Serial Killer Documentary - Billy Mansfield Jr.

0:07 In 1981, a search at Billy Mansfield Jr. 's sprawling rural property in Florida turned up the bodies of four young women.

0:17 He would drive and look for girls hitchhiking and abduct them.

0:21 Or he'd hang out at malls.

0:24 A serial killer by his early 20s, Mansfield Jr. 's abuse of women had begun in his teens.

0:31 Mansfield Jr. is someone that was raised in the world of violence and wreaked havoc and violence on anyone he came into contact with.

0:39 His sexual crimes escalated over time, both in terms of how violent they were to eventually resulting in murders.

0:45 Convicted of killing five victims, no young woman who crossed paths with Billy Mansfield Jr. was safe.

0:53 He sees women as evil. He doesn't value life at all.

0:58 Mansfield could be approachable, charming, but that was the mask. over this much more malevolent, depraved human being.

1:08 Billy Mansfield Jr. 's short but deadly spree was brought to an end in 1980 when he was exposed as one of the world's most evil killers. In 1980, when a woman was found dead the morning after leaving a bar in Watsonville, California, with 24-year-old drifter Billy Mansfield Jr., detectives were shocked at how little the killer had done to cover his tracks.

1:54 That kind of chutzpah, if you will, speaks to his feeling that he was more clever than anyone else and that he could do whatever he wanted to do. He acted with complete impunity. He just, he did not care.

2:09 Sometimes he even boasted about his crimes and kind of derived joy out of being able to recollect his crimes and what he did, almost like these were accomplishments that he should be rewarded for.

2:19 I don't believe he ever showed remorse, and I don't think he even feels remorse. I don't think he's capable of it.

2:27 This killer's story begins in a shack on the edge of Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1956. He had.

2:37 A troubled childhood. He was bullied and was bullied.

2:41 Billy's parents were William Mansfield Sr. and Virginia Mansfield. He was their first child. They would have four more after him, three boys and a girl.

2:53 You could say it was a completely dysfunctional family on the edge of the law at all times. The boys were encouraged to fight amongst.

3:04 Each other by.

3:05 their father.

3:06 He was reared in a world of violence. At one point, the father was seen chasing some of the kids down the street with a gun.

3:18 So this is the first instance that Billy is learning about the rules of life, and all of this is coming from his father, who was, this is a way that Billy is learning, even from a young age, that this is how you solve problems when people don't agree with you. And the family was actually very well known to the police because there were a number of different charges, both violent and nonviolent, between the men and the boys of the family.

3:42 Bringing did not prepare Billy Mansfield Jr. for a successful school life.

3:48 Mansfield Jr. attended school in Grand Rapids and was often described as a social misfit and often got into trouble in school. By the age of 14, Mansfield Jr. was already charged with larceny, which is stealing. In effect, it's an additional allegation against Mansfield Jr. was that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl on her way home from school.

4:12 His father, William Mansfield Sr., had been tried for a similar offense some 20 years earlier while still in his teens. He was acquitted, but it was the first of many such trials for the family patriarch.

4:26 It served time for rape in both Michigan and in Nevada, and an armed robbery up in Michigan.

4:35 His father had been charged with multiple nonviolent and violent crimes, including sexual molestation of multiple individuals who were underage. So perhaps even from that, just watching his father recognizing that this is something that people do, perhaps, or maybe even his father explained those incidences away as things that were OK to do. So this is the first instance that Billy is learning about the rules of life.

5:00 Already on a dark path by the age of 14, Mansfield Jr., known to his family as Billy, decided that formal education wasn't for him.

5:11 He dropped out of school when he was 14. He altered his birth certificate, which back in those days was much easier to do than it is now, and wound up joining the army.

5:25 During his time in the Army, Mansfield Jr. was assigned to places such as Germany. But after about 14 months of service, they determined that he really was not of age and that he had lied about his age to enlist, and he was discharged.

5:40 Mansfield maintained that that Army career is where he became an alcoholic and first experimented with drugs, which made him volatile, extremely volatile.

5:54 Despite his troubles, at the age of 17, Mansfield settled down with his childhood sweetheart, Phyllis. The couple had first met at school in their early teens. By the time they married in 1973, they already had a child together, and five months later, a second baby followed.

6:15 The marriage became very turbulent very quickly. Whenever his wife threatened to leave or when they would have a fight, He would threaten aggression on her and threaten that he would kill her. And at one point when she was holding their baby, he put a gun to her head.

6:35 Phyllis would later tell investigators about her husband's sexual proclivities.

6:44 She talked about how Billy was bisexual. He would pick up men in gay bars, bring them home, make her watch him have sexual encounters.

6:56 In 1974, when Billy Mansfield Jr. was 18, he was brought to trial for sex offenses. In fact, forcing two women to perform sex acts on him. And at the same time, it goes to trial and the jury find it impossible to believe that one man coerce two women to act in ways they didn't want to act.

7:23 It was around this time that the family took the opportunity to leave their legal difficulties in Michigan behind them.

7:33 After a fire at the Mansfield property in Michigan, the Mansfield clan purchased a five-acre plot in Spring Hill, Florida. It was surrounded by dense grove. It was rural. It was rustic. And it had several trailers on the property in different places.

7:49 Property was overgrown. It had junk cars. refrigerator parts, all kinds of things on it.

7:57 Local Hernando County Prosecutor Jimmy Brown quickly became well acquainted with the family.

8:04 During the course of my time knowing the Mansfields, I prosecuted the dad and Billy and his brother Gary and his brother Robbie and his brother Terry. Billy's family and another local family here, we refer to them as the Hernando County version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. They had an animosity toward each other. They feuded. They got into fights. They beat each other up. They stole things from each other.

8:30 I think it would be fair to describe the household, the family, as utterly lawless. There's no doubt that that lawless atmosphere that they were living in would have shaped their relationship with the legal system on the outside of that house.

8:54 Far from starting afresh in Florida, the Mansfield family continued their criminal pursuits. In fact, Billy Mansfield Jr. was about to escalate, with catastrophic consequences for any young woman who crossed his path. By 1975, the entire Mansfield clan had settled on the sprawling plot of land, including Billy Mansfield Jr.

9:24 and his wife and children. That winter, at a campsite 13 miles away in Brooksville, teenager Elaine Ziegler went missing.

9:38 Elaine Ziegler was a 15-year-old girl on holiday with her mother and stepfather. They came from Ohio.

9:46 Her family had been down here in 1975 for Christmas, staying at the KOA campground.

9:54 Elaine had been looking forward to seeing in the new year, but around 10.30 that evening... evening, she was seen talking to a dark-haired man in his 20s with a beard and piercing eyes.

10:08 She was seen getting into a blue, light blue Ford Fairlane with him with Florida plates, and that was the last that she was seen.

10:18 On New Year's Day, 1976, her parents made a frantic phone call to the police telling them that Elaine is missing. The police respond by reaching out to the community and giving descriptions. There's a reward of $ 500 placed for information leading to her recovery.

10:38 I remember her going missing. We did an extensive search, and we were concerned from the beginning that she had met with... Foul play.

10:50 Jimmy Brown was, at this time, the deputy state attorney serving Anando County.

10:56 The only thing that we had was a statement. He had very striking eyes, and they were described as mesmerizing. And so he had a very striking appearance.

11:07 Police officers canvassing members of the public for information had come across a young man who matched the description in the vicinity of the campground.

11:16 Showed him a picture and he said, oh yeah, I talked to that girl, she's from Ohio and I saw her New Year's Eve and she said she was leaving and heading back home to Ohio because she had people she needed to see and things she needed to do. Her parents swore she would not have left. She was happy, she wasn't having problems, she wasn't the type of person who would run away. They stuck around for, I think it was like six weeks before they finally went home.

11:52 They stuck around for a long time.

11:54 Elaine Ziegler's disappearance remained unsolved. In early 1976, Billy Mansfield Jr. moved with his family back to Michigan, where he spent the next four years in and out of prison.

12:15 In 1976, Mansfield Jr. is arrested for being drunk and disorderly and he's put in jail. Upon being released from the drunken disorderly arrest in October of 1976, he's immediately re-arrested for the rape of a 16-year-old Michigan girl. He pled guilty to a lesser charge and he went back to jail. In 1978, Mansfield Jr. is accused of sexual assault and the attempted rape of two other women.

12:46 Was sentenced to one year because he flipped on his cellmate who had committed murder.

12:53 And at this point, his wife uses the opportunity to file for divorce while he's away from her so she can start the proceedings.

13:00 He got out in 1980 and came back down to Florida. He and his dad and his brother Gary were working, doing refrigeration repair work and installation work, heating and air conditioning things.

13:16 Now a single man, in March 1980, 24-year-old Billy Mansfield Jr. was back in the bosom of his dysfunctional family. Just a month later, a 21-year-old Tampa woman went missing.

13:32 Sandy Graham was out drinking and playing pool at a local establishment that she frequented.

13:40 She was known to be this very outgoing, recently divorced young adult who really was comfortable speaking to different people.

13:49 She started playing pool with a guy who was not a regular at the bar. She took a break and started talking to another guy at the bar, at which time the guy she was playing pool with, who people didn't seem to know at the bar, got very upset.

14:03 Observers described the man's eyes as being very scary looking and piercing.

14:09 The stranger threw her car keys in the trash, but sadly, nevertheless, was seen leaving the bar with this stranger. Well, her friends who'd been there with her absolutely expected her to return because everything was there. Her glasses were there, everything. So what happened? Well, the answer was no one knew.

14:32 She literally disappeared into thin air.

14:35 A month later, a 16-year-old girl called Theresa Fillingham moved to Tampa.

14:41 She had gone off the rail in her teens, had some difficult and complicated family relationships, but appeared to be starting over, trying to start fresh and clean slate.

14:51 In May 1980, Teresa left her foster home in Washington state to move in with her older sister, Margaret.

14:59 Somehow she convinced me to take her to Florida with me. And so I brought her back with me and we rented a place. It was going to be a temporary place for a while and she was going to get her GED and get a job.

15:15 Teresa had only been in Tampa for a few days when she vanished.

15:20 She told me that evening that she had a job interview at University Mall in Tampa. This girlfriend of hers was going to go after a job too and they were going to go together.

15:32 I said, okay.

15:34 So I went to work that night. I got home probably about 10 o'clock and she still wasn't home and she had never showed for the job interview.

15:46 She didn't show up.

15:51 And when Margaret told the law enforcement about it, because she had a history of running away, they thought maybe she was just running away again.

15:57 In the course of things over the next few months, she still didn't turn up. All of her belongings were left behind intact. Her suitcase, her clothing, any jewelry that she had, she never came back for it. The Tampa Police Department had me come out and identify some Jane Does. So I had to go down and none of them were her. And then the case just got colder and colder and colder and colder.

16:28 And she never came back.

16:36 In June 1980, 40 miles north of Tampa in Hernando County, William Mansfield Sr. fell foul of the law once again, and this time on even more serious charges.

16:49 Our Mansfield Jr. 's father was charged with over 40 counts of sexual abuse of children.

16:55 We sent him away for 56 years for sexually molesting children from age 3 to age 15, multiple times.

17:05 Billy's father was a serious and prolific sexual offender of the worst kind. He was a very manipulative individual as well. and he would manipulate women, as some sex offenders do, to facilitate access to children. This is a lawless.

17:30 Man with not a moral.

17:33 Molecule in his body.

17:36 Five days after William Mansfield Sr. 's arrest, a young woman was attacked in Brooksville, not far from the camping ground where Elaine Ziegler had gone missing five years before.

17:48 18-year-old Pamela Sherrill was walking home along a road in Brooksville, Florida, when a man pulled up next to her in a car, dragged her into the car, drove her to a nearby mobile home.

18:00 Tried to force sex on her, and when she refused, he dragged her around the trailer by her hair.

18:06 And she fought back in a most remarkable way. She attacked him with a knife from the kitchen. And as she left the mobile home, she threw the knife at him.

18:18 She ran immediately to the sheriff's department, called and reported what had happened and gave absolutely perfect descriptions.

18:28 The local law enforcement officers immediately recognized Pamner's description of a man they'd had plenty of dealings with before, and a warrant was issued for Billy Mansfield Jr. 's arrest.

18:41 He found out that the warrant was in existence, and he and his brother Gary took off in a van, headed north, went up toward Ohio, through Illinois, down through Texas, and Nevada, and wound up in Santa Cruz, California.

18:56 Appears that he was trying to start a new life to try to evade the police, was using a new alias, was trying to make himself look different, and try to leave no trace of his crimes behind.

19:06 The Mansfield family members settled at a campground in the Watsonville, California area where Mansfield Jr. got a job as a maintenance man at a local mushroom farm. He took the persona of a man named Tom. The local people there described him as creepy.

19:25 Despite using an alias, the local sheriff's department got wind of Mansfield Junior and discovered the Hernando County arrest warrant on him.

19:36 And yet again, that charm comes into play. He's arrested formally, charged with the attack on Pamela, but he gets bail.

19:48 In November 1980, Billy Mansfield Jr. was released and continued living at the campground in Watsonville along with his younger brother, Gary. Two weeks later, another woman, Renee Sailing, had the grave misfortune to cross paths with the Mansfields.

20:07 On 6th December 1980, Renee showed up at a bar in Watsonville, California, looking for her husband.

20:14 Billy and his brother Gary happened to be there at the time. It was observed that Mansfield Jr. came on very, very strongly to another woman that was at the bar and worked.

20:26 Finding no success with a woman he'd been harassing, Mansfield Jr. turned his attentions to 29-year-old mother of three, Renee.

20:35 Eventually, Renee was seen walking towards the parking lot with Mansfield Jr.

20:45 A short time later, Mansfield Jr. comes back in the bar and talks to one of his associates, asks him if he wants to meet the chick. He gives him the keys to his car and tells him she's out in the car, at which point he tells him, don't let her go, keep her locked up.

21:02 This acquaintance did go to the car and look in, but because he couldn't understand Renee and she was intoxicated, he then left.

21:11 Just hours later, on the 7th of December, 1980, she was found dead.

21:18 Renee's sailing was found face down in a drainage ditch at the side of Buena Vista Drive, a road that ran from the bar in Watsonville to the campground where Mansfield had been staying.

21:30 Her pants had been pulled down to around her ankles. Her shirt was up over the top of her head.

21:37 When a member of the public found her, they noticed a black cord wrapped so tightly around her neck that it was embedded in her flesh. She had obviously been strangled.

21:47 There were many features of the crime scene that police would see repeated again and again, not least the calls of death.

21:55 Mansfield Jr.

21:56 's preferred method of killing was strangulation, and this involves... The person being very up close to you, your victim, basically having their last breath being choked out of them by your bare hands. And individuals who kill in this way, there's a sense of wanting to overpower their victims and maybe deriving some sense of pleasure from that and feeling more powerful than ever that you're taking a human life.

22:22 A number of witnesses identified Billy Mansfield Jr. as being the man Renee Saling had left the bar with. But when police arrived to arrest the 24-year-old, Mansfield was long gone.

22:36 Mansfield Jr.

22:36 And his brother, Gary, they fled the campsite that they were at, and they eventually found their way to Las Vegas to try to evade charges.

22:46 I think it was four days later, he got caught in a place called Winnemucca, Nevada. Winnemucca is not a very large place, and Billy and Gary were distinctive. Billy had a beard, Gary had a beard, had long hair. Billy's was parted in the middle, and the police in Winnemucca got lucky and saw them. Billy was charged with murder in the first degree, and Gary was charged with being an accessory to the murder.

23:16 It appears that he did nothing really to hide his crimes or protect himself from being caught. I'm not sure that he was taught that you try to get away with your crimes, you just do them.

23:33 Extradited back to California, the brothers were sent to jail in Santa Cruz to await trial for the murder of Renee Saling. Then Mansfield Jr. 's former wife Phyllis told Hernando County law enforcement an extraordinary story, one that had nothing to do with Renee.

23:54 Once Billy was safely behind bars, Phyllis came forward and contacted us down here. with information that she thought could be relevant.

24:05 So in early 1976, while they were back in Michigan for a short time, Mansfield Jr. told his wife that he had killed a woman. Now, the wife actually didn't believe this. She took it as a threat to her that he could be a killer if she ever left him.

24:23 We then got some corroborating information, found out that Billy frequented the KOA campground here. He partied quite a bit, and he liked the younger women.

24:34 The campsite in Brooksville, Florida, was the very place that 15-year-old Elaine Ziegler had vanished from on New Year's Eve 1975. There was hope at last that the mystery of the teenager's disappearance might be solved. In March 1981, investigators finally had the go-ahead to act on the information Mansfield Jr.

24:59 's ex-wife had given them.

25:02 March 16th of 1981 got the search warrant. Somewhat different from an ordinary search warrant because of the nature of the property with the abandoned cars and the refrigerator parts and the air conditioning parts and all the junk that was there and just general trash. It was, a lot of the ground was covered and there was a lot of vegetation on it too. So we commandeered units from the city of Brooksville Public Works Department, the Hernando County Public Works Department. We had bulldozers, we.

25:31 Had Excavating the five-acre site looks set to be a daunting task. But within 24 hours, the first grisly discovery was made.

25:47 On March 17th, we found the first bones. Once they found the bones, then we had a team, a forensic archaeology team from the University of South Florida that came up and helped with the excavation. She had multiple blunt force trauma to the head. There was also wire, electrical wire, which was found in the vicinity of her neck and also her hands. She was found in a fetal position and the cause of death was strangulation and the immediate cause of death, the blunt force, multiple blunt force trauma.

26:26 The discovery of a female body was not a surprise to the search team, but the forensic archaeologists soon realized this was not 15-year-old Elaine Ziegler.

26:39 Ultimately, they recovered the skeleton, full skeleton, of a 22-year-old, estimate 22-year-old, white female.

26:49 Detectives got to work on identifying the remains of the body uncovered at Billy Mansfield Jr. 's Florida home, while the 24-year-old remained in custody 2,800 miles away in California for the murder of Renee Saling.

27:06 We had a facial reconstruction expert take the skull, ultimately, and rebuild a face and then publish the face throughout the country.

27:15 While they waited to find out if a match would come back for their Jane Doe, detectives tried to find out where else their suspected serial killer may have struck.

27:27 The investigators in Florida circulate a picture of Billy Mansfield Jr. to other police forces, and the police in Tampa recognize the picture and suggests that he looks very like the man they're searching for in the disappearance of Sandy Graham.

27:50 Mansfield Jr. was officially named as the main suspect in Sandy's disappearance, but the body found at his property on March 17th was not hers, and investigators were only beginning to scratch the surface of Billy Mansfield Jr. 's career of murder. Nine days into their search, detectives made another discovery.

28:14 Fairly close to the location of the first body and also shallow. And she was a white female, age 15.

28:26 This one is naked with a cord wrapped tightly around its neck in a fetal position.

28:33 She had multiple blunt force trauma to the head and had electrical wire. near her head and her neck and her hands. She was ultimately identified by dental charts and by the jewelry that she was wearing. She was identified as Elaine Ziegler.

28:53 The 15-year-old Ohioan girl had been missing from the nearby campground for over five years.

29:00 Her parents were told and they had waited six years to find out what had happened to their daughter. And I think the really sad thing is that when they found out what did happen to her, it was that worst case scenario. It was the thing of their nightmares.

29:28 The third victim we found was shortly after that. It was April 3rd, as I recall. She was about 75 feet from the back door. of the mass field house.

29:43 The body looked to be that of a white female in her late teens.

29:48 She had multiple blunt force trauma to the head and also had electrical, heavy electrical wire around her neck and around one of her wrists. did a facial reconstruction on her and published her newspaper and photograph and no one came forward.

30:10 The bodies of three young women had now been found on Billy Mansfield Jr. 's property. All had suffered violent deaths. While Mansfield Jr. remained in jail thousands of miles away in California, the search continued. And on April 7th, 1981, a fourth and final set of remains was recovered from the Mansfields' Florida property.

30:37 She likewise was found strangled with wire and with a cord. She had her pants pulled down to around the ankle area and her shirt pulled up over her head.

30:50 The woman had dark hair and was still wearing jewellery similar to that of missing 21-year-old Sandy Graham.

30:59 The detective from Tampa goes to look at the remains and notices, for example, that Sandy Graham was wearing a very distinctive serpent bracelet. But he also notices that the remains, the teeth, are perfect. And Sandy Graham's teeth were perfect.

31:22 She had last been seen at a bar down in Tampa with someone matching Billy's description. Just like Renee Saling was last seen alive leaving a bar in Santa Cruz with someone matching Billy's description.

31:40 The search of the property concluded on April the 17th, 1981, and investigators were able to tell two families what had happened to their loved ones.

31:52 I've always felt that the worst thing in the world is not knowing. It is, at the same time, a horrific experience because you're telling someone that someone that was their family, someone they loved and had spent their lives with, has been murdered, but it does give a chance for closure.

32:15 Two of the bodies found at the Mansfield family property remained unidentified. In July 1981, 25-year-old Billy Mansfield Jr. stood trial in Santa Cruz, California, for the murder of Renee Salink.

32:35 But that trial ended with jurors not being able to determine whether he was guilty or not because there was not enough evidence. But later that year, Mansfield Jr. 's brother, who was also facing charges in the murder as an accessory after the fact, agreed to testify against his brother in the murder.

32:54 So we cut a two-state deal with Gary that he would cooperate both in California and in Florida against his brother. in exchange for immunity from prosecution in Florida and in exchange for charges being dismissed in Santa Cruz.

33:13 This is a family that would bond together when it was convenient, but when it came time for self-preservation, they also did not have any reluctance in abandoning one another just so that they could save themselves.

33:26 In February 1982, Billy Mansfield Jr. was back in front of judge and jury, this time in Marin County, California.

33:37 The retrial takes place, and this time it only takes two weeks.

33:41 Mansfield Jr. was sentenced to 25 years to life for the murder of Renee Saling.

33:48 In May 1982, Jimmy Brown brought Mansfield Jr. back to Florida to face charges there. The six-hour flight was the first time the prosecutor had properly chatted to the convicted killer.

34:03 He came across as friendly. He was able to strike up conversations with people. It just struck me that he'd already been sentenced to life in prison for murder on Rene Saling. He was indicted for four murders. here in Hernando County, and it was like none of it was real. None of it bothered him at all.

34:25 Through the summer of 1982, prosecutors in Hernando County prepared to put Billy Mansfield Jr. on trial for the murders of Elaine Ziegler, Sandy Graham, and the two unidentified women whose remains had been found on his property. The killer faced the stiffest of penalties if found guilty.

34:49 Florida's statute for first-degree murder provided for two penalties, either death by electrocution or life in prison but eligible for parole after serving 25 years of the sentence. My feeling was, at that point in time, with everything we knew about Billy, that he should never be in a position where he could be released, ever. And Billy was still quite young at the time, 26, I think. Billy getting out of prison and being able to go back and hurt other people was just something I could not bear thought of.

35:35 In August 1982, on the eve of trial, Mansfield Jr., in order to avoid the death penalty in Florida, decided to plead guilty to the murder of the four victims found on the Mansfield property.

35:48 Mansfield also pleaded guilty to snatching and attacking Pamela Sherrill, the teen he'd taken to his mobile home near Brooksville in 1980.

35:57 Based on his plea, Mansfield Jr. was sentenced to four life sentences plus five years for the kidnap and attempted rape of Pamela Sherrill. Mansfield Jr. was then returned to California to serve out his remaining sentence in the murder of Renee.

36:17 Billy Mansfield Jr. remains incarcerated at the California Healthcare Facility in Stockton. He became eligible for parole there in 1997, but has not yet met the conditions that would allow him to be released, and is perhaps unlikely ever to do so.

36:38 This is somebody who you can't say is likely to be rehabilitated because it doesn't really seem like he even cares that he took the lives of these people.

36:49 He was cold and relentless and could have at any minute committed another murder.

36:58 It is believed that Mansfield's killing spree did not begin or end with the five women whose murders he'd been convicted of. After his sentencing in 1982, Mansfield Jr. approached prosecutors with a deal.

37:14 He didn't like the idea that his father was in prison for 56 years, and he offered that if we would let his dad out of prison and if we would give him immunity in each of the states involved, that he would provide details so the families of about 80 victims would have closure. which of course we couldn't do, so we still don't know. We do know that they stopped in KOA campgrounds all the way from here to Santa Cruz, and KOA campgrounds were Billy's favorite.

37:51 Hunting ground, if you will, for victims.

38:02 In 2020, 38 years after Mansfield's Florida convictions, there was a major breakthrough in identifying one of the two unnamed bodies found buried on the Mansfield property.

38:15 Advances in DNA technology meant that they could extract DNA from the remains they discovered. And then they gave that DNA to a forensic genealogist who constructed a family tree.

38:29 The forensic genealogist found someone on an online database whose DNA profile suggested they were related to the unnamed teenager. The expert then used this to start building the family tree of this individual, which led to the realization there was a young woman in the family whose birth was registered, but no further records existed for her. The information was handed to a cold case detective in Hernando County, Florida, who called Margaret Johns with a question.

39:04 Do you have a sister that went missing in 1980?

39:07 And I was speechless.

39:09 I couldn't, I could hardly answer him.

39:12 I said, he said, yeah, I think that we have identified your sister who went missing in Tampa in 1980.

39:23 Margaret gave a DNA sample and six weeks later, the remains were positively identified as belonging to her younger sister, Teresa Fillingham. 16-year-old Teresa had disappeared in Tampa some 41 years earlier, just after moving in with Margaret.

39:43 I felt guilty.

39:44 I took her away from where she was safe and sound. into Florida with me, I failed to protect her or take care of her or watch over her. And so over the years, I just blamed myself. And nothing ever happened until the day I got the phone call saying that they may have identified her.

40:13 So it took a year just to get the.

40:18 Once the positive identification happened, just to get her remains back.

40:23 And that was it. That was the end of it.

40:27 So now I have it.

40:34 Knowing is something you can then process and deal with. Not knowing is an emptiness, a chasm, a black hole. inside you of just worrying about all of the different scenarios. Not knowing, I think, for people is much worse than anything they might come to know.

40:59 The identification of Teresa Fillingham offers hope the remains of Billy Mansfield Jr. 's final unidentified victim may one day be returned to her family.

41:11 My message to people who do have loved ones still missing maybe is don't give up. Anything's possible.

41:23 As with so many serial killers, the question of whether Billy Mansfield Jr. was born evil or was the product of his violent, dysfunctional upbringing may never be fully answered. But few would disagree with investigators who described him as a man without a soul, a remorseless, calculating killer who placed no value on the lives he took. And as revelations about his crimes continue to this day, Mansfield will forever be remembered as one of the world's most evil killers.