Original subtitles

Today, the nude body of a teenage boy

was found propped up against a back alley door.

He had been choked to death.

This is the 33rd killing of the same

type in the last few months.

The bodies just kept piling up at a very

disturbing frequency.

This killer was relentless.

Young hitchhiking kids are being picked up, raped,

strangled, and dumped naked.

There's no evidence left behind.

They showed us a board, and there were 45 names, at least,

on this chart.

And it was titled Southern California Homosexual Murders.

Crime rate was just unbelievable.

A witness said she saw a hitchhiker

gassed and pulled into a van.

He nicknamed it.

It was the Death Van.

He would say, if you got in the Death Van, you didn't get out.

The pressure of solving a case--

you felt very personally involved.

It was you against them.

Two men, Patrick Kearney and David Hill,

wanted for questioning in two murders,

surrendered here last Friday.

Officers also wanted to talk to them about five

other similar killings.

Kearney is arrested, put away in prison.

He's not going to do any more killing.

But from the spring of 1979 until early 1980,

the bodies just kept increasing and piling up at a very

disturbing frequency.

This killer was relentless.

Young hitchhiking kids from 15 to 19

are being picked up, raped, strangled and dumped naked.

They're beat up sometimes.

They're not necessarily tortured.

They're not kept prisoner.

And there's no evidence left behind at all.

The bodies are stripped down.

All their identifications are done away with.

This is also pre-DNA, so the forensic scene is a little less

than we would think of today.

A task force had been set up.

They were patting themselves on the back

at what they had accomplished.

But they hadn't solved the Freeway Murders.

Markus Alexander Grabs, a 17-year-old German tourist,

disappeared in August 1979.

He was over here hitchhiking.

And he was seeing Los Angeles.

And he was down in Newport.

He got his backpack, and he decided he was going to see--

go up Northern California.

And a van comes along and picks him up.

Markus Grabs is found in Malibu Canyon,

stabbed 70 times.

And it's a horrific scene.

The Sheriff's Department, they got it.

The homicide team, they went out.

They looked for evidence.

His body was nude.

He had a backpack.

The backpack had been thrown on him.

There's no evidence there.

So the homicide detective didn't

know what to make out of it.

This is miles and miles from Newport Beach,

in a very remote area.

Donald Ray Hyden, 15, disappeared August 27,

'79 in Los Angeles County.

His body is found just a short distance

away from Markus Grabs' body.

And his body is found in a dumpster.

It'd just been thrown in, nude.

He had been sexually molested.

The sheriffs-- you know, they're working that.

And they're looking at the two.

And they think, there's got to be something

connecting these two because of the closeness

where the bodies are found.

The gruesome discoveries were covering six counties,

from Kern County to the north of Los Angeles County,

Orange County to the south, on into Riverside County,

San Bernardino County, a very large

area of Southern California.

It became obvious that law enforcement authorities,

the detectives, needed to get together and connect

the dots geographically.

Who is the serial killer, or serial killers,

leaving bodies along the freeways?

I was just out of the Army in 1966.

I decided to go on to the Police Department.

I had a brother on the Department.

He'd been there seven years.

I was pretty impressed with where he had worked.

He never worked homicide, but he used to talk about friends

of his who were in homicide.

And it was kind of intriguing to me.

And I thought, I'd like to be an investigator.

I was one of the youngest guys.

I actually started in homicide with five years on the job.

I went to Hollywood Homicide, and

that was quite an experience.

John St. John was a personal friend of mine.

He came to RHD in the mid '70s.

Very likeable.

He was an older man.

John came on the job three years before I was born.

John was well known.

He was the number-one detective on the job.

He had badge number 1.

John was interested in this West Side Rapist case

that I'd handled.

And John, being an older man--

and he was probably in his late 50s at that time.

John was very interested in what

we did, what we did to solve it,

and how we put people in jail because he had never

worked a serial killer case.

And that was the only thing that put us on a level playing

ground because I always said, I want to know

what St. John has forgotten.

I was pleased to work with John.

I never had a problem.

We were partners, never had an argument.

We worked together for about three or four years.

But in '79, these bodies were really starting to pile up.

Even though we didn't have our own case at that time,

we were assigned to monitor these cases because we

had found out that a lot of these victims

were being abducted out of Los Angeles

and then dumped elsewhere.

It was important for us to stay on top

of this with the Sheriff's Department and

Orange County Sheriffs.

And we pretty much went to all their meetings.

At one time, they showed us a board.

And there were probably 45 names, at least, on this chart.

And it was titled, Southern California Homosexual Murders.

And we always felt like, if there's

bodies dropping around the county, eventually,

we're going to probably get one.

And of course, jurisdiction lies

with where they find the body.

John and I got our first call out.

Central Detectives called us in our office,

which was only about a mile away from the dump site.

And they said they had a nude young-- young boy in a dumpster

on Harlem Place off of Second Street.

When we got here, there was a black-and-white unit

here and Central Detectives.

And they pointed it out to us where the body was.

So we approached the dumpster carefully, told the patrol

officers, hey, stay back.

We don't want any more people around the dumpster

than we absolutely had to have, because it's

a crime scene, basically.

So then we just examined as much as we could,

look-- looking into the dumpster.

I'm 6' 4", and I had to stand on my tip-toes

to look in because he was down a little ways.

And I could see that it was a nude young boy.

It was fresh.

In fact, it looked more like he was asleep than decomposing.

By that time, we called the coroner's office,

took a real hard look inside the dumpster.

It was apparent that there was some kind of sexual assault,

since he was nude.

And we figured he'd probably abducted from somewhere else

and then just dumped here.

So we didn't have a lot of confidence

that we were going to find a lot of evidence here.

But we did have the coroner's office come out.

And we did a good search of the whole dumpster

and put the body in a body bag.

The first thought we had when we saw the body,

it was so similar to all the others that had been

occurring all through 1979.

And of course, this was early into 1980.

And we thought, oh, boy, we're in for a rough year.

We had about nine different bodies at that time,

but all similar situation, along freeways and

in back alleys like this, behind gas stations.

This just really-- we were pretty

convinced it was connected.

We identified the body as Charles Miranda,

15-year-old boy.

And we found out that he had been

hitchhiking around the Starwood area in West Hollywood.

And he wound up here, where they

dumped the body, of course.

For a killer that knew his way around,

you'd almost have to know these alleyways in downtown

Los Angeles because you don't just stumble

into one of these alleys.

And we figured there were two of them.

To lift a body that's 165, 170 pounds, that high,

it would probably take two guys to do it right.

So that's when we really were pretty convinced the killer

had an accomplice.

Looking at the body, it was disturbing to me

for a lot of reasons--

one, because he was about the age

of my oldest son at the time.

The body was badly bruised.

It was hard to tell too much until the autopsy.

And the autopsy kind of revealed

that he had ligature marks, and he'd been strangled

and sexually assaulted.

That particular method of operation

was pretty consistent with this new--

new wave of killings.

And so now John and I were-- it was game on for us

because now we're not only monitoring.

We have a case.

After Charles Miranda, there was a real uptick

between March and May of 1980.

Beginning with Thomas Lundgren, 13 years old,

May 1979, in Los Angeles County.

David Louis Murillo, 17, disappeared

September 9, '79, found the next day in Los Angeles County.

More and more young men were found nude, molested.

Who's doing it?

No one knows.

Robert Wirostek.

He was 18 when he disappeared, September 17, 1979, found

a week later in Orange County.

James McCabe, 12 years old, disappeared and

found February 3, 1980, in Los Angeles County.

Ronald Craig Gatlin, 18, disappeared March 14, 1980.

The police try to cover it up.

They don't want the public to panic.

They don't want to have the politicians

breathing down their neck.

So it's hushed up, and it's kept under the radar.

JJ Maloney is a reporter who ends up in Orange County.

Someone dumps an envelope on his desk in early 1980.

And it says, gay boys getting killed.

And it's all these clippings of all

these young boys who are being found

all over Southern California.

And he sees a pattern here.

And he goes to his editor.

He says, this is going on.

The police are stonewalling us.

It's our obligation to do this story.

And his editor agrees.

And on March 24, 1980, they break the story.

And Maloney coins the term, Freeway Killer.

Today, the nude body of a teenage boy

was found propped up against a back alley door.

He had been choked to death.

This is the 33rd killing of the same

type in the last few months.

The latest possible victim of the Freeway Killer

was found Monday behind this Mobile station

in Huntington Beach.

This is the sixth victim found in Orange County.

And he superficially resembles the boy described last week

by a witness, who said she saw a hitchhiker

gassed and pulled into a van.

Behind the service station here at Beech and Adams,

the nude body of 18-year-old Steven Wells

was found last Tuesday.

The Huntington Beach Police are asking for help

in finding Steven's killer.

The television reporters, the newspapers,

were starting to really focus on this.

And there's starting to be a panic about what was happening

in Southern California.

Why were all of these young men, teenagers and younger,

being kidnapped, and murdered, and

then dumped all throughout Southern California?

I was a sergeant at the Training Academy.

And they promoted me to lieutenant

and then transferred me into the Investigation Bureau.

And at this time, the assistant sheriff

had decided that they needed, we

needed, someone to handle the press

because we were getting larger and more and more activity

and having more and more contact with the media.

Actually, I started the first PIO, Press Information Office,

in Orange County.

My job as a PIO was to answer their questions so that they

wouldn't interfere with the investigation

or be bothering the investigators

while they're trying to work.

One of the, really, things about a serial killer

is that people have a rush, and especially the public.

Oh, you've got a serial killer.

You've got another Kearney out on the streets.

No, we can't say that yet.

And we used to take a lot of heat for that.

They'd say, oh, you got it.

You know, it's coming.

No, we're not ready to say that there is a serial killer.

We're still putting things together.

So it took us quite a while before we admitted that there

was a serial killer out there.

The terror increased, especially

in the gay community, because it became obvious

that many of these victims were either gay or bisexual or

suspected of being gay.

The gay community has been targeted with violence ever

since the gay community has existed,

so it's not new to have people targeting the community and--

and trying to pick people off.

In the past, the police usually wouldn't do very much

about it either.

Once you get into the 1970s, and the political climate is

a little bit different, the police are a little more

obligated to at least go through the motions that

they are investigating this.

The perception in the gay community at that time

would have certainly been that the police isn't going

to lift a finger to help us with this, unless it

makes them look bad somehow.

They don't care about us.

They've been targeting us for a century.

We had a murder that involved homosexuals,

but we didn't handle them any different

than any other murder.

Human beings are human beings.

So we were-- there might have been a prejudice in some areas

toward gay people.

But we couldn't-- we couldn't afford that.

We had to be pretty much neutral

and put our feet in the shoes of the victim

and find out who did it.

That was kind of our attitude.

The feeling of law enforcement

was, we have a problem, and we got to do something about it.

We had a lot of information coming in.

We had people making phone calls.

We had people writing letters.

We had people who would show up.

I have information, I think, maybe, on a suspect.

It was my job to take the information that

came in relative to Los Angeles murders that

were occurring with that MO.

They all had to be categorized and thoroughly investigated.

And that's where I came in, just on that particular MO

with the young boys.

Then the police get a break because of Maloney's headlines.

A young offender sees one of the headlines.

And he had been part of it, to a certain degree.

And he realizes, if the headline

is correct, then the person in question,

he thinks he knows who it is.

Now, he doesn't know for sure, but he's got an idea.

We had handled a case in Van Nuys.

And John and I, we were up all night,

36 hours at a crime scene.

And we were both pretty-- pretty beat.

We got a call from the office.

And we had pagers then, so my pager beeped.

I called the office.

And our lieutenant said, we have a kid

over at Los Padrinos juvenile facility

who thinks he knows something about the Freeway Killer.

So John and I thought, well, we got a lot of clues like this.

Tom and I-- Tom had given us clues similar to this.

But we thought, well, we better--

we better go do it now.

So we went over there.

And we get this kid, William Pugh,

and he's in custody for grand theft auto.

And he's a pretty streetwise kid.

And he's kind of hustling--

he's hustling us, trying to get a deal,

because he doesn't want to do any hard time

in juvenile authorities.

I said, I'll have to hear what you--

what you have to tell us first.

And then we could talk to the juvenile authorities.

We'll see what we can do.

So he said, well, I've been hanging out with this guy.

He's an older guy. And he has a van.

And he keeps a bunch of newspaper

clippings in his glove box about the Freeway Killer.

He lives in Downey, and he has a lot of young boys

coming to his house.

He's got kind of a mean streak.

I've seen him really get mad.

And I said, what's his name?

He said, William Bonin.

That was like the light bulb just went off.

William Bonin was born in 1947.

His parents had moved to Los Angeles

at the beginning of World War II

to work in the defense industry.

His father got a job with an aircraft company.

His parents left a great deal to be desired.

Both his parents were alcoholic.

His father physically abused his wife and the kids.

The father lost the family home gambling at one point,

and the kids were sent to convent schools.

And Bonin had some trouble there, said he was bullied.

He had a little bit of a tough time being gay,

trying to hide that he was gay.

At one time, he did have a girlfriend.

That was something to please his mother.

His mother placed him with a grandfather.

And unfortunately, he was a pedophile

and molested the children, especially William Bonin.

Then she thought, oh, maybe the best thing would

be to put him in an orphanage.

And he was molested by the older

kids there, the other boys.

He was also, at one point, held as a juvenile delinquent.

And supposedly, the adult counselor there molested him.

So this is a young man who had homosexual feelings at a very

young age, and those were-- were

punished at a very young age.

Then, about a year or two later,

his father got a job out here in Downey,

in Southern California.

Downey, California is famous for three things.

It has the oldest McDonald's that is in existence

still operating there.

And it's famous for the Carpenters, the musical group.

There was Karen Carpenter, Richard Carpenter.

And of course, they're not too happy about the other thing

they're famous for, and that is William Bonin.

When he moved in there, he had been abused.

And he wanted to control the neighborhood kids.

They would come by, and he would

give them alcohol or drugs or whatever for sexual favors.

And you can imagine how the neighbors were

not really happy on having William Bonin

in their neighborhood.

He's, say, 14, 15.

He's in a new environment.

He doesn't socialize well.

He doesn't want anyone to find out his secret about the fact

that he might be attracted to boys.

His mom goes to the track a lot.

His dad's out drinking and gambling.

So he's kind of on his own.

And he ends up getting in trouble with the law.

He stole a car.

He gets arrested.

In high school, he starts just skipping school.

And he basically becomes a high school dropout by the time

he's a junior in high school.

So this is, say, '67.

The Vietnam War is heating up, so his mother

talks him into joining the Army when he turns 18.

She thought it might be good for him.

It might give him some structure.

He agreed, and he convinced a friend to join with him.

And this is also part of Bonin's persona.

He hated doing things alone.

He ends up in Vietnam right before the Tet Offensive,

which is the most massive battle in the Vietnam War.

He was stationed there during his Air Force term

as a gunner in an aircraft and actually was awarded,

at one point, for his bravery.

He ran out of his helicopter, pulled

a wounded soldier out under fire,

dragged him back, and saved his life.

He also raped somebody at gunpoint,

a fellow soldier in Vietnam, which he doesn't

get in trouble for that.

He must have seen a lot of heavy-duty action

up and down because he was there when

it was really intense battles.

He also sees something which later plays in.

He sees South Vietnamese troops shackling

prisoners and then extracting information from them.

At the end of his military service,

there were a lot of disturbing signs about William Bonin.

In 1969, Bonin was convicted of sexual assault

against children.

He's only back two or three months,

and he's already raped four boys who were hitchhiking.

He's sent to the Atascadero, to a mental institution,

to see if they could rehabilitate him.

And they tried, and they gave up.

And they said, just send him to the state prison.

And he was sent to state prison.

And eventually, the state prison didn't know what to do

with him, and he's released.

So this is the type of individual

we have, a person who could not control

their emotions as to sexual molesting young children,

especially young boys.

He moved back home with his parents,

tried working as a bartender, and then

got a job as a truck driver.

And he made a statement to himself--

I will never allow anybody to survive.

Most serial killers work by themselves.

Bonin, interestingly, had five accomplices

at one time or another.

Vernon Butts was the big one because it was

with Vernon Butts, on an August evening

at the drive-in theater--

they're sitting there, watching the movie,

and they start talking about killing somebody.

And all of a sudden, they decide to do it.

So they left the drive-in.

And they drove down to a freeway entrance,

where Bonin knew that kids were hitchhiking.

And they pick up this kid, Mark Shelton.

And they take him up into the Cajon Pass,

which is up in the hills.

And they beat him up, and they rape him.

And now, they're at the point where they can step back,

but they kill him.

It's like they walked through the dark panel

into the new country.

Bonin has now got the taste.

And it's the taste that then keeps him going.

It's the power.

Bonin knew so much as to snatch some victims.

When you snatched them, obviously,

they're not going along.

They're not cooperating.

So he had a van with a sliding door

that didn't have to open out.

It was a Ford van.

It had been specially made so that it had no windows.

You couldn't unlock the doors in the back from the inside.

It had carpeting in the back.

And he had curtains up front so you couldn't see into the back.

And he nicknamed it.

It was the Death Van.

He would say, if you got in the Death Van, you didn't get out.

He was just always looking for someone

he could pull up on at a stop sign or a bus stop,

coax him into his van somehow.

He would get them comfortable, you know,

especially if they were hustlers.

He detested hustlers, and he would get them into the van.

And then he had a rope and a knife hidden away.

And so, as soon as they were in a compromised position,

he would put the knife to their throat,

tie them up, maybe work them over a little bit,

then rape them and then strangle them.

Generally, he would take the t-shirt

and strangle the individual with their own t-shirt.

Sometimes, he would take them to various locations.

Sometimes, he would take them to his friend

Vernon Butts's house.

Sometimes, he would take them to his house in Downey,

where he would molest them.

And then he would kill them, then would

have to take the body out, put it back in the van,

haul it someplace, and then dump the body along the

highway somewhere.

He would steal money from their pockets.

There was accounts where they would go and buy

food, fast food, and come back and

eat it right next to the bodies that they had just killed.

And Bonin would look over and say, thanks for this.

We're in the southern part of Downey,

and we come across the freeway here.

And we come to where William Bonin lived with his mother.

You can see what the house looks like.

It looks like a normal track house.

He would come in at nighttime, go through the door there.

And a lot of times, he would take the bodies.

And sometimes, they were tied up.

And sometimes, they walked in.

One of the cases was Darrin Kendrick.

They brought him down here.

And he walked into the house.

As soon as he got in the house, they closed the door,

and they tied him up.

And then he was molested.

And he was mutilated.

And they made him drink hydrochloric acid,

which, you know, his face and his throat--

the pain that he must have gone through.

Bonin had used an ice pick and pounded it into his ear.

He was not dead.

They stuck the ice pick in.

And you can imagine it goes into your brain.

And, you know, it causes a seizure,

but it doesn't kill you.

What type of human being--

what is going through your mind?

And then what is the satisfaction that you're

receiving from that?

Pugh is a young kid.

He's kind of a juvenile ruffian.

And the reason that Bonin met Pugh

is because Bonin used to party at this place owned by a guy

named Scott Fraser.

Fraser was a drug dealer.

And he had a lot of homosexual-type parties

with a lot of drugs.

He called up Bonin and said, hey,

there's a guy going to be over here.

I know you're going to like him.

He knew the type of young guys that Bonin

liked-- young, slim, blond.

He said, you should meet Billy Pugh.

So Bonin comes over.

And they hit it off immediately because, also,

they have something in common.

They were both incarcerated.

And their two favorite subjects to talk about

are sex and violence.

And that night, through Bonin's clever manipulations,

he convinces Pugh to go out and pick up somebody and

murder him that very night.

And they kill this kid named Harry Turner,

and he's dumped in downtown LA.

And it's dumped right in an alley,

so he's found immediately.

And LAPD, obviously, knows it's the same guy.

It's got all the earmarks of the same person.

And Bonin and Pugh basically talk one more time,

and then they never see each other again

because Pugh gets arrested.

And he ends up in a juvenile facility.

And he was a juvenile when they did this murder.

William Bonin's name had come up

at a couple of our different meetings with other agencies.

Bonin was a MDSO, Mentally Disordered Sex Offender.

And Bonin had been under surveillance

by Orange County Sheriffs at one time.

But they didn't-- there was nothing untoward about his

activities at that time, so Orange County

dropped him as a suspect.

We couldn't get back to the office fast enough.

We got back, called a meeting right away with our captain,

our lieutenant.

We decided that we got to put surveillance on this guy

right away.

So we knew where he was.

John and I started a background immediately,

getting as much information as we could,

the photos, everything we could possibly gather

to give to surveillance.

The sad thing about that surveillance

was, just within about 12 hours or

so, they watched Bonin and one of his accomplices

put a big box in the van.

They couldn't make the approach.

They'd blow the-- they didn't know what they had.

They couldn't make that approach.

We found out later it was probably

the last body that Bonin had actually killed.

But they stayed with the surveillance.

Bonin's under surveillance.

He had taken this path all the way

along the Hollywood Freeway.

He got off here on Santa Monica Boulevard.

And he made a left here on Santa Monica.

There's usually seven or eight teams.

So they're scattered, trying to cover

any direction he might go.

It's quite an art.

When you work-- when you go with these guys,

you'll see how good they are at it.

Bonin, in his van, now he's cruising through here.

This area in here, there would be young boys on the corners.

And Bonin would pull over and talk to them.

And as surveillance was watching him,

he'd have a conversation.

Maybe they didn't want to get in the car with him

for whatever reason.

So he would just move on and kept pulling over

and talking to different ones.

And then finally, up here around--

not this light, but the next light--

he stopped to talk to a kid.

The kid got in the van, and they watched that.

And then Bonin came back out and went back

on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Now, they have to really stay on him.

You can't risk losing him.

So now, they're watching him.

And he wasn't slowing down, like he

was looking for a place.

He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

Surveillance followed Bonin on Santa Monica Boulevard,

over the Hollywood Freeway, and wound

up here in this parking lot.

We are just east of the Hollywood Freeway.

He pulled into this parking lot.

And Bonin backed up his van.

Of course, surveillance couldn't tell

what was going on in the van.

So they just sat, and they watched.

And they thought, we better look closer.

So one of the surveillance officers

came out, snuck around the parking lot.

It was pretty dark out here.

There were no lights or anything.

He snuck up on the van, crawled underneath it to listen,

and he heard a lot of moaning.

And then he could smell some really bad--

bad smells.

And that's when he signaled to the other surveillance guys

that we've got to take him down.

So they break their way into the van,

and he's in the act of sodomizing

this young boy he had just picked

up on Santa Monica Boulevard.

And there's no doubt in my mind that he

was going to kill the kid eventually

because Bonin liked to have sex and strangle

them at the same time.

The kid was completely nude.

There was a crowbar.

And the kid's clothes were right there.

They were probably within minutes of this kid dying.

They got the kid out.

The kid was terrified.

He was a runaway from Orange County somewhere.

Got him safe.

Got him dressed.

They took Bonin into custody, of course.

They had a unit sit on the van until we could get a tow truck.

Tremendous amount of evidence in the van--

not only tools that he used to murder these young boys, but

also carpet fibers that matched fibers they

found on several of the bodies, which was pretty conclusive.

We didn't have DNA at that time.

And there was a lot of blood and body fluids on the carpet,

in the carpet.

If we would have had DNA, then we probably could have

identified certain victims.

But that wasn't the case.

That was one of the biggest cases I ever handled.

So it was a relief to have him in custody, believe me.

And I probably slept better that night

than I have in a long time.

It was pretty incredible.

The police arrest him.

Sergeant St. John is there to greet him.

Bonin writes about it in his jailhouse diary.

He describes the scene with St. John,

realizing that it's all over.

And he says in his diary, he starts crying.

I put him in the interview room.

And I was a little rough on him.

John was probably a little more professional than I was.

I kind of lost it a little bit.

And I was a little emotional.

John advised him of his rights, and he

started to talk a little bit.

And then he just clammed up.

And John kind of looked at me and said-- so we went

outside the interview room.

And he says, you know, I think he's--

I think he's a little nervous.

He keeps looking at you.

And he says-- like you're staring at him, you know?

He says, let me have a shot at him.

He says, I'm going to do a little fatherly thing with him.

Good cop, bad cop, everybody hears about that.

It's true.

It works.

It worked with Bob and John.

John was the elderly man.

I think John was almost 70 years old when he was working--

working that.

He was a calming influence.

Bob would just stand up there.

He's 6' 4", 6' 5".

He'd just glare at you.

And that's very effective, especially

to somebody like a Bonin, who is deathly afraid of him.

So John started talking to him.

And pretty soon, John pulled out

some pictures of the victims.

We got you dead bang, buddy.

We know you did it.

We got witnesses.

And Bonin started talking and laying out all these cases

he'd done and what have you.

That arrest was just the beginning of the investigation

because now, we're getting more and more information every time

he sits down.

He was very cooperative.

He was kind of proud of what he did.

He was talking in detail of how he killed these kids

and what they did.

Some of them, they took to his house,

where they'd torture them and murder them.

They had already got a confession from Bonin,

but it was on the grounds that they wouldn't use it because he

took them to other bodies.

He was a very manipulative guy.

That's where I became important to them.

The night Bonin was arrested, everybody went to the mother's

house in Downey.

I saw this lonely figure of a woman

sitting at the kitchen table.

It was his mother.

So the next day, I said to the newsroom--

I said, look, I think I can get her to talk to me.

Just give me a crew.

Let me see what happens.

So I go back the next day.

And sure enough, I got an interview with her.

And she-- she said how, you know, he was a wonderful boy

and, you know, he had a little trouble in the Army.

And she didn't know he was gay.

And she just can't believe he would do-- you know,

it's a typical mom protecting her son.

Bonin's in court a couple days later.

His attorney named Earl Hanson, who came up to me

and gave me his card, and he said, listen,

Bonin really appreciates the way you talk to his mother.

And he'd like to talk to you.

Show this card when you go to the jail,

and you'll be able to go in.

That would never happen today.

Never.

It just wouldn't-- it's impossible.

So I show the card.

I get in.

I go into where the attorney's room is.

In comes Bonin.

He's behind a Plexiglas.

I was surprised at how small he was.

He's a big-- he's a big man, but he's not tall.

You know, I figured this guy would

be, you know, overpowering all these kids, you know,

and putting them in a hog tie and everything,

big, massive muscles. No.

I was there for about an hour and a half.

No notes because I wasn't allowed to take any notes.

And he told me how he killed 26 kids--

26 kids.

What really sent chills down my spine was when he said,

I would never stop unless I was arrested.

He says, I was never going to stop.

I asked Bonin, what was the thrill?

And I remember, he said, he loved the sound

and he loved the terror in their face.

It was haunting, just plain haunting.

I mean, he just really enjoyed killing.

So that investigation went on and on.

I mean, we had to prepare for trial.

And he was laying out, of course, his accomplices.

And meanwhile, he didn't realize

at first that all these accomplices

were testifying against him.

Butts is prosecuted.

His attorney, at some point, said,

hey, we could make a deal.

He will testify against William Bonin.

Now, the DA's office needs something.

They can't-- there are no witnesses who saw

Bonin pick these people up, kill these people,

or dump the body.

He comes in, and he testifies at the preliminary hearing.

And he does it all, just down the line.

We had our case.

Everything was made.

It was perfect.

The DA couldn't have been happier.

Then they checked out Butts's cell.

He's hanged himself.

Now, we don't have a case.

All of those cases that Butts said, I was with him,

I drove the van, we can't do those.

We couldn't prosecute on the ones

that Butts had told us that William Bonin had done.

My conscience started bothering me.

And all the investigators and different police agencies said,

look, you know, we need you.

And finally, six months into the fact,

I said, okay, that's it.

I can't-- I can't handle this anymore.

And I broke the story that Bonin had confessed to me.

He said that once he got them in, the talk of sex came up.

He always had a knife handy, and he'd put a knife

at their throat occasionally.

And he says he-- he bragged about the idea

that he had a great ability to tie people up very quickly.

That is really a no-no in the reporter world,

giving up your source or conveying

information that he gave you.

And I admired him very much for what he did with Bonin.

I've never had another reporter do that.

I just felt it was the right thing to do.

I'm glad I did.

I mean, I got crucified by some members of the media.

I got hammered by the "TV Guide," which was

a big publication back then.

I had to do what I had to do, and

I don't regret it to this day.

I firmly believe that when the question comes up,

are we journalists or citizens first, we are citizens first.

The public has a right to know.

The jury has a right to know.

Every mother and father who have ever loved a child

have a right to know.

The jury came back about two days later

and found him guilty on all 10 murders.

They always go with the best cases.

He was responsible for more than 25.

And then he was subsequently held on four additional charges

in Orange County.

He got two separate life sentences and,

actually, capital punishment.

When Bonin is arrested, immediately,

the first thing they do is they winnow

out the cases they know that they believe Bonin committed.

And quickly, within a couple of weeks,

St. John tells the press-- because there are articles

saying, he killed 45 people.

Based on our investigation and incarceration

of Bonin at these times, we believe he was

responsible for 22 murders.

They know someone else is out there.

All of a sudden, there are more

bodies that are turning up.

And the bodies are really mutilated.

And some of them are-- are chopped up, genitals cut off,

found along various highways.

What's going on?

A Los Angeles judge set an execution

date today for convicted freeway

killer William George Bonin.

Bonin was sentenced to death for the 1982

sex murders of 10 boys.

The judge ordered the former truck

driver to die on June 23 in the San Quentin gas chamber.

William Bonin had been on death row

more than a dozen years and had gone

through all sorts of appeals, as is required

for death penalty convictions, when, in February of 1996,

he was finally executed.

He is put up as the poster boy for capital punishment.

There are protests outside San Quentin saying,

the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment.

And then there's others, like the victims' families

who are in attendance, who, you know,

their lives have been wrecked by this unrepentant guy.

I was called as a witness for the execution in San Quentin.

It wasn't a celebration because there were the mothers

of victims, fathers, and then, of course,

a lot of the cops who were involved in the investigation.

And there were probably 75 people,

I think, total in the room.

John St. John died 18 months before the actual execution.

And John had told me when we first convicted Bonin---

he said, I want you to do me a favor.

I might not be here if Bonin ever does get executed.

But I want you to do something for me.

And I said, what's that?

He says, I want you to get up close.

And I want you to say something to him.

And I said, okay, I'll do that.

John told me what he wanted me to say.

So at the execution, I'm in the room.

Bonin is on a gurney.

He's already gotten the first stage of the--

the lethal injection.

And I didn't think he'd hear me,

but I had to fulfill my promise to John.

So I got up real close to the window, and I said,

adios, mother-[bleep].

Orange County investigators are

dealing with a possible mass murderer and a list of victims

that continues to get longer.

The bodies continue to pile up in Southern California.

The madness has not ended.

I didn't actually feel I was getting the job done because we

were having so many of them.

And just when they thought they'd have something,

another body would show up.

And we're going back and looking at the chart.

We're saying, wait a minute, there

might be a third guy here, because that MO was

even a little bit different.

He was the most sadistic out of all of them.

The details about how they died--

nothing can match the sickening descriptions.

It's like a trilogy of terror with these three guys.