00:00:01
[music] In December 1991 in Detroit and neighboring city Highland Park, the bodies of two women were discovered in
00:00:14
abandoned buildings. >> They were being lured in with crack cocaine. Then they were strangled,
00:00:22
killed, and left for uh people to find. When more bodies started appearing, police from both districts realized that
00:00:31
a dangerous predator was roaming their streets. >> The community was livid. They wanted it
00:00:38
done right now. When are you going to solve it? We didn't have a clue of getting to the suspect yet.
00:00:47
One woman was sure she had survived an attack by the killer, a man she knew as Tony, 24year-old Benjamin Atkins, but
00:00:56
her claims were ignored by the police. >> They file a report, but then nothing comes of it. They basically just told
00:01:05
her, "Go home." Now, everybody knew her. Go home, darling. With every month that passed, the body
00:01:11
count continued to rise until one officer finally took Darene's claims seriously and drove her out onto the
00:01:19
streets to look for her attacker. She got to hyperventilating. And I grabbed her and physically shook
00:01:27
her. I said, "What's wrong, darling? What's wrong?" She said, "That's him. That's Tony." When the truth finally
00:01:35
emerged, Benjamin Atkins would be unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers.
00:02:02
>> [music] >> In 1994, a case that had horrified the city of Detroit concluded with one of the
00:02:12
world's fastest moving serial killers, 24year-old Benjamin Atkins, being locked away for life.
00:02:20
[music] But when the killings began 3 years earlier, they had gone largely unnoticed.
00:02:28
In the beginning when they did find that the victims were known prostitutes and they were drug addicts, [music] they
00:02:35
were just thought of as the typical homicides that were happening in the city at the time. [music]
00:02:41
>> To find a deceased sex worker was not at all unusual in Detroit. [music] >> When the community started demanding
00:02:51
answers, four law enforcement agencies came together to catch the killer. Atkins had the whole city paralyzed with
00:03:00
fear. Women were genuinely afraid to go out at night on their own, particularly in the Highland Park area.
00:03:08
>> The FBI profilers were stating that he killed more people in less time than Jack the Ripper.
00:03:14
And to be involved in that case was something that I will always remember. This killer's story begins in Ohio on
00:03:27
August the 26th, 1968. Benjamin Atkins had what you could describe as a catastrophic childhood.
00:03:38
He was the younger of two brothers and by 1970 his father had disappeared. his mom, Judy, was on her own with these
00:03:46
two young, very young boys. And so at that point, she went to Detroit where her mom was living.
00:03:56
But Judy was really absent through Benjamin's childhood. She was addicted to heroin and she was doing
00:04:05
prostitution. >> She simply couldn't cope. And it wasn't long before Benjamin was put into care.
00:04:18
>> He was in the foster system from a very early age, from the age of four or 5 years old. He and his brother were
00:04:26
shuttled from one foster home to another. >> He got shipped around [music] and eventually wound up in a boy's home
00:04:35
where he was physically [music] and sexually abused on a regular basis. In 1980, at the age of 11, Atkins was
00:04:45
discharged from the care system. >> He's returned to his mother, but nothing really has changed.
00:04:53
He watches her have sex with various men [music] at various points. >> The boys were left to their own devices,
00:05:02
and that is when Benjamin, as a teenager, started hustling on the street. He learned he could get money by selling
00:05:10
[music] himself with men on the street. From there, Benjamin got into a variety of drugs and he graduated to crack
00:05:20
cocaine. >> It was a way out. It was an escape for him from the horrors of the life that he
00:05:28
was leading. >> In the 1980s, Detroit was a city in decline. We had a drug problem at the time. We
00:05:37
had street sales of crack cocaine and heroin that were rampant. The city was overwhelmed with the
00:05:45
narcotics trade. Crack was available very easy, very cheap, and people got addicted very
00:05:54
quickly. >> By the time Atkins got to be an adult, he was spending a lot of his time on the
00:06:02
streets. He was homeless off and on. Sometimes he would stay with his brother. Sometimes he would just be
00:06:08
sleeping in abandoned buildings. And that's when the crimes began. >> In his early 20s, Atkins violent
00:06:20
tendencies started to emerge. >> Atkins was very methodical. He followed the same formula. He would meet a female
00:06:28
and maybe it was someone he even saw around. people tended to know each other there on Woodward A in Highland Park in
00:06:34
Detroit. And so he would typically talk to her, engage her in conversations, say, "Hey, I've got something to smoke.
00:06:42
You have a pipe." That was the question that he asked the one known survivor at the time, Darlene. Do you have a pipe to
00:06:48
smoke with? And that's how he was able to lure her off to a dark corner and then [music] try to kill her.
00:06:56
Darlene was someone who was a mom and a wife in Highland Park. She had boys. >> In October 1991, Darlene's youngest son,
00:07:07
Rashard Green, was 12 years old. >> It's not enough time for the words to put in about my mother. Nothing she
00:07:15
wouldn't do for her for her family, especially her kids. There's nothing she wouldn't do for us. Alongside caring for
00:07:21
her family, however, 34year-old Darlene struggled with drug addiction. [music] >> She was known around the area. She was
00:07:29
part of the community. She also spent some time on the street and she spent some time doing prostitution.
00:07:37
>> Even when she ventured off into different things, she would always make her way back to see if nobody else me or
00:07:45
her her baby. I used to sit in my front room window and look out the window looking for my mother to come walking up
00:07:50
at any moment. Some days I wouldn't go to sleep look waking up looking [music] for her. I would get on my bike and ride
00:07:56
through the neighborhood looking for my mother. That's my mama. >> Darlene had seen Atkins on Woodward A in
00:08:06
Highland Park and she knew him as Tony. That was his street name. There was one night, early morning hours
00:08:17
of like 3:00 or 4 in the morning, Darlene was out and about and she was on her way somewhere and she encountered
00:08:24
Tony. Tony asked her, "Do you have a pipe? You want to go smoke somewhere?" And there
00:08:31
was nothing unusual about that at all. Highland Park in Detroit had been a prosperous community, but it had gone
00:08:42
downhill very [music] quickly, reflecting the collapse of the economy of Detroit as a whole.
00:08:51
>> Most of the buildings on the southern Woodward corridor were abandoned. [music] There was hundreds, if not
00:08:56
thousands of houses in the city that were abandoned. >> They went to the outside of an abandoned
00:09:02
restaurant. Tony said something about, you know, it's a little windy out here. Let's go inside. Once they get inside,
00:09:09
she's reaching for the pipe and all of a sudden he grabs her and he takes the coat that she's wearing and brings it
00:09:18
down around her arms so she can't move. >> He attacked her. He raped her, but then
00:09:26
he attacked her again. And at that point, she started screaming. She realizes that her life is in danger
00:09:33
and so she's fighting him. She manages to hit him hard enough to give her a moment to run outside.
00:09:42
She runs outside. She's yelling, screaming, "Help! Help! Rape! There's actually someone nearby." He
00:09:50
heard Darlene screaming and he's like, "Where you at?" And that was enough knowing that there
00:09:58
was another man there who was approaching. That was enough to make Atkins run away.
00:10:07
>> Darlene Saunders was embarrassed, didn't want to tell anybody about the attack that she'd suffered and she
00:10:13
simply went home. >> Rashard remembers his mother arriving home that night. >> She just hugged me all night, sat right
00:10:23
there with me, just I I just love you so much. And you know, I knew something was
00:10:28
wrong. I'm just asking, you know, mama, what's wrong? What are you talking about? I love you, too.
00:10:34
Once she did finally go to sleep, of course, I had to go to school in the morning. I got myself together, went to
00:10:39
school, come back, she was still here, cuz normally she would be gone. That night wasn't the last time Darlene
00:10:47
would meet her attacker. >> She saw him at a crack house. not too long after that [music] and she was
00:10:54
coming up to the house and he held the door for her to come in and she said, "Tony, why did you do that to me?" And
00:11:01
he said, "I don't want to talk about it." She did not go to police because truthfully, for a lot of the women in
00:11:09
this situation, they get attacked all the time. So, she kept the story to herself.
00:11:17
I don't think it's surprising at all that Darlene didn't report what had happened to her. I mean, look at the
00:11:24
world she was living in. I fully expect that she didn't think anyone would believe her, that anybody would see her
00:11:32
as important enough to investigate that crime. >> Benjamin Atkins had got away with
00:11:40
assaulting a vulnerable young mother, but he wasn't about to stop there. And the next time his attack would end
00:11:48
in murder. In 1991, a man with the desire to kill was prowling the streets of Detroit. It
00:12:04
would be December before his crimes would start to be exposed. December 14th, 1991 was when Debbie
00:12:14
Friday was discovered in Highland Park. She was probably only killed the [music]
00:12:22
day before because that's about when she was last seen. So, she was not lying there very long in an empty building
00:12:30
before she was discovered. [music] Later that month, Bertha Mason was discovered.
00:12:38
That was by Detroit police. At >> the time, we were dealing with not as many officers as we should have on the
00:12:45
street. >> We weren't getting properly funded. [music] We had laid off 10 police
00:12:51
officers. >> So, it was not good conditions to be catching a violent, fastmoving killer.
00:13:02
>> Both victims were sex workers who were known to the police. And just a few days
00:13:08
later, at the start of the new year, the body count continued to rise. So then January 1992, January 3rd, there
00:13:21
was a demolition company at a house. One of the workers saw something over by the chainlink fence that was unusual.
00:13:30
Almost thought it was a mannequin at first, and they discovered it was a woman, the body of a woman. and that was
00:13:37
Patricia Canon George. >> With the discovery of a third body, the media was starting to ask questions.
00:13:50
The writer for the Detroit News came up and asked, "Could he speak with me?" I said, "Sure." He was saying, "What
00:13:58
information do you have on the serial killers?" We didn't use at that time serial killer. We use multiple homicides
00:14:06
and things like this. Detroit Police Department, their homicide division said there was no such
00:14:14
thing occurring in their community. We knew that was not true. We knew that there was incidents
00:14:23
occurring in Detroit. Usually there's cooperation of law enforcement between police agencies. Our officers from
00:14:30
Highland Park went to Detroit and they got buzzed off. So there were no communications [music] which made it
00:14:38
extremely difficult. >> It was only a few weeks before police were called to yet another crime scene.
00:14:45
>> Later in January 1992, Vicki True Love was discovered at an abandoned nursing
00:14:51
home along Woodward A. That's four women, three in Detroit and one in Highland Park. Detroit has no
00:15:01
choice but to think, okay, maybe it's the same person doing this. We got the same mo. We got the same victim type.
00:15:09
Maybe we have a serial killer. The scenes were very chaotic. All of them were in abandoned buildings
00:15:23
and you had rubbish and litter and construction material that's fallen from the buildings.
00:15:31
>> All four victims had cracked cocaine in their system and all had been manually
00:15:36
strangled. >> Some of the bodies have been there for several weeks, not in the best
00:15:43
condition. Although police were no closer to finding the killer, the crime scenes
00:15:51
were yielding some clues. >> Used condoms were found near some of the bodies. At one location, they was able to get a
00:16:02
palm print. >> Then there was the discovery at the Monterey Motel in February 1992 that
00:16:09
blew the case wide open. The Montterrey Motel was in Highland Park in Detroit on what was known as the
00:16:19
Woodward Corridor and it had a good past, but like Detroit itself had begun to decay dreadfully and it had become a
00:16:27
home for vagrants. It was often used by sex workers. On February 17th, 1992, a man searching
00:16:37
for scrap material in the motel made a gruesome discovery. He goes into the bathroom of one of the empty rooms and
00:16:47
he sees what appears to be a body part of a person and he realizes, okay, wow, this is a dead woman that I have found
00:16:56
here. And so he runs out of there. He gets police. Highland Park public safety officers
00:17:03
arrived at the scene and made the decision to check the rest of the motel. There were just trash everywhere.
00:17:12
Bits and pieces of rubble, parts of the room, wrappers from food and cigarettes and liquor bottles and just [music]
00:17:21
trash everywhere. They go through each of the rooms and lo and behold, they find two other females [music] in two
00:17:29
other rooms. And all three women have been left there at different times. They didn't have any identification, and
00:17:38
that's not unusual for people who's working in the street. They don't they don't carry identification on them. DNA
00:17:45
wasn't a big thing in the early '9s. We didn't have a DNA database. So, most of them were identified by
00:17:51
their fingerprints. >> Two of the three bodies were identified [music] as Valerie Chalk and Oneita
00:17:59
Hardy. The identity of the third body found inside the Mterrey Motel would remain a mystery for many years.
00:18:08
For this Jane Doe, they had her fingerprints and they had a lot of missing females on record to test her
00:18:14
against. They ran her prints against a lot of different women with no results whatsoever.
00:18:24
When they found three at once and they were all killed in the same fashion, they realized that it had to be one
00:18:30
person killing the people in the same way. They then linked it together with some
00:18:36
of the other bodies that were being found and they knew at that time that they had a problem that they were going
00:18:41
to need assistance with. >> Michigan State Police [music] profiler David Msy was called in to help. I was
00:18:51
asked to come in when they discovered the three bodies in the uh abandoned motel in Highland Park.
00:18:59
Profiling is something that we can provide detectives who may never have investigated a serial killer.
00:19:05
>> David started putting together a profile of the killer. >> I always felt that he was in that area
00:19:13
specifically [music] because he was comfortable there. I think that there was some thought that
00:19:17
maybe somebody else was coming in to Highland Park from the suburbs. And I never felt [music] that to be true. I
00:19:23
thought that he was in there. He didn't stand out. He didn't draw any attention to himself. And that's how he was able
00:19:28
to operate for so long and do so much damage. Seven bodies had now been discovered.
00:19:35
Women were terrified to go out after dark. The communities of Highland Park in Detroit were being targeted by a
00:19:43
serial killer and he was far from finished. By 1992, seven bodies had been discovered in and around abandoned
00:19:59
buildings in the cities of Highland Park and Detroit in Michigan. Police were following up all sorts of
00:20:08
leads, but were no closer to identifying their killer. >> Usually, when you start looking at a
00:20:16
murder, the first thing you're going to think about is motivation. And if there's no relationship, where do you
00:20:23
even start? And that's why serial killers are difficult to catch. It's that complete lack of relationship. This
00:20:31
could be literally anybody. >> At the time it was sort of chaos. We were going around asking informants for
00:20:40
any leads and there was a lot of people that were giving us leads and telling us
00:20:44
people that they thought were the person. And we were doing our jobs. We were going to those people investigating
00:20:50
them and questioning them trying to figure out where they were at the times of these deaths.
00:20:55
We had girlfriends reporting their boyfriends, wives reporting their husbands, and none of it was credible.
00:21:07
>> There was a lot of fear in Detroit and Highland Park when the news was getting
00:21:12
[music] around that there was a serial killer. And there were residents in Highland Park especially that were
00:21:18
worried about their children walking to school, that were worried about just taking a walk anywhere in the city.
00:21:27
>> The streets were barren. As soon as the street lights came on, you could walk
00:21:31
from one end to the next and probably wouldn't pass two people. >> As the [music] body count grew, so did
00:21:38
the interest from the media. >> It worked the community up in a frenzy. They wanted it done right now. Why
00:21:48
haven't we solved this? We're finding bodies. What are you doing about this? When are you going to solve it? We
00:21:55
didn't have a clue of getting to the suspect yet. Darlene Saunders, who'd survived an
00:22:05
attack the year before by the man she knew as Tony, heard the news reports. She could feel in her heart that it was
00:22:14
Tony that did this to the women. And so in March, she goes to police and she sits down and she tells her story.
00:22:24
They file a report, but then nothing comes of it. [music] >> They looked at as a drug addict,
00:22:30
prostitute, who going to do something to you like this? >> They basically just told her, "Go home."
00:22:38
You know, everybody knew her. Go home, darling. She was overlooked. She was treated like
00:22:44
an object, just pushed to the side. Meanwhile, 43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown went out one night and
00:22:56
didn't return home. >> Vicky Marie Beasley Brown, she was a mom. She had kids at home.
00:23:06
Vicky Marie's eldest daughter, Renee, was 23 years old when her mom went missing.
00:23:12
>> My mom was a very innocent, creative, charismatic ball of energy. She loved singing and drawing and
00:23:24
writing and cooking, but she didn't really have a lot of street sense. She trusted people probably a little bit too
00:23:32
much. She was not living on the street. She had a home, but she had had troubles in
00:23:39
her adulthood. She had had struggles with dependency on drugs. >> She struggled with addiction, but she
00:23:46
was not a prostitute. That was not her lifestyle. >> Renee was out of the country when she
00:23:52
heard that Vicky Marie was missing, but her nine and 10year-old sisters still lived at home with their mom.
00:23:59
>> We are a married Air Force family. At the time we were living in Germany and we had just had her first baby and we
00:24:06
got the news that my mom was missing. And from that um I just kind of knew something was wrong because she missed
00:24:13
my little sister's birthday and that's something she would have never done. It was terrifying because I'm not only
00:24:21
thinking about the fact that she's missing, I'm thinking that I have two little siblings who are little girls
00:24:26
that I'm like, well, where are they at? Who are they with? As Vicky Marie's family waited for news, another death
00:24:34
was linked to the active serial killer. >> In April, Brenda Mitchell was discovered
00:24:42
in an abandoned house in Highland Park. >> On April 15th, 1992, yet another body was uncovered at an
00:24:52
abandoned building in Highland Park. Public safety officer Craig Pulver Varenti was first on the scene.
00:25:01
We found a female body. She was covered in debris. Her clothes were half off. And we realized that it probably been a
00:25:10
murder and a sexual assault at the same time. >> The body was soon identified as
00:25:16
43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown. It was the news her daughter had been dreading.
00:25:23
>> The thing that's really tragic is that she just ended up at the wrong place at
00:25:28
the wrong time. and met up with the wrong person because that was not her life. That was not what
00:25:35
she did. That wasn't who she was. It was probably the scariest, most helpless time in my life because I felt
00:25:45
like there was nothing I was going to be able to say or do to make things right for those two little people who lost
00:25:54
their mom. Highland Park Police knew that they needed to start communicating with the
00:26:00
Detroit Police Department if they were to have any hope of finding the killer who was terrorizing their streets.
00:26:09
Finally, a meeting was set up and a multi- agency task force was created. Michigan State Police, Wayne County
00:26:18
Sheriff's Department, and the Detroit Office of the FBI. They all sent officers in to help.
00:26:25
>> And from there, after that, it came together. >> They realized that all the victims had
00:26:33
similarities. They were all choked. They were all sexually assaulted. With the arrival of summer in Highland Park, the
00:26:40
temperatures increased. >> In June, police were alerted to a foul smell that was coming out of an
00:26:50
abandoned commercial building on Woodward A in Highland Park. >> The original call came that there was a
00:26:57
stench coming from the building and somebody believed it to be a body. [music] So, I was dispatched there along
00:27:02
with a couple command officers. And as we got there and we entered the building, there were flies everywhere
00:27:09
and it appeared that the stench could just be from the garbage. So at the time, the two command officers stood
00:27:15
back at the door and I said I'd go in and further investigate. As I walked in further, I did look down
00:27:22
and I saw a leg hanging out from beneath the garbage. >> The 10th body was identified as
00:27:29
40-year-old Joanne Ouk. when I had an opportunity to view all of the victims and how they uh were
00:27:39
murdered that uh I really had a pretty [music] good understanding of the type of person that we would be looking for.
00:27:46
David My concluded that the killer was likely to be a black male who lived in the local area. He indicated that he
00:27:55
could be a familiar face to some if not all of the victims. They gave us a perfect profile of what
00:28:02
the killer would be and they were dead on on their profile. [music] >> I think the profile really helped the
00:28:10
investigators know that they're on the right track, that you're heading in the right direction and you're going to find
00:28:15
him. >> What police didn't realize is they'd already taken and put aside a statement
00:28:23
from a possible survivor of the killer they were so desperate to catch. In the summer of 1992, one of Darlene's
00:28:32
[music] family members put pressure on the police to look at her evidence again.
00:28:39
At that point, they finally found Darlene's old police report from March and they had her come back in
00:28:48
and finally police are taking her seriously that this Tony could be the killer. They decided, okay, we want to go out to
00:28:58
Woodward Avenue and see if we can find this Tony guy who attacked Darlene. [music]
00:29:03
So, Darlene was assigned to an officer with the Michigan State Police named Royce.
00:29:09
My job was to take Darlene out every night, hoping that we spotted the guy that had assaulted her.
00:29:23
Officer Royce, he just kept saying that we going to get him. My mother said they
00:29:27
they uh that they didn't nobody believe me. So why you believe me? I believe you. We going to get him.
00:29:34
>> Nighttime was Tony's time and so Darene knew that. And so it was always nighttime when they went out and Royce
00:29:42
would have Darlene with him and they would be out prowling around Woodward Avenue looking for Tony like a few times
00:29:48
a week. Darlene was one of a kind. She would tell me these war stories, how she had
00:29:56
to jump out of a car, how she had to jump out of motel room, how she had to run to get away. And I said, "Stop
00:30:04
telling me all these war stories and look at these people out on the street." Darling took him to all kinds of places,
00:30:13
all kinds of little nooks and crannies on Woodward A in the drug culture, in the Sidi Street culture [music]
00:30:19
that police had no idea even existed. They did this for a few weeks before one night when Darlene finally spotted Tony.
00:30:31
He was at a pay phone and Royce and Darlene were in a car and Darlene started to react. She started to
00:30:40
basically hyperventilate. [music] >> I thought she was sick. And I'm like, "What's wrong with you?" And I grabbed
00:30:47
her and physically shook her. I said, "What's wrong, darling? What's wrong?" She said, "That's him. That's Tony." And
00:30:54
I said, "Are you sure?" She said, "Royce, that's him." >> He stops the car. He gets out. He
00:31:01
approaches this guy. [music] >> I said, "Are you Tony?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you know who I am?" He said,
00:31:09
"Yeah." He said, "You're the state trooper that's been looking for me." I said, "Well, son, you got two choices?"
00:31:16
And he says, "What's my choices?" I said, "Either you can lay down on the ground or you can die." And I drew my
00:31:24
weapon. With nowhere to run, the man lay on the ground and the arrest was made. Darlene's attacker, Tony, was in fact
00:31:35
24year-old Benjamin Atkins. >> He knew he was going to get caught. It was the inevitable ending. I don't think
00:31:43
he'd have stopped until he was stopped. >> I was glad that he was caught cuz I still didn't understand what happened.
00:31:53
My father just kept saying that my mother did a good thing. >> Darlene was very important to the case.
00:32:00
To be honest, I don't think we would have got this solved if it wasn't for Darling.
00:32:08
Police were certain they finally had their man. A killer responsible for at least 10 murders was in custody. But
00:32:17
what he had to tell detectives would shock them. to the core. By the summer of 1992, the bodies of 10
00:32:34
females had been found in the cities of Detroit and Highland Park in Michigan. On August 20th, Benjamin Atkins had
00:32:43
finally been apprehended and was in police custody. About a day and a half after Atkins was arrested, they
00:32:53
questioned him. And at first, Atkins was denying everything. Nope, didn't do it.
00:32:58
Don't know these women. Have no idea what you're talking about. [music] And they were getting nowhere.
00:33:04
>> That's the nature of an interview with somebody like him. You can't go in and
00:33:08
in five minutes get a confession. It takes time. You have to learn about him, learn about why he may be the person
00:33:16
that he is. And so they called in an officer with Detroit police named Ron Sanders who was
00:33:23
known to be a very good interrogator. [music] Sanders took an approach of redemption
00:33:30
[music] like okay you can't save these women now but you can help yourself. And he was able to get Atkins to finally
00:33:39
crack and to finally confess these [music] crimes. >> No remorse whatsoever. I did this. I'm no guy that did that.
00:33:52
>> On August 21st, 1992, Atkins started spilling the details of all 10 murders the police were aware of. He also
00:34:02
confessed to the assault on Darlene Saunders. He would follow this formula of engaging
00:34:08
the female in conversation, taking her somewhere, an abandoned house, an abandoned commercial building, because
00:34:14
there were lots of them to choose from on Woodward A. And there they would start to smoke some
00:34:21
crack. Then things went sideways for Atkins. >> Benjamin knew if he had drugs, these
00:34:31
girls would follow him to the end of time. You manipulate somebody to kill them.
00:34:39
That's evil. Almost always he would take a piece of their clothing or maybe an object found
00:34:47
nearby to bind them. They would pass out. He would rape them. Sometimes they would come too. He would
00:35:00
strangle them again. And when he had strangled them to the point that he felt they were dead, he would actually check
00:35:07
to make sure they were dead, he would press on their chest or their stomach. He would feel for a pulse. He would
00:35:15
check to see if there was any breath coming out of them. So he followed all of these steps to make sure that they
00:35:22
were dead. Then he would find some place to hide them. For a person to just willingly go out
00:35:30
and kill people like that, I think that's a new level of evil. >> Saunders had wrote out every confession,
00:35:39
had him sign it as soon as he finished, and then go to the next one. We literally looked at each other like,
00:35:47
"Whoa!" Atkins confessions didn't end there, however. He had one more shock in store.
00:35:57
He said, "I'm going to give you a body that you guys haven't found." And that right there hit me like a ton
00:36:04
of bricks. Out of nowhere, Atkins had confessed to an 11th murder. >> That was CC Waymer, the final person he
00:36:13
[music] killed at the end of May. So, police went that day in August to discover her body in an empty garage in
00:36:20
Highland Park. >> He said it was down in the basement. Now, this was a garage. And I walked
00:36:26
that beat and I knew the exact place that they were speaking [music] of, but I never knew it had a basement.
00:36:33
The crime scene was ideal. There was nothing else in the basement. Not one thing. The temperature was cold enough
00:36:41
that the body was in ideal condition. >> Police were keen to find out the motive
00:36:48
behind Atkins crimes. [music] He did talk about a hatred for prostitutes. And as Ron Sanders was questioning him,
00:37:00
he was picking up on a very troubled childhood. And he was hearing about the mom who
00:37:09
would take her little boys and put them in the back seat while she was in the front seat with a John.
00:37:14
When it comes to serial killers, quite often we see that same childhood experience that they weren't really
00:37:21
loved like you should a child. >> There were cops who worked this case who said that he was killing his mother over
00:37:29
and over and over. They fit the characteristics of his mother. They were women who were working the streets. They
00:37:37
were women who were using drugs and [music] there were women of color. They were varying ages, but they fit the
00:37:47
type of his mom. I actually have no sympathy at all for Atkins and his troubled past. People
00:37:56
have even worse pasts than Atkins had, and they do not go on to hurt, much less kill anyone.
00:38:14
After Atkins was arrested in August 1992, as police were piecing together the details of all of these murders, they
00:38:23
tried to put together a time frame. It was probably 6 to 7 months that these 11 murders happened, which is very
00:38:31
chilling. In August 1992, Atkins was arraigned for 11 murders and the assault on Darlene
00:38:41
Saunders. >> There seemed to be a lot of media attention before Atkins was identified
00:38:46
and arrested when there was [music] a killer out there who was unknown and we didn't know who he was going to strike
00:38:52
next. But then by the time his trial came around in January 1994, Judge Kerwin couldn't help but notice where
00:39:01
did the media go? Does anybody still care about this case? I think it has become a bit of a cliche. This is just
00:39:10
another serial killer killing sex workers. So why should we care about that? >> They were mothers. Uh they they were
00:39:17
somebody other than a drug addict or a prostitute. They were people. >> The prosecution in this case went in
00:39:26
with confessions that Atkins made to all the crimes, DNA evidence against him, and a witness, a survivor who identified
00:39:37
him as the person who attacked her. That was quite a lot to overcome for his defense attorney.
00:39:45
and his defense attorney at one point felt like he might pursue an insanity defense. And so he hired a psychiatrist
00:39:54
to evaluate Atkins. He had been by this point telling [music] not only police but the
00:40:01
psychiatrists who were evaluating him that he was hearing voices that he had these alternate personalities [music] in
00:40:09
his head. The dominant one was named Tony. And Tony was the one who told him to do the crimes.
00:40:17
But how much was pretense and how much was genuine? I think that's something [music] that only Benjamin Atkins knew.
00:40:26
>> In my opinion, he was that one evil person that once he killed somebody, he enjoyed it.
00:40:34
>> The man was a monster. Let's just be truthful. He was a monster. He didn't care. He didn't care.
00:40:41
>> Psychiatrists deemed Atkins fit to stand trial and on January the 10th, 1994,
00:40:48
proceedings began at the Wayne County Circuit Court. Darlene Saunders, now clean from drugs,
00:40:56
was called to testify. Darlene Saunders was an extremely brave woman. When she testified at Atkins
00:41:06
preliminary hearing, she stood up to a barrage of cross-examination, designed to question her character and
00:41:14
her reliability as a witness, but she fought her corner admirably. >> She met a prosecutor showing them how he
00:41:22
tried to strangle her. It was like, you know, wow. Amazing woman. There's nothing that she couldn't do.
00:41:30
On April 14th, 1994, the jurors began their deliberations. It took them less than 3 days to reach a verdict. Benjamin
00:41:39
Atkins was found guilty on all 11 murder charges and the rape of Darlene Saunders.
00:41:48
>> After he was tried and convicted, and when the time came for his sentencing and he had his chance to make a
00:41:55
statement, he did not apologize to anyone. He put the emphasis on himself, what he
00:42:02
[music] had gone through. >> Benjamin Atkins received 11 life sentences for the murders, plus an
00:42:10
additional life sentence for Darlene Sa's rape. >> When Atkins was sentenced, it was a
00:42:17
great relief to [music] everyone from the victim families who was in the courtroom to Darlene herself.
00:42:25
When they announced the sentence for her own charges for the rape and the attack
00:42:30
that she had suffered, she yelled, "Praise you, Jesus." >> On September 17th, 1997,
00:42:37
after serving just 3 years of his life sentence, Benjamin Atkins died in prison. He was 29 years old. He was
00:42:47
serving out his sentences in one of the correctional facilities in Jackson, Michigan, and then he died of HIV AIDS.
00:42:56
So, we have to wonder, okay, did he get tested? Did he learn he had HIV? Was there any of that going on in his brain
00:43:03
when these murders were happening? We just don't know. In 2023, over 30 years after the
00:43:13
murders, the Jane Doe who was found at the Mterrey Motel was finally identified using forensic genetic genealogy. At the
00:43:23
request of her family, her name has not been publicly disclosed. >> It's fantastic how well the scientific
00:43:32
community has helped with police investigations. It's a very good thing for law enforcement and a very bad thing for
00:43:40
criminals because it's a little harder for them to get away with things these days.
00:43:45
>> One of the problems with serial killers and this interest that we have in them
00:43:50
is that we completely forget sometimes there are real people who were victims here who really really suffered.
00:44:01
I would like my mom to be remembered as a loving mom who cared about her kids, but who was at the wrong place at the
00:44:09
wrong time. She was a [music] gift to our family. So many times we allow people's decisions
00:44:16
and their past to dictate [music] and shape your future. And ultimately, you can't control what happens to you, but
00:44:23
you can control how you navigate it. Her life has created a legacy of love and purpose and identity and value in all of
00:44:33
us that we share with the people that we come in contact with. >> Darlene Saunders continued to struggle
00:44:40
with her addictions, but she'd been clean for a year when she passed away in 2002.
00:44:47
>> My mother did a lot of things not so nice and she did a lot of things that were nice.
00:44:57
I'll do anything to experience that again. You don't know how important somebody is
00:45:06
until you don't have them anymore. Benjamin Atkins took the lives of 11 women. He lured them to their deaths by
00:45:19
praying on their vulnerabilities and made sure their final moments were filled with horror.
00:45:26
Had it not been for Darlene Saunders, he may never have been revealed as one of the world's most evil killers.