Original subtitles

- This is the first time I've ever watched this.

- They wanted to make sure

that they could take her deposition

while she was still alive.

I can hear Mom's stress.

- It's got to be unbelievably scary

for someone like her to come so close to death.

- She had to survive and tell the tale,

but why was she the one who lived

with all the other women who didn't?

♪ ♪

- This is the man, Billy Chemirmir.

The suspect forced his way into the victim's apartment,

told her to, "Go to bed, don't fight me."

Chemirmir put a pillow over her face,

causing her to lose consciousness.

She survived.

- Mary Bartel's account, that's the moment

that I found out exactly what happened to my mom.

- Mary had come home.

She grabbed my hands.

She told me, "I think he did it to your mom."

My precious mother. I just didn't believe it.

- Billy Chemirmir killed my mom.

I just sat down and cried.

- This is everything that you don't want for your mom.

She was alone,

she was threatened,

and she was not peaceful.

And that's the nightmare I live with.

- Plano police confirm they are looking

at several suspicious deaths in this complex.

- Someone at this complex noticed

a suspicious silver Nissan

and took down the license plate.

That plate tip led them to Billy Chemirmir...

- And a jewelry box with 81-year-old

Lu Harris's name on it.

Harris was found dead.

- My grandmother was Lu Thi Harris.

And, actually, my grandmother named me.

That's something that will always connect me to her.

There are literally thousands of photos of my grandmother.

She is gorgeous and she loved dressing up.

She had a little kid smile.

She's smiling very genuinely.

I didn't know how much she traveled.

Tanzania, Hong Kong, Costa Rica.

- So did you work in the kitchen?

- She had met William Harris towards the end of the war.

William Harris really did love her and cared for her.

- He did bring her to the embassy

where they were evacuating.

Two days before the Vietnam War ended, she left.

- She left behind everything that she knew

because of this trust that she would build a better future

and come back.

That says a lot about the sacrifice

in our family legacy.

In the late '80s, the U.S. finally opened its borders

and she was able to visit her family again.

We visited my grandmother in Texas in 2005.

I was probably about nine or ten.

Hello. Welcome to the tour.

There she is.

- That's her smile and that's her laugh.

That's the garage. That's the same car.

- This was the last time that I saw my grandmother.

My dad picked me up from university.

He immediately burst out sobbing.

Like, "Karen, I have to tell you something.

"Your grandmother is dead.

We think that she fell."

- I remember him calling and saying,

"It wasn't an accident.

It was murder."

- When all of this is happening,

we have detectives working different angles.

- We already knew there was someone

killing multiple people at elderly living facilities.

With that information, there was a call

at one of the facilities about a suspicious person.

Turns out that it was Billy Chemirmir.

- Detectives ended up arresting him.

He was, you know, caught with Ms. Harris's jewelry.

At that point, officers were sent

to Ms. Harris's house.

They believed that she had just been murdered.

- I was in the alley.

One of the neighbors asked me, "Is everything OK?"

I said, "Yes, sir, we just need to check the welfare

of the lady who lives here."

And he said, "Well, she should be fine.

I saw her at the post office at 4:30 this afternoon."

We arrested Chemirmir at approximately 6:00 PM.

- When Dallas Police kicked the door in,

she basically was freshly dead.

- Investigators say Billy Chemirmir is responsible

for killing the 81-year-old woman.

- A medical examiner determined that final victim

died only about an hour before his arrest.

- We have all these different pieces

of evidence coming in that are all pointing at Chemirmir.

- He was very much caught red-handed.

There were several items of jewelry in his left hand.

Also a very large stack of $2 bills.

Ms. Harris's family said that she gave out

$2 bills for birthdays, holidays.

She always bought a large number of them

in sequential order.

We searched his car.

There was a hammer.

I suspect that's what he used to break the jewelry box.

Keys in the cupholder.

Those belonged to Ms. Harris's house.

Groceries, they were from the same store

that Ms. Harris was last seen there.

- At Ms. Harris's house, the police found

a Walmart shopping bag with receipts.

They tracked back to that Walmart

on Coit and Arapaho in Richardson

and were able to pull the surveillance footage.

- Walmart has cameras all over the place, all over the store,

so we were able to watch his conduct

for hours at a time and different days.

You know, older women with their husbands,

he would try to help them get a basket or whatever.

- We believe that he would sit at the Walmart

and wait for somebody that he thought that he could murder

and take the jewelry from.

- If you watch nature videos,

you see predators stalk their prey.

He did the same thing in his own way.

- And so on March 20, Ms. Harris is at the Walmart.

- We see him looking at Ms. Harris,

kind of following her.

He left first.

Shortly thereafter, she left.

- And Billy Chemirmir was waiting for her.

- It is terrifying to think that you could just be going

your merry own way in Walmart, be followed home,

and before you got the chance to close the garage door,

someone comes through it and...

that's the last person that you'll ever see before you die.

- After Chemirmir is arrested,

he's taken to the Dallas Police Department

where he is interviewed by detectives.

At that point, he gave the story

that he was a caregiver.

- He says he's looking for work.

He doesn't know anything about Ms. Harris's house.

- He bought a box of jewelry

from some random person down the street.

- Obviously, we didn't believe him.

- He was being looked at for a murder and possibly others.

Confronted with irrefutable proof...

- He just doubled down on his lies.

- His ability just to continue adamantly

to lie in the face of truth...

- You just don't see that very often.

At Chemirmir's apartment, Dallas found

several cell phones, gloves,

a printed out passport for an alias.

Also jewelry, of course.

- My mom's watch was found at Billy's apartment.

The Tag watch that was stopped, it was hers, without question.

- Our sources say suspect Billy Chemirmir is being

held here at the Dallas County Jail

on a capital murder charge.

- He is being held on $1 million bond.

- And his girlfriend Margaret, I would think she would have

to question where all this money's coming from,

but she adamantly denied knowing anything about it.

That could be the case.

He was definitely an alpha in that relationship.

- Billy Chemirmir is from Kenya,

a smaller town in the Rift Valley.

He was from a large, respected family,

son of a village leader.

His father lived to be over 100 years old

and had three different wives, 28 children.

- His sister helped him emigrate because she was here

and she runs a home health care business.

- He came to the United States in 2003 initially.

- He was a legal permanent resident,

a green card holder.

- We did a full criminal history on Chemirmir.

He had a prior DWI in 2010.

He got 18 months probation.

- He was a heavy drinker by everyone's report.

- Another DWI in 2011.

Failed to appear, and at that point,

there was actually a warrant out for his arrest.

And then you have domestic abuse and family assault.

- He was arrested for an assault

family violence charge.

From what I've learned, he was just very physically abusive,

verbally abusive, but they just kind of cohabitated

having a child together.

- If Mary Bartel had not survived

the attack of Billy Chemirmir,

the police may never have caught him,

because he would have been gone back to Kenya.

We may never have known the nature and extent

of these heinous acts.

- Police worry there are more elderly victims.

About two years ago, he was arrested twice

at the Edgemere Senior Living Apartments in Dallas

for falsely claiming to be an employee there.

- I remember I flipped on the TV

and just listened sentence by sentence

to see exactly what they were saying.

Dr. Catherine Sinclair, my aunt,

died April 2016.

What the Plano police said

made every sense to me in the world.

This is what had happened to Cathy.

- I immediately called the hotline.

Detective Tabor was very, very interested.

From the information they had,

Chemirmir was at her apartment complex

the afternoon Catherine was killed.

- Dr. Catherine Sinclair lived at Edgemere.

- Prior to the first murders

at Tradition Prestonwood in July 2016,

before these murders happened

at the Parkview Frisco Facility

and the nightmare at Preston Place,

Chemirmir had already committed multiple murders

at Edgemere.

- Experience Edgemere inside and out.

Its distinctive design blends the charm of a Tuscan estate

with authentic Dallas energy.

Safe and secure in a 16-acre gated community.

- The security guards at Edgemere called the police

about Chemirmir at least twice,

but the police were told about this jewel thief

and not a killer.

That was a really big missed opportunity

that might have prevented nearly all the rest

of the known murderers.

- God only knows when Chemirmir started,

but Dr. Sinclair was the first victim identified

by law enforcement that we're aware of

and was the first victim at Edgemere.

- It was early in the morning.

One of the housekeepers goes Into Dr. Sinclair's room.

She finds her unresponsive.

So I go to the apartment and I touch her arm,

and she was cold.

I called 911.

The paramedics and the police came up there.

- The next day, my sister and brother

went to Cathy's apartment.

They had already moved her to the funeral home,

but they noticed that there were blood spots on the bed,

on the sheets.

- The family of Dr. Sinclair brought

a police officer with them.

They said that there was a missing safe.

- A lot of really nice gems and jewels

and collectible coins were in that safe.

- 99 cameras, all of them at exits.

I looked at the footage, couldn't find anybody.

- I said, "Well, I'm gonna file a homicide complaint."

- This all smelled of foul play to them immediately.

- Something really smells rotten here.

- They basically force an autopsy,

stopping the body from being cremated,

getting it to the ME's office.

- We were informed

that Catherine died of natural causes.

We did not get a copy of the autopsy.

Cathy was a dedicated doctor.

You know, you knew she was a friend.

And then Cathy was murdered, no doubt in my mind.

But I was going up against this system that is saying no.

And this goes on for two years

prior to Chemirmir being caught.

- Dan Probst calls me April 4, 2018.

"I want to meet with you because I think my aunt

was one of Chemirmir's victims."

- We got started on the investigations

through one family saying, you know,

"We think this happened to our aunt."

- This is a portion of research for Dr. Sinclair.

We were trying to figure out, all right, are we crazy

or does this autopsy look as off to you as it does to me?

- Her autopsy is extremely consistent

with a violent smothering.

There was petechiae, which is blood vessels

bursting under pressure,

slight hemorrhaging from the mouth,

possibly a defensive bruise, green marks on her abdomen,

probably from somebody's knee

while they were smothering her.

That's rather odd for a natural death to me.

That was a murder, a no-brainer.

But I'm just a regular Joe.

- As we started learning more about Edgemere,

we realized this is a little bit bigger

than just one person.

Chemirmir was able to scout out his victims there

because he was working at Edgemere as a third party

independent aid for another resident

using an alias, Benjamin Koitaba.

- Benjamin Koitaba is

Chemirmir sister's ex-husband and cousin.

- Billy Chemirmir used Benjamin Koitaba's passport

his driver's license, his name, his bank accounts,

basically his everything.

- He worked for one of our residents

from February to April 2016.

That Monday, I get a call from a resident

saying a man had come to her apartment

claiming to be with maintenance.

She said he was a Black man wearing a maroon shirt

and maroon pants.

I look at the security footage

and I see Benjamin.

So I called the police.

- He's given a written warning as Koitaba.

And half the trespassing charges were,

if you have a written warning and you come back again,

then you can get taken to jail.

That's when it becomes a crime.

We walked him to his vehicle,

told him not to come back.

We banned him from the property.

- This was ten days after Catherine's death,

and none of this information was told to me

or to the family of Phyllis Payne.

- It has haunted me a lot

because Mom was the second known victim.

My mom was an interior designer,

really creative.

We said she probably should have been an architect

because she could draw floor plans

and do the structural work.

She loved being at Edgemere.

She was 4'11" and 99 pounds.

This defenseless, sweet woman,

to learn that her last moments on Earth were horror

is just more than you can bear.

- I had gotten a report

of Ms. Payne not showing up to her breakfast.

I went and knocked on her door.

Nothing, so I finally entered.

And I saw that she was laying in her bed peaceful as can be

and looked like she was just sleeping.

- But Ms. Payne had silverware that was missing.

- And she kept her good jewelry in a coffee can

in the refrigerator.

We looked, and it was gone.

The really hard thing to think about

is that he had to ask her,

"Show me where your good jewelry is."

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

- June 5, 2016,

Ms. Perry was found passed away.

- She was slumped out of her chair,

and there was a little pillow next to her.

That was the weird part for me.

Why would the pillow have blood on it?

- Ms. Perry also had some missing items, jewelry.

- So what led up to your suspicions of foul play?

- Well, after Dr. Sinclair passed away,

I asked one of the supervisors,

"How often does something like that happen

where you find them passed away?"

He said, "For someone that's not on hospice,

it's been seven years."

- Did that make you suspicious, or not yet?

- They said it was natural causes, you know.

I just... you trust that, right?

- Right. We did too.

- Yeah, but after the second one, Ms. Payne,

and then Ms. Perry a few weeks later,

I started looking back.

There was nothing saying that any of them were murdered.

It was just me and my suspicion

of it being such a coincidence

that they all had missing items.

So I looked at the electronic door logs

for Ms. Payne and Ms. Perry.

On the mornings of their deaths,

the door opened from the inside,

door closed, then ten minutes later,

it said door opened from the inside,

and then door closed.

It was like a sequence.

It said that same sequence for both ladies.

- Yeah.

- Josh Aleman puts this pattern together

when this is happening in 2016.

He starts reviewing video and finds this guy,

Benjamin Koitaba, who's really Billy Chemirmir.

- I found, after the door closed for the last time,

Billy Chemirmir leaving out of the facility exit

within ten minutes for both ladies.

After we found Ms. Perry's body,

that very next week, I got a call from a resident

saying that a man had come to her apartment claiming

to be with maintenance.

- And you knew that was Billy that was back,

although he was called Benjamin at that time.

- I had a gut feeling that it was him again, you know?

He stole a key fob and he stole jewelry from her.

There's a camera close to that apartment in the stairwell,

and I saw him.

He was carrying a manila envelope.

- So he was roaming the halls, picking out his victims.

- I'm thinking since he had been a caregiver,

Mom had probably seen him and recognized him,

and so she just opened the door.

- I could see that too.

- OK. So what happened?

- It turns out it was four weekends in a row.

At this point, I'm thinking he's stealing from residents.

He had been following employees in

at shift change, 7:00 AM,

carrying a manila envelope each time.

I called the precinct close by

to see if they'd send somebody to help us.

- What was their reaction

to everything you were feeding them?

Because they totally blew me off.

I reported robbery and homicide.

It went exactly nowhere.

- They wouldn't send anybody to help us.

- They should have. - Yeah.

So me and the maintenance guys decide, you know what,

we're going to get him ourselves.

We met up there at 6:30.

He walks in.

He was carrying that manila envelope.

Me and the maintenance guys surrounded him.

My boss puts him in a headlock...

♪ ♪

And we take him to this conference room.

I call the police.

- Yeah, you've been telling the resident

that your name is Peter and you work for maintenance.

- What happened to your arms?

Well, they're all beat up.

- We didn't think much of it at that time,

of these scratches.

Now looking back, it's painful to think about them.

- Billy Chemirmir is wearing a shirt

from a health care company that he no longer works with.

- Just the fact that you're the same person

that we caught the first time, that's enough.

- Look at him smiling like he did something.

Thief.

- The police opened the manila envelope.

- Inside there's a gun and a telescopic magnet

and there's a... and I don't know

if it was real or not,

but it looked like a diamond-like object.

- The gun wasn't loaded.

- Nobody would know if that gun was unloaded

if it was pointed at them.

- The magnet was used

to tell if jewelry was real or not.

If all the jewelry is gone,

that would be suspicious, right?

And so I can go through here,

and, you know, that may have looked like

it was something really valuable.

Obviously, it's not.

Silver and gold and platinum

will never attract to a magnet.

- And then he gave them his fake ID,

but in his wallet as well was another ID, Billy Chemirmir.

So with that, he was charged with criminal trespassing

and failure to identify.

- I'm going to tell you what, Josh singlehandedly stopped

the murders at Edgemere.

They stopped completely that day.

- We were pretty happy with what we did.

We all went to IHOP afterwards and celebrated.

We just caught a thief.

On June 18, 2016, we captured Billy Chemirmir,

and I got married the very next weekend.

And I went on my honeymoon.

Management took it from there.

- We've had three unattended deaths

with missing jewelry.

None of that was told to law enforcement

by the management of Edgemere.

And so instead of being investigated for murder

back in June of 2016,

Chemirmir was simply arrested for trespassing.

- Chemirmir is sentenced to 70 days,

but he's released early after only 12 days.

- This was prior to the murders

at Preston Place and Parkview Frisco

and just weeks before the Tradition Prestonwood.

18 days after Chemirmir is released,

he goes to the Tradition

and starts murdering people there.

♪ ♪

- After my honeymoon, I come back.

I just couldn't stop thinking about him.

The door locks and the camera footage said a story to me.

I knew he was a thief,

but for him to have stolen from them,

would that have meant that he killed them?

So I show the footage and door logs

to one of the supervisors up there,

and they told me to write it down

and put it in the file.

And I said, "So you don't want me to go to police just yet?"

They said, "No, not yet."

- So then they never gave you the go-ahead

to go to the police with it?

No. - I should have.

- That wasn't your call.

You had a job.

You tried.

You presented the evidence,

and you can't control what they did with it.

It's not on you.

And I just want to make sure you know that's not on you.

- Thank you.

- I really needed to meet you.

You filled in so many blanks, and it's part of our healing.

Thank you. - Thank you.

I needed this as well.

I've wanted to tell you for so long.

♪ ♪

- We were totally failed by the system.

- When I think of the lives that could have been saved,

I don't even have a word strong enough

for how horrendous that is.

- If they would have got on the stick from day one

when I said "homicide,"

there could be 20, 25 more people walking this Earth.

And that's something I think about.

About six months after we captured him...

We saw Chemirmir across the street from Edgemere.

I couldn't believe the guts of this guy.

We already called the police on him twice,

and he had the nerve to come back.

I called the police on him a third time.

The police talked to him.

He said that he was working across the street

as a caregiver and that he has no intentions

of going inside Edgemere.

And the police let him go.

Just me and my suspicions of him felt like I was alone.

The only one that could see this.

- Josh did everything he was supposed to do and more.

Law enforcement didn't put it together for two years more.

♪ ♪

- This is everything that I worked through

for a year and a half, all during the investigation.

I've been with the Plano Police Department for 22 years.

I've never seen a case of this magnitude,

let alone been a part of one.

- We were looking at somewhere probably

around 700 or more unattended deaths

that could be considered.

That's a huge undertaking.

- We pulled information from Chemirmir's cell phones.

- We were looking at locations where the phone data put

Billy Chemirmir at the same place as unattended deaths

where there was also missing jewelry.

We figured out most of the time when he was selling jewelry,

he would sell it same day or the next day

right after he killed that person.

- He was going to different jewelers.

He would also sell things online

using these money market platforms.

- Chemirmir would routinely go to pawn shops,

get the stolen jewelry appraised,

decline their offer, then take it to another business

like a gold and silver place

knowing the value of what he has

and present it as though he's an informed customer

and sell it.

- Within an hour or two

leaving Edgemere after my mom's death,

he was selling sterling silver

and 14- and 18-carat gold

to the Diamond and Gold Exchange.

- There were other locations that he went to.

But that particular location, Diamond and Gold Exchange,

Detective Hoffmann was able to get

surveillance and records

indicating that he'd been there over 50 times.

- He shortly has smothered somebody to death,

and he's walking in there with a big smile on his face

with their jewelry like he just left the fair.

- He's laughing, shaking hands.

- No sense that he just snuffed out a life.

It's all about the money.

- He portrayed himself

as a buyer and a seller of jewelry,

obtaining it legally.

This was his job.

He wanted to live a fancy life.

- The money he was making doing these homicides,

selling this jewelry was to support an image

of a high roller.

He frequented four or five African clubs,

and one in particular, Afrika Fusion.

According to the owner of the place,

Billy had been in there almost every single day

for, like, three years.

- He was buying people drinks, giving $20 tips.

- He would spend between $200 and $300 a day.

So he's spending all this money at these clubs,

but he doesn't have a job that will support that.

Chemirmir was in the health care industry

as a caregiver.

- He was able to pick up jobs with different agencies.

So he had several different home health care clients.

- People who knew him as a caregiver

knew him as Benjamin Koitaba.

- 2012 is when he became Benjamin Koitaba.

He took his cousin's identity.

Koitaba had a clean record, and most of these places

were not, you know, taking his fingerprints.

- This lack of safety and security

that was prevalent in the industry as a whole,

the MacPhee family is a victim of that.

- Carolyn MacPhee, her husband Jack had a rare disease

and she had had to hire a home health care aide...

more than one, actually.

And the agency she hired sent Ben Koitaba,

AKA Chemirmir.

- We emptied Mom's house out, and the only paperwork

that we still had was from the home health care provider.

All these records with his name on it.

- Wells Fargo.

Benjamin Koitaba wrote a check for $264.

He was always kind of standoffish.

Took care of Dad great, did his job,

but he'd always take his food and go into the different room

and be on a laptop.

So I don't know if he was

counting his cash, counting the gold.

- He was on there listing other women's jewelry to sell it.

- Yeah. Evil.

- Yeah.

My mom was supposed to be at church.

She never showed up.

She wasn't answering her phone.

- Scott called me and said,

"Mom's not answering her phone.

It's hanged at the house."

I was the first one there.

I saw her feet sticking out on the other side of the bed.

And she was on the floor with her arm over her face.

I took her arm off, and it was just shock.

Just stunned.

It's terrible.

- The CSI unit actually came,

and detectives showed up as well.

They inspected her fully,

found no evidence of any struggle.

- The police thought that she was all ready to go to church.

She went and got in her car. She had a little nosebleed.

- Which would explain the blood on the door.

It almost looked like a palm print.

- Or maybe she, you know, put her hand on the door

and went in the bathroom.

There was bloody Kleenex all over the place.

- Probably the nosebleed was the beginning of an aneurysm

and as she was walking back out,

something popped,

and she just fell to the ground

and was dead almost instantaneously.

That was the story.

- Looking back, there were a lot of questions

we should have asked.

There was a cup of hot tea on the counter.

Mom didn't drink hot tea.

And then there was a broken jar underneath the sink.

- She had a wedding ring that she never took off

and a fashion ring that had been a gift from our father.

We couldn't find her rings.

- The bed was crooked a little bit.

- Her comforter had some blood on it.

- I saw a bloody fingerprint on the inside of her glasses.

Where'd the blood come from?

♪ ♪

- We spent months grieving over a woman

who died suddenly of natural causes.

And you can build a story in your head that it was fast,

it was peaceful.

And then we get the paper delivered,

"The Dallas Morning News."

Front page is this story about this man that had basically

stalked Lu Thi Harris, smothered her,

and was caught with her jewelry.

- We saw his picture and recognized him

as Benjamin Koitaba, the caregiver for my father.

- So that's the list of all the dates

he was in there, right?

12, 14, 16, 18,

- 26 times. When was the first one?

- October 18, 2016.

And this is the last one, said Tuesday, January 3.

- 2017.

And he was waiting, right?

He was waiting for Dad to die...

he knew it was going to happen...

and then he just killed her for $5,000.

- Yeah, "Nobody will think it was me."

- April 2018, we got a phone call

from the Plano Police Department.

- We had gone back to the house

to reinvestigate Carol MacPhee.

- Oddly enough, we still had the glasses with the blood on.

Hadn't even cleaned them.

We handed those over to the Plano Police Department.

- Mrs. MacPhee's glasses had Chemirmir's DNA.

- To find Billy's DNA on her glasses a year later,

that was just incredible

and really pushed everything towards the fact

that he was this serial killer.

Around the Christmas season, 2017,

Chemirmir murdered three people,

separate from independent living communities.

Killed in their own home.

The first was Carolyn McPhee.

The second was Rosemary Curtis.

- Rosemary Curtis also met Chemirmir

through home health care.

Margaret, Billy's girlfriend,

had been a caregiver of their family.

Detailed records show that Billy was in the area

at the time of her death.

- And then there's Mary Brooks.

Mary Brooks was another victim that he stalked

and hunted at the same Walmart on Coit and Arapaho

in Dallas.

You can actually see from the surveillance footage

Chemirmir following her car out of the parking lot

of the Walmart to her house.

- He ended up murdering her.

- The magnitude of victims was overwhelming.

- The scope of the investigation was massive.

- It's like a scene right out of a crime drama.

Homicide detectives now exhuming a body

from a Dallas cemetery.

- They exhumed my mother's body.

They found bruising on her wrists

that looked like could have been from being held down.

- It reveals the lengths a task force is going to

to determine if Billy Chemirmir is a serial killer.

- We went where the evidence was taking us.

We had several different detectives calling families

to tell them we were investigating their case

as a possible homicide.

- I was walking to class one day,

and I receive a call from a detective

asking about my grammy's death.

- Knowing about the crimes Billy had been arrested for,

I started thinking, but what if this

wasn't a natural death?

My mom went back and looked at all the pillowcases,

and on one, she found a lipstick smudge.

It just all began to make sense.

- I'm looking at a Yelp review, of all things,

from a lady named Shannon Dion.

Turns out her mother, Doris Gleason,

was a resident of Traditions.

This Yelp review detailed exactly the pattern

for Billy Chemirmir's murders.

- Detective Hoffman called me and he said,

"I want you to Google Billy Chemirmir."

"Your mother's death is being investigated as a homicide."

- From the beginning, she wanted justice on this.

She knew something was wrong,

and finally, she's being listened to.

- Just in talking with Detective Hoffman,

he recognized my anger and frustration and sorrow

and that something had to change.

Tradition Prestonwood, Edgemere,

Preston Place,

every single one of these places,

they're all the same.

They all could have prevented so many deaths.

Furthermore, there are a lot more murders

than you know about.

- Sit pretty.

There you go.

You know, I'm 85 and I've lost a lot of friends.

Good.

But when we found out

that someone had killed these ladies,

we were just shocked.

- Preston Place was the second largest

hunting ground for Chemirmir.

He murdered seven people there

in a very short period of time.

- Around the time that these murders were happening

at Preston Place,

the rumor mill was starting to turn,

and some of these people were friends.

- Chemirmir killed Diane.

Diane and I were really close.

- My mother was such a social butterfly.

The ladies got together and started doing

monthly birthdays and happy hour.

- We had T-shirts that said, "Who let the girls out?"

By no means was Diane ready to die.

- I found her body on the floor in the bedroom.

She had a knot on her forehead the size of a tennis ball.

Dottie, her dog, was just going postal.

And my mother's engagement ring, wedding band,

and her 50th anniversary gold band,

they're missing.

- Diane lived just across the breezeway

and one apartment down.

This was Diane's apartment.

My theory is that he was waiting

in this stairwell down here.

- We had gone for a late lunch.

And what I was told was that after I dropped her off,

Billy Chemirmir was at the complex.

- She would have brought her dog this way

and gone down these stairs to let it go to the bathroom,

and then back up to her apartment.

- I figured he followed her up.

And when she turned around to close the door,

he slammed the door in her face

and then proceeded to kill her.

- I think he made a mistake with Diane.

She was tough.

I think she really fought him.

- So we have a cluster of deaths at Preston Place,

starting with Diane Delahunty.

- Chemirmir was murdering women at Preston Place

at a rate that is shocking.

- I found my mom on Tuesday.

Friday, there's another crime scene truck

there at Preston Place, another one of his victims.

- In that one week in December, Diane Delahunty,

Mamie Dell Miya, and a third woman

never identified publicly all were murdered.

- You keep track of the people, the dates of their death,

pretty soon you get to suspect that it might be murder.

We connected the dots first with Diane.

- That's when we started really adding it up.

- It's heartbreaking, and it was totally preventable.

Before any victims were murdered there,

the resident council of Preston Place

started raising major concerns about known defects

in the security, gates that aren't working,

and suspicious activity on the premises.

- I was on residents' council.

I represented building 10.

In May of 2017, I passed out a survey

asking how you feel about cameras.

"Cars have been broken into,

"persons observed climbing over the fence,

"and jewelry stolen from apartments.

"Do you think security cameras would help?

Yes or no."

All ten said yes.

- They're literally begging Preston Place

to take action to make them safe,

and it is completely ignored.

- After the survey, I wrote a letter to management.

"Preston Place is a home to people of advanced age,

"which makes us more vulnerable.

"Cameras would be a deterrent to those intent

on doing wrongful actions."

I never received any response to this letter.

- They just blew it off

when they were talking about security.

It was like, "We don't have a problem."

- This was my mother.

You only get one.

I'm upset with their dismissive behavior.

Their residents were telling them,

"Hey, there's somebody lurking around.

We have trespassers. We have robberies."

Why didn't they raise a red flag

to notify all the residents to be aware?

It angers me.

- There's absolutely moments in time that could have put

an end to all of this very, very easily.

And it starts with disclosure by all

of these different independent living communities

at the time this is occurring.

This is my black binder,

information as it pertains to my mom.

These are pictures I took of Parkview.

This is the security gate which on several occasions

was broken or not closed all the way.

Chemirmir was entering the building

through the side door, closest to my mom.

This door led right to her unit.

You know, he could sit in the car and just stalk

whoever was coming in and out.

There were a couple occasions

where the door wouldn't engage all the way.

This is a roll of electrical tape.

Oftentimes people would just prop the door open.

Wasn't hard for Chemirmir to gain access.

Rocks in the door.

My mom's front door, about ten steps.

This was the perspective from her front door

to the stairwell.

♪ ♪

And it's believed that that's the stairwell that he used

to get up to the third floor

where my mom's best friend, Helen Lee, lived.

This is how my mom was murdered.

I went to Parkview and I said,

"What do you know about some list

"that has my mom

and Helen as victims of Billy Chemirmir?"

I was told that what happened to my mom

and Helen had nothing to do with Billy Chemirmir,

that he was only in the building one time.

And that's when I found out about Kay Lawson.

- This attack, am I correct that that was a Sunday?

- Yes, it was a Sunday.

- Kill me, rape me, I didn't have any idea

what he was going to do.

- Sunday, October 29, 2017,

my mother was waiting for a visit from her grandson.

- My apartment was right by the elevator,

and I was going to go out and meet Danny.

- Out in the hallway, she saw a man.

He was nicely dressed.

- Talked to him, told him I was waiting for my grandson.

- They had about a ten-minute conversation.

- Then Danny came and we went in and locked the door.

- Chemirmir just loitered until her grandson left.

- Danny was gone maybe ten minutes or so

when the knock came on the door.

The little peephole was too high,

and so I unwittingly opened the door a little bit.

- There stood the man she had seen in the hall.

- He proceeded to knock me down from my walker.

He dragged me into the living room.

I was thinking to myself, "This can't be happening."

He proceeded to suffocate me.

- She was on her belly but she was able to get some air.

- All of a sudden out of my mouth came,

"Dear Heavenly Father."

I don't know how long I was down,

but pretty soon, he left me.

I didn't move from then on.

He left, but she kept playing dead.

And it was a good thing she did because he came back.

It turns out he had dropped a little cowbell charm

that her mother had given my father.

Eventually, he did leave and not come back.

- Kay Lawson was the first person that we know of

to survive Billy Chemirmir.

This was four and a half months

prior to the attack on Mary Bartel.

- She had bruises and abrasions

down the right side of her face

and a little bit on one of her arms.

But she was a tough old Iowa farm girl.

She had survived.

- It was so awful.

I can't tell you how bad it was.

- Kay's experience was six weeks after my mom,

eight weeks after Helen.

- My mother's case was very important

because she was a conscious witness.

- The police did take a pillow from her apartment,

sent it out for DNA testing.

They get the DNA back within three weeks,

and they knew it belonged to an African American male,

but they were not able to match it to somebody.

So it sat on the desk.

- That was in 2017,

and that investigation kind of just dies on the vine

and he continues murdering people.

At least 11 more people were murdered.

- March 2018, as they were getting ready

to make an arrest, they showed my mom a panel

of several photographs.

- And she said yes.

- "Number four."

- "That looks like him."

- When Chemirmir was arrested,

Frisco was able to confirm

that Chemirmir's DNA was on the pillow.

- It was shocking, during those four and a half months

between her attack and his arrest,

he was leaving corpses all over North Texas.

- Justice needs to be served.

- A whistleblower within the Tradition

took it upon herself to call him in jail.

- You just are blown away with all the cover-up.

- When they gave me the Google data,

I was sick for a week.

- The trial of Billy Chemirmir

starts in just a couple of hours.

- There was just one person who wouldn't move on it.

- He was just smirking.

- Rot in hell, you piece of shit.

- Rot in hell, you piece of shit.