World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 12 - Robert Berdella - KCB - Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ -December 1988, Kansas City. Robert Berdella finally confessed to kidnapping,
raping, torturing, and then killing six men four and a half years after his first victim.
-To him, they weren't living, feeling, breathing individuals. They were literally just pieces of meat,
and he would do with them what he wanted. -He took hundreds of photos and kept vivid,
detailed notes to document his macabre acts using ever-increasing twisted methods
to cause unimaginable pain and suffering. -This was not a spree killing. This was not somebody out of control of their actions.
This is somebody who knows what he's doing, knows what he wants to do, and does it.
That is the definition of evil. -After murdering them, he dissected his victims with such precision
he became known as the Kansas City Butcher. -And then he would cut the bodies up
with a butcher knife and chain saw and then put them in the trash. -His dark fantasies, sick mind, and horrific torture of six men
that sometimes lasted weeks at a time makes Robert Berdella one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ April the 2nd, 1988, Kansas City, Missouri. a man wearing nothing but a dog collar was found in the street.
He was taken to a house nearby where he pled for police to be called. A police investigation revealed a horrific series of murders
that took place at the hands of one man who systematically and methodically kidnapped
and tortured young, vulnerable men before killing them. -Berdella is evil because he took advantage of the weak,
and he just performed so many unpleasant acts on them while they were alive. For Berdella, it's more than just killing.
It's cruelty. -After claiming his first victim in 1984, he went on to murder five more men,
each time increasing the level of pain and suffering that he caused them. -Berdella had a complete disregard for human life,
and I think what he was always aiming for was to create this compliant, docile sex slave,
and some of his victims, he treated so brutally that they died as a result of the torture,
as a result of him trying to deprive them of all of their sensations. -Rick Holtsclaw was the assistant prosecutor
for the Sex Crimes Unit in Kansas City. -He would prey on those who were down and out
or needed some help. He would befriend them or take them in, and that's how it would begin.
-Berdella's crimes would go unnoticed for years until one day one of his victims managed to escape
and call for help. Troy Cole was the lead detective on the case. -We decided to bring in a backhoe to dig up
that one particular spot where it looked like it might have had a grave marker to it,
and sure enough, on the second scoop of the backhoe, it pulled up a human head. That was the first time that I realized
we had a homicide investigation, and it was probably gonna be a big investigation.
-Until this point, Berdella was seen as an upstanding member of the local community.
Roy Orth was a sergeant with the Kansas City Police Department. -Robert Berdella was a member
of the arts community in Kansas City, Missouri, a former student of the Kansas City Art Institute.
He was involved in his neighborhood crime watch program and, as I remember, was even a court-appointed advocate
for juveniles through the Kansas City, Missouri, Juvenile Justice System. -This seemingly normal member of the Kansas City community
went from being an upstanding citizen to an infamous serial killer. -Berdella documented the torture and the murder of his victims
for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, he wanted to relive and revisit that sense of power he felt when he was doing these things,
but secondly, he wanted to create an archive. I think he wanted history to remember him
and remember the horrendous things that he'd done. -This killer's story begins in 1949.
Robert Andrew Berdella, Jr. was born on January the 31st, the first of two sons.
He was raised in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in a strict Catholic household. -His father worked at the Ford Motor Company.
His mother was a homemaker, so they were very much the traditional American nuclear family.
-Berdella was a shy, intelligent child who struggled to fit in at school. -He was bullied by his peers
because he did stand out as different. He wore very thick glasses. He went to the algebra club.
He collected stamps. So, there was that sense in which he always felt that isolation from his peer group.
-Then, in his mid-teens, his world was turned upside-down. -Berdella's father died of a heart attack when he was 16,
and this did have quite a significant impact on him because his mother remarried,
and she went on to stash up another home with somebody else, and I think that Berdella really did feel
a sense of rejection here. He was part of his mother's past. The world had moved on, and he was left behind.
-Around the same time, Berdella had been working part-time. -There's a particular incident that Berdella later recalls
that is potentially significant. Berdella claims that he was raped when he was an adolescent at a restaurant where he worked.
-Berdella never reported the incident to the police. In 1967, after graduating high school,
Berdella enrolled in Kansas City Art Institute. At this time, he'd begun exploring his sexuality.
-He'd realized that he was certainly gay, and it was pretty apparent to him that his father would not have approved of that.
-He's also been brought up in the Catholic church, so I think there is very much an underlying sense of shame there.
-By 1969, Berdella had begun to experiment with drugs. He quit college after tutors failed to understand
his twisted art projects often involving live animals. -He may have been a bit nerdy to look at and a bit strange,
but he was clearly talented. -In need of a job, Berdella put his talents to a new use.
-Berdella started working as a short order chef and quickly rose. -He developed quite a reputation in the local community,
as people were talking about the food he was making, and he bought his own house.
He had quite a bright future. He really was a figure that commanded respect in the local community.
-By his mid to late 20s, Berdella had also developed a passion for collecting, and this hobby soon became a business in its own right.
-He was obviously a very good chef, but it wasn't his only talent. He also collected art and antiquities.
This was a man of quite considerable taste, working at some of the best restaurants
and at the same time operating a boutique called Bob's Bizarre Bazaar selling arts and antiquities.
-The boutique became Berdella's full-time job, and he began to rent out rooms in his home
to help make ends meet. Some of those lodgers were vulnerable young men who'd receive bed and board in return for carrying out jobs
around the house and at his antique shop. -People who'd run away from home, young gay men,
couples, rather a sort of benevolent figure -- as far as the local community concerned,
an entirely upright and straightforward citizen. -In 1984, Berdella's behavior began to get bizarre.
-His house had become literally a warehouse of all sorts of odd objects. This man who previously had been
sort of pillar of the local community was becoming increasingly odd, and he also, I think,
began to despise the young men who came seeking shelter. -In March that year at age 35, Berdella began a relationship
with a 19-year-old male former sex worker, Jerry Howell. -Berdella knew his dad, who also had a stall in the flea market,
so Jerry hung around with his dad, so Berdella knew both of them well. -Jerry had had some issues with drugs.
He'd had some issues with the criminal justice system, and I think Berdella was seen to be this trusted figure,
so when Berdella offers to help him, he offers to lend him money, Jerry takes him up on this.
He doesn't pay him back, though. -On July the 5th, 1984, he picked Jerry up from the flea market to help with some jobs,
but Jerry was more interested in getting loaded. Berdella gave him drugs and alcohol,
and they headed home, but getting increasingly frustrated with Jerry using him, Berdella gave Jerry some stronger medication
that caused him to pass out. -When the victim became virtually unconscious, Berdella would inject him with drugs,
giving him absolute control over the body. He would then repeatedly rape the victim
over a very extended period in this case -- 27 hours. -When he returned from work, the torturing continued.
-He's not only sexually assaulted, he is struck with a metal ruler. He's given a cocktail of drugs before he's even killed,
so we have a mixture of somebody who's going to be confused by what's going on. They're going to be confused by the drugs they've been given,
and then he's being physically and sexually assaulted. It's just a horrific way to die.
-The following night, Jerry was dead. Berdella had meticulously detailed the torture and murder
in extensive notes and photographs. -One of the things that Berdella did immediately after Jerry
had died was to note down and describe precisely what he did with the body, which effectively was to drain it of blood
and then dismember it and wrap it up in garbage bags. He kept a detailed record because, in many ways,
that was the kind of character that he was. He took pride in his work. He was completely cold and isolated,
interested only in his own satisfaction, which makes it all the more chilling. -Berdella bagged up the remains with all the instruments
he'd used and dumped it in the trash, which was picked up the next morning. On July the 8th, Jerry's father contacted the police.
-Jerry's father reports him missing, and Berdella is interviewed by the police in relation to this,
and Berdella says, "Well, I dropped him off at the 7-Eleven, the convenience store,"
and at this point in time, why wouldn't the police believe Berdella? He's this upstanding figure in the community.
He's not somebody who would appear to have a reason to lie, so, unfortunately, this case goes cold.
-Then officers received a tip-off from one of Berdella's previous boarders, Todd.
-One of Jerry's acquaintances who was also known to Berdella actually tipped off the police
that they thought Berdella may have been involved or at least given Jerry a hot-shot injection,
but there was no body. Nobody knew where Jerry was. -Berdella was put under surveillance,
but no evidence was ever found. -Jerry Howell's father always thought that Berdella had done something to his kid.
He just couldn't prove it, and, uh -- but, yes, he was very suspicious of him. -Jerry Howell's body was never discovered.
Berdella had developed a sick taste for torture and murder, and, after getting away with his first crime,
he began to look for ever-increasing horrific ways to get his sexual kicks. Nine months after he tortured his first victim,
19-year-old Jerry Howell, Robert Berdella took his next victim. -So, Robert Sheldon was somebody who had stayed with Berdella
before at his house, so there was a degree of trust in this relationship, and it was trust that Berdella really did take advantage of.
-On April the 10th, 20-year-old drug addict Robert Sheldon appeared at Berdella's door
looking for somewhere to stay after an argument with his girlfriend. Shortly after he set foot inside,
Berdella put his sadistic plan into action. -He keeps him for four days. Automatically, you know that this is going to be
somebody who's in distress. He starts to escalate his cruelty with this victim. He injects drain cleaner into his eyes.
He fills his ears with caulking material. There's damage to the hands from piano wire.
He's hitting him with a rubber mallet. All of these things are acts of cruelty, and they would not kill you.
It's subduing the victim. -He did some horrendous things to him, but the thing that really stood out for me was the tattoo
that he gave this victim on his shoulder. He was almost branding this man, saying, "You are mine.
I own you, and I possess you." -Like he had with his first victim, Berdella documented his methods by writing intricate notes.
This time, he went one step further and included himself in the photographs with his tormented victim.
-He wanted an absolute record of everything he'd done. It was a certain amount of pride.
There is no doubt what ever that that's what was in his mind. He'd documented it because he was proud of it.
-On the 14th of April, Berdella arrived home to find a workman he knew on the roof of his property.
Concerned that he'd be discovered, he decided to kill Robert. -He becomes quite paranoid because he knows this guy,
so Berdella takes matters into his own hands, and he goes and places a plastic bag over the head of his victim,
essentially ending his life. -Berdella began his ritual act of cutting up his victim's body piece by piece.
-Dismembering a body is not the easiest thing to do, but if you have some knowledge like a surgeon or a chef,
then you can quite effectively dismember a body, and that makes it easier to dispose of.
-This horrific expertise in chopping up bodies later earned Berdella the nickname "The Kansas City Butcher."
In keeping with his obsession with collecting, this time, Berdella decided he wanted to keep a souvenir of his actions.
-Berdella's second victim, Robert, he dismembered the body and cut off the head,
but this time he didn't put it all into black garbage backs and put it out for the garbage truck.
He kept the head first in the freezer in his house, and he later buried it in the garden
where it decomposed as a kind of trophy of the killing. -And this is really significant for me
because the head is what gives somebody their identity. It's what makes them a human.
I think by keeping the head, Berdella wants to be able to say, "I'm the one that has depersonalized this individual.
I'm the one that's dehumanized them." -Berdella had now tortured and murdered two people without being caught.
The following June, just two months after his last murder, he struck again. -Mark was a young man who had helped out
around Berdella's house. He'd mown the lawn for him a few times, and Berdella discovered him intoxicated in his shed one day.
He invites him into his home, and so begins the process of torture, as had been the case with previous victims.
-20-year-old Mark Wallace was gagged and injected with a cocktail of drugs to sedate him before he was restrained and raped.
-Mark was Berdella's third victim, and, again, I think we have, with this, the escalation and the experimentation.
We have injection of drugs. He's used the rubber mallet again to strike his victim,
but now he's applying electric shocks. -When Berdella returned from work that evening,
he found Mark trying to free himself. Berdella sedated him again before continuing to rape and torture his victim.
-It's almost as if he has a compliant victim, and he's thinking, "What will this do?"
Electric shocks are rarely fatal, but they can be tremendously painful. -As had become his custom,
Berdella kept a record of his barbaric actions in his diary. On the 23rd of June, 1985, he wrote,
"7:00 a.m., no signs of life." -He died as a result of the torture and, in previous cases, we've seen this happen before.
-Once again, Berdella lived up to his alter-ego of The Kansas City Butcher. -He's dismembered with a safety razor,
a knife, and a saw, and then literally left out with the rubbish. -With three local men now missing,
rumors amongst Kansas City's sex workers began to spread. -The male sex workers of Kansas City
had developed quite a wariness of Robert Berdella. He'd developed something of a reputation at this time
for being aggressive with people, for wanting to tie them up, wanting to aggressively rape them.
So there was definitely a sense in which, "This guy was somebody to steer clear of.
This guy was potentially dangerous." -Berdella was well-known for haunting what you might describe as gay bars,
as the gay community, but he was also very well-known for wanting to be in complete control.
He did not have a good reputation, and many of the people that came into contact with him
warned each other in that really quite small community. -Despite his reputation, some still trusted him.
On the 26th of September, 1985, Walter Ferris, a married man and acquaintance of Berdella,
turned up at his house. Once he set foot inside, his fate was sealed. -Walter asked Berdella whether he could stay at his house,
and I think in this Berdella sees another opportunity and so begins a process again of torture
and of absolutely horrendous pain and discomfort. -Berdella found new ways to inflict more suffering to his victim.
-With Berdella's fourth victim, we've got another development of the behavior. We've still got electric shocks
that he'd used on his previous victim. We've got injection of drugs. We've got sexual assault.
And one of the things he uses with this victim is ketamine. Ketamine is a tranquilizer.
It is used therapeutically, but it's known that it can cause horrific hallucinations,
and it has to be used very carefully in a therapeutic environment, so potentially we're looking at all sorts
of horrible hallucinations added to the horrible things that are actually happening to him.
It is a horrific set of circumstances that one cannot even really begin to imagine.
-Yet again, Berdella documented each and every step in minute detail. -Berdella by now was escalating his torture.
Extraordinary things were done to these poor men, and, yet again, there was an exact record
of what he could survive. I suspect part of the reason for that was that Berdella
wanted to see how much a human body could take, what it could accept. He wanted to test everything to its limits.
He wanted to see how far. "Could I -- Can he take that? Could he take more?" -In less than 24 hours, Walter was dead.
-Walter Ferris died at around midnight the day after he was captured by Robert Berdella.
Berdella disposed of Walter's body in the usual fashion, so he dismembered it in his bathtub,
and he put the piece of Walter's body out with the trash. -Days after his disappearance,
Walter's wife reported him missing to the police. -His wife and mother suspected Berdella
because the last time that Walter left the house, he said, "I'm going over to Berdella's,"
and he was never seen again. -For the second time in approximately 15 months, Berdella was questioned and put under surveillance,
but investigators quickly hit a dead end. -The missing-persons unit did an investigation.
They did their best to, uh, further the investigation along, but they were just unsuccessful.
There was not enough evidence to charge him. They went to his house. They tried to buy drugs undercover from him.
There was various things they did to try to -- to make a case. They were just unsuccessful.
-In just over a year, Berdella had detained, savagely tortured, and killed four men.
Each murder he committed increased in brutality as his dark imagination seemed to know no limits.
Yet he continued the pretense of an upstanding if eccentric member of the local community,
and police had no reason to link him with the disappearance of his victims. -The police had no suitable cause to search the house,
so as far as they were concerned, Berdella was simply helping the police with their inquiries.
They had no concrete evidence whatever against Berdella at that point. -On June the 17th, 1986,
Berdella selected his next victim. In the Red Light District of Kansas City, he picked up 23-year-old casual sex worker
and drug addict Todd Stoops. -Berdella's next victim, Todd, had already had contact with him over a number of years,
and he had suggested to the police that Berdella might have been guilty of killing his first victim
with an injection, which was never proven. -Berdella was sexually attracted to Todd,
and Todd and his wife had actually spent some time living in Robert Berdella's house
in exchange for sexual favors that Todd provided to Berdella with his wife's knowledge,
so this couple -- they were very vulnerable, and Berdella took advantage of that vulnerability.
When Todd needs money for drugs, Berdella sees another opportunity here. -As soon as Todd stepped foot inside,
Berdella began his deadly routine. Over a period of two weeks, he subjected him to a ferocious series of attacks.
-If what happened to Walter was horrific, he manages to outdo himself with Todd.
So we have nearly a fortnight of captivity with torture, whipping, sexual assault again,
all sorts of horrific physical acts to degrade, to cause pain, but he's also once again organized.
He's planning. He thinks injecting Drano into the eyes will blind his victim, which it does.
It makes it more difficult to escape. He injects it into the voice box to stop him screaming.
These are not the acts of a mad man. These are planned, deliberate actions of somebody
who knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. -Berdella took extensive photographs of the torture
and the demise of Todd. I think that Berdella felt that Todd was a significant victim for him.
He felt that attraction to him, and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd been at the center of quite a lot of fantasies
he'd had about having a sex slave. -On July the 1st, 1986, Todd died of septic shock
from an infection caused by the injuries he had received. Like his previous victims, Berdella dismembered Todd's body
and put his remains to be picked up by trash collectors. ♪♪ On the 23rd of June, 1987, a little less than a year later,
the Kansas City Butcher saw his next opportunity. -Larry Pearson was a sex worker who needed some bail bond money,
so Robert Berdella says to him, "I will bail you out, I'll give you the money, as long as you come
and stay in Ohio for a week with my family." So, Larry agrees to do this, and then when they arrive back from this vacation,
Berdella takes him captive. -Once again, we have escalation of this behavior. We started with cruelty.
It's escalating and escalating. We now have a victim kept for six weeks, tortured, sexually assaulted.
-Despite the constant torture, Larry fought back. -Larry didn't know what to do.
He knew he wanted to survive as best he could, until finally, in what must've been utter despair,
Larry bit Berdella's penis during oral sex. The injury to Berdella's penis was so severe he went to hospital.
-Berdella calls a taxi, and during the time while he's waiting for the taxi, he kills his victim.
-When he's dead, Berdella has the sense to try and keep the property cool to slow down decomposition
to reduce smells produced. Once again, these are all unconscionable acts, but they are planned.
They are deliberately undertaken. This is somebody who is in control of what he's doing.
-When Berdella returned from hospital, he dismembered Larry's body. -Berdella was so angry at the injury
that had been caused to him, that he was determined to take out the maximum punishment or revenge
on the man who had the temerity to actually hurt him. It was the first time anyone had tried to hurt him,
and so, yet again, he dismembered the body and yet again cut off the head, only this time,
he went out into the garden, dug up Robert's head, put Larry's in the same hole,
and proceeded to bring Robert's head into the house, clean it up, take the teeth out,
put them in two envelopes, and put the skull -- which was all that remained at that point --
into a closet in the upstairs of his house. -Heads are very, very significant for Berdella,
and I think the head of Larry is a very important one, because this is the guy who has come closest
to Berdella's fantasy of having this sex slave. He's the guy who's survived for six weeks.
He's survived the longest, and I think he wants to commemorate that. -But Berdella's barbarous nature was far from satisfied.
On March the 29th, 1988, he picked up 22-year-old male prostitute Christopher Bryson and took him back to his house.
-So, Christopher Bryson was wandering the streets when Robert Berdella picks him up,
and he offers him a beer, and they drive around in his car for a while. Berdella then says, "Well, come back to my house,
and you can have a beer there." So Christopher agrees, and they go back. -He was brought home to provide sexual favors for Berdella
and was told to go upstairs as soon as they got there. As Bryson mounted the stairs and started walking up,
he was struck from behind and rendered unconscious. -With his victim sedated and held captive,
Berdella began his deadly ritual. -Once again, he is tortured. He is assaulted. He is given bleach in the eyes, but this time it's swabbed
onto the eyeballs rather than injected in. That would probably be even more painful.
There are many nerve endings on the globe of the eye, which would react very badly to the bleach.
-Repeatedly electrocuted, raped, and injected with a cocktail of sedatives, Christopher remained a submissive captive
for four days. But on the morning of April the 2nd, 1988, when Berdella had left for work,
Christopher managed to set himself free. -He finds some matches, and he's able to actually burn through the ropes
that Berdella had restrained him with, so he flees the house wearing only a dog collar.
-It must've been an extraordinary sight -- a naked man wearing a dog collar. He runs across the street, meets a meter reader
who's going to a house. They knock on the door. The house owner is astonished. Opens the door astonished, won't let Christopher into the house,
but does call the police. -Roy Orth was a sergeant with the Kansas City Police Department when they received the call.
-Chris had been severely physically abused and was asking for help. District officers got there, found this was probably gonna be
some kind of an unlawful restraint, abduction situation, and called the Sex Crimes/Child Abuse Unit,
and our detective responded. -Rick Holtsclaw was the assistant prosecutor for the Sex Crimes Unit in Kansas City.
-Roy Orth called me and said, "We need you," and I said, "You don't need me today," and he said,
"No, I'm telling you we need you on this one." He may have told me briefly what it was,
that we had someone who had escaped naked with a dog collar. It became evident that they were gonna need some assistance,
so I went to the home on that Saturday afternoon, and we began the investigation, getting search warrants,
and that's how it began. -In just over a three-year period, Berdella had held, brutally raped,
tortured, and killed six men and got away with it. Unknown to the police, they were about to uncover the shocking crimes
committed by a sadistic serial killer, Robert Berdella. Troy Cole was the lead detective in charge of the case.
-I first became aware of him April 2nd, 1988. I was working in the homicide unit.
It was a Saturday, and I was called out in regard to a sodomy. A guy, allegedly had been kidnapped and held captive
for a number of days, and I was the duty sergeant, which meant that I handled the homicides,
the robbery and the sex crimes for that particular day. Christopher managed to escape and flag down a passerby.
That's what brought us to the residence. -The traumatized victim recounted his ordeal
and gave police the name and address of his captor. When Berdella arrived home that evening,
the police were waiting for him. -When Berdella drove up to the house, we asked him for identification, and he produced it.
He said, "I live here," and at that point, he was immediately arrested for investigation of sodomy.
We brought him downtown. I asked him if he would sign a consent to search the residence
so we could further the investigation. He refused. He said that he would rather talk to his attorney,
so at that point we booked him into the city jail and prepared to get a search warrant.
-With Chris' testimony, police were able to obtain a warrant to search Berdella's property the same day.
-When we first went up to kick the door in, we could hear large dogs in the background,
so we called animal control out. Immediate reaction was the house was filthy, had a stench,
the odor was horrible, clutter and dog feces everywhere. Was one of the worst houses I ever walked into.
-Using the information that Christopher had given them, officers searched Berdella's property for the room
where he'd held his victim captive. -So, our initial thought was to try to find the room
to verify his story. So we go upstairs, and after a brief period of time, we found the room that he had described.
We found the bed that he had described, and it had restraints tied to the bedposts,
so we were pretty sure at this point his story maybe had some legitimacy to it. -There was a device underneath the bed
plugged into the wall that was -- appeared to me to be an electric train transformer,
and there were jumper-cable clips on the ends of it so that he could attach them
to different parts of somebody's body and then increase the electrocution level by turning the transformer selector.
-In searching the rest of the house, officers discovered Berdella's most prized collection.
-We'd discovered several hundred -- probably 200 to 300 -- Polaroid photographs that he had taken.
Some of the people in the photographs were in obvious signs of being tortured. -Eventually we were able to find detailed torture notes
that Berdella had kept on several people -- six, in fact -- and, in reviewing those pictures,
probably the most telling was one of a young man that was hanging suspended upside-down
from steel I-beam in what we later learned was the basement of the Berdella home,
and this person appeared to be deceased. -As the police combed the property, they discovered more and more evidence
of Berdella's horrific crimes. -A short time later, we found a skull in a closet
which appeared to have been probably fairly recent. -The officers gather the evidence.
The following day, a pathologist was called in. -We had called in a doctor to examine the skull
that was in the closet, and he said that in his opinion that skull probably was less than two years old,
but it would obviously require further examination. So at that point we sort of catalogued what we could find
in the house that looked like it might have some evidentiary value to it. -One was a bag of what appeared to be human vertebrae
that were very clean. Obviously they had been boiled out, bleached. Almost looked like plastic.
And we also found the skull that was obviously human and hadn't been bleached out yet.
-The police returned to Berdella's home the next day, and they left no stone unturned.
-Berdella kept dogs in the backyard in an enclosure, and in looking at the backyard,
the grass was noticeably greener in a couple of areas, which caused me to think that, you know,
possibly there was something else there. -So, at that point, we decided to bring in a backhoe to dig up
that one particular spot where it looked like it might have had a grave marker to it.
-On the second dig, there was a sucking sound as it dug in and lifted out, and I stopped the man immediately and looked,
and there was a human jaw that had been pulled up, and then, of course, we stopped,
and eventually we found the full human skull. What it appeared that he was doing
was once he would dismember his victims, he collected the skulls and then would clean them
by burying them in the backyard, and after they'd been out there for whatever time he felt was necessary,
dig them back up and then clean them out, boil and bleach them. -When police extended their search
to Berdella's shop in the bazaar, they found a macabre window display. -As you walked up Westport Road,
there was a display of human skulls -- I think there were two, I can't remember now --
and initially, these were so clean that they appeared to be plastic, but it was later determined that they were also Berdella victims.
-Berdella's obsession with his crimes and brazen behavior were his undoing, but the police still had a mammoth task to overcome.
-Our biggest challenges early on were identifying all these people that were in the Polaroid photographs.
We had no idea when we started the investigation who any of them were. Of the 200, they were not all facial shots.
There were some body parts and people in various stages, but we needed to identify the skull
that was found in the closet, and we needed to identify the human head that we dug up in the backyard,
so those were our biggest challenges. -By May 1988, using Berdella's photos, detailed notes,
and dental records, the police identified the two skulls as belonging to his second victim, Robert, and his sixth victim, Larry.
On August the 3rd, 1988, at Jackson County Circuit Court, Berdella stood before the circuit court judge
Alvin Randall charged with the first-degree murder of Larry. -The state decide that they're gonna pursue a prosecution
for the murder of Larry first, but before they get very far, Berdella actually confesses.
He pleads guilty. -I think everyone was stunned. Strategically, I think it was a great move on the defense team,
because, at that time, kept the state from filing the death penalty charges against him.
Everyone was surprised. -I think he pled guilty because he was scared of the death penalty,
and I think he felt like we were gonna go for the death penalty, and at that point he started working out a deal
with his attorney to, "Let's try to cut a deal to save my life. -As the prosecution prepared to take Berdella to trial
for the murder of his second victim, Robert, he made a plea bargain. -Part of the guilty plea was that Berdella sat down
with his two defense lawyers and then also with Mr. Hall and Mr. Riederer, the prosecutor and the assistant prosecutor
from the murder division, and they spent two days under oath on the record, and he would lay out what he did to these victims.
-From the 13th to the 15th of December, Berdella fully confessed to all six murders.
-We spent three days with him over in the Jackson County jail, and he was very matter-of-fact
in describing all of the murders. Basically, he didn't show any remorse. I think he enjoyed reliving and describing
what he had done to the victims. I think he got a charge out of it, and it was a pretty compelling three days.
-Berdella is incredibly proud of these murders, of this project, of this extended experiment that he's been conducting,
and he really does enjoy reliving this and telling people who appear to want to hear about it.
-By revealing the true horror of his crimes to the authorities, he avoided the death penalty.
On December the 19th, 1988, at Jackson County Circuit Court, Berdella was sentenced.
-Berdella receives two life sentences for first-degree murder and four conditional life sentences
for second-degree murder. -But less than four years later on October the 8th, 1992,
Berdella died in Missouri State Penitentiary from a heart attack. He was 43. In just over three years, he meticulously planned,
documented, and implemented the brutal rape, torture, and murder of six men. He then cut up their bodies with such methodical precision,
he earned the nickname "The Kansas City Butcher." The prolonged torture of his victims
and his obsession with his own terrifying deeds would make Robert Berdella one of the world's most evil killers.
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Robert Berdella was an American serial killer, known as The Kansas City Butcher, who was responsible for drugging, raping, torturing and murdering six young men.

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

Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, tortured and murdered six men, detailing his horrific acts before being captured in 1988.

Key points

The Kansas City Butcher. Robert Berdella was known for his horrific methods of torture and murder, earning him the nickname 'The Kansas City Butcher.'
A Community's Trust Betrayed. Berdella, once seen as an upstanding citizen, turned into a notorious serial killer, shocking the local community.
The First Victim. In 1984, Berdella tortured and murdered his first victim, Jerry Howell, marking the start of his killing spree.
Berdella's Deadly Routine. Berdella begins his deadly routine with Todd, subjecting him to horrific torture.
Larry Pearson's Captivity. Larry Pearson is held captive for six weeks, facing escalating torture.
Christopher Bryson's Escape. Christopher Bryson manages to escape after four days of captivity.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

That is the definition of evil.

Summarizing the nature of Berdella's actions.

0:56WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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