[uneasy music]
I am writing a book about a serial killer.
[news reporter] Seventy-four-year-old
Samuel Little was sentenced today for killing three women
in South Los Angeles in the 1980s.
But it always nagged at me because I knew
he was good for more murders.
Sam Little got away with this for so long
because most of his victims
were in marginalized populations:
women of color, drug addicts, prostitutes.
[dramatic music]
[Scott] Once she started visiting Sam in prison,
that really awoke a lot
of different kind of demons in her.
[Jillian] Sam starts confessing to me
all of these cold cases,
all of these murders
that had been long unsolved
throughout the United States.
Then it was like the floodgates opened.
[whispering] Oh, Jesus.
[normally] How many victims are there?
[projector whirring]
[uneasy music]
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[Jillian] Right.
[Jillian] Uh, why did she deserve it?
♪
[Jillian] When I started writing a book
about Samuel Little,
I-I had no idea
of the scope of it.
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[laughs]
He is a vicious...
killer.
♪
And I thought,
"I have to keep going with this."
Like, I'm gonna pursue this.
It's about these victims.
I wanna know how he got away with this for so long.
♪
And I wanna understand
violence against women in this culture
and why it is so summarily dismissed.
♪
[news reporter] The FBI calls Samuel Little
America's most prolific serial killer.
[Sam] If you want me to tell my secrets to you,
come down here and look me in my eye
while I do.
[Jillian] My deal with the devil is,
"You will not die alone if you tell me the truth."
[Sam] I'm not gonna admit to those girls.
[Jillian] I don't believe you.
So you tell me the truth right now.
[news reporter] Little strangled 93 victims
between 1970 and 2005.
[Jillian] He was tried and got off
again and again and again.
[news reporter] Investigators believe
that Samuel Little killed more people
than serial killers Ted Bundy,
John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer combined.
[Jillian] If you weren't locked up,
I'd probably be dead by now.
[Sam] You're right.
[operator] You have a prepaid call from...
[Sam] This is Sam.
[operator] ...an inmate at the California State Prison,
Los Angeles County,
Lancaster, California.
Mr. Sam.
[Jillian] I started visiting Sam Little in prison
in August of 2018.
Now not only do I visit him every other weekend.
I also talk to him almost daily.
And I record
all my phone conversations with him.
Are you ready for some questions?
[Jillian] You haven't asked. I'll trade you.
You give me one secret, I'll give you one.
[Jillian] I have access to this serial killer,
and I hope that I could have something to offer
to law enforcement,
but, you know, you don't walk in
and start talking to a psychopath
and just be like, "So tell me about how you killed 'em."
♪
You ask a question,
and then you listen really carefully,
and if you listen hard enough,
you can hear what they need you to be.
So tell me the truth.
[Sam] If I was--
No, Mr. Sam, you know I don't-I don't judge you.
I'm just here to listen.
I think of it as, like,
I'm his mommy; I'm his daughter.
And I'm his ultimate victim.
He's an actor. He's a psychopath.
♪
Every... interaction he has
is transactional...
♪
...and he is two steps ahead of you
at any move.
I realize that it is a really strange relationship
for most people to hear, for them to understand,
but I'm in this privileged position
that Sam Little wants to answer my questions.
It serves him,
and it feels good to him.
So then how can I use that?
♪
If I'm gonna investigate this, then what are the questions
I'm gonna ask about?
Like, "Why did he get away with this for so long,
and how?"
I need to look at all the times
he actually was caught
and find out what went wrong.
[Jillian] Can you walk me through what happened
with the Patricia Mount case?
Do you remember picking her up?
[Jillian] I want the truth.
[eerie music]
[Jillian] Sam crawled the city's underbelly,
drifting from bar to bar,
looking for weed and women,
preferably both.
♪
[Kenny] On September the 12th, 1982,
we were notified that, uh,
there had been a discovery of a female body
in the middle of absolutely nowhere
in a hayfield.
[pensive music]
Found the body laying approximately in this area.
It was the body of a late 20s,
early 30s white female.
She was nude. She was laying on her back.
♪
She had defecation, you know, smeared on her body
and on the clothes.
She had obvious bruising on the neck area.
You can almost see the handprints.
She was strangled to death.
♪
I wonder if the original case file
has got my notes still in it.
There you go. That's her.
That's the victim, Tricia Mount.
♪
Several witnesses that knew Patricia Mount
had seen her at Willie Mae's tavern
the night before,
speaking to a Black male.
They described him as around 40s,
pretty good-sized fella, big hands.
♪
Couple of the witnesses, uh, actually saw Patricia
get in his car.
It was a small station wagon,
tan or brown in color.
♪
[Greg] She was 26 years old.
She had a very low IQ,
an IQ of around 40, from her paperwork.
Basically little girl
because of her mental capabilities
just thrown aside.
You know, there's no way
that should happen.
♪
[Jillian] Sam was good at finding the weak link.
He could look at a room
and see that somebody was lonely
or see that somebody was hungry
or see that somebody
really needed a fix,
and that's where he would go.
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[eerie metallic squealing]
♪
[Jillian] Right.
♪
We're working the case,
but we're basically at a dead end.
We knew he wasn't from-from the Gainesville area.
None of the witnesses ever saw him before.
We put out a BOLO,
which is "be on the lookout for,"
to southeastern United States
with the description of a suspect
and-and a vehicle fitting the description
we were looking for.
[Jillian] After Sam killed Patricia Mount,
he left Florida and went to Pascagoula, Mississippi,
where he then killed Melinda LaPree.
[desolate music]
A few months later, he was arrested there
in Mississippi
for shoplifting.
♪
They were able to connect
the brown Pinto station wagon
that he was driving
with a report about a murder in Florida,
and law enforcement got in touch with each other.
[Greg] In early December, we get notified
that Pascagoula, Mississippi, has a person in custody
for the murder down there
that matches the description of our murder,
and he matched the physical description
of our suspect.
[Kenny] And his name was Sam McDowell,
also identified as Sam Little.
Several of the witness positively identified Sam
from a photographic lineup.
So we, uh, obtained a-a warrant for his arrest
for the murder of Pat Mount.
♪
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[Kenny] We interviewed Sam McDowell.
You could almost sense the evil in the room.
We showed him a picture of the victim,
Patricia Mount.
He had a-a slight reaction.
He knew who we were talking about,
but, uh, he adamantly denied ever seeing her,
and never was she in his car.
[dramatic music]
[Greg] We knew that we were--
basically had a circumstantial case.
The only evidence we had
was three witnesses
from Willie Mae's bar
identifying him out of a lineup.
We were concerned.
We were hoping we'd get more evidence.
We found out then Sam Little
was arrested for shoplifting in Mississippi.
He had two individuals with him.
[Kenny] One, a teenage boy, Danny Beckless,
and an older Black woman
by the name of Orelia Dorsey.
[Jillian] Orelia Jean Dorsey
was 27 years older than Sam.
He met her in a jailhouse in Cleveland.
She was a convicted shoplifter.
She was his girlfriend,
and he traveled the country with her.
He called her Jean.
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Wow, it sounds like she really-she really took
good care of you.
Unfortunately, we couldn't sit down
and interview her
because Orelia was no longer there.
But we subsequently interviewed Danny Beckless.
He was a young teenager,
approximately 16 years old.
Danny indicated to us that he had been traveling
with, uh, Sam McDowell and Orelia Dorsey
for a period of time
and they had been staying
in the-in the Gainesville area.
[Kenny] We pressed him if he could remember
the night of the homicide
in Gainesville months earlier
of Patricia Mount.
[disquieting music]
[Greg] He said he thought Sam left the motel
around seven o'clock that night.
♪
[Kenny] The next morning, Danny went out and found
brown matter, fecal matter,
on the back seat of the car.
♪
[Greg] And he said the car smelled.
Orelia had wiped it up and cleaned it
the best she could.
[Jillian] The police suspected that Sam,
he was killing at night,
and Orelia,
she would clean his car out
in the morning, and they would move on.
They would not stay anywhere
for more than three days.
♪
Danny also would talk about, uh, Sam bragging to him
about picking prostitutes up, and then he said,
you know, he would get rid of them.
♪
[Greg] Sam did mention one time
that he had hurt ladies.
He had told Beckless that.
♪
Greg and I decided that we probably had
a serious serial killer on our hands.
♪
Going into trial,
we felt pretty good at that point.
♪
[Greg] Then we start trying to locate Danny Beckless,
and... we can't find him.
♪
Danny was gone.
[Kenny] This was a blow to the state's case
because without Beckless there,
we couldn't use anything that Beckless, uh, had told us
because it'd be considered hearsay
and the judge would not allow it.
♪
He never for a second thought he would be convicted.
Samuel Little's victims were ignored
for all of these years
in large part because
they were in marginalized populations.
♪
[Kenny] Pat Mount had a lot of trouble in her life.
She was mentally retarded. She was an alcoholic.
She hung around the bars,
was known to get drunk
and leave with different men.
All this was brought up during the trial.
And I-I felt a lot of people,
including the jury, felt that she was
less of a person
rather than being a victim of a homicide,
that she was almost asking for it.
I feel personally
that, uh, if she'd have been
a University of Florida student,
a lot different trial would've been conducted.
♪
[Greg] We disseminated the information.
We felt he was a serial killer,
and we put it out nationwide.
That's all we could do is warn people.
You throw a life away, basically,
a life, basically, of a child,
even though she was 26 years old.
And you feel sorry for someone,
that you couldn't do them justice to help them.
♪
I just felt like somehow,
we should've been able to keep him in jail.
[Jillian] There was such a miscarriage of justice.
They had him again and again.
When I read his rap sheet, I was shocked.
He served far less time
for rape, assault, and murder
than he did for his first breaking and entry charge
when he was 16 years old.
[melancholy music]
♪
He went to the Ohio State Reformatory
at the age of 16.
[Jillian] Yeah.
And that was where he learned to box.
[Jillian] I knew that I wanted to write
a more extensive piece
about Sam Little, and, you know,
a big piece of his identity is boxing.
I felt that in order to understand him,
I would have to go and just give it a try.
[trainer] Seven, eight.
[Jillian] And boxing has given me a perspective
on the Sam Little story in many ways.
[uneasy music]
What were the nicknames they called you?
[bell dings]
[people clamoring]
[Jillian] Sam was the middleweight champion
of the Ohio State Reformatory,
and boxing culture in the prisons in the '60s
was actually a funnel into professional boxing.
So Sam Little is 24
when he gets out of the reformatory.
[desolate music]
He goes and fights an amateur fight
in Cleveland.
He has all these people in his corner,
saying hang back,
except he's a KO fighter.
He is a powerhouse, right,
and they're saying hang back, hang back,
and he got his lip split,
and he lost by points.
♪
He put his boxing gloves in the trash
and said, "I'm never fighting again."
He took that rage somewhere else.
♪
Why don't you tell me why you stopped boxing?
[Jillian] I mean, I feel like that's really interesting,
Sam, for you to say that,
because you are actually a killer.
But you have killed people.
So you did have a killer instinct.
[Sam] I-I--
[Jillian] Right.
I was not calculating
in the kind of emotional toll
talking to the psychopath would take.
♪
I'm pretty angry.
I mean, I don't, like, function
in the world as an angry person,
but if I think hard enough
about the things that I've experienced
and also the things that I'm researching
with the Sam Little story and these victims,
I can get pretty angry.
I'm somebody who has experienced
domestic abuse.
I am somebody who has done
sex work in my life.
I'm someone who has certainly done
plenty of drugs.
I have a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.
Uh, boxing allows me to lean into the pain.
♪
There are many ways
of dealing with trauma:
by running away,
by being addicted,
and...
I think that that is
a large part of how Sam
chose his victims.
He was a predator.
He could walk in a room
and see who was the easiest prey.
♪
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[Jillian] They weren't all prostitutes.
[Laurie] You know, you don't think
things like that are gonna happen to you
'cause I wasn't that person.
I just tried some risky stuff.
My name is Laurie Barros.
I'm one of the few surviving victims
of Samuel McDowell Little.
♪
It's written all over you somehow or another,
how you carry yourself,
that you don't care about yourself,
you don't respect yourself,
you have no confidence.
And in--that was true. I had none.
[suspenseful music]
[Jillian] Remember, pick the ones
no one will notice are gone.
Remember, don't leave them alive.
Remember, don't get caught.
Remember, if the above fails,
get a lawyer.
Remember, deny, deny, deny.
♪
[Jillian] That was Laurie and Tonya?
That was the two women in San Diego?
That case?
♪
[siren wailing]
[Laurie] I was going through a divorce
and, you know, from an abusive husband,
wasn't caring very much
about how I was handling my life,
and that night, I got dressed up.
I was bored. I was lonesome.
And my friend
had a meth dealer that lived downtown.
I thought I would go see if he was home,
do a few lines, right?
[ominous music]
So I had gotten out of my car,
but I don't think I made it to the end of the block.
♪
I remember getting the feeling--
you know how you get a feeling somebody's following you?
♪
I instantly just froze up
and got really scared.
I thought, "Don't act like you're scared.
Don't act like you're scared."
He was-he was behind me now,
kind of got me in a chokehold,
shoved me into his car.
It seemed like he drove around aimlessly
for a little bit,
and driving up this dirt road,
it was pitch-black, just emptiness,
and I remember he pulled up there
and turned the car off.
I just assumed, "I'm gonna-I'm gonna get raped.
Prepare yourself."
And...
he...
turned around and pretty much took me by the neck
and pushed me in the back seat,
right over the seat.
♪
He--like this. He had his f--
just pressing down.
And my--his hands are around my neck.
His thumbs are on those hyoid bones,
and he kept pressing harder.
♪
He had told me to swallow,
says, "I love it when you swallow."
And I went unconscious.
♪
[sighs]
And I remember coming back to consciousness.
I know he thought I was dead,
and I knew that because I played dead.
♪
I remember kind of talking to God
and saying, "I'm sorry. I did this to myself."
I was so ashamed.
[Jillian] As survivors of violence,
one of the most difficult things
is that we often blame ourselves.
We're working with a set of cultural assumptions
that cause us
to internalize.
♪
[pensive music]
♪
I grew up with a kind of insatiable curiosity
that has gotten me into a lot of trouble.
But I don't think that any of that
really translated into some of my more...
self-destructive behaviors
until I had an experience at summer camp
when I was 12 years old,
when I had a relationship with a much older counselor.
Him.
And he was 21.
We got caught, and he got fired,
and I was publicly humiliated
and then went from being, you know,
this awkward...
preteen, really, um,
you know, to being the town slut, basically.
♪
You know? I mean, what-what would you do
if a 21-year-old
touched your 12-year-old daughter?
♪
I don't know what I would do,
but, uh, I-I...
w-wouldn't do what my parents did,
and I wouldn't do what the camp directors did,
which was, you know, blame me.
♪
I was publicly humiliated.
You know, the general...
opinion was that I seduced him
and, uh, you know, caused him to lose his job,
and, uh--and my whole life changed after that.
♪
I started to internalize
those kind of ideas about myself.
You know, I was bad, I was wrong,
I was shameful,
and, uh--you know,
and I started to act out in self-destructive ways.
I was anorexic. I was a cutter.
I still carry those scars physically.
It was a formative experience,
changed my life.
The experience of not being believed,
being blamed, it changed
my idea about myself,
and, uh, I can look at that experience
and see that that was where
my more self-destructive behaviors
started to manifest.
♪
I feel connected with these victims
because it could've been me any night of the week
for a very long time in my life.
[Laurie] It's probably been about 25, 26 years
since I've been back here to this site.
[eerie music]
When Sam Little was pushing me out of the car,
I know he thought I was dead.
[exhales heavily]
I was laying in dirt, but there was trash around me.
I was just kind of sprawled out on my back,
and I didn't move a muscle.
The idea that I'm laying in trash
has never left me,
that image and just kind of...
such a metaphor for how I've kind of felt
so much of my life.
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[Jillian] Yeah, 'cause you were.
[Jillian] But you thought she was dead.
[desolate music]
♪
[Wayne] We're going into Logan Heights now,
and, you know, back in 1984, when I joined
the San Diego Police Department,
this was kind of the start of the gang area.
Thirty-Second Street,
all the girls who were prostituting
would be along the street here.
They're just trying to get by.
♪
My name's Wayne Spees,
and I'm a detective sergeant
retired from San Diego Police Department.
[tense music]
On October 25th, I was working night watch.
♪
I was probably a week in in my phase training,
and my training officer was Lou Tamani.
In lineup that day,
Lou shows me this flyer.
We call them a BOLO, a "be on the lookout."
So this is the BOLO
that we received in lineup that night.
It says that this guy
had attacked a woman,
that he drove her to a-a location,
and raped her and strangled her,
and then he threw her out of the car,
thinking probably she was dead,
and, uh--and then, you know, left her there.
♪
The victim is 22-year-old Laurie Barros.
She gave a really good description
of the car and of our suspect:
a Black male,
40 to 45 years old, six foot one,
230 to 240 pounds,
He had a gold pinkie ring with two diamonds.
The vehicle he was driving
was a black two-door large American-made car.
It had three foam dice hanging from the rearview mirror.
♪
[engine turning over]
And now we're out a month later,
patrolling the-the area.
That night,
just before five in the morning,
the sun hasn't come up yet.
Radio slows down, and...
my partner Lou's telling me
about this area where this woman was attacked,
and Lou says to take the right turn off of 36th.
It's a dead-end street, and then it goes
into a, uh, dirt lot
with just these piles of trash.
♪
And we want to sneak up on anybody
so we don't wanna alert them with our lights on,
so we turn our lights out.
♪
We can see, you know, the outline
of-of a car up in front of us.
♪
Lou said, "Okay, closer, closer, closer,"
and then he said, "When I say so,
"turn the spotlights on
and turn the headlights on, high beams."
♪
And, uh, as we're pulling up, he tells me.
He says, "All right, light them up."
♪
And that's when we can see,
you know, the-the car.
We see it's the car that matches this description.
It's a large black American-made car.
It's a T-bird.
And we see movement in the back seat,
and we see a head, you know, pop up,
and then the door opens on the passenger side,
and he jumps out of the car.
♪
He gets out, and he looks directly, uh, at us,
and I notice he's-he's pulling his pants up.
He's zipping up his pants.
So I--in a very firm voice, I say,
"Get over here. I need to talk to you."
As he's approaching me, I have my light,
my flashlight, on him,
and as I put the light on his face,
I can see the scratches on his throat,
and they're fresh; they're-they're bleeding.
You know, and he has a-a clump
of, like, mucus-y blood on his shirt.
And then he looks down at my gun,
and I just told him; I said,
you know, "Don't do anything stupid."
He identified himself to me as Samuel McDowell.
♪
So I put him in the back of the car.
He's handcuffed. He's not going anywhere.
We got him.
And now I make my way up,
uh, to the back seat of the T-bird.
♪
When I... got up to the car,
I was on the passenger side,
and I can see a woman back there,
and she's naked,
and she's shoved down behind the driver's seat
on the floor,
and her hips and her-and her legs
are-are up on the seat, spread.
She had, you know, a lot of redness,
um, and bruising around her-her neck.
There was blood coming from her nose
and from her mouth, like she'd been punched.
Her eyes were rolled back in her head,
and it wasn't till the-- she started gurgling
that I realized that she's still alive.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
And Lou said, "You're safe. I'm a police officer."
And then that's when she said,
you know, "He raped me. He raped me."
[Jillian] To-that was Tonya,
when you got caught in the act?
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[dramatic music]
[Wayne] The victim was being treated
in the hospital.
We learned her name was Tonya Jackson.
She says she met Samuel McDowell
in a bar downtown,
and he offered her money for sex, and she agreed,
and then, uh, he drove her to that location
where she was attacked.
Now he's in the back seat, strangling this woman.
♪
She was moments away, uh, from death.
No doubt in my mind that, you know,
he would've killed her.
So the charges at that point
were the kidnap,
the rape,
and then the attempted murder.
He said, "Yeah, I'll talk.
I'll tell you exactly what happened."
You know, to me, he says,
"That-that doctor's exam's
not gonna show any rape,"
and he said, "The only thing that's gonna show
is where my hands were around her neck."
And, uh, I remember thinking to myself,
"Wow, that's a pretty incriminating, uh, statement."
I took my notepad out,
and I put quotation marks, you know,
and I wrote that down.
And then he said,
"I just kicked the shit out of her."
Uh, "That bitch deserved it."
He goes, "I should've killed that whore."
♪
[Wayne] So once we get him down to the station,
we hand him off to the sex crimes detective
who handled the first case, Laurie Barros.
He then brings Laurie down
and is going to have her identify, if she can,
Sam Little in a lineup.
[uneasy music]
[door creaks]
♪
[Laurie] And I picked him out in a matter of seconds.
♪
And just to let him know that I was on this side
of the-the glass...
♪
...I made him repeat the words
that I knew would probably...
make him a little anxious, which was,
"Swallow for me. I love it when you swallow."
Made him say that...
♪
...'cause I was looking for him to-to-to be unnerved by it.
And... I fell to my knees
and just broke,
just kind of crumbled.
Um, I knew that was him.
♪
[Wayne] So now we know we have him
for two cases.
Samuel McDowell was charged with both the attacks
on Laurie Barros and Tonya Jackson.
It's what we call a slam dunk.
I mean, you caught the man in the act.
♪
So in my mind,
this guy's going away for a long time,
and we got a really dangerous predator
off the street.
[Gary] Samuel McDowell, serial murderer, rapist,
torturer, strangler.
Let's see what we got here.
These are notes I haven't seen
in decades...
on this case.
I'm Gary Rempel.
I'm a retired district attorney
for San Diego County.
I tried the 1985 case of Samuel Little,
also known as McDowell,
in which he, uh, raped and assaulted
and tried to strangle two women.
We had a solid identification.
The, uh, first one had ended
with the victim being left for dead
in a trash heap, and in the second one,
police officer happened on the scene
and actually interrupted this, uh, man
as he was strangling his victim
in the back seat of his car.
There was no doubt in my mind I had the right guy.
So one of the first things I did
was look at Sam Little's rap sheet.
Many, many arrests
but not much time served.
Violent assault, rape, attempted murder.
In Mississippi, attempted murder, first degree.
Gainesville, Florida, acquitted.
An acquittal's kind of unusual.
That was a bit of a red flag.
♪
So having all these facts in mind, uh,
I began to prepare my case,
and the first thing I did, of course,
would be to interview the victims.
The first victim I interviewed is Tonya Jackson,
who was saved by the officer.
[Jillian] Well, I mean, it-it is violent.
It's violent to strangle someone,
right, Mr. Sam?
[Gary] Tonya Jackson
openly admitted she was a prostitute.
She denied there had been
any conflict over a fee or any other reason
for him to attack her
other than for his own pleasure.
♪
But if the cop hadn't come along
and interrupted the-the crime in the act,
she wouldn't have made a very good witness on the stand.
She just was, uh,
you know, poorly educated, uh, not a strong speaker,
and appeared to be a person of few words.
But then I interviewed the second witness,
Laurie Barros.
[Laurie] When I had my first meeting
with DDA Gary Rempel,
I can remember sitting down in there
and just b-trembling.
Uh...
[ominous music]
I gave him all the gory details
of what happened to me.
♪
So I heard her story, and she really seemed
to make an excellent witness.
She was a very attractive lady,
dressed modestly but nicely.
I thought there'd be no problems in the case.
The only thing was the timing.
What's she doing out in the street
at 11:30 in downtown San Diego at that time of night?
So I just wanted to know why she was there.
♪
So I brought her in for further questioning.
[Laurie] I knew something was wrong,
and he told me; he said,
"Yeah, we-we had to pull your record, you know?
It's what we do."
[dramatic music]
I got arrested a couple times,
and--you know, with a group of girls
for prostitution.
Being arrested was
horribly humiliating
and definitely a wake-up call,
going, "What are you doing?"
She came clean. I said, "That-that's okay.
He still didn't have the right to do what he did."
But now I had information
that affected her credibility
as a witness and as a victim.
♪
[Laurie] When I testified at trial,
I was an absolute nervous wreck.
Felt like all the pressure was on me
to make sure that the jury would believe me.
♪
[Gary] Both my victims did a pretty good job.
They shared their horror.
[eerie music]
Then it was the defense attorney.
Little took the stand. He kept his mild demeanor.
He testified that as to Laurie Barros,
he knew nothing about that case;
he had nothing to do with that case;
he in fact was with, uh, a friend
that he travels with, an older lady
that he takes care of,
a lady living on social security
named Jean.
[Jillian] Didn't Jean take the stand,
uh, at one of your trials?
Was it San Diego?
[Jillian] Wow.
[Gary] Jean testified unequivocally and strongly
that during the, uh, time in question,
she had been with Sam
and that, uh, there was no way
he could've committed the crimes alleged.
She was the consummate alibi witness,
the little under-oath church lady.
♪
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
She must have known.
You're not cleaning blood and shit and earrings
out of the back of a car and thinking, you know,
"My boyfriend's just fucking around."
I think she absolutely knew,
and I think she enabled it.
[Gary] But as to Tonya,
Sam said she was trying
to cheat him out of some money,
and he refused to pay her, and so she attacked him,
and he was simply fighting her off
when the officer arrived on the scene.
♪
[Jillian] Sam had a unique ability
for finding the people who would not be credible,
regardless of what they said.
Even if they lived, who would believe them?
Somehow, this man
was more credible
than these victims?
♪
[Laurie] I didn't hear from anyone
after I testified.
I had no idea that the jury didn't believe me.
♪
I had no idea that...
there was a hung jury.
♪
[mournful music]
[Gary] Tonya couldn't be located
for the second trial.
We were faced with a...
extremely weak case that was going to possibly end
in an acquittal,
so we accepted a plea
to two felony counts,
assault with intent to inflict great bodily injury.
We're darn lucky we got to send this guy away
four years to prison for what he had done.
I don't even know if he served
every minute of those four years.
That was the best we could get him,
and that's what we gave him.
♪
[sighs]
This was the worst outcome of my career.
They didn't do their job.
♪
Whether Tonya was around or not,
they had enough evidence from what happened to me.
The details I gave them, the report I gave them,
the drawing I gave of him,
and the fact he was caught in the act
is unbelievable to me
that they could not have made that trial work.
Somebody fucked up,
big-time.
♪
Hi.
[Gary] Hi. You must be Laurie.
[Laurie] I'm Laurie. Please come in.
[sighs]
Very different seating than 35 years ago.
Yeah.
So, uh, I've been curious a few times the...
-Yeah, yeah. -...case has come up,
and, you know, we-we didn't see you for that second trial.
-Yeah. -And, uh...
and I don't know if they didn't-didn't do
a good job locating you, or I didn't know
if you'd just made yourself scarce or what.
-What happened? -No one ever called me
or followed up with me at all.
-They didn't follow up? -Never.
I never knew there was a second trial.
I didn't know there was a hung jury
in the first trial.
I never got a call from anyone
to follow up after I testified.
Uh, we were put in a bad spot.
We, uh, couldn't go forward,
and we had to, uh,
make a deal with this crook
and, uh, you know, consequently
managed to send him to prison but not-not long enough.
-Right. -Yeah.
Because we're prostitutes,
we're women, it doesn't really matter.
That's ultimately-- what came out of that is...
"Who cares?"
Well, I think they don't believe women sometimes
when they have got a record for being a prostitute
and then they-they, uh-
they deny it when it comes for a trial
on this particular occasion.
I didn't deny it.
But you were doing prostitution.
Am I correct? Okay.
Five or six times, I was out on the streets,
doing prostitution.
I remember being in your office,
and I fully admitted it; I was humiliated.
I'm embarrassed of what I did.
But it shouldn't change anything.
I didn't deserve for some guy
to try and murder me.
There's no way he should've been able
to plea out like this so easily
with so much evidence.
Now, you understand,
without a witness, we didn't have a trial.
I'm a witness. It happened to me.
Right, but--
This is crazy. I didn't go anywhere.
Just, uh, a fucking phone call.
Can you think of any reason why you wouldn't have called?
Weren't you curious to know what happened?
I-I would've called; I'd like to know what happened
if I was in your shoes.
You're gonna put this on me?
-Did you feel-- -I cannot--
What a metaphor all this has become.
Being dumped in trash, never called,
never contacted.
If you cared so much,
it-it should've come from you.
I'm sorry you think I didn't do
the best could be done.
It didn't go well this time,
and this is just a horrible, horrible case.
Failed. They failed.
They failed me.
They failed every woman after me
that was killed.
I'm trying to point out the massive failure
of the system.
Nothing's gonna change
if all we're doing is defending ourself
and saying we did everything right.
We did not.
Women have died
because everybody's got the same mindset.
They're stuck. Their hands are tied.
"I did my best." No, nobody fought.
We just respond to the system and on to the next.
[breathes deeply]
So guess what.
All the deaths after me are on them.
Have fun sleeping at night with that,
'cause you do not get to escape it.
He went on a killing spree after he got out of prison
for serving two and a half years,
immediately after he got out.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Jillian] I want you to tell me
about when you got out of prison in San Diego.
You remember that?
[disquieting music]
[Jillian] Mm-hmm.
[Jillian] When I took on this serial killer story,
I was like, "This can't be real."
[dramatic music]
This man, who everyone knew was killing women,
got off again and again and again.
And I thought, "Oh, gosh.
"Like, I'm gonna get the answer.
"I'm gonna get the answer
"of why you feel you need to control women
"and why you feel you need to own women
"and, if you can't, why you feel
you need to destroy women."
It's like, "I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get the answer."
♪