Original subtitles

[thunder rumbling]

- [Narrator] Ordinary names,

but for serial killers,

ordinary names are never good enough.

We have to give them names that capture their dark souls,

names that capture the evil they have become.

Capture the rare unthinkable.

- When we here about somebody who moves,

from community to community,

calculating who to kill next,

which prostitute to get.

These crimes shock the conscience,

because they are so out of the ordinary.

They are so different

from what sadly, we've become quite used to,

the more ordinary rape,

the more ordinary assault,

the more ordinary robbery,

the more ordinary kidnapping.

There are these crimes that just shock the conscience,

and so I fully understand

why the public is preoccupied with them.

I think they are so outside the box,

that we have this understandable need

to try to grasp, why would somebody do that?

That's human nature.

Why would somebody take a rifle,

sit behind

a barricade and wait

for innocent victims,

why would somebody do that?

Why would somebody look for vulnerable children,

kidnap them, torture them sexually, and kill them?

It's hard for us to wrap our minds around

these kinds of crimes.

And it makes complete sense to me,

that the average human being,

would be both fascinated by this,

horrified by this, mystified by this,

and preoccupied by this.

Why, why, why?

[eerie electronic music]

Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer,

one of the best-known,

and most prolific serial killers of all time,

confessed to 71 murders.

His victims, sex workers,

women with vulnerable lifestyles,

even runaway teenage girls.

Steven Egger, a professor of criminology,

came up with a term for these vicious killers' victims.

- The "less dead" is a term I coined

to deal with and try to explain

the phenomenon of all or most

of the victims of serial killers.

According to a database that my wife and I have developed,

at least 75% of the victims we can find,

within the last 105, 110 years,

would classify as "less dead,"

and by less dead, they were less alive.

In other words, they are marginalized people of society.

They're throwaways.

People don't care about them.

They're prostitutes, they're women out by themselves,

they're say, elderly women all by themselves,

they're hospital patients who are helpless.

They're young kids who are runaways.

People just consider them as below society.

They don't want to see them.

And of course when they're gone, they don't see them.

Another way to put it is the best commonality

that I can come up with,

for a serial killer,

is that he or she,

in most cases,

will attack a vulnerable victim.

- There's people that society values more,

for whatever reason,

and that mere fact,

is part of what allows these killers to

get to the victims that they want,

and to get away with doing what they want,

for as long as they did.

- [Narrator] No case better illustrates this point,

than the case of the Green River Killer.

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18th, 1949,

in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Raised near Seattle's Pacific Highway,

in a rundown neighborhood near Sea-Tac Airport,

Ridgway was a poor student.

After high school, he was sent to Vietnam.

When he returned, he got a job painting trucks,

which he kept for 30 years.

Though he married three times,

and was fanatical about religion,

Ridgway was a frequent customer of prostitutes,

prostitutes he brought to his home, strangled,

then left their bodies in woodsy, remote sites.

The search for the infamous Green River Killer,

began on July 15th, 1982,

after the body of Opal Charlene Mills

was discovered on the banks of the Green River,

a quiet little stream, south of Seattle, Washington.

It was along the secluded banks of this river,

the Green River Killer disposed of his victims.

His MO was simple.

- The Green River Killer is a repeat

of a very common thread in serial murder,

in that, the overwhelming majority,

if not all of his victims, were prostitutes,

and he took them from a place in the urban environment

where they were picked up, out into the country.

He dumped their bodies, often in the same location,

multiple victims in the same location,

because he evaded forensic,

any discovery of forensic evidence

by depositing the bodies in places

where they weren't immediately discovered,

where time would allow animal depridation,

and the decomposition of the victim,

or he put them in water,

so that potential evidence could be washed away.

- [Narrator] As the bodies piled up,

more than 50 in less than 10 years,

and no evidence could be found,

Seattle police hoped profiling

would help them put away their killer.

- Profile's a tool.

What the public doesn't understand is,

a profile provides a

tool to narrow the possible

group of suspects.

Because frequently in a serial murder investigation,

who are your suspects?

Everyone.

If you can look at a crime scene, look at the victim,

look at all the information the police have gathered,

and come up with a type of person you think

may have committed this crime,

which is really what a profile is,

then you have narrowed their group of suspects

to a manageable number, as opposed to everyone.

- [Narrator] The FBI originated profiling,

and touted it as a breakthrough science

to stop serial killers.

On the outside, it looked like a brilliant idea,

but it had flaws.

- Part of the last resort approach

that the FBI takes is to use profiling,

and I think you have to keep in mind,

when you evaluate behavioral profiling,

that it is often used as a last resort

in the most difficult cases of all,

but it doesn't always work.

Sometimes it does,

but sometimes it leads to irrelevant information,

and it can even mislead.

- [Narrator] The real advances in serial killer capture,

turn out to be meticulous crime scene investigation,

and advances in forensic science,

particularly the use of DNA.

- The changes that I've seen in forensic science

are absolutely astounding.

Back in the day, we used to collect blood at a scene

and hopefully be able to type it,

and maybe come up with the killer's blood type,

but it didn't really tell us who the killer was.

We had something to match it to,

and it would be consistent with,

but it wouldn't necessarily tell us who the killer was.

Or you would have saliva,

or other bodily fluids left at a scene,

where you could determine if that person

was a secretor or a non-secretor.

Again, you can eliminate about a third of the population,

but it still doesn't tell you who your suspect is.

Now, especially with the advent of computers,

and the technology in DNA,

those two things have vaulted us

into 21st, 22nd, 23rd century,

because of the things that we're able to do,

and especially with DNA.

It's technology that's changing almost daily.

They're able to amplify DNA more so

than they ever have been able to do.

I've been able to get DNA, not me personally,

but a lab that I use has been able to get DNA

from bones that have been buried for 52 years, 53 years.

They were able to get DNA from those bones,

and not only get DNA,

but to develop a profile from it.

And so, they're able to take that profile

and enter it into a database,

so that if a maternal relative of that person

is ever located and their DNA entered,

it'll come up as a hit on that.

So DNA's probably one of the biggest things that we rely on.

One of the other things that's really

coming along with DNA also, is what you call "touch DNA."

and we're starting to do this more at property crime scenes,

not just where there's blood, or bodily fluids,

or anything like that.

If you have fingerprints at a crime scene,

you probably have DNA.

And so, you can take a photograph of that fingerprint,

and then swab that fingerprint, and submit that to the lab,

and develop a DNA profile just from that fingerprint.

- [Narrator] In many ways,

the future started with the Green River Killer case.

DNA evidence proved the Seattle police case

against Gary Leon Ridgway,

the man they had for years suspected,

but could not nail, for the murders.

- Well signature in the Green River case,

was not really as important as DNA.

As it turned out, as some suspected,

including the profiler,

Ridgway returned to his crime scenes, fairly often.

And in most instances, had sex with corpses.

In other words, he was a necrophiliac.

On almost all of his victims.

- [Narrator] Ridgway eluded the law until 2001,

when newly developed DNA testing technology

produced a match between evidence

collected from the victims, and Ridgway.

He escaped execution in return for showing

where he dumped some of his victims' bodies.

- I watched Gary Ridgway, I watched his confession,

and he was willing to talk about it.

He didn't mind going to prison for being a murderer,

but when it got to the part of why he did it,

he didn't want to talk about that,

because that meant that he had to talk about

the fact that he was a necrophile,

and he did not want to get into that at all.

But he finally did.

He finally opened up to it.

- I believe there's such a thing as a victim pool,

and the serial killer tries to

access that victim pool as often as he can.

So the victim pool means,

he might prefer blonde women with blue eyes.

That's his victim pool.

He very very seldom, if ever, deviates from that.

He might like hitchhikers.

He might like children.

There was a serial killer in the Midwest,

in Minneapolis and the Dakotas,

who killed developmentally disabled people

living in group homes.

That was his victim pool.

That's who he wanted to be around,

so he got jobs in those kind of homes,

so he'd have access to the victims of his choice.

- [Narrator] For Floyd Tapson,

those were his easy, helpless, female victims.

- Who do serial killers target?

Mostly,

prostitutes,

hitchhikers,

runaways,

drug addicts,

street children.

It's the victims that are easily accessed.

They don't cause a stir.

They're not investigated quite rapidly,

because no one even knows they're gone.

Didn't even know where they were to start with.

So, yeah, that's the "less than dead."

- [Narrator] What about gay serial killers?

What's their victim pool?

- There are a fair number of gay killers

who bring the victims back to their home on a pretense.

Of course, Dahmer brought them back on a pretense,

to pay them for photographing them in the nude.

There have been other gay serial killers,

but they don't generally pick up

gay prostitutes on the streets.

They're more

involved, they get more involved with their victims,

than say someone who would pick up a prostitute,

just from the street, or grab a stranger they don't know.

They want to get more involved with the victims.

Certainly Dahmer wanted to get

very involved with his victim,

he wanted them to stick around forever.

So it's a bit different in terms of the gay killings.

- [Narrator] Two gay serial killers broke this mold,

did not get to know their victims,

did not spend so-called normal time with them,

as did Chicago's John Wayne Gacy,

and Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer.

They were William Bonin, and Randy Kraft,

also known as "The Highway Killers."

- Each serial murderer has their own reasons,

their own psychological need to kill.

You can have a guy like Randy Kraft, for example,

who was a serial killer in California

in the late 70's and early 80's.

Here's a man who by all accounts drove incessantly,

continually at night,

driving hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

of miles on the highways.

For a person like this,

I think the difference in time between his crimes,

had less to do with being sated,

sexually or psychologically,

and more to do with opportunity.

His eyes were open as he drove around

for the opportunity to pick up a hitchhiking boy,

he killed young men.

His desire was there

pretty much continually,

but he knew that there were only certain circumstances

that he could control,

and until those circumstances were in place,

he would just keep driving.

- [Narrator] In this way, Randy Kraft

was like a straight male serial killer.

Unsuspecting male hitchhikers

along the coastal highways in California and Oregon

were Randy Kraft's victims.

- Randy Kraft, for example, was a homosexual killer,

and they can be extremely sadistic, homosexual murderers.

Some say they're worse than the people who are straight.

No, not worse, sometimes they do it differently.

We often see sadism involved.

They will often cut the body parts.

Not always, but we see them, they'll,

there are cases where they'll

cut off the penis of the victim

and cut off their heads and put it down their esophagus,

and things like that.

- [Narrator] Kraft was born in California in 1945.

As a kid, he was bright, with an IQ over 130.

He was admitted to the prestigious Claremont College,

where he joined the ROTC,

and was an enthusiastic supporter

of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

He graduated in 1968,

but by this time he was leading the gay life,

and becoming addicted to drugs.

Indications are that he needed drugs or booze,

needed to be high,

to do his killing.

In 1969, Randy Kraft joined the Air Force.

However, he was discharged one year later,

and as a civilian, resumed his gay, bar-hopping life.

Then, at the age of 26, in 1971,

Randy Kraft claimed his first victim,

a 30-year-old gay bartender.

There were several trademarks of his killings.

The victims were frequently burned on their left nipple,

with an automotive cigarette lighter.

Some of them had their left testicle cut out,

while they were alive.

Some had objects shoved into their rectums,

and of course, the use of drugs was common,

usually Valium ingested with alcohol.

The murders were truly horrific.

In one instance, the victim's eyelids were cut off,

to prevent him from closing his eyes during the torture.

For the next 12 years,

Kraft's need to kill and torture, was insatiable.

- His MO was to pick up like, perhaps a young marine,

off on a weekend,

and he would offer them,

hey I have some beers, you want a beer?

Hey I have some pot, how about some drugs,

do you want to do some drugs?

He would either spike the beer with Valium

or other tranquilizers,

or he would just offer them

as a means to continue the party.

Once he had control of his victim,

sometimes the victims were tortured

to an extreme degree,

emasculated, and he would then

just dump the bodies out on the highway.

He made very little effort, if any effort,

to hide most of his victims,

and would just dump 'em out

on the side of the road as he drove.

Just yet another indignity to perform.

What's interesting about Kraft,

is that the police knew for a long time,

that they had more than one.

- [Narrator] From 1971 to 1978,

dead men and boys were regularly found

dumped along California's highways.

Then, in 1979, there was a sudden explosion

of dead male bodies beside the Los Angeles freeways.

These were obviously the work of a homosexual serial killer.

But the way these men were killed,

did not fit with the other mutilated bodies found earlier.

This new frenzy of highway serial killing,

was the work of William Bonin,

California's second highway homosexual serial killer.

Two years younger than Randy Kraft,

he was born and raised in Connecticut,

with a drunkard father, and a frail mother,

he ended up spending much of his time with his grandfather,

a convicted child molester.

Soon, William Bonin, was doing this himself.

After high school, he joined the military,

and distinguished himself in the Vietnam War.

Returning home in 1969, at the age of 23,

he resumed molesting young boys, for which he was arrested.

By 1979, he was back on the streets, living in LA.

Resuming his molesting, he told a friend

that he would never go to prison again,

because he would never leave a witness.

For the next year, he raped and killed

an estimated 40 young men and boys.

Put under surveillance by the police,

he was arrested for molesting a 15-year-old boy.

Once in custody, he confessed to abducting,

raping, and killing, 21 young boys.

For most people, and the press,

the capture of William Bonin heralded

the end of the highway killings.

But when the murders continued, the public was baffled.

However, the police knew all along,

that there had been two killers.

As is often the case,

Randy Kraft was caught by dumb luck.

- They had a task force in place,

for many, many years, looking for Mister Kraft,

and were unable to do so,

but one night on a lonely stretch of highway,

a couple of highway patrolmen saw a car weaving around,

they pulled him over.

The driver got out of the car, and came back to them,

which is I think a red flag for the police

to think that there might be something going on

in the car that the driver doesn't want them to know about.

There was a young man in the front seat of the car,

who appeared asleep, but he wasn't asleep, he was dead.

And not only was there a dead young man in his car,

there were photographs of other young men,

who had turned up on the side of the road

in the recent past, in there,

and perhaps most chilling,

a list of I believe 60-some little

memory triggers, for him.

Little two, one or two or three word descriptions,

of various killings that he'd performed,

on this piece of paper.

So he was convicted I believe of 11 murders,

but the notion is that his list

contained 60-plus entries,

and was perhaps even then, not complete.

Randy Kraft and William Bonin were two of the most

prolific serial killers of all time.

With these two cases,

and their combined body count of over a hundred,

law enforcement got a better understanding

of the difference between a serial killer's MO,

his modus operandi, and his signature,

his perverted psychological need.

William Bonin and Randy Kraft had the same MO,

but different signatures.

One got psychological gratification from raping and killing.

The other got gratification from killing and mutilating.

But their MO's were the same,

targeting hitchhikers from a car,

and then dumping the bodies along the highway.

So the largest subset of victims

in the serial killer victim pool,

is made up of the "less dead,"

followed by easy prey,

such as folks in a hospital, or nursing home.

But sometimes it is a specific characteristic,

an unsuspecting victim might possess.

Ted Bundy liked brunette women, with blue eyes,

who resembled a girlfriend.

Sometimes victims are just

in the wrong place at the wrong time,

as were five coeds at the University of Florida,

all victims of the Gainesville Ripper, Danny Rolling.

Danny Rolling was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana.

His father James, a police officer,

often abused him, his mother, and his brother, Kevin.

In 1990, Danny left Louisiana,

but not before killing three people,

with the signature of mutilation,

that would become his trademark of killing.

And when he killed again in Florida,

he fit the definition of a serial killer.

Allusions to serial murderer Ted Bundy were inevitable.

The Washington-born killer had murdered coeds

at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1976.

But the slaughter of the Gainesville victims,

was more like Jack the Ripper.

Like the London ripper,

death had not been enough for Danny Rolling.

- Danny Rolling, who killed five college students

at the University of Florida in 1990,

would excise the nipples

of his female victims,

and carry 'em off in a little plastic bag,

to enjoy himself with later on.

- [Narrator] Never showing any remorse

for his heinous crimes,

Danny Rolling, a true psychopath,

was put to death by lethal injection on October 25th, 2006.

The Beltway Snipers,

John Allen Muhammad, and Lee Boyd Malvo,

who randomly killed 17 innocent victims in 2002,

chose victims randomly,

as did the Zodiac Killer,

still at large today,

who took the lives of at least

five unsuspecting young victims,

in the San Francisco Bay area.

And, the Son of Sam, David Richard Berkowitz,

who shot six unsuspecting victims in the summer of 1977.

And, Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker,

who killed ordinary people like you,

who thought they were safe in their homes.

So, just because you do not meet

the stereotypical serial killer victim pool,

never think you're entirely safe.

In all these cases,

the media played a role.

Right after World War II, American news media,

particularly television,

focused its bright lights on the serial killer phenomenon.

Case in point, the 1946 Lipstick Killer,

William Heirens.

The press has always given serial killers,

A/K/A's, or nicknames,

denoting the gruesomeness of their crimes.

At the turn of the 20th century,

it was Jack the Ripper, HH Holmes, the Doctor of Death,

Jane Toppan, the Angel of Death.

Then in the 1920's, came the Brooklyn Vampire, Albert Fish.

It's as if these mad killers possessed an alter-ego,

a split personality,

a Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

This idea would play a role

in the defense of William Heirens.

William Heirens was different from earlier serial killers.

Born in 1929, he grew up an affluent Chicago family,

and started his killing at early age, as a teenager.

- The Lipstick Killer, he would,

after killing a female victim,

go into her bathroom and take her lipstick,

and scrawl, "catch me before I kill again."

He apparently felt guilty,

and wanted to get apprehended.

- [Narrator] By the age of 13,

young Bill had become a pretty strange boy.

He took to petty crime, burglary, and cross-dressing.

Then, on June 3rd, 1945,

Heirens was looting the Chicago apartment

of Josephine Ross,

when his victim woke, and caught him in the act.

Attacking ruthlessly, he cut her throat,

and stabbed her several times.

Later, he said.

- [William] I wandered aimlessly from room to room,

enjoying multiple orgasms.

- [Narrator] Five months later, 33-year-old Frances Brown,

emerged from her bathroom to find Heirens

rifling through her purse.

As she began to scream, he shot her twice,

and then fetched a kitchen knife to finish off the job.

Dragging his victim into the bathroom,

Heirens tried in vain to wash her blood away,

then left her draped across the tub,

half-covered with a housecoat.

This is when he wrote in lipstick.

- [William] For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more.

I cannot control myself.

- [Narrator] A month later, on January 7th, 1946,

he invaded the bedroom of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan,

abducting the child,

and leaving a written demand for $20,000 ransom,

as a ruse to baffle the police.

Retreating to a nearby basement,

Heirens murdered the child

and dismembered her remains with a hunting knife.

Six months later, the 17-year-old Heirens

was caught attempting another burglary,

and confessed to killing the three women.

Except, Heirens claimed that it was not

actually he who killed the women,

it was his alter personality, George Murman,

short for "murder man,"

who killed those women.

As the youngest serial killer every incarcerated,

young William Heirens spent the rest

of his long life in jail.

Many criminologists saw that serial killers

had entered the American consciousness

through the new electronic media.

Television and radio had taken

the sex and violence of serial killing,

and turned it into drama,

along with all the suggestive nicknames.

Almost overnight, the idea of serial killing

had become a part of our fantasies.

- And then they loved names,

and the media usually is the one responsible for that.

But sometimes the killer is, himself.

BTK, signed his notes to the police, BTK,

Bind, Torture, Kill, BTK.

And a couple of times he wrote,

how many more people do I have to kill

before I can get some attention from you guys?

So, BTK, Son of Sam, where did that come from?

That came from him.

The Zodiac, that came from him, he named himself.

But some of them get named,

like D'Angelo,

the media named him,

the Original Night Stalker, California rapist, et cetera.

Sometimes the names come from the press,

sometimes they come from themselves,

sometimes they come from the police.

- Media, which means,

fiction and non-fiction,

documentaries, news reports,

through the whole basket,

is always looking for an audience,

always needs to find something

that will keep an audience attention,

making an audience tune in, or buy a book,

or read a newspaper,

so headline-grabbers, are more important than

somebody who's just killing prostitutes, for example.

So, somebody who's killing college students

is more important to media, typically,

because it will get more viewers and more readers.

In that case, you will tend to have media

skewed toward certain types of killers,

so audience then tend to think of serial killers

along those types.

The famous ones would be Ted Bundy,

John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer,

Son of Sam, the Hillside Strangler.

You tend to have those white guys

who seem to have it together,

who picked victims that make the audience feel vulnerable,

so they want to tune in,

so it's quite titillating

and there's a lot of sensation built around it.

And so, then you hear statements from news reporters,

like there aren't any black serial killers, well,

not in the media,

but they're certainly in research books.

We know about them.

But I remember when Anthony Sowell, in Cleveland,

was found with bodies in his yard, and in his house.

They were prostitutes primarily.

That got some headlines just because

the bodies were there in the house where he was living.

- [Narrator] Anthony Edward Sowell is an American

serial killer known as the Cleveland Strangler.

He was arrested in October 2009

after the bodies of eleven women were discovered

by police investigators at his Cleveland, Ohio duplex.

In 2011, Sowell was charged

with 11 counts of aggravated murder,

and 74 counts of rape, kidnapping,

tampering with evidence,

and abuse of a corpse.

He sits on death row.

- Did anyone cover his, the legal proceedings, the trial?

Not really.

There's very little known about him,

aside from the initial headlines.

I think he should qualify in every way

like Jeffrey Dahmer did, but he doesn't.

So, that's media.

Is it accurate?

Some of the documentaries are accurate,

but I definitely had media people who wanted

to believe certain myths,

and so if I didn't say something to them

that confirmed those myths,

I'm cut, and the myths continue.

- You also can't deny the role of the media.

Now I'm not a big believer in,

hey, you watch a serial killer crime on TV,

you go commit one.

I don't necessarily believe

there's a causal relationship there.

Maybe in some cases, maybe.

But more than that, I think what it does,

it distributes the notion.

Maybe you're a mixed up person

with a lot of hatred and a lot of negative feelings,

and you've been casting about

and expressing it a lot of different ways,

but then you watch a crime drama,

where somebody commits some sort of act,

and you, yourself, derive some satisfaction

out of vicariously experiencing the act they committed.

Maybe that makes you more likely to go

and try and commit the act.

Perhaps by reading about serial murder,

by seeing it on TV,

you develop a fantasy that,

you know let's face it,

I think the centerpiece of a lot of this crime,

is fantasy fulfillment.

You think about it, you think about it, you think about it,

you think about it, you live it, you live it, you live it,

and suddenly, the thing that was purely imagination,

you desire to see that fleshed out in reality.

- [Narrator] Once serial killing became known,

once it saturated the American family and home,

the fantasy became a reality for some people.

- Sometimes this

steady drip, drip, drip, exposure,

to violence in movies and television,

may increase the likelihood,

because there's this sense of familiar.

And when things are familiar,

sometimes we imitate,

sometimes we're influenced by that.

But if one has seen this kind of footage

for years and years and years,

there may not be anybody out there saying,

go kill the person you don't like,

but in that person's psyche, in their bones,

there's this familiarity.

I think that's it.

I think there's a familiarity with violence,

in this culture, that implicitly

may send a signal to somebody with violent instincts.

You have permission to kill.

- [Narrator] Perhaps the worst case

of copycat serial killing belongs to two men,

two men who were health workers,

Charles Cullen and Donald Harvey.

Harvey, the self-described original Angel of Death,

was born in Ohio in 1952.

Harvey's killing spree,

moving from hospital to hospital in that state,

lasted 17 years,

from 1970, to 1987.

- Donald Harvey was a young man

raised in Kentucky, eastern Kentucky, as I recall.

He had been molested, been raped

by his uncle and his next-door neighbor.

He promised never to tell on them,

because if he did, they promised to hurt his mother.

That was never gonna happen, but he didn't know that,

he was just a little boy.

And so he never told, he kept his secret,

and he was a good student,

but he became suicidal after he graduated from high school.

He joined the military, was suicidal there,

and then discharged him from the military.

He, I think, figured things out

that he wasn't gonna kill himself,

and got a job working in a hospital as an orderly,

and over the course of the next several years,

in three different hospitals he killed 57 men,

and they were all of the same age as the men

who had been abusing him.

He couldn't kill them,

I think one had already died,

but he had a power to kill them.

He had the power to kill these men.

So these were like proxy murders,

and he would put cyanide in them.

In fact his last murder,

there was enough cyanide to kill an entire army.

It was amazing how much cyanide he gave them.

He was a little sadistic at times,

because he did use, in one case for this elderly man,

who couldn't fight back,

he had a catheter and he took a coat hanger

and put it up to the catheter into his bladder,

several times, and killed him that way,

very very, painful.

But I think for the most part,

it was, he would give them large amounts of cyanide,

and it killed them pretty quickly.

And he, in pleading guilty,

no death penalty.

- [Narrator] In 2017, Harvey was beaten to death

in his prison cell.

A year after Harvey's last victim died,

along came Charles Cullen with his first victim

in a New Jersey hospital.

- Cullen has admitted to 29 murders,

and six attempted murders.

Officials in this case believe there are many more,

to which has not admitted.

He made a deal to give up all his victims

in exchange for no death penalty.

He was caught, he operated in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

I think there were 10 different institutions in 16 years,

where he killed.

So he's a pretty prolific healthcare serial killer.

He admired Donald Harvey, who was another,

even more prolific healthcare serial killer nurse.

So mostly he used medications,

he took advantage of medications not being accounted for,

on computer systems,

not being locked up,

sometimes he would just take them

and dump them in the wastebasket, just because,

just to see, they're not watching these.

He's given a long confession of where he talks about,

here's how you thwart someone like me.

But even when they got computerized,

he figured out how to manipulate the computer system,

so that it would seem like

he had taken a medication and then put it back,

although he hadn't.

And then he would

use some toxic medication on the patient

for whom that should have never been used.

And it was actually someone in the poison control center

who called the hospital where he finally was arrested,

and said, you have a serial killer there.

They said, no we don't,

and it went on for months before they finally stopped him.

- [Narrator] Over his 16-year nursing career,

Cullen, like his idol, Donald Harvey,

killed many patients who would not have died otherwise.

This copycat serial killer makes it clear

that any one of us can be at risk for a serial murderer.

Serial murderers are often spurred

by the myths of the media

in movies, television, and true crime print.

More and more serial murderers want to create

their own public legacy,

as the media creates anti-hero status for these monsters,

while forgetting about the victims.

- One thing about serial murder that strikes me is that,

there's a preponderance, there's just a plethora,

of ways to kill, of motivations.

It can be political, religious,

we have the traditional sex and power and greed.

We have, in my case, communication.

I did a study of a thousand serial killers,

and I found that three-quarters of them

communicate, before, during, and after the crimes.

And it's purposeful communication.

Things like the Mansons writing in walls,

writing on walls with blood,

people carving words and images into people's bodies.

So I think that communication, is a major,

the need to communicate, is a major motivation,

also the media coverage, is a major motivation.

The BTK killer, in one of his letters to the newspaper,

said, how many people do I have to kill

before I get some media attention?

Which kind of very bluntly pushed that thesis.

Many killers are motivated by the media coverage,

and while the crimes are ongoing,

they eagerly and zealously pursue

newspaper articles, magazine articles,

and electronic accounts of their crimes.

- [Narrator] Perhaps the most famous case

of a serial killer, using the media

as part of his heinous murders,

is the case of the Zodiac Killer.

- Everybody who becomes interested

in the subject of serial killers,

sort of finds one or another that

fascinates them maybe the most,

and I think for me, it's gotta be the Zodiac Killer.

The fact that he wasn't apprehended,

obviously plays into it,

but I think even more than that,

the letters to the police,

how the distance that he had.

It was obvious with Zodiac,

that killing was his aim.

He killed people in cars,

he killed couples, he obviously

had something against young couples.

And there's some psychology, I'm sure,

some psychology of the Zodiac, I'm sure plays into that.

But also, the outfit, right?

On that one murder that he committed by that lake,

near San Francisco.

One of the victims survived to tell the tale

of this bizarre outfit that he wore,

with like a squared off bag on his head,

and the Zodiac symbol on his chest,

that to me, adds a level of fascination to the crimes,

simply because this is a person whose fantasy life

was being led to such an extreme degree,

that they actually produced a uniform for themselves.

That's unique.

- [Narrator] Since the Zodiac Killer was never caught,

there are no pictures,

no childhood stories to analyze,

only handwritten letters and postcards,

and his infamous Zodiac costume.

Many have called him the perfect serial killer.

The first to die, was a teenage couple,

David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16,

shot dead on December 20th, 1968.

They were followed six months later,

with another shooting,

Michael Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22.

Darlene was killed with nine bullets

from a nine millimeter pistol, pumped into her body.

The young man, shot four times, survived.

Now, the Zodiac called the police, and said.

- [Zodiac] You will find the kids in a brown car.

I shot them with a nine millimeter Luger.

I also killed those kids last year.

Goodbye.

- [Narrator] Clearly, the Zodiac loved killing.

The power of controlling life and death,

a power that he would extend to manipulating and terrifying

a whole community through the media.

No doubt, the Zodiac had seen how television,

in its own twisted way,

glorified the killings by the Manson family.

He was becoming the first serial killer

to kill for killing's sake.

Then, he skillfully used the press,

to exalt his supposed God-like power.

- If they can't torture,

they can at least play a cat and mouse game with the police,

taunting them with cryptic clues,

feeling superior to law enforcement,

that too, gives them a sense of power.

And finally, if everything else fails,

they can at least terrify the community,

and become big shot celebrities,

making the front page, the headlines,

the 11 o'clock news.

Everybody knows who they are now,

even if it's only anonymously.

They have determined our agenda,

and that makes them feel really good about themselves.

- [Narrator] Now the killer began sending

a series of chilling communications to the press,

each signed with the astrological symbol of the Zodiac.

The letters were encoded,

and contained a line of cipher,

decoded by two local high school teachers.

The message read.

- [Zodiac] I will be reborn in paradise,

and all those I have killed will become my slaves.

I will not give you my name,

because you'll try to slow or stop my collecting slaves

for my afterlife.

- [Narrator] Panic spread throughout

the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Zodiac, as he was now called,

would kill again on September 29th, 1969.

On that fateful afternoon,

college students, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard,

were relaxing along the shore of a Napa Valley lake.

According to Bryan,

Cecelia noticed a man lingering

in the shade of some trees nearby.

Suddenly, he appeared, wearing a black hood,

with eye slits, and the Zodiac symbol painted on it.

The assailant held the frightened students at gunpoint.

Bryan and Cecelia were bound with clothesline.

And, just as they thought the ordeal was about to end,

the Zodiac Killer set upon them with a foot-long knife.

When the savage attack was over,

the stranger simply walked away,

and left his victims in agony.

To prove he was responsible for this gory act,

he inscribed the Zodiac symbol on the victims' car,

and once again, reported his crime,

and its location to the police.

Cecelia Shepard was conscious when the cops arrived,

and gave a detailed description of the attacker.

Shepard lapsed into a coma during transport to the hospital,

and never regained consciousness.

She died two days later.

But Hartnell survived to recount his tale to the press.

The Zodiac's next, and last, confirmed kill,

was a cab driver.

On October 11th, 1969,

Paul Stine met his maker.

- He killed a taxicab driver,

and it very well may be

that the only reason that taxi driver was killed,

was just so he would have another opportunity

to taunt the police.

He paused after killing this person

to rip a piece of their shirt off,

simply so he would be able to send it in to the police

and have a way of identifying, yes,

I really am the killer of these people.

- [Narrator] Zodiac would continue to taunt police,

and manipulate the press for years.

A 340-symbol cipher, mailed November 8th, 1969,

remains unsolved.

But there were no more confirmed killings.

Although many were suspected before,

and after the five he killed,

and the two he wounded,

the Zodiac would never be identified.

He would become the most famous

never-captured serial killer,

after Jack the Ripper,

and perhaps is still alive today.

American culture and its urban settings,

streets of prostitution,

homeless and lost people,

will continue providing the victim pool for serial killers,

and the media, with its insatiable demand for true crime,

books, movies, and television,

will continue telling the brutal stories

of American serial killers.

[spooky electronic music]