- há 5 meses
PEOPLE MAGAZINE INVESTIGATES SURVIVING A SERIAL KILLER S01E05 - SURVIVING THE HANDSOME DEVIL
Categoria
📺
TVTranscrição
00:00As many as a dozen murder cases can now be connected to alleged serial killer Bruce Lindahl.
00:06Bruce Lindahl was a predator who hid in plain sight.
00:10Just four houses from my girlfriend's house.
00:13He was the charismatic neighbor down the street with a friendly smile and disarming eyes.
00:18He had the goddamnedest blue eyes you've ever seen.
00:21He exploited the young and the innocent.
00:24Investigators made sure to retrieve DNA.
00:26Her body was found in rural Las Vegas.
00:28Sexually assaulted and killed.
00:30And for every victim they uncover now, there are many more that we don't know about.
00:34She has not been seen or heard from since her disappearance.
00:38At People Magazine, we want to share the stories of the people who survived this monster.
00:43I never thought that 40 years after something so horrible happened to me that it would come to light.
00:50I was in real danger and didn't know it.
00:52I'd bell right into the trap, like a trapped animal.
00:56I'm a couple of different people in this story.
01:23I'm a girl who lost her best friend in high school and I'm a girl who dated a man who harmed and threatened and murdered a lot of women.
01:34I'm a man who was controlling everything that I was doing without realizing it.
01:42Growing up, back in 1970s, Downers Grove, Illinois, was very much a Mayberry type of place.
01:52Very quiet, you never locked your doors and nobody ever worried about anything.
01:57At 19, life was extremely busy.
02:01I was always working two jobs.
02:02I was keeping an apartment and I started working at a restaurant where I had met someone who owned a plane and was a flight instructor and he offered to give me flying lessons for the price of gasoline.
02:15So if I could get enough gasoline money together, I could take as many flying lessons as I wanted to sit in that front seat and take off.
02:24It was actually very scary for me, but it was almost like one of those fun scaries, like rollercoaster ride.
02:30And I fell in love with flying right after that first flight.
02:35It's what I learned to love to do.
02:37It was an adventure.
02:39It was freedom.
02:41She fell in love with it.
02:43There was no going back for her, but it was also during her flying lessons that she met Bruce Lindahl, who would eventually take her life down a deep, sinister spiral.
02:55I met a parachute instructor at the airport.
02:59His name is Bruce.
03:01He was 20 something.
03:03He said, hello, do you fly out here all the time?
03:06And I said, yeah, I do.
03:07I'm here all the time.
03:09And when I had landed the plane, he was still here.
03:12He asked me where I worked and I had told him the restaurant where I was working at.
03:17And he came by later that day and sat in my section.
03:23He had incredibly deep blue eyes and you just couldn't take your eyes off of his eyes.
03:30They actually sparkled when he talked and he had such a great smile.
03:34And he was very charismatic and very down to earth and was just so intense on everything you were saying all the time.
03:45And we hit it off like right away.
03:47He paid a lot of attention to me, so I paid a lot of attention to him.
03:51You know, I think back.
03:53I didn't know I had anything to be afraid of at the time.
03:57Sherry and Bruce begin dating and soon Bruce won't let her out of his sight.
04:02My boss was never happy about him coming in because he was always taking up so much of my attention.
04:07I just told him he had to stop seeing me at work because he was getting me in trouble all the time.
04:13He said, OK, I'll be outside waiting.
04:16By the time I said, OK, go outside and wait.
04:18And he would sit out and wait for me.
04:21The whole time while you were at work?
04:23Yeah, I didn't think anything of it.
04:26What do you think of it now?
04:28Now I know how creepy it was, the fact that he always wanted to know where I was and what I was doing all the time.
04:35Yeah, hindsight, 20-20 type of deal.
04:40I was being stalked and didn't realize that I was.
04:44Then one day Sherry and Bruce have a conversation that stops her dead in her tracks.
04:50We were driving by the university in Lyle and Bruce had said, that's where I like to go hiking, let's go back there.
04:57And I said, I'm not going back there, that's where they found my friend's body.
05:01And he just looked at me and he goes, which friend is that?
05:06And I said, my girlfriend Beth that I grew up with.
05:10And then he became very, very interested in Beth and what happened to Beth.
05:16Elizabeth Drews was a teenage girl whose family moved to Downers Grove, Illinois, in the early 1970s.
05:23Her friends called her Beth.
05:25Beth and I were best friends from the very beginning, from the day we met.
05:29We had regular sleepovers, and we'd stay up all night long running around the neighborhood.
05:34We bent the rules, like sneaking out at night, and we thought, this is cool, let's go out.
05:38Two or three o'clock in the morning, go sneak down the street.
05:44From my 16-year-old perspective, it looked like her parents were way, way too strict.
05:50She would be grounded for a lot of staff.
05:52That's one of the reasons why we started sneaking out at two or three o'clock in the morning,
05:56because she was grounded all the time.
05:59Sherry and Beth are best friends into their high school years.
06:03But that comes to a stop on June 1, 1977, when Beth goes missing.
06:13The phone rang, and it was Beth's mom.
06:16She was asking if Beth was over at our house, because she hadn't come home all day.
06:20Beth is reported missing to police.
06:22But after interviewing family and friends, investigators come up with a theory that is not popular with
06:28Beth's friends.
06:29They said that she was a runaway right away.
06:32I guess because she was a teenager, and she was arguing with her parents.
06:36And we kept saying that she wasn't a runaway, and they kept saying, no, she's a runaway.
06:40That's the angle they took.
06:41She wouldn't have laughed and not contacted us.
06:46It's frustrating talking about it now, because I know so much more.
06:51They were wrong, and they just said, no, we're right.
06:54And they didn't want to listen.
06:57On October 6, 1977, four months after her disappearance,
07:03Beth's remains are found in the woods in Lyle, near a local university.
07:08That day was my 17th birthday.
07:14She was in the woods next to the university in Lyle.
07:19So my 17 year was a very hard, difficult year.
07:24Beth's death is categorized as unnatural, and local authorities begin an investigation.
07:29She was found in the same woods where the body of another student was found just two years before
07:36Betts. Her name was Pam Maurer.
07:40Pam Maurer was a 16 year old girl from Woodridge, Illinois.
07:45She was, by all accounts, just a quiet, nice girl, somewhat gregarious, average student,
07:51and she liked hanging out with her friends.
07:54On January 12, 1976, she disappeared.
07:58And then the next morning, they found her body on the side of a road in Lyle.
08:02She was raped and she had been strangled.
08:04A piece of rubber automotive hose was recovered near her body that we believe was the murder weapon.
08:11Pam Maurer's murder goes unsolved.
08:13And within a month into the Beth Drew's case, that investigation stalls too.
08:18At this time, police are completely unaware that there is a serial killer operating
08:23right in their backyard. And his name is Bruce Lindahl.
08:31Police don't make a connection between the deaths of Pam Maurer and Beth Drew's.
08:36And it leaves Beth's family and friends without any answers.
08:40Her mom had an extremely tough time after the loss.
08:45Extremely tough time.
08:46Do you think she ever recovered from this?
08:48I don't know.
08:50They moved away.
08:52Eventually, her family moved away and moved out of state.
08:57I'm sure the memories were just too tough.
09:02Teenage years grew into adult years.
09:04And over time, life just changed.
09:09And that's how I moved on.
09:14So at 19, I'm dating Bruce for about a month or so.
09:17And he became highly focused in on Beth and what happened to Beth.
09:22He was asking me about the police.
09:24What were they asking you?
09:25Who were they focused on?
09:27Who did they think did it?
09:28Constantly.
09:29I mean, it became an everyday topic for us.
09:33At the time, I didn't find it odd because I was really young.
09:38Bruce's fixation on Beth's murder builds and builds until one day when he tries to take
09:44Sherry to the scene of the crime.
09:50He asked me to go into the woods and my immediate reaction was no.
09:53There's no way I'm going back there.
09:55And he parked the car right at the gate of the woods.
09:57And I'm like, no, I'm not going back.
10:00And he's like, come on, get out of the car.
10:01Let's just go in.
10:02And I'm like, no.
10:03I refuse to get out of the car.
10:05Because Sherry didn't give in.
10:08She may have saved her own life.
10:11I was in real danger and didn't know it.
10:13Sherry doesn't want to go into the woods because that's where her best friend's body was found.
10:29And Bruce is persistent.
10:32He eventually backs off.
10:34But it's just one of many examples of Bruce flying off the handle when he doesn't get his way.
10:38Bruce would get angry very easily whenever I said no.
10:43He had a temper on him, a very, very quick temper.
10:46There was one time I found an earring in his car.
10:50And I said, whose earring is this?
10:53He took it out of my hand.
10:54He said, it's my sister's earring.
10:56And he rolled down the window and threw it out.
10:59And I said, why would you throw out your sister's earring?
11:02We don't need it.
11:03She doesn't need it.
11:04So there was just things that were off the Richter scale in his reactions.
11:12For Sherry, Bruce's anger was one thing.
11:15But his dangerous behaviors didn't stop there.
11:18Sexually, he got a little rough.
11:20There were times where I woke up and never remembered falling asleep.
11:28And I'd wake up and I'd be late for work.
11:30And a couple of times I'd be really groggy.
11:32And I was like, oh my god, I can't wake up.
11:34He goes, don't worry.
11:35You'll wake up.
11:36It'll wear off.
11:36It's fine.
11:37I had no idea at the time.
11:39Now I look back at that and think, the guy drugged me and I didn't know.
11:45This apartment creeped me out.
11:46It was dark.
11:47It was garden level.
11:48I remember walking in one time and the smell of mosquito repellent was so strong in the apartment
11:56that I couldn't breathe.
11:58I asked him why he was using so much.
12:00And he said it was to cover up the smell of things.
12:02And I couldn't.
12:02I'm like, whatever could smell this bad that you'd, you can't breathe.
12:07Everything he kept very hidden.
12:09And always told me not to open closet doors or not to look at things.
12:14Nope, stay out of there.
12:15That's private.
12:17No, stay out of that.
12:18That's private.
12:20It's like, why are you keeping all this stuff from me?
12:22That creeps me out today, knowing probably what was smelling so bad.
12:27I think the last straw in the relationship was he said that I wasn't making enough time for him.
12:35And he wanted more time.
12:36And I said no.
12:37And that was it.
12:39That was the end.
12:40That same year in nearby Aurora, another woman encounters Bruce Lindahl.
12:46And she walks right into the hunter's trap.
12:50This house was in my nightmares for years.
12:54Could have changed a lot of things had I not walked into this garage.
13:02Just can't believe I'm here today.
13:0640 years ago, I thought I was going to die here.
13:10When I was 19, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
13:17I hadn't figured out who I was.
13:20I had a job.
13:22I worked as a nurse's aide.
13:24And I took my work serious.
13:27And I had a steady boyfriend.
13:29And we lived together.
13:32March 6, 1979.
13:35It was a spring day.
13:36It was kind of sunny.
13:38I decided to walk to Cindy's house.
13:41We were best friends.
13:42We still are best friends.
13:46I could have taken the bus.
13:48But I decided to walk, you know, save myself 50 cents.
13:51I was standing on the corner at the stop sign of Ohio and Front Street.
13:59So going to Cindy's house, which you can see from this corner, and a car rolls up.
14:05A man, he asked me if I needed a ride.
14:08And I'm like, no, no, I don't need a ride.
14:11I'm going right over there to my friend's house.
14:14And he says, what are you going to do when you go to your friend's house?
14:18Being kind of naive, I'm like, oh, I'll probably hang out and smoke pot with her.
14:24So the conversation went towards smoking pot and how he had some really good reefer.
14:32And did I want to buy some?
14:33And I'm like, yeah, sure.
14:34He said he lived around the corner.
14:38It's like, OK, I'll follow you there.
14:42He had striking blue eyes.
14:44He seemed very nice and easy going.
14:47I didn't feel uncomfortable at all.
14:49I thought he's in his car.
14:51I'm on foot.
14:52It's daylight.
14:54So I'm going to buy some pot.
14:56I'm not doing anything wrong.
15:00We just didn't know that there was a monster among us.
15:03Just half a block from where I was.
15:07Just four houses from my girlfriend's house.
15:12Pulled into this garage and there's an electric door.
15:16And as he was sitting in his car in the garage, I'm standing out here and I'm thinking, what is
15:21he doing?
15:22So I walk in the garage and I walk up to the car.
15:26I'm kind of like, hey, what's going on?
15:28What are you doing?
15:30It was like the beginning of the end, walking in this garage.
15:35Soon as I got close enough to the car, I hear the garage door start coming down.
15:40And for a split second, something told me, leave, run.
15:45But I stood there and watched that door come down.
15:48And I'm like, what did I just get myself into?
15:52Why would he shut the garage door?
15:55Time out.
15:56I need a break.
15:57I'm starting to sweat.
15:59This is making me nervous.
16:01Oh, I'm sorry.
16:02I'm sorry.
16:03I just need some air.
16:04I didn't realize how much something like that would come back.
16:10It's like in the archives and your body starts reacting.
16:14Something in your brain that you haven't thought about for a long time.
16:20A lot of demons here.
16:21A lot of bad energy.
16:28Shake it off.
16:29I got this.
16:33When he got out of the car, first he was friendly.
16:36He invited me in, offered me a drink.
16:39I said, no thanks.
16:41He's like, come on downstairs.
16:42I want to show you my bird.
16:44Came down there stairway.
16:47In the corner over there, there was a falcon.
16:50That's a prey bird.
16:52I thought that was a little strange.
16:53But okay, hey, you know.
16:55He asked me if I like the moody blues.
16:58And he wanted to put this song on.
17:01And I'm like, yeah, sure.
17:03Why not?
17:04Put on the moody blues.
17:06Nights in White Sand.
17:08And that was the name of the song.
17:09Every time I hear that song on the radio,
17:12that song takes me right back there.
17:15I just wanted to get the pot.
17:16And I'm like, well, you know, I really got to get going.
17:19And we came up from the basement.
17:21And I'm in this little landing.
17:23He said, just wait here.
17:24I'll be right back.
17:26And when he came back, it was not the person that left.
17:29Because this man that came back put a gun to my head,
17:34a 9 millimeter, put it to my temple.
17:37I think he said something to the effect of,
17:40you know what's happening.
17:41And I said, no, I'm leaving.
17:43And he grabbed me by my neck.
17:45And he pushed me up, like, against the wall.
17:51It scared me so bad that it, I call it an out-of-body experience.
17:56It was like, I'm watching what's happening to me.
18:00It's not happening to me.
18:02But at the same time, something was telling me,
18:06I'm going to die.
18:07I'm going to die.
18:08I kept hearing, I'm going to die.
18:15He had a hold of me.
18:20And he dragged me to this part of the house.
18:24And I'm thinking, how am I going to get away from this person?
18:27What's going to happen to me?
18:28I'm scared to death.
18:30I'm trying to remain calm.
18:32But the whole time in my mind, my body, I'm just freaking out.
18:37I'm scared.
18:37So I said, OK, OK, but I have to go to the bathroom.
18:41In my mind, I was thinking, I'll lock myself in, and I'll get out the window.
18:47If I have to kick the window out, I'm going out the window.
18:50That's it.
18:51That's how I'm going to do it.
18:53And he's like, that's fine, go to the bathroom.
18:56Got in that bathroom, I'll lock that door, and there's clear glass bricks.
19:01They don't open.
19:02They're placed in there.
19:04There's no way I could get out.
19:06I didn't want to come out of that bathroom.
19:09And my plan wasn't going to work.
19:12Oh, my God.
19:14It was a horrible feeling.
19:15I just opened the door and came out.
19:24And he took me in the bedroom.
19:28He takes me in here, into this bedroom.
19:32And he has the gun still.
19:35And I'm begging him, please take the clip out of the gun, because I'm scared.
19:40I'm scared of that gun.
19:45And he actually took the clip out of the gun.
19:48I just wanted it out of there, so it would take him a while if he was going to shoot me.
19:53He'd have to at least put the clip back in.
19:55That gave me a few seconds.
19:57He hesitated, but he took it out.
20:01Why do you think he did that?
20:04Because my angels were protecting me.
20:07That's the only thing I can say.
20:10And then he told me to take my pants off.
20:15He gets on top of me.
20:18He proceeds to rape me.
20:21All I could think of was, how am I going to get out of here?
20:23I got to get out of here.
20:25And it's not working.
20:27He's not being able to perform.
20:28He's trying over and over again.
20:31It's not working.
20:32I'm like, what am I going to do now?
20:34Now he's going to beat me up because he can't perform.
20:38It just came to mind that I should talk to this man.
20:41So I start talking to him.
20:43I really like you.
20:46You're my type.
20:47Look, you're so handsome.
20:49And I'm like, don't worry about this.
20:51You know, this is no thing.
20:53We could try again later, you know.
20:55Let's go on a date this weekend.
20:57He bought it.
20:59Looked lying in a sneaker.
21:00I'm like, give me a piece of paper.
21:01I'll write my phone number.
21:03Well, the whole atmosphere changed.
21:06He seemed to have a split personality, like the monster was going away and the human being was coming back.
21:14I gave him my actual phone number and he let me get up and get dressed.
21:20I followed him out of the room, into the garage.
21:22I was holding my breath.
21:25Please just let me out.
21:26Please just let me out.
21:27I'm thinking the whole time, just another foot, just another foot.
21:30And I walked out.
21:36I said, give me a call.
21:37Okay, bye.
21:39Just like that.
21:40As soon as I got out of sight, I did a beeline right to Cindy's.
21:45And I was gone.
21:48I don't believe in luck.
21:50You know, I believe my guardian angels are with me.
21:52It just wasn't my time to go.
21:55What can I say?
21:55But, um, I got pretty close that day.
22:03Called the police.
22:03They said to go to the hospital.
22:05And they'd meet me there.
22:06And that's what I did.
22:08Told him that he was about 5'5", dark hair, piercing blue eyes.
22:14Told him where he lived.
22:15I described the house.
22:17I didn't know his name.
22:18But they knew who he was.
22:19They found him.
22:22After the police interview the man,
22:24they call Annette in for a follow-up interview.
22:27Well, interview, I'd say, it was more like an interrogation, not an investigation.
22:34The investigator, he just took that piece of paper and said, what's this?
22:38And I'm like, that's what saved my life.
22:41What do you mean, what's that?
22:42I told him I gave it to him.
22:44I told him why I did it, but they didn't like my story.
22:46They made me feel like I did something wrong.
22:50I don't know if they thought that we were having a lover's quarrel,
22:53or if he was dating me, or I don't know why.
22:56But when they interviewed him, he had pages of what he said happened.
23:00Mine was one paragraph.
23:03They didn't believe me.
23:05They dropped the case.
23:06End of story.
23:07That's all I ever heard.
23:08But the police told me his name was Bruce Lindahl.
23:15And I never forgot that name.
23:18And I'm not very good at remembering names, but I never forgot that name.
23:22We went to California.
23:27It was nice to get away from Aurora.
23:30It just, that was a bad thing.
23:32I just, I didn't really want to be here.
23:36So we went to California.
23:37Just a few months after Annette's rape, another young woman in the area goes missing.
23:48Debbie McCall went to Downers Grove North when she disappeared.
23:53Downers Grove North is the sister school of Downers Grove South.
23:58Both Pam Maurer and Beth Drews were found dead in the woods by a nearby university.
24:04But Deb McCall's body is never found.
24:07She had gone to school and asked a friend if they wanted to cut class with her and they said no.
24:11So the last person that saw her was this friend who she has to cut class with.
24:17Not only does she match the type of victims that Bruce has had in the past,
24:22she also goes missing from the same hunting grounds where Bruce operated.
24:26Did you ever learn about the other rapes?
24:29Here.
24:30Yeah.
24:31Yes, I learned about another woman who was here.
24:34That was abducted from a shopping center in Northgate.
24:37I'm talking about Debra Collander.
24:40I still feel like I can see her.
24:43I can still see the whole thing.
24:46It's been with me forever.
24:49I was getting my girls in the van and I was standing on the porch locking the door.
24:55And there were bushes in front of the house.
24:57And she came between the house and the bushes.
25:02And then I saw this naked girl.
25:05She just walked straight up to me and asked me if I could help her.
25:09And I quickly unlocked the door and let her in real quick before anybody saw her.
25:15I gave her some clothes to wear and we stood there and she told me the whole story.
25:22She said she was kidnapped and raped.
25:25Then he took pictures of her and when she described him, she said he had the god damnedest blue eyes you've ever seen.
25:34And my daughters looked at each other and they said, Mom, that's Bruce.
25:38I called the police and told them that I had a woman here at my house that had been kidnapped and raped.
25:55She told me her name was Debbie Collander.
25:59Deb lived in Aurora and had gone to a exercise class at the Northgate Mall.
26:04She rode her bike and she was approached by a subject later identified as Bruce Lindahl.
26:11And he asked for her help to help him start his car.
26:15He charmed her into getting behind the wheel of the car.
26:18And the minute she did, he took a sharp object and put it against her neck and told her to slide over to the passenger side.
26:25He then took her to his house.
26:33He raped her at gunpoint.
26:34He forced her to take lewd photographs.
26:37And then when he fell asleep, she escaped to a neighbor's house.
26:42When the detectives came to my house later that afternoon,
26:46my girls had known who he was from selling Girl Scout cookies.
26:50And the detective told me that my girls were very lucky.
26:55Why were they lucky?
26:57Because they could have been one of his victims.
27:00When police arrived, the evidence was all there.
27:02The gun was there.
27:03The Polaroid pictures of Deborah were there.
27:06There was no question it was Bruce who did it.
27:10He was arrested.
27:11Deborah was interviewed.
27:13And then it proceeded toward trial.
27:16After years of flying under the radar of law enforcement,
27:19Bruce Lindahl is finally charged with the kidnapping and rape of Deborah Colliander.
27:25And prosecutors are building a strong case against him.
27:29When I was 20 years old, I got a call from an attorney
27:32that said he was representing a girl who had been raped and that Bruce Lindahl had raped her.
27:37And that they needed a character witness against Bruce on his demeanor.
27:42And it shocked me.
27:45I thought, what a jerk, not being able to hear the word no.
27:51So to stand up for the girl, I decided to testify.
27:54And when the trial day came up, I never heard from the attorney.
27:58I read about her case.
28:00Two weeks before Deborah's case came up for court, she went missing from work.
28:05Colliander didn't show up for the trial.
28:08And eventually, the judge had to determine that they didn't have a victim or a witness,
28:13and they dismissed the case.
28:16She was gone. Dropped the case.
28:19Called the attorney, and he just told me that the charges had been dropped,
28:22and my services were no longer going to be needed.
28:25Never told me that she was missing.
28:26And then months later, I pick up the paper, and there's an article that a boy had been stabbed,
28:35and it was Bruce that did it.
28:38April 4th, 1981, the Gala Lanes bowling alley in Naperville.
28:43At some point, Bruce convinced Charles Huber, who was 18 at the time, to come back with him.
28:50Bruce attacked Charles and stabbed him 29 times.
28:54And so as the fights occurring, Bruce, in his rage, stabbed himself in the right thigh,
29:01and slowly bled out, and just collapsed on top of Charles Huber.
29:05Both of them lay dead on the floor covered in blood.
29:08It shocked me that he attacked somebody with a knife, and before that, raped Deborah Collyandre.
29:16I couldn't believe that I knew someone who stabbed another person.
29:22Bruce Lindahl's history, as well as the murder of Charles Huber,
29:26has local law enforcement making inquiries both near and far.
29:31The police called me in California and told me that he was passed away, that he had died.
29:38And I remember saying, good, I'm glad he's dead.
29:43And they wanted to ask me questions about my encounter.
29:47And I didn't want to talk to them.
29:49I said, no, I'm not answering questions.
29:52You didn't care about me.
29:54When I came to you, now you want to ask me questions?
29:58Not happening.
30:00And I basically told them to go up themselves and hung up.
30:03I wasn't interested in helping the police.
30:05About a year after Lindahl's death, police discover why Deborah Collyandre never showed up for court.
30:14A farmer checking his field saw an indentation.
30:17He pulled out a spade, started digging, and found the remains of Deborah Collyandre.
30:22It pisses me off because it could have been prevented.
30:30That poor girl.
30:33Imagine if it would have been me and they prosecuted him.
30:36Maybe that would have happened to me.
30:41Oh my gosh, I just, I can't think about it.
30:43At the time of his death, police were aware of at least a few of the violent crimes that Bruce Lindahl committed.
30:51This included the rape of Annette Lazar, the kidnapping and rape of Deb Collyandre, as well as the death of Charles Huber.
31:00But many more of his crimes remained uninvestigated.
31:05In the 1970s, there was a lot of misogynistic attitudes.
31:10It seemed like there just wasn't enough focus on crimes against women.
31:15Eventually, Pam Maurer's case from 1976 turns out to be the key that connects him to the series of unsolved murders in the area.
31:25After Maurer's raped and strangled body was discovered in the woods, the case is cold for decades until Lyle Police Department cold case detective Chris Loudon decides to take a fresh look at it.
31:40It was considered unsolvable because there just never was any suspects developed from the beginning.
31:47The case grew colder and the list of suspects didn't get any bigger.
31:52And people started dying and forgetting and it became a point where if we didn't try solving it now, we were never going to solve it.
32:02And we had one ace in the hole that the other investigations didn't have and that was DNA.
32:08We had semen that was left on Pam's underwear.
32:12There wasn't a lot of it. Some of it had degraded.
32:16And we sent that evidence to the lab and the lab extracted a profile from that DNA.
32:23And they compared it to DNA on file on public databases like 23andMe and Ancestry.com.
32:32And they found a familial hit.
32:34When they called me from the lab, they said,
32:38Does the name Lindahl mean anything to you?
32:40Detective Loudon researches the family tree and finds that there were two brothers named Lindahl living in the area at the time of the murders,
32:49one of whom was named Bruce.
32:51And the first thing I learned about Bruce Lindahl was that back in 1980, he was accused of kidnapping and raping a young woman in Aurora named Deborah Colleander.
33:06So we went to Aurora and found out Bruce had been accused of another rape in Aurora that involved a woman named Annette Lazar.
33:15Loudon also comes across a box recovered from Lindahl's house during the Colleander case, and it contains hundreds of photos.
33:23Among them were young women, some clearly underage, various poses, some headshots, some full body shots, some laying on a bed, some clothes, some partially clothed, some fully nude.
33:39Fearing that these pictures might be images of unidentified Lindahl victims, Detective Loudon expands his search to other unsolved cases in the area from that time.
33:50We found out about a young woman named Deborah McCall who had disappeared and they never recovered her body.
33:56We also found out about a girl named Beth Drews who was found dead in 1977.
34:01Once we made our list of potential Lindahl victims, we had a dry erase board and we had about 12 names on the board.
34:11And then we started just comparing each picture one by one.
34:15We ended up getting at least three girls that we are reasonably confident are girls that were found dead that were pictures that Bruce Lindahl had in his possession.
34:27And my partner and I looked at each other and said, you think we have a serial killer on our hands?
34:35The problem we encountered was Bruce Lindahl died in 1981.
34:42We weren't going to be able to interview him.
34:44And unless you have an actual DNA match from your suspect, it really doesn't mean anything.
34:50So we had to get his DNA.
34:52At this point, the police will have to do something so rare that no one in the county has ever done it before.
34:58They will need to exhume his body.
35:00We needed to dig up Bruce Lindahl's body and then remove fingernails, hair, the femurs and his molars to send to a lab to have it developed into a DNA profile to compare against the DNA we collected from Pam's underclothing.
35:19The lab told us that the chances of Pam's killer being anybody but Bruce Lindahl was one in eight quadrillion people.
35:31We held a press conference and we had decided that we were going to offer a tip line.
35:36If anyone has any information regarding Bruce Lindahl, please call us.
35:40We finally put a name and a face to this monster and that's pretty much what he was.
35:45Within maybe a week or two, I had 75 phone calls.
35:50In 2020, my mother noticed an article and she said, look at this guy who was around at the same time that Beth disappeared.
36:00Do you think that he had anything to do with it?
36:03And I looked at the article and I said, oh my God, Mom, I dated him.
36:07When I looked at the article, my whole world stopped.
36:22Everything started rolling in and flooding my mind and wouldn't stop.
36:27And I thought, oh my God. And all the pieces came together.
36:33I called the detective and said, I think you need to put Beth Drews on your list as potential victims.
36:40And he said, she's already on the list.
36:43Sherry gave me some extra information we didn't know about Beth.
36:46And then she told me that she dated Bruce Lindahl not that long after Beth's body was recovered, which was just an amazing coincidence.
36:59What she told me about Bruce and what Bruce said to her, it cemented in my mind what I already suspected, that Bruce was responsible for Beth Drew's death.
37:11I had an intimate relationship with a man who killed my best friend.
37:16And I live with that.
37:18I still haven't overcome it.
37:21It's something I deal with on a daily basis.
37:27That's hard.
37:29That's the hard part.
37:31Over the years, the families of his victims and his survivors were left with grief, trauma,
37:39and whatever pieces they had to pick up and move on with their lives.
37:44I didn't trust nobody after that, especially men.
37:47Didn't let nobody close to me.
37:50I didn't go places where I could be trapped.
37:53Claustrophobic, quit smoking pot.
37:55Changed me in a lot of ways.
37:57When I had my daughter, I had major, major concerns for her safety.
38:02When she would go off to events or she would go even on dates, I had to really, really manage my emotions because of all the memories of Beth.
38:13Flashbacks of Beth missing were extremely hard for me to deal with on a constant basis.
38:18It really made a difference in the way that I parented my daughter.
38:24I just had to move on.
38:26And that's exactly what I did.
38:28I never talked about it to anybody.
38:31Not my family, not my son or his father.
38:34I just put it in the back of my mind for 40 years.
38:38Come on, boy.
38:39Never told them until 2020 when the police called me.
38:42When I talked to somebody like Annette, who I know still had so much pain to deal with, I felt that she deserved an apology from the police community.
39:01Oh, yes, I was mad.
39:03I survived a serial killer where a lot of other women didn't survive.
39:09And it could have been prevented.
39:10Can you imagine if they prosecuted, but they dropped the case?
39:16I'm just sorry for the other families and lives lost.
39:22It breaks my heart that somebody who went through such a horrible thing can feel that we failed them so badly.
39:29It's infuriating as a cop.
39:31It's infuriating as a detective.
39:33And it's infuriating as a dad.
39:35Because none of these other girls has had to happen.
39:38How do you do that?
39:41I'm pissed off again.
39:44I don't think they're going to truly know how many victims he actually did have.
39:50I don't think they're ever going to truly get down to the bottom of it.
39:53I'm still haunted by Deb McCall and the girls who disappeared and we've never found.
39:59Until you find a body or other evidence otherwise, it's going to be tough to get some closure for their families.
40:06Bruce Lindahl was a small statured person with evil running from the top of his head to the pinky toe.
40:16I did cases with child pornography and human trafficking and Bruce Lindahl is still my standard for as low as a human being can be.
40:28If you were a victim of this person, don't be afraid. You did nothing wrong. Your story could connect to somebody's loved one being found.
40:40You know, they could all tie together because the stories connect. Tell your story. Be strong. It's exposing somebody that did terrible things to people, young people. There's no shame in that if you were a victim. I'm not ashamed of it.
40:57My story's been told and I'm at peace. It's really great when you get closure. It's a good feeling. Yeah. So glad. Come on, let's go. Get your cookie. Let's go now. I'm a survivor. I'm a survivor.
41:27Thank you.
Seja a primeira pessoa a comentar