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NARRATOR: On a Sunday morning in Ann Arbor,
homicide Detective Paul Bunten heads to the scene of a murder.
The victim is 30-year-old Rebecca
Greer Huff, a University of Michigan graduate student.
She has been stabbed more than 50 times
with what police believe to be a screwdriver.
It is an MO Detective Bunten has seen before.
In the past six months.
Two other Ann Arbor women were stabbed to death
while walking home alone.
17-year-old Shirley Small, and 26-year-old Glenda Richmond.
PAUL BUNTEN: It became glaringly obvious at that point
because of the wound pattern and, again, time of morning,
Sunday morning, a couple of months
apart that we had a serial killer on our hands.
DON TERRY: And we saw a young lady
walking down the street at 4:30 in the morning by herself.
And she wasn't just walking, she was looking around everywhere.
NARRATOR: Terry spots a man alone in a vehicle who appears
to be stalking the woman.
Terry calls in the suspect's tag number and dispatch
comes back with the name Coral Eugene Watts.
You could hear Mary's voice go up about three octaves
when she came back, and said that comes back to Coral Watts.
PAUL BUNTEN: Exactly.
And he's on the suspect list.
He, for whatever reason, decided to go
over a block instead of staying on the Main Street
he'd been on.
And when he did that, he had to make an illegal turn.
NARRATOR: Watts's says illegal turn gives Terry grounds
to pull the suspect over.
And when I heard you radio in that
you had that subject stalking, it kind of got my ear.
And I radioed to, Don, hold him, I'm on my way.
I probably made that trip back in record time
because you were still at the scene when I got there.
NARRATOR: 26-year-old Watts is handcuffed
and brought in for questioning.
The suspect lawyer's up and reveals nothing.
But his arrest for stalking allows police to get
a search warrant for his car.
PAUL BUNTEN: It did not yield a lot of usable evidence
but it yielded a lot of things that
led us to believe that he, very well may have been our suspect.
NARRATOR: Police placed a tracking device
on their suspect's car, and placed
him under 24/7 surveillance.
PAUL BUNTEN: He knew that he was a suspect in my eyes,
if nothing else.
And he was suspecting that he was being followed,
he was suspecting a lot of things.
NARRATOR: Coral Watts, a suspect and at least
three unsolved homicides, has apparently skipped town.
And I happened onto an old employer that owed him money,
and he had stopped by and gave him a forwarding
address to Houston, Texas.
NARRATOR: Detective Bunten picks up the phone
and puts it a call to Texas.
The message is simple, Houston, you have a problem.
Early on a Sunday morning, Lori Lister pulls into the parking
lot of her apartment complex.
So I had parked right over there that morning
and just walked into the courtyard.
NARRATOR: She makes her way to apartment 1223,
unaware that a stranger is lying in wait.
And he attacked me like just before I reached
the staircase because he didn't know if I
was upstairs or downstairs.
And he came behind me, but then he
pulled me underneath into this patio area
here where we were kind of hidden behind the fence there.
NARRATOR: The attacker takes Lori in a stranglehold
and demands to know which apartment is hers.
LORI LISTER: And I remember at that point
thinking he's going to kill me.
And if I don't tell him where I live,
he's going to put me in his trunk and bury me somewhere.
If I do tell him where I live, Melinda's up there.
I heard Lori's keys at the door.
NARRATOR: Melinda is Lori's roommate.
When she goes to open the door, she is immediately attacked.
Everything happened so quick.
When he grabbed me, he put a knife to me
and said that he was going to kill me.
So at that time, he was also choking me,
and I couldn't breathe.
And then I knew that I had to do something,
otherwise I would pass out.
So that's when I pretended to pass out.
NARRATOR: Melinda plays possum the attacker
drags her to the bedroom and ties her up with a wire hanger.
He then returns to Lori, choked unconscious,
and left lying outside.
MELINDA AGUILAR: He went outside and I heard him dragging her
up the stairs so I assumed that she was out because he was
dragging her up the stairs and I could hear
her body hitting the steps.
NARRATOR: Thinking Melinda is out cold,
the attacker focuses on Lori, filling a bathtub with water,
and preparing to drown her.
MELINDA AGUILAR: I opened up the sliding door
there to your right.
NARRATOR: Melinda seizes her chance to escape.
What I did is I jumped as high as I could and did
a somersault, and I actually hit my head on top
and then when I came down, I landed on my knees.
There was a lady sitting out in her little porch area,
drinking coffee.
And that's-- I told her I needed help.
Someone was trying to kill my roommate.
NARRATOR: As police respond to the call,
the assailant flees, leaving Lori
submerged in a tub of water.
The next thing I remember is when I was in the ambulance.
And I was still blacked out, but I
remember jumping up and saying, Melinda, Melinda, is she OK?
NARRATOR: While Lori is transported to the hospital,
Melinda remains with police who have
arrested a man seen running away from the apartment.
I went out there and I had to go to the police car
and, of course, the door was open
and they asked me if that was him.
And I said yes, and he just gave me one of those looks.
NARRATOR: The man ID'd by Melinda
is Coral Watts, the same man suspected of three
unsolved slayings in Michigan.
Watts agrees to plead guilty to a charge of burglary
with intent to commit murder.
Then he admits to nine more killings in the city of Houston
in exchange for a deal.
Well, the agreement was is that he was offered immunity
on the cases that fell under the jurisdiction
of Harris County, Houston.
NARRATOR: Watt's confessions close the books
on 13 unsolved homicides.
Without a grant of immunity from Ann Arbor,
Coral Watts goes silent about his time there,
and detectives are left with nothing.
On September 3, 1982, a Texas court
accepts Watts's plea of guilty to a charge of burglary
with intent to commit murder.
Under the terms of the DA's deal,
he receives the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison
and is not charged with any of the murders he confessed to.
DONNA PENDERGAST: It turned out that as the case
went up the appeal process, there had been a loophole.
NARRATOR: At the time of his plea,
Coral Watts was never put on notice
that the water he used to try and drown his victim
was considered a deadly weapon.
Sitting behind bars, Watts himself
picked up on the omission.
DONNA PENDERGAST: No lawyer caught it.
Watts caught it.
And when it went up the appeal chain, they ruled in his favor
and said, you were right, you weren't put on proper notice
so his crime was kicked down into a lower
category of burglary without the aggravating variable.
NARRATOR: Burglary with intent to commit murder becomes simply
burglary.
And Texas's mandatory release law comes into play.
The way the mandatory release law works,
it's your calendar time known as your day-by-day
time plus good time credits.
And Watts, by definition, was considered a model inmate.
So he was accumulating good time at the highest rate possible.
NARRATOR: Bottom line, the confessed serial killer
turned model inmate is scheduled for release in April 2006.
On a cold December night in 1979,
a man named Joseph Foy witnesses the murder
of 25-year-old Helen Dutcher.
JOSEPH FOY: While I was on my back porch,
I seen the man raise his hand and bring
it down in a slashing motion.
NARRATOR: Foy provides Ferndale police with a description
of the suspect and his vehicle, but the lead
is not enough to catch Dutcher's killer.
The case is cold for two years when Foy happens upon the face
of the devil again.
JOSEPH FOY: I'm watching TV and it's the nightly news.
And this thing catches my eye, this Black man
being led into a courtroom.
And I just yelled at my wife, that's
the guy that killed that woman.
NARRATOR: The man on the news report is Coral Eugene Watts.
DONNA PENDERGAST: I did believe what
he was telling me because he sounded so certain of himself
and so--
he had details, he sounded like he really
wanted to come forward but, you know, hey, I've tried
this before.
Will you just listen?
NARRATOR: The attorney general's office issues an arrest warrant
for Coral Eugene Watts, charging him
with the murder of Helen Dutcher nearly 25 years after the fact.
On November 7th, prosecutor Donna Pendergast goes to trial.
Her case hangs upon the testimony
of one eyewitness in a dark alley, 80 feet away
from the crime scene.
But I also felt confident that after hearing about Watts's
numerous cases in Texas that if we could get a judge
to show that we had a pattern and we'd get similar testimony,
and that we'd have a much stronger case.
NARRATOR: Judge Richard Kuhn agrees
and allows Watts's confessions to 12
prior murders into evidence.
DONNA PENDERGAST: Each and every one
of them alone, stalk, murdered.
You do say upon your own set, you
find the defendant guilty of first degree
premeditated murder.
NARRATOR: Coral Eugene Watts is found guilty
of the murder of Helen Dutcher and sentenced
to the maximum in Michigan, life in prison without parole.
The Ann Arbor murders remain unsolved.
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