He killed more than 50 women and children across the Soviet Union. In 1984, police caught him following young women around bus stations with a knife, rope and a jar of Vaseline in his bag. They let him go.
That was the second time. For his first murder, a 9-year-old girl in 1978, police had already arrested another man and executed him by firing squad. The real killer was a married father of two, a former schoolteacher and a Communist Party member.
His name was Andrei Chikatilo. In 1984 a blood test cleared him. The semen found on the victims was type AB, and his blood was type A. Investigators didn't know that in rare cases the two can differ, and he was one of those cases.
Back in 1978, a witness had seen the girl, Yelena Zakotnova, with a man who matched the police sketch of Chikatilo. Police went after Aleksandr Kravchenko instead, a man with a prior murder conviction who lived nearby. He confessed, took it back at trial and was shot in 1983.
Chikatilo had already been pushed out of teaching after complaints from pupils. After his release in December 1984 he went quiet for a few months, then kept killing until 1990.
At his trial in 1992, he sat in an iron cage so the victims' families couldn't get to him. He was convicted of 52 murders and executed in 1994.
In the video below, he calls himself "an actor who's performed a role to earn an Oscar and to get into the Guinness Book of Records." Then the cage, and a woman in the gallery screaming at him to be handed over to them.
One wrong confession and one misread blood test cost dozens of lives. Who do you blame more, the killer or the people who kept letting him go?
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A drifter in a Texas jail confessed to around 600 murders. Police took him out for steak dinners, rarely bothered to handcuff him and closed hundreds of cold cases on his word. He couldn't have committed most of them.
His name was Henry Lee Lucas. He had killed his mother in 1960 and served about ten years for it. After his arrest in 1983, he started confessing, and Texas built a task force around him. Detectives from across the country brought him their unsolved murders, and he said yes to almost all of them.
In 1985, the Dallas Times Herald checked his confessions against his paychecks, traffic tickets and work records. To commit all the murders credited to him in a single month, he would have had to drive about 11,000 miles in an old station wagon. On some of the dates, he was in another state. On others, he was in prison.
In the video below, from a 1993 interview on death row, Lucas explains what all those confessions got him. "I was a king," he says, and lists the cable TV, the cartons of cigarettes and the money he never had before.
He was convicted of 11 murders and sentenced to death for one of them. In 1998, Governor George W. Bush commuted that sentence to life. It was the only death sentence Bush commuted as governor. DNA has since cleared Lucas of at least 20 murders he once confessed to.
He died in prison in 2001.
If police stopped looking because a man said he did it, who actually killed those people?
A drifter in a Texas jail confessed to around 600 murders. Police took him out for steak dinners, rarely bothered to handcuff him and closed hundreds of cold cases on his word. He couldn't have committed most of them.
His name was Henry Lee Lucas. He had killed his mother in 1960 and served about ten years for it. After his arrest in 1983, he started confessing, and Texas built a task force around him. Detectives from across the country brought him their unsolved murders, and he said yes to almost all of them.
In 1985, the Dallas Times Herald checked his confessions against his paychecks, traffic tickets and work records. To commit all the murders credited to him in a single month, he would have had to drive about 11,000 miles in an old station wagon. On some of the dates, he was in another state. On others, he was in prison.
In the video below, from a 1993 interview on death row, Lucas explains what all those confessions got him. "I was a king," he says, and lists the cable TV, the cartons of cigarettes and the money he never had before.
He was convicted of 11 murders and sentenced to death for one of them. In 1998, Governor George W. Bush commuted that sentence to life. It was the only death sentence Bush commuted as governor. DNA has since cleared Lucas of at least 20 murders he once confessed to.
He died in prison in 2001.
If police stopped looking because a man said he did it, who actually killed those people?
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In 1978, a serial killer went on The Dating Game and won. He had already served prison time for attacking an 8-year-old girl. Nobody on the show checked.
His name was Rodney Alcala. The host introduced him as a successful photographer. When the bachelorette asked about his best time, he said night, because "that's the only time there is."
She picked him. Then she refused to go on the date because she found him creepy.
Ten years earlier, he had attacked the 8-year-old in Hollywood. She survived. He fled to New York, enrolled at NYU under a fake name and ended up on the FBI's list of most wanted fugitives. He was caught, convicted of child molestation and paroled in 1974.
Less than a year after the show, he kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Robin Samsoe.
At his third trial in 2010, he acted as his own lawyer. He put himself on the witness stand and questioned himself for about five hours, asking in his normal voice and answering in a deeper one. He also cross-examined Robin's mother.
Police later released 120 of his photos of young women and asked the public who they were. Many have never been identified.
In the video below, you can watch him charm the audience on The Dating Game, then hear from Robin's mother, who admits she brought a gun to his first trial.
He was convicted of seven murders. Investigators think the real number could be as high as 130. He died on death row in 2021.
Cheryl Bradshaw trusted her gut and said no. How often do you ignore yours?
In 1978, a serial killer went on The Dating Game and won. He had already served prison time for attacking an 8-year-old girl. Nobody on the show checked.
His name was Rodney Alcala. The host introduced him as a successful photographer. When the bachelorette asked about his best time, he said night, because "that's the only time there is."
She picked him. Then she refused to go on the date because she found him creepy.
Ten years earlier, he had attacked the 8-year-old in Hollywood. She survived. He fled to New York, enrolled at NYU under a fake name and ended up on the FBI's list of most wanted fugitives. He was caught, convicted of child molestation and paroled in 1974.
Less than a year after the show, he kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Robin Samsoe.
At his third trial in 2010, he acted as his own lawyer. He put himself on the witness stand and questioned himself for about five hours, asking in his normal voice and answering in a deeper one. He also cross-examined Robin's mother.
Police later released 120 of his photos of young women and asked the public who they were. Many have never been identified.
In the video below, you can watch him charm the audience on The Dating Game, then hear from Robin's mother, who admits she brought a gun to his first trial.
He was convicted of seven murders. Investigators think the real number could be as high as 130. He died on death row in 2021.
Cheryl Bradshaw trusted her gut and said no. How often do you ignore yours?
On Christmas Eve, a New Jersey father shot a man inside a car, then went home and put together his kids' presents. By his own account, the only thing that annoyed him that night was a toy wagon he couldn't assemble.
His name was Richard Kuklinski. His wife and kids in Dumont thought he was a successful businessman. Police called him the Iceman, because he froze one victim's body to hide when the man had died.
In 1985 a federal agent named Dominick Polifrone went undercover as a mob associate to get close to him. For 18 months he met with Kuklinski and recorded him. Kuklinski asked him for pure cyanide and explained why he liked poison: "Why be messy? You do it nice and calm."
On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski tested the agent's cyanide by putting it in a hamburger and feeding it to a stray dog. The dog lived. The cyanide was fake. About two hours later, police blocked the road and arrested him.
He was convicted of five murders. In prison interviews he claimed more than 100. The agent who caught him said he believed maybe 15.
In the video below, from HBO's The Iceman Tapes, Kuklinski tells the Christmas Eve story himself, and Polifrone describes sitting across from him while he laughed about a man who wouldn't die from the poison.
He died in custody in 2006.
His family never asked where he went when he got up at 2 a.m. and walked out the door. Would you have asked?
In 1978, the First Lady smiled for a photo with a Chicago contractor and signed it for him. Seven months later, police pulled 29 bodies out from under his house and yard.
His name was John Wayne Gacy. He ran the parade where they met, and he was wearing a Secret Service pin that cleared him to stand next to her.
He was also a local Democratic precinct captain and, in his spare time, Pogo the Clown. Ten years before the photo, he had served 18 months in an Iowa prison for sexually assaulting a teenage boy.
In December 1978, a 15-year-old named Robert Piest disappeared, and the trail led to Gacy. Police put him under surveillance around the clock. He took the officers out to eat, and he later claimed he told them each morning where he was driving so they wouldn't lose him.
On December 19, one of the officers was inside his house and caught a smell coming from a heating vent. He suspected it was dead bodies. Gacy was arrested two days later.
Four more bodies turned up in a river. He was convicted of 33 murders.
In the video below, from a 1992 death row interview with FBI profiler Robert Ressler, Gacy calls himself the victim of a "fantasy monster image." He explains the photo with the First Lady and says he spread 700 or 800 pounds of lime in his crawl space to fix the smell of clay.
He was executed on May 10, 1994.
If a man with bodies under his house could get cleared to stand next to the First Lady, what does a background check actually tell you?
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In 1973, college girls in Santa Cruz would get into a stranger's car and spend the ride guessing what the killer looked like. The driver was the killer.
His name was Ed Kemper. Students had been warned to accept rides only from cars with a university sticker. His mother worked at UC Santa Cruz, so he had one.
He was 6 foot 9, and his IQ had tested at 145. At 15 he shot and killed his grandparents. He was released at 21, against the advice of the hospital's psychiatrists, and in November 1972 his juvenile record was erased. By then he had already killed three times.
The day after he killed a 15-year-old girl named Aiko Koo, he sat in front of a panel of psychiatrists for a parole check. They found no reason to consider him dangerous.
He had wanted to be a cop, but he was rejected for being too tall. So he drank with cops instead, at a bar across the street from the courthouse, and asked them how the investigation was going.
Kemper says a detective once came to his house to take away a gun he wasn't supposed to have. The loaded .22 he had used in the murders was under the front seat of his car. A purse, a book bag and the IDs of his last two victims were in a box in his bedroom closet. The detective left thinking he was a nice, helpful guy.
In the video below, recorded in prison in 1984, Kemper tells these stories himself.
In April 1973 he killed his mother and her best friend, then called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth in Colorado to confess. They thought it was a joke and told him to call back later.
He asked for death by torture and got life instead. He is 77 now and was denied parole again in 2024.
Psychiatrists, cops and the girls in his passenger seat all looked at him and saw nothing. Who was supposed to stop him?
In 1973, college girls in Santa Cruz would get into a stranger's car and spend the ride guessing what the killer looked like. The driver was the killer.
His name was Ed Kemper. Students had been warned to accept rides only from cars with a university sticker. His mother worked at UC Santa Cruz, so he had one.
He was 6 foot 9, and his IQ had tested at 145. At 15 he shot and killed his grandparents. He was released at 21, against the advice of the hospital's psychiatrists, and in November 1972 his juvenile record was erased. By then he had already killed three times.
The day after he killed a 15-year-old girl named Aiko Koo, he sat in front of a panel of psychiatrists for a parole check. They found no reason to consider him dangerous.
He had wanted to be a cop, but he was rejected for being too tall. So he drank with cops instead, at a bar across the street from the courthouse, and asked them how the investigation was going.
Kemper says a detective once came to his house to take away a gun he wasn't supposed to have. The loaded .22 he had used in the murders was under the front seat of his car. A purse, a book bag and the IDs of his last two victims were in a box in his bedroom closet. The detective left thinking he was a nice, helpful guy.
In the video below, recorded in prison in 1984, Kemper tells these stories himself.
In April 1973 he killed his mother and her best friend, then called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth in Colorado to confess. They thought it was a joke and told him to call back later.
He asked for death by torture and got life instead. He is 77 now and was denied parole again in 2024.
Psychiatrists, cops and the girls in his passenger seat all looked at him and saw nothing. Who was supposed to stop him?