Infamous serial killers who were caught because of other crimes
At 3:15 a.m. on June 28, 1993, two New York state troopers, Deborah Spaargaren and Sean Ruane, spotted a pickup truck on Long Island’s Southern State Parkway with no rear license plate.
By 8:25 that morning, homicide detectives were questioning the driver. Years of tips, task forces, and profiles in other cases hadn’t done what a missing plate did in a few hours.
Five cases follow in which a minor offense did what the main investigation hadn’t: a parking ticket, a traffic stop, false plates, a missing plate, and a warrant for something else. Details are limited to how each arrest happened.
A parking ticket in Brooklyn
On the night of July 31, 1977, a woman named Cacilia Davis was walking her dog near the scene of the last “Son of Sam” shooting when she noticed a man walking past a car that had just received a parking ticket. Detectives traced that ticket to David Berkowitz’s car, and to his apartment in Yonkers, where they found a handwritten letter like the ones the “Son of Sam” had sent.
Detective Bill Clark recalled that nobody expected a shooter to get a parking violation. Detective John Falotico arrested Berkowitz outside his home on August 10 and told officers, “Well, you got me.”
Lights off, near Salt Lake City
Ted Bundy was also one of the world’s worst drivers, and a number of alert cops pulled him over for traffic violations over the years. On August 16, 1975, he was driving a Volkswagen near Salt Lake City with its headlights off when a Utah Highway Patrol officer tried to stop him. A chase followed, and Bundy was arrested for evading police. Investigators built on that arrest, and he was later convicted of aggravated kidnapping.
He escaped and fled to Pensacola, Florida, where a patrol officer ran the plates on his Volkswagen and learned it was stolen. That second stop ended his run.
False number plates
On January 2, 1981, Sgt. Bob Ring, 47, and PC Robert Hydes, 31, an inexperienced probationer, checked a parked car in a Sheffield driveway. A check revealed the plates were false, and they arrested the driver, Peter Sutcliffe. West Yorkshire Police had interviewed him nine times during a five-year investigation.
Sutcliffe asked to relieve himself behind a bush, and the next day Ring went back and found items he’d discarded there. After two days of questioning, Sutcliffe declared on January 4 that he was the Yorkshire Ripper. Hydes said later that Sutcliffe “lied repeatedly” until his last minutes of freedom. Both officers were commended.
3:15 a.m., no rear plate
Joel Rifkin told the troopers the plate had been there when he left home about 40 minutes earlier. Then he fled, and the chase ended when the pickup came to rest on a sidewalk. An inventory search to impound it turned up a body. Rifkin was charged with murder and reckless endangerment, then admitted to 16 more killings.
A task force located the remains of 15 victims, and he was convicted at trial in Nassau County on May 9, 1994.
A warrant for something else
In February 2002, an RCMP officer in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, obtained an unrelated warrant to search Robert Pickton’s farm for illegal firearms. A farm employee had already found purses belonging to missing women and reported him. Officers executing the warrant found personal items belonging to missing women, and a second warrant followed. The property became what one report called the largest crime scene in Canada’s history.
A public inquiry led by Wally Oppal later found that police bias, poor coordination between agencies, and leadership failures contributed to the years it took to catch him.
The bottom line
A parking ticket, a pair of false plates, a missing plate, and a firearms warrant did what years of work hadn’t. In one case, we interviewed the suspect nine times before the plates gave him away.
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