Original subtitles

[eerie ambient music]

- It's hard to believe that someone could slip in

and abduct a young woman

right out of her bedroom

and without anybody hearing a thing,

but that's what happened.

[intense ambient music]

- [Director] All right, so let's roll sound.

- [Audio Engineer] Sound speeds.

- [Director] And AVP.

- [Male Crewmember] We're good, Stephanie.

- When we talk about the golden age of serial killers,

it all started in the early to mid '70s

with this group of five.

Like Gacy and 33 bodies under his house.

Bundy traveling across the country.

Rader terrorizing over decades

and taunting law enforcement and the media.

Jeffrey Dahmer.

Even today, we find his crimes

to be on the extreme end of human behavior.

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer,

confessed to 71 murders over the course of several decades.

- Five of the most prolific serial killers

in American history were all operating at the same time.

- It's easy for us in hindsight to say,

well, why didn't that person get caught,

or why weren't people looking for them?

I think we have to keep in mind historically, the era.

- In the '70s in the United States

was an innocent sort of place.

- You find this sort of trusting environment.

- It was normal for people

to just hang out with strangers

and to hop into strange cars.

- [Reporter] The murder of people in series

has police departments across this country worried.

- Law enforcement didn't have a definition

for serial killers.

- Those police officers back in the '70s

just simply did not have the tools

that law enforcement officers have now.

- Being able to quickly run a name in a database,

that's something that didn't exist.

- There were no computers.

- No internet.

- No cell phones.

- No DNA.

- There were no surveillance cameras.

- Record keeping was in the back of everybody's drawer.

- We didn't yet have the 9-1-1 system.

And these killers took full advantage of that.

- [Male Reporter] John Wayne Gacy's criminal--

- [Male Reporter] Ted Bundy is still alive--

- [Female Reporter] BTK might--

- [Male Reporter] Jeffrey Dahmer--

- [Female Reporter] Green River Killer.

[intense orchestral music]

Georgann Hawkins. - Steven Tuomi.

- Lynda Ann Healy. - Kathryn Bright.

- [Female Speaker] Steven Hicks.

[voices overlapping]

- [Female Speaker] Shirley Vian.

- He took me by the shoulder and said, "Follow me."

Threatened to kill me if I didn't comply.

- I thought that he was just a normal man.

And I was just thinking,

I'm gonna get home and everything's gonna be fine.

Little did I know it was gonna be my worst nightmare.

- We kept trying to tell him,

but he's a kid, he's a kid.

He said, "Well, he's telling us he's not a kid,

so who should we believe?"

Believe the white guy.

- These five killers

don't come across to the outside world as frothing lunatics.

- And you could sit next to him on a bus,

or a train, or a plane.

You would never associate them

with being the worst serial killers in US history.

- Deep down inside is a monster that you could never see.

[intense orchestral music]

- My mother had told me

that the only thing she ever prayed for for herself

was to die peacefully in her sleep.

And that's the one thing she did not get.

- Wichita was a very calm city.

A city back in 1974 of roughly 300,000 people

with a large agricultural base.

We didn't think about crime.

Nobody thought about crime.

Crime happened in the big city.

Crime did not happen in Wichita, Kansas.

[slate claps]

- My family was a loving,

caring family of typical Americans.

My mother and my father were childhood sweethearts.

My mom was a good Catholic girl.

That is why there was five of us,

one after the other after the other.

I remember walking home.

I remember the snow being almost knee deep.

Opened up the back gate to the yard

and I saw my dog Lucky outside.

So I said, "Hey, lucky,

what are you doing out here, boy?

You okay?

Come on."

I opened up the kitchen door and there was no sound,

nobody.

And so I was like,

I yelled out, "Is anybody here?"

And one of my siblings yelled out,

"Charlie, come quick.

Mom and dad are playing a bad trick on us."

I ran down the hall,

went through the door in their bedroom,

and saw my mom and my dad there tied up

and dead.

[intense ambient music]

I could smell the fear and the pain

that they had gone through.

I could feel it all in the room.

The physical pain is like,

if somebody pried your chest open.

- The police had responded to the house.

They opened a spare bedroom

and that's where they found Joey Jr.

- The police believe that he sat on the chair

and watched the child suffocate.

And every time I think about that,

it's tough, you know?

- So then, the search was on for Josephine.

That's when the officers realized,

this house has a basement.

An officer went down there,

he didn't know where the lights were,

and he was kind of sweeping his arm,

trying to not bump into something.

And he went against something

that he thought was a punching bag hanging from the ceiling.

And then when he found a light,

it was Josephine who had been hung from a sewer pipe

in the basement of the house.

- She will really struggle.

And then as she struggles,

he will describe masturbating.

- If I'd have seen Joey and Josie,

it might've drove me mad.

Thank God I didn't see it.

Thank God.

- The crime scenes back in the '70s

are not like they are now.

The Otero crime scene,

that is a crime scene that would never happen today.

You had members of the media wandering through the house.

You even had a uh,

higher up official in the police department

decide to make himself a drink of water.

And so he had left the ice tray on the counter.

And so people thought,

well, the ice hadn't melted completely,

so that must've been the killer who did it.

- Back in 1974, we couldn't even spell DNA.

The technology didn't exist back then.

But at Josephine's feet, there was a pool.

The crime scene investigator had an incredible imagination

'cause he didn't know what it was.

He didn't know what its value was,

but he knew he wanted to preserve it.

So he took a pillowcase

and he cut it up into several small pieces.

And then he dipped it in that pool.

31 years later,

a genetic profile would be drawn

from one of those preserved pieces of evidence.

- The police department thought at first

that this was a drug murder.

They took several people into custody

and it turned out they weren't related to the case at all.

- In 1974,

the idea that someone would kill for pleasure

was unheard of.

It just wasn't something that existed in anyone's mind.

- There had to be some motive.

Why does somebody just pick out this family

and slaughter four people?

And so a lot of opinions were sought

from psychologists of the day,

thinking that they would have some insight

as to what would motivate a person to do this.

- Dennis Rader, as a child,

had a perfectly normal upbringing.

He said, "I was never abused.

Everything was normal in my family."

But then he says,

"I knew from a young age that I had factor X."

"Factor X is the demon inside of me," he says,

"That caused me to have to torture people and kill people."

- Rader will describe a specific incident

when he was a kid

where he was at some kind of family outing,

and they tied a chicken to a tree stump

in order to kill the chicken.

And the tying of the chicken to that stump

caused him to have

what he would describe as sexual feelings.

- Dennis Rader was cultivating this persona of churchgoer.

He was married.

He was relatively young.

He was 28 years old.

Relatively handsome.

So he should have everything going for him.

And so when he loses this job in 1973,

things weren't perfect.

He was not in control.

And some ways that people may try to over-correct for that

is by gaining control in some other aspect of their life.

And you know, perhaps it triggered

his need to control something or someone.

- When the Otero family was killed,

the way he tells it,

he was between jobs, was bored,

didn't feel good about himself,

so factor X came out.

[intense ambient music]

- When you look back at the first known kills

for these five serial killers,

you have to understand that

they have been fantasizing about killing

for a long time.

It starts with developing victim profiles in their head.

Where they would get these victims,

how they would control them.

Rader's life centered around a lot of fantasy,

but you can only fantasize so long

before you cross that line.

And that was the case with John Wayne Gacy.

[intense ambient music]

- In my mind,

John Gacy was the worst kind of a killer you can imagine.

You know, like a shark swimming around down there.

He would lay his eyes on

somebody walking down the street.

And then in his mind, that person was dead.

[dramatic music]

John Gacy frequented homosexual areas in Chicago.

There was a couple of areas,

one called Bughouse Square and the other called Boystown.

He patrolled down there.

I mean, he would go around the block,

looking for somebody to pick up.

He had a black Oldsmobile

with a spotlight on the driver's side.

He had some phony badges.

A lot of the kids that he picked up,

a lot of them were homosexuals.

Many of them, he took to his house.

And many of them, that was a one-way trip.

[intense electronic music]

- Gacy picked up 16-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy

at the Greyhound bus station.

- According to Gacy,

what happened was he offered him money for sex.

He got him back to his house, Gacy's house.

When he was in bed,

they did what they did with one another.

- He wakes up in the morning

and the kid's standing at the foot of his bed

with a big butcher knife in his hand.

And he thinks the kid's coming after him to attack him.

He jumps out of bed, fights with him

takes the knife away from him,

and stabbed him in the heart twice.

Killed him.

- What's interesting about this

is that for most normal people,

you would probably call somebody

because now you've just killed somebody.

And Gacy reports being aroused

and orgasming in this most intense way.

- He goes into the kitchen,

and there, the kid's been preparing breakfast.

He was slicing the bacon.

These are Gacy's words,

but he said that he probably wanted to know

how thick I wanted my bacon sliced.

But unfortunately, he didn't take it that way at the time,

and he says, defended himself and killed him.

Buried him in the crawl space.

- This is when Gacy crosses over,

when he has his first kill.

And now, he recognizes that powerful arousal component

of controlling somebody's life,

essentially playing God,

deciding whether they live or die.

And that's where

he then starts this collection of young men

who he tortures as a sexual sadist

and eventually kills.

So when we look back at the serial killers,

we're typically looking for a triggering event.

But in Gacy's life,

there was, I think, a series of things that were going on.

- John Gacy was given the middle name of Wayne.

His father wanted his son to be this tough guy

named after this hero cowboy,

just like John Wayne.

Well, when his son wanted to spend more time

with his mother and do more gardening,

Gacy's father would verbally assault,

emotionally assault,

and physically assault John Wayne Gacy Jr.

- John Wayne Gacy, around the age of four or five,

is at home upstairs with a neighbor girl

who was much older than him,

a teenage girl.

And apparently, she was fondling his genitals

or touching him in sort of a sexual way.

Well, both mothers come upstairs and discover this.

The mother of the girl strikes her in front of Gacy.

A moment like this is really significant

in that you have sexuality being joined with shame,

being joined with physical aggression.

A combination like that

would produce someone who is capable of acting in a way

that is both sexual, and aggressive, and shame inducing.

And that's exactly what John Wayne Gacy did.

[slate clicks]

- I was molested when I was a boy.

It's hard to think back on it and admit it ever happened.

It takes away from how you look at yourself as a male.

And that was part of the reason

I never told anybody for all those decades.

When I was nine or 10 years old in 1956,

my mother and I went up to resort in Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

A fellow named John, he was about 16.

He worked there, he did odd jobs.

I didn't have any buddies up there to spend time with

and so he befriended me.

He had some time off

and he wanted to know if I wanted to go in a boat with him.

So he took me out in a boat.

I'd never been in a rowboat before,

so that was fun for a little nine or 10 year old boy.

We tied up the boat.

He ah, he took me in the thicket and um,

ah, he did a terrible thing.

He did a terrible thing.

He took me by the shoulder and said, "Follow me,"

threatened to kill me if I didn't comply.

And I turned around.

He said, "Open your mouth."

I opened my mouth and um,

that's what happened.

Thank God it was over quickly.

It was over quickly.

Is a person born evil?

Do they become evil?

I don't have an answer for that.

- Serial sexual killers do not snap at 30 years of age

and become serial killers.

It evolves over time.

And that time begins when they're quite young.

As that desire for these violent sexual fantasies continue,

offenders can look for more and more opportunities

to satisfy those urges and compulsions.

- In the 1960s,

Gacy started edging closer and closer to murder.

He had sexual relations with teenagers, underage kids.

This was his MO out there.

One of these young kids was Donald Voorhees Jr.

He was the son of a state representative in Iowa.

Gacy would show him some stag films.

They did have sexual acts together numerous times.

- When the boy finally told his father what had happened,

his father went right to the state police

and demanded that Gacy be arrested and tried.

- He was charged with sodomy

of a 15 year old boy.

- They threw the book at him.

He got get the maximum 10 years.

- Well, I'm John Gacy.

I'm from Waterloo, Iowa.

- [Interviewer] And you're a man of them authority here.

What is your title?

- Well, I'm first cook.

- Gacy was not only a model prisoner at Anamosa.

He almost seemed to run the prison.

The parole board looked at Gacy's actions within the prison

and said, well, okay,

he could probably be a model citizen.

Let's release him.

Out of his 10 year sentence,

Gacy only served 18 months.

- In the 1970s,

there was no such thing as a sex offender registry.

It just didn't exist.

So essentially, Gacy is allowed to go to Chicago

and begin his life with a clean slate.

- If Gacy had served his full sentence,

that would have brought about

one of the great ironies and sad ironies to this case,

meaning that 33 young lives would not be gone.

- The case stands out because it was so brazen.

I mean, there were other

roommates in the home at the time.

No one heard anything.

It was hard to believe that someone could slip in

and abduct a young woman right out of her bedroom

without anybody hearing a thing.

But that's what happened.

[downbeat rock music]

- In 1974, there was a new freedom for women.

Law schools, medical schools,

you know, were forced to admit women and people of color.

And it was about time.

It was a time when you could aspire to anything.

- In 1974,

Ted Bundy was a graduate of the University of Washington

and he was attending law school,

but living in the University of Washington District.

He wanted to be a famous lawyer,

he wanted to be a politician.

He was trying to become

an up-and-comer among people he admired.

- Lynda Healy.

She was a University of Washington student

who was abducted from her basement bedroom.

She just disappeared without a trace.

- Lynda Healy lived off campus

in a house with some of her girlfriends.

And her apartment was in the basement.

- Her roommates hadn't seen her for a day or two.

And finally, one of them went down

and went into her room.

And it looked like she had been there.

Her bed was perfectly made.

They spotted some blood though

and opened a closet

and found a nightgown that had the blood on it.

- She was missing.

Nobody knew where she went.

Lynda was just gone.

The crime scene,

the place where Lynda Ann Healy disappeared from

was processed to some extent

by the Seattle Police Department.

- We didn't have crime scene technicians.

We didn't have digital cameras.

And I remember my Lieutenant telling me,

you have film, it's expensive.

You're using flash bulbs, they're expensive.

Don't take a lot of pictures.

So crime scenes, you know,

even a homicide crime scenes

might only have like 20 or 30 pictures.

And today, we have hundreds.

- There weren't any particular suspects at this point.

That was kind of a one-off case.

- It was the beginning of that series

of young women disappearing from college campuses

and other areas around the Pacific Northwest.

- Our son is the best son in the world.

He's a very normal, active boy.

He did all the things that most boys liked to do.

- Ted Bundy was known to have had a very unusual childhood.

He was considered an illegitimate birth.

The mother was not married at the time.

And then he was raised for the first few years of his life

in the home of his maternal grandparents.

- Ted Bundy was brought up on the assumption

that his grandparents are his parents

and his mother is his sister.

He's sort of brought into this world or web of lies

and starts forming his personality

based on this family dynamic

that is really an unhealthy dynamic.

- I knew Ted Bundy from the time I was five until I was 15.

My brother was Ted's age,

so most of the boys hung out together

and I was the tag along little sister.

My brother told me very early on to stay clear of Ted.

He was just a mean spirited kid.

Ted liked building holes in the ground

with sharp stakes pointing up.

And then he'd make this big thing of leaves,

and sticks, and twigs

so that you couldn't tell that it was there.

And one of the girls from a couple of streets up

went through one

and got the whole side of her leg gashed up really bad.

He liked that.

He liked scaring people, especially little girls.

And he liked hurting them.

And he liked hurting animals that were small and helpless.

There was a cat in our neighborhood

that was hanging from a clothes line

and it was on fire.

He'd lit it up with gasoline, with lighter fluid,

and set it on fire.

And you could hear that cat screaming.

It was horrible.

- In terms of the five serial killers we're discussing,

animal cruelty may be sort of a practice run

for violence and aggression against humans.

If an individual has the capacity to harm an animal,

it's really not much more of a leap

for them to harm another human being.

We certainly see it with Ridgway,

we certainly see with Rader,

the same with Gacy and then Bundy.

- His behavior spoke very loudly of who he was.

And I doubt if any of the people in the neighborhood

were surprised when Ted was killing women.

[intense ambient music]

- By the time Ted Bundy was a young teenager,

he was shoplifting, he was lying.

He was a Peeping Tom in Tacoma neighborhoods

when he was 14 or so.

He applied to the University of Washington

and started attending.

And he learned in a psychology class

that people will help somebody who appears vulnerable.

- Prior to Ted Bundy's first kill,

we want to look at what's going on in his life.

He'd been dating a woman named Stephanie Brooks.

- Stephanie Brooks represented everything that he wanted,

but really just couldn't achieve on his own.

Upper class life, access, beauty.

And being with her, he had those things by proxy.

- So, Bundy's low view of himself

was really elevated by dating Stephanie Brooks

until Stephanie broke up with him.

This was a real turning point for Bundy.

It was devastating for him.

He felt abandoned, he felt betrayed.

And it's this point when Bundy,

who has been fantasizing over a long period of time,

actually decides he's going to act out

and try to capture his first victim.

- In Bundy's case,

it's often discussed

how his victims had a physical similarity

to the woman that broke his heart basically.

And that perhaps, and in that regard,

it might've been more revenge, or retribution,

or along that lines.

- He was so angry at her for breaking it off

that this entity in him,

this compulsion to kill would take over.

He really couldn't control his impulses anymore.

And a few years later, Lynda Ann Healy was killed.

- There's something about the first kill

that might've served a particular psychological purpose

that they might have become addicted to.

You see this with Bundy and you see this with Dennis Rader.

- After the Otero murders, police were really baffled.

They had absolutely no suspects at all.

Three months after the Otero murders,

Dennis Rader decided he was going to kill again.

- This time, it's a Wichita State student,

Kathryn Bright.

- Dennis saw Kathryn Bright

and he decided that she would be his next victim.

And so for the next several weeks, he stalked her.

- But he didn't plan for her little brother

to be at the residence.

- While he's there, he ties them both up.

And then Kevin gets his feet loose

and he attacks Dennis Rader.

This is totally unexpected,

not in Dennis Rader's plan at all.

- At that point, the killer

makes his way back over to Kathryn.

There's quite a struggle with her.

At some point during that struggle,

a knife comes out and Kathryn is stabbed multiple times

with quite a bit of ferocity.

Kevin still survived and Kevin runs out the front door.

[suspenseful ambient music]

[suspenseful ambient music]

- Kevin Bright runs out,

runs to a convenience store across the street,

and the police are called.

[siren blaring]

- By the time officers arrived,

Kathryn is on the floor right outside her kitchen.

An officer asked her initially, you know,

do you know who did this to you?

And she says, no.

That's really the last communication she makes.

She's taken

and they try to save her life for several hours,

but she dies later that day.

- He should have been caught, but he wasn't.

And that's why in the future kills,

he wanted to be very careful

to make sure, A, no man was involved,

no dog was involved,

that everything went better.

- The description that came from Kevin Bright

pretty much matches Dennis Rader.

However, the description didn't do much good.

They're looking for a loner.

They're looking for a criminal.

They're looking for someone out of the ordinary.

- They were looking for somebody

that had a reason to commit these murders.

And even though Dennis Rader's right in their sight,

he is a church goer,

he is well known in the community,

they don't see him

because they don't see him as somebody

who could do something like that.

- It stayed a big news story for a long time.

There was a lot of follow up on it

and there was some consternation

when they couldn't find the killer.

And that became a secondary news story.

Was the police department doing its job?

Why haven't they caught the guy?

What are the leads?

- Now, you have five homicides in Wichita, Kansas

within a few months of one another.

- When we look at law enforcement capability,

we have to understand

that they didn't have the technological advances

that we have today to detect

or even make connections between homicide cases.

Particularly in BTK's example,

Wichita, Kansas in the '70s,

small town, small police force.

They're not used to dealing with homicide cases.

They're not trained in that way.

- In the early days,

nobody linked Kathryn Bright

and her brother to the Otero murder.

There were maybe some similarities,

but everybody thought

that these were just individual murders.

We had no idea that it was going to turn into something huge

and really something monstrous.

- By the spring of 1974,

Ted Bundy's MO was going to college campuses

where he fit in.

I mean, he looked like a student.

Well, at that time, college campuses were a safe place.

A young woman on a campus wouldn't think twice

about walking from the library late at night

to her dorm room.

And of course,

parents obviously wanted to send their children

to someplace safe.

- Sue was a dream child.

Very ambitious.

All she wanted from the time she was tiny

was to go to school.

You know, mothers have a certain second sense

when it comes to their children.

She was boarding the airplane.

She turned around and she looked at me,

and she just gave a little wave.

And I told my husband, I'll never see her again.

[somber music]

- Sue was loving everything about college life.

She was so happy there.

This was her dream and her destiny.

She had made arrangements to meet another dorm mate.

And when she didn't come back from that meeting,

her roommate knew immediately that something was wrong.

So they called the campus police.

- For her not to come home was just not right.

She just wouldn't do that kind of thing.

She just wouldn't.

- When my husband told me,

I just had this uneasy feeling.

He said, "Sue's missing and they can't find her."

And I said, "No, she's dead."

It was a different world.

We didn't have computers, or DNA, or Amber Alerts.

And the police departments

were not coordinating with each other.

And we were out there buying ads in Seattle paper.

You know, have you seen this child?

- In a lot of the cases at first involving Ted Bundy,

people sometimes speculated that,

oh, well, the girl is just off on her own

or maybe she's spending a couple nights

with a new boyfriend.

In the '70s,

the concept of a serial killer was something

that people pretty much attributed to a horror movie.

So there wasn't a really good understanding

about that concept.

- At one point, someone asked my husband,

"Aren't you going to feel silly

when she shows up married to somebody?"

And I think that kind of was the mentality back then.

It's a different mentality now, thank goodness.

- During the first half of 1974,

there were a series of murders,

about one a month,

pretty much of the same age.

They looked very similar to one another

and they lived similar lifestyles

as young women in 20s lived.

Ted Bundy's MO was to

try and get women to trust him

and go with him.

He was the kind of person

that could talk a young woman into helping him,

a stranger.

He was looking for the empathetic female

so he could overpower her and ultimately kill her.

- The night she disappeared,

she walked across campus

and he was standing at the library,

which she had to walk in front of to get to her dorm,

with his arm in a sling.

And he called to her and asked her to help carry his books.

Could you help me to my car?

It's just over there.

We teach our children to be compassionate, to be helpful,

and to reach out to those that are disabled.

You know, were we wrong to bring her up that way?

I don't think so.

It's so important for them to care for others.

And that's what happened.

She helped him.

- Contrary to what we might think,

serial killers don't come across to the outside world

as frothing lunatics.

- We are not some kinds of inherent monsters.

We are your sons and we are your husbands.

- Dennis Rader had a BTK side

and he had a Dennis Rader, the family man side.

He much preferred the BTK side.

- With guys like Bundy,

you have a success, and then another, and then another.

And pretty soon, you start to believe you're invincible.

- John Wayne Gacy built carefully

an entire life to live, a facade, a duality.

- My brother says,

"Me and this boy are working together

and we're digging around Gacy's house."

Well, it ended up they were digging their own graves.

[intense ambient music]