Serial Killer Documentary - John Eric Armstrong
Serial Killer Documentary - John Eric Armstrong
Speaker 1: In the summer of 1999, 26-year-old John Eric Armstrong was
honorably discharged from the U.S.
Speaker 2: Navy.
Speaker 1: He settled in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, with his wife and
their new baby.
Speaker 3: He was a nice neighbor, a good friend, a good father, apparently,
according to his neighbors.
Speaker 1: But Armstrong wasn't the loving family man that people believed.
Speaker 2: Him to be.
Speaker 4: Armstrong was, in my humble opinion, the personification of evil.
Speaker 1: Armstrong was using the services of sex workers, many of
whom he then brutally murdered.
Speaker 5: He's killed multiple women. It was natural to him.
Speaker 6: Only person that that type of lifestyle that could be
natural to is a monster.
Speaker 1: As more details emerged, police realized that these murders went
far beyond their local area.
Speaker 7: You're talking Singapore, Hong Kong, and all these exotic locales
that his boat traveled to while he was.
Speaker 8: In the Navy.
Speaker 9: He's going to be one of the most prolific, well-traveled
serial killers in history.
Speaker 1: John Eric Armstrong had gone global and been unveiled as
one of the world's most evil killers. On April the 10th, 2000,
in Detroit, Michigan, police were alerted to an alarming discovery.
The bodies of three sex workers had been found near
some railway tracks in varying states of decomposition.
Speaker 2: This was the work of a serial killer.
Speaker 4: He didn't try and conceal his crimes. He just discarded
the bodies, didn't try and hide them. He just came
back to visit and abuse. and then move on to
the next murder and dispose of that one and roll
it downhill and find another one.
Speaker 1: With no leads, the police were under pressure to find
the unknown killer before he could strike again. Then a
chance traffic stop and subsequent arrest of 26-year-old John Eric
Armstrong led to more revelations than they could ever have expected.
Speaker 7: In the patrol car, one of the patrolmen could hear
Armstrong in the back muttering something under his breath. I'm
glad it's over. I'm glad you guys got me.
Speaker 1: This killer's story begins on the southeastern coast of America.
John Eric Armstrong was born on November the 23rd, 1973.
Speaker 7: Armstrong was born and raised in New Bern, North Carolina.
and by all accounts had a very normal upbringing, very
normal childhood.
Speaker 3: I think the most important point in his early life
was the death of a younger brother, Michael, who died
of sudden infant death syndrome at barely two months old.
And this had an impact on the young John Eric Armstrong.
Speaker 10: Armstrong was five years old at the time, and at
five years old, I'm not sure that children fully understand
the concept of death and dying and perhaps how permanent
it is. So it's quite possible that it impacted him
in a way that made him feel completely powerless.
Speaker 7: He was so distraught over that, that he deliberately rode
his bicycle out in traffic, almost like, you know, with
the intention of joining his baby brother.
Speaker 1: The loss of the baby had a major impact on
Armstrong's parents.
Speaker 7: Shortly after his baby brother Mikey died in the crib,
his biological father left the family.
Speaker 1: After his father left, young Armstrong stayed in the family
home with his mother. Towards the end of the 1970s,
Armstrong started school, and his classmates saw nothing unusual about him.
Speaker 7: The people who went to school with him, for instance,
his fellow students, they saw him as just a normal kid.
He was a little quiet. He seemed pretty meek. One
person described him as aloof, but really nothing unusual about
his childhood, nothing that would make someone ill at ease.
Speaker 9: Armstrong felt that he was kind of an underachiever and
being bullied, and a lot of this behavior impacted him psychologically.
Speaker 10: We've got somebody whose whole identity is being formed around
this victimhood, this powerlessness, this, the world is against me.
And I think that internal anger, rage, revenge is more
what drove him as he went into adulthood.
Speaker 3: There was a strange incident in his life. At school,
he said, one of his classmates, a girl, was trying
to persuade him to have sex with her, and he
didn't want to.
Speaker 7: And he locked himself into a bathroom and threatened to
kill himself.
Speaker 11: This led to a month-long stay in a mental health facility.
Speaker 7: So he obviously had issues with sex.
Speaker 10: A simple pressure for sex is not going to put
you into psychiatric care.
Speaker 3: There's a lot more going on here.
Speaker 9: At the age of 16, Armstrong felt that he was
still dealing with the negative impact of his brother's death,
and so he went for additional psychiatric counseling.
Speaker 10: To seek psychiatric care at age 16, when he's just
had care for another incident, this is somebody who's really,
really struggling to function in the world.
Speaker 1: By his late teens, despite his problems, Armstrong had managed
to start a relationship with a girl. But when his
high school sweetheart left him for another boy, Armstrong was devastated,
especially when he saw his love rival shower his ex-girlfriend
with gifts.
Speaker 9: Armstrong interpreted this as her prostituting herself for her affections
in exchange for these gifts that this other new suitor
was providing her.
Speaker 10: This guy sees women, sex, relationships, transactional. And even he
said that this.
Speaker 3: Was like she was a prostitute.
Speaker 10: What an awful way to see relationships.
Speaker 1: In April 1992, when Armstrong was 18 years old, he
signed up with the U.S. Navy.
Speaker 10: He joined the military, which is, I don't think, an
unusual thing for somebody like him who feels, you know,
like he needs to be in a big gang because
he feels like the world's against him and he needs
control and he needs power.
Speaker 1: Armstrong was assigned to the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, then
the largest sailing vessel in the world.
Speaker 11: Life aboard the Nimitz, it would be pretty exciting.
Speaker 9: It can go anywhere in the world, and often did,
and Armstrong would have enjoyed that life.
Speaker 7: He worked in the barbershop, it was said, and then
he had one or two other jobs on the boat.
And he had a good record, by all accounts, aboard
the boat. Nothing really stood out.
Speaker 3: At one point, he was nicknamed Babydoll. He had this
very childlike face, this very innocent approach. which didn't really
make him look like a grown-up man at all.
Speaker 1: Despite his youthful features, Armstrong was over six foot tall
with a large build. It was while aboard the USS
Nimitz that Armstrong met the woman he would go on
to marry. After both being honorably discharged in 1999, the
couple moved to Michigan to start their married life and
raise their first child.
Speaker 7: And so they settled into a city in Metro Detroit,
on the west side of Metro Detroit, called Dearborn Heights,
and they lived with her parents for a while.
Speaker 1: Armstrong started working for a chain of retail stores, then
later as a security guard, and then refueling airplanes at
Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
Speaker 9: It seems like Armstrong may not have been able to
find his way, at least vocationally, in a career.
Speaker 1: Those around Armstrong just saw him as any other guy
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: One lady said, I used to get a ride home
with him or a ride to work, and she said
he was just the nicest guy.
Speaker 3: He was a nice neighbor, a good friend, a good father, apparently,
according to his neighbors. and yet he had this completely
other side, this classic Jekyll and Hyde approach, particularly to women.
Speaker 9: Beyond this normal life appeared to be a facade, and
behind that facade, Armstrong was going out and engaging in
activity like having sex on a regular basis with sex workers.
Speaker 10: He has got a bad attitude, misogynistic attitude towards women,
so I think we can kind of see where it's
coming from with him.
Speaker 1: John Eric Armstrong wasn't the loving family man he was
portraying to those around him. He was living a double
life filled with dark secrets, one that would soon be exposed.
Armstrong's preferred haunt for picking up sex workers was in
downtown Detroit, around 10 miles from his family home.
Speaker 7: Unfortunately, prostitution has always thrived in Detroit, and the area
of Michigan Avenue has always been a hot spot for prostitution.
Speaker 1: Kyle James Casares was a child when his mom, Kelly
Jean Hood, began working on the streets in the 1990s.
Kelly started taking drugs following the death of her father
and was trying to fund her addiction through sex work.
Speaker 6: She was actually very close to my grandfather, and when
he passed away, she couldn't deal with the pain.
Speaker 5: My mom, before the drugs.
Speaker 6: And even after the drugs, was one of the most
kind-hearted person you could ever meet. We were her world.
She made sure we had a good childhood. best she could,
giving her what she could.
Speaker 9: It's, you know, a very common motivation of sex workers
is to engage in prostitution to raise money to support
their drug habit.
Speaker 1: Despite his young age, Kyle worked out how his mom
was earning the money to pay for her addiction.
Speaker 6: I was with her all the time and I knew
the people she hung out with and I would just
see them around the neighborhood and what they were doing,
and I just connected the dots. I was worried, but
it was nothing I couldn't do. She was a grown woman,
and she was my mother. I felt like I needed
to protect her all the time.
Speaker 1: Kelly Jean Hood was one of many women selling sex
in the Detroit area at the time. Natasha Olenichak was
also working in the same area.
Speaker 12: I wasn't in the streets for the drugs. I was
in the streets for money, fast money. seeing nice cars, clothes,
mink coats, stuff like that.
Speaker 8: And I don't know, I just fell in the trap.
Speaker 12: I always had jobs and everything.
Speaker 8: I just wanted to do something to get quicker money,
and I did.
Speaker 1: The nature of the industry means that sex workers often
operate in secluded and dark areas, making them extremely vulnerable
to predators.
Speaker 10: Sex workers are... at a huge risk of serious harm
and homicide. I mean, mainly because of their accessibility. Sex
workers are easy to get into a place on your own,
no questions asked.
Speaker 7: And because they want the money, they'll go with you
to a dark place where no one else is around.
It is a very risky business. They're living a very
high-risk life.
Speaker 1: One night in August 1999, Natasha was working a shift
on the usual streets. Unbeknown to the sex workers in
the area, there was a deadly predator on the loose,
and he was out that night looking for his next victim.
Speaker 8: I was on 8 Mile Road.
Speaker 12: He was in a Jeep, and he circled one time,
then he circled again.
Speaker 8: He pulled up.
Speaker 12: And he asked me for a date, and I said, yeah.
Then I got in the truck. He was big. He
was bald-headed at the time. He was tall. He wore glasses. Yep,
and he was a big guy.
Speaker 9: He wasn't little.
Speaker 12: I didn't feel uncomfortable with him or anything, you know?
Speaker 8: I wasn't nervous or nothing.
Speaker 1: Natasha was staying in a motel room close to the
red light area.
Speaker 2: So the pair headed there.
Speaker 7: He got inside the room and he just was feeling uneasy.
He asked to use the bathroom. He used the bathroom.
He came out and he said, I just don't really
feel right.
Speaker 3: I got to leave.
Speaker 11: And he leaves.
Speaker 9: She goes into her room. A little while later, there's
a knock on her door. She opens the door. It's
that guy.
Speaker 12: I should've never opened the door. I should've just said,
never mind. But I didn't think he was gonna come back.
Speaker 1: Opening the door to let the client back in turned
out to be a decision that Natasha would soon regret.
Speaker 12: He came in, then that's when he slammed my door,
and he was like, don't scream, don't yell, because that's when.
Speaker 8: He had the knife, them sharp, big ones.
Speaker 12: And I was like, oh, my God, you can have
all my money, whatever, my whatever.
Speaker 1: But the attacker wasn't interested in taking Natasha's money.
Speaker 2: He wanted to take her life.
Speaker 12: He said he was going to kill me. And I
was like, don't kill me. I got kids. He came
in with his knife at me. My neck, my eyes,
my toes, my fingers.
Speaker 8: He had just blood everywhere because he cut me. Then
I was on the bed, like, laying down.
Speaker 12: He had his body on me, and then he grabbed
the telephone cord and wrapped it around my neck like
five times and was like choking.
Speaker 1: The asphyxiation caused Natasha to pass out. When she regained consciousness,
her attacker was gone.
Speaker 12: I went out to the, ran out of the motel
room and said, I need help, I need help. I
was almost, this guy just tried to kill me and
And that's when the police came.
Speaker 1: The police interviewed Natasha, but her description of the attacker
wasn't enough on its own.
Speaker 9: It's very difficult for the police to follow up on
any kind of attack like this because there's so little
to go on about who this person is.
Speaker 8: And after that happened, I said, I got to get
out of this.
Speaker 12: I had to get counseling and stuff because I got
diagnosed with PTSD.
Speaker 8: PTSD.
Speaker 1: Less than four months later, on December 2, 1999, another
woman was targeted. 31-year-old sex worker Monica Johnson was driven
to work on Michigan Avenue by her boyfriend. The couple
parked up on a side street just off the notorious
red light strip.
Speaker 9: And he stayed in his car while she walked down
Michigan Avenue to do some business, and that's the last
he ever.
Speaker 5: Saw of her.
Speaker 1: Monica had been picked up by a man on Michigan Avenue,
and they'd driven away from the area to have their
sexual encounter.
Speaker 7: And it was just a short little kind of secluded area,
a short little service drive, and they parked along there
near an alley, and they carried out a transaction.
Speaker 1: But then things took a dark turn when the man
Monica was with attacked and strangled her. A passerby found
her still alive hours later and called for an ambulance.
Speaker 7: And the ambulance came and they picked her up and
they took her to the hospital. But by the time
they got there, she had died.
Speaker 1: With no eyewitnesses or CCTV of the attack on Monica Johnson,
the police had no leads and very little to progress
their investigation. Nor had they identified any suspects for the
attacks on several other sex workers in Detroit in 1999.
Monica's killer was still on the loose in Detroit and
he could strike again at any moment.
Speaker 3: So when we get... into the beginning of 2000, the
turn of the millennium, he escalates really quite quickly. He
cannot give up the compulsion to have sex with sex
workers and kill.
Speaker 2: Them.
Speaker 1: 39-year-old Wendy Jordan was known to the police as a
sex worker in the red light area of Detroit. On
January the 1st, 2000, Wendy got into the car of
a man who wanted to pay for her services.
Speaker 7: He was on Warren Avenue in Detroit, and he picked
Wendy up, and he took her to this side street
that was right next to a funeral home, and they
parked in the parking lot of this funeral home. And
they proceeded with their transaction, and then he killed her,
and he drove with her in the Jeep a few
miles away. And he pulled over and dumped her over
a bridge into the Rouge River on Ann Arbor Trail.
And then he went home.
Speaker 1: Wendy's body had been left in Dearborn Heights, the home
of John Eric Armstrong and his family. Since leaving the
Army less than a year earlier and moving to the area,
Armstrong had changed jobs a number of times. On January
the 2nd, 2000, Armstrong set off for work at a
retail store.
Speaker 9: At some point in the morning, Armstrong reported feeling sick
and told his boss he had to leave work, at
which time he drove away.
Speaker 11: Apparently on his way home.
Speaker 5: Home.
Speaker 11: On his way home, Armstrong.
Speaker 9: Pulls over on the bridge over the Rouge River and
says he did that because he felt so ill he
was going to vomit over the bridge.
Speaker 2: Armstrong looked down at the River Rouge below.
Speaker 4: It's maybe, at that point, 50 yards wide. six, eight
feet deep at the most. And it runs for miles,
but there's not a real strong current.
Speaker 5: It was January and it was still frozen.
Speaker 7: And so he looks over the bridge and he sees
this woman.
Speaker 1: It was the body of Wendy Jordan who'd been left
there the previous day. Armstrong flagged down a passerby to
call the police.
Speaker 11: I'm on the Rouge River and there's a dead body
in the river.
Speaker 3: He phones them up and, of course, the body is discovered.
It is indeed Wendy Jordan.
Speaker 1: The police arrived at the scene and Armstrong told them
that he'd left work early because he was feeling ill
and had been driving home.
Speaker 3: But the police regarded, and I quite agree with them,
as most peculiar. He just happened to stop on the
bridge and he just happened to look over and he
just happened to see a body. Goodness me. I mean,
it almost defies belief, doesn't it, to be honest?
Speaker 1: Detectives wondered if there was more to the discovery than
Armstrong had told them. But if he was involved in
any way, why would he have alerted the police?
Speaker 10: He said he could see a body floating in the
river and it was all innocent.
Speaker 7: Why would he do that?
Speaker 10: This really, it seems like it would go against everything
that you think that he would do. You would think
that he would want to get away with it. You
think he'd want to stay under the radar.
Speaker 9: Based on the unusual nature of Armstrong being in that
place at that time, the police bring him down for
additional questioning to the police station, during which he maintains
that he has no connection to this person. He didn't
know who they are or why they were there. And
he stuck to his story that he felt sick and
left work.
Speaker 11: I leaned over to vomit.
Speaker 7: And then when I leaned over, my.
Speaker 5: Eye caught something.
Speaker 11: I looked over, and there she was.
Speaker 7: It seems unusual that you picked the exact spot that
would lead you to be looking over.
Speaker 10: The edge of where she was.
Speaker 11: Tell you right now, I wasn't with her.
Speaker 10: I never saw her.
Speaker 8: I'd never seen her.
Speaker 4: I'm going to be sorry.
Speaker 11: If I'm not knowing anything, I guess.
Speaker 7: Armstrong had placed himself directly into the murder inquiry, but
with no grounds.
Speaker 11: To detain him, police let him leave. His account of
what happened had raised their.
Speaker 7: Suspicions, and they decided to investigate Armstrong further. Dearborn Heights
had him pegged and they don't get a whole lot
of homicides like Detroit does. And so they dug into
this one and they hung on. They followed him around.
Speaker 9: They even asked to search his car, which he consented to.
So they did a forensic examination of his car, which
they do. Tape lifts of, they try to see if
there's fingerprints or DNA or blood inside the car.
Speaker 7: And one of the officers happened to notice in the
search of the Jeep that he saw what he believed
were little specks or residue that were gold in color
that matched the shoes that Wendy was wearing.
Speaker 3: Within the car, there was forensic evidence that Wendy Jordan
had been in it. which pointed even more conclusively to
the fact that he'd not only known her, had her
in the car, and thrown her out into the river.
Speaker 7: They got a warrant for his blood and saliva, and
they did DNA testing, and then they did DNA testing
from Wendy's body.
Speaker 1: Conclusive DNA evidence could give the police enough to link
Armstrong to the murder of Wendy Jordan, but this wouldn't
be a quick process.
Speaker 4: DNA really came onto the criminal investigation scene in the
late 80s.
Speaker 3: So it was relatively new.
Speaker 9: They didn't have the technology that we have today to
both get DNA and analyze even a good DNA sample.
Speaker 1: It could take months for the DNA results to come back.
The police would have to wait for those before they
could take any further action against Armstrong.
Speaker 4: And the prosecutor ordered him released until such time as
they had the results from the DNA lab.
Speaker 9: At this point, the police look at Armstrong, and he's
a former military service member who got out of the
service and got a decent job and settled with a
wife and family, and so his daily life doesn't seem
to indicate, you know, a killer.
Speaker 1: It would be an agonizing wait for investigators. Meanwhile, John
Eric Armstrong remained free to roam the streets of Detroit.
Three months after Wendy Jordan's body was discovered... 42-year-old Wilhelmina
Drain was on Michigan Avenue.
Speaker 7: She said she was trying to catch a bus home,
and she was an older lady.
Speaker 1: A vehicle pulled up alongside her, and the man driving
asked her if she needed a lift.
Speaker 7: And they start to travel along, and she instructs him
how to take her home, which was north of Michigan.
She lived like off Joy Road, and he traveled north.
But he didn't make the turn he was supposed to make,
and he turned somewhere else, and he pulled over, and
he reached for her.
Speaker 11: She sprays him with mace, and she's able to escape.
Speaker 1: Five days later, on April the 7th, 2000, sex worker
Devin Marcus survived an attack and reported the incident to
the police. Around the same time, another sex worker called
Cynthia was attacked by a man fitting the same description
as the other two incidents.
Speaker 3: He left her for dead, but in fact, she wasn't dead.
Speaker 11: She survived.
Speaker 1: The attacker was showing no signs of slowing down.
Speaker 7: We've got Wilhelmina, we've got Devin, we've got Cynthia, who
were attacked and survived, and he was escalating. He was
definitely escalating. I mean, once he kicked back into gear
in mid-March, he escalated. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 1: On April the 10th, 2000, the police received a phone call.
Somebody thought they saw a body on the side of
a railroad track as they were passing through.
Speaker 4: I was the commanding officer of the violent crime section
of the Detroit Police Department, composed of the Violent Crime
Task Force, the Fugitive Apprehension Team, and the Crime Analysis
Team of the Detroit Police Department. Every Monday morning, we
would have a briefing. While we were in that meeting,
the head of the Homicide Division got a message to
call the office.
Speaker 1: Jerry Cliff passed the news on to his colleague Del Christian,
a team leader on the Violent Crime Task Force.
Speaker 13: The commander from the Detroit Police Department came through and said, hey,
they found a body over by the railroad tracks.
Speaker 5: It's just a track that just goes through.
Speaker 13: It's a single track in that area that's used by
one of the passenger rails and also freight.
Speaker 5: And a passenger.
Speaker 13: on the train that looked out the window and saw
the body, told the conductor, I think I just saw
a body on the track, and the conductor contacted the
police department.
Speaker 1: Not long after this report came through to the police,
there was more news to follow.
Speaker 7: As they walk around the area, they discover a second body.
Speaker 4: And he came back and he said, there's two bodies
at the scene, and they're in different states of decomposition.
Speaker 7: They walk around further, and unfortunately, third body. And so
they realize, okay, this is very bad. These three females
were probably left here by the same person.
Speaker 1: With three dead bodies found in the same location, police
had to act fast to establish what had happened to
these women.
Speaker 4: There was one victim. She was lying 10 to 15
yards away from the tracks themselves. on grass and gravel,
but not concealed at all in brush or anything like that.
She had her pants down around her ankles. She had
her legs had been spread in a revealing manner, I
guess you would say. There was what appeared to be
tights of some sort wrapped around her neck. So you
could tell that she'd obviously been raped and strangled. As
we walked further down the street, It would have been north.
There was a lot of brush. And that's where the
second and the third bodies were found.
Speaker 7: The bodies weren't very well hidden.
Speaker 10: So this isn't somebody who's done what they've done and
they're leaving the scene. So we have to assume that
the killer knows these bodies will be found, wants them
to be found, in fact. They want to display what
they've done to the world.
Speaker 1: The victims all had ligature marks around their necks, showing
that they'd been strangled. Their bodies had also been posed
by their killer.
Speaker 10: I don't think that somebody who does that to women
has got great relationships with women. probably struggles in relationships
with them and feels an awful lot of resentment towards women.
I mean, the misogyny of it just is probably the
loudest message that you can get from something like that.
It's wanting to degrade and humiliate the victims.
Speaker 1: This was a man taking pleasure in killing and demeaning women.
Speaker 13: Once we realised, oh, we have a, what, what I
would call a dumping ground for the bodies.
Speaker 5: We knew we had a serial murderer.
Speaker 4: We mobilized pretty much everybody that we had. Didn't take
us long to realize that this guy was a very
prolific killer and that we needed to get him off
the street as soon as humanly possible before somebody else died.
Speaker 11: Now you have multiple victims.
Speaker 9: You have future victims that may happen unless you catch
this person because they're not going to stop killing until
you catch them.
Speaker 1: Over eight months in 1999 and 2000 a spate of
attacks and murders had happened in the detroit area of
michigan it was clear to police that a serial killer
was loose on the streets attacking and murdering women at
an increasing rate detectives knew they needed to act.
Speaker 9: Fast now this ups everything in the police mind the
investigation immediately takes on a different tenor.
Speaker 4: This is obviously a serial, because you could tell by
looking at the three bodies that they were in differing
states of decomposition, and it's going to be the only
case we're going to be dealing with for the next
few days until we get the bad guy.
Speaker 1: The race to catch the killer was on, but with
limited evidence and no leads, the investigators had little to
go on. They needed to identify the three women and
work out a possible connection between them in the hope
that it might lead the police to their killer.
Speaker 4: As we were able to identify the victims, we also
found out that there had been previous arrests for or
encounters with the law concerning prostitution and whatnot.
Speaker 3: One was called Robin Brown, also known as Nicole Young.
One was Rosemarie Felt, and the last was called Kelly Hood.
Speaker 1: For Kelly Hood's son, Kyle, his worst fears for his
mother had come true.
Speaker 5: I heard my grandmother coming up the stairs.
Speaker 6: And the first thing she told me before anybody, she said, Miko,
they found your mom.
Speaker 5: She's not here with us anymore. They found her. She's gone.
Then I knew then that she meant she was dead.
Speaker 4: She became addicted to drugs. The only way that she
could support herself after her family broke up was to
work the street. She didn't become addicted because she wanted to.
She wasn't working the street because she wanted to. She
was working the street to support a habit she had
no control over.
Speaker 1: Police had identified the victims were all sex workers, but
specialist help would be needed to track down their killer.
FBI profilers got to work on building a picture of
the offender.
Speaker 9: The profiler will come in and look at all the victims,
look at the victimology, what commonalities among these victims, among
the way they were posed. among the way they were killed,
and maybe even if you can figure out the way
they met the person that killed them.
Speaker 3: Looking at the crime, the FBI's behavioral science unit suggested
that the crimes had been committed by a white man,
comparatively young, 25 to 30.
Speaker 4: They told us, you're looking at his successes. You need
to look for a failure. And by that, they meant
somebody got away. And if we could find that somebody,
we would get a physical description, maybe a vehicle description,
so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: Having identified the women as sex workers, police knew they
needed to interview women in the red light area in
the hope of getting much needed information.
Speaker 13: Well, from two or three of the girls that were interviewed,
They mentioned that, yes, a guy tried to kill me.
Speaker 5: He was driving a Jeep.
Speaker 13: Another one said that he had a tiger tattoo on
his arm, that he was a white male with reddish hair.
Another one said he had a work shirt with the
name Eric on it.
Speaker 1: The reports all seem to point to the same offender.
Speaker 4: So we realized that the next thing that he would
do is find another victim.
Speaker 1: In the hope of stopping the killer in his tracks,
Detroit's Violent Crime Task Force set up covert surveillance on
Michigan Avenue and the surrounding streets.
Speaker 9: Now you have potentially a predator hunting victims through this area,
and you can't afford to miss that.
Speaker 4: We basically flooded the area with surveillance crews and detectives
in plain clothes, not business suits, but you know, jeans
and jackets and basically patrolled looking for someone fitting his description.
Speaker 1: They didn't want the killer to realize that the police
were onto him. Any suspicion they were looking for him
could scare the killer off and prevent him from being caught.
Speaker 9: So during this time in this area, an actual police,
marked uniform patrol car noticed a car with a guy in.
Speaker 11: It that might have matched the description of the profile.
Speaker 9: And so they do a routine car stop so they
can identify him, get his driver's license, get his date
of birth, run him through the system to see if
anybody's looking for him, who is this guy.
Speaker 1: The driver of the vehicle was John Eric Armstrong. Dearborn
Heights were waiting for DNA results to establish a link
to the murder of Wendy Jordan. But Armstrong was unknown
to the officers in neighboring Detroit.
Speaker 7: He said he was coming home from work. Well, his
work was in the other direction. He lived in Dearborn Heights.
He worked over in that direction. He was a long
way from home.
Speaker 1: Based on the matching description and Armstrong's story not adding up,
police arrested him for further questioning. But before they could
get to the station, there was a shock in store
for the officers.
Speaker 9: The officers that are driving him hear him muttering in
the back seat under his breath, and he's saying kind
of in a low voice, I'm just glad it's over.
Speaker 11: I'm glad you got me.
Speaker 4: He was taken straight down to the fifth floor police headquarters,
and that's when the interviews began.
Speaker 1: As the officers talked to Armstrong, one of them leaned
forward and put his hand on top of Armstrong's.
Speaker 5: He says, I just touched you.
Speaker 4: He says, I left my DNA on your body simply
by laying my hand on yours. And that's when they
began to explain to him, you know, if.
If you had anything to do with these murders and
you touched them in any way, we're going to be
able to tell. There is absolutely no way that you're
going to plead that you didn't touch them if we
get this DNA analysis that proves that you did.
Speaker 7: And all of a sudden, he just started, OK, I
did it, I did it, I did it. Then he
started making all of his confessions, and one right after another,
a lot of confessions for several hours.
Speaker 1: John Eric Armstrong confessed to the murders of the three
women found at the rail yard, Nicole Young, Rosemary Felt,
and Kelly Jean Hood.
Speaker 9: Also during this time and this confession, he confessed to
the murder of Wendy Jordan off the Rouge Bridge. He
knew that he was a suspect in that case, so
it was time to confess to that.
Speaker 1: But Armstrong's confessions... had only just begun.
Speaker 4: He actually went through a list of a number of
females that he had murdered while he was on the
USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in multiple foreign countries. Anytime he
was on shore leave, he would go ashore and quite
often he would find a prostitute and.
Speaker 5: Go through his routine, rape.
Speaker 4: Murder, and sometimes he would dispose of the bodies, and
sometimes he would just leave them.
Speaker 7: You're talking Singapore, you're talking Hong Kong, and all these
exotic locales that his boat traveled to while he was
in the Navy.
Speaker 9: At this point, FBI officials begin to investigate Armstrong's claims
of all these other murders internationally, because if it is true,
He's going to be one of the most prolific, well-traveled
serial killers in history. And so they start to look
into all of these things that he's telling them in
other jurisdictions. Some of his descriptions aren't definitive enough, so
when they look, the dates don't match up.
Speaker 11: It could be he's telling the truth, he just didn't
give them enough details.
Speaker 1: In March 2001, 27-year-old John Eric Armstrong went on trial
for the murder of Wendy Jordan at the Frank Murphy
Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit. To the surprise of
those involved... in the investigation, and despite his earlier confessions,
Armstrong changed his story.
Speaker 7: By the time he was brought up on charges and
things were proceeding through the court system, he was maintaining
his innocence.
Speaker 1: During the trial, DNA and forensic evidence was presented to
the jury. Fibers from Wendy Jordan's clothes had been found
in Armstrong's vehicle, and the results of the DNA taken
by the Dearborn Heights police had come back. The semen
found inside Wendy's body was John Eric Armstrong's.
Speaker 7: And so in the case of Wendy Jordan, his attorney,
one of the tactics he tried was that, okay, You
got DNA evidence, and it's linked my client to Wendy Jordan.
So yeah, they had sex that night, but it was consensual.
And when he left her, she was alive. So somebody
else killed her.
Speaker 1: The jury didn't believe this excuse. On the 3rd of April, 2001,
after a two-week trial, John Eric Armstrong was found guilty
of the first-degree murder of Wendy Jordan and given a
life sentence. On the 18th of June, 2001, he was
also found guilty of the first degree murder of Kelly
Jean Hood and given another life sentence.
Speaker 6: She was a wife, a mother, a daughter, and she
was a human being that deserved to live and deserved
to come back from her addiction.
Speaker 5: If he didn't take her life, I know she.
Speaker 6: Would have came around because everybody can overcome an addiction.
Speaker 1: On July the 4th, 2001, Armstrong pleaded guilty to the
second-degree murder of Robin Brown, Rosemary Felt, and Monica Johnson.
He was sentenced to an additional 31 years. Armstrong was
never charged with the attack on Natasha Olenichak, but she
is certain he was the man who attacked her in
August 1999. He was wrong for doing what he'd done,
and period.
Speaker 12: I don't even know how someone can just be at
home with their wife and killing women.
Speaker 8: How can you just go out and do that?
Speaker 1: Armstrong was taken to the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility
in Michigan to serve his sentence.
Speaker 4: I've worked other serial investigations, and one of the things
that you learn when you're doing that is serial criminals
don't just stop. When and if they get back into
polite society, they're going to start up all over again.
Speaker 8: If he could, he would still be doing it. If
they let him out, he would do it again.
Speaker 4: Armstrong was, in my humble opinion, the personification of evil.
He had no remorse whatsoever for what he was doing.
Speaker 3: He knew what he was.
Speaker 4: Doing was wrong. He knew he was taking lives. He
was a manipulator.
Speaker 5: And he would do it until we stopped him.
Speaker 1: The lives that Armstrong took before being caught will always
be remembered by their loved ones, who bear the pain
to this day.
Speaker 6: My impression of John Eric Armstrong, he's just a monster.
He's killed multiple women. So it was natural to him.
Only person that type of lifestyle that could be natural
to is a monster, plain and simple.
Speaker 1: Armstrong killed five women in Michigan and violently attacked many more.
He also claims to have murdered women all over the
world when he was in the Navy. If true, John
Eric Armstrong is one of the most globally prolific serial
killers to ever exist and will forever be
Speaker 2: Known as one of the world's most evil killers.