The Self-Proclaimed Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

The Self-Proclaimed Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
In September two thousand and three, on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado,
Richard Paul White was arrested on suspicion of killing his
closest friend.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
That was a cold blooded murder, bloody shooting.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Detectives who questioned White quickly realized he'd more than just
one crime to get off his chest.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
And you guys him so, well, I'm kat because I've
had girls running down to streep away from me and handcoaser.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Richard Paul White was happy to describe his brutal murders
in graphic detail.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Well, I'll tell you that quick in mark or remember
this punch in the faith hand cover and a time
not to get up off the ground.

Speaker 4 (00:48):
I think he enjoyed what he was doing.

Speaker 5 (00:50):
The more they that he'd do it, the less he
would have feelings about it.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
White blamed his violence on his childhood, on God, and
on the innocent women he abducted and attacked.

Speaker 6 (01:04):
He had a real issue with women who didn't watch
the straight and arrow.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
With four confirmed murders and many more traumatized survivors, Richard
Paul White had confessed to being one of the world's
most evil killers. In September two thousand and three, when

(01:44):
Richard Paul White made his detailed and disturbing confession to
Colorado detectives, it sparked a statewide search for the people
he claimed to have killed.

Speaker 6 (01:55):
He gave us a very detailed description for it occurred.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
Thinking about the whole time.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
That's like Charliet, five hours with somebody in your car.

Speaker 7 (02:09):
He goes into detail about two bodies and where's this
posed for thirty He also maintains another two bodies have
been dumped in a canal in La Hunter.

Speaker 5 (02:23):
We have these bloodhounds from Douglas County come down and
a sniff.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
I can't tell you if there were two other women
that he killed, or if this is just something that
he made up.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Some of White's stories checked out, others may have been
nothing more than fantasy. Joel Humphrey was one of the
Denver detectives task was separating truth from fiction.

Speaker 6 (02:51):
There was no record who we could find of anyone
being dragged to death behind a car, and of course
that is such a horrific act that wasly be investigative
records about it.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Investigators soon realized that both the crimes White committed and
the ones he imagined were the product of an incredibly
dark and twisted mind. This killer story begins on the
twenty ninth of October nineteen seventy two in Denver, Colorado.
Richard Paul White and his two younger sisters had a

(03:25):
miserable childhood. Their mother and father's volatile marriage broke down
when the children were still small.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
His parents got divorced, and then his mother took up
with a drunken, abusive man who abused everybody beat up
his mother. Kids would see the beatings, and then he
would force her to have sex.

Speaker 8 (03:46):
Those kinds of things.

Speaker 9 (03:49):
Along with violence and neglect.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
White and his sisters suffered psychological torture at the hands
of their stepfather.

Speaker 10 (03:58):
He would engrave the initials of the children onto bullets
and then hold a gun to their head. That's sadistic, controlling,
abusive behavior.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
White role with his sisters was he was kind of
the protector and he would do anything to protect those
two girls as they were growing up.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
White and his sisters did not enjoy a settled, stable childhood.

Speaker 7 (04:31):
He moved around a lot. I think he attended twenty
three elementary schools.

Speaker 10 (04:36):
And that would have created an awful lot of instability
and inability to make friends at school to build relationships
with the teachers.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
In his teens, Richard Paul White lived with his father
in the isolated town of Messita in Costia County, about
five hours drive from Denver. The house there was poor,
with dirt floors. As White entered adolescence, those around him
noticed signs that all was not well with his mental state.

Speaker 7 (05:10):
White got his sister's pet parakeet and twisted its head
off and threw it on the ground so the cat
could eat it.

Speaker 10 (05:19):
Cruelty to animals in children is just one of those
flags that says there's something wrong here.

Speaker 7 (05:27):
White was late to claim to the police that he
committed his first rape when he was a young teenager
in eighth grade.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
If this was true, it was just one indicator of
the unhealthy attitude White was developing towards women, perhaps as
a result of his experiences at home.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Watching his mother be abused stay in the relationship she
was in. You know, her stepfather would beat her and
then he would rape her, and the next day they'd
go drinking again.

Speaker 10 (06:00):
Makes it look like violence can be a normal part
of relationships.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
In nineteen ninety eight, at the age of twenty six,
Richard White met twenty two year old Hazel at a
bar in South Denver, and he wasted no time in
demonstrating to her his twisted attitude towards women.

Speaker 11 (06:25):
He was determining and nice to me and asked me
out on a date a couple times before I went.
The first date that we had, we went out to
drinking at the bars and we came back to his
house and he was violent that first night by like
smacking something out of my hand, got really angry with me.
But then the next morning he drew me a bath

(06:45):
and got me flowers, which is I guess kind of
a typical thing for the abusers to do. But I
didn't know that at the time because I'd never been
in an abusive relationship. So I forgave him and we
kept on dating.

Speaker 9 (06:58):
Hazel moved in with White, who she called RP.

Speaker 11 (07:03):
When I moved in, there is when it got The abuse.

Speaker 6 (07:06):
Got worse and the control, and there was a very
abusive relationship. He would beat her.

Speaker 11 (07:14):
I thought that it would like it was just like
a one off thing. Maybe he's just got angry and
it won't happen again. But it continued to happen and
escalated to the point where, you know, he would if
I left him. He was threatening to, you know, kill
my family or do something to my dad or my sister.

Speaker 12 (07:33):
I was scared to leave.

Speaker 10 (07:38):
He probably would have absolutely meant that, But it tells
us what a controlling individual he is. He sees relationships
as something he is an owner.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Of control and violence became part of Hazel's daily life.

Speaker 11 (07:59):
Was pretty much everyday thing that he beat me. At
first it was maybe in the face and places where
people could see, and then he got better at hiding
the bruises, like punch me on my legs or my back,
or he'd point guns at me all the time. He'd
make me, you know, give him, you know, sexual favors.
With the gunpoint at me. He raped me over and.

Speaker 12 (08:22):
Over to.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
In two thousand and two, the couple moved into Hazel's
father's vacant house in North Denver. Four years into the
unhappy relationship. Hazel was doing what she could to cope.

Speaker 11 (08:37):
I was smoking pots so that I could block out
what was going on in my life, and drinking.

Speaker 12 (08:43):
He drank a lot.

Speaker 11 (08:44):
Usually he was a little happier when he was drinking,
but sometimes it would escalate at that point, I was
working from like five am to five pm and then
going to college until eleven pm, just so I could
be away from the as much as possible.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
Hazel's fear of her boyfriend was made worse by his
obvious fascination with violence and murder.

Speaker 11 (09:09):
Oh are peused to read a lot of books about
serial killers.

Speaker 12 (09:12):
That was kind of a hobby of his.

Speaker 11 (09:14):
He'd like to learn about the specifics about how they
got away with it. When he would read them or
tell me about him, he always had this look in
his eye that was really scary.

Speaker 10 (09:25):
He was obsessed with one particular awful film that had
been banned in fact, and he used to make Hazel
watch this film.

Speaker 12 (09:35):
It was awful. I hate watching that.

Speaker 11 (09:37):
Maybe think about what kind of person he was, or
what kind of person would listen or watch those kind
of things.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
White also revealed to Hazel that he'd given more than
a passing consideration to the practicalities of getting away with murder.

Speaker 11 (09:51):
He would tell me about how he thought it would
be so easy to pick up people who like prostitutes,
who have family members looking for them, or you know,
no one would miss them, and he could do whatever
with them, do you would kind of have this excitement
about him when he talked about it.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Though Hazel was terrified of White, she never suspected that
his fantasies might become a reality. In January that year,
a young woman whom we're calling Tracy, went missing from
East Colfax Avenue, less than three miles away.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
She was the mother of two children. She lived with
their grandmother, and she was last seen at a bus
station on Coalfax.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
The disappearance of twenty five year old Tracy, who was
blind in one eye, left a hole in her family's life,
especially her young children.

Speaker 8 (10:53):
We had a little girl that wanted to know what
happened to her mother.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
She thought she'd been abandoned by her mother, that her
mother and just left town. Didn't care about her birthdays,
didn't care about ever seeing her again.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
In the late summer of that year, another woman went
missing from the same stretch of highway.

Speaker 5 (11:14):
Victoria Tarpin was dal that lived in Denver and East
Collfacts with her sister.

Speaker 6 (11:24):
East Colefax is the longest street in the United States.
The portion that goes through Denver has deteriorated. It has
deteriorated to the point that it really that it is
a place you would not want to go. It is prostitutes,
people purchasing drugs, and people selling drugs. Victoria Trippin was

(11:45):
from Salt Lake City. She had a criminal history. She
was working as a sex worker.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
She went out, told her sister she has gone out
for cigarettes, but she decided then that she had the
opportunity to make some money.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
As the mother of two approached a potential client, a
woman she knew a fellow sex worker want her not
to go.

Speaker 6 (12:08):
She advised Victoria Turpin that the individual that was picking
her up had a reputation among the sex workers for
being violent. She was willing to take that risk in
order to get the quick money so she could buy drugs.

Speaker 8 (12:24):
She never came back.

Speaker 7 (12:27):
Victoria was last seen on the twenty ninth of August
two thousand and two. She failed to turn up to
her thirty third birthday party.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
In September.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Victoria's sister reported her missing, but in reality, it was
not unusual for Victoria to disappear from time to time.

Speaker 6 (12:49):
The sex workers in Denver would frequently go missing or
do frequently go missing, and it attracts no attention. It
is part of their lifestyle that They may disappear for
a while. They may find another area to work, They
may find an individual to live with, may may be

(13:09):
arrested and incarcerated. The other people that they work with
are not particularly concerned about this because it is such
a regular fact of life.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Less than a month after Victoria Turpin got into a
client's car and vanished, another woman disappeared in similar circumstances, and.

Speaker 6 (13:29):
Alicia Gonzalez was picked up at Colfax and Pearl, who's
twenty six years old. She had had a very troubled life.
She was certainly loved by her family. She met people
that introduced her to drugs. She became a drug addict,
and then she turned to prostitution to find a means
of getting the money for drugs on a regular basis.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
After a short stint in prison and a month in
rehab in the summer of two thousand and two, an
Alicia moved in with her mother and tried to stay clean.

Speaker 6 (14:03):
But then in August, she told her mother she was
going to go out and party.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Just weeks after returning to a life of drugs and
sex work, and Alicia Gonzalez seemingly vanished into thin air.

Speaker 6 (14:17):
Her sister became concerned after she spoke to her on
September the ninth and then never heard from her again.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
There were things like birthdays and things like that that
her mother would not have thought she would have missed,
and her mother was concerned she was missing.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
While the families of the missing women hope for their
safe return. In the autumn of two thousand and two,
in a house just a few miles away, twenty six
year old Hazel was in the process of breaking away
from her abusive boyfriend, Richard Paul White.

Speaker 11 (14:52):
Finally I got the courage to talk to people about it,
start talking to people about his abuse.

Speaker 12 (14:59):
I called the safe house here in Denver, and.

Speaker 11 (15:02):
Then I told my dad about it, and I told
RP that I had told these people. I think he
was worried of being found out that he was an abuser.
And finally he said that one night I could if
I didn't want to be with him, it was okay.

Speaker 12 (15:17):
That he would leave.

Speaker 9 (15:20):
It was not a clean break.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
For months, White refused to leave the home they shared,
a house which belonged to Hazel's father.

Speaker 11 (15:30):
He didn't have a place to go, he didn't have
a whole lot of friends and he didn't have a
job at that time anymore, and when he left.

Speaker 12 (15:38):
He kept calling me.

Speaker 11 (15:40):
He was calling me at work, he was calling me
on my cell phone, you know, at home. I had
to get a restraining order against him.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
But by May two thousand and three, Hazel's ordeal at
White's hands appeared to be over. He stopped calling and
stopped making threats. While Hazel attempted to move on with
her life, White appeared to have stalled.

Speaker 11 (16:03):
I think our Pew was staying with his sister some
of the time, and also was unt just homeless, might
have been staying in his car.

Speaker 12 (16:11):
They didn't really call me.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Hazel had nothing of her ex boyfriend for four months.

Speaker 9 (16:18):
Then one evening in.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
September two thousand and three, she learned that one of
White's only friends, Jason Reichart, had died unexpectedly.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
Jason Reichart worked at a printing company with Richard White
at one time. Their friendship began there.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
White met Jason in the late nineteen nineties at a
print shop in Denver. He introduced his friend and co
worker to his then girlfriend Hazel.

Speaker 12 (16:47):
We hung out with them.

Speaker 11 (16:49):
We've go over to his house and hang out and
drink and you know, have barbecues and stuff like that.
Jason was a really sweet and giving man. He was
fun to be around. He was always nice to everyone.
I've never seen him like in a bad mood or
be rude to anyone I know.

Speaker 12 (17:10):
Jason was close to his family.

Speaker 11 (17:12):
He owned his own house, and he had a nice truck,
and you know, his friends with his neighbors.

Speaker 12 (17:18):
He had a good job.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
When Richard White left the printing company, the friend stayed
in touch. In August two thousand and three, White turned
up on Jason's doorstep in Aurora, a city just outside Denver.
He was now single and jobless.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
And he kind of was living in his truck, and
I think that mister Riker took pity on him, took
him in, gave him a place to stay, and then
he also got him a job at the printing place
where he was working.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
This happy domestic arrangement lasted just a few weeks. On Monday,
the eighth of September two, two thousand and three, twenty
seven year old Jason failed to turn up for work.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
He was one of those employees who never missed, and
when he was late didn't show up, his boss got concerned.

Speaker 7 (18:13):
He tries to call him, can't find him, and eventually
contacts the police.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
They did a welfare check at his house and upstairs,
in a bedroom they found Jason's body.

Speaker 7 (18:28):
They find Jason Reichart dead in a pool of blood
in his bedroom.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
The sudden death of good Samaritan Jason Reichardt was a
shock to those who knew and loved him. Investigating officers
worked quickly to make sense of the scene.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
He was shot in the forehead, one shot right in
the middle of his forehead.

Speaker 8 (18:54):
He was shot with a pistol.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
The pistol was there still at the crime scene, and
at one point there was a question was this a
suicide or was this a homicide?

Speaker 7 (19:04):
But there was no suicide note, no shellcasing, nothing. It's
also significant is that his car is Dodge car is missing.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Things like credit cards atm cards, those kind of things
were gone, Things had been wiped down.

Speaker 8 (19:24):
There had been an attempt to.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Hide things like fingerprints on the doorknobs, that type of thing,
so there was some indication that was possibly a robbery.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
There was no sign of Jason's temporary housemate, thirty year
old Richard Paul White. The following day, local media reported
Jason's death as a potential suicide. Hours later, however, White's
sister contacted the Aurora Police Department with a different story.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
White's sister knew it wasn't a suicide.

Speaker 8 (19:59):
White had told her it.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Was an accidental shooting, that he had killed Jason while
they were inspecting the gun, and so she took him
to a place in the pine forest. He told her
he was going camping there, but he was really hiding out,
trying to avoid being arrested. It didn't take him that long.

(20:21):
I think it was a few hours before they captured
mister White.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Back at the Aurora Police headquarters, Richard pull White stuck
to his story that Jason Reichardt's death had been an
unfortunate accident.

Speaker 6 (20:37):
He initially stated that they were cleaning pistols and that
it was an accidental discharge.

Speaker 4 (20:43):
Its bread. I cleaned my one.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
Then that were sitting there talking Latin, and next night
I think that a good.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
White insisted he had no reason to want his friend dead.

Speaker 13 (20:57):
You know, here's Jason, and Jason had told me out.
He'd let me to sleep on the couch, he helped
me get a job. You know, he was my only friend.
I did not mean to kill him.

Speaker 6 (21:11):
The question in that investigation is whether that gunshot was
fired by accident or whether it was fired deliberately. There
were a number of inconsistencies. He initially stated it happened
in one room. He later changed that to stating that
happened in another room.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Homicide detectives interviewing White did not believe his story of
the gun going off accidentally, especially when he told them
what he'd done immediately after Jason's death.

Speaker 14 (21:41):
I jumped in his truck and he had a card
with in there, and I went to an ATM machinery,
took out two hundred and forty dollars, and then I
ran around picked up some hookers.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
White had used Jason's money to cruise the red light
district all these coal picking up three different women before
he called his sister and went on the run.

Speaker 8 (22:05):
This was a robbery.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
He was taking advantage to somebody who had helped him out,
and he killed him and then he took his belongings,
he took his money, took his truck.

Speaker 8 (22:16):
Clearly was not an accident.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
As Aurora detectives probed Richard White's story to get to
the truth, they had difficulty keeping him on the topic
of Jason Reichhart.

Speaker 6 (22:28):
On several occasions, he interrupted them and said, I've done
this before. Don't you want to talk to me about
the other ones? I could give you the world, I
could make your day. And finally they told him, okay,
we'll talk about the other ones.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
When the police officers finally allowed White to expand on
his claims, nothing could have prepared them for what he
had to say.

Speaker 7 (22:53):
He tells the police he's killed at least three times.
He also admits to abducting, torturing, and hurting other women
as well.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
I can't start doing things. I can't start cruising the backs.
I can't stop. I need to start. I don't need
to die or to be away forever.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Richard Paul White told the police that he'd been abducting
sex workers from Denver's East Colfax Avenue. In horrifying detail,
White outlined his murderous routine he stayed.

Speaker 6 (23:35):
In each case, he picked up his victims off the street.
Once they arrived at his house, he would punch them
and knot them down, at which point he would begin
sexually assaulting them.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
White described putting his victims through a prolonged sadistic ordeal.

Speaker 8 (23:54):
These women weren't just strangled to death.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
They were tortured for hours, twenty four hours. Sometimes they
were handcuffed, They were forced to pray with him.

Speaker 8 (24:06):
He would go through these states of rage.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Where he would beat them, where he would strangle them
almost to death, and they let them come back the
whole time raping them.

Speaker 6 (24:17):
At some point that he would strangle each of them
and then he would dispose of them, and in a
manner that he thought they wouldn't be found.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
During that conversation, that initial conversation, the number of three
became five. He didn't know any of his victims and
they didn't know him.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
The officers were shocked at the possibility that the serial
killer could have snatched multiple victims without anyone noticing. Denver detectives,
including Joel Humphrey, took over the investigation to find out
if White's confession held Walter.

Speaker 6 (24:53):
He advised as that the first individual that he killed
was blind in one eye, had a scar on her
left or. He stated that he had abducted her taken
her to his house. Originally his only intention was to
rape her. He stated, at first it was desire, then
it was power, and then after he had raped her,

(25:16):
he became concerned that she would inform the police about that,
and out of fear, he killed her.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
White told detectives he'd committed his first murder in January
two thousand and two. He said he'd then driven the
young woman's body two hundred and eighty miles to Costia County,
where he'd once lived with his father. He left her
body in a shallow grave in the remote desert.

Speaker 6 (25:42):
He did that with the intention of her body being
eaten by animals.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Southern Colorado in that location is not a lot of people.

Speaker 8 (25:53):
Nobody's going to go hiking over her body or that
kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
White and he'd made the five hour drive to check
on the body a number of times.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
Been after several times. It's the yeah.

Speaker 6 (26:09):
Richard White stated that the last time he viewed her body,
the only thing that was left of her body was repelvis.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Four days after White's confession, detective Joel Humphrey went to
Masita to search for the woman's remains. They found only
animal bones. Still having no idea if Richard Paul White
was a serial killer or a fantasist, investigators set out
to verify another of his claims.

Speaker 7 (26:37):
He says two bodies are buried in the backyard of
a house that he and Hazel shared.

Speaker 6 (26:43):
Richard Whitehead told then that he had buried the victims
in the flower bed that ran along the north wall.

Speaker 4 (26:52):
Of the house.

Speaker 6 (26:54):
Consequently, the homicide unit went out and excavated that area.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
In September two thousand and three, Mitch Morrissey was Denver's
chief Deputy District Attorney. He attended the dig at the
house where Richard Paul White once lived with his former girlfriend,
Hazel White had since moved out.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
So I walked up to the men as they were
working in the trench digging, and they said they.

Speaker 8 (27:24):
Already had one body out of the ground.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
And right next to me was a wheelbarrow, and in
the wheelbarrow was a half opened suitcase a bag. There
was clearly a body in the bag, but it was
packed in really tightly and it was discolored. I've been
to hundreds of crime scenes and I've never seen anything

(27:48):
like this.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
The female body was exactly who homicide officers had expected
to find, twenty six year old and Alicia Gonzalez.

Speaker 6 (28:00):
She was immediately identified because Richard White had kept property
of hers, and he had remembered the name, and he
gave the name to the police when he made his confession.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
White had explained to police what he'd done after murdering
at Alicia in September two thousand and two.

Speaker 6 (28:20):
She was bleeding and he put a plastic bag over
her face to try to contain the blood, tied her
up so he could put her in a suitcase, and
then buried her in the flower bed that ran along
the north wall of the house.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
There was still some remnants of that on her body
when they did the autopsy. There was still ropes and
things that tied her feet to her hands.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Richard Paul White's graphic confession was being proven to be true,
and the grizzly discoveries at his former home did not
stop there.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
They had a map that had been drawn by mister White,
and they were told there were too, so they are
obviously looking for the second victim. She was in the
ground with concrete on top of her.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
With some difficulty. The second woman in the yard of
Richard Paul White's former home was disinterred while efforts began
to identify her. Her body was taken for autopsy and
it became clear that she and and Alicia had met
a similar end.

Speaker 8 (29:31):
The question was how did these women die? And that
was pretty clear.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
The cartilages in their necks were broken, and they had
clearly been strangled to death, not manually, but with a ligature.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
What the autopsies could not show was how both the
women had suffered at White's hands. Their bodies were too decomposed.
But the killer was more than happy to supply the details.

Speaker 6 (30:01):
He would talk to them about their lives, where he
would describe his life to them, and it basically would
be an ongoing process of sexual assault, casual conversation, sexual assault,
more casual conversation, and praying, sexual assault, more casual conversation

(30:21):
and pray.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
Detectives couldn't believe what they were hearing. An interview that
had begun with White confessing to accidentally killing his friend
Jason Reichhart had turned into an horrific tale of a
serial killer and the demise of at.

Speaker 9 (30:38):
Least two victims.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
White's former partner, Hasel was confronted with the fact not
only that her ex boyfriend was a murderer, but also
that he'd taken his victims' lives in the home that
she and Richard Paul White had shared, I was.

Speaker 12 (30:56):
I was freaking out. I was scared.

Speaker 11 (30:59):
I didn't have any I was just freaking out. How
could that happen? How could that happen without me knowing
as well? I suppose? How could he do that?

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Like in my own house, at least one of the
victims had been held in the house.

Speaker 9 (31:15):
When Hazel was at home.

Speaker 6 (31:17):
He tied her up and placed her underneath the stairs
in a storage area that they had that was walled
off underneath the stairs, kept her there all night.

Speaker 13 (31:29):
Value the whole plan, and that's I could like to
have your girlfriend come home and eat that head body.

Speaker 4 (31:36):
You know how long she did? She did, think so
a little longer, but I don't know, because Rigging Morris
didn't leave yet. So I'm thinking the more than twenty
four hours.

Speaker 12 (31:51):
I knew he was capable of that.

Speaker 11 (31:52):
And if he had said that he had done those
things to other women, I knew that that was very
possible to be true, because he did the you know,
he did pretty horrible things to me, and I was
pretty close.

Speaker 12 (32:06):
To death in a lot of.

Speaker 11 (32:08):
The situations, and maybe because he had some kind of
feelings for me that I was spared I was very
lucky to be spared.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
On the twelfth of September, the search moved three hours
south of Denver to La Hunter in Otero County. Local
under Sheriff Ken Kimsey found himself drawn into white story.

Speaker 5 (32:34):
Two of them he allegedly brought down to Ottero County
and dumped them. We found out that his grandmother lived
in La Hunter. From visiting there his grandmother there, he
knew some of the places to go and ended up
going to that canal and dumping them.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
I felt safety there after. Kind of rural.

Speaker 14 (32:57):
I think it's an irrigation show too, in honest bath here.

Speaker 5 (33:01):
That this canal is one of the bigger canals that
runs in Otterill County and it's one hundred and fourteen
miles long runs towards the Kansas. So we brought some
dogs out of Douglas County and they were dogs that
would sniff like for bodies.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Over a year had passed since White had allegedly thrown
his victims off a bridge to dispose of their bodies.

Speaker 5 (33:28):
We weren't really able to find anything because of the
time span, But I truly believe he did dump them there.
Why would he lie about that now.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
On the seventeenth of September, while Canada's team continued to
search in Ottero County, White was formally charged in Aurora
with his friend Jason Reichardt's death. He had not yet
been charged in relation to the women found buried in
his backyard.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
He was in the Arapaho County jail and he was
going to be there until he got convicted or acquitted
in a trial, so we had some time to put
together our case. Once it broke in the media, and
once there were pictures of mister White in the newspaper
on TV, women that had gotten away from him started

(34:20):
to come forward and they had been raped by him,
They had been tied up by him.

Speaker 8 (34:27):
Some of them had been taken back to.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
The same house where we found the other victims, but
had escaped him.

Speaker 6 (34:35):
For an initial interview of Richard White, Richard White stated
that he had abducted one woman, sexually assaulted her multiple times,
and when he was taking her out of the house,
he had her handcuffed and she ran from him.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
In fact split second, She's running down the street screaming
from my house with hand cuts and no cop shot.
So I grab a ar fifteen, you know, and I'm thinking, okay,
this is a bit as the end.

Speaker 6 (35:12):
He initially thought about shooting her, that thought better of that,
and she ran off and got away. We were eventually
able to identify her and we interviewed her.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Three women would eventually come forward to tell police they
had been abducted and violently attacked by Richard Paul White.
One was able to successfully identify him from a lineup.
Another led officers to the house where she'd been kept
prisoner for almost twenty four hours.

Speaker 6 (35:43):
She attempted to appease him and make it appear as
if she really had emotional feelings towards him. She also
talked to him about music and how she liked hard
rock and he liked hard rock. After multiple sexual assaults concluded,
he drove her back and dropped her off. She survived.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
In White's interview with police, he said that God would
often determine the outcome for the victims.

Speaker 14 (36:10):
Then we have to pray together, because two people come
together in gardening and he'll listen.

Speaker 4 (36:14):
I told her I was going to kill her. She
was terrified, you know.

Speaker 14 (36:17):
She went straight to hea then because we've prayed, We
prayed before I killed her.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
In December two thousand and three, investigators were able to
identify this second woman, found in White's former garden in
North Denver.

Speaker 6 (36:33):
Her picture was released and her sister came forward and
advised us that her sister, Victoria Truppin, had been missing.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
A DNA match between a family member and the remains confirmed.
The victim was thirty two year old mother of two,
Victoria Turpin, who disappeared in August two thousand and two
after going out to buy cigarettes.

Speaker 9 (36:58):
In May two thousand.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
And four, Richard Paul White was charged with fifty three offenses,
including the kidnap, sexual assault, and murder of Analysia Gonzales
and Victoria Turpin, as well as the sexual assault, kidnap,
and attempted murder of the three survivors.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
When it came down to settling this case, either through
a trial, seeking the death penalty, any of those kind
of things, there was a plea bargain that was made.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
The deal related to locating the remains in Costia County
of the woman White had admitted killing in January two
thousand and two.

Speaker 7 (37:37):
The DIA suggests that if he shows them where the
first body was buried, they won't proceed with a.

Speaker 9 (37:46):
Claim for the death penalty.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
White's cooperation would also mean he would not be charged
with the woman's murder.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
He eventually took them to where the body was. What
I remember is basically the a section of her pelvis
and part of her backbone, and that was about it.
And obviously there was nothing to indicate.

Speaker 8 (38:12):
Whose body this was.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
The remains that were found in September two thousand and
four matched to White's description of what was left of
the victim's body. That same month, Richard Paul White pleaded
guilty to the murders of Jason Reichart and Alicia Gonzalez
and Victoria Turpin on.

Speaker 7 (38:32):
The twenty ninth of November two thousand and four. White
is indeed sentenced to two life terms without parole and
one hundred and forty four years for the attacks on
the women who are lucky enough to survive. In early
December two thousand and four, he's given life without parole

(38:54):
for the murder of Jason Raikart.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Richard Paul or White will spend the rest of his
days at the SuperMac Centennial Correctional Facility in Fremont County, Colorado.

Speaker 11 (39:09):
Just a sense of relief. I guess, knowing for a
fact that he will never be out. He did write
me a letter and almost in almost mockingly told me
that I don't even like saying the word, but he said,
I'm sorry. I killed those hookers in your in your

(39:34):
house and bury them in your yard. He might have
written the words down, but I know that wasn't he
wasn't sorry.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
After his sentencing, White sat down with a police artist
to describe the victim whose partial remains he'd led police
to in Messita, White remembered clearly the facial disfigurement of
the woman he'd murdered in January two thousand and two.
When the drawing was finished, a local detective recognized her immediately.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
He looked at the composite and he goes, I know
who this woman is. This woman was a eyewitness to
a homicide that I had about six years ago.

Speaker 8 (40:16):
He figured out her name.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
They were able to go back to her family and
contact her children, contact her grandmother, and she had been
missing for all that time.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
The body was confirmed as Tracy, the mother of two
who disappeared from East Colfax early in two thousand and two.
With this final identification. There was some closure for the
women's families, as well as for Hazel, who had to
process what her sadistic ex boyfriend had done right under
her nose.

Speaker 11 (40:49):
I just felt horrible for those women and their families
and remembered how he said that no one would ever
miss them or know that they were gone.

Speaker 12 (41:00):
Obviously people do, and their families did.

Speaker 11 (41:03):
We contacted the families later on and then light a
candle light vigil, and the families came over to the
house and never able to light candles for that, which
was good.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
While White's surviving victims continue to try and make sense
of his devastating crimes, the killer himself has expressed ambivalence,
saying that while he feels anger towards sex workers, he
also feels sorry for them.

Speaker 6 (41:35):
He expressed remorse. He described himself as an evil person,
and he stated that God was telling him to commit
these crimes.

Speaker 4 (41:47):
That's directly labor. I know that there's something wrong with me.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Serial killer Richard Paul White's worldview was dominated by ideas
of good and evil, people who were worthy of respect
and good treatment, and people whose lifestyle meant they were
deserving of brutality and pain. This belief, along with his
own sexual deviancy, led to White torturing and killing at

(42:15):
least three innocent women and likely even more. White has
never explained why he shot dead his friend Jason, but
with four confirmed murders and many survivors who suffered at
his hands, there is no doubt that Richard Paul White
is one of the world's most evil killers.