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The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers

June 27, 2024 / 44:01

This episode covers the abduction and murder of Dawn Magar in 1973, the investigation into her case, and the eventual capture of Gerald Winger, a serial killer. Key topics include DNA evidence, the timeline of events, and the impact on the community.

Dawn Magar, a 20-year-old mother, went missing while shopping in Aaso, Michigan. Her body was discovered weeks later, leading to a long investigation that remained unsolved for decades.

Gerald Winger, who had a history of violent crimes, was identified as a suspect years later when DNA evidence linked him to Dawn's murder. The episode details how investigators used DNA technology to finally solve the case.

The narrative includes the emotional toll on Dawn's family and the community, as well as the chilling details of Winger's predatory behavior over the years.

Ultimately, Winger was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001, bringing closure to a case that haunted the community for nearly three decades.

TLDR

The episode details the abduction and murder of Dawn Magar and the capture of serial killer Gerald Winger through DNA evidence.

Episode

44:01
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in January 1973 a young woman went missing in AC quied Michigan farming Community when Da magar was abducted it
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was unnerving it was just chilling could something like this happen in broad daylight that's impossible in this
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area 6 years years later a 16-year-old high school student was murdered in similar circumstances just 40 m away it
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was strange the location where her body was found you could almost superimpose on top of dawn magar's scene where her
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body was found Gerald Wingard followed a pattern he would troll rural towns and college campuses for young women to
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abduct to rape sometimes to kill he would get into his vehicle and he would go cruising he was out looking for a
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victim Winger got away with murder for three decades but in the end his horrific past caught up with
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him this was one of the first cases in the world that DNA evidence played a factor
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when Gerald Winger was at last brought to Justice he was finally recognized as one of the world's most most evil
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[Music] [Music] [Music] killers in 1973 Dawn and Don mag were high school sweethearts married
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with a one-year-old son when Dawn vanished while out shopping the close-knit community of aaso Michigan
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was terrified where she was abducted Groceries on the ground truck door open foggy night and everything we knew
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something really bad had happened it was an unsolved case for so many years it was just part of the local lore whoever
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this is they're still out there and who knows who else they've abducted and
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killed evil had invaded this rural idial Dawn's friends and family wouldn't see
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peace or Justice for almost 30 years this killer Story begins on the 15th of January
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1941 in a small town just 130 mi from oaso with the birth of Gerald Leroy Winger he was from Niles Michigan which
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is which is almost to the Indiana border Winger was one of five children in a close ordinary middleclass family well
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we know if win's background wouldn't really suggest the things that were were
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to happen later in his life you can hide in a big family and perhaps you're you're not under so much attention in
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high school he was an athlete he was considered fairly intelligent uh well-liked he seemed like
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the All-American boy actually had a football scholarship in June 1959 aged just 18
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Wingard married his first wife an 18-year-old girl from his hometown a few months later he enrolled
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at University and the couple moved to Anne Arbor he went to the University of Michigan he was to all intents and
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purposes hard working late in 1960 this upright University student is uh involved in a car accident with
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his then partner which puts an end to his athletic career in the wake of the car accident
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the couple have a baby a little boy but the tragedy continues to strike them and
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after 7 months the baby dies unexpectedly 4 months later in July 1961 a fellow student at the University
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suffered a hallowing attack uh young woman and her boyfriend the young woman was blind they were uh traveling in his
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car uh they decided to stop on the side of a rural road and spend a little time together while they were sitting there
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they noticed a car drive by them kind of slow the next thing they know a man gets
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out of the driver's side of the car and they can see that he's got a rifle
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in his hand he asked the girl to tie up the boy but she couldn't because she was
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blind so he ordered her back into the car and he tied up the boy he then proceeded to take her purse take his
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wallet take his keys moved some stuff from the vehicle that he was in into their car and then he put the girl into
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the car and drove off with her as a 19-year-old blind girl at that time taken from her boyfriend taken to an
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unknown location she had no idea where she was at and then brutally raped having brutalized the young woman
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the attacker left her tied up in a ditch next to a remote Country Road he told her to walk away and she struggled in
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this rural area to get away from him and she hid and when she knew that he was finally gone and likely not coming back
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she wored worked her way somehow back out to the road and flagged down a motorist that that brought her
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care when police returned to the scene they found the woman's boyfriend still
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alive and an incriminating piece of evidence they find that the car that the suspect left there um appeared to be his
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own car and it was Gerald wert's car he told somebody about what he' done ended
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up going to a lawyer and he was advised to go to the police and hand himself in which is what he did but he didn't hand
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himself in out of any remorse or guilt or shame or anything like that cuz he basically said but I had a black hour I
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can't remember anything that I did yeah I'll accept it was me but I have no
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memory of it he was charged with the armed robbery and the sexual assault tried before a judge Wingard pled
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Insanity several experts argued he was suffering from a skitso personality disorder
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this would certainly explain those behaviors of violence and and the rapes and would certainly have an impact on
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the rest of his life and the way that he was going to behave in spite of Wing's protestations
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of his innocence he was convicted of the rape and robbery and sent to jail for eight
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years his wife divorced him shortly after after his incarceration freed in 1969 Wingard quickly remarried had a
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daughter and forged a career in the relatively new field of computer programming the family settled in the
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Lancing area of Michigan just a 30-minute drive from the small city of aaso a place that was struck by tragedy
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on the 27th of January 1973 with The Disappearance of 20-year-old Local woman Dawn magar she
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was at home in chessine with her husband and one-year-old child she left chestin
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to come to aaso to do some shopping once she got here she started having car trouble so she called up her
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father-in-law and made arrangements to borrow his truck so she could finish her errands so she went over to his house
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got the truck and then from there she made a couple of stops and then she went to a plaza just north of aaso called the
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Yankee Plaza that was a pretty small shopping center it only had like maybe three
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stores or businesses in it author Billy Bates was a child living in the aaso area in
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1973 we were in that shopping plaza all the time and so when this happened when Dawn magar was abducted I remember my
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mom talking about it cuz she was a young mom herself she stopped in there to do some
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shopping at the store when she didn't make it back home her husband started getting concerned and then he eventually
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came into a was to file a missing person's report she was not the type of person
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you would expect to go missing immediately as soon as she was reported really she was seen as a high-risk
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victim this is is totally out of character they found her father-in-law's truck out in the strip mall parking lot
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the door was open the items that she bought were in the vehicle there was a couple of keys from the keychain uh one
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laying on the floor in the truck and one laying on the ground outside the truck early on they they felt that there was
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some foul play involved and they they started acting on that accordingly La was known in the area as
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a popular young woman from a close family she grew up in corana and she had two brothers uh she lived at home with her
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mother and father who were very loving um she did well in high school she had a lot of friends well-liked person just a
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real downto Earth friendly Midwestern girl you know journalist Tony hornus got to know daor at High School in Corona
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she was gorgeous strawberry blonde little little freckly I would say she was in the group with a with a
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bunch of us you know parties after football games and you know just that kind of thing school
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activities Dawn and her husband DA got together in high school and eventually married in 1971 and had a
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child having just celebrated her son's first birthday Dawn was now missing Under Suspicion
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circumstances so at the time that she was abducted it was very foggy the fog was thick and uh would have been very
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easy for somebody to kidnap someone without being seen the police got a search party going and there were
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hundreds of people there you know I was there and we did grid searches around the
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county we all knew we were looking for a body after more than 5 weeks of daily searches tirelessly scouring the rural
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area on foot and on Horseback the fears of volunteers like Tony were realized news of a gruesome Discovery less than
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10 miles from where the 20-year-old mother had last been seen alive spelled tragedy for Dawn magar's friends and
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family on March 4th 1973 there were two boys up in the Oakley area uh their family had a maple syrup
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operation so they had a lot of maple trees and their job was to go out that day and just check the trees and while
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they were doing this they found what looked like a human being to them on the ground so the state police responded up
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there and they were able to determine that it was Don magir it appeared that she had been
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inducted and murdered and was also raped prior to her death the violent homicide
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of a young mother was a shockingly unusual occurrence in shiai County while investigators waited for
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the results of Dawn's autopsy her murder became the only thing local people were
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talking about it's a rural area very low crime back in those days maybe somebody would
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break into somebody's car maybe break another house once in a while but murder
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oh my gosh never well at this point it obviously it turned into a homicide investigation there were a couple of
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pretty good suspects back when this happened but they never had anything conclusive to show that any one of those
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people had committed the crime first rule like that in the law enforcement he are going to look at the people closest
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to her you know the husband everything Rock Solid Alibi no way could Don have done this took
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polygraphs no no no he was home with his son as public fears mounted and with a murderer on the loose detectives hoped
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that Dawn's remains would give them the answer to who had killed her because of the cold weather there
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was not a lot of decomposition she was found faced down on the ground her coat was buttoned up
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in the front and her arms were inside coat not the sleeves so that the coat was kind of like a straight jacket and a
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bullet hole in the back of the jacket and um then of course subsequently in the autopsy they
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discovered there were two other bullets the forensic evidence that was collected
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at the time was exquisitly preserved through some real fine police work uh and and scene work so what the medical
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examiner found was that she had been shot once in the bag and twice in the back of the head with
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22 caliber bullets and they were able to recover the bullets from her body Dawn had also been raped and the
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killer had left behind vital evidence so during the autopsy uh they did a vaginal
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swab and uh when it was tested later by the lab there was a presence of seen Physicians who did the autopsy had
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collected the Sean samples from her and literally put them in a like a sandwich bag back then like it it's crazy to
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think about that and then they put it in storage back then of course all you could do was
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match blood types you couldn't there was nothing else you could really do the blood type detected from dawn
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magar's attacker did not match either of the police's main suspects but the
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following summer 18 months after Dawn's murder another significant clue emerged
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in 1974 there was a couple of boys swimming in the shiw wasi river right in aaso just off on the north side of the
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bridge on Main Street they stumbled across something laying on the bottom of the river they picked it up and it was a
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gun would have been easy for anyone driving by or to to exit a vehicle and and throw items out from uh that
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location the firearm was a 22 caliber revolver because of the deterioration of the firearm in in the river the rusting
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and so forth they were unable to ballistically prove that it was involved because of the circumstances the
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location that was found the ammunition the right making model of the gun they believed that this was the murder
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weapon Detectives now had the gun they believed had been used to kill Dawn magor but they still did not know who it
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belonged to the investigators were able to trace that firearm back to a pawn shop in Yuma
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Arizona and they were able to obtain a name of Robert Shaw but when they went to that address uh Mr Shaw had already
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moved and uh they were unable to track him any further 2 years later police detectives made another Discovery in
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1976 again there was a couple of kids playing in the river this time south of the bridge south of where the gun had
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been found and they found a wallet laying on the bank of the river uh not too far from the water that wallet was
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turned in to the police and it was found to have the identification of Don magar
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so this guy definitely came back through aaso and pitched it off this bridge and
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the shasi river is one of the very few rivers in the world that run from south to
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North and so when he threw it out it kept drifting Downstream it offered no other uh
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information at that point no no evidence or anything but it also helped um confirm that this gun that was found two
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years before would be the gun that was used in this crime by the late 1970s with no new
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information to help catch Dawn's killer the trail had gone cold a body blow for
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the community but especially for the young woman's family Dawn's father continued to search
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for her killer after she was found and spent most of his time doing that and the family felt that eventually
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contributed to his death was his obsession was we're trying to find out who who killed
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her in April 1979 a teenage girl Laura May McVey disappeared just a few miles away from
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oaso and in shockingly similar circumstances uh she was a 16-year-old uh high school student who I
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I believe was on their high school track team or cross country team she was running jogging along a road as I recall
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and then just turned up missing there was a witness that seen her talking to someone in a van and then after that she
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was never seen again until her body was later found in another County further north her body had been outside for
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quite a while so there was some decomposition but they were able to determine that she had been
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strangled and that was how she died Di and there was evidence that she was sexually assaulted but there was no
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seman this time the police quickly identified a suspect somebody had observed a strange
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or suspicious van in the area uh wrote that registration or license plate number down after this individual who
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had written this license plate number down heard about the abduction and and the death of Laura McVey uh and turn
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that information over to the please the van turned out to belong to 38-year-old Gerald Winger who'd been in the
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hubberston area at the time he was up fishing with his brother and another friend and he left the same night said I
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got to go home I got to go do something he just went cruising Winger's pattern
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seems to be attacking and sexually assaulting vulnerable young isolated women he would was out looking
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for somebody who fitted that kind of profile when police ran a background check on their suspect they uncovered
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his conviction 20 years earlier for rape and when they searched his van they found fibers they believed had come from
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Laura mcvey's blue jogging suit who was charged with with murder but there were lots of arguments about
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whether the evidence was a admissible whether the police had collected it in the right way whether it was a lawful
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search because and he was really really lucky there because some of the key evidence just wasn't able to
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be presented to the court the judge dismissed it you know and he walks away as the trial
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collapsed for the murder of Laura McVey wingett left the courthouse with a smile on his face insisting to the press
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and to the public that he was an innocent man and he had done nothing wrong whatever it was a gigantic
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fraud he may have proclaimed his innocence but after his release officers witness firsthand Gerald wingard's
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predatory habits the Michigan State Police uh did surveil him for quite some time and what
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they learned from that he would often leave the L area where he resided and would travel to uh strip clubs in the
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Detroit area but instead of taking the freeway system in Michigan that would offer the fastest and most direct route
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he would take the back roads and would always cut through various college campuses what the detectives believed at
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that time is that he was trolling he was out looking for a victim someone that he could abduct
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without being seen wingert was never caught in the act and the surveillance operation was eventually called
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off he dropped off the radar at that point the man that investigators was certain was responsible for killing
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Laura McVey was free to roam the streets of aaso but Gerald Winger's luck was
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about to change two decades after the notorious unsolved murder of Dawn magar in shiai County evidence from the crime
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scene was still sitting on a shelf in a Michigan crime lab including Seaman samples found in Dawn's
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body back in in the 70s they really weren't that sophisticated with DNA but they had recovered DNA from her and they
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preserved it in 1994 Michigan and started um getting involved with DNA evidence DNA
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technology biological samples that had previously only revealed a perpetrator's
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blood type could now produce a DNA profile that would match a single individual this is exactly what the
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State Crime Lab managed to do with the dawn magar case in the mid 1990s they were able to uh build this
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profile this DNA profile on our unknown killer I became the detective at the aaso post in November of 1998 and I
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actually took an interest in the unsolved homicide cases at the post the magar case to me was the most promising
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because there was DNA evidence detective Mark pendra was determined to solve the
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25-year-old Cold Case and catch a predatory killer he now had the DNA of the man who'd raped Dawn magar before
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she was murdered but there was no match on the police database you have a DNA profile which is great but you have no
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idea who it belongs to so you still basically have a houd done it also preserved in evidence was the handgun
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found dumped in the shasi river in 1974 it was actually Mark's idea to focus our efforts on a firearm that had
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been found uh within a year of this murder so we turned back towards the gun to see if that could lead us to somebody
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when Mark told me this case is solvable you know we got the gun you know and that's when I really believe too that it
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could be it could be solved in 1974 the gun had been registered to a man named Robert Shaw but the police
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hadn't been able to find him in 1999 the they tried again in an unexpected breakthrough they quickly discovered
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that Robert Shaw was living in Lansing Michigan now we're excited we got the
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connection of that gun getting to Michigan so we started investigating Robert Shaw and then eventually uh we
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contacted him for an interview he specifically recalled buying a 22 caliber revolver from a pawn shop in
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Yuma Arizona when he was stationed in the Army down there and that he had purchased it for plinking and shooting
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jack rabbits and so forth he didn't know what happened to the gun he knew he
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didn't have it anymore he thought maybe he had traded it to a friend but really
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had no idea so we interviewed him extensively we did our background investigation on
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him we actually ran a polygraph and he came back in conclusive so now we're wondering was he involved
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in the crime detectives knew there was one Sure Fire way to eliminate as a suspect so when they did a DNA test on
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him it was no match that was in her it was another dead end until a few months later when Robert Shaw contacted
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detective Steve harburger out of the blue he called me up one day and he said Steve I I've got another name I want to
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give you I was looking at a case of wine this case of wine made me remember a guy
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that my ex-wife began having an affair with back in the early '70s and it reminded him of the name of weert
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and that's how he finally remember this name so he provided us with that name
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she eventually left me for this guy and I remember his first name was Jerry he thinks that the gun became up
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missing around that time and Joe might have taken it investigators began to gather everything they could about this
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new suspect we found out that in 1961 he had been convicted of a robbery and a rape in an arbor of a blind
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woman and we also found that he had been arrested in 1981 for 1979 homicide in Ionia so this was the first time that we
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had a suspect that had the background and the propensity for doing this type of crime and we both became extremely
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excited at at the potential that this was our killer um it was at that time that he and I put all of our energy into
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Mr wiard to either identify him properly through DNA evidence or eliminate him and keep moving on in
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2000 we had surveillance done on him and what we were looking to do was to get a
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DNA sample by the year 2000 59-year-old Gerald Winger was living with his latest
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wife just outside Detroit Winger was married four times so you know quite the ladies man I guess
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but he you know he'd been dormant for a lot of years you know living a quiet
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life in Sterling Heights he was a computer wiz and people liked him kept to himself quiet he was uh very bright
00:28:57
from what I recall and um but he was a charmer he's got a good job he's blending in uh with his environment just
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like everyone else does but in in secret you know he's got this other life that that he at least
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had lived at one time and may have continued aaso detectives started following their suspects every move what
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we had that the surveillance team looking for was him to discard a cigarette chewing gum a pot bottle
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anything of those of that nature that would contain his DNA and unfortunately during the whole time they were
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surveilling him he never discarded anything like that while their team was trying to prove a link between their
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suspect and the DNA traces left on Dawn magar's body Mark and Steve were finding
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other links between Dawn's case and wingard's other suspected or confirmed
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attacks starting with the rape of the blind students over three decades earlier we found that a girl was
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abducted the weapon used was a 22 caliber the victim was abducted from a rural area uh transported to another rural
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area where she was raped but the other thing that we found very interesting was the victim from
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1961 her underwear were missing da magar it was found that her underwear were missing the other thing
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that we found that was similar was that he had tied the victim's hands behind
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her back in 1961 in 1973 Dawn's arms were inside of her coat not in the armsleeves but inside of her
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coat and the coat was zipped up in effect acting like a straight jacket the officially unsolved murder of Laura
00:30:58
McVey in 1979 also carried intriguing similarities we were able to get photographs of the different scenes
00:31:08
associated with Laura McVey that the location where her body was found you could almost
00:31:16
superimpose on top of Da magar's uh scene where her body was found the position of the bodies and so
00:31:24
forth the type of rural area it was strange they were they were almost identical detectives were building a
00:31:32
case but it was purely circumstantial they doubted it would be enough to secure a
00:31:40
conviction we need to tie him in through DNA we need to definitively show that he
00:31:46
was the one who left the seen deposits uh in da magar's body that were recovered so what they ended up doing
00:31:56
was doing a trash pull when we put our trash out by the curb site all of a sudden it becomes a public entity so uh
00:32:03
I just pulled up to the curb I jumped out grabbed four bags of trash threw them on my car and drove
00:32:09
off in November 2000 32 cigarette butts from Gerald wingard's garbage bags were
00:32:17
sent to the State Crime Lab in Lansing Michigan through the winter and early spring the Cold Case detectives waited
00:32:25
to find out if they had finally cracked the dawn magar murder case and could take a dangerous man off the streets
00:32:34
when the call finally came it was incredible [Music] news I eventually heard back from the
00:32:43
lab and they said we found a DNA match on a merit brand cigarette Bud total excitement it was it was
00:32:51
unbelievable that we were able to finally put a name with the DNA profile that we had from from a case in
00:32:59
1973 to somebody that was likely involved in at least one other homicide of a of girl that got he got away with
00:33:06
it and now it was looking like we were going to be able to put a case together on
00:33:12
him question by the police on the 7th of March 2001 Gerald Winger denied visiting
00:33:20
aaso or ever meeting Dawn Maga I reached down into my bag and I said let me show
00:33:26
you a picture of her and he says I don't know her I've never seen her before and
00:33:32
at this point he became extremely agitated began slamming his fist on the table look I've told you once I'm not
00:33:39
going to tell you again I don't know her I've never met her I've never had sex
00:33:44
with her I I don't know this woman when the police interrogated Winger for the
00:33:49
first time they found him out in a series of Lies he certainly had been in the ooso area at the time of Dawn's
00:33:56
disappearance he certainly newer the DNA proved that and gradually it became abundantly
00:34:04
clear that there was a case to be answered and winget had to answer it he said well guess what you're under arrest
00:34:13
for the murder of Don magar we informed him that we did have a search warrant for um DNA and other biological evidence
00:34:22
and that we were going to be collecting that uh from him and it was very hard to read his emotions he
00:34:31
was angry but he also seemed scared and I think he knew at that point it was done that that we had
00:34:41
him so then right after that we knew we needed to go tell Don magar's mother
00:34:47
that we had gotten her man she was quite elderly at the time so we broke the news
00:34:52
to her kind of easily that we had found the man that was responsible for her daughter's murder and he was locked up
00:34:58
in jail she was obviously very grateful after all this time that we had gotten a
00:35:03
man that had killed her daughter in November 2001 Gerald Winger stood trial for the murder of dawn magar
00:35:16
for the first time the people of shasi County got a look at the bogey man who'd
00:35:21
cast a shadow over the area for 28 long years it was a very arrogant defiant type of demeanor that he was portraying
00:35:33
throughout this proceeding this trial he was cocky he always turned around laughing at his daughter kind of had
00:35:41
this look to his face like he didn't care about other people that that was the kind of look that he had on his
00:35:47
face investigators desperately hope that a case years in the making would be enough to convict him first off and
00:35:56
foremost we had had Sean which had DNA secondly we had the gun and the gun was very important because without that gun
00:36:05
we never get to jural Winger attorney Vince green represented Winger he admitted that they had sex but
00:36:13
he said it was consensual sex his defense was that he had met the victim who was a stranger they had just
00:36:25
met they had consensual sex and then they parted ways and when they did she was still alive to Dawn's family
00:36:33
wingard's claims were a further violation and an insult to his victim's memory oh I think they were all offended
00:36:41
and and angry that he would insinuate that number one she would cheat on her husband and number two that
00:36:50
she would be the type of girl that would just meet somebody and have sex with them the DNA evidence that linked Winger
00:36:57
to the crime also revealed a time frame the sexual intercourse had to have taken
00:37:03
place around the time of the murder the spermatozoa still had tails attached there's a short time window or time
00:37:12
period where those Tails began breaking off and in her case those Tails were still attached her body had been
00:37:21
preserved in the middle of winter in Michigan outdoors and so our forensic experts
00:37:29
were able to testify to the fact that whoever left this seminal evidence in Dawn was likely the
00:37:39
killer it was powerful testimony but it relied on a jury comprehending the strength of the DNA evidence still a
00:37:49
relatively new field at the time but prosecutors were also able to prove that Gerald Wingard had a history of violent
00:37:58
sexual attacks on women the Clincher was when the woman he raped in 1961 came walked into the courtroom with her
00:38:07
Leader dog and that was heart-wrenching you know testimony when she testified to all this
00:38:16
and went through all the graphic detail that was involved in this in this rape and sexual
00:38:23
assault the jury kept looking at her and then they look at him and they look at her and theyd look every time the new
00:38:29
detail would come out from her they'd look right at him and then he would just
00:38:34
kind of show that defeat the girls that um were associated with him as victims had a similar build they were petite
00:38:44
they had um blonde or strawberry blonde hair he seemed to have a thing for that type of
00:38:50
woman there was a juror who fit this profile of the type of woman he liked and we all noticed during the trial he
00:39:00
spent a lot of time staring at this juror it was a little spooky on November the 26 2001 the jury
00:39:10
retired to consider whether Gerald Leroy wingert was guilty of first-degree murder when the jury went out for
00:39:21
deliberations he said something to the deputy was keeping an eye on him he says get my bill ready to jail cuz I'm going
00:39:28
to be checking out he was confident he was going to be found not guilty I thought that we had put together a lot
00:39:35
of circumstantial evidence a lot of similar a evidence we had our DNA and we had a gun so I felt really confident how
00:39:44
do you find Reasonable Doubt when there isn't any when you have DNA evidence
00:39:50
that is so clearly indicating that whoever killed this person did it probably right before
00:39:57
right after they had sex with this person after 2 days of deliberation the jury found Wingard guilty of
00:40:06
premeditated first-degree murder I was elated this guy who was not only responsible for Dawn's death most
00:40:17
likely responsible for Laura mcvey's death was certainly responsible for the
00:40:22
rape and robbery involving this other lady back in ' 61 and quite frankly maybe others was now going to pay the
00:40:30
price he was caught and now he was going to pay for what he did the sentencing for this type of
00:40:38
conviction first degree murder and felony murder there's only one sentence he can get and that's life in prison
00:40:43
with no parole Gerald wingert was finally facing the music for the murder of dawn magar
00:40:51
something he never expected to have to do his jaw dropped and he was just looking at disbelief when they said
00:41:00
guilty he was so like I said he was so confident he was going to be going home right after this that he just couldn't
00:41:07
believe that he was found guilty Winger did not want to get caught he he didn't
00:41:12
like being held to account for some serial offenders they don't care it it's
00:41:18
part of the game Winger didn't like it it actually quite frightened him I think Gerald Leroy Winger died in prison
00:41:27
in August 2022 he never officially admitted to any further murders though investigators had
00:41:37
their suspicions about the man who habitually cruised rural back Lanes on the lookout for lone females he did a
00:41:47
lot of traveling he'd been to a lot of states and plus did a lot of traveling a
00:41:51
Michigan so the potential for murder was certainly there it was definitely on his
00:41:56
mind they're quite compulsive and obsessive serial killers it's very very
00:42:03
difficult I think to get rid of a compulsion or an obsession and whereas they might be able
00:42:11
maybe to control things I don't think the compulsion ever goes away I do believe that the Gerald wiart
00:42:21
was involved in many more homicides there was uh one former soulmate of his that we had talked to
00:42:30
and that soulmate said that wingert had told him that there were nine bodies Gerald wingard's crimes against
00:42:46
young women started young at just 20 years old for those who knew him his violent sexual offending came out of
00:42:54
nowhere but once he'd embarked on a path of predatory behavior he didn't know how
00:43:00
to stop Winger took the Peace of Mind the security and in some cases the lives of
00:43:07
the young women unlucky enough to cross his path but in 2001 he finally paid the
00:43:14
price for being one of the world's most evil killers [Music]

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 90
    Most shocking
  • 85
    Most heartbreaking
  • 85
    Most surprising
  • 80
    Most emotional

Episode Highlights

  • Gerald Winger's Pattern of Abduction
    Gerald Winger trolled rural towns for young women to abduct, rape, and sometimes kill.
    “He would get into his vehicle and go cruising.”
    @ 00m 58s
    June 27, 2024
  • The Disappearance of Dawn Magar
    In January 1973, a young woman named Dawn Magar went missing, sparking fear in her community.
    “This was totally out of character for her.”
    @ 09m 21s
    June 27, 2024
  • The Gruesome Discovery
    After weeks of searching, Dawn Magar's body was found, shocking the small community.
    “The fears of volunteers were realized with a gruesome discovery.”
    @ 11m 29s
    June 27, 2024
  • DNA Evidence Breakthrough
    In the mid-1990s, DNA evidence from Dawn's case was finally analyzed, offering hope for justice.
    “This case is solvable.”
    @ 25m 07s
    June 27, 2024
  • DNA Match Found
    Detectives finally find a DNA match linking Gerald Winger to the murder case.
    “It was unbelievable that we were able to finally put a name with the DNA profile.”
    @ 32m 51s
    June 27, 2024
  • Trial and Conviction
    Gerald Winger stands trial for the murder of Dawn Magar and is found guilty.
    “He was looking at disbelief when they said guilty.”
    @ 40m 57s
    June 27, 2024

Episode Quotes

  • He was finally recognized as one of the world's most evil killers.
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers
  • It was an unsolved case for so many years.
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers
  • Who knows who else they’ve abducted and killed?
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers
  • Evil had invaded this rural ideal.
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers
  • He was so confident he was going to be found not guilty.
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers
  • He was looking at disbelief when they said guilty.
    The University Predator: Jerald Wingeart | World’s Most Evil Killers

Key Moments

  • Community Shock02:21
  • Dawn's Disappearance08:00
  • Gruesome Discovery11:41
  • DNA Breakthrough23:51
  • Suspect Identified27:50
  • Trial Begins35:12
  • Guilty Verdict40:06
  • Life Sentence40:42

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown