Original subtitles

The most notoriouskillers hide in plain sight,

free to kill and kill again.

But most are not the criminalmasterminds of fiction.

In their minds, theycommit the perfect murder.

In reality, it's their foolishmistakes that get them caught.

St. Charles County, Missouri.

May 15th, 2001.

A maintenance worker cleans trash

from the roadside ofHighway 67, 20 miles north

of downtown St. Louis.

Amongst the garbage and weeds,he makes a horrific discovery--

the rotten corpse of a young woman.

The body that was discoveredwas of a black female.

She was nude.

Detective SergeantJana Walters is called out

to investigate the crime scene.

She was inadvanced stage of decomposition

due to the environmental factors.

It looked like she had maybebeen out there for at least

three or four days.

The body is justyards away from the roadside

and barely hidden from the passing traffic.

She was just tossed out of thevehicle, removed from a vehicle

just like the other debris and trash

that's alongside the highway.

Walters and her team find no clues

as to the girl's identity.

The body undergoes an autopsy.

We were hoping that we were going

to be able to gather some type of DNA that

would pertain to the suspect.

But during the autopsy, whatwe did find was a dental plate.

And inside the plate was an inscription of a name

and a series of numbers.

And that was our clue tothe identity of this female.

Walters is able to trace

the numbers back to adental company in St. Louis.

After speaking with the company that

made this dental plate, it wasconfirmed that the female that

was found was Teresa Wilson.

Teresa Wilson was a 36-year-old mother

from a deprived area of St. Louis

who worked as a prostitute.

Bill Smith, a reporter forthe "St. Louis Dispatch,"

looks into thebackground of the victim.

The picture that I got was a portrait

of a woman who had a lot of internal struggles

and had herself a very difficult life,

wanted very much to be a good mother,

wanted to be a productivemember of society,

wanted everything that anybody else would want,

the whole American dream kind ofthing, but kept reaching for it

and kept slipping back.

And the main reason she wasslipping back was the drugs.

So now we're looking at someone

who picks up prostitutes.

Was it our first one, second one, third one?

We have no idea at this point.

Two weeks later inan alley of the same rundown

neighborhood that the firstvictim, Teresa Wilson,

turned tricks, St. LouisPolice recover another body.

She'd been run over by acar, dumped in the alley,

and has some adhesive stickinessall over on her wrists, mouth,

ankles.

Supervising the case for St.

Louis City Metropolitan Policeis seasoned cop Major Harry

Hegger.

Looked like an act of convenience

where somebody had disposed of a body.

There was no real effort to hide it.

Hegger's detectiveslearned that the woman

is 46-year-old Betty James.

She, too, was a sex worker.

The autopsy later revealed that she died

of suffocation, strangulation.

Then just one month later,

Walters receives a calltelling her that another body

has been found.

It was likelooking at the same scene.

The body has beendumped in a roadside ditch

just yards from wherethey found Teresa Wilson.

This is three females, nude, that

were tossed out of a vehicle within hundreds

of yards of one another.

Walters identifiesthe victim as Verona Thompson,

another 36-year-oldmother from the Washington

Park area of east St. Louis.

I really had no clue that this was going on

or that there was any patternto any of what was happening.

I don't think anybody in the community

really had any kind of an idea.

Again, the idea of a woman's body

turning up in a roadside ditch or in an alleyway

or something like that wasnot that unusual in St.

Louis at that time.

But Thompson alsoworked as a prostitute.

This sounds alarm bells with the police.

So now we had identicallifestyles of the bodies.

Coincidence?

There's no coincidence.

Walters asksneighboring jurisdictions

whether they have any unsolved murders that

fit the pattern being revealed.

There is an immediate match.

A body found on the 1st ofApril in Washington Park,

on the other side of the Mississippi River,

is identified as 34-year-oldAlyssa Greenwade.

We now have four bodies in four months.

The similaritiesin the cases are startling.

All four had been tortured before being

strangled to death.

It was pretty clear that thesame person was responsible

for this, even though we had two states involved

and there was quite a bitof difference in the areas.

Hegger decides to pull the cases.

He creates a dedicated task force

with detectives across thedifferent jurisdictions.

And after we sat down and talked,

it was fairly easy to determine that we

probably had a serial killer.

And they're right.

Over the next fourmonths, the serial killer

claims the lives of two more prostitutes, Yvonne

Crues and Brenda Beasley.

he strangles his victims and dumps their bodies

at regular intervals.

You're looking at everypossibility trying to figure

out to give yourself somedirection because nothing

else is helping you.

You have no idea.

You just know that everyfour to six weeks, a body

shows up along the roadside.

If the police aregoing to stop the body count,

they have to find the killer, fast.

St. Louis Police have aserial killer on the loose.

Beaten and strangledwomen are being discovered

on an almost monthly basis.

Frustrated in their search, the task force

call in the help of theFBI's Violent Crime Unit.

Special Agent Robert Morton is an expert

in profiling serial killers.

What we really do is provide

a blueprint of the type of person

that is involved in the crime.

Morton's experiencetells him that serial killers

usually dispose of the bodies close

to the location of the crime.

In this case, he was not worried

about geographic boundaries.

He would go across the bridge from one state

into another to dump the bodies.

He was accessing the victims in St. Louis

and then he would dump thebody either in Illinois

or in Missouri.

With bodies beingdumped in a wide rim around St.

Louis, the task force suspectthat the killer may be someone

who drives for a living.

So at this point, we arestarting to look at possibly

truck drivers and speakingwith the prostitutes

and asking, who do youthink would be responsible?

Have you ever had anybody approach you, have

you felt fear for your safety?

That was met with, we alwaysfeel fear for our safety.

This is our job, this is the hazards of our job.

We started warningmany of these prostitutes

out there that we had possiblyhad somebody that was abducting

them, luring them into a car,taking them to some location,

and killing them.

Preying on themost vulnerable in society

means that often, their disappearances

go completely unnoticed.

When these women disappeared, nobody ever

filed a missing persons report because they

were estranged from theirfamilies, they were outcasts.

The killer knows what he's

doing, killing vulnerablepeople on the edge of society.

The community is so saturatedwith that kind of thing

at that time that it justkind of washed over them.

These are disposable women,

according to a killer.

So it gives us a little bit of an idea

into the mindset of who we're looking for.

But we still had no idea whothe identity of this person was.

Six victims have now been found,

and still there are no cluesas to who the killer is.

You're always trying tolook into the mind of who's

doing this and why they'redoing it, how they're doing it,

and who it is.

In autumn 2001,the two most recent bodies

discovered by the police offer a clue

that could change the courseof the investigation, DNA.

There was DNA by the way of semen

in the throat of one of the victims

and the anus of the other.

Investigatorscompare the two DNA samples.

It was a perfect match, a 100% match.

At last, policecould link at least two

of the victims to onekiller with hard evidence.

We knew for sure we had two bodies,

two victims, same suspect.

And based on very strong similarities,

how they were murdered andhow they were disposed of,

it was pretty obvious to usthat this person was responsible

for all the rest of them, too.

Police check the DNAprofile against CODIS, the FBI

database that holds the DNA records of thousands

of criminals in the US.

It came back with negative results.

There was no match.

The person that we werelooking at as responsible

for the death of these womenhas not been arrested and put

into the system.

The DNA profileremains unidentified.

It was very frustrating for all investigators.

We had no evidence that is useful to us.

The DNA had no known standard.

And we investigatedhundreds of potential leads,

but still it led us nowhere.

And then in late 2001, eight months

after finding the first body, the case

takes an unexpected turn.

After November of 2001, mysteriously enough,

no more bodies were discovered.

Our killer was consistentwith every month,

and now we have nothing.

Months go by and police

are left speculating what couldhave happened to the killer.

We had one of three scenarios.

Either this guy moved out of town, relocated;

maybe he died; or he mighthave been incarcerated.

With no moremurders and no fresh leads,

the investigation losessteam and the case goes cold.

Then in May 2002, BillSmith casts his attention

to the unsolved murders.

What kind of piqued my interest

as much as anything was the factthat some of these women who

had disappeared and who had been found dead

were from this area called Baden.

This was an area that I was very familiar with.

Bill Smith wasworking the human interest

stories for a Sunday special.

I thought that I could communicate something

to our readers about these women that hadn't

been communicated thus far.

Smith trawls the streets of Baden

searching for the story.

He writes an article exploringthe tragic life of Teresa

Wilson, whose body was discovered in Charles

County a year earlier.

A few days after the article is published,

he receives a mysterious letter.

The first thing I noticed

was that the stamp was upsidedown, which is very unusual.

I opened up the envelope and looked at it,

and there were two pieces of paper.

One was a letter written in red and it looked

to be computer-generated.

It said, Dear Bill, nice sob story Teresa Wilson

and went on to say, write another one.

Write a good one and I'lltell you why many others are.

The letter claimsto be from the serial killer.

To prove I'm real,here's directions to number 17.

Attached is a computer-generated map.

A hand-drawn X marks the location

of the killer's 17th victim.

I thought it was a joke.

I thought it was either areporter pulling my leg or just

somebody on the outside who had read the story

who had a sick sense of humor.

But Smith takesthe letter to the police,

just in case.

And they can't believe their luck.

This is our lead.

This is what we're waiting for.

The map that was sent pinpointedan area approximately half

a mile, 3/4 of a mile from wherethe discovery of Teresa Wilson

and Verona Thompson were.

This time, X really does mark

the spot Walters recoversthe skeletal remains

of an unknown woman exactly where

the map had said they would be.

When we discovered the skull,we saw blatantly that there

were indentations in the skull.

There were seven to nineblunt trauma indentations.

We tried to match that withsome type of tool or instrument,

and it appeared that it couldhave been done by a hammer,

the claw end, more crowbar.

The previouswomen were all strangled.

Whoever was killing them is getting more violent

and is playing a game with the police.

This is somebody that istaunting law enforcement.

He's taunting the citizens, the people

of this community saying,look what I can do

and you can't catch me.

Criminal Psychologist David

Holmes recognizes this as atrait common to serial killers.

Many serial killers become a little

frustrated as their careeradvances considerably.

They almost want recognition.

They don't particularly want to be caught,

but they want it recognized that they

or someone has actually been clever enough

to commit these acts.

My feeling is that he feltthat I didn't understand him,

I didn't understand these women.

And for me to show them ashuman beings, real people,

was something that irritated him.

The boastful letter gives

the police a unique opportunity to put

an end to a sick killing spree.

But first, they face the challenge of identifying

the letter's author.

I had the stamp and glued the label

and everything checked forDNA, hoping it had been licked.

No fingerprints on the envelopeor the letter, nothing.

The killer seemsto have covered his tracks.

He thought he'd controlled every

element of this letter andevery aspect, but he hadn't.

The killer has unwittingly

led police right to his door.

In St. Louis, Missouri, police have

received a letter from aserial murderer of prostitutes.

He provided a map that has ledthem directly to the remains

of one of his victims.

Looking at the envelope and the letter,

there wasn't very many leads to go on.

There was no DNA evidenceon there or anything else

for them to track down.

The task force take the killer's map

to Mark McAmish of the IllinoisState Police Cyber Crimes Unit.

The map that was provided wasreduced in size, the edges were

removed, which hid any information that would

have been beneficial to us.

McAmish knows that it is printed

from an online mapping website.

Through some discussion in theoffice, one of the other guys

says, it looks like it's through Expedia.

McAmish realizes thatthe killer must have visited

Expedia's mapping websitebetween the date of the article

being published and the datestamped on the envelope's

postmark, a period of two days.

With that information, westarted looking at how can we

locate this map and whether or not

there would be logs of IP addresses that

had gone in and lookedat the specific location?

IP addresses are unique numbers that

can identify every computerconnected to the internet

and log their activities.

Only one IP address had continued to click

in and zoom in on this map.

It is an identicalmatch to the killer's map.

We were lucky that it actuallycame back to a specific user

name, M. Travis.

It's a stunning breakthrough

for the investigation.

I think that he was a littlebit unknowledgable or arrogant

about the internet.

And he went out and got this map.

He didn't think aboutbeing tracked at the time.

The IP address leads investigators

to 36-year-old waiter Maury Travis.

A background check revealsTravis has a history of drug

abuse and has served time forarmed robbery, an offense that

took place just before theFBI began routinely taking

suspects' DNA, which explains why he

did not appear as a DNA match.

The records also show that he was in prison

for a parole violation duringthe period when the killings

had mysteriously stopped.

He had been incarceratedfrom the late fall

to the early spring on a parole violation.

So that fit right in.

It didn't take a rocketscientist to kind of figure

out, we've probably got the right guy here.

Police track their number one suspect

to an address in Ferguson,a residential community

in North St. Louis.

We were able to set upsurveillance on his home,

did a lot of research on him.

He was very paranoid,

he was very cautious..

He was always looking over his shoulder.

And I didn't want to move on him right away,

but I wanted to give a 48- to 72-hour

close look at this guy tosee what his activities were,

what's this guy all about?

After three daysof 24-hour surveillance,

the police are ready to make their move.

Our approach is going to bekind of a just a very calm,

laid back, non-accusatorytype approach.

At 7:00 AM on the 7th of June,

detectives from the task force and FBI

Special Agent Robert Mortonmove in to question the suspect.

We were able to gain entry relatively easily.

He opened the door and let us in.

He was very agitated whenwe were there at first,

very excited, very animated.

Travis immediatelytries to control the interview.

He kept asking us why we were there,

what are you doing this tomy house, why are you here?

We eventually were able totell him that we were there

because we have a search warrant.

We asked him if he had read the letter

that had been posted in thenewspaper and he said, yes.

And we said, well, we know that that letter

came from your computer.

He kept asking us, how can that happen?

He couldn't comprehend the fact that we

were able to trace the map back to him

through his use of the computer.

His demeanor then changedfrom that to, well, if that's

true, then why are you here?

Why do you want to talk to me?

They showed him some photos of some women

and asked him if he'd everhad sex with these women.

Well, he denied it.

So they were still talking andhe kind of paused for a while

and he said, hey, can you showme pictures of those dead women

again?

I want to see a picture of those dead gals.

And it's like, hey, wedidn't tell you they're dead.

In this onemoment, Travis has carelessly

incriminated himself.

Despite this tacit admission,he stubbornly refuses

to confess to his crimes.

We talked with him a long time.

And we were trying to convincehim to take us to find

the missing victims' bodies.

Finally, he said, OK, I'll do that.

Travis' letter boasted of 17 victims,

but police have only found eight.

They are determined to find the missing bodies.

Travis tells them that he will lead

them across the MississippiRiver to east St. Louis.

Special Agent Morton and a St. Louis detective

put Travis in the back ofthe car and hit the freeway.

He was talking with usactually almost flippantly,

joking with us at that point.

And then when he saw the bridge, there was

a huge change in his demeanor.

And he basically said, we're not going

to go over there because I'mnot going to show you anything.

You might as well just take me to jail.

And in the end, he basicallysaid, well, if you don't arrest

me, I'm going to run away.

They takeTravis back to the police

station in downtown St. Louis for further questioning.

But instead of answering their questions,

Travis continues to try andcontrol the interrogation.

So Hegger tries a different approach.

I asked him if he wanted anything--

do you want something to drink,do you want something to eat?

And he said he wanted a soda.

So I got a can of soda, cleanedit up, sanitized it, brought it

back, and gave it him.

Travis has inadvertently

made his second big mistake.

And I hadthat can taken up to our lab

and within 12 hours, our chemistmade a positive DNA match

off that can to the semen that was

recovered from the two victims.

Police now have to Travis

linked to at least two murders.

This was it, we have our man.

He's not going anywhere.

But the DNAmatch isn't the only proof

linking Travis to the murders.

The police are about to discovera treasure trove of evidence

that will reveal thedeep depravity of Travis,

a visual record of how he tortured,

abused, and killed his victimsin the most intimate detail--

-- that he could go blindand relive for his enjoyment

again and again.

On June 7th, 2002, the police and FBI

raid the home of Maury Travis.

They suspect the 36-year-old waiter

of being behind the murderof several prostitutes

in the St. Louis area.

Once has has been arrested, forensic teams

move in to search his house.

Their initial impressioncoming in, first floor

spotless, clean, immaculate.

Walk down to thebasement, different story.

Bloodstained carpeting, bloodstained walls,

bloodstained ceiling,splatters, duct tape, handcuffs.

Obvious a lot of trauma had taken place.

But he still refuses to acknowledge

any guilt. Police are leftwondering what kind of monster

they have in their custody.

The police must piecetogether his story to find

out who Maury Travis really is.

Our investigation did leadto speaking to different family

members about Maury Travis.

He had a girlfriend, he had afamily life, he had a mother,

he had a father.

Travis was born onthe 25th of October, 1965.

He grows up in the residential community

of Ferguson in north St. Louis.

He had a typical childhoodlike most people do.

He had a mother that was very supportive of him.

All the way through his childhood,

he was a controlled, reserved individual.

This was consistent throughout his life.

But in 1987, aged 22, Travis' life

takes a downward spiral when heenrolls at college in Atlanta.

He gets hooked on cocaine.

For someone who enjoys the sense of control

and a feeling of being in control,

cocaine would have been the perfect drug.

Cocaine promotes a sense of control.

It gives this hyper confidence that you

are in total control of the universe

if you're high enough on it.

Unfortunately, of course,as his habit progressed,

he will have become aware of the fact

that the cocaine was beginningto be a bit more in control

than he was.

In March 1988, Travisreturns home on spring break,

desperate for money tofeed his expensive habit.

Travis will have had tokind of scour every option

before he decided to takethings into his own hands.

In an eight-day crimespree, Travis robs five St.

Louis shoe stores at gunpoint.

The police soon catch up withhim, and at the age of 24,

Travis was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Maury Travis did not take to prison.

When he was sent to prisonfor quite a long term

with no real sense that he wasgoing to be able to get out,

he went into overdrive to try and regain

control over the situation.

Travis bombardsthe judge with letters

pleading for leniency.

He did everythinghe could to put pressure

on the justice system, to pleadhis case in every way and shape

that might have reduced his sentence, that might

have got him out of there.

After five yearsand three months behind bars,

Travis is released from prisonon parole for good behavior.

He returns to St. Louis, wherehe picks up work as a waiter

in a downtown hotel.

Some of the people we interviewed

that worked around him, they talked about what

a nice guy he was, that he hada great pleasant personality.

He was always friendly, very respectful.

But all the time, Travis is

hiding his secret double life.

That's signs of a psychopath.

They'll give you a falsefront, but the real dark side,

that's the real person.

Mr. Nice guy next door one minute,

and the next be this savage, controlling,

wild, brutal beast.

Just that fast, two very different people.

He loved the idea of transiting between one

and the other, which kind of for him

showed he was in controlof the different personas

that he was projecting.

In the basementof Travis' house,

his true persona comes to light.

Police discover a torture chamber,

and they are about to uncover the full depths

of his depravity.

One of the crimescene investigators located

a false wall, and inside that false wall

where numerous VHS tapes.

The videotapes reveal exactly

how Travis treated his victims.

He taped women who were tiedand bounded to a pole who were

blindfolded; he taped women who were

performing sex acts on him.

And I think there weresix, eight, or 10, a bunch

of different women in different states of

bondage, handcuffs, duct tape.

All them were duct tapedacross their mouth, many times

the wrists and ankles.

He was torturing them withsoda bottles, beer bottles,

all kinds of instruments.

But the physicaland sexual torture

is just the half of it.

Travis is subjecting hisvictims to psychological abuse.

He taped women whowere chanting what he told them

the chant, which was he wasthe king, he was the master,

they will do everything for him.

He would make them saythat over and over again.

If they didn't say itright, he would hit them.

This guy was the son of Satan.

This guy was the devil.

He was a pure psychopath and his excitement

came from torturing people.

But one video shows the very moment

that Travis goes even further.

One of the tapes wasmarked "The Wedding Tape,"

and it started out with a family wedding.

The tape broke in the middle of the wedding

and what we're now looking at is a scene

of his basement with a nude black female

who was on the ground.

Into the camera comes Maury Travis.

And after he has herperform a sex act on him,

he pushes her to the floor.

And this is a very young woman.

He adjusts the camera, he'sgot the video camera running.

He steps off the set, comes back with a belt,

and strangles her till she dies.

He then looks into the camera,straight onto the camera,

and says, first kill.

It feels good.

This is where we knew we had a horrendous killer.

Even after 12 years, thatvideo still kind of haunts me.

The shocking videoconfirms beyond any doubt

that Travis is the serial killer that they

have been looking for.

Travis' real side was indulginghis dark, sadistic fantasies

with girls that hepicked up off the street.

Maury Travis is, to a great extent,

a textbook serial killer.

It's premeditated, he plans for it.

He's very careful, he's very organized.

He selects the victims who arethe least likely to be missed.

He would trawl St. Louis'

poorest neighborhoods lookingfor drug-addicted prostitutes.

He despised those women for their lifestyle,

because they were prostitutes,because they were crack users.

There's no question in my mind that he

saw himself as better than they were

and saw them as the villains.

Travis would thentake them back to his home

and torture them in his basement.

This was a horrific, lengthy torture process

where the victim would slowlybut surely become aware

that this was not the kind of S&M activity

where they may have beenused to with other clients.

Once these victims were dead,his interest in them waned.

At that point, he very unceremoniously dumped

them at the side of the road.

They were no longer any interest to him.

Eight of his victims are recovered,

but now that he is in custody, the police

can find answers to crucialquestions about the fate

of other possible victims.

But Travis will not give them an easy ride.

He will take control of the investigation

and seal his murderous fate.

June 2002, St. Louis, Missouri.

Police have just taken custody of suspected

serial killer Maury Travis.

In his home, they find evidenceof his shocking murder spree.

But that's not all.

It seems Travis had big plans.

We found diagrams.

He had drawn out sketchesand was making an order list.

He wanted to and he was gettingsome bids on what it would

take to expand his basement.

It appeared like the roomwas going to be big enough

for maybe two or threewomen with bunks that they

would be restrained down.

This guy had mapped out a course for himself

to expand his whole torture andabduction and rape and murder

far beyond what he'd beendoing over the last year, year

and a half.

If he wasn't caught and stopped right now,

there would be perhaps hundreds more

female said he would murder.

This is a man that did not deserve to get out.

Thankfully, police have

Travis safely off the streets.

He's locked up in a county jailwhile he waits to be charged

for his horrific crimes.

Suddenly, from a guy that was always

in control of his environment,he's lost control.

We've got him now.

So I think that's what was obviously

very unsettling to him.

And with the mountingbody of evidence against him,

Travis knows that he is almost certain

to face the death penalty.

As he kind of faced afuture where he was probably

going to be killed by thestate, he decided to keep

absolute control over himself.

And before he could everadmit to any one killing,

he took his own life.

Monday evening I got a call saying,

hey, I've got some bad news.

They found Travis hangingin his cell, he's dead.

I was stunned.

But more than stunned, I was really angry.

Maury Travis had decided,I'm in control of everything,

including taking this to my grave if I want to.

Sadly, Travis will never serve justice

for his horrendous crimes.

That was a real disappointment.

We were looking forward to putting

together a very airtight,prosecutable case against him.

But the factthat Travis is not punished

is not the worst consequence of his final act.

Where are the answers of people

that have missing loved ones?

Was Maury Travis responsible for them?

Why did Maury Travis do what he did?

We have no one to answer those questions.

He took the coward's way out.

He killed himself, and in a sense

that's taunting us still becausenow we don't have the answers.

Travis taunts the police

further with a suicide notethat he leaves for his mother.

The note reveals nothing aboutthe killings or his victims.

However, it did containa little bit of information

where he said he'd been sick inthe head since he was about 14.

All his life he'd beenunhappy and had a problem.

So I think it was kind of an admission

that this wasn't just something that happened.

This quiet, unassuming man

became one of the most brutalserial killers in US history.

His letter boasted of 17 victims,

but the police believe Traviscould have been responsible

for as many as 20 murders of prostitutes

in the St. Louis area.

With Travis dead, they willnever know the full extent

of his murder spree.

It's very frustrating for us as investigators.

Maury Travis claimed 17 murders.

We had eight bodies.

Where are the rest of them?

Now we'll never know.