Elias

On April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot twice in the chest by his own father, with a gun Marvin had given him for Christmas. When police asked the father if he loved his son, he said, "Let's say I didn't dislike him." Marvin sang "What's Going On" and "Sexual Healing," and in 2015 a jury ordered the makers of "Blurred Lines" to pay his family $7.4 million for copying one of his songs. In the video below the two of them sit side by side on a porch, laughing, in one of the rare clips of them together. The father explains why he refused to pray for Marvin to make the Detroit Lions in 1970. He couldn't stand to picture "my boy on a stretcher." By 1984 Marvin had moved back into his parents' house in Los Angeles. He was using cocaine and was sure someone wanted him dead, so he had given his father a .38 revolver for protection. That Sunday his parents argued about a missing insurance letter. Marvin went after his father and beat him, and a few minutes later the father came back with the gun while his mother Alberta watched. Seven months later his lawyer told a Los Angeles judge that Marvin was "the aggressor and the provocateur" and showed booking photos of the father's bruises. Doctors had also removed a walnut-sized tumor from the father's brain after his arrest. The judge suspended a six-year prison sentence and gave him five years of probation, after about 80 days he had spent in jail. Then he said on the record that Marvin "provoked this incident. And it was all his fault." The father sat through it in tinted glasses and barely moved his head. When he was allowed to speak, he said, "I love him right now. And I'm paying a price for it too." He never went back to prison and died in 1998, at 84. Was it a frightened old man defending himself, or a father who had waited years to do it?

17-year-old Carla Walker was taken from her boyfriend's car after a Valentine's dance in 1974 and found strangled three days later. Police questioned her killer that year and let him go after he passed a polygraph. He lived less than a mile away for the next 46 years. Her boyfriend Rodney McCoy was beaten with a pistol in the front seat. Her brother Jim was 12, and he went with his parents to the morgue, where he still remembers his mother's scream: "It was like an animal sound." Their father died in 1987 and their mother in 2015, and neither of them ever learned who did it. Glen McCurley owned a .22 Ruger that matched the magazine left at the scene. He told police it had been stolen from his truck, passed the polygraph and went home, and after the murder he bought a new magazine for the gun he said was stolen. In 2020 a genealogy lab gave detectives his last name, officers pulled a McDonald's straw out of his trash, and the DNA matched what was on Carla's bra. When detectives came to his house he was 77 and joked with them at the door. "You sure got the wrong fellow, cuz I ain't never killed nobody." When he tried to give himself an alibi, his wife cut in: "That's not true, Glen." In the interview room he said he had never seen her, never met her, never talked to her, and then they asked him how he killed her. In the video below, the bodycam at his door and the interview room, with Jim talking about his sister. In August 2021, on the third day of his trial, he changed his plea to guilty and got life. He died in prison in 2023, at 80. Police had his gun and his name in 1974. Did a polygraph let a killer walk, or did they just stop looking?

At 7, Isaac Rogers says Wayne Williams stepped from behind a wall and blocked him on an Atlanta stairwell. His 16-year-old brother vanished after walking him to the school bus. Williams was never tried for a single child, and police closed many of those cases anyway. Between 1979 and 1981 the official list grew to 30 names. Almost all of them were Black children and young men between 7 and 28, and 29 of them were dead. Patrick Rogers was found in the Chattahoochee River on December 7, 1980. On February 27, 1982, a jury convicted Williams of killing two grown men, 21-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne and 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, and the sentence was two life terms. After the verdict police attributed other deaths to him and closed many of those files, even though no jury had ever ruled on them. Some of the mothers never accepted it. Camille Bell, whose son Yusef was killed, told CNN, "Even if it takes 30 trials, I don't care." Catherine Leach, whose son Curtis Walker was killed, said, "Wayne Williams didn't kill our children. No! And we want justice." In 2019 Atlanta reopened the evidence, and by 2021 officials said they had gone through about 40% of it. No public result has settled the case. In the video below Williams explains what he meant by "drop shot," the same words he was reminded he'd used for poor Black children. Then Isaac Rogers describes that stairwell, and he says he doesn't know about all the victims but he is sure about his brother. Williams still says he didn't kill anybody. His next parole review is in November 2027. Did Atlanta catch the man who killed its children, or did it just close the file on them?

Luis Garavito, "the Beast," killed at least 189 Colombian children and kept a diary of each date, place and age. In 2016 he told a reporter he'd be out in eight years. "Killing 200 children comes very cheap," the reporter said. "For what I did, very little," he replied. For years he moved around Colombia posing as a monk, a street vendor or a homeless man to get close to his victims, and investigators say he could change who he was from one day to the next. He confessed in 1999, and the courts handed him sentences that added up to 1,853 years and 9 days. Colombian law capped that at 40, and then he started helping prosecutors. An investigator in Pereira says he drew the spots step by step, "as if he had a GPS," and they found remains without him there. A senator said that cooperation brought his 40 years down to 24. So by the time Spanish reporter Jon Sistiaga sat down with him in Valledupar prison, Garavito was 60 and counting. The investigator told Sistiaga there is no life sentence in Colombia, and when asked if Garavito could kill again if he got out, he said yes. He asked for parole in 2021 and was denied, tried again in 2023 and was refused, and died in custody that October. In the video below, Sistiaga asks him if he should be afraid, when he's getting out, and whether the price was fair. When the interview ended and the guards cuffed him again, Sistiaga says Garavito smiled and sent regards to his children. Families found their children's remains because of that deal. Was it worth it, or should a man like this never have been offered a single day off?

Richard Chase, "the Vampire of Sacramento," killed a pregnant woman in her home and drank her blood out of a yogurt cup. Four days later he killed a mother, her 6-year-old son, a family friend and a 22-month-old baby, then cut off the baby's head. More than a year before the first murder, a worker at the psychiatric home where Chase lived told his superiors that Chase was killing small animals and birds and drinking their blood, and that he would "graduate to larger animals and eventually to people." The staff called him Dracula. In September 1976 he was released to his mother anyway. "We all raised hell about it, but it didn't do any good," a staff member later told FBI profiler Robert Ressler. His first victim, on December 29, 1977, was a man shot while unloading groceries outside his home. The pregnant woman was Teresa Wallin, 22. The baby was Evelyn Miroth's nephew David, and his body was found two months later. Six people in four weeks. When police searched his apartment they found blenders with blood in them and a calendar with the word "Today" written on the dates of the murders and on 44 other days. In the video below, Chase sits on the witness stand at his 1979 trial while that hospital worker describes what he warned about, then the judge explains why the baby's murder alone was enough for the death penalty. Chase told an FBI profiler that Nazis and UFOs were poisoning him and turning his blood to powder. The jury convicted him of six murders and found him legally sane. In December 1980, on death row, he saved up his prescribed pills and swallowed them all at once. Was Richard Chase too sick to be put to death, or did the jury get it exactly right?

Andrei Chikatilo, "the Butcher of Rostov," murdered 52 women and children and was sentenced to death from an iron cage. His first victim, he confessed, was a 9-year-old girl he lured to a secret shack with chewing gum. The Soviet Union had already shot another man for her murder. On December 22, 1978, in the mining town of Shakhty, he stabbed Lena Zakotnova three times in the stomach and strangled her, and two days later she was found in the Grushevka River. Police had blood in the snow by his shack and a witness who described a man just like him talking to Lena at the bus stop. Neighbors had even seen him at the shack that evening. They arrested Aleksandr Kravchenko instead, a 25-year-old laborer who at 17 had raped and murdered a 10-year-old girl. He had an alibi, home all afternoon with his wife and her friend, until police told the wife she'd be charged as an accomplice and the friend with perjury. Both changed their stories, and Kravchenko confessed, then took it back at trial. He got death, then 15 years on appeal, then death again after the girl's family pushed for a retrial, and he was shot in July 1983, while Chikatilo went on killing until 1990. In the video below, Chikatilo sits in the cage at his 1992 trial while the victims' mothers scream at him from the benches. Then the judge reads out his death sentence and asks if it's clear to him. "Clear," he says. Chikatilo confessed to killing Lena and was convicted of it. In 1993 Russia's Supreme Court threw that count out for lack of evidence, and Kravchenko was cleared after his death. Officially, nobody killed Lena Zakotnova. Was Kravchenko an innocent man the state murdered, or a child killer who got what he had coming anyway?

Sam Cooke was shot dead by a motel manager in Los Angeles in December 1964, and five days later a coroner's jury ruled it justifiable homicide. The only witnesses were the woman who pulled the trigger and the woman who had run off with his clothes. He was 33 and one of the biggest Black stars in America, the voice of "You Send Me" and "Wonderful World," and he ran his own record label. "A Change Is Gonna Come" came out after he was gone. That night he drove a woman named Elisa Boyer to the Hacienda Motel on South Figueroa Street. She told police he took her there against her will and tried to force himself on her, so when he went into the bathroom she ran, grabbing his clothes on the way out. Cooke went looking for her in a sport jacket and one shoe. The manager, Bertha Franklin, said he broke into her office and grabbed her, so she shot him. By her account he said "Lady, you shot me," kept coming, and she hit him with a broomstick until he went down. In the video below Cooke sits with Dick Clark eight months earlier and says the best thing that could happen to him would be hits for the young singers he works with. "I will knock on wood," he laughs. Then the coroner's report, and the pathologist Cyril Wecht walking through Franklin's version. Police found $108 in a money clip in his Ferrari. Muhammad Ali, his close friend, said that if Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Ricky Nelson, "the FBI would be investigating." Etta James saw his body before the funeral and wrote that "no woman with a broomstick could have inflicted that kind of beating against a strong, full-grown man." Was it self-defense in a cheap motel, or a story a jury signed off on in five days?

Marvin Gaye was beaten by his own father from the age of 7, and at 44 that same man shot him dead. His father was a preacher in Washington, D.C. Marvin's sister said he got whipped for leaving his hairbrush in the wrong place or for coming home from school a minute late. Years later Marvin told his biographer David Ritz: "By the time I was twelve, there wasn't an inch on my body that hadn't been bruised and beaten by him." He said the waiting was the worst part, because his father made him undress first and let him hear the belt buckle "just loud enough." Living with him, Marvin said, was like living with "a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all powerful king." In the video below, a year before his death, Marvin is asked on TV whether he once tried to kill himself. He says he hates questions that make him look weak, then answers anyway: "I really didn't feel like I was loved, and because I didn't feel loved, I felt useless." Then you see his mother Alberta smiling as she remembers the little boy who always pushed his way up to the piano in church. Marvin credited her with keeping him alive: "If it wasn't for Mother, I think I would have been one of those child suicide cases you read about in the papers." In April 1984 she was the one who pulled her husband and her son apart after a fight in the Los Angeles house Marvin had bought for his parents, and moments later the father came back with a handgun. The prosecutor said the first shot was fired from a distance and the second from close to point-blank range, which meant he had walked closer and had time to think about it. That is why the charge was raised to first-degree murder. Was it one fight that went too far, or something that started when Marvin was 7?

Chris Watts stood on his porch in Colorado and told TV cameras he just wanted his pregnant wife and their two little girls back. The next day he asked police to let him talk to one person first, his father, and the camera in that room kept recording: he told his dad that his wife had choked their daughters and that he "freaked out" and killed her, and when his father asks, "Did she kill 'em?" he answers "Yeah" and then "They were blue." In the video below you see him on the porch on August 14, 2018 and in that room the next day. It ends in prison in February 2019, when he finally told investigators that he had killed the girls himself. Shanann Watts was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy they were going to name Nico, and their daughters Bella and Celeste were 4 and 3. He buried his wife in a shallow grave at the oil field site where he worked and put his daughters' bodies inside oil tanks on the same site. On November 6, 2018 he pleaded guilty, and in exchange prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. Two weeks later he got five life sentences without parole. The first person he lied to after the police was his own father, and the camera got all of it. Was that the last bit of shame in him, or just one more person he needed to fool?

In 2008, the man who planned Tupac's murder told police exactly how it happened. They promised that nothing he said that day could be used against him, and for 15 years nobody charged him. Then he started telling the same story to anyone who would pay for it: on BET in 2018, on VladTV in 2019, and in his own book, "Compton Street Legend." Prosecutors said going public is what cost him that protection, and at trial his own lawyers argued he only said it all for the money. In the video below Duane "Keffe D" Davis reads a passage from that book on camera, in sunglasses and a polo shirt. Tupac "made an erratic move," he reads, and "one of my guys from the backseat grabbed the Glock." On September 7, 1996, after the Tyson fight in Las Vegas, a white Cadillac pulled up next to Suge Knight's BMW at a red light on Flamingo Road. Tupac was hit four times and died six days later, at 25. In that 2008 interview Davis named the shooter: his nephew Orlando Anderson, sitting in the backseat. Hours earlier Tupac and his crew had beaten Anderson near the elevators inside the MGM Grand. Anderson denied any part in it and was killed in 1998. In July 2023 police searched his home outside Las Vegas, and that September he was arrested. At trial the jury listened to two and a half hours of his 2008 interview and found him guilty of first-degree murder in less than three hours. At his sentencing on October 13 the judge told him, "I've heard you say some variation of the same thing to law enforcement, to BET, in your book." She gave him 40 years to life. He is 63. He is the only person ever charged with killing Tupac. The other three men in that Cadillac are dead, and the gun has never been found. Was it guilt that kept him talking for 15 years, or the money?

Ed Kemper killed 10 people, including his grandparents when he was 15 and his own mother when he was 24. In a 1981 prison interview he describes the moment he almost stopped: he picked up two girls, let them go, and a week later went home and murdered his mother. The footage was shot for The Killing of America, a documentary made for Japanese audiences that never got a regular release in the United States. Most people know Kemper from Netflix's Mindhunter, and this is the real man on a couch next to a barred window, 6 foot 9 and calm. In the video below he starts with his fingers pressed together and talks about sitting with a severed head in his hand, telling himself he wasn't insane because Viking heroes did the same. "Part of our heritage," he says. Then he gets to the two girls. He says they looked so much like his first two victims that it was "unbelievable," and that everything in him "went towards killing them." He let them out of the car. "They never even knew what was going on." "I said, 'No, it's got to stop.' And a week later I murdered my mother." In April 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett in Santa Cruz, then drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and called the Santa Cruz police on himself from a phone booth. California had no death penalty at the time, so he got life in prison. Near the end of the clip he says, "I am an American, and I killed Americans." He is 77 now and still locked up in Vacaville, California. He let two girls walk away because he decided it had to stop. Was that the last piece of a conscience, or was he just choosing who came next?