HAUNTING HOMICIDES-Michael Benson

chumbacasino dot com. No, we're not necessarily dapoi where everybody lost et terms Conditions eighteen plus.

Georgia and Formacola and Kathy Bernhardt. The book that we're featuring this evening, is Hunting Homicides with my special guest journalists and author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program, and it's really good to have you back. Michael Benson.

of Genessee Junction. And at that time I teamed up with private investigator Donald A. Tubman my boots on the ground, and we got some PaperWorks signed by the mom of one of the one of the victims and were made the family investigators got us an inn with law enforcement, and we had access to files we ordinarily wouldn't have found. And we did a great deal too, I think answer some of those questions now, Alis Bernhardt, the mom has since passed away, but I'd like to think that we

gave her a little bit of closure. Makes me feel pretty good because you know, we gave her a name instead of a question mark.

to school. She was abducted, police believed by a perverted motorist who lured her or dragged her into his car, and she was found shot with a nine millimeter gun and left dead beneath the thorn apple trees a few miles up the road. Now, she usually walked to school with her brothers and sisters and friends, but on this

day she was alone. On this day, she took a brief detour southward, stopping at her friend Sue Carpenter's house, only to learned that Sue had already left, and by that time her brothers and their friends who usually walked with her, were already well up the road, so that left Joeyan alone for the walk to school. She was, by all accounts, in a great mood that morning. She

had things to look forward to. The Hemlock Fair was that weekend, and she's been saving money out of her lunch money to ride all the rides that weekend, and that leads to one of our favorite suspects who was ferris wheel operator William Henry Redmond, a man who moved from town to town with the carnivals and fairs and who had twice during the nineteen thirties been arrested, convicted, and jailed for attacking girls when he was still a teenager.

Then on April twenty sixth, nineteen fifty one, this couple of years after join Lynd's murder, Redmond took his attacks to the next level and murdered a little girl who wanted a free ride on his ferris wheel. Now she was found in a truck on the grounds of the penn Premiere Show, Carnival and Trainer Pennsylvania to eight years old Jane Marie Elfoff found lying on her back across the seat of a tractor trailer with her feet towards

the driver's door. So Joanne Lynn in Hemlock was a little girl who couldn't wait to ride the ferris wheel. So the connection was made eventually between these two. That was major disappointment when it turned out that Redmond was not a DNA match with the semen that was found on Joan Lynn's slip. Now, Interestingly, even since the book has come out just a few weeks ago. Don Tubman and I have made progress on this case. It's fifty

with a seventy year old case. Party's were doing the math in my head, but we put a couple of pieces of information together and I think came up with the lead that maybe no one's looked at before. Involves the bloodhounds that they used during the days when joe Anne was still missing, before her body had been found, and the bloodhounds stopped at a house farmhouse called Green Acres. It had formerly been a home for tourists spend the

summer at the lake. The bloodhounds got to the house, stopped and then went behind the house, milled around behind the house a little bit, and then returned to the road. And police thought that was the end of the trail and this was the spot where the motorists had picked up the little girl. But if that was the case, why did the dogs take a right and go behind the house. What were they doing milling around behind the house, and why did they return to the road again before

they stopped completely. And it occurred to us that joe Anne had gone behind that house for reasons on known so a don spent some time in a basement going through boxes of old police records and found a letter that had been written to the Rochester Police Chief in nineteen fifty saying that she had a friend and coworker who had a sixteen year old son who lived in the house Green Acres and was living with a couple a sixty year old sixty two year old man and

his sister. Now why this little pseudo family is living together in Hemlock, we don't know. But the letter goes on to say that the sixty two year old man had been kicked out of his house by his wife for trying to fool around with her little step daughter. Right, so we have a pedophile and a sixteen year old boy living together in the house where Joanne Lyn sent a the bloodhounds stop. So that's pretty interesting. Now. The key now is to find these people, and it's because

they were separated from their families. It's proving to be a little bit difficult. But if we can find out where their remains are, and we're assuming they've passed away, although the teenager would be eighty six now, very possibly still alive. But if this is a DNA case, there was seeming found on the slip of the victim, and if we could get a match that we could solve the case, which it was just pretty exciting for something that's seventy years old.

is entirely full of those kinds of antidotes. What about the connection between Aldoff and Lynn's DNA, You write part of the mystery of this was there a match for that?

they kept that semen sample for seventy years. When DNA technology came in, they had no problem again a profile off of it, and the case is solvable because of that. I mean, it's a long distance from what we got from Monroe County before the nineteen sixty six case, in which they complained that everything had degraded, and then eventually when we really got interested in it, they said they lost it. So Livingston County, whoever bagged that evidence, was

way ahead of their time. A crime scene investigator from the future. But yeah, it's sad a lot because I do get a lot of phone calls and messages from people who have been abused and because their husband, their ex husband, or their father or whoever it was, was a monster, they're convinced that they must be the killer

of this person or that person. One case, we found a he a woman who said that her father had abused her as as a child, and when double Jessey junction came out, he didn't want to talk about it, left the room in a hop at one point when somebody asked him a question about that, Hey, didn't you used to live in that neighborhood And subsequently this man, uh moved down to Florida where a little girl was murdered and the composite drawing of the suspect was a

dead ringer for him. So I mean, and that's that's the way we get. We've been pulled into these cases in a lot, in a lot of instances, uh, where we were interviewing people for either Double Jessey Junction or Nightmare in Rochester, the double initial murders, and people said, well, you know, while you're looking at that, you should look at this one as well. I think if you go through the names that you read at the beginning of the show, you'll find a disproportionate number of them are

women with the same first and last initial. And that's not to say that those cases are connected in any way, but those were the cases that were referred to us because if you look for double initial cases, here's one, and that's how we started. I'm sure Smoyer and Jack King and thegi in the book are really they're mostly female. There are a couple of males thrown in one because he was, you know, with a female apparently somebody was mad at But I think females make the most haunting victims.

In true crime. The oldest case was the Joan In case from nineteen forty nine, but the most recent was twenty fifteen. They thought, the thing they have in common really is that they get under your skin. And these are cases that you'll be thinking about long after you're done reading what I wrote about them.

was planned to go to the mall. And this is a good kid, active in Girl Scouts and volunteering. Tell us what happens on that day with plans to go to the mall Palas.

go to the mall by herself. And she lived at the end of a dead end street in a recently built suburban housing area, and the way it was set up to follow the main roads to the mall was a mile further than if you just took the shortcut through the woods right, So she needed to get back in time for a babysitting job that she had that evening, so she decided to go through the woods, and her partially clad body was found in a water filled gravel

pit two miles from the Moss home. Her head was in eighteen inches of muddy water and her feet were on the shoreline. Partially Covering the body was a water logged four foot wooden ladder that looked like it had been in the water for some time. Body wore a bron a pullover blouse. The underwear and shorts were found one hundred feet away on the side of a steep hill. Now, unlike many of the cases in this book, this one

was solved. The hunt for Pamela Moss's killer developed into the largest manhunt in Monroe County history up until that time.

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your skin crawl. He'd been released from probation in June sixty two after a November nineteen sixty convention conviction in Erie County for molesting two young girls in Depew, That's a Buffer suburb. Moore was charged with third degree assault for the debut crime and given a sixty day suspended sentence.

who was a pretty little girl. Now Moore is still alive. He is the senior resident of the New York State Penal System. He's now been behind bars for the killing of Pamela Moss for fifty six years.

He jumped her in the middle of the woods. He raped her, he strangled her to death, and then he wrapped her up and put her in his pickup truck and drove her to the landfill where he dumped her body on the opposite side of the landfill from where men were usually working, which is why the body wasn't found more quickly.

hard to find Lover's Lane near Pittsford, New York. Now here's a fun fact, you know, fun with quotation marks around it. I grew up about a mile from that drive in, and I remember going with my mom and dad I was six to see Mutiny on the Bounty at the Starlight drive in. You know, I don't I don't know if the Bensons went the same night as

Jack and Suie, but we might have. And the other interesting point about this case is that the cover of Haunting Homicides is based on the Marquis of the Starlight Drive In was adapted by my daughter as the title and byline for the book, which I think gives it a striking and different look. I don't know if any other book it quite looks like Haunting Homicides. It's kind

of a spooky cover. By the way, we know that we know that Smoyer and king At actually went to the movies that night because there was a witness who saw Sherry at the concession stand at about nine to fifty pm. And the witness was a good one. She was a twenty year old Carol Beachy. She had been Smayer's former West High West High School classmate. She easily recognized Seri and vice versa. They waved at one another. Sherry seemed upbeat and there was no evidence of a problem.

The movie ended at one five am, but for those who fell asleep there could have been confusion because immediately following the first showing, the first half of the movie was shown again for the benefit of latecomers, so the theater didn't go dark that morning until two forty am.

No authorities would soon learn that there were two witnesses with a reason to recognize King's car, who he saw Smoyer and King at one fifty am speeding home from the drive in, already twenty minutes late for Smoyer's curfew

will They never made it home. At seven am on Sunday, Smoyer's parents called the sheriff, and less than four hours later, a fisherman from Brighton discovered the bodies a mile and a half from Smoyer's home on a difficult access dirt road that led to the state owned hunting and fishing area off of Old Root ninety six, also known as the Pittsford Victor Road. The bodies were close together but

oddly configured. They were lying on the ground near the front of King's car, positioned in the shape of a tee. She was clutching one of his trouser legs. He was lying on his left side. Neither his slacks nor his short sleeved sports shirt were in disarray. He was shoeless, but his loafers lay nearby. The girl was faced down wearing bermuda shorts, blouse and white sneakers. Her clothing was all so undisturbed no sex aspected and therefore no DNA.

Police speculated that They'd been ordered to lie down before they were shot, and Smore apparently clutched King in fear just before they died. Or no powder burns on the bodies, suggesting that the shots were not fired from point blank range. Four shells from A forty five were found near the bodies and a fifth was found inside King's car, a quarter in a penny land on the dirt road, fifty dollars in King's pocket, milkshit containers found in King's car.

Smore had a small amount of money in her purse, so robbery wasn't the motive. Jack King was not familiar with the area actual actually, neither of them were. Sherry's parents had only moved to their new house the year before, and she'd been away to college for most of that time. You know she knew if she knew about a lover's lane, would have been in Genesee Valley Park, which was near

the high school that she went to. Throughout the suburbs. Now, neither of these kids know how to get to the place where their bodies are found, which I think a key point in figuring out who did it. To prove that he couldn't have found the lover's lane. He had a hastily sketched map in his pocket so that he could get to Shury's house right and so then the difference between the two victims was that Shari had been beaten in the back of the head, crushing her skull.

The killer had a special anger for her, or for females in general. And yet there was no sign of sex in the crimea the clothes weren't even disheveled, And the timeline for the night of the murder turns out to be a real problem. The postmartar procedures determined that the teens were shot at about five in the morning, but sheriff's deputies had reported to the scene at three thirty am to investigate a report that two cars had been stuck in the sand about two hundred feet beyond

the place where the shooting occurred. So at three thirty am, King and Smoyer aren't there. So where were they at three point thirty, already long past curfew? We don't know, And why and how they got to the lover's lane we don't know. Daily car there is Jack's father's car, and there's a scrape on the side of the car that wasn't there that morning.

exit and a lot of opportunities for fender benders. So it's possible that somebody scraped Jack's dad's car. Jack had a fit, and somehow the rest of the evening was revenge. Although I mean who knows. Profiles at the time said that there was a killer, that the killer was a religious zealot who was out to punish sinful teenagers for their lustful ways. This is I guess, under the assumption that the killer came upon them already on the lover's

lane or preps kissing in the car at the movies. Well, it seemed a little bit wacky to me, But then a guy just liked that profile shows up. On April twenty fifth, nineteen sixty four, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, a thirty year old Rochester man named Vernon M. Hunter ran the Thruway toll booth in Victor at the New York State Thruway, entering the throughway without taking a ticket.

The Throughway interchange at Victor called troopers and set a nineteen fifty six car it just passed without license plates, and the chase began on the Throughway. Suspect crossed the mall and returned back got on the route ninety six and at ninety miles an hour, with now twenty officers in pursuit. The chase lasted for close to an hour, and it finally came to an end when he drove across the lawn and cop cars boxed him in so

once his car was uh oh. Then they rammed his car so that the fender was rubbing against his tire. With his car disabled, his adrenaline plummeted and he just sat there and awaited a rest. It was now two o'clock in the afternoon. Now when he was captured. It was near Panorama Plaza. It happens to be the same plaza that Pamela Moss was heading toward. He has an Army forty five loaded with six ball shells in his car,

and that's taken away from him. In the high hopes that this will be a match for the Smaier King Ballistics, but it was not. The man was captured and explained that he'd been on his way to Auburn but didn't have toll money for the thruway, gave his address. He said he owned the car, but it was unregistered. He was a six foot Husky veteran, and police learned he'd been in the Army for two years, was stationed in Europe.

It's honorably discharged. They took him to the Henrietta substation and charged him with carrying a loaded gun without a permit. And during his arraignment, Hunter seemed happy. He was smiling and joking, said he wanted to call his brother. Background check revealed that he had previous address for drunk driving and speeding tickets, but he'd never been charged with a felony. While authorities awaited word from Washington on his gun, he

began acting weird in his jail cell. Now the newspaper reported that he poured water onto his mattress and put his shoes in the toilet. I'm guessing that's us. He urinated on his mattress and put his shoes in the toilet. And then they found that he had been a former resident of the Willard State Hospital, which was an ancient asylum for the chronic insane, and that he'd been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and discharge from that facility on February fifteenth,

nineteen sixty two. As quote improved unquote, his behavior became increasingly erratic. He told cops he was the son of God, that teenagers under twenty five were bad and needed to be punished, So here he was. He was just what the profilers for the Smayer King murders were looking for, religious fanatic, well a grudge against young people. And it really looked very promising until the FBI ruined it and

said the gun was no match. Now, my own profile, which developed in conjunction with Don Tubman and all the other smart people I've talked to over the years, is that our killer is a local. You have to be a local to find the crime scene. I mean, it's a dirt road, off a dirt road, down a slope by the next you had to have gone fishing there or parked there before to know where it was. So he's a local kid, and he's got a special grudge

against Sherry Smoyer or women in general. Now, just like Hunter, just such a suspect is reported to me by a man we called Darryl. He said his brother, Edgar was the killer. Daryl said that Edgar had dated Sherry that summer and had run into her at the movies by accident. He became angry that she was with another guy and followed them afterwards, eventually forcing them to a location that

he was very familiar with, and he killed them there. Now, my informant even said that he'd seen his brother throw the gun into the eerie canal and later admit to killing the couple. But there was a problem. Darryl, our informant was in their do well, a troubled guy with a sketchy passed mental issues, and his brother, the accused, had no record and was squeaky clean. So as a man of caine squealing on Abele and predictably police talk to. Both decided that it was a hoax of some sort

and that was that. But you know, if Edgar isn't the guy by this investigation's way of thinking, it's someone just like him.

All these things were difficult to explain that he did it very simply, but in his own, you know, kind of scattered way. Now, he said that, you know, Dad was a misogynist. Dad abused Mom, His brother Edgar was a misogynist, had gone through several wives, and you know, and he had to admit that even he too had troubles with women, largely because Mom was addicted to prescription drugs and didn't defend the kids when Dad was on a rampage. And I think a lot of misogynists developed

that feeling in this way. So it's the anger towards Mom that's been expanded to include all women in the world. So and I didn't give that piece of information enough weight when I decided that maybe Lynn King, victim's niece, you know, lawyer trained questioner, should talk to Darryl and see what happened. Well, it didn't go well. He didn't

like being accused of things by a woman. Eventually said some really really ugly things about both Lynn King and the King family, which apparently he was making up, you know, out of whole cloth. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the King family or Glynn King. Then he started in on me. He done research into me, he found out that nobody likes me, and blah blah blah. Anyway, he was having

a worse witness as time went along. I think by the time the police took over and talked to him and his brother, they found a very very strong case of sane and insane, and the sane one was the one who was being accused.

it's very frustrating that it's happened this way. We're still fascinating, we're still very hopeful and King Slayer, but we shall see what happens.

go away for spring break with her friends. Her mom understandably said no, and Brittany, instead of doing what mom said, told a lie, said I'm spending the night with friends here locally, and split for South Carolina. The fact that her mother did not know until she was already missing. So it's April twenty fifth, two thousand and nine. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina a great place to go for spring break, as long as you don't wander around at night in

your shorts. Brittany was staying at the Bar Harbor Motel. She went to visit a friend at the Blue Water Resort on Saturday night, which was down the road, and she left to return to her own motel and was never seen again. Now, according to her Blue Water Resort friends, who were adult men, she was having an argument with one of the girls she traveled with. She borrowed the girl's shorts and the girl wanted them back, so that

meant an unscheduled walk back to her hotel to change. Now, the last evidence of Brittany on the Earth is on a surveillance video that shows her leaving the Blue Water Resort on Ocean Boulevard eight fifteen pm, wearing a white top and the controversial black shorts. She left by herself and was never seen again. Now, her mom last spoke to her at noon on the day she disappeared. Down The mom still had no clue where her daughter was. Brittany said she just spent the morning just hanging out.

Britney's on again, off again boyfriend, John Greco. He was one of the first to realize that something was wrong. They'd met on a blind date and had been going together for years off and on, and when when he called her, he always got a call back right away, but this time there was nothing, no response, and five hours without a callback. John called Britney's parents and told them he thought something had happened to Britney, and that was how Dawn Drexel found out that her daughter had

gone south. Now, the day after Britney disappeared, her phone gave a single ping in Mclellanville, Georgetown County, South Carolina, and then went forever silent. So skip ahead to twenty sixteen. Seven years later, an FBI investigation on new and incredibly nightmarish information human traffickers snatched Brittany. A series of jailhouse snitches read it out. An inmate named Timothy DeShawn Taylor as the same guy who was arrested six years earlier

for attempting to kidnap a Myrtle Beach woman. The story went to Taylor picked Brittany up in Myrtle Beach and drove her to Mcclellanville, where he showed her off and introduced her to his friends. He then quote tricked her out unquote, as human traffickers are prone to do. One of the informants said he saw Brittany being abused tortured

for days in a smelly stash house. One of the informants was named to Kwan Brown, and he said he was at the stash house to meet Taylor, who told him he needed to borrow some money, and he saw Brittany there. She'd been beaten. She was sporting a black eye, and he watched as she made a run for it. The stash house was in the country and there was a back door that faced a dirt road, but she ran too slow. She was grabbed, dragged back, and pistol whipped now Sean. Taylor then took her in back of

the house. Two shots were fired, and Brown did not see her after that. He said he assumed they wrapped her up and took her away. That's not the end of the story. Unfortunately, the FBI spoke to other informants who carried the story from there, saying that Britney's body was taken to a gator pit and fed to the alligators. So, you know, haunting, to say the least, the ultimate nightmare for a mother.

save the mom from the grief. But once you know that that's what happened, tell her please, it's just torturing her by keeping it a secret.

Brighton or Pittsford. And Kelly's mom, Christine Riley, called Webster police the following morning and said Kelly didn't come home last night and the search for Kelly at the homes of friends was fruitless, and she was presumed to have run away. During interviews, Christine was candid about her worries that Kelly was growing up too fast. She'd found letters in Kelly's room that were troubling. But here's the most

haunting part. There were nine sightings of Kelly Gaffield in the Rochester area in August, September, and October of nineteen ninety five, reports that reinforced the notion that she was alive and well put off on her own you three young people who knew her told police that they'd run into Kelly on the street and had briefly spoken to her. The very first sighting came on August eighth, just minutes

after she left her house. Her aunt saw her walking into the woods behind the Phillips Village off Krieger Road. That's the apartment complex where she lived. It was about seven to fifteen pm and it was a secluded area known as a teen hangout. And the last sighting in early October was by a male friend who said he ran into her in the parking lot of a top friendly supermarket on South Clinton Avenue in town of Brighton,

and the young man said Kelly appeared agitated. So all of this is adding to this feeling that Kelly doesn't want to go home. Kelly's left home and she does not want to go home. But Kelly's mom knows Kelly is not a runaway. She never returned to pick up her belongings. She didn't even take her asthma medication. You know, her aunts and cousins said she was not a runaway candidate. She liked her family, she was willing to talk about

her problems. Well. Kelly's missing person status changed at ten o'clock in the morning on October twenty second, three solid months after she's disappeared, when her decomposed body was discovered by a hunter in a wooded area east of Phillips Road near Ridge Road in Webster, fairly close to where her aunt saw her on the evening of her disappearance. Right, so not an easy to reach spot. There's no path to kind of have to hack you wate through the

weeds to get there. And it almost seemed that the police were duped into believing Kelly was still alive, because you know, these woods would have been searched if their fall play had been suspected, but they weren't. You know, people keep running into Kelly now, every report of a Kelly sighting was followed up on with police interviews, and the family was now saying that the cops dropped the ball by treating the case as a runaway case. And

police defended themselves. They said the sightings were so frequent that they had work on the theory that she was okay, but elsewhere there had never been any indications, for example, that she was being held against her will, and at

age sixteen, she was being treated as an adult. Now, the frustrating thing in this case is that there's an unchanging list of suspects been common knowledge in Webster for many years, and I first heard about the case from an informant who gave me the names of the men

on the list. And the story was that she'd been lured into the woods by a group of boys, that they had preps, given her alcohol and drugs, and were in the process of having sex with her when something went wrong, you know, made the stories she had an asthma attack and the boys, instead of getting her help, they abandoned her. The problem with that is she had a couple of broken ribs, so there's in the case if she had an asthma attack, it might because somebody

was too rough with her. If she's tired to breathe when you have broken ribs sticking into your lungs. Now, none of the young men who aren't that young anymore have ever confessed to law enforcement, although two of them have committed suicide, which I think lends some credence to the validity of the list of names. I would urge, you know, any of those young men who might be listening to you know, tell Webster police. You know, at this point, I don't think you're gonna have to deal

with a murder charge. It all happened when you were a kid. It was a bad incident that went from bad to worse. But I'm not sure that life wouldn't improve for these gentlemen if they fessed up, because obviously they have consciences.

life ends. He decides to set the record straight. And I guess they're they're they're protecting each other as much as they're protecting themselves, but it would be better for all of them if the truth was known.

and my mom they both passed away. Since we're sitting in a backyard at a summer party and folding chairs, sipping beer, and my book Killer Twins had just come out, and my mom was bragging to Alice about her son, the crime writer, and Alice said, it's too bad that your Michael can't write a book about my Kathy, And my mom said, ask him. Well. Alice was too shy

to asked me. But eventually I got around to approaching Alice, and we decided that we had a lot in common and we could be very good for one another because people who wouldn't talk to me in a million years were now going to tell me everything they knew because I'm working for Alice Bernhardt, who's a beloved men member of the community, true sweetheart, ninety year old woman who

everybody loves. She's still the neighborhood's grandma. And for her, she's finally found someone who's going to treat her like a grown up and, like you said before, tell her the truth about what happened instead of letting her imagination continue to work. Right, And we did a really good

good job. I have to say that we teamed up with Donald, a tubman who's been around ever since, and our best lead during the initial investigation led us to a set of brothers who are prone to violence against women, including sex attacks under threat of death. In the Devilo genesy junction, we refer to them as the Wilson brothers, but their names were actually Johnson, and they were from Dundee, New York, and one of them was married to George

Anne's sister and another to her first cousin. The brothers had no scruples. You know that one of them quote beat up unquote their mom. The best way to explain the depravity of the family is this. Both our primary suspect, Clint and his father, Clint Sor, died soon after being caught raping their own granddaughters. So Junior was a chip

off the old block in the sickest possible way. And if it's a coincidence that this guy lives next door to one of the victims and his brother in law of another, then I you know, I'll eat my hat.

Georgianne's nephew said that quote the Johnson boys killed the girls, but that it was okay because they took care of it inside the family, which led us to investigate the deaths of the brothers, and many of which were caused by or occurred in the vicinity of their wives, so the women of the family took over and systematically disposed

of these guys. And in haunting horamsites, we get a close up look at the investigation into the death of Georgie Anne's brother in law shot to death with a shotgun in the town of Henrietta by his wife's boyfriend while the wife, George Ane's sister was in the car screaming.

We take a close up look at the investigation into that crime, as well as some haunting eyewitness accounts of the bizarre cauldron of human depravity that was allowed to fester in near Genese Junction during the summer in nineteen sixty six. The book also has an update on the double initial murders, which is the murder of Carmen Cologne, Wanda Walkowitz, and Michelle Maenza in nineteen seventy one and

nineteen seventy three in Rochester. All of them were picked up while walking alone on the street in an urban setting and their bodies were found raped beside a country road in a very rural setting, and that was the thing that they tied them together. They're all ten or eleven years old, and we give some updates, and that we follow the the odd patterns set by Kenneth Bianchi and Joseph Naso, which is now joined by a new

guy named Paul Frediani. And these are all young men who were in high school in the Rochester area at the time of the double initial murders, and all of them moved to California and became convicted killers. Wow, so yeah, it's weird. Us, of course, is the most unusual of the bunch because his victims all had the same first and last night not all, but most of them had

the same first and last initial. And he killed a woman in California whose name was also Carmen Cologne, same name as the first double initial victim in the Rochester area. Now that's a DNA case, the limited DNA case. We have DNA from the middle victim, but not from the other two. And obviously so far there's never been a DNA match with any of these suspects.

of that much. The Boston Strangler was one that was known but until the mid sixties, when Pandora's Box was opened pretty much during the summer in nineteen sixty six, same time as the child I murders, you know, with it. By the end of the sixties, we knew that that serial killing was a thing, that evil was out there,

and that there were human predators. But to watch the light bulb go on slowly is very profound for me that we're so much smarter now and to the point where that the nature of mind bogglingly horrible crime has changed. We don't see the serial killer who allowed it was the pressure cooker to build up in between crimes, the

one who taunts police but stays a shadow. Today we see spree killers, guys who harm themselves in one way or another and then go to a crowded place and try to kill as many as they can, and usually it turns out to be a particularly violent and horrible form of suicide because they end up dead, either shot

by a police officer or at their own gun. So there's this period at the end of the twentieth century where there's this phenomenon of serial killing, and I don't think it'll ever cease to fascinate me because it was the thing that terrorized me to the point of trauma when I was a kid. You know, I'm glad I

gave Alice Bernhardt some closure. I'm not sure that I'll ever give myself closure, and luck luckily for the crime readers, I think I will always be searching for answers involving these sorts of crimes.

Michael Benson. If I can give a quick plug for stuff coming up, sure not. Still on sale at a bookstore near you is Carmine the Snake, biography of mafia legend Carmine Persco that I wrote with Frank Demadio on sale next month. Brooklyn the bag Dad, Christopher Strom's memoir written with Jerome Pricelin, myself by a New York Police Department interrogation expert who after retirement, goes to Iraq to fight terrorism. And next year my next mob opus written

with Frank Domadio, called Lord High Executioner. It's the story of the man who ran murdering albert Anastasia. Wow.