What sets this killer apart
is the ferocity of his killings.
This was not just one blow, one stab, one shot.
This was the complete annihilation of a person.
This is a repetitive disfigurement.
This is the removal of a fetus.
This is a killer with a sense of brutality towards women.
What makes the killer twisted
is the quick succession of the killings
and the overkill of each one of them.
This is the hardest type of homicide investigation
for any detective,
because you know he's going to strike again,
and soon.
[tense music]
♪
Middletown, New York. We're a relatively small city.
Population about 25,000 people.
Was just a small town. It was a safe town.
Not a lot of crime.
Back in the '90s, the downtown
became a very busy area. It started flourishing, too,
with more people visiting the area.
March 26, we got the call
that a couple were walking on a railroad track bed,
and they saw what they thought was a mannequin.
Upon further investigation,
they realized it was a human body.
I immediately responded
with other detectives to investigate.
Upon arrival, I noticed what appeared to be a female body
laying on the ground.
She was naked, and appeared to have multiple stab wounds
all over her face, her body.
You could tell that she had been cut open
with a sharp object--her face,
her neck, I believe her upper breast area.
And her body was posed,
where her arms were laid out on her sides,
and her legs were a little bit apart.
She was very brutally stabbed, brutally mutilated.
Her face was totally obliterated.
You couldn't even tell anything about her face
at the time we were on the scene.
I've seen all sorts of homicides in the past.
This was one of the worst cases of homicide
that I've seen in my career.
The body was very clean.
It appeared to have been washed up,
so it was obviously that she had been killed somewhere else
and then transported there, and then dumped there,
and then posed there.
A very, very strange type of thing.
So, we're formulated a search pattern.
We went from the point of the body
and worked our way outward in different directions,
looking for clues.
There was a railroad tracks,
and we were walking up and down them,
looking to see if we could find something
that may be pertinent to the investigation.
Specifically, tire track marks,
to see if she was dumped off there,
possibly footprints--any type of evidence.
One of the detectives on the scene
recognized one of the tattoos
on her--I believe it we also on her
right arm--and thought he may have known that tattoo.
And he went back to headquarters,
pulled some photographs out of an individual
who had very similar tattooing,
and it was determined to be Juliana Frank.
Juliana Frank from Middletown, who I personally have known,
but unfortunately, due to the injuries,
did not recognize her at all.
It was shocking to see who it was.
It was someone that I went to school with.
Anytime somebody gets killed, it cuts through you.
But when you know the person,
it cuts a little bit more through you.
What was going through my mind was, "Who could have done this?
What kind of animal could have done this to this woman?"
We had nothing but a dead body
that somebody had mutilated, so it was important to seek out
whoever was close to Juliana Frank
that could give us some type of help.
It was a Monday. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon.
The phone rang, and it was my mother-in-law, Beverly,
and she said, "Toni Anne, Julie's dead. Juliana's dead."
I couldn't believe it. We went to the coroner's office,
and they left her arm out, so we could see her tattoo.
We walked a little closer, and I kind of lost it,
just from seeing what was done up here.
And then I didn't see skin here.
I just saw hollowness. And the next thing I know,
I was crying on the floor in the office of the coroner.
My husband, I'd never seen him cry.
He was just besides himself.
Julie was a very, very loving person.
Very loving.
At the time of the autopsy, based upon the injuries,
this was typical of a crime of passion.
A lot of overkill.
This was multiple, multiple stabbings,
which we learned was more than 40 times.
And that's when the doctor, the pathologist,
discovered that she in fact
was either four or five months pregnant,
and the killer removed the fetus.
It was gruesome. It was just a terrible thing to see.
And I said, "I never want to see this again."
She was pregnant, and had been cut open.
The fetus had been cut out.
You had a horrific crime against this person.
The body had been washed. She was posed.
Compounded by what was done to her fetus.
When you have a suspect that leaves women like this,
it is so troubling,
because they know that she's going to be discovered.
It was very deliberate, and that was the intention.
"I will humiliate you,
and anyone that comes across your body,
I want them to know and feel the humiliation."
Obliterating someone's face, someone's identity,
seems to be an act by someone who knew the victim,
an act of rage at her,
to the point where he just wanted to destroy who she was,
destroy her and her identity.
The fetus was horrifically removed from this mother-to-be.
So, this is a-this is a thought-out plan
of desecrating this body.
There's an element of rage, of passion,
of emotional behind this act.
Generally, when you see overkill, it's personal.
We knew that Juliana Frank was pregnant,
and it gave us a point of focus.
We realized that we should focus
on whoever the father might be.
We thought that might have been a case
where he did not want Juliana Frank to have the baby.
What we did next was to fan out,
and we started talking to everybody
who was associated with Juliana Frank.
Her friends were--many of them
were known to the police department
through different types of dealings with them.
I would refer to them as a very rough group.
We came across a female that was known to her,
name of Angela Colon.
And when we conduct the interviews with Angela,
she gave us some initial direction, right up front,
of who had killed Juliana.
That certainly got our attention.
Juliana Frank happened to be over at a friend of hers
on John Street in Middletown, New York,
and claimed that she saw Juliana Frank being murdered
by an individual, Hector.
Angela Colon said, on Monday, March 25,
in the last morning hours, she saw this guy, her friend,
hector, kill Juliana Frank,
and roll her body up into a carpet that was there.
He then put the body out front on the porch.
Angela said there was a lot of blood spatter on the walls,
and they cleaned it as best they could.
So, we immediately started looking for Hector
as a suspect.
We were notified that there was a body
found inside a residence.
But now, we're having bodies turn up,
and it's started to become alarming.
It did cross my mind that they could be the same killer.
♪
I was motivated to find the killer of Juliana Frank,
because I knew her, and the injuries to her body
were just literally unbelievable, unconscionable.
Who could have done this, and why?
Who could be this angry at somebody?
A statement was obtained from her friend Angela Colon.
She told us that she witnessed a friend of hers, Hector,
become violent with Juliana Frank,
and as a result of that information being developed,
I went out and located the suspect.
And in the interview room, he was advised of his rights,
Miranda warnings,
which he waived--the right to an attorney.
I went at him probably the toughest I've ever went
at any individual during an interview.
I literally threw down in front of him
the photographs of Juliana Frank,
and showed him the injuries to her,
the mutilation of her face.
But he put his hands together, as though he was praying,
on the opposite side of the desk, in the interview room.
He looked up to God, to the ceiling,
and he said, "God, please, I didn't do this.
I didn't kill this woman. I didn't not kill her.
I'm a friend of hers. I wouldn't hurt her at all."
Immediately, we applied for a search warrant
for his apartment.
According to what Angela said, you know,
there should have been quite a lot of blood.
But we got word from the Crime Scene Unit
that they didn't discover any type of significant evidence
there of any homicide.
And we all kind of thought, "Wow, how come not?
There had to be some blood somewhere."
I told a couple of the detectives,
"You gotta go bring Angela Colon in again."
And I sat with her myself.
I said, "We have a problem, Angela."
I said, "This isn't what happened."
And with that, she turned away and started sobbing.
And I said, "The statement you gave us yesterday is false.
Is that correct?" She said, 'Yes, it is."
She said, "I lied about it."
She said that she felt pressured.
She said she felt like she had to tell the police
what they wanted to hear.
I don't know if she would have done this out of fear,
or she was just trying to settled some type of a score.
But she had made the entire story up involving Hector.
He had to be released.
We didn't have any information further to charge him with.
It's frustrating. It's frustrating.
We wanted this thing solved.
We wanted to get the guy and get him quick,
before evidence starts to disappear.
At Juliana's funeral, where were lines out the door.
Just more and more people came,
because this family was so known in the town.
There were just loads of people.
But I know a lot of people came because it was a murder case,
you know, and they wanted to be part of it.
In crimes of passion, it's usually a boyfriend or husband.
We assigned a detective
to attend the wake from a distance,
filming everybody that's coming and going.
The reason for that is the suspect
might just appear to pay his respects.
It's not uncommon for murder suspects
to attend the funeral of the very person that they murder.
Maybe the killer was attending the funeral,
because he wants to see all the people
who are there mourning this victim,
all there because of what he did.
He might get some satisfaction from that.
Inflicting physical and likely emotional pain
on their victim was almost not enough,
and have to take it one step further
in seeing the emotional pain
that they have inflicted on the family
and loved ones of that person.
It's this sick,
twisted secret that only they know about.
So, yes, they can attend the funeral services
for that very purpose,
to continue to hide in plain sight.
We had her parents, including her brother,
come to the PD and look at the video,
to see if they could identify somebody
that they weren't familiar with, perhaps the bad guy.
So, they looked at the video,
and nothing ever became of that.
It's 1991. We had no DNA. We had nothing.
We had absolutely nothing.
There came a point in time
when all leads virtually dried up,
and the case started to become cold at that point.
It was July 10, 1992. Around 12:00 noon,
I received a call of a 1047, which is an unattended death.
I was working a shift with the detective bureau,
Criminal Investigation Division, and we were notified
that there was a body found inside a residence.
A woman who lived nearby had actually answered the apartment
and found Ms. Laurette Huggins, lying there naked on the floor.
I was the first person there,
and when I went in that bedroom,
there was a body in there.
Female, no clothes, arms over her head,
with her legs spread open,
and large gouge in the side of her neck,
and looked like several puncture wounds
in the middle of her chest.
It was a gruesome scene. The living room was a mess.
You could tell there was a struggle there.
Pretty shocking to see.
She had obvious multiple puncture wounds
to her lower abdomen.
She had a fair amount of dried blood on her hands,
which possibly indicated that she put up a struggle,
these were defensive.
And it was obviously she was posed this way,
and not just pulled into the room and dropped that way.
Her legs were spread, probably,
relatively as far as apart as they could have gotten.
It was a first-floor apartment.
There were no apparent signs of any type
of forced entry on the door or any damage to the door.
There were boxes in the living room,
and the house was--looked like people were moving out of it.
The bulk of the boxes were stamped the day before,
so I knew now that she had to have been in here
less than 24 hours.
And then I came across a coat hanger.
It was flat on the floor.
As I turned it over, on the flat edge,
on the paper of the coat hanger,
there was an obvious fingerprint.
The fingerprint appeared to be in blood.
I was kind of hoping that this was gonna be our suspect.
On July 10, 1992,
Laurette Huggins was found inside her home,
in the city of Middletown.
Our body seemed to have been posed.
She had multiple stab wounds all over her
left side of her neck, her back, her chest.
While the crime scene was being processed,
we got ahold of Laurette Huggins' daughters
and spoke with each of them, trying to obtain information
that could help us try to solve this case.
We learned that Laurette Huggins
was originally from St. Vincent,
the island in the West Indies.
She was separated, estranged from her husband.
actually, I believe the marriage had been annulled
after a short time.
The victim was in the process of moving out of the apartment
and moving back to the Caribbean.
She apparently had worked her regular job the night before,
had gotten off work in the evening.
The house was a nice house, on Bonnell Street.
So, she wasn't a street-type person.
She wasn't out there with a bad group.
We knew we had a homicide with no suspect.
We'd like to find whoever did this immediately.
Juliana Frank was killed back in March of 1991.
And now we have another victim
who is stabbed multiple times,
she is found naked, she is found in a posed position.
This began to make us really wonder at this point,
"Is this related?
Is this too much Hall of Fame a coincidence?
Are we looking at a single killer her?
Is this the same person that did this?"
This is a small town. There are not a lot of murders.
And now, there are two brutal stabbings of women.
Is it possible there's a killer in town?
You have two female victims.
They are both disrobed. They're both posed.
There's a possibility of sexual assault.
And most importantly,
the manner in which they were murdered,
multiple stab wounds to the upper torso.
These are major red flags
that these victims are likely connected.
But the strange thing is, these crimes occurred one year apart.
We were investigating Laurette Huggins' murder,
and it was becoming extremely frustrating for us,
because we didn't have any solid leads.
No real suspects in this case at all.
Nobody popped out immediately at us.
And then within about a week, I was working a day shift,
and a detective from the City of Poughkeepsie
Police Department
came to our police headquarters with flyers and information
that he was investigating two girls who were missing
after a night out at the Blue Note nightclub in Poughkeepsie.
A woman from Poughkeepsie named Angelina Hopkins,
who was 23 years old,
and her cousin, Brenda Whiteside,
who was visiting from Westchester County,
they went out to the club Blue Note,
and they never came home.
Both their parents went to the police.
The mother and sister of Angelina Hopkins
essentially began their own investigation,
and did a terrific job.
Angelina's mother, she was not going to sit still
and wait for something to happen.
Fear and anger, and this combustible brew of emotions
started to get to be too much for her,
and she had to do something.
So she went with her daughter Cecilia
to the club Blue Note at night and started asking questions.
This is a 43-year-old woman, who was talking to anyone
who she could make eye contact with,
asking, "Where's my daughter? Where's my niece?"
She was absolutely fearless.
They started going back to the Blue Note bar
and backtracking the steps--who they were with
and what had happened.
Someone in the bar told them that this gentleman had left
with the girls on the night they went missing.
A light-skinned black man in his early 30s,
and he is in a car outside.
So, Anna goes up to this man and gets right in his face,
and he denies that he knows anything
about Angelina Hopkins,
he doesn't know Brenda Whiteside.
The sister jotted down the plate number,
and she was able to turn that over
to the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department.
And Poughkeepsie forwarded it on to us.
Once you have the license plate number,
you can-you can get a lot of information.
We knew that the person that was driving the car
and had left with the girls from the Blue
Note bar in Poughkeepsie was Nathaniel White.
When I heard the name Nathaniel White,
my ears went up. Back in 1986,
he committed an armed robbery in the New Windsor,
New York area. While he was on parole,
he abducted a girl off the street,
and he was subsequently charged with unlawful imprisonment.
He was also charged with violation of parole,
and he did another year, and he got out of jail in 1992.
So, we have two murders,
and now these two girls have gone missing,
last seen with Nathaniel White.
Could this guy possibly be involved?
Before we were able to pick up Nathaniel White
for questioning, a third murder occurred.
The similarities between the cases were striking.
All of these victims were stabbed.
All of them were found nude.
All of them were found posed in a similar pose.
Normally, you don't pose people.
You kill them, you rob them, you do whatever, and you leave.
You don't pose them.
We were aware that the two girls
from Poughkeepsie were missing.
The family had determined
that the person that was driving the car
and had left with the girls from the Blue Note bar
in Poughkeepsie was Nathaniel White.
It was determined that we needed to pick up
Nathaniel White and speak to him.
On the morning of July 30, 1992,
the state police received a call.
A man--I believe he was walking his dogs--had
located a body of a deceased female.
The body was found on a dirt driveway.
The driveway went up toward a abandoned restaurant.
The victim was unclothed
and appeared to be posed in a spread position.
It was determined
that the victim had been stabbed 47 times.
Normally, you don't pose people.
You kill them, you rob them, you do whatever, and you leave.
You don't pose them.
Our first step is identify the victim.
Different police departments were notified,
and they see if they can match missing persons.
And the victim was identified the next day by family members.
Her name was Adriane Hunter.
Now, we certainly realized there's a problem,
because to have two homicides within a space of weeks
is certainly troubling.
20 days before Adriane Hunter,
Laurette Huggins was also stabbed
multiple times in her home.
And then the homicide of Juliana Frank a year
and a half or so earlier.
The similarities between the cases were striking.
All of these victims were stabbed.
All of them were found nude.
All of them were found posed in a similar pose.
And in between, two girls are missing now, from Poughkeepsie.
I'm sure many people were feeling very uneasy.
It was all happening in a very,
very short period of time.
If all these women who were victimized,
murdered and missing, are related,
and were perpetrated by the same person,
his conduct is escalating. That is a spree killer.
A spree killer is someone who kills with a sense of urgency.
They could kill every week, every month,
but there's a sense of pattern
in how they are committing their murders.
They're strategic. They're on the hunt.
What sets this killer apart
is the ferocity of his killings,
the ability to annihilate a body,
to cut a fetus from a woman's body.
And the length of time between killings
is just getting shorter and shorter,
and the body count is just gonna get higher
and higher over a short period of time,
until someone stops this person.
We learned there was a direct link
between Nathaniel White and the two women,
Adriane Hunter and Laurette Huggins.
Laurette Huggins had been a neighbor of Nathaniel White.
It was also determined,
when we did neighborhood interviews on Harriman Drive,
where the body of Adriane Hunter was found,
that Nathaniel White had previously
lived on Harriman Drive at the end of the road.
We needed to locate and pick up Nathaniel White
and speak to him.
There was three teams sent out to his house.
Knocked on the door. There was no answer.
There did not appear to be anybody at home.
We parked down the road, and we waited.
A very short time later,
a male and a female exited the residence
and were driving in the direction
of the city of Middletown.
We identified the driver as being Nathaniel White
and the passenger as being his live-in girlfriend,
Jill Garrison.
And we brought the car to a stop.
We knew the license plate was stolen,
so we wanted to approach is where we were gonna speak
to him about the stolen license plate.
After he was arrested on that,
he was brought to the Troop F headquarters
in the town of Wallkill here in Orange County,
and that's when the question began in earnest.
He was advised of his Miranda warnings.
Had no interest in having an attorney.
When we asked him about the missing
girls from Poughkeepsie,
he claims that he had dropped them off down the street
and doesn't know what happened to them since then.
He said he did not know Adriane Hunter,
and when we asked him about Laurette Huggins,
he said he was familiar with her,
but really, at that point,
could offer us no other information.
His demeanor was very calm. He never raised his voice.
He never cursed. He never became upset.
But would make no admissions as to harming any of these women.
We were reaching a stalemate.
There comes a time when the interviewers
have reached the wall.
They're not gathering any more information,
and it's time to use a different technique.
It was decided then that we were gonna offer
to let him take a polygraph examination.
At approximately 1:30 in the morning
on the morning of August 4,
I was advised that I would be administering Mr. White
a polygraph examination
to determine whether or not he was
or was not involved with the Huggins homicide.
That's when Nathaniel White changed his story.
The polygraph, at this point,
became a very important investigative tool
to determine whether Nathaniel White
was telling the truth or not.
I've been doing polygraphs for quite some time.
It's stressful. It's up to you to go into a room
and determine, at the end of the day,
is he or isn't he telling the truth?
We decided that we were gonna do the polygraph
on the Laurette Huggins homicide.
We picked the crime that we had the most information about.
We knew the location, we knew the time of death.
He had initially told us that he had seen her
three days prior to her homicide.
She had brought back some cardboard boxes
to what appeared to be, like,
to pack some last-minute belongings into.
He claimed that he had helped her, on Tuesday,
the 7th of July, carry the boxes into the house.
What was very important with the boxes, however,
is that they were date-stamped. They were egg carton boxes,
and the store date-stamped them to that Friday, July 10,
the day that she was murdered.
Therefore, if in fact he did help her with the boxes,
it had to be the day of the murder,
not three days prior to the murder.
It was clear to me, as a polygraphist,
that he was not telling the truth
about whether or not he had been
in Mrs. Huggins' residence on July 10.
But Nathaniel White totally denied killing anybody.
And then Investigator McCoy confronted him
with the bloody fingerprint
that I found on the coat hanger in the living room.
And after a period of time, he broke down.
Mr. White ultimately admitted that he in fact
had killed Ms. Huggins.
He said he went with her into the apartment with the boxes.
Helped her. He said they engaged in sexual intercourse.
He said that was not the first time.
They got angry. She in fact cut him on his left forearm,
and that as a result of that,
he stabbed her repeatedly with a pair of scissors.
Primarily in the area of the neck,
when she was laying on the floor,
first in the living room,
and then dragged her body into the bedroom.
He continued to stab her
and then left her posed in the bedroom.
And he claims that he had seen that in a vampire movie.
I advised Mr. White that the simple fact
is the punishment
doesn't change from the number of homicides that you commit,
and that I believed that he was involved with the Hunter case.
At that point, he said, "Yes, I killed. Ms. Hunter."
Said he saw her walking in Middletown, near a bank.
Told her that they could go do drugs together.
Drove down to Harriman Drive. Had intercourse in the car.
He said that she actually asked him for money,
which infuriated him.
At that time, he said, he punched her several times,
causing her to fall down and become unconscious.
He retrieved a ten-inch butcher knife from his vehicle,
and he stabbed Ms. Hunter, I believe, over 47 times.
Jim McCoy then mentioned
to him the girls from Poughkeepsie,
Brenda Whiteside and Angelina Hopkins.
I told Mr. White
that Hopkins' mother was very distraught
in looking for her daughter, and it just wasn't right.
He put his head down, and he said, "Yeah."
He said, "I killed them."
He said they left the Blue Note bar.
Once they were at Harriman Drive,
he had Angelina Hopkins go with him into the woods.
He claimed that they had sexual relations in the woods,
and when he was done, he had her turn around,
and struck her with a large piece of metal
that was back in the woods.
Strick her in the head once or twice. She was still alive.
Went back to the car and told Brenda Whiteside,
who was waiting in the car,
that her friend needed her back in the woods.
And when they got in the vicinity of where Angelina was,
he also struck Brenda Whiteside with that same piece of metal.
He said he continued to strike them
when they were on the ground until he was exhausted,
until he couldn't pick up the weight anymore.
He just admitted that, "Yes, I killed this one.
Yes, I killed that one." And he went for each one.
He told me that the first person
that he killed was Juliana Frank.
When he confessed to killing Juliana Frank,
then we understood.
He was locked up April 1991 to April 1992.
In between the Juliana Frank murder
and Laurette Huggins murder,
White was in jail, and he couldn't kill.
That's why there was a gap over a year
between his first and second murder.
While he's in prison for a year,
after killing Juliana, nobody asks him about it,
so he's kind of emboldened by it.
He feels like, "Wow, I got away with it."
He sat in prison, and he just became a pressure cooker.
And when he came out, he just exploded.
He wanted to kill more, and he did.
The pressure has been released,
and this killer has found this way
of releasing those emotions, and there's no turning back,
especially given the likelihood of the gratification
and potentially joy and release
that this person would have experienced with that killing.
He said that he had met Juliana Frank on the street,
and they drove down by the railroad tracks in Middletown.
They had engaged in consensual acts,
and, again, during or shortly after,
that she had asked him for money, which angered him,
and that he punched her several times, causing her to fall.
Said he then stabbed her multiple times
and cut open her belly.
He said he didn't know that she was pregnant
when he killed her.
But after that, for some reason,
he had a thirst for blood.
Nathaniel White confessed to these five homicides:
Juliana Frank, Adriane Hunter, and Laurette Huggins,
all stabbed, and them two girls missing
from the Blue Note nightclub in Poughkeepsie.
Nathaniel White took the police
to the location of the bodies of Hopkins and Whiteside,
and the police, using search dogs,
located their remains,
and then also, after a very hard search,
located the skeletal remains of a female child.
Nathaniel White admitted to the murder
of 14-year-old Christine Klebbe,
who had disappeared from her home in Goshen.
Christine Klebbe,
who had disappeared a short time earlier,
happened to be the niece of Nathaniel White's girlfriend.
We knew she was missing, but we did not know
that she was a homicide victim.
During subsequent interview with Investigator McCoy,
Nathaniel White admitted to killing Christine Klebbe.
His difficulty in admitting that he had killed Christine
was because he felt it was family,
that he had actually hurt his family.
I don't think he actually kidnapped her.
He enticed her into getting into his car,
and they went for a ride.
They then went and bought beer.
Said that he went with her to an isolated road.
He said he told her to follow him back into the woods,
and killed her.
The only explanation that Nathaniel ever gave as to why
he had committed these acts--he said,
for some reason, he had a thirst for blood.
He couldn't explain it. It was just there.
He was motivated by one thing,
and I think that was his sexual appetite.
Nathaniel alleged that after engaging
with a sexual encounter with these women,
that they asked him for money,
and as a result he became outraged and he murdered them.
But we have to ask ourselves, is this true?
These women were not known sex workers,
and we don't actually even know if they engaged in sexual acts.
And so what was the true motivation behind these crimes?
Maybe these women were rejecting him,
and he didn't like rejection, so that's why he killed them.
Nathaniel White--every case that he was involved with,
there was a certain degree of brutality attached to it.
Nathaniel White was subsequently charged
with all six murders.
After he was in jail for a few days,
news media came to the jail
and requested the opportunity to interview Mr. White in jail.
The trial lasted at least four weeks.
There were probably almost 70 prosecution witnesses.
You certainly feel for the victims,
the families that were sitting in court through the trial,
that had to listen to the details
of the killing of their loved ones.
So, I think there was some relief
that he was convicted without any doubt.
Nathaniel White was sentenced to consecutive terms
of 25 years to life in prison on each of the murder counts,
which led to an aggregate of 150 years to life in prison.
The families of all six victims were ecstatic
when the guilty verdict was read in court.
They hugged, they kissed, they cried,
and they were thanking-thanking the good Lord.