another to have scores of people.

Bob had Philly at his bazaar -bazaar that he'd occasionally serve.

I think it had people in them.

Odd guy. It got him off of a lethal injection, though.

He was a thick boy.

He would cut the bodies up using his expertise as a chef and bring them out

here to the curb on Monday morning and monitor it from his window to make sure

the trash men took the trash away. And that was his method of disposing of the

bodies of the men that he killed.

Bob Berdella was a real landfill Louie to think that he put pieces of a human

being out in the trash for trash men to collect on Mondays.

astounding. All they had to do was catch the scent of decomposing flesh or look

inside and realize that there was a chopper inside.

I was very suspicious about the landfill, putting the bodies out with

It just didn't sound in character, not to mention the problems that would

How secure is that to put a body out on your curb in a plastic bag?

You know, you wrap stuff up and put it out on the curb, you never know whether

it's going to be torn apart by dogs or hit by a car.

He seems like a more careful person to me than that.

I believe it was the police department that called and said that they needed

They needed us to appraise a piece of residential property because I can't

us what it is.

But they'll have a car there in five minutes to pick us up.

We had no idea where we were going, what we were doing.

We end up at Bob Riddell's house.

Dining room had some weird stuff in there, coffee table with some weird

on it.

Screaming faces, that sort of thing.

Vicious dogs in cages right outside the back door.

Huge dog kennels, chain -link fenced kennels. They weren't little dog runs

spot, you know, to run through. These were secured enclosures.

They were not couch potato dogs. These were a huge dog.

The kitchen was really strange.

A couple of big stainless steel commercial tables.

At first you figure the guy could have been a chef at a restaurant, could have

owned a restaurant.

didn't, you know, I knew of Bob Radella, but didn't know, you know, nobody knew

this stuff.

So he thought, okay, you know, he's got the dinner party, caters, who knows

what. But then you look around and it just wasn't right. It wasn't a normal

kitchen. It wasn't a kitchen you're going to entertain in. One of the

steel tables had, you know, built -in sinks and huge garbage disposal.

It was a large, never seen a garbage disposal that large.

What the hell else was he going to do with it? He's not going to grind up

lettuce in that thing.

Basically, the food or waste enters from the top down onto the grind plate,

which is spinning at the time the food enters the machine.

The food is propelled by these teeth here along the side, or against the side

rather, of the shredder unit, which pulverizes the waste, forcing it through

these cutting chambers into the grind chamber where the waste exits the

I don't know much about human bones and what they look like when they're out of

the body, but I would figure they'd be pretty large, and as you can see, the

grind chamber is not exactly huge.

So if you want a bone to come down here, and let's say it was this big, it

lodges in here, the machine starts, it grabs that bone, jams it real quick,

because in this area of the machine, it's not going to grind that bone, take

on, and rip it up. It's going to jam and stop.

The flesh would not be a problem at all. It would rip it up and send it on down

the drain line.

Pretty easily.

I do see hospitals use them, unfortunately, to grind things.

I have seen some labs use them to get rid of tumors and whatnot.

Men will go to any length to get head is my only comment on this.

You said, I want the police to explain why they allow the loved ones of

to die in the convenient area of 10th and McGee. I don't think any family of

victims or anybody else that has been killed down related to 10th and McGee.

are going to be happy to find out that their loved one is basically written off

by the police as far as investigations go, et cetera, because they died in a

convenient neighborhood. The police knew what was going on, so it's no big deal.

And that accounts for your remark to me, and I don't mean at all to make light

of it, that I killed six, but they, the police, by allowing this to stay open,

they killed more.

Yes. This has been something that's been going on for over 20 years, to my

knowledge. It seems to me that you're suggesting that had the police done

job, had they followed the leads, had they really been on your case prior to

April 2nd, 1988, they would have caught you and some of the suffering could

have been prevented. Maybe not caught me.

Scared me off, maybe.

Prevented.

Things are happening after how?

Definitely.

In a way, do you wish they had?

Yes. Well, it was the police's fault because they should have caught me.

They should have stopped having all those attractive little boys down there

tempting me.

It was like nothing had anything to do with his, you know, he had no

responsibility at all.

It was just like, well, it's like, hey, I was on a diet, but you kept shoving

food down my throat. It was like, oh, okay.

Six victims for a serial killer over a four -year period is low. Generally, the

urge to kill hits much more frequently than that. But I think that Berdella was

a hoarder. He spent a lot of time with his victims.

He needed his residents to house them. He needed a safe house to perform his

hideous experiments.

So I don't see him as a roadside picker -up of young men, a guy like Berdella.

well, William Bonin, the freeway killer here in Los Angeles.

I don't see him as that kind of guy. I think six may be the total.

That question was always there, and I was always being asked that. I have no

specific information that there were other victims.

There could have been.

At times I had some thoughts there might have been, but Bob certainly never

indicated that he had misled anyone in his testimony.

Personally, I believe there were only six victims.

A lot of people disagree with that.

I think one of the things that convinces me is the fact that Berdella had

already cut a deal, so his punishment was not going to be any different if it

were 6 or 60.

When you look at the research on serial killers, they don't kill fewer people

over time. They go up, and he went down.

I also thought it was odd.

They would find two skulls.

I can say he's a collector. He collects everything.

If you look at those search warrants, this man didn't throw anything away.

So why would you keep two skulls and then just load every bit of every

other body up and put it out on the curb for the trash to pick up?

I don't think I can.

except that.

I can tell you what led up to the escape.

Like I said, the first couple days I was unconscious and I couldn't really see

nothing.

I didn't really know what my eyesight was coming back.

What was going to happen if my arms, I couldn't move my arms. It was totally

numb. And, you know, I just didn't know what this dude had up his sleeve, you

know. But I did know at this time that he was not going to let me go.

I don't go to church every Sunday, but I do have, I do have, I believe in God

and I did call on him. You know, I don't take no credit for anything because I

kind of more or less put things in his hands. He had my hands tied where if I

tried to move around.

They were tight, you know, and then when he got back, there was, you know, there

was a real restriction, you know, marks on your hand. He knew he'd been trying

to get away.

And plus another thing, he would turn the TV up so loud, and he would go out

the room.

I didn't really know if he had left, if he had really left the house, or if he

was watching me to see what I was trying to do. I believed everything he said,

okay? He told me he had killed before, and he would again, okay?

On the fourth day, as being as my hands was numb, and I was thinking I couldn't

do nothing with him, I asked him if he ever tied anybody's hands any

differently. I said, if you can tie my hands and feel assured that I can't get

away, could you tie me?

And he did.

And he tied them. Took them down from here and tied them here.

You know, I always waited like two or three hours after he was gone.

What I thought was two or three hours.

Tried to do anything.

I tried playing with him.

Playing with the knots, man. I was moving the knots, and I got them off. I

that I could get them off, okay? But it wasn't the time. I didn't know.

So I was going to do it. At that point, on the fourth day, I had planned for the

fifth day I was going to do it, okay?

The next day,

he went ahead with the regular scares before he did everything.

Asked me if I had to go to the bathroom, and I said no.

While I was talking to him, he had some matches, because he always gave me a

cigarette, right?

before he left.

I smoked a cigarette and he always took the matches away.

He was standing there and he threw them down just kind of by the table.

I kept his attention talking to him while he didn't remember to pick the

up. I don't know why, but that's what happened.

I already knew I had to burn the ropes with the matches.

So after I got them loose, I could have reached down and touched my feet, but

there was a...

The bedpost was a metal bedpost, and I was so freaked out in my head that I

thought he had booby -trapped the metal. You know what I'm saying? I actually

thought I was going to get shocked or electrocuted if I tried to touch the

metal. That is why I burnt the ropes.

And so I got that loose. It was just like a fast panic, man. I didn't know

about the window because the window was covered by a big pitcher.

I didn't know if he was going to open. I didn't know if he was in the

downstairs. I didn't know how much time I had. I really didn't know how high I

was up or anything.

Or I surely would have tried to look for my clothes before I went out.

That's the fear. Once I knew that I had committed to untying the ropes, I just

knew it was all or nothing.

And so the Dreamland building, man, I just got up,

raised the window, and I was happy that it came all the way up. And I looked

down. I remember seeing a dog dish right there below on the sidewalk.

And I was thinking, damn, I'm going to jump down there and get attacked by

dogs.

So I crawl out, and I'm hanging.

I was going to try to jump over to the fence.

The next yard was, you know, appeared to be about this far on the sidewalk. It

was all divided.

I was going to jump over to the next, where the grass was. I was going to try

get a little sway going and jump over there.

The ledge broke, and I fell straight down.

I hurt my leg a little bit, but that was nothing. I dove over the fence, and,

you know, I wasn't thinking about being naked or nothing. I just wanted to, you

know, I was out of there, so.

The unlucky one.

Couldn't you have put up a better fight?

I'm Hazard.

I'm back, boys.

What I missed while I was gone.

I'm in the movie.

I got my life back till I even had my own song.

I guess some of us are just lucky.

I'm the one that got away.

He was an old gay broken watch.

He's back twice.

I'm Lazarus. I'm the city.

It's not my time to go.

To sit back. To don't laugh.

He told us.

Are you saying you feel remorse or that you've been misunderstood?

I'm not going to sit here with my finger to my chin and say nobody understands

me.

Yes, there has been a lot of remorse.

And he may well feel remorse, but he has the remorse.

of a crook that got caught.

Oh, poor Bobby.

The world grieves for you. The world reads that excerpt from W .H. Auden's

poem, and I forget the title.

Maybe it's his most famous poem, September 1, 1939.

It goes something like this. I and the public know what all schoolchildren

learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

Well, maybe somebody gave you a few whacks in the head when you were a kid,

I doubt if you were systematically terrorized the way you terrorized your

victims. You deserve no sympathy.

There was a report in the Sunday Kansas City Star in December about the dangers

you might face after you leave the Jackson County Correction Facility.

and are moved to another larger prison.

How do you feel about reports like that? Do they make you anxious?

They do give me some reason for concern, but one of the reasons I'm concerned is

that these were not just reports.

These were digging out quotes from unnamed prosecutors implying that

the inmates down there are waiting to get their hands on me.

I am at this point less concerned about the inmates acting

on their own as opposed to the inmates or an inmate acting

in response to maybe some directive or

coercion from the police officers.

Do you think you're being set up, perhaps?

Well, I think the Star and Times have, since they haven't been able to get a

court to put me, to death, are now trying to get the inmates to do it for

In a sense, he was killed by the prison system.

I don't make those kind of judgments, and it would be like a death sentence

the prison system probably took on instead of the judicial system.

But I wouldn't say that was fitting.

According to his parents, his mom, They had withheld the medication, and he died

of a heart attack.

So the question was put to me by several people who Bob had told he was going to

give the complete story to and were visiting him in prison, didn't give the

complete story to, called me and asked me if I would lead an effort to call for

an investigation and to condemn the prison system for their lack of

responsibility to Bob's medication. I did not do that.

It was not something at that time I was willing to do, to take on the role of

challenging the prison system, because I could understand in some ways

how Bob got himself in that situation. Very demanding, very

difficult in terms of trying to make others feel very small.

and himself being very important. And I'm just guessing that the guards in the

prison system just said, you're not going to control us. And they withheld

medication and he died.

I think probably unfortunate because I don't think he had

in return for his life given the testimony to our reader and admitted

had done. And so that guaranteed him life in prison.

And it's not up to us to make those decisions.

It should have been done.

What I said was at the time that I thought that even though he wasn't given

death penalty, number one, he would go to prison for the rest of his life, and

number two, he'd die in prison a lot sooner than he would if he were

In Missouri, it takes us about ten years to execute somebody.

I don't know how long he was in prison, but probably about six years before he

died.

Why I believe that was simply that his behavior was so uncontrollable

and was so bad towards anybody, towards everybody that he encountered, that I

just assumed that he would do something in jail that would get him killed.

Now, he died of a heart attack.

Was he murdered? I don't know.

He got what he deserved, you know.

I don't know how you put an end to all that, but the truth of the matter is, if

you go back and look at the facts, that's how he ended up. He ended up

what he deserved.

It's really too bad that he didn't live longer than he did, because I think he

was getting, you know, he was a control freak, and people were losing interest

in him.

And I think that had he lived sooner or later, he would have given up more

information.

I don't think he could have helped himself.

I think he was... He wanted the attention.

And you know the whole story about how he died in jail?

Well, I don't know the whole story. I just know he died of a heart attack. But

the story everybody was telling was that he was like, you know, okay, he

probably was asking for more potato chips and he was cussing out some guard.

And then he's like, oh, guard!

And they're like, oh, yeah, we'll be there. We'll be there.

You know, they just let him die. You know, it's like, you know, everybody was

like, well, and they had to pay extra.

Supposedly, they had to pay extra to keep him isolated.

You know, because, I mean, everybody, you know, everybody would have wanted to

have a piece of him, you know.

So anyway.

You played me like an anvil, you beat me into the dawn.

Since you and me, no witnesses, then it can't be wrong.

Now shut your eyes, are you invisible?

No one will hear you scream.

Dead man walking, no one's talking.

All that's left is your stain.

So found out the demon, the gatekeepers all turn away.

Sparks from the hammer, this will be your last day.

Stay off the sunset, maybe the darkness will cop a flea. For whom does the

anvil toll, Bobby?

The anvil tolls for thee.

Just a bunch of earth is all that's left of 4315 Charlotte. But some people will

never forget the house, nor the man who lived here.

Bob Berdella, Kansas City's most infamous serial killer, is dead.

He died in prison after his victims were killed in his home.

Berdella confessed to sexually and physically torturing six men here.

But some believe there were more victims and hope digging up the house might

unearth some secrets.

That's why millionaire Del Dunmire, who owns the property, had workers carefully

tear it down.

Private Detective Ashley Hearn was here in 1988 when the truth came out, and

he's been here for the past five weeks.

making sure no other bodies turned up. He says the stairs to the basement will

be saved, as well as this drain, reportedly used to carry away the blood

Berdella's victim.

Well, this appears to be the final chapter of the Berdella story, and no

could be happier than those who live on either side who will split the property.

I did not see any attempt of clergy.

any attempt of politicians, attorneys, police, to ever try and wrap that up and

say, here's what happened, here's what it means, here's what we've learned from

it? I guess I kind of got obsessed with it.

I think a lot of us did.

Me, the lawyers, the other reporters, everybody.

It was difficult to let go of the case.

At a certain point, I just decided that's exactly what I needed to do.

So I gathered boxes, boxes of documents and

notes and tape -recorded interviews.

And one day I just took all that, loaded it up in the car, and drove out to the

city landfill and dumped it.

When there are pieces of the puzzle,

put them together.

Facts don't diminish the myth because we need the stories. And we even need the

stories of the quote -unquote bad people as much as we need the stories of the

good people. We need our heroes and we need our villains.

And so the myth becomes the real story then, not the facts.

I don't know how he does it, but, you know, you get obsessed. And, you know,

here you are in Hawaii.

flew all the way here to pursue this case for this movie. So I think you can

that it kind of just sort of keeps going.

Bob Berdella deserves my sympathy.

Bob Berdella got off easy compared to his victims.

In the future, people...

Be quiet, be cautious, be circumspect around strangers, especially if you're

women, especially if you're gay men and women. You know, they fit the victim

profile. Elderly people, children, be cautious. There's demons out there. The

odds are profoundly against you ever running into someone like Bob Berdella.

But it pays to be cautious because these guys do exist.

I'm James Elroy offering.

slag to throw on the grave, hopefully unmarked, hopefully remote, hopefully

untended, of Bob Rudella. Thanks for joining us.

I got a story I want to tell.

It's about the next door neighbor.

Our creature's found in hell.

He's one sick bastard.

No one's a pity.

Mr. and Mrs.

McDullivoy, he's the butcher of Kansas City.

It's getting kind of icky. Bob the Boozy Man.

You won't wake up from this dream. He's Bob the Boogeyman.

No one can hear you scream. Bob the Boogeyman.

He'll wipe your eyes clean. You know he's big.

Bad.

Bob. Bob the Boogeyman.

Bob's chili was a mighty manly mix -up.

Herbs and spices, but never any chicks.

Spice and beans, chunky and nice.

Tattoos taste great with Dahmer's advice.

Chomp down, y 'all.

Dah, dah, dah.

Dah, dah, dah.

Dah, dah, dah.

Dah, dah, dah.

We'll talk to the dude on the bar. He's got 12 -point clothes in the dark.

Ammonia in your eyes make it hard to see. Some Drano in your throat make it

to scream. And it would seem from the color on your neck that your non -virgin

ass is about to get reamed. Bludgeoned and pummeled and raped and abused.

Tooken in a chili pot is where they find you. Browned up like dew and crushed

crackers too. You're better resident than a male prostitute.

He's Big Bad Bob.

He's Bob the Boogeyman.

Well,

he gives you a drain on cocktail that makes it hard to holler. He'll put you

a short leg, make you wear a vital collar.

Be careful when we tread upon the slippery, sunny slope.

Bizarre, bizarre.

Bizarre, bizarre.

Bizarre, bizarre.

Bizarre, bizarre. Bizarre, bizarre.

Bizarre, bizarre.

Bizarre, bizarre.

Who that?

Why, it's Bob the Boogeyman.

That's not Bob.

Wait a minute.

Oh, yeah, he's the Boogeyman.

He's gonna get you.

He's gonna get you.

Can I say get you one more time? Say it one more time. Get you.

Get the y 'all out here.

What? Oh, that's another song. That's right.

Bob the Boogeyman.

Bob the Boogeyman.

Who?

Bob the Boogeyman.

He's Bob the Boogeyman.

He's Bob the Boogey. The Boogey. The Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo -Boo

-Boogeyman!