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From plumbing problems to traffic stops gone wrong, sometimes murderers are caught red-handed in the most unexpected ways. Join us as we examine shocking moments when killers were interrupted mid-crime! Our countdown includes Jeffrey Dahmer, the Yorkshire Ripper, Dennis Nilsen, and many more gruesome cases where split-second timing made all the difference.
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00:00And he was just sitting there, and he put his hands up like this, as I approached.
00:06Welcome to WatchMojo, and today, we're looking at 20 examples of a killer being caught in the middle of a murder.
00:14I think my first reaction then was to turn around to Scotty and say, don't look Scotty.
00:18Of course, that's the worst thing you can say.
00:21Coral Eugene Watts.
00:22Thinking Melinda is out cold, the attacker focuses on Laurie.
00:26We begin with a capture that proves the value of quick thinking.
00:35Coral Eugene Watts was a drifter who had already claimed dozens of lives by 1982.
00:41In fact, some suspect that he is the most prolific serial killer in American history.
00:47But his spree ended when he broke into a Houston apartment and attacked two roommates.
00:52While Watts was attempting to drown one woman in the bathtub, the other roommate, who had feigned unconsciousness, slipped out the balcony and alerted the neighbors.
01:03They called the police and spotted Watts as he fled the apartment.
01:06Authorities cornered him in a nearby yard, ending a cross-country nightmare and proving that a neighbor looking out for another can be the only thing standing between a predator and its prey.
01:18While Laurie is transported to the hospital, Melinda remains with police, who have arrested a man seen running away from the apartment.
01:26Harvey Glattman.
01:27The self-styled glamour girl slayer, Harvey Glattman used photography appointments to lure aspiring models to their deaths.
01:35His reign of terror was cut short in 1958 by a stroke of sheer luck and the brave actions of a potential victim.
01:42A highway patrolman was cruising past a parked car when he noticed a violent struggle occurring in the front seat.
01:48He pulled over to find Glattman wrestling with a woman, Lorraine Vigil, who had grabbed the killer's gun and was fighting for her life.
01:57The officer's arrival ended the standoff, leading to the arrest of a serial killer just seconds before he could claim another victim.
02:03Glattman was executed in 1959, and Vigil outlived him by over 40 years, passing away in 2002 at the age of 66.
02:15Matej Kerkow.
02:17Moving from the 50s into the digital age, we have the disturbing case of the Slovak cannibal.
02:23Matej Kerkow treated the internet as his own personal grocery store, seeking voluntary victims who wished to be killed.
02:30In this way, he murdered and ate at least two women.
02:34In 2011, a Swiss man agreed to meet Kerkow, but secretly contacted the police.
02:39An undercover agent then took the man's place and arranged a rendezvous in the woods.
02:44When Kerkow arrived, he was armed with knives, body bags, and spices, fully expecting to butcher and eat his date.
02:52But he quickly realized it was a sting and drew a firearm, shooting the agent.
02:57He was then struck by a sniper's bullet and died in the hospital a few days later.
03:03Karl Denke.
03:05This entry takes us back to 1924 for a story straight out of a gothic horror novel.
03:10In a small German town in the kingdom of Prussia, residents were startled by agonizing screams coming from the home of Karl Denke, a respected local organist.
03:20Suddenly, a man burst from the apartment, covered in blood and screaming for help.
03:25This man was Vincennes Olivier, who had just been hit in the head with a pickaxe.
03:31Police initially didn't believe Olivier owing to Denke's charitable reputation, and actually arrested him for vagrancy.
03:39But a judge insisted on investigating further, and Denke was taken in for questioning.
03:44He then took his own life inside the holding cell before police could interrogate him.
03:49When police searched his home, they found human flesh being cured inside jars of brine.
03:56Tsutomo Miyazaki.
03:58Sometimes, getting caught for a lesser crime exposes a monster.
04:03Tsutomo Miyazaki, known as the otaku murderer, had been kidnapping and killing young girls across Tokyo throughout the late 1980s.
04:11And his downfall didn't come from a homicide investigation, but from a concerned father.
04:17In 1989, a man spotted Miyazaki taking lewd photos of his daughter in a park and confronted him.
04:23Miyazaki attacked the father and fled on foot, leaving his vehicle behind.
04:28When he foolishly returned to the park to retrieve his car, police were waiting for him, having been called by the concerned father.
04:35He was taken into custody, and a search of his home revealed thousands of videotapes and photos of his previous victims.
04:42Pulling the curtain back on a serial killer hiding in plain sight.
04:47Robert Black.
04:49A retired post office worker is mowing his lawn when he sees a van pull up.
04:56He also sees a young girl walk past the van, and then he sees the young girl lifted up and whisked into the van.
05:04This is arguably the closest call on this list.
05:09In 1990, a resident in the Scottish village of Stowe was mowing his yard when he saw a six-year-old neighbor getting into a stranger's van.
05:17While it didn't look like a violent struggle, the neighbor's intuition screamed that something was wrong.
05:23He took note of the vehicle's license plate and ran to the girl's house, informing her mother.
05:28She then called the police, who quickly intervened and captured the vehicle, in a horrible twist.
05:35The girl's father was one of the responding officers, and he found his terrified child bound and gagged inside a sleeping bag in the rear of the van.
05:44The man was arrested and identified as Robert Black, a serial predator and killer of at least four young girls.
05:51And the man who opens the back doors of the van is the little girl's father, who's a policeman.
05:59Can you imagine what impact that must have had on him?
06:04Arthur Shaw Cross.
06:05We were less than two minutes into the flight from Northampton Park back to Rochester when we flew over Salmon Creek, and underneath the bridge, I could see a body frozen in the ice.
06:22By 1990, the Genesee River Killer had Rochester, New York, under siege, having murdered at least a dozen people.
06:31With no leads, police launched a helicopter surveillance team to monitor the local riverbanks.
06:37On January 3, 1990, the body of June Cicero was discovered in Salmon Creek.
06:43It was also around this time that both an eyewitness and a police surveillance team spotted a man standing on a bridge over the creek, performing an act of a sexual nature.
06:54The man's car was identified, leading police straight to one Arthur Shaw Cross.
07:00It was a capture that felt cinematic, utilizing both aerial tactics and boots on the ground to capture one of New York's most infamous killers.
07:09It was what the police had been waiting for.
07:11FBI profilers had highlighted the killer's pattern of returning to the dead bodies, and McCaffrey decided to follow the Chevrolet.
07:19Yuck him Kroll.
07:21That was something where you had to more than just swallow.
07:24I have seen many things, but this was something completely new to me, that a human being was able to do such a thing.
07:30This German serial killer claimed at least eight lives between 1955 and 1976.
07:37And the break in this case came from the unlikeliest of places, the plumbing.
07:42The waste pipe in Yuck him Kroll's building was clogged, and when a neighbor asked what it could be, Kroll told him it was guts.
07:50Not knowing if it was just a morbid joke or a grim reality, the neighbor alerted a nearby policeman.
07:57This led them straight to Kroll's apartment, where they found a human hand boiling on the stove, and human remains crammed into the waste pipe.
08:05Needless to say, Kroll was arrested immediately, earning the moniker, the Rur Cannibal, in the process.
08:14After decades, Kroll was finally apprehended simply because the plumbing couldn't handle the evidence he was trying to flush away.
08:22He said rather flippantly, oh, it's guts, which it literally was, intestines.
08:28And the neighbor complained, Kroll was nothing if not brazen.
08:32With us is David McVicker, who is one of the rare individuals that survives an attack by a serial killer.
08:43The freeway killer, William Bonin, murdered at least 14 young men in California.
08:48And his spree ended in, of all places, a parking lot.
08:53On the night of June 11, 1980, police spotted Bonin picking up a teenage boy in his van.
08:59They followed the vehicle to a gas station parking lot and then approached.
09:03Hearing screams and bangs coming from within the van, they then opened the doors and found Bonin actively assaulting his latest victim.
09:11A search of the vehicle uncovered a toolkit of horrors, including ropes, knives, and newspaper clippings related to the freeway killer.
09:19The officers had physically interrupted an assault and probable murder in progress.
09:26And Bonin became the first prisoner to die by lethal injection in California, having been executed in 1996.
09:34After his attack, a brutal attack on you, and you were just a young boy at that time, he gets out and that's when he's doing the killings?
09:44Correct. Yeah, it was before Megan's law.
09:47I was told that he was in for 15 to life, but I was wrong.
09:49Richard Cottingham.
09:52The motel staff immediately called the police, and an officer was dispatched.
09:56If you hear screaming coming from a hotel room, please don't ignore it.
10:01In 1980, housekeeping staff at a New Jersey Quality Inn heard muffled cries and screams coming from room 117 and ran to help.
10:10They entered to find Richard Cottingham, the so-called Torso Killer, attacking his latest victim, Leslie Ann O'Dell.
10:19Police were quickly summoned.
10:21O'Dell had been bitten and was bleeding heavily, but she was alive.
10:25Luckily, the swift arrival of authorities put an end to Cottingham's double life as a suburban father and brutal killer,
10:31and he was arrested in the motel hallway at gunpoint.
10:34His capture unraveled a series of murders that plagued New York and New Jersey,
10:39all because some concerned people refused to turn a blind eye to a disturbance.
10:45Despite being virtually caught in the act, Richard Cottingham professed his innocence.
10:50He just flat-out denied it, and I, you know, I found it very difficult to accept.
11:00They sort of caught him red-handed, as one might say.
11:03Isai Sagawa.
11:05When the old man started to scream, the killer stood up and calmly walked away into the night.
11:11It's 1981, in Paris, and a Japanese student named Isai Sagawa is struggling to drag two heavy suitcases into the city's Bois de Bologna.
11:23Passerby watched with suspicion as he tried and failed to dump the luggage into a lake.
11:29They also saw what looked like blood seeping from the suitcases.
11:33The witnesses called the police, who tracked Sagawa down shortly after and arrested him.
11:37You see, inside the suitcases were the dismembered remains of Sagawa's classmate, Renee Hartveldt.
11:45He had shot her and eaten parts of her body before trying to dispose of the rest.
11:50A man walking through a public park carrying the bloody remains of his victim
11:53has to be one of the strangest and most surreal captures on record.
11:58Thanks to briefing the press with the description of the tiny Asian man witnesses saw in the Guadalajan,
12:04they soon had a lead.
12:06Sean Great.
12:07The same document that lists his aggravated murder charges in the death of Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith.
12:14The charges came after a third woman who escaped led police to their bodies in this Ashland home last month.
12:21This 2016 case went viral thanks to a terrifying piece of audio.
12:26A woman held captive in an abandoned house in Ohio managed to loosen her bonds while her kidnapper, Sean Great, slept nearby.
12:34She grabbed his phone and dialed 911, telling the operator that she was imprisoned and that her abductor was currently sleeping.
12:42When police arrived, the courageous woman was able to open the door for them, leading officers right to the bedroom where Great was woken and arrested without incident.
12:50While processing the scene, investigators discovered two other decomposing bodies in the property.
12:57Great was convicted for murdering five women between 2006 and 2016 and is currently on death row in the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.
13:07The man, convicted of killing Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith, both found dead in his home as a third woman escaped.
13:15We noticed a pickup truck in the center lane, and as we got closer, we realized that there were no, there was no license plate on the vehicle.
13:25This famous serial killer murdered a suspected 17 women in New York, but he wasn't taken down by a massive manhunt or DNA evidence.
13:34He was caught because of a missing license plate.
13:37In 1993, state troopers attempted to pull Rifkin over for the minor traffic violation, but Rifkin panicked and floored it, leading police on a high-speed chase that finally ended when he crashed into a utility pole.
13:51When troopers approached the wrecked car, they were hit with the undeniable stench of death.
13:57Wrapped inside a blue tarp in the trunk of the vehicle was the decomposing body of his final victim, Tiffany Bresciani.
14:04It's a classic example of how traffic stops are often the most dangerous and ultimately the most revealing part of police work.
14:14Worked my way to the back, and as we were shining the flashlights in the back, we could see what appeared to be someone rolled up in a blue tarp.
14:28Randy Kraft.
14:29At 1.10 in the morning of May the 14th, 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers spot a Toyota Celica weaving down the road.
14:42While Rifkin went down thanks to a missing license plate, Randy Kraft went down after making an illegal lane change.
14:49In 1983, California Highway Patrol pulled Kraft over after he made the move, believing that he was driving under the influence.
14:57As Kraft fumbled through a sobriety test, one of the officers turned his attention to Kraft's passenger, who was slumped over and unresponsive.
15:06He initially believed that the man was drunk or sleeping, but upon closer inspection, the officer made the horrifying realization that he was dead.
15:14Kraft had been driving down the freeway with the fresh corpse propped up in the seat next to him.
15:19Kraft also had a coded list of victims in the car, leading to his nickname as the Scorecard Killer.
15:25The sheet of lined paper was a handwritten list in two neat columns, beginning with stable and ending with what you got.
15:34When homicide detectives examined the list and the dozens of pornographic photos, it dawned on them that they'd stumbled on the killer they'd been hunting for over 10 years.
15:46Wayne Williams.
15:47From 1979 to 1981, more than 28 people disappeared and were found dead.
15:54Wayne Williams pled not guilty, convicted of murdering two of the oldest victims, with evidence for 10 other murders presented in court.
16:01Atlanta was in a state of panic in 1981 due to the child murders plaguing the city.
16:07Desperate for a break, police began staking out bridges over the Chattahoochee River, hoping to catch the killer dumping evidence.
16:14In the very early morning of May 22nd, a recruit heard a loud and distinct splash in the water.
16:21They immediately stopped the car to emerge from the bridge, which was being driven by one Wayne Williams.
16:27Two days later, the body of Nathaniel Cater surfaced downstream.
16:32It's now widely believed that the splashing sound the officer heard was Cater's body hitting the water.
16:39Williams was arrested and convicted of two murders, including Cater's.
16:44But some believe that he was responsible for dozens more as the Atlanta child killer.
16:49Wayne Bertram Williams.
16:53Do you know why we pulled you over, Mr. Williams?
16:56I guess it must be about all those boys.
16:59David Parker Ray.
17:00Good evening.
17:01She survived three days of torture in Ray's house of horror.
17:06Now she is speaking publicly about her brush with death to inspire other Ray victims to come forward.
17:11This man spent $100,000 building a soundproof trailer equipped with grotesque surgical tools and mirrors to torment his kidnapped subjects, leading to his nickname as the Toybox Killer.
17:24But in 1999, one of his victims, a woman named Cynthia Vigil, fought back.
17:30When Ray left the room, she managed to grab an ice pick, stab his accomplice in the neck, and flee the Toybox, wearing only a dog collar and chains.
17:40She then banged on a neighbor's door, screaming for help.
17:43The neighbor called the police, who quickly arrived and investigated the trailer, exposing decades of horrific abuse and a suspected murder.
17:51Ray was a sadist, who thought he had created the perfect prison, but he underestimated the bravery and the strength of Cynthia Vigil.
18:00Vigil Jaramillo was able to break free while Ray was at work by stealing a key to the lock on her chains and stabbing Hendy with an ice pick.
18:08Her escape led to their arrest.
18:11Ray died in prison in 2002 and took his evil secrets with him.
18:15Catherine Knight.
18:16We head to Australia for a crime scene that traumatized even veteran officers.
18:30Back in February of 2000, police arrived at the home of Catherine Knight, hoping to conduct a simple welfare check.
18:38Catherine's partner, John Price, failed to show up for work and an employee was concerned.
18:42The house was a grotesque showpiece.
18:46Knight had murdered and skinned Price, hanging his pelt from a meat hook in the living room.
18:51When police walked into the kitchen, they found Price's head in a pot.
18:55And that's not all.
18:57Knight had even cooked some of his flesh and set two plates on the dinner table with place cards for his children, intending to feed them their father.
19:06Knight was found asleep in the bedroom and was promptly arrested.
19:09We heard what appeared to be someone snoring coming from one of the bedrooms.
19:16So we knew that there was someone alive in the house.
19:19Looked in here and there she was lying on the bed.
19:21Peter Sutcliffe.
19:22Two police officers came across a vehicle, two occupants in the vehicle, a man and a woman,
19:29and discovered that the number plates did not tally with the vehicle.
19:34That rang alarm bells, so they arrested the driver for suspicion of theft of number plates.
19:41The Yorkshire Ripper was the most wanted man in Britain in 1981, evading capture for years.
19:48And to think, it all ended in a Sheffield driveway.
19:52Police spotted a car in a known red light district and approached.
19:56Inside was Peter Sutcliffe and a sex worker he likely intended to murder.
20:01Peter Sutcliffe was arrested when officers discovered that the car had false plates.
20:06But before being taken in, Sutcliffe asked to relieve himself behind an oil tank,
20:11and he used that moment to ditch a hammer, knife, and rope.
20:16The arresting officer, suspicious of the sudden bathroom break, returned to the scene the next day and found the discarded tools.
20:22Sutcliffe was confronted with this sudden fine, and immediately confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper, killer, of at least 13 women.
20:33Sutcliffe knew he was caught, and it was then he said,
20:37I know what you're leading up to.
20:38It's me, I'm the Ripper.
20:40Dennis Nilsen.
20:41And he showed me a drain with an inspection plate cover open, and he pointed out that some bits of flesh had been hauled out of the drain at the bottom.
20:56Another killer, another plumbing downfall.
20:59Dennis Nilsen, known as the Muswell Hill murderer, had been killing men in London for years,
21:05often taking them back to his apartment, dismembering their bodies, and flushing their remains down the toilet.
21:11This worked for a while, but the drains in his apartment building eventually backed up.
21:17A plumber named Michael Katran was called to investigate, expecting a routine blockage.
21:23Instead, he pulled up a gruesome slurry of human flesh and bone.
21:28The remains were traced to the top flat, which belonged to Dennis Nilsen.
21:32Police were notified, and when Nilsen returned from work, they went upstairs to his flat.
21:37They immediately noticed the smell of rotting flesh and confronted Nilsen.
21:41Who admitted that two bags of human body parts were currently inside his wardrobe.
21:47I said to him, look, your drains were blocked with human remains.
21:51And he looked at me and he said, oh my god, how awful.
21:55And I just pushed my face a little bit nearer to his and said, don't mess about.
22:00Where's the rest of the body?
22:02And he said, okay, it's in plastic bags in the front bedroom.
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22:21Jeffrey Dahmer.
22:25I think it might be in a drawer.
22:28I'll find it.
22:29I'll be right back.
22:31You mind if we come in?
22:32And who can forget the lucky break that ended the nightmare in Milwaukee?
22:36In July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer lured a man named Tracy Edwards back to his apartment.
22:43When Dahmer pulled a knife on him, Edwards realized that he was in mortal danger and bolted from the apartment,
22:50running down the street with a pair of handcuffs still dangling from one wrist.
22:54He flagged down a passing patrol car and the officers agreed to return to the apartment to help him get the key for the handcuffs.
23:01Once inside, an officer opened one of Dahmer's dressers and found numerous Polaroids of dismembered corpses.
23:09Dahmer tried running, but was quickly taken down and arrested.
23:12Police later searched his apartment thoroughly, finding the notorious fridge of body parts and the tub of dissolving torsos.
23:21Sir, we're under arrest for the attempted murder.
23:25The man out there, you have the right to remain silent.
23:28Can you say a cannon will be used against you in a court of law?
23:31Can you believe these stories?
23:34Let us know in the comments below.
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