Episode
Cold Case Files: The Original Night Stalker
Overview
In the 1980s, a serial killer prowled the posh streets of Orange County. Police were unaware of the serial attacks until 1996, when DNA revealed the killer's secret and they linked four murders to a single DNA profile. Detectives uncovered three more crimes attributed to the man dubbed "The Original Night Stalker" before learning he had an earlier career as a serial rapist! Watch as cold case detectives compare the attacker's DNA with nearly every convicted violent offender in California.
Details
- Series
- Cold Case Files
- Season
- Season 2
- Episode
- Episode 22
- Air date
- 2000-05-28
- Runtime
- 60 min
Episode context
The Original Night Stalker is Episode 22 in Season 2 of Cold Case Files. It aired on 2000-05-28. The runtime is 60 min.
Previous / Next
Episode 21: License to Kill/The Tell-Tale Mark/The Supermarket Mystery
A quarter of a century after the murders of two nurses, Canadian police suspect that a former Toronto cop committed the crimes. A blow to the head of a garbage collector in San Jose leaves strange markings, and decades later a detective, with help from forensic science, matches the markings to the etchings of a vintage bar sign. California police hope that DNA will help them track down the man who stabbed and killed a woman as she sat in her parked car in front of a supermarket in 1985.
Episode 23: Cold Hit/Silent Kill
A thumbprint connects two separate murders and it is later discovered that the suspect had a strange fetish for women's lingerie. Then, an elderly woman is found murdered in her bed and the only evidence is a single strand of hair.
More episodes from this season
Episode 20: Soft Kill/Unsolved
Police run down more than 11,000 leads before coming up with a suspect in the murders of three Virginia girls; and the abduction and strangulation of a California woman continues to baffle investigators more than 11 years after the crime.
Episode 24: Mommie Dearest
A mother is suspected in the murders of two of her daughters, when her third daughter finally convinces police to reopen two cold cases.
Episode 19: A Map To Murder/Life on the Run
After a long manhunt, cops finally close in on a serial killer with the help of the Internet and information supplied by a subsidiary of Microsoft. And a drug trafficker jumps bail, goes into the bike shop business, and helps pioneer the sport of mountain biking while he's on the lam.
Episode 25: A Sealed Fate/Deadly Divorce
A murderer's saliva, found on envelopes that he sealed, helps seal his doom 37 years after his first killing. And Colorado police crack a cold case 24 years later when they take a DNA sample from the victim's son that proves that his father murdered his mother.
Episode 18: The Good Samaritan/Gun Shy
New DNA technology and the national DNA databank help police hunt down a rapist-killer 11 years after he committed his crimes, and a detective's painstaking recreation of a woman's shooting death proves it wasn't an accident.
Episode 17: The Cuff Link/Graveyard Shift
Police solve an old murder case with a painstaking examination of the tool mark on the plastic flex cuff that bound the victim's hands, and a 15-year-old murder case is finally cracked open when a disgruntled wife tells police that her husband committed the crime.
Episode 16: Cat and Mouse/Cabbie Killer
A police investigator discovers a letter written 16 years earlier that provides clues to a woman's murder. And a firearms expert supplies the evidence that South Carolina authorities need to put a man on trial in 2002 for a murder committed in 1961. It was the oldest murder case ever tried in the state.
Episode 15: The Unluckiest Man/The Deadly Triangle
Fire investigator Jack Malooly helps crack the case of an arsonist and killer who set a series of fires to collect insurance money; and a prison inmate tells a homicide detective that he can't help him with his current murder investigation, but knows plenty about another murder that took place in California 15 years earlier.
Episode 14: The Perfect Murder/Death of Innocents
It takes nine years and the work of cutting-edge forensic toxicologists to solve the murder of a medical examiner's wife. Then, a determined Alabama sheriff reopens the case of the deaths of two babies, hoping to get their mother to confess.
Episode 13: Vintage Murder/Trouble in Paradise
Police doggedly reopen a rape-murder case 25 years after the crime and find enough DNA evidence on the suspect's cigarette butts to bring him to justice. And a confession made to a "Baywatch" TV star helps police solve the three-year-old riddle of a wealthy Newport Beach woman's murder.