It's not fair.
I shouldn't have to live this way.
I shouldn't have to go through all of this.
I'm disgusted by my own father.
As my father,
he was an amazing person, amazing father,
but then him as a man, he was evil.
He was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
My father's name is Robert Eugene Brashers,
and he got away with his crimes for 20 years almost
before anyone ever knew who he was,
and the whole time he was dead.
My whole life, I thought I'd done something wrong.
And I didn't. It was him.
I just... [sniffles]
I still feel guilty, and I still feel...
ashamed...
of not saying stuff.
I wish I was older at that time
so that I would have been able to understand
everything that was going on.
People would have gotten justice.
They got the answers they needed,
but they don't get justice,
and that's wrong.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
[banging on door]
[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
When I was five years old, me,
my mother, and my two older sisters lived in
Huntsville, Alabama,
and I thought at the time my older sister's dad was
my dad until the day Robert Eugene Brashers
pulled in my driveway.
♪
We're sitting outside on the front porch,
and this tall, dark,
handsome man gets out, and he says,
"Hey, Debra Kay, I'm your father."
Debra Kay! You've gotten so big.
I asked my mother, and my mother said, "Yes,
that is your real father."
He came over and hugged me, and we talked a little bit.
My mother was explaining everything to me
and was saying that he was away working,
and that's why he wasn't around, and that they
were getting back together.
He's been gone a long time, but he's here for good now.
I missed you so much.
I never wondered where he was the whole time,
but he had been in prison over gun charges.
My father was very charming, very good-looking.
When my father come into my life,
we went on family trips,
we had everything we ever needed
and wanted, and I had
never had that before.
I went from being a mama's girl to --
Straight to a daddy's girl within a couple of
months of meeting him, because of the way he was.
He was just so loving and so caring.
Are you really here to stay?
- That's right. - You want to come see my room?
You bet I do. Let's go!
When my mom and dad got back together,
they decided to move us to Arkansas.
Life was amazing in Arkansas -- For the first year,
everything seemed perfect.
It was the American dream,
and then it went to...
the American horror story.
♪
This is a photo of me and my mother and my father,
my two sisters, and my aunt
the night we left to move to Arkansas with my father.
This is a picture that I will never hang up in my house
that I don't want my children to see.
If someone looked at this photo
and didn't know anything about my history,
they would just think it was a happy family,
and you'd never know the man that was in this photo
was so evil
and had killed so many people.
When I first looked at it, I just
covered his face, because looking at his face
makes me doubt myself, because I love a man
that's a serial killer.
My father seemed like the perfect father.
I thought he was just
the greatest man alive.
But my father was an alcoholic,
and he would say, "Let's go to the liquor store.
Don't tell your mama, though."
Hey, kiddo.
It was a secret that we kept from my mother.
It didn't seem very harmful to not tell her.
Hey, you want to go for a ride with me?
- Okay. - Yeah.
But hey, don't say nothing.
I remember one day,
my mother was off work, we're getting in the van
with my father, and she comes running out of the house.
Hey! Where the hell do you think you're going?
And she screams, "You are not taking
"my f'ing kids
to the damn liquor store"
was her exact words.
She said, "Get my kids out of that car right now!"
You get that kid out of the car, and you get back in
the house right now. - Don't tell me what I can do.
- No, absolutely not! - You don't tell me what I can't do.
You are not going to the god...
He just gets out of the van, and they get into a fistfight.
My father that day looked like a Tasmanian devil,
just his hands were just wailin' just on her.
I had never seen my father look angry.
Never. I was terrified, because that's
not the father that I knew.
The next thing I know,
she kicked him in between his legs and beat him up.
He was begging her to stop.
"I'm not going to do this.
"These children will not be going through this.
"We come out here to have a better life,
and my children will not see this anymore."
We go to sleep that night and wake up to my father
being there, apologizing and begging all of us
to take him back.
And that is the only time he ever put his hands on my mother.
This photo, we're sitting here
playing around at the kitchen table.
And he's acting like he's choking one of my sisters.
When you look at this photo, knowing my father's crimes,
you would think he was hurting us here,
and he's not, he's just playing around with us.
If he was just any other man, it would be okay
playing around.
But it's not any other man.
When I look at this now,
and I see his hands around my sister's throat,
it makes me think of my sister being drug from
the bedroom that's behind us to the living room in our house,
because my father was mad.
♪
My father was a carpenter.
He "traveled" a lot for work,
but I was -- I'm not sure what all
work he was doing when he traveled.
One time, my father went away
for a one-day job and come back,
and he seemed very different.
He would get angry very, very easily,
and none of us knew why.
- [makes growling noise] - [speaking into fan]
[laughing]
We didn't have central heating and air in the house,
so we had to use fans.
We're just laying in front of the fan, and we were talking.
You know, when you're talking in front of a fan,
it makes the fan noise,
and were being too loud, and it pissed him off.
He was mad.
[laughter]
What is going on in here?!
DEBORAH: He went into a violent rage, you know,
"I done told you to shut up!"
And he started to walk away, and my sister said something.
Jeez, relax.
What did you just say?
He just had this mean, mean, mean
look on his face.
♪
And he dragged her from
the bedroom to the living room and whooped her.
We were terrified.
We didn't know when he was gonna stop,
[distant screaming]
And hearin' her scream and holler,
[distant scream]
And watching her try and kick him away,
I can see it so vividly.
[distant screaming]
It wasn't my father -- That wasn't a loving person.
That was his alter ego, I guess.
[distant screaming]
Looking back, knowing what I know now,
It was around the time
that he had committed murder,
and...
it was like his hidden life and his real life
were colliding together.
His attitude and his behavior just completely changed.
My father seemed very paranoid.
He was not himself at all.
One day, we were playing outside,
and my father just shows up out of nowhere,
just really mad. - Not ever going back there!
- Robert, calm down. - Well, you don't understand.
I'm not going back to that place.
DEBORAH: He's screaming and hollering at my mother,
he's not going to go back to prison.
He'll kill hisself first,
and saying that he has his gun with him.
Go ahead and take care of things right now.
DEBORAH: As my mother and father were arguing,
a family friend got the gun out of the van.
I could see unloading the bullets
and putting them in his pocket.
Then he took off running,
and my father turned around right when he did.
I'll never forget the look on his face that day.
His eyes were just taken over,
like he was possessed by something.
That's the same look that he had
had when he whooped my sister.
- Get back here with that! - DEBORAH: My father started
chasing him and took off after him.
For some reason, he had to have that gun.
He was dead set on killing
this man over his gun.
I didn't know what to think.
Looking back now, the gun that the man
took from my father could have been
one of the guns he used at one of his crime scenes.
And my father wanted the gun back
so badly because he was
afraid if it got into the wrong hands,
it would connect him to the crimes
that he had committed.
I can feel in my heart that
that gun was connected to some crime somewhere.
My father was obsessed with the news, and he would watch it
all the time -- CNN on one TV, the local news on another TV.
I figured he grew up that way, watching
the news with my grandfather, so that's what it was for,
and now I know different.
He was afraid that he was going to get caught, and he had
to know and have time to run
before they were able to catch him.
One day, we're sitting there watching
the news in the living room as a family.
This crime comes across of a woman
and a child being killed very close to home.
Oh, my God, this is horrible.
He went in the house,
bound and gagged the mother and daughter,
raped the daughter,
and killed both of the mother and daughter.
Robert, this is just a few blocks away from here.
And my mother gets very scared, because there was
no robbery -- they just come in,
killed the mother and child, and left.
She told my father she was scared for us,
and my father talked
like, "Oh, it's not gonna happen to us.
You don't have to worry about it."
Just keep the doors locked.
Nothing's gonna happen.
We didn't I think that the man sitting on
the couch reassuring us that it's not gonna happen to us
is the man that done it.
♪
My father knew it was him they were looking for,
and he never freaked out.
You would think if your own sketch come across the screen,
and your own crime did,
that you would freak out, and he didn't.
And the sketch come on the screen and everything.
We looked at the sketch, and we never thought ever,
in a million years, it was my father.
But 20 years later, when I look at the actual sketch
that they put on the news,
it was my father.
♪
They look nothing alike at all.
Nothing alike. So you would have
never thought this man was this man.
But that was the same person
And this is the same person.
This is the same person, too.
But they look nothing like him.
He put a wig on
every time he done something -- Changing your hair makes you
look a whole lot different,
the color of your hair or anything makes you look
a whole lot different.
One day, we had to take my aunt to the Greyhound bus stop in
Memphis, Tennessee, to catch
a bus back to Alabama, and we pull in, my mother and my aunt
get out of the van and go inside to get her bus ticket.
As we're sitting there,
police surround the entire bus stop.
Christ, what the hell is all this?
DEBORAH: And my father starts freaking out.
The police are behind our van, beside our van, everywhere.
He looks distraught, he's looking left, right,
up and down, and he took
his glasses off, and he took his hat off and threw them on
the dashboard.
Hey, sit still and be quiet.
He got stern with us.
He was like, "Y'all just shut up now, just shut up and don't
say nothing," lookin' in the rearview mirror,
looking in the side mirrors, over and over and over again,
and just sweating and just tensed up,
and you could tell he just
did not know what to do.
I wondered, what are you afraid of?
Why are you acting like this?
But I knew better than to ask that question.
What the hell is taking them so long?
DEBORAH: Looking back now,
I think my father took his sunglasses and hat off because
he didn't want them to look at him and think, "Oh,
this is a sketch of a man that raped a 14-year-old girl."
All right. I got her a ticket.
Well, hurry up. Let's go.
DEBORAH: My mother come and get in the van.
He's like, "We gotta go, we gotta go."
- Let's go. - What's wrong?
I don't know what the hell all this is,
but I don't want to be here for it.
Later on, they find out that it
was a prostitution sting at the bus station.
It scared him. He was terrified.
He thought he was going down then.
I don't know if my father had a gun on him that day or not.
I don't know what would have happened
if the police would have come up to the door
and said, "Excuse me, Mr. Brashers, gonna need
for you to step out." No one knows.
But it terrifies me now,
thinking about what would have happened.
One day, me and my sisters were at
the softball field, and they had a softball game that day.
My mother and father come and watch, and after the softball
game is over with, they're like, "Come here for a second.
Come look at this at the back of the van."
Hey, we have a surprise for you.
- Check out that window there. - And it said,
"Just married" on the back of the van.
He wrote it in the dust.
- Just married? - DEBORAH: They were happy.
We were happy.
But we go to school,
you're not married, y'all coming to pick us
up from the baseball field, and y'all are married.
Why weren't we there?
How come we didn't get to come?
Why didn't you say something?
DEBORAH: Years later, I learned that my father
decided that he was going
to break into a woman's house that he had done work
for before
and cut her phone line.
He had a gun.
I think he was gonna break in and kill this woman.
But he got caught breaking in her house.
When he got arrested, he was in jail that one night.
And then the very next day, he comes back,
and him and my mother are married.
Your spouse cannot be called
to testify against you.
That is why they got married.
They did not get married because they loved each other.
They only got married
so my mother could not be used as a witness against my father.
After that, it just changed.
It was just a big, complete change.
Come on, honey, let's go.
DEBORAH: One day my father was around, loving, caring.
And then the next day, my father is gone,
and I'm told he's on the run.
His court date was coming up
on his gun charges, and he was afraid of the police,
and he was trying to make sure they didn't find out
who he was.
They didn't know that my father was a killer.
My mother told me that, "Your daddy had done
"a bad thing, and he didn't go to court for it,
so now he is on the run."
She thought it was just a simple gun charge,
not knowing he'd done a lot more than that.
Whenever we could see my father,
she would make sure we got to see him.
One day, my mother said, "We're gonna go pick up
your daddy," and I'm like, okay,
but we knew that he couldn't be seen.
So we went and bought a rug,
and he was sitting in the back seat.
Once we got to the house,
we got the rug out of the trunk, and we unraveled it.
It was really big.
We tried to act like it was too heavy for all of us
to carry, you know, at one time.
We held the road for where he could get out of the car,
so nobody could see him get out.
We're all acting like we're struggling
to bring this rug in the house,
and really my father's crouched down in the middle of
the rug as we're,
you know, walking the rug into the house.
At the time of me being a young girl,
I thought this was hilarious. - Hold it up high.
I knew I had to keep my father a secret,
everything about him,
or if not, he would get caught.
I wanted a father so badly that, no matter what it took,
I was okay with it.
I didn't ask questions.
I didn't care, because I had a daddy.
Hey.
Thank you for helping me out.
Really means a lot to me.
DEBORAH: I did not tell no one, because I didn't want
my daddy to get caught.
I didn't want my daddy to go away.
Hopefully all this will be over soon.
DEBORAH: Because I knew my father had already
said he was not going back to prison.
[sobbing quietly]
[sniffles]
[sobbing quietly]
He was a coward.
He manipulated me.
I just wish I would have said something when I was little.
I wish I would have told the police that my father
was at my house,
and he would have gotten caught,
he would have gotten charged with everything.
But I didn't.
I done what daddy said to do.
It's really, really hard not to blame myself,
because I knew he was on the run.
I knew it was wrong.
And I should have said something,
and I didn't.
It was like it was back to the American dream
for a couple of days, and then he was gone.
The next time we went and seen him
was when we went to Kennett, Missouri.
My mother got a calling card in the mail
and a number to call, and she called it,
and my father said that he had a hotel
in Kennett, Missouri, and that he wanted us to come up.
We got to the hotel, we go up to the room.
Hey! Look at my girls!
- Daddy! - Oh!
DEBORAH: My father is so happy to see us.
He's hugging us, loving on us, we're loving on him.
But once we get in there, my mother sets us down
and tells us that my father's name is Mitch.
That's the name that the hotel room's under, and that if anyone
asked, his name is Mitch.
We're gonna play a game of pretend, okay?
We're not gonna call him daddy anymore.
DEBORAH: It was hard for me to call
him Mitch, because that's my daddy.
Okay.
But I knew that everything that my mother was
asking and my father was asking of us to do,
I knew that was to keep my father safe from going to jail.
My father seemed carefree,
like he had no worries in the world.
He didn't seem stressed out like I'd seen him before,
and it was just a family vacation at a hotel.
It was amazing.
It was the best time that we had
had since he had been on the run.
Before we left the hotel that night to go out to eat,
he went into the bathroom and come
back out with some sandy-colored hair.
It was a wig.
Okay, everyone ready?
DEBORAH: And then he had sunglasses and a hat on.
I knew why he had to do that, because he was on
the run, and the police wouldn't be able to notice
who he was.
Tell you what,
on the way back, we'll stop, pick you up somethin' special.
DEBORAH: He looked just like a normal guy,
just with different color hair.
After he put his disguise on,
and we went out to eat and went shopping,
he took us to Walmart.
I got a Doodle Bear, and I wrote,
"I love Daddy" all over it.
This is a Doodle Bear,
the toy that I bought when we went shopping.
And I wrote, "I love my Daddy" all over it.
We wrote little messages on there to each other.
I wrote it on one arm, and he wrote back on the other one,
"I love you so much, too, darling."
And handed it back to me.
That night, we wrote stuff back and forth to each other.
I went to sleep cuddlin' the bear that night
and woke up to police everywhere.
[heavy music playing]
I wake up from my sleep, and there's police everywhere.
Seems like 20 cops in the room
with their guns drawn, flashlights out.
[indistinct shouting]
My father had a gun to his head.
Don't do it! [indistinct talking]
They were screaming at him,
"Please, sir, put the gun down, please, sir,
put the gun down," and he wouldn't do it.
OFFICER: Give that -- Give that to me!
- Get back! Get back! - OFFICER: Sir, put it down.
You get any closer, I will do it.
DEBORAH: My father did not know why the police were there.
Back! Get back from me.
DEBORAH: I thought that they showed up because of me.
Maybe because I called him daddy, because I couldn't call
him Mitch -- that was my daddy.
It was hard to call him another name.
Later, I learned the reason the police showed up was
because they were just looking into a stolen license plate.
They did not know he had committed any crimes at all.
But he thought that he was caught over everything.
My father looked scared.
He looked... terrified.
Like a dog
cowered in a corner, where you're about to whoop them.
You know, they know that look on, like, which exit
can I get out of, and there was no way for him to exit.
OFFICER: Drop your gun!
He knew how that night was gonna end.
Don't point that at him! Leave him alone!
DEBORAH: My sister jumps up, throws her arms out.
"You're not gonna shoot my daddy,"
and then they escort us out of the room.
He didn't want to let us go,
because I knew, my sisters knew,
and my mother knew the moment we walked
out of that room,
that was the last time we'd ever see him alive.
We're sitting at the end of the hallway, and I'm in shock.
I can't believe that I just woke up to
all these police officers,
my mother's screaming and hollerin' not to look at
what's going on behind me.
I'm thinking maybe this is a dream.
Maybe this isn't going on.
They were trying to talk him
down to where he didn't shoot hisself.
They were trying to stop it,
but they couldn't.
Me and my sisters were at the hospital in a room,
watching TV, and my mother
and my grandfather come in and say that they need to
talk to us.
I was told my daddy was dead.
They told me that there was a gunshot through his head,
that it killed his brain, and without your brain,
your body doesn't work.
And so they have him on life support,
and he's an organ donor.
I asked to see him, and when we walked in the room,
his whole face was bandaged.
All you could see was his chin.
We were able to hold his hand,
and I remember holding his hand, and they were warm.
And I kept asking, "How is he dead
if he's warm?"
He chose to die.
He chose to take his own life.
Why, over a gun charge, would you do that?
Me finding out that he killed himself
made me believe that he doesn't love me.
He never loved me.
I could have went and seen him in
jail if he would have gotten arrested.
Just because you're behind bars
doesn't mean that my life stops.
But my life stopped when you killed yourself.
That he would rather die than be
able to see me through a glass...
I felt my father hated me and did not care.
What did I ever do to you for you
to hate me is what I thought for 20 years.
I learned all the details of what
my father had done in September of 2018.
I was a stay-at-home mom.
My husband worked full-time, and...
then I get a knock on the door.
[knocking noises]
Hi, ma'am. We're investigating a series of homicides locally.
This is about my dad, isn't it?
It was an instant gut feeling that I knew, and that's
when they told me that my father was a serial killer.
DEBORAH: They're like, "Your father is a suspect
"of three murders, a rape,
and an attempted burglary."
And he got away with his crimes for 20 years
almost before
anyone ever knew who he was, and the whole time he was dead.
Oh, my god.
They had DNA from the last crime scene that he had done,
and I knew about the genetic testing.
Okay, um... What do you need for me?
And I'm like, "Do y'all need DNA?
"Do you need a picture of him?
What all do you need?"
And they're like, "Oh, we have a DNA kit in the car.
Do you mind?" I'm like, "No,
I'll do whatever it takes to help you."
Yeah, of course.
I was giving them everything that they needed, because I
wanted them to leave as quick as possible
so that I could go in my house and just cry,
because I knew it was true.
The detectives leave, and I just search
and search and search and search and search.
I added everything up, looking at all of
the cases, everything.
My father's crimes started in 1983.
He went to prison in 1985 in Florida for attempted murder
and rape on a woman who,
thankfully, lived, and then in 1990,
as soon as he gets out, he goes and kills
Jenny Zitricki.
He went in and beat and raped her and strangled her
and left her in her bathtub
and then wrote on a mirror, "Don't [bleep] with my family,"
to throw them off their tracks.
Jenny was killed in 1990, and I was born a year later.
But when he killed her, he was dating my mother at the time.
[quietly] Oh, my god.
In 1992, in Cobb County, Georgia,
he goes to jail for impersonating a police officer
and being a felon in possession of a gun.
He gets out of prison in 1997,
and then goes to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1997
and rapes a 14-year-old girl and leaves her alive.
In 1998, in Missouri, my father killed a mother
and a daughter and raped the daughter, as well.
Also in 1998, he breaks into a house in Arkansas
and cuts a woman's phone line
and gets caught -- Not long after that
is when he went on the run.
The timeline of the crimes matched where he lived at.
All the dates just added up,
and I said, I know in my heart, in my gut,
that my father is the person that done every bit of this.
This is Jenny Zitricki.
This is the article of the cold case.
The way he hurt her
and strangled her...
And then you look at our family photo, and you
think of him putting his hand around my sister's neck.
When I see that photo,
I think of this innocent woman
who didn't deserve anything done to her.
She never had a chance to become a wife,
a mother, anything.
What could possess you
to hurt this innocent woman, any innocent woman?
And then I look at this one,
and this is the one that hurts even worse,
because...
this little girl was the same age
as your daughters almost, or my sisters,
and this wife, you had one of your own.
Did you not think about their family and what would
happen to their family when they found them
the way they did?
But you didn't care.
My DNA helped identify my father's DNA at a crime scene,
at multiple crime scenes,
and, at that moment,
I did not feel like I let my father down,
like I had all my life.
I felt like I had just helped a lot of people.
It did not feel like a betrayal
towards my father, because he betrayed me first.
At that moment, it was
a hatred towards my father, and I don't like the w--
That word at all, but I hated my father.
I do suspect my father has committed other crimes that
have never been uncovered, and
the investigators suspect him of a lot more crime,
especially rapes, I do believe,
but no one knows.
This news killed my mother.
She had cirrhosis of the liver.
We found out in October. She died December 23.
She felt guilty, because she could have
turned her husband in, but she chose not to
because she thought it was just a simple gun charge.
She could have saved lives.
She gave up.
She didn't want to be here anymore.
She didn't want people looking at her and questioning her of
how could you have a serial killer
as a husband and not know it?
I just want my mama so bad, and that's what hurts
the most about all of this is I hate my father
even more because
my mother is not here because of him.
A knock at my door turned my life
upside down, and I've been trying to
cope with this ever since,
and every day, it's a struggle.
I have no idea what it'll take for me
to heal from this, I really don't know.
I went from being Robert Eugene Brashers's
daughter to being the daughter of an American
serial killer and rapist.
How do you turn off
the love for someone that's a serial killer
but half of your genes...
half of my genes come from him.
And how can I say I love this man?
No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try,
I could never run away from this, because it's always on
my mind.
I know the truth.
It's not my fault, but I still...
[sobbing]
I still fight with it every day,
and I want one day to be able to
wake up and not remember that
I'm the daughter of a serial killer.