Speaker 1: Tonight, you're going to come face to face with a
Speaker 1: serial killer, one of the most prolific serial killers.
Speaker 2: In US history.
Speaker 1: They don't usually talk to reporters, and in the forty
Speaker 1: five years of sixty minutes, we've never interviewed one until now.
Speaker 1: Charles Cullen was a critical care nurse who admits to
Speaker 1: killing up to forty people.
Speaker 2: Some suspect it was a lot more.
Speaker 1: The murders took place over sixteen years in seven different hospitals.
Speaker 1: There were suspicions at nearly all of them that culin
Speaker 1: was harming patients, yet none of them passed that information
Speaker 1: on to subsequent employers. Newspaper headlines called him the Angel
Speaker 1: of Death. But as you will see, Charles Cullen was
Speaker 1: no mercy killer. Until we interviewed him a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: He'd never spoken publicly about his crimes, never tried to
Speaker 1: explain why he did it, or even express remorse to
Speaker 1: the families and victims when he finally faced them in court.
Speaker 3: This monster didn't even know us or our son, but
Speaker 3: had the audacity to end his life.
Speaker 1: I like to tell you a little bit about my
Speaker 1: mother that you murdered. You don't even have the guts
Speaker 1: to look this way, do you, Charles? Why don't you
Speaker 1: look up that up?
Speaker 4: I like to show you what you did to our children.
Speaker 1: This is their dad and is coughing.
Speaker 5: How do you like that?
Speaker 1: This was the scene seven years ago with the Somerset
Speaker 1: County Courthouse in New Jersey, as Charles Cullen sat through
Speaker 1: his sentencing hearing, refusing to speak or even acknowledge the
Speaker 1: family members of people he had murdered. Even the judge
Speaker 1: was exasperated.
Speaker 6: Cullen, I asked you a question, why is it that
Speaker 6: you have chosen not to address the court?
Speaker 2: Can you hear me?
Speaker 7: Mister Cullen?
Speaker 1: He's kept that silence behind the walls of the New
Speaker 1: Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where he is in protective custody,
Speaker 1: to keep him safe from other inmates. Protecting himself from
Speaker 1: his own demons has been more difficult. We found out
Speaker 1: when we sat down across from him in a cramped
Speaker 1: cubicle separated by a thick layer of glass, to talk
Speaker 1: about the people he's killed.
Speaker 8: Forty an arbitrary number.
Speaker 7: Forty is an estimate. I gave a number between thirty
Speaker 7: and forty. I think I have identified you know, most
Speaker 7: of them.
Speaker 8: Look, you pled guilty to murder. You don't use that word.
Speaker 7: I think that I had a lot of trouble accepting
Speaker 7: that word for a long time. I accept that that's
Speaker 7: what it is.
Speaker 8: Do you consider yourself a serial killer?
Speaker 7: I mean, I guess it depends upon a person's definition.
Speaker 7: If it's more than one in it, it's a pattern,
Speaker 7: I guess then yes.
Speaker 1: In Cullen's case, all of his victims were patients assigned
Speaker 1: to hospital units where he worked as a nurse. They
Speaker 1: ranged an age from twenty one to ninety one. Some
Speaker 1: were critically ill, others were ready to be discharged when
Speaker 1: Cullen injected them with drugs that would kill them. It
Speaker 1: was a pattern that began twenty six years ago. It's
Speaker 1: a Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, Colin's very
Speaker 1: first nursing job.
Speaker 7: I worked on the burn unit, So I mean there
Speaker 7: was a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, and
Speaker 7: I didn't cope with that as well as I thought
Speaker 7: I would.
Speaker 1: And that was the first place that she gave so
Speaker 1: in medication and caused them to die. The patient was
Speaker 1: John Yengo, a judge from New Jersey who was suffering
Speaker 1: from a severe case of sunburn until Cullen injected him
Speaker 1: with a fatal overdose of lightocane.
Speaker 8: Do you remember the person?
Speaker 7: I mean, I remember one, and that's the only person
Speaker 7: I've been able to identify, But.
Speaker 1: There could have been more. Saint Barnabas didn't know about
Speaker 1: the patient Culin murdered, but it did suspect him of
Speaker 1: trying to kill or harm half a dozen other patients
Speaker 1: by randomly and repeatedly poisoning bags of sailine solutions.
Speaker 6: Someone was spiking ivy bags with insulin in the storeroom.
Speaker 1: Charles Graber a New York writer as well as a
Speaker 1: former medical student and researcher. He spent seven years investigating
Speaker 1: Cullin's murders for a new book called The Good Nurse.
Speaker 1: Graber says a number of patients at Saint Barnabas went
Speaker 1: into insulin shock and nearly died.
Speaker 6: He was the main suspect for poisoning random bags of saline.
Speaker 6: He if you talk to the investigators there, they'll tell
Speaker 6: you Colin was our man. We knew he was dirty.
Speaker 6: They couldn't prove anything. It's all circumstantial.
Speaker 8: They fire him.
Speaker 5: He moved on.
Speaker 1: When Cullin left the hospital. The insulin overdoses stocked at St.
Speaker 7: Barnabas. They could have had my license investigative and probably
Speaker 7: revoked at that point in time.
Speaker 8: Should they have? Should they add?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 1: But instead of ending Charles Cullen's nursing career, Saint Barnabas
Speaker 1: marked the beginning of a sixteen year killing spree. Cullin
Speaker 1: would work at eight other hospitals and be suspected of
Speaker 1: harming patients at six of them, but those suspicions never
Speaker 1: reached subsequent employers, and Cullen continued to murder patients with
Speaker 1: virtually impunity. In nineteen ninety three, prosecutors investigated Cullin for
Speaker 1: murdering ninety one year old Helen Dean. An autopsy tested
Speaker 1: for nearly one hundred medications, but not the one Cullen
Speaker 1: used to kill her. A powerful drug called the jockst
Speaker 1: or Ditch for short. It was Cullin's first weapon of choice.
Speaker 8: Why did you like ditch ditch? You know?
Speaker 7: Was it a very powerful cardiac medication?
Speaker 8: What does it do to someone?
Speaker 7: In small amounts, it slows the heartbreat down. In larger amounts,
Speaker 7: it can call what's called complete heart block and then
Speaker 7: the heart is very irregular, and you know it can
Speaker 7: cause death. It does cause death in large amounts.
Speaker 1: It was also readily available in critical care units, and
Speaker 1: Cullen figured out ways to conceal his digoxin withdrawals from
Speaker 1: an automatic drug dispensary system called Pixies, which required nurses
Speaker 1: to type in the name of the patient and the
Speaker 1: drug to be administered.
Speaker 7: I wouldn't go in under ditch. I would go under
Speaker 7: tile and all for another medication that would be in
Speaker 7: the same drawer. So you know, there was no record
Speaker 7: of me going in for ditch other than the fact
Speaker 7: that you know it was in the same drawer.
Speaker 8: How did you choose who you were going to give
Speaker 8: this medication to.
Speaker 7: It's difficult for me to go back in time and
Speaker 7: think about what things were running through my mind at
Speaker 7: the time.
Speaker 8: Was it personal?
Speaker 7: No? No.
Speaker 8: Did you get pleasure out of it? Satisfaction?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 7: I mean I thought that that people weren't suffering anymore, so,
Speaker 7: in a sense, I thought I was.
Speaker 8: Helping.
Speaker 1: Culin suggested several times that his actions were merciful, but
Speaker 1: the evidence doesn't support it. Sixty year old Eleanor Stecker
Speaker 1: an asthma patient was recovering and in no pain when
Speaker 1: Culin administered a fatal de Jockson overdose. College student Michael Straenko,
Speaker 1: who suffered from an autoimmune disease, was recovering from what
Speaker 1: his parents called routine surgery to remove his spleen.
Speaker 10: My heart, it aches for my son, It bleeds.
Speaker 1: For my son.
Speaker 3: We vividly remember Charles Cullen walking into the waiting room.
Speaker 3: He looked us right in the eye and stated how
Speaker 3: Michael was gravely ill and people don't make it. And
Speaker 3: my wife's told Culin, that's enough. You could leave.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: We're haunted by the memory of Charles Collin coming to
Speaker 3: the waiting groom to get our reaction.
Speaker 1: There were people that you caused to die who were
Speaker 1: not near death and not suffering that much.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 7: Again, you know, I mean, Michael here isn't to justify
Speaker 7: you know, what I did to There is no justification.
Speaker 7: I just think that the only thing I can say
Speaker 7: is that I felt overwhelmed at the time.
Speaker 11: Can you give us anything, Can you give the families anything,
Speaker 11: any explanation for how this happened and why this happened?
Speaker 7: Like I said, I can't. I just can't say that
Speaker 7: it was more or less, you know, felt like I
Speaker 7: needed to do something and I did, And that's not
Speaker 7: an answer to anything.
Speaker 1: Charles Cullen was the youngest of eight children and grew
Speaker 1: up poor on this street in West Orange, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Protected by his mother. Cullin was seventeen when she died.
Speaker 1: He tried to kill himself. He spent six years in
Speaker 1: the Navy, most of them as a missile technician on
Speaker 1: a nuclear submarine. He was miserable, felt bullied, tried to
Speaker 1: kill himself again. After receiving a general discharge, he decided
Speaker 1: to take up nursing. He got married and started a family,
Speaker 1: but it all went sour. A messy divorce, custody battles, bankruptcy,
Speaker 1: heavy drinking, more half hearted suicide attempts, and trips to
Speaker 1: the psychiatric ward. That was Charles Cullen's state of mind
Speaker 1: when he was killing people. And on the night he
Speaker 1: finally confessed to the murders.
Speaker 12: I tried to kill myself throughout my life because I
Speaker 12: never really liked who I was, said I was worthy
Speaker 12: of anything.
Speaker 6: It was never about anyone but Charlie Collin. He did
Speaker 6: what he did because of his own needs, his own compulsions.
Speaker 1: Author Charles Graeber interviewed Colin more than a dozen times
Speaker 1: for his book, and he remembers seeing words like paranoid,
Speaker 1: major depression, hostile, passive, aggressive, and anti social on psychiatric reports.
Speaker 6: He sees himself as a victim, and as a victim,
Speaker 6: he's entitled to lash out in any way. He wants
Speaker 6: to make things right. If that means killing patients, it
Speaker 6: just anything justifies his Victimodey.
Speaker 1: You said at one point that you thought it was
Speaker 1: about power and control.
Speaker 6: What do you mean If the rest of his life
Speaker 6: was spinning out of control, if he was losing custody,
Speaker 6: if he was feeling depressed, if his love life was
Speaker 6: in the toilet, he could poison patience, He could save patients,
Speaker 6: He could make decisions. He had an arena in which
Speaker 6: he mattered and where his actions had definite consequence.
Speaker 1: Here you have a person who tried to kill himself
Speaker 1: at least twenty times, who was in and out of
Speaker 1: psych wards, and on some occasions walked right out of
Speaker 1: the psych ward and write into a job as a
Speaker 1: critical care nurse.
Speaker 6: Right He actually took a call asking him back on
Speaker 6: shift from a psych ward.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't the hospitals do some background.
Speaker 6: Checks well, partially because they weren't required to, and partially
Speaker 6: because there was a nursing shortage on Charlie Collen looked
Speaker 6: good by the end of his career. He was a
Speaker 6: sixteen year veteran. He had recommendations, and for a hospital
Speaker 6: to ask too much or say too much became a liability.
Speaker 6: You can't penalize a nurse for seeking counseling, for seeking treatment,
Speaker 6: for going to a rehab center successfully, and so because
Speaker 6: of that, Charlie hid in those shadows.
Speaker 1: When Colin was hired at Saint Luke's University Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: he'd been fired or forced to resign from five other hospitals,
Speaker 1: yet none of this was in his file with the
Speaker 1: state Nursing Board. By his own count, Colin had already
Speaker 1: murdered eleven people and he would kill at least five more.
Speaker 1: At Saint Luke's, nurses were suspicious, there were rumors about
Speaker 1: his past, and Culin was caught red handed stealing lethal drugs,
Speaker 1: but instead of calling the police, Saint Luke's brought in
Speaker 1: a lawyer to confront Colin.
Speaker 8: Do you think that they knew what you were doing
Speaker 8: at Saint Luke's.
Speaker 7: I think that they had a strong suspicion.
Speaker 8: Did you expect to get caught?
Speaker 7: Well, I think you can say I was caught at
Speaker 7: Saint Parnabus and I was caught at Saint Luke's. There's
Speaker 7: no reason that I should have been in practicing nurse.
Speaker 8: After that, they offered you some kind of a deal.
Speaker 7: They said, if you resign, we'll give you neutral references,
Speaker 7: and I decided to go with that.
Speaker 1: What is it about this system and about hospitals that
Speaker 1: no one went to the police. No one really wanted
Speaker 1: to find out what was going on.
Speaker 8: They gave you an opportunity to leave.
Speaker 7: I think because it's a matter of worrying about lawsuits.
Speaker 7: If they pointed out that there was a problem, We're
Speaker 7: going to be found liable for millions of dollars. So
Speaker 7: they guess they just saw it was a lot easier
Speaker 7: to not put themselves in a position of getting sued.
Speaker 1: After Charles Cullen was escorted out the door of Saint
Speaker 1: Luke's Hospital with no consequences, one of the nurses called
Speaker 1: a friend that the Pennsylvania State Police with her suspicions.
Speaker 2: And an investigation was begun.
Speaker 1: By then, Cullen had already found another job at the
Speaker 1: Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey. He would murder another
Speaker 1: thirteen people there, but it would be his final stop.
Speaker 2: That story when we come back.
Speaker 1: In September two thousand and two, when Charles Cullen was
Speaker 1: hired as a critical care nurse at New Jersey's Somerset
Speaker 1: Medical Center. The hospital knew nothing about his dark past,
Speaker 1: and didn't know that he'd been fired or forced to
Speaker 1: resign at a half a dozen hospitals, or that he'd
Speaker 1: been investigated by authorities for harming patients. And there was
Speaker 1: no reason to suspect that Culin had murdered five patients
Speaker 1: at his last job.
Speaker 2: He was able to move from.
Speaker 1: Hospital to hospital without so much as a bad reference.
Speaker 1: Colin would kill another thirteen people at Somerset in thirteen months,
Speaker 1: and try and kill three more before two detectives, eight
Speaker 1: bureaucrat and a female nurse finally connected the dots.
Speaker 8: You're under suspicion at Saint Luke's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you went off to Somerset and kept doing exactly
Speaker 1: the same things, And it looks like to me that
Speaker 1: you wanted to get caught.
Speaker 8: I don't know. You don't know.
Speaker 7: Because you know you're right. I mean, I continued, but
Speaker 7: I was also I was also careful. I was also
Speaker 7: deny any time anybody would have asked me.
Speaker 1: It was the suspicious death of a Roman Catholic priest
Speaker 1: named Florian Gaull that set in motion the events that
Speaker 1: would eventually expose Charles Cullen. Reverend gall had died unexpectedly
Speaker 1: overnight while recovering from pneumonia, and the hospital discovered high
Speaker 1: levels of the heart drug to Jockson in his blood.
Speaker 1: It was the second unexplained overdose in two weeks.
Speaker 13: The bloodline were astronomical. They're way higher than you would
Speaker 13: ever shoot for by using the drug therapeutically.
Speaker 1: Doctor Stephen Marcus is the director of New Jersey's Poison
Speaker 1: Control Center. He heard about the de Jockson overdoses when
Speaker 1: a pharmacist at Somerset called his office asking for help
Speaker 1: with some dosage calculations. The pharmacist also confided that two
Speaker 1: more patients in the same unit had turned up with
Speaker 1: abnormally high levels of insulin.
Speaker 2: What's going through your mind?
Speaker 13: My number one, two and three thought was that there
Speaker 13: was something malicious going on in the institution.
Speaker 1: In July of two thousand and three, Marcus set up
Speaker 1: an urgent conference call with the hospital's medical director, doctor
Speaker 1: William Cores, and taped the conversation, in which he told
Speaker 1: the hospital to notify the authorities, the police matter.
Speaker 14: What we're wrestling with is, you know, throwing the whole
Speaker 14: institution and the chaos versus responsibility to wintact pace from
Speaker 14: further harm. And we have been trying to investigate this
Speaker 14: to get the more information before we made any kind
Speaker 14: of brush to you know, judgment.
Speaker 11: If there is somebody out there that is purposely doing
Speaker 11: this to.
Speaker 14: Individuals at your hospital, we have a legal obligation to
Speaker 14: report this.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 1: Somerset Medical Center would eventually notify authorities, but it would
Speaker 1: take the three long months. Do you know how many
Speaker 1: patients died between those.
Speaker 13: No, I don't know the number, but I do know
Speaker 13: that there were some patients that died in between them.
Speaker 13: Five that we know of those, But those five deaths
Speaker 13: will I'll remember them of the rest of my life.
Speaker 8: Sorry, they didn't have to happen.
Speaker 2: They should have been preventable.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was October before Somerset County Detectives Tim Braun
Speaker 1: and Daniel Baldwin finally met with hospital officials. They were
Speaker 1: told about a half a dozen incidents in the critical
Speaker 1: care unit. No one used the word homicide.
Speaker 15: They had dropped a couple names on us with regards
Speaker 15: to their own internal investigation that they claimed to have
Speaker 15: conducted for several months, and they did provide us two
Speaker 15: names in particular, but did not identify them as any
Speaker 15: type of suspect or anything like that.
Speaker 8: One of them was Charles Colin.
Speaker 1: Yes, the detectives ran a routine background check on Charles
Speaker 1: Colin and discovered that he'd been arrested for stalking a
Speaker 1: female nurse and breaking into her apartment in eastern Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: The file there also contained a posted note saying that
Speaker 1: the Pennsylvania State Police had called just a few weeks
Speaker 1: earlier asking similar questions. Detective Baldwin called the trooper who
Speaker 1: made the inquiry and hit Petert.
Speaker 4: After learn speaking with the trooper, he informed me that
Speaker 4: his agency had conducted an investigation armister Colin with a
Speaker 4: suspicion that he was murdering patients in Pennsylvania as well,
Speaker 4: that he was using the joction to murder.
Speaker 8: Patients, and you found this out with making two phone calls. Yes,
Speaker 8: that was it. Do you think you had your man, yes.
Speaker 1: Yes, But the detectives knew that proving it would be difficult.
Speaker 1: A number of law enforcement agencies had tried and failed.
Speaker 8: How helpful was the hospital in this investigation?
Speaker 15: How helpful was the hospital? They were very helpful by
Speaker 15: answering court issued subpoenas, and that was the extent of
Speaker 15: their cooperation.
Speaker 1: When the detectives asked to see computerized records from the
Speaker 1: automated drug dispensary and the critical care unit, they say
Speaker 1: the hospital told them that it was impossible because the
Speaker 1: drug dispensing machine only stored records for thirty days. They
Speaker 1: learned otherwise from the machines manufacture.
Speaker 2: They lied to you, Yes they did.
Speaker 1: They didn't want to give you records that turned out
Speaker 1: to be crucial to your investigation.
Speaker 15: Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 8: Do you think they tried to obstruct your investigation?
Speaker 15: They didn't try to help it, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: When the detectives informed Somerset that Charles Cullen was the
Speaker 1: target of their investigation, the hospital fired him, not for
Speaker 1: harming patients, for lying on his job application. Did you
Speaker 1: get the sense at Somerset, for example, that any of
Speaker 1: your colleagues, any of the nurses, any of the doctors,
Speaker 1: knew what was going on.
Speaker 7: No, I mean, until you know I was fired, I mean,
Speaker 7: nobody gave me any indication that anybody was suspicious. I mean,
Speaker 7: the weird thing about Somerset Hospital was is that they
Speaker 7: were planning on firing me the night before, so they
Speaker 7: let me work one more shift knowing that they were
Speaker 7: going to fire me the next day. So they let
Speaker 7: me work an additional shift with the suspicion that I
Speaker 7: had harmed patients, which is kind of bizarre thing to do.
Speaker 8: Did you harm anybody that night?
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 1: With Colin gone and the medical center uncooperative, detectives Brawn
Speaker 1: and Baldwin decided they needed an ally inside the hospital
Speaker 1: to help them gather evidence to make their case. They
Speaker 1: decided to approach Amy Ridgeway, a critical care nurse who
Speaker 1: worked with Culin on the night shift and was his
Speaker 1: best friend at the hospital.
Speaker 16: He was always early, always on time, crisp and sat
Speaker 16: down and was very serious about getting to work.
Speaker 8: Did you consider him to be a good nurse?
Speaker 5: I did.
Speaker 1: When the detectives first interviewed Ridgeway, she was hostile and
Speaker 1: upset that Culin had been fired, so they decided to
Speaker 1: show her the evidence that they had gathered, the Pixis
Speaker 1: record showing Cullen's drug withdrawals from the dispensary and his
Speaker 1: real employment history.
Speaker 8: Would you tell her? Do you remember?
Speaker 4: I just told her that he was released from several facilities.
Speaker 4: There were allegations about him at other facilities for doing
Speaker 4: similar things that were going on at Somerset Medical Center.
Speaker 4: Because at that point she realized this couldn't be a coincidence,
Speaker 4: and she offered to help.
Speaker 16: Yes, Danny pushed this piece of paper across the table
Speaker 16: to me, and it was the Pixis print outs. And
Speaker 16: I was devastated. I knew, I knew he was murdering people.
Speaker 3: How did you know that there were so.
Speaker 16: Many withdrawals of lethal medications. There's no reason, no reason
Speaker 16: except if you want to kill someone.
Speaker 2: Were you angry?
Speaker 16: I was sad for my patients. I was so many
Speaker 16: things were going through my mind. I was sad I
Speaker 16: didn't see it. I felt betrayed by my own intuition.
Speaker 1: Amy Ridgway, who later persuaded Colin to do the interview
Speaker 1: with us, spent days analyzing medical records for the detectives
Speaker 1: and schooled them on a computerized record system that would
Speaker 1: help reconstruct Colin's activities on specific days. She recorded phone
Speaker 1: conversations with Colin and wore a wire at a meeting
Speaker 1: in this restaurant. The same day, a newspaper article reported
Speaker 1: that he was being investigated for killing patients.
Speaker 16: I said, I know you're guilty. I know I know
Speaker 16: you did this, and yet I'm still here. I'll take
Speaker 16: you down to the station. We'll go together. And he
Speaker 16: changed his face, just changed.
Speaker 8: And what did he say.
Speaker 16: He said, I want to go down fighting. I want
Speaker 16: to go down fighting.
Speaker 1: Colin told us he suspected that the police were listening in.
Speaker 7: I knew that Amy had helped the police. I strongly
Speaker 7: suspected that she was wired when she was asking me
Speaker 7: those questions. So you know, you know, that didn't stop
Speaker 7: me having the same opinion of Amy, which is that
Speaker 7: she's a good nurse, that she's caring nurse, and that
Speaker 7: she did it because she felt it was the right
Speaker 7: thing to do.
Speaker 1: He was arrested right after that meeting on what police
Speaker 1: now admit was mostly circumstantial evidence. What they needed was
Speaker 1: a confession but Colin refused to say anything, so once
Speaker 1: again the police turned to Amy Ridgway for help. What
Speaker 1: did you say to get him to confess?
Speaker 16: I wasn't. I wasn't very honest with him, and there's
Speaker 16: a part of me I still feel guilty about that.
Speaker 16: I was manipulating him a bit. I told him. I
Speaker 16: told him the investigators were also looking at me, and
Speaker 16: how could he think that I wasn't somehow going to
Speaker 16: be implicated. I remember saying to him, so, who was
Speaker 16: your first first victim? And was it a long time ago?
Speaker 16: Was it recent? And he started to talk. He said
Speaker 16: it was a long time ago.
Speaker 7: I believe it was with a medication to drop the
Speaker 7: blood pressure.
Speaker 1: Collins's formal confession with the detectives would last seven hours.
Speaker 6: We'll never know how many people Charlie Collin killed.
Speaker 1: Charles Graber spent seven years investigating the case for his
Speaker 1: book The Good Nurse.
Speaker 6: It's very difficult going back. There's no paperwork, there are
Speaker 6: no bodies to e. Zoom Is working over sixteen years
Speaker 6: in St. Barbabas alone, He later told investigators, ghosting three
Speaker 6: or four people a week, he didn't always o their outcomes.
Speaker 8: How many do you think I would be.
Speaker 6: I would be very surprised, as would pretty much everyone
Speaker 6: I've spoken to with any knowledge of this case if
Speaker 6: it was not in the hundreds, multiple hundreds.
Speaker 8: You've been in here a while nine years. You knew
Speaker 8: it was wrong? Yes, I did at the time, at
Speaker 8: the time and later, are you sorry what you did? Yes?
Speaker 7: But like I said, I don't know if I would
Speaker 7: have stopped.
Speaker 10: Tonight, you're going to hear about the man the FBI
Speaker 10: is now calling the most prolific serial killer in the
Speaker 10: history of the United States. His name is Samuel Little,
Speaker 10: and over the last year and a half, he has
Speaker 10: confessed to ninety three murders. That's more than were committed
Speaker 10: by Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer combined.
Speaker 5: No one would have known.
Speaker 10: The scale of Little's crimes if not for a Texas
Speaker 10: ranger who had a hunch Little had never confessed to
Speaker 10: anyone about anything, But over the course of seven hundred
Speaker 10: hours of interviews, ranger James Holland coaxed the seventy nine
Speaker 10: year old into revealing his life's work. The confessions have
Speaker 10: enabled investigators across the country to solve dozens of cold cases,
Speaker 10: but Holland needs help to match up the rest. It's
Speaker 10: why the Texas Ranger is telling us the story of
Speaker 10: how he got America's deadliest serial killer to confess. With
Speaker 10: a swagger that would make John Wayne envious. Texas Ranger
Speaker 10: James Holland arrived this summer at the California State Prison.
Speaker 10: He was escorted to the interview room for another round
Speaker 10: with Samuel Little, the killer who went undetected for nearly
Speaker 10: half a century. Don't be fooled by his grandfatherly appearance.
Speaker 9: I got a numerous verbs of women in my life.
Speaker 10: Oh, fifty years, ninety three murders in nineteen States from
Speaker 10: nineteen seventy to two thousand and five. Now near the
Speaker 10: end of his own life and out of appeals, Little
Speaker 10: has been spilling his secrets to Ranger Holland over the
Speaker 10: course of several interviews since May of last year.
Speaker 7: Where did you kill the most?
Speaker 9: Oh, so, that's easy, Florida in California?
Speaker 8: What city did you kill the most? In Miami and
Speaker 8: Los Angeles?
Speaker 7: And how mad you kill in Los Angeles?
Speaker 8: Los Angeles? Approximately twenty so?
Speaker 5: How did he skip by so long?
Speaker 17: He was so good at what he did? You know,
Speaker 17: how did you get away with that?
Speaker 8: Sammy? Did the crime?
Speaker 17: Left town?
Speaker 10: The drifter from Ohio prayed upon the fringes of society, prostitutes,
Speaker 10: drug addic women. He believed the police wouldn't work too
Speaker 10: hard to find. The ranger says Little was a cunning
Speaker 10: killer who sized up his victims and his surroundings.
Speaker 17: The first thing I picked up on is how wicked
Speaker 17: smart he was. This guy smarked, Oh, like genius.
Speaker 5: Yeah, why do you say that?
Speaker 14: Oh?
Speaker 17: Well, number one, you know the photographic memory, his memory
Speaker 17: for details, And we're like, Sammy, tell me what's around her.
Speaker 17: There's three tombstones over there, there's a Calichi road, drive
Speaker 17: down a quarter mile. There's a white Baptist church that
Speaker 17: needs to be whitewashed. Phenomenal.
Speaker 10: For example, Little remembered unusual arches close to the spot
Speaker 10: where he killed a woman outside of Miami. Sure enough,
Speaker 10: when Miami detectives investigated, they saw the arches. Little had
Speaker 10: strangled Miriam Chapman near those arches in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 5: You never felt like he sent you on some wild
Speaker 5: goose chase.
Speaker 17: No, nothing he has ever said has been proven to
Speaker 17: be wrong or false. We've been able to prove up
Speaker 17: almost everything, mister Little.
Speaker 10: Because of Little's confessions, judges and prosecutors nationwide have been
Speaker 10: able to close long standing cases.
Speaker 8: What is your plate to the charge of murder?
Speaker 9: Yimy?
Speaker 10: Here was Little, via a video link from his prison
Speaker 10: in August, pleading guilty to two stranglings in Cincinnati. In
Speaker 10: just over a year, fifty cold cases that had been
Speaker 10: dormant for decades have been solved due to the detailed
Speaker 10: confessions Little provided to the ranger.
Speaker 8: Tell me about.
Speaker 17: North Little Rock, Tell me what that girl looked like?
Speaker 8: Hey booked team, he had a gap twenty.
Speaker 10: Little grows disturbingly animated as he describes how he strangled
Speaker 10: his victims.
Speaker 17: She fightful life, you know, fightful my pleasure.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So how do you reach a serial killer? How do
Speaker 5: you get them to talk?
Speaker 17: You avoid the things that normally work for investigators.
Speaker 5: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 17: You avoid things like, you know, remorse, enclosure for the family.
Speaker 5: Because they don't have remorse and they don't care about closure.
Speaker 17: No, it doesn't appeal to them at all. I mean
Speaker 17: you're asking them to open up their soul to the
Speaker 17: things that are more intimate to them than anything in life.
Speaker 17: Why should they do that with you? And that's what
Speaker 17: you're working for?
Speaker 8: Real friendly? She would laughing, Well, I would.
Speaker 17: Kill with Sammy. There's indications of visualization of when he's
Speaker 17: thinking about a crime scene. He'll start stroking his face
Speaker 17: and as he's starting to picture a victim, you'll see
Speaker 17: him look out and up and you can tell he
Speaker 17: has this revolving carousel of victims and it's just spinning
Speaker 17: and he's waiting for it to stop at the one
Speaker 17: that he wants.
Speaker 2: To talk about.
Speaker 10: Investigators had discovered that little like to sketch. Ranger Holland
Speaker 10: gave him art supplies, wondering if he might be able
Speaker 10: to use his remarkable memory to draw his victims. Oh
Speaker 10: and he has.
Speaker 5: Wow, these are all of his drawings. These are all
Speaker 5: his They're pretty detailed. Is there one that you looked
Speaker 5: at and you knew right away? Oh that's there's a.
Speaker 15: Lot of them.
Speaker 17: Really, yeahs As.
Speaker 5: We matched it up, how many is he sketched?
Speaker 8: Here's somewhe around fifty.
Speaker 5: The note on this one's super creepy.
Speaker 17: Sam killed me, but I love him, He writes notes
Speaker 17: on some of the drawings.
Speaker 5: Tall girl by the Highway, Right girl on the strip
Speaker 5: joint right left in the woods, nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 17: Right, Yes, and we matched that one up. You have, Yes,
Speaker 17: that's a New Orleans murder.
Speaker 5: I can't remember the person who checked me out at
Speaker 5: the hotel this morning. If someone gave me a million
Speaker 5: dollars to draw face, I couldn't do it. The fact
Speaker 5: that he can still do.
Speaker 17: This right, He basically takes a photograph in his mind
Speaker 17: of exactly what he sees as he leaves them.
Speaker 10: A year and a half ago, Ranger Holland had never
Speaker 10: heard of Samuel Little. Little was rotting away in this
Speaker 10: prison at the edge of California's Mojave Desert, sentenced to
Speaker 10: three life terms in twenty fourteen for strangling three women.
Speaker 10: In court, prosecutors had labeled Little a sexual predator. He
Speaker 10: denied everything and was defiant to the end, but the
Speaker 10: FBI noted that Little had somehow skirted charges for violent
Speaker 10: crimes year after year in state after state, in places
Speaker 10: where women disappeared, including Texas. That drew the interest of
Speaker 10: Ranger James Holland, a skilled interviewer who says he's convinced
Speaker 10: dozens of killers to confess during his career.
Speaker 5: Typically when people want you involved in a case. They
Speaker 5: want you there because.
Speaker 17: Why Virtually every single case that I ever deal with,
Speaker 17: there's no DNA evidence, there's no forensics, there's no nothing.
Speaker 10: And there was nothing linking Samuel Little to additional murders,
Speaker 10: just suspicions. The ranger was intrigued by a cold case
Speaker 10: in Odessa, Texas. Denise Brothers was a prostitute working on
Speaker 10: the wrong side of town. Then she went missing in
Speaker 10: nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 8: We looked everywhere.
Speaker 10: Her son, Damien, remembers driving around Odessa with his grandparents
Speaker 10: looking for her. A month later, Denise Brother's body was
Speaker 10: found at the back of an abandoned parking lot, dumped
Speaker 10: in brush.
Speaker 5: Were asked to come down and look at the body.
Speaker 5: You had to do that, yeah, ol Grean fourteen? That
Speaker 5: stick sweet?
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10: For twenty four years, Damien didn't know who killed his
Speaker 10: mother or why. Ranger Holland learned Denise Brothers had been
Speaker 10: strangled and did Samuel Little was in West Texas at
Speaker 10: the time.
Speaker 17: Did Sammy do it? I don't know, but I felt
Speaker 17: like there was a reasonable probability that.
Speaker 2: He did it.
Speaker 10: To find out if his instinct was right, the ranger
Speaker 10: went to California last year to interview Little, who had
Speaker 10: always been hostile to law enforcement.
Speaker 17: Did I believe he was going to confess a complete
Speaker 17: arrogance on my part? Absolutely, And for the first couple.
Speaker 5: Of minutes it really was going quite poorly. Oh he's raging.
Speaker 10: Oh yes, a Little vented in the interview room for
Speaker 10: thirty minutes that he had been wrongly depicted as a rapist.
Speaker 17: There was no doubt in my mind that Samuel Little
Speaker 17: was not a rapist. But I told him he knew it,
Speaker 17: and I knew it that he was a killer. And
Speaker 17: he stops and he kind of looks at me for
Speaker 17: a second. He didn't seem to mind it. And then
Speaker 17: you could see in his eyes as he's looking away
Speaker 17: and he falls back as I say the word killer,
Speaker 17: and that appealed to him. That's how he defines himself.
Speaker 5: As a killer. Yes, was there a moment where you
Speaker 5: said I've got him.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 17: When he talked about there may be three victims in Texas.
Speaker 10: Three victims, and one of them was in Odessa, Texas.
Speaker 8: All of a sudden we turned to each other, Oh
Speaker 8: my gosh, he's talking about Odessa, And we grab our
Speaker 8: files and start going through and backing when he's talking
Speaker 8: about and verifying.
Speaker 10: And Christy Paulizzolo of the FBI and Angela Williamson of
Speaker 10: the Department of Justice analyze violent crimes. They were listening
Speaker 10: to the interview across the hall and had access to
Speaker 10: the FBI database and the Denise Brothers file.
Speaker 5: You've got the photos of the crime scene in front
Speaker 5: of you. Did it match up right away?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 5: And he had details. Yes, it hadn't been reported in detail,
Speaker 5: like what in Denise's case? You remember that she wore
Speaker 5: a DENTHO.
Speaker 10: The autopsy confirmed Brothers did wear a denture. All the
Speaker 10: details matched. Samuel Little had killed Denise Brothers. Ranger Holland
Speaker 10: knew he was on to something big. He schemed to
Speaker 10: have Little extra dated to Texas for a few months
Speaker 10: so he could talk to him around the clock and
Speaker 10: extract more confessions. I would think Texas, with the death penalty,
Speaker 10: is the last place a killer like Sanley Little.
Speaker 5: Wants to go.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Basically, what I told him was, I can go to
Speaker 17: the district attorney and I can ask him to take
Speaker 17: the death penalty all off the table, and I believe
Speaker 17: that he will do that.
Speaker 10: Which was especially brazen since Ranger Holland had never met
Speaker 10: the district attorney in Odessa, Bobby Blind.
Speaker 18: And he said, I'd like a letter from you on
Speaker 18: your letter head saying that you would wave the death penalty.
Speaker 18: And I said, well, you know, that's a pretty tall
Speaker 18: order just to do.
Speaker 5: Blindly, So why why did you do it?
Speaker 15: There's a greater good.
Speaker 18: The strange ranger that was calling me from California tell
Speaker 18: me he had a serial killer. I put my faith
Speaker 18: in him.
Speaker 10: The next morning, the letter waving the death penalty was
Speaker 10: in Samuel Little's hands. Last September, the ranger sent a
Speaker 10: plane to whisk Little to Texas, where he was housed
Speaker 10: in the Wise County Jail for forty eight straight days.
Speaker 10: For hours on end, the two men sat in a
Speaker 10: small room. During that time, Little confessed to sixty five
Speaker 10: of his murders. The ranger replied Little with pizza and
Speaker 10: doctor Pepper. To keep the stories flowing.
Speaker 5: People will hear this and go, why were you treating
Speaker 5: a serial killer?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 10: Well?
Speaker 17: What do I say to that? I say that we
Speaker 17: can have one case, or we can have ninety three cases.
Speaker 5: It was in your best interest for him to be comfortable.
Speaker 17: Oh, absolutely, yes, yes, So.
Speaker 5: Why why did he finally confess to you.
Speaker 17: At the end of the day. Yeah, maybe Samon just
Speaker 17: liked me.
Speaker 10: Today Little is back at the California State Prison. We
Speaker 10: wanted to interview him on camera, but state law won't
Speaker 10: allow it, so we asked him to call us. He did,
Speaker 10: answering our questions for nearly an hour, and we wondered
Speaker 10: why he decided to confess. Now, are you worried that
Speaker 10: there might be innocent people in jail for some of
Speaker 10: your crimes?
Speaker 9: Probably the numerous people who are convicted and sent to
Speaker 9: present on my head, I see back to help me
Speaker 9: get somebody out of jail. God, I smile a little
Speaker 9: bit more on me.
Speaker 10: For most of our call, Little spoke of his victims.
Speaker 9: He was broken, homeless, and they walked right into my
Speaker 9: fighter wheel.
Speaker 10: It was uncomfortable to listen to his graphic stories. Towards
Speaker 10: the end of the interview, we asked him to reflect
Speaker 10: on the depths of his crimes.
Speaker 9: I don't think there's another person that did what I'd
Speaker 9: like to do. Stop taking only one in the world,
Speaker 9: and that's that honor. That is a curse.
Speaker 10: With Little's old age, failing health, and to fear that
Speaker 10: his memory could slip. There is urgency to figure out
Speaker 10: who and where the rest of his victims are.
Speaker 17: It's kind of like never ending. You have to continue,
Speaker 17: you have to finish it.
Speaker 10: Ranger Holland's been encouraging little to keep drawing. Three new
Speaker 10: sketches arrived at the ranger's office just last week, three
Speaker 10: new faces lasting in the mind of the most prolific
Speaker 10: serial killer in American history.