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Sick Timothy · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:08
  Dispersion. Nineteen forty four, West Mahanoy Township, Pennsylvania became the home of
• 0:42
  a life steeped deep in pain and tragedy. Timothy Wayne McBride had just been
• 0:48
  born to Charles McBride and Fern Yost. Only a year later. The scene
• 0:53
  would be set for a winding trail of death and destruction when Charles left Fern
• 0:58
  and their one year old son to fend for themselves. Chasing after jobs and
• 1:03
  trying to keep afloat, Fern moved Timothy and herself from place to place,
• 1:07
  never staying anywhere long enough to establish a home and grow some roots before moving
• 1:12
  on to the next. Timothy would later describe his relationship with his mother,
• 1:18
  especially during these times, as cold and unaffectionate. But in nineteen fifty some
• 1:23
  of that turbulent and unstable childhood changed. Even though Fern was still emotionally distant
• 1:30
  from her son, that wasn't always how she was with others, and when
• 1:34
  Timothy was around six years old, she married Bernie Croger. Bernie adopted Timothy
• 1:41
  as his own, but by the time Timothy had gained one stable parental figure
• 1:45
  in his life, he'd also already taken the first step down a very slippery
• 1:49
  slope. At the age of only six, Timothy made his first acquaintance with
• 1:55
  the law when he was charged with his first crime. He'd stolen a bye
• 2:00
  sickle, been caught, and with that came his first blemish on his criminal
• 2:05
  record. Only four years later, and things had taken a drastic turn from
• 2:08
  the relatively harmless to the beginnings of something extreme. Timothy began showing signs of
• 2:15
  obsession and possessiveness towards women, or more accurately, one woman in particular,
• 2:23
  Fern, became the target for Timothy's sexual and emotional desires, further driving a
• 2:29
  rift between mother and son. Timothy acted out these urges in any way that
• 2:35
  he could. He started wearing feminine clothing and stalking other women. By the
• 2:39
  age of thirteen, Timothy had established himself as an exhibitionist who often got caught
• 2:46
  fondling and groping women on the streets. By the age of seventeen, Timothy
• 2:51
  had left home and appeared to be trying to correct his course. He joined
• 2:54
  the navy as a cook, but his attempt to stay on the right side
• 2:59
  of the law did not last for very long. Only fourteen months into his
• 3:02
  training, Timothy was dishonorably discharged for a crime that Timothy had become all too
• 3:08
  comfortable committing, sexual assault. Now completely free of anything that could provide him
• 3:15
  with a sense of structure or even morality, Timothy was unleashed. One crime
• 3:21
  he later admitted to happened almost right after he was dishonorably discharged, and that
• 3:27
  was when he raped a woman in Waukegan, Illinois. He then stabbed his
• 3:30
  victim with a pair of scissors before leaving her to bleed out at the scene.
• 3:36
  The woman somehow survived, but her assailant was still free to strike again.
• 3:40
  That same year, Timothy attacked another woman in Chicago. His second victim
• 3:45
  also survived the attack, but this time Timothy was caught and convicted for rape
• 3:50
  and attempted murder. He was sentenced to twenty five to fifty years behind bars,
• 3:55
  but he would get out after serving only fourteen. In nineteen seventy seven,
• 4:00
  Timothy was released on parole, and he seized his new found opportunity.
• 4:05
  On the surface, he played the part of the reformed inmate and bided his
• 4:10
  time. As part of the conditions of his parole, he enrolled in Southern
• 4:15
  Illinois University, Carbondale, where he studied administrative justice with a minor in psychology.
• 4:20
  This would turn out to be the perfect degree for any one learning how
• 4:25
  to avoid being caught for any future crimes that they wanted to commit. Timothy
• 4:30
  then went on to study and then become an e M T ambulance driver,
• 4:34
  then giving himself the perfect mask and the authority to hide behind to commit them.
• 4:41
  By day, he walked the streets seemingly an upright citizen and reformed inmate.
• 4:46
  He was first a student and then an e MT medic. His colleagues
• 4:49
  became his friends, and both the men and women who knew him found him
• 4:53
  to be pleasant and charming. But by night, Timothy Crager was some one
• 4:59
  else. In entirely, he stalked the streets, often traveling to other cities
• 5:03
  to help muddle the waters and keep the authorities off the trail of his crimes.
• 5:09
  In nineteen seventy seven, that very same year that Timothy was released,
• 5:13
  he broke into a home in Carbondale and stole a thirty eight caliber handgun.
• 5:17
  He then later broke into another home where he attacked to mother and her twenty
• 5:21
  five year old daughter, He sexually assaulted the daughter before shooting both of the
• 5:26
  women in the head, killing them and eliminating any witnesses to his crimes.
• 5:30
  But one of his victims was a little closer to home. She was the
• 5:34
  thirteen year old daughter of one of his neighbors, and by nineteen seventy nine,
• 5:40
  Timothy had already been molesting her for over two years. When he was
• 5:44
  finally caught and arrested for sexually assaulting a miner, his e mt friends and
• 5:48
  colleagues could not believe that the Timothy Crazer they knew would be capable of such
• 5:54
  a heinous crime. He told them that the girl had lied to him about
• 5:57
  her age, and they believed him. His friends all banned together and posted
• 6:01
  his bail, essentially releasing a killer and a rapist back onto the streets.
• 6:08
  Timothy then seized his opportunity again. While out on bail, he attacked and
• 6:14
  killed two more women in Pennsylvania and raped a third. When he was found
• 6:18
  guilty for the child molestation charges, his former colleagues were beside themselves with guilt
• 6:25
  and shame. Almost unbelievably, Timothy was released only a year after sentencing in
• 6:31
  nineteen eighty his psychiatrist announced that he believed Timothy to be reformed, and said
• 6:36
  that the only way to prove this theory was to put Timothy to the test.
• 6:42
  It's crucial to remember at this point in time that no one had connected
• 6:45
  the trail of bodies and assaults to Timothy. In fact, the authorities hadn't
• 6:49
  even pieced together that these crimes were being committed by the same person. Yet
• 6:54
  Timothy had put all the knowledge he'd gained from his administrative justice degree to good
• 6:59
  use, but far from his intelligence. It was the lack of DNA technology
• 7:03
  that had actually kept him ahead of the investigators for as long as he would
• 7:08
  be. For the most part, Timothy only had to conceal his identity from
• 7:12
  his victims and keep variables in his im O for the authorities to think that
• 7:16
  maybe there was more than one killer out there. The closest that came depending
• 7:20
  everything on one person was when Timothy became known as the blue bandanna rapist.
• 7:27
  He often wore a blue bandana over his face when committing his crimes, and
• 7:31
  perhaps this marked the beginning of the end of him evading suspicion, maybe spurred
• 7:36
  on by his success in eluding authorities. So far, Timothy began to get
• 7:42
  careless. In nineteen eighty two, he broke into a house wearing the same
• 7:46
  blue bandana. He then proceeded to rape a thirty four year old woman while
• 7:50
  her ten year old daughter watched. He then left and later attacked a fifty
• 7:55
  seven year old woman in Cape Girardo. He strangled her to death, but
• 8:00
  then left several strands of his own hair behind at the crime scene. Later
• 8:05
  that year, he killed another sixty five year old woman in Cape Girardo.
• 8:07
  This time he left behind his blood, a palm prince in a boot lace
• 8:11
  that he'd used to strangle her, and even several of his skin samples were
• 8:16
  recovered under the victim's finger nails. Unbeknownst to Timothy, the noose was tightening.
• 8:22
  When he murdered twenty three year old Deborah Shepherd, he would leave behind
• 8:26
  a clue that would unravel the long web of crimes that he had gotten away
• 8:31
  with so far. This time, the investigators recovered a sample of Timothy's seamen
• 8:35
  from Deborah's shirt, and even though DNA technology had not reached a point where
• 8:39
  they could do very much with it, they saved and stored that sample,
• 8:43
  and the countdown began ticking. In nineteen eighty three, when Timothy was thirty
• 8:48
  eight years old, the police found him sitting in his car holding a pistol,
• 8:52
  which was a direct violation of the terms of his parole. They arrested
• 8:56
  him, probably thinking that their job was done, but it was only the
• 9:01
  beginning. Behind the scenes, investigators had begun to connect the dots, and
• 9:05
  the technology was finally catching up to the point where they could start to prove
• 9:09
  that Timothy was guilty of so much more. In two thousand seven, investigators
• 9:16
  ran Timothy's DNA against the Seaman sample recovered at Deborah Shepherd's murder. The results
• 9:20
  were a match. When he was first confronted with this new evidence, Timothy
• 9:26
  denied this crime, but confessed the very next day. He still concealed his
• 9:31
  other crimes, but the other DNA samples he'd left behind over the short spree
• 9:35
  of his most heinous crimes were starting to catch up with him. When the
• 9:39
  victim's families announced that they would not be seeking the death penalty, Timothy Crager
• 9:45
  came clean. He confessed to the murders of nine more women and at least
• 9:50
  seven more sexual assaults. He was sentenced to forty years for the murder of
• 9:54
  Deborah Shepherd and another forty for Virginia Lee Witt and Mary in Illinois. He
• 10:00
  then pled guilty to the murder of five women from Cape Girardo and was given
• 10:03
  thirteen consecutive life sentences for once. It's pretty safe to say that Timothy won't
• 10:09
  be getting out of prison again. He is currently still serving his sentence at
• 10:13
  the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois, which is a prison design for inmates who
• 10:18
  need extra security or simply can't follow the rules of other prison systems. That's
• 10:35
  ten Minute Murder for today brief and bingeable true crime. I'm Joe the host,
• 10:41
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• 10:43
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• 11:22
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• 11:52
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• 12:00
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• 12:11
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• 12:16
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• 12:20
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• 12:26
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• 12:30
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