Original subtitles

In the early hours of New Years Day, 1981,

Police in St Paul, Minnesota, received a hysterical 911 call.

The anonymous call was made by her attacker,

and it was to be the first of many.

She was badly beaten with a tyre iron,

left for dead in the snow.

When I went there the next morning,

her blood was still in the snow and we thought, "There's no way

this person who'd been so viciously beaten could have survived."

The assailant, soon became known as "The Weepy Voiced Killer".

His eerie tones were so distinctive

that he was quickly linked to many more attacks.

You knew that it was the same person

I've listened to those calls so many times over the years.

So, you know it's the same person making these phone calls.

I think he was looking for absolution and he never got it.

He had confessed his sins.

But there was no forgiveness for Paul Stephani,

"The Weepy Voiced Killer",

who had become one of The World's Most Evil Killers.

Between January 1981 and August 1982,

Police in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul

received a series of disturbing, anonymous phone calls

from a serial killer.

Each time they were linked to the discovery of a woman's body.

There was a sense of urgency, the danger that he was out there,

and also a sense that he wanted to be caught,

because I can't remember a time in 40 years of covering crime

of somebody calling up and leading police that way

to the victims and seeming hysterical.

There was a lot of fear in the community.

There was a sense that this would be solved quickly,

that the voice would be recognised,

but then nothing happened.

The now infamous whiney voice in the 911 calls,

cause him to be dubbed The Weepy Voiced Killer.

He brutally attacked five women.

This isn't somebody who wants to be caught.

It's somebody who wants status, who wants recognition.

He's absolutely desperate to be seen as a serial killer.

He wants a recognition of being a serial killer.

That's something that's quite important to him.

This killer's story begins in Minnesota.

Paul Michael Stephani was born on the 8th September 1944.

Paul Stephani was born in a smaller town

down in Southern Minnesota by Austin, Minnesota.

It's my understanding that his parents divorced and that

he had a very strict stepfather who was a devout Catholic.

It's quite interesting

looking at the religious background of serial killers,

cos it tends to affect them in one of two ways.

On the one hand, they might use the kind of values

that they've grown up with as a justification for their behaviour.

On the other hand, their failure to live up to those values

might be something that they feel fundamentally ashamed of

and it's that shame that actually drives their offending.

He had a strong bond with his mother, there was a strength there.

So there was nothing that I could find that made any sense

that could even explain why he did what he did.

I think there would've been quite clear boundaries

around what's acceptable or unacceptable.

Ideas about sin.

Stephani had been diagnosed with epilepsy as a child

and when he kept losing his jobs as an adult, he blamed the condition.

Nevertheless, he did appear to settle down.

He moved out of Austin to St Paul,

and by the age of 26, had met his wife.

In 1970, he got married... so far so normal.

It didn't last all that long, they divorced five years later.

In the 1970s, there's still quite a bit of stigma around divorce,

especially within Catholic communities.

So I think this on his part,

perhaps would've been seen as something of a failure.

So I think it's quite an interesting element of his background.

Some time after his divorce, Stephani went off the rails

and showed his violent side for the first time.

The details of the incident are unknown,

but Stephani was convicted of assault,

meaning his name was now on a list of known violent offenders.

Stephani soon moved on and began a relationship with a Syrian girl

who he reportedly hoped to marry.

They were pretty close, dating for four years,

and then she leaves him for an arranged marriage

that she had no control over.

Stephani struggled with the rejection.

When he lost yet another job, this time at Malmberg Maufacturing,

things were spiralling out of his control.

Something is burning at him inside.

Something is eating at Paul Stephani.

In the early hours of New Years Day, 1981,

things took a sudden and sinister turn.

As the night's celebrations wound down,

36-year-old Stephani encountered a 20-year-old student, Karen Potack.

She was walking home when she suddenly was attacked

right off Pierce Butler Road, a main road in St Paul.

It's an absolutely vicious attack,

callous, without warning and for no reason.

At 3:00am on new year's day,

the police in Saint Paul receive a phone call,

an anonymous phone call.

The phone call was a hysterical person.

It wasn't clear if it was a man or a woman.

This is incredibly deliberate on his part.

He is wanting to appear to be

somebody who can't help what he's doing.

He thinks she's dead.

He's certainly left her for dead and he's consumed.

So you've got two conflicting emotions inside Stephani:

One, an absolute desire to hurt women.

Two, a fierce guilt about having done it.

There was just this urgency, "Get there, help her"

and an ambulance was sent there.

And that's where they found Karen Potack near-death in the snow.

She'd been hit over the head with a tyre iron, multiple times,

to the extent that some of her brain

was actually exposed to the elements.

So this is a really, really significant attack.

And it's one that shows us that the person who carried it out

wanted to kill the victim.

The location of Stephani's first attack

would later form a key part of the investigation

as police worked to identify him.

She's found in a very significant place near some railway tracks,

near a factory in which Stephani once worked.

It was the Malmberg Manufacturing company

where Stephani had lost his job.

He would later claim this upset to be the reason he attacked.

That's something about serial killers too,

when they first begin killing people,

and of course, but Potack, he didn't kill her, but he left her for dead,

they go to places that are familiar with them

at the beginning of their assaults.

Karen was taken to hospital

but was not expected to survive.

When I went there the next morning

the blood was still in the snow, and we thought,

there's no way this person who'd been so viciously beaten.

could have survived.

In fact, miraculously, Karen is not dead.

Although, perhaps mercifully, she doesn't remember anything

about the attack and she certainly doesn't know who attacked her.

The police attributed that to the cognitive damage

that was done to her in the assault,

she was never the same after that.

Paul Stephani has got away with what he thought was murder,

but in fact wasn't.

I expected two things that Karen Potack would not survive,

which she did.

I expected this case to be solved right away,

they would catch his person, man or woman, but nothing happened.

Paul Stephani was still at large.

When he attacked again,

he made sure that this time his victim didn't survive.

On New Years Day in 1981,

Paul Stephani had attacked for the first time,

leaving a 20-year-old woman for dead in the city of St Paul, Minnesota.

The 36-year-old killer had stunned investigators by dialling 911

to report the savage attack in his soon to be infamous, weepy voice.

Just five months later, on the 3rd of June,

his high pitched tones would be heard again.

He sounds quite childlike and pathetic essentially.

There's an emphasis on "Poor me." "Feel sorry for me."

"I can't help myself."

So, this is very deliberate on his part.

This is all about him.

30 minutes after the 911 call,

a grim discovery was made in bushes by a freeway in St Paul.

Some boys were out playing

and a ball went over to the edge of where they were playing,

and they... they saw...

they thought it was a dummy laying in the grass, kinda hidden.

And they realised it was an actual person and a body

and they called the police.

She's dumped in the bushes.

And when we think of the kind of things that we find in the bushes,

it's things that we discard, things that we don't want anymore,

things that we would consider to be trash.

And that's very much how Stephani saw this victim.

The body was that of a woman wearing a red jacket.

She had no identification but did have a single key on her person.

The key was to the Greyhound bus locker in St Paul,

by Mickey's diner, a pretty iconic location in St Paul.

Through there, they found some of her identification

and were able to figure out it was Kimberly Compton.

Working backwards, the police then found out

she had just arrived that that day from Pepin, Wisconsin,

the police had to tell her family

that she was brutally assaulted and murdered.

At this point we didn't have any idea of

who or why or what had happened.

She'd only that day gone to St Paul on the Greyhound bus

to start a new life after leaving Wisconsin.

This was gonna be a clean slate.

This was the beginning of a new life,

and sadly it was the end.

Tracking Kimberley's last movements,

police discovered that after arriving at the bus station,

Kimberley had gone to a nearby diner where she'd met a friendly local

who seemed keen to welcome her to the city.

Stephani was personable, got a conversation going with her

and said, "Hey, you're from Wisconsin."

"Let me show you some of the sights of St Paul."

He came across as sort of an older man

looking out for this young woman with hopes and dreams.

15 minutes later, she was dead.

Kimberly Compton was stabbed 61 times in the upper body, mostly,

in a very violent assault with an ice pick.

Later on the medical examiner determined,

not only was she stabbed,

but she was also choked to death with some shoelaces.

This method of killing, this ferocity,

it isn't about losing control. This is about gaining control.

This killer is somebody who wants to not just kill,

but absolutely obliterate his victim.

Two days after Kimberly was murdered,

Police received another call from the high-pitched caller.

It wasn't recorded,

but investigators were hopeful it would provide more clues

that could lead them to the killer.

He stayed on the phone a little bit longer,

and the police traced his phone call to a phone booth

at the Bus Depot where she had just gotten off.

And the police followed up and went to the Bus Depot,

tried to take fingerprints,

but there were so many people that had used the phone in that area

that it would not have any positive results.

On the 11th June, the killer called again...

He's quite frustrated. He's quite annoyed.

He wants this murder to be recognised.

He wants something to happen.

He's telling the police, you know,

"Hey, I'm in charge. I want you to do what I want you to do."

"Don't talk, listen. Stop me. I can't help myself. Do your job."

You know, basically saying, "Catch me."

Police were quick to make the connection

between the recent 911 calls

and the one they received five months previously

in the unsolved Karen Potack case.

One of the people, I believe, in the 911 centre, said,

"That sounds like an individual that about a year ago that called...

"That same squeaky high weeping type of voice."

Two young women found a few miles apart,

brutally attacked, and the phone call.

Police felt they had a serial killer on the loose

and alerted the media that... the connection they believe existed.

In an attempt to put a name to the voice, they released the 911 calls.

We put the phone call on the air

and we were sure people would recognise the voice.

The media soon dubbed him 'The Weepy Voiced Killer.'

'We're hoping that somebody will recognise the voice.

Whether it be a friend or a relative or a neighbour

or someone you work with or drink with.'

You would think that somebody would recognise that,

anybody who'd had an argument with him or he'd heard him stress

would recognise him from the voice.

It was so distinct.

With no immediate leads,

detectives tried to find other links to the victims

in the hopes of identifying the predator.

They noted that both victims had been wearing red.

FBI profilers theorized that the colour could be a trigger.

A warning was issued to the public.

He's got a whole town, a whole city, in fear.

Everybody is gonna be watching their backs

and making sure that they don't wear anything red, especially women.

Now, Stephani is someone who enjoys controlling women.

And when he says something like this,

he's controlling, not just one, but potentially thousands of women.

These victims of his were wearing red

and he had dated a girl from Syria for about four years.

And the only picture I ever saw her that he had, she was wearing red.

This was a big story in the twin cities.

A lot of coverage of the serial killer we believe was on the loose,

even though there'd only been one killing at that point.

And then things got quiet.

For months, there was no word from the Weepy Voiced Killer.

Residents hoped they had seen the last of his horrific acts.

Then, in late August 1981, Police in St Paul received an emergency call.

An individual named Alan Lopez was holding his family hostage.

A negotiator is sent a SWAT team is sent.

He insists that...

he's gonna kill them.

The police were trying to get him to come out.

And Allen Lopez, during that conversation with the police

said, he is the person that killed Kimberly Compton.

I covered that standoff and it was bizarre enough on its own.

Then we hear that he's confessing to being Kimberly Compton's killer.

Eventually the standoff is resolved.

The SWAT team entered the house to discover that Alan Lopez

has indeed killed his father, mother, and sister.

26-year-old Lopez was arrested for the murders of his relatives, and

investigators worked on connecting him to Kimberly Compton's murder.

However, a voice comparison between Lopez and the weepy voiced 911 calls

found no similarities.

The questions remained unanswered

and in February 1982, Lopez committed suicide in jail.

In August,

another woman's body was found across the river in Minneapolis.

It was a very brutal scene,

and police were called and ambulance called.

And she was found deceased by numerous stab wounds.

Investigators, trying to piece together what had happened,

struggled to identify the woman.

Two days later, a 911 call came in with a familiar sounding voice.

So now we knew it couldn't have been Alan Lopez

because now we have another murder

with the same weepy voice calling the police department.

It was a challenge to the police department

showing that, "Here, I've done this. Now, see if you can catch me."

There's quite a lot that's happening in this call.

Firstly, he's asserting that status and authority.

"You've gotta listen to me."

Then he's almost boasting about the number of times that he's stabbed,

drawing our attention to how violent he is.

And then he's linking those two killings.

He'd gone quiet for close to a year,

and suddenly we have this murder of a young woman in Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis police department

got ahold of the St Paul police department,

and they started working together

on trying to identify who this caller was.

Investigators were also working hard to identify the victim.

A vital tip came when a postal worker handed in a woman's purse

belonging to a local nurse, Barbara Simons.

Her purse was in a mailbox.

And they tracked down who Barbara Simons was.

They knew she was the killed near the Mississippi river.

And they found out that she had been at a bar, the Hexagon bar,

the night before her body was found.

Witnesses from the bar

remembered seeing 40-year-old Barbara with a man.

Stephani came up and asked her for a cigarette,

and he danced with her and was very open that he was with her

and had made contact with her.

This would appear to be quite a bold move on his part.

So he's going out and he's hunting for victims

out there in public where other people can see him.

But by this stage, he's gotten away with murder.

And I think he's becoming a lot bolder.

But Stephani's boldness would eventually lead to his downfall.

Witnesses who had seen Barbara leave the bar with a man,

provided a detailed description.

The police... were closing in.

In August 1982,

the body of-40 year-old Barbara Simons

had been found in Minneapolis.

She had been stabbed over 40 times.

Police had received another call from the Weepy Voiced Killer

claiming that she was his latest victim.

Getting away with murder appeared to have given the killer confidence.

This time he had spent time in public with Barbara before he killed her.

Witnesses at the Hexagon Bar recalled seeing her with a man.

Seems like they hit it off, according to some people at the bar.

And he offered to give her a ride home.

In fact, if I recall, she said to the waitress there at the bar

"Boy, I hope he's a nice guy,

"because he's gonna give me a ride home."

And obviously he wasn't, and she was killed that night.

He took her down to an area,

assaulted her, stabbed her numerous times

and left her to be found too.

And I believe this time that they thought that a Phillips screwdriver,

similar to an ice pick, was used in those assaults.

Bar staff gave detailed descriptions of the man's appearance

and detectives began trawling through

a database of violent offenders in the area.

Based on the description of what the bartender and the waitress said,

they narrowed it down to about eight or nine.

And the bartender picked out Paul Stephani

as being the person that was talking to Barbara Simons that night.

Police began to focus on him, trying to figure out where he lived,

trying to put the pieces together on Paul Stephani.

Investigators on both sides of the river are working on the case.

They knew they had a very dangerous person out there.

Investigators learned all they could about Stephani's background,

making a crucial link from another of the attacks.

Among the things they figured out about Paul Stephani

is that he had worked in Malmburg manufacturing,

which is the place where Karen Potack,

the first victim, had been attacked.

And I think that was significant to them because

not only had he given the street where she was found,

he named a business and that was unusual.

Police were now confident that Stephani

was The Weepy Voiced Killer.

They knew who they believed they were looking for at that point.

And the clock was ticking... Is he gonna do it again?

Is he gonna call in with something?

And so investigators are working,

comparing notes on both sides of the river.

The media, we are in a kind of a frenzy to keep it out there

because we didn't want one more victim.

To everyone's horror, there would be another.

Despite now being under police surveillance,

he slipped through the net.

And on 21st August 1982, went hunting for his next victim.

That night, Stephani met Denise Williams.

Denise has been engaged in sex work for quite some years.

So she she's out and about on the streets quite frequently.

And he offers her money to engage in a sex act with him.

So she accepts, she gets in his car,

they drive off, they exchange business.

And he says that he's going to take her back to Minneapolis.

He found her in Minneapolis he's taking her back.

She got suspicious because he didn't seem to be going back

to where he was supposed to take her.

Suddenly he pulls over his car, and viciously attacks her.

She fights back. She street savvy. She fights back.

She saw a pop bottle.

She takes that bottle, smashes it across his face,

and causes him to bleed.

She manages to escape.

And he started going after and stabbing her again.

A person heard her screaming, came over and helped her out.

And Stephani turned on him and threatened him.

And he got Williams away

and Stephani took off and left the scene.

Stephani is a killer who is used to being 100% in control

when it comes to his crimes,

but this time he's really met his match in Denise.

He's come up against a woman who is not going to put up this.

She's not going to just let this guy take her life.

She is quite tough. She's quite street wise.

I imagine she's been in quite a few altercations with clients before.

So this really rattles him, like,

this woman has won and he has lost in this particular situation.

So I think it really does knock him off balance.

He had to think in the back of his mind,

if he was rational at that time,

that police are going to be interviewing him,

"How did this assault happen? Where did it happen? Who did it?"

And that it was unravelling very fast for him

after Denise Williams started pounding him with that bottle.

Having failed in his attack,

the predator returned home to assess his injuries.

He goes home to St Paul, and then he made another phone call.

This time he wasn't calling to get help for a victim,

He was calling for help for himself.

He actually calls 911 and requests an ambulance

and his voice wasn't quite as high and quite as weepy or anything else,

but he said he was hurt and he needed an ambulance.

The call raised alarm bells for the person who received it.

"Hey, this sounds like the guy that's been on television

"that I've heard The Weepy Voice Killer."

It sounds like his voice is very similar,

so they got the police involved.

The St Paul police department, who had Stephani under surveillance,

saw the police department show up.

Next thing he knows is an ambulance shows up at Stephani's residence.

And the murder killing spree was over.

They arrested Paul Stephani and it ended right there.

Denise Williams had become the second victim

to have survived the brutal attack of a serial killer.

She had been the victim of an assault

and went to the hospital,

and she described her attacker

The police then showed her some mugshots of different people

and she picked out Paul Stephani.

She became, in many ways, the hero of all this.

What she did and her response

was lifesaving for others, herself and others.

Stephani was charged with the assault of 19-year-old Denise Williams

and with the murder of 40-year-old Barbara Simons.

But The Weepy Killer had lost his voice.

Although he said, in his phone calls to police,

"Somebody needs to stop me"

he didn't give them enough information

to actually make that happen.

He wanted to continue, but he wanted people to think

that he wasn't in control of what he was doing.

He wanted people to have sympathy for him to feel sorry for him.

Paul Stephani went from the guy calling in confessing,

to when the police had him, he's not cooperating at all.

But as they're pressing him, they show him some crime scene photos.

And that seemed to be the trigger point.

When the police would open up their file,

there were pictures of Karen Potack and Kimberly Compton.

His voice elevated to a higher pitch.

He starts getting hysterical in his voice

and they felt, at that point, "This is it."

How he sounded in that room,

paralleled the phone calls they've been getting.

So at least from their experience in the room, they felt no question.

This was their guy.

So when we looked at everything that we had

between Karen Potack and Kimberly Compton

and Denise Williams and Barbara Simons,

the stronger cases with the actual identification

were the Minneapolis cases, Barbara Simons and Denise Williams.

We went ahead with the prosecution of those two cases first.

In 1984 and 1985,

when he faced trials for the attempted murder of Denise Williams,

and the murder of Barbara Simons,

Stephani pled not guilty.

The Denise Williams evidence was her ID

describing how the assault took place.

The good Samaritan that came up

could identify Stephani as attacking her,

and then threatening him with the screwdriver.

The violence displayed in his attack

was evident in his demeanour in court.

There seemed to be a lot of rage that was contained.

Physically, the thing that stood out the most was just the glare,

looking around, the glare that he had in that courtroom.

This sort of a disdain for everyone in the courtroom.

When we are looking at his behaviour in court,

when he's having these outbursts, when he's quite antagonistic

and he's quite confrontational, this is the real him.

And I think up until this point in time,

it's only his victims who've seen this.

The Weepy Voiced Killer had become infamous for the 911 calls

in which he confessed to his crimes.

Prosecutors used these recordings in the trial.

During the trial, there were a number of witnesses

and evidence that was presented, but by far

the most compelling evidence was stuff he gave to them.

His phone calls, he in essence, put on a platter,

"Here I am. I'm the guy that called."

There were efforts to challenge it,

And whether it was really Paul Stephani or not.

You knew that it was the same person.

I've listened to those calls so many times over the years.

So, you know, it's the same person making these phone calls.

Some key people who testified and said they recognised the voice.

They included his ex-wife, his sister.

So people who knew him were able to describe "That's the same guy."

To have two women up there incriminating him

really does turn on its head all of those values he's got

about the role of men and the role of women.

Women are supposed to be passive. They're supposed to be subservient.

They're supposed to be compliant, and here they are convicting him.

Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence

connecting Stephani to the 911 calls,

they were deemed inadmissible for identifying the attacker

in the earlier 'Weepy Voice' cases in St Paul.

During the course of that trial, the judge threw out

the voice identification of The Weepy Voice Killer.

He said it wasn't sufficient

to tie him to Karen Potack or Kimberly Compton.

The only thing we had connecting Stephani

was his voice on those calls,

and we didn't think we had enough evidence

to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was him.

Consequently, Paul Stephani was never tried for those crimes.

He was found guilty of the second degree murder of Barbara Simons

and the attempted murder of Denise Williams.

In total, he was sentenced to 58 years in prison.

Essentially a life sentence, he wasn't gonna be getting out.

We didn't want to go through another trial if we didn't have to,

unless we could absolutely prove it.

They wouldn't need to.

Twelve years into that sentence,

The Weepy Voiced Killer would make his final confession.

In 1985, Paul Stephani was sentenced to 58 years in prison

for the assault of Denise Williams

and the callous murder of Barbara Simons in Minneapolis.

The killer had become infamous for the weepy voice confessions

he made after his heinous attacks.

More than a decade after his conviction,

Stephani had one final confession to make.

Paul Stephani found out that he had terminal cancer

and he wasn't gonna live more than a month to 12 months.

That was what the doctors were giving him because of skin cancer.

So, he asked the guards at the prison, Oak Park Heights,

to get ahold of the St Paul police

because he wanted to talk to them about what he had done.

And so the investigator went in and met with him.

He'd already been convicted in Barbara Simon's murder

as well as Denise William's assault.

Stephani admitted that he had assaulted Karen Potack

and he admitted killing Kimberly Compton.

So all four, he admitted that he was responsible

for their assaults or their deaths.

This isn't that he's suddenly become remorseful,

that he's suddenly grown a conscience overnight,

that he knows he's going to meet his maker

and he needs to offload all of this stuff.

What he's trying to do is control what he leaves behind.

He doesn't wanna leave this world

not having the credit for all of the murders that he's committed.

Stephani had confirmed that he was responsible

for all of the crimes he had been suspected of.

But his next admittance would stun investigators.

And then out of the blue,

he mentioned that he also had drowned this woman.

He couldn't remember her name, but drowned a woman in Lauderdale,

which is suburb of St Paul.

He confessed to a murder

that nobody had any indication that he'd ever done.

In fact, in his confession,

it took them for a while to identify who that victim was.

The police went back to say, "Is there any unsolved cases

"where someone was drowned and you never found a suspect?"

and sure enough, they found Kathleen Greening in 1982.

She was a school teacher in the St Paul area.

And apparently she and Paul Stephani had gone out on a date

and she was drowned.

And for many years, police suspected her husband.

And when the police went back to look at the evidence,

he gave them evidence about her house

that only the killer would know,

the layout of the house, how he did it.

He had strangled her, drowned her in a tub in her own home.

This time, Stephani hadn't phoned 911

and in another stunning revelation,

he claimed that wasn't the only thing that was different in this case.

He'd met with Kathleen on several occasions.

He described the murder, you know, them going up to a bathtub,

are they going to have consensual sex?

Uh, this is completely different, he had feelings for this person.

He's a master of information control.

He wants to be very careful

about the story that's emerging around his murders.

The reason that Stephani didn't call the police after killing Kathleen

was that he didn't want them to know about it.

There's something he feels ashamed of,

something he feels embarrassed about,

something that doesn't fit with the persona that he's trying to create.

Reporter, Caroline Lowe,

was intrigued by this killer who had suddenly confessed all.

I went to prison to meet with him, to see what I could learn,

because most killers, most criminals I've covered,

never admit they did it. I thought,

"Is there anything we can learn from him?"

I remember sitting there in prison, as he's describing Kathy Greening,

he said, "We had a really good evening.

"We went out, we went home."

And then he takes his hands up to his throat.

And he said, "I just suddenly felt like doing this to her."

And he's showing me with his hands.

It was chilling to see him just calmly describe what he did...

...talking like, "What did you do for your vacation last summer?

But he's talking about killing people and attacking people.

Investigators re-examining the evidence in Kathleen's case

were able to prove that she had known her killer.

They found his telephone number in her address book

that the authorities had overlooked in their original investigation.

We didn't have these smartphones and everything in those days

that you could put somebody's name and telephone number in.

She had it in there 'Paul S'.

and they knew from the arrest of him,

that that was his telephone number.

There was one aspect of the confession

that bore a striking resemblance to the Barbara Simon case.

He mentioned that he put her purse in a mailbox.

And that was one of those details that only the killer knew.

And one of the other cases, a purse had been put in a mailbox,

but that was so significant.

So he gave them things that there was no doubt,

by the time they were done, that Paul was, in fact, her killer.

It was a big revelation for the media and county attorney's office

because two or three different offices had reviewed that case.

And part of the problem was the medical examiner couldn't determine

if it was accidental or a homicide.

So the cause of death was undetermined.

It had taken 15 years,

but finally her loved ones knew the truth

about who was responsible for Kathleen's death.

The depraved killer had confessed to murdering three women

and to the attacks on Karen Potack and Denise Williams.

The way he abused those women,

stabbing a person 61 times, beating a woman with a tyre iron

until she's unconscious, leaving her for dead.

That's a violent, evil person.

When you look at that, the brutality and the anger,

you just wonder why somebody wasn't alerted to the rage in this person,

and the evil of this individual a long time ago.

But Paul Stephani hadn't finished his final chapter.

Before he died, he contacted Caroline.

He wrote me a letter, actually I got the next week,

and he asked me if I would reach out to the victim's families.

This is the letter, which I still have.

He asked me if I'd reach out to the victim's families,

because he's wanted me to tell them

that he wanted to put flowers on their graves.

I would not be a go-between,

between a serial killer and these families

to help him maybe feel better as his life is winding down.

I think that he wanted to make his slate clear

in the eyes of law enforcement, in the eyes of God.

"As a devout Catholic, I am admitting to all my sins,

"please forgive me.

"I'm telling the police everything I did."

And that's why I believe that he did not commit any more murders

than those he confessed to.

53 year old Paul Stephani, died of cancer in June 1998.

After all of his confessions,

one question remained unanswered.

'Why?'

A lot of us thought that maybe his religious upbringing

and his family falling apart...

he was taking it out on women.

He was very hostile in the brutality of the attacks.

You don't stab someone 61 times with an ice pick, you know,

without having a lot of rage and anger.

The twin cities will never forget the losses suffered

by their communities at the hands of Paul Stephani.

If you mention The Weepy Voice Caller/killer,

anyone in Minnesota remembers that.

If they were around back then they remember The Weepy Voice Killer.

Paul Stephani thought he could do whatever he wanted to do

in his rage and, uh, his being evil

and that he could call up and tell the police that he's sorry,

and that he would be forgiven or go to church and he would be forgiven.

I think he was looking for absolution...

and he never got it.

He's a small town boy

became one of the most notorious serial killers in Minnesota history.

Paul Michael Stephani

has become etched in the minds of all who knew him

as the notorious Weepy Voiced Killer,

whose rage-fuelled and vicious attacks

took the lives of three unsuspecting women,

and forever changed the lives of two more.

Stephani may have believed that he would be forgiven for his sins,

but his horrific and violent actions mean he will never be absolved

as one of... the World's Most Evil Killers.

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