Carroll Edward Cole: The Man Who Asked to Be Stopped
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He walked into police stations, he sat across from psychiatrists, he told them in documented records that he was going to kill women and he could not stop himself. |
| 0:10.4 | He asked to be locked up. |
| 0:12.4 | They let him go. |
| 0:13.9 | This is Carol Edward Cole, and this might be the most infuriating true crime case you've ever heard. The thing about Carol Edward Cole is not the number of women he killed, which one is too many. |
| 0:48.3 | It's how many times he told someone he was going to do it. |
| 0:51.5 | He walked into police stations. He sat across from psychiatrists. |
| 0:55.0 | He described his compulsions in plain language, and then he was released anyway. |
| 1:00.4 | Carol Cole spent 20 years telling the system exactly what he was, and then watched them find |
| 1:05.7 | other explanations. 13 confirmed victims later, he was executed in Nevada, and his brain was sent to a |
| 1:12.9 | university for researchers to try to figure out what went wrong. He was born on May 9, 1938, |
| 1:19.4 | in Sioux City, Iowa. His family moved to Richmond, California in 1939, pulled west toward the |
| 1:25.3 | Kaiser shipyards and the jobs that the war was generating. |
| 1:29.0 | His father, Laverne, was drafted not long after the move, and Carol was left at home with his mother, Vesta. |
| 1:35.3 | Vesta Cole was an alcoholic, having affairs while her husband served overseas, and she needed |
| 1:41.1 | her five-year-old son to stay quiet about it. The way she secured that |
| 1:44.8 | silence was to take Carol to a stranger's apartment, make him watch while she slept with multiple |
| 1:50.1 | men, and then beat him when it was over. Twisted his arms, made clear that violence was available, |
| 1:56.5 | and the threshold for it was very low. And here's the thing about experiencing something like that when |
| 2:01.3 | you're five years old. It doesn't only traumatize you. It teaches you. Women, alcohol, betrayal, |
| 2:08.5 | secrecy, pain. Carol spent the rest of his life trying to resolve something that happened before |
| 2:13.9 | he was even old enough to name it. His father came home from war in 1945 and Vesta's |
| 2:19.7 | physical abuse reportedly stopped. The psychological humiliation did not. At school, peers mocked his |
... |
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