[Kenda] May 13th, 2013.
It's a day that people that live in this rural area
will never forget. Ever.
[dispatcher speaking]
[man speaking]
[dispatcher speaking]
[man speaking]
[Joe] They have a spree killer on their hands.
Wherever he happens to be is where he might strike again.
And we don't know where that is.
[Nelson] Nobody knows what's going on.
Why is he doing this? Who is he targeting?
[man speaking]
The body count is going to continue to rise.
Where is this son of a [bleep]?
[man speaking]
Some crimes occur, make the evening news...
We now have the identity of all five victims.
...And then don't survive the 24-hour news cycle.
And there are some crimes that people are never able to forget.
And this is one of them.
I spent my career closing murder cases.
But I'm not the only one who answered the call.
It takes a rare breed to solve the unsolvable,
to catch a ruthless killer.
to find justice for the dead.
That's what it takes to be an American detective.
[Kenda] It's around 7:00 a.m. and Marsha Longfellow is worried.
She's been trying to call her friend Elliezear Graham
for quite some time and hasn't been able to reach him
and that, she thinks, is very unusual.
So she goes to the gas station where he works.
But he's not there.
And then she notices fluttering newspapers in the wind
a short distance away from the station.
She walks closer to investigate.
And sees something on the ground.
What is that?
[screams]
[Kenda] What she finds is Elliezear Graham.
Half-naked and dead. And so it begins.
I'm David A. Frankel.
I'm a retired Washoe County Sheriff's Office detective
in Reno, Nevada.
When I got hired, after a couple of years,
I rotated into an undercover role
where you follow the worst criminals around
and you really gotta eye into how the criminals think, what they're doing.
Criminals always throw curve balls,
so you just gotta keep an open mind and think out of the box.
On that day, we got notified of a body
out of Interstate 80 and there's not much out there.
I remember seeing, like, newspapers all over
and then the body was kind of in an area just off the road
and seemed to be covered by a blanket.
[Kenda] The briefing deputies tell Frankel that the victim is 51 years old.
His name is Elliezear Graham
and he works at that particular gas station
a very short distance away.
[Frankel] The body was found at the I-80 Mustang exit.
It's very familiar to people because
the Mustang Ranch is at that exit.
[Nelson] The Mustang Ranch is a brothel
about 15 miles outside of Reno.
It has been there for a long time.
[Frankel] The Mustang Ranch, it's a popular place.
You're wondering if it's related to that.
[Kenda] Prostitution encourages the arrival
of an unsavory element in society.
It waves a red flag.
It says, come here.
And do as you wish.
Come on down.
You're the next contestant. And the customer is always right.
The deputy coroner and Frankel together respond to look at the body.
[Frankel] His pants are pulled down and his shirt's pulled up.
He appears to have some sort of injury.
[Kenda] The deputy coroner does a closer examination of the head
and he discovers three small caliber gunshot wounds.
The general position and the indication of the body is he was killed recently,
overnight, less than 12 hours.
There's no evidence of a struggle, no defensive wounds.
He has money in his wallet.
So why is he undressed?
Does the shooter wanna humiliate him
so when he's discovered he's naked?
It could be anything.
[Frankel] Mr. Graham's body was found
hundred yards or so from a gas station that he also worked at.
We did talk to people at the gas station.
[Kenda] The employees say the last time they Elliezear
was last night when they closed and they all left for the evening.
And there's certainly nothing out of the ordinary
in this gas station this morning.
There's no robbery.
They say he has a truck.
So where is it?
They don't know.
It's always important to search the surrounding area
from a crime scene to determine
if other evidence can be discovered.
And as those investigators fan out to search the area,
Detective Franco goes to speak with the relatives of the victim.
So I was at work and then they told me that my brother was murdered.
I just didn't believe it was real.
Because I had just talked to him.
I just got my Mother's Day gift.
You know, how is it possible?
But...
that's it.
[sighs]
It was right in this stretch where he was killed.
And he was found here.
Up there.
When I came, there was still blood markings over there.
By the stop sign.
This is my brother, Ellie.
You can't see it in this picture, but Ellie had a crooked smile.
You know?
It looked like a Popeye grin.
When I was growing up, there was 15 children.
My dad was a pig farmer.
And I think dad and Ellie were like mud on a pig.
They were inseparable.
The two of them loved the hogs.
He had multiple jobs.
The gas station, the mission, the newspapers.
He worked for the mattress company.
I don't even know when he slept.
But he kept it all up.
He'd always help somebody.
When somebody needed something, oh, go to Ellie.
He can help you.
Who do you rely on when your reliable rock is no longer here?
When they told me that Ellie was murdered,
I thought Frank killed him.
[Frankel] The sister believed that Mr. Graham's brother, Frank,
may have killed her brother.
They had an ongoing dispute that was pretty toxic.
[Kenda] Detective Frankel goes to see relatives
for the very purpose of trying to develop a suspect.
And this family handed him a suspect on a silver platter.
[Kenda] At 7:30 a.m., the victim, Elliezear Graham,
was discovered dead near the gas station where he worked.
And now investigators are looking
into his own brother as possibly the killer.
[Trina] When they were kids, Frank and Ellie were very close.
They were like two peas in a pod.
[Kenda] She said they will never talk about it,
but something really bad happened between them,
and neither one forgives the other.
Tension between Frank and Ellie grew.
For 20 years, they had their rivalry.
[Frankel] In the prior few weeks,
there had been an incident where Frank may have tried
to run his brother over with a car.
[Kenda] She said Elliezear was visiting his parents at the family home,
and her brother decided to come by as well.
And when that happens,
there's always going to be trouble.
Frank allegedly announces he's going to kill his brother
by running him over and attempts to do the same.
[tires screech]
When your blood runs hot,
whatever is convenient becomes a weapon.
[Trina] I just remember Ellie just saying, you know,
my leg's messed up.
I'm like, are you okay? Yep.
And then the police were called.
[Kenda] But Elliezear wouldn't pursue anything.
So the sheriff's department drops the charge.
[Frankel] Immediately you're thinking, we might have a really good lead.
So you definitely have to go check that out.
[Kenda] There's nothing more dangerous than a feud that goes on for 20 years
and then a recent event where it escalates.
It gets more hateful by the minute.
They find Frank, bring him into the office for interrogation.
He is hostile.
He is angry.
He finds it to be ludicrous that they think he would kill his brother.
And they say, well, why not?
You tried to two weeks ago.
Finally, he says, look,
I just got into town.
I've been driving a truck for weeks.
He's an over-the-road trucker.
They check with his employment, and that's true.
[Frankel] We were able to verify that Mr. Graham's brother, Frank,
was not involved in his murder.
He's just a brother who doesn't like his dead brother.
But that's all he is.
So, it's back to square one.
You just have to reassess any other information
you can get and keep tracking down people
with connections to the victim.
[Kenda] Now it's nine o'clock in the morning,
and Frank will hear us back from the officers
searching the crime scene area
where they discover a pickup truck in a ditch along I-80.
You certainly have to go look at it because it's in the vicinity
of where the body's found and see if there's any connection.
[Kenda] They search the truck, assuming it belongs to Mr. Graham,
and they don't find anything of any interest.
So they run the plates,
and they discover it belongs to someone else entirely.
[Frankel] It came back to people with the last name of Pape,
and they lived in Fernley, Nevada,
which was in the next county over...
it's what we call a Cow County,
meaning it's a lot of farmland.
It was a pretty peaceful little town.
[Kenda] Robert Pape is 84 years old,
and he lives with his wife, Dorothy.
And his truck is abandoned within a quarter mile of the murder scene.
Now, why is that?
Did they see anything, or are they involved?
You have to keep an open mind of it could be any of the above.
[Kenda] He may be 84 years old,
but all it takes is six pounds of pressure to pull the trigger.
[Frankel] First thing we do is call the police department in that jurisdiction
and ask them, hey, can you make contact with the Papes
and ask them if they know anything
about their vehicle being out here at the Mustang exit.
[Kenda] And the officer that answers the phone says, "Boy, that's amazing."
We found his house on fire in Fernley this morning.
That was pretty alarming, like, what's going on?
[Kenda] A 911 call came in at 5.30 this morning,
when the fire department responded,
they discover a pickup truck in the garage was on fire.
The fire had also spread to the house.
The firemen went in to clear the house, but found no one home.
Robert and Dorothy Pape are not in this house.
[Frankel] I felt that it wasn't this crazy coincidence.
A light bulb went off.
These might be linked together.
What is going on here?
Something is.
[Frankel] So we responded out to Lyon County in the Fernley area
where the other crime scene was
to see if we could help with anything that they needed.
My name is Marty Dues.
I was the detective for the Lyon County Sheriff's Office.
When the Washoe County Sheriff's Office calls us,
we're now looking at possibly sitting on a piece of evidence for their case.
Everybody was kind of getting extremely confused.
The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together oddly.
[Frankel] Things are going through your head, like,
was Mr. Graham involved in something at the Pape's house?
Did he steal their truck?
We know that the fire department
responded to a truck on fire in the garage.
They assume it is a truck belonging to the resident, Mr. Robert Pape.
However, at 7.30 in the morning,
Robert Pape's truck is 20 miles away.
So then the question becomes,
if it's not the Pape truck, then whose truck is it?
[Frankel] When the police in Lyon County ran their records check,
that truck came back to our victim, Mr. Graham.
It's like, what the heck is going on here?
This just gets more confusing by the moment.
[Frankel] There must be some kind of connection.
And also, where are the Papes?
Are they in the house? The fire department says no.
[Dues] The fire department goes in, puts out the fire,
and they make a sweep of the house.
So we were basically taking it at their word.
And it was myself and the fire marshal who were talking.
And we're both kind of, like, are we sure we checked the house good?
[Kenda] Fire departments are good at putting out fires.
They're not very good at searching places.
You train detectives to be thorough and detailed
and overlook nothing.
So we did a greater walkthrough of the house.
[Kenda] With a structure fire, the entire house is covered in soot.
It's understandable why people overlook things,
because it's a mess.
Filthy mess.
[Dues] When we did go into the master bedroom,
the bed had been stripped.
There was a weird substance on the floor,
just like squiggles on the carpet.
It looked like shampoo.
It was really weird. It kind of threw us off.
When we got to the walk-in closet,
something was just-- It was just--
They just call it JDLR. It just doesn't look right.
Most of their clothes were hung up, but then there's these two huge piles
of clothing on the ground.
Like somebody just emptied out a dresser and just threw it on the floor.
Then we started just peeling back some of the clothes.
And then all of a sudden, it was just like,
I think we got a problem.
[Kenda] You find what you've been looking for.
Two dead people.
[Kenda] Detective Dave Frankel and Detective Dues
of the Lyon County Sheriff's Department find two dead bodies.
An elderly man and an elderly woman.
They confirm the identity of these two people,
and they are in fact Robert and Dorothy Pape.
[Frankel] We have three bodies.
The Papes are dead.
Mr. Graham is dead.
What is going on?
[Dues] In Lyon County, all deputy coroners are in the sheriff's office.
So we were like, okay,
we need to start switching over
to coroner mode and crime scene mode.
[Frankel] Mrs. Pape had been shot in the head,
and Mr. Pape had been shot in the head and torso.
Small caliber bullets, just like Elliezear Graham.
Now we know this is connected,
and the same shooter is involved in all of this mess.
There is some evidence of decomposition,
which says this didn't happen this morning,
this happened a few days ago.
So they are first.
Mr. Graham is victim number two.
What is the purpose behind that?
Detectives continue their search, and they find two locations.
The obvious spots where these people were killed.
[Dues] More than likely, Dorothy's laying in bed,
and Robert Pape's laying flat on his back,
um, on the floor.
So somebody moved those bodies post-mortem.
Now, why did they do that?
[Frankel] The Pape's house appeared to be like
a ransacked residence.
Jewelry seemed to be gone.
Other things that would lead them to believe
this might have been a burglary gone bad.
[Kenda] To have this kind of violence
associated with theft and burglary is very rare.
[Dues] We did a greater walkthrough of the house.
Now I start seeing indications that are throwing me off.
There's a full cookie sheet of freshly cooked bacon.
It's just sitting on the counter.
They find half-eaten food.
You have a guy who kills
and then decides to live there
with his victims
because they're decomposing two or three days' worth.
He's eating a pizza with dead people.
Extremely creepy. Extremely.
[Kenda] And while they're working this scene,
these relatives of Dorothy and Robert Pape arrive.
And they inform them of their deaths.
[Terry] I go screaming up the driveway
in my car,
and I jump out,
and this guy in a suit comes running up to me.
I asked him, "You're a fire detective or something?"
And he goes, "No, I'm a homicide detective."
He puts his hands on my shoulder,
like this, and he's holding me,
and he goes,
"We believe that they've been murdered."
And I'm like, "What?
What do you mean they've been murdered?"
They ask who they might have known
that would have done this.
[Frankel] They'd said a lot of people know the Papes,
and nobody had a bad word to say about 'em.
Murder never ever crossed my mind,
because everybody in that town loved 'em.
This is Bob and Dottie's 50th wedding anniversary.
They celebrated
just the two of 'em
because in their minds, that's all there was.
You never saw one without the other.
Bob and Dottie were married 63 years.
Bob was in the U.S. Army
and he was in Korea for two years,
and he had a purple heart.
And then Bob's career was in the Drywall Tapers Union.
Dottie was a stay-at-home mom.
She had like five miscarriages
trying to have children.
And so Bob and Dottie...
pretty much gave up on ever having any children.
And then she got pregnant with my husband.
We were, the four of us, a very close family.
[Frankel] With the Papes being deceased in Lyon County,
and Mr. Graham being deceased in our county,
and the coincidences of their vehicles being
at opposite scenes,
obviously we're thinking
there's some kind of connection.
[Kenda] They ask, "Did your mother
or your father know a man named Elliezear Graham
who worked in a gas station 20 miles away on I-80?"
And I went, "Absolutely not."
So it certainly gives one the impression so far
that these victims were connected at random.
[Frankel] It puts a lot of pressure on you
because obviously your body count's going up quickly.
Is somebody going on a killing spree?
Do we have a serial murderer?
Are we going to find more bodies?
[Joe] Your assumption is "Great.
That this person isn't through killing.
He likes it.
And wherever he happens to be
is where he might strike again.
And we don't know where that is."
Now it's 11:00 a.m.
Both agencies have been placed on high alert.
The Lyon County Sheriff's Department gets a phone call
to check the welfare on Angie Duff.
This is a neighbor of the Papes.
Detective Dues can see that house
from where he's standing.
[Dues] They said the female that owned the house
would volunteer at the senior center,
and she was a no-call, no-show that morning.
We sent two street deputies.
Well, they get there and there's no answer.
One of them went around back.
And the back glass had been shattered.
And there's glass everywhere.
[Kenda] He's looking through that window
and sees the absolute worst thing
he could see.
The fear was he would strike again.
And he has.
[Kenda] It's a little after 11:00 a.m.
on the same day,
and they discover two more dead bodies.
A man and a woman.
[Frankel] All of a sudden, that's five.
Our body count's going up.
There's no longer any doubt.
This is one person.
They're on a killing spree.
Anyone they encounter, they're gonna kill.
That's when the pressure ratchets up pretty high.
[indistinct radio chatter]
When they gain entry to the home of Angie Duff...
[Kenda] ...they examine the house.
[Dues] It's a chaotic crime scene.
Actually, it was more like a combat zone.
She was fighting for her life.
There's blood everywhere.
[Dues] It's all over the carpets.
[Dues] It's on the floors. It's on the walls.
I can honestly say
it's the most bloody non-suicide
I've ever seen.
[Kenda] The victims here are identified as Angie Duff
and her companion, Lester Leiber.
Both have been shot to death with small caliber bullets.
[Dues] Lester also had a very evident knife cut
into his chest.
Now we have two weapons involved,
perpetrated by the same person.
Maybe we're now really enjoying the violence?
Hard to say.
But it's an escalation.
[Dues] So now what's the motive?
Nothing is taken.
Nothing's rattled through. The cars are still here.
And I have had a serious fight in this house
with firearms and a bladed weapon.
It's like it's calculated,
but it's random at the same time.
[Kenda] So they're looking at these bodies,
and then they realize
the blood is very fresh.
This just happened.
[Dues] If they got far, they're on foot,
right in the general area.
Where is this son of a [bleep]?
He's here somewhere.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Frankel] So now we have to lock down that neighborhood
and keep track of who's going in and out
because the killer might be right next to us
and us not even knowing.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Dues] We brought in the SWAT team
and then they searched...
as far as they could in every direction.
We have other deputies doing house-to-house,
knocking on doors.
[Frankel] It's quite a chaotic scene
in a way of a lot of moving parts.
[Kenda] This is absolutely every officer
with a badge and a gun
that they can get their hands on.
We already have five people killed.
We could have 20 dead before this is over.
We're going to make it stop.
And the way to make it stop is to find him.
[Frankel] In a small town, word gets around very quickly.
So there was a lot of news media around.
The people of Fernley are terrified.
You know your neighborhoods better than we do.
Be our eyes and ears. Call us.
[Nelson] Nobody knows what's going on.
People were wondering,
"Is he going from house to house?
Why is he doing this? Who is he targeting?"
[Kenda] A lion that is on the hunt,
and they are the prey.
That's pressure.
An hour passes.
It is the longest hour in history
for that neighborhood.
The urgency is incredible.
They feel it in their chest,
their hearts' in hammer mode at the moment.
[Frankel] And all of a sudden,
we received another call
of a possible burglary.
[Kenda] They rush over a few houses down,
and they talk to the homeowner.
He said, "I hear somebody
crawling around
in a crawl space under my house."
He is probably able to see them
from under that house,
and he has a gun.
That's a very awkward feeling.
You begin to feel very naked,
very naked indeed.
The SWAT team was called so they could do the search.
[Kenda] So SWAT dives under that house...
and they find nothing.
[Frankel] But they did locate a phone
and a large amount of cash.
[Kenda] Maybe he was here, but he's not here now.
So where did he go?
When you know that your shooter is nearby,
your head is on a swivel,
your gun is in your hand,
the safety is off,
you're prepared to defend yourself.
And you better be.
Because he's prepared to kill you.
So they're looking around,
and all of a sudden, they hear somebody yell,
-"There he is." -[indistinct shouting]
[Dues] And all of a sudden, he comes like...
through the garage, and...
[indistinct shouting]
[Dues] ...he's got a pair of jean shorts on.
He's covered in blood.
The SWAT team comes around the corner, sees him,
and then just [mimics swarming] swarmed in on him,
puts him at gunpoint, orders him onto the ground,
and got him in cuffs.
[Kenda] You assume he has a gun on his person.
But they search him, and there's no gun.
[Dues] He's holding both key fobs
for both the cars at Angie Duff's house.
[Kenda] He identifies himself as Jeremiah Bean.
Okay, Jeremiah. It's time to talk to this boy
and find out what his maladjustment is.
[tense music playing]
[Kenda] It's euphoric
when you finally find the animal
and you lock him up.
And he suddenly doesn't look like he's 12 feet tall.
He just looks like what he is,
an idiot.
[Frankel] Once you get this person in custody,
it's almost a relief.
And now it's piecing together
how this all happened.
[Dues] He says he wants to talk.
Like, "I want to tell my story."
[Kenda] Mr. Bean decides he's gonna do
an absolutely pathetic
third-grade-level impersonation
of a schizophrenic.
He's acting
as if he's speaking to voices coming out of his own head.
What he's getting is an F from his acting instructor
because it's just pathetic.
They see through his smoke screen
in a microsecond.
[Kenda] And eventually, Jeremiah realizes
that his shtick isn't working,
and he starts to break down.
[Dues] He just literally painted the story
from the first time that he sought the Papes
and decided that he was going to rob them
to the point where he was in the holding cell.
[Kenda] He says he was staying with a friend
in the area of the Papes' home.
He's a heroin addict.
He's desperate for money.
[Frankel] He had been watching the Papes
and kind of looked at them as an easy target.
That's why he chose
to victimize them.
[Kenda] Her husband rushed to her aid
and suffered the same fate.
[Kenda] Then he ransacked their home,
took their property of value,
and stayed there for a day or two.
[Dues] He went to Reno and pawned some things,
got some money, went to a strip club.
He was using the Papes as his own personal ATM.
[Dues] And then he came back to Fernley,
right back to the Papes' house.
[Dues] He said that he then took bottles of shampoo
and squeezed them onto the carpet,
hoping that that would mask the scent.
He drives it onto I-80 and heads west.
[Kenda] He's within a quarter mile
of the gas station where Graham works.
Graham sees him
off the road in his truck.
[Kenda] He grabbed his pants to try to move,
and they came down.
He grabbed his shirt to drag him,
and all it did was pull up.
That's why he's almost naked.
So now he jumps in Graham's truck.
[Dues] But instead of getting back on I-80
heading westbound,
for some reason,
he went back to Fernley,
right back to the Papes' house.
[Kenda] Then he realizes
he's got another thing he has to cover up.
[Dues] He decided he was going to hide all his crimes
by starting a fire,
and then hopefully escape and disappear,
which didn't go exactly as he planned.
The home of Angie Duff.
[Dues] He said he wasn't there to rob the house.
He was there to simply garner a vehicle.
-[woman screaming] -[Dues] Angie goes into fight-or-flight.
But she picks fight,
and so she begins
to tussle with him a little bit.
-[woman screams] -[Dues] And he says
that there's a struggle over the gun.
And he gets her pushed back,
and she kind of slumps,
and then he drops the gun and he shoots her.
[Dues] Lester, who is in the backyard
watching the Papes' house burn,
comes back in the house.
And Bean said that, you know,
basically he's caught him off guard,
firing at him, hitting him,
and missing him,
blowing up the sliding glass door.
They get into a small scuffle, but it wasn't much.
He said Lester went down pretty fast.
And then he grabbed a knife and started stabbing him.
Now he is covered in blood.
And here come the police.
Oh, no. Now he's trapped.
You could see when he was done talking,
his whole body just relaxed.
He got it all off his chest.
[Kenda] After the confession is complete,
they recovered a.22 caliber pistol,
the ultimate corroborating evidence.
He is toast, as we say in the murder biz.
The person of interest or suspect
in five murder cases
made his first court appearance
just minutes ago.
So we're all waiting in the courtroom.
He comes in with his attorney
and stands up
and pleads not guilty.
It was really mind boggling to everybody 'cause...
he confessed
right away that he did it.
So he goes into trial.
[Kenda] The evidence going to trial is overwhelming.
Jeremiah Bean is convicted
of five counts of first-degree murder
and sentenced to death.
They say the death penalty is revenge.
They're right.
It is. Time for you to say goodnight, Jeremiah.
[Nelson] Death is permanent,
and he didn't care.
He killed five innocent people that he didn't even know.
People that had families,
people that had kids and grandkids,
and didn't think twice about it.
What I learned from this case is
keep an open mind
'cause anything can happen.
And as much as I like to look at the good in people,
there are wolves among us that will do terrible things.
[Trina] The last time I was out here
to tend to Ellie's cross was
about two and a half, maybe three years ago.
It just is a reminder that he's not forgotten.
[Terry] The sickest part about the whole thing,
if that slimy son of a [bleep] had gone over to Bob and said,
"Hey, man, I need to make a couple of bucks",
he would have hired him
to help him pull weeds or do whatever.
But what does he do? He kills him.
Angry is what it makes me.
How dare you?
It makes me want to take a hammer to his head.
[Kenda] When people say there's good in everyone,
this is the reason why that's not true.
There's no good in Mr. Bean.
What mercy do we owe him?
None.