[crows cawing]
[man] Larry was a very shy kid.
Very eager to please.
Exceedingly respectful and soft-spoken.
And seemingly gentle.
Oh, he wouldn't hurt a flea.
But there was this...
duality to him.
Something we would call "Jekyll and Hyde."
He really lived to kill.
[muffled screaming]
[tires screech]
[theme music playing]
Welcome to Very Scary People.
I'm Donny Wahlberg.
Like a wild animal hunting for easy prey,
he stalked young girls and women he caught alone.
Walking, running, bicycling.
There was no escape from this predator.
Once in the grip of his horrifying urge
to rape and kill he ended defenseless lives
that had hardly begun.
It seemed like that he might never be caught.
Could the mystery man investigators finally took
into custody be the killer?
Or was he nothing more than a troubled wannabe serial killer,
making false confessions.
This is part one of "The Twin."
[reporter] Tricia Reitler took a walk off campus
and never came back to Indiana Wesleyan University.
Some of her clothing was found with a small amount of blood.
Investigators believe
Reitler was abducted. But by whom, where and why?
Police have no hard evidence to say.
[Casey] On March 29th, 1993, Tricia Reitler,
a 19-year-old college freshman
at Indiana Wesleyan University
took a break from writing her term paper.
[Joni] She decided to walk a few blocks down
to a Marsh store to get
a root beer and to get a magazine.
[Casey] But on the way home,
something happened.
[Joni] All of a sudden, she vanishes.
And nobody knows where she is.
[telephone rings]
The phone rang at about 12:30
just after midnight.
And it was the Marion Police department.
And the first question
she asked was, "Do you know where Tricia is?"
At that moment, my heart sunk.
[Donna] We knew that something was really wrong.
It was like a punch in the gut.
[Tim] It was horrible.
Horrible. It's a parent's worst nightmare.
[Belinda] I was legitimately panicking.
We were roommates, Tricia and I,
our freshman year.
That weekend before Tricia's disappearance.
I found out from my
friends that she was being stalked.
And I started asking her about it.
She had said that,
on the day that she ran,
he would start following her
at a certain, like,
road or intersection.
And then he would
follow her a little ways
behind while she was running,
and then he would turn off,
and go a separate way.
Who was this person?
Where was this van?
[Joni] A predatory stalker
is the rarest kind of stalker.
It's also the most dangerous.
Because they often target strangers.
They often don't give much warning.
This is somebody who is finding
a lot of pleasure
out of the process, and a lot of interest
in picking out girls.
We have a window to what he is thinking about
by what he's journaled.
[Hillel] "Take buck knife.
Gloves.
Mask.
Take a lot of clothes,
blankets to keep her out of sight.
No body contact.
Buy condoms.
No forensic residue.
Check colleges,
parks.
Teen joggers and bikers.
Many alone.
Get one. Find one.
Find one now."
When police retraced Tricia Reitler's steps
it became pretty apparent
that she was the subject of a violent attack.
[Tim] I go out to check that area,
and I see some things
that appear to be a crime scene.
[Hillel] Her clothes were found under a tree
with the blood on it.
And later, they also found
an earring that had been torn out of her ear.
[Tim] The crime scene proves two things.
That she had been abducted, and that
a sexual assault occurred.
[Casey] The perpetrator,
he is someone
who gets their eye on the prize and decides,
"I've been fantasizing about this for so very, very long.
Today is the day, this is the time,
I'm about to make it happen."
[reporter] Tricia Reitler, seen here on home video
purchased a soft drink at a Marsh supermarket.
And passively walking along this Marion street,
towards her college dormitory,
was confronted and abducted.
[Donna] Tricia went to Indiana Wesleyan University.
She was funny. She was outgoing.
She was athletic.
[Garry] Daddy's little girl.
We had a special relationship.
Tricia wanted to be a psychologist.
And basically, she wanted to put families back together again.
[Belinda] She was always smiling.
That's the one thing that I seriously miss about her.
[copier whirring]
[reporter] And exhaustive investigations has produced few clues,
except the recovery of some blood-stained clothes.
[Michael] They organized huge
sweeps of the area looking for
any kind of clues.
The college is in a very
rural area.
[Garry] All you see is,
-cornfields... -[Donna] Yeah.
...and soybean fields,
and trees.
[Michael] There was just so many
places where she could be.
They were searching everywhere and,
they never found anything.
[Donna] It was uh, I call it
the zombie state.
You could barely function but you knew you had to.
[Hillel] "Seen many nice girls,
at Marsh's.
Lots of walkers at 7:15.
Walking to apartments on Nebraska
in 44/43.
Must be housing
for the university.
Seen some prospects.
Look at maps.
Get the van ready."
[Joni] Tricia Reitler
was walking home alone.
I think the tragedy is,
she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[Hillel] That place that he had pre-determined
would be the best place to cease someone.
Fields where there was no one nearby,
where there was no lighting, and we can only speculate
at that point, he pulled up his van.
[John] Police had started with nothing.
The have some physical evidence.
They don't have a body.
So what they begin is with a wide net.
Who fits the bill for this?
Who has a criminal past or a connection to the victim?
[reporter] Police do have a suspect in Tricia Reitler's disappearance.
A man who has been questioned several times by police,
but never identified.
[Tim] Tony Searcy.
He had been involved in some
felony thefts.
[Joey] And they found the connection
between him and Tricia Reitler
through a dining hall where she worked.
[Tim] Tony Searcy was dating
a girl that worked in the cafeteria.
[Joey] The very night of Tricia Reitler's disappearance,
Tony Searcy made a 9-1-1 call
in which he was reporting a rival thief.
Police believed that he was pointing
the finger at someone else
to avoid detection in the disappearance of Tricia Reitler.
We bring him in.
They thought he was trying to come up with an alibi,
uh, throw the police off their investigation
with this bogus claim.
[Tim] He felt like,
he could do something like that, so,
[Michael] They asked him to take a lie detector test.
He took it, and he failed.
[Tim] So that's when we called
the FBI, and had a second polygraph.
Flunks that polygraph.
He became a person of interest.
And they decide to search Tom's car.
Police had cadaver dogs
sniff around his vehicle.
[dogs sniffing]
Lo and behold, the cadaver dogs hit...
on Tony Searcy's trunk.
[Hillel] "Replace rear carpet in van.
Cut out stained carpet.
Vacuum van thoroughly.
Spray down chemicals.
Wiped with Armor All.
Burn paint and tarps.
Buy new hacksaw blades.
Clean all tools with denatured alcohol.
Take tires off,
and clean mud from under fenders.
[Joni] His eliminating
forensic evidence that might be there.
This is somebody who is looking for future victims.
And reminding himself of cleaning up old ones.
Clean up is about self-preservation.
And it's so that the offender
can continue on with his crimes.
[Casey] Tony Searcy
is on the record and saying,
"I've done a lot of bad stuff in my life
but I didn't kill this woman."
As part of the investigation,
of Tony Searcy for the disappearance
of Tricia Reitler,
police had cadaver dogs sniff around
his vehicle.
Lo and behold, the cadaver dogs hit
on Tony Searcy's trunk.
[Donna] Your emotions are so,
twisted. You feel guilty for being excited
that we may have found her scent, you know.
[Casey] The problem is that, in criminology,
Tony Searcy has no history of violence.
And even though it's possible that he's good for it,
the truth is that,
he doesn't have that long record of fantasy
that would actually graduate to an abduction,
a stalking, a kill, a rape.
He's just a copper thief.
[Joey] Cadaver dogs are trained
to alert to enzymes in humans
that mimic the smell of copper.
And the problem was,
that if Tony Searcy is a copper thief,
he certainly would have copper
in the back of his trunk
that would have these cadaver dogs alerting to it.
[Hillel] It's why the police
became so suspicious of him.
[Tim] Oh, I definitely
thought he was the prime suspect.
[chains jangling]
Tony was arrested about four weeks after
Tricia went missing.
But he was only charged with copper theft.
Because that's all they could prove.
[Tim] Tony Searcy was never charged
with any crime related to
the abduction of Tricia Reitler.
Just to bring her home.
[voice breaking] That's all we want.
[Donna] Somebody has that one bit of information that we need.
And put an end to the nightmare that we're living.
[cannon roars]
[gun firing]
[Michael] The first time I met Larry Hall
was a Civil War reenactment
in Rochester, Indiana.
Then Gary, a few months later.
[Hillel] Larry and Gary were identical twins.
They very much got into Civil War reenactment.
[cannon roars]
[Hillel] They were so authentic,
that they were recruited to attend, uh, and be extras
in the filming of two Civil War movies.
One was Glory,
and the other was Gettysburg.
Now, ultimately,
the only one of the twins you can see
is just a glimpse of Gary in Gettysburg.
[upbeat music playing]
I noticed, Larry was more of a follower in a way.
He wasn't fastest in speaking,
had to stop and think for a few moments.
He was very easy to approach to talk to,
but he would never open up the conversation.
I felt that
Gary was more dominating over Larry.
With a lot of the reenactments and with the movies,
it often meant a road trip.
They're travelling in places all around the country.
[Michael] There was that brother camaraderie
in their travel to reenactments.
There was one instance,
in the van, that really
sticks in my mind.
Larry and Gary were sitting up front.
I was in the back seat and,
Gary reaches down underneath him,
and pulled out a pair of woman's underpants.
He looked at his brother Larry,
and said, "What's this doing here?"
I just thought at that time,
it was just joke on each other.
Larry shrugged off, and kind of played it back, about,
"You're married. You have a wife. You planted it there."
Looking back,
it is very disturbing to think about.
It all adds up.
[Hillel] Larry and Gary Hall.
Their upbringing was kind of strange,
in that their father was actually the grave digger
at this historic
tiny, little cemetery on a hill.
And part of the benefits of that job,
is that they lived in this
big clapboard house
overlooking the cemetery on one side.
[Ron] I'm sure their peers would have thought it was creepy,
I do believe that one time I heard the house,
inside was rather messy.
[Hillel] One of their friends said it was like,
"Living inside of a rummage sale."
[Casey] The parents were hoarders.
There was stuff piled to the ceiling in every room.
The fact that they lived in a hellhole of a house,
probably, had a huge impact
on their development growing up,
and the way they perceive the outside world.
[Hillel] Their father Robert,
always had kind of the smell of beer on his breath.
The boys were actually terrified of him.
The relationship that Larry had
with his mother was, some would say, smothering.
The mother's smothering affection for the son
gets in the way of him having a normal relationship
with a female.
And that was definitely,
a part of Larry's problem.
He has a very unusual relationship
toward my mother. And to this day,
he'll talk to Mom almost
as if she's his girlfriend
rather than his mother.
It's spooky. It's creepy.
[Joey] Eight months after Tricia's disappearance,
a farmer in Indiana would make a grisly discovery.
[crows cawing]
[machinery whirring]
[Michael] In November 8th, 1993,
a farmer in Perrysville, Indiana
was working this huge cornfield
with his combine, when he spotted
something unusual.
As he was cutting
through one of the rows of corn,
he looked down from his tractor,
and saw a dark object.
He got down to see what it was.
Maybe at first thought, it was an animal.
Then to his horror,
saw it was in fact a body.
[John] So he calls police.
The first thig police believe is,
this could be Reitler.
The autopsy revealed that, uh, she had
a broken jaw.
[Casey] Forensic investigators
concluded that she most likely died of strangulation.
[Hillel] Given the amount of decomposition,
the challenge was
identifying the body.
Welcome back to Very Scary People.
After a college co-ed is snatched off campus
in a bloody ambush,
and the body of a girl is found callously dumped
in a cornfield,
fear is spreading that there is a serial killer on the loose.
Detectives are closing in on a person of interest,
who raised suspicions.
But there are also serious doubts he actually did it.
Did police get the right guy?
[man] "I feel a calling from deep inside.
Sometimes so strong that it's hard to hide.
Take buck knife.
Gloves, mask,
two new plates.
Buy two more leather belts.
Seeing several singles walking.
Teenage, close to country.
Find them now."
[Loren] In the early '90s,
we actually lived outside of Georgetown, Illinois.
Probably about eight miles or so, out in the country.
Most people knew each other and were friendly.
People didn't even lock their doors.
[mother] Jessie, she was really a good kid. Very shy most of the time.
We had a lot of pictures of the back of her head
because she just didn't want her picture taken that often.
She wanted to be a pilot.
She wanted to fly jets.
Which I thought was so unusual.
She was always smiling or laughing.
That's the stuff you love.
September 20, 1993
was a Monday.
[Casey] 15 year-old Jessica Roach was out riding her
prized mountain bike along a rural road.
[John] And her sister decides she's going to go into town and drives by.
Sees her sister walking the bike on the road.
[Myndi] It's a normal sunny day. She pulled off.
Stood there, watched me drive by. Waved real smiley and waved.
And I looked in the rearview mirror and she was walking her bicycle.
And then I stopped at the sign and turned the corner.
That was the last time I saw Jessica.
When I came home, her bicycle was lying in the middle of the road.
Jessica is missing. No one can find her.
[Loren] She was gone.
My husband called and he says,
one of our daughters is missing.
I remember just getting real quiet.
And feeling just kinda cold.
I immediately knew something serious had happened.
-Here? -Yeah.
There's something not right here.
We don't have just a missing person.
There was foul play.
The search went on for three days.
[Terry] With each day that passed, there was less and less hope.
[sobbing]
[Loren] I can tell you that that third day,
I knew she wasn't coming home.
To me, she's a sweetheart.
But what can I say?
I'm her grandpa.
[Gary] We knew of people in the area that we thought would be capable of
sexual assaults and things like that.
But as far as an actual kidnapping,
we had not experienced that in this county to my knowledge.
[Loren] To me, it was almost like a random thing.
This man was in town
and probably scoping out the school.
Jessie was a type that he liked.
And I feel like he followed her home from school.
We basically had no leads
and that continued on for several weeks.
[reporter] This week, a body was found in a farmer's cornfield.
Two months later, across the state lines in Indiana,
a local farmer is simply ploughing his cornfields
when he sees from the top of his tractor, something dark.
He is absolutely horrified to discover a dead body.
[reporter] Police in Indiana say the body found may be that of Tricia Riddler of Ohio
who went to Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion.
Everyone including the family thought, okay, this could be her because
it was the right area. It was a young woman.
[reporter 2] On the day we visited, the got one of many calls from Marion Police,
alerting them another body has been found in rural Indiana.
It's not Tricia.
But it is another emotional reminder.
That feeling of that loss and not being able to...
bring her home.
[Gary] They positively ID'd the fingerprints
as being those of Jessica Roach.
[Myndi] As much as we didn't want it to be her, at the same time, I did.
So we could say our goodbyes and that was closure
for me, knowing that we found her and she's not suffering.
We at least knew where she was now.
[Gary] Cause of death was the strangulation.
The body had nothing that would help us identify an individual
that had been involved.
It could be a drifter from a million miles away,
who covers a lot of miles doing things like this.
That offender is a real challenge.
[Hillel] Clearly with Jessica Roach, it was very impulsive.
He saw this girl in what seemed like the middle of nowhere.
She looked extremely vulnerable.
He decided to take advantage of that.
[Gary] The fact that their girl was basically taken off of her bike.
The body was left in a cornfield.
It's just such a desolate area.
That had me completely stumped.
And suddenly, there's a potential clue.
There's a witness who sees a distinctive-looking stranger
walking out of a cornfield.
Right around the time when Jessica Roach went off the radar screens.
What I recall seeing was a man coming out of the cornfield.
He had a stocky build,
a rounded face, an obvious chin.
This would've been the same timeframe when we believe the body was put in the cornfield.
Late at night.
[Kaylen] 13 year-olds should not have to worry about being kidnapped.
Our doors were never locked.
You know, it just changes life as we knew it.
We were terrified.
[John] In May of 1994, a spring day,
two teenage girls riding their bike
notice a van.
[Kaylen] We were riding our bikes, and...
I just hear this loud van go by and he slowed down and, like, stared at us.
I was like, I think that he's... he's...
following, like, he's looking at us, watching us.
And then he came at us in the opposite direction and he did it again.
Let's go. We gotta get outta here.
-We took off as fast as our legs would move. -We bolted.
He took off following right behind us.
[Kaylen] We could hear the gravel being thrown. He was right there.
I was scared that he was gonna hit or try to knock her over.
All I could see were his headlights 'cause he was right there behind us.
We cut down an alley where his van was not going to be able to fit through.
And we just took off riding as fast as we could to get back to her house.
He had dark hair, and...
I guess, a bushy facial hair or beard.
It's the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me in my life.
[Ron] Larry was kind of a loner.
Was very quiet.
Stayed to himself.
I always saw them together
when they were younger.
Gary was more outgoing than his twin brother
and Larry seemed to follow his lead more.
I was the more dominant, outgoing twin.
And I think he was jealous of that.
[Hillel] Larry and Gary, as they grew up,
they did show a lack of respect for authority.
It turned into vandalism.
They were grilled by the police,
and the police were kind of amazed at how hardened they were
in answering interrogations.
Not saying who did it.
Larry did help set fire to several buildings in town.
In fact, he was even arrested.
Larry and Gary were inseparable. They were very close.
They're brothers. They're best friends. They're constant companions.
In 1984, Robert was fired.
[Ron] Their father lost his job in the cemetery.
He was fired not only for drinking,
but he had on occasion, buried people in the wrong place in the cemetery.
[Hillel] Once he was let go, the family left his big giant house,
and ended up in a very tiny one-bedroom house.
Gary went to live with his girlfriend.
And this was an extremely traumatic event for Larry.
Because Larry was a very shy kid.
And his best friend, his partner in crime, so to speak,
was his twin brother Gary.
And suddenly there was just this huge void in his life.
[Ron] Larry was janitor at the bank.
He cleaned foreclosed or houses for sale.
This was a very lonely individual
who got deeply into the hobbies he pursued.
If Gary was interested in something, then Larry had to be.
They became interested in civil war reenactments.
This was the perfect excuse to grow these bug bushy mutton chop sideburns
of which he was very proud.
In 1987,Gary gets married.
[Michael] He had a child, and he had a job.
And that kinda puts hard on doing civil reenactments because it's a weekend thing.
Larry, he was not married.
He lived at home with his parents.
So therefore, Larry had more freedom
to do civil war enacting.
[Hillel] He went as far away as Wyoming, and Colorado and California.
And Missouri, in addition to Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.
There was a time when Larry went to reenactments by himself.
When we left reenactments,
everybody went their own way.
[John] At this point, you have two homicides across borders of two states,
in a fairly small area, that are apparently connected.
And not any leads that are gonna take them anywhere.
And then there's a car stop and that changes everything.
Almost exactly one year since the day that Tricia Reitler disappeared,
two more teenage girls report being stalked by a man in a van.
These girls go and notify their father.
They've got his license plate number.
[Michael] When police pull the van over,
and the police officer saw a bunch of objects that were pretty chilling.
[Casey] A hunting knife, a coil of rope,
some lighter fluid and a wad of cotton.
And most chilling of all,
the missing poster for Tricia Reitler.
[Hillel] He sees newspaper clippings about Tricia Reitler's abduction,
letterhead for Indiana Wesleyan University,
but with her name all over it.
So, I guess, city people thought "We got the guy."
[John] Police talk to the driver.
He's a guy named Larry Hall.
When he's questioned by detectives...
[Ron] Larry engages with them about "I dreamt this."
I may have done it. I may not have done it.
Larry said he would show them where she was buried.
But then just kinda had them driving in circles.
Which really upset the officers.
[John] And at this point, detectives are starting to have their doubts.
This guy isn't even sure he's the guy who did it.
They reach out to Larry Hall's hometown.
And there's a detective who's known him for 20 years.
"Who? Larry Hall? He's just an odd duck. He's totally harmless.
That's not gonna be your guy."
[Hillel] This made them feel he was just a wannabe wasting their time.
And they let Larry go.
[Gary] False confessions. I think it's common.
I think most police officers have dealt with that.
[Michael] Almost every time you get a big murder case,
people come forward to confess even though they've had nothing to do with it.
They're enthralled by the publicity.
And they want something in their life so bad that they
convince themselves that they've done it.
And it's really kinda sad, but there are people out there who do that.
[John] Larry Hall is one of two twins.
He and his brother. Larry and Gary.
They're born in 1962.
[Larry] Larry was born blue.
Being born blue is a clear indication that you're not getting enough oxygen.
[Hillel] His mother had some problems in birth.
What we now call twin to twin transfusion syndrome.
TTTS is a fascinating complication of a twin pregnancy.
You have two babies sharing a single placenta.
What ends up happening is that one twin sends blood to the other.
But the recipient can't return it.
Larry is continuously giving away these precious resources and the oxygen to Gary.
But Gary is hoarding them and unable to give them back to Larry.
It's almost like a parasitic situation.
[Larry] Larry comes out at delivery really small, thin, lean, blue.
Totally deprived of, you know, the normal resources
that he would need to develop normally.
Basically brain damage that can follow that child throughout his life.
[Ron] Gary was always sharper.
I'll put it that way.
[Larry] There's an entire class of disorders related to
personality, behavior, attention,
hyperactivity, social and awkward social behavior.
And this is how Larry Dwayne Hall was born into this world.
[Gary] I laid the picture down on the table in front of us
and I said, how about this girl? Do you remember ever talking to her?
He flinched.
[Casey] In November of 1994, the lead detective, Gary Miller,
is still trying hard to figure out who killed Jessica Roach.
A year after Jessica's body had been found,
there was a complaint in the two of Georgetown.
There's a new report of a guy in a van, stalking girls.
[Gary] The license plate came back to Larry Hall.
So I just picked up the phone.
Called the Wolbach police department.
He said, "Well, one thing with Larry is,
if you've had a civil war reenactment, he would be there."
I started looking. And in the rural area outside of Georgetown,
they had had a revolutionary war reenactment
on Sunday before the Monday that Jessica was abducted.
I certainly thought it should be followed up.
So he goes to Indiana to interview Larry Hall.
[Gary] I had a picture, it was a school picture of Jessica Roach.
And I laid the picture down on the table in front of us.
And I said, "Do you ever remember talking to her?"
And Larry immediately flinched to the right. Turned his head.
A lot of detective work is intuitive.
In this particular case, Larry Hall's reaction wasn't even subtle.
He immediately showed recognition of the girl in that picture.
The murder victim, Jessica Roach.
On November 15th, 1994,
Miller returns with FBI polygrapher Michael Randolph.
[Gary] He didn't wanna take the polygraph.
I stepped out and Mike began talking to him.
[Casey] Randolph gains the trust of Larry Hall and engages him in conversation.
Larry Hall tells Michael Randolph, "I'm ready. I'm ready to confess."
[Hillel] Here is the statement that agent Randolph took down.
It starts, "I recall I was in Illinois for the revolutionary war reenactment.
I was on the road and there was a girl walking a bike.
I stopped and talked to her.
I had to grab her, because she wouldn't have gotten in by herself.
Since I usually kept starting fluid in rags,
I might have used these on her.
I tied her up. But I can't remember with what.
I remember taking her pants off.
I took my pants off.
And had sex with her."
[Gary] He said that he took her to an extremely wooded area by a river.
[Hillel] "I laid her up against a tree.
And put a belt around her neck.
Then she stopped breathing.
I just do things. I am not in control.
This was one of those times when I was not in control.
I have nightmares
where I remember these murders."
[Casey] It was almost as if once the floodgates opened,
he was ready to tell them everything he knew.
He confessed to killing a bunch of girls
in the Midwest, from several states.
And then recanted on all those confessions.
And then Larry takes it back. "I didn't kill them."
[Hillel] There was no forensic evidence...
against Larry.
How is this guy able to commit all these murders and not
leave one piece of physical evidence?
Why would you confess to multiple murders if you didn't do them?
[Casey] Was it a false confession?
[reporter] He says he agreed with anything police said so they would let him go home.
Or is he the greatest serial killer to never be convicted of any murder?
The FBI is currently investigating Hall's possible
involvement in other abductions.
Hall could be a serial killer.
I'm convinced. There is no question in my mind.
He did exactly what he told me he did.
I'm not a killer. You're just using me to solve all those crimes.
I'm not a killer, okay?
Larry Dwayne Hall was either responsible for the kidnapping, sexual assault
and strangulation deaths of one victim after another,
or a poor soul so desperate for attention, he was willing to confess to murders
he did not commit.
Final ruling comes in front of a judge and jury during a rollercoaster ride through
the court system.
The DA prosecuting the case steps up his investigation
with a daring new plan to get his man in part two of "The Twin."
I'm Donnie Wahlberg. Thanks for watching. Good night.