Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

Deep in the archives of the Los Angeles Police Department is a room they call "The Tunnel".

Here in this place are more mysteries than even in Hollywood's storied imagination.

Once these were active investigations.  Now, they are as dead as their victims.

And they'll stay dead, unless a cold case detective like Richard Bengston can somehow bring them back to life.

Richard Bengston: We're the last chance homicide detectives, because once we've looked at it, if we can't solve it, then nobody else is going to look at it.

But where to begin? Just in the years since 1960, 9,000 unsolved homicides have landed here in the dust-bin of justice.

Keith Morrison: How do you solve 9,000 cold cases?

Richard Bengston: You know what, you can't. But if you can solve one, one unsolved case that nobody else could solve, then you're ahead of the game.

Keith Morrison: Even though they're that old, because it matters?

Richard Bengston: It doesn't matter how old they are, just bring answers to one family that didn't have answers before.

Or so any cop would hope.

But in 2002, when Bengston was assigned to a 30-year-old triple homicide, he had no idea that he'd need help from a pair of the most unlikely partners he'd ever encountered: two women who had never met, never knew about each other, lived in different parts of the country. But they did share the very same dark secret about the crimes.

Jeanne Laudenberg: I've kept this inside of me for so many years. Quite a story. Hard to believe it really happened.

Renée Laudenberg: It's frightening and scary and evil and horrible and nightmarish.

No, for all those years, the riddle played hard to get along the docksides and among the blue collar watering holes of L.A.'s port town: San Pedro...

What riddle? The one that spun out through a 1970s string of ugly sex murders...

In 1972 Lois Petrie, a recently widowed woman in her 40s, was killed on the bed of her bungalow.

Two years later, Catherine Medina, a middle-aged laundry worker turned up dead in a park.

A month after that, the nude body of 53-year-old Anna Felch was dumped on the side of a road.

Richard Bengston: They were neat murders. Not a lot of evidence left behind.

The killer had made no secret of his motive.  He'd raped them all, and strangled their lives away as he satisfied his sick desires.

Richard Bengston: And the other common denominator was all these ladies were known to hang out in the bars in the San Pedro area, so we had another common link besides all being females between the ages of 40 and 60.

But as Bengston began digging through the original file, he could see why the case had died its own slow death: the killer was clever. He'd covered his tracks.

He left not a single fingerprint, not a witness, not a clue.

And of course, it being the '70s, DNA was not yet even a gleam in some future investigator's eye.

Richard Bengston: I don't know if we knew we had a shot at cracking it. But I enjoy putting the pieces back together, you know, figure out what happened, how it happened.

Pieces? What pieces? Well, no one knew it yet, of course, but there was a piece, a clue, for this unsolved puzzle. It was 2,500 miles away in Pittsburgh, Pa. And it wasn't an it, it was a she: Jeanne Laudenberg.

In the Spring of 2003 Jeanne was living a quiet life, working in the accounting department of a company in downtown. What had happened to her three decades earlier had been firmly planted in the past - an unwelcome memory.

It was right around the time of those murders, back in 1975. Jeanne was a college student. She'd met a guy who lived in California.

So, flushed with love and optimism, they decided to move in together. And that summer - 1975 - Jeanne flew out to the coast, San Luis Obispo, to find an apartment. Her beau was scheduled to arrive in town a couple of weeks later, so his step-father, a man named Adolph, picked up Jeanne at the airport. 

Jeanne Laudenberg: He seemed like an elderly fatherly figure, and just really nice. He smiled a lot, he was very kind, and we got along great.

So they did, and Adolph squired Jeanne around town as she found an apartment and then he helped her get it ready for the arrival of his step son.

Jeanne Laudenberg: We went to flea markets together, we did a lot of shopping for the apartment, and we just had a good time together.

Then, just a few days before her boyfriend was due in town, Adolph looked at Jeanne and he was suddenly different.

And he told her a shocking story. A story about a serial killer in the harbor town of San Pedro. A killer who just might have Jeanne square in his cross hairs.

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