A prison interview on camera hands a convicted man the one thing his sentence took away, which is an audience. What he does with it varies. Some men talk because a lawyer thinks it will help, some because a reporter is the only person who asks, and one because the interview was his last. The cases below run from a radio telephone in a Houston suburb in 1973 to a Court TV interview recorded in a Florida prison in December 2024. In most of them the person who gained least from the broadcast was the man who gave it, and the people who paid for it were seldom the ones who had asked.
On the morning of August 8, 1973, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., then 17, telephoned police in Pasadena, Texas, to say he had killed a man. The man was Dean Corll, 33, an employee of the Houston electric company. An inquiry followed that attributed the deaths of 27 boys and young men to Corll, and it became known as the Houston Mass Murders. Authorities ruled Corll’s death self-defense. Police described Corll as the leader and Henley and a second teenager, David Owen Brooks, as his accomplices.
The first television image of Henley was not an interview. While police worked in Houston, he asked to speak to his mother, and a television reporter from KPRC lent him the radio telephone in his car. The station filmed the call. Henley cried, "Mama, I killed Dean." A KPRC reporter, Fred Edison, testified about the call at a hearing in January 1974; KPRC’s later accounts and the Houston Press credit the reporter Jack Cato.
The coverage became part of the defense. Henley’s lawyer, Gray, subpoenaed editors and news directors from newspapers and broadcasters in eight Texas cities, seeking everything they had published or aired, in order to show that publicity had made a fair trial impossible anywhere in the state. Late in January both sides agreed that Henley could not get a fair trial in Houston at that time, and Judge Hatten moved the trial out of the city. A San Antonio jury convicted Henley in July 1974 of six of the murders, and he received six consecutive 99-year sentences, 594 years in all. The verdict was reversed in December 1978. He was tried again in June 1979, convicted again, and given six life sentences.
The public attention did not end with the trial. In 1997 a Houston gallery showed 23 of his paintings, and relatives of victims protested outside on opening night with signs reading "Hang Henley! Not his art!" Twenty-one of the paintings sold. In an interview with KHOU he said: "I was a boy who was caught." In 2011 he was held at the Michael Unit at Tennessee Colony and, at 54, told the Texas Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth: "I try to keep myself busy, and I try not to sleep much. I don’t like dreaming about the old days." The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied him release again on November 7, 2025, and set his next review about ten years later.
Between October 1979 and July 1983 five boys aged 4 to 13 were killed in Salt Lake County, Utah: Alonzo Daniels, Kim Peterson, Danny Davis, Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham. On July 24, 1983, detectives questioning a man they knew as Roger Downs about the missing Graeme Cunningham learned that he was Arthur Gary Bishop, a former Eagle Scout who had been involved with Big Brothers, and that evening he confessed to all five. A jury convicted him in 1984 of first-degree murder in each case, with aggravated kidnapping, and returned death sentences. The Utah Supreme Court examined in detail how and when he came to confess, and affirmed on February 3, 1988.
In a 1984 television interview with the ABC4 anchor Phil Riesen, Bishop said he had struggled all his life to connect with his parents and had not known how to deal with his problems. Creighton Horton, then a deputy Salt Lake County attorney, told ABC4 that many people who had known Bishop thought of him as a good person, and called the solving of all five cases at once remarkable.
What television did next is recorded in a courtroom. After the Utah Supreme Court’s decision Bishop told the courts he wanted no more appeals, and on April 8, 1988 Third District Judge James Sawaya held a hearing on whether he was competent to choose that. Three court-appointed psychiatrists, Louis Moench, Mark Rindflesh and Breck Lebegue, testified that he had no significant mental disorder that would impair his ability to think rationally. Moench called the decision "knowing, intelligent and rational." Bishop gave several reasons, according to the Deseret News. He believed his death would have a cleansing effect on the community and the families. He had been moved by news coverage of the execution of another Utah prisoner, Dale Pierre Selby, which he saw as having brought relief to surviving families. He believed that some of his victims' families had not forgiven him and that his execution would spare them what he called the sin of unforgiveness. He was executed by lethal injection at the Utah State Prison in June 1988.
Carroll Edward Cole was put to death at Nevada State Prison in Carson City on December 6, 1985, the first person in Nevada to die by injection. He had pleaded guilty in Las Vegas to the 1979 murder of Marie Cushman, for which a three-judge panel unanimously sentenced him to death, and he had earlier been convicted of killing Kathlyn J. Blum in Nevada, on a guilty plea, and Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts in Dallas, by jury verdicts. He told the Nevada court he had killed at least 13 people. Beyond the five convictions, those statements were never weighed by a court. At his sentencing hearing he acted as his own lawyer and asked the panel to sentence him to death. He filed no appeal, and on October 22, 1985 the Nevada Supreme Court held that his waiver was valid and affirmed.
His last hours were reported minute by minute. UPI wrote on December 5 that he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and baptized by Father Dave Casaleggio, that he spent his final hours talking with guards, watching television, playing Monopoly and speaking with chaplains, and that for his last meal he ate jumbo shrimp, french fries, a tossed salad and clam chowder. In a final interview with KLAS-TV, UPI reported, he laughed often but trembled, and admitted he was frightened. He said he would be lying if he claimed not to be worried. He told the station again that his crimes deserved the death penalty. "I’m a danger to society," he said, and he said he would kill again if released.
In several interviews in the last years of his life, UPI reported, he had said the killings were "for revenge against my mother," whom he accused of abusing him as a child. Those statements were never tested in court.
Between March and November 1984 at least eight women were killed in and around Tampa. Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe, pleaded guilty on September 23, 1985 to eight counts of first-degree murder in Hillsborough County and received life sentences on all counts but one, the murder of Michelle Simms, for which a jury recommended death by 11 votes to 1 and Judge John P. Griffin sentenced him to death on July 25, 1986.
Four months after that sentence, on November 25, 1986, Long gave a long on-camera interview on death row to Victoria Corderi of CBS News, and CBS broadcast short segments on December 26. A trial court later ruled that the interview had been a considered defense strategy. Whatever it was meant to accomplish, it became evidence. Long was also charged in neighboring Pasco County with the murder of Virginia Johnson, and at that trial the State played part of the CBS recording. The defense asked for the whole tape. CBS refused, citing the First Amendment, and took the question to the Second District Court of Appeal in CBS, Inc. v. Cobb. The network eventually handed over about 13 minutes of additional tape, and the judge refused the defense request for the rest. He kept out one line, in which Long said he must have "destroyed about a hundred people," as too inflammatory.
The jury convicted Long on November 7, 1988, recommended death 9 to 3 and, on March 2, 1989, Judge Cobb imposed it. The Florida Supreme Court reversed in Long v. State, 610 So. 2d 1276. The four Hillsborough murders, the court held, could not be presented at that trial given the terms of the plea agreement. And once the State used part of the CBS interview, Long "was entitled to have the entire interview or portions thereof placed into evidence in the interest of fairness." A third trial was held in Ocala in January 1994; the jury convicted him and recommended death by 7 votes to 5, and Judge Charles W. Cope imposed it. In 1997 the Florida Supreme Court reversed again, and the Johnson prosecution ended with an acquittal ordered by the court.
The Simms sentence stood. Long was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on May 23, 2019, and pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m., aged 65. A survivor of his, 17 at the time, told ABC Action News in 2019 that she would have liked to thank him "for choosing me and not another 17-year-old girl." The interview that had been meant for Long’s benefit had by then spent thirty years in the case law, on both sides of the argument over fairness.
Dennis Nilsen was a 37-year-old civil servant, a former Army cook and police constable who interviewed job seekers in London, when he was arrested in February 1983 at Muswell Hill, north London. He told police the account went back to 1978 and that there had been 15 or 16 deaths. At the Old Bailey in November 1983 he was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders, and given life imprisonment with a recommended minimum of 25 years, later made a whole life tariff. The number of young men he killed has never been settled.
In September 1992 Central Television interviewed him in prison for Murder in Mind, a programme in its Viewpoint 93 series on offender profiling. The Home Office tried to stop the broadcast, saying it had not given permission for the interview; Central said permission had been given in advance. On January 16, 1993 the decision was taken not to ban it, and it was shown in full that evening.
The families of the men Nilsen killed spoke rarely, and mostly to object. Seaton Sutherland, the brother of Billy Sutherland, campaigned against the publication of Nilsen’s memoirs. In January 2020, when ITV’s drama Des was about to air with David Tennant in the title role, a friend of Seaton Sutherland told the Edinburgh Evening News that the family would never come to terms with what had happened and that a new television drama was hurtful to the families of all the victims. Netflix followed in August 2021 with Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, drawing on more than 250 hours of audio recordings Nilsen made in his cell and on 7,000 pages of his unedited autobiography. Its director, Michael Harte, described Nilsen as an unreliable narrator whose account was often contradicted by other witnesses. Nilsen had died on May 12, 2018, at York District Hospital, aged 72; the inquest concluded natural causes.
Hugo Bustamante Perez has been convicted in Chile of three killings in two events, both in Villa Alemana. In January 2005 he killed his former partner, Veronica Vasquez, 49, and her nine-year-old son, Eugenio, and was sentenced to 27 years. In 2006, from prison, he was interviewed for Mea Culpa, a program presented by Carlos Pinto on TVN. Asked whether he might do the same thing again if he were released, he did not rule it out. "I have thought about it," BioBioChile quoted him as saying. T13 reported that he told the program he could not be sure he would never commit a similar crime.
The prison service’s report of 2016 advised against parole, according to Chilevision, and he was released in April 2016, having served about 11 years. In an interview broadcast by Chilevision on condition that his face not be shown, he said that talking about the case was harmful to him, that he would never be able to forget what he had done, and that "the greatest punishment, the hardest, I carry inside me." On his release he said: "the same law that convicted me gives me the right to go free." In a 2016 interview with El Mercurio’s Sabado magazine he said he could not promise he would not offend again.
On July 29, 2020, Ambar Cornejo, 16, the daughter of his new partner, went missing in Villa Alemana. He and her mother were detained on August 6. A constitutional accusation tied to the 2016 parole decision passed the Chamber of Deputies in September 2020 and went to the Senate. On December 7, 2021 a court in Vina del Mar sentenced Bustamante to presidio perpetuo calificado, the most severe penalty in Chilean law, for Ambar’s murder, with other charges; her mother was convicted with him. The Supreme Court confirmed both sentences in June 2022.
The later interviews were with a journalist, not a camera, but they were reported on television and in print as if they were the same thing. Between June 2023 and January 2024 Ivonne Toro Agurto met Bustamante six times in prison. He gave her two names, Eduardo Paez and his mother, and told her it was a gift. In June 2024 he told a prison officer that he had taken part in two homicides. Elena Hinojosa and her son Eduardo Paez Hinojosa, 27, were identified as his 1996 victims, and Hinojosa’s niece told Radio Bio Bio that it angered her that the original inquiry had not been pursued. A court of first instance convicted Bustamante again in 2026; in October 2026 the Valparaiso Court of Appeals revoked that conviction and held the case time-barred. The prosecution and the family argue the limitation period was interrupted by the later crimes, and an appeal to the Supreme Court was reported as filed.
Between July 1976 and July 1977 six people were killed and seven wounded in New York City, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. The man responsible signed letters to police and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin as "Son of Sam." David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, was arrested on August 10, 1977. He pleaded guilty on May 8, 1978 to six counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced on June 12 to 25 years to life on each.
The money followed him at once. In August 1977, UPI reported, one of his early lawyers was accused of trying to sell taped interviews and book rights to two newspapers for as much as 100,000 dollars; both papers refused. A judge barred police from discussing the case with reporters. The laws that took the name "Son of Sam," under which a state diverts to victims the proceeds a criminal earns from telling his story, grew out of that period, and in 1991 the United States Supreme Court held New York’s version unconstitutional in Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board.
In 2004 UPI reported that he had a website where he posted writings. Prison officials said it broke no rules. Neysa Moskowitz, then 71, whose daughter Stacy was among the dead, said that if she were the warden he would not be allowed to do anything, and that the prison treated him like a little prince. In January and May 2006 the New York Sun reported two suits by Berkowitz, one seeking the return of photographs, a typewriter and letters, the other aimed at stripping a lawyer of profits from a book.
In August 2017, on the 40th anniversary of his arrest, CBS News sent Maurice DuBois to Shawangunk Correctional Facility, where he was working as a library clerk. He told DuBois he had learned at four or five that he was adopted, described a childhood that was mostly ordinary but marked by depression and a belief that he deserved to die, and called the killings "a break from reality." Asked about release, he said: "As a realistic hope, I don’t see any hope for parole, no." The parole board refused him again on May 14, 2024, at his 12th appearance. A documentary series in 2025, Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, drew on interviews he gave a newspaper reporter and on a 2024 telephone call with its director, Joe Berlinger, in which he said he was very sorry and should have sought help sooner.
Between October 2007 and January 2008 four people were killed in and near the national forests of the southern Appalachians and north Florida by Gary Michael Hilton, a drifter then 61. They were John D. and Irene W. Bryant, a retired couple from Hendersonville, North Carolina; Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, a nurse and Sunday school teacher from Crawfordville, Florida; and Meredith Hope Emerson, 24, a University of Georgia graduate. He pleaded guilty to Emerson’s murder in Dawson County, Georgia, on January 31, 2008, and received life with parole possible after 30 years. A Leon County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Dunlap on February 15, 2011, and on April 21, 2011 Circuit Judge James C. Hankinson sentenced him to death on a unanimous recommendation. In March 2012 he pleaded guilty in federal court to the murders of the Bryants, and in April 2013 received four life terms plus 15 years.
In December 2024, at a Florida prison, he gave his first interview in 17 years, to David Scott, an Atlanta investigative reporter, for the Court TV series Interview with a Killer. It aired on April 13, 2025. "It’s time after 17 years to break my silence," Hilton said. He was 78 and had congestive heart failure, and Scott said Hilton wanted to leave an account of what he had done. Scott had one hour to cover four killings. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Hilton bristled at one of his descriptions of the crimes and seemed perversely proud of them. Hilton remarked that 61, his age when he killed Emerson, was unusually old for such crimes. Scott called Meredith Emerson "the hero of the story."
The interview changed nothing in court. Hilton’s death sentence was affirmed in 2013, postconviction relief was denied and affirmed in 2021, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief on April 1, 2026. His lawyers asked the Supreme Court in August 2026 for more time to file a petition. As of October 21, 2026 no death warrant had been reported.
In these eight, the interview was never neutral. Long’s lawyers wanted a story told and ended with a recording the State could use, and with an appellate ruling about how much of any such tape must be played. Bishop’s last argument to the courts leaned on news coverage of another man’s execution. Cole spoke the day before his own, when nothing he said could change a sentence. Bustamante said on camera in 2006 and 2016 that he could not promise not to offend again, and the press replayed those broadcasts in 2020, when the death of a sixteen-year-old brought his record back. The families who object, in Edinburgh in 2020 or outside a Houston gallery in 1997, object after the fact. The people whose names are on the court record were not asked.
• August 8, 1973: Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. telephones Pasadena, Texas police; KPRC films his call to his mother.
• July 1974: Henley is convicted in San Antonio of six murders.
• October 1979 to July 1983: Five boys are killed in Salt Lake County, Utah.
• July 24, 1983: Arthur Gary Bishop confesses.
• November 4, 1983: Dennis Nilsen is convicted at the Old Bailey of six murders and two attempted murders.
• 1984: Bishop gives a television interview to ABC4; a Utah jury convicts him and returns death sentences.
• September 23, 1985: Robert Joe Long pleads guilty to eight murders in Hillsborough County, Florida.
• December 5 to 6, 1985: Carroll Edward Cole gives a final interview to KLAS-TV and is executed.
• November 25, 1986: Long gives CBS News a death-row interview; segments air on December 26.
• June 1988: Bishop is executed.
• January 16, 1993: Central Television’s interview with Nilsen is cleared and broadcast.
• 1997: A Houston gallery exhibits Henley’s paintings; the Florida Supreme Court orders Long’s acquittal in the Johnson case.
• January 2005: Hugo Bustamante kills his former partner and her son.
• 2006: Bustamante gives TVN’s Mea Culpa an interview.
• April 2016: Bustamante is released on parole and gives interviews.
• August 2017: David Berkowitz speaks to CBS News on the 40th anniversary of his arrest.
• May 23, 2019: Long is executed.
• December 7, 2021: Bustamante is sentenced to presidio perpetuo calificado for the murder of Ambar Cornejo.
• December 2024: Gary Michael Hilton gives Court TV his first interview in 17 years; it airs April 13, 2025.
• November 7, 2025: Henley is denied parole.
• October 26, 2026: The Valparaiso Court of Appeals revokes Bustamante’s 1996 conviction as time-barred.