The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - My Friend, the Serial Killer | 1. Local Man

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Steve Fishman is an intern at his local Connecticut newspaper and a regular hitchhiker. When one of his hitched rides comes to an unnerving conclusion, Steve shrugs it off—until weeks later, when the news breaks that the driver he rode with has confessed to being a serial killer who preys on hitchhikers. Steve sees the chance to get the scoop of a lifetime: a killer’s story, Who better to tell it than someone who almost became one of his victims? Unlock all episodes of Smoke Screen: My Friend, the Serial Killer, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month  thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An Orbit Media & Sony Music Entertainment production in association with Rhyme Media. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Smokescreen, my friend the serial killer. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season ad-free right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. The Binge.

A quick warning before we start. This show contains descriptions of sexual violence and murder. Listener discretion is advised. Tell me about your first big break as a journalist. Okay, well, it's 1975. I'm a college dropout. My dad has recently kicked me out of the house. And I'm an intern at this small newspaper in Connecticut,

which means I get the pizza and the coffee, I work weekends, and do anything I can to get my byline in the newspaper. Now, I love being in the newsroom. It's full of life. I mean, typewriters, police scanners, people shouting. And in the back of the newsroom, there's a kind of closet with these newswire machines. And all day and all night, they pound out breaking news stories. And when there's an important story, bells ring. One or two for a minorly important story, to maybe a dozen bells for, say, the invasion of a country.

Or for big local news. So one day I'm in the newsroom and the bells start ringing like crazy. I rush over and watch as the machine prints out this story. A man has just confessed to the cops that he committed a series of rapes and murders. Crimes they didn't even know existed. And he's a local man, the serial killer next door. Then it prints the guy's name. Wait a second. I know this guy. And it makes me realize I came close to being a victim myself.

I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential rape director. This is My Friend the Serial Killer. I'm Steve Fishman. Since starting out at the Norwich Bulletin, that small Connecticut paper, I've had a long journalism career, won awards, covered a lot of big, dark stories. The serial killer's son of Sam opened up to me.

So did the guy behind the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, Bernie Madoff. But this story about the serial killer I knew, the serial killer I became friendly with, was different. It was personal. And in a sense, it's where journalism began for me. This story has haunted me for years. For decades, really. Which is why, for a long time, I resisted it. I didn't want to revisit this territory. I didn't want to think about the horror of the serial killer's crimes.

But there was another reason I resisted. I'm afraid my younger self got this story wrong. And I haven't wanted to revisit that either. Until now. Episode 1 Local Man. victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so take me back to the very beginning where this story starts.

Well, probably in my parents' basement in suburban New Jersey. I just dropped out of college. All those discussions about enlightenment, poetry, and, you know, whatever. It stopped feeling exciting to me. It certainly stopped feeling important. And anyway, dropping out was kind of a thing in the 70s. Find yourself, remember? So at first, where I found myself was in my parents' house,

diligently trying to be a writer. My parents had this basement. Kind of had small windows, so it was always kind of gloomy. And they had this wet bar that they never used. It had like a blue Formica countertop. And that's where I set up my office. Every day I'd write these short stories out by longhand. Ardent accounts, you know, I don't know, teenage romance in the style of who was then my favorite writer, Hemingway.

Listen, my parents were not enthusiastic about my current lifestyle choice. My father in particular had no idea what the hell I was doing. He wore a suit every day. He worked in the city. He commuted to a skyscraper. And every now and then he would thump down these stairs and he'd say to me, so when are you going to be done? When are you going to be published, these short stories?

It was as if he was asking me, like, what the hell are you doing? I think he kind of thought I was pulling a stunt. To him, you know, I was avoiding being an adult. And then one day, he cracks. What do you mean he cracks? Well, it must have been a weekend. I remember he sat me down at our breakfast table. He's back by the sun, so he's got this kind of fuzzy halo effect on him.

And he tells me, I have to leave the house. I have to leave home. And then he starts to cry. Wait, so he is telling you to leave the house, but that he's crying? Yeah, it's confusing. It was confusing then, it confuses me now. I have this reaction, like, he's crying, so I got to comfort him? It's all right, Dad, I understand. I'll go pack a few things. I think the idea for him of tossing me out of my childhood home must have seemed sadistic, which in a way it was. But he had this idea that at 19 years old,

I should be on my way to taking on responsibilities. So my dad hustles me into the car and drives me, I think it was like 15 minutes away, and says basically, all right, here you are, and dumps me on the sidewalk. And in my memory, he just leaves me on the sidewalk to hitchhike. And the truth is, you know, I was okay with that. Frankly, I hated being in that basement. I knew I had to get out of that dungeon. I had needed to leave college, and now I needed to leave the suburbs.

I mean, if I was going to write anything, I needed to find something to write about. So there I am on the side of that road. I stick out my thumb. You have to remember that back then, it's like 1975. It's just not such a big deal to hitchhike. It's a way to get around, especially if you don't have a car, which I didn't. I start getting rides, and soon I land that internship at that daily newspaper in Norwich, Connecticut. And you know, I figured, hey, Hemingway had been a journalist too. And at that newspaper is where the course of my directionless life changes forever. I mean, I will never forget the first time I walked into this newspaper.

It's like eight o'clock at night. The town is totally dead. But I walk into the paper's office, which is on the second floor, and the place is lit up like a ballpark. So remember, this is back before everyone is on the internet. People still trust journalists. Newspapers are booming. I mean, I could hear it. All the clatter of typing and yelling. It was really vibrant. It was really alive.

And then I sit down with the managing editor in his little office. Oh, by the way, it seemed really old to me at the time, though he was 28. And the managing editor seems confused. I'm not really sure he knew that the paper had an internship program. So he kind of ignores me. He sits across the desk, goes about his business, and gets on the phone with one of his cop buddies. Because I think this guy really wanted to be a cop more than a journalist. And as I'm sitting there, he's got this cop on the line, and he's holding forth, and they're having a grand old time. And then I overhear the cop, who's on the other end of the line, reveal the name of a dead person so that the paper can include it before deadline. And now this editor, my future boss,

stands up and yells across the newsroom to the reporter who's covering homicides, do you have the name of that dead guy yet? And then he turns to me and his face breaks into a wicked smile. As I would later find out, the boss loved drama. He loved competition, he loved journalism, and he loved journalism prizes. I took it all in. This did not feel like college. It felt like there were stakes, there were deadlines, there were dead bodies.

And so I'm thinking, this is going to be fun. So now I fall into the routine of the newspaper. And also, I keep hitchhiking. Sometimes the rides are great. You would get these mothers who would have their children in the back seat. Or, you know, young hippies in minibuses who would offer me drugs and also, you know, dreams of changing my life, like buying a van

and painting it purple and driving across America. And then there were other kinds of rides. One time, a couple of guys took me to the end of a dirt road. And right before they steal my backpack, one of them says to me, don't you know you shouldn't hitchhike? Maybe I'm willfully oblivious, but I figure I've been lucky enough.

I'm going to keep hitchhiking. One weekend, it must have been around the fall of 1975, I'd just turned 20, and I need to get back to Norwich from Boston, where I'd been visiting a friend. So here I am again on the side of the road, thumb out, and waiting for a ride. Do you remember the moment when the car picked you up? So I was on the side of the road, and there's a LeSabre. The car in my memory is kind of a green, you know, a sedan, like a nice enough car, pulled up, and I was just really happy.

But there's this guy, like, nice enough. He had a kind of, like, a bit of a drawl. He seemed to be kind of my size, kind of red-orange hair. He probably was 10, 15 years older than me at the time. I tell him, I'm going to Norwich, and I'm lucky. He says he's from Norwich and he knows a shortcut. Nice guy. Tells me his nickname is Red, like his hair. So he seemed a little bit like a stranger, but not like strange, but a stranger. And we kind of fell into conversation about like so where are you from what

do you do and and he says well I'm kind of an electrician but you know I'm trying to get on my feet I said yeah it's not easy always he said well that's you know I just came out of prison so that's both like a conversation stopper and now I'm thinking, well, this could be a story, you know, like feature a guy just coming out of prison, reintegration into society. Now I'm trying to draw him out about it. And would you be open to doing a story about it? And he says, sure, yeah, sure.

I mean, he's a guy who's articulate, he, sure, yeah, sure. Um, I mean, he's a guy who's articulate, he's friendly, he's open. Fifteen, twenty minutes go by and we're getting to my destination. I jot down his contact information. The car stops.

I reach for the door handle and it doesn't open. The handle just doesn't work. I turn quickly to see what the hell's going on, and I feel panic taking over. We're going to come back to that ride. But first I need to introduce you to a guy in Miami. My name's Ed O'Donnell. I'm an attorney.

Now it's June 1976. Ed O'Donnell is a prosecutor in Miami, Florida, where something strange is about to happen in a courtroom. The case started as a rape case. He got basically caught in the act. So the alleged rapist is awaiting his bond hearing to see if he'll get bail. Before the hearing starts, the suspect motions to an officer in the courtroom, and the officer in uniform walks over, clearly annoyed.

Is this important, he says. The suspect replies, is murder important? He started wanting to talk to the uniformed guy about murders. And, you know, uniformed guys are just that. They don't take statements. They contacted homicide. The suspect is brought from the bond hearing to a couple of homicide detectives. And they came to me and told me that this guy wants to confess to these murders.

And I said, well, you know, let him confess. You know, you never know. People confess to things they didn't do. But let's find out. The detectives give the guy a notepad. On it, he writes four names of people. Two boys, a girl, and a young woman. The detectives don't recognize any of these names.

The suspect tells the cops to go check missing persons. One of these detectives, this guy named Charlie Zatropalek, heads over to the missing persons desk. He starts with the two boys the suspect mentioned. I said, well, I'm looking for two kids that are together. I said, you got anything like that? One of the detectives had to be sitting there. He goes, yeah, he says, I got a case like that. He said, we thought they ran away. I said, I don't think they did.

Okay, consider this scene for a moment. Here is a suspect caught in the act of rape who now wants to voluntarily confess to being a serial killer. The murders he wants to claim are not active cases. They're not even cold cases. No one knew these were murders to solve until he starts talking. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, located at 1320 Northwest 14th Street, Miami-Dade County, Florida, room 518, on June 17, 1976, starting at approximately 8 p.m.

They've brought the suspect to a kind of TV studio they have at the police station. It's typically used to record training sessions, but they've decided to use it to film these confessions. They will be one of the first ever videotaped murder confessions in U.S. history. And much of this tape has never been heard before. The suspect goes willingly without his lawyer.

And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Robert F. Carr III. On the video, the two homicide detectives face the suspect, Robert F. Carr III. They're just a couple of feet apart. Remember, it's the 70s. One cop looks mawed with a mustache and bangs, kind of Beatles style. The suspect is chain smoking.

There's a clock on the wall showing the time and date of the recording. Behind the suspect is a blackboard, as if it's a classroom. The two detectives call the suspect by his first name, Bob, like they're pals. Should you talk to me, anything which you say can and will be introduced into evidence in court against you. You understand that, Bob? Yes, I do. can and will be introduced into evidence in court against you. You understand that, Bob? Do you want an attorney to represent you at this time or any time during questioning? Your entitlement is such constant.

You understand that? That's right. So, you know, he was obviously advised of his rights and told that no promises could be made to him. You know, anything he told us, and we made it real explicit. You know,

we're going to, we're going to find out whether all this is true. Boy, he unloaded. I'll tell you that. They'd ask the questions he'd answer. And then he'd go, he,

you missed this or he'd give you more. I've never seen anything like it. And 40 years later, whatever it is, I've never seen anything like it since. And I've done a lot of homicide work. On the tape, one detective asks Bob a question. Bob, calling your attention to March 1976. Do you have an occasion to be in the Dade County area? Yes, I do. As near as I can figure, I arrived in the Dade County area in Miami on March 25th from

Connecticut. And upon arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary in the crime that I planned to commit. What kind of crime did you plan on committing when you came down here? A rape, kidnap, and rape. I knew that I was going to take a trip. I knew that I was going to Mississippi on this trip. I proceeded to make a list of what items I thought I would need in order to make this trip. And every time I thought of something, I got it on a piece of paper. He's making a shopping list. I knew the knife that was,

that was, that the site of it was frightening somebody. It had to be chrome so that it would show it in black and white. I needed rope, gasoline,

canned goods, paper towels, and first on this list of items was disconnect the door handle on the right-hand side of the car. The door handle

disconnected on purpose. I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential rape victim. Many victims had grabbed the door handle. That seems to be a natural reaction for everybody. That's the first thought. Go ahead, the door handle, try to get out. The minute the door handle doesn't work,

they freeze it, I don't know what to do next. I didn't know what to do when it was me in that seat. So there I am in Connecticut hitchhiking, about to get out of that green sedan, and I'm grabbing the door handle, but nothing happens. Like, it doesn't catch. And I freeze. What are you thinking in this moment?

I'm not sure I'm thinking at all, but if I'm thinking, I'm thinking, what the hell is going on and what is going to happen? Except that this guy seems nice. We had a nice conversation. He's from the same town where I live. And so for a moment, I'm on the edge of panic. But before it escalates, this nice guy interrupts.

He's almost apologetic. He says, oh, sorry, there's something wrong with the door handle. I got to get it fixed. It's warm out and the car window is open. I reach my arm out and open it from outside. I shout goodbye and then hustle along. I push that really weird moment out of my mind. And I start thinking, you know, I need a feature story for the week.

This guy told me he was in a rehab program for ex-cons. He'd gotten a job at a gas station, and I think, that might be a story. A local man trying to reintegrate into society after prison. When I get back to the newsroom, I track down the supervisor of this rehab program, and the supervisor gets on the phone. And he says, do you know what this guy did to get into jail?

And I realize, I don't. I hadn't asked him. You know, I'm still an inexperienced journalist. You wouldn't want to know, he says. In other words, no story. Kind of amazing to me now that I didn't push to find out what crime could be so awful that this supervisor would veto an interview.

So that was it. And then, you know, you had that kind of gray metal desk, and I pulled out a bottom drawer, and I slipped his name and number into a folder and put his name on the tab of the folder, Robert Carr, and kind of forgot about it. Months go by, and I start getting assignments, everything from high school football games to a highly competitive local Easter egg hunt.

I know how that sounds, but I will tell you that I felt like I was in the thick of it, and I was having a blast. Still, really looking to make a splash. Back then, as I think about it now, you know, I was pretty full of myself and pretty eager for the rest of the world to see how important I was or you know going to be and that noisy little newsroom felt like the place where I was going to prove myself looking back I realized I was very ambitious and maybe blinded by my ambition I think that explains what happens next. The newsflash comes across the wire, the one with the bells ringing like crazy. The one that reports on the local man arrested for a series of rapes and murders. I'm standing in front of the wire machine in my tie.

The newspaper had a strict dress code. I can read the story as the teletype is spitting it out, and I start to get more details. It says the man captured his victims hitchhiking, and then it prints his name, and I shiver. Robert F. Carr III. I go back to my filing cabinet and I pull out the contact info I'd stuffed in there months before. It matches and suddenly I realize I'd taken a ride with a serial killer.

A serial killer who got his victims hitchhiking. Who had trapped them with a disconnected door handle. I had sat in that seat, had a friendly conversation with him. And then I had tried to open that door handle, just like his victims must have done. And for a moment, my mind is back there in that car with what I now know to be a serial killer. And I can feel the panic rise in my stomach. But then my thoughts turn elsewhere

because I'm thinking, this could be the break that I've been looking for. This could be a big story. And if I landed, it could win awards. And you know what? My dad would understand awards. And so me, ambitious 20-year-old me, who ducked kidnapping or worse, is thrilled. What a break for my career. I'd met a local man who was a confessed serial killer, and I have his phone number. I dial the number. A woman answers.

I tell her, I'm calling from the Norwich Bulletin. And I say, Mrs. Carr? She says, yes. And I say, I have to come over and see you. That's next time on My Friend the Serial Killer. Unlock all episodes of Smokescreen, my friend, The Serial Killer, ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all of them ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes all at once. Unlock

your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page in Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Killer is a production of Orbit Media in association with Rhyme. Creator and host, that's me, Steve Fishman. Our senior producer is Dan Bobcoff. Our associate producer and production coordinator is Austin Smith. Editorial consulting by Annie Aviles. Fact check, Catherine Newhand. Our mixer and sound designer is Scott Somerville. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. Additional reporting by Daniel Bates, Ben Feuerherd, Andy Tebow, and Francisco Alvarado. Special thanks to Cassie Epps at Otis Library in Norwich, Connecticut.