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World's Most Evil Killers S04E10
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CreativityTranscript
00:07On the 24th of February 1986, police in Talladega, Alabama forced entry into the home of 24-year-old
00:16Sherry Weathers. The profoundly deaf mother of two had not turned up to school for nearly
00:23a week, and the reason soon became clear. Sherry and her two young children had been
00:29strangled to death, and piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross.
00:35The utter callousness of it, of not only killing them, strangling them, but then posing them
00:41to be discovered, it's an act of a vile human being.
00:47The horrific scene will forever be etched in the minds of the two detectives who worked
00:53on the case.
00:54When you see something like that, you can't help but think about your own child. This
00:59could happen to my child, too.
01:01And so now you know you've got to do everything you possibly do to bring this person to justice.
01:08The killer was a 31-year-old artist named Daniel Siebert, and his macabre masterpiece was far
01:15from complete. Two more bodies would soon be discovered, but the police had no idea where
01:21to find him. He's in the wind. We didn't know where he was, but we knew that somebody's
01:28going to die until he was caught. Daniel Siebert had made his mark as one of the world's most
01:35most evil killers.
01:58When 33-year-old Daniel Siebert was sentenced to death for the murder of Linda Jarman on the 17th of
02:05April 1987,
02:06it signaled the end of the killer's cold-blooded career. On the 19th of August, he received a second
02:14death sentence for the murders of Sherry Weathers and her two children. Officially found guilty of five
02:21murders, authorities believe that Siebert was responsible for many other deaths across the U.S.
02:27in the mid-1980s. Homicide detective Eugene Jacks was part of the policing team who hunted
02:35the killer for over six months before his dramatic arrest in September 1986.
02:43He killed Sherry because she was deaf and she would never amount to anything because she was deaf. He killed
02:53those two little boys because their mother was dead and they would never amount to anything because they wouldn't have
02:58a mother. He killed Linda Jarman to get her car. He says he killed Linda Odom because she was a
03:06racist. I think he just killed people because he liked to kill people.
03:09In a series of interviews with the killer, Eugene learned a lot about just how callous Daniel Siebert could be.
03:18If you didn't know what kind of monster he really was, you could actually like him, but he had no
03:24compassion for anyone, no feelings for anyone.
03:27These people didn't matter to him, not at all. He didn't hate them. He just didn't have any feelings for
03:34them, none whatsoever.
03:37This killer story begins in Mattoon, Illinois, a small city in America's Midwest.
03:44Stiebert was born in 1954, so these were the post-war years in the U.S. The economy was starting
03:51to boom. We have the idea of the American dream, but I think when we look behind closed doors at
03:56his family life, it was anything but that.
03:59There were reports of abuse from his father towards his mother and towards him.
04:05Father was an aggressive man. He mistreated both Danny and his mother.
04:11He was a man who was violent and abusive and controlling, and this is the role model of masculinity that
04:19Siebert grows up with.
04:21So I think that there is a real sense of shame that Siebert maintains throughout his life, and having been
04:28victimised, I think that Siebert was always trying to turn the tables and be the aggressor.
04:35Siebert's parents divorced in 1968, just a month before his 14th birthday. The young man's life began to spiral out
04:45of control.
04:46He became addicted to drugs. He had got into prostitution, himself acting as a male prostitute.
04:56I think there were several warning signs in Siebert's childhood and adolescence that point towards a very troubled individual.
05:04He's somebody who could not make relationships work with other people. He didn't relate to his peers particularly well.
05:11There was a feeling of rejection from the family environment, and it's this sense of isolation, and later the choice
05:17to be isolated, which is something that's very concerning for me.
05:22There was nothing about him that could be described as ordered. He was like a Catherine wheel, going round and
05:30round in every single direction, a firework.
05:34Aged 18 and looking for some stability in his life, Siebert enrolled with the military in 1972.
05:43Siebert's decision to try and join the Marines is a really, really interesting part of this case, because it's what
05:49that decision symbolises.
05:51The Marines symbolised this alpha male, this toughness, this kind of real American hero type persona.
05:58And I think Siebert wanted to try and live up to that.
06:03Unfortunately, he couldn't deal with the order the Marines brought him.
06:09And quickly, well, within a year, went absent without leave.
06:14After being dishonourably discharged from the Marines, Siebert was once again at a loose end.
06:21But the troubled young man had a hidden talent that soon began to flourish.
06:28One thing that Siebert excelled at was as an artist.
06:33It was the only thing he was good at.
06:36You can tell by looking at some of his drawings, it was just, you know, I think he was expressing
06:40his fantasies in his drawings.
06:42That's how he got started with that.
06:44He was quite a person, I mean, he had an engaging personality.
06:49Enjoyable to talk with, really.
06:51If you didn't know what kind of person he was down deep, you would have to actually enjoy sitting and
06:54talking with him.
06:56But life for the charming young artist remained difficult.
07:00Between 1972 and 1978, he was principally based in Los Angeles.
07:05And there were a series of offences, drug offences, some violence, charges of battery.
07:11It was a life lived on the edge, on the fringes of society and on the fringes of the law.
07:19By January 1979, 24-year-old Siebert was living in Las Vegas.
07:25He was in a relationship with a male partner.
07:27It was reportedly an abusive one that ended with him fatally stabbing his lover.
07:34This homicide was a particularly vicious one because Siebert stabbed his partner 29 times.
07:40Now, for me, that means that he has made that decision 29 times to put the knife in again.
07:46This was somebody who knew what they were doing.
07:48They knew what they were doing was wrong and they chose to do it anyway.
07:53Despite the viciousness of the slaying, at his subsequent trial, Siebert was charged with manslaughter, not murder.
08:02Siebert insisted that it was a matter of self-defense.
08:05How it can be to stab someone that many times is slightly beyond me.
08:10But it did seek to throw into doubt whether it was a premeditated murder and therefore added strength to the
08:19argument that it was a crime of passion.
08:21I think because this was a homosexual relationship, there was a tendency for the court to just want to accept
08:27that narrative and put this case to bed because there was still stigma around homosexuality in the U.S. at
08:33this time.
08:33And I think that was perhaps what drove this offense in the first place because a lot of violence has
08:39its roots in shame.
08:40I think Siebert was fundamentally ashamed of who he was.
08:44He never accepted who he was.
08:46He never felt that society would accept him for his true identity.
08:51So I think this early offense is so important and the criminal justice system's reaction to it was just not
08:58good enough.
09:00Siebert was sentenced to ten years in prison, but after serving just two, he escaped while on work detail in
09:08December 1981.
09:10Now, we really do have a lethal weapon waiting to go off.
09:16While he's on the run, he kidnaps a woman at gunpoint in San Francisco and she only escapes by jumping
09:25out of the moving car on the Golden Gate Bridge.
09:29It is a remarkable, remarkable escape because in my own mind, I'm not the slightest doubt that he intended to
09:35kill her.
09:37Siebert was recaptured the following day in nearby Oakland and returned to prison.
09:43An extra year was added to his sentence, but in 1985, he was freed on parole on the proviso that
09:50he would return to court to face charges for the abduction and assault he'd committed during his brief escape.
09:57Due to attend court in San Francisco in December 1985, Siebert didn't turn up.
10:07His next known whereabouts were over 800 miles away in Tucson, Arizona, where he was found hitchhiking and heading east.
10:17But now, Daniel Siebert is not calling himself Daniel Siebert, he's calling himself Daniel Spence.
10:23He's given a lift by a man called Donald Hedron, who is on his way to Alabama.
10:29Before the journey comes to an end, Donald has offered Spence a post as a volunteer at the Alabama Institute
10:38for the Deaf and Blind in which Hedron works.
10:42The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind is a big part of the community.
10:46It's actually a community of its own or a family of its own, you might say.
10:51And he has, superficially at least, the perfect cover.
10:57Artistic young man, happy to volunteer at an institute for those with deafness and blindness.
11:03Leaving his troubles in California far behind him, Siebert settled down in Talladega, Alabama in January 1986.
11:14Working at the AIDB, he had a new identity and a new community of friends.
11:22After he arrived here, people realised that he was an accomplished artist and he was asked to do a mural
11:28at AIDB, which he did.
11:31And that's one of the reasons he stayed here for a while, was doing that mural.
11:35Once again, he hid in plain sight.
11:42The affable art volunteer, friend of Donald, welcome in the institute.
11:48And then, and it's almost heartbreaking, he meets Sherry Ann Weathers,
11:54a 24-year-old deaf mother of two small boys, and they form a relationship.
12:01A new circle of friends had welcomed 31-year-old Daniel Siebert into their lives with open arms.
12:09But they had no idea they'd allowed a brutal killer into their close-knit community.
12:15Siebert spent much of his time at the apartment of his new girlfriend, 24-year-old Sherry Weathers.
12:22By the 24th of February, Sherry, a single mother of two, hadn't turned up at the school for almost a
12:30week.
12:31Her concerned friends contacted the authorities.
12:35In February 1986, the police department received a call for a welfare check at Sunrise Apartments in Talladega.
12:45Police were dispatched. Officer Tom Byrman was the first on the scene.
12:49When he entered Sherry Weathers' apartment, he discovered the bodies of Sherry Weathers and the two boys.
12:55He immediately backed out, locked the door, and called for investigation.
13:00Eugene was joined on the case by an investigator from the district attorney's office, Dennis Surrett.
13:08We arrived at the apartments, and the police department had already had the scene roped off.
13:13And we met the other investigators, went into the apartment, and as you walk into the room, there's a bedroom,
13:20and then there's a living room, and there's a kitchen.
13:22And right in the center of the living room and the kitchen, you see three bodies.
13:28It's quite horrible.
13:30I haven't forgotten it after all these years.
13:35One of the next-door neighbors had heard the two little boys playing in the tub.
13:38He got them out of the bed.
13:40He strangled the two little boys.
13:42He actually woke them up because they were in bed asleep.
13:46He wanted them to know that they were being killed.
13:49He wanted them to feel that fear.
13:53And he'd stack their bodies on top of the mother.
13:56It looked like it formed a cross.
13:58That's my first impression.
14:00Sherry Weathers and her two sons, five-year-old Chad and four-year-old Joseph,
14:06had been strangled to death five days earlier on the 19th of February.
14:11It was a sickening scene, even for seasoned detectives.
14:16But the team knew they needed to stay professional
14:19and not let their emotions get in the way of their police work.
14:24You know the minute you walk into that scene,
14:27you know this is a death penalty case.
14:30And you know things have to be done differently.
14:33Everything has to be perfect.
14:35Everything has to be exact.
14:36Everything has to be documented.
14:37I's dotted, T's crossed, because you know where this is headed to.
14:41Because you know a murder of two or more,
14:43it's going to be a death penalty case.
14:44And then the emotional part hits you.
14:47You know, this is a young mother.
14:48This is two young children having their lives ahead of them.
14:53What kind of person would do this?
14:55I mean, it mostly hits you.
14:58That's the second thing.
14:59The reality is what you got, then the mostly you're hit.
15:03You know, especially if you have children.
15:06When you see something like that,
15:07you can't help but think about your own child.
15:10This could happen to my child, too.
15:12It's something that you don't, you just don't forget about it.
15:16Just as the two investigators were getting to grips with their Halloween day,
15:21some more worrying news came in.
15:24We're in the middle of processing that scene.
15:26We'd been there probably two or three hours processing the scene for evidence.
15:30And then we were notified that Linda Jarman, who was a friend of Sherry Weathers,
15:35she did not show up for classes that day.
15:38She lived in an adjoining apartment, not to this building, but to the next building.
15:43So Dennis and I went to her apartment, and we discovered her on the bed in the bedroom,
15:50and she'd been strangled.
15:5233-year-old Linda Jarman, a deaf teacher at the same institute where Sherry was a student,
15:59had been murdered in cold blood.
16:01He used a sock and just strangled her in her own bed.
16:06Of course, most people don't know what a VCR is these days and times,
16:09but back in those days, VCR was worth some money,
16:11so he stole her VCR in order to get money to travel further.
16:16Linda Jarman's cream-coloured car was also missing.
16:20The team would report their findings to former Talladega County District Attorney Robert Rumsey.
16:29The evidence would show that after he strangled Sherry and Chad and Joey,
16:36that he went to Linda Jarman's apartment telling her that he had had a fight with Sherry
16:42and could he sleep on her couch.
16:45When she went back to bed and went to sleep,
16:48then he went in and he strangled her to get her car to leave.
16:52After speaking to acquaintances and colleagues of Sherry and Linda,
16:56the detectives soon had a number one suspect,
16:59who they discovered had been using a different alias.
17:03At that point, we learned the name Daniel Spence from the people at the school.
17:08And we start running him in the computer to see if we find out Daniel Spence,
17:12who he is, where he is, everything we can find out.
17:15And it's determined that his name is actually Daniel Lee Siebert.
17:19Once we developed him as a suspect and got his true identity,
17:24we put a nationwide pickup out on Danny Siebert and Linda Jarman's car.
17:29He quickly became the prime suspect because Daniel Spence wasn't here,
17:34and Linda Jarman's car was gone.
17:38As the duo headed to Siebert's apartment building,
17:42they soon discovered there was another potential victim.
17:46So we go knocking on the door and there's no answer at the door.
17:52A neighbor comes out and says, why are you here?
17:55I said, we're looking to see Mr. Siebert.
17:57He said, well, he's not here.
17:59He said, but I got to tell you, my girlfriend's missing.
18:02Well, who's your girlfriend? It's Linda Odom.
18:04How long has she been missing?
18:06Well, two days, I hadn't seen her. She hadn't been home.
18:09Well, do you know if she's ever connected with this guy here, Mr. Siebert?
18:13Yeah, they're kind of friends.
18:15Well, you need to go to the police department and file a report.
18:18In the space of 24 hours,
18:21four people had been found dead and another was missing.
18:25The investigators needed to find Daniel Siebert fast.
18:29And they soon had word from authorities over 350 miles north of Talladega.
18:37We received information from Elizabeth Town, Kentucky,
18:41that they had located Linda Jarman's car right off the interstate in Elizabeth Town.
18:47That's when Dennis and I left here to go there to process the car for fingerprints and physical evidence.
18:53And so they take us to the scene and we go up in an embankment from where the car was
18:58and we find a campsite.
18:59We uncover a campsite.
19:01And Eugene and I, we find identification to the boys.
19:04We find information on Shea Weathers and Linda Jarman all at that campsite.
19:09So we're fairly certain at this time we're on the right trail.
19:13It was a huge breakthrough that confirmed Daniel Siebert was their man.
19:19We got Daniel Siebert's fingerprints out of the car.
19:22Plus, by other evidence, we knew that tied to him the type of cigarettes he smoked and the type of
19:27chewing gum that he chewed.
19:29We recovered photographs of women and children, women's cosmetics.
19:34There were also some quite chilling items at this campsite.
19:39There were photos of the Weathers family.
19:42There were drawings of the Weathers family.
19:44And I think this emphasis on those victims is so significant in this case.
19:49This young mother and her two children seem to have quite a lot of importance for Siebert.
19:55Because I think that he didn't feel they deserved to be alive.
19:59These boys were happy.
20:00They were loved and cared for by their mother.
20:02I think he felt a real sense of envy and resentment towards them.
20:07It was something that he wanted to relive.
20:09And I think those three murders of Sherry Weathers and her two children were the murders he was most proud
20:14of.
20:16Despite being sure Siebert was responsible for at least four murders, the dangerous killer remained undetected.
20:24Dennis and Eugene, both of them are excellent processors.
20:30They go and they're in Kentucky for quite a while.
20:34So they were up there several days.
20:37And he's in the wind.
20:39We didn't know where he was.
20:41But we knew that somebody was going to die until he was caught.
20:44In Linda's car, Eugene and Dennis had recovered an address book belonging to 31-year-old Siebert, which would eventually
20:54prove to be an important find.
20:57I had one investigator.
20:58Her main job, I'd say, in this investigation was to stay in contact with non-associates of Siebert.
21:07And she had built a rapport with the girlfriend of Siebert's out there.
21:12And she promised that if she heard from him, she would call.
21:16With every day that passed, the investigators knew Siebert could strike again at any moment.
21:23Each day when you went to work, the first thing you did was start checking tips and leads on the
21:28possibility of where Siebert was.
21:30There wasn't a day that went by that you didn't do something on the Siebert case.
21:34I don't know how many miles that we put on cars going from here to there to check out leads
21:41or information on Siebert or some of his friends or this, that and that.
21:45I mean, Lord, there's no telling.
21:48As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, Siebert's location remained a mystery.
21:55The investigators desperately searched in vain.
21:58But in reality, he was over 900 miles from Talladega, Alabama, in New Jersey, and was about to claim another
22:07victim, 57-year-old tour guide Beatrice McDougall.
22:13Daniel Siebert was in Atlantic City, staying in a hotel.
22:19On March 8th of 1986, walks by a room of a Mrs. McDougall that was a tour guide.
22:29She was fixing up for a reception for a hospitality room.
22:34He would have deduced fairly quickly that she's a tour guide, so she's likely to have some cash on her.
22:40Siebert was determined to get his hands on Beatrice's money by any means necessary.
22:46And he goes in there and kills her.
22:50We don't know at that point that it's Siebert, but he's often in the wind and we ain't got a
22:56clue where he is after that.
22:58He just drops off the radar.
23:01Siebert had stabbed Beatrice twice in the stomach and strangled her to death in an opportunistic attack.
23:09I think that there is just no regard for the rights or the feelings of other people.
23:15It's all about him.
23:16He needs money at this point in time because he's on the run.
23:20He also wants to kill any potential witness to this crime, this crime of theft.
23:25So her life was just not considered valuable by him.
23:29As Siebert remained undetected, the bad news continued for investigators in Alabama.
23:36On the 30th of March 1986, another victim of the 31-year-old artist would be discovered.
23:45We're all actually at the DA's office working on another case, and we recall that we've got a body.
23:51And just outside of Talladega, there's a little cemetery on the left-hand side of Alabama Highway 21.
23:58And there we find a skeletonized body.
24:01No question, it's been there for a long time.
24:03Decomposition has already come and gone.
24:05And we sift through everything.
24:07She's not buried or anything.
24:08She's been laid on top of the ground.
24:10We know it's female, and that's all we know.
24:12And we sift through the pine straw and everything, looking for all the bones, the teeth, and this, that, and
24:17the other that we could find to identify.
24:20And ultimately, she was identified as Linda Odom, the girl that was missing from the next door neighbor of Siebert.
24:26The timeline suggested that 32-year-old cocktail waitress Linda Odom was Siebert's first victim.
24:35Siebert strangled Linda on the 19th of February 1986, meaning he'd killed five people on that one day.
24:43Linda's body was taken to Siebert's apartment, and he disposes of the body by lowering it in sheets out of
24:52the window
24:52and then taking it to a nearby cemetery to dispose of it.
24:57And interestingly, Siebert said that when he was disposing of Linda's body, he started punching her.
25:04I mean, she was obviously dead at this point in time, but I think that was something that enhanced his
25:09feelings of control over this victim.
25:12And I think that that sense of rage as well that he expresses at this point in time, the way
25:17that he's seeing this community,
25:19this community who are so welcoming, who are so inclusive, who are loving towards one another,
25:24this is something that he feels he was entitled to when he was younger, something that he never had.
25:29And these people don't deserve it, according to him.
25:32So I think that's what's underlying all of this behavior.
25:35This is a young girl.
25:38She didn't deserve what happened to her, but she just dumped in the cemetery.
25:44That kind of hurts your heart that somebody is so cruel to do something like that.
25:48What the detectives in Alabama didn't know is that by now, Siebert was in prison in New Jersey,
25:55serving 61 days for assaulting a woman.
25:58When he was arrested for the altercation, he used the stolen social security card of murdered five-year-old Chad
26:06Weathers as identification.
26:09This meant that no one had made the link between Siebert and any of the murders.
26:14So during the time that Siebert was on the run,
26:17he actually used the identities of Sherry Weathers' two boys, um, to, to gain new identification.
26:25And at this point in time, it was relatively easy to do that,
26:28to use a child's identity to get a social security number.
26:32But I think that the significance of this is more than just a practicality.
26:36I think there is something much more meaningful going on here.
26:40By possessing these children's names, by presenting yourself as them, you are owning them.
26:47You are possessing them. They are yours.
26:49And it's that extension of control over your victims.
26:53After serving his time for the assault, Siebert was in police custody again in June 1986, this time in Virginia.
27:03This young officer stops Siebert, and in the car he finds ropes and knives, ladies' belongings, photographs,
27:12just all types of things that just made him very suspicious of this man.
27:18They checked the car, and it was stolen.
27:20So he was arrested for, uh, car theft, uh, being in, in possession of, of the stolen car.
27:28He was using the identity of Joey Weathers, using the social security card as identification.
27:35He made bond, and he was gone.
27:39Siebert was incredibly cunning, incredibly manipulative.
27:42I think he was well aware of the fact that law enforcement wasn't particularly well joined up,
27:48in terms of interstate communication and sharing of information at this time.
27:52And I think he, he truly did take advantage of that.
27:56In August, Siebert was yet again in another state, Maryland.
28:01He assaulted a woman in Baltimore, but wasn't captured by the police.
28:06He then headed back west towards Nashville, Tennessee.
28:11The investigators in Alabama still had no idea where he was, but a breakthrough was on the horizon.
28:19Detectives who'd reached out to people listed in Siebert's address book
28:23had been contacted by one of his ex-girlfriends in Nevada.
28:27She had news that Wood finally cracked the case.
28:31This lady calls from out there and says that she had just spoken with Danny Siebert on the phone.
28:37And he told what time it was where he was at.
28:40And she could hear thunder.
28:42And it was raining.
28:44So the investigator came and then told the rest of us about the call
28:48and that it was raining at that particular time.
28:51With very little information, the investigators tried to trace the source of Siebert's call.
28:59He said it was not easy to trace telephone calls.
29:01But they told us if we had any idea of where he was, it would make it a lot easier.
29:06Otherwise, it could take three weeks to a month to trace it.
29:09I told the investigator to go call the National Weather Service
29:12and find out where it's raining in that time zone.
29:14It was raining in Tennessee.
29:16That was it in that time zone.
29:18We were able to use that information and trace the telephone call to Hurricane Mills in Tennessee
29:25to a little convenience store restaurant there.
29:30It was a stunning revelation.
29:33Detectives could now pinpoint Siebert to the small community of Hurricane Mills, Tennessee,
29:3970 miles west of Nashville.
29:42So I called the district attorney, told them we're going to Tennessee.
29:47He said, okay, I'm coming with you.
29:49And no question we were keyed up because we spent six months and no counting how many trips, not me,
29:55but how many trips with the investigators and stuff had gone running down every little lead that they could come
30:03up with,
30:03which really had proved fruitless.
30:06And, but this is a live hit now.
30:10So we all loaded up in cars, headed to Tennessee.
30:13I called TBI, which is Tennessee Bureau Investigation.
30:16This is what we got going on.
30:18We kind of traced to this location and we're headed that way.
30:22After six and a half months of searching for Siebert,
30:26the anticipation of his arrest was at the forefront of the detectives' minds.
30:32The journey up there was, it's almost like waiting for your birthday party.
30:37We were all extremely excited.
30:39Well, by the time we got there, it was late night.
30:41And we decided not to do anything, but send one out investigator in there
30:47to see if they could see anything to the surface.
30:50Because you had this service station where the car was from,
30:54and then you had a restaurant up here, and then you had another filling station, a restaurant up here.
30:58So one investigator went and kind of knew the owner and said,
31:03yeah, he's been painting some signs for me.
31:06And he'll be in here in the morning to collect his check.
31:09It would be a sleepless night for the arresting officers.
31:14Everybody's upbeat.
31:15Everybody's tired, but everybody's upbeat.
31:17And I don't think a single one of us took a nap that night out there on the road,
31:22because we were just on the roadway waiting for morning.
31:27The following morning, the 5th of September 1986,
31:31the team were ready to pounce as dawn broke over Hurricane Mills.
31:37It's hard to describe what it was like sitting there waiting for him to come around the building,
31:42but I'd always wondered if I'd recognize him when I saw him.
31:46When he rounded the corner of that building, there was no doubt in my mind, that's him.
31:50As soon as he went in the door, Dennis and I were out the door.
31:54We went in behind him.
31:57He wasn't there.
31:59Scared us to death.
32:00We just looked at the clerk.
32:02Where is he?
32:02And she pointed to the restroom.
32:04And we went in.
32:05And TBI and the captain went in and arrested him in the men's room.
32:11And his only question to us was, how did y'all find me?
32:16I mean, he's got about six weapons just aimed at him,
32:18and he's caught with his best down, basically.
32:21We seized his backpack.
32:23We found where he'd been staying in a car, a wrecked-out car behind the station.
32:27And he is immediately taken to the court in Tennessee.
32:31And we contacted our governor and asked her for her plane to fly him back.
32:37Finally, Daniel Siebert was in police custody.
32:40He would never be free again.
32:43I mean, man alive, you can't imagine the relief you feel.
32:46We've got him.
32:47He's not going to hurt anybody else.
32:50And there again, you're thinking of Sherry and you're thinking of the babies
32:53and Linda and Linda Oden.
32:55You're thinking about the MLK, we can put everybody to rest now.
32:58And it's the best feeling in the world.
33:01The police had their man, but the job was far from done.
33:06Detectives were certain he was responsible for the murders of five people in the small community.
33:12Linda Oden, Linda Jarman, Sherry Weathers, and her two sons, Chad and Joey.
33:19Investigators had stacks of evidence against Siebert, but they were hoping an interview with the 32-year-old would uncover
33:26even more secrets.
33:29It was tense for me, and I'm sure it was for the captain, because we were wanting to get a
33:36confession.
33:37This was the end of a long, hard battle for us, and we wanted them to admit what he had
33:43done.
33:45Siebert told Eugene about the five murders he'd committed on the 19th of February, 1986,
33:51and also confessed to the killing of Beatrice McDougall in Atlantic City on the 8th of March.
33:58He showed no remorse for any of the murders.
34:02He wasn't concerned at all, showed no emotion whatsoever, never shed a tear.
34:09You could tell there was no concern in him about what he had done.
34:13And if we had released him right there, he'd have done it again in a few days,
34:17because he had no remorse whatsoever for what he'd done.
34:20I'm told people want to know how he felt about his victims.
34:24He didn't feel about his victims.
34:26He had no feelings for them one way or the other.
34:28He had no feelings for anyone.
34:30I don't know that he really felt anything about himself.
34:34To be honest with you, he just, he had no feelings.
34:37I think he was a psychopath.
34:39I think he demonstrated every normal, or if you can use the word normal when applied to a psychopath,
34:45every possible psychopathic tendency, an utter lack of remorse, an utter lack of conscience,
34:50an utter lack of empathy with other people.
34:53They were simply objects.
34:55Sebert also confessed to another murder that predated any of the other six,
35:02whilst he was lodging with Donald Hendron in Alabama.
35:06It's early February 1986.
35:09Donald Hendron's asleep.
35:12Sebert gets out of bed and borrows Donald's car and picks up a girl called Cheryl Evans.
35:20She's working as a prostitute in Birmingham and Alabama.
35:24He kidnapped her, robbed her, and killed her, and, uh, carried her body to Ohatchee,
35:30and dumped it in a roadside garbage dump, and then just returned the car like nothing had happened.
35:36That brought the tally of victims to seven, but Eugene was certain there was still more.
35:43He had uncovered a telling piece of evidence when searching Sebert's home back in February.
35:49In his apartment, I'd found a road atlas.
35:52I'd gone through the road atlas, and out on the west coast, he had had X's with zeros, X's and
35:59zeros, and he just had X's.
36:01I asked him about those, and he said every place that there was an X with a circle around it
36:06is where he had killed someone,
36:08and just the X's were robberies.
36:11I contacted each of these jurisdictions, and sure enough, each place that there was an X with a circle,
36:16they had recovered a body.
36:19This is basically Sebert's commemoration of the murders that he's committed.
36:24I think every time he looked at that map, he would have felt powerful, he would have felt superior,
36:29and we do often see this in cases of serial killers.
36:33Sebert confessed to killing three sex workers in Nevada and California in late 1985.
36:41The fact that he's targeted sex workers is really significant for me,
36:45because he's preying upon these women's vulnerabilities.
36:47He's well aware that society does not value these individuals as much as it values others,
36:54and therefore he has access to them, he has the opportunity to harm them.
36:59He was also indicted for the murder of Beatrice McDougall,
37:03but never went to trial for this.
37:06Despite admitting to as many as 13 murders,
37:09detectives could only link 10 victims to the 32-year-old.
37:13But for his impending trials, Sebert would only be indicted for the murders of the five
37:20that had been thoroughly investigated in Alabama.
37:23There was five homicides.
37:27Linda Jarman was a capital case because it was murdered during the commission of a robbery or a theft,
37:33of getting a car.
37:35Sherry Weathers, Chad and Joey was a capital case because it was murder of two or more people
37:42pursuant to a common plan scheme or design.
37:44Linda Odom was not a capital case.
37:47He pled guilty to Linda Odom after all of this life sentence.
37:52During three trials over the course of five months between March and August 1987,
37:59Sebert was found guilty of all five murders and sentenced to death twice.
38:04I probably tried 30 death penalty cases or more.
38:10But this one is just the magnitude of it and what makes another human being go do something like this.
38:19I mean, you got a woman that's death that he's intimate with,
38:23a four- and five-year-old who wakes up from their sleep to strung,
38:29goes to another death woman and kills her just to get her car to get out of there.
38:35I mean, just stick in your mind, it'll be there on my deathbed.
38:41I think the sentences that he received were appropriate.
38:46I think he committed the most serious of crimes,
38:49so that deserves the most serious of sentence.
38:52But I think if we were to ask his victims' families,
38:56they're not going to have their loved ones brought back.
38:59I think they have achieved some sense of justice.
39:03But at the same time, I think they were asking a lot of questions
39:05as to how this man had slipped off the radar of the authorities.
39:09This man had committed a homicide in 1979 and he went on to commit more,
39:15so could more have been done to prevent that?
39:18I think one of the things that always moves me most about this story
39:21is that when he was asked about the killing of Sherry-Ann and the boys,
39:25he said, Sherry didn't have anything to say, Joey didn't have anything to say,
39:30Chad didn't have anything to say, and I don't have anything to say.
39:34If there's anything that could be more heartless,
39:37more utterly revolting, more depraved than that remark,
39:42I have yet to hear it.
39:44And this is a man who's snuffed out the life of a deaf 24-year-old mother
39:47and had two children aged five and four.
39:50It is utterly monstrous.
39:55In August 1987, Daniel Siebert began his death row sentence.
40:00For 18 months, the case had consumed the investigators who had worked on it.
40:07Now they could breathe a sigh of relief.
40:12I still think about those two little boys, and always will, I'm sure.
40:20I'm sure Dennis and other investigators do too, because they all had children too.
40:26I don't know what it is, but I know he's a psychotic killer.
40:29And had he not been taken in Tennessee, that's what's so outstanding about the police work.
40:37Had he not been taken in Tennessee, I don't know whether it would have been Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nevada, Utah, or
40:46California,
40:46but somebody else would have died.
40:49He wasn't through.
40:51After numerous unsuccessful appeals throughout the years,
40:5553-year-old Siebert remained on death row for almost 21 years.
41:01On April 22nd, 2008, Daniel Siebert died.
41:06But not from Leith's injection, from pancreatic cancer, natural causes.
41:12In the end, he escaped the death penalty.
41:15I mean, this was a personal type of crime.
41:17This is not something that you're standing 30 feet away and shoot somebody.
41:21This is someone you put your hands around their neck and choke the life out of.
41:25That's bad. Think about that.
41:27Because it takes anywhere from two to four minutes to do that to someone.
41:31And you're sitting there, and you've got your hands around their neck, and you're taking the life from them.
41:36You've got to be enjoying that, otherwise you wouldn't do it that way.
41:39And if you're enjoying something like that, man, you are bad.
41:42And I just wish we had got to let you do it.
41:46I think we felt we cheated for that.
41:50Daniel Siebert was linked to at least ten murders and was convicted of five.
41:55But he never tried to justify his reason for killing people.
42:00For me, what makes Siebert one of the world's most evil killers is the degree of manipulativeness that he was
42:06able to exercise.
42:07He was able to come across as an individual with feelings, as an individual who cared about others.
42:13But those feelings were not genuine at all.
42:16They were simply a performance.
42:19He was an absolute monster.
42:21He was a horrible person.
42:23He really was.
42:25And that's what comes to mind any time anyone mentions his name.
42:30He's a monster.
42:33Daniel Siebert was a callous killer who felt no remorse.
42:37To choke the life out of two children simply because he felt they would never amount to much is a
42:44cold-blooded act that cannot be forgiven.
42:47We may never know exactly how many lives he took, but Siebert's death means he can no longer harm anyone
42:54and will forever be remembered as one of the world's most evil killers.
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43:42You