NO one knew that the blue-eyed and “silver-tongued” Bruce Lindahl was a serial killer – until new DNA technology revealed his horrendous crimes.
Lindahl is believed to have murdered at least nine young people during a nine-year period up until 1981 in the United States and is being investigated for many more cold cases.
The true nature of this stone-hearted kidnapper, rapist and strangler only emerged when Detective Chris Loudon tried to solve the 46-year-old case of slain schoolgirl Pam Maurer, 16, from Lisle, near Chicago in Illinois.
His investigation led him to a box full of naked photographs of young women taken by the twisted Lindahl.
Inside were Polaroids and prints of often terrified, underage and drugged females either tricked or forced to come home with the sadistic predator.
Most escaped alive, but many did not.
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Chris, who recently retired from Lisle County police after more than 25 years as a detective, is certain nine women died at his hands.
Lindahl’s reign of terror only came to an end at the age of 29 when he accidentally stabbed himself in the leg during the frenzied murder of 18-year-old high school student Charles Huber in 1981.
He hit a crucial artery and bled to death on top of his victim.
I don’t believe we know all his victims
Chris tells The Sun: “He would have killed and raped so many more women if he hadn’t died.
“He would be about 70 now. He would still be doing it. I don’t believe we know all his victims.
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“In 1979 he murdered three girls and in 1980 he murdered two within two months and then he died a few months later.
“I think he was just getting into his groove. He had figured out how better to do it, how to dispose of evidence.”
The unmasking of this serial killer is examined in a new three-part series on Paramount+ titled The Box, which starts streaming on August 11.
Chris restricted the radius of his investigation to the towns where Lindahl had lived between 1974 and 1981.
They were the Lisle, Woodridge, Downers Grove and Aurora areas west of Chicago.
Each time Lindahl moved, the deaths followed him.
But Chris believes he could have struck in the neighbouring state of Wisconsin, where he regularly visited one girlfriend, and detectives are looking at 80 other unsolved deaths in DuPage County, Illinois.
Jekyll and Hyde character
Unlike many killers, electrician Lindahl was not a loner.
Instead, friends and ex-girlfriends describe the skydiving enthusiast as “very charming” and handsome.
But he had a hair-trigger temper, once attacking a cop during an arrest, and threatened to kill the women he was dating if they did not agree to engage in degrading sex acts with him.
Fran, who was aged only 14 when Lindahl raped her, told how she woke up after being drugged to find him “taking polaroid pictures of me naked in bed”.
If you don't come back to me I will kill you
While Susan recounted in the documentary that the killer kidnapped her and took her to the woods because she left him.
He told her “if you don't come back to me I will kill you” and boasted he would put sulphuric acid on her dead body in order to cover up the crime.
DNA breakthrough
Pam is believed to be among the first women not to make it out alive.
The teenager’s body was found in the snow by the road, having been raped and strangled in January 1976.
Chris decided to reopen the case in 2019 after hearing how Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo was arrested a year earlier thanks to his DNA being found via a genealogy website.
The detective took DNA from Pam’s clothing and sent it to a firm called Parabon labs.
The company was able to trace a potential family tree, leading to Lindahl, from the sample by comparing it to around two million DNA records on a database.
They also produced an imaginary photofit – which looked remarkably like Lindahl.
Lindahl wasn’t someone who was known to us at the time
Chris explains: “Parabon are the unsung heroes in the whole thing. If it wasn’t for Parabon we wouldn’t have solved this case.
“Lindahl wasn’t someone who was known to us at the time, this wasn’t a friend of Pam’s or someone she had a spat with.”
That, though, was only the spark of the case. A lot more detective work was yet to be done.
Getting away with murder
Lindahl had been arrested for numerous crimes, but had never served time in jail.
His close calls with justice included being accused of raping 20-year-old Annette Lazer at gun point in March 1979 and kidnapping Debra Colliander in June 1980 before raping her.
The state’s lawyers decided not to prosecute in Annette’s case, but Debra was two weeks away from giving evidence against Lindahl in a trial when she went missing and the case had to be dropped.
A man later confessed to being hired by Lindahl to kill the key witness.
Photos of drugged girls
Evidence discovered in her case included the box of photos, but that did not lead to any further investigation by the police back in 1980.
Chris says: “I don’t know how the cops investigating the case could not have been p***ed off that he was taking pictures of underage girls.
“We found dozens of pictures of young girls, as young as 13 and 14, and some were under the influence and some of them looked positively terrified.”
We found dozens of pictures of young girls, as young as 13 and 14, and some were under the influence and some of them looked positively terrified
The documentary reveals that police officer Dave Torres was friends with Lindahl.
Shockingly, in the series Torres admits to having seen some of the photos and describes the murderer as a “silver-tongued devil.”
But Chris thinks the main problem back then was that the police did not take crimes against women seriously and didn’t properly investigate the spate of missing persons.
He comments: “It astounds me and it makes me very sad that it did not occur to the police back then to compare notes with other departments.
Pam Maurer’s body was found was about 200 yards from where another girl was found the next year
“What concerns me the most is that where Pam Maurer’s body was found was about 200 yards from where another girl was found the next year and they went to the same school.”
After Lindahl was named as Pam’s likely killer in 2020, over 75 women came forward to reveal they had been attacked by him.
Chris continues: “I spoke to a lot of women who survived horrific rapings by Bruce Lindahl, things where he degraded them, he did really creepy things such as posing them for photos while raping them and asking them things like ‘what do you like to do?’
“It was heinous that he was treating this like some kind of sex act that they were going to enjoy.
“Talking to all these women was really hard, they were all crying, they all had a basic feeling that no one seemed to care when they reported.
No one seemed to care when they reported
“It will p*** me off until the day I draw my last breath.”
The other murdered women that Chris is allowed to name are Kathy Halle, Elizabeth Drews, Susan Jabczynski and Debra McCall.
Others are ongoing cases, so he cannot identify Lindahl as their suspected killer.
Lindahl's modus operandi was to stalk women at shopping centres, trick them to get in his car, before raping and strangling them.
Therefore, it is a surprise that his final victim was the young male Huber who had gone bowling with the killer.
The police do not know the motive for the attack, but he stabbed Huber 28 times during a drinking session at the home of Lindahl's girlfriend.
Human rights madness
While some neighbouring police departments helped Chris, others were very obstructive.
He reveals: “One threw me out of their own lobby, because I was asked for a copy of a report.”
Chris believes that privacy activists are also getting in the way of justice.
Parabon is no longer allowed to use DNA samples taken from genealogy databases in its research due to a human rights outcry.
Chris comments: “Any innocent has nothing to hide. We need every tool we can get because we are fighting a battle on an uneven battlefield.
We need every tool we can get because we are fighting a battle on an uneven battlefield
“We are being so hamstrung it's going to get to the point that we are not going to solve any crimes unless we have a taped confession.”
Even though Chris has retired, Lindahl will continue to haunt the former detective.
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Chris concludes: “I still have bad dreams about it and I will probably have bad dreams for the rest of my life.”
The Box is available to watch as a box set on Paramount+ fromAugust 11
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