Chester Turner： The Descent Of A Quiet Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Chester Turner： The Descent Of A Quiet Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Speaker 1: As an unknown killer, Chester Turner was assigned the moniker

of the South Side Slayer. In just over a decade,

Turner killed at least fourteen women and may have murdered

many more.

Speaker 2: Had he not been caught, he absolutely would have continued this.

He had a particular victim typology that he pursued. He

had an area a geography that he was very familiar

with and that he was very experienced in. He would

have continued to be a killing machine.

Speaker 1: So what drove Turner to commit such acts of depravity

on women who lived in his own community.

Speaker 3: However Chester Turner may have suffered in his own life,

it provides no excuse for what he did to these women,

murdering them in their most vulnerable positions and impossible circumstances.

Speaker 1: Psychological criminologist and former FBI agent doctor Brianna Fox is

trying to discover why Chester Turner was able to commit

so many crimes unchecked.

Speaker 4: My work isn't just academic. I've been in the field

and sat across from serial killers. I've tried to apply

my experiences to work out just how these seemingly normal

people become the monsters that they turned out to be.

Speaker 1: What were the red flags on his descent to murder?

And could police have caught the man who would become

known as the South Side Slayer earlier.

Speaker 4: I'm doctor Brianna Fox, and this is the Scent of

a serial killer.

Speaker 1: Doctor Breonna Fox will be using her unrivaled expertise and

research to examine the case of Chester Turner, a rapist

and serial killer who was killing women in the nineteen

eighties and nineties.

Speaker 4: Chester Turner is a prolific murderer who's an excellent case

to study for descent of a serial killer. Alongside my

fellow experts, we'll be investigating the red flags which appeared

throughout his life. To get an accurate understanding of what

these were, we have to start at the beginning. Chester

Turner was born in nineteen sixty six in Warren, Arkansas.

Speaker 5: Chester Turner grew up in Warren, Arkansas. Nice little house,

mother and father, lots of domestic violence. Okay, so here's

little Chester, five six years old watching dad beat up

mom every day. What does this teach him?

Speaker 6: So, when you're very young and you look at how

your father deals with your mother and how he controls

his wife through violence and threats, this is the framework

you're growing up with as a young child. You see

that this for you is what's normal. This is how

men treat women.

Speaker 5: Chester's mother gets the courage to leave the abusive husband.

They pack up little Chester, his mom and out to

California they go. But where do they go in California?

They move into South Central, which is at the time

a very violent, very crime ridden area.

Speaker 6: It's lower economic area, it's south of downtown Los Angeles.

It's not a safe place, and you just have to

be cautious even when you come up to a red light.

Speaker 5: So they move to the six hundred block of Century

Boulevard in South Central, which within South Central itself.

Speaker 7: Is beyond tough.

Speaker 5: Okay, So this kid basically walks out of his home

every day into a war zone.

Speaker 1: Turner's mother was so worried about the crime he was

around she sent him back to Arkansas.

Speaker 7: For a while.

Speaker 5: Chester moved in with his father, who had remarried. So

Chester now has a step mom and step siblings. And

according to reports, the step mom beat little Chester and

she allowed her kids to beat on him. And here's

the thing, Chester was not allowed to fight back.

Speaker 1: Turner moves back to la to live with his mother. However,

the disruption to his schooling will only continue.

Speaker 2: Turner had been a pretty poor student and had had

a lot of challenges academically growing up.

Speaker 5: As Chester moves into high school and even in junior high,

he's bullied by all of these kids because why because

he's not from there?

Speaker 7: Okay, he's from.

Speaker 5: Arkansas, and that's immediately noticeable. Okay, And he tries to

fight back, but it's just too much, there's too many kids.

What does he start doing? Of course, he blends right in.

He starts to do drugs. He starts to drink. In

a developing adolescent brain, using drugs on a regular basis

is going to cause a lot of issues. And if

you are, if you are on drugs, then your inhibitions

can be low and your risk taking will be elevated.

And what does Chester's mother now start doing to him, Well,

she starts treating him like he doesn't exist. She locks

him out of the house until she gets home, right,

she keeps food from him until she feels like feeding him.

Speaker 7: So what is she doing now?

Speaker 5: She's abusing him, but she's abusing him psychologically. He's descending

down a slippery slope of internalizing all of the pain

and the rage he feels.

Speaker 4: This led Turner to develop several maladaptive coping strategies to

deal with the traumatic experiences in his childhood. For instance,

he began using drugs heavily as a form of self

medication and escapism. He also developed a me versus everyone mentality,

which caused him not to identify or empathize with others.

Speaker 1: As Turner became more involved in drugs and the criminal lifestyle,

his situation at home and his relationship with his mother

deteriorated further.

Speaker 2: As he got older. They began to have conflicts in

the home because of his activities in the community, including

drug use and some petty crime. She did have to

throw him out of her house, but eventually allowed him

to come back in. She stayed there for a few years,

just about halfway through his high school, but then she

decided that she'd be moving to Utah. This left Turner

alone and on his own.

Speaker 1: After his mother left, Turner dropped out of school when

he was fifteen.

Speaker 3: Before he dropped out, he had acquired a nickname among

his classmates as Chester the Molester, for grabbing female students

and inflicting his attentions upon them.

Speaker 5: Chester begins to start groping girls in school, grabbing at them. Okay,

and we're talking about a time when it was viewed differently, and.

Speaker 7: He wasn't reprimanded for it.

Speaker 5: Really, he has nobody at home and at the time

in school, teachers they might notice, but they're not going

to say anything.

Speaker 7: You know, this is South Central.

Speaker 5: There's a lot of trouble going on in that school

and Chester is just one more kid who's causing a

lot of mischief. This teaches him one that he can

commit crimes, he can do stuff to women, to girls,

and get away with it.

Speaker 6: So you see this proclivity for sexually assaulting even in

his early years, and of course this just continues.

Speaker 5: At sixteen years old, Chester has a growth spurt. He

grows into this enormous man who's a child in a

man's body now, and what does he do. He starts

fighting back, okay, and he stabs a kid, slices him

in the stomach.

Speaker 7: He's sixteen years old, but he doesn't get in trouble

for it.

Speaker 5: So as he's growing older, seventeen eighteen into an adult,

Chester gets into an altercation with a police officer and

During this altercation, he hurts the police dog, so he

gets an animal cruelty charged against them. Now he's fighting

with police, right, so this is all escalating.

Speaker 7: The violence factor is rising here.

Speaker 4: The tumultuous nature of Turner's childhood, accompanied with the psychological

trauma of being victimized by literally every parental figure in

his life, likely contributed to his attachment and abandonment issues.

Attachment disorder creates a cun tradiction in a person, making

them become possessive over their familial relationships, but also rejecting

and pushing away families and loved ones. In Turner's case,

the fact that his mother abandoned him would have only

reinforced his belief that relationships with other people were never going.

Speaker 3: To be stable.

Speaker 4: The sexual assault of his female peers earned him the

nickname Chester the Molester, and this reflects the internalization of

this belief and the fact that there was no retribution

for those acts. This enabled them to believe that he

could offend with impunity. By this point, Turner's mother has

abandoned him and he is living alone in an area

of rife with violence and crime, meaning it feels more

normalized to engage in antisocial and criminal behavior that he's

begun to commit. This eventually led Turner further into the

descent of crime and violence in his life.

Speaker 3: Los Angeles is a place that holds out a lot

of promise, but often that promise doesn't get fulfilled, and

that was the case with him as well. Found himself,

as so many people do, homeless, and gravitated toward downtown

Los Angeles, where there are homeless services and homeless shelters.

Speaker 2: He worked for a while as a cook in a restaurant,

but he was unable to maintain an ongoing residence. When

his mother moved to Utah, he was known to drift

through Los Angeles, mainly staying at homeless shelters in the area.

Speaker 5: Chester's on the street Now he's an adult. He's selling drugs.

He's mixing it up with gang members, sex workers, and

he gets into an altercation with some drug dealers one

day and one of them takes out a box cutter

and slashes him across the face, and the adrenaline Andy

is pumping so hard he doesn't even notice that he's

been cut. In fact, he's walking home and he thinks

he's sweating and he wipes.

Speaker 7: His face and his blood.

Speaker 5: Now this causes this scar right across his face that

he will carry on into his life.

Speaker 1: Turner's chaotic lifestyle reflect that the environment he was living in.

Speaker 2: It's the eighties, geographical and neighborhood areas were sharply defined.

There was very much a dividing line between communities where

we identified that this is a place that is predominantly

populated by Black Americans.

Speaker 3: Los Angeles in those days was in the grip of

a crack cocaine epidemic. And nowhere was it felt more

viciously than in South Los Angeles among the poor people

and the people of color, where this drug was trafficked mercilessly, relentlessly.

Speaker 6: It was a drug infested area, a lot of drug activity.

It really bordered on the South skid Row area. So

it was a high crime, high gang, high drug, high

violent area.

Speaker 3: The police were working over time because of the drug wars.

Because of the drug problems, you had gang wars accelerating

because turf was more valuable, drugs were more valuable. Some

of the saddest victims of the crack cocaine epidemic were

the young women who prostituted themselves. These young women were

so vulnerable because they were so deep in the throes

of their addiction that they didn't even bother asking for

money for sex. All they wanted was drugs. All they

wanted was crack cocaine, and that made them so vulnerable

to the worst kind of violence.

Speaker 1: Bodies of women assumed to be sex workers were starting

to be found.

Speaker 2: There were two things that were striking about how his

victims were found. They were partially clothed, rarely completely nude,

and then left in areas at the side of a street,

near the entrance of a doorway, an alley, a road.

Not all of the clothes were taken off. It indicates

that there was maybe a short amount of time in

which the beginning of the crime was started.

Speaker 6: If you look at the number of homicides that were

occurring in Los Angeles in that time frame, say about

a fifteen year timeframe eighty five to about ninety eight

ninety nine, the minimum number of homicides was about thirteen hundred,

which is a huge number, but that rose into in

the early nineties to about two thousand homicides a year.

That is a huge number of homicides to be handled

by an investigating agency.

Speaker 1: Los Angeles authorities put together an investigation group to try

and identify Fine, the person they believed was responsible for

most of the killings.

Speaker 5: The South Side Slayer Task Force was formed by the

Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff's Department because there

were so many unsolved murders of females in South central

during this era.

Speaker 6: At the time, they had about fifty members from both

departments working on this task force, you know, and their

face with really a very very difficult task because generally

you have a very high risk population that's being targeted.

Mostly these are outdoor crime scenes, which create lots of

problems forensically.

Speaker 5: But by nineteen eighty seven, it's down to like fifteen

to seventeen members because there are zero leads. With all

sorts of crime going on, drug dealing, nobody will talk

to you, so it makes it very difficult for investigations

like this. What you need in this really is a

DNA connection, and at that time DNA wasn't a thing.

Speaker 1: Law enforcement try to find similarities and patterns in the victimology.

Speaker 5: These bodies just start showing up in South central Los

Angeles with the same signature raped murdered, and what can

law enforcement do but collect rape kits and forensic evidence,

and this stuff just starts to get stored in labs

and passed around. But remember this is at a time

when you know DNA comparison was in its infancy, so

law enforcement was smart enough to know that sooner or

later science is going to catch up to this killer.

Speaker 6: In March nineteen eighty seven, Diane Johnson, aged twenty one,

is found strangled, partially nude, sexually assaulted in a construction

area off the one ten Freeway. In October nineteen eighty seven,

a Nette Ernest was found strangled, sexually assaulted, partially nude

on the shoulder of a road. In nineteen eighty nine,

Anita Barrera, thirty one years old, was found strangled, sexually assaulted,

partially nude outside of a garage off FIGAROA Street. Regina

Washington strangled, sexually assaulted, and partially nude in a garage

off FIGAROA Street. She was six months pregnant.

Speaker 1: While police were investigating the bodies of his victims, Turner

was coming to their attention for other crimes, including those

that were sexually motivated.

Speaker 5: In his twenties, Chester is living with a girlfriend, Felicia Collier,

and he's very violent, of course, towards her like Dad

was to mom.

Speaker 7: That's where he gets that. He beats her.

Speaker 5: In fact, one night he even rapes her. And she

reports one night that he comes into the house late

at night and he's got scratches all over him, okay,

and he writes it off as you know, I was working,

something happened.

Speaker 7: I got scratches, But that's not what it is.

Speaker 5: Chester Turner got into an altercation with one of his victims.

Speaker 3: He was arrested a half dozen times for nonviolent offenses,

which could be anything like you know, smoking, sitting on

the sidewalk, doing things that homeless people will do in

this area of town and which are against the law.

Speaker 5: As we look at Chester Turner's descent, and this happens

with a lot of serial killers. You know, they start

to do things without even thinking about it because they

can't help themselves. And in this case, in nineteen ninety one,

he's arrested for leut conduct. He masturbates in front of

a crossing guard. He goes to jail, and within hours

of getting out of jail, he exposes himself to somebody else.

Speaker 4: Dealing drugs and living in a high crime area will

just reinforce to him. Then no one will set boundaries

that he must live within, and moving frequently throughout the

city will only allow him to continue on his crimes

free with low risk of detection.

Speaker 1: Once released from jail, Turner continued to murder unsuspected by police.

Speaker 6: Andrea Triplett was found partially dude, strangled and sexually assaulted

off Figaroa Street. Desiree Jones was found strangled, partially nude,

sexually assaulted off Figaroa Street in nineteen ninety five. Natalie Price,

thirty one years old, was found partially nude, strangled and

sexually assaulted. In November of nineteen ninety six, Mildred Beasley,

forty five years old, was found partially nude, strangled, sexually

assaulted in a lot off Figaroa Street.

Speaker 1: Police realized they had a serial killer on their streets.

Who's mo O fitted a particular pattern, geographic location and

victim type.

Speaker 5: And here's Chester Turner right in the mix of all

of this. And of course the task force doesn't know

it's him. Nobody knows it's him. He is stealthily moving

about the South Central area murdering at will.

Speaker 8: All of the victims were African American, with a range

of ages between early to mid twenties to early forties.

Most of the murders happened along the Figaroa Corridor in

Los Angeles or adjacent to the Figaroa Corridor. Strangulation as

a cause of death for their victims that it's a

very upclose personal type of killing where you're actually looking

into somebody's eyes. And the amount of time that it

takes to cause death with the constant pressure to cut

off all air supply and blood supply to the brain

is generally much longer than people would think. It can

be several minutes with constant pressure.

Speaker 6: Looking at strangulation homicides, there are several indesia that you're

always looking at or indicators. One is fingernail marks and

bruising that occurs on the neck. You see it in

the strap muscles of the neck. You also have as

you're squeezing the neck, you're essentially what you're doing is

you're not really including the breathing process because the trachy

is pretty is very solid structure. What you're doing is

occluding the carotid arteries with pressure and so you're preventing

blood from going to the brain. So blood flows in,

but it can't flow out, and then you get what

we call particual hemorrhaging. So the pressure, the increased pressure

in the brain causes these micro blood vessels, typically in

the eyes, the whites of the eyes, or the eyelids,

or in the lips, to burst. So seeing particular hemorrhaging

is a very very common indicator of some form of strangulation.

Speaker 1: Turner continued to sexually assault and murder women with growing carelessness.

That gave police clues to his identity.

Speaker 5: So in February third, nineteen ninety eight, there's a break

in these South Central slangs. One of the murders is

actually caught on CCTV. A woman, paul A Dvance. She's

grabbed by the neck, forced to the ground, brutally.

Speaker 7: Raped and then murdered. And you can see it on

the video.

Speaker 5: But the problem is it's dark, it's grainy, so you

can't make out a face. But the one telltale sign

here is that the perpetrator is a huge man, a big,

big guy.

Speaker 8: A very grainy videotape where you couldn't make him out.

You could only see that he was a very large man,

but you could make out what was happening based on

once the crime scene was discovered.

Speaker 7: He attacked her.

Speaker 8: He threw her to the ground, he sexually assaulted her,

strangled her to death, and walked away.

Speaker 6: Paul Avance, twenty four years old, was found behind an

abandoned business. In April nineteen ninety eight, Brenda Breis, thirty

nine years old, was found strangled just outside the area

where Turner was operating near Little Tokyo. Her body was

found partially nude, sexually assaulted, and strangled in an apportable outhouse.

Speaker 1: Despite the number of victims, law enforcement have yet to

connect any of these murders to Turner.

Speaker 9: In Chester Turner's case, you've got rape and you've got murder.

There's no indicators that he was torturing these women. It

just appears that he's killing them after he's done raping them,

maybe for the simple reason of just not leaving behind

somebody that is a witness to the crime.

Speaker 3: It was very difficult to solve any of these murders

because of the prostitution that was going on.

Speaker 7: You didn't know who they were with when they were

with them.

Speaker 3: The anonymity of that work to protect themselves from law

enforcement was the goal in order not to be arrested

as they were working, but that at the same time

made them vulnerable and made it that much harder to

solve their murders. Sometimes even the families of these young

women didn't know where they were or what they were doing.

Speaker 2: Those victims may have come in contact with a number

of people throughout their day. By the time their bodies

are found, police are now challenged with narrowing down which

one of those numerous people could have been the killer.

Speaker 4: Turner is increasingly showing a preference for power and control

by the types of vulnerable victims that he preys upon

and the manner in which he killed them. Strangulation is

a very violent and personal way to conduct murder, and

that was the way he chose as a way of

showing his dominance and taking his anger out on these victims. However,

he was still able to evade police entirely. At this time,

police were only taking samples of DNA from RESCI suspected

of committing aggravated sexual assaults and violent crimes, which Turner

has not yet been arrested for. Despite the red flags

along Turner's descent. Police only know him in the context

of the lesser crimes, which they were not reviewing, and

have not yet to suspect him of murder. However, Turner's

prolific criminal activities are about to be stopped in their

tracks when he commits a crime with a significant change

in his mL.

Speaker 1: Police reach a crucial turning point on March sixteenth, two

thousand and two. In the string of unsolved murders.

Speaker 5: Chester Turner knew a woman named Maria Martinez, and he

met Maria at one of the missions, homeless Shelter If

you Will, and they knew each other.

Speaker 3: Maria Martinez was staying in a shelter forty seven years

old when Chester Turner asked her for a cigarette and

a light.

Speaker 7: He pulled her behind a dumpster and raped her.

Speaker 3: Attacked her on an assault that went on for a

couple of hours.

Speaker 5: And instead of like the other women, killing Maria, he

allows her to live.

Speaker 7: Why does he do this. He does this because he.

Speaker 5: Knows her, and he threatens her if you go to

the police, I will come back and I will kill you.

But that's his mistake right there, because what does she do?

She goes to the police.

Speaker 6: And she said, look, I did not give him permission

to have sex with me. He forced himself on me,

he rate me for two hours, and I want to

prosecute him. And this was really the beginning of the

downfall for Chester Turner.

Speaker 5: Maria Martinez goes to the hospital, they do a rape

kit on her. Okay, so they get evidence and they

run the DNA and this links Chester Turner directly to

that rape of Maria Martinez. Once they realize it's Chester Turner,

they go out looking for him and they know where

to look, so they go to this mission that he

frequents and there they find him, fully clothed, hiding inside

of a shower.

Speaker 6: Turner was convicted of the rape of Maria Martinez and

he was sentenced to eight years in prison. And because

they were able to recover the DNA, this started the

chain of actually identifying Turner in essentially an eleven year

string of sexual murders.

Speaker 9: Chester Turner was already locked up and they were running

his DNA, you know, against unsolved cases where there was

DNA evidence. You had homicide investigators das that embraced this technology,

and as more data was input into the system from

offenders that were locked up. You know, you had cold

case units developing that all they would do is try

and match up, you know, DNA from their unsolved cases

to people that were in the database. And that's when

chester Turner was caught.

Speaker 5: Pop his DNA into CODIS the National Data Bank and

look like a It's like a slot machine hitting three

sevens because they get one hit after the next. On

chester Turner murders and rapes, he begins to be connected

to the South Central slangs.

Speaker 7: He is a serial killer.

Speaker 5: So one of the first murders he gets connected to

is forty five year old Mildred Beasley, who was murdered

and left behind.

Speaker 7: A dumpster in South Central.

Speaker 5: Then they go to this murder of Paula Vance, which

is caught on CCTV, and they match the DNA to

chester Turner. And then when they look at chester Turner

and they look at this video, it's a perfect match.

Speaker 7: He's the same sized man.

Speaker 5: So not only do they have his DNA for that one,

but they have him on videotape. Law enforcement begins to

focus on a string of murders with the same m O,

the same signature.

Speaker 9: Chester Turner was all over the news. We've got a

guy locked up who now we can get justice for

these victims that to date had been unsolved.

Speaker 5: And Chester Turner's DNA is found on eight additional victims

of murder between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 4: Well, it may seem surprising that Turner changed his mo

is in fact very common for a serial killer to

become so arrogant and so overly confident that he genuinely

believed that this woman should fear and respect him so

much that he would just let her go once the

police understood the severity of his crime. Ann had Turner's

there are careful collections of DNA from the bodies of

previous crime scenes will now finally identify Chester Turner as

the killer.

Speaker 8: I don't know that a lot of people realize the

amount of resources that are required to put these kinds

of cases together. I mean, again, you're not just talking

about one crime scene, You're talking about multiple crime scenes.

That's already one issue. Then you're talking about a cold case,

and cold cases have their own set of issues. Being

able to find documentation, a complete set of documentation, trying

to find chain of custody documentation to follow the evidence

from the sexual assault kits that are collected by corner

criminalists that are booked into evidence at the coroner's office,

and on some of these cases, we've had up to

three or four crime labs involved. Then you have to

track down the analysts, who many of which no longer

work at those crime labs. Then you got to comb

through the details of all of these reports, whether it's

the crime scene reports or background on your victim or

the defendant's criminal history. By digging into their criminal histories,

sometimes were able to develop information that will lead to

another piece of evidence or connection to the victims to

support the DNA.

Speaker 1: Chester Turner's case finally goes to court in two thousand

and seven. Here he displays some unusual behavior for a

man facing a possible death sentence.

Speaker 3: People who were there said he acted pretty cocky for

someone who was on trial for multiple murders, on trial

for his life, and that he laughed and seemed rather

at ease with what was going on in the courtroom,

and at one point, as he was being moved out

of the courtroom, he mouthed something, and some witnesses said

that what he did say as he moved his lips

was I'll be back, as if facing so many sentences

for so many crimes, he even thought that he would

have a chance of getting out on the street again.

Speaker 1: Police and prosecutors have built a strong case against Turner

using the DNA evidence and the CCTV tapes.

Speaker 5: In Chester Turner's trial, what the prosecution did was they

used Paula Vance's murder because it was on tape as

kind of the blueprint for what Chester Turner was doing

to scores of other women.

Speaker 6: The Paula Vance tape really helps solidify that it's clearly

not consensual when you match the mo or modus operendi

in the paul Advance case with the other aspects of

them in that all of these women are really found

in a fairly small geographic area. They're all black females,

they're all street people, they're all roughly about the same

age that is their peerage members for Turner. They're all strangled,

and they're all basically partially clothed. They're all outdoor crime scenes.

So when you look at the Paula Van's case, all

of these aspects are in play, and they match up

with all of the previous homicides.

Speaker 9: I've been involved in trials with serial killers where they

try and say I had sex with her, but it

was consensual. It was probably some other guy, you know,

she was having sex with, which is what the serial

killer capitalizes upon. He knows he's choosing somebody that has

issues because of their lifestyle, and it's a way that

he opportunistically uses later on to try to diminish his

responsibility and you know, cast the blame elsewhere. So the

game in this trial is to say, well, it was

consensual sex, it was somebody else, because you found evidence

that there were other people that had had sex with

her as well, you know, using the victim's desperate lifestyle

against her to try to clear his own name. When

the jury hears, wait a minute, your DNA was not

found in just one, two, or three or more, but

all these victims you just happen to have the misfortune

of having sex with all the same victims that the

unidentified subject had sex with. They're not going to believe that.

But that's what the strategy typically is, and that's what

it was in this case.

Speaker 1: July two thousand and seven. Using the DNA evidence, Chester

Turner is convicted and is sentenced to death.

Speaker 4: Chester. Turner was ultimately convicted and given a death sentence

for the murders of ten women and one child. It

was his arrogance that finally led him to be connected

with the DNA from the other murder victims, but Maria's

bravery and coming forward ultimately crack the case.

Speaker 6: Now, the great thing that they did was they didn't

just look at unsolved homicide cases. They looked at all

these cases and they go back and they find a guy,

David Jones, who'd been arrested for three of these cases.

And they go back and look at the cases and

they go, well, you know, David Jones was a mentally

challenged janitor who lived in the area, who admitted that

he had smoked drugs with these various victims of homicide.

He had a prior rape conviction. So for the police,

this made a lot of sense, and he was convicted

on the three homicides, but there wasn't really the forensic

DNA evidence. So they went back and they tested these

cases and they were like, oh my gosh, the DNA

in these cases actually matches Turner. And if you look

at the mo in those three in those four homicide cases,

it's the same mo that Turner has.

Speaker 5: Turner is linked to David Allen Jones's murders, and Jones

is what he's let out of prison files a wrongful

conviction lawsuit against the state. I mean, the guy had

been in prison on a separate rape charge that he

was convicted of, but he's still awarded seven hundred and

fifty thousand dollars for being wrongly convicted.

Speaker 6: In two thousand and four, with further DNA analysis, Chester

Turner is linked to four additional homicides Alandra Bunn, Mary Edwards,

Deborah Williams, and Cynthia Johnson.

Speaker 1: Turner is convicted again and receives a second death sentence

in twenty fourteen for the four additional murders, facing life

and death behind bars. Turner never admitted to his killings,

offering no apology or remorse towards his victims and their families.

Speaker 8: There could be additional murders, however, unless there is evidence,

some type of forensic evidence such as DNA that is

uploaded into the DNA database which then would result in

case to case hits, we wouldn't know about it. Think

at this point, I've been presented a few years ago

with one additional murder, and I don't know if the

detectives are working to see if they can uncover others

that might be also unsolved homicides, but I know of

at least one in this case.

Speaker 1: What were the red flags in Turner's life that should

have been picked up as warning signs of what was

to come?

Speaker 4: There are a number of major red flags exhibited in

Turner's life to date. He was sexually aggressive towards women

from a young age. He had difficulty assimilating the society.

He was unable to hold onto a job or settle

into a home. He also consistently reoffended from early age

through adulthood and displayed a lack of self control throughout

his life.

Speaker 6: This whole dynamic of treating women as property, as something

that you can threaten to get what you want had

been going on since his mid to early adolescens and

just accelerated to his first homicide that were aware of

at age twenty or twenty one.

Speaker 3: However Chester Turner may have suffered in his own life,

it provides no excuse for what he did to these women,

murdering them in their most vulnerable positions and impossible circumstances.

Speaker 1: Could police have caught the South Side Slayer earlier.

Speaker 4: Police were aware of the South Side Slayer and his

prolific victim pool and many of his crimes committed against

black victims who were given less attention by the police force.

Because he was committing his crimes in an area with

the transient population and epidemic levels of crime, it was

incredibly difficult for the police to stop him. They were

aware of Chester Turner as a perpetrator of other sexually

motivated crimes and would have been able to tie him

into the crimes far sooner if DNA had developed quicker.

Speaker 6: Chester Turner's early criminal career didn't involve violent crime. Most

of it was thefts, auto theft, larcenies, drug crimes, summon

decent exposure, parole violations. He starts his violent criminal career

of murder in nineteen eighty seven and it continues for

eleven years through nineteen ninety eight. But I don't think

there's really any red flags that we can find in

that early career that would lead police to think when

he'd been arrested that this could be their guy.

Speaker 5: Remember, this is at a time when you know DNA

comparison was in its infancy, so law enforcement was smart

enough to know that sooner or later, science is going

to catch up to this killer, and sure enough it did.

Speaker 1: With the red flags have brought Turner to the attention

of authorities, and would he have been caught earlier if

he was perpetrating his crimes now.

Speaker 4: The behavior he exhibited towards classmates, earning him the nickname

Chester the Molester, would now be taken far more seriously.

If Turner's DNA was submitted to CODIS when he was

arrested for lude behavior in nineteen ninety one. In nineteen

ninety two, this would have been able to link him

to the crimes much sooner and prevented future murders. However,

it was not the law to submit DNA from minor

sexual offenses at that time, although it is the law

to do so today.

Speaker 2: One of the things that is significant about Turner is

that had he not been caught, he absolutely would have

continued this. He had a particular victim typology that he

pursued dude, He had an area a geography that he

was very familiar with and that he was very experienced in.

He would have continued to be a killing machine.

Speaker 4: It is this lack of empathy and acknowledgment of the

fourteen women Turner brutally murdered that leads me to believe

the Turner would have continued murdering innocent women having not

been caught by learning vulnerable victims with the promise of drugs,

carrying out sexual assaults, and then murdering them by strangulation

and disregarding bodies as if they were trash all shows

a lack of remorse and empathy. This combination is extremely

dangerous and likely would have continued had Turner not been

incapacitated by arrest.