Original subtitles

[uneasy music]

I am writing a book about a serial killer.

[news reporter] Seventy-four-year-old

Samuel Little was sentenced today for killing three women

in South Los Angeles in the 1980s.

But it always nagged at me because I knew

he was good for more murders.

Sam Little got away with this for so long

because most of his victims

were in marginalized populations:

women of color, drug addicts, prostitutes.

[dramatic music]

[Scott] Once she started visiting Sam in prison,

that really awoke a lot

of different kind of demons in her.

[Jillian] Sam starts confessing to me

all of these cold cases,

all of these murders

that had been long unsolved

throughout the United States.

Then it was like the floodgates opened.

[whispering] Oh, Jesus.

[normally] How many victims are there?

[projector whirring]

[uneasy music]

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Jillian] Right.

[Jillian] Uh, why did she deserve it?

♪

[Jillian] When I started writing a book

about Samuel Little,

I-I had no idea

of the scope of it.

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

He is a vicious...

killer.

♪

And I thought,

"I have to keep going with this."

Like, I'm gonna pursue this.

It's about these victims.

I wanna know how he got away with this for so long.

♪

And I wanna understand

violence against women in this culture

and why it is so summarily dismissed.

♪

[news reporter] The FBI calls Samuel Little

America's most prolific serial killer.

[Sam] If you want me to tell my secrets to you,

come down here and look me in my eye

while I do.

[Jillian] My deal with the devil is,

"You will not die alone if you tell me the truth."

[Sam] I'm not gonna admit to those girls.

[Jillian] I don't believe you.

So you tell me the truth right now.

[news reporter] Little strangled 93 victims

between 1970 and 2005.

[Jillian] He was tried and got off

again and again and again.

[news reporter] Investigators believe

that Samuel Little killed more people

than serial killers Ted Bundy,

John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer combined.

[Jillian] If you weren't locked up,

I'd probably be dead by now.

[Sam] You're right.

[operator] You have a prepaid call from...

[Sam] This is Sam.

[operator] ...an inmate at the California State Prison,

Los Angeles County,

Lancaster, California.

Mr. Sam.

[Jillian] I started visiting Sam Little in prison

in August of 2018.

Now not only do I visit him every other weekend.

I also talk to him almost daily.

And I record

all my phone conversations with him.

Are you ready for some questions?

[Jillian] You haven't asked. I'll trade you.

You give me one secret, I'll give you one.

[Jillian] I have access to this serial killer,

and I hope that I could have something to offer

to law enforcement,

but, you know, you don't walk in

and start talking to a psychopath

and just be like, "So tell me about how you killed 'em."

♪

You ask a question,

and then you listen really carefully,

and if you listen hard enough,

you can hear what they need you to be.

So tell me the truth.

[Sam] If I was--

No, Mr. Sam, you know I don't-I don't judge you.

I'm just here to listen.

I think of it as, like,

I'm his mommy; I'm his daughter.

And I'm his ultimate victim.

He's an actor. He's a psychopath.

♪

Every... interaction he has

is transactional...

♪

...and he is two steps ahead of you

at any move.

I realize that it is a really strange relationship

for most people to hear, for them to understand,

but I'm in this privileged position

that Sam Little wants to answer my questions.

It serves him,

and it feels good to him.

So then how can I use that?

♪

If I'm gonna investigate this, then what are the questions

I'm gonna ask about?

Like, "Why did he get away with this for so long,

and how?"

I need to look at all the times

he actually was caught

and find out what went wrong.

[Jillian] Can you walk me through what happened

with the Patricia Mount case?

Do you remember picking her up?

[Jillian] I want the truth.

[eerie music]

[Jillian] Sam crawled the city's underbelly,

drifting from bar to bar,

looking for weed and women,

preferably both.

♪

♪

[Kenny] On September the 12th, 1982,

we were notified that, uh,

there had been a discovery of a female body

in the middle of absolutely nowhere

in a hayfield.

[pensive music]

Found the body laying approximately in this area.

It was the body of a late 20s,

early 30s white female.

She was nude. She was laying on her back.

♪

She had defecation, you know, smeared on her body

and on the clothes.

She had obvious bruising on the neck area.

You can almost see the handprints.

She was strangled to death.

♪

I wonder if the original case file

has got my notes still in it.

There you go. That's her.

That's the victim, Tricia Mount.

♪

Several witnesses that knew Patricia Mount

had seen her at Willie Mae's tavern

the night before,

speaking to a Black male.

They described him as around 40s,

pretty good-sized fella, big hands.

♪

Couple of the witnesses, uh, actually saw Patricia

get in his car.

It was a small station wagon,

tan or brown in color.

♪

[Greg] She was 26 years old.

She had a very low IQ,

an IQ of around 40, from her paperwork.

Basically little girl

because of her mental capabilities

just thrown aside.

You know, there's no way

that should happen.

♪

[Jillian] Sam was good at finding the weak link.

He could look at a room

and see that somebody was lonely

or see that somebody was hungry

or see that somebody

really needed a fix,

and that's where he would go.

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[eerie metallic squealing]

♪

[Jillian] Right.

♪

We're working the case,

but we're basically at a dead end.

We knew he wasn't from-from the Gainesville area.

None of the witnesses ever saw him before.

We put out a BOLO,

which is "be on the lookout for,"

to southeastern United States

with the description of a suspect

and-and a vehicle fitting the description

we were looking for.

[Jillian] After Sam killed Patricia Mount,

he left Florida and went to Pascagoula, Mississippi,

where he then killed Melinda LaPree.

[desolate music]

A few months later, he was arrested there

in Mississippi

for shoplifting.

♪

They were able to connect

the brown Pinto station wagon

that he was driving

with a report about a murder in Florida,

and law enforcement got in touch with each other.

[Greg] In early December, we get notified

that Pascagoula, Mississippi, has a person in custody

for the murder down there

that matches the description of our murder,

and he matched the physical description

of our suspect.

[Kenny] And his name was Sam McDowell,

also identified as Sam Little.

Several of the witness positively identified Sam

from a photographic lineup.

So we, uh, obtained a-a warrant for his arrest

for the murder of Pat Mount.

♪

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Kenny] We interviewed Sam McDowell.

You could almost sense the evil in the room.

We showed him a picture of the victim,

Patricia Mount.

He had a-a slight reaction.

He knew who we were talking about,

but, uh, he adamantly denied ever seeing her,

and never was she in his car.

[dramatic music]

[Greg] We knew that we were--

basically had a circumstantial case.

The only evidence we had

was three witnesses

from Willie Mae's bar

identifying him out of a lineup.

We were concerned.

We were hoping we'd get more evidence.

We found out then Sam Little

was arrested for shoplifting in Mississippi.

He had two individuals with him.

[Kenny] One, a teenage boy, Danny Beckless,

and an older Black woman

by the name of Orelia Dorsey.

[Jillian] Orelia Jean Dorsey

was 27 years older than Sam.

He met her in a jailhouse in Cleveland.

She was a convicted shoplifter.

She was his girlfriend,

and he traveled the country with her.

He called her Jean.

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Wow, it sounds like she really-she really took

good care of you.

Unfortunately, we couldn't sit down

and interview her

because Orelia was no longer there.

But we subsequently interviewed Danny Beckless.

He was a young teenager,

approximately 16 years old.

Danny indicated to us that he had been traveling

with, uh, Sam McDowell and Orelia Dorsey

for a period of time

and they had been staying

in the-in the Gainesville area.

[Kenny] We pressed him if he could remember

the night of the homicide

in Gainesville months earlier

of Patricia Mount.

[disquieting music]

[Greg] He said he thought Sam left the motel

around seven o'clock that night.

♪

[Kenny] The next morning, Danny went out and found

brown matter, fecal matter,

on the back seat of the car.

♪

[Greg] And he said the car smelled.

Orelia had wiped it up and cleaned it

the best she could.

[Jillian] The police suspected that Sam,

he was killing at night,

and Orelia,

she would clean his car out

in the morning, and they would move on.

They would not stay anywhere

for more than three days.

♪

Danny also would talk about, uh, Sam bragging to him

about picking prostitutes up, and then he said,

you know, he would get rid of them.

♪

[Greg] Sam did mention one time

that he had hurt ladies.

He had told Beckless that.

♪

Greg and I decided that we probably had

a serious serial killer on our hands.

♪

Going into trial,

we felt pretty good at that point.

♪

[Greg] Then we start trying to locate Danny Beckless,

and... we can't find him.

♪

Danny was gone.

[Kenny] This was a blow to the state's case

because without Beckless there,

we couldn't use anything that Beckless, uh, had told us

because it'd be considered hearsay

and the judge would not allow it.

♪

He never for a second thought he would be convicted.

Samuel Little's victims were ignored

for all of these years

in large part because

they were in marginalized populations.

♪

[Kenny] Pat Mount had a lot of trouble in her life.

She was mentally retarded. She was an alcoholic.

She hung around the bars,

was known to get drunk

and leave with different men.

All this was brought up during the trial.

And I-I felt a lot of people,

including the jury, felt that she was

less of a person

rather than being a victim of a homicide,

that she was almost asking for it.

I feel personally

that, uh, if she'd have been

a University of Florida student,

a lot different trial would've been conducted.

♪

[Greg] We disseminated the information.

We felt he was a serial killer,

and we put it out nationwide.

That's all we could do is warn people.

You throw a life away, basically,

a life, basically, of a child,

even though she was 26 years old.

And you feel sorry for someone,

that you couldn't do them justice to help them.

♪

I just felt like somehow,

we should've been able to keep him in jail.

[Jillian] There was such a miscarriage of justice.

They had him again and again.

When I read his rap sheet, I was shocked.

He served far less time

for rape, assault, and murder

than he did for his first breaking and entry charge

when he was 16 years old.

[melancholy music]

♪

He went to the Ohio State Reformatory

at the age of 16.

[Jillian] Yeah.

And that was where he learned to box.

[Jillian] I knew that I wanted to write

a more extensive piece

about Sam Little, and, you know,

a big piece of his identity is boxing.

I felt that in order to understand him,

I would have to go and just give it a try.

[trainer] Seven, eight.

[Jillian] And boxing has given me a perspective

on the Sam Little story in many ways.

[uneasy music]

What were the nicknames they called you?

[bell dings]

[people clamoring]

[Jillian] Sam was the middleweight champion

of the Ohio State Reformatory,

and boxing culture in the prisons in the '60s

was actually a funnel into professional boxing.

So Sam Little is 24

when he gets out of the reformatory.

[desolate music]

He goes and fights an amateur fight

in Cleveland.

He has all these people in his corner,

saying hang back,

except he's a KO fighter.

He is a powerhouse, right,

and they're saying hang back, hang back,

and he got his lip split,

and he lost by points.

♪

He put his boxing gloves in the trash

and said, "I'm never fighting again."

He took that rage somewhere else.

♪

Why don't you tell me why you stopped boxing?

[Jillian] I mean, I feel like that's really interesting,

Sam, for you to say that,

because you are actually a killer.

But you have killed people.

So you did have a killer instinct.

[Sam] I-I--

[Jillian] Right.

I was not calculating

in the kind of emotional toll

talking to the psychopath would take.

♪

I'm pretty angry.

I mean, I don't, like, function

in the world as an angry person,

but if I think hard enough

about the things that I've experienced

and also the things that I'm researching

with the Sam Little story and these victims,

I can get pretty angry.

I'm somebody who has experienced

domestic abuse.

I am somebody who has done

sex work in my life.

I'm someone who has certainly done

plenty of drugs.

I have a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.

Uh, boxing allows me to lean into the pain.

♪

There are many ways

of dealing with trauma:

by running away,

by being addicted,

and...

I think that that is

a large part of how Sam

chose his victims.

He was a predator.

He could walk in a room

and see who was the easiest prey.

♪

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Jillian] They weren't all prostitutes.

[Laurie] You know, you don't think

things like that are gonna happen to you

'cause I wasn't that person.

I just tried some risky stuff.

My name is Laurie Barros.

I'm one of the few surviving victims

of Samuel McDowell Little.

♪

It's written all over you somehow or another,

how you carry yourself,

that you don't care about yourself,

you don't respect yourself,

you have no confidence.

And in--that was true. I had none.

[suspenseful music]

[Jillian] Remember, pick the ones

no one will notice are gone.

Remember, don't leave them alive.

Remember, don't get caught.

Remember, if the above fails,

get a lawyer.

Remember, deny, deny, deny.

♪

[Jillian] That was Laurie and Tonya?

That was the two women in San Diego?

That case?

♪

[siren wailing]

[Laurie] I was going through a divorce

and, you know, from an abusive husband,

wasn't caring very much

about how I was handling my life,

and that night, I got dressed up.

I was bored. I was lonesome.

And my friend

had a meth dealer that lived downtown.

I thought I would go see if he was home,

do a few lines, right?

[ominous music]

So I had gotten out of my car,

but I don't think I made it to the end of the block.

♪

I remember getting the feeling--

you know how you get a feeling somebody's following you?

♪

I instantly just froze up

and got really scared.

I thought, "Don't act like you're scared.

Don't act like you're scared."

He was-he was behind me now,

kind of got me in a chokehold,

shoved me into his car.

It seemed like he drove around aimlessly

for a little bit,

and driving up this dirt road,

it was pitch-black, just emptiness,

and I remember he pulled up there

and turned the car off.

I just assumed, "I'm gonna-I'm gonna get raped.

Prepare yourself."

And...

he...

turned around and pretty much took me by the neck

and pushed me in the back seat,

right over the seat.

♪

He--like this. He had his f--

just pressing down.

And my--his hands are around my neck.

His thumbs are on those hyoid bones,

and he kept pressing harder.

♪

He had told me to swallow,

says, "I love it when you swallow."

And I went unconscious.

♪

[sighs]

And I remember coming back to consciousness.

I know he thought I was dead,

and I knew that because I played dead.

♪

I remember kind of talking to God

and saying, "I'm sorry. I did this to myself."

I was so ashamed.

[Jillian] As survivors of violence,

one of the most difficult things

is that we often blame ourselves.

We're working with a set of cultural assumptions

that cause us

to internalize.

♪

[pensive music]

♪

I grew up with a kind of insatiable curiosity

that has gotten me into a lot of trouble.

But I don't think that any of that

really translated into some of my more...

self-destructive behaviors

until I had an experience at summer camp

when I was 12 years old,

when I had a relationship with a much older counselor.

Him.

And he was 21.

We got caught, and he got fired,

and I was publicly humiliated

and then went from being, you know,

this awkward...

preteen, really, um,

you know, to being the town slut, basically.

♪

You know? I mean, what-what would you do

if a 21-year-old

touched your 12-year-old daughter?

♪

I don't know what I would do,

but, uh, I-I...

w-wouldn't do what my parents did,

and I wouldn't do what the camp directors did,

which was, you know, blame me.

♪

I was publicly humiliated.

You know, the general...

opinion was that I seduced him

and, uh, you know, caused him to lose his job,

and, uh--and my whole life changed after that.

♪

I started to internalize

those kind of ideas about myself.

You know, I was bad, I was wrong,

I was shameful,

and, uh--you know,

and I started to act out in self-destructive ways.

I was anorexic. I was a cutter.

I still carry those scars physically.

It was a formative experience,

changed my life.

The experience of not being believed,

being blamed, it changed

my idea about myself,

and, uh, I can look at that experience

and see that that was where

my more self-destructive behaviors

started to manifest.

♪

I feel connected with these victims

because it could've been me any night of the week

for a very long time in my life.

[Laurie] It's probably been about 25, 26 years

since I've been back here to this site.

[eerie music]

When Sam Little was pushing me out of the car,

I know he thought I was dead.

[exhales heavily]

I was laying in dirt, but there was trash around me.

I was just kind of sprawled out on my back,

and I didn't move a muscle.

The idea that I'm laying in trash

has never left me,

that image and just kind of...

such a metaphor for how I've kind of felt

so much of my life.

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Jillian] Yeah, 'cause you were.

[Jillian] But you thought she was dead.

[desolate music]

♪

[Wayne] We're going into Logan Heights now,

and, you know, back in 1984, when I joined

the San Diego Police Department,

this was kind of the start of the gang area.

Thirty-Second Street,

all the girls who were prostituting

would be along the street here.

They're just trying to get by.

♪

My name's Wayne Spees,

and I'm a detective sergeant

retired from San Diego Police Department.

[tense music]

On October 25th, I was working night watch.

♪

I was probably a week in in my phase training,

and my training officer was Lou Tamani.

In lineup that day,

Lou shows me this flyer.

We call them a BOLO, a "be on the lookout."

So this is the BOLO

that we received in lineup that night.

It says that this guy

had attacked a woman,

that he drove her to a-a location,

and raped her and strangled her,

and then he threw her out of the car,

thinking probably she was dead,

and, uh--and then, you know, left her there.

♪

The victim is 22-year-old Laurie Barros.

She gave a really good description

of the car and of our suspect:

a Black male,

40 to 45 years old, six foot one,

230 to 240 pounds,

He had a gold pinkie ring with two diamonds.

The vehicle he was driving

was a black two-door large American-made car.

It had three foam dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

♪

[engine turning over]

And now we're out a month later,

patrolling the-the area.

That night,

just before five in the morning,

the sun hasn't come up yet.

Radio slows down, and...

my partner Lou's telling me

about this area where this woman was attacked,

and Lou says to take the right turn off of 36th.

It's a dead-end street, and then it goes

into a, uh, dirt lot

with just these piles of trash.

♪

And we want to sneak up on anybody

so we don't wanna alert them with our lights on,

so we turn our lights out.

♪

We can see, you know, the outline

of-of a car up in front of us.

♪

Lou said, "Okay, closer, closer, closer,"

and then he said, "When I say so,

"turn the spotlights on

and turn the headlights on, high beams."

♪

And, uh, as we're pulling up, he tells me.

He says, "All right, light them up."

♪

And that's when we can see,

you know, the-the car.

We see it's the car that matches this description.

It's a large black American-made car.

It's a T-bird.

And we see movement in the back seat,

and we see a head, you know, pop up,

and then the door opens on the passenger side,

and he jumps out of the car.

♪

He gets out, and he looks directly, uh, at us,

and I notice he's-he's pulling his pants up.

He's zipping up his pants.

So I--in a very firm voice, I say,

"Get over here. I need to talk to you."

As he's approaching me, I have my light,

my flashlight, on him,

and as I put the light on his face,

I can see the scratches on his throat,

and they're fresh; they're-they're bleeding.

You know, and he has a-a clump

of, like, mucus-y blood on his shirt.

And then he looks down at my gun,

and I just told him; I said,

you know, "Don't do anything stupid."

He identified himself to me as Samuel McDowell.

♪

So I put him in the back of the car.

He's handcuffed. He's not going anywhere.

We got him.

And now I make my way up,

uh, to the back seat of the T-bird.

♪

When I... got up to the car,

I was on the passenger side,

and I can see a woman back there,

and she's naked,

and she's shoved down behind the driver's seat

on the floor,

and her hips and her-and her legs

are-are up on the seat, spread.

She had, you know, a lot of redness,

um, and bruising around her-her neck.

There was blood coming from her nose

and from her mouth, like she'd been punched.

Her eyes were rolled back in her head,

and it wasn't till the-- she started gurgling

that I realized that she's still alive.

[indistinct police radio chatter]

And Lou said, "You're safe. I'm a police officer."

And then that's when she said,

you know, "He raped me. He raped me."

[Jillian] To-that was Tonya,

when you got caught in the act?

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[dramatic music]

[Wayne] The victim was being treated

in the hospital.

We learned her name was Tonya Jackson.

She says she met Samuel McDowell

in a bar downtown,

and he offered her money for sex, and she agreed,

and then, uh, he drove her to that location

where she was attacked.

Now he's in the back seat, strangling this woman.

♪

She was moments away, uh, from death.

No doubt in my mind that, you know,

he would've killed her.

So the charges at that point

were the kidnap,

the rape,

and then the attempted murder.

He said, "Yeah, I'll talk.

I'll tell you exactly what happened."

You know, to me, he says,

"That-that doctor's exam's

not gonna show any rape,"

and he said, "The only thing that's gonna show

is where my hands were around her neck."

And, uh, I remember thinking to myself,

"Wow, that's a pretty incriminating, uh, statement."

I took my notepad out,

and I put quotation marks, you know,

and I wrote that down.

And then he said,

"I just kicked the shit out of her."

Uh, "That bitch deserved it."

He goes, "I should've killed that whore."

♪

[Wayne] So once we get him down to the station,

we hand him off to the sex crimes detective

who handled the first case, Laurie Barros.

He then brings Laurie down

and is going to have her identify, if she can,

Sam Little in a lineup.

[uneasy music]

[door creaks]

♪

[Laurie] And I picked him out in a matter of seconds.

♪

And just to let him know that I was on this side

of the-the glass...

♪

...I made him repeat the words

that I knew would probably...

make him a little anxious, which was,

"Swallow for me. I love it when you swallow."

Made him say that...

♪

...'cause I was looking for him to-to-to be unnerved by it.

And... I fell to my knees

and just broke,

just kind of crumbled.

Um, I knew that was him.

♪

[Wayne] So now we know we have him

for two cases.

Samuel McDowell was charged with both the attacks

on Laurie Barros and Tonya Jackson.

It's what we call a slam dunk.

I mean, you caught the man in the act.

♪

So in my mind,

this guy's going away for a long time,

and we got a really dangerous predator

off the street.

[Gary] Samuel McDowell, serial murderer, rapist,

torturer, strangler.

Let's see what we got here.

These are notes I haven't seen

in decades...

on this case.

I'm Gary Rempel.

I'm a retired district attorney

for San Diego County.

I tried the 1985 case of Samuel Little,

also known as McDowell,

in which he, uh, raped and assaulted

and tried to strangle two women.

We had a solid identification.

The, uh, first one had ended

with the victim being left for dead

in a trash heap, and in the second one,

police officer happened on the scene

and actually interrupted this, uh, man

as he was strangling his victim

in the back seat of his car.

There was no doubt in my mind I had the right guy.

So one of the first things I did

was look at Sam Little's rap sheet.

Many, many arrests

but not much time served.

Violent assault, rape, attempted murder.

In Mississippi, attempted murder, first degree.

Gainesville, Florida, acquitted.

An acquittal's kind of unusual.

That was a bit of a red flag.

♪

So having all these facts in mind, uh,

I began to prepare my case,

and the first thing I did, of course,

would be to interview the victims.

The first victim I interviewed is Tonya Jackson,

who was saved by the officer.

[Jillian] Well, I mean, it-it is violent.

It's violent to strangle someone,

right, Mr. Sam?

[Gary] Tonya Jackson

openly admitted she was a prostitute.

She denied there had been

any conflict over a fee or any other reason

for him to attack her

other than for his own pleasure.

♪

But if the cop hadn't come along

and interrupted the-the crime in the act,

she wouldn't have made a very good witness on the stand.

She just was, uh,

you know, poorly educated, uh, not a strong speaker,

and appeared to be a person of few words.

But then I interviewed the second witness,

Laurie Barros.

[Laurie] When I had my first meeting

with DDA Gary Rempel,

I can remember sitting down in there

and just b-trembling.

Uh...

[ominous music]

I gave him all the gory details

of what happened to me.

♪

So I heard her story, and she really seemed

to make an excellent witness.

She was a very attractive lady,

dressed modestly but nicely.

I thought there'd be no problems in the case.

The only thing was the timing.

What's she doing out in the street

at 11:30 in downtown San Diego at that time of night?

So I just wanted to know why she was there.

♪

So I brought her in for further questioning.

[Laurie] I knew something was wrong,

and he told me; he said,

"Yeah, we-we had to pull your record, you know?

It's what we do."

[dramatic music]

I got arrested a couple times,

and--you know, with a group of girls

for prostitution.

Being arrested was

horribly humiliating

and definitely a wake-up call,

going, "What are you doing?"

She came clean. I said, "That-that's okay.

He still didn't have the right to do what he did."

But now I had information

that affected her credibility

as a witness and as a victim.

♪

[Laurie] When I testified at trial,

I was an absolute nervous wreck.

Felt like all the pressure was on me

to make sure that the jury would believe me.

♪

[Gary] Both my victims did a pretty good job.

They shared their horror.

[eerie music]

Then it was the defense attorney.

Little took the stand. He kept his mild demeanor.

He testified that as to Laurie Barros,

he knew nothing about that case;

he had nothing to do with that case;

he in fact was with, uh, a friend

that he travels with, an older lady

that he takes care of,

a lady living on social security

named Jean.

[Jillian] Didn't Jean take the stand,

uh, at one of your trials?

Was it San Diego?

[Jillian] Wow.

[Gary] Jean testified unequivocally and strongly

that during the, uh, time in question,

she had been with Sam

and that, uh, there was no way

he could've committed the crimes alleged.

She was the consummate alibi witness,

the little under-oath church lady.

♪

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

She must have known.

You're not cleaning blood and shit and earrings

out of the back of a car and thinking, you know,

"My boyfriend's just fucking around."

I think she absolutely knew,

and I think she enabled it.

[Gary] But as to Tonya,

Sam said she was trying

to cheat him out of some money,

and he refused to pay her, and so she attacked him,

and he was simply fighting her off

when the officer arrived on the scene.

♪

[Jillian] Sam had a unique ability

for finding the people who would not be credible,

regardless of what they said.

Even if they lived, who would believe them?

Somehow, this man

was more credible

than these victims?

♪

[Laurie] I didn't hear from anyone

after I testified.

I had no idea that the jury didn't believe me.

♪

I had no idea that...

there was a hung jury.

♪

[mournful music]

[Gary] Tonya couldn't be located

for the second trial.

We were faced with a...

extremely weak case that was going to possibly end

in an acquittal,

so we accepted a plea

to two felony counts,

assault with intent to inflict great bodily injury.

We're darn lucky we got to send this guy away

four years to prison for what he had done.

I don't even know if he served

every minute of those four years.

That was the best we could get him,

and that's what we gave him.

♪

[sighs]

This was the worst outcome of my career.

They didn't do their job.

♪

Whether Tonya was around or not,

they had enough evidence from what happened to me.

The details I gave them, the report I gave them,

the drawing I gave of him,

and the fact he was caught in the act

is unbelievable to me

that they could not have made that trial work.

Somebody fucked up,

big-time.

♪

Hi.

[Gary] Hi. You must be Laurie.

[Laurie] I'm Laurie. Please come in.

[sighs]

Very different seating than 35 years ago.

Yeah.

So, uh, I've been curious a few times the...

-Yeah, yeah. -...case has come up,

and, you know, we-we didn't see you for that second trial.

-Yeah. -And, uh...

and I don't know if they didn't-didn't do

a good job locating you, or I didn't know

if you'd just made yourself scarce or what.

-What happened? -No one ever called me

or followed up with me at all.

-They didn't follow up? -Never.

I never knew there was a second trial.

I didn't know there was a hung jury

in the first trial.

I never got a call from anyone

to follow up after I testified.

Uh, we were put in a bad spot.

We, uh, couldn't go forward,

and we had to, uh,

make a deal with this crook

and, uh, you know, consequently

managed to send him to prison but not-not long enough.

-Right. -Yeah.

Because we're prostitutes,

we're women, it doesn't really matter.

That's ultimately-- what came out of that is...

"Who cares?"

Well, I think they don't believe women sometimes

when they have got a record for being a prostitute

and then they-they, uh-

they deny it when it comes for a trial

on this particular occasion.

I didn't deny it.

But you were doing prostitution.

Am I correct? Okay.

Five or six times, I was out on the streets,

doing prostitution.

I remember being in your office,

and I fully admitted it; I was humiliated.

I'm embarrassed of what I did.

But it shouldn't change anything.

I didn't deserve for some guy

to try and murder me.

There's no way he should've been able

to plea out like this so easily

with so much evidence.

Now, you understand,

without a witness, we didn't have a trial.

I'm a witness. It happened to me.

Right, but--

This is crazy. I didn't go anywhere.

Just, uh, a fucking phone call.

Can you think of any reason why you wouldn't have called?

Weren't you curious to know what happened?

I-I would've called; I'd like to know what happened

if I was in your shoes.

You're gonna put this on me?

-Did you feel-- -I cannot--

What a metaphor all this has become.

Being dumped in trash, never called,

never contacted.

If you cared so much,

it-it should've come from you.

I'm sorry you think I didn't do

the best could be done.

It didn't go well this time,

and this is just a horrible, horrible case.

Failed. They failed.

They failed me.

They failed every woman after me

that was killed.

I'm trying to point out the massive failure

of the system.

Nothing's gonna change

if all we're doing is defending ourself

and saying we did everything right.

We did not.

Women have died

because everybody's got the same mindset.

They're stuck. Their hands are tied.

"I did my best." No, nobody fought.

We just respond to the system and on to the next.

[breathes deeply]

So guess what.

All the deaths after me are on them.

Have fun sleeping at night with that,

'cause you do not get to escape it.

He went on a killing spree after he got out of prison

for serving two and a half years,

immediately after he got out.

[indistinct police radio chatter]

[Jillian] I want you to tell me

about when you got out of prison in San Diego.

You remember that?

[disquieting music]

[Jillian] Mm-hmm.

[Jillian] When I took on this serial killer story,

I was like, "This can't be real."

[dramatic music]

This man, who everyone knew was killing women,

got off again and again and again.

And I thought, "Oh, gosh.

"Like, I'm gonna get the answer.

"I'm gonna get the answer

"of why you feel you need to control women

"and why you feel you need to own women

"and, if you can't, why you feel

you need to destroy women."

It's like, "I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get the answer."

♪