Cold Case Files - Sunday Morning Slasher

Episode Date: October 10, 2017

While police in Michigan and Texas search for what they believe to be two separate killers, women are being strangled, stabbed, and sometimes left alive. When one man is found guilty in Texas, a legal loophole forces Michigan investigators to race to find the link before the killer is released from prison.

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unless we do something. Our story begins in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but by the time we're done, it will have taken us up the highway to Detroit, over the river into Canada, and across the country all the way to Houston, Texas. On September 14, 1980, homicide detective Paul Bunton was assigned to a new case. It was a Sunday morning. Rebecca Huff, a 30-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan, had been stabbed more than 50 times with what looked like a screwdriver. Detective Bunton had seen other stabbings like this recently, and there was one detail that stood out which seemed to connect these murders.

All of them were very early morning, Sunday mornings. It became glaringly obvious at that point that we had a serial killer on our hands. One-third of all murder cases in America remain open. Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare cases. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. Rebecca Huff was the third young Ann Arbor woman to be stabbed to death in just six months. In July, 26-year-old Glenda Richmond was found dead near her front door,

stabbed 28 times. And before that, in April of 1980, Shirley Small had bled to death on the sidewalk outside of her home after being repeatedly stabbed with something shaped like a scalpel. She was only 17. It didn't take long for the local news to jump on a story about a serial killer, and they gave him a name, the Sunday Morning Slasher. It was a shock for the community, especially for the university community. There's women walking around up on campus very, very late at night. It was very shocking. There was a lot of fear, and rightfully so.

Weeks went by, the town full of fear, but Ann Arbor police weren't able to make any headway on catching the Sunday morning slasher. Then, Detroit Police Sergeant Jim Arthurs read about the case and was immediately reminded of his own unsolved murder. A young woman named Gloria Steele was stabbed to death in a similar fashion back in 1974. She was stabbed 33 times in the chest, also in the front doorway of her apartment. Jim called up Detective Button and filled him in on the Gloria Steele case. It didn't take long for Button to see the connection, too. When we looked at the photographs, the wound pattern, the wound type, was practically an

overlay to two of our homicides. Jim Arthur's never had enough evidence to make an arrest in the Gloria Steele case, but he did have a prime suspect, Carl Eugene Watts, who also went by the nickname Coral. I never forgot him because I really felt bad about the fact that we were unable to get a case on him. We just didn't have enough physical evidence, I think, at that time, and I never forgot the guy. Carl Watts had a history of violence and psychiatric disorders.

He assaulted a woman at the age of 15, leading to his first psychiatric evaluation in 1969, and he was thought to have strong homicidal impulses. In 1974, Watts was arrested for assault and battery and confessed to attacking 15 women. He then committed himself to the Kalamazoo State Hospital, where he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. We started doing some basic workup on Carl Watts and found that he was a very, very troubled person. And the more work we did on his background, the more convinced we became that he was our prime suspect. Carl Watts seemed like the perfect fit for this murder, except for one thing. He lived in Detroit, 50 miles away from Ann Arbor.

If Watts was going to be arrested for the murder of Rebecca Huff, someone needed to place him in Ann Arbor on the morning of the crime. You'll see these meter heads on the parking meters here. Somebody's been going around sawing those off. On November 15, 1980, two months after the last Sunday Slasher murder, Ann Arbor police officer Don Terry was working the night shift. He was on the lookout for a thief who'd been ripping off parking meters. But something else caught his attention.

And we saw a young lady walking down the street at 4.30 in the morning by herself. And she wasn't just walking. She was looking around everywhere. The woman was frantic, constantly looking over her shoulder like she was being followed. And she was, by a man in a car. He went down a block and then came back up a block ahead of us and stopped and stared at her again. And then he went up, turned around, came back, stopped, did the exact same thing again. It was very obvious that he had an eye on her and he was following her. He, for whatever reason, decided to go over a block

instead of staying on the main street he'd been on. And when he did that, he had to make an illegal turn. That illegal turn gave cause for Officer Terry to pull the car over. He ran the plates. Back at the station, Detective Button was working late and heard a familiar name come across the radio. Carl Eugene Watts. And I radioed to Don, hold him, I'm on my way.

Detective Button hurried to meet up with Officer Terry. They arrested Watts for stalking and brought him in for questioning. But Watts had been through this before. He knew the drill. He got an attorney and brought him in for questioning. But Watts had been through this before. He knew the drill. He got an attorney and didn't say a thing. Police were able to get a warrant to search his car. It did not yield a lot of usable evidence, but it yielded a lot of things that led us to believe

that he very well may have been our suspect. There were some wood carving tools, that the tools looked remarkably like the wounds. None of them had human blood on them, however. But it just solidified what we already believed about him. As much as Detective Button believed that Carl Watts was the killer he'd been looking for, he just didn't have the proof. They had to let Watts go. But they put 24-hour surveillance on him, watching and waiting to see if he did anything suspicious. Watts knew the police suspected him of murder, though,

and he kept a low profile. After eight weeks of playing cat and mouse, Detective Button got tired of waiting and brought Watts in for questioning once again. And we talked for several hours. I tried not to get too accusatory because I wanted to keep talking with him. But I finally started getting fairly accusatory and he continued to talk to me. And I even got to one point where I says, Coral, I even know how you did it. And I actually got around behind him and I says, Coral, I even know how you did it. And I actually got around behind him and I put my hand around his throat like this. And I said, and you just stabbed like this and kept stabbing. And he practically went limp on me when I did that. And I said, you are a very sick, troubled person. And he agreed with me. He, at that point, just kind of went within himself and said,

I want to talk to my mother. Coral Watts was quite literally sick. He'd been diagnosed by several doctors with mental illness. Watts was also troubled, clearly. But officers couldn't arrest Watts for being just sick and troubled. That's not a crime. Police had no choice but to let Coral Watts go free. They kept watching him, but gradually surveillance had to be scaled back further and further, until eventually, Coral Watts fell out of sight. Off the radar. Gone. I went down there one day and I couldn't find his car. And I happened onto an old employer that owed him money,

and he had stopped by and gave him a forwarding address to Houston, Texas. Detective Button put in a call to the Houston PD to warn them that they had a dangerous man, potentially a serial killer, on the loose in their city. But Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, and in the early 1980s, the city was seeing 700 murder cases every year. Houston PD put surveillance on Watts, but that really only amounted to the occasional check-in. Here's Houston detective Doug Bostock. We would just do spot checks on him at work and so forth, and he was still checking in at work. He was still at the apartment. And after a while, he completely disappeared.

A few months went by. Then early one morning, Lori Lister was pulling into her apartment complex. So I would park right over there that morning and just walked into the courtyard. As Lori made her way towards her apartment, a man came up from behind her and put her in a chokehold. He attacked me like just before I reached the staircase because he didn't know if I was upstairs or downstairs. And he came behind me, but then he pulled me underneath into this patio area here where we were kind of hidden behind the fence there. And I remember at that point thinking, he's going to kill me, and if I don't tell him where I live, he's going to put me in his trunk and bury me somewhere. If I do tell him where I live, Melinda's up there. Melinda Aguilar was Lori's roommate, and Lori knew she would be home. If she led the man upstairs, maybe,

just maybe, Melinda would be able to do something to save them both. She knew she'd be putting Melinda in danger, but if she didn't, she also knew that she'd be dead for sure. She decided to put her fate in her roommate's hands. Lori told the man which apartment to go to. Then he choked her unconscious. Now it was up to Melinda. I heard Lori's keys at the door. Melinda went to the door to let her roommate in. As soon as the door opened, she was attacked. Everything happened so quick. When he grabbed me, he put a knife to me and said that he was going to kill me. So at that time, he was also choking me, and I couldn't breathe.

And then I knew that I had to do something, otherwise I would pass out. So that's when I pretended to pass out. Melinda's ruse worked. The attacker thought Melinda was out cold, so he dragged her into the bedroom and tied her up with a wire hanger. Then he went back to the front door to retrieve Lori and drag her inside. So I assumed that she was out because he was dragging her up the stairs and I could hear her body hitting the steps. The man started filling the bathtub with water, preparing to drown Lori. Melinda could hear him making noises, clapping and jumping up and down excitedly. That's when Melinda knew it was time to make her move.

I opened up the sliding door there to your right. What I did is I jumped as high as I could and did a somersault, and I actually hit my head on top, and then when I came down, I landed on my knees. There was a lady sitting out, you know, out in her little porch area drinking coffee. And that's, you know, I told her I needed help. Someone was trying to kill my roommate.

The next thing I remember is when I was in the ambulance. And I was still blacked out. But I remember jumping up and saying, Melinda, Melinda, is she okay? Melinda's neighbor called the police. As the sirens came, the attacker fled. Lori was taken to the hospital in the ambulance, but Melinda stayed behind. The police needed her help. They'd caught a man running away from the apartment complex and asked Melinda to ID him. I went out there and I had to go to the police car and of course the door was open and they asked me if that was him, and I said yes, and he just, you know, gave me one of those looks.

The man, their attacker, was Carl Watts. Here's Houston homicide detective Doug Bostock, one of the officers who had been keeping tabs on Watts for the past year, ever since Ann Arbor detective Paul Bunton had given them the heads up. I was advised that Carl Eugene Watts was, in fact, in custody, but I was ecstatic. It looked like he was going to be off the streets. We've got one attempted homicide that literally was pulled from the bathtub from being drowned, literally, by a witness. The other one escaped him and could testify.

Prosecutors charged Watts with burglary with intent to commit murder. While they suspected Watts of many, many more crimes, they didn't have the evidence to prove it. For the attack on Lori and Melinda, though, they knew they had a solid case. Now, here's where Corll's case gets strange. On the day that he's supposed to go to trial, Watts agreed to plead guilty to the charge of burglary with intent to commit murder and serve a 60-year prison sentence in exchange for a deal. Here's Sergeant Tom Ladd. Well, the agreement was that he was offered immunity on the cases that fell into the jurisdiction of Harris County in Houston.

Watts was prepared to confess to multiple murders in Houston so long as he got immunity for them. The DA figured Watts was already going to prison for a long time. Here was an opportunity to clear several open murder cases in the process. It seemed like a win-win. They gave Watts his deal, and he got to talking. Here's audio from Corll's confession. You'll also hear Sergeant Ladd asking the questions. Okay, Corll, at this point, we're only going to talk about cases that fall under the Harris County District Attorney's Office jurisdiction. The first case we'd like to bring up is about the female over southwest end of town.

They started with the murder of 24-year-old Elizabeth Montgomery. You grabbed her by the, what, shoulder? By the neck. By the neck? Then what happened? I stabbed her one time. You stabbed her one time. Do you remember what area of the body you stabbed her? Somewhere in the chest.

That same night, he also killed 21-year-old Susan Wolfe. Just for the record, how long was it from the first girl you stabbed until you stabbed this second girl in a time frame? We're talking about, what, an hour, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, hour and a half? Best that you could recollect. Oh, maybe 15 minutes. Then, 24-year-old Margaret Fossey four months later. When you first saw her, she was already in her car driving?

Yeah. Like she was in a small blue car? Yeah. Then what happened? I killed her. After you killed her, what did you do with her body? Watts put Fossey's body into the trunk of the car, then stole some architectural drawings out of it.

Then he burned them. Why did you burn the drawings? I figured you'd kill the spirit. I figured you'd kill the spirit. I figured you'd kill the spirit. When he took something and he admitted it, we'd ask him why. I said, well, it was to help kill her spirit. Now, whether or not he really believed that

or he was just feeding me a line, just getting me off his back, I don't know. But he stayed with that story all throughout the interviews. 22-year-old Yolanda Gracia, 20-year-old Elena Simander, and by the time Watts was done, he'd confessed to 12 murders in the Houston area, including two had been listed as missing persons. Corll even took police and showed them where he'd buried the bodies. His victims were seemingly chosen at random, with no real connection and no real motive. The murders in Houston weren't the only ones Corll was prepared to confess to either. Word got back to Detective Paul Button of Ann Arbor that he'd had the right idea about his Sunday morning slasher all along.

I got a telephone call that said, you need to get down here right away. If you give him a grant of immunity, he'll confess to your three murders. So I got a hold of the chief and we got the prosecutor in. We sat and talked with him and all of us decided, you don't give immunity to a murderer. You just don't do that. No immunity deal meant no confession from Cora Watts. And for Detective Benton, that meant his case had stayed open, officially unsolved. Well, I think the first thing, you get obsessed with the case. And I was obsessed with this case for several years.

It's frustrating. It's a portion of your life that there's no closure to. And I felt obsessed, but the victim's families, there's no closure. And that bothered me a lot. On September 3, 1982, Coral Eugene Watts pled guilty to a charge of burglary with intent to commit murder. And in accordance with the deal he struck with the DA, he received the maximum prison sentence of 60 years. The judge declared, I hope they put you so deep in the penitentiary that they'll have to pipe sunlight into you. The judge declared, On September 24, 1982, Coral Watts was booked into the maximum security prison in Huntsville, Texas.

While he wouldn't serve a day of prison time for the 12 murders he'd confessed to in Houston, he'd be put away, off the streets. He'd be in jail until the age of 88. And normally, this is where our story would end. But the story of Coral Eugene Watts still holds one of the most bizarre twists in the history of criminal justice in America. The twist, and the real end to the story, after the break. I learned something shocking from an FBI report recently. Do you know what the average property loss from just one home break-in is?

$2,316. Think of it. One burglary. Over $2,000. If you tally up all the burglaries in this country, it's worse. The total loss is in the billions. With so much to lose, I'm telling you, it's as important as ever to protect your home. Try it with SimpliSafe Home Security. SimpliSafe protects

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That's simplisafe.com slash coldcase. Now available at Best Buy. Hello, Dick Enberg here, and I'm mighty excited to announce the start of my new show, Sound of Success, right here on Podcast One. For 60 years, I've rubbed shoulders with sports greatness, from athletes in the world of football, baseball, college and professional basketball, golf, tennis, the Olympics, and so much more. Join me as I explore in-depth stories from the greatest figures in the world of sport,

and I'll share a few of my own. Download new episodes of Sound of Success every Thursday on the Podcast One app, Apple Podcasts, and PodcastOne.com. Oh, my! August, 1992. Ten years after Coral Watts went to prison for his conviction of burglary with intent to commit murder, ten years after his confession to, and subsequent immunity for, killing 12 people in the Houston area, Harriet Simander decided to check up on the man who

murdered her 20-year-old daughter back in 1982. I made one call just to check on him, just to see where he is. The person whom I spoke with told me that he was coming up for parole. Herrett was horrified. After serving only 10 years of a 60-year sentence, Coral Watts was going to come up for parole. So she decided to get help

from Houston Victims' Rights advocate, Andy Kahn. To heck with parole. Parole is a moot point. And I asked the question of the decade when I contacted authorities, all right, he's up for parole, but does he have an automatic mandatory release date? Yes. So not just parole, but a mandatory release for a mass murderer. How is this possible? How could this happen? Bear with me here as release for a mass murderer. How is this possible? How could this happen? Bear with me here as it gets a little complicated. Here's Michigan Assistant Attorney General Donna Pendergast to explain. It turned out that as the case went up the appeal process, there had been a loophole. Yes, a loophole. And not one that any clever lawyer discovered on Watt's behalf. One he discovered himself while sitting behind bars.

Apparently, in Corll's original case where he was convicted of attempting to drown Lori Lister in a bathtub, the prosecution had considered the water in the bathtub a deadly weapon. Which is totally fine, except that at the time of Corll's plea deal, they failed to notify him of this. So Corll appealed. If Corll wasn't aware of all terms of his plea deal, the plea deal itself was invalid. No lawyer caught it. Watts caught it. And when it went up the appeal chain, they ruled in his favor and said, you were right, you weren't put on proper notice.

So his crime was kicked down into a lower category of burglary without the aggravating variable. Suddenly, the charge that was supposed to keep a serial killer behind bars until he was close to 90 years old was reduced to just burglary. Then there was the Texas Mandatory Release Law. Here's Andy Cotton again. The way the Mandatory Release Law works, it's your calendar time, known as your day-by-day time, plus good time credits. And Watts, by definition, was considered a model inmate. So he was accumulating good time at the highest rate possible. That put Coral Watts, the model inmate, on track for mandatory

release in April of 2006. So, Andy and Harriet set to work lobbying the Texas state legislature to abolish the mandatory release law. And they do it. Sort of. We did abolish mandatory release effective 1996, but we couldn't go back retroactively and pass this law and keep people like Watts from getting out. Andy and Harriet's work meant that the next Coral Watts wouldn't be able to get out on mandatory release. But it didn't do anything for the actual Coral Watts. The wheels were already in motion for Watts' release, and there didn't appear to be anything they could do to stop it. In August of 2002, with just three years to go until Coral Watt's release, Andy and Harriet organized a gathering of the friends and family of Coral's victims.

They got together on the 20th anniversary of Coral's last killing spree to make their voices heard, and hopefully, spur the community to take some kind of action. I would like to share our memories of Carrie Mae Jefferson. I would suggest to you that what we face here, at this time and place, is a confrontation with pure evil. I want him to stay in that prison, or any other prison where they put him all his

mortal life. The whole world is watching Texas today and judging what goes on. This event wasn't just a therapeutic release. It was bait. We knew it was now or never. You know, we figured if we were going to lose and he was going to be released, we were going to go down kicking, screaming, and fighting, and the whole world was going to know that a serial killer was going to be legally released. As most of you know, Carl Eugene Watts will be the first serial killer in this country ever to be legally released. And I'm asking everyone here, are we going to let that happen?

No! And it worked. The local news jumped at the story. The faces of the murder victims, all known to have died at the hands of one serial killer. These are the faces of the family members left behind, gathering to honor the victims. So they're launching a petition drive, doing whatever they can to keep a confessed serial killer off the streets. One reporter in particular, Doug Miller from a local news station, was especially taken with this story and vocal in its reporting. I covered this case when I was a very young man, and I never forgot it.

Reporters aren't supposed to take sides or take positions, but there's such a thing as a bad guy, and this guy was a bad guy. And the very notion that this man would ever go free was simply terrifying. But because of his good behavior behind bars, the state of Texas must legally free him in less than three years. People telephoned our television station and asked, how in the world can this happen? What can we do to stop it? The truth was there was nothing they could do to stop it.

The governor himself couldn't put a stop to this. The news story spread, as did the people's outrage. Nobody could fathom how this seemingly gross miscarriage of justice could happen. But ultimately, no matter how upset the community was, there was nothing that anybody in the city of Houston could do. You can yell and scream and, you know, be upset all you want, but the law's the law. And unless you can miraculously find a cold case that's 25, 30 years old, he's going to be released. That's right. A decades-old cold case that could now be solved and attributed to Coral Watts,

resulting in a fresh conviction, was the only way to keep him behind bars. That's when Andy realized where he might be able to find such a case. Although it was a long shot. They had really just about run out of avenues when we got this inquiry, and I started having contact with Andy Kahn, and he asked us to begin looking at our old cases. Andy put in a desperate call to Donna Pendergast at the Michigan Attorney General's office, hoping against hope that they might be able to link Coral Watts to any of their open homicides from the 1980s, like, for instance,

the Sunday Morning Slasher murders. It was particularly interesting to me because when I was a senior at the University of Michigan, there was an individual known as the Sunday Morning Slasher. And all these years later, as I started looking into the Coral Watts case, I started reading about it and I realized that it in fact had been him. Donna strongly suspected Coral of being the Sunday Morning Slasher, but she wasn't the first and she didn't have any more evidence than those who'd come before her. So she broadened the search, and she got the Michigan State Police to examine all of the open murders from the late 1970s and early 1980s in Wayne County. That's where Detroit is. Police started combing through the roughly 150 still open homicides from that time.

Here's Lt. William Hanger from the Michigan State Police. We were looking for obviously female victims, stabbing, strangulation, drowning. The problem was being that a lot of these cases were 25-30 years old and during a time period in which there were quite a few murders going on in the metro Detroit area, a lot of these cases, we were having problems coming up with the evidence. Out of 150 cases, police found 35 that could have been committed by Watts and had evidence that was able to be tested for DNA. But the process wasn't fast, nor was it getting great results. It was progressing very slowly. I'd get periodic calls from Andy Kahn saying, do you guys have anything up there?

And I'd say, Andy, we're looking. We're trying. But we knew the clock was ticking. On January 13, 2004, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox went on to the Abrams Report, a national news program, to tell the story of Cora Watts and appeal to the public for help solving cold cases that might involve him. It certainly was worth a try. He went on national TV and he basically explained a little bit about the Coral Watts case and said, if anybody knows anything out there, please come forward. And that brings us to a man named Joe Foy and a cold winter night in 1979

in Ferndale, Michigan. I was on my back porch of my house, probably about 50 feet into the lot. While I was on my back porch, I seen the man raise his hand and bring it down in a slashing motion, and when he was done with that, the body dropped to the ground. And that's when he walked to his car, and he came around this way, just the way I'm walking now, and he was looking at me while I was looking at him. And he stopped at his door, car door, just like this,

and just kept looking at me. The body was that of 25-year-old Helen Dutcher, and Joe Foy had just witnessed her murder. I looked in the face of evil that night. I can't describe it any other way. It was like looking in the face of the devil. Joe called the police and told them what he saw. He gave a description of the killer and the killer's car. He even helped them draw a sketch.

But it wasn't enough, and Dutcher's case went cold. Then, two years later... I'm watching TV, and it's the nightly news, and this thing catches my eye of this man being led into a courtroom. And I just yelled at my wife, that's the guy that killed that woman. It's 1982, and the news report Foy is watching is about Coral Eugene Watts going to prison in Texas on charges of burglary with intent to commit murder. As soon as the broadcast was over, I called the Ferndale police and said, I had just seen the man that killed the woman in Ferndale. And they eventually said they weren't going to do anything because of the plea bargain that they made down in Texas with him. They were satisfied that he was getting 60 years. He'd probably either end up dead or an old man coming out of prison. And I kept constantly calling him, bickering at him, yelling at him,

you got to do something, you got to do something. The last words I got from them was put it to bed, Mr. Floyd, just put it to bed. And I couldn't fight the government. There was nothing I could do about it. So that's exactly what I did. I put it to bed. Joe tried his best to let it go, but he never forgot what he saw, or the name of the killer, which he now knew was Coral Eugene Watts. Joe kept quiet for another 24 years, until 2006, when he saw Coral Watts on TV once again, this time on a national news program, The Abrams Report. Flipping through the channels again, here's that same clip again of Watts being led

into the courtroom. And I'm going, now what is this idiot doing on TV again? It ended up being the attorney general of Michigan. And he's pleading for people, if anybody knows anything on any case of Cora Watts, please help them. And I'm sitting there like, you idiots. I said, don't you know anything about the Ferndale murder? How come no one's ever calling me about this? So Foy wrote down the phone number on the news report and called it first thing the next morning. I came in the next morning and my secretary handed me a pink message slip and it said, Joseph Foy saw one of Coral Watts' murders. And I just looked down and I remember it like it was

yesterday. I said, sure you did. And I looked at my secretary. I said, wacko? And she said, I don't think so. That's Donna Pendergast. Donna gave Joe a call back and listened to his story. At first, she's skeptical. It's her job to be skeptical. But the more Joe talked, the more she realized, this guy's for real. I did believe what he was telling me because he sounded so certain of himself, and so he had details. He sounded like he really wanted to come forward, but, you know, hey, I've tried this before, will you just listen? In the end, Donna was satisfied.

She decided to go for it, and her office issued a warrant for Corll's arrest. Nearly 25 years after the fact, and more than 20 years after his plea deal, Corll Eugene Watts was finally charged with murder. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what you're about to hear in this courtroom will terrify you. On November 7, 2004, Donna Pendergast took her case against Coral Watts to trial. The burden of whether a serial killer would stay in jail or go free rested on her shoulders and on the shoulders of Joe Foy, who witnessed the crime, in the dark, from 80 feet away. Part of Donna's strategy was to show that this murder fit a pattern for Watts,

and in order to do that, she argued that Watts' previous crimes in Texas, and his murder confessions, should be allowed into evidence. Judge Richard Kuhn agreed. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will be hearing evidence that will be introduced to show that the defendant committed crimes for which he is not on trial. Donna told the stories of the 12 women Watts killed in Texas. Each and every one of them, alone, stopped, murdered. But in order to really show the jury what Watts was capable of,

she needed these women to be more than just faces and names. So she brought in the survivors. Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar. He came around and grabbed me. And a third survivor, Julie Sanchez, who'd had her throat cut by Watts in 1982. He grabbed me like this. He went the first time like this. When he got here, he pushed it all the way inside

and then came like this. That's when he cut the rest of my neck and my ear. Did you see the man who attacked you turn around as he was running away? Yes. He stopped complete. Turn around and look at me. And smile.

He was laughing. He was just laughing at me. The defense attorney, though, did his best to direct the jury's attention away from Watts' past crimes and onto the details of Helen Dutcher's case. You're going to hate that guy. You hate him already right now. There's no doubt about that. But when the case really all boils down to, it's going to come down to one single witness. In particular, he questioned the credibility of the lone witness, Joe Foy.

He walked from the front of the car. He walked around the front of the car. Correct. But Joe Foy had been waiting to tell his story for 25 years. He was ready. I went in with a game plan. It was just like a sporting event. I was psyched up. I knew him and I would go head to head, that he would try to discredit me as much as he could. Did you use the word glance when you said you had a glance at him? Is that correct? Correct. You said you could actually use the word glance twice. Correct. You said you locked eyes, but you also said it was a glance. Correct.

You ever have a glance in a bar with a woman? That could last forever, too. He kept saying that, well, how can your memory be that good 25 years later? And again, you don't need a good memory if you're telling the truth. You're able to recognize the person's eyes? Yes. That's what you want us to believe? Yes.

Okay. And if you ask the question again, I'll tell you yes then. I understand. One of the best witnesses I've ever seen. He just, he came across very credible. He didn't let the defense attorney rattle him. And you see him for one second. That's all I needed. He just exuded

credibility. Will you bring the jury in, please? The trial lasted for six days, and it took the jury four hours to find Coral Eugene Watts guilty of murdering Helen Dutcher. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole, the maximum sentence one can receive in the state of Michigan. Two days later, Michigan authorities began making moves to try Watts for the murder of 19-year-old Gloria Steele as well. The effort to keep Watts behind bars was a success. He should be dead right now. He's breathing barro there. The only thing I can say, I hope God escorts his ass to hell.

Watts died of prostate cancer one week after receiving his second life sentence, this one for the murder of Gloria Steele. The story of Coral Eugene Watts is the story of a confessed serial killer who for years got away with murder and nearly walked free. But thanks to the testimony of witnesses, attorneys, and police across multiple states, Coral Watts did stay in prison for the rest of his life. In the end, Ann Arbor's Sunday morning slasher case was never officially solved. But chances are, Detective Paul Button looked into the eyes of the killer he was hunting. I finally looked at him and I said, Coral, I haven't got enough fingers and toes to count the amount of people that you have killed, have I? And he looked around the room and he said, there's not enough fingers and toes in this room. And there were four of us in there. If 80 fingers and toes weren't

enough to count as victims, how many would be? We'll probably never know exactly how many deaths came at Coral Watts' hands, but suffice it to say, Coral Eugene Watts was one of the deadliest serial killers in American history. I mean, here's a guy that 99.99% of the public has never heard about, yet basically he is credited with more murders than guys like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Green River Killer.

But no one knows this guy. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings. Produced by McKamey Lynn and Scott Brody. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're edited by steve dolimator and distributed by podcast one cold case files classic was produced by curtis productions and hosted by the one and only bill curtis check out more cold case files at aetv.com and by downloading the A&E app.