World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 11 - Bobby Joe Long - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[ Dramatic music plays ] -Northern Tampa, Florida, 1984 -- 17-year-old Lisa was abducted.
The teenager was subjected to a terrifying 26-hour ordeal by a sadistic sexual predator.
Unlike his other victims, she was the only one to survive. -A sexual sadist, a man who thought nothing of abusing,
mutilating, stabbing women. He was a man who had a ferocious hatred of women. -At his peak, the bodies of the killer's victims
were discovered at a rate of one every other week. The evidence revealed that a depraved serial killer
was on the loose. -Each crime scene was like somebody crazed, not even somebody, some thing, monster type, you know?
It was just terrible. -That monster was 31-year-old Army veteran and divorced father of two Bobby Joe Long.
-I don't know if I was blind or, you know, but I never imagined in a million years
that he was capable of doing the things that he's done. He was an animal, you know?
And, I mean, this is somebody that I loved. -Long became one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history.
During his 8-month sadistic killing spree, he murdered 10 women in Florida, making Bobby Joe Long one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Tampa, Florida, 23rd of September, 1985 -- At the 13th Judicial Circuit Court,
Bobby Joe Long only pleaded guilty to the murder and kidnap of eight women and seven counts of sexual battery
in and around the Tampa Bay area and to the abduction and sexual battery of Lisa,
his only surviving victim. -When in a single spree, he killed 10 young women and not only killed them, abducted them,
subjected them to dreadful abuse. He was without question one of the most dreadful,
depraved killers in recent times in the United States. -During the months of March to November 1984 in Tampa Bay,
young women were disappearing in and around an area called the strip. Their bodies would later be found
dumped in remote locations. Discarded and exposed to the elements, some were posed grotesquely in humiliating positions.
-They were all women who were out and about on Nebraska Avenue or around that vicinity.
Now, this was quite a notorious area of the red-light district, so this suggests that this is somebody
who was targeting people who they believed to be sex workers. -He would haunt the red-light districts.
He would target, focus on women, whom he knew could be tempted into his car with the offer of money.
They were the classic serial killer victim. -Anna Flowers recalls the impact the murders had on the local community at the time.
-When he started killing prostitutes, the flamboyant strip was full of fear. Prostitutes knew they could be next,
and they were very scared, and girls just out partying, they knew they could be next, and it was absolute terror.
-The first body was discovered in May 1984. She was 20-year-old exotic dancer Lana.
-What's happened to her is that Bobby Joe Long has picked her up, driven her to a remote location and killed her.
Here's somebody who was literally just plucking women off the streets. He's identifying his victim as somebody
he thinks he's entitled to, as somebody he thinks that he can just pick up and use and discard.
-On the 13th of May, 1984, Lana's body was discovered. When police examined the crime scene,
they immediately knew they were dealing with an extremely dangerous individual. -It is almost impossible to imagine the terror
that Lana must have suffered at the hands of Bobby Joe Long. There's no suggestion that he raped her after her death.
He raped her and then strangled her. He had tied her hands behind her back. I think that was Long trying to humiliate his victims,
to humiliate women. -This killer's story begins in 1953. Bobby Joe Long was born
on October the 14th in Kenova, West Virginia. His parents divorced when he was 2 years old.
Bobby Joe's teenage mother had dreamed of moving to Florida one day, and after her divorce, she left West Virginia with her son
and headed for the Sunshine State, where she struggled financially to support them both.
-So Bobby Joe Long's mother used to work in bars. She was single. She was on her own with him, and she had to go out and work.
She was the breadwinner. -As a child, Long suffered many accidents, head injuries that caused
several periods of unconsciousness. Some were minor, like falling from a swing. Others were more serious --
falling down stairs and being thrown from a horse. One of his most serious injuries occurred at the age of 7
when he was hit by a car. The accident left him with a deformed jaw and teeth. -And the kids would bully him to death about that,
and he finally had an operation on that as well. He wore those scars, you know, all of his life.
-With money scarce, they lived frugally in a one-bedroom apartment, even sharing a single bed until Bobby Joe was a teenager.
Bobby Joe confided in his ex-wife, Cindy, about his relationship with his mother.
-He would tell me that certain nights that she would come home with a boyfriend,
that he would get woke up and put on the couch while the boyfriend spent the night with her.
-Long slept with his mother, which often angered him when she brought home a man,
of which there were a string, and I think it's in there somewhere that the genesis of Long's loathing for women began.
-When you look at how he speaks about his mother and what he thought about her, he held her in quite a lot of contempt and disdain.
He said some very offensive things about her. He criticized the fact that she worked as a barmaid,
that she wore revealing outfits, and that, for me, says that he's got some incredibly fixed
and very conservative views about women, who they are, how they should behave. They should look after their husbands,
look after their children. He's got a very fixed idea of men as breadwinners and women as caregivers.
-Long harbored a grudge against his mother for not looking after him or paying him enough attention.
-He had a horrible resentment towards his mother, and to be very honest with you, had I ever heard that he,
you know, had harmed his mom, I probably wouldn't have been surprised because he really did have a hate for his mother.
-And as time went on, the more time she paid to men, the more he resented it, and psychiatrists have said that that's part of his problem,
that he was actually killing his mother again and again. He hated women. -Long had also been born with a condition
that would later in life prove a challenge to his masculinity. -He had Klinefelter syndrome,
which meant that he had two X chromosomes and one Y. Now, one of the symptoms of that is it gives a young boy,
as he grows into adolescence, significant extra estrogen. -High levels of the female hormone can result in men
developing enlarged breast tissue, called gynecomastia. -This happened to Bobby Joe Long to his great embarrassment
and I think also heightened the fact that he loathed women. -Age 13, Bobby Joe Long
underwent surgery to remove his breasts, leaving ugly scars that made the young man
very self conscious about his body. -When were kids, you know, we were always swimming down in the Keys and everything.
He would always keep a shirt on because he was embarrassed of the scars from the surgery.
-By his early teens, this cocktail of anger at his anger and his own physical self-loathing
was already beginning to turn Bobby Joe Long into an angry young man. ♪♪ -Bobby Joe Long's mother had moved to Miami, Florida,
with her young son. By waiting on tables in bars and restaurants, she was eventually able to provide them
with a better life in the Miami suburbs. Age 13, Bobby Joe was a student at Hialeah High High School
in Miami-Dade County, where he became close friends with a young girl called Cindy.
-Our childhood was great. You know, we used to go to the movies. We'd go fishing. We'd go hunting.
We'd go to the Keys scuba diving. It was a very normal childhood for the South Florida area.
-Long didn't excel in high school. Went he left, he got a job as an electrician's assistant at a firm.
Age 19, he used his newly acquired trade and joined the Army. On January the 25th, 1974, he married Cindy,
his childhood sweetheart. -So, yeah. He swept me off my feet really hard, and I don't know.
I guess I just fell madly in love with him, you know, and thought that in the fairy-tale world
that this was going to be my husband, and we were going to live together forever.
-But Cindy's fairy-tale marriage was short-lived. Not long after the wedding, alarm bells began to ring about her husband's temperament.
-If there was another guy that would talk to me or anything, he would just have a fit about it.
A few times, he accused me of, you know, messing around with people, which I had not.
Controlling, he would me what I was going to eat. He hated the smell of popcorn for whatever reason,
so, you know, that was always something that he would just have a fit about, if I was eating popcorn, or garlic.
He didn't like garlic. And, you know, I mean, it was just like you were basically his puppet on a string, you know?
And that should have been a red flag to me, but, you know, I was young. I was in love.
-On March the 14th, 1974, Long sustained another serious head injury in a motorcycle accident,
and his behavior changed dramatically. -I think that if possible, the motorcycle accident
just kind of knocked the screw loose that was holding everything together at the time.
-The long-term effects of a head injury, some people will be fine. Others, it can seriously affect personality.
If your brain is damaged, particularly at the front, you can almost become a different person.
-Whilst in the hospital, the nursing staff noticed that he masturbated constantly.
Long was released 5 months later, but when he returned, Cindy found that he became violent towards her.
He also became obsessed with sex and demanded she have intercourse with him at least twice a day.
-There was no doubt that Long developed an overt, compulsive and dangerous sex drive when he was a young man.
It turned him into this hypersexual being that flicked the switch, if you like. -So brain injuries,
particularly to the frontal lobes, they can affect impulse control. They can make you sexually disinhibited,
and I think in Long's case, we certainly can see some suggestions that that injury has changed who he was.
-Long was discharged from the Army on medical grounds and retrained as a radiologist.
The couple had two children together. -My son was born in 1974, and then when he was 6 months old,
we discovered I was pregnant with our daughter, who was born in 1975, so it was almost like having twins around,
but he was always a good father to them. He absolutely loved them. He was very strict with them, but, you know, he loved them.
He would do things with them and everything, so he was never violent towards our kids.
-Despite the abuse, Cindy stuck by her man. -They always have the knack to turn it around to,
you know, make it your fault, and you, as the victim, you, you know, you believe it is your fault,
so you're constantly walking around on eggshells trying to please this person, and, you know, you can't please them.
He used to have a habit of getting on top of me on the bed or the couch, and he'd put his knees, like, right here,
where I couldn't move my arms, and he would just sit there and, like, smack me in the face.
Then that became a habit of when he was, you know, very upset with me. -In the wake of the motorbike accident,
something had definitely changed within him, and he had always been short-tempered,
but then he became increasingly violent towards his wife, and by implication, she feared for her son and daughter.
-After the birth of their second child in 1975, 22-year-old Bobby Joe started going out more often
and refused to tell Cindy where he was going. -He was leaving the house at night time, telling me
that he, you know, just needed to go out and clear his mind and get away from the kids and myself and everything.
And, you know, in my heart I felt like he was probably seeing somebody. -Bobby Joe Long didn't have a lover.
He had a secret sadistic hobby -- raping women. -Well, when we look at serial killers,
they very rarely go from being normal, average, non-criminal individuals to killers overnight.
-He set out on a scheme by answering ads, classified ads, in the local paper. He specifically targeted bedroom furniture,
but even if it was something in the kitchen or something in the front room, he went to the house.
If he discovered that the woman was on her own, he would rape her and then leave her.
-At night he was a rapist, sexually assaulting women he found in the classified ads section of the local paper,
and when he returned home, his violent behavior continued. In June 1980, following a particularly severe beating,
Cindy required urgent medical treatment. In the emergency room, Cindy lied about how she'd sustained her injuries.
Staff believed she was a victim of domestic violence and called the police, but she continued to lie to them.
-I have walked around for the last 30-plus years regretting the fact that I never did have him arrested.
-On returning home, Cindy decided to take matters into her own hands. -I came home that night
and I loaded a double-barreled shotgun, and I sat there until his alarm went off with it at his head,
cocked, trying to get the nerve to pull the trigger. I was so humiliated from being at the hospital,
and the police officer knowing I was lying and the doctor knowing I was lying, and I was tired of being his punching bag.
-But she couldn't pull the trigger. -The only reason that I never pulled the trigger that night,
I'm sorry, was because of my kids. I kept thinking, you know, "Who will raise them?
He's going to be dead. I'm going to be in jail." I mean, this is how demented he had my mind to. [ Sniffs ]
♪♪ -Over approximately 10 years, Long sexually assaulted at least 50 women across Florida.
These were completely random victims and were impossible to connect. The unknown offender became known
as the classified ad rapist. With no evidence to link Long to the attacks, he was free to continue his assaults on unsuspecting women.
-It was a consistently dramatic way of discovering victims. He didn't go searching for them on the street.
He wasn't hiding in the bushes or waiting in the park. He was a perfectly ordinary bloke answering a classified ad,
and saying, "Oh, I'd like to see the item you've got for sale." -Cindy had no knowledge of Bobby Joe's sadistic hobby,
but in 1980, she plucked up the courage and filed for divorce. -He was an animal, you know?
And, I mean, this is somebody that I loved. I mean, when I tell you I loved him,
I loved him, you know, your first true love, you know? And how could I have been so blinded?
-Bobby Joe eventually left the family home and moved to the Tampa Bay area. -When we first got divorced, we, you know,
weren't very kind to each other because there was still so much animosity, but we still had to contact each other
because we had the two children. So probably around 1982 or '83 we started where we could be civil to one another, and, you know,
I had forgiven him for what he had done to me, just with the understanding that, you know, he's a sick individual.
-By the time they finally divorced, I think Long had decided that his only true satisfaction
would be in a great many sexual partners. -Bobby Joe Long had a fresh hunting ground of Tampa Bay
where just raping and abusing women was no longer enough. He would go from being the classified ad rapist
into a serial killer. ♪♪ Divorced from his wife, Bobby Joe Long began his sadistic murderous spree.
Preying on vulnerable young women in the red-light district, his need for sexual gratification was insatiable.
On the 10th of May, 1984, exotic dancer Lana had arranged to meet her boyfriend after work
and was walking along the strip. -Lana was an Asian, and she was a pole dancer in a bar on the strip.
She had relocated from California, and she had a boyfriend. She was often asked to be taken home,
but she didn't usually do that even though that was extra money. Bobby Joe Long came along in the car,
and he stopped the car and asked her if she'd like a ride. She got into the car, and that was his first
known victim in that killing frenzy period. -Lana's body was found three days later
by two boys near East Bay Road, Tampa. She'd been brutally raped, strangled, and her body grotesquely posed.
-She had the hangman's noose around her neck, and she was cut while all that was going on.
It was out of control. The ligatures showed signs of a knife, and he just left her in the field.
-This was one of those cases where you have this first murder, and the individual who's been killed
is associated with the sex work trade, is somebody who's seen as less deserving.
And very often, these murders don't get the same attention, don't get the same kind of investigation as others,
so very often these first murders are real opportunities to apprehend a serial killer before they kill again.
-On the 26th of May, Long struck once again. He picked up 22-year-old sex worker Michelle on the strip.
-Michelle was a beauty queen at one time, and she was very pretty, but she was a drug addict,
and so she did that to support her habit. -After she got in the car Long drove to Park Road, known as the local Lover's Lane.
He tied her up, beat her and viciously raped her, and then threw her out of the car,
but Michelle was still alive. -This victim has got spirit, and she puts up a fantastic fight,
which makes him extremely angry, so angry, indeed, that not only does he try and strangle her,
he then goes on to cut her throat viciously. -So he cut the throat of one victim.
He really didn't care. He wanted to get his pleasure, have his fun and then just simply dispose of these women.
-When you're getting to that level of brutality, we're beyond simply ending a life.
We are into cruelty. We are into doing things for Long's own perverted pleasure,
and that, to my mind, is evil. -Strangulation and the use of ligatures became Long's killing trademarks.
He used ropes and a series of knots to create a collar like a hangman's noose. -With strangulation you're very physically close,
and you have complete control. You have ownership of that other person while you're strangling them,
and you know you have power of life and death literally in your hands. -Michelle's body was found a day later
in an isolated area of Hillsborough County by a construction worker. There was no indication
that Long selected women of a physical type, but during his 8-month killing spree
all of his victims were young women, and the majority were sex workers. -They were the classic serial killer victim.
How often have we talked about how vulnerable prostitute sex workers are to a serial killer?
Bobby Joe Long falls into the stereotype. I think he made a conscious decision in early 1984
to start killing, and once he started, he simply could not stop. -On the 8th of June, he picked up factory worker
and 22-year-old Elizabeth, who had been in the red-light area of Nebraska Avenue.
-He doesn't look like a monster. He's incredibly charming. He's incredibly charismatic, and he's good-looking,
so he's able to disarm you quite easily. -Like his other victims, Elizabeth felt safe enough to accept a ride from him.
-But what he concealed was this volcanic temperament hiding beneath the surface that gave him this extraordinary drive
to be incredibly violent towards women. -She got in the car and went through the same MO --
raped her violently on the front seat of his car, took her to a remote place and continued to rape and torture her.
-Long strangled Elizabeth with rope, stole her cash card and later emptied her account.
Her body was found 16 days later in an orange grove in Brandon, approximately 10 miles from Nebraska Avenue.
-The line between rape and murder is extremely thin. This is a man who is now addicted,
obsessed, to rape and murder. -In two months, law enforcement agencies had discovered three bodies, but they had no witnesses
and no tangible leads that could help them identify a killer. -When we look at Long's motivation for murder,
I think here's somebody who felt that they were entitled to kill these women. He had a very black-and-white outlook.
There were women who were respectable, and there were women who were not respectable,
and he felt that he was the one who could decide which ones lived and which ones died,
and I think if he was honest, and you asked him why did he commit these murders,
because he wanted to, and it's as simple as that. -It's not about simple killing,
it's about the power and control over women. That was exactly what Bobby Joe Long
was demonstrating -- "I have ultimate control." -As the number of deaths rose, the community in Tampa were left terrified.
-The killer had a particular appetite for prostitutes, and they knew that they could be killed anytime.
And after the one girl that was not a prostitute was murdered, anyone could be a victim, and they knew that,
and terror was prevalent all over the city. -Long's lust for killing was insatiable.
On the 7th of October, the body of 18-year-old sex worker Chanel was discovered lying by the entrance road
of a cattle ranch near the Pasco-Hillsborough county line in Florida. She'd been shot in the neck.
-Chanel was the only black girl that he killed. A troublesome teenager, but she wasn't particularly
a professional hooker at that time, but she was just beginning to go back into the business.
But this night, she just got in the car with the wrong man, and she was murdered in the same way --
tortured, raped. -Police were at a loss. They still had no evidence to lead them to the perpetrator.
Bobby Joe Long was free to kill again. Just 1 week later, police made another grim discovery.
On the 14th of October, 1984, the body of 28-year-old sex worker Karen was found in an orange grove in Hillsborough County.
The victim's hands and feet were bound. She had been struck on the forehead and strangled.
-Karen was from a very upper middle class family in St. Petersburg, was an excellent student.
She had it all, but in high school, she got hooked on drugs, and it just turned her whole life around
because she lost her ambition to succeed at anything but just support her habit.
-By mid-October, 1984, investigators had collected forensic evidence from the crime scenes and bodies of five victims,
but the elements were working against them. -Long left his victims out in the Florida heat.
You've got temperature degrading that body. You have predators. You have animals.
If that body isn't found quickly, it is going to severely interfere with the forensic pathological investigation.
It's almost like you're working against the clock. -But what they did find suggested
that the victims were likely linked to a single killer. -Among the things they found were some distinctive red fibers
and also some very distinctive tire tracks. -And they were tire tracks that belonged
to a specific type of tire. It was custom-made for use on Cadillacs, so that was quite unique,
so those were some common denominators. Those were some pieces of the puzzle, and eventually, they would get put together.
-Deputies had begun patrolling the perpetrator's hunting ground, Nebraska Avenue and West Kennedy Boulevard.
Investigators also created a profile of the murderer to help narrow down their search.
-He had the injuries from youth, head injuries, birth defects, all of it. They had about a dozen things
that serial killers had in common. Bobby Joe Long had them all. He was a profile poster child of serial killing.
-On October the 31st, in an isolated area of Hillsborough County, police discovered their sixth body,
that of sex worker Kimberly Hopps. The authorities hunting the unknown killer desperately needed a breakthrough
in the investigation. Little did they know that Long himself was about to hand it to them.
At around 2 a.m. on the night of November the 3rd, 17-year-old Lisa was cycling home
from her job at a donut shop in northern Tampa. Long pulled her from her bicycle at gunpoint,
dragged her into a car and blindfolded her. She was made to remove all her clothes,
and he bound her hands, wrists and feet. He then forced Lisa to perform oral sex on him.
-But this time, he doesn't drive into some neglected field or other place. This time, unusually, he takes her to his apartment.
-In the apartment, he rapes her, and then he took her into the shower and washed her hair.
Lisa remained calm and complied with her tormentor. -And then he shifted, like lightning,
and dragged her out of the shower and raped her, and then he would talk to her, sweet talk,
you know, "I'm sorry," apologizing. "I'm sorry we had to meet like this. You seem like a nice girl. I really like you,"
and then a simple request from her might be denied violently. -Now until this point, Bobby Joe Long's victims
have always been terrified, killed... raped, killed immediately. But this is not the case with Lisa.
-Lisa's survival instincts kicked in. In the apartment, she touched as many objects and surfaces
as she could, especially in the bathroom. After hours in captivity, she had gained Long's trust.
Still blindfolded, he allowed her to touch him intimately. -He let her touch his face, and she would be able to say,
"Oh, he's got pockmarks," or, "He's got a little mustache," or this or that. And just enough of seeing
under the blindfold would identify other things. -Later that night in the dark, he removed Lisa's blindfold.
-She convinces him that she will do whatever he wants, that she is no threat to him.
He can do whatever he wants to her. She is somehow malleable in his hands. I think Bobby Joe Long kind of fell for her in a sort of way,
but I think something else was going on as well. -Then Long did something unexpected.
-But the next morning, he said, "It's time to go." And she thought, "Is he going to let me go?"
And he did. -After driving for a short while, Long stopped to withdraw cash at an ATM near his apartment.
With Long out of the car, Lisa adjusted her blindfold. She made a mental note of everything she could see.
-Lisa remembered several details about her ordeal. She remembered that she'd been picked up in a red car,
which was a Dodge Magnum. She remembered the word Magnum being on the interior of the car
and on the seats. She remembered what Bobby Joe Long looked like. She also recalled that they'd stopped at an ATM.
-At approximately 4 a.m., Long dropped Lisa off in a parking lot in North Tampa.
-I think Long was beginning to think that this spree of killing women, this rape and murder spree in Tampa Bay,
was probably coming to an end. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of his case
that he chose to let a victim go, and as he did so, he knew he was actually signing his own death warrant.
-Lisa walked home and woke her father, who immediately called Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
She gave a detailed description of her abductor, his red Dodge Magnum car and the ATM they had stopped at.
Her clothes were also submitted to the FBI forensic lab. Investigators quickly began circulating details
of the suspect among law enforcement departments in Florida. -So there were these really crucial pieces of the puzzle
that investigators could put together, and they could narrow down a suspect list.
They could find out who owned cars like this. They could find out who conducted transactions at ATMs,
and that was a really valuable starting point. -Lisa's testimony was effectively
the break in the case. At that point, no one knew or even suspected that Bobby Joe Long
had indeed killed a number of women in the Tampa area. -As Lisa's case was an abduction,
it wasn't initially connected to the previous six murders, but in the following 8 days, two more bodies were found --
one in neighboring Pasco County and the other in Hillsborough County. The first was 18-year-old waitress Virginia,
and the second was 21-year-old student Kim Swann. -Many of Bobby Joe's victims were decomposed,
so it was more complicated for them to put together the details when they had six bodies,
but now they have Lisa's testimony, and they find Kim's body and Virginia. -On the 13th of November,
police finally received a breakthrough when the forensic test results came back from the lab.
-The authorities took considerable pains to examine the crime scenes. Among the things they found were some distinctive red fibers
and also some very distinctive tire tracks. -The same red carpet fibers that had been found
on the bodies of seven of the eight other victims matched the fibers that had been discovered on the clothing
Lisa was wearing during her abduction. -It was revealed that they had the red carpet fibers.
They had all of these pieces of the puzzle coming together. -With such strong evidence connecting Lisa's attacker
to the other Florida murders, the police knew they had to identify the killer fast.
-So they started to put together the evidence that Lisa McVey had provided. They looked through records of ATM transactions.
They looked through records of car ownership, and they honed in on a range of suspects,
and one of them was Bobby Joe Long. -With forensic evidence, the tire marks and the make and model of the car,
their net was closing in on Bobby Joe Long. -On November the 14th, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office
formed a task force with four other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI in Florida, to catch the suspect.
-You have a full-scale task force at work absolutely determined to nail the man who's been committing
all these foul rapes and murders. A surveillance team is put on Bobby Joe Long. They follow him everywhere.
-The following day on November the 15th, Long's red Magnum was spotted driving down Nebraska Avenue.
-Now, they needed to make sure that this was their guy, so they pulled him over in his car one day
under the guise of looking for a suspect in a robbery, and they took a photograph of him and then let him go.
-Lisa, Long's only surviving victim, was shown the photograph and was able to positively
identify Bobby Joe Long as her abductor. On the same day, bank machine records for Hillsborough County
confirmed Lisa's testimony. Long had used an ATM at approximately 3 a.m. near his apartment the morning he dropped her off.
Still under surveillance and with a warrant for Long's arrest, the task force seized their chance.
-The net is closing very quickly around Long. -They were not going to let this guy commit
yet another murder, and they followed him to a movie theater one day, and he went in, and he watched a film,
and the police waited outside for him to come out. -On November the 16th, 1984, Long was arrested outside a movie theater.
His Dodge Magnum was seized, and a sample of the red carpet from the vehicle was immediately submitted to the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement crime lab. When questioned about the abduction and rape of Lisa,
he quickly confessed. But when he was interviewed about the eight murders, he denied all knowledge of them.
Within hours of sending the carpet sample from Long's car to the forensics lab, the results were back.
The fibers were an exact match to the ones found on the victims and on Lisa's clothes.
-There is no doubt whatever that those red carpet fibers were the link among a number of the killings
and identified Bobby Joe as the serial killer. -So they tell him about the carpet fibers,
and he realizes that the game is up. So what he's doing here is, he's trying to get back in control,
so he confesses to the murders. He said, "Yes, it was me." -While being interviewed,
Long made another shocking admission -- He revealed the location of another victim,
21-year-old waitress Vicky in Hillsborough County. -But by that point, he was well aware
that the scales of justice were certainly tipping against him. As if to dot the Is and cross the Ts,
Long drew them a map of where he dumped Vicky's body. If there was a final nail in his coffin,
that was most certainly it. -So he called me, and when I answered the phone, I could tell right away
something was wrong in his voice. And he said, you know, "The girls, I killed the girls in Tampa."
And I said, you know, "You're not funny. Don't mess with me like that." And then Bob asked me, he said to call his parents
and tell our children that he was killed in a car accident, and I said, "I'm not going to lie to our kids,"
you know, and I couldn't lie to them. -But just 6 days after his arrest, another body was found in rural southern Hillsborough County,
that of 18-year-old Artis, a prostitute Long picked up in March 1984. He confessed to her murder,
and it's believed that Artis was his first victim. Long had now claimed the lives of 10 women.
On April the 22nd, 1985, in Dade City, Pasco County, Florida, Long was tried for the murder of 18-year-old waitress
and sex worker Virginia. He was found guilty and was sentenced to die by electric chair.
-I think he's accepted that basically he is facing the death penalty. Now, what brought about the change of heart?
Probably the overwhelming weight of evidence that was being thrown at him. -On September the 23rd, 1985, Long pleaded guilty
to eight accounts of first-degree murder, eight counts of kidnap and seven of sexual battery.
He also pleaded guilty to the charges of sexual battery and kidnapping of Lisa. After several appeals, the death penalty he received
for the murder of Virginia was revoked. He's currently incarcerated in a high-security prison,
serving at least four 99-year sentences, 28 life sentences, one 5-year sentence for aggravated assault
and one death sentence for the murder of his third victim, Michelle. But more than 30 years after his brutal murderous spree,
Bobby Joe Long has yet to be executed. -There's quite a bit of to-ing-and-fro-ing after this,
when you look at the trial, when you look at his appeals, so he wants to withdraw his guilty plea,
and then he wants to reinstate it, and what's happening here is, he's enjoying pulling other people's strings.
So when he's in prison, there's very, very little that he's got control over, but one of the things that he can control is his plea,
and he's using that to his full advantage. He really is a puppet master. -Convicted of nine brutal murders
and the abduction and rape of one, Tampa Bay's mass murderer is suspected of taking more lives,
and that makes Bobby Joe Long one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Bobby Joe Long is an American serial killer and rapist who terrorised the Tampa Bay Area in Florida during 1984. During his eight-month sadistic killing spree, he murdered ten women.

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

Brief Summary

Bobby Joe Long's brutal murders of women in Tampa are examined, focusing on survivor Lisa McVey's testimony and Long's psychological profile.

Key points

The Abduction of Lisa. 17-year-old Lisa was abducted and endured a terrifying 26-hour ordeal.
Bobby Joe Long's Notoriety. Long became one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history, murdering 10 women.
Cindy's Struggle. Cindy endured years of abuse and contemplated violence against her husband, Bobby Joe Long.
The Killer's Control. Bobby Joe Long's murders were driven by a desire for power over women.
Lisa's Survival. Lisa McVey's calmness and quick thinking allowed her to survive her ordeal with Long.
The Breakthrough. Lisa's testimony provided crucial evidence that linked Long to the murders.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He was an animal, you know?

Describing Bobby Joe Long's nature.

1:17WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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