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In August 2018, Chris Watts stood on his front porch in Colorado and told a TV reporter he hoped his pregnant wife and two little girls were "somewhere safe." He knew exactly where they were. The day before, at 2 a.m., his wife Shanann came home from a work trip. She was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy. They were going to name him Nico. Their daughters, Bella and Celeste, were 4 and 3. That afternoon a friend couldn't reach Shanann, went to the house and called the police. Chris drove home from work. His wife's car was still in the garage. Nobody was inside. The next day he talked to the cameras. In the video below he says he left every light in the house on that night, hoping the kids would run through the door and tackle him. He talks about their Minnie Mouse couch and about not getting to kiss them goodnight. Then he looks into the camera and asks his family to come home. "I hope that she's somewhere safe right now, and with the kids." One day later he failed a polygraph. A few hours after that he confessed. Shanann was in a shallow grave at the oil site where he worked. The girls were inside two oil tanks nearby. He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. Shanann's family didn't want him executed. He got five life sentences with no chance of parole. Months later, in prison, he finally told the whole truth: the girls were still alive in his truck when he drove them out to that oil site. The part almost nobody knows: on the same day his family "went missing," Chris called the girls' school and told them the kids wouldn't be coming back. He also called a realtor about selling the house. He had been seeing a woman from work since June.

In 1986, Charlie Rose sat across from Charles Manson inside San Quentin and asked him one simple question: was the murder of Sharon Tate a murder? Manson stared at him for a few long seconds. Then he said "no." In August 1969, members of his "Family" killed seven people over two nights in Los Angeles. One of them was actress Sharon Tate. She was 26 and eight and a half months pregnant. Manson wasn't in the house that night. Prosecutors said he didn't need to be. He sent them. In 1971 he was sentenced to death. A year later California's Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, and his sentence quietly turned into life in prison. Fifteen years later Rose flew out to San Quentin for CBS. In the video below he asks Manson what he thought about Sharon Tate and her unborn baby. Manson says "it's not my world." He says he doesn't know what "care" even means. Then he says that if he had been the general, he would have told the killers "good job." Rose keeps pushing. Manson keeps talking about war. "There's no murder in a holy war, man." Then Rose asks one more time. Was it murder? Silence. "No." He was denied parole 12 times. In November 2017 he died in a hospital bed at 83. He never walked outside a prison again. The part almost nobody knows: the house where Sharon Tate died wasn't really hers. She was renting it. Until January 1969 it belonged to Terry Melcher, a music producer and Doris Day's son. Melcher had come out to Manson's ranch to hear him play, and he said no to a record deal. Manson had been to that house before. He knew it. And one of Manson's songs did end up on a record. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys let Manson and his girls live with him in 1968. That year the band released Manson's song "Cease to Exist" as "Never Learn Not to Love." Manson's name wasn't on it.

Around 1990, a reporter sat across from Richard Ramirez in a San Francisco jail and asked him if he admitted to being evil. He smiled, said "we are all evil in some form," and then gave a straight answer anyway. In 1984 and 1985 Los Angeles called him the Night Stalker. He came in through open windows at night, while people slept. In 1989 a jury convicted him of 13 murders, plus rapes, burglaries and attempted murders. One man he shot in the head still lives with the bullet in his brain. When the jury voted for death, deputies walked him through an underground garage to the jail bus. He told the reporters waiting there: "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland." A few months later he sat down with reporter Mike Watkiss. In the video below Ramirez mostly reads from a script he brought with him. Asked who he is, he says "just a guy." Asked if he killed 13 people, he says it would be "improper" to comment because of his appeals. Then he reads a line about serial killers doing on a small scale what governments do on a large one. Then comes the question about evil. "Yes, I am evil. Not 100%, but I am evil." The strangest part isn't him. It's the women. By then women from all over the country were lining up to visit him in jail, and some of them fought each other over him. One of them had sat on the jury that convicted him. In 1996 he married one of his fans, a 41-year-old magazine editor named Doreen Lioy, in the visiting room at San Quentin. He was sentenced to die 19 times over. It never happened. He spent more than 23 years on death row while his appeals dragged on, and in June 2013 he died in a hospital bed at 53. The part almost nobody knows: he was caught because of one fingerprint and about two months. Police lifted a print from a car he had stolen and dumped. The LAPD's new computer fingerprint system only held people born in 1960 or later. Ramirez was born in February 1960. His name came back, his face was on the front pages, and people in East LA recognized him on the street, chased him down and beat him until the police got there.

In February 1992, a woman screamed "Jeffrey, I hate you" and charged at Jeffrey Dahmer in a Milwaukee courtroom. Later that day he stood up and told the judge he had never wanted to go free. He had wanted to die. Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys. Wisconsin tried him for 15 of them. He pleaded guilty but insane, so the whole trial came down to one question: was he sick, or did he know exactly what he was doing? On February 15 the jury said he was sane. Two days later the families got to face him. Between them stood an 8-foot wall of bulletproof glass, built just for this trial. Errol Lindsey was 19 when Dahmer killed him in April 1991. His oldest sister, Rita Isbell, walked up to the microphone and said she didn't even need it. In the video below she calls him Satan and says she never wants to watch her mother go through this again. Then she breaks. She starts toward him, and deputies have to pull her back. Then it's Dahmer's turn. He reads from a paper in a flat voice. He says this was never about getting out. He says he didn't do it out of hate, and that he understands why the families hate him. "I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself." Near the end he apologizes to two police officers. Nine months earlier they had walked a drugged 14-year-old boy back into his apartment and left. Both were fired. Dahmer says they did their best and he simply fooled them. The boy was dead by morning. In 1994 a judge gave both officers their jobs back, with $55,000 each in back pay. One of them later became president of the Milwaukee police union. Dahmer got 15 life sentences in a row. Wisconsin has no death penalty. Two years later another inmate beat him to death in prison. He got what he asked for, just not from the court. The part almost nobody knows: Errol Lindsey had a daughter. She was born six months after he died, so she never met him. In 2022 Netflix recreated her aunt's speech in its Dahmer series almost word for word. Rita said nobody from Netflix ever called her, and that she hadn't planned a single word of what she said that day.

On July 31, 1979, a judge in Miami sentenced Ted Bundy to die in the electric chair. In the same breath, he told him he would have made a good lawyer. Bundy really had gone to law school. By the summer of 1979 he was 32, and police in several states believed he had killed young women from Washington to Florida. On January 15, 1978, a man got into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in the middle of the night. Lisa Levy, 20, and Margaret Bowman, 21, were killed. Two more girls were beaten in their beds and survived. Eight blocks away, another student was attacked the same night. The trial was moved to Miami. 250 reporters from five continents showed up, and it became the first trial in America shown on national TV. Bundy had five lawyers paid for by the state. He kept pushing them aside and doing the job himself. In the video below he stands up in a sweater and questions one of the first police officers who walked into Lisa Levy's room. He wants details. Could he describe the room? Did it look neat, or messy? Was there blood anywhere else? He is on trial for killing her, and he wants to hear what her room looked like. What sank him was a bite mark. A dentist showed the jury that the marks on Lisa Levy's body matched Bundy's teeth. They took less than seven hours to find him guilty. At sentencing he told the court he wasn't asking for mercy, because it was "absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do." Judge Edward Cowart gave him death anyway. Then he said this: "You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer. I'd love to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner." The part almost nobody remembers is that this trial never had to happen. Before it started, prosecutors offered him a deal: admit to the two sorority girls and a 12-year-old named Kimberly Leach, get 75 years, no electric chair. At the last minute he said no. His own public defender said he just couldn't stand up in front of the world and say he was guilty. Being his own lawyer had worked for him before. In Colorado in 1977 a judge let him go without shackles so he could study his case in the courthouse law library. He jumped out of its window. He got a third death sentence for Kimberly in 1980. He was executed on January 24, 1989, after confessing to 30 murders in his final days. Judge Cowart had died two years earlier. So what was the judge really seeing that day: a bright young man who took the wrong road, or the exact charm that let Bundy kill for four years before anyone stopped him?

Seven months before police started digging bodies out from under his house, John Wayne Gacy posed for a photo with the First Lady of the United States. He's smiling, and pinned to his suit is a little "S" from the Secret Service. In 1978 he was one of the most liked men in his Chicago suburb. He ran a construction company, organized the city's Polish Constitution Day parade, threw summer parties for hundreds of neighbors, and dressed up as Pogo the Clown to cheer up sick kids. On December 11, 1978, a 15-year-old named Robert Piest told his mom he was going to talk to a contractor about a summer job. The contractor was Gacy. Rob never came home. Ten days later Gacy was in custody. Police found 26 bodies in the crawl space under his house. Three more were buried elsewhere on his property, and four had been thrown in a river, Rob among them. 33 young men and boys. The youngest was 14. In the video below he sits in prison flipping through photos of all of them. He says he has studied their faces for 12 years, looked into their schools and their friends, and has no memory of a single one. "None of them ever worked for me." Then a Chicago TV reporter asks him about one victim, John Butkovich. Gacy says that's not one he killed, and that the only thing he knows about him is that he was an employee. The reporter stops him: "Not one that you killed" sounds like there were others you did. Gacy backs up fast. "Strike it." John Butkovich worked for Gacy for about two years. In 1975 he went to Gacy's house to pick up his paycheck and was never seen again. Gacy later drew police the exact spot in his garage floor where he was buried. At least three other victims had worked for his company too. Gacy confessed to police in 1978, then spent the rest of his life saying he was innocent. He was sentenced to death in 1980 and executed in May 1994. Decades later, DNA is still putting names to the boys from that crawl space. A few still don't have one. So what was he really doing with those photos for 12 years: trying to remember them, or making sure his story still held up?