Killers: Behind the Myth (2013–2015): Season 2, Episode 6 - The Scorecard Killer - full transcript
When police see a car weaving between lanes on a Californian highway late one night, they pull the car over. In the driver's seat is Randy Kraft. In the passenger seat is a dead body. In the boot is a list of names, and under the seat is a collection of photos of what look like dead bodies on a sofa. A former military airman, Kraft targeted marines and gay men, routinely sodomising and emasculating them before he killed them. The torture his victims endured became more and more extreme. A computer programmer with a high IQ, Kraft to this day maintains his innocence and despite the extensive evidence against him, denies killing anyone. He is currently appealing his death sentence in the Federal courts. Kraft now sits on Death Row in the infamous San Quentin prison, convicted of 16 counts of murder. Known as the "Scorecard Killer" because of a piece of paper he kept believed to be a death list of victims, conservative estimates allege he has killed at least 50 more. Others put his total body count at over 100.
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NARRATOR: The most notoriouskillers hide in plain sight,
free to kill and kill again.
But most are not the criminalmasterminds of fiction.
In their minds, theycommit the perfect murder.
In reality, it's their foolishmistakes that get them caught.
St. Charles County, Missouri.
May 15th, 2001.
A maintenance
worker cleans trash
from the roadside ofHighway 67, 20 miles north
of downtown St. Louis.
Amongst the garbage and weeds,he makes a horrific discovery--
the rotten corpse
of a young woman.
The body that was discoveredwas of a black female.
She was nude.
NARRATOR: Detective SergeantJana Walters is called out
to investigate the crime scene.
JANA WALTERS: She was inadvanced stage of decomposition
due to the
environmental factors.
It looked like she had maybebeen out there for at least
three or four days.
NARRATOR: The body is justyards away from the roadside
and barely hidden from
the passing traffic.
She was just tossed out of thevehicle, removed from a vehicle
just like the other
debris and trash
that's alongside the highway.
NARRATOR: Walters and
her team find no clues
as to the girl's identity.
The body undergoes an autopsy.
We were hoping
that we were going
to be able to gather
some type of DNA that
would pertain to the suspect.
But during the autopsy, whatwe did find was a dental plate.
And inside the plate was
an inscription of a name
and a series of numbers.
And that was our clue tothe identity of this female.
NARRATOR: Walters
is able to trace
the numbers back to adental company in St. Louis.
After speaking
with the company that
made this dental plate, it wasconfirmed that the female that
was found was Teresa Wilson.
NARRATOR: Teresa Wilson
was a 36-year-old mother
from a deprived
area of St. Louis
who worked as a prostitute.
Bill Smith, a reporter forthe "St. Louis Dispatch,"
looks into thebackground of the victim.
The picture that
I got was a portrait
of a woman who had a lot
of internal struggles
and had herself a
very difficult life,
wanted very much to
be a good mother,
wanted to be a productivemember of society,
wanted everything that
anybody else would want,
the whole American dream kind ofthing, but kept reaching for it
and kept slipping back.
And the main reason she wasslipping back was the drugs.
JANA WALTERS: So now
we're looking at someone
who picks up prostitutes.
Was it our first one,
second one, third one?
We have no idea at this point.
NARRATOR: Two weeks later inan alley of the same rundown
neighborhood that the firstvictim, Teresa Wilson,
turned tricks, St. LouisPolice recover another body.
She'd been run over by acar, dumped in the alley,
and has some adhesive stickinessall over on her wrists, mouth,
ankles.
NARRATOR: Supervising
the case for St.
Louis City Metropolitan Policeis seasoned cop Major Harry
Hegger.
Looked like an
act of convenience
where somebody had
disposed of a body.
There was no real
effort to hide it.
NARRATOR: Hegger's detectiveslearned that the woman
is 46-year-old Betty James.
She, too, was a sex worker.
The autopsy later
revealed that she died
of suffocation, strangulation.
NARRATOR: Then just
one month later,
Walters receives a calltelling her that another body
has been found.
JANA WALTERS: It was likelooking at the same scene.
NARRATOR: The body has beendumped in a roadside ditch
just yards from wherethey found Teresa Wilson.
This is three
females, nude, that
were tossed out of a
vehicle within hundreds
of yards of one another.
NARRATOR: Walters identifiesthe victim as Verona Thompson,
another 36-year-oldmother from the Washington
Park area of east St. Louis.
I really had no clue
that this was going on
or that there was any patternto any of what was happening.
I don't think anybody
in the community
really had any kind of an idea.
Again, the idea
of a woman's body
turning up in a roadside
ditch or in an alleyway
or something like that wasnot that unusual in St.
Louis at that time.
NARRATOR: But Thompson alsoworked as a prostitute.
This sounds alarm
bells with the police.
So now we had identicallifestyles of the bodies.
Coincidence?
There's no coincidence.
NARRATOR: Walters asksneighboring jurisdictions
whether they have any
unsolved murders that
fit the pattern being revealed.
There is an immediate match.
A body found on the 1st ofApril in Washington Park,
on the other side of
the Mississippi River,
is identified as 34-year-oldAlyssa Greenwade.
We now have four
bodies in four months.
NARRATOR: The similaritiesin the cases are startling.
All four had been
tortured before being
strangled to death.
It was pretty clear that thesame person was responsible
for this, even though we
had two states involved
and there was quite a bitof difference in the areas.
NARRATOR: Hegger decides
to pull the cases.
He creates a
dedicated task force
with detectives across thedifferent jurisdictions.
And after we sat
down and talked,
it was fairly easy
to determine that we
probably had a serial killer.
NARRATOR: And they're right.
Over the next fourmonths, the serial killer
claims the lives of two
more prostitutes, Yvonne
Crues and Brenda Beasley.
he strangles his victims
and dumps their bodies
at regular intervals.
You're looking at everypossibility trying to figure
out to give yourself somedirection because nothing
else is helping you.
You have no idea.
You just know that everyfour to six weeks, a body
shows up along the roadside.
NARRATOR: If the police aregoing to stop the body count,
they have to find
the killer, fast.
St. Louis Police have aserial killer on the loose.
Beaten and strangledwomen are being discovered
on an almost monthly basis.
Frustrated in their
search, the task force
call in the help of theFBI's Violent Crime Unit.
Special Agent Robert
Morton is an expert
in profiling serial killers.
BOB MORTON: What we
really do is provide
a blueprint of
the type of person
that is involved in the crime.
NARRATOR: Morton's experiencetells him that serial killers
usually dispose of
the bodies close
to the location of the crime.
In this case,
he was not worried
about geographic boundaries.
He would go across the
bridge from one state
into another to dump the bodies.
He was accessing the
victims in St. Louis
and then he would dump thebody either in Illinois
or in Missouri.
NARRATOR: With bodies beingdumped in a wide rim around St.
Louis, the task force suspectthat the killer may be someone
who drives for a living.
So at this point, we arestarting to look at possibly
truck drivers and speakingwith the prostitutes
and asking, who do youthink would be responsible?
Have you ever had anybody
approach you, have
you felt fear for your safety?
That was met with, we alwaysfeel fear for our safety.
This is our job, this is
the hazards of our job.
We started warningmany of these prostitutes
out there that we had possiblyhad somebody that was abducting
them, luring them into a car,taking them to some location,
and killing them.
NARRATOR: Preying on themost vulnerable in society
means that often,
their disappearances
go completely unnoticed.
When these women
disappeared, nobody ever
filed a missing persons
report because they
were estranged from theirfamilies, they were outcasts.
NARRATOR: The killer
knows what he's
doing, killing vulnerablepeople on the edge of society.
The community is so saturatedwith that kind of thing
at that time that it justkind of washed over them.
JANA WALTERS: These
are disposable women,
according to a killer.
So it gives us a
little bit of an idea
into the mindset of
who we're looking for.
But we still had no idea whothe identity of this person was.
NARRATOR: Six victims
have now been found,
and still there are no cluesas to who the killer is.
You're always trying tolook into the mind of who's
doing this and why they'redoing it, how they're doing it,
and who it is.
NARRATOR: In autumn 2001,the two most recent bodies
discovered by the
police offer a clue
that could change the courseof the investigation, DNA.
There was DNA by
the way of semen
in the throat of
one of the victims
and the anus of the other.
NARRATOR: Investigatorscompare the two DNA samples.
It was a perfect
match, a 100% match.
NARRATOR: At last, policecould link at least two
of the victims to onekiller with hard evidence.
We knew for sure
we had two bodies,
two victims, same suspect.
And based on very
strong similarities,
how they were murdered andhow they were disposed of,
it was pretty obvious to usthat this person was responsible
for all the rest of them, too.
NARRATOR: Police check the DNAprofile against CODIS, the FBI
database that holds the
DNA records of thousands
of criminals in the US.
It came back with
negative results.
There was no match.
The person that we werelooking at as responsible
for the death of these womenhas not been arrested and put
into the system.
NARRATOR: The DNA profileremains unidentified.
It was very frustrating
for all investigators.
We had no evidence
that is useful to us.
The DNA had no known standard.
And we investigatedhundreds of potential leads,
but still it led us nowhere.
NARRATOR: And then in
late 2001, eight months
after finding the
first body, the case
takes an unexpected turn.
After November of 2001,
mysteriously enough,
no more bodies were discovered.
Our killer was consistentwith every month,
and now we have nothing.
NARRATOR: Months
go by and police
are left speculating what couldhave happened to the killer.
We had one of three scenarios.
Either this guy moved
out of town, relocated;
maybe he died; or he mighthave been incarcerated.
NARRATOR: With no moremurders and no fresh leads,
the investigation losessteam and the case goes cold.
Then in May 2002, BillSmith casts his attention
to the unsolved murders.
What kind of
piqued my interest
as much as anything was the factthat some of these women who
had disappeared and
who had been found dead
were from this
area called Baden.
This was an area that I
was very familiar with.
NARRATOR: Bill Smith wasworking the human interest
stories for a Sunday special.
I thought that I could
communicate something
to our readers about
these women that hadn't
been communicated thus far.
NARRATOR: Smith trawls
the streets of Baden
searching for the story.
He writes an article exploringthe tragic life of Teresa
Wilson, whose body was
discovered in Charles
County a year earlier.
A few days after the
article is published,
he receives a mysterious letter.
BILL SMITH: The
first thing I noticed
was that the stamp was upsidedown, which is very unusual.
I opened up the envelope
and looked at it,
and there were two
pieces of paper.
One was a letter written
in red and it looked
to be computer-generated.
It said, Dear Bill, nice
sob story Teresa Wilson
and went on to say,
write another one.
Write a good one and I'lltell you why many others are.
NARRATOR: The letter claimsto be from the serial killer.
KILLER: To prove I'm real,here's directions to number 17.
NARRATOR: Attached is a
computer-generated map.
A hand-drawn X
marks the location
of the killer's 17th victim.
I thought it was a joke.
I thought it was either areporter pulling my leg or just
somebody on the outside
who had read the story
who had a sick sense of humor.
NARRATOR: But Smith takesthe letter to the police,
just in case.
And they can't
believe their luck.
This is our lead.
This is what we're waiting for.
The map that was sent pinpointedan area approximately half
a mile, 3/4 of a mile from wherethe discovery of Teresa Wilson
and Verona Thompson were.
NARRATOR: This time,
X really does mark
the spot Walters recoversthe skeletal remains
of an unknown
woman exactly where
the map had said they would be.
When we discovered the skull,we saw blatantly that there
were indentations in the skull.
There were seven to nineblunt trauma indentations.
We tried to match that withsome type of tool or instrument,
and it appeared that it couldhave been done by a hammer,
the claw end, more crowbar.
NARRATOR: The previouswomen were all strangled.
Whoever was killing them
is getting more violent
and is playing a
game with the police.
This is somebody that istaunting law enforcement.
He's taunting the
citizens, the people
of this community saying,look what I can do
and you can't catch me.
NARRATOR: Criminal
Psychologist David
Holmes recognizes this as atrait common to serial killers.
Many serial killers
become a little
frustrated as their careeradvances considerably.
They almost want recognition.
They don't particularly
want to be caught,
but they want it
recognized that they
or someone has actually
been clever enough
to commit these acts.
My feeling is that he feltthat I didn't understand him,
I didn't understand these women.
And for me to show them ashuman beings, real people,
was something that
irritated him.
NARRATOR: The
boastful letter gives
the police a unique
opportunity to put
an end to a sick killing spree.
But first, they face the
challenge of identifying
the letter's author.
I had the stamp
and glued the label
and everything checked forDNA, hoping it had been licked.
No fingerprints on the envelopeor the letter, nothing.
NARRATOR: The killer seemsto have covered his tracks.
He thought he'd
controlled every
element of this letter andevery aspect, but he hadn't.
NARRATOR: The killer
has unwittingly
led police right to his door.
In St. Louis,
Missouri, police have
received a letter from aserial murderer of prostitutes.
He provided a map that has ledthem directly to the remains
of one of his victims.
Looking at the
envelope and the letter,
there wasn't very
many leads to go on.
There was no DNA evidenceon there or anything else
for them to track down.
NARRATOR: The task force
take the killer's map
to Mark McAmish of the IllinoisState Police Cyber Crimes Unit.
The map that was provided wasreduced in size, the edges were
removed, which hid any
information that would
have been beneficial to us.
NARRATOR: McAmish knows
that it is printed
from an online mapping website.
Through some discussion in theoffice, one of the other guys
says, it looks like
it's through Expedia.
NARRATOR: McAmish realizes thatthe killer must have visited
Expedia's mapping websitebetween the date of the article
being published and the datestamped on the envelope's
postmark, a period of two days.
With that information, westarted looking at how can we
locate this map
and whether or not
there would be logs
of IP addresses that
had gone in and lookedat the specific location?
NARRATOR: IP addresses
are unique numbers that
can identify every computerconnected to the internet
and log their activities.
Only one IP address
had continued to click
in and zoom in on this map.
NARRATOR: It is an identicalmatch to the killer's map.
We were lucky that it actuallycame back to a specific user
name, M. Travis.
NARRATOR: It's a
stunning breakthrough
for the investigation.
I think that he was a littlebit unknowledgable or arrogant
about the internet.
And he went out
and got this map.
He didn't think aboutbeing tracked at the time.
NARRATOR: The IP address
leads investigators
to 36-year-old
waiter Maury Travis.
A background check revealsTravis has a history of drug
abuse and has served time forarmed robbery, an offense that
took place just before theFBI began routinely taking
suspects' DNA, which
explains why he
did not appear as a DNA match.
The records also show
that he was in prison
for a parole violation duringthe period when the killings
had mysteriously stopped.
He had been incarceratedfrom the late fall
to the early spring
on a parole violation.
So that fit right in.
It didn't take a rocketscientist to kind of figure
out, we've probably
got the right guy here.
NARRATOR: Police track
their number one suspect
to an address in Ferguson,a residential community
in North St. Louis.
We were able to set upsurveillance on his home,
did a lot of research on him.
HARRY HEGGER: He
was very paranoid,
he was very cautious. .
He was always looking
over his shoulder.
And I didn't want to
move on him right away,
but I wanted to give
a 48- to 72-hour
close look at this guy tosee what his activities were,
what's this guy all about?
NARRATOR: After three daysof 24-hour surveillance,
the police are ready
to make their move.
Our approach is going to bekind of a just a very calm,
laid back, non-accusatorytype approach.
NARRATOR: At 7:00 AM
on the 7th of June,
detectives from the
task force and FBI
Special Agent Robert Mortonmove in to question the suspect.
We were able to gain
entry relatively easily.
He opened the door
and let us in.
He was very agitated whenwe were there at first,
very excited, very animated.
NARRATOR: Travis immediatelytries to control the interview.
He kept asking us
why we were there,
what are you doing this tomy house, why are you here?
We eventually were able totell him that we were there
because we have
a search warrant.
We asked him if he
had read the letter
that had been posted in thenewspaper and he said, yes.
And we said, well, we
know that that letter
came from your computer.
He kept asking us,
how can that happen?
He couldn't comprehend
the fact that we
were able to trace
the map back to him
through his use of the computer.
His demeanor then changedfrom that to, well, if that's
true, then why are you here?
Why do you want to talk to me?
They showed him some
photos of some women
and asked him if he'd everhad sex with these women.
Well, he denied it.
So they were still talking andhe kind of paused for a while
and he said, hey, can you showme pictures of those dead women
again?
I want to see a picture
of those dead gals.
And it's like, hey, wedidn't tell you they're dead.
NARRATOR: In this onemoment, Travis has carelessly
incriminated himself.
Despite this tacit admission,he stubbornly refuses
to confess to his crimes.
We talked with
him a long time.
And we were trying to convincehim to take us to find
the missing victims' bodies.
Finally, he said,
OK, I'll do that.
NARRATOR: Travis' letter
boasted of 17 victims,
but police have
only found eight.
They are determined to
find the missing bodies.
Travis tells them
that he will lead
them across the MississippiRiver to east St. Louis.
Special Agent Morton and
a St. Louis detective
put Travis in the back ofthe car and hit the freeway.
He was talking with usactually almost flippantly,
joking with us at that point.
And then when he saw
the bridge, there was
a huge change in his demeanor.
And he basically
said, we're not going
to go over there because I'mnot going to show you anything.
You might as well
just take me to jail.
And in the end, he basicallysaid, well, if you don't arrest
me, I'm going to run away.
NARRATOR: They takeTravis back to the police
station in downtown St. Louis
for further questioning.
But instead of answering
their questions,
Travis continues to try andcontrol the interrogation.
So Hegger tries a
different approach.
I asked him if he
wanted anything--
do you want something to drink,do you want something to eat?
And he said he wanted a soda.
So I got a can of soda, cleanedit up, sanitized it, brought it
back, and gave it him.
NARRATOR: Travis
has inadvertently
made his second big mistake.
HARRY HEGGER: And I hadthat can taken up to our lab
and within 12 hours, our chemistmade a positive DNA match
off that can to
the semen that was
recovered from the two victims.
NARRATOR: Police
now have to Travis
linked to at least two murders.
This was it, we have our man.
He's not going anywhere.
NARRATOR: But the DNAmatch isn't the only proof
linking Travis to the murders.
The police are about to discovera treasure trove of evidence
that will reveal thedeep depravity of Travis,
a visual record of
how he tortured,
abused, and killed his victimsin the most intimate detail--
[screaming]
--that he could go blindand relive for his enjoyment
again and again.
On June 7th, 2002,
the police and FBI
raid the home of Maury Travis.
They suspect the
36-year-old waiter
of being behind the murderof several prostitutes
in the St. Louis area.
Once has has been
arrested, forensic teams
move in to search his house.
Their initial impressioncoming in, first floor
spotless, clean, immaculate.
Walk down to thebasement, different story.
Bloodstained carpeting,
bloodstained walls,
bloodstained ceiling,splatters, duct tape, handcuffs.
Obvious a lot of
trauma had taken place.
NARRATOR: But he still
refuses to acknowledge
any guilt. Police are leftwondering what kind of monster
they have in their custody.
The police must piecetogether his story to find
out who Maury Travis really is.
Our investigation did leadto speaking to different family
members about Maury Travis.
He had a girlfriend, he had afamily life, he had a mother,
he had a father.
NARRATOR: Travis was born onthe 25th of October, 1965.
He grows up in the
residential community
of Ferguson in north St. Louis.
He had a typical childhoodlike most people do.
He had a mother that was
very supportive of him.
All the way through
his childhood,
he was a controlled,
reserved individual.
This was consistent
throughout his life.
NARRATOR: But in 1987,
aged 22, Travis' life
takes a downward spiral when heenrolls at college in Atlanta.
He gets hooked on cocaine.
For someone who enjoys
the sense of control
and a feeling of
being in control,
cocaine would have
been the perfect drug.
Cocaine promotes a
sense of control.
It gives this hyper
confidence that you
are in total control
of the universe
if you're high enough on it.
Unfortunately, of course,as his habit progressed,
he will have become
aware of the fact
that the cocaine was beginningto be a bit more in control
than he was.
NARRATOR: In March 1988, Travisreturns home on spring break,
desperate for money tofeed his expensive habit.
Travis will have had tokind of scour every option
before he decided to takethings into his own hands.
In an eight-day crimespree, Travis robs five St.
Louis shoe stores at gunpoint.
[siren]
The police soon catch up withhim, and at the age of 24,
Travis was sentenced
to 15 years in prison.
Maury Travis did
not take to prison.
When he was sent to prisonfor quite a long term
with no real sense that he wasgoing to be able to get out,
he went into overdrive
to try and regain
control over the situation.
NARRATOR: Travis bombardsthe judge with letters
pleading for leniency.
DAVID HOLMES: He did everythinghe could to put pressure
on the justice system, to pleadhis case in every way and shape
that might have reduced
his sentence, that might
have got him out of there.
NARRATOR: After five yearsand three months behind bars,
Travis is released from prisonon parole for good behavior.
He returns to St. Louis, wherehe picks up work as a waiter
in a downtown hotel.
Some of the people
we interviewed
that worked around him,
they talked about what
a nice guy he was, that he hada great pleasant personality.
He was always friendly,
very respectful.
NARRATOR: But all
the time, Travis is
hiding his secret double life.
That's signs of a psychopath.
They'll give you a falsefront, but the real dark side,
that's the real person.
Mr. Nice guy next
door one minute,
and the next be this
savage, controlling,
wild, brutal beast.
Just that fast, two
very different people.
He loved the idea of
transiting between one
and the other, which
kind of for him
showed he was in controlof the different personas
that he was projecting.
NARRATOR: In the basementof Travis' house,
his true persona comes to light.
Police discover a
torture chamber,
and they are about to
uncover the full depths
of his depravity.
JANA WALTERS: One of the crimescene investigators located
a false wall, and
inside that false wall
where numerous VHS tapes.
NARRATOR: The videotapes
reveal exactly
how Travis treated his victims.
He taped women who were tiedand bounded to a pole who were
blindfolded; he
taped women who were
performing sex acts on him.
And I think there weresix, eight, or 10, a bunch
of different women in
different states of
bondage, handcuffs, duct tape.
All them were duct tapedacross their mouth, many times
the wrists and ankles.
He was torturing them withsoda bottles, beer bottles,
all kinds of instruments.
NARRATOR: But the physicaland sexual torture
is just the half of it.
Travis is subjecting hisvictims to psychological abuse.
JANA WALTERS: He taped women whowere chanting what he told them
the chant, which was he wasthe king, he was the master,
they will do everything for him.
He would make them saythat over and over again.
If they didn't say itright, he would hit them.
This guy was the son of Satan.
This guy was the devil.
He was a pure psychopath
and his excitement
came from torturing people.
NARRATOR: But one video
shows the very moment
that Travis goes even further.
One of the tapes wasmarked "The Wedding Tape,"
and it started out
with a family wedding.
The tape broke in the
middle of the wedding
and what we're now
looking at is a scene
of his basement with
a nude black female
who was on the ground.
Into the camera
comes Maury Travis.
And after he has herperform a sex act on him,
he pushes her to the floor.
And this is a very young woman.
He adjusts the camera, he'sgot the video camera running.
He steps off the set,
comes back with a belt,
and strangles her till she dies.
He then looks into the camera,straight onto the camera,
and says, first kill.
It feels good.
This is where we knew we
had a horrendous killer.
Even after 12 years, thatvideo still kind of haunts me.
NARRATOR: The shocking videoconfirms beyond any doubt
that Travis is the
serial killer that they
have been looking for.
Travis' real side was indulginghis dark, sadistic fantasies
with girls that hepicked up off the street.
Maury Travis is,
to a great extent,
a textbook serial killer.
It's premeditated,
he plans for it.
He's very careful,
he's very organized.
He selects the victims who arethe least likely to be missed.
NARRATOR: He would
trawl St. Louis'
poorest neighborhoods lookingfor drug-addicted prostitutes.
He despised those women
for their lifestyle,
because they were prostitutes,because they were crack users.
There's no question
in my mind that he
saw himself as
better than they were
and saw them as the villains.
NARRATOR: Travis would thentake them back to his home
and torture them
in his basement.
This was a horrific,
lengthy torture process
where the victim would slowlybut surely become aware
that this was not the
kind of S&M activity
where they may have beenused to with other clients.
Once these victims were dead,his interest in them waned.
At that point, he very
unceremoniously dumped
them at the side of the road.
They were no longer
any interest to him.
NARRATOR: Eight of his
victims are recovered,
but now that he is in
custody, the police
can find answers to crucialquestions about the fate
of other possible victims.
But Travis will not
give them an easy ride.
He will take control
of the investigation
and seal his murderous fate.
June 2002, St. Louis, Missouri.
Police have just taken
custody of suspected
serial killer Maury Travis.
In his home, they find evidenceof his shocking murder spree.
But that's not all.
It seems Travis had big plans.
We found diagrams.
He had drawn out sketchesand was making an order list.
He wanted to and he was gettingsome bids on what it would
take to expand his basement.
It appeared like the roomwas going to be big enough
for maybe two or threewomen with bunks that they
would be restrained down.
This guy had mapped
out a course for himself
to expand his whole torture andabduction and rape and murder
far beyond what he'd beendoing over the last year, year
and a half.
If he wasn't caught
and stopped right now,
there would be
perhaps hundreds more
female said he would murder.
This is a man that did
not deserve to get out.
NARRATOR: Thankfully,
police have
Travis safely off the streets.
He's locked up in a county jailwhile he waits to be charged
for his horrific crimes.
Suddenly, from a
guy that was always
in control of his environment,he's lost control.
We've got him now.
So I think that's
what was obviously
very unsettling to him.
NARRATOR: And with the mountingbody of evidence against him,
Travis knows that
he is almost certain
to face the death penalty.
As he kind of faced afuture where he was probably
going to be killed by thestate, he decided to keep
absolute control over himself.
And before he could everadmit to any one killing,
he took his own life.
Monday evening I
got a call saying,
hey, I've got some bad news.
They found Travis hangingin his cell, he's dead.
I was stunned.
But more than stunned,
I was really angry.
Maury Travis had decided,I'm in control of everything,
including taking this to
my grave if I want to.
NARRATOR: Sadly, Travis
will never serve justice
for his horrendous crimes.
That was a real
disappointment.
We were looking
forward to putting
together a very airtight,prosecutable case against him.
NARRATOR: But the factthat Travis is not punished
is not the worst consequence
of his final act.
Where are the
answers of people
that have missing loved ones?
Was Maury Travis
responsible for them?
Why did Maury Travis
do what he did?
We have no one to
answer those questions.
He took the coward's way out.
He killed himself,
and in a sense
that's taunting us still becausenow we don't have the answers.
NARRATOR: Travis
taunts the police
further with a suicide notethat he leaves for his mother.
The note reveals nothing aboutthe killings or his victims.
However, it did containa little bit of information
where he said he'd been sick inthe head since he was about 14.
All his life he'd beenunhappy and had a problem.
So I think it was
kind of an admission
that this wasn't just
something that happened.
NARRATOR: This
quiet, unassuming man
became one of the most brutalserial killers in US history.
His letter boasted
of 17 victims,
but the police believe Traviscould have been responsible
for as many as 20
murders of prostitutes
in the St. Louis area.
With Travis dead, they willnever know the full extent
of his murder spree.
It's very frustrating
for us as investigators.
Maury Travis claimed 17 murders.
We had eight bodies.
Where are the rest of them?
Now we'll never know.
[music playing]
---
NARRATOR: The most notoriouskillers hide in plain sight,
free to kill and kill again.
But most are not the criminalmasterminds of fiction.
In their minds, theycommit the perfect murder.
In reality, it's their foolishmistakes that get them caught.
St. Charles County, Missouri.
May 15th, 2001.
A maintenance
worker cleans trash
from the roadside ofHighway 67, 20 miles north
of downtown St. Louis.
Amongst the garbage and weeds,he makes a horrific discovery--
the rotten corpse
of a young woman.
The body that was discoveredwas of a black female.
She was nude.
NARRATOR: Detective SergeantJana Walters is called out
to investigate the crime scene.
JANA WALTERS: She was inadvanced stage of decomposition
due to the
environmental factors.
It looked like she had maybebeen out there for at least
three or four days.
NARRATOR: The body is justyards away from the roadside
and barely hidden from
the passing traffic.
She was just tossed out of thevehicle, removed from a vehicle
just like the other
debris and trash
that's alongside the highway.
NARRATOR: Walters and
her team find no clues
as to the girl's identity.
The body undergoes an autopsy.
We were hoping
that we were going
to be able to gather
some type of DNA that
would pertain to the suspect.
But during the autopsy, whatwe did find was a dental plate.
And inside the plate was
an inscription of a name
and a series of numbers.
And that was our clue tothe identity of this female.
NARRATOR: Walters
is able to trace
the numbers back to adental company in St. Louis.
After speaking
with the company that
made this dental plate, it wasconfirmed that the female that
was found was Teresa Wilson.
NARRATOR: Teresa Wilson
was a 36-year-old mother
from a deprived
area of St. Louis
who worked as a prostitute.
Bill Smith, a reporter forthe "St. Louis Dispatch,"
looks into thebackground of the victim.
The picture that
I got was a portrait
of a woman who had a lot
of internal struggles
and had herself a
very difficult life,
wanted very much to
be a good mother,
wanted to be a productivemember of society,
wanted everything that
anybody else would want,
the whole American dream kind ofthing, but kept reaching for it
and kept slipping back.
And the main reason she wasslipping back was the drugs.
JANA WALTERS: So now
we're looking at someone
who picks up prostitutes.
Was it our first one,
second one, third one?
We have no idea at this point.
NARRATOR: Two weeks later inan alley of the same rundown
neighborhood that the firstvictim, Teresa Wilson,
turned tricks, St. LouisPolice recover another body.
She'd been run over by acar, dumped in the alley,
and has some adhesive stickinessall over on her wrists, mouth,
ankles.
NARRATOR: Supervising
the case for St.
Louis City Metropolitan Policeis seasoned cop Major Harry
Hegger.
Looked like an
act of convenience
where somebody had
disposed of a body.
There was no real
effort to hide it.
NARRATOR: Hegger's detectiveslearned that the woman
is 46-year-old Betty James.
She, too, was a sex worker.
The autopsy later
revealed that she died
of suffocation, strangulation.
NARRATOR: Then just
one month later,
Walters receives a calltelling her that another body
has been found.
JANA WALTERS: It was likelooking at the same scene.
NARRATOR: The body has beendumped in a roadside ditch
just yards from wherethey found Teresa Wilson.
This is three
females, nude, that
were tossed out of a
vehicle within hundreds
of yards of one another.
NARRATOR: Walters identifiesthe victim as Verona Thompson,
another 36-year-oldmother from the Washington
Park area of east St. Louis.
I really had no clue
that this was going on
or that there was any patternto any of what was happening.
I don't think anybody
in the community
really had any kind of an idea.
Again, the idea
of a woman's body
turning up in a roadside
ditch or in an alleyway
or something like that wasnot that unusual in St.
Louis at that time.
NARRATOR: But Thompson alsoworked as a prostitute.
This sounds alarm
bells with the police.
So now we had identicallifestyles of the bodies.
Coincidence?
There's no coincidence.
NARRATOR: Walters asksneighboring jurisdictions
whether they have any
unsolved murders that
fit the pattern being revealed.
There is an immediate match.
A body found on the 1st ofApril in Washington Park,
on the other side of
the Mississippi River,
is identified as 34-year-oldAlyssa Greenwade.
We now have four
bodies in four months.
NARRATOR: The similaritiesin the cases are startling.
All four had been
tortured before being
strangled to death.
It was pretty clear that thesame person was responsible
for this, even though we
had two states involved
and there was quite a bitof difference in the areas.
NARRATOR: Hegger decides
to pull the cases.
He creates a
dedicated task force
with detectives across thedifferent jurisdictions.
And after we sat
down and talked,
it was fairly easy
to determine that we
probably had a serial killer.
NARRATOR: And they're right.
Over the next fourmonths, the serial killer
claims the lives of two
more prostitutes, Yvonne
Crues and Brenda Beasley.
he strangles his victims
and dumps their bodies
at regular intervals.
You're looking at everypossibility trying to figure
out to give yourself somedirection because nothing
else is helping you.
You have no idea.
You just know that everyfour to six weeks, a body
shows up along the roadside.
NARRATOR: If the police aregoing to stop the body count,
they have to find
the killer, fast.
St. Louis Police have aserial killer on the loose.
Beaten and strangledwomen are being discovered
on an almost monthly basis.
Frustrated in their
search, the task force
call in the help of theFBI's Violent Crime Unit.
Special Agent Robert
Morton is an expert
in profiling serial killers.
BOB MORTON: What we
really do is provide
a blueprint of
the type of person
that is involved in the crime.
NARRATOR: Morton's experiencetells him that serial killers
usually dispose of
the bodies close
to the location of the crime.
In this case,
he was not worried
about geographic boundaries.
He would go across the
bridge from one state
into another to dump the bodies.
He was accessing the
victims in St. Louis
and then he would dump thebody either in Illinois
or in Missouri.
NARRATOR: With bodies beingdumped in a wide rim around St.
Louis, the task force suspectthat the killer may be someone
who drives for a living.
So at this point, we arestarting to look at possibly
truck drivers and speakingwith the prostitutes
and asking, who do youthink would be responsible?
Have you ever had anybody
approach you, have
you felt fear for your safety?
That was met with, we alwaysfeel fear for our safety.
This is our job, this is
the hazards of our job.
We started warningmany of these prostitutes
out there that we had possiblyhad somebody that was abducting
them, luring them into a car,taking them to some location,
and killing them.
NARRATOR: Preying on themost vulnerable in society
means that often,
their disappearances
go completely unnoticed.
When these women
disappeared, nobody ever
filed a missing persons
report because they
were estranged from theirfamilies, they were outcasts.
NARRATOR: The killer
knows what he's
doing, killing vulnerablepeople on the edge of society.
The community is so saturatedwith that kind of thing
at that time that it justkind of washed over them.
JANA WALTERS: These
are disposable women,
according to a killer.
So it gives us a
little bit of an idea
into the mindset of
who we're looking for.
But we still had no idea whothe identity of this person was.
NARRATOR: Six victims
have now been found,
and still there are no cluesas to who the killer is.
You're always trying tolook into the mind of who's
doing this and why they'redoing it, how they're doing it,
and who it is.
NARRATOR: In autumn 2001,the two most recent bodies
discovered by the
police offer a clue
that could change the courseof the investigation, DNA.
There was DNA by
the way of semen
in the throat of
one of the victims
and the anus of the other.
NARRATOR: Investigatorscompare the two DNA samples.
It was a perfect
match, a 100% match.
NARRATOR: At last, policecould link at least two
of the victims to onekiller with hard evidence.
We knew for sure
we had two bodies,
two victims, same suspect.
And based on very
strong similarities,
how they were murdered andhow they were disposed of,
it was pretty obvious to usthat this person was responsible
for all the rest of them, too.
NARRATOR: Police check the DNAprofile against CODIS, the FBI
database that holds the
DNA records of thousands
of criminals in the US.
It came back with
negative results.
There was no match.
The person that we werelooking at as responsible
for the death of these womenhas not been arrested and put
into the system.
NARRATOR: The DNA profileremains unidentified.
It was very frustrating
for all investigators.
We had no evidence
that is useful to us.
The DNA had no known standard.
And we investigatedhundreds of potential leads,
but still it led us nowhere.
NARRATOR: And then in
late 2001, eight months
after finding the
first body, the case
takes an unexpected turn.
After November of 2001,
mysteriously enough,
no more bodies were discovered.
Our killer was consistentwith every month,
and now we have nothing.
NARRATOR: Months
go by and police
are left speculating what couldhave happened to the killer.
We had one of three scenarios.
Either this guy moved
out of town, relocated;
maybe he died; or he mighthave been incarcerated.
NARRATOR: With no moremurders and no fresh leads,
the investigation losessteam and the case goes cold.
Then in May 2002, BillSmith casts his attention
to the unsolved murders.
What kind of
piqued my interest
as much as anything was the factthat some of these women who
had disappeared and
who had been found dead
were from this
area called Baden.
This was an area that I
was very familiar with.
NARRATOR: Bill Smith wasworking the human interest
stories for a Sunday special.
I thought that I could
communicate something
to our readers about
these women that hadn't
been communicated thus far.
NARRATOR: Smith trawls
the streets of Baden
searching for the story.
He writes an article exploringthe tragic life of Teresa
Wilson, whose body was
discovered in Charles
County a year earlier.
A few days after the
article is published,
he receives a mysterious letter.
BILL SMITH: The
first thing I noticed
was that the stamp was upsidedown, which is very unusual.
I opened up the envelope
and looked at it,
and there were two
pieces of paper.
One was a letter written
in red and it looked
to be computer-generated.
It said, Dear Bill, nice
sob story Teresa Wilson
and went on to say,
write another one.
Write a good one and I'lltell you why many others are.
NARRATOR: The letter claimsto be from the serial killer.
KILLER: To prove I'm real,here's directions to number 17.
NARRATOR: Attached is a
computer-generated map.
A hand-drawn X
marks the location
of the killer's 17th victim.
I thought it was a joke.
I thought it was either areporter pulling my leg or just
somebody on the outside
who had read the story
who had a sick sense of humor.
NARRATOR: But Smith takesthe letter to the police,
just in case.
And they can't
believe their luck.
This is our lead.
This is what we're waiting for.
The map that was sent pinpointedan area approximately half
a mile, 3/4 of a mile from wherethe discovery of Teresa Wilson
and Verona Thompson were.
NARRATOR: This time,
X really does mark
the spot Walters recoversthe skeletal remains
of an unknown
woman exactly where
the map had said they would be.
When we discovered the skull,we saw blatantly that there
were indentations in the skull.
There were seven to nineblunt trauma indentations.
We tried to match that withsome type of tool or instrument,
and it appeared that it couldhave been done by a hammer,
the claw end, more crowbar.
NARRATOR: The previouswomen were all strangled.
Whoever was killing them
is getting more violent
and is playing a
game with the police.
This is somebody that istaunting law enforcement.
He's taunting the
citizens, the people
of this community saying,look what I can do
and you can't catch me.
NARRATOR: Criminal
Psychologist David
Holmes recognizes this as atrait common to serial killers.
Many serial killers
become a little
frustrated as their careeradvances considerably.
They almost want recognition.
They don't particularly
want to be caught,
but they want it
recognized that they
or someone has actually
been clever enough
to commit these acts.
My feeling is that he feltthat I didn't understand him,
I didn't understand these women.
And for me to show them ashuman beings, real people,
was something that
irritated him.
NARRATOR: The
boastful letter gives
the police a unique
opportunity to put
an end to a sick killing spree.
But first, they face the
challenge of identifying
the letter's author.
I had the stamp
and glued the label
and everything checked forDNA, hoping it had been licked.
No fingerprints on the envelopeor the letter, nothing.
NARRATOR: The killer seemsto have covered his tracks.
He thought he'd
controlled every
element of this letter andevery aspect, but he hadn't.
NARRATOR: The killer
has unwittingly
led police right to his door.
In St. Louis,
Missouri, police have
received a letter from aserial murderer of prostitutes.
He provided a map that has ledthem directly to the remains
of one of his victims.
Looking at the
envelope and the letter,
there wasn't very
many leads to go on.
There was no DNA evidenceon there or anything else
for them to track down.
NARRATOR: The task force
take the killer's map
to Mark McAmish of the IllinoisState Police Cyber Crimes Unit.
The map that was provided wasreduced in size, the edges were
removed, which hid any
information that would
have been beneficial to us.
NARRATOR: McAmish knows
that it is printed
from an online mapping website.
Through some discussion in theoffice, one of the other guys
says, it looks like
it's through Expedia.
NARRATOR: McAmish realizes thatthe killer must have visited
Expedia's mapping websitebetween the date of the article
being published and the datestamped on the envelope's
postmark, a period of two days.
With that information, westarted looking at how can we
locate this map
and whether or not
there would be logs
of IP addresses that
had gone in and lookedat the specific location?
NARRATOR: IP addresses
are unique numbers that
can identify every computerconnected to the internet
and log their activities.
Only one IP address
had continued to click
in and zoom in on this map.
NARRATOR: It is an identicalmatch to the killer's map.
We were lucky that it actuallycame back to a specific user
name, M. Travis.
NARRATOR: It's a
stunning breakthrough
for the investigation.
I think that he was a littlebit unknowledgable or arrogant
about the internet.
And he went out
and got this map.
He didn't think aboutbeing tracked at the time.
NARRATOR: The IP address
leads investigators
to 36-year-old
waiter Maury Travis.
A background check revealsTravis has a history of drug
abuse and has served time forarmed robbery, an offense that
took place just before theFBI began routinely taking
suspects' DNA, which
explains why he
did not appear as a DNA match.
The records also show
that he was in prison
for a parole violation duringthe period when the killings
had mysteriously stopped.
He had been incarceratedfrom the late fall
to the early spring
on a parole violation.
So that fit right in.
It didn't take a rocketscientist to kind of figure
out, we've probably
got the right guy here.
NARRATOR: Police track
their number one suspect
to an address in Ferguson,a residential community
in North St. Louis.
We were able to set upsurveillance on his home,
did a lot of research on him.
HARRY HEGGER: He
was very paranoid,
he was very cautious. .
He was always looking
over his shoulder.
And I didn't want to
move on him right away,
but I wanted to give
a 48- to 72-hour
close look at this guy tosee what his activities were,
what's this guy all about?
NARRATOR: After three daysof 24-hour surveillance,
the police are ready
to make their move.
Our approach is going to bekind of a just a very calm,
laid back, non-accusatorytype approach.
NARRATOR: At 7:00 AM
on the 7th of June,
detectives from the
task force and FBI
Special Agent Robert Mortonmove in to question the suspect.
We were able to gain
entry relatively easily.
He opened the door
and let us in.
He was very agitated whenwe were there at first,
very excited, very animated.
NARRATOR: Travis immediatelytries to control the interview.
He kept asking us
why we were there,
what are you doing this tomy house, why are you here?
We eventually were able totell him that we were there
because we have
a search warrant.
We asked him if he
had read the letter
that had been posted in thenewspaper and he said, yes.
And we said, well, we
know that that letter
came from your computer.
He kept asking us,
how can that happen?
He couldn't comprehend
the fact that we
were able to trace
the map back to him
through his use of the computer.
His demeanor then changedfrom that to, well, if that's
true, then why are you here?
Why do you want to talk to me?
They showed him some
photos of some women
and asked him if he'd everhad sex with these women.
Well, he denied it.
So they were still talking andhe kind of paused for a while
and he said, hey, can you showme pictures of those dead women
again?
I want to see a picture
of those dead gals.
And it's like, hey, wedidn't tell you they're dead.
NARRATOR: In this onemoment, Travis has carelessly
incriminated himself.
Despite this tacit admission,he stubbornly refuses
to confess to his crimes.
We talked with
him a long time.
And we were trying to convincehim to take us to find
the missing victims' bodies.
Finally, he said,
OK, I'll do that.
NARRATOR: Travis' letter
boasted of 17 victims,
but police have
only found eight.
They are determined to
find the missing bodies.
Travis tells them
that he will lead
them across the MississippiRiver to east St. Louis.
Special Agent Morton and
a St. Louis detective
put Travis in the back ofthe car and hit the freeway.
He was talking with usactually almost flippantly,
joking with us at that point.
And then when he saw
the bridge, there was
a huge change in his demeanor.
And he basically
said, we're not going
to go over there because I'mnot going to show you anything.
You might as well
just take me to jail.
And in the end, he basicallysaid, well, if you don't arrest
me, I'm going to run away.
NARRATOR: They takeTravis back to the police
station in downtown St. Louis
for further questioning.
But instead of answering
their questions,
Travis continues to try andcontrol the interrogation.
So Hegger tries a
different approach.
I asked him if he
wanted anything--
do you want something to drink,do you want something to eat?
And he said he wanted a soda.
So I got a can of soda, cleanedit up, sanitized it, brought it
back, and gave it him.
NARRATOR: Travis
has inadvertently
made his second big mistake.
HARRY HEGGER: And I hadthat can taken up to our lab
and within 12 hours, our chemistmade a positive DNA match
off that can to
the semen that was
recovered from the two victims.
NARRATOR: Police
now have to Travis
linked to at least two murders.
This was it, we have our man.
He's not going anywhere.
NARRATOR: But the DNAmatch isn't the only proof
linking Travis to the murders.
The police are about to discovera treasure trove of evidence
that will reveal thedeep depravity of Travis,
a visual record of
how he tortured,
abused, and killed his victimsin the most intimate detail--
[screaming]
--that he could go blindand relive for his enjoyment
again and again.
On June 7th, 2002,
the police and FBI
raid the home of Maury Travis.
They suspect the
36-year-old waiter
of being behind the murderof several prostitutes
in the St. Louis area.
Once has has been
arrested, forensic teams
move in to search his house.
Their initial impressioncoming in, first floor
spotless, clean, immaculate.
Walk down to thebasement, different story.
Bloodstained carpeting,
bloodstained walls,
bloodstained ceiling,splatters, duct tape, handcuffs.
Obvious a lot of
trauma had taken place.
NARRATOR: But he still
refuses to acknowledge
any guilt. Police are leftwondering what kind of monster
they have in their custody.
The police must piecetogether his story to find
out who Maury Travis really is.
Our investigation did leadto speaking to different family
members about Maury Travis.
He had a girlfriend, he had afamily life, he had a mother,
he had a father.
NARRATOR: Travis was born onthe 25th of October, 1965.
He grows up in the
residential community
of Ferguson in north St. Louis.
He had a typical childhoodlike most people do.
He had a mother that was
very supportive of him.
All the way through
his childhood,
he was a controlled,
reserved individual.
This was consistent
throughout his life.
NARRATOR: But in 1987,
aged 22, Travis' life
takes a downward spiral when heenrolls at college in Atlanta.
He gets hooked on cocaine.
For someone who enjoys
the sense of control
and a feeling of
being in control,
cocaine would have
been the perfect drug.
Cocaine promotes a
sense of control.
It gives this hyper
confidence that you
are in total control
of the universe
if you're high enough on it.
Unfortunately, of course,as his habit progressed,
he will have become
aware of the fact
that the cocaine was beginningto be a bit more in control
than he was.
NARRATOR: In March 1988, Travisreturns home on spring break,
desperate for money tofeed his expensive habit.
Travis will have had tokind of scour every option
before he decided to takethings into his own hands.
In an eight-day crimespree, Travis robs five St.
Louis shoe stores at gunpoint.
[siren]
The police soon catch up withhim, and at the age of 24,
Travis was sentenced
to 15 years in prison.
Maury Travis did
not take to prison.
When he was sent to prisonfor quite a long term
with no real sense that he wasgoing to be able to get out,
he went into overdrive
to try and regain
control over the situation.
NARRATOR: Travis bombardsthe judge with letters
pleading for leniency.
DAVID HOLMES: He did everythinghe could to put pressure
on the justice system, to pleadhis case in every way and shape
that might have reduced
his sentence, that might
have got him out of there.
NARRATOR: After five yearsand three months behind bars,
Travis is released from prisonon parole for good behavior.
He returns to St. Louis, wherehe picks up work as a waiter
in a downtown hotel.
Some of the people
we interviewed
that worked around him,
they talked about what
a nice guy he was, that he hada great pleasant personality.
He was always friendly,
very respectful.
NARRATOR: But all
the time, Travis is
hiding his secret double life.
That's signs of a psychopath.
They'll give you a falsefront, but the real dark side,
that's the real person.
Mr. Nice guy next
door one minute,
and the next be this
savage, controlling,
wild, brutal beast.
Just that fast, two
very different people.
He loved the idea of
transiting between one
and the other, which
kind of for him
showed he was in controlof the different personas
that he was projecting.
NARRATOR: In the basementof Travis' house,
his true persona comes to light.
Police discover a
torture chamber,
and they are about to
uncover the full depths
of his depravity.
JANA WALTERS: One of the crimescene investigators located
a false wall, and
inside that false wall
where numerous VHS tapes.
NARRATOR: The videotapes
reveal exactly
how Travis treated his victims.
He taped women who were tiedand bounded to a pole who were
blindfolded; he
taped women who were
performing sex acts on him.
And I think there weresix, eight, or 10, a bunch
of different women in
different states of
bondage, handcuffs, duct tape.
All them were duct tapedacross their mouth, many times
the wrists and ankles.
He was torturing them withsoda bottles, beer bottles,
all kinds of instruments.
NARRATOR: But the physicaland sexual torture
is just the half of it.
Travis is subjecting hisvictims to psychological abuse.
JANA WALTERS: He taped women whowere chanting what he told them
the chant, which was he wasthe king, he was the master,
they will do everything for him.
He would make them saythat over and over again.
If they didn't say itright, he would hit them.
This guy was the son of Satan.
This guy was the devil.
He was a pure psychopath
and his excitement
came from torturing people.
NARRATOR: But one video
shows the very moment
that Travis goes even further.
One of the tapes wasmarked "The Wedding Tape,"
and it started out
with a family wedding.
The tape broke in the
middle of the wedding
and what we're now
looking at is a scene
of his basement with
a nude black female
who was on the ground.
Into the camera
comes Maury Travis.
And after he has herperform a sex act on him,
he pushes her to the floor.
And this is a very young woman.
He adjusts the camera, he'sgot the video camera running.
He steps off the set,
comes back with a belt,
and strangles her till she dies.
He then looks into the camera,straight onto the camera,
and says, first kill.
It feels good.
This is where we knew we
had a horrendous killer.
Even after 12 years, thatvideo still kind of haunts me.
NARRATOR: The shocking videoconfirms beyond any doubt
that Travis is the
serial killer that they
have been looking for.
Travis' real side was indulginghis dark, sadistic fantasies
with girls that hepicked up off the street.
Maury Travis is,
to a great extent,
a textbook serial killer.
It's premeditated,
he plans for it.
He's very careful,
he's very organized.
He selects the victims who arethe least likely to be missed.
NARRATOR: He would
trawl St. Louis'
poorest neighborhoods lookingfor drug-addicted prostitutes.
He despised those women
for their lifestyle,
because they were prostitutes,because they were crack users.
There's no question
in my mind that he
saw himself as
better than they were
and saw them as the villains.
NARRATOR: Travis would thentake them back to his home
and torture them
in his basement.
This was a horrific,
lengthy torture process
where the victim would slowlybut surely become aware
that this was not the
kind of S&M activity
where they may have beenused to with other clients.
Once these victims were dead,his interest in them waned.
At that point, he very
unceremoniously dumped
them at the side of the road.
They were no longer
any interest to him.
NARRATOR: Eight of his
victims are recovered,
but now that he is in
custody, the police
can find answers to crucialquestions about the fate
of other possible victims.
But Travis will not
give them an easy ride.
He will take control
of the investigation
and seal his murderous fate.
June 2002, St. Louis, Missouri.
Police have just taken
custody of suspected
serial killer Maury Travis.
In his home, they find evidenceof his shocking murder spree.
But that's not all.
It seems Travis had big plans.
We found diagrams.
He had drawn out sketchesand was making an order list.
He wanted to and he was gettingsome bids on what it would
take to expand his basement.
It appeared like the roomwas going to be big enough
for maybe two or threewomen with bunks that they
would be restrained down.
This guy had mapped
out a course for himself
to expand his whole torture andabduction and rape and murder
far beyond what he'd beendoing over the last year, year
and a half.
If he wasn't caught
and stopped right now,
there would be
perhaps hundreds more
female said he would murder.
This is a man that did
not deserve to get out.
NARRATOR: Thankfully,
police have
Travis safely off the streets.
He's locked up in a county jailwhile he waits to be charged
for his horrific crimes.
Suddenly, from a
guy that was always
in control of his environment,he's lost control.
We've got him now.
So I think that's
what was obviously
very unsettling to him.
NARRATOR: And with the mountingbody of evidence against him,
Travis knows that
he is almost certain
to face the death penalty.
As he kind of faced afuture where he was probably
going to be killed by thestate, he decided to keep
absolute control over himself.
And before he could everadmit to any one killing,
he took his own life.
Monday evening I
got a call saying,
hey, I've got some bad news.
They found Travis hangingin his cell, he's dead.
I was stunned.
But more than stunned,
I was really angry.
Maury Travis had decided,I'm in control of everything,
including taking this to
my grave if I want to.
NARRATOR: Sadly, Travis
will never serve justice
for his horrendous crimes.
That was a real
disappointment.
We were looking
forward to putting
together a very airtight,prosecutable case against him.
NARRATOR: But the factthat Travis is not punished
is not the worst consequence
of his final act.
Where are the
answers of people
that have missing loved ones?
Was Maury Travis
responsible for them?
Why did Maury Travis
do what he did?
We have no one to
answer those questions.
He took the coward's way out.
He killed himself,
and in a sense
that's taunting us still becausenow we don't have the answers.
NARRATOR: Travis
taunts the police
further with a suicide notethat he leaves for his mother.
The note reveals nothing aboutthe killings or his victims.
However, it did containa little bit of information
where he said he'd been sick inthe head since he was about 14.
All his life he'd beenunhappy and had a problem.
So I think it was
kind of an admission
that this wasn't just
something that happened.
NARRATOR: This
quiet, unassuming man
became one of the most brutalserial killers in US history.
His letter boasted
of 17 victims,
but the police believe Traviscould have been responsible
for as many as 20
murders of prostitutes
in the St. Louis area.
With Travis dead, they willnever know the full extent
of his murder spree.
It's very frustrating
for us as investigators.
Maury Travis claimed 17 murders.
We had eight bodies.
Where are the rest of them?
Now we'll never know.
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