Original subtitles

[slow dramatic music]

[rain pattering]

- It was a really bad rainy day.

I decided to hitchhike.

I thought that he was just a normal man.

He showed me his ID and I was just thinking,

"I'm going to get home and everything's going to be fine."

Little did I know it was going to be my worst nightmare.

[dramatic music]

[dramatic music]

- [Man] Five of the most prolific serial killers

in American history were all operating at the same time.

- [Reporter 1] John Wayne Gacy-

- [Reporter 2] Ted Bundy-

- [Reporter 3] BTK.

- [Reporter 4] Jeffrey Dahmer-

- [Reporter 5] The so-called Green River Killer.

- [Man] This was the golden age of serial killing.

- I mean, if you kill 30-some people

and you never got caught, you begin to think

you're never gonna get caught.

But the biggest mistake John Gacy made was Robert Piest.

That was the beginning of the end.

- [Reporter] Officers armed with warrants

began searching the premises for the bodies of young men

believed to have been killed and buried there.

- Gary Ridgway worked for 30-plus years

at the Kenworth plant in Seattle,

and he was a truck painter.

- You could sit next to him on a bus, or a train,

or a plane, you would never associate him

with being one of the worst serial killers in US history.

- Dahmer picks up this young boy.

They engage in some sexual activity.

Steven Hicks decides, "It's time for me to leave."

But Dahmer doesn't want him to leave.

And the only way that he could figure out

how to do this was to basically kill him.

- [Reporter] BTK began today's letter with a question,

"How many do I have to kill before I get my name

in the paper or some national attention?"

- Dennis Rader apparently wants more attention,

or just as much attention, as Ted Bundy.

- Once the police department announced

that there was a guy called BTK

and he was now a serial killer,

Wichita grew up a little bit.

- All of law enforcement started putting things together,

and it wasn't long before Ted was tied

to the cases in Chi Omega.

- On the way to jail Bundy said, "I wish you had killed me."

[slow dramatic music]

- At the time when we charged Ted Bundy

for the Chi Omega murders

he was already convicted and sentenced in Utah.

And he was under investigation in Colorado

for an associated murder

for which there wasn't hard evidence.

But I knew now, for the first time in Bundy's history,

we had some real good scientific forensic physical evidence.

[upbeat music]

- Keep your pieces short so that we can all get on the air.

- Smile, Ted.

- This is Larry Warren reporting live from Miami, Florida

where the jury in Ted Bundy's-

- [Man] There are some 250 reporters

and television technicians from around the country.

They will be following the trial

and making video tape recordings of it.

- The trial for the Chi Omega killings was televised live.

And this is all, you know, years before O.J. Simpson.

[slow music]

It was probably the first trial

that really captured our attention.

- The legal preliminaries are underway in Florida,

where Theodore Bundy is charged with murder.

[slow dramatic music]

- It wasn't gavel to gavel coverage,

but it was quite a national story.

- We are watching it all by television, as we have done-

- There was media everywhere,

and there was one floor of the courthouse

that was turned over to reporters and journalists

from all over the world.

- [Reporter] In court, the urbane Theodore Bundy

proclaims his innocence.

- [Ted] For I find it somewhat absurd to ask for mercy

for something I did not do.

- This trial was an eye-opening moment for the public

because you had this charming-looking,

articulate, smiling Ted Bundy.

It was not the portrait of what most people

expected a serial killer to look like.

And that was a scary proposition for a lot of people.

[slow music]

- Having cameras in the courtroom

is a very good thing for law enforcement

in the sense that we can see how the suspect

and the witnesses are acting,

their demeanor, the things that they say.

And that can be very helpful

as you are investigating other cases.

We picked up a few clues about Ted's trickiness,

his arrogance, his narcissism,

his wanting to represent himself.

- [Reporter] You going to represent yourself

or are you going to get another attorney?

- I'm staying with the man I know best

right now, and that's me.

- Ted played to the cameras.

He got to be this well-known attorney

that he never really could become

because he hadn't graduated from law school, for one thing.

- My name's Ted Bundy and I'm defending the case.

And I'm just here to introduce myself.

- Here he was representing himself,

being a TV star lawyer, a big deal to Ted.

[men laughing]

- So you see Bundy's narcissism

on full display in the courtroom.

He thought, "Here I can show how smart I am,

"how much smarter I am than law enforcement."

- He was like out of body.

He was acting as his own lawyer, but he wasn't.

He was acting as the lawyer

for the person that committed these crimes.

He never did see himself as having committed the crimes.

He knew he did, but it wasn't that persona

that committed the crimes.

And he had no guilt.

[people laughing]

- Bundy actually thought that his abilities as an attorney

were going to be so good

that he wasn't even going to be convicted.

And actually his narcissism is what got him convicted

because he wasn't a very good attorney,

but he played to the audiences.

- [Reporter] Each day, the courtroom

is filled with spectators drawn by a fascination

with Theodore Bundy himself

or by the gruesome details of the crimes.

- At the time where serial murderers began to surface

you have them being portrayed in the media

as kind of glamorous figures.

- [Reporter] What is unusual to see

is that many of the onlookers are women, young women,

contemporaries of the five Florida State sorority sisters

who were assaulted in their beds a year and a half ago.

- Every time he turns around, I kind of get that feeling,

"Oh no, you're going to get me next."

- One of the really odd things is how he had groupies.

He had these young women who just thought he was so handsome

and they seemed to be able to just shrug off

the fact he was a murderer.

[slow dramatic music]

- I'm not afraid of him.

He just doesn't look like the type to kill somebody.

- I could not believe the young women

that thought he was a hero.

Let's have some consideration for the families

of the victims and stop making a circus

out of this, people's tragedies.

- The level of exposure and sensationalism

that was happening in that trial

fueled interest in that sort of event from that point on

to where criminal trials become

the new sort of theater of the next decade,

where we're watching a parade of serial murderers

in front of us through their trials.

- [Reporter] Crucial pieces of evidence the state has

linking Theodore Bundy to the slaying

of the two Florida State coeds

is teeth marks found on the body of one of the coeds.

The prosecution claims that Bundy's teeth match those marks.

- The only thing that captured Ted Bundy for murder

was the bite mark.

On the morning after the murders,

I decided that I should examine the bodies myself.

What surprised me was when I looked

at one of the young ladies, I saw a bite mark.

It was deliberate.

I thought something could be done with it.

Bite marks had never been used

in a court in Florida at that time.

The idea came up that we could get

a search warrant for his mouth.

I believe that it might be the first search warrant

for a person's mouth in the history of the country.

We took him to my dentist's office, the doors swung open,

and there were three doctors

and behind them was a dental chair.

As soon as he saw them, he said,

"You can't do this.

"You can't do this.

"I want my lawyer."

- [Reporter] For the state, perhaps the single most

important piece of evidence linking Bundy

to the crimes is bite marks.

- [Lawyer] Can you tell us, within a reasonable degree

of dental certainty if those teeth

made the marks on those photographs?

- Yes, sir.

- [Lawyer] And what is that opinion, sir?

- They made the marks.

- This was Ted Bundy's bite.

I believe now that he did indeed sign that body.

He put his signature on it with his bite.

- Mr. Bundy, a jury of your peers,

having found you guilty of the offense

of burglary of a dwelling

and committing assault upon a person therein,

this court judges you guilty.

[slow dramatic music]

- The verdict was guilty basically on all the charges.

So we were quite thrilled.

- This court, independent of, but in agreement

with the advisory sentence rendered by the jury

does hereby impose the death penalty

upon the defendant Theodore Robert Bundy.

- I think Judge Cowart developed a respect for Ted.

- You'd have made a good lawyer

and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me,

but you went another way, partner.

Take care of yourself.

I don't have any animosity to ya, I want you to know that.

- Bundy had this glibness,

superficial charm that won people over.

This happened time and time again.

That judge was manipulated.

And it demonstrates how dangerous psychopaths can be

in their ability to charm and manipulate others.

- And the family will be devastated by this.

But we'll stick behind him because we know

he's not guilty, as do all his friends.

- He thought he was a brilliant lawyer.

But he just showed his stupidity representing himself

because he was not a brilliant lawyer.

He never could back that arrogance up

with true intelligence.

[slow music]

- The Bundy case was really a critical case for us

because it brought national attention

to this problem of serial killers.

It was when we first defined what a serial killer was,

someone who's committed three or more murders

in three or more locations, with a cooling-off period

between each of the murders.

And the common traits in serial killers

is that they're very egocentric,

narcissistic, thinking only of themselves,

have no remorse or empathy for their victims,

and they're usually very careful preparing for their crimes,

because they understand that it is against the law.

And Bundy was really one of the first.

The Bundy case also helped us develop

the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP.

- The FBI's ViCAP program was meant to make connections

and link cases together across jurisdictions,

cases that were serial in nature.

- The ViCAP program was specifically designed

to have homicide detectives complete questionnaires

on their homicide, solved or unsolved, send them to the FBI,

and the FBI would look at and analyze these cases

and see if there were commonalities between the cases.

- This system will assist investigators

in learning and acquiring information

about serial multi-jurisdictional predators.

- We recognized that we had these cases

going on with Ted Bundy.

We had the case with John Wayne Gacy going on in Chicago.

And now there was an impetus driving

this understanding of these individuals.

[slow dramatic music]

- In February of 1980, after Bundy gets his sentence,

John Wayne Gacy goes on trial for the murder of 33 boys.

- Chicago prosecutors began presenting evidence today

in the trial of John Gacy, evidence it hopes will lead

to the death penalty in the case involving more murders

than any trial in American history.

- It was certainly the biggest case

I had tried up to that point.

If you're going to have capital punishment in Illinois,

John Gacy deserves it.

- Gacy's trial was unique.

It was 33 murders tried at one time.

It was the most cases tried in any serial killer case.

- We saw the trial from beginning to end.

And what's very different, he just sat there

like he was waiting for a bus.

[slow music]

My mother said, "We are going there every day."

It was a long haul for us to go every day,

but it doesn't matter.

You gotta be there to support

all the other families that were there.

Many of the parents were there all the time.

- [Reporter] The central question for the seven men

and five women on the jury, is Gacy crazy or diabolical?

One answer could mean life in a mental institution.

The other could mean death.

- There was a jury looking at 33 murders at the same time.

You had to educate them in a layman's way

as to the difference between crazy and

the legal standard for sanity at the time of an offense.

[dramatic music]

- Gacy's MO was to lure young men and boys to his home.

He had done this over and over and over again.

- What John Gacy targeted for was certainly

a homosexual event, possibly non-consensual.

And if it became obvious to him that that individual

was going to be a threat to him

and not go along with the program,

then he made the choice to make them a victim

with the handcuff trick and the rope trick.

- [John] He'd put the handcuffs on him behind his back,

show his victims that he was cuffed.

But Gacy would get out of the cuffs

as he's showing them to the victim.

So he said, "That's the trick.

"I can get out of the cuffs.

"So now you try it and see

"if you can get out of the handcuffs."

- Now he's got the hands immobilized.

He can't get out.

He said, "Well, don't try yet,

"but I'm going to show you the rope trick now."

- [Reporter] And then there's the Gacy confession

about how he killed his victims,

strangled them with his now infamous rope trick.

- This is too long.

You don't need it this long.

What I told them, I says, "Here, all you do

"is you wrap it around, you put one knot in it,

"then you put a second knot in it, okay?"

I says, "Then you take a stick and stick it in here.

"And you just turn this."

- That's called a garrote.

And any number of the bodies buried in the crawlspace

still had a noose around their neck,

or the marks from the noose.

- John Wayne Gacy, he was doing it in a very thoughtful,

cold-blooded, premeditated, strategic manner.

He was thinking like a predator.

He wasn't thinking in terms of someone

that didn't know right from wrong.

[slow dramatic music]

- There was no way that he could be found insane.

He covered up his tracks for how many years.

He was a pillar of society.

There was a lot of shrinks that came

and said, "Oh yeah, he's nuts."

Well, okay, prove it.

Show me why he's crazy.

Show the jury why he's nuts.

[dramatic music]

[people talking]

- [Reporter] It took the jury of seven men and five women

less than two hours to find John Wayne Gacy

guilty of murdering 33 young men.

Gacy was convicted of murdering more people

than anyone else in US history.

- Very pleased, very happy for the people of Illinois.

Very happy that John Gacy has been stopped.

- They constantly kept saying this could have been solved

much earlier than it was.

They dropped the ball.

But I do believe that good things

do come out of bad situations.

And it's because of my brother's disappearance

and other kids of that age that they changed their ruling

on when a minor does disappear

things happen much more rapidly than it did in the 70s.

It was 72 hours.

Now it's within 24 hours they are on it.

- If there's anything good to come out of the Gacy case,

it would be the ability to keep track

of people who are missing.

Police come up with a computerized system

that they can use to track people who have been murdered,

reported missing, or have been kidnapped.

[slow dramatic music]

- There's a commonality between John Wayne Gacy

and Jeffrey Dahmer in the fact that they were both gay men

trying to exist and live a life

in a time where being a gay man was not accepted.

They're spending their whole life as outcasts,

as not being good enough.

And that becomes sort of the context

for their sexual behaviors,

as well as all their interactions.

[slow dramatic music]

- There's a large gap after Dahmer killed Steven Hicks

to his next kill, because Dahmer's not ready yet.

He's only 18 years old.

- Dahmer actually went to Ohio State University

after he graduated from high school.

He didn't do well.

He flunked out after one semester

and his father dragged him to the army recruitment office

and insisted that he join up.

[slow dramatic music]

- When I enlisted, all I wanted to do

was make my mother proud.

First day in Germany, this jolly guy

meets me at battalion headquarters.

He says, "Hey, we got a roommate for ya."

And that roommate was Jeffrey Dahmer,

Private First Class Jeffrey Dahmer.

When I first met Jeff, I'll never forget that first look.

When he looked at you, it was a blank stare,

like no one was even in there.

And then it just started,

Night after night, after night, after night,

the attacks, the choking.

He was raping me all the time.

It was almost every single day.

I reported the rape.

They did not document rapes or any of that stuff.

It's like no one was in charge.

He was drinking constantly.

He'd get drunk.

He would masturbate.

They caught him at Family Park in front of children.

The MPs escorted him back to the barracks,

several occasions with just his underwear on.

- Dahmer was actually discharged from the military

because of his abuse of alcohol.

- After the military, Dahmer returns home

and his drinking continues.

His father can't deal with him anymore.

[slow music]

- His father actually sent him to live in West Allis,

which is a suburb of Milwaukee, with his grandmother.

- The family also recognized

that he had a drinking problem back then.

And the father was hoping that by living with Grandma

that Grandma could kind of keep that in check.

- On August 7th, 1982, Dahmer is arrested

for exposing himself to women and children at a park,

and he's fined and released to the care of his grandmother.

[slow dramatic music]

- He went to a mall and stole a male mannequin

that he brought back to have sex with.

He actually went to some young men's wakes

and would look at 'em.

In one case, he told us he tried to dig up the grave

and was going to try to take home a dead body.

- With these behaviors, Jeffrey Dahmer appears to be trying

to avoid his urges to kill.

If I can have sex with this mannequin,

then I'm not killing people and having sex with a dead body.

We don't see themes of control

with all five of these killers,

but we do see it prominently with Dennis Rader.

In between his first set of killings

and his second set of killings,

Dennis Rader took seven years off to raise his family

and seemingly control his impulses to kill.

So Rader and Dahmer are able to sort of kill

and then lay low for a while.

There is this cooling-off period

that lasts a fairly significant amount of time.

Gary Ridgway, on the other hand, once he started killing,

he went on a killing rampage

the likes of which history has rarely seen.

[slow dramatic music]

[dramatic music]

- The first victim of the Green River Killer

was Wendy Coffield.

She was 16 years old.

- [Reporter] Two boys riding their bikes

along the Green River spotted the body

of 16-year-old Wendy Coffield tangled among these pilings.

- She had been living in foster care in a home in Tacoma,

and she had run away from foster care

and was thought to be engaging in prostitution.

She was last seen just a couple of days

before her body was found in the Green River.

The ligature that was used on Wendy Coffield was her pants,

and they had been wrapped tightly

and kind of knotted around her neck.

And this was the first body

that was found in the Green River.

So at that time no one knew

that it was part of a serial killing.

[slow music]

- Gary Ridgway is the antithesis of Ted Bundy,

who was very charismatic,

very outgoing, supposedly attractive.

Gary Ridgway is none of those things.

And yet when you're watching him

and you're listening to how he lived his life,

to some degree he lived his life that way.

He's invisible.

And that's what contributed to much of his success

in being able to get away with this for so many years.

- With Ridgway, I don't know

that he necessarily mapped this crime out.

Ridgway was already having experiences with prostitutes.

And it sounds more like it was just

an opportunity that presented itself.

Fantasy is an important part of this,

but you also have to have the opportunity.

And he had fantasized about this particular event

for many, many, many years,

almost even going back to his childhood arguably.

- Gary Ridgway had a domineering mother.

You know, he wasn't a very smart individual.

This was a guy who was reported

to have wet his bed until he was age 13.

- He described how his mother would wake him in the night

and be angered by the bed wetting,

and put him in the bathtub

and wash his genitals aggressively.

Gary said it was both humiliating

and sexually arousing at the same time.

- [Mark] This created

really conflicting feelings for Ridgway.

- One part of him lusted after his mother in a sexual way.

Another part of him hated his mother.

So as a child growing up, you have these

really conflicting emotions that then develop

into sort of this love, hate relationship

with women as you get older.

- His father constantly reinforced into him

his hatred for prostitutes, because he was a bus driver

and his father was always talking about,

in a very degrading way, about prostitutes.

So you see how this could impact Ridgway

and his thinking early on.

And of course, who is Ridgway targeting

when he starts to act out, who is he targeting?

He's targeting prostitutes.

[slow dramatic music]

- When he was in the military, he discovered prostitution.

And, you know, that was an outlet for him.

He told us that after he was discharged from the military

and he came back to the Seattle area,

he discovered that his first wife

had become involved with somebody else,

that she was having an affair

and she wanted to get divorced.

and they did ultimately get divorced.

And this enraged Ridgway.

- 1982, Gary Ridgway's first kill.

At this point in Gary's life, he's in his early 30s.

And at this particular time

a number of social environmental stressors happening to him.

He was arrested for soliciting a prostitute

and had just gone through his second divorce.

The former is significant because two years prior to that

he was arrested for choking a prostitute.

So there seems to be a pattern that was already ramping up,

if you will, related to sexual and violent behavior.

- [Reporter] Four more victims were discovered,

three in the river and one on the river bank.

All of them had been strangled.

- It was only a few weeks after Wendy Coffield was found

that they discovered another set of bodies in the river.

I think it was clear at that point

that they were dealing with a serial killer.

[slow dramatic music]

- Our first victims are in the Green River.

Both Wendy Coffield and Debra Bonner

were found floating in the water.

We had two other victims that he had placed in the water

and put large rocks on them to hold them down.

The detectives, as they're investigating

the two in the river, they're doing a canvas

and that's when they come across the body of Opal Mills.

She has her jeans around her neck, used as a ligature.

And other than that she's face down and nude.

- What's really important here is that Gary Ridgway

is a serial sexual killer.

And so the power and control that existed in his murders,

I think is extremely compelling.

He said at times the idea that he was strangling someone

at the point that he was also sexually assaulting

his victims, that was such a feeling of omnipotence.

- He was picking sex workers, many of them women of color.

- They had broken homes.

They had been abused.

They had people who didn't care for them,

who didn't love them.

And they were vulnerable.

Ridgway knew that they were the least likely

to draw attention if they went missing

or if they turned up dead.

I don't think that the community in general

reacted the same way as they had

during the time that Ted Bundy was killing.

And I think that was largely related to attitudes

that kind of marginalized the women that he victimized.

And as a result of that,

people didn't give it the same kind of attention

as if you kill a sorority girl

at the University of Washington.

- You go back to the 70s, you find

this sort of trusting environment

where we trusted strangers.

We didn't look askance at strangers.

Then there was a lot of national attention

to these bigger cases like Ted Bundy,

like John Wayne Gacy, and culture changes.

- Come on, hop in.

- [Narrator] Talk to your children

about not talking to strangers, and do it today.

A message for your child-

- So these individuals had to start targeting

groups of victims that weren't previously being targeted.

That's where we start to see a shift to vulnerable types

of population groups like drug abusers, prostitutes,

high-risk victims, because they have to find

their victim population somewhere.

When investigators in King County, Washington,

start discovering these dead prostitutes,

they didn't really waste any time

in getting a task force put together.

Because they had been dealing with Ted Bundy

over the years in the same general area,

they recognized that putting together

a task force with multiple facets

would be the best way to solve this case.

- And that task force was made up

of the King County Sheriff's Department,

Seattle Police Department, and the FBI.

- At the time that Ridgway was really

in the height of his killing period,

people just have to remember that the science

and the technology and what was available

to law enforcement was so different.

We had pretty rudimentary forensic science.

The technology just wasn't there.

There weren't elaborate databases.

So when you were trying to track who the Johns were,

for example, that we knew frequented

Pacific Highway South,

you know, those were all individual

hard copy little notes and cards.

- Back in the 70s and the early 80s

certainly we didn't have all

of the electronic surveillance means that we have now.

There are no cell phones.

When we initially started finding the bodies,

they were using VHS tapes for videotaping the crime scenes.

In the past, remember, it's still photography and that's it.

And now we're able to videotape the crime scenes

and go back and maybe look at things

that we might've not seen at that time.

So that was considered real cutting-edge technology

back in the 80s.

- [Reporter] Almost immediately after

the fourth and fifth bodies were pulled out

of the Green River last month, King County police

asked the FBI to prepare a psychological profile

of the possible killer, or killers.

- Early on, the Green River task force

had asked for FBI assistance.

And at that point, FBI agent John Douglas

had gotten involved in the case.

John Douglas was one of the founding agents

of the Behavioral Science Unit.

He and Robert Ressler are known

for going around the United States

interviewing murders and serial killers,

and produced research on it.

- Profiling generally has to do with an unknown subject

where you're looking at both the psychological dynamics

and the behavioral dynamics

based on the crime and crime scene,

and trying to create, sort of, the composite

of an individual who would commit the crime.

- I think what we're dealing with here is a serial murderer.

The man who commit a crime like this

definitely would have had to been involved

in crimes in the past.

And in all probability will be involved

in crimes like this in the future.

- You know, he made no attempt whatsoever to bury the body.

The river was just a short distance away,

another 175 yards.

He could have dumped her into the river.

There's a strong current.

This is something I think is going to give us

some clues into his personality.

[slow dramatic music]

- The profile that was done on the Green River Killer

was very broad and very general in scope.

- Some things were correct such as, you know,

his age, his race, that he was divorced.

But considering the demographics of Washington

at that time, it's very broad.

- I know it was disappointing at the time,

but the science of profiling at that point

was still very young.

- [Richard] Some of these cases have taken

two and three years or more to eventually solve,

but I am optimistic about this.

- [Interviewer] Will someone else

have to be killed before you can solve it?

- I certainly hope not.

- Between July and October of 1982,

Gary Ridgway was killing three to four women a month.

But because some of these bodies

weren't recovered until years later,

law enforcement really didn't have a good handle

on how many women were going missing.

Meanwhile, we have sex workers

that are extremely fearful for their lives

because they noticed the women that are missing.

- [Woman] Take one, mark.

- I asked him if he was the Green River Killer.

He said nothing, just a plain blank look.

[dramatic music]

I remember those eyes, those beady little eyes.

I am the only survivor of the Green River Killer.

[slow dramatic music] [rain pattering]

- I was 20.

I was getting stressed out

because it was a really bad rainy day.

And I decided to hitchhike.

I got into Gary Ridgway's truck.

[dramatic music]

We had talked and he showed me his ID.

And I knew that he had worked at Kenworth.

And I also started to trust him because I saw the ID.

After all that small chit chat

we went to a area that I knew.

Well, I was making an exchange for a sex act.

He kept telling me to get out of the truck

and go up in the woods.

I kept hesitating and saying I didn't want to,

and why do I have to do that?

So then he gave me the $20.

And so then I decided to go up in the woods.

He did not want sex.

He immediately attacked me and threw me on the ground.

- He had covered my mouth, and the string on the neck.

I tried my hardest to breathe

through my nose, through my eyes.

Things happen so fast.

You just have no time for thinking.

You don't think, you do.

You have to do it.

- I was a fighter to the end.

I was not letting him get the best of me.

I was given some extreme power

to push him away against a tree,

but I had also bit him.

I ran so fast I literally don't remember touching ground.

I found a trailer and they let me in

and I hid there for a long time.

[rain pattering]

[slow dramatic music]

So I got back to my apartment

and I was just totally freaked out for a long time.

Because of the strangulation, I couldn't talk for a week.

I wasn't going nowhere because I kept thinking

that he was out looking for me.

And that was the weirdest feeling,

to not feel safe out in public.

I didn't tell anybody for a long time.

- She didn't initially report what had happened to her.

You know, she was engaged in prostitution.

So she herself was committing a crime.

Ridgway told us that many of the women he picked up

asked him whether or not he was the Green River Killer.

And he would say, you know,

"Do I look like the Green River Killer?

"Look at me.

"I'm not a very big guy.

"I'm not that strong."

What Ridgway was doing was very cunning,

it was very deliberate, and it was very premeditated.

- There are so many things he doesn't do well,

but this one particular thing, killing young women

is something that he perfected.

- He was killing so frequently,

within days, weeks of each other.

There were just so many victims during that time

that he appeared to be really out of control.

[slow dramatic music]

- Everybody thought the Green River case

was never going to get solved.

But then Rebecca Garde had the courage to come forward.

- Ted Bundy was on death row.

And he offered to share his thoughts

about who the serial killer known

as the Green River Killer was.

- By 1985, BTK had disappeared.

And then he kills his neighbor.

- [Reporter] 53-year-old Marine Hedge

was last seen a week ago.

There are very few clues to work with on this case.

- Dahmer specifically targeted victims

who were very small, so he knew he could overpower them.

Konerak was only 14 years old.

- [Dispatcher] Fire Department.

- [Caller] This butt-naked young boy,

he's been beaten up real bad

and he has no clothes on.

He's very hurt.

- We kept trying to tell them,

"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.