[tense music]
This is a case about a killer screaming at law enforcement,
"I'm here. This is what I've done.
Do I have your attention now?"
[camera shutter clicking]
He's guilty of the ultimate desecration of somebody's body.
The necrophilia in this case
is the ultimate means of control.
What's particularly twisted
is the way he's leaving their bodies,
humiliating them, posing them, escalating his killings,
and getting reckless, and he still wasn't caught.
[ominous music]
♪
The city of Dearborn Heights
is mainly a residential community
located about 12 or so miles
west of downtown Detroit.
The majority of the residents
would probably be considered blue-collar workers.
It is a relatively safe city to live in.
I used to live in the city of Detroit,
and back then, at the time of this case,
everybody thought Dearborn Heights was a quiet,
sleepy suburb, because Detroit,
around that time, would see,
like, probably around 400 homicides in a year.
[ominous music]
♪
On January 2, I received a call
approximately 5:30 p.m. from my captain
who informed me officers were out
with a deceased person in the Rouge River
and I responded to that location.
♪
When I arrived at the scene,
after speaking with the officers,
I did look over the railing down into the river
and I observed the victim.
[soft ominous music]
♪
She was partially clothed.
She had her miniskirt down around her ankles.
There appeared to be a high-heel gold shoe there.
See a victim wearing such clothing,
we determined that she may have been a working girl.
♪
It was evident that
she hadn't floated downstream from another location
where her body wouldn't have ended up on the ice as it did.
I never really considered the possibility
that the victim jumped.
Had that been a suicide,
she would have had all of her clothing on.
In my opinion,
someone had thrown her over the railing of the bridge
to either harm her, kill her, or dispose of a body.
♪
You try not to allow your emotions to get involved,
but it's very cold and callous
for an individual just to discard a body
over the railing into the Rouge River.
♪
The Wayne County dive team responded to the location,
and they removed the victim from the ice.
♪
The dive team wrapped her hands in plastic
to preserve any evidence, perhaps under her fingernails.
And then she was taken to the Wayne County Medical Examiner.
♪
While I was there at the scene,
I spoke with the person that waved down the witnesses
to call 911.
His name was John Armstrong
and they lived real close in the area.
I spoke with Armstrong.
He advised me that he was on his way home from work.
Felt a little nauseous and decided to stop and vomit.
He said he didn't want to throw up in his car,
and so he'd gotten out of the car
to throw up into the water,
and then, when he looked down, he saw this lady down there.
♪
And he stood on the curb waiting for a vehicle
to come by and asked them to call 911.
♪
The story could have sounded reasonable,
but there was no vomit in the area.
He did not seem nauseous.
I became a little bit suspicious.
♪
He consented to us to search his Jeep,
and upon looking at his vehicle,
didn't seem to be too much out of place
other than inside, we observed a condom wrapper.
♪
And normally people don't leave condom wrappers
laying around in their vehicles,
so it did raise a few red flags, naturally.
♪
And Armstrong, he was being quite helpful at that time.
He was transported to the police station.
He was interviewed by a couple of other investigators.
He comes in, he makes a statement.
They thought he's maybe a little unusual.
But he's just squirrely.
We determined he moved to Dearborn Heights
with his wife recently,
and he ended up with employment
at the Metro Airport refueling aircraft.
He was asked whether he had
been with prostitutes recently or ever,
and his response was not since he met his wife.
He had advised he had never had contact with our victim.
He didn't know her.
She'd never been in his vehicle.
There really wasn't enough evidence at that time
to even consider charging him with anything,
so he was allowed to leave.
[dramatic music]
The next day, January 3rd,
the body was transported to the medical examiner's office
where an autopsy was performed.
♪
It was determined that she had been a victim of homicide.
The manner of death was manual strangulation.
The medical examiners performed
an evidence collection kit,
which is commonly called a rape kit.
They could determine if the victim
had had intercourse recently,
or believed to be fairly recently.
The victim was also fingerprinted
for identification purposes,
and were able to identify our victim was Wendy Jordan.
♪
We determined that she had family members in the area.
They were contacted.
Dearborn Heights Police call and they say,
"We need you to identify your sister,
Wendy Jordan."
I said...
"Why do you think it's-- it's Wendy Jordan?"
He said, "We don't think it's Wendy Jordan.
We know it's Wendy Jordan."
♪
We was just in shock.
Just living inside of a nightmare,
not really believing somebody had murdered your sister.
♪
She was a sweet person, warm-hearted,
always had positive words to say,
wished you well, all of that.
I'm not sure when I realized that she was having a problem
with drugs, but eventually I knew.
In December of 1999, she was living with my dad.
She had a job at a BP gas station.
I really thought she was getting her life on track.
I found out after she was murdered
that she had been working as a prostitute.
I really didn't know that.
That was hard for me, you know, to realize that,
because this somebody I had idolized.
♪
We determined that she had been arrested previously
for soliciting charges in the city of Detroit.
However, it doesn't matter if you're a prostitute or not,
we're still gonna try and find out what happened to you
and who killed you.
The fact that Wendy was just thrown off a bridge
onto some ice,
like you would throw some garbage
out the window of your car, is really a horrific
and twisted way of disposing of someone.
This is a particularly cold-blooded,
calculated move.
Wendy Jordan was a sex worker.
They are the most vulnerable of all victims.
They willingly work
and put themselves in harm's way,
never knowing how their evening is going to end.
Unfortunately, we see a lot of sex workers
who are victims of killers.
They don't have a lot of ties to the community often.
Family is used to having them disappear
for long periods of time.
And, you know, the colder the trail gets,
the more challenging it is
for the police to find out who their killer is.
♪
In the days and weeks that followed the discovery
of Wendy Jordan's body,
police were keeping an eye on Armstrong,
but not too close.
We always keep an open mind.
Getting tunnel vision is the worst thing
an investigator can do.
But as time went on, we didn't have any additional leads.
We had done everything we could do.
The best way to solve this case
was the evidence collection kit, the rape kit,
that was recovered from Wendy Jordan's body.
But back in the year 2000, we had to wait several months
for the results to come back, and that's exactly what we did.
♪
I was a Detroit police officer
back in April of 2000.
We had been labeled
the murder capital of the world, unfortunately.
I was the youngest member of Violent Crimes Task Force
at 26 years old.
That particular day, I received a text message
to report to a crime scene, to a murder scene,
in southwest Detroit.
♪
When I arrived at the scene,
I was told that the victim was discovered
by the rail conductor as he was on his locomotive.
♪
Maybe 10, 15 yards from the tracks themselves,
perfectly visible to anybody going by,
there is the body of a young female.
She was a black female with red hair.
She had a shiny, black jacket on,
and then from the bottom down, she was unclothed.
♪
She was in a posed position,
I guess would be the best way to describe it.
Her legs were spread, displaying her private parts.
♪
She had some tights around her neck area
and she also had ligature markings,
so possibly the tights were used to strangle her.
♪
As we were combing the area,
looking for anything that would give us any idea
who may have perpetrated this crime,
we heard an officer call out,
"Found another victim! Found another victim!"
There was one potential victim we found
that managed to escape.
She gave us a very good description of her attacker.
This might be the killer that we're looking for.
We were in the middle of investigating the death
of a female found lying near the railroad tracks.
She appeared to only have been dead for a few hours.
When all of a sudden, we were then directed down a culvert
just a few yards from there, and in that culvert,
there was yet another body of a female,
similarly posed in that manner.
She was a white female.
Her shirt was raised over her breast area,
and then she had on some stockings
with the crotch area ripped open.
It gave us indication
that she had been possibly sexually assaulted as well.
♪
This young lady had some decomposition to her.
She had actually been there for a little while.
[soft dramatic music]
I, being a young investigator at the time,
I was blown away.
I'm taking all this in
and maybe two to three minutes after that,
the third victim was discovered.
She was within 10 or 15 feet of our second victim.
♪
She had been there actually a little bit longer
'cause the decomposition had settled in on her.
♪
She had a lot of bruising on her face and her body area.
That tells us that she possibly tried
to fight off her attacker,
and that the attacker was very, very aggressive.
♪
All three victims did have ligature markings
around the neck area.
We can clearly see that the person that was committing
these heinous crimes was the same individual.
♪
All the bodies had been staged
in a sexually- provocative pose.
They were all on their backs with their legs spread open,
either both legs or one leg.
There was absolutely no attempt by the perpetrator
to conceal his handiwork in any way.
First female that we found--
for lack of better way of saying it, the freshest kill,
she was maybe 10, 15 yards from the tracks themselves,
perfectly visible to anybody going by.
The second and the third bodies that we found,
in the more advanced stages of decomposition,
it's not like he hid them.
♪
In looking at the pattern of bodies,
and that they're being left
in increasingly more obvious places,
this indicates someone
who wants law enforcement to find these bodies,
and potentially indicates a person who,
on some level, wants to be caught.
A killer wants to be caught
because he simply cannot stop killing.
This is who he has become. He's aware of it.
It's a passion. It's an addiction.
The bodies are placed strategically
to let investigators know that he's out there.
♪
They know their bloodlust is not going to stop,
and it's almost like they can't stop it,
even though they know it's wrong.
And they're just gonna keep doing it
until the police catch up with them.
♪
The three victims were taken to the morgue.
Autopsies were performed on them.
The official cause of death was strangulation
on all three victims.
Rape kits were performed
on all three of the victims as well,
and found semen to possibly give us a DNA match.
♪
They were able to identify the victims through fingerprints,
because all three of them had previous arrests.
The victims were Robbin Brown,
Rose Marie Felt,
and Kelly Hood.
At that time, Detroit Police got in contact
with the victims' families.
♪
Kelly was my older sister.
I was her pain-in-the-butt little sister,
so you know, my friends and I would bother her,
and she'd just, "No, get away," you know.
And as we got older, we got closer.
She was very caring. Very nurturing.
She loved her babies. Three beautiful kids.
You know, they were her world.
The day I found out about my mother,
I can remember like it just happened a few moments ago.
I was--I was nine years old,
and my grandmother comes walking in
through the kitchen door. [sniffles]
She turns to me and she says, "Mijo..."
[sniffling and sobbing] "They found your mother."
♪
"They found her on the train track."
This monster didn't even have the decency...
♪
Had no...
no heart.
He left my mother on a train track.
Discarded her like trash.
♪
[dramatic music]
Now, we have three victims,
but we didn't know who the killer was,
how many other dead bodies there might be
waiting to be found,
or why he was targeting prostitutes.
♪
It was all hands on deck.
We brought all our specialized units in,
our Violent Crimes Task Force,
our Sex Crimes Unit, our Homicide Unit,
and we were told by our command staff,
"No one's going home until
this individual is in custody."
♪
Our concern was
serial killers, they tend to escalate.
So we need to get this guy off the street now.
This guy's a killing machine.
[dramatic music]
♪
We had found three bodies
and realized we had a probable serial killer on our hands.
We knew that we had to stop it, and we had to stop it fast.
♪
The crime scene technicians were still at the scene,
combing the area for additional clues.
♪
There were all kinds of cigarette butts.
There were kinds of condoms.
There were candy bar wrappers.
There were fast food drink cups and juice bottles.
In all this trash,
one thing that stood out to the technicians--
a coat that was lying next to Kelly Hood's body.
And it looked like it belonged to her.
And inside the pockets of the coat
were a couple prescription bottles...
and those prescription bottles had a name on them.
The first name was Anthony.
So it was incumbent upon us to follow up,
to find out who this individual was,
and why was this pill bottle in her possession?
We ran his name through our system,
and we were able to see he had a violent criminal past
and he had just been recently arrested.
So police dug a little bit more into Anthony's background
and they found a police report of Anthony's cousin,
who said that Anthony got drunk
and he pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill him
and the gun that Anthony had was not even registered to him.
He didn't legally own the gun.
So we definitely felt at that point
we had a potential suspect.
[soft dramatic music]
He was brought in for questioning
and he was asked to take a polygraph.
The police asked him, "Hey, do you know these girls
"who were found at the railroad tracks?
"And why on Earth would your prescription bottles
"be found in the pocket of a coat
that we believe one of them was wearing?"
His answer was basically,
"Well, I used to live, you know, with my brother."
Anthony speculated that
he had left the pill bottles there.
Anthony mentioned his brother
interacted with prostitutes on occasion,
so Kelly hood might have picked up the bottle that way.
[electronic chiming]
The polygraph let us know he was being truthful with us.
We were able to clear him for these murders.
This turned out to be a dead lead for us.
It's pretty obvious we have a serial killer on our hands.
We gotta work these cases until there's either somebody in jail
or all the leads of been exhausted.
♪
The beginning of April, it had been several months
since the discovery of Wendy Jordan's body,
and as time went on, we had no additional leads,
we had no additional suspects. It was a waiting game.
♪
Still hadn't had any DNA results back
linking the victim to the perpetrator.
We were seeing this as problematic,
but we were still waiting for the results.
♪
One of the things that the commander did
was he reached out to the FBI and asked to be put in touch
with the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
So they brought in a profiler from the FBI
that was giving us some insight
to the type of individual that we're looking for
just based off of the crime scene.
They told us we were looking for
white male somewhere between 25 to 35 years of age.
And they told us, based off of the type of killings
that were being perpetrated, the individual was getting
sexual gratification from strangulation.
♪
The strangulation was part of a sexual dysfunction.
The strangulation works for him.
But maybe perhaps in a dating environment,
or a marital relationship,
maybe that's not-- doesn't work for him.
There's some guilt, there's some shame
that's associated with this sexual act.
The fact that these bodies were posed
and left at least partially nude,
he likely experienced some form of deep abandonment, rejection,
shame from someone very integral to his life,
and that emboldened him to feel the need to exert control
and sort of the ultimate dominance over these women.
The idea that he's picking on these vulnerable women,
and he's killing them and humiliating them,
leaving them, it's possible that this killer
has had a problem with women in his past.
Could be a girlfriend, his mother, or someone.
He's got a lot of rage.
♪
There's so much going on,
and it's all happening at the same time
by multiple teams of investigators.
The Behavioral Analysis Unit,
they gave us some really good advice.
They said for every one that he had successfully abducted
and killed, there was probably one or two out there
that managed to get away
and that knew who he was and what he looked like.
And when they told us that, it made perfect sense.
♪
The call went out immediately
to hit the streets.
We started interviewing various working girls.
And it was very urgent to them
to get this guy off the street,
so they were more than happy
to give us as much information as they could.
They start telling us about some of their experiences,
fights that they had with the johns, and robbery attempts.
And as the Behavioral Analysis
Unit had predicted we would find,
we found someone who actually had been abducted
and taken to the railroad tracks.
♪
That's when we got the best information
as to what this guy might look like...
what kind of a car he might be driving in.
That's when we got
the best lead that we could possibility get.
♪
We had multiple, multiple surveillance units
out there cruising the street.
They saw a Jeep fitting the description.
This might be the serial killer that we're looking for.
[dramatic music]
We had three bodies and it was obvious
that we were proceeding with a serial killer investigation.
There was one potential victim
that we found that managed to escape.
♪
Devon was only 22 years old back in 2000.
She was a prostitute who worked Michigan Ave
around Joe Street,
and so she was picked up by a john.
He insisted on taking her
to that stretch of the railroad track
where the three victims were found.
But before Devon knew it,
that john had tried to strangle her.
[tense music]
And Devon was able to fight that guy off
and get out of the vehicle.
♪
Devon gave us a description of our suspect.
That he was a white male, red hair,
with a shirt on that had the name "Eric" on it,
and that he also was driving a box-style Jeep.
♪
So that was something huge
from an investigative standpoint.
This might be the serial killer that we're looking for.
It's possible this killer had other victims out there,
maybe assault survivors out there,
that we don't know about.
There was one particular lady, Wilhelmina Drane.
She had her own tale to tell of someone who assaulted her.
♪
It was April 2, 2000, when Wilhelmina Drane
was on Michigan Avenue at about 52nd Street,
and she was near a bus stop and she was trying to get home.
A man pulled up next to her in a Jeep,
and he said, "Hey, do you need a ride?"
She got in the vehicle with him and then
he went to another location
instead of taking her where she wanted to go.
He tried to attack her. She was strangled by him.
♪
But she was strong enough to fight off the attacker.
She was carrying mace and she got him with the mace.
She got out of the Jeep,
and she threw bottles at it as it drove away.
♪
She gave us a very good description of her attacker.
She described the Jeep as well.
He had fit the description that was given by Devon.
A white male, late 20s, with red-color hair--
but also she stated that he had
a tiger tattoo on his arm.
That information was... awesome.
[dramatic music]
♪
There were significant- enough similarities
that it's pretty obvious that this was the same guy.
All of a sudden, things just began to fall into place.
Now, we can kind of bring it in.
We're not looking for a car, you know.
We're looking for a Jeep.
And so that really helps.
We're looking for a white male, glasses, red hair,
"Eric" on his shirt,
and then the tiger tattoo on his arm.
♪
We had multiple, multiple, surveillance units out there
in unmarked cars, cruising the street.
We had over 100 people out there easily,
and they were watching for the Jeep,
and they were watching for this tall,
stocky, white male with red hair.
♪
At midnight on April 11/12,
two Fourth Precinct officers were driving around.
They saw a Jeep fitting the description.
Jeep was just going down Michigan Avenue
in that far right lane looking for women.
And so they pulled the Jeep over.
And they asked the man to step out,
and they began to question him,
"Where are you going? Where do you live?"
His answers didn't really make a whole lot of sense.
He fit the description that was given
and they're saying that he had the tiger tattoo
that was on his right arm.
So they put him in the back of the patrol car.
And then something very interesting happened.
♪
As the officers were
taking this individual into custody,
another lady walked by and seen him
and said, "Hey,
that's the [bleep] right there that tried to kill me."
They drove him downtown,
put him in an interrogation room.
And we generally start, you know,
doing some background, basic questioning.
"What's your name? What's your date of birth?
What's your address?"
His name was John Eric Armstrong.
♪
I thought my job was done.
We have all these seasoned investigators.
But I, along with Detective James Hines,
were chosen to go in there and do the interview.
And I was in shock. I couldn't believe it.
And I'm thinking to myself, "Wait a minute. Me?"
Because this case was major,
and failure was not a option.
[soft suspenseful music]
♪
We had arrested a suspect
who we believed was our serial killer.
Me and my partner were sent up
to do the interrogation and interview
of John Eric Armstrong.
♪
It was nerve-racking, particularly for me.
This was the first serial killer case that I'd done.
♪
My partner and I, we walk into the room,
and John Eric Armstrong is sitting there...
♪
And he's clenching his coat.
And he's like this.
And he's kind of, like,
rocking back and forth, back and forth.
♪
We start to get into conversation,
just about, like,
just trying to get him opening up to us.
And we talked to him for several hours.
♪
Finally, we were just like,
"Okay, there's some things we need to talk to you about."
I said, "You know about DNA, don't you?"
He said yes. And I said, "Do you know how it works?"
I took the back of my hand,
and I rubbed it against the back of his hand.
I said, "I just left a little bit of me on you."
♪
And I said, "You know what?
We got a lot of you on those girls you murdered."
♪
And at that time, he just blurted out,
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.
I killed them, I killed them."
♪
We were both in, like, a state of shock.
It's like, "Wait a minute!
He just confessed to killing somebody!"
♪
My partner and I were sitting next to John
as we were talking to him,
and he told us about
each one of the crimes that he committed.
♪
For Rose Marie Felt, Kelly Hood, and Robbin Brown,
his methods were very similar.
He told us how he would drive around in his Jeep,
how he picked them up,
how he performed sex acts with them,
and then, as...
the victim was on top of him,
he would strangle them,
either with his hands or with their own tights.
[tense notes]
And I'm sitting there like,
"Wow, this is heavy," you know?
♪
He told us that he placed the three victims
that we had found.
[flies buzzing]
♪
He positioned them so he can always go back
and have sex with them,
because he didn't have to argue nor fight with them
or anything like that,
and he knew that they would always be there.
♪
At that point,
almost 25 years on the police department
in a city like Detroit,
I thought I would never be shocked by anything.
♪
I asked him, "How long would you go back
and visit one of your victims?"
And he said,
"Well, until I couldn't stand the smell anymore."
♪
When you talk about a decomposing body,
and someone engaging in sexual intercourse,
she is at his disposal.
That's what he gets out of this.
Availability, on his terms, the way he wants it.
That's what this corpse offers to him.
The necrophilia in this case
is the ultimate means of control.
So he enacted this almost god-like act
of taking their life, and that wasn't enough for him.
He then continued to relive this act
by having sex with them even after their death.
He kills her, and then he has sex with her.
But he knew what he was doing was wrong.
And that's really the definition of insanity,
that you can't tell right from wrong.
John Eric Armstrong is not insane under the law.
He knows right from wrong.
[dramatic music]
When I arrived at work that morning,
we had received the DNA results,
which indeed did link Wendy Jordan
to our suspect, Armstrong.
All the evidence pointed at Armstrong
as being the perpetrator of this crime,
so now, it was time to make this arrest.
That was when I was advised that he was already in custody
in Detroit for a series of horrific homicides
and was confessing.
It was a, "Holy smokes, you gotta be kidding me.
"This guy was killing all these innocent people
in the city of Detroit right under our noses?"
♪
We had John Eric Armstrong in custody
and he had confessed to the murders
that had happened in the city.
♪
While we were conducting the interview,
Dearborn Heights PD had got in contact with Violent Crimes
and said, "Hey, we're interested in the person
that you guys have in custody in reference to a homicide."
And that victim was Wendy Jordan.
At this point, I kind of maintained my composure
and I said okay, you know,
so we need-- we need to talk about it.
♪
We end up getting the confession from him...
that he killed Ms. Jordan as well,
and told us the story what happened,
how he picked her up.
During the time of the interview,
Armstrong confessed that
he had picked Wendy Jordan up on Warren Avenue
where he proceeded to strangle her to death.
♪
His serious murderous crime spree
didn't start in Detroit until after that.
He wasn't familiar with the railroad tracks yet,
so he threw her body over the bridge railing into the river.
♪
From that point, it was like the flood gates opened.
It was like he just kind of gave up and said,
"There's no sense deceiving anybody any longer,
no sense lying about this. This is what happened."
♪
He then confessed to several more murders
while he was in the Navy.
When he would visit certain ports,
he would get off the ship, go in, find a prostitute,
and he allegedly murdered some,
and then get back on ship and travel to the next port.
♪
For the investigators, this was a huge revelation.
They were looking at someone who appeared to be
an international serial killer.
He claimed to have killed someone in Singapore,
for instance, Thailand, Hong Kong.
We had got up to 22 or so homicides,
including additional ones that were overseas.
At that time,
all those overseas cases were unresolved
because Armstrong had left each country
right after every murder.
[soft tense music]
♪
By the time it came to us
at the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office,
we knew there had been five deaths
that he was responsible for in the same area
based on what we have here and this is what we can prove.
You have the right to remain silent.
So there's five murder one.
That's what we charged him with.
♪
The first one that actually went to trial
was the case where Wendy Jordan was the victim.
I went to the arraignment, I went to the pretrial.
I went to everything.
When I first saw John Eric Armstrong, I said,
"He look like anybody's next-door neighbor.
He looked so young and innocent."
♪
Serial killers are often able to get away
with multiple killings over an extended period of time
because of a tremendous ability to compartmentalize.
They can have multiple personas
and this chameleon-like ability
to blend in to whatever scenario they're placed in.
They can have families, belong to a church,
have a job, socialize in the community.
People have no idea that there's another side,
a psychopath among them.
How do you go from husband,
brother, friend, employee, veteran, father--
how do you go and get to this,
the ultimate violation against a woman's body?
That is the question.
♪
The trial for the murder of Wendy Jordan,
it took the jury just two hours
to find Armstrong guilty of murder in the first degree,
mandatory life sentence.
It was life without the possibility of parole.
I slept so good that night.
♪
The trial for the murder of Kelly Hood--
again, another mandatory life sentence.
I think the closer he got to realizing
that he was gonna spend the rest of his life in jail,
the more sorry he became.
He pled to the other cases.
He offered what's called a conditional plea.
He pled guilty to second-degree murder
for the other killings
and he received an additional 31 years in prison.
He's in a place now where he can't hurt anybody else.
♪
I'm glad we were able to bring closure for so many families.
♪
I know in my heart she's at peace.
[soft dramatic music]
And I think that's what helps me deal.
You know, 'cause she's not suffering.
♪
If she was here right now,
what I would tell her is how much I love her...
♪
How much I've missed her every day
and every second of my life,
how I've never stopped,
or stopped thinking about her. [sniffles]
♪
When Wendy was murdered,
my best friend was taken away from me.
♪
And you know what your best friend is.
That's your everything.