Carroll Edward Cole: The Man Who Asked to Be Stopped

Carroll Edward Cole: The Man Who Asked to Be Stopped Carroll Edward Cole was convicted of murdering at least thirteen women across California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Texas between 1971 and 1980, making him one of the most prolific and underdocumented...
Carroll Edward Cole: The Man Who Asked to Be Stopped
Carroll Edward Cole was convicted of murdering at least thirteen women across California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Texas between 1971 and 1980, making him one of the most prolific and underdocumented serial killers of the twentieth century. Despite repeated contact with law enforcement, psychiatric evaluation at multiple state hospitals, and documented confessions of violent homicidal urges, Cole was discharged and released each time, enabling a decade-long killing spree that left investigators scrambling to connect cases spanning half the country.
This is not a story about a killer who hid in the shadows. Carroll Cole walked into police stations and told officers exactly what he planned to do. He sat across from psychiatrists and described his compulsions with clinical precision. He asked, repeatedly and explicitly, across twenty years, to be locked up before he hurt anyone. The system heard him every time and let him go anyway. What follows is one of the most infuriating true crime cases you will ever hear, and it is a story about a broken system every bit as much as it is about a broken man.
#CarrollEdwardCole #SerialKiller #TrueCrime #MentalHealthFailure #TrueCrimePodcast #SerialKillerHistory #ColdCase
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He walked into police stations. He sat across from psychiatrists. He told them in documented records that he was going to kill women
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and he could not stop himself. He asked to be locked up. They let him go.
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This is Carol Edward Cole and this might be the most infuriating true crime case you've ever heard.
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[Music]
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The thing about Carol Edward Cole is not the number of women he killed, which one is too many.
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It's how many times he told someone he was going to do it. He walked into police stations. He sat across from psychiatrists.
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He described his compulsions and plain language and then he was released anyway.
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Carol Cole spent 20 years telling the system exactly what he was and then watched them find other explanations.
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13 confirmed victims later. He was executed in Nevada and his brain was sent to a university for researchers to try to figure out what went wrong.
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He was born on May 9, 1938 in Sue City, Iowa. His family moved to Richmond, California in 1939, pulled west toward the Kaiser shipyards and the jobs that the war was generating.
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His father, LeVern, was drafted not long after the move and Carol was left at home with his mother, Vesta.
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Vesta Cole was an alcoholic, having affairs while her husband served overseas and she needed her five-year-old son to stay quiet about it.
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The way she secured that silence was to take Carol to a stranger's apartment, make him watch while she slept with multiple men and then beat him when it was over.
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Twisted his arms, made clear that violence was available and the threshold for it was very low.
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And here's the thing about experiencing something like that when you're five years old. It doesn't only traumatize you.
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It teaches you. Women, alcohol, betrayal, secrecy, pain.
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Carol spent the rest of his life trying to resolve something that happened before he was even old enough to name it.
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His father came home from war in 1945 and Vesta's physical abuse reportedly stopped. The psychological humiliation did not.
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At school, Pears mocked his name as feminine, adding a daily layer of rejection on top of everything else that had already happened at home.
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By age 7, he had strangled the family puppy and woken up with no memory of doing it.
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At 8, he lured a classmate named Duane Eugene Owen to a lake, enrichment, and then drowned him.
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Authorities ruled it an accident. The idea that an 8-year-old could walk another child deliberately into the water was just not something anyone in 1946 was going to entertain.
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Carol Edward Cole had an IQ of 152. He maintained a D+ average and dropped out before his junior year.
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Having a genius level IQ does not protect you from any of that. If anything, it just means you understand how bad things are with more clarity.
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The Navy took him in 1957 and discharged him within a year for drinking and stealing government property.
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The Army gave him a bad conduct discharge in 1958 after he was caught stealing pistols.
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In 1960, he attacked two couples that a lover's lane enrichment with a hammer and served 30 days at a county work farm. No psychological evaluation was ever ordered.
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Then, in January 1961, Carol Cole walked up to a police car in Richmond and he told the officer that he had the urge to rape and strangle women and was genuinely frightened of what he might do.
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The officer told him to go commit himself voluntarily, which is, even for 1961, a fairly creative response for someone describing future violent crimes in real time.
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He went to Napa State Hospital where staff noted his anti-social personality and sadistic tendencies and discharged him.
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In 1962, Dr. Weiss at Stockton State Hospital heard Cole explain that he was afraid of women and felt compelled to kill them before he could be intimate with them.
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Dr. Weiss wrote this down, diagnosed a schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type and released Cole on indefinite leave in April 1963.
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American mental health policy had been changing dramatically since the mid-1950s. When new anti-psychotic medications made large state hospitals seem outdated and state governments, glad to shed the cost, push patients toward community-based care.
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State hospital populations dropped from roughly 558,000 in 1955 to a fraction of that by the mid-1970s.
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The community care meant to replace all of what was never actually built.
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Carol Cole fell into that gap every time and was sent back out every time.
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In November 1963, he married Billy Whitworth. Both of them were heavy drinkers.
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Conventsd she was unfaithful, he burned down the motel where they were living in August of 1965. Two-year sentence released in 1967.
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He broke into a Missouri home and attempted to strangle in 11-year-old girl while she slept.
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Five years, paroled in 1970. After parol, he drifted to Reno. He attempted to strangle two women in bars and surrendered to police both times, describing each time what he had done and why.
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Dr. Felix Peoples initially flagged serious concern about Cole's strangulation compulsion.
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Then revised his conclusion, not dangerous, just manipulative, using threats to get free housing.
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Carol Cole, who had twice recently attempted to strangle strangers, was handed a bus ticket to San Diego.
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That was the whole intervention, a bus ticket. You don't have to go home, but you have to get out of here.
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He arrived in San Diego and killed SE Louise Buck on May 7, 1971. He met her at a tavern, strangled her in his car, and drove around with her body in the trunk for two days before leaving her on his 33rd birthday.
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Two more women in Southern California followed that same year. Their bodies were never found.
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For the next nine years, Cole worked as a laborer and truck driver, moving through the American West and South.
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There was no national database linking homicides across state lines in the 1970s.
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A strangulation in Las Vegas and one in Wyoming were two separate cases and separate departments with no reason to connect them.
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He kept moving and nothing connected. He met Diana Pachal, a barmaid in 1972 and he married her.
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He disappeared for a few days at a time throughout their relationship. In September 1979, he strangled Diana during an argument.
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Raptorn had blank it and put her in the closet. He lived in that apartment for eight more days.
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When a neighbor reported something suspicious, police came, found Diana, and Carol told them that she had died from alcohol poisoning.
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They believed him and released him without charges. He killed Marie Kushman with the Casbah Motel in Las Vegas the following month, then he drove to Dallas.
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In November 1980, in Dallas, he killed Sally Thompson, Dorothy King, and Juan de Fey Roberts in rapid succession.
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Police found him at the scene of the third death and were preparing to call it once again, "natural causes" and release him.
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Carol Cole sat down and told them everything. All three Dallas murders, then the ones before that, going back a decade.
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In Oklahoma City around Thanksgiving 1977, he claimed to have blacked out and regained consciousness to find a woman's dismembered remains in his apartment.
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A ledging he had consumed portions of her body before disposing of it in a city dump.
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That victim was never recovered and the account could not be fully verified. The confirmed total stands at 13, with the real number almost certainly higher.
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Convicted in Texas and sentenced to life, Cole agreed to extradition to Nevada, where he pleaded guilty to two more murders and asked the court for the death penalty.
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When the judge sentenced him to die, Carol looked up from the defense table and said, "Thanks, Judge."
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He then waved all rights to appeal. His mother Vesta had died in 1984, and Carol reportedly told people he saw no reason to continue without her as the object of his rage.
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Then a Vada Supreme Court reviewed his waiver, confirmed his competency, and appointed outside counsel to present the mitigating evidence Carol refused to offer.
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The childhood, the documented brain damage, the two decades of unanswered pleas.
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Carol Edward Cole was executed by lethal injection on December 6, 1985. The first person in Nevada history to die that way, and the first state execution in six years.
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He was 47 and had converted to Catholicism before his death, which people debated with the usual energy.
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His brain was sent to the University of Nevada, Reno, where researchers looked for a physical explanation for a lifetime of violence.
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His case became training material for FBI behavioral profilers, the pattern of targeting women who reflected his mother's specific profile, or drinking, or perceived infidelity.
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That particular combination of emotional power and cruelty, all of it became a textbook example of what criminal profilers call symbolic victimology.
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When you look at what Carol Edward Cole actually left behind, it's a pile of paperwork.
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Police reports from 1961, clinical notes from 1962, revised psychiatric assessment from Reno, concluding the most dangerous man that any of these professionals had likely ever talked to, was probably just working an angle for a free bed.
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13 confirmed victims and a system that hurt him say in plain language that he was going to kill decided each time that something else was more likely going on.
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He asked to be stopped for 20 years. Nobody even attempted.
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