Trigger warning, this episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Please listen with discretion.

On Saturday, February 27, 1971, an 18-year-old New Hampshire woman named Susan Randall hitched

a ride with a wrong person. Earlier that night, she had met up with a friend and manchester

to hang out and get some pizza. It was close to midnight when her friend got a ride

back home with her own father, but Susan told them not to worry, she would hitch a ride

back home herself. Her mother had warned her of the dangers of getting rides from strangers,

but this was the 70s, an era when teens and young adults thought nothing of it. Susan

walked until she got to the chicken house restaurant and stood outside. Diners inside

saw the young woman bundled up in a fur coat, waiting. Eventually, a man pulled up in a

white car and Susan got in with him. Two days later, her body was found in the frozen

Merrimack River, beaten and half naked. According to the police, that same night, a carpenter

named Robert Breast was moving from one apartment to another, hauling furniture back

and forth in his white sedan. He, the police were convinced, was the culprit. And why

not? Two years earlier in July of 1969, Breast's girlfriend, Luella Blakezley, had disappeared,

never showing up for a date he claimed. Her body wouldn't be found for 20 years. And

six months before his girlfriend disappeared, an 11-year-old named Deborah Horn, a child

that Luella herself had been tutoring, was abducted from her home and murdered. Breast

had not been arrested or charged in either of these cases, but he had been a suspect.

And now, after Susan was found murdered, a search of Breast's car revealed fibers from

her coat, he had scratches on his hands, blood on his boots and even blood on his fingernails,

which matched the victim's blood type. If that wasn't enough to be an open and shut

case, Breast sealed his fate by confessing to a man named David Carita, a jailhouse

...