- 2 years ago
These notorious criminals were experts when it came to evading law enforcement. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re examining ten criminals who remained free for decades.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Say, say, say who you are. You're PTK.
00:03Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're examining criminals who remained free for decades.
00:08We're only including those perpetrators who've been caught,
00:11and we're avoiding Hollywood celebrities, since we have that list already.
00:15The court does find Mr. DeAngelo guilty, murder in the first degree.
00:20The Grim Sleeper
00:22The serial killer known as the Grim Sleeper died in prison over the weekend.
00:26Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of murdering 10 women, but
00:30suspected of killing so many more.
00:32Active initially in the 1980s, the Grim Sleeper earned his moniker from the extended break he took
00:38between 1988 and the early 2000s. Real name Lonnie Franklin Jr., the Sleeper took his first
00:44confirmed victim in 1984. He then claimed a further nine lives, with his final murder
00:49occurring on September 11, 1988. He did attack a 30-year-old woman the following November,
00:56but she survived.
00:57Shepard says the LAPD didn't have the manpower,
01:00nor the technology at the time, to solve the multiple murders.
01:04Perhaps fearing the repercussions of her survival, the Sleeper lay dormant for over a decade,
01:09his next victim likely being 43-year-old Georgia Mae Thomas on December 28, 2000.
01:15It wasn't until the advent of DNA testing that Franklin was considered a suspect,
01:20and he was finally arrested in 2010, 26 years after taking his first victim.
01:26In the end, he was caught. That's the best part.
01:28John Paul. It's rare that a killer turns themselves in.
01:32It's even rarer that they do so after 40 years.
01:35Wasn't there. And she wasn't there the next morning, or the next, or the next 40 years.
01:43Back on June 6, 1980, 42-year-old Anthony Byrd was found bound,
01:49beaten, and killed in his West London apartment.
01:51Police were called after he failed to turn up for work,
01:54and they knocked his door down with a sledgehammer, finding the dead body.
01:58Fast forward to 2021, when 61-year-old John Paul walked into a Hammersmith police station
02:04and confessed to the decades-old crime.
02:06Who murdered someone?
02:07Me.
02:08You murdered someone?
02:09No.
02:10Did you?
02:10He arrived at 9.38 a.m. and was arrested by 3.35 that afternoon.
02:16Paul's fingerprints matched those taken from the crime scene,
02:19ending the 40-year-old cold case on a rather unpredictable note.
02:22OK, who did you murder?
02:24A man. A man.
02:27Thomas Cass.
02:28After the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit began a reinvestigation of the case in 2013,
02:33newly tested fingerprints, evidence led them to believe Thomas Cass of Orleans, Vermont,
02:39shot and killed Delano when Cass was 20.
02:41It was the morning of September 1, 1966,
02:44and retired Navy veteran Everett Delano was working in Sanborn's garage.
02:49That's when a thief walked in, shot Delano three times in the head, and fled with $100 in cash.
02:55The case was never solved, and it eventually became New Hampshire's oldest cold case.
03:00It was quite literally forgotten by the police,
03:03but a cold case unit received a call from Delano's family in 2013,
03:07hoping for some kind of progress.
03:09The authorities quickly looked into the file
03:11and found an old fingerprint that investigators had lifted from the scene.
03:15They matched it to one Thomas Cass.
03:17That's our scumbag. We got him, Jack. We found him.
03:21Authorities informed Cass about the match in 2014, and he soon after took his own life.
03:26Police say he will not be charged because he is deceased.
03:30Joseph George Sutherland.
03:32Four decades after Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore were brutally murdered in a mission in court,
03:3761-year-old Joseph George Sutherland of Moosonee pleaded guilty
03:41to two counts of second-degree murder.
03:43Back in 1983, Toronto was hit with a series of grisly murders.
03:47In August, 45-year-old Susan Tice was fatally stabbed in her Bickford Park apartment.
03:53Four months later, 22-year-old Aaron Gilmore was found stabbed in her Yorkville apartment,
03:58which was located near Tice's.
04:00Both victims were found by family members, and both had been assaulted.
04:04The murders went unsolved for decades,
04:06but advances in DNA testing confirmed that they were slain by the same person.
04:11It was in the year 2000 that detectives were able to link the two murders
04:14of one unknown suspect thanks to DNA left at the scenes.
04:19However, it wasn't until 2019 that investigators used
04:23genetic genealogy to trace the DNA to five brothers.
04:26Genealogy is like fishing. You never know how long it's going to take you to catch a fish.
04:31After eliminating four from contention, they finally found Joseph George Sutherland,
04:37who pleaded guilty to the killings in 2023, 40 years after they occurred.
04:42Glenn Samuel McCurley
04:44"...for almost half a century. Think about that.
04:46Time and evidence caught up with a killer today."
04:49We move from the North to the South, with this crime occurring in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1974.
04:55Seventeen-year-old Carla Walker was in a car with her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy,
04:59when the door suddenly burst open and the couple was attacked.
05:02"...and the car door yanked open."
05:06McCoy was knocked unconscious, and Walker was kidnapped.
05:09Three days later, her body was found in a culvert.
05:12The case quickly went cold, and remained as such for the next 46 years.
05:17"...Carla Walker was found dead in a Fort Worth culvert at just 17,
05:21a violent killing no one has ever answered for until now."
05:25In 2020, investigators tested DNA taken from Walker's clothing,
05:29and matched it to 77-year-old Glenn McCurley.
05:32Horribly enough, McCurley was actually considered a suspect back in the 70s,
05:37but a past polygraph test cleared him of suspicion.
05:40He was sentenced to life in prison, and died in 2023.
05:44The Chameleon Killer
05:45Terry Rasmussen earned the moniker Chameleon Killer not because he blended in,
05:50but because he went by a number of different aliases.
05:53Bob Evans was an alias, along with Curtis Mayo Kimball, Gordon Jensen,
05:57Jerry Markerman, or Lawrence William Vanner.
06:00They were all used by this man, Terry Rasmussen,
06:04a divorced father of four from the Southwest.
06:06While Rasmussen has only been convicted of one murder,
06:09experts believe he committed at least five.
06:12Many peg him as the man behind New Hampshire's Bear Brook murders of the late 1970s,
06:16which encompassed the deaths of four girls, including Rasmussen's daughter.
06:20Just didn't disappear off the face of the earth without a name or an identity.
06:24He died before he could be tried for their deaths.
06:27He is also thought to have slain his girlfriend, Denise Bowden, in 1981.
06:32Finally, he did away with his wife, Eunsoon Joon, in 2002,
06:35and it was for this crime that he was finally arrested and imprisoned.
06:39He died in High Desert State Prison in 2010.
06:42Curtis Kimball.
06:43Curtis Kimball.
06:44Or Gerald, uh, Mock, uh, what's his name?
06:47Mockerman.
06:48Mockerman, right.
06:49Ring a bell.
06:51No.
06:52BTK.
06:52I have many, what I call them, projects.
06:55And this morning, authorities believe 78-year-old Dennis Rader,
06:58the infamous BTK serial killer, may be responsible for even more deaths.
07:04Having given himself the famous nickname BTK,
07:07Dennis Rader was active for many years within the general Wichita area,
07:11killing at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991.
07:15He confessed to 10 murders almost two decades ago.
07:18He was known as BTK, a name he gave himself, short for Bind, Torture, Kill.
07:23He is currently serving life sentences at a maximum security facility in Kansas,
07:28and now there is new evidence that may connect the infamous BTK serial killer to additional murders.
07:34And he might have gotten away with it were it not for his own hubris.
07:37Despite the high body count, police were unable to solve the crimes,
07:41and the trail was cold by 2004.
07:44But it was then that BTK began communicating with the media
07:48and in 2005, he sent a floppy disk to Wichita's KSAS-TV.
07:53Investigators found metadata within the disk with the words Christ Lutheran Church
07:57and a word modification made by Dennis.
08:00A simple Google search found that one Dennis Rader was president of the church council,
08:05and the rest is now history.
08:07I loved you, Mark, because I was trying to get you.
08:10David Zanstra
08:11A pastor charged with the killing of an 8-year-old girl in Delaware County
08:15decades ago is back in Pennsylvania tonight.
08:17In July 2023, an 83-year-old retired minister named David Zanstra was arrested
08:23and charged with murder.
08:25The case went all the way back to 1975.
08:28It was August of that year when a young girl named Gretchen Harrington disappeared
08:32in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
08:33Two months later, her body was found by a jogger.
08:37Zanstra was responsible but played innocent,
08:39even calling the police to report the missing child when Harrington's dad approached him for help.
08:44David Zanstra is, ladies and gentlemen, a monster.
08:48He is every parent's worst nightmare.
08:50Zanstra then moved south, leaving his crime in the rearview mirror.
08:54That is, until 2023, when investigators received new information and traveled to Georgia to
09:00interview Zanstra.
09:01The retired minister finally confessed to and was charged with the decades-old crime.
09:06He's going to have to find out what the God he professes to believe in
09:11holds for those who are this evil to our children.
09:14The Long Island Serial Killer
09:16One of the most infamous cold cases of our time was the Gilgo Beach killings.
09:21Dating back to 1996, a man did away with at least 10 people and dumped
09:25their remains in the Gilgo Beach area of Long Island.
09:28Now, there were 10 sets of remains, all told, found along that area of Gilgo Beach.
09:34It had long been a dumping ground for bodies.
09:38In December 2010, the remains of four women were found, and they were dubbed the Gilgo
09:43Four.
09:44Just a few months later, investigators found six more sets of remains, bringing the body
09:49count to 10.
09:50The case was extensively studied until July 2023, when a Manhattan architect named Rex
09:56Huerman was arrested and charged with killing three of the Gilgo Four.
10:00He's been charged in the deaths of three women, and he is the prime suspect in the death of
10:04a fourth.
10:05Maureen Brainerd Barnes was found right with the other three.
10:09And so it seems that 27 years after the death of the first victim,
10:13the mystery of the Gilgo Beach killings may have been solved.
10:16It's not clear that Huerman's going to be linked to all 10 sets of human remains, but
10:21it's a good bet, Kira, that prosecutors are going to move forward charging him with the
10:25death of Maureen Brainerd Barnes.
10:27Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified
10:32about our latest videos.
10:33You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.
10:37If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications.
10:43The Golden State Killer
10:45New details of the rigorous investigation that detectives say brought down the Golden
10:49State Killer more than 40 years after his alleged killing spree began.
10:53The Visalia Ransacker
10:55The Night Stalker
10:57Irons
10:58The Golden State Killer
10:59Whatever you want to call him.
11:01Joseph James DeAngelo is a nasty man.
11:03DeAngelo was active throughout California between 1974 and 1986, committing over 100
11:10burglaries and killing at least 13 people.
11:12He was also known to have quite an ego, often taunting both his victims and the police with
11:18threatening phone calls.
11:24It wasn't until 2018 that DeAngelo was finally arrested, having been caught via the modern-day
11:30magic of genetic genealogy.
11:32He was sentenced to life in prison on August 21, 2020, 46 years after his crime spree began
11:39and at the age of 74.
11:41"...and I'm really sorry to everyone I've hurt.
11:51Thank you, God."
11:52Does the idea of criminals walking among us scare you?
11:55Let us know in the comments below.
11:57All right, Larry, your prince came back.
12:01Did you enjoy this video?
12:03Check out these other clips from WatchMojo,
12:05and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.
Comments