There's still so many things
we don't understand about this case,
and probably never will.
We just had bits and pieces
of some kind of strange puzzle.
And even if we could put them all together,
I don't know if I want to see whatever picture they make.
Uh-huh.
My name is Joseph Kirby.
I'm a former lead detective sergeant
in San Bernardino County.
I was supervising the Major Crimes Unit
between 2007 and 2015.
San Bernardino County is about 60 miles east
of Los Angeles.
It is a part of California's
Inland Empire region.
We have a population of about two million.
We've seen our share of violent crimes,
gang-related homicides,
relatively large-scale drug busts,
what have you.
We probably run
upwards of 65 murders a year
in the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau,
which is higher than the national average.
But I had never seen anything like what happened
to the Sheridan family on Alton Avenue.
Nobody had.
911, what is your emergency?
My name...
My name is Kacie Porter,
and I was friends with Tiffany Sheridan.
Our kids went to the same elementary school.
When you have kids that age,
and you meet a lot of parents that you don't always care for,
but Tiff and I, we just hit it off.
We were supposed to meet at this restaurant for lunch,
but she never showed, and I just...
I figured she had forgotten, so I let it go.
But then Lauren came home, and she said
that Sam hadn't been to school in a few days.
And, um, I kept calling
and I kept texting, but I never got a reply back.
And I just knew, in the back of my head,
that something is wrong.
I'm Will Martinez.
I'm a deputy sheriff
with the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.
Me and my partner were the first officers
to arrive on scene.
We got a call regarding a welfare check
for a residence in the Shandin Hills.
Nice area.
It was a gated community, as I remember.
The whole thing felt weird.
Something about it was just off.
Police department!
Anybody home?
We need to go around.
Police department! Anyone home?
My partner called out,
identified ourselves again,
but there was no movement.
Hello?
Anybody home?
Mother of God.
This was a crime scene.
Oh, what happened to them...
I think about it every day.
I have nightmares about it.
Why them?
That... was a bad day.
When I saw that, I was...
floored.
I looked at my partner and I said,
"Oh, my God, he's back."
Hi.
My name's Lexi Taylor.
I'm a senior homicide detective
for the San Bernardino P.D.
I worked as a patrol officer for about nine years
before being offered a job in the homicide bureau,
and that's when I started working with my partner,
Joe Kirby.
Growing up, my mom worked two jobs
to support me and my older brother.
There was a rotating door of less-than-great men,
you would say, come and go in our life.
I think that's when I first started
thinking that, maybe, I would like
to try to help people.
You know, maybe I could help someone
like my mom out of a tough situation.
I actually never intended to be a cop.
I had aspirations of being a drummer in a metal band.
But one of my friend's brothers
was in the Academy, and I thought it sounded cool.
I liked how you had to think on your feet,
use your brain as well as your body.
After a couple of days in training,
I was hooked, man.
That is how I have always approached
my career in law enforcement.
Try to be there for people when things are at their worst.
And, fuck, it was never worse than on this case.
Between 1993 and 1995, there were three murders
in Riverside and San Bernardino County
that we eventually realized were serial murders,
and which had some ritualistic aspects.
I think this is it.
Yeah.
Okay, she was covered with a blue tarp.
You could see it easily from the road.
This is a service road, not a lot of people
come down it.
It was just horrible. I mean, you never expect
to see something like that.
On August 8th, 1993,
the torso of 24-year-old Shifra Gutierrez
is discovered in San Bernardino
National Forest.
She had been dismembered.
Her genitals mutilated.
The uterus removed.
The coroner gave a best-guess estimate
she had been there two weeks,
but it's difficult to tell.
Shifra was my best friend
in high school.
She was a dope bitch.
She just had this joy for living,
and this lust for life, you know?
And she was funny as fuck.
She wasn't a bad person.
You know, she just...
I don't know, she just got into some bad shit,
like a lot of people out here do.
I was always telling her, I was like,
"This is dangerous, Shifra.
You know, you gotta stop doing this."
Oh, shit, I said I wasn't going to do this.
There's an area off the 91
in the Casablanca neighborhood,
and that's where Shifra was last seen.
We do know she went up to a room at a motel
called Dean's Corner that was frequented by sex workers.
And there was a man with her, but...
clerk couldn't remember what he looked like.
He could've killed her there.
Could've been strangulation, for example.
We'll probably never know.
What we do know for sure
is that she was somehow moved
from that room without anybody noticing.
Or somebody noticed and just didn't care.
But we got our first lead.
A name.
All guests had to fill out a ledger,
and the suspect had written down
the name Albert Shiny.
And the case went cold.
I don't need to tell you that, especially at that time,
sex workers and marginalized people
tended to get the short end of the stick
in the criminal justice system.
I'm not saying it was right.
I'm just saying it was,
and is the reality.
So, it was written off as an isolated incident.
But we were wrong.
A grisly crime scene has police on high alert
in Arlanza tonight,
not far from the Riverside Municipal Airport,
where the body of 82-year-old Ambrose Griffith
was discovered murdered
in his apartment earlier today.
Mr. Griffith was disabled and, apparently,
suffered from MDS, a blood condition
that required daily assistance from a caretaker.
Nine months after Shifra Gutierrez is killed,
Ambrose Griffith is found murdered
in his assisted living facility.
On the night of June 3rd, 1994,
someone scaled the back side of his building
and entered his unit through a sliding glass door
that was apparently left unlocked.
He was bludgeoned with an oxygen tank
that was in his room,
and then stabbed more than 30 times
with a box cutter.
That was brutal.
And you gotta understand, this guy was bedbound.
I mean, he could not walk,
or could barely walk, on his own.
So, he was totally defenseless to the attack,
which was obviously unprovoked.
No one else in the building heard so much as a peep
from his room.
So, it must've happened fast, which is...
some comfort, I guess.
One of his eyes was also removed.
It was a sloppy scene.
A murder committed by somebody in a frenzy
who was not thinking it through at all.
It's probably why we were able to get our first real clue.
The print was run through the system,
but nothing came back.
The lab guys stayed on it for weeks,
but it was only a partial.
No motive.
82-year-old victim
with no family and few friends,
except the few people that lived in his building
who were just as sick as he was.
So, the police didn't make any connection
with the Gutierrez murder.
Not yet.
It's okay. It's okay.
We want to thank everyone
from the Riverside Police Department
with their continued support.
Someone out there
knows what happened to our little boy, and...
and...
We are begging
for you to help us
return him home
safely and unharmed.
Noah Lafone was abducted
while walking home from school
on October 7th, 1995.
He was 12 years old.
There were no witnesses,
and pretty much no information to go on.
There was a pretty extensive search
and media effort this time to try to find him.
We were doing door-to-doors.
This was the first case I was on involving a child,
so I really threw myself into it.
I'd get off work and I'd go join Search and Rescue.
People put in hundreds of hours,
but days turned into weeks
and it gets harder and harder to stay positive.
Three months later, in January,
his body is discovered in a shallow creek
near Silverwood Lake.
He had been weighed down by concrete bricks,
and his body was in pretty bad shape.
There were multiple lacerations
to his abdomen,
and his liver had been removed.
Twelve years old.
Whole life ahead of him.
Poof.
We also found a box cutter, the weapon,
as well as Noah's school backpack
and all its contents.
This is where we got our second lead.
It was a page that had been written on
and then torn out,
but you could still see an imprint.
Kaliban.
What the heck was kaliban?
A bird from the Caribbean, we found out.
Or a character from Shakespeare.
I mean, was this some kind of a code?
Was this another Zodiac Killer?
Then, two weeks after his body was discovered,
the Riverside Police Department
received a letter in the mail.
Provided details of the three killings.
It was unreleased information only the police would know,
which basically proves whoever wrote it
was the killer, or at least someone
who had direct contact with the killer.
And there was a message.
Thanks for not catching me.
Learned a lot.
Ten transits remain, isn't it insane?
I'll be back.
Was he telling us he was planning on killing ten more?
Was that what he meant?
This was the first time we realized
this was an actual serial killer.
It's worth mentioning the jurisdictional problems
that can arise when someone commits a murder
across county lines.
It can make connecting them
a lot more difficult.
But this guy wanted us to know.
He wanted us to know what he did,
and that he wasn't finished.
And he signs the letter with that symbol.
Years went by.
The cases went cold.
Detectives at that time figured
whoever was responsible for the three deaths
was either incarcerated for another crime
or had died,
because they probably wouldn't have stopped killing
on their own.
But as soon as I saw that symbol on the ceiling,
I realized that was the killer from '95.
He wasn't bluffing in his letter.
He hadn't stopped.
He'd just taken a 15-year break.
Why?
We're still trying to figure that one out.
One thing's for sure.
If his first murder spree had felt sloppy
and unplanned,
this new one was anything but.
The suspect gained entry
through the first floor bathroom window,
cut through a screen on the side of the house,
then attacks Ted and Tiffany sometime after 1:15 a.m.,
after Tiffany sends her last work email.
There was bruising on Ted's face.
Struck by a blunt object.
We think the suspect probably roughed him up
as a form of intimidation,
and convinced him and Tiffany
to go downstairs willingly.
This little girl, Samantha...
Yeah, it looks like she put up more of a fight.
Some of the furniture in her room,
her comforter,
all disturbed and in disarray.
The suspect zip-ties their hands and feet,
wraps duct tape around their mouths.
You see, this guy had gotten smarter.
He'd learned from the murders in '95.
Less sloppy, more methodical.
I mean, the buckets? What the fuck?
Pardon my French.
He ties the three of them
to chairs around the dining room.
Deliberately facing each other, do you understand?
He places their feet
in these five-gallon painters buckets.
He prepared these things ahead of time.
Like, they had their names on them.