Fred dinenage (narrates): In February 1998,
the murder of 41-year-old Paula Vance
was captured on cctv in downtown Los Angeles, California.
The grainy footage made it difficult to identify Paula's killer,
but the detectives watching the murder play out
before their eyes,
knew they were seeing a serial killer in action.
When we saw the tape, we both exclaimed at the same time,
"this isn't his first time."
But we didn't have any other murders at that time in that area
to blame on this unknown person.
It would take another five years
before the killer was unveiled as 37-year-old Chester Turner.
The 6'2", 250-pound murderer
had strangled 14 women to death
across an 11-year reign of terror.
I tried to get the jurors to imagine how long
Chester Turner's hands were on the throats of these women
and what they went through
to see the reflection of their eyes, in his eyes
as he's choking the life out of them.
That's a horrible, horrible way to die.
DNA would lead to the downfall of the prolific killer
who was sentenced to death for his savage crimes.
He was ruthless, merciless. He was a killing machine.
He targeted the most vulnerable people in society
and treated them like nothing more than rubbish.
Detritus to be chucked away.
With his reign of terror finally over,
Chester Turner had been unmasked
as one of the world's most evil killers.
(Theme music)
In April 2007,
40-year-old Chester Turner was found guilty
of the murder of ten women across Los Angeles
and sentenced to death.
A second trial seven years later found him guilty of another four.
He strangled the lives out of all 14 of his victims,
but he has never spoken about their deaths.
LAPD homicide detective cliff Sheppard
worked on the cold case unit
that would eventually uncover Turner's murderous career.
They were just victims of opportunity for him.
He came across them, they approached him.
I think, especially in Paula Vance's case,
we have that on tape.
The two of them are... are talking.
They're face-to-face when he suddenly attacks her.
Did he do that with all the women probably?
But we don't have anybody surviving to tell us.
Turner never confessed to his crimes
even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence against him,
which suggests there could be many more victims out there.
Prosecutor Bobby grace
helped to put the serial killer behind bars.
There've been other cases that I've done
that have gotten more media attention,
but no other case
that tugged at my emotions more than this case.
Because there were so many stories of the women
who had lost their lives
and... and how it had affected the victims.
That's something that will stay with you forever
and you really can't shake it.
This killer's story
begins on the November 5, 1966.
Chester dewayne Turner was born in Warren, Arkansas.
When he was just four years old, his parents split up
and his mother moved him to California.
Chester Turner had a fairly normal background.
He grew up here in the Los Angeles area,
attended Los Angeles area schools.
Per his mother, he had no violence in his childhood, no child abuse.
He had a half-brother.
Mum owned her house around century and hoover.
Chester grew up in the area, attended school in the area.
Turner was known as 'Chester the molester' at school,
because he used to act very inappropriately
with his female classmates.
He just used to go and grab them.
So, from a very early age
he feels this sense of entitlement to do
what he wants with women.
To just go and take what he feels entitled to from them.
Growing up in south Los Angeles led to a tough existence for Turner,
who at 6'2" and 250 pounds was an imposing figure.
During Turner's adult life, there was quite a lot of turbulence.
He moved from job to job. He ended up having four children.
He was in and out of prison.
Chester started dealing drugs, he admitted to that.
There's a scar on the right side of his face
that he claims some other young men attacked him to Rob him,
and he put up a fight.
He is a big kid. And they cut him across his face.
(Dramatic music)
Turner often found himself on the wrong side of the law.
While on parole for a minor offence in la,
he headed to salt lake city in Utah where his mother now lived.
But trouble seemed to follow him wherever he went.
He had a violent temper.
A man who...
You didn't know it, he would never show it,
but was always somehow on the edge.
And it was not difficult to get him to ignite.
In salt lake city, he had an incident with another girl
that he became involved with.
Chester and his wife separated.
The other girl had a little bit of a relationship with Chester
until one night Chester
became angry with her and slapped her.
With that, the woman phoned the police,
the police responded,
found out Chester was on parole from Los Angeles,
that there was a parole violation and arrested him
and sent him back to Los Angeles.
Turner couldn't financially support his children.
And when he wasn't in prison,
he would struggle to find a roof over his head.
He's on his own.
He's separated from his wife and kids.
He's separated from his mum and half-brother.
They're in salt lake city.
So, he was now left up to finding a place to live
and he ended up in some Los Angeles missions,
downtown Los Angeles.
Turner's misdemeanours were mainly non-violent.
Theft and drug-related convictions led to most of his prison stays.
But there was sometimes a sexual element to his crimes.
It appears that one day he was walking down the street
near... the area he lived
and he exposed himself to people at a bus stop.
Police responded. He was arrested.
The jail released him, he went out,
he did the same thing and got arrested again.
Twice in a day.
You know, I don't know
what's going through his head at that point,
if it was drugs, he's becoming a sexual deviant.
I... I... I don't know.
While appearing on the surface to be a small-time criminal,
Chester Turner was to evolve
into one of Los Angeles' most prolific serial killers.
By 1998,
he had raped and murdered at least 14 women
but the police were none the wiser.
However, in march 2002,
after encountering 47-year-old Maria Martinez,
Turner would make a mistake that changed everything.
She was homeless
and she lived in
one of the downtown homeless shelters,
and she was well-known to the security guards
and some of the other people who lived in
and around the skid row area of Los Angeles.
When Chester was homeless
and he was staying in a mission downtown,
apparently Maria knew who he was
because he worked security at the missions too.
One night Maria is walking
around downtown Los Angeles in the evening
and she saw Chester.
Chester called her to him
and asked her for a cigarette and a light.
She was reluctant, but she approached him.
And as soon as she did, it was like a trap.
He grabbed her, picked her up,
pulled her behind a parking lot behind some dumpsters
and sexually assaulted her.
(Sombre music)
Unlike his previous victims, for some reason,
Turner let Maria live.
And even accompanied her back to the homeless mission,
but Maria wanted to make an impromptu stop en route.
Maria started walking towards the police station,
Chester next to her.
They got to the front of the police station
and he told her,
"you don't tell the police or I will kill you."
Terrified,
Maria instead went back to the mission
while Turner disappeared into the night.
There she showered and broke down
and told one of the counsellors what happened to her.
The counsellor notified police.
Police responded, interviewed her, got information about Chester.
They tracked Chester down at another mission
and located him hiding in a bathroom.
This really trips him up,
because she's somebody that he knows.
She's someone from the neighbourhood.
She can identify him.
And I think at this point in time, he's feeling absolutely untouchable.
He feels that he can go and do whatever he wants to this woman
and get away with it.
But fortunately, that wasn't the case.
Because he thought there was no way that she was going to report this.
That's how arrogant he was.
Turner was promptly arrested.
On march 16, 2002,
he was found guilty of sexual assault
and sentenced to eight years in prison.
While behind bars, his cheeks were swabbed
as part of a new state-wide legislation.
In the state of California at that time,
there was a new law that had been passed
that if you were convicted of a felony offence
and a felony is anything that you can go to state prison for,
you have to give a DNA sample.
And so as part of his conviction,
Chester Turner had to provide a DNA sample
which was then turned over to California's DNA database.
So, that actually is really the beginning of the story
to this particular case.
The authorities didn't know it yet,
but they had just imprisoned
one of the most dangerous men in Los Angeles.
The DNA evidence collected from Chester Turner's mouth swab
would soon reveal a history of murder
that would shock the entire city.
(Dramatic music)
In march 2002,
35-year-old Chester Turner had been jailed
for the rape of 47-year-old Maria Martinez
in downtown Los Angeles.
Authorities had no idea
that they had actually captured an active serial killer
who had begun attacking women over a decade beforehand,
during a turbulent time across the city.
In the early '90's,
la city and la county
would experience about 1,000 murders each year.
I mean, that's three people a day.
That's a lot of murders.
That's a lot of information, a lot of violent people out there.
At that time,
rock cocaine was coming into being
and rock cocaine was very popular with people,
with both drug dealers, gang members and users.
It was easily obtainable and highly addictive.
And one of the major problems with crack cocaine
was that it was mainly sold on the streets openly,
almost brazenly in many parts of south Los Angeles.
And it contributed to a lot of other violence
including robberies, shootings, other incidents,
because the drug use was so prevalent at that time.
(Dramatic music)
Despite the alarming number of murders,
coverage in the media was next to nothing.
The truth must be
that many of the victims were rather disregarded.
They were absolutely on the very fringes of society.
Homeless or addicted.
Some were sex workers, not all,
but they were people who were not valued by society
and certainly not by white society in Los Angeles at that time.
If this had happened in Beverly Hills,
if it happened in west Los Angeles,
it would have been national or international news.
Because it was black women in south central,
people could ignore it
or chalk it up to the lifestyle that these women led that,
you know, is a ready-made explanation
as to why they died.
It actually got little to no coverage
in the major media publications
and broadcast news at the time.
This is horrifying.
But in the background of Los Angeles,
the southside of Los Angeles at that time,
sadly it's not uncommon.
These people are or are regarded as disposable.
They are somehow not very significant.
That is what makes it truly horrifying for me.
It was around this time
that LAPD homicide detective cliff Sheppard
was concerned at how quickly the murder rate
had spiralled out of control.
I was aware
that we had many unsolved murders of women
in south Los Angeles,
women whose bodies were found in alleyways,
abandoned buildings, in parkways, in the street.
That was an epidemic.
One such victim was 41-year-old Paula Vance.
In February of '98,
I was working the central homicide that's downtown Los Angeles.
My partner j loverly and I were working one morning
when we received a notification of a woman's body being found
behind the university club at sixth street and hope.
That's right near the main library downtown.
It was clear that Paula had been strangled to death
and the downtown cctv network had captured her murder.
On that tape you could see
the deceased and a man walking to the rear of the building
at about 6:00, 6:30 in the evening before.
They're having a conversation
when suddenly the man makes like a wrestling move,
throws his arm around her and suddenly he's on top of her
and he takes her down to the ground.
And for the next 20 minutes, you can see him assaulting her.
And you can see her from the camera footage
trying to struggle.
And then he's able to put all of his full weight on her.
He's much bigger than her.
I believe that she was 5 foot tall or less,
and then you can't see her move anymore.
And it's apparent that she's... she's no longer living.
He is still attempting what appears to be,
you know, a sexual assault.
And then he gets up casually and leaves her for dead.
When we saw the tape, we both exclaimed at the same time,
"this isn't his first time."
But we didn't have any other murders at that time in that area
to blame on this person, the unknown person.
The footage was shocking
and the quality of the images
made identifying Paula's killer near impossible.
The footage was very grainy,
but it showed her basically being dragged away.
This is really, really chilling footage.
We have got a front row seat to the murder of this poor woman.
You don't get a great image of the man,
I mean, you can see he's big, you can see that he's a male black,
he appears to have a shaved head.
He was wearing a unique jacket that had a design on the back.
We were able to determine that it was a buffalo bills logo
that was on the back of that jacket.
So, for days, my partner and I would be out in the evenings
looking for somebody,
anybody wearing that jacket
that sort of fit the man's description.
We got nowhere with that.
Sadly, Paula Vance became just another number
in the tally of unsolved murders across Los Angeles.
Three years after her death,
an improvement in technology led to a new investigation.
In 2001,
Los Angeles police department started a cold case unit.
I was able to get into that along with five other detectives
because of the advances in DNA,
ballistics, fingerprints and other things.
We had around 9,000 unsolved murders between 1960 and the present.
The thought was that we could solve many of these cases
by using the technology that we have,
especially with DNA that was the emphasis.
Because the majority of these women were sexually assaulted
in addition to being killed,
the Los Angeles police department at that time
would do what is known as a sexual assault kit,
where forensic analysts would take samples
of places from the crime scene
and most importantly from the victim's body
in an effort to try to get forensic material
that could be used later to try to identify the person
who was involved in a crime.
Investigators from the cold case unit
were particularly interested in a number of unsolved murders
which had all occurred within a small radius of each other.
The murders were confined to an area
that we call the figueroa corridor in south Los Angeles.
There's a major street in the city of Los Angeles
called figueroa street
that stretches all the way from downtown Los Angeles
up through the harbour, which is about 30mi.
But that particular area was also significant
because it cuts right through
what is known as south central la.
And that area was the ground zero
for the crack cocaine epidemic.
A lot of women are addicted
and they're looking for cocaine, they're using cocaine.
They're easy victims.
He would probably approach them, show them some rock cocaine,
and they'd go, "ok, let's go."
Then he would kill them.
Even though you were able to get crack cocaine very openly,
most people would not smoke it right on the open street
where they could get arrested by police.
So, it was going to be usually in some secluded area.
Unfortunately,
the figueroa corridor created the perfect area
where you could do this kind of thing
and not be easily seen.
And so, he...
For lack of a better word,
he had the perfect hunting ground
and the circumstances surrounding it
to get away with doing what he was doing.
(Dramatic music)
Detectives wondered
if the murders might be linked to one perpetrator.
But it was a victim from outside the figueroa corridor
that would provide the breakthrough in the case.
And the unit inexplicably out of the blue
got a DNA hit on the case of Paula Vance,
which was the murder
that was captured on closed circuit TV.
So, when we were notified that we had a suspect,
I needed to know who he was and his background.
The DNA belonged to a convicted felon,
a man whose sample had been taken and added to the state-wide database
when he was imprisoned for sexual assault in 2002,
35-year-old Chester Turner.
Turner's DNA also linked him
to one of the victims from within the figueroa corridor,
45-year-old Mildred beasley had been murdered in November 1996
over a year before Paula Vance.
We began in November 2001.
I think it was finally in September of 2003,
when we received an answer
that Chester was a suspect in the Paula Vance murder
and the Mildred beasley murder.
That started looking at Chester for other murders.
Knowing that he lived in south Los Angeles,
that we had a lot of unsolved murders down there,
now we had to find those murders.
Investigators found themselves in uncharted territory.
They had a murderer who was already behind bars
instead of hunting the killer,
they were hunting for his victims.
And it would soon become apparent
that Chester Turner was one of the most prolific killers
in Los Angeles' history.
In September 2003,
Chester Turner had been identified as the killer of two women,
Paula Vance and Mildred beasley.
The 35-year-old convict
was already serving time for sexual assault
and detectives from a cold case unit
were just beginning to learn about his crimes.
With Chester, because of where he lived,
we focused on south Los Angeles.
We came up with probably about 30 victims in the area
between southeast division and 77th division.
Turner very deliberately chose his hunting ground
as his own neighbourhood
because this was the place where he felt powerful.
He felt confident. He knew the streets.
He knew the people who were on the streets.
And by killing on his own patch,
he is minimising the risk to himself.
There's quite a lot that he feels in control of in this area.
And he gets away with it, time and time, and time again.
So, he feels very territorial over this particular area.
Turner had begun killing over 16 years previously.
In march 1987,
he took the life of 21-year-old Diane Johnson
with his bare hands.
Diane Johnson is the first known victim of Turner.
She was found on a construction site around about six blocks
from where she lived.
And there was some drag marks
that led to the site where her body had been deposited.
She'd been strangled and she was naked
from the waist down.
She's just discarded on this construction site.
And that is quite revealing
in terms of how Turner sees his victims.
He's had his fun with them. He's just going to discard them.
It's like a predator with a carcass.
By September 1989, Turner had claimed a fifth victim.
The prolific killer murdered 27-year-old Regina Washington
in a garage on figueroa street.
She had been strangled, murdered, but on top of that,
the suspect had tied a TV cable around her neck.
And she was suspended off the ground by a few inches
because of the cable.
I'm looking at the photographs of the crime scene
and this guy...
He's got some real anger.
I mean, you sexually assaulted this woman.
You strangled her.
And then you're sending more messages that,
you know, you really hated her.
It wasn't just her or it was all women.
And showing how violent you can be.
She was strangled with an electrical cord
and her body was found in an abandoned premises.
Again, we've got this idea of the victim
as just trash to be discarded.
A post-mortem confirmed
what detectives could see for themselves
at the crime scene.
Regina Washington was six months pregnant.
When we first filed charges against Chester for that murder,
we argued that the foetus was viable
and should be counted as another victim.
We included it with the charges.
It's wickedness at the highest level.
A pregnant mother trying to eke out a living,
partly trying to get straight for her baby.
It's a... it's a heartless act
which marks Turner out as a man of very significant wickedness.
As Turner's DNA continued to be discovered
on the historic murder victims,
detectives came up with a potential modus operandi.
It's believed Turner would lure his vulnerable victims
with the promise of drugs.
You look at the murders that Chester Turner committed,
I mean, they're all female,
and many of them had been using cocaine,
which makes them extremely vulnerable.
They... they're very easy victims.
Their guard's down
and they have this desire to just obtain more drugs
and they don't care how they get it.
So, anybody that approaches them offering them money or drugs,
they will probably go with them.
There were a lot of people who found themselves
on la's skid row down on their luck.
They were runaways. They were throwaways.
And I think this kind of area was very attractive to Turner,
because it's full of people who are off the social radar anyway.
They are the missing, missing.
These are people that you can attack,
that you can kill.
And nobody's really going to care very much about them.
It's sometimes hard not to feel sorry for them
to be honest.
But Turner didn't feel like that. He saw them as his victim pool.
They were people he could prey upon.
Another of Turner's signatures
was the way in which he left his victims.
Chester Turner would rape his victims
and then leave them partially undressed.
So, in most cases
the victims were left with their pants down
or if they had a dress,
that dress would be pulled up
which was a tell-tale sign that there was some sexual assault,
but he also brazenly left them in areas where
they wouldn't necessarily be found right away,
but he wasn't...
He wasn't trying to hide the fact
that he was trying to kill these women.
His eighth victim was 29-year-old Andrea tripplett.
Turner murdered Andrea in April 1993.
Once again her body was discovered on figueroa street.
She had been strangled to death.
Most of his victims were manually strangled.
He had one or two of the victims he used a ligature,
article of clothing or something.
But most of them he used his hands.
You're talking to the guy face-to-face,
you're having a conversation, suddenly boom.
He takes you down and you're on the ground
and he's striking you and choking you.
I don't think anybody was prepared for that.
And that fit right into the size and strength of Chester Turner,
because you could easily see
because of his size and... and strength
that he could easily strangle someone to death.
And that... that those people would not be able to fight back
significantly against him
because he would be able to physically overpower them,
but still have the strength to strangle someone to death
with his bare hands.
(Sombre music)
In a brazen display of cold-heartedness,
Turner attended the wake for Andrea tripplett
just days after he had squeezed the life out her.
Not a sign in Turner's mind of remorse, guilt.
I mean, it requires
a most disgraceful attitude.
One might almost call it in human
to insert yourself into the wake.
And this tells us about quite a sadistic side of him.
It's not enough for him to kill these women.
He's almost got to go and rub it in,
in terms of going and liaising with their families afterwards.
This guy is really unsavoury indeed.
But it's also indicative,
so, often is the case
that serial killers love to revisit their crimes.
They like to find out what they've done.
They like to go back to the crime scene.
They like to take trophies.
They like to take pleasure in it.
And here,
Chester Turner is demonstrating
precisely those classic characteristics.
He's inserting himself
into the agony of the family and friends of Andrea tripplett.
In total, Chester Turner's DNA linked him to ten murders
between 1987 and 1998.
Detectives interviewed the killer,
but he had no intention of helping them
with their investigation.
He's handcuffed at a table and we're talking to him.
We're not telling them everything just yet.
We want to feel him out.
And I said, "there's been women who've been murdered
"and your name's coming up."
And you could see in his face,
suddenly his jaw started trembling.
So, he knows he's been caught now.
And he knows he's in really deep trouble
and what could happen to him.
But then suddenly it was, "I didn't murder nobody."
Chester Turner told the police
that he did not kill any of these women
and that he just had sexual relations
with a lot of women,
and it's just a coincidence
that his DNA was found with ten women
who ended up strangled to death.
It was just a tragic coincidence.
So, at that point I figured
that we may never get him to admit to anything,
anything about the murders.
And no matter how much evidence we... we tell him that we have
or even show them that we have.
Investigators would have to let the science do the talking.
It would take five years to collate all their findings
and a trial date was set for the spring of 2007.
But Chester Turner wasn't going to go down without a fight.
In April 2007,
40-year-old Chester Turner was on trial
for the murder of ten women across Los Angeles, California.
DNA had linked the convicted sex offender
to all ten victims.
It would be the job of prosecutor Bobby grace
to convince a jury
that Turner was undoubtedly a killer,
in spite of his egotistical demeanour.
Chester Turner was a fairly smug individual.
He would sit in court and kind of sneer and laugh.
Act as if he would be incredulous at some of the evidence
that was presented.
But he very definitely very cold, very callous
individual throughout the proceedings.
And he did not take the witness stand.
Five years had passed
since Turner's original interrogation by detectives,
but his story hadn't changed one bit.
He continued to deny
that he was responsible for any of the ten murders.
Turner's defence in court
was that yes he'd had sex with all these women.
Well, he couldn't really argue that he hadn't,
because he's DNA was all over the bodies.
But he'd left them before they died.
They were alive when he left.
I mean, beyond belief by way of a defence.
But put yourself in the seat of the defence attorney,
he's got nothing else.
There's nothing else to possibly explain
these dreadful series of killings.
As well as the undisputable scientific evidence,
Bobby grace relied heavily on the cctv evidence
that captured Turner murdering 41-year-old Paula Vance
in February 1998.
There are absolutely no witnesses to any of these murders
and that's why the Paula Vance case was so important
because that allowed me to argue to the jury
that Chester Turner would kill his victims
in the manner that was depicted
in the closed-circuit video.
But also, it was important to counter any argument
that the women wanted to have sex with Chester Turner.
His gratification seems to come from violence.
And so, sex and violence are synonymous for him.
If the science alone
wasn't evidence enough of Turner's guilt,
Bobby wanted to make sure
that the jury could picture the terrifying ordeal
that each and every woman was put through.
I tried to get the jurors to imagine how long
Chester Turner's hands were on the throats
of these women
and what they went through
to see kinda the reflection of their eyes in his eyes
as he's choking the life out of them.
That's a horrible... Horrible way to die.
And then probably the most personable way
that you could kill somebody is... is to strangle them to death
and looking them in the face as you strangle them.
It's just a horrifying,
but something that we had to convey to the jury for them
to understand the manner in which he killed these women.
On April 30, 2007,
after three days of deliberations,
the jury had reached a unanimous verdict.
As a juror, you just have to believe in science.
And if you believe in the science,
then there wasn't really much of a conclusion to draw,
but that he was the person that was guilty.
Chester Turner was found guilty on ten counts of murder
and sentenced to death.
An eleventh guilty verdict
for the murder of the unborn baby of Regina Washington
was overturned in 2020.
It's sort of sobering
when you're listening to the verdicts
and then to the sentence,
that's what you hear is,
"we find him guilty, we sentence him to death.
"We find him guilty. We sentence him to death."
It's impressive when you have that many victims.
For a man who had refused to talk about the murders
and had remained silent for years,
Turner still wanted to have the final word.
Chester Turner after he was convicted
and was being led away,
he turned around and mouthed something.
Some people have said that he said, "I'll be back,"
and that it was in reference to me.
I'm not sure.
I tend not to worry about stuff like that.
By saying that, he is suggesting that he knows more
that there is more to come, that there is a next chapter.
I think he enjoys having that control over people.
He enjoys having that kind of suspense.
And he's created this drama in the courtroom by saying that.
With Turner safely behind bars for the rest of his life,
the cold case unit continued to try and uncover
more potential victims of the serial killer.
When I was doing my research,
I'm looking at the unsolved murders
that Chester could be responsible for.
So, I'm looking for females
who were found strangled in south Los Angeles
in abandoned locations, this out of the view locations.
I came across some murders,
where an arrest had been made
and the person was convicted.
David Allen Jones, an intellectually disabled janitor
had been questioned without an attorney
and jailed for nine years for the murder of three women,
who had now been linked by DNA to Chester Turner.
Fortunately for David Allen Jones,
the DNA evidence
connecting Chester Turner exonerated him,
and he was released for being wrongfully convicted
of a murder that he didn't commit.
Chester Turner had once claimed "I'll be back"
and his prophecy proved to be correct.
In June 2014,
the 47-year-old killer was found guilty
of a further four murders
and was once again sentenced to death.
Chester Turner never took the stand.
He never put himself in a position where he could be questioned
either in the first trial or the second trial,
which strategically would have been a big mistake,
because then we could have asked him
point blank,
"how is it that you were able to have sex
"with all these women and they ended up dead?"
Turner is somebody who is never going to talk
about his motive I think.
I think that's always something that he will keep to himself.
But to me, it is quite obvious.
He killed these women because he felt entitled to do so.
He felt that... that he had the right to end their lives
because he saw them as people who have no value.
He saw them as people who would not be missed.
And he thought that this was something
that he could get away with.
Chester Turner has never given an explanation as to
why he killed 14 women.
The grieving loved ones of his victims
may never get the closure they so desperately need.
Many of these women had daughters.
And, you know, by the time this case went to trial,
some of those daughters had children of their own.
So, these women who were killed,
they actually had grandchildren who they had never met.
A murder destroys a lot of people, not just the victim,
their families.
And just these,
I keep saying it leaves a big hole in... in their life
that they can't fill.
That they'll never be able to talk with that person again,
have celebrations with them.
That person will never be able to have a family of their own.
So, a lot of destruction that's done.
There wasn't a massive amount of media attention on these cases.
And I think to understand this,
we need to look at the concept of ideal victimhood.
So, sometimes when people become the victims of murder,
we're very quick to empathise and to sympathise with them.
And to say, "isn't that terrible that it happened to them?
"They are completely innocent.
"They... they really didn't see this coming.
"This is an awful thing."
But when other people become the victims of murder,
we're not quite as sympathetic.
And very often when people are involved in sex work,
when people have drug dependency issues,
we have a tendency to victim blame
and to say, "well,
"if you wouldn't have been doing that,
"you wouldn't have become a victim."
And I think that is very much the case here.
And I think there's also a sense in
which there is some racism around this case
because many of the victims were black.
I think that this whole George Floyd moment
has kinda really crystallised
what I thought about the case way back then.
And that black lives aren't mattered,
particularly black women.
The circumstances surrounding that
still exist here in america
and that we haven't really had the progress
that many of us would have hoped for.
And that there's so much more work to do.
There are still scores of unsolved murders
in and around the figueroa corridor.
There may be many more victims of Chester Turner
but the evidence to prove it no longer exists.
Many of the sexual assault kits
that were taken from some of these 80-plus women,
they were inadvertently destroyed by LAPD.
And so, we know for a fact that there were several women
who are part of these 80 women
who were strangled to death and sexually assaulted,
and that fits the mo of Chester Turner,
but we'll never be able to prove
whether or not he was the perpetrator
because we no longer have the sexual assault kits.
California haven't executed anyone since 2006,
but Chester Turner remains on death row.
There's no doubt that the killer will remain locked up
for the rest of his life,
whenever or however that comes.
He was remorseless.
That's what is hard to understand.
He was a killing machine.
He didn't stop. He was driven by lust.
He was driven by the desire to kill.
And that's what makes him incredibly difficult to understand.
And for most ordinary civilised human beings,
he doesn't fit in.
Look at the body count, and the number of years he operated.
He has no compassion for anyone else.
It's him.
It's all, you know, narcissism, this is about him.
Chester Turner was a ruthless and brutal murderer.
He took the lives of 14 women
and has never explained what drove him to do it.
The fear in his victims' eyes
as his hands squeezed their lives away
will hopefully forever haunt him.
He is undoubtedly
one of the world's most evil killers.
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