Who Killed Jennifer Judd? - Ep.3: The Serial Killer’s Highway

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Interstate-10 is known as the serial killer’s highway among criminologists. Given the brutal nature of her injuries and the fact that she was found dead on a service road running parallel to the highway, Sarah investigates the possibility that a serial killer might be responsible for Renée's death. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nature is a dangerous place. On I Was Prey, the podcast, listen to the life-or-death experiences of people who have survived animal attacks, natural disasters, and deadly parasites alike. Featuring audio from Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Animal Planet. From hit shows like This Came Out of Me,

Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence. Please be advised. My initial reaction to the Rene Bergeron scene was very complicated. I knew it was going to be a complicated case because she was found without her head.

That wasn't found for at least another day. She was found without her tongue. That certainly meant something. And the injury to the body, the clothing, She didn't have all of her clothing. She was very clean. I knew at the time this was going to be a real challenge to try to recreate what could have happened to this young woman. For ID and ARC Media, I'm Sarah Kalin,

and this is Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom, a podcast documenting my three-year investigation into the 1993 murder of Rene Bergeron, a murder that has remained unsolved for nearly 30 years. Previously, on Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom. Do you have any knowledge about Maria Cain's behead? No, sir. I sure don't.

I'll take a lie detector test or whatever I have to do. I have no knowledge whatsoever. She was a drug addict. I mean, she had it bad. I never will forget her. But I call her Maria. But we find out later her name was Renee Bergeron. But she always be Maria Martinez to me.

If this had been a 60-year-old lady that was at a grocery store shopping, I think Cookie would have put more focus on it a lot more time. I hate to say it this way, but she was just a whore. Who cares? I actually feel that's the way he looked at it. It doesn't matter what you heard. The lease was in her name. That was her house.

She wasn't living off of anybody. I think it's important to recognize that there were a lot of tales about her at the time that were not accurate. The injuries to the neck, which involved decapitation, meaning that her head had been physically removed from her body. These wounds, they're just indicative of someone who is in a state of rage, trying to do as much damage as they possibly could. Interstate 10. It runs through eight states, from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida. Almost 2,500 miles long.

It's the fourth longest highway in the country, one of the flagship freeways of the American interstate highway system when construction first began in 1957. And according to some, Interstate 10 is the serial killer's highway. Now, there is no official designation. Reasonable, educated people disagree on which exact stretch of highway is the Serial Killers Highway.

But the fact of the matter is that I-10 covers a lot of ground. It stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Along the way, it hits a number of high-crime areas, including brushing up alongside the Mexican border at Juarez as it passes through El Paso. And while El Paso is a statistically very safe city, Juarez, with easy access to 10, is the third most dangerous in the world. I-10 also hits Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, New Orleans, and Mobile, Alabama. Why are highways so popular with serial killers?

Logistics. That's the first answer. It's easy to kill and then disappear. We did see it in the past with trains as the railroads expanded. There are a number of unsolved axe murders believed to have been committed by offenders who hopped on and off the trains to kill the same way we think of them doing now on the highways. Plus, highways offer anonymity.

This is the greatest tool a serial killer has. Some killers choose the trucker profession specifically because of the ability to move about the country. Victims are often dumped nowhere near where they were picked up or killed. This is part of why there are so many John and Jane Does associated with these kinds of killings.

In 2010, the FBI began tracking serial homicides specifically associated with highways and major roadways. When you examine that data, the highest number of murders over the longest stretch of the highway does appear to be across the bottom quarter of the country, tracking along Interstate 10,

right where Renee's body was found. This certainly factors into my thinking when I first see the Renee Bergeron case, making me believe there's a strong chance that it is the work of a serial killer. First, of course, it's unimaginably brutal. There's decapitation, mutilation, object rape, not to mention the fact that whoever killed her

drained her body of blood and appears to have posed her in that prone position on the grass. Which brings me to the second reason why this could be the work of a serial killer. It looks ritualistic, obsessive, the kind of murder that someone with a sadistic compulsion would commit. And third, perhaps most relevant to this part of our story, she was found on a service road just off Interstate 10,

on arguably the most popular highway for serial killers in the whole United States. Not only did many serial killers travel on highways to commit their murders, many also disposed of their victims' bodies along the highway. Keith Jesperson is the most well-known. But there's Richard Rogers who dumped his bodies at highway rest stops and Jerry Lee Johns who left his red-headed victims

by the side of the road It is my first impression It is the very reason I am asked to look at this specific case So it is necessary to ask Could a serial killer have been responsible for the murder of Rene Bergeron? Do you remember me approaching you about the case? Yeah, you emailed me.

You emailed me about the case. And I was intrigued enough to say, come and let's meet. And so then we did get together when you came up to the cottage. This is Dr. Ann Burgess, a legendary researcher, professor, and consultant in the areas of trauma-informed rape victim interviews, serial predation, forensic psych nursing, homicide investigation, and psychological profiling. You might recognize her work as that of the character Dr. Wendy Carr in the Netflix series Mindhunter,

which portrayed the FBI's behavioral science unit as they basically invented the psychological profiling of serial killers. Dr. Wendy Carr, so you're saying you don't think us interviewing these killers is crazy? Just the opposite. Wendy Carr is the fictionalized version of Dr. Burgess. I mean, imagine. I truly imagine what it takes to bludgeon someone to death. Now, here is what is so cool about Dr. Burgess.

She is a leader in two fields critical to solving unimaginable murders like what happened to Renee. Those fields are forensic nursing and victimology. Basically, what kind of a person commits this kind of crime? And what clues can a victim and their life offer us about who may have killed them? To solve this case, I know that I need to understand both who Renee is and who the person who did this to Renee is. Without either, I'll be as lost as the original investigators. Before we can dive into Renee's case, it is important to rewind and give some more

context to the work Dr. Burgess did on serial killers, the work that was portrayed in Mindhunter. For Dr. Burgess, that work started with looking at sexual crimes. Back in the 1970s, Dr. Burgess was an assistant professor of nursing who focused on forensic psychology. And as part of her research, she conducted an extensive study with rape victims seeking treatment in emergency rooms. From that research, she was able to develop a comprehensive study on the impact of rape on victims,

as well as how best to interview and treat rape in a clinical setting. It's this work that led her to be invited to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. William Webster was the head of the FBI out of Washington, D.C. He was new. He was visionary. He was young, D.C. He was new. He was visionary. He was young, energetic. And he said, we will have our agents at the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy to teach law enforcement across the country. Not only did he say that law enforcement needed to be trained in the area of rape investigation, but they, at the academy, needed to do research. And so because they had to do research, several of the agents were interested in interviewing criminals.

As Bob Ressler told me, how can I teach criminal psychology if I haven't talked to any criminals? So the FBI had all of these imprisoned serial killers they could interview, but no system for conducting those interviews. They didn't get into talking with the suspects. They usually would usually turn that over, and they certainly didn't understand the victim. Victimology was not something in their playbook at that particular time. So I happened to be at the right place at the right time. This is where Dr. Burgess came in.

She was a professor and researcher. She knew that the only way this research could be comprehensive and systematic is if they put a methodology into place. Well, it would be nice if you had a set of questions that you asked each one, and then we could take a look at whether that would make some sense, we could do some statistics, etc. And that really was how the study got started. She believed that the interviewers,

that is, the FBI agents sitting down to talk to the killers, should ask a standard set of questions to known serial killers in order to build up a database of information. Even the order in which they asked the questions was important to how the answers would be compiled and interpreted. At one point, she went so far as to color-code the questionnaire in order to guarantee that the process was maintained across the board. In fact, the first book we wrote was an academic book for the field, so to speak,

on patterns of sexual killing. That's, of course, what it was. But where did we get our sample? Well, I asked Bob Dressler to please give us a list. And he was able to find, I think, 82 serial killers where they thought there had been multiple victims. And out of that, we pared it down to 36. And these were ones that we thought they could get interviews with.

We really wanted them to go out and interview these men. So they did. And during those interviews, they focused on so many things you've probably heard of, probably even know by heart now yourself. How did they treat animals in their childhoods? Did they have a penchant for starting fires? Had there been physical or sexual abuse growing up? Did they choose and stalk victims?

Or did they simply act on impulse in a momentary lapse of self-control? Did they know their victims or pick total strangers? And the men they interviewed, well, you know them too. Ed Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, even Mobile's own Thomas Wisenhunt, to name a few. But Dr. Burgess had her own focus in those interviews.

I was more looking at the psychology and the psychiatric aspect, and that had to do with the upbringing, the child development part, what went on in the family. And we clearly saw the pattern of the absent father. And that always intrigued me, because up until that point, they often would talk about the domineering mother and how bad the mother was, and she did this and that to the child.

But they didn't factor in that there's no father around. And so the mother was really having to do both the discipline as well as the nurturing part of parenting. But the absent father was important. And then the other, I think, important thing that we found out is there was something in each one of these narratives of a very powerful experience that maybe for other people other young boys wouldn't have mattered but it had some type of sexual connotation to it and that seems to be what really hooked the young male child in.

And it could be as young as five, six, seven years old. I can remember Jean Jobert was clearly talked about at age five. He wanted to, quote, gobble up his babysitter. And if you looked at his crimes, even the ones before he started killing, they would have bite marks that the victims in some way would be bitten. And then, of course, in his killing, he had targeted young boys. So just to summarize, what Dr. Burgess finds in these studies is important. Childhood development and factors in the child's surroundings played a role

in sexual homicides. It wasn't just sociopathy or psychopathy. Nurture played as much a role as nature. Remember, at the time of this research, serial killers were on the rise, both in headlines and popular culture, a rise that continued from the 70s on through the end of the 90s. At the same time as pop culture was turning our attention to a new swath of slasher flicks, the newspapers were filled with more and more stories of horror movie-style killers walking amongst us in the real world. It was the golden age of the serial killer.

There are a number of theories as to why serial killers and serial sexual predators seem to rapidly burst forth from the broader population of your typical rapists and murderers, and why, in particular, we experienced a sort of serial killer bubble in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Urbanization likely played a role. a sort of serial killer bubble in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Urbanization likely played a role. More people in one place with greater anonymity. Lead paint in buildings, lead in gasoline, too, and so much more of it everywhere with that ever-expanding highway system.

There's also the fact that a whole generation of men grew up in homes plagued by unacknowledged and untreated PTSD and their fathers, veterans of World Wars I and II. Plus, true crime and true detective magazines were widely available and very popular, marketed to and consumed by boys in their tweens and teens. They essentially were pornography filled with intensely sadistic imagery, linking sex and violence at a critical stage of development in the minds of some young boys who

could buy it at will during a time when healthier forms of porn were simply inaccessible. None of these things acted on their own, but altogether created a perfect storm of developmental impacts. Add that to the important factors of nature, that is, the naturally occurring psychopathy or sociopathy, and the math is simple. More developmental impacts on the regularly occurring number of sociopaths and psychopaths in a population will likely create more serial killers versus, say, your garden-variety, ruthless sociopaths and psychopaths in a population, will likely create more serial killers versus, say, your garden-variety, ruthless, sociopathic CEOs. But this golden age and the newly popular image of the serial killer all led to the government investing considerable resources

into groundbreaking research, like the research that Dr. Burgess did. And that research has proved to be vitally important to our understanding of sexual homicides today. What do you wish the broader public knew about serial predation? I think the public needs to know how long the surveillance goes, how much that the offender gets out of stalking, silently stalking his victim. Just take a store clerk, even if that offender comes in every day to buy a newspaper

or something, that that can be setting up something and where the, I remember one clerk that would say, smile and say hello every, and that would feed into his fantasy. But we had seen that in other kinds of cases. So I think that you cannot assume that the victim is a stranger to the offender, maybe a stranger to the victim, but that person may well have been watching and surveilling the victim for a while. It builds the fantasy. It builds into what he wants to do and how he's going to do it. Which brings us to the Rene Bergeron case. When I presented the information to you what was your initial reaction to to Renee's scene my initial reaction to the Renee Bergeron scene was very complicated I knew it was going to be

a complicated case because she was found without her head that wasn't found for at least another day she was found without her tongue that certainly meant something and the injury to the body um the clothing she didn't have all of her clothing and she had nothing she was very clean there was not like a lot of blood smeared on her, and later determined that she had no blood, that something had drained the blood. I mean, this was going to be, I knew at the time, this was going to be a real challenge to try to recreate what could have happened to this young woman. What at Renee's scene to you presents as an indication of a sexual homicide or possibly at first glance the work of a serial predator? Well, when you go to a crime scene and you want to look at a particular victim, sell the position the victim is in, the clothing or not,

any markings on the body, any items that are there and items that are not there that you might not learn until you talk with someone. Did the offender take anything off of the body, any markings, any souvenirs, things like that? When you only have the victim and you believe that it's a serial killing, and even if you don't, how do you reestablish or re-evaluate the fantasy that was going on in the killer's head?

That's really the hard thing is, and it's easy if it's a robbery, say, because the wallet's missing or items are taken. But when there's nothing like a robbery or say, because the wallet's missing or items are taken. But when there's nothing like a robbery or anything else to explain why the victim was killed, you have to think about a serial killing. There are a variety of indicators that you have a sexual homicide here, even without the presence of evidence of that. And one of the important things of understanding it as a ritualistic crime is how much time that the offender spent at the crime scene. And that could be determined by the various things that are left at the crime scene. Was the victim covered?

Was the victim just left without any type of attention to it? How much time the offender spent at the scene, what he did to the body, why he did the things he did, all would point to the fantasy. So in its simplest terms, the murder of Rene Bergeron and the subsequent crime scene I've studied through photos and the medical examiner's report, is undoubtedly a sexual homicide. And by virtue of how extensive the wounds were, how grotesque they appear to the average person, how long the killer must have

spent with the body, they certainly look like they could have been inflicted by someone who had done this before and would likely do it again. By definition, this means it could be the work of a serial killer. So how do I begin to investigate whether a specific serial killer could be involved in this? Well, I need to turn to the very data set that Dr. Burgess first helped to create. Nature is a dangerous place. Burgess first helped to create. featuring audio from Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Animal Planet from hit shows like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. In order to find out whether a known serial killer could be responsible for the murder of Rene Bergeron,

I know that I need to get access to something called the Radford and FGCU database. Basically, the database aims to track every known or broadly suspected serial killer in the world, past and present. For each killer and victim, there are 185 possible characteristics, like murder weapon, gun, knife, rope, something else, mutilation and its variations, like decapitation,

and any other details relevant to the crime, like whether the victim's body was hidden or not, plus all of the other bullet point facts of the case, like where and when it happened and who the suspects are, if that is known. As you might imagine, this is a comprehensive collection. Because we know serials work in patterns, an extensive record like this allows for comparisons to unsolved cases. As soon as I have access to this database,

I start scouring for any relations to this case. First, I look at the Gulf Coast region, South Alabama, Mississippi, eastern Louisiana, the western panhandle of Florida. What murders show up in this area? Then I look to see if any of those murders look similar to what happened to Renee. Are there any other sexual homicides?

What about decapitations? The decapitation felt like the key to me. Even among sexual homicides, even among murders with mutilation, decapitation is quite rare. However, when I look at the data, there are not a lot of matches. But there's one match that looks promising, a serial killer by the name of Sean Vincent Gillis. Sean Gillis is a serial killer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

less than a three-hour drive from Mobile. As far as we know, Gillis killed four black women and four white women. He himself is white. Some of his victims were sex workers. One was an elderly lady living in an assisted living facility. One was a 52-year-old stay-at-home mom. One was his own housekeeper. His choice of victims is obviously quite varied,

but his methods and signatures are not. All of his murders look very similar, and one of them looks almost identical to Renee's, right down to the position the body had been left in for discovery. His M.O., or the logistics used to find, capture, and subdue victims, was this. Generally, he tried to get women into his car, where he would then strangle them with a zip tie. His signatures, or the elements of the crime that brought alive the fantasy

and satiated his compulsions, were stabbing, slashing, mutilating, exploring the victim's body post-mortem, and sometimes even necrophilia and cannibalism. Gillis is believed to have been active from March 1994 to February 2004, a 10-year run in which he tried to rack up a good number of victims in order to attract local media attention for his crimes. He was jealous that Derek Todd Lee was getting more attention as the local serial killer du jour. Gillis's murders are not a perfect match for Renee's murder, but they also are not dissimilar

enough to eliminate him based simply on scenes. Could Sean Gillis possibly be responsible for the murder of Renee? Could she be one more notch in his belt to achieve fame as a serial killer? Matt and I decide to call a friend at the FBI to see if she can help us out. Hey, Matt, what's going on? It's felony Friday. It is felony Friday. What you got?

We're working on a cold case. Okay. I think I've mentioned it to you before. The lady in 1993 was beheaded and sexually mutilated, and her body was dumped on the I-10 service road in Theodore. Yeah. We've been working on this case for about 16 months now, and we're leaning, we're

not 100% sure, but in 92, 93, Sean Gillis out of New Orleans, who is a notorious serial killer, was operating heavily and doing the same things, beheading, sexually mutilating, positioning bodies. And he's in prison over there there and we know the FBI assisted with their that case in Louisiana. We don't know if we would have or be able to get any access to crime scene photos that you guys took or anything that could help us compare body positions or similar characters well and absolutely let me um the agency said that the fbi did a time one more time ma'am what's the what's the guy's name the subject's name again

sean gillis let me do some digging on this it looks like this may have been shut up to headquarters but new orleans is gonna have these records and if there's any photographs at all associated with anything that they may have processed, I should be able to... Just to jump in for a second, we say New Orleans, not Baton Rouge. Don't worry, this is corrected with a quick email later on. Perfect. And no rush. You don't have to try to push that through today, obviously, but we just... His name's coming up just because of his MO and the way

this girl's found. It's really coincidental. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, how many people, that's pretty heinous. Yes, yeah. Man, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, let me do some digging around. I'll get you what we can get you. All right, thanks. Have a good weekend. All right. You too. You guys have fun. So we're now asking the FBI for a favor. Can we find out if any extensive profile of Gillis was ever created by them? Have they gone back and looked at him for anything unsolved? Matt and I decide to also speak with the detectives in the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. They are the team responsible for the bulk of the investigation into Sean Gillis.

We don't record this conversation. According to the detectives, Gillis did not usually travel very far. Going all the way to Mobile would be unusual for him. This is because Gillis liked to bring his victims back to his house. When he killed someone, he typically engaged in the mutilation and exsanguination at his own home in Baton Rouge. He did this during the middle of the night while his live-in girlfriend was at work as a nurse on overnight shifts. To have done these acts someplace he didn't know or feel safe is extremely unlikely.

But despite that, the team at East Baton Rouge has a hard time ignoring the ways in which the crime scenes and condition of the bodies were similar. The way Renee was found strongly resembled the way one of Gillis' victims, a woman named Catherine Hall, was found. Hall was discovered on a remote dirt road, almost in the wood line. She was supine, arms outstretched in a nearly identical fashion to Renee.

She had been slashed on her torso, and she had been exsanguinated. Because of this, it's hard to not feel like Renee's murder could be connected to Gillis. But as Matt and I dig into this, more and more evidence turns up that makes us question whether Gillis could actually have been involved. Yes, the crime scene looked like his work, but the drive between Mobile and Baton Rouge is three hours. This meant that Gillis would have to drive to Mobile, murder Rene,

bring her back to Baton Rouge, dismember and clean her body, then drive it back to Mobile, where he would set her up on the road, a road that almost nobody even knew existed. That's at least six hours of driving and many more hours of work that Gillis would have to do in a pretty narrow window of time between the end of his workday and the time when his girlfriend returned home. Also, Gillis tended to fixate on his victims prior to killing them. There is no evidence that Rene passed through Baton Rouge in the weeks prior to her death or that Gillis passed through Mobile. Significantly, once he was captured, Gillis confessed to his crimes and provided detail to back up his claims. This is part of his pathology, this desire to have the crimes recognized, even lauded. But he's never confessed to killing Renee.

If he did kill her, wouldn't he have owned up to it in order to claim more of the glory he saw in serial murder? So it seems pretty unlikely that Sean Gillis had anything to do with Renee's murder. But if he didn't, who did? Could it have been the work of a previously unidentified serial killer? Or could it have been someone else who only committed brutal murder just this once? place on I Was Prey, the podcast. Listen to the life or death experiences of people who have survived animal attacks, natural disasters, and deadly parasites alike. Featuring audio from

Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Animal Planet. From hit shows like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. There are countless organisms that make a living off of us. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the thing. We give a lot of attention to famous serial killers, but it is important to acknowledge that the same characteristics we see in serial killings are present in many sexual homicides.

It's often what defines them as such. Someone might have that same fixation, that same obsession with the victim. That is actually key to so much of Dr. Burgess's work. She's focused on the psychology of all sexual homicides, not just the ones from the most famous headlines. And that psychology is critical to understanding a case like Renee's. Assuming you only know the crime scene and the state of the body,

what might you hypothesize about what happened and who might be responsible? Well, we certainly know that rage was a part of that. Anger, rage, there was such intensity, if you will, of injury to this young woman that you automatically think was conflict, argument, what happened, or why was she being targeted? You always want to know why. Why was she at that time, why'd she become the victim? So somebody knew her. That is not going to be a stranger. I never thought a stranger would just do that. He could have just killed her. You know, he didn't have to do all the things that we just described. So the challenge was to start trying to recreate it.

What was near there? Why was she... There had to have been some water because she had been washed or somehow. So that would be something to look at. What were the buildings nearby? Where could this have happened? Because it didn't look like it happened there. So that was not the original crime scene,

that she was killed or something was done to her elsewhere, and then she was killed, and then she was moved into a vehicle of some type and just thrown, I felt just discarded. So not only was it the rage and the anger but it was the misogyny maybe some somebody was really angry at her for something yeah the in specific object rape with the blade in particular can you talk a little bit about yeah indications that gives us yeah there was not only there was insertion into her vaginal area, there was a march to her face that her mouth had been cut. And interestingly enough, as others had always said, it reminded them of a very early 1940s case,

the back dahlia out of California. But there was such mutilation of the she was desexualized that's often a finding that you make so somebody had wanted to absolutely turn her into almost a mannequin it had no no person to her that's really interesting I think that that's actually really key that that the had no person to her. That's really interesting. I think that that's actually really key, that the distaste for her sexuality,

whether it was through sex work or whether it was her relationship with a Black man, that there was something about her sexuality that was particularly offensive. Yes. I feel validated. I feel like I am at least pointed in the right direction if what I saw in the initial scene was so similar to how Dr. Ann Burgess would interpret it. Imposter syndrome is real, and I struggle with it mightily. But at least for a little while, I feel as though I can handle this case, do it justice.

Everything I know about this type of crime, I truly believe I owe to the giants, the pioneers of the field, who came well before me and made my work today possible. But especially that of Dr. Burgess. And that is what gives me even a glimmer of a chance at solving Renee's murder. Next time, on Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom. And I remember my mom explaining to me the difference of love and being in love. And I said, so you're not in love with David?

And she said, no, I just love him as a friend. And it was because she said that he was a good friend and he was my dad's best friend. Hello? Hey, David? Yeah. Hey, Detective Peek. How are you today? I never did ask her who I was looking for.

I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Man, I've been wracking my brain for 25 years trying to figure that out. I wish I could swap my life for hers and bring her back. Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom is produced by Arc Media for ID. You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love it if you would take a second to subscribe and leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.