Slipping Through the Cracks: The Story Behind the Parkside Strangler

Detective Tim Watts, a young and inexperienced detective, is the sole detective in Cochise County, Arizona. On May 16th, 1970, the detective received his first call for a murdered girl who had been dumped at the trailhead at Sahuarita. The killer displayed her to the world like a piece of art. The killer was brilliant and left few clues behind. She had been completely naked, and it was clear that she had been repeatedly beaten and raped before then being dumped. The coroner determined that she had died from strangulation. A whole year had passed with no new leads and no closer to catching him. This led to numerous sleepless nights for the detective. Her killer had clearly held her for a great deal of time. She was half starved, tortured, and rapped repeatedly. But then, to his shock, a second victim was left in the very same spot as the year before. And strangely, on the very same date. He had even posed her the same way as the first victim. He realized that he now had a serial killer on his hands. He felt the pressure and the guilt of not catching him. If he had this poor second girl, she wouldn't have had to die. There was also a note left behind for the detective regarding the second girl who was found. It was a way in which the killer was trying to taunt him directly, get in his head, and mess with him. Throw him off his game. The kills left very few new clues behind. After several murders, the detective called in the (B.A.U.) The F.B.I.'s newly formed profiler unit helped him figure out the unsub he was hunting. This, he hoped, would give him an insight, perhaps an edge, on how to catch him. The bodies of poor young women who were all Jane Does. He couldn't identify any of them. These were the days before D.N.A. testing. And they hadn't been reported missing. The longer the killing went on, the more that the detective got frustrated he was unable to stop him. However, the "Parkside stranger" grew frustrated with the detective as well. He liked to challenge and push the Detective. So, to get the undivided attention of the detectives, the night before the detective's big wedding, The Parkside strangler broke into his little sister's house and that night raped her repeatedly, then coldly slit her throat. It was the killer's way of ruining the detective's wedding. Things took a turn. When the killer secretly attended his sister's funeral. And no one even knew that it was the killer at the time. The detective's anger leads to him learning the identity of the park-side strangler, causing "the Parkside Strangler" to have to flee the state to evade law enforcement and making the Detective's job harder and the Detective Spent years afterward trying to locate the killer and finally take him down.