- 9 months ago
Sometimes the most dangerous predators aren't caught by brilliant detective work, but by sheer dumb luck! Join us as we explore how history's most notorious killers were captured through random traffic stops, plumbing problems, and their own stupidity. Our countdown includes Dahmer, Bundy, BTK and more! Which capture surprised you the most?
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00:00Routine traffic stops were never routine ever again.
00:04Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 10 major serial killers who were caught by sheer chance.
00:09It's not through hard work that most serial killers are arrested. It's by accident.
00:17Ed Kemper
00:17I could kill you now pretty easily. Do some interesting things before anyone showed up.
00:24The famous co-ed killer wasn't caught due to a manhunt. He was caught because he got bored.
00:29Shortly after murdering his mother and her friend, Kemper fled to Colorado,
00:33expecting a dramatic police chase that never materialized. You see,
00:36nobody realized that he had murdered not only his mother and her friend,
00:40but six others between May 1972 and February 1973.
00:44He was in Pueblo, Colorado. He was in a phone booth, and he hadn't had any sleep for several days.
00:53And he said he had done something really bad.
00:56So Kemper found a phone booth and called the police to confess,
00:59but the officers thought it was a prank. He had to actually plead with them to take him seriously,
01:04and they finally agreed to come pick him up. That is how oblivious law enforcement was to his
01:09involvement in the murders. Who knows how long it would have kept up if Kemper hadn't decided to
01:13surrender out of sheer exhaustion and impatience.
01:15He made comments to Jim Connor on the telephone that he had killed all of the co-eds, too.
01:20Danny Rowling.
01:21This is a person who volcanically erupted behaviorally. The hatred, the paranoia, the psychosis
01:28just unleashed itself upon the world.
01:31A terrified Florida campus went on lockdown, and a massive task force hunted a man who had just
01:36murdered five college students. But the so-called Gainesville Ripper wasn't tackled by homicide
01:41detectives. He was chased down by local patrolmen after robbing a supermarket in Ocala. He crashed
01:46his getaway car, fled into the woods, and was arrested for armed robbery.
01:50And five days later, he tries to commit another robbery, this time in a store in Ocala, where he
01:57holds the manager to ransom and demands he opens a safe. But unfortunately, other people realize
02:02what's happening. The police are called, and Rowling is unable to escape this time.
02:07The officers had absolutely no clue they had just handcuffed one of America's most wanted monsters.
02:13Danny Rowling sat in jail as a generic robber until investigators noticed that his tools matched
02:18evidence from the murder scenes, and the connection was thankfully established. The most feared man in
02:23Florida was taken down because he needed some quick cash, and because he was a terrible getaway driver.
02:29Finally, two months later, Rowling was indicted on five counts of first-degree murder for the atrocities
02:36in Gainesville.
02:37Joel Rifkin
02:38The whole city is talking about this monster, Joel Rifkin, and I am dating a Joel Rifkin.
02:43But you like your Joel Rifkin.
02:45Yeah, I just wish he had a different name.
02:48New York's most prolific serial killer was taken down by a missing $10 piece of metal. It sounds like
02:53a bad joke. On the morning of June 28, 1993, Joel Rifkin, killer of at least nine women,
03:00was cruising along the Southern State Parkway with the decomposing body of his final victim
03:04casually sitting in the truck bed. Police noticed his lack of license plate and attempted to pull
03:08him over.
03:09We just were driving, checking the parkway, doing the usual routine stuff. We noticed a pickup truck
03:18in the center lane, and as we got closer, we realized that there was no license plate
03:24on the vehicle.
03:25Rifkin panicked, leading troopers on a high-speed chase that finally ended when he slammed into a
03:30utility pole. Officers approached the wreck expecting a traffic citation, only to be hit
03:34by a horrific smell. It's then that they found the body of Tiffany Bresciani, leading to Rifkin's
03:39arrest. Sometimes, even the smallest infraction reveals the darkest secrets.
03:44As we were shining the flashlights in the back, we could see what appeared to be someone rolled
03:51up in a blue tarp.
03:54Peter Sutcliffe.
03:55Leeds and surrounding areas were just places of fear, while this maniac was on the rampage.
04:03Britton was in a panic hunting the Yorkshire Ripper, pouring millions into a massive investigation.
04:08Meanwhile, the killer was sitting in a parked car in Sheffield with a sex worker. Two officers
04:13on a routine patrol approached the car, suspecting nothing more than a minor crime, when they
04:17noticed that the vehicle had stolen plates.
04:19Two police officers came across a vehicle, two occupants in the vehicle, a man and a woman,
04:26and discovered that the number plates did not tally with the vehicle. That rang alarm bells,
04:33so they arrested the driver for suspicion of theft of number plates.
04:37In a twist of fate, they allowed Sutcliffe to relieve himself behind an oil tank before
04:42taking him to the station, and he used that moment to ditch his knife and hammer.
04:46The next day, Sergeant Robert Ring returned to the site of the arrest and found the weapons,
04:50and when confronted about the find, Sutcliffe readily admitted that he was the Yorkshire Ripper.
04:55License plates really do have a knack for taking down serial killers, don't they?
04:59Sutcliffe knew he was caught, and it was then he said,
05:03I know what you're leading up to. It's me, I'm the Ripper.
05:06Jeffrey Dahmer.
05:07That's okay, guys, we can get into that rough house and kind of wreck what's up.
05:09Did you have the key to the handcuffs?
05:12Yes. Yeah, it's somewhere in here. I just, uh, I think it might be in a drawer.
05:19Um, I'll find it. I'll be right back.
05:22You mind if we come in?
05:23The police didn't have an inkling of Dahmer's crimes, and who knows how long his reign would
05:28have continued if it wasn't for Tracy Edwards. Edwards was taken to Dahmer's apartment,
05:32but he got scared and punched the killer before fleeing. He flagged down some cops,
05:36who took him back to Dahmer's. Edwards was still handcuffed,
05:39and Dahmer told the police that the key was in the bedroom.
05:42Where's this key, you think?
05:45Um, I think it might be in the bedroom.
05:50While looking for that key, Officer Rolf Mueller opened a bedside drawer and found grotesque Polaroids
05:55of various dead bodies. That casual peek transformed a welfare check into a nightmarish discovery for the
06:01ages. Had Edwards not escaped, or had that officer not peeked inside that particular drawer,
06:06Dahmer would have likely talked his way out of it, just as he had done before.
06:10Uh, you guys... I don't know what you guys do. Just take care of it.
06:15Okay?
06:16Yeah, I will. Thanks, officers.
06:19John Christie.
06:20Now, breathe deeply. Please just relax. Please deeply. Close your eyes.
06:26The legendary horrors of 10 Rillington Place were only revealed because of a routine DIY renovation.
06:31John Christie had turned his London flat into a tomb, concealing bodies under floorboards and
06:36behind kitchen walls. Yet, in a move of either staggering arrogance or unbelievable stupidity,
06:42he left the bodies behind when he moved out in March 1953.
06:45This is mahogany. Pure mahogany.
06:47Oh, yeah?
06:48Ten quid a lot.
06:50What, for everything?
06:51Everything, bar that mattress that'll walk out by itself.
06:53The new tenant, Beresford Brown, was renovating the kitchen and installing some wall brackets
06:57to mount a radio when he peeled back the wallpaper over a hollow alcove.
07:01He then shone a flashlight into the dark opening and locked eyes with the decomposing remains of
07:05three women. Christie was eventually found wandering London in a homeless daze,
07:10and he was hanged that July.
07:11You're Christie? John Reginald Christie.
07:17I should have to take you into custody. Come along.
07:21David Berkowitz.
07:22I mean, it was a time where one man could terrorize an entire city of 8 million people.
07:30Literally everybody who walked the streets, particularly women, were terrified.
07:35During the notorious summer of Sam, New York City was a ghost town at night,
07:39terrified of the .44 caliber killer.
07:41A massive task force hunted him down, but the break didn't come from a dramatic revelation.
07:46It came from a dog walker.
07:47Cecilia Davis was walking her dog when she saw a suspicious man near a car that had just been ticketed.
07:53Moments later, she heard gunshots.
07:54And then we have the parking violation ticket on the car at the scene of the killing of Stacey Moskowitz.
08:03Two plus two plus two equals David Berkowitz.
08:06She called the police a few days later, who looked into vehicles that received parking tickets in the area that night.
08:12They found one given to a Ford Galaxy for parking too close to a fire hydrant.
08:16It belonged to one David Berkowitz.
08:18After further investigative efforts, Berkowitz was arrested, another serial killer undone by another traffic violation.
08:25Follotico went up to the driver's side of the car.
08:28Berkowitz was already in the car.
08:29He had his gun out and he said, put your hands on the dashboard and don't move.
08:35Berkowitz turned to Detective Follotico and said, you got me.
08:40On the 8th of February, 1983, a maintenance worker was called out to a house in London
08:47to investigate some unusual smells coming from the property's block drains.
08:52In a gruesome twist of domestic life, the Muswell Hill murderer was betrayed by his own plumbing.
08:57Dennis Nielsen had been flushing his victim's remains down the toilet for months,
09:01bizarrely confident in his unconventional disposal method.
09:04But eventually, the pipes rebelled, causing a massive blockage in his apartment building.
09:08After residents complained about the drains being blocked, a plumber was called in to investigate.
09:16And they found what looked like bits of flesh.
09:19When a plumber arrived to clear the blockage, he found human flesh clogging the system.
09:24Nielsen, standing nearby, bizarrely claimed that someone must have flushed away their KFC.
09:29But the plumber was not convinced.
09:30The drain was linked to Nielsen's apartment.
09:32And when police arrived to investigate, they immediately noticed the smell of rotting flesh.
09:37And that was that, a serial killer foiled by the limitations of a London sewer system.
09:42And you could smell immediately the decomposing flesh.
09:45I said to him, look, your drains were blocked with human remains.
09:49And he looked at me and he said, oh my god, how awful.
09:53And I just pushed my face a little bit nearer to his and said, don't mess about.
09:58Where's the rest of the body?
09:59Ted Bundy
10:02Three days later, on February the 15th, 1978, an alert Pensacola police officer stopped America's most notorious serial killer near the Alabama state line for driving suspiciously.
10:16This serial killer fancied himself a genius, but it turns out he was just another bumbling killer taken down by a traffic violation.
10:23Indeed, Bundy's rampage did seem unstoppable, until he drove through Pensacola, Florida.
10:28One night, Bundy was seen driving suspiciously, attracting the attention of Pensacola police officer David Lee.
10:34Lee ran the plates in a routine move and discovered that the car had been reported stolen.
10:38Naturally, he pulled the car over and confronted the driver.
10:41Evening, officer. Sorry, I couldn't make out your headlights, and I think I just got a little bit spooked.
10:47Can I see your license and registration, please?
10:49Bundy knew the game was up and tried running, but the officer eventually caught him and slapped on the handcuffs.
10:54One of the most dangerous predators in American history, known for his ability to evade capture across multiple states,
11:01was brought down because he was driving slowly through a quiet neighborhood.
11:04He just had a gut feeling that something might be wrong, and of course, it came out over his radio after he called it in that the vehicle had been stolen.
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11:32Dennis Rader
11:32We could tell that it was somehow affiliated with Christ Lutheran Church and the Park City Community Public Library.
11:39And the next thing we looked at was statistics, and it shows here that it was last saved by Dennis.
11:45So somehow a Dennis, who was affiliated with the church or the library, was somehow involved with this document.
11:52The famous BTK remained a phantom for 30 years, having seemingly gotten away with murdering 10 people.
11:58But he was ultimately undone by his own ego.
12:00BTK wanted to taunt the law after years of inactivity, but was terrified of being traced.
12:05In a moment of supreme stupidity, he wrote to the police asking if a floppy disk could be tracked.
12:10The police, sensing an opportunity, lied and said no.
12:14And of course, we responded by running an ad in the paper, which he asked us to do,
12:18basically telling him we can't trace a floppy disk, which we knew, of course, was inaccurate.
12:23For some reason, BTK actually trusted them and sent a disk to a local TV station.
12:29And the police could not believe their luck.
12:31They simply right-clicked on the files and saw the metadata that loudly displayed the name Dennis and a local church.
12:36They looked into the church and saw that one Dennis Rader was president of the church council.
12:41Undone by his own mistake, BTK would probably still be free if he had never sent in that floppy disk.
12:46Can you think of any other examples?
12:55Let us know in the comments below.
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