Benjamin Atkins | World’s Most Evil Killers | Forensic Files

[music] In December 1991 in Detroit and neighboring city Highland Park, the bodies of two women were discovered in
abandoned buildings. >> They were being lured in with crack cocaine. Then they were strangled,
killed, and left for uh people to find. When more bodies started appearing, police from both districts realized that
a dangerous predator was roaming their streets. >> The community was livid. They wanted it
done right now. When are you going to solve it? We didn't have a clue of getting to the suspect yet.
One woman was sure she had survived an attack by the killer, a man she knew as Tony, 24year-old Benjamin Atkins, but
her claims were ignored by the police. >> They file a report, but then nothing comes of it. They basically just told
her, "Go home." Now, everybody knew her. Go home, darling. With every month that passed, the body
count continued to rise until one officer finally took Darene's claims seriously and drove her out onto the
streets to look for her attacker. She got to hyperventilating. And I grabbed her and physically shook
her. I said, "What's wrong, darling? What's wrong?" She said, "That's him. That's Tony." When the truth finally
emerged, Benjamin Atkins would be unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers.
>> [music] >> In 1994, a case that had horrified the city of Detroit concluded with one of the
world's fastest moving serial killers, 24year-old Benjamin Atkins, being locked away for life.
[music] But when the killings began 3 years earlier, they had gone largely unnoticed.
In the beginning when they did find that the victims were known prostitutes and they were drug addicts, [music] they
were just thought of as the typical homicides that were happening in the city at the time. [music]
>> To find a deceased sex worker was not at all unusual in Detroit. [music] >> When the community started demanding
answers, four law enforcement agencies came together to catch the killer. Atkins had the whole city paralyzed with
fear. Women were genuinely afraid to go out at night on their own, particularly in the Highland Park area.
>> The FBI profilers were stating that he killed more people in less time than Jack the Ripper.
And to be involved in that case was something that I will always remember. This killer's story begins in Ohio on
August the 26th, 1968. Benjamin Atkins had what you could describe as a catastrophic childhood.
He was the younger of two brothers and by 1970 his father had disappeared. his mom, Judy, was on her own with these
two young, very young boys. And so at that point, she went to Detroit where her mom was living.
But Judy was really absent through Benjamin's childhood. She was addicted to heroin and she was doing
prostitution. >> She simply couldn't cope. And it wasn't long before Benjamin was put into care.
>> He was in the foster system from a very early age, from the age of four or 5 years old. He and his brother were
shuttled from one foster home to another. >> He got shipped around [music] and eventually wound up in a boy's home
where he was physically [music] and sexually abused on a regular basis. In 1980, at the age of 11, Atkins was
discharged from the care system. >> He's returned to his mother, but nothing really has changed.
He watches her have sex with various men [music] at various points. >> The boys were left to their own devices,
and that is when Benjamin, as a teenager, started hustling on the street. He learned he could get money by selling
[music] himself with men on the street. From there, Benjamin got into a variety of drugs and he graduated to crack
cocaine. >> It was a way out. It was an escape for him from the horrors of the life that he
was leading. >> In the 1980s, Detroit was a city in decline. We had a drug problem at the time. We
had street sales of crack cocaine and heroin that were rampant. The city was overwhelmed with the
narcotics trade. Crack was available very easy, very cheap, and people got addicted very
quickly. >> By the time Atkins got to be an adult, he was spending a lot of his time on the
streets. He was homeless off and on. Sometimes he would stay with his brother. Sometimes he would just be
sleeping in abandoned buildings. And that's when the crimes began. >> In his early 20s, Atkins violent
tendencies started to emerge. >> Atkins was very methodical. He followed the same formula. He would meet a female
and maybe it was someone he even saw around. people tended to know each other there on Woodward A in Highland Park in
Detroit. And so he would typically talk to her, engage her in conversations, say, "Hey, I've got something to smoke.
You have a pipe." That was the question that he asked the one known survivor at the time, Darlene. Do you have a pipe to
smoke with? And that's how he was able to lure her off to a dark corner and then [music] try to kill her.
Darlene was someone who was a mom and a wife in Highland Park. She had boys. >> In October 1991, Darlene's youngest son,
Rashard Green, was 12 years old. >> It's not enough time for the words to put in about my mother. Nothing she
wouldn't do for her for her family, especially her kids. There's nothing she wouldn't do for us. Alongside caring for
her family, however, 34year-old Darlene struggled with drug addiction. [music] >> She was known around the area. She was
part of the community. She also spent some time on the street and she spent some time doing prostitution.
>> Even when she ventured off into different things, she would always make her way back to see if nobody else me or
her her baby. I used to sit in my front room window and look out the window looking for my mother to come walking up
at any moment. Some days I wouldn't go to sleep look waking up looking [music] for her. I would get on my bike and ride
through the neighborhood looking for my mother. That's my mama. >> Darlene had seen Atkins on Woodward A in
Highland Park and she knew him as Tony. That was his street name. There was one night, early morning hours
of like 3:00 or 4 in the morning, Darlene was out and about and she was on her way somewhere and she encountered
Tony. Tony asked her, "Do you have a pipe? You want to go smoke somewhere?" And there
was nothing unusual about that at all. Highland Park in Detroit had been a prosperous community, but it had gone
downhill very [music] quickly, reflecting the collapse of the economy of Detroit as a whole.
>> Most of the buildings on the southern Woodward corridor were abandoned. [music] There was hundreds, if not
thousands of houses in the city that were abandoned. >> They went to the outside of an abandoned
restaurant. Tony said something about, you know, it's a little windy out here. Let's go inside. Once they get inside,
she's reaching for the pipe and all of a sudden he grabs her and he takes the coat that she's wearing and brings it
down around her arms so she can't move. >> He attacked her. He raped her, but then
he attacked her again. And at that point, she started screaming. She realizes that her life is in danger
and so she's fighting him. She manages to hit him hard enough to give her a moment to run outside.
She runs outside. She's yelling, screaming, "Help! Help! Rape! There's actually someone nearby." He
heard Darlene screaming and he's like, "Where you at?" And that was enough knowing that there
was another man there who was approaching. That was enough to make Atkins run away.
>> Darlene Saunders was embarrassed, didn't want to tell anybody about the attack that she'd suffered and she
simply went home. >> Rashard remembers his mother arriving home that night. >> She just hugged me all night, sat right
there with me, just I I just love you so much. And you know, I knew something was
wrong. I'm just asking, you know, mama, what's wrong? What are you talking about? I love you, too.
Once she did finally go to sleep, of course, I had to go to school in the morning. I got myself together, went to
school, come back, she was still here, cuz normally she would be gone. That night wasn't the last time Darlene
would meet her attacker. >> She saw him at a crack house. not too long after that [music] and she was
coming up to the house and he held the door for her to come in and she said, "Tony, why did you do that to me?" And
he said, "I don't want to talk about it." She did not go to police because truthfully, for a lot of the women in
this situation, they get attacked all the time. So, she kept the story to herself.
I don't think it's surprising at all that Darlene didn't report what had happened to her. I mean, look at the
world she was living in. I fully expect that she didn't think anyone would believe her, that anybody would see her
as important enough to investigate that crime. >> Benjamin Atkins had got away with
assaulting a vulnerable young mother, but he wasn't about to stop there. And the next time his attack would end
in murder. In 1991, a man with the desire to kill was prowling the streets of Detroit. It
would be December before his crimes would start to be exposed. December 14th, 1991 was when Debbie
Friday was discovered in Highland Park. She was probably only killed the [music]
day before because that's about when she was last seen. So, she was not lying there very long in an empty building
before she was discovered. [music] Later that month, Bertha Mason was discovered.
That was by Detroit police. At >> the time, we were dealing with not as many officers as we should have on the
street. >> We weren't getting properly funded. [music] We had laid off 10 police
officers. >> So, it was not good conditions to be catching a violent, fastmoving killer.
>> Both victims were sex workers who were known to the police. And just a few days
later, at the start of the new year, the body count continued to rise. So then January 1992, January 3rd, there
was a demolition company at a house. One of the workers saw something over by the chainlink fence that was unusual.
Almost thought it was a mannequin at first, and they discovered it was a woman, the body of a woman. and that was
Patricia Canon George. >> With the discovery of a third body, the media was starting to ask questions.
The writer for the Detroit News came up and asked, "Could he speak with me?" I said, "Sure." He was saying, "What
information do you have on the serial killers?" We didn't use at that time serial killer. We use multiple homicides
and things like this. Detroit Police Department, their homicide division said there was no such
thing occurring in their community. We knew that was not true. We knew that there was incidents
occurring in Detroit. Usually there's cooperation of law enforcement between police agencies. Our officers from
Highland Park went to Detroit and they got buzzed off. So there were no communications [music] which made it
extremely difficult. >> It was only a few weeks before police were called to yet another crime scene.
>> Later in January 1992, Vicki True Love was discovered at an abandoned nursing
home along Woodward A. That's four women, three in Detroit and one in Highland Park. Detroit has no
choice but to think, okay, maybe it's the same person doing this. We got the same mo. We got the same victim type.
Maybe we have a serial killer. The scenes were very chaotic. All of them were in abandoned buildings
and you had rubbish and litter and construction material that's fallen from the buildings.
>> All four victims had cracked cocaine in their system and all had been manually
strangled. >> Some of the bodies have been there for several weeks, not in the best
condition. Although police were no closer to finding the killer, the crime scenes
were yielding some clues. >> Used condoms were found near some of the bodies. At one location, they was able to get a
palm print. >> Then there was the discovery at the Monterey Motel in February 1992 that
blew the case wide open. The Montterrey Motel was in Highland Park in Detroit on what was known as the
Woodward Corridor and it had a good past, but like Detroit itself had begun to decay dreadfully and it had become a
home for vagrants. It was often used by sex workers. On February 17th, 1992, a man searching
for scrap material in the motel made a gruesome discovery. He goes into the bathroom of one of the empty rooms and
he sees what appears to be a body part of a person and he realizes, okay, wow, this is a dead woman that I have found
here. And so he runs out of there. He gets police. Highland Park public safety officers
arrived at the scene and made the decision to check the rest of the motel. There were just trash everywhere.
Bits and pieces of rubble, parts of the room, wrappers from food and cigarettes and liquor bottles and just [music]
trash everywhere. They go through each of the rooms and lo and behold, they find two other females [music] in two
other rooms. And all three women have been left there at different times. They didn't have any identification, and
that's not unusual for people who's working in the street. They don't they don't carry identification on them. DNA
wasn't a big thing in the early '9s. We didn't have a DNA database. So, most of them were identified by
their fingerprints. >> Two of the three bodies were identified [music] as Valerie Chalk and Oneita
Hardy. The identity of the third body found inside the Mterrey Motel would remain a mystery for many years.
For this Jane Doe, they had her fingerprints and they had a lot of missing females on record to test her
against. They ran her prints against a lot of different women with no results whatsoever.
When they found three at once and they were all killed in the same fashion, they realized that it had to be one
person killing the people in the same way. They then linked it together with some
of the other bodies that were being found and they knew at that time that they had a problem that they were going
to need assistance with. >> Michigan State Police [music] profiler David Msy was called in to help. I was
asked to come in when they discovered the three bodies in the uh abandoned motel in Highland Park.
Profiling is something that we can provide detectives who may never have investigated a serial killer.
>> David started putting together a profile of the killer. >> I always felt that he was in that area
specifically [music] because he was comfortable there. I think that there was some thought that
maybe somebody else was coming in to Highland Park from the suburbs. And I never felt [music] that to be true. I
thought that he was in there. He didn't stand out. He didn't draw any attention to himself. And that's how he was able
to operate for so long and do so much damage. Seven bodies had now been discovered.
Women were terrified to go out after dark. The communities of Highland Park in Detroit were being targeted by a
serial killer and he was far from finished. By 1992, seven bodies had been discovered in and around abandoned
buildings in the cities of Highland Park and Detroit in Michigan. Police were following up all sorts of
leads, but were no closer to identifying their killer. >> Usually, when you start looking at a
murder, the first thing you're going to think about is motivation. And if there's no relationship, where do you
even start? And that's why serial killers are difficult to catch. It's that complete lack of relationship. This
could be literally anybody. >> At the time it was sort of chaos. We were going around asking informants for
any leads and there was a lot of people that were giving us leads and telling us
people that they thought were the person. And we were doing our jobs. We were going to those people investigating
them and questioning them trying to figure out where they were at the times of these deaths.
We had girlfriends reporting their boyfriends, wives reporting their husbands, and none of it was credible.
>> There was a lot of fear in Detroit and Highland Park when the news was getting
[music] around that there was a serial killer. And there were residents in Highland Park especially that were
worried about their children walking to school, that were worried about just taking a walk anywhere in the city.
>> The streets were barren. As soon as the street lights came on, you could walk
from one end to the next and probably wouldn't pass two people. >> As the [music] body count grew, so did
the interest from the media. >> It worked the community up in a frenzy. They wanted it done right now. Why
haven't we solved this? We're finding bodies. What are you doing about this? When are you going to solve it? We
didn't have a clue of getting to the suspect yet. Darlene Saunders, who'd survived an
attack the year before by the man she knew as Tony, heard the news reports. She could feel in her heart that it was
Tony that did this to the women. And so in March, she goes to police and she sits down and she tells her story.
They file a report, but then nothing comes of it. [music] >> They looked at as a drug addict,
prostitute, who going to do something to you like this? >> They basically just told her, "Go home."
You know, everybody knew her. Go home, darling. She was overlooked. She was treated like
an object, just pushed to the side. Meanwhile, 43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown went out one night and
didn't return home. >> Vicky Marie Beasley Brown, she was a mom. She had kids at home.
Vicky Marie's eldest daughter, Renee, was 23 years old when her mom went missing.
>> My mom was a very innocent, creative, charismatic ball of energy. She loved singing and drawing and
writing and cooking, but she didn't really have a lot of street sense. She trusted people probably a little bit too
much. She was not living on the street. She had a home, but she had had troubles in
her adulthood. She had had struggles with dependency on drugs. >> She struggled with addiction, but she
was not a prostitute. That was not her lifestyle. >> Renee was out of the country when she
heard that Vicky Marie was missing, but her nine and 10year-old sisters still lived at home with their mom.
>> We are a married Air Force family. At the time we were living in Germany and we had just had her first baby and we
got the news that my mom was missing. And from that um I just kind of knew something was wrong because she missed
my little sister's birthday and that's something she would have never done. It was terrifying because I'm not only
thinking about the fact that she's missing, I'm thinking that I have two little siblings who are little girls
that I'm like, well, where are they at? Who are they with? As Vicky Marie's family waited for news, another death
was linked to the active serial killer. >> In April, Brenda Mitchell was discovered
in an abandoned house in Highland Park. >> On April 15th, 1992, yet another body was uncovered at an
abandoned building in Highland Park. Public safety officer Craig Pulver Varenti was first on the scene.
We found a female body. She was covered in debris. Her clothes were half off. And we realized that it probably been a
murder and a sexual assault at the same time. >> The body was soon identified as
43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown. It was the news her daughter had been dreading.
>> The thing that's really tragic is that she just ended up at the wrong place at
the wrong time. and met up with the wrong person because that was not her life. That was not what
she did. That wasn't who she was. It was probably the scariest, most helpless time in my life because I felt
like there was nothing I was going to be able to say or do to make things right for those two little people who lost
their mom. Highland Park Police knew that they needed to start communicating with the
Detroit Police Department if they were to have any hope of finding the killer who was terrorizing their streets.
Finally, a meeting was set up and a multi- agency task force was created. Michigan State Police, Wayne County
Sheriff's Department, and the Detroit Office of the FBI. They all sent officers in to help.
>> And from there, after that, it came together. >> They realized that all the victims had
similarities. They were all choked. They were all sexually assaulted. With the arrival of summer in Highland Park, the
temperatures increased. >> In June, police were alerted to a foul smell that was coming out of an
abandoned commercial building on Woodward A in Highland Park. >> The original call came that there was a
stench coming from the building and somebody believed it to be a body. [music] So, I was dispatched there along
with a couple command officers. And as we got there and we entered the building, there were flies everywhere
and it appeared that the stench could just be from the garbage. So at the time, the two command officers stood
back at the door and I said I'd go in and further investigate. As I walked in further, I did look down
and I saw a leg hanging out from beneath the garbage. >> The 10th body was identified as
40-year-old Joanne Ouk. when I had an opportunity to view all of the victims and how they uh were
murdered that uh I really had a pretty [music] good understanding of the type of person that we would be looking for.
David My concluded that the killer was likely to be a black male who lived in the local area. He indicated that he
could be a familiar face to some if not all of the victims. They gave us a perfect profile of what
the killer would be and they were dead on on their profile. [music] >> I think the profile really helped the
investigators know that they're on the right track, that you're heading in the right direction and you're going to find
him. >> What police didn't realize is they'd already taken and put aside a statement
from a possible survivor of the killer they were so desperate to catch. In the summer of 1992, one of Darlene's
[music] family members put pressure on the police to look at her evidence again.
At that point, they finally found Darlene's old police report from March and they had her come back in
and finally police are taking her seriously that this Tony could be the killer. They decided, okay, we want to go out to
Woodward Avenue and see if we can find this Tony guy who attacked Darlene. [music]
So, Darlene was assigned to an officer with the Michigan State Police named Royce.
My job was to take Darlene out every night, hoping that we spotted the guy that had assaulted her.
Officer Royce, he just kept saying that we going to get him. My mother said they
they uh that they didn't nobody believe me. So why you believe me? I believe you. We going to get him.
>> Nighttime was Tony's time and so Darene knew that. And so it was always nighttime when they went out and Royce
would have Darlene with him and they would be out prowling around Woodward Avenue looking for Tony like a few times
a week. Darlene was one of a kind. She would tell me these war stories, how she had
to jump out of a car, how she had to jump out of motel room, how she had to run to get away. And I said, "Stop
telling me all these war stories and look at these people out on the street." Darling took him to all kinds of places,
all kinds of little nooks and crannies on Woodward A in the drug culture, in the Sidi Street culture [music]
that police had no idea even existed. They did this for a few weeks before one night when Darlene finally spotted Tony.
He was at a pay phone and Royce and Darlene were in a car and Darlene started to react. She started to
basically hyperventilate. [music] >> I thought she was sick. And I'm like, "What's wrong with you?" And I grabbed
her and physically shook her. I said, "What's wrong, darling? What's wrong?" She said, "That's him. That's Tony." And
I said, "Are you sure?" She said, "Royce, that's him." >> He stops the car. He gets out. He
approaches this guy. [music] >> I said, "Are you Tony?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you know who I am?" He said,
"Yeah." He said, "You're the state trooper that's been looking for me." I said, "Well, son, you got two choices?"
And he says, "What's my choices?" I said, "Either you can lay down on the ground or you can die." And I drew my
weapon. With nowhere to run, the man lay on the ground and the arrest was made. Darlene's attacker, Tony, was in fact
24year-old Benjamin Atkins. >> He knew he was going to get caught. It was the inevitable ending. I don't think
he'd have stopped until he was stopped. >> I was glad that he was caught cuz I still didn't understand what happened.
My father just kept saying that my mother did a good thing. >> Darlene was very important to the case.
To be honest, I don't think we would have got this solved if it wasn't for Darling.
Police were certain they finally had their man. A killer responsible for at least 10 murders was in custody. But
what he had to tell detectives would shock them. to the core. By the summer of 1992, the bodies of 10
females had been found in the cities of Detroit and Highland Park in Michigan. On August 20th, Benjamin Atkins had
finally been apprehended and was in police custody. About a day and a half after Atkins was arrested, they
questioned him. And at first, Atkins was denying everything. Nope, didn't do it.
Don't know these women. Have no idea what you're talking about. [music] And they were getting nowhere.
>> That's the nature of an interview with somebody like him. You can't go in and
in five minutes get a confession. It takes time. You have to learn about him, learn about why he may be the person
that he is. And so they called in an officer with Detroit police named Ron Sanders who was
known to be a very good interrogator. [music] Sanders took an approach of redemption
[music] like okay you can't save these women now but you can help yourself. And he was able to get Atkins to finally
crack and to finally confess these [music] crimes. >> No remorse whatsoever. I did this. I'm no guy that did that.
>> On August 21st, 1992, Atkins started spilling the details of all 10 murders the police were aware of. He also
confessed to the assault on Darlene Saunders. He would follow this formula of engaging
the female in conversation, taking her somewhere, an abandoned house, an abandoned commercial building, because
there were lots of them to choose from on Woodward A. And there they would start to smoke some
crack. Then things went sideways for Atkins. >> Benjamin knew if he had drugs, these
girls would follow him to the end of time. You manipulate somebody to kill them.
That's evil. Almost always he would take a piece of their clothing or maybe an object found
nearby to bind them. They would pass out. He would rape them. Sometimes they would come too. He would
strangle them again. And when he had strangled them to the point that he felt they were dead, he would actually check
to make sure they were dead, he would press on their chest or their stomach. He would feel for a pulse. He would
check to see if there was any breath coming out of them. So he followed all of these steps to make sure that they
were dead. Then he would find some place to hide them. For a person to just willingly go out
and kill people like that, I think that's a new level of evil. >> Saunders had wrote out every confession,
had him sign it as soon as he finished, and then go to the next one. We literally looked at each other like,
"Whoa!" Atkins confessions didn't end there, however. He had one more shock in store.
He said, "I'm going to give you a body that you guys haven't found." And that right there hit me like a ton
of bricks. Out of nowhere, Atkins had confessed to an 11th murder. >> That was CC Waymer, the final person he
[music] killed at the end of May. So, police went that day in August to discover her body in an empty garage in
Highland Park. >> He said it was down in the basement. Now, this was a garage. And I walked
that beat and I knew the exact place that they were speaking [music] of, but I never knew it had a basement.
The crime scene was ideal. There was nothing else in the basement. Not one thing. The temperature was cold enough
that the body was in ideal condition. >> Police were keen to find out the motive
behind Atkins crimes. [music] He did talk about a hatred for prostitutes. And as Ron Sanders was questioning him,
he was picking up on a very troubled childhood. And he was hearing about the mom who
would take her little boys and put them in the back seat while she was in the front seat with a John.
When it comes to serial killers, quite often we see that same childhood experience that they weren't really
loved like you should a child. >> There were cops who worked this case who said that he was killing his mother over
and over and over. They fit the characteristics of his mother. They were women who were working the streets. They
were women who were using drugs and [music] there were women of color. They were varying ages, but they fit the
type of his mom. I actually have no sympathy at all for Atkins and his troubled past. People
have even worse pasts than Atkins had, and they do not go on to hurt, much less kill anyone.
After Atkins was arrested in August 1992, as police were piecing together the details of all of these murders, they
tried to put together a time frame. It was probably 6 to 7 months that these 11 murders happened, which is very
chilling. In August 1992, Atkins was arraigned for 11 murders and the assault on Darlene
Saunders. >> There seemed to be a lot of media attention before Atkins was identified
and arrested when there was [music] a killer out there who was unknown and we didn't know who he was going to strike
next. But then by the time his trial came around in January 1994, Judge Kerwin couldn't help but notice where
did the media go? Does anybody still care about this case? I think it has become a bit of a cliche. This is just
another serial killer killing sex workers. So why should we care about that? >> They were mothers. Uh they they were
somebody other than a drug addict or a prostitute. They were people. >> The prosecution in this case went in
with confessions that Atkins made to all the crimes, DNA evidence against him, and a witness, a survivor who identified
him as the person who attacked her. That was quite a lot to overcome for his defense attorney.
and his defense attorney at one point felt like he might pursue an insanity defense. And so he hired a psychiatrist
to evaluate Atkins. He had been by this point telling [music] not only police but the
psychiatrists who were evaluating him that he was hearing voices that he had these alternate personalities [music] in
his head. The dominant one was named Tony. And Tony was the one who told him to do the crimes.
But how much was pretense and how much was genuine? I think that's something [music] that only Benjamin Atkins knew.
>> In my opinion, he was that one evil person that once he killed somebody, he enjoyed it.
>> The man was a monster. Let's just be truthful. He was a monster. He didn't care. He didn't care.
>> Psychiatrists deemed Atkins fit to stand trial and on January the 10th, 1994,
proceedings began at the Wayne County Circuit Court. Darlene Saunders, now clean from drugs,
was called to testify. Darlene Saunders was an extremely brave woman. When she testified at Atkins
preliminary hearing, she stood up to a barrage of cross-examination, designed to question her character and
her reliability as a witness, but she fought her corner admirably. >> She met a prosecutor showing them how he
tried to strangle her. It was like, you know, wow. Amazing woman. There's nothing that she couldn't do.
On April 14th, 1994, the jurors began their deliberations. It took them less than 3 days to reach a verdict. Benjamin
Atkins was found guilty on all 11 murder charges and the rape of Darlene Saunders.
>> After he was tried and convicted, and when the time came for his sentencing and he had his chance to make a
statement, he did not apologize to anyone. He put the emphasis on himself, what he
[music] had gone through. >> Benjamin Atkins received 11 life sentences for the murders, plus an
additional life sentence for Darlene Sa's rape. >> When Atkins was sentenced, it was a
great relief to [music] everyone from the victim families who was in the courtroom to Darlene herself.
When they announced the sentence for her own charges for the rape and the attack
that she had suffered, she yelled, "Praise you, Jesus." >> On September 17th, 1997,
after serving just 3 years of his life sentence, Benjamin Atkins died in prison. He was 29 years old. He was
serving out his sentences in one of the correctional facilities in Jackson, Michigan, and then he died of HIV AIDS.
So, we have to wonder, okay, did he get tested? Did he learn he had HIV? Was there any of that going on in his brain
when these murders were happening? We just don't know. In 2023, over 30 years after the
murders, the Jane Doe who was found at the Mterrey Motel was finally identified using forensic genetic genealogy. At the
request of her family, her name has not been publicly disclosed. >> It's fantastic how well the scientific
community has helped with police investigations. It's a very good thing for law enforcement and a very bad thing for
criminals because it's a little harder for them to get away with things these days.
>> One of the problems with serial killers and this interest that we have in them
is that we completely forget sometimes there are real people who were victims here who really really suffered.
I would like my mom to be remembered as a loving mom who cared about her kids, but who was at the wrong place at the
wrong time. She was a [music] gift to our family. So many times we allow people's decisions
and their past to dictate [music] and shape your future. And ultimately, you can't control what happens to you, but
you can control how you navigate it. Her life has created a legacy of love and purpose and identity and value in all of
us that we share with the people that we come in contact with. >> Darlene Saunders continued to struggle
with her addictions, but she'd been clean for a year when she passed away in 2002.
>> My mother did a lot of things not so nice and she did a lot of things that were nice.
I'll do anything to experience that again. You don't know how important somebody is
until you don't have them anymore. Benjamin Atkins took the lives of 11 women. He lured them to their deaths by
praying on their vulnerabilities and made sure their final moments were filled with horror.
Had it not been for Darlene Saunders, he may never have been revealed as one of the world's most evil killers.

In 1991, the bodies of sex workers started being discovered in Detroit, Michigan after they were violently assaulted and strangled to death by 24-year-old Benjamin Atkins.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

For More FilmRise Check Out Our Other Channels: FilmRise Television: https://www.youtube.com/⁨@FilmRiseTelevision⁩ FilmRise Movies: https://www.youtube.com/@FilmRiseMovies Highway to Heaven - Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@HighwaytoHeavenFullEpisodes

Brief Summary

Benjamin Atkins murdered 11 women in Detroit, terrorizing the community before being caught due to survivor Darlene Saunders' testimony.

Key points

The Discovery of Bodies. In December 1991, the bodies of two women were found in abandoned buildings, sparking fear in Detroit.
Darlene's Encounter with Tony. Darlene, a survivor, identifies her attacker, Benjamin Atkins, but her claims are ignored.
The Rising Body Count. As bodies are discovered, the fear in the community escalates, leading to a police investigation.
The Serial Killer's Profile. Benjamin Atkins, a methodical killer, was linked to multiple murders in Detroit.
Darlene's Silent Struggle. Darlene, a survivor, feels ignored by the police after her attack by Tony.
The Discovery of the Bodies. In Highland Park, police uncover the bodies of multiple victims, leading to a chilling investigation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Go home, darling.

Police dismiss a survivor's claims.

1:07WatchMay 29, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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