Original subtitles

Cape Fear...

sounds ominous just in the name.

It was named Cape Fear based off of pirate stories

back in the 1600s.

Sailors were scared of it, the water,

because it was so-- so rough.

It's been said that it sucks in storms,

hurricanes.

There's a history of this area being cursed, or bad luck,

or something along those lines.

I've seen many crimes committed in this area.

I've seen full moons where people do act out.

I've seen Friday the 13th where bad things do happen.

It was the summer of 1977.

There was a group of kids leaving a school dance.

Approximately 10:30, 11 o'clock at night.

Barbara Lewis was a 17-year-old girl.

Her and her friends, at one point,

they said their goodbyes.

And Barbara was left walking alone.

There was no place in Wilmington

that was so dangerous, but a block from home,

safest place in town.

The next morning,

the Wilmington Police Department got a call...

...that there was a young black girl who was,

what appeared to be, deceased in the alley

behind a house.

Police at the time responded and found Barbara Ann Lewis.

Her clothes were cut from her body,

wearing her shoes only,

and was left laying on her back in that field

where she was strangled to death.

We found heel prints where the killer dragged her.

They had a shoe print impression

that they photographed by the crime scene.

Police did find two people

that saw Barbara get pulled across the street.

They were able to describe the assailant

as a tall black man.

Pretty vague description as far as that goes,

but nonetheless, it gave us a starting point.

Unfortunately, at that time, we were unable to locate

anyone in particular.

The Cape Fear area is located in southeastern North Carolina.

Wilmington is what I would consider to be a small,

quaint town, you know, surrounded by beach communities.

I think Wilmington is sort of a place

where people are more superstitious

than in other places.

I think that's something to do with the history here,

all of the ghost stories, the pirate stories

that you hear.

And there were serial killers that would come through here.

The growth of Wilmington and all the new people moving in

and all the tour that come here, too,

kinda created a-- a hunting ground.

I think people believe that there is

some other force out there that's...

causing these things.

So just a couple weeks later, two hours away up in New Bern,

police get a call from a hysterical woman.

She's found the body of a young woman

who's been severely beaten outside of an elementary school.

New Bern is only about 100 miles north from Wilmington.

The victim was partially clothed on her back

and had been beaten severely about her head and body.

We collected biological evidence

such as blood and semen.

There was nothing else to go on.

I remember it was quite bizarre because of the nature

of the beating that she took.

He had struck her so hard, he had embedded her head

into the ground.

Her head is beaten so severely that...

they don't know who even the victim is,

until her mother identifies her as Gwendolyn Nelson.

Gwen was an 18-year-old young mother

to her daughter and lived with her mother.

Gwen liked to hang out in the neighborhood.

Gwen always kind of struck me

as someone that was very vibrant and full of life.

She just has an aura about her, someone that she looked

like she'd be fun to be around.

She was also known as a person who did not put up with much,

was a fighter, was a scrapper, and stuck up for herself.

What's the problem?

When a woman's killed, a lot of people ask,

"Who do you first look at?"

Normally, a boyfriend, a husband, a domestic partner

are always included in a suspect pool.

Police contacted her boyfriend.

He lived several doors down from the crime scene.

He stated she had actually been to his house that night.

He told the officers Gwen had left his house.

She was walking up the street.

And at the intersection there of Elm Street,

a black male individual came out and engaged her in conversation.

And then grabbed her

by the upper body,

and drug her across the street towards the schoolyard.

The boyfriend thought there was nothing to it.

He thought maybe they were joking around

and they knew each other.

He went inside, shut the door,

and he was the last person to see her alive.

Her boyfriend described the suspect as a black male,

taller, and provided a clothing description with sneakers,

nothing out of the ordinary.

But the officers at the time had suspicions of the story.

"Why did you not intervene?"

Why did you not call somebody to help if you see somebody get

grabbed about the upper body and dragged off the street?

Why would you not do anything?

He seemed like the strong suspect.

They couldn't say he did it,

but they couldn't rule him out either.

But if Gwen this boyfriend was telling the truth,

that means there's still a killer

out on the streets of New Bern.

There is a guy out there just randomly

snatching people off the street.

You never know who's gonna be next.

And that's when, Friday the 13th,

marks the Cape Fear Killer's deadliest chapter.

Back in the '70s,

I can't imagine the terror that these women

must have been feeling to have someone stalking

and preying on people around here in this area.

You start to understand that we have a problem here,

and this may not be just an isolated incident.

You know, as a woman, you wanna be able to walk home

at night by yourself and be safe.

But cases like this, people just being attacked,

it makes you feel like it's not safe

to be alone as a woman.

It's the summer of 1977, and here in Wilmington,

Barbara Lewis's body

was discovered.

And then just two hours away in New Bern,

the body of Gwen Nelson shows up.

Two totally separate cities.

During that time, there was no correlation

between those two murder investigations.

This is a photo of me as a reporter

for the New Bern Sun Journal.

For years, both the murders of Barbara Lewis

and of Gwen Nelson became unsolved cold cases.

When I was writing the story for the Sun Journal,

I had the opportunity to speak to Gwen's daughter,

who was only two at the time.

She never felt safe leaving home.

She never felt safe going to school.

Her grandmother kind of kept her really close to her

just to make sure that she was safe.

Over 30 years later, in 2012,

I was on evening shift.

As I was leaving, I was approached by a patrol officer

in the alleyway.

He told me that he had a missing person--

Latricia Scott.

Latricia was 24-year-old

that lived in the downtown area of Wilmington,

and she was a student at Cape Fear Community College.

She had two young children that lived in the house.

In January 2012,

Latricia Ann Scott's mom called police.

She was frantically looking for her daughter.

She hadn't been returning calls.

Latricia's mom said she hadn't come home from school that day.

In 2012,

I was a detective assigned to the violent crime section.

I was working the night Latricia Scott

was reported missing.

I was assigned

to the Wilmington Police Department,

the Homicide Unit, as an investigator,

but also as a cold case investigator.

We started looking for attacks in the area

and found a cluster of-- a high number of rapes

for a particular small area during that time frame.

The last year or two in that particular area,

women walking alone were grabbed from behind

and dragged and assaulted.

It just kept happening over the course of years.

2008 and then 2010, 2011.

We have definitely had a serial rapist

operating in that area.

In 2007,

I took over the investigative unit

at New Bern Police Department.

We had a number of cold cases that had not been worked.

The oldest of the cases was Gwendolyn Nelson's homicide

dating back to 1977.

The attacks, they were in a close time frame,

and then July of 1979, Friday the 13th, they stopped.

In some cases, there was a description of the suspect--

a black male,

with a pretty large, imposing figure.

Late 2008,

I reached out to Wilmington Police Department detectives,

Detective Odham, and Detective Tully.

We started comparing notes.

When Detective Dombrowsky and I were comparing cases,

I looked at his crime scene photos,

something that resonated in my mind.

This is a picture of a partial shoe print impression taken

from the New Bern PD murder scene of Gwen Nelson in 77.

And this is a shoe print impression

taken from the crime scene

of the Barbara Lewis murder in 1977.

It appeared to be the same shoe print

in both cases.

Then we noticed something else.

Between the two crimes of Gwen Nelson

and Barbara Lewis,

we reviewed some of the crime scene photographs

and it was pretty stark to me.

They almost looked identical, the way they were laid out

on the ground.

That was the initial correlation

that we really needed to solidify

that those cases were involved with each other.

Could this be the same guy?

If it is, there is one man that police were looking at.

In July 1979, he was convicted of three counts

of assault in Wilmington.

And also confessed to a couple of the rapes and assaults

that occurred in New Bern.

He'd spent about 30 years incarcerated

for those offenses

that he committed in the late '70s.

We know now why the assault stopped,

because he was locked up on Friday the 13th

in July 1979.

He went to prison for three decades.

And the second he gets out,

these rapes start happening again.

You know, in the community,

people were fearful.

They said, "Who the heck would do something like that?"

This guy was a vicious criminal walking the street

that was capable of just indiscriminately taking women

and brutally assaulting them.

All over the city,

everybody knew that he wasn't done yet.

We knew he intended to look for other prey.

Around the Cape Fear area.

We had the 1977 murder of Barbara Lewis,

the 1977 murder of Gwendolyn Nelson,

and then we come up to 2012.

Latricia Scott went missing

from Cape Fear Community College.

We started looking back to the early '70s,

and we found up to a dozen unsolved rapes

around Cape Fear between 1977 and 1978.

And then July 1979,

on that Friday the 13th, they stopped,

and it didn't occur any longer after that.

I can understand the sense of calm

would have come across the city now that they know

that this individual is incarcerated.

That was the light bulb going off

that Friday the 13th--

that's exactly when the one individual was convicted

of three counts of assault in Wilmington.

Andrew Bernard Adams.

He was very imposing.

He made a lot of people just feel uncomfortable.

People described him as Frankenstein.

Once they realized that Andrew Adams

could be connected to Barbara and Gwen's murder,

they started to peel back his history,

and they found a very dark history.

Mr. Adams went into prison at 17 years old

for rape and was released in May of 1977.

In 77 and 78, his mother lived in downtown Wilmington

and his father lived in New Bern.

Because of the lack of technology and information

sharing in the 70s, Andrew Adams was able to go

back and forth between Wilmington and New Bern

and commit these attacks without police ever being able

to piece them together.

Andrew Bernard Adams was locked up in July of 1979,

arrested for a number of rapes that occurred down here.

This time, his sentence, it was 20 years.

They kept him in prison as long as they possibly could.

But they could not hold him

in prison any longer.

Statutorily, could not do it.

The mug shot of how Bernard looked

when he was released from prison in 2007.

July 2008,

we had a young woman walking alone

in a very busy area downtown.

She was walking home from the bars.

Out of the blue, she was grabbed from behind

and dragged into a concealed area

in a church courtyard.

He asked me if she had ever been raped before.

The rumor is that she was stabbed

with a wooden stick with nails in it.

Somehow, by the grace of God,

she crawled out onto the street.

And someone saw her, a bloody mess.

They miraculously saved her life.

We were able to get a description from her.

It was a black male in his late 30s, early 40s,

around six-foot-two,

over 200 pounds, with a muscular build

and short hair.

There was no doubt in our minds

that Andrew Bernard Adams was responsible,

but we didn't have forensic evidence to show

that he was an attacker.

But the fact that he's out there

and has the ability to attack again,

there is a sense of creepiness.

Women around the community, they knew Adam's history.

They're locking their doors. There's a fear going around.

You didn't know when he was going to strike again.

Is it gonna be tonight?

Is it gonna be tomorrow night?

Uh, where is it gonna be?

So 2010,

another year has gone by,

and things have seemed a quiet town,

another quiet year until Friday the 13th.

A lone black female was walking

through a wooded area, uh, taking a shortcut

to her residence, at night.

And she was attacked from behind.

He said, "Have you ever been raped?"

And after that, he stole some personal property from her,

including her earrings.

We wrote a search warrant for Mr. Adams' house

to look for any evidence related to the rape

of that particular female.

Property that had been stolen from her,

as well as his DNA.

It was obvious that...

he was very institutionalized from being in prison.

Very sparse furnishings, not much in the room.

He had a calendar

with every day x-ed out with big black magic marker.

Then we noticed something strange

we found a package that was underneath his bed

that contained multiple pairs of ladies' panties.

Adam said that he just had a fetish,

and he was stealing the panties off of clotheslines

when he was walking near his house.

I then asked him, "Well, how many people

hang dirty panties on a clothesline?

And he became evasive at that time.

Detective Odham took Andrew Adams' DNA

and they sent him off to the crime lab.

The waiting game is excruciating,

especially when you think or note

that every day he had that urge.

And then all of a sudden,

I get a call telling me the DNA

that we had collected from Mr. Adams

matched the DNA

at the Gwen Nelson crime scene in 1977.

It eliminated the initial suspect,

which was Gwen Nelson's boyfriend.

But the sample was degraded to the point

where it wasn't of the standard that's usually used in a court

or for the purposes of DNA evidence.

But it was a match nonetheless.

And Dombrowsky was gonna be pushing the VA's office

to charge Mr. Adams with the first-degree murder

and rape of Gwen Nelson in 1977.

So months go by, no decision had been made.

We pretty much were just always waiting for it

to happen again.

And, you know, trying to get that one extra puzzle piece

to maybe give us the reason to charge him,

it wasn't uncommon for me or Odham or both of us

to drive past his house and wave.

I wanted him to know that we didn't go away.

I guess it's a little bit of pompous thing to do,

but, oh, well...

I just knew something terrible was gonna happen.

And then we come up to January 2012,

when Miss Scott went missing.

There was two names that were listed as people

that she sometimes associated with.

When I saw the name for the first time

on paper that she was with, my heart dropped.

So I picked up my desk phone and I called my partner,

Detective Odham, and I said,

"You're not gonna believe this."

But this missing persons report that I have on my desk,

Latricia Scott, she was last seen with Andrew Bernard Adams.

And he said, "You're kidding."

It became apparent

that we were gonna have to jump in this case immediately.

Number one, to find her...

...if she is still alive.

But number two, to prevent something

from happening to her.

We knew what Mr. Adams was and what he was capable of.

I remember it being Friday the 13th, 2012.

People think of Friday the 13th,

they think of bad luck, superstition.

It's not uncommon for the police that I work with

to have heightened awareness, especially on night shift that,

"Oh, it's Friday the 13th."

You don't know what to expect.

The night before, I was passing the corner where Adams lived.

I had noticed there was a group of people in the street.

There was some type of altercation going on.

Miss Scott's family, they went directly

to the person that Miss Scott was last seen with,

which was Mr. Andrew Bernard Adams.

The family members were heated,

and I can tell that Adams was getting nervous.

Now that the police are there,

I had asked him to...

go into a more private area.

While doing that, I put my digital recorder in my pocket

to record our conversation.

When we got to the backyard, I had noticed that the ground

had been freshly dug.

And I...

brought that to Adam's attention.

He knelt down on the ground

and physically dug a three-foot hole

just with his hand to show me that there was nothing

in this hole.

I was taken back, at the ease he had

to use his hands to do it.

Other officers were walking around and they said,

"Well, there's another area that was also disturbed."

I could see he was in fear,

because he was nervous, you know.

Adam asked if he could go inside.

And I allowed that, because he was not in custody.

He was free to leave.

At the same time,

other officers were walking around

near the end of the street.

There was a large fence

that separated the railroad tracks and bushes.

You can see that there was a Styrofoam cooler that had

looked like it had been thrown over the fence.

The detectives found that there was sheets,

pillowcases, some clothing items

that were tucked away inside.

But they had markings consistent with blood,

somebody that had a serious injury.

We executed the search warrant on Friday,

January 13th of 2012.

When the sun came up on Friday the 13th,

the police began digging.

And it was a painstaking process,

it took a long time,

but they uncovered the back part of a foot,

the heel specifically sticking out of the ground.

This is the hole where Latricia Scott's body was found,

buried in the yard.

I believe I was maybe on my way to work,

when we got word there had been a body found.

I remember people being

worried and very upset.

I believe there were some people crying.

When Latricia's body had been found buried,

it was disheartening

because here's an individual

that you had been closing in on and then there's a new victim

to his senseless,

violent mind.

Anytime we have what we feel is an opportunity

to save someone's life,

and we can't,

it's heartbreaking.

Um,

you know, um,

you-- you can't call yourself a human if you don't feel that.

So after Latricia's body was found,

there was a high importance to get Adams in custody

as soon as possible.

But he had taken off.

He had left the area, and he was nowhere to be found.

He was in the wind.

Now you've got an individual committing assaults,

is committing homicides, and has no regard

for human life, for human safety,

and he's out there on the street,

and he's stressed,

he's... being chased,

and... highly dangerous.

In early January of 2020, Wilmington Police makes

a grisly discovery, the bludgeoned body

of a 24-year-old Latricia Ann Scott

buried in a shallow grave.

When Latricia's body was found

buried in Andrew Adams,

I was on edge and was of high importance

to bring him in and to get him off the street

for everybody's safety.

When he left the scene that night,

we didn't know where he went.

We know he doesn't have a vehicle.

He doesn't have a lot of money.

We knew he was probably in the area.

While we were at the police station, we had a gentleman

walk in the front door, and told us that Andrew Adams

was in his boarding house, which was only two blocks away.

That night, we evacuated the house,

and he was more or less barricaded inside,

not coming out.

So we deployed gas munitions into that house.

He didn't come out,

and that's a very tough individual,

if you can withstand the fumes of pepper gas.

We go inside the house.

We were on the second floor looking for him.

And he wasn't up there.

Then we find this hole that he dug.

Adam's head tunneled through the floor and the wall,

through the plaster, through the wood,

and he was high on the first floor

in a completely different section of the house.

We ultimately found him, but he just tunneled

through the floor. I mean, he was a strong man.

I was standing about a block,

maybe a half-block away,

downwind, and all of a sudden my eyes started watering

and hurting from the tear gas. It was very surreal.

I think that the whole city

could then breathe a sigh of relief.

When he was arrested

and brought into the police station

and interviewed by me and Lee Odham.

Adams was emotionless, calm.

Initially, he was a little hesitant.

Unfortunately, this buildup of trust

that she had led to her demise,

because she was with somebody who was extremely violent,

who had an extremely checkered past.

And sooner or later, that side of them showed its face,

and she paid with her life.

At his house, we took a hammer.

It had a small hair

that was caught in between the hammerhead and the handle.

Unfortunately, we learned that that was the weapon used

against Latricia.

It didn't matter at that point because he confessed.

Then Mr. Adams was interviewed

about the Gwendolyn Nelson murder in 77

and confronted with the DNA match.

We walked him through all the facts

and he was able to relay particularly

detailed information

about her clothes, a light-colored tube top,

a dark-colored pair of shorts.

He confirmed that she did indeed try to fight him off,

which is why he struck her in her head to disable her.

He was then interviewed about the murder of Barbara Lewis.

He vividly described grabbing the girl,

which he didn't know was Barbara Lewis,

and dragging her across the street behind a bush.

He says he was hiding from the guys

who were on the porch at the end of the street,

and he was pulling Barbara out of sight.

He didn't realize that he had choked her too hard

and for too long.

When we got to the why,

his answer was-- opportunity.

After that, they were able

to get enough evidence to charge him

with murder in the Latricia Scott case

and murder in the Gwen Nelson case.

The DA's wanted to go for the death penalty,

but it came back that Andrew Adams' IQ was too low,

and so legally they were not able to.

Adams pleaded guilty to second degree murder

and second degree rape.

He got two life sentences

without the possibility of parole.

With Barbara's case,

there wasn't enough physical evidence to charge him,

but he had already been given

two large sentences with Gwen and Latricia's murder,

so that case is closed, without prosecution.

It was a tremendous sense of relief.

On the ride home that night, the totality of--

five years of working that case, um...

hit me.

And I knew from interviews with the family that Gwen's mom

cried almost every day

since she was killed, and--

I was...

upset...

because...

her mother had passed away and had never had

the opportunity to see this justice brought.

Throughout this case,

there was a connection to Friday the 13th.

It was the date that Adams was locked up that got

the investigators' attention. July the 13th, 1979.

Friday the 13th.

And then three decades later, on Friday the 13th, 2012,

the police find Latricia's remains.

The same day, Andrew Adams was arrested again,

but now he's in prison for the rest of his life.

With cold cases, it's such a great moment

when you're solving the puzzle

that someone else couldn't solve.

We put it all together.

The last time Virginia Rodriguez

talked to her son, Pepe,

was on Friday the 13th.

I saw the volume of blood that was on the floor.

You think it can't get any worse, and then it does.

They had his head in a bucket.

He's a psychopath.