History's Hidden Killers

She didn't know about the wilderness or the rifle or the map with the X's. What Cindy Paulson knew was that wherever Robert Hansen's Cessna was going, she was not coming back. She ran barefoot in handcuffs across...

Five words. "Everything is going to be okay." Chris Maier said them on his knees, hands bound, staring at a man with a fifty-two-pound rock. He said them to Holly Dunn. He was twenty-one. He was dead within minutes...

She crossed the courtroom. She walked directly at Richard Speck. She stopped close enough to touch him. And she said: "This is the man." Then Corazon Amurao disappeared from public life for sixty years. On the night of...

She told him she'd be his secret girlfriend. She told him her father was dying and she was his only caretaker. She asked him questions to build rapport. She was seventeen years old, blindfolded, in a serial killer's...

On February 16, 2005, a purple Memorex floppy disk arrived at KSAS-TV in Wichita. The disk had been mailed by Dennis Rader. It contained a Microsoft Word file titled Test A.RTF. The file's content was unremarkable. The...

In his fourteen years as the compliance officer for the city of Park City, Kansas, Dennis Rader designed a rain slicker for himself with the word POLICE printed across the back. He wore it on the job. He was not a...

In April of 1985, Marine Hedge was killed in her own bedroom in Park City, Kansas. She was sixty-three years old. She lived alone. Her body was found a week later in a ditch outside town. Marine Hedge lived on...

Factor X was a phrase Dennis Rader typed in a letter to a Wichita television station in February of 1978. He used it to describe what he claimed was driving him to kill. He compared the feeling to a demon. He compared...

Cynthia Dawn Kinney walked out of her aunt and uncle's laundromat in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on June 23, 1976. She was sixteen years old. A cheerleader. Reportedly, she was last seen getting into a beige 1965 Plymouth with...

Twenty-six names ran through these five conversations. Karen Sparks. Lynda Healy. Donna Manson. Susan Rancourt. Kathy Parks. Brenda Ball. Georgann Hawkins. Janice Ott. Denise Naslund. Nancy Wilcox. Melissa Smith. Laura...

Nita Neary did not scream. She ran upstairs. She woke another sister. They turned on the lights. They opened doors. They found their friends. That is who acted first on the night of January 15, 1978, inside the Chi...

The first time, he went out a window. The second time, he went up through a ceiling. Both times, the building he left behind had believed it was holding somebody smaller than who was actually there. Utah had Ted Bundy...

Carol DaRonch was eighteen when she fought her way out of Ted Bundy's car on a November night in 1974. She ran into the road. A couple stopped. She told her story to the Murray Police Department at ten o'clock that...

Before Ted Bundy was the most recognized name in American criminal history, he was a man nobody had connected to anything. In 1974, across the state of Washington, young women began to disappear. Not from dark alleys...