Original subtitles

What happened that night?

It's the kind of thing

that people don't think actually happens.

But it's true, and I know it's true,

because I was there.

In 1990,

Panhandle was a typical Texas small town,

30 minutes from Amarillo.

It's a primarily farming community

and was the county seat-- Carson County.

There was about 2,000 people there.

We're a very Christian, conservative community.

It was a pretty quiet place. Nothing ever happens there.

Got one light,

had just the town square

and a few little, you know, stores around that,

and that was about it.

This is a picture of me when I was principal

at Panhandle High School.

The high school only had 250 kids.

In high school, I was a dishwasher

at one of the local diners,

and they were known for their pies.

And most of my classmates,

I had grown up with since kindergarten.

Kids were bored a lot.

We drove around. we would drive downtown,

drag Main Street,

often would go and drink beer in the country.

I am Tam Terry.

I'm the sheriff of Carson County, Texas.

We didn't have a dispatcher after midnight,

but if you called the police department,

that radio rang at my house.

That night, on July the 13th, 1990,

I had two kids that were less than five at home.

We'd planned on going out to the ranch the next day

and riding some horses.

We were settling in for the evening,

like normal folks do.

And just before I went to bed,

one click of the radio, the base station radio,

something came across about an assault

that had taken place.

That Friday night,

while everyone else was getting ready for bed.

Jimmy Britten, he was 41.

He had just gotten home

after a night out, with some friends...

...and he heard a knock on the door.

Well, typically at night,

you don't get people knocking on your door.

So that was a surprise.

So Jimmy looks out, and it's obvious it's dark,

there's a streetlight on the corner.

Jimmy saw a teenager there who was asking to use the phone

because there'd been a car wreck.

Jimmy Britten opens the door, wanting to help.

Jimmy was set up for an ambush.

The next thing he knows,

he's dealing with a kid with a knife.

He slashed him across the chest

and the torso and the abdomen several times.

And for the next 15 minutes,

Jimmy was fighting for his life.

Room to room fighting, struggling for the knife.

And when Jimmy was afraid he might lose this fight...

The kid started vomiting profusely.

Jimmy was able to shove him out the door

and slam the door and lock him out.

He was losing blood,

but he did not want to take his eyes off

the teenager outside.

Jimmy watched this guy

pace back and forth outside his home.

Jimmy thought, "Hey, this guy's regrouping,

and he may be gonna take another swipe at me."

And that's when he realized

there was another way in.

And so he was concerned

that the kid might get in the back door.

He got to that back door and he secured it.

He was finally able to manage a call to the police.

911, what is your emergency?

And when he looked back up after calling them.

All of a sudden, this guy...

he was gone.

He had vanished into the night.

The victim was Jimmy Britten.

We were friends.

He was a meat inspector for the USDA.

He always has his lawn mowed.

He takes good care of his dogs.

He's always in church.

He's just that guy that everybody likes.

I heard on the radio he was being treated by EMS

for multiple slash wounds to his torso.

He had lost a lot of blood.

It was certainly a critical situation.

Jimmy gave the officers the car description

and that there's maybe a suspect involved

that could be headed back towards Panhandle.

I wanted to catch this guy, so I got dressed as quickly

as quickly as I possibly could. Try not to wake the kids up.

Got out of the house, in the car, and hauled ass.

And I'm probably driving 110,

and you think, "Wake up, Tim.

"We gotta move.

We gotta get down there."

It's quite the adrenaline rush.

So I went eight miles south

to the intersection of 293

and on to Market road 294

because I was almost certain he would come through there.

And I pull off in the bar ditch,

turned off all my lights and sit there,

thinking that if a vehicle came through there,

I'm fixing to stop him.

If he wouldn't stop, I would have shot his tires.

If that didn't work out,

I would've rammed him with my pickup.

I was determined to get him stopped and get him captured.

When you're out there in the dark by yourself,

your greatest fear is you don't know

who you're looking for.

And you better get ready

because your life could be in danger.

And I was on edge. It's terrifying.

But the car that I was looking for never came by me.

We had no idea where he was.

And trying to find him

was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

A few hours before, I had friends who were

at Lake McClellan for a birthday party.

They were drinking alcohol, bonfires, music,

dancing, laughing...

being rambunctious high school kids.

They did not realize that there was a killer among them.

like some predator stalking his prey.

They were completely oblivious to what was going on.

They were sitting ducks.

I've been doing this police work

for 42 years.

These things don't happen in Panhandle, Texas.

I've been slashed at with a knife a couple of times.

I've been shot at a couple of times.

But Friday, July the 13th, 1990,

I will never forget that night.

The teenager had stabbed Jimmy Britten.

This was a totally unprovoked attack

on an innocent guy,

and we're looking for the suspect.

It was scary that we had no way

of letting people in Panhandle know what was happening.

They're completely unaware that there's...

a killer out there.

It's the middle of the night,

People in Panhandle are asleep, home in bed,

don't have a clue what's going on.

Their doors are unlocked, their windows may be open,

and they have no idea that there might be danger.

When the officers arrived,

they found Jimmy Britten was bleeding.

He had multiple slash wounds across his torso.

Even though he was terribly wounded,

he was conscious.

Jimmy Britten told them he recognized his attacker.

It was his stepdaughter's ex-boyfriend.

His name was Kenneth Glenn Milner,

but he was commonly called Glenn.

Jimmy thought Glenn Milner was bad news.

He didn't really want him around his stepdaughter.

Jimmy prevented them from having a relationship

because Glenn had several interactions

with law enforcement in Panhandle.

He was a person that the school

and law enforcement were concerned about

hurting people or killing people.

A couple years ago,

he climbed up on the water tower

at our city park.

And was threatening to jump off

because his girlfriend had broken up with him.

And police officers were able to persuade him to come down.

Not long after the water tower incident,

he drove to Palo Duro Canyon and proceeded to drive off

a cliff in another attempt to commit suicide.

There's a 600 foot drop

and probably a 10 to 20 percent grade.

And he survived that.

Following that, he was admitted

to a psychiatric hospital.

And he was there for a while.

And he learned to play the roles, I think,

that the doctors wanted him to play.

But once he got out, and then, you know,

here we go to July the 13th.

He attacked Jimmy Britten.

You know, we've got to stop this guy before he hurts

somebody else or maybe even kills somebody.

We knew where he lived.

And so we went to his house looking for him.

Parents didn't know where he was.

You have to be concerned

that they might not have been truthful.

So it's very possible

that he could've been hiding in there.

Everybody had their pistols out.

Most police officers are very brave,

and valor means a lot,

but that don't mean they're not scared.

We entered his room.

If a mouse had ran across the floor,

I'd have probably shot that sucker six times.

The room was painted black.

And the walls, you'd expect to see things like

a rock star poster or a Playboy bunny poster.

And he had slasher movie posters on the wall.

Just grotesque, bloody, deadly things.

Plus, there was a bunch of grotesque masks.

I'm not talking two or three.

I'm talking 12 or 15.

One mask was modified to show

that part of the facial features had been blown away.

You look down and see what looked like a corpse

laying on the floor.

Ah!

There was a fake corpse in that room.

It's just a shock to the senses.

To me, it tells me he's creepy

and that his intentions are not healthy,

and that he has a warped sense of reality.

We found something even more disturbing,

a handwritten hit list

of people that he planned to kill.

That hit list had high school students.

They had adults.

He wasn't just after Jimmy Britten.

That was just his starting place.

We need to catch him

before he marks any more names off that list.

Frankie Garcia was just 17,

was about to start his senior year.

He was very sweet.

That night, Frankie rode to an old barn

out in the country

that we called "the haunted house."

It was an eerie place.

It was just abandoned,

empty, that had no electricity.

Frankie had to walk up to the barn

without knowing...

what was about to happen.

That he was with a killer.

After Jimmy Britten got hurt,

we were hoping that things were settling down.

But, in reality, things were just beginning.

This vengeance, this cold-blooded murder

going out with intentions of hurting multiple people.

Glenn's parents told the officers that Glenn Milner

and Craig Shackelford were close friends.

When the officers got to Craig Shackelford's house,

they could tell that he was on edge,

that he was nervous.

He said something about Glenn was not the same

the last time he talked to him.

His voice even sounded different,

in that he acted like something snapped.

So Craig tells officers,

"I've got something you need to see."

And he goes to the side table

and pulls out a handwritten note

to Craig from Glenn Milner.

And the note said,

"Don't ask questions, just do as instructed."

Cryptic instructions to go to places in the country

and look under railroad trestles,

and there's a box.

"Open the box and follow the instructions."

Well, this kid was playing some sick games.

Well, I'm thinking,

what in the world's gonna happen next?

The bridge where Glenn told Craig the box was

is on a dirt county road about four miles northwest

of Panhandle-- out in the sticks.

Set a roadblock on 221.

In the middle of the night,

when you didn't know what you'd run into,

it could be a pretty scary place.

We're looking around under the road, tucked away.

We found a green ammunition box.

It's risky-- opening that box,

it was scary.

This thing gonna blow up when I open the lid?

Is it a booby trap?

You don't really have time to have a bomb squad

look it over.

So you just man up and do what you gotta do--

open the thing.

And we were scared to death.

It wasn't a booby trap.

And inside the box,

we found three handwritten notes

and a tape.

The tone of the letters was that Glenn

didn't expect to survive the night,

and that he was somehow trying to convey them goodbye.

Jimmy Britten's in the hospital,

and that Glenn Milner put him there.

And I think they're just thinking,

"What in the world's gonna happen next?"

The letters were addressed to specific people.

Craig, Milner's parents,

and Kenja,

who was an intern at an Amarillo TV station.

This is a picture of me

on the night I graduated high school in 1988,

and it was during the time that I dated Glenn Milner.

We dated from around May

through probably the end of July.

We spent lots of time at the park

talking about our futures and what we wanted to do.

He was funny, and fun, and kind.

He always called me "princess,"

but he ended up kissing another girl,

and I wasn't OK with that.

By 1990, I was really busy with college.

I wanted to be a news reporter

at one of the affiliates in New York or Washington.

That was kind of my dream.

We talked on the phone, probably weekly,

and then eventually that kind of became monthly,

and then, you know, every couple of months.

The police told me that there was a note

Glenn had written to me along with the tape.

The note said, "You know, I'm really sorry

"that I've done this, but on the upside, hey,

here's the story of the decade for you, princess."

Kenneth Glenn Milner was a student in my high school.

He made good grades. He dressed nice.

He carried himself well.

Everything about Glenn,

you thought that he was going to be successful.

We had a few classes together,

my freshman, sophomore,

which was his junior, senior years.

Glenn could be charming. He wasn't unattractive.

He had good hair, and in the '80s,

we parted it in the middle and feathered it back,

and he certainly did that.

In theater arts, using a Styrofoam bust,

he made the Hellraiser character

with the pins in his head.

He was very talented in the makeup, and mask,

and the behind-the-scenes stuff for movie making.

Glenn definitely had an affinity for horror movies,

that delicious tingle of being, you know, scared.

He idolized Ted Bundy, Manson, Jack the Ripper.

We're a very Christian, conservative community,

and in the '80s, there was a big Satanic Panic.

It became very well known that he was

into satanic activities and beliefs.

He was reading the book of "Necronomicon,"

and it gives you ritual things you can do

to get closer to Satan.

I heard that he was also drinking cat's blood.

He really believed that he could be the son of Satan

and be closer to him by having the name Damion.

I know that he used to call himself Damion,

but he never showed that part of himself with me.

And so, I wasn't afraid, but, yeah,

I probably should have been.

Glenn had scripted himself a horror movie,

where he's the star, and we're the pawns.

It was apparent that Milner had nothing to lose,

that he felt like he was not gonna survive the night,

and that he was not afraid to die,

and he was going to do everything he could

to hurt the people on that list.

We felt like time was running out.

Glenn Milner expected Friday, July 13th, 1990,

to be his last day on Earth,

and that he really wanted to go out

hurting people or killing people,

then that's what he was gonna try to do.

We did a welfare check

on everybody on the hit list,

but, because everybody didn't have a cell phone

in their pocket,

you had to go knock on doors

and talk to people face to face.

There was a number of high school students

that Glenn didn't consider his friends,

or that he felt might have wronged him in some way.

It's after midnight by this time,

and the investigators learned

that there had been a party at Lake McClellan.

Glenn had showed up at that party.

It's frightening to imagine

those kids are probably bunched up,

drinking a little beer, having a good time

around the campfire.

They're completely unaware that there's a killer out there

looking for their next victim.

They'd have been easy targets.

The students said they saw Milner at Lake McClellan,

but he kind of walked around by himself

with his hands in his pocket. He didn't say much to anybody.

Somebody saw him take some pills.

Glenn was kinda quiet, observing everyone,

kinda looking around.

He had a few drinks.

And then he proceeded to get sick,

was grabbing his stomach.

And the next thing they knew, he just left.

Well, first thought is some sort of relief.

He could have done a lot of damage.

And then we're thinking, "Hey, this ain't over with yet."

This kid that's hell bent

on killing people is on the loose.

Friday the 13th was a normal day.

You know, I worked.

We had dinner with the kids, and I think we had hot dogs.

I remember putting my son to bed that night

in his Ninja Turtle sheets.

And we went to bed.

Life was good.

We were laying in bed, asleep.

And all of a sudden, the doorbell rang.

I looked at the clock.

It was at 2:45.

And I thought,

"My goodness, who'd ring the doorbell at this time."

When I went to the door,

I looked through that little peephole.

All I saw was yellow eyes, and it just floored me.

I thought, my brain's doing a trick on my mind.

It can't be yellow eyes out there.

I kind of blinked my eyes,

and that's when I saw Glenn standin' there.

Just felt like there's something back here telling me,

"This is not good, so don't let him in."

He looked at me, and he said,

"I really need to come in and talk to you."

And I said, "Glenn, you're not coming in my house."

I mean, I could see it in his eyes--

he wasn't the Glenn Milner that I knew.

That night when I looked at him,

I knew he was possessed.

I couldn't see his hands.

I said, "Glenn, what do you got in your hand down there?"

The first bullet felt like somebody hit me

with a baseball bat in the gut.

And I thought, "What was that? What hit me?"

The second shot blew my leg out from underneath me.

I just thought to myself, "This can't be happening."

And then my mind changed drastically, and I was worried

about Patti and my kids.

He was going to kill us all.

He already had put his finger in the bullet wound,

so his hand was falling.

So I just grabbed his hand and put my fingers in there

with him to try to plug the hole.

And I told her, I said, "Honey, I love you."

"And I want you to know, I want you to go on.

"I'm not gonna live.

I found the police station phone number

...and called them

and told them, and the whole time

he was telling me, "Tell them it was Glenn Milner."

The scariest part-- you're laying there

waiting on the ambulance,

and you're not real sure where he is.

Maybe Milner was still outside.

Maybe he was coming back.

That call came across the radio.

Shots fired.

I heard from the dispatcher.

In a loud voice,"Oh, my God,

he just did another one."

I thought he'd taken another person off the list.

We didn't know where he was.

We didn't know where he's going next.

And if that won't scare the bejesus out of you,

I don't know what will.

At this point, the search was a bunch of police cars driving

back and forth on every street in town looking for him,

spotlighting down alleys,

looking at the park.

And then I heard on the radio that...

...Glenn Milner had been spotted parked

in front of the Panhandle Police Department.

And Milner's car was parked facing the curb.

Glenn Milner was sitting in the car.

I didn't notice the pistol at first.

I should have.

When I got out of the car,

I remember Trooper Davis saying,

"Watch out, he might shoot your ass."

Our fingers were on the triggers...

and we were ready.

Glenn, he was sitting in the car,

planted himself in the driver's seat

with the barrel of the gun

under his chin, not moving.

So Milner had planted himself right in front

of the Panhandle Police Department,

And he was prepared to kill himself

and go out in a blaze of glory.

We were saying, "Glenn, put the gun down."

Glenn, put the gun down. Put the gun down."

And for some unknown reason,

"Here I am, and you've got me."

He was not defiant, he was just kind of blank.

He wasn't screaming. He wasn't kicking.

He wasn't bragging about what he'd done.

Glenn told officers the reason he didn't kill himself

in front of City Hall

was that he forgot the words to the incantation

that he was required to say before he killed himself

by his satanic beliefs.

And he was afraid to kill himself

without saying those words first.

After Milner was in custody,

we all took a big sigh of relief,

thinking, "Well,

nothing else was gonna happen."

And I'm just thankful that everybody was still alive.

Nobody had died.

Just then, somebody called dispatch.

The witness described a location that's known

as "the haunted house."

and they said, "We gotta get down there."

It was on the edge of town, and nobody lived there.

It was kind of boarded up and just abandoned.

It was, kind of, known to be the dark,

haunted place

that Panhandle kids went when they wanted to scare

the bejesus out of themselves.

The haunted house was really just a dilapidated barn

that had no electricity.

A lot of kids would go out there and drink beer,

just hanging out.

It was real creepy.

When the officers got

into the barn,

it was a dirt floor.

And they found

a pentagram drawn in the dirt.

And, in the middle of the pentagram,

there was blood and a wet spot,

and...

a teenage boy face down.

It was an execution.

It was a ritual.

We did a welfare check on everybody on the hit list,

and they were accounted for, except for Frankie Garcia.

His parents told officers

that Frankie was last seen with a friend from school,

Glenn Milner.

Texas Rangers went in to interrogate him

about the situation. He was completely calm.

He was proud of what he had accomplished.

In his confession, Glenn detailed

everything that happened.

Glenn Milner told investigators

that he started the day on Friday at the barn.

He drew the pentagram.

He placed candles around

in certain areas, and he had prepared that area to kill him.

After school that day, Glenn Milner lured Frankie

to get in the car with him

and told him they'd go riding around and drink beer

and that they'd be buddies.

And he took Frankie to the barn.

He pulled out the gun and made him get on his knees,

and Frankie begged for his life.

He stuck the gun in Frankie's mouth.

Glenn Milner stated that he killed Frankie Garcia

because his beliefs were

that he was required to kill a virgin

before he ended his own life.

And that he thought Frankie Garcia was a virgin,

and Frankie was compliant with him,

and was an easy target.

Frankie was just his starting place.

His plans were to kill

up to a dozen more people.

When we had the hearing, they brought him

into the courtroom.

When he got on that stand, he never took his eyes off me.

He had so much hate in his heart that he didn't kill me.

Glenn Milner wanted the death penalty.

So that he could go to the other side.

They went for the two attempted murders and one murder

instead of capital murder.

He pled guilty and was sentenced

to three consecutive life terms in prison.

When it was over,

he stood right up and made

his fingers into a gun, and he said,

"If I ever get out, I'll finish the job."

And he meant it, and there was no doubt in my mind

that he would.

Every time it's a Friday the 13th,

I remember Frankie.

In my nightmares, Frankie would come to me

and make me watch him get killed.

Every night, repeatedly.

Life is precious.

Somebody planning on the cold-blooded murder

of several individuals

is about as twisted as you can get.

You hear about evil,

but you never think it's going to affect you.

Our whole town, they finally realized

that this could happen in Panhandle.

In Panhandle, Texas?

This doesn't happen here.

Well, let me tell you, it happens everywhere.

And evil can strike into your heart at any time.

Horror cliche is, it happens on a dark, stormy night...

...and that's what this was.

That's the thing about the dead.

When you start pulling 'em back up,

You never know what you're gonna find.

Friday, February 13th, my daughter never came home.

The front door is cracked, your adrenaline is running.

This is the actual mask he wore.

People described him as Frankenstein.

He wasn't protecting people, he was hunting them.

They had his head in a bucket.

He literally peeled his face off.