On May 1, 1992, America’s Most Wanted put a Texas case before a national audience, and about fifty tips came in. One came from a viewer in Kansas City, Missouri, who looked at the face on the screen and recognized the man known there as Fowler, a worker on a city garbage truck. Three days later the man was in custody.
Broadcast appeals invite a simple story about one telephone call, and the record is less tidy. In seven of these ten cases a television program or a news bulletin reached a viewer whose call mattered, and the calls had little in common except that each came from someone who stood close to the face: a coworker, a relative, a witness who had waited years, women who had once been told to forget. In the other three, broadcasts brought tips by the hundred and no arrest. The program, the year and what the caller did or said are the part that counts.
Kenneth Allen McDuff was 20 in August 1966 when he abducted three teenagers near Fort Worth and killed them. A jury sentenced him to death. After the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia the sentence was commuted to life, and in October 1989, when the Texas parole board was under orders to release hundreds of prisoners a week, a panel voted to let him go. Accounts of the 1966 judgments differ. The Cleburne Times-Review says he was sentenced to die for the murder of Robert Brand. KWTX reported in 2024 that he was convicted in the deaths of all three and received three death sentences. Texas Monthly described the conviction as one for the murder of Edna Sullivan. The differences have never been settled.
Within about three years he was the subject of a murder investigation in Central Texas, and investigators came to believe he was responsible for the deaths of several women, among them Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed. A detailed statement about the Reed case was released to the press, and on May 1, 1992, America’s Most Wanted aired the case.
The Kansas City viewer recognized "Fowler." On May 4, three days after the broadcast, McDuff surrendered without a struggle at a Kansas City dump. He was flown to Waco and arraigned on a federal weapons charge. On May 6 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographed him arriving at the McLennan County Courthouse and described him as a suspect in the cases of at least eight women.
He was convicted of the capital murders of Northrup and Reed and sentenced to death in both. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Northrup conviction in 1997. The Fifth Circuit denied relief on November 17, 1998, and Texas executed him at Huntsville the same day. The number of women he killed has never been fixed. The Star-Telegram called him a suspect in at least eight in May 1992. Gary Cartwright wrote that authorities thought there might be as many as nine. 48 Hours said in 1998 that investigators suspected as many as 14 others, and 14 names were read at a memorial that year. Texas Monthly wrote that only McDuff knew for sure.
The men who caught him kept telling the story. In August 2017 Parnell McNamara, by then the McLennan County sheriff, presented the case with a former Falls County sheriff and a former federal prosecutor to more than 300 people at a law enforcement conference in Waco. McNamara called the 1989 release the product of a "runaway parole system" and said McDuff "should never have been released." KWTX reported that the case is credited with changing the Texas criminal justice system.
Coral Eugene Watts confessed in 1982 to killing 13 women, 12 of them in Texas and one in Michigan. He was 28, a bus mechanic for Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and he had just been arrested in Houston on a charge of burglary with intent to commit murder. Houston prosecutors said they had no evidence tying him to any of the killings. They gave him immunity for the deaths he described, in return for a guilty plea and a 60-year sentence. The families of the women he named gained answers. He never stood trial in Texas for a single death.
Michigan had its own file on him. Detectives there, among them Paul Bunten, had watched him in 1981, and Bunten sent the Houston police homicide division a full case history on April 8, 1981. When Watts offered in 1982 to confess to 22 killings in Michigan if he were given the same immunity there, the Washtenaw County prosecutor, William Delhey, declined. Bunten later put it more simply: you do not give immunity to someone who has committed murder.
Texas’s sentence then began to shorten. In October 1987 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held, in a different case, that a defendant has a constitutional right to notice that a deadly weapon finding may be made. Watts’s case was sent back, and in 1989 the court deleted the finding from his sentence. Under a mandatory supervision law that still applied to prisoners sentenced in the 1980s, he earned three days of credit for every day served, and 60 Minutes calculated that his release would come after about 24 years. His date fell in 2006.
The key call was an old one. A Ferndale, Michigan, man named Joseph Foy had seen the man who killed Helen Dutcher, 36, in December 1979, and had described him to a police sketch artist the next day. The case went cold. In 1982, when Watts’s face appeared on television after his arrest in Texas, Foy recognized him and called the police again. Michigan did not bring Watts to trial for the Dutcher killing until 2004.
An Oakland County jury convicted him of first-degree murder on November 17, 2004, with Foy among the witnesses, and on December 7 he was sentenced to life without parole. A second Michigan prosecution followed. In 2007, a little more than a week before his death, a Kalamazoo court convicted him of the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele, 19, and gave him a second life term. He died of prostate cancer in a secure area of a hospital in Jackson, Michigan, in September 2007, while held at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility.
In April 1987 the program Unsolved Mysteries broadcast a segment about Robert Dean Weeks, who also used false names, among them Robert Howard Smith. Shortly afterward a viewer responded, and the tip led to his arrest in Tucson, Arizona, on fraud and embezzlement charges. The first charge the law could bring was financial.
Nevada brought the larger case a year later. In April 1988 Weeks was convicted of two murders: his former wife, Patricia Weeks, in 1968, and Cynthia Jabour, a real estate agent he had dated, in 1980. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in a Nevada prison on September 20, 1996. Investigators also suspected him in the 1971 case of a business associate, James Shaw, and, much later, in the death of Carol Ann Riley, a San Diego nurse who had planned to end her relationship with a man she knew as "Robert Smith." Riley was identified in August 2025, nearly 40 years after her death, and her death is treated as a homicide. Weeks was never charged in either case.
Joseph Ture Jr. is serving life sentences in Minnesota for six murders committed in 1978, 1979 and 1980. Four days after Alice Huling and three of her children were killed in rural Stearns County, near Clearwater, on December 15, 1978, a Wright County deputy arrested Ture for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. He was released on January 4, 1979.
A state cold-case unit reopened the killing of Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, in 1996. Special Agent Everett Doolittle went back to the alibi that had cleared Ture, an entry in the Ford plant’s records for May 1979, and saw that when investigators checked it they had looked at the work schedule of Joseph Ture Sr., the father, not the son. With the alibi gone, Ture became the chief suspect in both the Wohlenhaus and Huling cases, which had occurred five months apart.
That year the CBS program 48 Hours broadcast a story on the case. CBS said later that the broadcast alone did not produce enough to convict anyone. What it did was bring several women forward who recognized Ture as a man who had assaulted them years earlier. Many were waitresses. One told CBS that police had urged her and another woman to forget what had happened to them. "It was a 'boys will be boys' mentality," she said.
A Washington County jury convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder in the Wohlenhaus case in 1998. In January 2000 a Stearns County jury convicted him of the four Huling murders. He had also been convicted of the first-degree murder of Diane Edwards, 19, of West St. Paul, killed in 1980, and of Minneapolis offenses in 1981. He denies all of the killings. On January 13, 2026, Minnesota’s Supervised Release Board voted unanimously to deny parole and continued his case 20 years. The Department of Corrections listed him at Lino Lakes in October 2026.
Reinaldo Javier Rivera was a former Navy officer living in North Augusta, South Carolina. He was caught because the last woman he assaulted survived. On October 10, 2000, an 18-year-old woman in Augusta reached a telephone and called 911, and her account gave investigators the information that led to his arrest, according to the Associated Press.
The call that mattered came after a news broadcast described the man. Two people who knew Rivera telephoned police separately to say they thought it was him: a co-worker and his sister-in-law. The Supreme Court of Georgia recorded both calls in its 2007 opinion. On October 12, 2000, two days after the assault, police located Rivera in a motel room in Aiken County, South Carolina. He was taken to a hospital.
He confessed to police to the killings of four young women in Georgia and South Carolina: Marni Glista, 21, an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Gordon; Tabitha Bosdell, 17 or 18 depending on the source; and Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson, both 17, of Aiken County. Charges were filed in the other three deaths, but no trial is reported. Only the Glista case reached a jury. A Richmond County jury convicted him of malice murder and 13 other counts on January 23, 2004, rejected his defense of mental illness, and three days later voted for death. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed in 2007. State habeas relief was denied in 2011, and a federal judge denied his habeas petition on September 13, 2024. The Eleventh Circuit docketed his appeal on February 26, 2025. The Georgia Department of Corrections lists him under a death sentence as of June 30, 2026.
The CBS program 48 Hours began working on the Tricia Pacaccio case in the summer of 2008. Pacaccio, 18, of Glenview, Illinois, died in August 1993. Her family had heard of an arrest in California and expected an Illinois charge. None came. Cook County had matched DNA connected to the 1993 case to a neighbor, Michael Gargiulo, in 2003, and had decided the match alone could not support a charge. Gargiulo had been 17 at the time of her death.
The man arrested in California on June 6, 2008, by Santa Monica police on suspicion of attempted murder of a woman who survived was Gargiulo. DNA from the Santa Monica investigation matched a profile already on file from the Illinois inquiry. On September 4, 2008, he was indicted for the murders of Ashley Ellerin, 22, in February 2001, and Maria Bruno, 32, in December 2005.
In May 2011 48 Hours broadcast an episode on the case called "The Boy Next Door." Shortly after it aired, a witness contacted the correspondent, Maureen Maher, and the program put the family in touch with Chicago authorities. Two former coworkers from the Hollywood nightclub where Gargiulo had worked came forward. They said that in the late 1990s he had told them he had killed a girl in Chicago. In the Illinois arrest warrant the two were identified only by letters. On July 7, 2011, Cook County charged Gargiulo with first-degree murder in the Pacaccio case, eight years after the DNA match.
A Los Angeles jury convicted him in August 2019 of the murders of Ellerin and Bruno and the attempted murder of the woman who survived, finding lying in wait and multiple murder, and a judge sentenced him to death on July 16, 2021. He was extradited to Illinois in September 2024. As of September 30, 2026, the Illinois case had no trial date. He denies killing Ellerin, Bruno and Pacaccio.
Samuel Little was convicted of eight murders and confessed to 93. For about 35 years he moved around the United States, and many of the deaths he described had first been recorded as overdoses, accidents, natural deaths or causes unknown. Arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 5, 2012, on a 2009 Los Angeles narcotics warrant, he was convicted in 2014 of three Los Angeles murders and sentenced on September 25 to three consecutive terms of life without parole.
In 2018 the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, ViCAP, flagged him in connection with an unsolved killing in Odessa, Texas, and referred the case to the Texas Rangers. Ranger James Holland interviewed him for more than 700 hours. On October 6, 2019, the FBI announced that it believed all 93 confessions were credible and that law enforcement had verified 50, and it called him the most prolific serial killer in United States history. The same day 60 Minutes broadcast Holland’s first television interview, and the FBI received hundreds of tips. Victims were identified in Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Arkansas as a result, CBS News reported.
An earlier appeal had used drawings. Little had drawn the faces of women he said he remembered, and in February 2019 the FBI released the sketches in the hope that families would recognize someone. A Memphis family did, TMJ4 News reported. By his death on December 30, 2020, investigators had verified about 60 of the confessions. A December 2021 Texas Department of Public Safety release put the number at 62 and asked for the public’s help with the rest, including 16 unmatched confessions in Los Angeles and nearby Compton dated 1984 to 1996. Little pleaded guilty to five more murders in Texas and Ohio in 2018 and 2019.
The Twin Cities recordings show an appeal that reached everyone and named no one. From the last night of 1980 to the summer of 1982, a man called police and emergency operators in St. Paul and Minneapolis after assaults on women. He sobbed and apologized. "Will you find me?" he asked in one call, according to the Star Tribune’s 1981 coverage as quoted by the researcher Tomas Guillen. After the death of Kimberly Compton, 18, on June 3, 1981, he phoned two days later to say he was sorry and would turn himself in. On June 6 he called to complain that some newspaper accounts of the killings were wrong. On June 11 he called again, whimpering and hard to understand, to apologize to her.
Operators traced several of the calls. Each time the caller was gone when officers arrived. Broadcast stations played the recordings more than once, and police received more than 150 calls from the public, which the Star Tribune reported in December 1981. The recordings were short and the crying distorted the voice, Guillen wrote, and none of the tips identified the caller. Newspapers came to call him the weepy-voiced killer.
Paul Michael Stephani was arrested in August 1982. A 19-year-old woman he had assaulted fought back and hurt him badly enough that at about 2 a.m. on August 21 he called a dispatcher and asked for an ambulance. The reports differ on how the link was made. One account says dispatchers recognized the voice. Guillen wrote that he was tied to the assault because he sought treatment for the wounds she had inflicted, and that routine police work then connected him to the murder of Barbara Simons, 40, a nurse from Minneapolis killed earlier that month. Both accounts agree that his own call for help put him in the hands of police. At his trial his former wife, his sister and a woman who had lived with him testified that they believed the crying caller was him. Guillen judged that this testimony could not by itself have identified him. Stephani was convicted of the murder of Simons and of the attempted second-degree murder of the young woman, with second-degree assault of a man who intervened.
Terminally ill in prison in 1997, he asked to speak to St. Paul police and confessed to the killings of Compton and Kathleen Greening, 33, and to an assault on a 20-year-old woman on New Year’s Eve 1980. He was never charged with them. He died in the Oak Park Heights prison in June 1998. Guillen concluded that the calls had no investigative value while the killings were being investigated.
The Belgian crime program Koppen Justitie devoted a special edition in late November 2007 to the murder of Annick Van Uytsel, an 18-year-old student from Diest. The broadcast brought in about 100 tips, none of which led to a breakthrough. The investigation, led by the Leuven prosecutor’s office, made no arrest for almost three years. An anonymous caller had claimed, in the meantime, that she had been the victim of a hit-and-run. He was later traced, had nothing to do with the case, and a court ordered him to pay damages to her parents.
The answer, when it came, came from another case. In January 2010 Shana Appeltans, 18, and her boyfriend, Kevin Paulus, died in Loksbergen, in Belgian Limburg. She was the next-door neighbor of a teacher named Ronald Janssen. Investigators doing routine inquiries among the neighbors judged him strange and nervous, and after two days of questioning he confessed to killing them. Over the following weekend he confessed to the murder of Annick Van Uytsel, and on Monday, January 11, 2010, the Leuven prosecutor’s spokesman, Ivo Carmen, confirmed it.
His name had come up before. A witness named him in the Van Uytsel case, RTBF reported in January 2010, but the testimony was judged too vague to act on. Carmen said a possible link to a 38-year-old man from Loksbergen had not been pursued. In January 2011 three members of the Vlaams Belang tabled a proposal for a parliamentary inquiry, saying that, according to Comité P, Janssen’s name had come up three times as a possible suspect in the Van Uytsel investigation and that the federal judicial police in Leuven had never questioned or arrested him.
The assize court at Tongeren convicted Janssen of three premeditated murders on October 20, 2011, and sentenced him the next day to life imprisonment. The presiding judge, Michel Jordens, said there were no mitigating circumstances. A separate trial at Hasselt later convicted him in ten further cases. VRT NWS reported in October 2021 that an attempt at early release had failed.
Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst, the ZDF program that asked viewers to help solve crimes, had begun in 1967, and the Manfred Wittmann case was featured on it in the program’s early years, the Fränkischer Tag reported on the 50th anniversary in 2017. What the broadcast produced has not been reported. Between December 1968 and November 1969 three girls, aged 14, 16 and 16, were murdered in the Itzgrund and Lichtenfels country of Upper Franconia. The paper’s Kronach reporter called the period 357 days of fear. Parents drove their daughters to dances and collected them afterward. A Coburg paper ran the headline "Der Mörder lebt unter uns," the murderer lives among us.
Other efforts filled the gap. Police arrested a young man from Tettau after the second killing and held him at Kronach, believing they had their killer; he was not, and what became of him has not been reported. The Coburg paper brought in a self-styled clairvoyant, Erwin Grünig, known as the "Seer of Lake Constance." He described the killer as a man with dark wavy hair and attached earlobes who worked with machines. Not all of it was accurate, the Fränkischer Tag noted in 2020, but some of it matched Wittmann, and his appearance in the area seems to have pushed Wittmann toward a confession under questioning.
Wittmann was a building-site mixer operator in his mid-twenties from the village of Kaltenbrunn who lived with his parents in the middle of the village. He told people there that the killer would never be caught because he was "too clever." Police arrested him in Kaltenbrunn on December 12, 1969, and about eight hours later he confessed. The jury court at Coburg held him fully responsible and, on December 15, 1971, sentenced him to three life terms. In June 2013, after 43 years in custody, the rest of his sentence was suspended on probation, and he went to a care facility in Middle Bavaria whose location officials did not disclose.
Set side by side, the seven cases that worked and the three that did not are less different than they look. In Kansas City the call came from a viewer who knew a man only by a borrowed name. In Michigan it came from a witness who had carried a face since 1979. In Georgia a co-worker and a relative telephoned separately about the same man, and in Illinois a witness reached the correspondent and two former coworkers spoke up after years. Minnesota’s women had been telling their story for years before a camera arrived. Little’s confessions turned into hundreds of tips in a single evening.
The failures are the ones with numbers attached. A hundred tips on a Belgian special edition, more than 150 calls after the Twin Cities recordings, and an unrecorded count in Upper Franconia led nowhere. Stephani was taken after calling for an ambulance, Janssen after the death of his neighbor, and Wittmann in his village, eight hours before he confessed.
• 1966: Kenneth McDuff kills three teenagers near Fort Worth and is sentenced to death; the sentence is commuted after Furman v. Georgia (1972).
• December 12, 1969: Manfred Wittmann is arrested at Kaltenbrunn and confesses about eight hours later; December 15, 1971, three life sentences at Coburg.
• December 31, 1980 to August 1982: the weeping caller phones police in the Twin Cities; more than 150 tips follow broadcasts reported in December 1981.
• August 21, 1982: Paul Stephani calls for an ambulance and is taken into custody; later convicted of the murder of Barbara Simons.
• 1982: Coral Watts confesses to 13 killings under an immunity agreement; his face appears on television and a Michigan witness calls police again.
• April 1987: Unsolved Mysteries broadcasts the Robert Weeks segment; a viewer’s tip leads to his arrest in Tucson.
• April 1988: Weeks is convicted of two murders in Nevada.
• October 1989: McDuff is paroled.
• May 1, 1992: America’s Most Wanted airs the McDuff case; May 4, he is arrested in Kansas City.
• 1996: 48 Hours broadcasts the Joseph Ture story; several women come forward.
• 1997: Stephani confesses to two killings; June 1998, he dies in prison.
• 1998: a Washington County jury convicts Ture of the Wohlenhaus murder; November 17, 1998, McDuff is executed.
• January 2000: a Stearns County jury convicts Ture of the Huling murders.
• October 10 to 12, 2000: Reinaldo Rivera is named by two callers after a news broadcast and located in Aiken County.
• January 23, 2004: Rivera is convicted in Richmond County, Georgia.
• November 17, 2004: Watts is convicted in Oakland County; December 7, 2004, sentenced to life without parole.
• 2007: Koppen Justitie broadcasts a special edition on Annick Van Uytsel in November; Watts is convicted in the Steele case and dies in September.
• January 2010: Ronald Janssen confesses in the Appeltans and Paulus deaths and, on January 11, in the Van Uytsel case.
• May 2011: 48 Hours airs "The Boy Next Door"; July 7, 2011, Cook County charges Michael Gargiulo.
• October 20 to 21, 2011: Janssen is convicted at Tongeren and sentenced to life.
• June 2013: Wittmann is released on probation.
• August 2019: Gargiulo is convicted in Los Angeles; July 16, 2021, he is sentenced to death.
• October 6, 2019: the FBI announces that Samuel Little’s confessions are credible; 60 Minutes airs Holland’s interview and hundreds of tips follow.
• December 30, 2020: Little dies.
• January 13, 2026: Minnesota’s Supervised Release Board denies Ture parole and continues his case 20 years.