Serial Killer Documentary - John Eric Armstrong

0:00This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. It's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. It's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, OK, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Cupid Mayon. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Mm-hmm. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupid only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers, chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it, put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. In the summer of 1999, 26-year-old John Eric Armstrong

1:12was honorably discharged from the US Navy. He settled in Dearborn Heights, Michigan with his wife and their new baby. He was a nice neighbor, a good friend, a good father, apparently, according to his neighbors. But Armstrong wasn't the loving family man that people believed him to be. Armstrong was, in my humble opinion, the personification of you. Armstrong was using the services of sex workers, many of whom he then brutally murdered. He's killed Martha Boyman. It was natural to him. Only person, that type of lifestyle that could be natural to us, I'm also. As more details emerged, police realized that these murders went far beyond their local area. You're talking Singapore, Hong Kong, and all these exotic locales that his vote traveled to while he was in the Navy. He's going to be one of the most prolific well-traveled

2:14cheer killers in history. John Eric Armstrong had gone global and been unveiled as one of the world's most evil killers. On April 10, 2000 in Detroit, Michigan, police were alerted to an alarming discovery. The bodies of three sex workers have been found near some railway tracks in varying states of decomposition. This was the work of a serial killer. He didn't try and conceal his crimes. He just discarded the bodies, didn't try and hide them. He just came back to visit and abuse, and then move on to the next murder and dispose of that one and roll it down the hill and find an own.

3:18With no leads, the police were under pressure to find the unknown killer before he could strike again. Then a chance traffic stop and subsequent arrest of 26-year-old John Eric Armstrong led to more revelations than they could ever have expected. In the patrol car, one of the patrolmen could hear Armstrong in the back muttering something under his breath. I'm glad it's over. I'm glad you guys got me. This killer's story begins on the southeastern coast of America. John Eric Armstrong was born on November 23, 1973. Armstrong was born and raised in Newburn, North Carolina, and by all accounts, had a very normal upbringing, very normal childhood. I think the most important point in his early life was the death of a younger brother, Michael,

4:18who died of sudden infant death syndrome at barely two months old. And this had an impact on the young John Eric Armstrong. Armstrong was five years old at the time, and at five years old, I'm not sure that children fully understand the concept of death and dying and perhaps how permanent it is. So it's quite possible that it impacted him in a way that made him feel completely powerless. He was so distraught over that that he deliberately rode his bicycle out in traffic, almost like, you know, with the intention of joining his baby brother. The loss of the baby had a major impact on Armstrong's parents. Shortly after his baby brother, Mikey, died in the crib, his biological father left the family. After his father left, young Armstrong stayed in the family home with his mother.

5:28Towards the end of the 1970s, Armstrong started school, and his classmates saw nothing unusual about him. The people who went to school with him, for instance, his fellow students, they saw him as just a normal kid. He was a little quiet. He seemed pretty neat. One person described him as a loof, but really nothing unusual about his childhood. Nothing that would make someone illiterate. Armstrong felt that he was kind of an underachiever and being bullied, and a lot of this behavior impacted him psychologically. We've got somebody whose whole identity is being formed around this victimhood, this powerlessness, this world is against me. And I think that internal anger, rage, revenge is more what drove him as he went into adulthood. There was a strange incident in his life.

6:30At school, he said, one of his classmates, a girl, was trying to persuade him to have sex with her, and he didn't want to. And he liked himself and to a bathroom and threatened to kill himself. This led to a month long stay in a mental health facility. So he obviously had issues with sex. A simple pressure for sex is not going to put you into psychiatric care. There's a lot more going on here. At the age of 16, Armstrong felt that he was still dealing with the negative impact of his brother's death, and so he went for additional psychiatric counseling. To seek psychiatric care at age 16, when he's just had care for another incident, this is somebody who's really, really struggling to function in the world. By his late teens, despite his problems, Armstrong had managed to start a relationship with a girl. But when his high school sweetheart left him for another boy, Armstrong was devastated,

7:35especially when he saw his love rival shower his ex-girlfriend with gifts. Armstrong interpreted this as her prostituting herself or her affections in exchange for these gifts that this other new suitor was providing her. This guy sees women, sex relationships, transactional, and even he said that this was like she was a prostitute. What an awful way to see relationships. In April 1992, when Armstrong was 18 years old, he signed up with the US Navy. He joined the military, which is I don't think an unusual thing for somebody like him who feels, you know, like he needs to be in a big gang because he feels like the world's against him, and he needs control and he needs power. Armstrong was assigned to the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, then the largest sailing vessel in the world.

8:42Life above the Nimitz, it would be pretty exciting if you go anywhere in the world and often did and Armstrong would have enjoyed that life. He worked in the barber shop, it was said, and then he had one or two other jobs on the boat. And he had a good record by all accounts aboard the boat. Nothing really stood out. At one point, he was nicknamed Babydoll. He had this very childlike face, this very innocent approach. Which didn't really make him look like a grown up man at all. Despite his youthful features, Armstrong was over six foot tall with a large build. It was while aboard the USS Nimitz that Armstrong met the woman he would go on to marry. This is Rick Burgess from the Rick Burgess Show. I want to talk to you for a second about something most of us put on autopilot, car insurance. If you're just letting your policy auto renew year after year without shopping around, I'm telling you, you are probably throwing money away. Race change all the time and staying loyal to one company can end up costing you big time.

9:46That's why you need to go check out Insureify. I went to Insureify.com to test it out myself and I was blown away by how easy it is. In about two minutes, totally free, you can compare actual real-time quotes from over a hundred top insurance companies all side by side in one place. No endless phone calls, no pushy sales pitches. Here's what I really love. Insureify doesn't just help you once and walk away. They actually keep monitoring your rates in the background and alert you whenever prices drop, so you never miss out on a better deal down the road. Millions of drivers have already used insureify to stop overpaying and there's no reason you shouldn't too. Do yourself and your wallet a favor. Go see what you could say right now at insureify.com. That's insureify.com. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Cupid Mail for a minute now, bow. And wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of you all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Cupid. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Cupid? Do you not have the internet?

10:52It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise. The one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. Once you know what, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo? Will the answer egg yolks? Cupid is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles, chefs use it, restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Cupid hit. So if you haven't tried Cupid yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. After both being honorably discharged in 1999, the couple moved to Michigan to start their

11:54married life and raise their first child. And so they settled into a city and metroidy trade on the west side of metroidy trade called Dearborn Heights and they lived with her parents for a while. Armstrong started working for a chain of retail stores then later as a security guard and then refueling airplanes at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It seems like Armstrong may not have been able to find his way, at least vocationally in a career. Those around Armstrong just saw him as any other guy in the neighborhood. One lady said I used to get her right home with him or right to work and she was just a nice guy. He was a nice neighbor, a good friend, a good father apparently according to his neighbors. And yet he had this completely other side, this classic Checkland hide approach, particularly to women. Beyond this normal life appeared to be a facade

13:01and behind that facade Armstrong was going out and engaging in activity like having sex on a regular basis with sex workers. He has got a bad attitude, misogynistic attitude towards women. So I think we can kind of see where it's coming from with him. John Eric Armstrong wasn't the loving family man. He was portraying to those around him. He was living a double life filled with dark secrets, one that would soon be exposed. Armstrong's preferred haunt for picking up sex workers was in downtown Detroit, around 10 miles from his family home. Unfortunately, prostitution has always thrived in Detroit. And the area of Michigan Avenue has always been a hot spot for prostitution. Kyle James Casares was a child when his mum Kelly Jean Hood began working on the streets in the 1990s.

14:04Kelly started taking drugs, following the death of her father, and was trying to fund her addiction through sex work. She was actually very close to my grandfather, and when he passed away, she couldn't deal with the pain. My mum, before the drugs and even after the drugs, one of the most kindhearted person you could ever meet, we were her world. She made sure we had a good child, and best she could, given what she could. It's a very common motivation of sex workers is to engage in prostitution, to raise money, to support their drug habit. Despite his young age, Kyle worked out how his mum was earning the money to pay for her addiction. I was with her all the time, and I knew the people she hung out with, and I would just see them around neighborhood and what they were doing, and I just connected the dots. I was worried but it was not what I can do. She was a grown woman, and she was my mother. I felt like I need

15:10a protector all the time. Kelly Jean Hood was one of many women selling sex in the Detroit area at the time. Natasha O'Laynichack was also working in the same area. I wasn't on the streets for the drugs. I was in the streets for money, fast money, seeing nice cars, clothes, mean coats, stuff like that, and I don't know, just I just fell in the trap. I always had jobs and everything. I just wanted to do something to get quicker money, and I did. The nature of the industry means that sex workers often operate in secluded and dark areas, making them extremely vulnerable to predators. Sex workers are at a huge risk of serious harm and homicide. I mean mainly because of their accessibility, sex workers are easy to get into a

16:10place on your own, no questions asked, and because they want the money, they'll go with you to a dark place where no one else is around. It is a very risky business. They're living a very high risk life. One night in August 1999, Natasha was working a shift on the usual streets. Unbeknown to the sex workers in the area, there was a deadly predator on the loose, and he was out that night looking for his next victim. I went on eight mile road, he was in a Jeep, and he circled one time, then he circled again. He put up and he asked me for a day, and I said, yeah, then I got in the truck. This is Rick Bird, just from the Rick Bird you show. I want to talk to you for a second about something most of us put on autopilot, car insurance. If you're just letting your policy auto-renue

17:11year after year without shopping around, I'm telling you, you are probably throwing money away. Race change all the time and staying loyal to one company can end up costing you big time. That's why you need to go check out Insureify. I went to insureify.com to test it out myself, and I was blown away by how easy it is. In about two minutes, totally free, you can compare actual real-time quotes from over a hundred top insurance companies all side by side in one place. No endless phone calls, no pushy sales pitches. Here's what I really love. Insureify doesn't just help you once and walk away. They actually keep monitoring your rates in the background and alert you whenever prices drop so you never miss out on a better deal down the road. Millions of drivers have already used Insureify to stop overpaying and there's no reason you shouldn't too. Do yourself and your wallet a favor. Go see what you could save right now at insureify.com. That's insureify.com. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That's Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Cupid male for a minute now,

18:12Bowen. Wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of you all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Cupid. If you're thinking, wait, what is Cupid? Do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise. The one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. Once you know what, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo? Well, the answer? Egg yolks. Cupid is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it, restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Cupid hit. So if you haven't tried Cupid yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only at McDonald's.

19:21He was big. He was barheaded at the time. He was tall. He wore glasses. Yup, and you could choose a big guy. He wasn't little. I didn't feel uncomfortable with him or anything, you know. I wasn't nervous or nothing. Natasha was staying in a motel room close to the red light area. So the pair headed there. He got inside the room and he just was feeling uneasy. He asked to use the bathroom. He used the bathroom. He came out and he said, I just don't really feel right. I got to leave. And he leaves. She goes into her room a little while later. There's an knock on her door. She opens the door. It's that guy. I should never open the door. I should have said never mind. But I didn't think he was going to come back. Opening the door to let the client back in turned out to be a decision that Natasha would soon regret. He came in and that's when he

20:26slammed my door and he was like, don't scream, don't get him. Because that's when he had the night. Some sharp, big ones. And I was like, oh my God, you can have all my money, whatever, my, whatever. But the attacker wasn't interested in taking Natasha's money. He wanted to take her life. He said he was going to kill me. And I was like, don't kill me. I got kids. He came in with his night family. My foot neck, my eye, my toes, my fingers. It just blood everywhere. Because he cut me. Then I was on the bed like laying down. He had his body on me and then he grabbed the telephone cord and wrapped it around my neck like five times and was like choking. The asphyxiation caused Natasha to pass out. When she regained consciousness, her attacker was gone.

21:31I went out to the, ran out of the motel room and said, I need help. I need help. I was almost, this guy just tried to kill me and then that's when the police came. The police interviewed Natasha, but her description of the attacker wasn't enough on its own. It's very difficult for the police to follow up on any kind of attack like this, because there's so little to go on about who this person is. And after that happened, I said, I gotta get out of this. I had to get call saying stuff, because I got diagnosed with PTSD. Less than four months later on December 2nd, 1999, another woman was targeted. 31-year-old sex worker Monica Johnson was driven to work on Michigan Avenue by her boyfriend. The couple parked up on a side street just off the notorious red light strip.

22:33And he stayed in his car while she walked down Michigan Avenue to do some business, and that's the last year of a server. Monica had been picked up by a man on Michigan Avenue, and they driven away from the area to have their sexual encounter. And it was just a short little kind of secluded area, a short little service drive, and they parked along there, Naren Alley, and they carried out a transaction. But then things took a dark turn when the man Monica was with attacked and strangled her. A passerby found her still alive hours later, and called for an ambulance. And the ambulance came and they picked her up, and they took her to the hospital, but by the time they got there, she had died. With no eyewitnesses or CCTV of the attack on Monica Johnson, the police had no leads, and very little to progress their investigation. Nor had they identified any suspects for the attacks on several other sex workers in Detroit

23:38in 1999. Monica's killer was still on the loose in Detroit, and he could strike again at any moment. So when we get into the beginning of 2000, the turn of the millennium, he escalates really quite quickly. He cannot give up the compulsion, so have sex with sex workers and kill them. 39-year-old Wendy Jordan was known to the police as a sex worker in the red light area of Detroit. On January 1st, 2000, Wendy got into the car of a man who wanted to pay for her services. He was on Warren Avenue in Detroit, and he picked Wendy up, and he took her to this side street that was right next to a funeral home, and they parked in the parking lot of this funeral home. And they proceeded with their transaction, and then he killed her, and he drove with her in the

24:41Jeep a few miles away. And he pulled over and dumped her over a bridge into the Rouge River on the Ann Arbor Trail, and then he went home. Wendy's body had been left in Dearborn Heights, the home of John Eric Armstrong and his family. Since leaving the army less than a year earlier and moving to the area, Armstrong had changed jobs a number of times. On January 2nd, 2000, Armstrong set off for work at a retail store. At some point in the morning, Armstrong reported feeling sick, and told his boss he had to leave work, at which time he drove away, apparently on his way home. On his way home, Armstrong pulls over on the bridge over the Rouge River, and says he did that because he felt so well he was going to vomit over the bridge. Armstrong looked down at the River Rouge below. It's maybe at that point,

25:4350 yards wide, 6'8 feet deep at the most, and it runs for miles. But there's not a real strong current. It was January, and it was still frozen. And so he looks over the bridge and he sees this woman. It was the body of Wendy Jordan who'd been left there the previous day. Armstrong flagged down a passerby to call the police. On the Rouge River and there's a dead body in the river, I think she got raped, she's naked, got a close grip off. He phones him up, and of course, the body is discovered it is indeed Wendy Jordan. The police arrived at the scene, an Armstrong told them that he'd left work early because he was feeling ill and had been driving home. But the police regarded and I quite agree with them as a most peculiar. He just happened to stop on the bridge and he just happened to look over and he just happened to see a body. Goodness me, I mean it almostifies belief, doesn't it, to be honest.

26:47Detectives wondered if there was more to the discovery than Armstrong had told them. But if he was involved in any way, why would he have alerted the police? He said he could see a body floating in the river and it was all innocent. Why would he do that? This really seems like it would go against everything that you think that he would do. You would think that he would want to get away with it. You think he'd want to stay under the radar. Based on the unusual nature of Armstrong being in that place at that time, the police bring him down for additional questioning to the police station. During which he maintains that he has no connection to this person, he did know they are, why they were there. And he stuck to his story that he felt sick and left work. No, we don't. I found it. And then when I leave over, I had caught something I would never, there she was. It seems unusual that you picked the exact

27:49five that would mean you to be looking over the edge of where she was. So you went up, left over there, never saw her, never seen her. You're going to say, I'm sorry, I'm going to say, I can't. You're not knowing anything. Maybe some things that you want to tell us. But I didn't know how she wasn't going to achieve the need. And you just pulled out, but you're going to throw up and she was laying down. I had to follow it. Yes, yes, I had to follow it. Armstrong had placed himself directly into the murder inquiry, but with no grounds to detain him, police let him leave. His account of what happened had raised their suspicions and they decided to investigate Armstrong further. Dearborn Heights had him pegged and they don't get a whole lot of homicides like Detroit does. And so they dug into this one and they hung on. They followed him around. They even asked to search his car which he consented to.

28:49So they did a forensic examination of his car which they do tape lifts of, they try to see if he has fingerprints or DNA or blood inside the car. And one of the officers happened to notice in the search of the Jeep that he saw what he believed were little specks or residue that were gold in color that matched the shoes that Wendy was wearing. Within the car there was forensic evidence that Wendy Jordan had been in it, which pointed even more conclusively to the fact that he not only known her had her in the car and thrown her out into the river. They got a warrant for his blood and saliva and they did DNA testing and then they did DNA testing from Wendy's body. Conclusive DNA evidence could give the police enough to link Armstrong to the murder of Wendy Jordan but this wouldn't be a quick process. DNA really came under the criminal investigation scene in the late 80s so it was relatively new.

29:50They didn't have the technology that we have today to both get DNA and analyze even a good DNA sample. It could take months for the DNA results to come back. The police would have to wait for those before they could take any further action against Armstrong. In the prosecutor ordered him released until such time as they had the results from the DNA lab. At this point the police look at Armstrong and he's a former military service member who got out of the service and got a decent job and settled with a wife and family and so his daily life doesn't seem to indicate you know a killer. It would be an agonizing wait for investigators. Meanwhile John Edeak Armstrong remain free to roam the streets of Detroit. Three months after Wendy Jordan's body was discovered 42-year-old Wilhelmina Drain was on Michigan Avenue. She said she was trying to catch a bus home and she was an older lady.

30:52A vehicle pulled up alongside her and the man driving asked her if she needed a lift. And they start to travel along and she instructs him how to take her home which was north of Michigan. She lived like off-Joy Road and he traveled north but he didn't make the turn. He was supposed to make and he turned somewhere else and he pulled over and he reached for her. Well she sprays him with mace and she's able to escape. Five days later on April the 7th, 2000, sex worker Devyn Marcus survived an attack and reported the incident to the police. Around the same time another sex worker called Cynthia was attacked by a man fitting the same description as the other two incidents. The left of the dead but in fact she wasn't dead. She survived. The attacker was showing no signs of slowing down.

31:55We've got Wilhelmina, we've got Devyn, we've got Cynthia who were attacked and survived and he was escalating. He was definitely escalating. I mean once he kicked back in the gear in mid-March, he escalated. Boom, boom, boom, boom. On April the 10th, 2000, the police received a phone call. Somebody thought they saw a body on the side of a railroad track as they were passing through. I was the commanding officer of the violent crime section of the Detroit Police Department composed of the violent crime task force, the fugitive apprehension team and the crime analysis team of the Detroit Police Department. Every Monday morning we would have a briefing while we were in that meeting. The head of the homicide division got a message to call the office. Jerry Cliff passed the news onto his colleague, Del Christian, a team leader on the violent crime task force.

32:58The commander from the Detroit Police Department came through and says, I'm hey, they found a body over by the railroad tracks. It's just a track that just goes through it's a single track in that area that's used by one of the passenger rails and also freight and a passenger on the train that looked out the window and saw the body told the conductor, I think I just saw a body on the track and the conductor contacted the police department. Not long after this report came through to the police, there was more news to follow. As they walk around the area, they discover a second body. He came back and he said, there's two bodies at the scene and they're in different states of decomposition. They walk around further and unfortunately third body and so they realize, okay, this is very bad. These three females were probably left here by the same person.

33:59With three dead bodies found in the same location, police had to act fast to establish what had happened to these women. There was one victim she was lying 10 to 15 yards away from the tracks themselves, on grass and gravel, but not concealed at all in in brush or anything like that. She had her pants down around her ankles, she had her legs had done spread in a revealing manner, I guess she would say. There was what appeared to be tights of some sort wrapped around her neck so you could tell that she'd obviously been raped and strangled. As we walked further would have been north, there was a lot of brush and that's where the second and the third bodies were found. The bodies weren't very well hidden, so this isn't somebody who's done what they've done and they're leaving the scene. So we have to assume that the killer knows

35:03these bodies will be found once them to be found in fact. They want to display what they've done to the world. The victims all have ligature marks around their necks showing that they'd been strangled. Their bodies had also been posed by their killer. I don't think that somebody who does that to women has got great relationships with women, probably struggles in relationships with them and feels an awful lot of resentment towards women. I mean the misogyny of it, it's probably the loudest message that you can get from something like that. It's wanting to degrade and humiliate the victims. This was a man taking pleasure in killing and demeaning women. Once we realize, well, we have a what I call a dumping ground for the bodies, we know we had a serial murderer. We mobilized pretty

36:07much everybody that we had didn't take a slong to realize that this guy was was a very prolific killer and that we needed to get him on the street as soon as humanly possible before somebody else died. This is Rick Burgess from the Rick Burgess show. I want to talk to you for a second about something most of us put on autopilot car insurance. If you're just letting your policy auto renew year after year without shopping around, I'm telling you, you are probably throwing money away. Race change all the time and staying loyal to one company can end up costing you big time. That's why you need to go check out and verify. I went to insurify.com to test it out myself and I was blown away by how easy it is. In about two minutes, totally free, you can compare actual real-time quotes from over a hundred top insurance companies all side by side in one place. No endless phone calls, no pushy sales pitches. Here's what I really love. Insurify doesn't just help you once and walk away. They actually keep monitoring your rates in the background and alert you whenever prices drop so you never miss out on a better deal down the road. Millions of drivers have already used

37:10insurified to stop overpaying and there's no reason you shouldn't do yourself and your wallet a favor. Go see what you could say right now at insurify.com. That's insurify.com. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That's Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Cupid Mail for a minute now, Bowen. Wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of you all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Cupid. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Cupid? Do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise. The one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. Once you know what, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo? Well, the answer, egg yolks. Cupid is made with egg yolks only giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it, restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Cupid hit.

38:13So if you haven't tried Cupid yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Now you have multiple victims, you have future victims that may happen unless you catch this person because they're not going to stop killing until you catch them. Over eight months in 1999 and 2000, a spate of attacks and murders had happened in the Detroit area of Michigan. It was clear to police that a serial killer was loose on the streets, attacking and murdering women at an increasing rate. Detectives knew they needed to act fast. Now this ups everything in the police mind.

39:14The investigation immediately takes on a different tenor. This is obviously a serial because you could tell by looking at the three bodies that they were in different states of decomposition. And it's going to be the only case that we're going to be dealing with for the next few days until we get the bad guy. The race to catch the killer was on but with limited evidence and no leads, the investigators had little to go on. They needed to identify the three women and work out a possible connection between them in the hope that it might lead the police to their killer. As we were able to identify the victims, we also found out that there had been previous arrests for or encounters with the law concerning prostitution and one eye. One was called Robin Brown, also known as Nicole Young. One was Rosemary Felt and the last was called Kelly Hood.

40:16For Kelly Hood's son Kyle, his worst fears for his mother had come true. I heard my grandmother coming up to stairs and at first I actually told me before anyway she said, Miko, they found her mom. She's not here with us anymore. They found her. She's gone. Then I knew then that she met with that. She became addicted to drugs the only way that she could support herself after her family broke up was to work the street. She didn't become addicted because she wanted to. She wasn't working the street because she wanted to. She was working the street to support her habit. She had no control over. Police had identified the victims were all sex workers, but specialist help would be needed to track down their killer. FBI profilers got to work on building a picture of the offender. The profile will come in, look at all the victims, look at the victimology, what commonalities among these victims, among the way they were posed, among the way they were killed,

41:17and maybe even if you can figure out the way they met the person that killed them. Looking at the crime, the FBI's behavioral science unit suggested that the crimes have been committed by a white man compared to the young 25 to 30. They told us you're looking at his successes. You need to look for a failure and by that they meant somebody got away. And if we could find that somebody we would get a physical description, maybe a vehicle description, so on and so forth. Having identified the women as sex workers, police knew they needed to interview women in the red light area in the hope of getting much needed information. Well, from two or three of the girls that were interviewed, they mentioned that yes, a guy tried to kill me, he was raving a Jeep. Another one said that he had a tiger tattoo on his arm, that he was a white male with reddish hair. Another one said he had a work shirt with the name

42:22Eric on it. The reports all seem to point to the same offender. So we realized that the next thing that he would do is find another victim. In the hope of stopping the killer in his tracks, Detroit's violent crime task force set up covert surveillance on Michigan Avenue and the surrounding streets. Now you have potentially a predator hunting victims through this area and you can't afford to miss that. We basically flooded the area with surveillance crews and detectives in plain clothes, not business suits, but you know jeans and jackets and basically patrol looking for someone fitting his description. They didn't want the killer to realize that the police were on to him. Any suspicion they were looking for him could scare the killer off and prevent him from being caught. So during this time in this area an actual marked uniform patrol

43:22car noticed a car with a guy in it that might have matched the description of the profile. And so they do a routine car stop so they can identify him, get his driver's license, get his data birth, run him through the system to see if anybody's looking for him. Who is this guy? The driver of the vehicle was John Eric Armstrong. Dearborn Heights were waiting for DNA results to establish a link to the murder of Wendy Jordan, but Armstrong was unknown to the officers in neighboring Detroit. He said he was coming home from work. Well his work was in the other direction. He lived in Dearborn Heights, he worked over in that direction, he was a long way from home. Based on the matching description and Armstrong story not adding up, police arrested him for further questioning, but before they could get to the station there was a shock in store for the officers. The officers that are driving him hear him muttering in the back seat under his breath and

44:23he's saying kind of in a low voice, I'm just glad it's over, I'm glad you got me. He was taken straight down to the fifth floor police headquarters and that's when the interviews began. As the officers talked to Armstrong, one of them leaned forward and put his hand on top of Armstrong's. He says, I just touched you. He says, I left my DNA on your body simply by laying my hand on yours and that's when they began to explain to him, you know, if you had anything to do with these murders and you touched them in any way, we're going to be able to tell. There is absolutely no way that you're going to plead that you didn't touch them if we get this DNA analysis, the proofs that you did. And all of a sudden he just started, okay, I did it, I did it, I did it. Then he started making all of his confessions and one right after another, a lot of confessions for several

45:23hours. John Hedrick Armstrong confessed to the murders of the three women found at the rail yard. Nicole Young, Rosemary Felt and Kelly Jean Hood. Also during this time and this confession, he confessed to the murder of Wendy Jordan off the Rouge Bridge. He knew that he was a suspect in that case. So it was time to confess to that. But Armstrong's confessions had only just begun. He actually went through a list of a number of females that he had murdered while he was on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in multiple foreign countries. Anytime he was on shortly if he would go ashore and quite often he would find a prostitute and go through his routine, rape, murder and you know sometimes he would dispose of the bodies and sometimes he

46:28would just leave him. You're talking Singapore, you're talking you know Hong Kong and all these exotic locals that his boat traveled to while he was in the Navy. At this point FBI officials begin to investigate Armstrong's claims of all these other murders internationally because if it is true he's going to be one of the most prolific well-traveled serial killers in history. And so they start to look into all of these things that he's telling them in other jurisdictions. Some of his descriptions aren't definitive enough so when they look the dates don't match up, it could be he's telling the truth he just didn't give them enough details. In March 2001, 27-year-old John Eric Armstrong went on trial for the murder of Wendy Jordan at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit. To the surprise of those involved in the investigation and despite his earlier confessions Armstrong changed his story.

47:31By the time he was brought up on charges and things were proceeding through the court system he was maintaining his innocence. During the trial DNA and forensic evidence was presented to the jury. Fibers from Wendy Jordan's clothes had been found in Armstrong's vehicle and the results of the DNA taken by the Dearborn Heights police had come back. The semen found inside Wendy's body was John Eric Armstrong's. And so in the case of Wendy Jordan his attorney, one of the tactics he tried was that okay you got DNA evidence and it's linked my client to Wendy Jordan so yeah they had sex at night but it was consensual and when he left her she was alive so somebody else killed her. The jury didn't believe this excuse on the 3rd of April 2001 after a two-week trial, John Eric Armstrong was found guilty of the first degree murder of Wendy Jordan and given a life sentence. On the 18th of June 2001 he was also found guilty of the first degree murder of

48:40Kelly Jean Hood and given another life sentence. She was a wife, a mother, a daughter and she was a human being that deserved to live and deserved to come back from her addiction. If he didn't take her life I know she would have came around because everybody came to overcome an addiction. On July the 4th 2001 Armstrong pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Robin Brown, Rosemary Felt and Monica Johnson. He was sentenced to an additional 31 years. Armstrong was never charged with the attack on the Tasha Olenichak but she is certain he was the man who attacked her in August 1999. He was wrong for doing what he's done in period. I don't even know how someone can just be at home with their wife and kill him women. How can you just go out and do that?

49:43Armstrong was taken to the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility in Michigan to serve his sentence. I've worked other serial investigations and one of the things that you learn when you're doing that is serial criminals don't just stop. When and if they get back into police society they're going to start up all over again. If he could he would still be doing it. If they let him out he would do it again. Armstrong was in my humble opinion, the personification of evil. He had no remorse whatsoever for what he was doing. He knew what he was doing was wrong. He knew he was taking lives. He was a manipulator and he would do it until we stopped him. The lives that Armstrong took before being caught will always be remembered by their loved ones who bear the pain to this day. My impression of John Eric Armstrong he's just a monster. He's killed him off the woman. So it was natural to him. Only person that

50:49that type of lifestyle that could be natural to is a monster playing the simple. Armstrong killed five women in Michigan and violently attacked many more. He also claims to have murdered women all over the world when he was in the Navy. If true John Eric Armstrong is one of the most globally prolific serial killers to ever exist and will forever be known as one of the world's most evil killers.