The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - My Friend, the Serial Killer | 5. Donna

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

In the present day, Steve tracks down Donna, the killer’s daughter, who he first met when she was 12. Nearly fifty years later, Donna describes the harsh reality of growing up the daughter of a serial killer who she loved.   This episode will be released for free on July 1st.   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

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his 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. A quick warning before we start.

This show contains descriptions of sexual violence and murder. Listener discretion is advised. It's late at night, and my producer and I are driving through the mountains of West Virginia. So we're on this two-lane road without, you know, no streetlights, going through what looks like the woods. It's the last leg of a long journey. We're on our way to meet the daughter of a serial killer. Well, for me to meet her again.

I haven't seen her since she was 12. And there are no cars around, are there? I don't think I've seen a single car on this road. Yeah. Just like, what? I mean, the whole space is being cleared out to make room for this evil. And then the phone rings. A name pops up.

It's Donna, Robert Carr's daughter. My producer Dan and I look at each other. Donna has been hard to schedule. Is she about to cancel on us? Yes, she is. Hi, we're going through the mountains, so I guess the connection's going in and out. Turns out she's just checking in.

I assume you have somebody picking you up? At least that's how the conversation opens. Making sure we're getting in okay. But that's not the reason for this midnight call. Donna wants to talk about her father. I do too. That's why I'm making this trip. I want to hear about growing up with a serial killer.

I expect Donna to tell me how horrible it was growing up with a father like Robert Carr. But she says something that surprises me. He was my father. And as a little girl, I truly did love my father. Donna was a daddy's girl. as a child, I did love him. And whether that was right or wrong or otherwise, it didn't matter. It still hurt. It still hurt. That must be very complicated.

It was very complicated. I can't wait to meet you tomorrow. In person. Sounds wonderful. I to meet you tomorrow in person sounds wonderful I will see you tomorrow this is my friend the serial killer I'm Steve Fishman

episode 5 Donna Number five, Donna. Oh, my God. How are you? It's been just a little while. It's been just a little while. How are you? I'm all right.

It's good to see you after all these years. Donna hugs me when I arrive. It feels a little like a reunion. How are you doing? Is this going to be an emotional day? It could be. You're still blonde after all these years. I know.

I know. It's getting gray in there. It's hiding right now. Donna is 60 years old now. She's moved around a lot over the years. You lived here a long time? We bought this about two and a half years ago. She lives here with her husband, her third.

It's a modest home, full of cats and dogs and in the front yard. Are those bees? Is that a bee? Yeah. Oh, my God. You cultivate whatever you call it with bees? Yeah. Oh, my God. You're not scared? You don't get bit? Oh, yeah. I get stung. Donna's taken her husband's name.

Nobody knows it's Donna Carr, huh? Mm-mm. Very few people. Yeah. Very few. Yeah. Very few. Yeah. We head inside, sit down in her living room. Donna lights a Sonoma, an off-brand cigarette. She's trying to save money.

What's your tattoo say? Well-behaved women seldom make history. Oh. It turns out the short time Donna and I had spent together Well-behaved women seldom make history. It turns out the short time Donna and I had spent together had left a big impression. Never forgot your name. Never forgot you. Yeah, I've thought about you quite a bit over the years. So it was a little bit of a shock to hear from you.

Yeah. And what did you think over the years about me? Just wondering what you were doing, how you're, because you were very young when I met you. And just wondered where your career and your life had taken you. And, yeah, just curious. She tells me she even called my old newspaper, the Norwich Bulletin. I wanted to see some of the articles you had written. Why? To bring back a good memory of somebody that, you know, you had kind of a connection with.

This comes as a surprise. I didn't expect Donna to even remember me. And if she did, I worried how she'd react to how I'd covered the story of her father. But Donna's been thinking about me warmly over the years. She's been searching for me in a way. And here I am, popped back into her life. Donna's been on a journey, and it's been a lonely journey. And she's been consumed by it, still is, by trying to understand her father. To hear in his words why he did it, what he did, what his thought processes were. The why, constantly the why. Why did you do this?

What was going on in your head that you would do this to people and to your own children? Why? Donna has spent most of a lifetime searching for answers. Why did he do it? I want answers to that question, too. Was it because he didn't get treatment, which is what I'd written all those years back, or something else, something about the monster within,

the one Donna must know? So, Donna, where should we start? I don't know, there's so much So I start back when Donna was a child in a nuclear family that could seem more or less like other families I ask for a happy memory and she tells me about a camping trip to a Connecticut state park a place called Devil's Hop Yard.

Devil's Hop Yard was my favorite place as a child. Some of the only family moments that I remember. We used to go camping there when my brother and I were small. When you enter the park, it's immediately, it's just very lush and forested. It's always been very beautiful to me. My brother and I would go play by the river. My dad would make the campfire, and I remember we would put empty beer bottles in there and melt the glass. I've always loved the smell of campfire smoke. My father just seemed more relaxed there, more friendly.

It was beautiful. It was very dark there. It was probably my first experiencing the Milky Way. It was just way up, like a transparent cloud. You know, toward bedtime, as we got ready to go to bed, we would sit around and talk a little bit. One, maybe two nights we would stay. I don't even know that we had a tent. I think we slept in the car.

My mom and dad would lay the front seats back and my brother and I would, one of us would make a bed on the floorboard and one of us on the seat. At the time, I did still love my father. What did you love about him? I don't want to say I was his favorite child, but he could always make me smile. When I saw him, I would smile and light up. That was the bond that I had with my dad at the time.

When Donna was about nine, the trips to the park ended. Her father was arrested for two rapes and imprisoned in Connecticut. When he got parole, Donna was a preteen. She still wanted a normal family, a dad who went to work and came home for dinner. And for a time it seemed like things were looking up. The family was together again. I can remember having a good Christmas. He bought a stereo and he seemed actually happy, you know, smiling, kind of joking a little bit. The thing seemed good from our perspective.

But with her father, nothing was ever dependable. We just didn't know when it was coming. He would go from being very nice and doing things for us and buying us gifts to very mean. So you always looked for that fear constantly that he was going to turn on you. Donna had seen him turn on people, people he loved.

She'd seen it from a very young age, from five years old. So we were in Miami living out of the car. And apparently my mother had been holding a $20 bill for my father. They're driving around a rough neighborhood. And she couldn't find the $20 bill. She was looking everywhere through her purse, her wallet. She couldn't find the $20 bill. She was looking everywhere through her purse,

her wallet, she couldn't find it. And so he threw her out of the car. What did he say to her? Get the fuck out. Get out of the damn car. And then took off, turned to me, and I was

probably, I don't know, five, maybe six, and said, I guess you're raising your brother now. Donna's mom is stranded on the side of the road in this dangerous neighborhood. Donna takes her father seriously, and she's scared. And I think it was close to the entire day he made her sit there and then went back and got her. She sat there? Yeah. What else was she going to do? She sat there.

Carr was the leader of the family, no questions asked. When he wanted to move, they moved. And he wanted to move constantly. You know, we'd be in Florida, and then we'd go to Connecticut. And then we'd go to Virginia, or then we'd go out west somewhere. And so a lot of times we didn't even have school because we were living in a car. Just traveling around. I really didn't have a lot of friends

because we would just up and leave. Donna guesses she went to dozens of schools as a kid. By the time she's 12, she's living near me in Norwich, Connecticut, and that's when her mother gets a phone call. I think we were standing in the kitchen. I remember that ugly green linoleum. My mother was very upset when she told us.

I remember that. Her voice was shaking when she told us that he had been arrested in Florida. They were saying he had been arrested in Florida. They were saying he had murdered three people in Florida. I remember my thoughts just swirling. You know, you don't want to believe that of your father. You don't want to believe that he murdered people. I didn't want to.

I didn't want to. I didn't want to believe it. As Donna speaks, cigarettes are accumulating in the ashtray on the living room table. I've been making notches in my notebook for each one. We're up to seven. And now, she starts looking at the pack again. I was just very, very confused, very frightened would be a really good word to describe how I felt. I didn't want my father to have to go to be in prison. This was just a few months after that nice Christmas when her dad bought her the stereo.

But now she knows about the murders, and the chance that she will have a normal family must feel impossible. And yet, in a way, her parents continue to try. After my father's arrest, I guess he had contacted my mother and said that he wanted to see us in Florida at the jail. Donna's obedient mother agrees. Her father had just announced that he is a serial killer. And now, they're all going to be together again like it's another family occasion. Donna's mom got a friend with a station wagon to drive down the coast. And I remember getting to the Florida state line after dark,

and there were police cars everywhere. Donna says some of the victims' families had issued death threats against her and her brother and her mother. And so we were escorted from the state line to Miami, which is a very long way. We stayed in a motel that night, and the next morning we go to the prison, and we're taken into a room to visit my father. Very sterile room with a table and some chairs.

Him walking in, handcuffed and with leg shackles in a prison uniform. Did you hug him when you first came in? I did. We hugged him. If we didn't hug my father when we saw him, it was like the worst thing in the world had just happened. And he would get very angry. So you always made sure you hugged your father when he came in. Did he hug you back?

As much as you can do with handcuffs on, he hugged us back, yeah. Did you feel like he was glad to see you? Yeah, I do feel like he was glad to see us. But I also, at the same time, thought, what's he going to try to prep us for now? Like, what does he want us to say? Donna says he'd coach the kids for his previous court appearances. You know, go up on the stand and testify what a great daddy he was. The family spends about two and a half hours with her dad in jail. Then they have to head back to Connecticut and figure out what life will be like now.

And how could life be anything like it was? Donna, just 12 years old and on the cusp of high school, knows her father is not just a rapist, but a killer. You know, once it hits the news, that's... that's it. Everybody knows. Now, in school, kids would call her a killer. People made me feel like I was guilty. Saying what? What did they say? Your father's a serial killer.

Your father's a pervert. Your father's this. And then they beat you up. I didn't go to the best schools. In school one day, her class is doing a project on current events. Donna remembers one girl went up to the teacher to have a private chat. And they both looked at me, and then she didn't have to do her assignment

that day, because I'm pretty sure it was news stories of my father. You just start shaking. You know, you just start shaking because now, you know, and that just tells you how much everybody knew what he had done and that they knew us and who we were. And you know how you get like an adrenaline rush or a rush of fear and everything just kind of, you go kind of lightheaded and start shaking. That was what my experiences in school were all the time after that.

Donna wasn't even a teen yet and and she started drinking. Heavily. She drank for the numbness, to forget, she says. So when I was younger, in my teens, it was probably peppermint schnapps and beer. Just like your dad? Mm-hmm. I don't want any of his traits, you know, to be honest with you. None. If you share DNA with someone like Robert Carr, it can feel like a curse.

I have become hardened and callous, and I really have a hard time expressing emotion. A bit like her father. You destroyed my life. And he never leaves her thoughts. I can still hear my father's voice in my head. And what does that voice say? I want to know. It's been so many years since I've seen Donna, and I realize that she was so young when we met,

I might never have told her that I'd had my own run-in with her father just before his arrest in Florida. You know, I was hitchhiking back from Boston. I tell her about that ride, about thinking her father seemed like a nice guy, and about that moment of panic when the door wouldn't open. And then about standing over the wire machine at the newspaper months later and watching the news come in.

And it was the story about your father being picked up and confessing to murder. And in that story it said he got his victims by picking them up hitchhiking. How'd that make you feel? Kind of made me feel like that, right? Made me feel like, fuck. You're very lucky. You made it out of the car.

Lots of people have been telling me that lately. I don't usually linger on my extraordinary luck. Lately, when I hear those descriptions of how Carr asphyxiated people with one hand, I picture it. What would I have done? And suddenly I can't catch my breath.

It was only a few months after Carr picked me up that he picked up his last victim, Rhonda Holloway, in Connecticut. He took her to Devil's Hop Yard. The same place her father used to take Donna and her brother and mother on those brief camping trips where they'd sit around the fire at night

and look at the Milky Way. And that is where he raped and murdered her. Devil's Hop Yard is, you know, probably the one happy place that I had with my father. And so I don't know if he did it intentionally, taking her there, or if it was just a good spot, but there's plenty of remote locations, or were at that point in time in Connecticut, but he chose to do it there.

And then, after murdering Rhonda, Carr doesn't stop. He just keeps going. He drives to Florida, kidnaps Tammy, holds her captive for 10 days, and then, just after promising to send her home, he kills her. Then he's back in Miami, raping and raping. It doesn't seem to matter. A 15-year-old boy, a 17-year-old girl. And then, when he's finally caught in the act, he decides to confess.

Confess it all. That's when Donna's life and mine first intersect. I showed up at her doorstep. She was 12, and I was trying to get an interview with her father, trying to appeal to her mother to help me. I remember meeting you, Steve. You know, you wanted to talk to us about what had happened with my father. There was a little knee wall over by our apartment. The knee wall was by a big old maple tree. And you and I sat outside and talked for quite some time.

I had my notebook out, but I wasn't using it. Yeah. And just sitting there talking. I mean, you just asked me questions that I can remember not having any problem answering you or talking to you or trusting you, which was very hard for me at that point to trust anybody. So, but I do remember trusting you. And trust was obviously an issue at that point because if you can't trust the most important person, supposed to be the most important person in your life, you don't trust anybody. I was visiting Donna's apartment as a journalist,

angling for a story. But then Donna's mom asked if I could take her daughter out of the house a bit, where they'd been holed up. I said, yes. I remember playing pinball. We didn't have a lot of pleasures in our life. We didn't have money to go to, you know, do things like that. So, yeah, I remember that.

So it was nice at the end. It was. I remember you playing pinball. I don't tell Donna, but my memory is that she was really angry that day and stormed out of the arcade. I don't know whose memory is most accurate, but it seems that over time Donna's come to see me as a kind of companion in this lonely journey she's on. Donna never did get to read the articles I'd written about her father. She was too young

back then, and when later she went looking, the paper's archives failed her. But I want to know what she thinks of my story's angle, that her father could have been stopped if only the state had given him help, if only the state of Connecticut had stopped him instead of releasing him on bail and then parole. You know, one of the things I think about is, so I was 19 and then 20, I think I probably was 20 when this all happened, and the articles I wrote were very much in some ways about your father's point of view, which was he couldn't get help in Connecticut. And so he wanted help.

He couldn't get it. And that's why this happened. Everything was always somebody else's problem, always somebody else's problem, always somebody else's fault. If the car broke down, even though he had worked on it, it had to be somebody else's fault. Well, that guy at the store gave me the wrong part. Just always like that. I tell Donna that the social worker, Chloe Carl, had vouched for her father.

He told Chloe that he didn't want parole, that he didn't feel he was ready to get out, that he knew he would hurt people if he did, that it seems to Chloe, your father was looking for help. But Donna remembers something different, something that happened when she visited him in Summers Prison in Connecticut. So when he first went to Summers Prison, he was in the security, the high security facility. Eventually, I guess he earned the ability

to move over what was called the farm, and they would be allowed to go out and do day work out in the fields. We would go to visit him, and he would talk to my mother, not knowing that I was listening to every word he said. I was close, but they didn't think I could hear them. One of the prison's fields was right up by the Massachusetts border. He was going to be working on a certain field that day,

and that she was going to drive up, slow down, not stop, but slow down enough for him to jump in the car and then take off. So Robert Carr had plotted to escape. Donna thinks it was her mom who reported Carr's plan to prison officials. She did not want him out. I do not know why he made parole. Because he shouldn't have, after planning an escape. This new bit of information troubled me. I mean, I'd believed that Robert Carr was searching to contain himself. Even kind Chloe sometimes suspected that Carr was cunning.

That the monster knew just what to say to people like Chloe. And to people like me, and maybe once upon a time, to a little girl who loved her father. Now, Donna won't believe anything he says. I don't buy that he did all of this because he wanted help and he didn't get it. If you truly wanted help, when you were out, there were places you could go.

There are counselors, there's therapists, there's facilities. He didn't want help. He wanted to blame someone else for what he did. Donna has spent a lifetime trying to understand her father and to shake free of him as a girl she was his favorite he made her light up even after she knew he was a murderer she wrote to him in prison it was always dear daddy it was clear to me something had happened between them. It wasn't just that she now knew about the murders. She wrote those Dear Daddy letters after that. There had to be something else, and I wanted to know what it was.

And that's about the time that Donna mentions her storage unit. She's got a box full of his papers that she hasn't been able to find, and in there are letters she wrote to her father. There might be one or two letters in all of that stuff that I had written him when I was young. I wanted to read them. I think it's in your storage space. They might be buried in there somewhere.

Worth us all trying to go today? I mean, we could try. Sure. Let's for a ride. That ride led me to write a series of articles which in many ways altered the course of my life. Those articles made me a journalist. Half a century later, I'm taking a ride with his daughter to find out if I'd missed something crucial back then. You want to take the windy scenic route or you want to take the interstate?

I think we can take the interstate. Okay. We chat on the way over. She tells me and Dan she's thinking of picking up and leaving West Virginia. Fresh start again. I would love nothing more than to go back to Wyoming. She never stays in one place all that long. Maybe one more trait inherited from her father.

It's daytime, and I can really see the mountains now. This is what the song's about, right? Country Road? Yeah. Mountain Mama? Yeah, these look like storage units, huh? What does it look like? The storage unit is overflowing with stuff. Boxes of ready-to-eat meals.

Donna's husband is a bit of a survivalist. Papers, things from our old hemp business. Throw bags. I climb on top of a small mountain of boxes. If I fall, it'll be great for the podcast. Well, we don't want you to fall. There's service up in here. Well, there's a bunch of cardboard boxes down here. I can't believe how much crap we have in here.

Oh, my God. You should see my basement. A half hour goes by. We're all getting discouraged. And then, at the very bottom of a stack of half a dozen boxes, there's one with papers. This is it, baby. Robert F. Carr III.

Yep. We found it. Wow. I got a little shiver, really, going up and down my spine. I actually can't believe we found it. Me either. Yeah. We rush back to the car. The box is crumbling. I can't wait, and I start picking documents to the car. The box is crumbling.

I can't wait, and I start picking documents off the top. Not sure what I'm going to find. Psychiatric report. Wow. There's a lot in here. Let's see what this says. There was no evidence of delusional thinking, although he talked about having given statements... So Robert Carr is sane.

Hmm. By the time we get back to Donna's house, she's already ordered pizza. It's a party of sorts. And the party game? Look through a serial killer's archives. I drop the box of documents on the floor. Sit next to it. It's stuffed.

I pull out something at random it's a Valentine's Day card to the best father in the world I love you happy Valentine's Day love Donna there's a picture of an owl on the cover tell me you give a hoot. Do you remember sending him this? So you sent that when you were 13, huh? What were you thinking? I don't know, it was easier than writing a letter. Honestly, I really do get tired of writing letters to him,

and he wanted long, lengthy letters, so I thought that was kind of my way out of it. But you can see what I wrote. To the best father in the whole world. We knew it was expected. So you didn't mean anything? You didn't mean that? No.

I mean, I may have in the moment, probably missing him, but he was far from it. I find other letters from Donna to her father. Dear dad, I love you. I'm sorry I haven't written in so long, but have been trying to get my head together because I was involved in some drugs, pot, drinking, and I finally got out of them. Donna steps out of the room, and I turn to Dan, my producer. These loving letters from Donna at age 15. I don't know what to make of that.

I think maybe she loved him more than she feels comfortable saying now. Her father replied with concern letters, always signed off with affection. They contained advice. By then, Robert Carr had found religion, and for all the problems Donna faced, he had one solution. He urged her to find Jesus. Then she tells us about another batch of letters, letters from her father. I remember being 17, and my brother had sent, he was still writing to my dad, and my brother sent him a picture of us.

And that triggered all the letters from him. In that photo, 17-year-old Donna is a beautiful young woman. Robert Carr had last seen her when she was 12, but now she has long blonde hair to her waist. She's thin. She has blue eyes. She's no longer a child. And I got the mail, and it was addressed to me in his handwriting, and they had to put, you know, the return address as the prison that they were in and then their prisoner number. And opening that and reading even the first few sentences was jaw-dropping. Exactly what he was going to do to me.

He was going to rape me. I ask her about the voice in her head, the one she had mentioned earlier, her father's voice. I can still hear my father's voice in my head. What is he saying to you? When I hear his voice, he's reading his letters out loud. The awful ones? Yes.

I can remember exactly what his voice sounded like. I'll never forget it. When I'm hearing the things that he said in the letters, in his voice, he's very soft-spoken. It's very calm. Just matter-of-factly. After that, Donna cut off all contact with her father. Next time,

on the finale of My Friend the Serial Killer. I did not want him out of prison. I did not. He was a very smart man. He always believed he would get out.

Really? Always. And my fear is that one day he would. 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. My friend the serial 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. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Thank you.