Deangelo

NO one knew that the blue-eyed and “silver-tongued” Bruce Lindahl was a serial killer – until new DNA technology revealed his horrendous crimes.

Lindahl is believed to have murdered at least nine young people during a nine-year period up until 1981 in the United States and is being investigated for many more cold cases.

The true nature of this stone-hearted kidnapper, rapist and strangler only emerged when Detective Chris Loudon tried to solve the 46-year-old case of slain schoolgirl Pam Maurer, 16, from Lisle, near Chicago in Illinois.

His investigation led him to a box full of naked photographs of young women taken by the twisted Lindahl.

Inside were Polaroids and prints of often terrified, underage and drugged females either tricked or forced to come home with the sadistic predator.

Most escaped alive, but many did not.

Chris, who recently retired from Lisle County police after more than 25 years as a detective, is certain nine women died at his hands.

Lindahl’s reign of terror only came to an end at the age of 29 when he accidentally stabbed himself in the leg during the frenzied murder of 18-year-old high school student Charles Huber in 1981.

He hit a crucial artery and bled to death on top of his victim.

I don’t believe we know all his victims

Detective Chris Loudon

Chris tells The Sun: “He would have killed and raped so many more women if he hadn’t died.

“He would be about 70 now. He would still be doing it. I don’t believe we know all his victims.

“In 1979 he murdered three girls and in 1980 he murdered two within two months and then he died a few months later.

“I think he was just getting into his groove. He had figured out how better to do it, how to dispose of evidence.”

The unmasking of this serial killer is examined in a new three-part series on Paramount+ titled The Box, which starts streaming on August 11.

Chris restricted the radius of his investigation to the towns where Lindahl had lived between 1974 and 1981.

They were the Lisle, Woodridge, Downers Grove and Aurora areas west of Chicago.

Each time Lindahl moved, the deaths followed him.

But Chris believes he could have struck in the neighbouring state of Wisconsin, where he regularly visited one girlfriend, and detectives are looking at 80 other unsolved deaths in DuPage County, Illinois.

Jekyll and Hyde character

Unlike many killers, electrician Lindahl was not a loner.

Instead, friends and ex-girlfriends describe the skydiving enthusiast as “very charming” and handsome.

But he had a hair-trigger temper, once attacking a cop during an arrest, and threatened to kill the women he was dating if they did not agree to engage in degrading sex acts with him.

Fran, who was aged only 14 when Lindahl raped her, told how she woke up after being drugged to find him “taking polaroid pictures of me naked in bed”.

If you don’t come back to me I will kill you

Bruce Lindahl

While Susan recounted in the documentary that the killer kidnapped her and took her to the woods because she left him.

He told her “if you don’t come back to me I will kill you” and boasted he would put sulphuric acid on her dead body in order to cover up the crime.

DNA breakthrough

Pam is believed to be among the first women not to make it out alive.

The teenager’s body was found in the snow by the road, having been raped and strangled in January 1976.

Chris decided to reopen the case in 2019 after hearing how Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo was arrested a year earlier thanks to his DNA being found via a genealogy website.

The detective took DNA from Pam’s clothing and sent it to a firm called Parabon labs .

The company was able to trace a potential family tree, leading to Lindahl, from the sample by comparing it to around two million DNA records on a database.

They also produced an imaginary photofit – which looked remarkably like Lindahl.

Lindahl wasn’t someone who was known to us at the time

Detective Chris Loudon

Chris explains: “Parabon are the unsung heroes in the whole thing. If it wasn’t for Parabon we wouldn’t have solved this case.

“Lindahl wasn’t someone who was known to us at the time, this wasn’t a friend of Pam’s or someone she had a spat with.”

That, though, was only the spark of the case. A lot more detective work was yet to be done.

Getting away with murder

Lindahl had been arrested for numerous crimes, but had never served time in jail.

His close calls with justice included being accused of raping 20-year-old Annette Lazer at gun point in March 1979 and kidnapping Debra  Colliander in June 1980 before raping her.

The state’s lawyers decided not to prosecute in Annette’s case, but Debra was two weeks away from giving evidence against Lindahl in a trial when she went missing and the case had to be dropped.

A man later confessed to being hired by Lindahl to kill the key witness.

Photos of drugged girls

Evidence discovered in her case included the box of photos, but that did not lead to any further investigation by the police back in 1980.

Chris says: “I don’t know how the cops investigating the case could not have been p***ed off that he was taking pictures of underage girls.

“We found dozens of pictures of young girls, as young as 13 and 14, and some were under the influence and some of them looked positively terrified.”

We found dozens of pictures of young girls, as young as 13 and 14, and some were under the influence and some of them looked positively terrified

Detective Chris Loudon

The documentary reveals that police officer Dave Torres was friends with Lindahl.

Shockingly, in the series Torres admits to having seen some of the photos and describes the murderer as a “silver-tongued devil.”

But Chris thinks the main problem back then was that the police did not take crimes against women seriously and didn’t properly investigate the spate of missing persons.

He comments: “It astounds me and it makes me very sad that it did not occur to the police back then to compare notes with other departments.

Pam Maurer’s body was found was about 200 yards from where another girl was found the next year

Chris Loudon

“What concerns me the most is that where Pam Maurer’s body was found was about 200 yards from where another girl was found the next year and they went to the same school.”

After Lindahl was named as Pam’s likely killer in 2020, over 75 women came forward to reveal they had been attacked by him.

Chris continues: “I spoke to a lot of women who survived horrific rapings by Bruce Lindahl, things where he degraded them, he did really creepy things such as posing them for photos while raping them and asking them things like ‘what do you like to do?’

“It was heinous that he was treating this like some kind of sex act that they were going to enjoy.

“Talking to all these women was really hard, they were all crying, they all had a basic feeling that no one seemed to care when they reported.

No one seemed to care when they reported

Detective Chris Loudon

“It will p*** me off until the day I draw my last breath.”

The other murdered women that Chris is allowed to name are Kathy Halle, Elizabeth Drews, Susan Jabczynski and Debra McCall.

Others are ongoing cases, so he cannot identify Lindahl as their suspected killer.

Lindahl’s modus operandi was to stalk women at shopping centres, trick them to get in his car, before raping and strangling them.

Therefore, it is a surprise that his final victim was the young male Huber who had gone bowling with the killer.

The police do not know the motive for the attack, but he stabbed Huber 28 times during a drinking session at the home of Lindahl’s girlfriend.

Human rights madness

While some neighbouring police departments helped Chris, others were very obstructive.

He reveals: “One threw me out of their own lobby, because I was asked for a copy of a report.”

Chris believes that privacy activists are also getting in the way of justice.

Parabon is no longer allowed to use DNA samples taken from genealogy databases in its research due to a human rights outcry .

Chris comments: “Any innocent has nothing to hide. We need every tool we can get because we are fighting a battle on an uneven battlefield.

We need every tool we can get because we are fighting a battle on an uneven battlefield

Detective Chris Loudon

“We are being so hamstrung it’s going to get to the point that we are not going to solve any crimes unless we have a taped confession.”

Even though Chris has retired, Lindahl will continue to haunt the former detective.

Chris concludes:  “I still have bad dreams about it and I will probably have bad dreams for the rest of my life.”

The Box is available to watch as a box set on Paramount+ from August 11

The Golden State Killer has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a decade-long spree of rape and murder which terrorised much of California in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Joseph James DeAngelo, 74, pleaded guilty in June to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges under a plea deal that avoided a possible death sentence.

The former cop also publicly admitted dozens more sexual assaults for which the statute of limitations had expired. Prosecutors called the scale of the violence ‘simply staggering’, encompassing 87 victims at 53 crime scenes spanning 11 counties.

There were so many victims that the sentencing hearing had to be moved to a university ballroom so that relatives and survivors could attend and tell the judge how their lives had been ruined by the predator.

DeAngelo sat silently through three days of heart-rending hearings, expressionless in a wheelchair that prosecutors contended is a prop to hide his still vigorous health.

But the aging serial killer briefly rose from the chair before he was sentenced to tell the court he was ‘truly sorry’.

DeAngelo said: ‘I listened to all your statements, each one of them, and I’m truly sorry for everyone I’ve hurt.’

The Golden State Killer remained a mystery when he seemingly vanished in 1986, his horrific crimes going unsolved for decades until DeAngelo’s arrest in Sacramento County on April 24, 2018.

The serial killer, also known as the ‘East Area Rapist’ and the ‘Original Night Stalker’ before detectives linked the sprees to the same culprit, typically crept into his victims’ bedrooms at night, tying them up, raping them, and stealing valuables.

Investigators tied DeAngelo to the catalogue of offences using a then-novel technique of tracing him using family DNA from commercial genealogy websites.

Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty, but settled for a life term given California’s moratorium on executions, the coronavirus pandemic, and the advancing age of DeAngelo, his victims, and witnesses they needed to make their case.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him under a plea deal that called for him to be sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, plus 15 life terms with the possibility of parole and eight years for other enhancements.

He said DeAngelo ‘deserves no mercy’.

One of his victims, Jane Carson-Sandler, said she had served the equivalent of a life sentence over the four decades since she was raped by DeAngelo – adding that it is now his turn to do the same.

Speaking during an earlier hearing she said: ‘Our wounds heal and our scars remain.’

Kris Pedretti was 15 when the Golden State Killer attacked her just before Christmas in 1976.

She said: ‘This kid who liked to go shopping and do cartwheels on the lawn, that girl was gone.’

Soon after attacking her, DeAngelo escalated from targeting single women and girls to humiliating their husbands and boyfriends.

He would tie the men up and pile dishes on their backs, then threaten to kill both victims if he heard the plates rattle while he raped the woman.

That’s what happened to Bob and Gay Hardwick, who were living together in Stockton in 1978.

She said: ‘That’s been with me for 42 years now, and in my view that’s a long life sentence for someone to serve who didn’t deserve to serve it.

‘Not one of us, the survivors, deserved to have this kind of violence and hatred and desecration put upon them.’

DeAngelo was a cop for the first six years of his onslaught – the first three years when he was known as the Visalia Ransacker for about 100 burglaries and one slaying in that San Joaquin Valley farm town and then the next three years in the Sierra foothills city of Auburn northeast of Sacramento, until he was fired for shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer.

He killed two more people in Sacramento – a couple out walking their dog – but committed most of his murders after he left the police force and moved to Southern California, where he was dubbed the Original Night Stalker.

DeAngelo eluded capture for four decades until investigators used a new form of DNA tracking to unmask and arrest him in 2018.

One of six prosecutors who spoke before the sentencing, Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward, said the outcome of the case offered hope to victims of long unsolved crimes.

He added: ‘As science and technology evolve, the space for evil like this to operate within gets smaller and smaller. Simply put, the DNA will never forget.’

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