The Bench. A quick warning before we start. This show contains descriptions of sexual violence and murder. Listener discretion is advised. It's late at night, and my producer and I are driving through the mountains of West Virginia. So we're on this two-lane road without no streetlights, going through what looks like the woods. It's the last leg of a long journey. We're on our way to meet the daughter of a serial killer. Well, for me to meet her again. I haven't seen her since she was 12. And there are no cars around, aren't there? I don't think we've seen a single car on this road. Yeah. Just like what? I mean, the whole space is being cleared out to make room for this evil. And then the phone rings. A name pops up. It's Donna. Robert Carr's daughter. My producer, Dan and I look at each other. Donna has been hard to schedule. Is she about to cancel on us?

Yes, Steve.

Hi. We're going through the mountains, so I guess the connection is going in and I don't know. It turns out she's just checking in.

I assume you have somebody picking you up.

At least that's how the conversation opens, making sure we're getting in okay. But that's not the reason for this midnight call. Donna wants to talk about her father. I do, too. That's why I'm making this trip. I want to hear about growing up with a serial killer. I expect Donna to tell me how horrible it was growing up with a father like Robert Carr. But she says something that surprises me.

He was my father. And As a little girl, I truly did love my father.

Donna was a daddy's girl.

He had just been, you know, confessed to all these crimes. And I didn't understand that much. As a child, I did love him, and whether that was right or wrong or otherwise, it didn't matter. It still hurt.

It still hurt. That must be very complicated.

It was very complicated.

I can't wait to meet you tomorrow in person.

Sounds wonderful. I will see you tomorrow.

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Oh, my God. How are you?

It's been just a little while. It's been just a little while. How are you?

I'm all right. It's good to see you after all these years. You do. Donna hugs me when I arrive. It feels a little like a reunion. I How are you doing? Is this going to be an emotional day?

It could be.

Still blonde after all these years. I know.

I know. It's getting gray in there. It's hiding right now.

Donna is 60 years old now. She's moved around a lot over the years. You lived here a long time?

We bought this about two and a half years ago.

She lives here with her husband, her third. It's a modest home full of cats and dogs in the front yard. Are those bees? Is that a bee? Yeah. Oh, my God. You cultivate whatever you call it with bees? Yeah. Oh, my God. You're not scared? You don't get bit? Oh, yeah, you get some. Donna's taken her husband's name. Nobody knows it's Donna Carr, huh? Mm-mm.

Very few people.

Yeah.

Very few. Yeah.

We head inside, sit down in her living room. Donna lights a Sonoma, an off-brand cigarette. She's trying to save money. What's your tattoo say?

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

It turns out the short time Donna and I had spent together had left a big impression.

Never forgot your name. Never forgot you. Yeah, I've thought about you quite a bit over the years. So it was a little bit of a shock to hear from you. Yeah.

And what did you think over the years about me?

Just wondering what you were doing, because you were very young when I met you, and just wondered where your career and your life had taken you. Yeah, just curious.

She tells me she even called my old newspaper, the Norwich Bulletin.

I wanted to see some of the articles you had written.

Why?

To bring back a good memory of somebody that you had a a connection with.

This comes as a surprise. I didn't expect Donna to even remember me. And if she did, I worried how she'd react to how I'd covered the story of her father. But Donna has been thinking about me warmly over the years. She's been searching for me in a way, and here I am, popped back into her life. Donna has been on a journey, and it's been a lonely journey. And she's been consumed by it, still is, by trying to understand her father.

To hear in his words why he did it, what he did, what his thought processes were. The why, constantly the why. Why did you do this? What was going on in your head that you would do this to somebody, to all of them? What made you so I feel like you could do this to people and to your own children. Why?

Donna has spent most of a lifetime searching for answers. Why did he do it? I want answers to that question, too. Was it because he didn't get treatment, which is what I'd written all those years back, or something else, something about the monster monster within, the one Donna must know. So, Donna, where should we start?

I don't know there's so much.

So I start back when Donna was a child in a nuclear family that could seem more or less like other families. I ask for a happy memory, and she tells me about a camping trip to a Connecticut State Park, a place called Devil's Hopp Yard.

Devil's Hopp Yard was my favorite place as a child. Some of the only family moments that I remember. We used to go camping there when my brother and I were small. When you enter the park, it's immediately, it's just very lush and forested. It's always been very beautiful to me. My brother and I would go play by the river. My dad would make the campfire, and I remember we would put empty beer bottles in there and melt the glass. I've always loved the smell of campfire smoke. My father just seemed more relaxed there, more friendly. It was beautiful. It was It was very dark there. It was probably my first experiencing the Milky Way. It was just way up, like a transparent cloud. You know, toward bedtime, as we got ready to go to bed, we would sit around and talk a little bit. One, maybe two nights we would stay. I don't even know that we had a tent. I think we slept in the car. My mom and dad would lay the front seats back, and my brother and I would... One of us would make a bed on the floorboard and one of us on the seat.

At the time, I did still love my father.

What did you love about him?

I don't want to say I was his favorite child, but He could always make me smile. When I saw him, I would smile and light up. That was the bond that I had with my dad at the time.

When Donna was about nine, the trips to the park ended. Her father was arrested for two rapes and imprisoned in Connecticut. When he got parole, Donna was a pre-team. She still wanted a normal family, a dad who went to work and came home for dinner. And for a time, it seemed like things were looking up. The family was together again.

I can't remember having a good Christmas. He bought a stereo, and he seemed He seemed actually happy, smiling, joking a little bit. The things seemed good from our perspective.

But with her father, nothing was ever dependable.

He just didn't know when it was coming. He would go from being very nice and doing things for us and buying us gifts to very mean. So you always looked for that fear constantly that he was going to turn on you.

Donna had seen him turn on people, people he loved. She'd seen it from a very young age, from five years old.

So we were In Miami, living out of the car. And apparently, my mother had been holding a $20 bill for my father.

They're driving around a rough neighborhood.

And she couldn't find the $20 bill. She was looking everywhere through her purse or wallet. She couldn't find it. And so he threw her out of the car.

What did he say to her?

Get the fuck out. Get out of the damn car. And then took off, turned to me, and I was probably, I don't know, five, maybe six. And said, I guess you're raising your brother now.

Donna's mom is stranded on the side of the road in this dangerous neighborhood. Donna takes her father seriously, and she's scared.

And I think it was close to the entire day he made her sit there and then went back and got her.

She sat there?

Yeah. What else was she going to do? She sat there.

Kara was the leader of the family, no questions asked. When he wanted to move, they moved. And he wanted needed to move constantly.

We'd be in Florida, and then we'd go to Connecticut, and then we'd go to Virginia, or then we'd go out West somewhere. And so a lot of times, we didn't even have school because we were living in a car, just traveling around. I really didn't have a lot of friends because we would just up and leave.

Donna guesses she went to dozens of schools as a kid. By the time she's 12, she's living near me in Norwich, Connecticut, and that's when her mother gets a phone call.

I think we were standing in the kitchen. I remember that ugly green linoleum. My mother was very upset when she told us. I remember that her voice was shaking when she told us that he had been arrested in Florida. They were saying he had murdered three people in Florida. I remember my thoughts just swirling. You don't want to believe that of your father. You don't want to believe that he murdered people. I didn't want to. I didn't want to believe it.

As Donna speaks, cigarettes are accumulating in the ashtray on the living room table. I've been making notches in my notebook for each one. We're up to seven. And now she starts looking at the pack again.

I was just very, very confused. Very frightened would be a really good word to describe how I felt. I didn't want my father to have to go to be in prison.

This was just a few months after that nice Christmas when her dad bought her the stereo. But now she knows about the murders, and the chance that she will have a normal family must feel impossible. And yet, in a way, her parents continue to try.

After my father's arrest, I guess he had contacted my mother and said that he wanted to see us in Florida at the jail.

Donna's obedient mother agrees Her father had just announced that he is a serial killer, and now they're all going to be together again like it's another family occasion. Donna's mom got a friend with a station wagon to drive down the Coast.

And I remember getting to the Florida State Line after dark, and there were police cars everywhere.

Donna says some of the victim's families had issued death threats against her and her brother and her mother.

And so we were escorted from the state line to Miami, which is a very long way. We stayed in a motel that night, and the next morning, we go to the prison, and we're taken into a room to visit my father. Very sterile room with a table and some chairs. Him walking in, handcuffed him with leg shackles in a prison uniform.

Did you hug him when you first came in?

I did. We hugged him. If we didn't hug my father when we saw him, it was like the worst thing in the world had just happened, and he would get very angry. So you always made sure you hugged your father when he came in.

Did he hug you back?

As much as you can do with handcuffs on, he hugged us back, yeah.

Did you feel like he was glad to see you?

Yeah, I do feel like he was glad to see us. But I also, at the same time, thought, What's he going to try to prep us for now? What does he want us to say?

Donna says he'd coach the kids for his previous court appearances.

Go up on the stand and testify what a great daddy he was.

The family spends about two and a half hours with her dad in jail. Then they have to head back to Connecticut and figure out what life will be like now. And how could life be anything like it was? Donna, just 12 years old and on the cusp of high school, knows her father is not just a rapist, but a killer.

You know, once it hits the news, that's it. Everybody knows.

Now, in school, kids would call her a killer.

People made me feel like I was guilty.

Saying what? What did they say?

Your father's a serial killer. Your father's a pervert. Your father's this. And then they beat you up. I didn't go to the best schools.

In school, one day, her class is doing a project on current events. Donna remembers one girl went up to the teacher to have a private chat.

And they both looked at me. And then she didn't have to do her assignment that day because I'm pretty sure it was news stories of my father. You just start shaking. You just start shaking because now... And that just tells you how much everybody knew what he had done and that they knew us and who we were. You know how you get an adrenaline rush or a rush of fear, and everything just you go light-headed and start shaking? That was what my experiences in school were all the time after that.

Donna wasn't even a teen yet, and she started drinking, heavily. She drank for the numbness to forget, she says.

When I was younger, in my teens, it was probably Peppermint schnapps and beer.

Just like your dad? Mm-hmm.

I don't want any of his traits, to be honest with you. None.

If you share DNA with someone like Robert Carr, it can feel like a curse.

I have become hardened and calloused, and I really have a hard time expressing emotion.

A bit like her father.

You destroyed my life.

And he never leaves her thoughts.

I can still hear my father's voice in my head.

And what does that voice say? I want to know. It's been so many years since I've seen Donna, and I realized that she was so young when we met. I might never have told her that I'd had my own run in with her father just before his arrest in Florida. I was hitchhiking back from Boston. I tell her about that ride, about thinking her father seemed like a nice guy, and about that moment of panic when the door wouldn't open. And then about standing over the wire machine at the newspaper months later and watching the news come in. And it was the story about your father being picked up and confessing to murder. And in that story, it said he got his victims by picking them up, hitchhiking.

How did that make you feel?

It made me feel like that, right? It made me feel like, fuck.

You're very lucky. You made it out of the car.

Lots of people have been telling me that lately. I don't usually linger on my extraordinary luck. Look, lately, when I hear those descriptions of how car asphyxiated people with one hand, I picture it. What would I have done? And suddenly, I can't catch my breath. It was only a few months after Carr picked me up that he picked up his last victim, Rhonda Holloway, in Connecticut.

He took her to Devil's Hoppyard.

The same place her father used to take Donna and her brother and mother on those brief camping trips where they'd sit around the fire at night and look at the Milky Way.

And that is where he raped and I wanted to go to her. Devil's Hoppyard is probably the one happy place that I had with my father. And so I don't know if he did it intentionally, taking her there, or if it was just a good spot, but there's plenty of remote locations or were at that point in time in Connecticut, but he chose to do it there.

And then after murdering Rhonda, car doesn't stop. He just keeps going. He drives to Florida, kidnaps Tammy, holds her captive for 10 days. And then, just after promising to send her home, he kills her. Then He's back in Miami, raping and raping. It doesn't seem to matter. A 15-year-old boy, a 17-year-old girl. And then when he's finally caught in the act, he decides to confess. Confess it all. That's when Donna's life and mind first intersect. I showed up at her doorstep. She was 12, and I was trying to get an interview with her father, trying to appeal to her mother to help me.

I remember meeting you, Steve. You wanted to talk to us about what had happened with my father. There was a little knee wall over by our apartment. The knee wall was by a big old maple tree, and you and I sat outside and talked for quite some time.

I had my notebook out, but I wasn't using it.

Yeah, and just sitting there talking I mean, you just asked me questions that I can remember not having any problem answering you or talking to you or trusting you, which was very hard for me at that point to trust anybody. But I do remember trusting you. And trust was obviously an issue at that point, because if you can't trust the most important person who's supposed to be the most important person in your life, you don't trust anybody.

I was visiting Donna's apartment as a journalist, angling for a story. But then Donna's mom asked if I could take her daughter out of the house a bit, where they'd been holed up. I said, yes.

I remember playing pinball. We didn't have a lot of pleasures in our life. We didn't have money to go to do things like that. So, yeah, I remember that.So.

It was always nice at the end. It was. I remember you playing pinball. I don't tell Donna, but my memory is that she was really angry that day and stormed out of the arcade. I don't know whose memory is most accurate, but it seems that over time, Donna has come to see me as a companion in this lonely journey she's on. Donna never did get to read the articles I'd written about her father. She was too young back then, and when later she went looking, the papers or archives failed her. But I want to know what she thinks of my story's angle, that her father could have been stopped if only the state had given him help, if only the state of Connecticut had stopped him instead of releasing him on bail and then parole. One of the things I think about is, so I was 19 and then 20. I think I probably was 20 when this all happened. And The articles I wrote were very much in some ways about your father's point of view, which was he couldn't get help in Connecticut. And so he wanted help. He couldn't get it. And that's why this happened.

Everything was always somebody else's problem, always somebody else's problem. Always somebody else's fault. If the car broke down, even though he had worked on it, it had to be somebody else's fault. Well, that guy at the store gave me the wrong part. Just always like that.

I tell Donna that the social worker, Chloe Karl, had vouched for her father. He told Chloe that he didn't want parole, that he didn't feel he was ready to get out, that he knew he would hurt people if he did, that it seems to Chloe, your father was looking for help. But Donna remembers something different, something that happened when she visited him in Summer's Prison in Connecticut.

So when he first went to Summer's Prison, he was in the high security facility. Eventually, I guess he earned the ability to move over what was called the farm, and they would be allowed to go out and do day work out in the fields. We would go to visit him, and he would talk to my mother, not knowing that I was listening to every word he said. I was close, but they didn't think I could hear them.

One of the prison's fields was right up by the Massachusetts border.

He was going to be working on a certain field that day, and that she was going to drive up, slow down, not stop, but slow down enough for him to jump in the car and then take off.

So Robert Carr had plotted to escape.

She agreed to it to his face.

Donna thinks it was her mom who reported Carr's plan to prison officials. She did not want him out.

I do not know why he made parole because he shouldn't have after planning an escape.

This new bit of information troubled me. I mean, I'd believe that Robert Carr was searching to contain himself. Even kind Chloe sometimes suspected that Carr was cunning, that the monster knew just what to say to people like Chloe and to people like me, and maybe once upon a time to a little girl who loved her father. Now, Donna won't believe anything he says.

I don't buy that he did all of this because he wanted help and he didn't get it. If you truly He didn't want to help. When you were out, there were places you could go. There are counselors, there's therapists, there's facilities. He didn't want to help. He wanted to blame someone else for what he did.

Donna has spent a lifetime trying to understand her father and to shake free of him. As a girl, she was his favorite. He made her light up. Even after she knew he was a murderer, she wrote to him in prison.

It was always, Dear Daddy.

It was clear to me something had happened between them. It wasn't just that she now knew about the murders. She wrote those Dear Daddy letters after that. There There had to be something else, and I wanted to know what it was. And that's about the time that Donna mentions her storage unit. She's got a box full of his papers that she hasn't been able to find. And in there are letters she wrote to her father.

There might be one or two letters and all of that stuff that I had written them when I was young.

I wanted to read them. I think it's in your storage space.

It might be buried in there somewhere. Are we all trying to go today? I mean, we could try.

Sure. Let's take a ride and talk with you. In 1976, Robert Karp picked me up hitchhiking and took me for a ride. That ride led me to write a series of articles, which in many ways altered the course of my life. Those articles made me a journalist. Half a century later, I'm taking a ride with his daughter to find out if I'd missed something crucial back then.

You want to take the winding scenic route or you want to take the interstate?

I think we can take the interstate. Okay. We chat on the way over. She tells me and Dan she's thinking of picking up and leaving West Virginia. Fresh start again.

I would love nothing more than to go back to Wyoming.

She never stays in one place all that long. Maybe one more trait inherited from her father. It's daytime, and I can really see the mountains now. This is what the song's about, right? Country Road?

Yeah.

Mount Mama. Yeah, these look like storage units. What does it look like? The storage unit is overflowing with stuff. Boxes of ready to eat meals. Donna's husband is a bit of a survivalist. Papers, things from our old hemp business. Crow bags. I climb on top of a small mountain of boxes. If I fall, it'll be great for the podcast.

Well, we don't want you to fall. There's serve stuff in here.

Well, there's a bunch of cardboard boxes down here.

I can't believe how much crap we have in here. Oh, I got to make that.

You should see my basement. A half hour goes by. We're all getting discouraged. Then at the very bottom of a stack of half a dozen boxes, there's one with papers. This is it, baby. Robert F. Carr III.Yup..

You found it.Wow..

I got a little shiver, really, going up and down my spine. I actually can't believe we found it.Me neither.Yeah. We rush back to the car. The box is crumbling. I can't wait, and I start picking documents off the top. Not sure what I'm going to find. Psychiatric report. Wow. There's a lot in here. Let's see what this says. There was no evidence of delusional thinking, although he talked about having given statements-So Robert Carr is saying, By the time we get back to Donna's house, she's already ordered pizza. It's a party of sorts. And the party game? Look through a serial killer's archives. I dropped a box of documents on the floor. Sit next to it. It's stuffed. I pull out something at random. It's a Valentine's Day card. To the best father in the world, I love you. Happy Valentine's Day. I love Donna. There's a picture of an owl on the cover. Tell me you give a hoot. Do you remember sending him this? Mm-hmm. So you sent that when you were 13, huh? Mm-hmm. What were you thinking?

I don't know. It was easier than writing a letter. Honestly, I really do get tired of writing letters to him, and he wanted long, lengthy letters, so I thought that was my way out of it. But you can see what I wrote.

To the best father in the whole world. To the best father in the whole world.

We knew it was expected.

So you didn't mean anything? You didn't mean that?

No. I mean, I may have in the moment, Probably missing him, but he was far from it.

I find other letters from Donna to her father. Dear dad, I love you. I'm sorry I haven't written in so but have been trying to get my head together because I was involved in some drugs, pot drinking, and I finally got out of them. Donna steps out of the room, and I turn to Dan, my producer. These loving letters from Donna at age 15. I don't know what to make of that. I think maybe she loved him more than she feels It's comfortable saying now. Her father replied, with concerned letters, always signed off with affection. They contained advice. By then, Robert Carr had found religion, and for all the problems Donna faced, he had one solution. He urgent her to find Jesus. Then she tells us about another batch of letters, letters from her father.

I remember being 17, and my brother had sent... He was still writing to my dad, and my brother sent him a picture of us, and that triggered all the letters from him.

In that photo, 17-year-old Donna is a beautiful young woman. Robert Carr had last seen her when she was 12, but now she has long blonde hair to her waist. She's thin, she has blue eyes. She's no longer a child.

And I got the mail, and it was addressed to me in his handwriting, and they had to put the return address as the prison that they were in and then their prisoner number. And opening that and reading even the first few sentences was jaw-dropping. Exactly what he was going to do to me. He was going to rape me.

I asked her about the voice in her head, the one she had mentioned earlier, her father's voice.

I can still hear my father's voice in my head.

What is he saying to you?

When I hear his voice, he's reading his letters out loud.

The awful ones?

Yes. I can remember exactly what his voice sounded like. I'll never forget it. When I'm hearing the things that he said in the letters in his voice, he's very soft-spoken. It's very calm, just matter-of-factly.

After that, Donna cut off all contact with her father. Next time on the finale of My Friend, the Serial Killer.

I did not want him out of prison. I did not. He was a very smart man. He always believed he would get out. Really? Always. My fear is that one day he would.

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