The 5 Worst Female Killers In Modern History | World's Most Evil Killers | Absolute Crime

foreign a man walking his dog on the outskirts of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire made a shocking and grisly Discovery dumped in a rural ditch was the body of a man who'd been violently stabbed to death the police didn't know it yet but there was a serial killer on the loose when is the next body gonna turn up we've got to find her who did this and we gotta find it quickly the investigation would lead detectives to a woman a violent individual who'd killed without hesitation or remorse and for no other reason than the pleasure and gratification it offered her she is heartless ruthless and sadistic during a 12-day killing spree Joanne Dennehy butchered Three Men and left a trail of Destruction that stretched from east to west across the UK she's not somebody who feels bad who feels remorseful he regrets things she does what she wants to do and she doesn't care about the consequences Joanne Dennehy had ruthlessly become one of the world's most evil killers foreign [Music] [Music] police in Hereford arrested a runaway fugitive and her besotted accomplice in a killing spree that lasted almost two weeks 31 year old Joanne Dennehy had murdered Three Men and stabbed two others in broad daylight leaving them for dead one of the most dangerous women in criminal history she's now locked away in prison and will remain there for the rest of her life the fact that she'll never see daylight again in the outside world is of huge comfort for the family for Joanne Dennehy it's absolutely the right thing that she won't come out of prison Joanne dennehy's crimes were incomprehensible to the British public at the time of her imprisonment author and journalist Christopher Benny D took a special interest in the case I wanted to really try to get inside how the police were working and how rapidly they caught this very dangerous woman the strong curiosity he had for dinner his crimes caught the attention of the murderer herself and very soon Christopher was in written correspondence with the killer Behind Bars her letter is beautifully written um very eloquent very good grammar um certainly On a par with somebody of a good education behind them um and we developed this relationship where I was trying to get inside her head but at the same time she would being the arch manipulator was trying to get inside my head his attention peaked and Christopher eventually went to visit Dennehy at bronzefield prison in 2015. she looked into my eyes and she said to me Christopher killing you would be good for me and it was a nice cold stair I can tell you so yes she would have killed me in a heartbeat if she'd had a chance the story of this cold-blooded killer begins over 35 years ago in the picturesque city of Saint Albans in Hertfordshire Joanne Dennehy was born in 1982 and began life in a loving and secure family home very few could have predicted this bright and intelligent young girl would turn into a sadistic monster with a taste for violence by all accounts as she was starting off in life with a what we might say is a perfect foundational upbringing Joanne's anahi appears to come from quite a normal family she had a relatively uneventful childhood she's one of two siblings her mother Works in a supermarket her father worked as a security guard and for a telecommunications company and from the outside they appear to be a normal family she had a sister to which she was very close uh they hadn't even developed a secret language uh she was she played netball for the school um she was a very normal quite bright school girl but Dennis his idyllic childhood was curtailed as she entered her teens started to experiment with drugs she started not going to school and she linked up with a man called John Trina her parents they were at their wit's end they didn't know what to do they tried to keep her locked up or bring her home from school the teachers tried to reprimand her and the more they tried to control Joe it was Joe saying stuff you and it was literally like throwing petrol on a fire Dennehy and Trina ran away together embarking on a turbulent relationship despite den of his violent outbursts the couple had two children together and eventually settled in Cambridgeshire I think quite a lot is made of the fact that Joan denhee misused alcohol and and drugs but but I think she's well aware of the fact that this is going to be discussed and she knows that these offer quite a convenient excuse for her behavior and alcohol and drugs and other substances can disinhibit but that's assuming that people have got those moral standards to begin with and Joanne denehy didn't have them in the first place a very disturbed woman she had done a lot of self-harm of cutting herself and so on so there were a number of danger signs that this was somebody who was not attuned to society as time went on dinner his erratic Behavior intensified she'd cheat on Trina and leave him and their two children for sporadic periods of time her drinking worsened and she reportedly began to carry a knife hidden in her boot I think she's she's somebody who perhaps has always enjoyed hurting other people it's almost like she's this crazy scientist and the world is her experiment finally in 2009 trino took the children and fled from Dennehy afraid of what she might do next the company that she was keeping as well she was surrounded by people who were similarly disconnected so so I think when there was no check or filter or break on her behavior she was only going to get worse dinner he had become no stranger to the local police she'd been in and out of prison for drug offenses and was also given a 12-month community order for being in control of a dangerous dog in February 2012 dinner he spent three days on the psychiatric unit at Peterborough City hospital where she was diagnosed with a series of disorders she has had various diagnoses attached to her anti-social personality disorder Psychopathic personality disorder and these are our conditions they're not mental illnesses and there's a real important difference between the two because people with personality disorders know the difference between right and wrong they're they're fully rational they're in control of what they're doing but they choose to do it anyway so she's not somebody who feels bad who feels remorseful he regrets things she does what she wants to do and she doesn't care about the consequences by 2013 31 year old Dennehy had settled in a small bed set in Byfield a housing estate in Peterborough but the local residents were unaware of her troubled past or her violent nature one of dennehy's new neighbors was Michelle Bowles she was polite to me but I wouldn't mount on her mouth basically it's well spoken to me and never spool she was actually quite Pleasant to get mine I showed her respect she loves babies she was excellent children I didn't have a problem with her when I saw her or spoke to her I said hello she said hello back but other residents were not so sure Michelle's friend John Chapman lived in the same building as Dennehy he was a Falklands War veteran who'd fallen on hard times I did not look way too many spin I should know because I'm out of storage used to say it's just John Ben Smiley all the time and happy and like nice to know but John Chapman didn't smile when Joe and Dennehy was around John was petrified John came in mine and he said on several occasions there's this mad woman moved in she said she's gonna get rid of me whatever way she can and he was right to be afraid in just a few months Joanne dennehy's threats would turn to violence and John Chapman would be dead in early 2013 Joanne Dennehy was living in Shelton housing in Peterborough following the breakup of her relationship her ex-partner had left her after becoming increasingly concerned about her erratic and sadistic Behavior the bed set to Dennehy now called home was managed by Kevin Lee a father of two who lived in Peterborough with his wife Christina she remembers hearing about this strange new tenant Christina has asked for her identity to be concealed he was dressed with work the money element of it it was turning into kind of a nightmare really it was getting a little bit unmanageable Kevin used to house disadvantaged people so you've done it for years and obviously he was used to giving people chances and so he did with with her but Kevin Lee and dennehy's relationship quickly grew into more than just a business one Lee began to employ Denna he is a rent collector obviously I wasn't aware at the time to me it would have been just another tenant and he just said about this woman and that she's really tough really hard he needed to evict some people and whether she was threatening and it suited him because he wasn't getting any Joy from the council so I think she had a bit of Wellies and you know really big mouth and threatening and I don't know whether that at the time he thought that was his only way out and to deal with these people 48 year old Kevin Lee became infatuated with the younger Dennehy and they soon became lovers in exchange Jenna he was living rent free in at least two of Lee's properties across Peterborough in a household that becomes quite apparent if someone's behaviors sort of changed and didn't seem quite himself Dennehy would make up unnerving stories to impress her new landlord and lover so one point she told Kevin Lee her father had abused her and that she'd killed him absolute nonsense of course never did anything of the kind she was neither abused nor did it was he dead but she was also a pathological liar having just said about her that um she spent eight years in prison because he raped her as a child abused her as a child um it's not unbelievable story but then when Kevin said that she'd also killed other people and that she hadn't got caught for those it sounded a bit far-fetched I just I didn't know what to think I didn't know whether it was a truth or whether it was just a load of old rubbish but it wasn't long before Joanne Dennehy turned her murderous fantasies into reality 31 year old Lucas slabazevsky had moved to the UK from Poland in 2005. after meeting dinner here a few days previously he'd began exchanging text messages with her on the 19th of March 2013 slabazevsky went to visit Dennehy at one of the houses she was staying in on rolleston Garth and was never seen alive again she almost certainly lured this man with the promise of some kind of sexual favor but without a moment's hesitation she stabbed him through the chest once very very hard killing him almost instantly slabazevsky had been coaxed into dennehy's deadly Embrace she led him to believe the pair were in a relationship he willingly and naively entered the Trap she'd laid for him everybody that comes into contact with Joe and then he it's like falling into a spider's web and you can't get out men can't get out they become entranced by a full sorts of reasons dinner he had complete disregard for the life she'd just taken then he puts this poor polish man's body in a wheelie bin and then shows it to a 14 year old and so look how clever I am I've killed this man you're weed again but it was only a temporary solution Dennehy knew she couldn't keep slabazevsky's body in a bin she had to dispose of it quickly but she needed help she called upon one of her friends 47 year old Gary stretch who was more than willing to assist Jonathan he is quite bright she's quite so she's able to exert quite a lot of control in her interactions with with other people and that's what makes her exceptionally dangerous now looking at the relationship that Joanna he had with her accomplices I think she was able to to charm these men she was able to kind of lure them in really and they would have been flattered by her attentions you know here she is this younger woman wanting to spend time with them these were men who had quite dull quite boring lives and I think they were quite excited to get involved in in what Joanne wanted to do at seven foot two inches tall Gary stretched towered above dinner his slight frame an unsuccessful burglar stretch was absolutely infatuated by her twisted and lethal charms Gary stretchen joined and he met when both of them were on parole from prison for various offenses she realized that she could use him to do whatever she wanted he was a bodyguard her minder and that's how they formed this team which became so overpowering for stretch that he would do anything for her I don't think Joanne dunny had any emotional feelings to also accomplish this whatsoever they were useful to her at the time and and she just cast them aside when she was finished with them with the help of stretch Dennehy dumped Lucas slabazevsky's body in a ditch in rural thorny Dyke Just 10 miles east of Peterborough City Center unable to control herself her confidence rising and her desire for violence building in just over a week Dennehy would strike once more she turned her attention towards her fellow Byfield resident 56 year old Falklands War veteran John Chapman who reportedly had walked in on Dennehy while she was in the shared bathroom of their bed set every time he spoke about her he was with fear like this in his Tony voice and we thought it's just John John just leave it if she starts is our phone numbers fingers and we've come around you know help you and get you in here with us he went thanks and there was the last time we saw John on March the 29 2013 Dennehy attacked the helpless John Chapman John Chapman was an inoffensive kindly man who may have been asleep or in an alcoholic stupa when dinner he killed him but she did so by stabbing him once in the neck severing his character to archery and then five times in the chest with such Force that one wound broke the breastbone it also punctured his heart it's a frenzy that is quite difficult to comprehend but evidence of what the behavioral scientists now call escalation first victim One Step route second victim six stab wounds it's heartbreaking their poor defenseless man killed and to know what she'd done to him how she killed him it was just heartbreaking for his all dinner he was developing her confidence and her crimes were becoming more and more brutal with each move now where Joanna he's so bad is that this woman actually used a knife to attack a grown strong man is very up close and personal it's not a point of a gun which is not quite a personal thing it's not by bludgeoning it's not by strangulation by Nature a woman is not often strong enough to strangle a strong man but this is a young woman using a knife to repeatably stab somebody and for that reason alone makes her a Hands-On bloodlusting killer I can't describe how evil this woman is I really can't she's the worst I've ever met it's always been said the woman's method of killing is usually poisoning it can sometimes be other things but knives no it's a very male killing method and it said some people speculate that denehy was to some extent trying to be more male more masculine than the men around her because she felt they were rather weak and feeble and she had to be the boss and being a boss meant you were male but Dennehy was offsetting one role with another that of a femme fatale charming and enticing men into her life before switching character in an instant with deadly results we're quite quick to to point to Joanne dennehy's masculine traits because they're the ones that are most visible to us her aggression and her violence and the Very brutal way in which she perpetrated these murders but I don't think she's somebody who would be like that all the time because that wouldn't serve her needs all of the time I think sometimes she was feminine and she was demure in a way she she's somebody who will just adapt her behavior so it's very difficult to know who the real Joe undone he is after killing John Chapman Dennehy didn't hesitate in continuing her Rampage on the very same day she'd strike again with fatal consequences later that day she lures her boss and her lover and the bed sitting houses owner Kevin Lee to the house but this time Dennehy wasn't in the mood for love she was searching for another victim to try and quench her murderous desires March the 29th would be the last time that Kevin Lee was seen alive Joanne Dennehy was in the middle of a murderous Rampage having taken the life of 31 year old polish man Lucas slabazevsky 10 days earlier Jenner he had just killed 56 year old John Chapman and had a third victim in her sights a landlord Kevin Lee the pair had been having a secret affair Kevin's wife Christina was the first to notice something was awry when he didn't arrive home on that March evening it was very much like a come home from work tea on the table pajamas on he was quite sort of traditional old-fashioned in that sense I tried to ring him and his phone wasn't on which was odd in itself it'd never have his phone switched off because that's that was his livelihood that was his business and I knew it had charge Kevin had felt threatened by Dennehy days before but he'd wrongly assumed it was just bravado Kevin did tell me that she told him that she wanted to kill again and I think that was the crucial thing because it wasn't just a case of bragging or mentioning that she'd committed murders in the past it was the fact that she specifically told him she wanted to kill again so that's gonna nerve anybody false or not it's just not a thing that normal people say hours passed growing desperately concerned Christina with the help of Kevin's business partner Paul Creed tried to trace Kevin I'd asked Paul to look at Kevin's phone records so we gave them to me and there was a number that kept appearing on the telephone and I said to Paul I said um which houses are empty at the moment because they need work doing to them and he gave me a list and I subsequently just went round to each of those properties I knew he was in trouble put it that way at that point I knew there was something not right I knew Kevin wasn't coming home Christina began an urgent hunt unaware her search was in vain Dennehy had already struck she'd stabbed Kevin Lee to death at the same house in rolleston Garth where she'd murdered Lucas slabazevski 10 days earlier Lee was dennehy's third victim I wouldn't describe John dannehy as a serial killer I would describe her as a spree killer because there didn't seem to be any points during her her Killing Spree in which she returned to any semblance of what was a normal life for her it tended to be a continuous chain of events what is not in doubt instead these first three victims were simply a Prelude to what she hoped would be a further spree Dennehy again with the help of Gary stretch and this time another accomplice Leslie Layton deposited the bodies of John Chapman and Kevin Lee on the outskirts of town Chapman was placed at thorny Dyke the same spot where they dumped Lucas slabazevsky's body 10 days previously Kevin Lee was left 10 miles further north at nearby nubra Dennehy dressed Lee's body in women's clothing and left him positioned in a grotesque and crude manner with his buttocks exposed I think Joanna Dennehy was unusual in that she liked humiliating her victims it was clearly a modus operandi there and there was a clearly a motive pleasure of of killing somebody rather than doing it for some particular reason oblivious to the fate of our husband Christina Lee was becoming increasingly concerned about Kevin's whereabouts among the police then I went back with Paul Creed to one specific house because I noticed that the light wasn't on and then it was on when we went back later so I thought there's obviously somebody at the house and I just said to the police you know I'm really worried I expressed my concerns and gave them permission to break into the house which they did inside the house on rolleston Garth there were no obvious signs of trouble but the police immediately sensed that something was wrong they said that they could smell it was a really strong smell of bleach and they could see some Blood on the floor and you know I just knew and Christina wouldn't have to wait long for news of her husband the following day March the 30th 2013 police were called to an area of Farmland in nubra by a dog walker who'd made an horrific discovery on TV all the time the dreaded knock at the door and then to detectives came and obviously he had not been identified at that point but they just said that they'd found a body which you know I was expecting to hear that so they just kind of told me what I was expecting to hear you don't feel anything because you because you've got to and it's a feeling that you've never felt so you know where some people might think you'll be doing this you'll be doing that I don't know it's just kind of a blur really you just alive I think that's but not alive you just existing for police a very serious picture was beginning to emerge of a killer on the run with an Unstoppable determination for Destruction when is the next body going to turn up we've got to find it who did this and we got finally quickly detectives soon discovered Kevin Lee's burnt out car Christina had provided them with Denny his phone number and by using it they were able to form a crucial link they must have been trying to call it too and using their systems or whatever must have tracked it down through GPS that the location of Kevin's burnt out car was where this mobile had been so it was quite obvious that she'd been there they realized that he knows somebody called Joanne Dennehy and there was an affair between them and then they came across a man called Leslie Layton who they interviewed he tried to cover up he didn't know anything about them where they were which in fact he did he soon cracked because he was weak-willed spineless and he said yes dinner heat and stretch are on the Run they've gone East and they've probably come West and with that the police went wallet they they issued a national wanted alert for every agency in the country to find these this couple as quickly as possible dinner he and stretch were now wanted fugitives she reveled in the idea high on the thrill of being on the Run she loved the notoriety of it she relished the fact that the men around her were frightened on her in an attempt to try and evade the authorities Dennehy and stretch first headed to Norfolk where they burgled a house they then made their way across country to Hereford with the intention of selling the stolen goods to help fund their escape dinner here and stretch became a a sort of a hate to say this a Bonnie and Clyde type outfit their faces were in all the newspapers now they were wanted Most Wanted after they burgled another property in Hertfordshire the pair stopped 20 miles outside of Hereford to liaise with a man named Mark Lloyd who joined Dennehy and stretch on the journey they get an accomplice or a friend of theirs to bring the stolen property into Hereford town to sell it and it's at that point that denhee decides she wants to kill again it had been four days since the murders of John Chapman and Kevin Lee on April the 2nd 2013 with Mark Lloyd in tow Dennehy was caught on CCTV entering this small shop in Hereford at 3 30 p.m she seen pointing at the cashier in a threatening manner just 10 minutes after this footage was captured Dennehy in an unprovoked random attack attempted to murder a fourth man she had this terrific anger and bloodlust she's had a quarter bottle of whiskey she's been smoking Roll-Ups and she suddenly sees a man walking his dog in broad daylight and she says the stretch stops we stopped I want to kill him brandishing a knife then he jumps out of the car and runs up behind him and stabs him in the back den of his unfortunate victim was Robin baressa a 63 year old retired fireman you knew exactly how she what she intended to do I'm going to kill you she said to the fireman I want to hurt you I'm going to kill you and she plunges this five-inch lock knife into his back Time and Time and Time Again The Man thought he'd been punched he turned around and saw a covet in his blood he collapsed she calmly walked away and got in the car and said to stretch no let's go and find somebody else back in the car Dennehy took the time to pose for this selfie it seemed unbelievable to imagine but she wasn't finished having felt the thrill of attack once she hunted out her second victim of the day 10 minutes after the first attack she spots another man walking his dog and it was the same bloodthirsty scenario all over again she got out she told stretch to stop the car she got out with this very small knife uh walked up to him and plunged it into him time and time and time and time again can you imagine the shock this man wouldn't have known what was happening his broad daylight she's licking the blood off of the knife his blood he feels himself getting dizzy and sick and then he collapses and she takes this dog walks casually back to the car another car passes and she waves at the people in it are you getting the car and off they come this second helpless victim was John Rogers a 56 year old Hereford local Dennehy stabbed him more than 30 times it was an horrific and entirely spontaneous act completely lacking in reason it is a reflection of a brutality a viciousness a lack of any kind of control that makes Dennehy very unusual she is a most frightening figure who behaves in the most obscenely violent way imaginable almost defying belief when we look at the two attentive murders you know towards the end of her spree this is something altogether different these are strangers these are men that she doesn't know so I think what was happening here was that she was up in the ante she was getting bored you find that Psychopaths tend to have a promise to boredom and a need for stimulation so so she was even applying that to her murders remarkably both men survive these attacks although their injuries were life-threatening they were still able to give the police descriptions of Dennehy and the instantly recognizable star tattoo on her cheek by now the police sirens are going all round and blue lights are going all around herefordshire they're panickings like somebody's kicked over a wasp nest the local police had been alerted to her spree and were about to put an end to her Bloodshed they cornered Dennehy and stretch on Newton close in Hereford two officers turn up and they spot this car with Danity in it talking to the dog on the back seat while Gary stretched to try and negotiate stolen property at the front tour of one of his associates house they arrest Denny he on the spot Gary stretch and one of his friends do what they call him police parlance a runner they jump in another car and speed off something like a car chase goes on for about 20 miles and then stretch decides to get out and run for it now Mr Stretch is not built for Speed and of course he's very unfit and he's stopped and he generates the police officer said ah you've arrested me Joe and I would have been the next Bonnie and Clyde footage of Dennehy in custody at Hannaford police station just 40 minutes after stabbing two men and leaving them for dead showed her laughing and joking with the arresting officers or something we're going [Music] downhee is like a chameleon um she's become a very accomplished actor so she will play to whatever audience is in front of her um she can be charming and and sound very educated and literate and at the same time to another audience she could sound quite rough and quite downbeat so she's she's really honed these these skills of responding to to the people that are around her the following day April the 3rd 2013 the bodies of dennehy's other two victims were discovered just outside of Peterborough in a ditch on Farmland at thorny Dyke investigators found 31 year old Lucas slabazevski and 56-year-old John Chapman a close friend of Michelle Bowles we wasn't concerned till we actually noticed he was missing no one had seen him at all and next thing we knew the forensics were around the back of the house we were praying outside thinking please don't let it be John let him live if we had known what he meant and what she was going to do at the time we would have got John out of that house let him live with us but how are we supposed to know she was a serial killer to take John's life Lucas's life and Kevin's life why Joanne Denna he's pre-trial hearing was set for the 18th of November very difficult to understand quite how far the road is from a nice Suburban upbringing to a ditch in Peterborough where you're dumping the bodies and then you've stabbed to death it's an extraordinarily long road a very dangerous one and a very destructive one but she certainly traveled in and took some pleasure in the traveling at the hearing of the old bayley dinner he was devoid of remorse she laughed as proceedings took place and stunned her legal team when she chose to plead guilty the fact that Joanna Dennehy decided to admit murdering these three men and denying them a lawful burial took the whole of Court too by surprise including her defense Barrister who said that proceedings weren't going as anticipated so the judge asked Joanna denehy in the dock what she'd said she told him I have pleaded guilty and that's that Karim Khalil defending Gary stretch remembers the shock that rippled through the courtroom when this unexpected plea Was Heard it's surprised all I think that the judge seemed entirely satisfied with that result her Council asked for time to speak with her to see whether she really had meant what she just said and returned to tell the court that he actually entirely understood the charges against her she meant to plead guilty and that was the end of it many of the serial killers I've interviewed obviously is guilty of sin tried to hide behind the criminal justice system and use it as a defense uh to retreat back into it to use mitigation I didn't intend to kill somebody but I had a drink disorder a drug disorder I'm not culpable of committing these crimes basically I'm innocent John Dennehy it's not like that she just loved it Kevin Lee's Widow Christina couldn't bring herself to face the woman who dragged her husband down into her own sordid world and destroyed her family I went to court but I stayed in the family room I didn't want to be in there because I didn't want that thing to ever see my face I thought you haven't got the luxury to grace my face so therefore you shall not see me just that cocky and pathetic and so predictable and I just thought it's just so abhorrent that I thought no it's just best off in another room during the hearing den of his partner in crime Gary stretch argued he was manipulated by her throughout the Killing Spree Gary stretch's possession was that he had not known that she was going to kill any of the people that she killed whilst accepting that after the event um he was made aware that she had killed people and the difficulty of course that he confronted was the assertion that he was a willing participant in covering up those killings once he became aware of them there's no question in my mind that Dennehy did influence Gary stretch hugely John then he's somebody who was very much in the driving seat all the way through the the murders that she committed and the men were just there in in a supporting role she was she was the the center stage actor here and I think the fact that she was doing this on her own she wasn't coerced or compelled by it by anybody else does make her quite unique in a final Act of defiance Dennehy refused to relinquish control of her fate over to the legal system she stood up in court and told the judge exactly how she felt I don't want to be controlled by anybody I don't want to be in control by my lawyers by the police by anybody and that's what she told the judge get stuffed basically get stuffed your honor on February the 28 2014 Mr Justice Spencer sentenced Joanne Dennehy to a whole lifetime she became the first woman in British history to directly receive this highest of custodial sentences in a courtroom dinner he was immediately sent to bronzefield prison she will never be released dennehy's accomplices were also imprisoned for their part in her crimes Leslie Layton who helped dispose of two of the bodies received 14 years and Gary stretch received two life sentences it was a Bittersweet relief for Michelle Bowles the victim's family as well are carrying the life sentences in there carefully as long as these kids a lot of kids Lucas has never ever gonna have kids John you know he's never going to be around again none of them are he wasn't a horrible person he was one of the loveliest genuine people he could ever meet he really was he would have done anything for anybody it'll take years for Christina Lee and her family to get back to normal after dinner he callously ended the life of her husband personally it makes you want to rethink the death penalty to me that'd be too easy for somebody like that let them rot wherever they are really so yeah I expected that I think it was just so hideous how a female you know it's hard to even think that's a woman I say she got what she deserved not tall she didn't get what she deserves she just is where she needs to be it's just Everything Everything Has Changed and what was a family unit and people just learn about their business everything came crashing down he was a laugh a second he was the most one of the most optimistic persons I've ever come across never moaned about anything not negative about anything any problem would be overcome we laughed a lot no yeah we had a lot of fun Joanne Dennehy has refused to disappear quietly even in prison she's continued to wreak havoc from the day Joanna Dennehy was sentenced to prison she has exhibited more anti-social behavioral traits in as much as she's tried to escape twice she wanted to chop the fingers off a prison officer and use that on the electronic keypads to get out dinner here's absolute lack of remorse and the savagery involved in her crimes are Beyond The public's understanding of what a woman would usually be capable of John Donahue was unusual in that the most notorious women murderers in this country have tended to be associated with a man either Myra hendley associated with Ian Brady or Rose West associated with her husband Fred then he was kind of acting alone although she had people helping her a bit afterwards covering things up but she was a kind of self-motivated murderer I think the the reason that we're so fascinated and so shocked by female serial killers is because of our general expectations of the role of women in society we expect them to be the carers and the nurturers and the givers rather than the takers of life Dana he touched the public imagination because she was a young woman and one who seemed to contradict everything that most of us expect of women and to do so in such a Cavalier and violent way that she set herself apart from the female population she's in prison now and she's going to be in prison for the rest of her life but Joe and then he will not stop manipulating she will manipulate the system she'll work the system and when the time's right she'll definitely kill again it's difficult to comprehend the insatiable Killing Spree of Joanne Dennehy with a Lust For Blood and a twisted lack of morals she manipulated others along her way as she murdered Three Men and brutally attempted to kill two strangers in broad daylight the safest place for a dangerous individual like Joanne Dennehy is behind bars which is where she will remain for the rest of her life Lane County Courthouse Eugene Oregon May 8 1984 a U.S mail carrier and a mother of three stood accused of the murder of her daughter seven-year-old Cheryl and the attempted murder of her two other children eight-year-old Christy and three-year-old Danny her name Diane Downs Diane Downs was pure evil wrapped up in someone who had a smile to this day she has never admitted that she did the deed but when her daughter Christy testified the terrible truth was all too clear when the person asked her the question who shot you and your siblings she says my mum did it it was a court case that shook America and all the wild Downs insisted she'd never harmed her family she violated that sacred Duty and attempted In Cold Blood to kill all three of her children the callous murder of her daughter and attempted murder of her two other children makes Diane Downs one of the world's most evil killers [Music] foreign [Music] field Oregon May 1983 the small industrial town that lies next door to the City of Eugene was home to one of America's most reviled murderers Diane Downs the 27-year-old mother had driven her three children to a remote location just outside of town Diane Downs then pulled over to the side of the road and shot each of her three children seven-year-old Cheryl died her siblings Christy and Danny survived the ordeal but were left scarred this seemingly senseless attack stunned the nation foreign what makes this case exceptional is that Diane Downs doesn't look like any other mother who kills their children most mothers who kill their children their children are babies they're under the age of 12 months these mothers are from pretty desperate circumstances but Diane Downs was something altogether different clemson.com and we're talking about what the president did in deciding not to go talk show host Lars Larson was a young investigative reporter assigned to The Sensational story in 1983. this case involving Diane Downs really had everything it had a mother it had children murder and sex and mystery and you had an American murder suspect who had tried to murder her three children and succeeded with one of them and horribly wounded the other two Downs was having a relationship with a married man a fellow colleague at the U.S post Office where she worked Diane Downs said she was in love with this man this was the man she wanted to be with she thought that by eliminating the children that that would be the last hurdle she would have to jump over to be able to be with this man forever Downs had decided that he was the most important person in her life bar none here we've got a mother who relentlessly pursued her own wants and desires and really didn't care about her children I suspect she's a classic example of a narcissistic killer the only thing she thinks about is herself her children exist in the world for her she doesn't exist in the world for her children and her life history suggests that is true this was a way to change her life this was a way to get a new boyfriend the boyfriend she wanted and that meant so much to her that it was more important to her than the life of her children this Killer's Story begins over 60 years ago Diane Downs was born on August the 7th 1955. in Phoenix Arizona you know there's little to indicate that there was anything especially abnormal about her family life her father was a poster worker and her mum was a stay-at-home mother her father was quite the disciplinarian he had some quite strict rules he would often give lectures to his children about how to behave but it was very much a stereotypical American nuclear family as a teenager Diane met Stephen Downs while in high school and they became a couple when she was 17 Diane enrolled in Bible College in Orange California but soon problems began to brew Diane had gone to Bible college but that hadn't lasted very long she was only there for two semesters and she was kicked out of college because of quote her promiscuous behavior and and that's the theme that we see throughout her life after her expulsion Diane returned to her parents home in Arizona and married Stephen Downs they got married when she was 18. now she was very quick to to want to start a family and they soon had their child their first daughter Christy was born in October 1974. just over a year later Diane had her second child a girl she named Cheryl Diane and her husband had two children together and after this her husband decides that's it enough our family's complete and he goes and has a vasectomy but Anne is absolutely adamant she wants another child so she goes and has a short-term affair with another man and becomes pregnant with her son Danny [Music] I suspect that she engaged in what I call instrumental sex and what I mean by this is for some women sex is a tool it's a weapon they want to get pregnant because they believe that that will create a relationship Diane's seem to really enjoy the pregnancy stage of motherhood but when the baby actually arrived she didn't quite like that so much there are lots of reports that she left the children alone she left them unattended when they got home from school they were waiting on the porch for hours at a time in 1980 Diane and her husband Stephen divorced soon after Downs was pregnant again that's because she'd volunteered to be a surrogate mother at the time in the United States there were approximately 100 surrogate mothers in the entire country those are the estimates at the time so being a surrogate mom put you in a very rarefied piece of air you were unique and she was actually interviewed for a national newspaper in the early 1980s and she very much seemed to enjoy that experience so she's got a taste of that Limelight and and she will use her her role as a woman her role as a mother as a way to get people to look at her in 1981 she was paid ten thousand dollars by a couple desperate to have a child nine months later Downs gave birth to a baby girl that she handed to the sponsoring couple that same year she got a job with the U.S Postal Service there she had an affair that would be the Catalyst of catastrophe he was a married man who she encountered they they were sexually involved surprise surprise this is what she does and he was fine with just having an affair but once Diane Downs wanted a real relationship with him he he was done now she's had quite a lot of short-term relationships with people in this workplace in in the post office and he believes that actually this is just going to be a bit of a fling because he knows what her reputation is but she becomes quite fixated on him she wants them to have a longer term relationship but instead he ended things he made it very clear to her he didn't want to raise her children and he didn't want to have children by her and I believe at the point at which he says that to her is when she decided that if he won't have me with my children maybe he'll have me without them the key thing is that he doesn't want to be the stepfather to her children so her children at this point in time they become a barrier to her getting what she wants by the end of 1981 Diane Downs have moved over 1200 miles north to Springfield Oregon now after she moves to to Oregon she expects that he's just going to follow her and actually that doesn't happen he's not interested Diane Downs pursued the man she loved for nearly two years writing and even visiting him to plead for his affections to no avail the cold-hearted mother of three then came to an incredible conclusion in order to be with the man she loved she had to kill her children late in the afternoon of May the 19th Diane Downs took her three children eight-year-old Christy seven-year-old Cheryl and three-year-old Danny on a fateful Journey they were headed to a farm in the small rural town of Marcola just 12 miles away from their home in Springfield she's going kind of out of the way from from where she lived she's on the opposite side of town so she appears to be doing things that that aren't particularly rational the children had no idea that their mother had made a dreadful decision in order to run away with a man she was obsessed with Diane Downs had planned to kill her children that evening when we see a killer who says well I was going to kill my children and then I could be with this man forever we say well that's irrational that's crazy but to her I think it made perfect sense she's completely smashed any of our expectations about mothers they should put their children first and that is something that she's never done Diane Downs drove her three children to a co-worker's house in Marcola and her children get to see the horses and pet the horses and she talks to this co-worker and they visit for a while the problem was the woman she was visiting had no idea Downs was coming this friend doesn't seem to be able to make sense of why Diane has suddenly turned up there the unusual trip was part of Diane downs's carefully designed murder plan the visit to see the horses would serve as an alibi she thought if I could just get rid of these three children then I could go with the love of my life but she had to do it so she conspired for a long time she arranged this phony visit to a friend's house that she never visited before she conspired to be driving home late on a lonely road a long way from any houses or any activity I believe that she was planning this for at least days could have been even weeks one thing that we need to understand about these crimes is that because she's driving down the street with a loaded gun which means before she stepped into that car she knew she was going to kill her children in keeping with her pernicious plan after leaving the farm Diane Downs packed the children in the car and drove to a carefully chosen site on old Mohawk Road she pulled over and got out of the car we are talking about a premeditated homicide this is something that the average person thinks of as inconceivable and impossible with the children not suspecting a thing she went to the trunk of the car she pulled out a Ruger 22 caliber semi-automatic pistol walk back to the driver's side with the gun in hand When the Children First see the gun they have to be in total disbelief it has to be inconsistent with all of their experiences then she knelt on the seat lean forward towards her daughter seven-year-old Cheryl and from about six inches away fired on the case on the night of the attack was forensic expert Jim pecks one shot was in the back that exited about at the sternum and that was probably the bullet that was found in in the passenger side inside the vehicle as Cheryl tried to exit the car her mother lent out of the passenger side door and fired again there was a another shot in the lower torso here that stayed in her after the first bullet is fired the second and third bullets are fired within seconds when a gun is fired in a closed space like a car it is very loud I mean it is booming shocking on its own is stunning and for children more so decks down shorter three-year-old son in the back the boy was on the driver's side back seat uh had a single wound gunshot wound to the spine she then shot her daughter Christy in the chest twice as the girl raised her hand to defend herself a bullet ripped through the thumb of her left hand there was a bullet penetrating wound that went through her hand exited near the thumb and then into her chest in the back of the car Christy and Danny were clinging to life lying in the foot while in the front Cheryl was mortally wounded I suspect that Diane Downs chose to shoot her children because in placing distance mentally and physically between her and them it's a cold calculated decision you don't have to be staring into somebody's eyes to do it foreign it was a clinical and cruel attack but downs's evil plan was far from over while her children Lay Dying Diane Downs continued with her coldly conceived plan and covered her tracks not only did she know she was going to kill her children she knew that she was going to have to in order to make it look like somebody else did it she was gonna have to shoot herself so she shot herself in in the arm she knew she could probably get away with shooting through the fleshy part of her arm not do any permanent damage not break a bone not incapacitate herself and then she arranged to take a bandage that she'd already folded up and put in the trunk of her car it was a large piece of cloth to wind it around her arm because she had shot herself in her own left arm down Zen drove the six miles to the Mackenzie willemette Hospital in Springfield gunshot wounds particularly multiple gunshot wounds the damage that can be done is tremendous if it's not destroyed something vital like the heart then you've got serious problems with ongoing bleeding and that can be rapidly fatal a number of minutes could do it if Downs are driven at top speed she might have got help for her children in about 10 minutes but that is not what she did realizing the children were still alive she drove very very slowly so slowly that she actually held up traffic and what's amazing to me and what makes this a special moment is here are her children they've been shot they're on the literal precipice of death and and she's traveling 10 miles an hour to make sure from her perspective that they don't get to the hospital on time and we know this because of witnesses who pulled up behind her on the road couldn't figure out why is she going so slowly and because it was such a winding Lonely Road these people had to follow for a long period of time that represents a sordid departure from her obligations as a mother like I have never seen that was her last chance to save those children that was the last chance for her super ego for her moral self to step in and say I've got to stop and it didn't happen and and that that made it a truly horrible moment maybe more horrible than the shooting itself because at that point she proved herself Beyond Redemption Downes is peculiar driving continued to attract attention from other cars and their Curious passengers a family that happened to be on the same road had a child in the car I think he was eight or nine years old and earlier in the day they had seen a red automobile with Arizona plates which happened to be red he says to his mother are all the cars from Arizona red that's the kind of comment a child would make but it would cement your mind so they knew that they were following a car they would later identify as dying Down's car who had a red Nissan car with red Arizona license plates on it Diane Downs pulled into the Springfield hospital about 30 minutes after she'd shot her children she finally gets to the hospital she spills out of the car says to the emergency room Personnel please save my children well one of them has already died the other two were just just barely saved Cheryl the middle daughter she was Dead on Arrival at hospital she had been shot and she had choked on her own blood she died in pain her daughter Christy has also been shot twice but she's alive Danny the son had been shot once and he was clinging on to life as well on arrival at hospital Christian not even able to speak so we may have a mixture of direct trauma there injury to the brain from a stroke and the shock the horror of what's happened to her and she ultimately suffers a stroke most likely it's the result of blood loss so in her case it wasn't lethal but it was totally life-changing Danny has been shot and he is paralyzed because of the damage to his spinal cord only one member of the family had a bandage on their wounds she's got these these three one fatally injured child in the car and she she goes into the hospital and she is the only one that appears to have a dressing she's the only one who appears to have an injury that's been treated so that suggests to me that actually she's put herself first again she's made sure that she's okay she's nursed her own injury whilst her children were in the car dying every action downs talk in the wake of the attempted murder of her three children was part of a perverse plot one that painted herself and her family as the victims of a random attack I think the fact in the case that is the most extraordinary is that after she mustered up whatever courage it took to shoot three of her children um she had to create the impression that somehow she was a victim she wasn't a victim in this case she was a coldly calculating mother who had decided to eliminate her children as the roadblock between her and her life with this man Downs had concocted an incredible story about a bushy-haired stranger a mysterious carjacker who shot her children Downs claims she managed to trick the murderous man and drove hell for leather all the way to the hospital in order to save her fatally wounded children but as the investigation would soon prove downs's story was part of a desperate and devious scheme she'd formulated to get away with murder the McKenzie willemette Medical Center May the 19th 1983 Springfield Oregon so in the hospital she starts to put aside her version of events she says that the car was flagged down by a bushy-haired stranger she said had been attacked on a lonely road late at night and she was on her way driving home and she sees a man her story and decides to stop he's signaling for help according to Downes when she got out of the car the bushy-haired man shot her in the arm and then he shot her three children what didn't make sense is that he would shoot her in the arm here not in the head not in the chest but shoot her in the arm and then shoot her three children inside the car blood everywhere and then she claimed that she had her keys for her car on a ring kind of like the ring that I have and she said she pretended to throw it the way you can say pretend to throw a ball for your dog while he's distracted she jumps in the car she says pulls her doors shut and manages to drive off she says at high speed I believe she said I drove like a mad woman The Sensational story that Diane Downs told about the events baffled everyone the story that didn't make sense at all was that Diane Downs would stop her car open her door and get out of the car for this man who she didn't know but it was not just the odd tale that was troubling downs's extraordinary Behavior at the hospital also alarmed observers but according to the doctor in charge at the hospital she was calm she was quite self-assured she appeared to be in control of her behavior she was occasionally laughing she was occasionally giggling staff at the hospital described her reaction as surprising Danny sustained a shot to the spine and when his mother was told about this she seemed to be quite surprised oh so it didn't hit him in the heart suggesting that perhaps that was her intention when she shot him again when she was told of Christie's injuries she showed little compassion for her injured child Diane told the doctors that if if her daughter was going to have you know any kind of brain damage to let her die this is very unusual as an as an immediate response but it was her daughter Christy's reaction to her own mother that set alarm bells ringing Diane comes into the room where Christy is in the hospital and she leans over the bed and starts saying to Christy I love you and from the people in the room they say that Christy looked absolutely terrified they noticed that her heart rate had gone through the roof when Diane came into the room so this is a little girl who is very frightened she's afraid of her mother and and this is a really clear indication of that she's scared that her mother is going to try and harm her again for one of the children to wake up with the memory that her mother shot her is it's just Indescribable it it it the universe becomes unstable and untrustworthy this the Sky Has Fallen her attitude and demeanor in the hospital was very unusual uh for for the kind of incident that occurred uh to her own children and so that was probably one of the first indications by the deputy who was there that this this doesn't look right as they did not believe downs's version of the events investigates as quickly identified her as the prime suspect in the aftermath of this attack the decision is made to to remove the children from Diane's care to to put them into to foster care they became Wards of the state so Diane at this point has lost her children the police did not immediately arrest Downs instead they meticulously gathered evidence in the case state trooper and forensic expert Jim pecks was called The Night of the incident I received a call from the sheriff's office that there had been a shooting and involved a woman and her children and that there was a need to process a vehicle Jim pecks closely examined the entire car that night and in daylight the whole of the next day when he looked at the passenger side door and the areas underneath the car he made a series of discoveries that would break the case wide open as far in A bloodstain in the door jamb of the passenger door and the direction was wrong and it came from the outside [Music] according to Diane Downs the bushy-haired man was standing outside the vehicle on the driver's side of the car but Jim pecks had found that the murdered girl's blood had spattered back onto the door jamb on the passenger side of the car the opposite side to where the bushy-haired man had supposedly attacked you can see that there is a small blood stain here so the door was open at the time that this blood stain was created outside the vehicle the blood spatter meant the victim in this case seven-year-old Cheryl was shot at least once when she was outside the car of the passenger side of the vehicle [Music] strings are used to show the position of the origin of these bloodstains and from when they traveled through the air and struck the side of the vehicle crucially Jim pecks also found some tiny droplets of blood under the car as well on the rocker panel on the passenger side this particular slide shows the rocker panel that's underneath you can see on here on this lower portion here there are a number of very small blood stains these are probably one to two millimeters in size this discovery LED Jim to an irrefutable conclusion when I found the blood spatter outside the vehicle that was a you know something is amiss in this story because that's a long ways away to shoot someone who is very close to the rocker panel I knew from the size of the droplets that it was created by someone who's coughing blood or a contact near contact shot the muzzle would have to be close to get droplets that were that small then you have to stop back and think when the individual The bushy-haired Stranger allegedly is standing outside the driver's door let's take some pretty long arms to get clear over there and outside the passenger door what Jim pecks did not find further confirmed their suspicions there were no blood spatters on the driver's side of the car at all if the bushy-haired man had attacked us downson said Jim would have expected to find Blood spatters on the driver's side of the car but there were none so the again it arouses our suspicions in law enforcement that something is amiss here if someone's not telling the truth it's a Jim packs and his fellow detectives that whoever shot seven-year-old Cheryl could not have been standing outside the car on the driver's side the evidence also showed that the shooter fired the gun within inches of the victim's body and that was significant in her case because one of the children had tried to open the car door to escape either because Diane Downs was shooting the two kids in the back or because she had already been shot and fell out of the car and she was shot again foreign [Music] in the car showed how Christy and Danny had been shot and where those shots came from in looking at the at the clothing that all of the children had on I was able to do specific tests to determine how far away the end of the muzzle was from each of them at the time that the shot was fired you can tell both from Powder Burns because when when the bullet is fired there's a certain amount of of powder that comes out and it's still burning if a gun is fired at very close range to either clothing or to skin it will cause burning around that that you will not see if somebody is shot from a greater distance Jim pecks concluded the two children in the back seat had been shot by someone who'd fired from inside the car and from Point Blank Range detectives now had proof that Diane Downs his story about a mysterious bushy-haired stranger was a lie whoever shot the children must have been inside the car when they fired the Fatal shots the physical evidence the blood splatter evidence did not conform to the way she described the crime so it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that she was the perpetrator meanwhile Diane Downs was left free to talk to the press and protest her innocence was decided to go ahead and continue to let her talk because we knew there was a relationship to her with this shooting and so she she continued to harangue law enforcement and imply that we're looking at her and that we weren't looking for The bushy-haired Stranger yeah she was right we weren't Downs was now the only suspect in the murder of her daughter Cheryl and the attempted murder of her other two children Christy and Danny all three had been shot at night in the family car on a lonely country road after a day out when forensic expert Jim pecks found spent bullet cases inside the car he determined that all the victims had been shot with a 22 caliber semi-automatic weapon so they issued a warrant and searched Diane downs's house in Springfield the police are quite surprised at what they find this does not look like a family home this looks like the home of a rather narcissistic single woman so there are three pictures on top of the television stand of Diane also one of the things that the police find is a a unicorn which appears to be a kind of Memorial to the children it has their names on it and a date on it but surprisingly this wasn't something that Diane came to acquire after the attack it's something that was already there before so she's memorializing her children even before they're dead the question becomes how can a mother maim two of her children and kill another child and live with herself and the answer is she can live with herself only if the only thing in her Universe was her narcissism and herself her children don't exist they from her perspective was an obstruction between her and her new love beyond that they were nothing when the detectives found downs's diary her motivation for attempting to murder her three children was eerily clear in that diary she talks an awful lot about the co-worker that she's become incredibly fixated on and it becomes quite clear to police that this relationship with him is the reason that she's tried to kill her children was because they were the barrier they were the obstacle that was standing in the way of her relationship with him during the search the police also found a 22 caliber rifle and their hopes were peaked though is certainly suspicious it's a 22 rifle so you know is this potentially the murder weapon we took the rifle back to the crime laboratory I test fired the rifle and compared the the tool marks created by the rifle to the cartridge casings that were found at the scene they were different so the rifle was not used in the commission of this crime the unspent bullets found in the magazine cartridge did provide a vital clue that would help solve the case even though the marks on the cartridges from the rifle didn't match test fires that I performed with the rifle they had the same extractor marks on them as the casings that I retrieved from the vehicle the extractor marks are made on the soft shell casing when a bullet is ejected from the barrel of a gun the way the gun gets rid of that bullet is a thing called an ejector as that gun Cycles pulls the shell back and then kicks it out of a port and and it's gone and then Chambers another round let's say you have a pistol that's already loaded and you decide I want to unload the gun you would then release the magazine that's all the other bullets and then pointing it in a safe Direction you pull the slide and when you pull it back it will take the unfired bullet so bulletin shell and kick it out of the gun she had apparently done this had cycled some rounds of ammunition through the gun and they had ejector marks on them even within the same brand make model and year of a gun those ejector marks are somewhat unique even if you had two identical Ruger pistols the ejector marks will be slightly different their imperfections in manufacturing of the gun there'll be small differences but there will be differences Jim pecks plays two 22 caliber bullets side by side under a comparison microscope one ejected by danza's rifle and the other one that was found inside the crime scene car what you have is a Split Image down the middle and what we're looking at are extractor marks and as you can see by the fine striations here these extractor marks were both made by the same extractor which means there is a relationship between the cartridge casings from the crime scene and the cartridges from her apartment then we knew that this is a breakthrough moment where there is a relationship to the fired casings that hit the children to the cartridges that were inside the tubular magazine of the rifle checking sales records police knew that Diane Downs had owned a Ruger 22 caliber semi-automatic pistol after test firing one exhaustively Jim pecks found similar extractor marks on the bullet casings he concluded that a Ruger 22 caliber pistol was the murder weapon but it was never found while Diane Downs managed to dispose of the gun but at home she had a rifle that also shot 22 caliber rounds and when the police processed this evidence they found that they were the same manufacturer as the bullets that were used to shoot her children they had ejector marks on them some of them that were the same as the ejector marks from the pistols the bullet casings and their Telltale extractor marks were enough to convict Diane Downs for the murder and attempted murder of her three children on February the 28 1984 nine months after the crime she was brought into custody when the arrest finally went down I think the whole town breathed the sigh of relief she appeared at the Lane County Courthouse for her arraignment after the charges were read Diane down sprung a major surprise her attorney stands up and after he's finished all the legal arguments says and besides your honor my client is pregnant and it would be bad for her health to go to jail I was sitting in that corner seat you could hear the entire room take a big deep breath it was stunning just absolutely stunning according to rumors the father was a local reporter there was one reporter that had sex with her and I can tell you this it wasn't me and she became pregnant from that but she loved the attention that she got by the time the trial began on May the 8th 1984 Downs was eight months pregnant obviously she was pregnant at the time of the trial and this was something that I think she thought would help her Garner quite a bit of sympathy her Antics however were not enough to fool the jury a mountain of evidence went a long way to convincing them of Diane downs's culpability in the crime then her surviving daughter Christy took to the stand this little girl had to have been under so much strain and stress her mother's tried to kill her she's living with a new family her sister is dead her brothers in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and now she has to sit in front of a room full of strangers talk about the most difficult night of her life [Music] when the the person asks her the question who shot you and your siblings she says my mum did it this was one of those moments in court where everything is dead still nobody dares breathe Christy laid out how her mother first shot Cheryl then turned and shot Danny in the back then shot her twice in the chest the testimony just tore your heart apart this wasn't the critical piece of information there was lots of physical evidence of what Diane Downs had done but I think this was essential in making sure that Diane Downs was convicted of the crime she committed on June the 17th 1984 the jury found Diane Downs guilty of the murder of her seven-year-old daughter Cheryl and the attempted murder of her daughter Christy and son Danny she was sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years [Music] ten days after she was found guilty Diane gave birth to a baby girl the child was immediately given up for adoption at the same time the prosecutor in the case Fred huge adopted the two children who survived their mother's attack after the trial was over Fred adopted the two children and he did a wonderful job of raising those two kids so I admire him for that that was a lifetime commitment to be the father and his wife the mother to these children that they really deserved and that Diane Downs denied to them [Music] in prison Diane Downs managed another surprise on July the 11th 1987 three years after her incarceration she escaped she got out of the prison easy as pie climbed the fence she was loose for more than a week and she was only about 10 blocks away she was staying with some men later one of the men said he thought she was trying to get pregnant Diane Downs the mother who tried to kill her three children was returned to prison where to this day she protests her innocence I can tell you that for all the stories I've covered Diane down stands out because this woman was pure evil she did something that's unheard of she violated that sacred Duty an attempted In Cold Blood to kill all three of her children for no other reason than to increase your chances at having a particular boyfriend I don't think they're worse than they'll buy your own mother your mother is the the one that should nurture you should protect you the cold-hearted murder of her daughter Cheryl and the attempted murder of her two other young children Christy and Danny makes Diane Downs one of the world's most evil killers November the 30th 1989 Central Florida when a 51 year old male picked up a prostitute from the side of the road he had no idea that she would turn out to be a cold-blooded killer she was just utterly remorseless this was somebody who enjoyed watching Men die she shot him four times with a nine shot revolver in her mass murder spree hardened killer Eileen warnos targeted middle-aged wealthy men with expensive cars if she kills deal we would know sympathy no she was just a ruthless mean [ __ ] very few women ever killed in such a violent and vile manner in history eventually she was recorded confessing with the help of her girlfriend how did you do this why did you do this in just one year this female serial killer callously shot robbed and murdered seven men making Eileen warnos one of the world's most evil killers oh really [Music] [Music] [Music] Daytona Beach Florida it was here that sex worker Eileen warnos went on a murderous Rampage between November 1989 and November 1990. her actions left locals fearing for their lives Munos shot and killed at point-blank range seven men between 1989 and 1990. here is somebody who is deliberately targeting men who are looking to engage in the services of a sex worker and she is killing them and robbing them and disposing of their bodies detective David Taylor was on the police task force that was instrumental in bringing warn us to Justice the community that once we identified alien Warners as the killer of these men that a female was that vicious in killing these people about nine in ten serial killers on men and one in ten are women female serial killers tend to use quite remote methods like poisoning but mournals literally went and picked victims as they drove Pastor on the highway it's very rare to have a female serial killer but it's even rarer to have one that kills in the way that the world did she essentially killed like a man Mike Joyner was an undercover police officer on the wernos case and was key to her arrest she would be on the side of the road and prostitute and she would pick up a man as they stopped to help her and then she would take them somewhere and kill him and take their money or take whatever value they had detective Brian Jarvis was also on the warnost task force and he recalls the impact her Killing Spree had on Florida at this particular time because of the way the bodies were found the way things turned up there there's a lot of panicle over this to have a serial killer on the loose is something that is going to have an impact on any Community everybody in Florida uses the highways everybody feels that they have that connection to this case this killer Story begins in 1956 Eileen warnos was born on the 29th of February in Rochester Michigan a mother was just 16 years old when she gave birth and was unable to raise her by March 1960 when Ali's just four she's formally adopted by her mother's parents her grandparents she had a really brutal upbringing with them so she was regularly beaten by her grandfather there were allegations of incest within the family her grandfather had a home-built sauna in his house and if he wanted to punish her for doing something he didn't like he'd lock her in the sauna and crank up the heat and just let her stay in there Eileen's abusive childhood sent her on a downward spiral and fueled her hatred of men this was somebody who was constantly in fear someone else's grandfather allegedly repeatedly said to her that she was worthless that she should never have been born that she was a mistake so she's learning that she can't trust anyone that she can't depend upon anybody and this is very very dangerous Eileen learned early to use any means available to survive before she got to routine years she was known as a cigarette Bandit she would trade sexual favors for packs of cigarettes from around Evan she Asing her body as something to trade as a tool and this kind of disconnection from her emotions is something that that is going to have a significant impact on the rest of her life her behavior left her pregnant aged 14. now on the orders of her grandfather that baby is adopted it's taken away from her and this is just reinforcing those ideas that she already has that those who are supposed to love me hurt me that I am worthless that I'm not deserving of love shortly after she was forced to give up her child Eileen was hit by another tragedy a grandmother dies of liver failure having been quite a heavy drinker for many years her grandfather actually blames her for her grandmother's death her grandfather was Furious and through warnos out of the house age just 15 warn us was left homeless alone her only option was to live in the woods at the end of their Street she lives a very feral existence sleeping in an old car and she's still a child at this point and and this is incredibly damaging there is absolutely nobody there for her she is literally just taking each day as it comes she's making sure that she has enough to eat she is is basically using her body as she's used it before she's learning that life is full of rejection it's full of pain it's full of fear and that she really needs to hurt others before they get the chance to hurt her one person she was still close to was her brother Keith just 11 months older than Eileen the rumor was that their relationship was an unnatural one there were allegations of incest and school friends of Keith said that they'd witnessed these things going on so she felt a connection but it was a very pathological and a very toxic one unable to cope living outside during the cold winter months in Michigan age 16 Eileen hitchhiked over a thousand miles west to the warmer climbs of Colorado two years later she was arrested for her first offense driving under the influence and disorderly conduct which included the dangerous discharge of a 22 caliber weapon eventually in 1976 age 20 she hitchhiked 2 000 miles Southeast to sunny Florida [Music] it is no accident that very shortly after she gets to Florida she falls in love with or at least decides to marry a 69 year old man called Lewis Gratz fell he was president of the yacht club but it was a doomed marriage she's been incredibly violent towards him Eileen was actually beating him up she was hitting him with his own walking cane Lewis put a restraining order on warn us and filed for annulment just weeks after they were married while the proceedings were going through Eileen received some devastating family news in 1976 her brother Keith dies of throat cancer and she's absolutely beside herself and even though their relationship was an incredibly abnormal and dysfunctional one she felt that she had an ally in him but now she was completely on her own Eileen received ten thousand dollars when her brother died spends it almost within weeks guns cars motel rooms and then she decides she has to sustain this lifestyle and turns to armed robbery to do it in 1981 she was arrested for stealing thirty five dollars and two packets of cigarettes from a convenience store one I spent over a year in jail but that didn't deter her over the next decade her criminal activity escalated she really did demonstrate versatility she was being arrested for driving Under the Influence for assault and battery for for robbery one man claimed when she was a prostitute again that she whipped a gun out and put it to his head and demanded two hundred dollars she was to put it politely out of control in 1986 juanas met a woman who changed her life when she met Tyree what Aileen thought this is my soul mate this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with and I will do anything for this girl the owner of The Last Resort bar in Daytona Beach Al bulling remembers who won US well who was a regular customer she used to come in here she chewed Paul here with her girlfriend Ty she was a she was a little mouthy with Eileen if she needed a beer she'd sit on a pool table and kind of demand her get her another beer or whatever having blown her inheritance warn us took it upon herself to raise the money the two needed to live alien would go out and prostitute to make money so that she could buy things for tyrea she would want to take care of her and make sure she was happy and and never want to leave her and I think that was what it boiled down to Daytona Beach Florida November the 30th 1989 33 year old Eileen warnos was now living with lover tyria Moore and was indulging in a host of petty crimes to maintain their extravagant lifestyle frequency of the crimes and the force warnos used to enact them was increasing it all came to a head the night she was picked up by 51 year old Richard Mallory Richard Mallory owned an electrical repair shop and he'd been forced for many years and he didn't make any secret of the fact that he did enjoy engaging in the services of sex workers he picked her up hitchhiking they were drinking they were hanging out as it were and one thing led to another some type of violent encounter where she ended up killing him she shot him four times with a nine shot revolver she took a couple of pieces of proper that belonged to him a camera and a radar detector and she pawned them she made some money off of the deal when Richard Mallory's body was found two weeks after he was killed there was no evidence to clarify what sparked her rage his body was found it was it was very decomposed basically all we have to work with is what we have found at the crime scene the physical evidence and the trace evidence Etc we do know that he was shot multiple times and his victim was found in a secluded area right outside the city of Daytona what triggered warn us to kill for the first time remains a mystery but what is certain is that the murder of Richard Mallory was the beginning of a dark and deadly chapter for her entire life wernos has been victimized by men she's been abused by them but now she's turned the table she's the one that's in control and she's very much enjoying it because she's learned from a very early age that violence equals power and she really is on quite a high at this point taking one life once wasn't enough six months later Warner struck again there's usually what they call a brief cooling off period and this absolutely applied here large part of it was due to her paranoia and her fear of of getting and when she came back from that brief cooling off period now she was the Predator she was looking for who she was going to kill next she's somebody who's being proactive she's seeking out victims she's getting access to them she has an opportunity to harm them and she takes that opportunity these men they were all white males they were all traveling the roads along they were middle-aged 40 to 65. on May the 19 1990 she was picked up on the I-75 Highway by a 43 year old machine operator David Spears when they pulled over and he began to undress she slipped out of the passenger's side door walked around to the driver's side aimed and fired he'd been shot six times one shot was not enough for warn us she was making a point with her killings she was saying this is for all the men who have abused me over the years this was somebody who enjoyed watching Men die because For the first time in her life she was powerful she was the one in control she was the one calling the shots David was last seen by his son leaving work at midday to meet his ex-wife when he didn't show up his family reported him missing our Patrol Division had come upon a vehicle that was abandoned on I-75 it was in the southbound lane on the shoulder it had a flat tire and when they ran the VIN number on the vehicle it came back to David Spears who had been reported a missing person we searched the area we secured the vehicle to process it and we found that she had taken some stuff out of the vehicle and tossed it off the side of the road into the the weeds the items included the license plate or the tag from the car David Spears body was found less than two weeks later dumped in Citrus County a few miles from the I-75 Highway foreign ERS went on the prowl again in Pasco County Florida 40-year-old Charles kaskaden a part-time rodeo rider picked up one us about 30 minutes north of Tampa he was traveling back from St Louis he had been up there visiting his mother and he drove back from St Louis to the champ area where he was living with his fiancee and just before he got to Tampa he encountered Aileen Eileen had developed a deadly routine once a man picked her up his fate was sealed they would drive away and she'd be undressing and they'd find her a remote location she'd encourage the victim to also remove his clothes as Charles undressed Warner slipped out of the car and came round to the driver's side door then at Point Blank Range she fired she didn't just kill she shot Charles garcadden nine times once she was sure he was dead she took his car and his possessions she didn't do that with Richard Mallory she just took it if she could use now she's starting to gather those those souvenirs and those trophies and and it's becoming a passion of hers to do this stuff she then dumbed Charles his body a few miles from the highway in Pasco County she left these victims basically in the middle of nowhere and to do that to another human being there's zero compassion she's Pure Evil just a week after her last killing the deadly predator was on the hunt again on June the 7th oneos chose to work her favorite Highway the I-75 in Central Florida after three murders she'd honed her technique victims were all men who drove expensive cars so they were the symbol of success that night Christian Missionary Peter Sims age 65 left his home in Jupiter Florida and was driving north on the I-75 Peter Sims was on a road trip and he never made it to his destination his intent was to drive up to New Jersey and from there he had planned on going over to Arkansas he had a number of Bibles in the car with him he was going to pass them out along the way instead for some unknown reason Peter Sims picked up Eileen warnus he could not have thought of as a more upright character he also took part in an Outreach Christian Ministry but I think that that infuriated warnos because she thought you hypocrite I'm going to kill you and she duly did the following month the car was found in the Okala National Forest 50 miles west of Daytona Beach the evidence discovered would point to warn us as the terrifying serial killer targeting middle-aged men across the Sunshine State Daytona Beach Florida July 1990. Eileen warnos was living in a local motel with her girlfriend tyrea Moore in under seven months the serial killer had callously shot murdered and robbed four men in what was by now a sadistic pattern when each of the middle-aged men pulled over and picked her up the 34 year old sex worker attacked she was just utterly remorseless she didn't just shoot them once she'd shoot them three times four times five times they had all been shot with a small caliber weapon namely a 22. and another trait that these victims shared was that they had all been robbed with their personal effects their pants back is pulled inside out their personal ID was missing in their vehicles was missing as well on July the 4th 1990 the car belonging to 65 year old Peter Sims was found abandoned in the Okala National Forest in Orange Springs an hour's drive from Daytona Beach now this is interesting because his body has never been discovered the only way we know that he's dead is that his car was taken by Moore and warnos and driven around Aileen and tyrea had decided that they wanted to go see the fireworks in Daytona Beach as they were driving they noticed a sign that indicated there was an Indian Reservation up in the Ocala Forest they turned around and tyrea was going just a little bit too fast she went off the road the car turned on its passenger side and sled the engine had stalled out the carburetors flooded they couldn't get it started the witness reported the suspicious encounter to Marion County police department in Florida who went to investigate now the one thing that was important to note here was that was the first time somebody actually saw these girls we had received a telephone call through our 9-1-1 Center that a vehicle had crashed in the community of Orange Springs Florida and walking away from that vehicle were two women when they got to the scene the investigators searched the car and made note of its distinct condition the license plate had been removed the driver's side seat was in the forward most position and we would find that certain things were missing from his vehicle in this case it was his receipt book in in cash so at this point we have another missing person we have no idea what happened to him using the VIN number on the vehicle the car was soon identified it's been longing to missing person Peter Sims we searched the areas extensively I don't know if it was for days or weeks but it was a long time it was spent up there looking for Peterson's body looking for any type of evidence the police found a series of pawn shop tickets in the car when they tracked down the store they made a major breakthrough in the case one point ticket we found was for a box of tools and that's what was one of the things that was stolen from David Spears the other Pawn ticket we found was for a 35 millimeter camera and a radar detector that's what was stolen from Richard Mallory they submitted the car to forensic examination and made an important discovery on the driver's side door handle Unos leaves a palm print in seams his car which will eventually become extremely significant my last word porn many of the items that she stole from her victims in order to get some fast money and her fingerprints would still be on these items now because Eileen had such a significant criminal record her fingerprints were on file and it was only going to be a matter of time before they were matched up and she was connected to these murders but before the police could piece the puzzle together one are struck again it became very frustrating and I can remember even at times thinking are we going to be able to solve this are we going to be able to come up with something and every time we got another body it mounted it it you know it got worse on July the 30th 1990 won US selected her fifth victim a 50 year old salesman called Troy Bullis Troy Burris he had gone out to do a delivery run and when he got to Daytona he headed north up into Ormond Beach made a few stops up there turned around when he was returning to the plant he disappeared on the way back to Daytona he picked up Eileen like previous victims Troy pulled up at a secluded spot minutes later Warner shot him twice at Point Blank Range 50 year old Troy's body was found five days later one of our deputies came upon his truck and had been abandoned at the intersection of State Route 40 and 19 very isolated area a month later she took her sixth life on September the 12th 1990 56 year old retired police chief Charles Dick Humphries was coming off the I-75 when he picked up Eileen warnos they drove to a deserted location a few miles off the highway in Southwestern Marion County and pulled over David Taylor was the homicide detective called to the scene the evidence is consistent with Mr Humphreys getting out of the vehicle from the driver's side we're looking at alien warn us getting out from the passenger side and it was at that point that shots rang out so Mr Humphrey just shot several times he staggers over to this location and that's where Mr Humphrey's collapses but what was so important to us was the fact that he was shot one time at a close non-contact range beating that the gun was held only just a few inches away from his chest when that round was fired when I shot Charles Humphries multiple times [Music] she's using violence than she needs doing this Overkill it's not enough to kill him she has to destroy this individual and this is somebody whose behavior is escalating by the Autumn of that year investigators were still unable to identify the Killer and stop the murders foreign by the time Mr Humphreys was killed we had thought about there being a connection so we had contacted every agency in Central Florida whether it was on a local state or federal level because we didn't know anything we were almost in the dark on this and it was very frustrating officers Revisited the evidence from the previous six murder cases searching for Clues and it wasn't more than just a couple weeks later when Sergeant Brian Jarvis was actually going through other cases in Florida that had very similar MOS such as an older white male shot multiple times vehicle missing in the shot with a small caliber weapon and it was Brian that began to connect a couple dots by winter of 1990 a task force was formed made up of detectives from several of Florida's counties thank you we actually all met at the Marion County Sheriff's Office that's when this picture began to evolve no there's a possibility these cases could be related while the police continued that investigation one US was free to kill again the most important thing on our minds at that point is we got to stop The Killing we have to do something to Stop The Killing and we started with the task force and we had another body it was it was devastating she kills water Gino Antonio a man of 62 who was found in a Logging Road he'd been shot four times in the back and the head and his car had been stolen Antonio's abandoned car was found five days later just south of Daytona Beach in Brevard County Water Gino Antonio he was a reserve deputy sheriff with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office and some of the things that were taken from him personal facts were like us at a handcuffs and a flashlight but the task force another murder was a mighty blow it's like why couldn't we do more you know how could we let this happen it's kind of a personal blame and uh what can we do the task force refocused on the case of missing man Peter Sims hoping to find clues that would lead them to the killer we were perplexed with that case because we had not located his body but he was a middle-aged white male the biggest piece of evidence in that case was we had eyewitnesses that see these two females leaving the scene of that crash and after interviewing the witnesses the police were able to draw a composite sketch of the two women and that changed everything I think the Eureka moment came the first time we went public within the first hour of releasing these Composites we had a call that came in it was I item number five our fifth lead that named tyrea and Aileen and in very short sequence we had three other leads come in that also named the same girls so now we knew there was something to that those leads initially took us to some biker bars now we have undercover investigators that are now going from bar to bar looking for people that look familiar with the people in the composite sketches one of the undercover offices sent to find the suspected serial killer was Mike Joyner I was the lieutenant over a special Investigation Unit SIU unit that called me in to a meeting and said today had found out that she was staying in Daytona or close to Daytona and wanted me to go over there and see if I could find her some of those biker bars over there and maybe you know get close to it Daytona Beach Florida January 1991 after callously shooting and murdering seven men the net was finally closing in on a cruel serial killer Eileen warnos she is a woman who took pleasure in not only killing but also robbing her victims wernos is targeting adult men sex workers who are vulnerable symptoms of their clients so she looks very different she kills like a man she is right in front of them watching them die and really quite enjoying it 34 year old warn us did not know it yet but she was about to meet her Destiny in Daytona Beach after a composite sketch was released to the public dozens of leads came in and Eileen warn us was identified as the prime suspect we'll review the leads it showed us that they had ties to the locations that we were looking at that indicated that they'd gone Inland which would have been Marion County and then to the east coast which was Daytona Beach so a number of the undercover officers from all over the state that we were working with went over to Daytona Beach in an attempt to locate her within a couple of days she was found by undercover police officer Mike Joyner I walked in a bar down there and uh I saw her she was shooting pool and I recognized her and she had a bad scar on her forehead did my heart go to racing and beating no an uncover offer work then we had can be yourself if you don't control his emotions so I just ordered another beer kept on working but I knew I had her you know I knew I was going to let it out of my sight Mike spent three days following one us around the biker bars in the area in his bed to get close to her he even slept at her favorite hangout The Last Resort and they had school buses seats all on the back porch and that's where I slept was on the school bus and then they opened the bar up at seven o'clock you went back inside and went drinking again and shooting pool I mean that's all you're done you shot pool and drink beer and she had no money and I had all the money so she's gonna stay the closest to which got nowhere from then on I had to and I started buying her beer and playing pool and get kind of hung together with the task force secretly stationed outside on January the 9th 1991 Mike Joyner made his move we were in the bar we were dancing you know I had a lot of money and that's what she was interested in and um she wanted to know if I wanted to go out and one night and party and I told her I said y'all yeah I'd love to go out but I said do you stink going had a bath and on the wind and I said I stink and I said I ain't doing that I'll go get a motel room and we'll clean up but I going out when I was thinking ass woman Mike told one us to wait for him at the bar while he went to get his room key instead he met with a task force outside and I meet with my outside people and tell them you know we make a plan because we knew what she had in mind because that's words I told them was piss on the fire and calling dogs to get some trouble with this is her and I'm not going off with her because I'm not going to be the next victim Mike returned to the bar with a motel key and showed it toward us he then waited for her to make the next move could I get worried about it no she wasn't gonna kill me in the bar so I wasn't you know I really wasn't worried about it not at that point I just went and got another beard and said it just whenever you get ready I'm ready to go let's go a little while later warn Us in the undercover cop walked out of the bar the owner of The Last Resort Al bulling was an eyewitness to what happened next then we're just sitting at the bar drinking you know they didn't want to arrest her in the bar or anything because they didn't know what she had or didn't want nobody else getting hurt so they waited for her to walk out the door as soon as they hit the door that's when they arrested her one US was bundled into a car and taken away the task force had successfully executed the arrest safely I wasn't worried about my safety because I had the best backup in the world it was a relief I think that's the best way to describe it as a relief the next day investigators managed to track down one of his partner tyria Moore in Scranton Pennsylvania and they said to her let's make a deal if you can provide evidence if you can help us convict Eileen muernos then we will give you immunity from prosecution so I think this this was a very very tempting offer diarrhea agreed to call Eileen and let the police record their conversations okay okay yes how did you do this why did you do this hi yes I love you I [Applause] am okay no don't do it now get it over with right history moment yeah it's still over with all right the same month he was arrested Eileen wanos fully confessed to the seven murders [Music] okay so then what you're telling us is you're voluntarily coming forward to talk to us now yeah to let you know that I'm the one that needs to charge despite the seriousness of her crimes juanos refused an attorney but in what was the Cornerstone of her defense she claimed that in each case the men had tried to rape her and I was a professional so these guys just like pumped it down some fires on them I'm just trying to make my money and go what else is trying to look out for herself she's still trying to perform this role as the victim because I think she's more than familiar with the fact that many sex workers are regularly raped and assaulted by their clients and I think she's trying to Garner A Bit of Sympathy for herself in in doing this I don't know it I know that I don't want my girlfriend involved because this is why I'm doing this they've been talking to her parents in Texas tomorrow that she did not do anything her trial for first degree murder started a year later on January the 13th 1992 at the Volusia County courthouse near Daytona it's an extraordinary defense after all she could simply have reported them to the police but she didn't do that she took the law into her own hands and indeed executed them herself is a simmering pot of resentment and it's not enough that she's killed her victims but she wants to make them suffer after they've died she wants to tarnish their reputations so she says that her victims picked her up they targeted her they were the Predators not her in an unusual twist wernos was only tried for her first murder that of 51 year old Richard Mallory Florida State Attorney John Tanner was the lead prosecutor in Florida if you have a series of crimes that are related in certain factors then you may be able to bring in evidence of those other crimes and in this case it was murder called the Williams rule John Tanner was able to draw a link between the seven murders each of these killings looked almost identical showing I think basically that this appeared to be the print of the same killer and it certainly challenged the theory that she was simply defending herself against rape when you're saying that everyone that picked me up tried to rape me in credibility is becomes a real issues on January the 27 1992 Eileen warnos was found guilty of the murder of Richard Mallory and sentenced to death then she pulled a major surprise one of the odd twists of this whole thing after being sentenced for Richard Mallory's death she elected to plead guilty for five other counts of first-degree murder and she accepted the death penalty without going to trial she really just wanted to get it over with she didn't want to go to trial again and she didn't want to face tyria by November 1992 warnos had been given a total of six death sentences she was never charged with the murder of Peter Sims as his body was never found after 10 years of appeals and litigation she finally met her fate very close to the end of her life she said I have hate crawling through my system I'm competent sane and trying to tell the truth I'm one who seriously hates human life and I would kill again Eileen warn us was executed by lethal injection on October the 9th 2002. her reactions were a typical Eileen she was verbal she was discussing something about the mother ships ready to blast off that she would be back again one day and here we go I've told a lot of people that when we stopped talking about Bonnie and Clyde that'll probably be the same day we quit talking about alien warnose some people believe that she was an abuse victim that she was very childlike vulnerable other people feel that she was a sadistic killer she enjoyed ending men's lives in reality it was probably a bit of both and that's why we continue to be fascinated by her in just one year she callously killed seven Men In Cold Blood and then robbed them she had a record unmatched by any other female killer the violent nature of her multiple murders makes Eileen warnos one of the world's most evil killers in April 1991 doctors at Grantham and cast even Hospital in Lincolnshire were perplexed in just two months the health of 13 children on Ward 4 had mysteriously deteriorated four of them had died sadly I had shared with the parents and said look this is impossible but I can't do anything more I felt so sad he died in my hands but this was no unfortunate coincidence I began to realize that there was a serial killer that was working on that Ward and was causing the collapses of these children unbelievably one of the nurses was deliberately attempting to kill her young patients by injecting them with deadly poison Sergeant walked in and then he said um we have reason to believe that Paul's illness hypoglycemic attacks who are a result of a male administration of drugs and I remember my words exactly that would explain a lot wouldn't it Beverly Alex the woman dubbed the angel of death had without doubt become one of the world's most evil killers [Music] [Music] it was a case that shocked the world for 59 days in 1991 there was a serial killer stalking the children's Ward at Grantham and cast even Hospital in Lincolnshire nobody knew it 22 year old nurse Beverly Alex job was to protect the children in her care but she abused her role she was purposely harming them her crimes were horrific and ruined the lives of many including the families of her innocent victims as a judge said to take her down there were emotional scenes in the public Gallery with families bursting into tears one woman jumped up shouting bastard bastard another shouted Locker in a cage Beverly Elliott had tried to get away with murder her Story begins over two decades earlier Beverly Alex was born on the 4th of October 1968 in the small Lincolnshire Village of Corby Glenn she was one of four children there don't seem to be any real red flags in in Beverly Alex background that would suggest that she'd go on to do the things she did so normally when we we have a serial killer we have an abusive or a violent childhood there's something that's there in the background but with Beverly Outlet there doesn't seem to be any real powerful explanatory Factor fast forward to April 1991 22 year old Beverly Allard had been working on the children's Ward at Grantham and kiss Stephen hospital for three months one of the Consultants on Ward 4 was Dr cherith Nani yakara my first impressions about Beverly era it was nothing outstanding she was just another quiet Pleasant obliging lens who was available during at its short time on the ward three children had died suddenly and a further nine had fallen seriously ill under suspicious circumstances on April the 22nd 1991 Beverly allott was on duty when 15 month old Claire Peck was admitted to Ward four she was under the care of the two Consultants at the hospital Dr Frederick Porter and Dr Nana yakara clear pick she had come with a severe attack of asthma breathing difficulties requiring oxygen so Dr Porter was cold and he had come he had tried to resuscitate and provide all the necessary care as appropriate and Beverly alert on this occasion had been with him in spite of all the efforts taken Dr Porter couldn't resuscitate and she had died within hours Claire pack was the fourth child to die unexpectedly at Grantham and kersteven Hospital in three months it was an alarming number in such a short space of time I said I really don't know what's going on and got together with Dr Porter and the senior nursing manager and checked through all the cases of worrying suspicions and anxieties we had I compiled a report and sent it to unit general manager saying we have series of these unexplained and sometimes explained collapses we are very worried about these problems and therefore we want to bring it to a notice we need your help on the 30th of April the hospital decided to ask the police to investigate the deaths to see if there could be something or someone casting a shadow over Ward 4. the case found its way to Chief superintendent Stuart Clifton one of my detective sergeants at Grantham contacted me to say that he'd had a call from Grantham Hospital which suggested that they'd had a high number of collapses of children which may or may not be down to some criminal act when I use the term collapsed I'm talking in terms of each of them having stopped breathing and the resuscitation team known colloquially as the crash team were called to resuscitate the children there were two pediatricians employed at the hospital at Dr Porter and Dr nanyakara Who had differing opinions about whether the collapses of children at that hospital over a period of about three months were actually medically related or whether they were at the hands of somebody who was causing those collapses after a meeting between detectives and doctors on the 3rd of May It was decided they'd asked Professor David Hull an expert in Pediatric to give his Insight on each of the cases he set out in some detail his findings but concluded by saying of the 13 children that I've looked at I think that there are only three that are worthy of further investigation in two of these cases I feel that there will be a medical explanation and in one case a little boy called Paul Crampton I think it's worthy of further investigation five-month-old Paul Crampton had been admitted to Ward four on the 20th of March 1991 with a chest infection his dad David remembers it well Paul was actually born with um measles and he was taken home and then after a relatively short period a few months Kath took him to the doctors my wife and he had a wheat they were I think over cautious but that's the right thing with a child of that age and they took him into Hospital the first three days of his care were completely unremarkable and and he was expected to go home on on that third day during the course of that that day Beverly Hallett brought to the attention of other nurses the fact that this little boy was having difficulty breathing I walked into a scene I did not expect and that was Paul in the arms of a nurse I think at that particular time he was cold clammy Gray and I recall that nurse Beverly Allen was there and she said at the time this child is hypoglycemic the doctor had been called the doctor came and Paul was taken into the treatment room and he disappeared for what seemed to be an eternity before we were allowed into the dream of room and I remember Paul sat there playing with his toes he seemed to made a Total Recovery the following day which was a Sunday Beverly Alec went to take the drip down and within the space of a few minutes the boy was once again hypoglycemic so obviously that was quite frightening so we went within a very short space of time from a child that's coming home to a child that's now seriously ill and without too much explanation three days later this little boy is expected to go home that day because he's continued to recover from his attacks at about 10 minutes to 12 the boy's father goes up to the hospital canteen to get himself a sandwich and when he returns some 20 minutes or so later he finds a little boy that is gray arched back and clearly in some form of distress Paul came from the board that Paul had collapsed again and my colleague rushed through and when he saw his collapse he immediately called the team from Nottingham and transferred him he went in the ambulance both with my wife and and with a doctor and nurse Beverly Allen went in the ambulance with him I remember walking into the ward at Queen's Medical Center and it was just totally different atmosphere calm relaxed pause in intensive care but she's got the feeling that he was just going to get better and he did transferring Paul Crampton to Queen's Medical Center in Nottingham had saved his life test revealed the insulin in his blood which is usually between four and six Milli units per liter was alarmingly high Dr Porter had taken blood which had been sent to the university hospital at Cardiff for examination the insulin in the blood Paul Crampton at 47 000 is the second highest ever recorded in the world he was fortunate enough to survive and it was felt that he had abnormal external incident been administered I think when we got the blood results I began to realize that there was a serial killer that was working on that Ward and and was causing the collapses of these children I had a phone call from Grantham police and it was we'd like to come see you I won't tell you what it is but we'll come and see you tomorrow so that's an office in Grantham at the time and um Sergeant walked in and then he said um we have a reason to believe that Paul's illness hypoglycemic attacks were a result of male administration of drugs and I remember my words exactly that would explain a lot wouldn't it it was Unthinkable with someone at Grantham and guest even Hospital murdering helpless children the police had to investigate each of the cases to try and find the Killer they would begin with seven week old Liam Taylor who was admitted on the 21st of February 1991 just two days after nurse Beverly allott had begun working on Ward four had to tread carefully in a healthcare setting it is very difficult to investigate a murder or a suspected murder because all of the the individuals on that that Ward have a legitimate reason to be there they have the access to the victim anyway and often it's very difficult to prove that direct link between one particular member of staff and one particular victim so the police have got a really really difficult job on their hands when they're investigating this type of crime and it wasn't going to get any easier about a week or so into the inquiry the whole investigation was blown by the local paper and of course then the world's press descended on on Grantham local radio reporter Sean dunderdale was one of the first journalists to latch on to the story none of us had experienced a story like this um before we we kind of heard rumors we knew the police were involved at the hospital that something was happening but exactly what I mean at that stage I don't think even the police knew what they were facing what they were coping with because nobody knew what was happening there wasn't that much information to start with and slowly it started to develop as a story that clearly something big was happening at Grantham that there was a major investigation and eventually it did sort of get out there into the into the media that there had been certainly a number of of odd occurrences involving children on the children's World detectives began to approach family members of the victims with the shocking news that their children may have been deliberately attacked by an active serial killer in the early stages of the investigation the the parents were certainly had a an attitude that suggested that the police should not be interfering with an investigation of this type I think it's fair to say that as the teams began to investigate the circumstances and they became more and more aware of the circumstances surrounding the collapse of their child they became more and more on board police had to try and find a link between all 13 of the children who'd been affected they began with the first suspicious case the death of seven-week-old Liam Taylor who'd been left under the care of a new staff nurse Beverly Hallett on the 21st of February of 1991 he was taken to Grantham hospital and was seen by one of the pediatricians and diagnosed with bronchiolitis a couple of hours later and they see their child with just a nappy on he's clearly terribly distressed and the nurse Beverly Elliott explains that during the course of feeding he'd vomited and choked the next evening the two parents decide to stay in the hospital the mom is so tired that she goes to bed early and the father stays up he looks in on the child just before midnight after having had a shower at the hospital and sees that there's a nurse with him he goes off to bed thinking that the problems are over and it's awoken about five o'clock in the morning by the night sister who asked him to come because Liam has relapsed the child's blue box arched and Dr nanyakara tells them that they stop breathing and they'd had some difficulty restarting the heart later that morning Liam dies [Music] sadly I had to share with the parents and said look this is impossible but I can't do anything more I felt so sad he died in my hands the last nurse to tend to Liam before his death was Beverly Allen who joined the war just four days previously it was her first ever nursing role so Beverly Hallett had applied to other hospitals other departments for a job as a nurse upon her completing her her qualification and she'd been turned down by all of them when Ward 4 employed Beverly Allied it was because they were incredibly short staffed they were pretty desperate they they needed more nurses on duty and normally they wouldn't have taken Beverly alley on because she she didn't have the correct level of qualifications though the usual level of qualifications that they would ask for so it was desperation really Alex had begun training as a nurse at 16 even at a young age she seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with hospitals was a regular in the a e Department she would constantly turn up their complaining of various symptoms and illnesses and she got a bit of a reputation amongst the staff there so they were very surprised to learn that that she was a trainee nurse and the adults just simply weren't joined up because often when when somebody is a nurse and they're training as a nurse you're only seeing them you know during that part of their day you're not seeing the the bigger picture detectives investigating the suspicious incidents on Ward 4 had begun to look into each case to find a common link Beverly Allied had again been on duty on the 5th of March 1991 the day that Timothy Hardwick was admitted Timothy Hardwick was an 11 year old boy who had a lot of problems in his life he he suffered with cerebral palsy and was epileptic he had an epileptic of fit at school in Newark as a result he was transferred to Grantham hospital where doctors managed to get his fitting under control a very very short time after Beverly had been left with him this child suddenly stops breathing she raises the alarm and the Crash team occult one of the staff nurses came to my office and said and please come and see Timothy he is not well apparently he had collapsed and then when I went I tried to resuscitate him but by that time he's virtually had no signs of life sadly they can't resuscitate him and the child dies just five days later on March the 10th 14 month old Kaylee Desmond was on Ward 4 suffering with a chest infection after being left alone with aled for some one-to-one nursing Kaylee had an unexpected heart attack badly Alec was seen in the room and I actually called other nurses to go and have a look which was one of her common things she would call other nurses to say come and have a look at this child and then the crash team would be called KB survived the collapse and was transferred to another hospital due to the massive toll the arrest put on her young body she was left brain damaged detectives investigating the unusual pattern the patient collapses on Ward 4 found a clue in Katie's x-rays we were able to show that there was needle tracking under the arm of this little girl and and an air bubble which had obviously um caused the equivalent of what we would call a heart attack this mysterious needle Mark was further proved to detectives they were dealing with a killer they'd already discovered the high insulin count in the blood of Paul Crampton who survived they continued their investigations with the cases of two more suspiciously ill children Bradley Gibson and two-year-old Yik Chan Bradley Gibson is Edmonton under Dr Porter he was about five or six years old and had breathing difficulties that Porter had treated him with possible chest infection and he then suddenly had stopped breathing and stopped his heartbeat as well what you call a cardiac arrest which is extremely rare Dr Porter had tried repeatedly to resuscitate him with the defibrillator he managed to get him round extremely fortunate yet Chan was admitted with the suspected fractured skull he's in the hospital for a couple of days and he's charging around the place he's clearly not very much wrong with him one particular evening Beverly island is going off duty and she speaks to the oncoming nurse at about nine o'clock in the evening and said can you have a look in Chan he's crying he's he's not very well the oncoming nurse goes into the room and and finds him with his back arched and blue and the Crash team had called and he's resuscitated Bradley Gibson and Yik Chan both survived unscathed three-month-old identical twins Katie and Becky Phillips were not so lucky the pair were born prematurely and were regular visitors to ward 4. in early April 1991 they were back and being treated by Dr Nana yakata they had repeated admissions not surprisingly again with variety of illnesses diarrhea vomiting breathing difficulties and so on so forth and the parents quite rightly were very worried and brought them straight to the hospital rather than going to the GP I had seen them and discharged them reassured the parents but the same night Becky was brought to the casualty the casualty staff taking lots of effort to resuscitate but she was virtually dead so I had a long discussion with the parents they were completely shocked and they were very very upset I left some blood samples in the laboratory for any future investigations if needed we subsequently found that that blood and had it analyzed and that contained 9660 Milli units per liter of insulin in the blood and you always have to remember with these huge figures that a child should have 15 to 20 Milli units so it horrendous later on that same day April the 5th Dr Nana yakara asked Becky's parents to bring her twin sister Katie in as a precaution Katie's taken into hospital and that afternoon she's allocate related to the care of Beverly Ellet one of the senior nurses goes to that particular room to see what's going on as she enters she sees Beverly Outlet nursing the child in her arms the child's crying she sees that the child collapse within Beverly Alex arms and the Crash team are called they managed to resuscitate Katie who is later transferred but over the next three days the child Katie suffers convulsions and this child is severely brain damaged as a result of what occurred now during my investigation detective inspector Jones managed to find x-rays that were taken at the time the child had squeeze injuries which had broken a number of ribs this was further evidence that proved to detectives that something very Sinister was happening on Ward 4 at Grantham and cast even Hospital between the deaths of Becky Phillips on the 5th of April and Claire peck on April the 22nd four more boys had been admitted with minor symptoms and unexpectedly came close to death that made a total of 13 suspicious incidents four deaths and nine close calls but now investigators have the arduous task of making a list of suspects one of the names on that list was a woman who always seemed to be on duty whenever something went wrong 22 year old staff nurse Beverly Allen May 1991 police were investigating a Spate of mysterious deaths and illnesses on the children's Ward at Grantham and kersteven Hospital in Lincolnshire after digging deeper into the individual cases they were certain they were chasing a serial killer that's clear evidence of air injected under the arm of one child there's evidence of squeeze injuries there's evidence of um insulin what was a common factor with the vast majority of these children was that each of them had a cannula fitted a site usually in the back of the hand where drugs or drips can be administered through so injecting cardiotoxic drugs would not be would not be very difficult because it could go in through the IV port Healthcare is a very common method used by these people it's accessible it's something that that is not going to immediately cause concern because this is something that's already in that hospital environment anyway and also poisoning is quite a quite a remote method of killing somebody you're not up close and personal with them it's not messy you can administer the poison and then then leave the scene you don't have to see them suffer the effects of it Chief superintendent Stuart Clifton and his team interviewed all the staff members on Ward 4 and a new piece of evidence emerged that suddenly became crucial I began to look at the circumstances of insulin in Grantham hospital and I found that it was kept in locked fridges on on the wards and on the children's Ward the key to the fridge had gone missing three days before the first child had collapsed Beverly Hallett was the last known person to have that key but no hospital investigation had actually taken place Beverly alett's name kept cropping up she always seemed to be at the hospital when the incidents occurred and the staff duty rotor confirmed this what we discovered was that for every collapse Beverly Hallett was the only nurse that was on duty on every occasion and on many of these occasions we could actually put a right at the bedside either at the time of the collapse or just before much on the 21st of May 1991 Stuart Clifton made the brave decision of having Beverly Alice arrested I basically couldn't take the chance that if she was still working on there she would harm more children albeit that I hadn't completed the investigation by any means we were merely scraping the surface at that time so she was arrested and the house was searched during the course of that search we found a hospital pillowcase a used syringe and a little child's notebook and it was headed allocations book this allocations book had gone missing from Ward four it detailed the names of children who needed extra attention and which nurse was allocated to them it was not only further proof that Alex had been caring for the children who died but evidence that she was hiding the information from her colleagues Beverly Alec was interviewed at the police station over the course of two days she made no admissions in fact she went so far as to distance herself from all the events at that hospital saying things such as I wasn't there on that day my I didn't come on duty until after that had happened so she she completely distanced herself maintained her innocence she was a very strange girl in the interview in that she would talk to you quite quite normally or talk to the interviewing officers quite normally about things like football pop music and the minute you got down to to actually talking about the events at Grantham hospital she became a completely different person when news of the arrest broke the Press knew this was a huge Story Once the investigation went that one step further and obviously a nurse had been arrested a nurse was clearly under investigation they had to go public with that and that's what it all exploded really that's when the world's media work was suddenly interested because it had never been heard of before that a nurse would do such a thing you know it's such a rarity and certainly in this country at first the whole of of Grantham was just surrounded by journalists at TV Crews from around the world newspapers Alex arrest was also a huge shock for the victim's families I felt the mixed emotion wise he would want to harm a child but secondly we now know what was wrong with Paul and thank God it's not anything to do with Paul it's not a medical problem it is an outside influence Stuart Clifton and his team were convinced that Alec was behind the deaths but they had no proof she was released on bail without charge I convinced the hospital that they needed to suspend Beverly Ellet from Duty because we couldn't take the chance and they couldn't take the chance that another child would be attacked the police needed to build a case if they were right about Alec then they just released a serial killer into the public Chief superintendent Stuart Clifton turned back to the expert who just a month previously had concluded the majority of the cases could be explained medically I I asked David Ho to go away and re-look at the case notes of the children but to use the statements that my team had taken which detailed the circumstances of the collapse of each of each of these children he agreed to do that months passed is Stuart Clifton and his team built the case against Beverly allott and by November 1991 Professor Halden re-examined his original case notes based on the new evidence found by detectives he agreed that all the incidents could be viewed as suspicious on the 20th of November Alec was arrested once more the former nurse is charged with the murder of four children she also faces eight charges of attempted murder of eight other children she faces a further eight charges of causing Grievous bodily harm with intent she was new to appear at the Grantham magistrates Court the next day bear in mind this is a young girl that's never been in police custody before and at nine o'clock the next morning one of the police women had to go and wake her up she didn't appear to have a care in the world there wasn't very much in the way of remorse she didn't cry there was no kind of real visible reaction in her so I think she does have that kind of cold personality she's she's orchestrated all of these terrible events but but she doesn't feel any impact from them she's somebody who who doesn't have the same feelings and emotions as as the rest of us during the 15-month wait for her trial the stunned press began to uncover Beverly allet's history of Faking illnesses and self-harming the more we dug into Ali's background again the more unbelievable it became and the one question our listeners would ask is how how did nobody spot all of this um and and allow her to continue being a nurse how did she get through that recruitment process we've got an authorization from her to have a look at her medical records They indicated going back to Childhood that that Beverly liked to be the center of attention there were incidents while she was at school where she would sprain a finger and demand that she'd her arm be put in a Sleek I think it's tempting to look back and say they should have picked up on that they should have known that this was somebody who was not quite right but I don't think they would have automatically made the link between somebody who was perhaps harming themselves and somebody who would then go on to harm other people nurses care for their patients they want to preserve their lives and enhance their quality of life so to think that a nurse would do this is it's almost Unthinkable on February the 15th 1993 24 year old Beverly Allard was in Nottingham Crown Court charged with the murder of four children and the attempted murder of a further nine her not guilty plea meant a trial would have to take place for much of the time Beverly was not there because she was suffering from anorexia and was supposedly too ill to attend trial the judge in his wisdom ruled that it should go ahead without her the court case was very harrowing experience I mean it was it was a long drawn-out Affair uh Beverly how it wasn't in court for a lot of it again I think some of that manipulation that she was was known for some of the manipulation she'd clearly done in the hospital she was trying it with the court case as well and I know that was having an impact on on family members they knew of their own individual case the actual scale of it apart from what they'd read in the media heard on the radio it was the first time they'd actually heard exactly what had been happening at crantham hospital I mean that was quite traumatic because obviously it was a fact that there was significant media interest and and we couldn't walk down the street from the car park to the court case without having microphones and stuffed under our nose and and cameras flashing and yeah there's a lot of emotion a lot of emotion around that time clearly you couldn't just go home and you know close the door and put the TV on and forget about it it was it just was all encompassing it was it was the only thing that was on my mind throughout the case and and for a long time afterwards as well in the times that Alec was in the courtroom she seemed completely distant from what was going on around her I firmly believe she felt the families would still be on her side because you know they'd been very close you know they thought certainly initially in those initial stages that um you know she'd helped save or tried to save their child's life and so in court you know she would smile at them to the outside world a lot of the evidence may have seemed circumstantial but as the trial went on it became clear the case against Alex was a strong one for a long time people believed it must be a mistake you know a nurse surely wouldn't be be responsible for that there must be some other explanation for it but then slowly as the evidence was revealed you could see that tight turning that that people suddenly realized complete revulsion that that a nurse of all people would would do that um you know it's suddenly like well if I can't trust a nurse who can I trust and I think that that was a real shock to the nation it resonated right across the country when those those actual facts came out about what Beverly Elliott had done during the trial the jury heard from experts who believe that Alex had been suffering with a mental illness throughout her life which caused her to commit the murders for Munchausen syndrome is a condition which basically means that people will invent symptoms in themselves in order to gain the the attention of medical professionals there's also Munchausen Syndrome by proxy this is when somebody invents symptoms in somebody else in order to get attention from medical professionals and and that somebody else is often a child or somebody who you're in charge of the care of I think she's she's certainly ill and that there has to be an element of of evil somewhere within that because people can be ill without without wishing to cause harm to other people on the 28th of May 1993 after a draining three-month trial the jury had reached a decision I think the moment we were called back into the court is something you know we'll always I certainly I'll always remember it was very tense you know very quiet a member of the jury stood up and that first verdict came in of guilty and there was just a again an intake of breath lasted just a couple of seconds then someone I remember shouted yes and I think there was a couple of people clapping and then tears from the families tears from members of the public it was a very difficult job for the police to actually say you know without doubt Beverly Allen was responsible so so there was always that possibility if the jury could have just tipped the other way and thankfully you know that guilty verdict came in I think it was a huge sense of relief for everyone on May the 28 1993 judge Mr Justice Latham sentenced Beverly Allen to 13 concurrent life sentences one for each of the charges against her a relieved David Crampton made a statement outside the courtroom well I still Bev it out it's a rather pathetic figure really and when we listen to her medical evidence we probably could conclude that these are tragedies were inevitable there was clearly some massive media interest associated with the Alec case both pre and post to trial that was pretty easy for me and my family because um Paul was at home and well if Paul if something worse had happened to Paul such as it happened to other families how would I have conducted myself I don't know thankfully I'll never have to know Paul is 26 years old he has a house he has a long-term partner lovely girl he's got a career Paul's doing very well very very well Beverly Allard was immediately sent to Holloway prison but after just a week behind bars She was transferred to rampton secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire I think the fact that Beverly outlet has ended up in a secure hospital is is a really interesting one for me because this is somebody who before developing Munchausen Syndrome by proxy could have been argued to to have just Munchausen Syndrome so she was fabricating illnesses and symptoms in herself before she was harming other people she was going after that role as the patient she wanted to be seen you know by medical professionals and and play that sick role she's essentially achieved what she set out to achieve she's got that status of the patient which she always wanted what do I think about where I'll let seven a sentence I I I don't waste any energy on that I don't don't really think about it she doesn't enjoy the same freedoms that I do my rest of my family and the vast majority of the population in this country she's in a prison um whether that is more comfortable than perhaps some people would like is a bit academic really in December 1993 Central television interviewed Beverly Allard inside Brampton hospital as part of a special news report she enjoys relative luxury and freedom within the maximum security walls the parents of her victims who gave their approval for these pictures to be included in central TVs the Tuesday special tonight believes you should be in prison it's not too bad what's a good thing about it you like it better than where you were before because I've got more freedom locked up all the time Stuart Clifton also visited Alec inside ramton in 1994 determined to get the truth out of her she made admissions at that time she admitted nine of the 13 cases that she'd been um convicted of she wouldn't have anything to do with the two Phillips cases the minute that I began to press her for details about precisely what she'd done what she'd used she just walked away from me wouldn't answer any more questions there are plenty of questions left unanswered especially for the loved ones of the victims of Beverly allot Alex crimes are like dropping a pebble into a pool of water those Ripple spread far and wide a dramatic effect clearly on the families how the families of the victims but their extended family grandparents parents Etc and of course a dramatic effect on the hospital and its staff so her crimes went far and wide into the community not just the immediate people affected I think Beverly Allen was was really most at home when she was in the middle of a drama so she was deliberately creating the drama and then casting herself in it in a leading role within it there's a real impact there of you know it could have been a family member you know it's the local hospital one of my members of my younger family could have gone into the hospital to be cared for by a nurse and look what happened and that could and that's the thing with this story you know it could have happened to absolutely anyone the parents who were affected by that were purely unlucky that their child went into that hospital on that day and that Beverly alley was their nurse we may never understand why Beverly alert intentionally set out to poison the children she was meant to care for a lust for attention turned from selfish to deadly and for three months in 1991 she acted upon it in the most horrific manner nobody on Ward 4 was safe but the determination of doctors and police brought justice for all the victims families and proved that Beverly allott the angel of death was a cold-blooded killer on November the 11th 1988 police searching for missing 51-year-old Burt Montoya paid a visit to the boarding house where he'd been living in Sacramento California rumors of suspicious activity in the garden LED detectives to begin digging up the area I'm sitting in this Hall and I'm hanging on to what looks like a human femur bone over the next three days seven bodies would be discovered under the ground at 1426 F Street the landlady and number one suspect was a 59 year old woman named Dorothea Puente when you look at this person you don't what about if they assume or even think that this is a serial killer she looks like everybody's grandma Puente had been stealing from the tenants who trusted her the easiest way to keep them quiet was to murder them she was a survivalist killing these people were necessary to survive period they had to go Dorothea Puente had been unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] it is one of the most infamous homes in the USA 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento California became the makeshift burial site of seven people their landlady and murderer was 59 year old Dorothea Puente eventually charged with nine murders in 1988 she had poisoned her tenants in order to steal from them Puente died in 2011 at the age of 82 but the house lives on now under the ownership of Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes it's become a Macabre Monument to her it's was built in 1895 and it's gone through a lot of iterations a lot of people have been in and out of it it can't be torn down it's considered a historic uh house in the Sacramento and they would not let anybody tear it down so it's here it sits detective John Cabrera helped bring Puente to Justice when he uncovered human remains in the yard of 1426 F Street in November 1988. as far as interior of this house it's still the same the floors in which the victims walked on the floor in the sleeping bedroom is where the victims lied still the original floors in here everything the Victorian house has become a tourist attraction and Tom and Barbara have embraced the gruesome history of it we love it we have no problem whatsoever with uh any of it so it's just our house and we made it home and we're pretty happy with it you still get people walking by asking if you know how could we be crazy enough to buy this house and stuff but between the two of us we've made it into a home yeah and you know we tried to um make it more comfortable and and try to diffuse the whole Mystique around it and yeah we're doing our best she was a hardened criminal in the body of a little old lady yeah it was a hard hard person Pure Evil despite the renovations John still remembers the home as the boarding house where nine people lost their lives this is what I would call the Death Room this is where Dorothea would bring her victims after giving them the drug and alcohol combination and then bringing them in here and leaving them on the floor until she could prepare them at a later time and when I pull the carpet back the odor was so overwhelming it was unbelievable but I knew and recognized that smell and it was the smell of putrefied body fluid that had seeped through the wooden floor from her victims who had laid there for anywhere from two to four weeks probably the day after finding the first body Saturday November the 12th 1988 John vividly recalls the moment he realized the little old lady living at 1426 F Street was not what she seemed I looked up at one point under that balcony and Dorothea was standing there looking right straight down at me knowing that probably within minutes I was going to uncover that second body and sidetracked me from digging in order to walk her over to the motel and it's there she made her Escape would remain a wanted fugitive for five days but her Story begins over 85 years ago she was born Dorothea gray in San Bernardino County California on January the 9th 1929. she was one of several children she lost both of her parents quite early on she spent time in an orphanage she was kind of passed from Pillar To Post quite a lot so she didn't form those stable secure attachments with her caregivers that many of us do and I think that went on to shape the person that she became Dorothea you know lived a very difficult Early Childhood she was deprived in substantial ways she didn't have loving parents she had to scavenge for food by the mid-1960s Dorothea had been married three times and taken on the name of her third husband Puente she had already served time in prison for forging checks and had found a new way to earn money starts to to get involved in sex work selling her body and to basically put clothes on her back and feed herself so she is living this is quite kind of feral existence now he's an individual for whom violence and abuse was just normal for her if we look back at her childhood experiences they're certainly not normal and warm and loving they are quite brutal and quite cold so this is the only thing that that she knows it's it's those basic emotions and those Basic Instincts and then after becoming a prostitute she discovered this occupation of being a caregiver which requires minimal qualifications and all of a sudden a world was opened up to her in 1981 Puente began renting an apartment at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento she took on the role of caretaker for the other tenants in the Victorian boarding house soon after Puente met 61 year old Ruth Monroe Rue's son Bill Klausen remembers his mother fondly she was great I mean she was my mom I'm going to say she's great but she was she she brought up five kids after my father passed away and I thought she did a good job we met Dorothea through a gentleman that my mom met while she was working and he kept asking her out and she finally went out with him and then they started seeing each other and he introduced her to Dorothea during their friendship Dorothea decided she wanted to open a restaurant and my mom wasn't working anymore and my mom had a little bit of money so she ended up opening the little cafe at the round Corner Bar Ruth ended up marrying Harold the man who'd introduced her to Puente but soon he was diagnosed with cancer and living full time in a hospital Ruth didn't want to live alone and Puente had an idea she could live with her at 1426 F Street it turned out to be a fatal decision we moved her in there on Easter Sunday 1982. and she died April April 26th two weeks later I saw my mom every day from the time I moved her in there I stopped by there on my way home from work and the last three days of our life she seemed like she was getting sick and when I went there I noticed that she had a drink in her hand and my mom didn't drink so I asked her I said what's that and she said it's a drink that Dorothea fixed to to calm her nerves I said fine you know I didn't think anything of it because I knew they were friends and okay fine but Ruth deteriorated so badly over the next few days that the next time bill went to visit her she was almost catatonic mom was laying there I sat next door and touched her and told her I said Dorothea is taking care of you you'll be fine and uh she had a tear coming out of her eye and that was it she didn't say anything she just laid there the next morning I got a call from my brother telling me that Mom was mom was dead went over there she had already been taken away by the coroner's wagon and Dorothea had said that she committed suicide the news stunned Bill totally out of character she had she had everything to live for she had grandchildren she was happy what's not easy not easy you still have the pain in your heart by August 1982 Dorothea was back in trouble with the authorities she had been abusing her position as caretaker for her fellow tenants dorotheo had pled guilty to fraud she was a forging signature on the back of Social Security checks of her victims and then cashing them she received a prison sentence and was sent to the women's prison down in Chowchilla well in 1985 she was paroled and when she paroled she came back to Sacramento and she came back to 1426 F Street the caretaker was back in business the next time police arrived on Dorothea puente's doorstep they would be armed with shovels searching for a missing man and what they would unearth in the yard of 1426 F Street would shock the world in September 1985 56 year old Dorothea Puente was out of prison after serving three years for fraud and back living at 1426 F Street the boarding house where she acted as landlady for her near do well tenants despite being on parole Puente continued to exploit the other residents by collecting their Social Security checks and keeping most of the money for herself she knows that vulnerable people aren't really looked after that people have forgotten about that that people don't care about them and and she goes and she targets them so she's a predator who's not just picking up on individual vulnerabilities but she's picking up on social ones as well for three years Puente went undetected tenants at the Sacramento boarding house came and went until November 1988 when a local social worker Judy moese filed a missing person's report after losing touch with a 51 year old called Bert Montoya Birds suffered from mental disabilities and was a diagnosed schizophrenic his last known address was 1426 F Street I got a copy of the report and um what I started doing then was running a background check on the missing person who was Bert Montoya and trying to get a little bit of background on him and also running a check on the caretaker who was in charge of this particular individual and Bert was a disabled adult and uh the caretaker Dorothea Puente was apparently in charge of him living here on November the 11th 1988 John Cabrera his partner Terry Brown and Puentes parole officer Jim Wilson decided to pay a visit to 1426 F Street to search for some Clues Into The Disappearance of Bert Montoya prior to leaving on that day we were starting to leave and Judy Luis turned to me and said you guys better take some shovels and I went well what for and she said because I've driven by in the past and I've seen mounds of dirt out there and uh it kind of looked like a burial ground armed with shovels John Terry and Jim arrived at Puentes boarding house well we come to the front door knock on the door the three of us and uh she answered and she's dressed very nicely she looked at me and said I was expecting you guys you know it kind of caught me off guard and I said okay well I said you know why we're here we're here to see you know about Bert what happened to him and she said yeah and uh I asked if we could come in John's first task was to find out more about the mysterious house what is this place 1426 F Street what is it here that you're running what is this place what are you doing here and at that time she looked at me she looked at her parole officer and she just said you know um Jim uh I'm in violation of my parole Puente had been ordered not to run a boarding house after her release from prison in 1985. she'd got away with it for three years due to her seemingly Charming persona the aprente played this role she crafted this in credibly skilled performance as a harmless little old lady so she would often take her teeth out she would tell people she was 10 or 15 years older than she actually was she wanted to present herself as innocent and kindly when she was anything but while Jim and Terry chatted with Puente in the kitchen John began his search of 1426 F Street it appeared that Bert Montoya had simply vanished Into Thin Air after I completely looked through the rooms didn't find anything I came back and bearing in mind what Judy had talked about as far as the Mounds of dirt I asked Dorothea I said look um I'm going to be able to tell the social worker that we looked and we didn't find anything and she was somewhat agreeable with that okay you know that's good and um then I said I have one more question for you can I dig in your yard and she says why don't we do this you guys go back to the office I know you have a lot better work to do than to be over here and then I'll make a phone call I'll call some people they'll come over here and they'll do the digging for you and then you can come back I thanked her and I said you know we're here we have the shovels we'll just go ahead and dig around if there's anything we put out of place we'll do our best to get it back you know to way it was and so she says okay and that's when we went outside to dig around the three men only had two shovels so John borrowed one from Puente so we had three shovels three of us were digging and in one of the holes is what we started finding something similar to cloth and it just seemed out of place in the ground and then I dig a little bit further and I was down to about three feet and that's when I thought I struck a tree root so I took the shovel and I started banging on it and I started trying to dislodge this root or sever it so I could continue to dig down and I couldn't do it it just wouldn't break so I got Down in the Hole and with both of my hands embracing my feet I just kept pulling on this what I thought to be a run and I pulled on it and pulled on it and finally it dislodged itself and I'm sitting in this hole and I'm hanging on to what looks like a human femur bone and at that time get out of the hole and I realized something's up we've just come across human remains the three men were completely stunned as was Puente she looked down into the hole and she could see the bone and she grabbed your mouth and she's oh is that what I think it is yeah what can you tell me about this she says I don't know but there's been other people that's been living here I was in prison and there was a lot more people living here before her John halted the dig a full forensic search of the yard would have to begin the next day at that time I decided I was going to take Dorothea back down to the Hall of Justice and I was going to now question her in full I questioned her about what I found I questioned her about where Bert was I'd even told her as part of my technique in my interview I said I bet if I dig any more I'm going to find more bodies and she just looked right at me and said well if you do I didn't put him there as news spread of the discovery of human remains the Press were in attendance at 1426 F Street the very next day Saturday November the 12th 1988. deputy coroner Laura Santos was in charge of the excavation I think there's a mode you go into and you're an investigator that you just know you have a job to focus on and you just focus on that and there were a lot of distractions because there were reporters from all over the world and there were crowds of people lining the streets and people would shout at me and and tell me things like turn towards the camera when you're digging and um you know I just had to ignore it and shut it all out because I just felt I had a job to do it I knew it was a really important job and that a lot of what happened in the future was going to hinge on what I did as far as whether she was prosecuted or not despite having a body Unearthed in her yard 59 year old Dorothea Puente had not been charged with any offense there was no reason to suspect she may be responsible as John Cabrera continued his dig Puente called him into the house and she says am I under arrest and I just thought how on what what was it that gave her the impression that she was under arrest immediately I said no and I said why do you ask and she said well all of this is making me nervous and she goes I would like to get a cup of coffee and I'd like to go over to where my nephew is around the corner at the hotel and I said okay get what you need and then I'll walk you over there she comes walking out has a little red coat has her purse walk down the stairs walk out but what I told her was that I would escort her because there were a lot of people starting to gather and I thought I don't want anyone walking up to her bothering her so I use that ruse to walk her down to the corner a photographer captured the moments John escorted Puente out of the house no one yet knew it but Dorothea Puente would never return to 1426 F Street and I watched it go all the way down and then go up into the hotel and that was the last I saw her at that time so I run back and I continue digging again short time later I hit something and I'm fiddling around with my shovel I'm trying to get it up figuring what's down here and I keep trying to bring it up and bring it up and I do and in my shovel is a human leg so immediately I stopped I yelled to my commander we have another one and he runs over and the first thing he asks is where's Dorothea it was a good question where was Dorothea Puente a second body had been found buried in her yard and she was nowhere to be seen she wasn't at the hotel having a coffee it had all been a ruse so that she could make an escape Dorothea Puente was on the Run on Saturday November the 12th 1988 a police forensic team were digging up the yard of a boarding house in Sacramento California they had just Unearthed a second body Dorothea Puente the 59 year old landlady of 1426 F Street had left the house and headed to a nearby hotel to have a coffee but detectives were now very keen to speak with her I said I took her and watched to go to the coffee shop she's supposedly over there at the hotel so then another detective came and found out by speaking with the person at the counter in there that in fact Dorothea had come into the hotel walked through the lobby went to a pay phone picked up a pay phone and called apparently called a taxi cab because the cab arrived and took off Puente had absconded and detectives had no idea where she was headed and so at that time we called in the FBI and um you know Enlisted the help of other resources and outside agencies and trying to locate her because that is what was key right now is to try to find her as fast as we could back at 1426 F Street one of the many people who had gathered to watch the Dig had given some important information to deputy coroner Laura Santos story that he had dug holes in this yard for Dorothea and she paid him cash and then she and she just told him she was bearing trash so he came in and pointed out where he had dug holes over the next three days the excavation of the yard continued just as we kept digging we kept finding bodies and more bodies and it just seemed endless whatever we took down whatever we moved wherever we were digging we'd find a body it was just unbelievable she put seven people in this small yard and there wasn't even a witness to any of these burials not one the seventh and final body was found on Monday the 14th of November it was buried right in front of the house just feet from the sidewalk bundled up in almost like us scrunched up seated position but she was missing her head hands and feet I went through every flower pot and emptied them out to make sure that we weren't missing anything but those appendages were never found to this day we've never recovered the head hands or feet their whereabouts it's anybody's guess if the walls in this home could talk we would probably be horrified three days after the discovery of the seventh body Thursday the 17th of November Dorothea Puente was finally found she had been spotted by a man in a bar almost 400 miles from Sacramento in Los Angeles he goes home and while he's watching TV he sees her on TV as being wanted on the news so he calls LAPD gives the information I was just having drinks with this person the man told the police which hotel Puente was staying in and she was promptly arrested John Cabrera immediately flew down to John Wayne Airport in nearby Santa Anna we landed LAPD pulled up out on the tarmac we got out of the plane and uh there she was they had her in cuffs you know we ceremoniously walked over and they transferred her to me I asked her you know are you okay yeah I'm okay and then out of nowhere she just says Mr Cabrera ah I'm sorry John had many questions to ask about the seven bodies buried in puente's yard but there was still no proof that they had been murdered and the 59 year old fugitive wasn't planning on a confession we got back here to Sacramento I took her down to the Hall of Justice at that time I asked her if she wanted to give any kind of a statement and she declined and so we just booked her into Sacramento County Jail and that would be the last time that I'd ever speak with her she would never speak to me again with Puente safely locked away the task of identifying the seven bodies had begun most of them didn't have teeth or they had one or two teeth the case of the one body in the front yard she didn't have any hands so we couldn't do fingerprints so we started gathering information most of the tenants at 1426 F Street were either homeless or estranged from their families which made identifying them even more difficult in the beginning there were people saying oh you're never going to be able to do this and so I was pretty happy that I was able to identify everybody and they all had some kind of disposition as far as most of them had some family members somewhere and so they were all buried among the seven names was Bert Montoya the man whose disappearance had initiated the dig on F Street Bert would be the third body that I found he was buried under a concrete basin in the backyard he was number three and uh that puzzle was now solved Bert Montoya had wandered away he had some type of mental deficiency and his parents had always taken care of him in 13 about 13 years before he died he disappeared from their home in New Orleans Louisiana and they had no idea what had happened to him and it turned out that his 92 year old mother was still alive and she had been searching for him her whole life and or you know ever since he's been missing and so they were really really grateful to know even though it was such a sad ending they were very thankful that they were able to have him come home as well as identifying the victim's Laura needed to find out the cause of their deaths toxicology report showed that each of the seven bodies had traces of the same prescription sleeping pill we did find traces of domain the drug in the bodies and that was another thing that I was able to determine by gathering all these medical records on everyone none of the victims had ever been prescribed domain only Dorothea Puente had been described domain this particular drug when coupled with alcohol could be deadly it just simply puts you in a catatonic state and with the alcohol overwhelm the body and stop the heart poisoning is one of the ways we've seen female serial killers operate because it's a way that doesn't require a lot of physical strength and so we don't have to overcome your victim physically because that's more difficult for a female particularly in this case an elderly female to overcome the victim physically as detectives delved into puente's past they found even more evidence that exposed her as a callous killer all in all in the very end of the investigation she would be charged with nine murders seven in the art in which we would uncover and then they added Ruth Monroe Ruth's death had initially been ruled as suicide back in April 1982 the new revelation was a shock for her son Bill Klausen well that kind of just pulled my stomach and that's like I said that's when it it brought everything back to where okay now we can go after her you know because all this time we know that mom didn't commit suicide especially with the amounts of the drugs that were in her all the undissolved pills in her stomach there's no way that she could have taken all of that and lived long enough to take everything the ninth victim was a 77 year old man from Oregon called Everson gilmouth he had become pen pals with puency during her three years in prison for fraud and then when she paroled in 1985 he went and picked her up and drove her back here to The Boarding House and this is where he would be staying within months Everson had seemingly disappeared and severed all ties with his family every time they would call he was always out they never got to speak with him and she always had a reason why but in actuality he picked her up in late 1985. he was laying in a homemade coffin along the Sacramento River in early 1986. and Everson would remain a John Doe until this case in 1988 broke and that's when his family contacted our office and saying we're looking for a father Puente remained on remand for over four years her defense lawyers were worried she wouldn't get a fair trial in Sacramento due to her notoriety eventually it was agreed that the trial would be held in Salinas in nearby Monterey County we got a court date and what I wanted to do was get in there give them my information give my testimony and for the sake of the families of these victims I wanted to make sure that she would never walk on the public streets again that she wasn't going to do that or harm anybody anymore but the trial would not be as straightforward as investigators hoped puente's refusal to admit to the murders meant they would somehow need to prove that the sweet little old lady in the dock was in fact a heartless killer after being on remand for over four years the trial of Dorothea Puente finally began at the Monterey County courthouse on February the 9th 1993. the 64 year old admitted to burying the bodies of seven of her tenants and continuing to claim their Social Security money but maintained she was innocent of the nine counts of murder against her Bill Klausen testified during the trial his 61 year old mother Ruth Monroe was one of the women that Puente was accused of killing in 1982. when I walked to the jury box or to where I needed to be she just had a just a cold stare just a cold stare and after I testified I walked away she just kept staring straight ahead up by the judge it angered me at the time when I walked back facing her as I was walking back to go back and sit down my thoughts were just to to Strangler but I have more control than a lot of people and I just walked past and went back and sat down and listen to the rest during the five-month trial the jury heard from both sides puente's defense team admitted that she was a thief but not a murderer while the prosecution argued that the traces of dalmaine proved that all the victims had been poisoned on August 26 1993 after deliberating for 24 days the jury found Dorothea Puente guilty of three murders but were deadlocked on all the other charges I think what disappointed me as an investigator and I think it disappointed people that were involved in the case that of all the nine charges of murder seven of them were so similar there was no doubt that the seven bodies that we found in this yard should have all been guilty however only three of the seven in the yard would be charged against her four others would go 11-1 with one juror saying no he didn't believe that's what happened the jurors refusal to deliberate meant that the judge Michael ferger had no choice but to declare a mistrial of the other six charges one of them being the murder of Ruth Monroe they were talking about doing a retrial because of that but then they decided not to because of the cost which I mean I understand it took a lot of money as it was and then the district attorney kept telling me well she's not going to get any more time she's already going to spend life in prison so we just kind of okay we had to accept it on December the 10th 1993 Dorothea Puente was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole she was immediately sent to the central California women's facility in Chowchilla the 64 year old landlady had killed her tenants for no other reason than to steal their money she wanted their social security check she wanted that cash so she just had to dispose of them to get to it so she saw her victims as obstacles they were barriers that were getting in the way of something that she wants and she very cool and calm and in a very calculated manner dispatched them so she could have their money although no charges were brought against any others it has long been suspected that Puente must have had an accomplice the issue the issue of her disposing of the bodies creates one of the big mysteries of her case because Dorothea was not a large person some of these people were fairly large and and even to move a 100 pound sack of potatoes takes a fair amount of force there's reason to believe that Dorothea actually Enlisted the help of some other tenants who would prefer to be her helper in the burial than her victim being buried it was obvious to us given the bodies especially Bert someone helped her carry these bodies down I have suspicions I have my own opinion who I believe helped her but that's just something that I will always leave for the investigation during her time in prison puense remained in the Limelight she released a book of recipes called cooking with a serial killer in 2004 and in 2008 she agreed to meet with sacktown magazine journalist Martin cuz in the prison visitors Hall I waited and I waited and I waited some more and as I sat there I thought I've been duped I've fallen for another Dorothea Puente ruse I scanned the room wondering if perhaps I had missed her but knowing that I hadn't and that's when the door clanked open once more and and walked Dorothea Martin was Keen to speak to the 79 year old who hadn't been seen or heard for 15 years this was the first time I had ever interviewed a serial killer so I stood up to greet her we shook hands her hand felt small bony she gave me a tight smile and we began Wednesday seemed happy to make small talk but whenever Martin steered the conversation towards her crimes she gave him short shrift I said very um explicitly to her that we were coming up on the 20th anniversary of her arrest and that I was interested in talking to her about the case before I got very far into that preamble she interrupted me and for the first time she looked me Square in the eye and said I'm not guilty she would never have admitted to her crimes because what purpose would that serve I mean often when we see cases of serial killers who were caught and sent to prison we think that's the end of the story but it's not because they will continue to manipulate people behind bars they will continue to pull people's strings and get the things that they want after meeting with Puentes six times Martin's visit suddenly stopped after the killer had asked him to buy her a hundred and fifteen dollars worth of gifts in our final conversation I asked her how does it feel to be known as a murderer and she looked me Square in the eye and said I don't give a [ __ ] what anyone else thinks and that to me was as telling as any comment that she had made to me in the time that we had been talking this was someone who was in effect uh revealing that no matter what people might think of her she didn't care on March the 27th 2011 Dorothea Puente died in prison she was 82 years old she took all her secrets to the Grave when I heard she died I mean it made me feel good I just I had like a relief if she was still alive and I saw her I couldn't forgive her I should because it's the human thing to do but in my heart no I really wouldn't want to there's nothing I could do though she's gone mom's gone she's gone so it's over [Music] Dorothea prente was a PR she didn't look like one she was a wolf in sheep's clothing but the way that she chose her victims she would pick people who others didn't care about people who she could prey on she's essentially a parasite who hooks onto people gets what she wants out of them and then coldly disposes of their body so so she really is an incredibly dangerous character she was a very evil woman and a woman that when she made her mind up what she was going to do she did it without hesitation without remorse she set out on a journey and that Journey ended November 11 1988 when we arrived at her doorstep when you look at 1426 F Street today it's difficult to imagine the horrors that took place inside when tenants arrived here they would have felt comfortable meeting the sweet looking landlady but in Dorothea puente's eyes they were sub-human her only reason for taking them in was to kill them steal their money and bury them in her yard Puente took any remorse she may have had for her victims to the Grave she will always be remembered as one of the world's most evil killers foreign [Music]

Channel: Absolute Crime

Views: 3,022,987

Keywords: Absolute Crime, Crime Documentaries, True Crime, True Crime Documentaries, Murder documentaries, True Crime Stories, True Crime Youtube Channel, True Crime Documentary, full documentary channel, full length documentary 2022, prison documentaries, murder documentary, worlds most evil killers, most evil killer, marathon, binge watch, top 5, worst women, women killers, worst woman serial killer

Id: jgB4kfFRAoY

Length: 217min 21sec (13041 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023