Unknown Speaker 2 (14:08)

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Peyton Moreland (14:53)

Now, as horrible as the story was, the case against Terry Childs was actually about to get even more complex. Because in 1995, this is a full decade after Lois's murder is solved and closed. A hiker discovered something strange in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This person was foraging for mushrooms when he Found a human bone hidden underneath some plants and moss. It's actually a human jaw bone. And the mushroom hunter notified the police, and they searched the area and found more bones, including multiple ribs. That's what they found in the initial search. But I will note that as the years went by, people just kept finding more and more bones in this area. However, no one ever came across a complete skeleton. And to this day, this person's body of all these bones still hasn't been fully recovered. Either way, the discovery was important because these remains were really right next to the area where Lois had been killed. They weren't her body. Her remains were intact when she was found. So this was a second corpse in the same region. And given the rate of decomposition, this person had been dead for a while, since around the time of Lois's death. That meant there were two possibilities. Option one is the two separate, unrelated murders happened at the same place but weren't connected. And option two, Terry is a serial killer. Maybe he killed two or more people and he used the same mountain to commit these crimes. Problem was, police were only suspicious, but they couldn't prove anything. All they could do was keep investigating and gathering evidence as they tried to solve this second murder. Now, eventually, they actually identified the deceased as a missing woman named Linda Josevich. She had not been seen in 16 years, since 1979, the time Linda had been 19 years old. And she had been born and raised in Santa Cruz. That's the same town that Lois was living in when she was killed. Linda came from a big family. She had four sisters, and she was the middle child. She loved playing sports. She was very close to her family. In fact, even though Linda was a college student, she still lived at home with her parents and her younger siblings. Plus, when Linda needed a job, her oldest sister, Kathy, helped her. She found her a retail position at a department store called Mervyn's. Kathy had actually worked there for a while, and when she quit for a new job, she recommended her little sister Linda as her replacement. The rest is history. Now, on November 7, 1979, this is before Lois's murder, Linda was working an evening shift at Mervyn's. She wanted to buy a drink from the vending machine, but she didn't have any spare change on her. But she knew she had some coins in her car. So during her break, at about 7pm, Linda walked out into the parking lot. That was kind of dark, and no one ever saw her again. And that same night, her car also went missing. Like she'd either driven away or Someone had stolen it. A few days after her disappearance, it was found. The glove box was open, and it was clear that someone had definitely gone through it, like they were looking for valuables. There was no sign of Linda herself, and the police suspected that she had been kidnapped from that parking lot. However, they didn't have any hard evidence about what had happened to her, not until her body was found 16 years later in 1995, right next to where Lois was murdered. Now, some detectives asked Terry directly if he knew anything about Linda's abduction and murder, and he waffled. He didn't confess to the crime, but he did admit to knowing a little bit about her disappearance. The information he gave was accurate, but just not very specific. It could have been a lucky guess or something he had read in the papers. So the police came out of the interrogation feeling uncertain about whether he was a viable suspect or not. So they waited a while and then questioned him again. And they still didn't get anywhere. Time went on. They kept interrogating Terry and failing to get any useful information. Now, a full 10 years passed without any progress one way or another. But finally, in 2017, Terry finally admitted that he had killed Linda, too. He also described exactly where and how he had dumped her body, including details that only the real killer could have known. For example, he said he had returned to the scene of the crime after a few days, and then he'd buried Linda's remains under a bunch of loose leaves. The only person who could have known about that was the actual murderer. So it was enough to convince the police that Terry had also killed Linda. Now, sadly, once again, the motive was completely senseless. Not that there's ever a good reason to commit murder. But Terry said he killed Linda because that night he was in a bad mood and he wanted to take his anger out on someone. He'd been fighting with his mom. He was angry, and Linda just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to Terry, he happened to pass by the Mervyn's parking lot right when Linda was going to her car for that loose change. And on impulse, he approached her. He pushed her into the passenger seat and then beat Linda until she was too hurt to escape or even scream for help. Afterward, he says, he climbed into the driver's seat, used her keys to start the car, and drove off into the mountains with her. And once he got to a remote reservoir with no witnesses around, he opened the passenger side door. Except he had no intention of letting Linda get away. After all, she was pretty hurt at this Point, Terry had to drag her out of the car. He beat her even more. He choked her with his belt, and then he stabbed her to death. And finally, he left her body in the brush, where it remained undiscovered for the next decade and a half. Now, in total, 28 years had passed between the day Linda went missing and. And when her family finally learned what had happened to her. And when they heard the details straight from Terry's mouth, it didn't bring them peace. His story was so violent and disturbing. As Linda's older sister Kathy put it, I don't think we want to know all the gruesome details, but knowing someone is accountable is humongous. I want to pause and talk about the timeline here because I have to backtrack a little, and it might be hard to track when each thing happened. Okay, so Terry confessed to lois's murder in 1996. And then the police suspected he had killed Linda after her body was found in 2007. And then 10 years later, he admitted to killing her in 2017. But in between this, he gave other additional confessions. They all, though, took a long time to investigate. So there were multiple open cases being solved at different times. It can get a little confusing. So let's go back to the very first one from October 1996. Now, for context, this was after the police had found Lois's body, but before Terry had even gone to trial for her murder. Linda was missing and dead at this point, but her body hadn't been found. Now, Terry was living behind bars in jail while he waited to appear in court for Lois's murder. And one day, he approached the guards and said, hey, I have killed a total of 12 people. I didn't name names or admit to anything specific. For the time being. All he was willing to say was, I have murdered 12 people. And he also said where the murders had happened. He said four were in Santa Cruz, one was in Reno, Nevada, two were in Seattle. And honestly, he went on. According to Terry, he got away with it for years because he had so much insider information about the criminal justice system. You'll remember how earlier I mentioned that his father had worked as a bail bondsman. He wasn't a detective or a crime scene investigator, but apparently he still taught Terry just enough about detective work that he knew how to cover up his crimes. And I'll also note that as an adult, Terry also worked as a bail bondsman, just like his dad had. And he claimed that that also made it easier for him to get away with the murders. But on Top of that, Terry claims he had an accomplice. See, at the time of some of those homicides, Harry was dating a woman whose name has not been released to the public. And I don't know who she was. But I do know that Terry told the police that his girlfriend had helped him cover up some of his crimes after he murdered Lois. He said the two of them drove out to the mountains to get rid of loose hair, footprints, or anything else that could be traced back to him. And now, when he confessed, Harry didn't just take credit for his crimes, he also implicated his partner. Now, I do have to say the police were not totally convinced that these confessions were credible. It seemed odd that being a bail bondsman's son would help Terry stay one step ahead of homicide investigators for so many murders, especially because he'd been convicted of countless petty crimes before he was caught for Lois's murder. So it was a bit hard to accept that he had committed a dozen perfect murders while still getting arrested for drugs, theft, assault, and everything else. And on top of that, prosecutors thought he actually had a motive to lie.

Unknown Speaker 3 (23:42)

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Ryan Reynolds (24:11)

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Peyton Moreland (24:33)

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra c mint mobile.com See, Terry knew that if he was found guilty, he would be sent to one of California's roughest, most violent prisons. His life would be terrible and he might have wanted to negotiate for the right to be sent to a different, nicer facility. Maybe he figured if he could share information about some unsolved cold cases in exchange for a promise that he could pick what prison he would live in. That would work. So Terry definitely seemed like the sort of person who would give a false confession if he thought it would benefit him. So even though he said he'd killed 12 people, even at the time, the investigators don't fully believe him. Except right after this conversation, the police found evidence linking Terry to an unsolved murder from Nevada back in 1987. The victim was Rulin McGill. She was a school teacher. On July 10, she drove to Reno for a dentist's appointment and to run errands. And then she never made it home. Her family actually found her body in a ditch not longer after they reported her missing. She had been both stabbed and choked to death, exactly like Linda. Now, when the police asked Terry about Rulan's murder, he took full credit of it. He confessed to the senseless killing, and shortly afterward, he went to court and got sentenced to life in prison for it. This is obviously on top of the 41 year sentence he was already serving. But the convictions didn't stop there. The police also linked Terry to two other unsolved cold cases. They were for a woman named Joan Mack and a man named Christopher Hall. Now, Joan was found dead on October 11, 1984. Before then, she had been a 28 year old unhoused woman who was trying to raise her five year old daughter alone. Her killer had stabbed her to death, which was consistent with Terry's movie, as was the fact that her body was found in a remote area. It was a hilly spot above a beach. But unlike in Terry's other homicides, Joan was tied up and gagged before her murder. And as for Christopher, his death was just three months later. On February 3, 1985, he was shot to death in a park. And the police knew that Terry had used a gun in some of his crimes. He had shot Lois to death. But on top of that, Christopher and Terry actually had known one another. They were part of the same drug dealing enterprise. So it wasn't really hard to imagine that if one of their deals had gone bad, Terry might have killed Christopher in an act of revenge. Now, to be clear, the investigators didn't have any hard evidence to prove he was involved with either murder. They just suspected it based on what they knew about his habits and patterns and who he was associated with. Now, the police pulled Terry into an interrogation, and he gave a full confession to both of these killings. And afterward, prosecutors charged him with Joan and Christopher's murders in 1997. But the cases Never went anywhere. It was thrown out before it could even go to trial. Apparently, the courts didn't think there was enough evidence against Terry, even with his confession. The judges were worried that he might have given a false statement again as part of a plan to try to renegotiate the terms of his sentence. And if his confession wasn't credible, nothing else was concrete enough to justify taking things to court. So for 20 years, there was no forward progress in either of those cases. They both went cold. But in 2017, the same year that he confessed to Linda's homicide, Terry actually agreed to give a more detailed confession about both Joan and Christopher. He included information that hadn't been released to the public, but it was completely consistent with what investigators had learned in those cases. That was enough for the police to feel, okay, we actually do believe his confession. And you might be wondering, why was he coming forward now? It's been 30 years since all of these murders. Well, according to Terry, the ghosts of his victims had been haunting him in prison. He meant that literally. Terry believed that Linda, Joan, and Christopher's spirits were tormenting him. Incidentally, those were the three murders he hadn't been convicted of yet. He didn't seem to have an issue with Lois or Rulin's ghosts. But Terry said these specters appeared to him in his cell, and they were, quote, eating up his brain. They never left him alone. His hope was that if justice was served and he confessed with detail and was convicted of the murders, the ghost would finally rest in peace. Then they would leave him alone, too. Now it's possible that his guilt was really just getting to him, and he was hallucinating angry phantoms. Or who knows, maybe he actually was haunted by his victim's vengeful spirits. But the investigators thought it was a lot more likely that, once again, Terry was confessing because he had something to gain from it. After all, he negotiated for a plea deal that took the death penalty off the table. Ultimately, though, it didn't matter why he was confessing, just that he was sharing key information. It was enough to actually close those cases and hopefully give the victim's loved ones some closure. So the prosecutors charged Terry with these additional murders. Now, there was no trial because he did, in fact, accept a deal and plead guilty to both homicides. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. Also note that Terry's girlfriend, the one he claims helped him clean the scene of the crime after Lois's murder, was actually eventually arrested. And when they brought her in, the police also Found illegal weapons in her possession. She also accepted a plea deal and only spent five years behind bars for her crimes. And as for Terry, he stayed in prison for the rest of his life as a serial killer. On February 11, 2023, he died behind bars at the age of 67. When Terry passed, that meant the prosecutors would never hear another confession from him again, which meant it was impossible to say how many people he actually did murder in his lifetime. Now, remember, Harry claims he was a serial killer who killed a dozen people, but he was only convicted for five murders. If his confession was honest and if he really did take 12 people's lives, we still don't know who those other seven victims were. We also don't know if their bodies are still waiting to be found or if Terry could have closed any existing cases. All we can say is that if they died at Terry's hands, their deaths were probably horrible. Their families deserve to know what happened to them and to get answers. But sadly, the answers may not be what they want to hear. It's always so, so confusing to me when someone gets arrested for one murder and doesn't just say what happened to everyone. Like, if he's going to come out and be like, I killed 12 people, why not just say what happened? The fact that he takes years in between giving more information and more information, it's torment. It goes to the fact that his brain is still evil. He's tormenting people. He's tormenting families. He's tormenting victims. I also will never understand why killers confess to crimes they didn't commit, even if they feel like they might get something out of it. We have seen serial killers take credit for crimes we know they didn't commit before. It is such a twisted and upside down thing. But I'll never understand. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and I will see you next time as we go further into the dark together. Goodbye.

Morgan Absher (32:02)

Do you want to sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases? I'm Morgan Absher.

Kaylan Moore (32:08)

And I'm Kaylan Moore.

Morgan Absher (32:09)

And we'd love for you to check out our new show, clues.

Kaylan Moore (32:12)

Each Wednesday, I piece together the timelines and break down the hard facts, digging into forensic details, investigative techniques, and everything that led to justice or didn't.

Morgan Absher (32:21)

And while Kailyn dives into the facts, I'm pulling out the threads, digging through the Internet theories and looking at the details that may or may not add up.

Kaylan Moore (32:29)

From serial killers to shocking cold cases. We shine a light on the stories that have been waiting, sometimes for decades, to finally be heard.

Morgan Absher (32:37)

So join us as we uncover the breakthroughs, the heartbreak and the relentless pursuit of answers behind the world's most unforgettable investigations.

Kaylan Moore (32:45)

Come open a case file with us every Wednesday and listen to clues wherever you get your podcast.