Town note
Most of the settlers here were tenant farmers who paid their rent in tobacco.
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FILE 573 / 20 February 2025 / 178 MIN / full
We are in Bethesda, Maryland. This is in Montgomery County, Area Code 301. about 0:04:50
Most of the settlers here were tenant farmers who paid their rent in tobacco.
about 0:06:35Most of the settlers here were tenant farmers who paid their rent in tobacco.
about 0:06:3540%
about 0:10:50White 74.8% · Black 3.6% · Asian 11% · Hispanic 7.2%
Ethnicity can overlap race.Property crime
▼ about a third under
Violent crime
▼ about half
Six-bedroom, six-bath house, 5,890 square feet on 0.35 acres, built in 2003
about 0:13:39Six-bedroom, 11-bath house on the river, 11,522 square feet on 1.93 acres
about 0:14:35"66,294"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:09:57
"52%"
Comparison: "way more females than males". No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:07
"43"
Comparison: "a few years higher than the national average". Direction: above.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:10
"61%"
Comparison: "well above the national average". Direction: above.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:19
"6.5%"
Comparison: "very low". Direction: below.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:22
"74.8%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:40
"3.6%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:40
"11%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:40
"7.2%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:40
"40%"
Comparison: "lower than our normal". Direction: below.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:50
"the largest religious group"
Comparison: "not by a big margin". No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:10:55
"about average"
Direction: about the same.
As told in 2025 about 0:11:12
"$178,370"
Comparison: "national average $69,000". No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:11:19
"$138,500"
Comparison: "$100,000 is average". Direction: above.
As told in 2025 about 0:11:33
"$1,072,100"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:11:43
"$2,340"
Comparison: "almost double the national average". Direction: above.
As told in 2025 about 0:12:18
"$950,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:12:48
"$3,190,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:13:39
"$23,500,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:14:35
"$196,910"
No direction stated.
As told in 2025 about 0:15:48
"about a third under"
Comparison: "national average". Direction: below.
As told in 2025 about 0:18:58
"about half"
Comparison: "national average". Direction: below.
As told in 2025 about 0:19:04
3.0 / 5 · average of 2
“The safest place the reviewer has lived, very international, clean and green in summer, but very residential and not very walkable, and sometimes a bit too calm.”about 0:07:01
“They cannot wait for their lease to expire: the car was broken into a month after moving to the nice neighbourhood, construction causes mayhem downtown, drivers are chaotic, it is hot and humid, the J2 bus drivers are aggressive, there are few proper primary care doctors, rent is absurd for dated low quality housing and there are no good mechanics, only expensive dealerships.”about 0:07:44
His mother, Flavia, was a homemaker who claimed descent from the Mayflower. He was late to walk and talk, attended a special school from the age of six to fifteen and was taken to Yale's child study centre at four, where he was wrongly diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He trapped and tortured animals in the backyard, dissected them, decapitated the pets of children who picked on him, and was in and out of psychiatric care. Allison ran away as a teenager and said later that she never had a family.
He graduated from high school in 1972 at the age of 21 and, in the spring of 1974, from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He was a good cook and an exceptional ice sculptor but could not hold a job, working fourteen jobs between 1974 and 1981, including a year as a cook on the SS Norway and a three-week stint at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He spent summers in Provincetown, where he later claimed to have killed women in the dunes.
He joined the Navy and cooked aboard the USS Carl Vinson, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and briefly the USS Iwo Jima. Other sailors stuffed him in a meat locker for three hours and, on another ship, smashed his head against the deck. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, found unfit for duty and discharged in June 1985 with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and a 30 per cent disability pension. He refused to take his medication and moved into his brother Jeff's basement on Sudley Spring Road in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In October 1985, nine-year-old Sarah Pryor vanished in Wayland, Massachusetts. She had eaten a dish of Jell-O, watched television and gone out for a walk at about four in the afternoon, telling her father she would go further than she had ever gone before. She walked north on Concord Road for about a mile and a half and was seen by several people, then disappeared. There was no crime scene and no physical evidence. In 1997 a fragment of her skull was found in a field in Wayland, the only remains ever recovered.
After a divorce and a promising job at a computer firm, he met a married colleague named Patricia Mack and began an affair with her. One night, while her husband was away, she came to his house for dinner. By the pool they began kissing; he bit her nipple, she slapped him, and he bit the tip of it off. He beat her unconscious, then dragged her to the bathroom, cut off her breast, cooked it on the grill and ate it. He doused her crotch in rubbing alcohol and set it on fire, then dismembered her with a butcher knife, put the remains in plastic bags and dumped them.
On 31 May 1986 six-year-old Michelle Dorr, a friend of Jeff's daughter Eliza, was playing in a plastic pool at her father Carl's house two doors away. She came to Jeff's house asking for Eliza. He bagged the body, cleaned the room, drove to his job at a country club and clocked in at 2.46 p.m. Carl had been watching the Indianapolis 500 and reported Michelle missing about 5.30. Under hypnosis and sodium pentothal he said he had not done it, but he also told a psychiatrist that he had killed her, and he came to believe he was Jesus, the white Messiah, who could bring her back.
On 8 June a detective found him in Jeff's driveway; the next day he was questioned, rocked, cried, vomited at a photograph of Michelle and said he might have blacked out and done something. The case went cold.
By 1990 he had saved more than $40,000. He joined the First Baptist Church of Bethesda.
In 1992 a psychotherapist named Penny Houghteling hired him as a gardener. He became attached to her, stole from the house and was jealous when her daughter Laura, a Harvard graduate, came home in June. On 14 October 1992, after Penny told him she would be away, he bought duct tape, braided rope and nylon cord and wrote "Laura" in the memo of the cheque. Just after midnight on 19 October he let himself into the house dressed in Penny's lingerie, blouse, slacks, wig and trench coat, carrying her purse and a .22 rifle. He woke Laura, asked why she was in his bed, demanded that she tell him he was Laura and made her swear it on a Bible. He made her bathe, bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape, then wrapped the tape around her head until she suffocated. Cutting the tape away, he stabbed her in the neck, cut off her earlobe to take an earring, sat and watched her body for an hour, wrapped her in a sheet and put her in his truck. He slept in her bed, left at eight in the morning and was mistaken by a housekeeper for Laura. He buried her near Interstate 270 across from his campsite. Her brother Warren saw him driving away and he fled.
He told the bear that he was not getting out of this one. A bucket holding 230 pieces of jewellery, including Penny's daughter's ring and a brooch called the angel of death, was dug up at Wellfleet Cemetery in Massachusetts. He is serving two consecutive terms at the Eastern State Correctional Facility in Maryland. Only a fragment of Sarah Pryor's skull has ever been found.
October 1985 to October 1992, with earlier claimed killings from 1974 / Wayland and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Silver Spring, Bethesda and Rockville, Maryland
As told in the episode, on 20 February 2025.
Accused
the 1980s / house in California
As told in the episode, on 20 February 2025.
Accused
Public places are marked on the map.
crime scene
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about 2:20:23home
about 0:41:56road
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about 1:14:00body found
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