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In August 2021, Robert Durst sat on a witness stand in Los Angeles, on trial for murder, and a prosecutor asked him under oath if he would lie to help his own case. He told the jury he would. Then he asked them to believe him anyway. Durst was a 78-year-old New York real estate heir. His wife Kathie vanished in 1982 and was never found. His best friend Susan Berman was shot at point-blank range in her LA home in 2000. The next year his neighbor in Texas, Morris Black, turned up in pieces in Galveston Bay. Durst admitted cutting up the body, took the stand, called it self-defense and walked. Then he made a mistake. He sat down for HBO's The Jinx, and in 2012 he walked into a bathroom still wearing his microphone. The tape caught him muttering "killed them all, of course." In March 2015 the FBI arrested him in a New Orleans hotel, the night before the finale aired, with $42,000 in cash and a latex mask. So he did what worked in Texas. He took the stand again. In the video below prosecutor John Lewin walks him through it, slowly. Would he lie under oath? Has he lied in this trial? Durst barely looks up. Then Lewin gets to the most important question of the whole case. "I did not kill Susan Berman. But if I had, I would lie about it." Lewin asks how that doesn't destroy his credibility. Durst says what he's telling them is "mostly the truth." Then Lewin asks about Kathie, and tells him the reason he keeps getting caught is that his lies just aren't very good. Weeks later the jury convicted him. He got life. In January 2022 he died in a prison hospital, two months after New York indicted him for Kathie's murder. The part almost nobody knows: on that same stand Durst said he was on meth during his Jinx interviews and wasn't truthful in them. And he explained the famous bathroom line. What he really meant, he said, was "they'll all think I killed them all, of course." He just didn't say that part out loud.

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?

In June 2005, the president of a church council stood up in a Kansas courtroom and explained ten murders to a judge like he was walking his boss through a work assignment. He even had a work word for them. Projects. His name was Dennis Rader. For 31 years Wichita knew him only as BTK, the name he gave himself in letters to the police and the newspapers. Between 1974 and 1991 he killed ten people. Two of them were children, an 11-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother. Then he went quiet for more than a decade. He had a wife, two kids, a job as a city compliance officer handing out fines for tall grass and loose dogs, and a seat on the council of his Lutheran church. In 2004 he started writing to the police again. He wanted attention. Eventually he asked them a question: if he sent them a floppy disk, could they trace it? The police answered with an ad in the newspaper. "Rex, it will be OK." He mailed the disk. Inside was a deleted file. Its properties said Christ Lutheran Church, and the last person to edit it was named Dennis. Nine days later he was in handcuffs. In the video below the judge asks him, count by count, what he did. He answers in the calm voice of a man filling out a form. He chose his victims through what he calls a "selection process." If one didn't work out, he moved on to the next. When the judge asks what he means by "trolling," Rader explains it like a lecturer, the different phases serial killers go through, as if he's talking about somebody else. One of the ten was Marine Hedge, 53. She lived a few houses down from him. "We'd walk by and wave," he says. "It wasn't anything personal. Just a neighbor." He even had special clothes for it. He called them his "hit clothes." The detail almost nobody remembers is how they confirmed it was him. Police didn't want to tip him off with a swab, so they got a tissue sample his daughter had left at a college clinic years earlier. Her DNA matched the killer's as his child. In August 2005 he got ten life sentences in a row, at least 175 years. Kansas had no death penalty when he killed, so he never faced it. He is still in prison today.

For nine days, Susan Smith cried on national TV and begged a stranger to bring her two little boys home. They were at the bottom of a lake a few miles away the whole time, and she was the one who put them there. On the night of October 25, 1994, she ran up to a house in Union, South Carolina, screaming. She said a Black man with a gun jumped into her car at a red light, made her get out, and drove off with her sons in the back seat. Michael was 3. Alex was 14 months old. The whole country went looking for a man who didn't exist. His sketch was on every channel. Hundreds of volunteers searched the woods on foot and on horseback, divers went into the lakes, and the town tied yellow ribbons on every tree. In the video below she tells the story herself. She says her son asked "Mom, where you going?" and she told him she loved him before the man slammed the door. "I just felt like such a failure." A week later she stands next to her husband David and begs whoever has her children to bring them home. On Good Morning America she says she has put her faith in the sheriff. The sheriff had stopped believing her almost from the start. The light she described only turns red at that empty intersection when another car is waiting on the cross street, and she swore there was no other car. She failed a lie detector test. And a rich man she was seeing had just written her a letter saying he didn't want children. The video ends on November 3. That morning she was on TV saying the hardest part was not knowing. That afternoon she confessed. She had let the car roll down a boat ramp into John D. Long Lake with both boys strapped into their car seats, and watched it float, flip over and sink. Divers had already searched that lake, close to shore. The car was 122 feet out, upside down. The jury needed about two and a half hours to convict her. She got 30 years to life. In November 2024 she told the parole board she would give anything to go back. David told them it wasn't a tragic mistake. The board said no, unanimously. On November 19 she goes before them again. Her lawyers said she meant to die in that car too and got out at the last second. So which was it: a broken mother who lost her nerve, or a woman who killed her sons for a man and then cried for the cameras for nine days?

Jeffrey Dahmer's father once carried a locked metal box down to the basement and got ready to smash it open. Inside was a human head. He never opened it. In 1994, Jeffrey sat next to him in a Wisconsin prison and told the story on national TV. Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys, most of them in Milwaukee. He was arrested in July 1991, after one man escaped his apartment with a handcuff still on his wrist and flagged down a police car. Two months before that, police had been at the same door. A 14-year-old boy was found on the street, drugged, naked and bleeding. Two women called for help. The officers believed Dahmer when he said the boy was his 19-year-old boyfriend, walked him back inside, and left. The boy was killed that night. His father, Lionel, wrote a book about raising him called A Father's Story. In the video below, they sit side by side with Stone Phillips, and Phillips asks about the box. Jeffrey kept it locked in his bedroom closet. One week his dad came to visit, saw it, and asked what was inside. Jeffrey wouldn't open it. They argued. Lionel took it down to the basement to break it open himself. "I was thinking, I've got to stop this from happening," Jeffrey says. "It's all going to come crashing down now." It didn't. The box was never opened in front of his dad. "And so the lies continued," he says. "The whole scenario just continued for years after that." Then the cameras stop, and at the end of the tape you see what happened next. On his way out, Dahmer casually pointed at a box in the room and wanted the crew to know: that's the type of box. It looked almost exactly like the one his father had found. He got 15 life sentences. Wisconsin has no death penalty. In November 1994, a few months after this interview, another inmate beat him to death with a metal bar while they cleaned a prison gym bathroom. He was 34.