02x01 - A Gruesome Discovery

[bunniefuu]

Narrator:
Secrets in the wild.

Brutal murders.

Beautiful
yet treacherous places.

These are the stories
of the investigators

who solve crimes
in the wilderness.

[ Roars ]

I was really hoping
this wasn´t human remains.

Tucker:
Who is this person?

This was not just
some isolated individual

that not another soul
on this planet cared about.

Was it a m*rder?
Was a suicide?

You always assume foul play.

O´Toole: There really did
seem to be a rise

in these serial K*llers.

Ryan: A woman alone
ain´t safe at all.

Coelho: They have a person
down here who´s confessing

to k*lling people
in national parks.

Is he telling the truth?

Man: Is it possible
another suspect k*lled her?

Absolutely.

It was a true mystery.

And I was like,
oh, my gosh, we got a name.

Coelho: Who would have thought
that her son would come back

in the same position
that she was in

and solve the case?

♪♪

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My name is Don Coelho.

I´m a retired
national park ranger.

In June of 1983,

I got a radio call
from another park ranger.

He said a family
and some children found

what they felt
were partial human remains.

Summit Meadow was my area
of responsibility.

It´s located
on the Glacier Point Road,

and that is the road
that goes out to one of

the most spectacular scenes
in the National Park Service.

I was concerned immediately,
and to be honest with you,

I was hoping it was gonna be
a bear paw.

All the way up there,

I was really hoping
this wasn´t human remains,

and without seeing it yet,

I didn´t know
one way or the other.

The only way to find out
is to go out and take a look.

I had medical training,
and when I saw it,

I realized
this was not a bear paw.

This is...

part of a human being.

Is this a homicide?
Is it a suicide?

A missing person
that we didn´t know about?

I called in other rangers
to help me.

I took over
the crime scene itself,

and Kim took over identifying

what our evidence was
at that point.

[ Police radio chatter ]

My name is Kim Tucker,
and I was one

of the two primary investigators
on the Summit Meadow case.

We had no idea of the who,
what, when, where, why, or how

this hand had come
to Summit Meadow.

Coelho: At this point,
we secured the meadow.

We didn´t know
what was out there.

Part of the forearm and the hand
were lying exposed

near some running water
and mud in the meadow.

♪♪

There was a light colored
Band-Aid,

not still on the finger,
but touching one of the fingers.

It obviously had been frozen
and thawed,

which is normal in the meadow
at that time of the year.

We were hoping we would get
a blood sample or a hair sample

that might tell us
male, female,

maybe race, maybe not.

It was obvious it wasn´t fresh.

It was a true mystery.

Coelho:
The challenge was

we´re out in a wilderness area
in a national park.

You´re not on a city street
somewhere.

Some of us went through
the Las Vegas Police Academy,

I being one of them.

We were taught about
a lot of the crimes

that were going on in Las Vegas.

We do ride-alongs and so forth.

But now coming to Yosemite,

very similar things
were occurring,

but they were occurring

in a very rural,
wilderness environment.

You´re talking wilderness.

Coelho: In wilderness areas,
a person can walk off a cliff.

A person could fall into
a crevasse or down a creek bed,

and nobody knows where they are.

Reynolds: You could encounter
partial bodies

that were found by visitors
that may have been predated on

by wildlife, bears,
coyotes, or whatever.

You could have individuals
who had been r*ped

or beat up

and maybe they´re on a trail.

So you really had
to investigate the scene.

You had to investigate it
and do all that you can

to determine,
what is this puzzle telling us?

Rousseau: Whenever you find
any human remains,

you always assume foul play,

unless proven otherwise.

Coelho: Our job next would be
to start looking for the body.

Tucker:
We called the Mariposa County

Search and Rescue
volunteer teams.

And a lot of their volunteers
were teenagers.

Coelho:
If somebody found something,

it would be photographed,
cataloged, taken as evidence.

I felt there has to be
something else around here.

Tucker: Maybe somebody would
find some piece of evidence,

something that could give us
the next clue,

anything that might
help us learn,

who is this person?

How did they arrive here?
When did they arrive here?

Coelho: We found a lot of bones
inside dens for bobcats,

dens for bears,
dens for coyotes.

Turns out none were human.

Tucker: Well, we knew
we had a fatality,

but we didn´t have
any known missing people

from the immediate area.

So it was very difficult
to think,

well, what is
the next thing we should do?

♪♪


♪♪

Tucker:
Soon after the remains were
recovered at Summit Meadow,

I took the evidence
to a forensic anthropologist

to provide any information
about gender, age, race.

In the Summit Meadow case,
all I had was a forearm.

I can, with my hands and eyes,
examine the bone surface

to generate information
about an individual´s weight,

height, race, sex.

I told investigators
that this is somebody

who has died recently.

They still had tissue.

The hand and the forearm
were relatively small,

and it appears to be
a slightly built female

weighing maybe 110 pounds.

Her wrist and her elbow area

suggested that she was
at least 25 years of age

at the time of her death.

There was no evidence
of cuts, cut marks.

I couldn´t find any.

How they died
could not be determined.

There are a lot of people
that fit that profile.

Given the information
we had available to us,

it would be unlikely
we would identify the victim.

I thought probably
the victim might have died

in the fall of 1982,
but I thought it was conceivable

that the phone had been
out there for at least a year.

[ Bird screeches ]

I came from a conservative,
rural background.

My father worked
for the Forest Service,

and we lived in very remote
areas of Northern California.

I had just turned 19
when I started working

for the National Park Service.

I was the only woman working
in the office at the time.

The winter of 1974,

my supervisor had gone
to the FBI Academy.

While he was there,
he was asked,

"We´re getting pressure
to get women

into law enforcement
in the National Park Service.

Do you know anyone
who might want to go

to a law enforcement
training center?"

He said,
"Well, maybe my secretary."

That´s where I was headed.

♪♪

[ Singing indistinctly ]

End the w*r in Vietnam!
Bring the troops home!

Tucker:
The ´70s in Yosemite were

very much like ´70s elsewhere,
I think.

There were a lot
of social forces changing.

[ Crowd chanting
"Power to the people!" ]

We had w*r in Vietnam,

civil rights movement,

and the women´s equality
movement.

Woman: Women, join us!

Tucker: But it was
a pretty tumultuous

period of time for the country.

Coelho: During the 1970s,
early ´80s in Yosemite,

there was a lot of drug use,

drug sales,
and drug-related crime.

There was a lot of
that kind of craziness.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

I started in 1974.

Because I was
a criminal justice major,

they put me undercover
immediately,

everything from violence
to sexual as*ault.

Criminals go on vacation, too.

Tucker: There was a small number
of people working together

in the law enforcement office
at that time.

There were three permanent
investigators --

myself and two others.

Our attention was
on the Summit Meadow case,

but we had very little
to work with.

Coelho:
We had a bifurcated case.

Who is the victim?

How did the victim die?

There was no DNA.

The Internet hadn´t been
invented yet.

It was all phone calls.
It was all paper.

We wanted to find
the rest of that person

to let somebody´s family know

that their loved one
was found in Yosemite.

Tucker:
We have visitation in Yosemite

from all over the world.

Someone could come
from anywhere.

Coelho: Does anybody know if
somebody who went to Yosemite

never came back?

Does anybody have a car parked
at a trailhead outside the park

or any other vehicles
that were unattended

that possibly could be
related to this?

Rousseau: Over a year´s time
in Yosemite,

we would get half a dozen
possibly missing people.

Some would be runaways.

Some would be who came up
with their boyfriend.

But some would be
to do away with themselves

because they felt they couldn´t
face the life they had lived

wherever they came from.

♪♪

Tucker:
We did have a young teenager

who´d been reported missing
in July of 1981

at another location in the park.

Her name was Stacy Arras.

She had gone hiking
to one of the backcountry

High Sierra camps
with her father.

Smith:
There was a highly suspicious

disappearance of a girl
up in the Sunrise area.

It doesn´t fit a place
that someone

would normally disappear
in an evening,

in a location
in a backcountry environment

where there´s
other people around

but you´re far away
from civilization.

Tucker: She went missing
from a section of the park

that is off the Tioga Pass Road.

That was quite a distance
from Summit Meadow.

She would have had to have
gotten out onto a main road,

somehow gotten to

a very different environment
in the park.

I thought it was unlikely --

not impossible, but unlikely --

that the remains that were found
in Summit Meadow

were the missing person
from July of 1981.

I ruled her out, and I think
most other people did, too.

We had to get word out to other
agencies and other departments.

Tucker: We searched with

the California
Department of Justice.

We searched on
a national database.

Coelho: Kim and I realized
that if we had a homicide,

we don´t know
where that m*rder is.

Tucker: Yosemite National Park,
and likely others,

can attract people
who are drifters,

who are not known,
don´t want to be known.

Smith: Crime increased
dramatically in California

from 1960 into the mid-´80s,

and this thing called
stranger violence.

That´s violent crime that occurs

amongst people
that don´t know each other.

So that´s the scariest
kind of crime.

O´Toole:
In the 1970s and the 1980s,

there were a number
of serial K*llers

that were operating
in California.

Based on the data,
there really did seem

to be a rise
in these serial K*llers...

[ Man breathing heavily ]

O´Toole: ...particularly
serial sexual K*llers

whose motivation is for sex.

And typically, their victims
are people that they don´t know.

These are strangers to them.

And these are what we call
human predators.

They drive around literally
looking for new victims.

And that was really a phenomenon
that had not really existed

or been identified
before the ´70s

and then into the ´80s.

♪♪

♪♪

Coelho: At that point,
as an investigator,

you keep searching, searching,
asking questions.

But we had negative results.

Just a lot of dead ends.

Once the snow came in,
that was it.

There was no way
we could get back up

and do any more searches at all.

We´ve had no inquiries from
other agencies, other people.

We just have to wait.

I think it´s what
any of these officers

around the world talk about --
a cold case.

So you have to triage your time,
your energy, your resources.

But that doesn´t mean
you ever stop thinking about it.

♪♪

In the spring of 1984,
we were contacted

by the California
Department of Justice,

and they said they had a person
who was claiming

to have been responsible
for homicides

in many jurisdictions
all over the country.

He said he had m*rder*d people

in a mountainous national park
in California.

So, of course, Yosemite could be
that mountainous national park.

When I got Kim´s call,
she was obviously excited

that we may have a break
in the case.

Tucker: So that´s how we first
learned of Henry Lee Lucas.

♪♪

In the spring of 1984,
Kim called and said,

"They have a new lead.

There´s a serial k*ller who´s
confessing to k*lling people

all over the United States.

It´s Henry Lucas."

We had no knowledge about
Henry Lucas at all.

Is he telling the truth?

Don and I were both feeling
like he could be responsible

for this unidentified woman
in Yosemite.

♪♪

♪♪

My name is Phil Ryan.

I´m a retired Texas Ranger.

What the Texas Ranger do is
assist local law enforcement.

You have an assigned territory.

Mine was four counties.

One of my counties
was Montague,

and it was
one of my poorer counties.

Montague is a real small town.

The sheriff called me
about a missing person

in September 1982.

He felt like foul play
might have been involved.

It was an 82-year-old woman
named Kate Rich

out of Ringgold, Texas,

and her daughters
hadn´t heard from her,

and they noticed that she had
a pet cat that hadn´t been fed.

And that never happens
with Kate.

So we started out initially
just surveying the house.

Then a Highway Department
employee found her purse

on the side of the road.

So that told me that she´s dead.

We just got to find her body.

♪♪

We got contacted by two or three
daughters of Kate Rich´s,

and they said
that they´ve run a guy

by the name of Henry Lee Lucas
and a little girl

by the name of Becky Powell
out of their mom´s house.

Cuba: They were supposed
to keep the house clean

and do her bookkeeping.

What the relatives discovered
was they were siphoning funds.

Henry was 46.
Becky was 15 years old.

And they were passing themselves
off as husband and wife.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

Cuba: Becky Powell was
a little girl

who came from a dysfunctional
family where there was nothing

most of us would consider
a normal lifestyle.

She gravitated toward Henry,
we think,

because he watched after her.

He would take care of her.

I think the relationship
started that way.

Ryan: Lucas, at that time, was
living in the House of Prayer.

It was an old chicken farm
that was turned into a church.

First thing I did with my part
of the investigation

was interview everybody
at the House of Prayer church.

And that´s when I also found out

that Becky Powell
was also missing.

Henry left with her
and came back without her.

♪♪

♪♪

We pull up there, and I told him

we were investigating
a missing Kate Rich.

He said,
"Oh, no, I love that woman."

Henry was unkempt,

usually had body odor,

and he had one eye.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

My sense is Henry had a low IQ

but a high street smart
in conning people.

He kept changing his story.

He told me Becky had left
and went to Florida,

and he said Kate and Becky
both were in California

with Kate Rich´s daughter.

I knew he was lying.

♪♪

In the back of my mind,
I thought that

Henry got mad and k*lled Becky,

and then Kate figured it out,

and then he had to k*ll her.

Oh, I could prove he was lying,

but with no evidence,
what do you do, you know?

I knew only a confession
was my best bet.

Eventually, I found out
that Henry had been

in possession of a firearm.

In Texas,
if you´re a convicted felon,

it´s against the law.

Cuba:
When he was arrested,

he says he was put
in a cold cell,

and that was to get him
so uncomfortable

that he finally said
to the jailer,

"I´ve done some bad things"

and he wanted to record it.

Ryan: He said, "I can take you
to where Becky´s body is.

It´s not a pretty sight,

but I can only show you
of what´s left of Kate."

♪♪

He told me that he had
this problem with, uh...

desiring dead people,
sex with dead people

and animals.

You´ve got to mask your feelings
as best you can

when you´re taking confessions.

But some of that stuff
makes you want

to reach across the table
and strangle ´em.

Try not to damage the meadow
the best we can.

Coelho: We´ve got a human being
laying dead up there.

We don´t know really
what ever happened to her.

This was not just
some isolated individual

that not another soul
on this planet cared about.

It was hard.

Summit Meadow is not
so heavily trafficked.

There are locations
where you can get in tree cover

where you would not likely
to be observed.

Coelho: It could be a great
place to do a body dump

because animals
in the wilderness

start feeding on human remains
or destroy bones.

It doesn´t mean that person
was k*lled in the national park.

They could have been k*lled
anywhere and dropped off there.

Coelho: I sat here
and just took my time

looking into the forest
to see,

if the remains were here,

then could there be
a body up there?

Right.

We didn´t know if it was
a crime of violence

where they chopped the arm off
and threw the limbs

away from the road.

♪♪

♪♪

Ryan: Henry walked me out to
the m*rder scene of Becky was,

and he he told me,
"If you dig right here,

you´ll find a pillowcase
with some of her in it,

and then her legs
will be out in this direction.

Her head´s in this direction."

And we were able to locate
the whole body.

Henry said he disposed
of Becky´s suitcase

up by the railroad tracks.

And we go up there
and we find it.

A suitcase, some of her clothes.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

There was a mathematics book

that she had been
teaching herself.

And I was reading that book,

and it was --
bring you to tears.

You could tell she was a lonely,

misunderstood, or abused girl.

You´re wishing you could have
known about all that

and got her out of that.

With Kate Rich, he k*lled her,

and then he burned her body
in a makeshift stove

out beside the shack
where he was living.

I did not personally know Kate
prior to this,

but I talked
to family members enough

to where you get a sense of her.

By all accounts,
she was nice to people

and lived a fairly meager life.

She lived to a ripe age, but...

nobody wishes
that kind of death

on a family member or any human.

My name is Mike Cox.

In 1983, I was a police reporter

for the
"Austin American-Statesman."

I come from a family
of journalists.

My grandfather was
a newspaperman,

and my parents were both
newspaper people.

I just didn´t know any better,
that´s --

[ Chuckles ]

The Austin Police Department
had a press room,

and I seldom
even went to the office.

I would go straight to the
police station in the morning

and listen
to the police monitor.

So one morning I hear
that they´ve got a guy in jail

up in north Texas who claims
that he´s k*lled two women

and has sex with the bodies
after they´re dead.

And it looks like
it´s a pretty big story.

When I got there,
Lucas was about to be arraigned,

but I looked on that more
as an interruption

more than anything else,
´cause an arraignment

is a pretty routine procedure.

Ryan:
He was asked by the judge,

"Do you understand that you´re
being charged with m*rder?"

And he tells the judge,
"Yes, sir.

I got about 100 of them
out there."

Cox: All of a sudden,
Lucas just blurts out,

"What about those 100
other women that I k*lled?"

And as you might imagine,
that got my attention

pretty quickly.

So as soon as it was over with,

I wrote my story
in the hotel room

and the next morning
had a banner story

in the
"Austin American-Statesman"

about Lucas.

The Associated Press
picked it up,

and, you know,
it went nationwide, worldwide.

Ryan: When the story that
there might be a serial k*ller

in the Monague County jail
broke,

the town has never seen
so many helicopters,

news media trucks,
news reporters.

In Texas,
a former mental patient,

Henry Lee Lucas,
says he´s a mass m*rder*r.

So far, he´s led police
to the bodies of two women,

and he claims
he has k*lled many more.

♪♪

Cuba:
Henry said victims were easy.

He found mostly women who
were stranded with their cars

or separated from a group.

Ryan: Every night
when I would leave to go home,

I would give him a legal pad.

I said, "If you think
of anything,

write it down for me."

And then he started
drawing pictures of women

that he claimed to have k*lled.

Ryan: And he would draw
victims´ faces

and then tell where they´d be,
what town it was in.

And he would pass those out,

sure we can get these confirmed,
you know?

Cox: Lucas said, "I´ve been
k*lling everything I can

for the last 10 years."

The murders that we know
Henry committed

were gruesome enough
to indicate that, you know,

he wasn´t a rookie.

He had a fetish that...

was pretty bloody.

Cox: There were a lot of things
about him that perfectly fit

the profile
of a serial k*ller --

how casually he would talk
about, you know,

sticking a knife in somebody.

And like any good sociopath,
which I think he was,

you know,
he could be very personable.

Ryan: When you´re working
serial K*llers,

they sort of get their own M.O.

And best I could tell
with Henry,

it was easy catches on the side
of the road of females,

more than likely stabbed.

And serial K*llers
can operate like that

if there´s no connection
to the victim and the k*ller.

Where he messed up --

he k*lled two
that he had a connection to.

Cox: Lucas was born and raised
near Blacksburg, Virginia,

to a very poor family.

His father had been
a railroad worker

and lost both of his legs.

"He just bumped along
on his a*s."

I believe that´s the way
Henry put it

when he told me his father.

His mother allegedly
was a prost*tute

and turned tricks
in front of him

when he was a young boy.

Hickey:
The trauma he experienced
at the hands of his mother,

who physically, emotionally
abused him horrifically,

really damaged him
as a young boy.

Cox:
He had a terrible upbringing.

Playing with his brother
and a pocket knife,

he lost one of his eyes.

They eventually gave him
a glass eye,

but that one eye
was always sort of droopy,

so it was easy to tell that
he had a prosthetic eyeball.

Cuba: His mother would beat him
with a broom.

She had done that his whole
childhood growing up with her,

and it became a trigger.

She had him, is what he claimed,

and he stabbed her in the neck.

And when he saw her fall,
he was so scared

and shocked by what he´d done
that he ran.

He was arrested for that.

Cox: And while he was
in the penitentiary,

he did some time
in a mental hospital.

He was interviewed extensively
by a prison psychiatrist,

and he was released around 1970.

When Henry was told
he was going to be released

because of overcrowding,

his response was
that he wasn´t ready.

They forced him out
of the prison.

Before he left, he told them,

"You will be sorry
if you make me leave."

Prince: We went on several
local tours in Texas,

and the sheriff
would take custody of him

and see if he could find
his crime site.

Cox: All of the officers
that I ever talked to about it

marveled at his ability to say,

"Okay, turn left here,
turn right here."

I did talk to
a fair number of cops

whose integrity I trust,

and they all said,
"He led us to the scene."

Cuba: They went on all kinds
of back roads.

They started
miles from the site,

and Henry got them there.

Calls started coming
from everywhere

from officials who wanted
to interview Henry

for potential crimes
in their areas.

Prince:
Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida,

New Mexico, Chicago, Colorado,
California.

We had about 1,000 officers
come in and talk to him,

look at his M.O.,

look at where he was at the time
their homicide occurred.

We set up a task force,
and I was assigned to head it,

just to assist agencies
from other jurisdictions

that had unsolved homicides.

Cuba: Once they got
to the interview,

they received a list
of instructions from Bob Prince

about how to talk to Henry.

Prince: When the investigators
would come,

I´d always advise them,

"Don´t believe him
if you can´t confirm it.

And if you can´t confirm it,
he´s not a credible person."

He knew details
that people were stunned about.

He did seem to know details

that only the k*ller
would have known.

He would know what magazine
was on the bedside table.

Henry was guiding them
to a crime site in West Virginia

and said, "I remember the
muffler on our car fell off,"

and they all looked around,

and in the brush
they found an old muffler.

He was a walking Rand McNally
of the United States.

He´d been on every road
there ever was.

Prince: If the law enforcement
agency contact us

on a m*rder
and had some evidence,

we would send out
Lucas´s information,

a copy of fingerprints,
and pubic hair.

The boy enjoyed
giving me pubic hair.

I don´t know why.

♪♪

There were cases where they did

actually file charges
against him.

But I think there were others
that were just, you know,

were considered cleared
by his confession

that he had done it.

I don´t think there´s any doubt
he did k*ll a lot of people.

Lucas was convicted
of 11 homicides,

including his mother,
and he actually went to trial

and he was convicted.

And we consider that
one level of certainty.

Cox: The numbers of murders
that he claimed

just kept going up and up
and up.

Reporter:
From the very beginning,

authorities have been skeptical
of Lucas´s confessions.

Yet in the course of interviews

with 450 law enforcement
officers from 30 states,

Lucas has so far
been positively linked

to approximately 150 murders.

Cuba:
He was constantly traveling.

He´s said in an interview once,

"My urge -- I couldn´t quit it."

It was a k*lling spree,
´75 to ´83.

♪♪

♪♪

This case began for us
in Yosemite in June of 1983.

We had no clue as to who
the victim might have been.

In the summer of 1984,

Henry had listed a number
of places across the country

where he was reporting
that he had committed homicides.

And one place that he specified

was a mountainous national park
in California.

At that point,
we didn´t really know

that much about serial K*llers.

You might see something on TV
every once in a while

or read something in the paper
about it,

but I didn´t really equate it
with that.

Tucker: That was probably
my first introduction

to an active serial k*ller,

that it could be real
and it could be here.

According to the Texas Rangers
investigative files,

Henry Lucas and Becky Powell

were living
with Kate Rich´s daughter

in Hemet, California,
between January and May of 1982.

In September of 1982,
he had a vehicle

that was impounded
by local authorities

in Needles, California.

We searched Henry´s car
that was abandoned

and found a knife
and some blood.

Tucker: It was really critical
that the Texas authorities

were able to confirm
that Henry Lucas

had been residing
in an area of California

that was within
a six- to eight-hour drive

from Yosemite National Park
during the time period

we believe
our victim was k*lled.

We just started talking about it
and tried to think,

well, what -- what are we
really dealing with here?

This was the beginning

of a circus
that would never leave town.

Coelho: The fact that we might
be able to interview

the person responsible
for the Summit Meadow Jane Doe,

and that was mind-blowing.

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