(True Crime) Doug Kari ”Berman Murders: the Mojave Desert’s Most Mysterious Unsolved True Crime” pt. 2

[00:00:00] From the darkest reaches of space to the deepest corners of your mind, welcome to From The Void. Welcome to From The Void. I'm your host John Williamson and I'm back with the second part of my interview with author researcher Doug Carey and we talk all about his book,

[00:00:33] Berman Murders, Unraveling the Mojave Desert's Most Mysterious Unsolved Crime. We wrap it up this week and we will be back next week with an all new mystery, but until then enjoy part two, The Berman Murders, the Mojave Desert's most mysterious unsolved crime on this week's

[00:00:50] episode of From The Void. Yeah and in your investigation what's interesting is that you know it's not a situation where if indeed he did it he never paid the price necessarily for

[00:01:13] that crime, but you want to cover the fact that he's got quite the history because one of the things that you know would be interesting to look at would be you know did he have any other

[00:01:21] telltale signs any red flags that would indicate that he had sort of the disposition to pull off a crime like this and then you start to find out that there's some interesting background

[00:01:32] to him in regards to some time he spent overseas. So talk about what you found out there and what led you to believe it. Yeah this is definitely a guy who has the ability

[00:01:42] to pull this off. Well he had a troubled relationship with women that was clear from the work that investigators did, but we really learned more about all of that later on because

[00:01:57] after I started investigating the case in in 2014 when it just it had gnawed on me for so many years I thought hey I want to I want to just find out what happened there and I

[00:02:10] started digging in one thing led to another. My first story on the case was a cover story for LA Weekly and it attracted a lot of attention and because I got involved and the Sheriff's Office

[00:02:23] decided to cooperate with me they also decided to assign a homicide investigator to actually do a homicide report and see if they could close up this case and that was in parallel to what I was doing. After my LA Weekly article came out some information emerged from jailhouse

[00:02:43] informants including the cellmate of the chief suspect because it turns out that after he retired from the Marine Corps, he's now a middle-aged man, he has a pension, he's an off a retired Marine Corps officer, he has education. What does he do with his life?

[00:03:05] He goes to Cambodia which has a reputation as kind of a lawless country particularly regarding matters of child sex and he rents this upscale villa and sets up shop with trafficking in

[00:03:25] little girls. I mean I'm talking nine to twelve year old tiny little children and he is having them live in his house and he's taking care of them and sending them to school but the price

[00:03:36] they have to pay is to be under his domination and control and he's doing horrific things to these children, he's tying them up, raping them, beating them, gagging them, leaving them bleeding. I mean this isn't some you know sick pedophile who thinks he's in love

[00:03:55] with a child, this is a guy who's purposefully trying to dominate, injure and control and violate children and it makes you wonder did that kind of propensity just suddenly start to happen in midlife or is this a continuation perhaps of behavior that's been there all along

[00:04:21] or desires that have been there all along and it dovetails with what law enforcement thought right away that there was some sexual motivation involved in whatever happened to the Bermondes. This certainly seems to fit that and you think about the handcuff key and it starts

[00:04:38] to make sense. Maybe he saw an opportunity to just kidnap these people and have his way with them and then slay them or maybe he made some inappropriate proposition and that led to violence.

[00:04:54] We don't know but what we do know is there are only a few people out there and we've got one person who has now proven to be a violent sexual sadist capable of the most horrific kinds of crimes. It would tend to indicate that he should be looked

[00:05:14] at very, very hard as a potential suspect. So you mentioned that you know he does eventually end up in jail which is where he sort of starts to confess and you mentioned that part of the reason perhaps he starts to confess within prison is that you know

[00:05:33] people who are viewed as like pedophiles are pretty low on the food chain and really look down on even within prison. So maybe as a safety mechanism almost to ensure his own safety

[00:05:47] he starts to brag about the murders. So you mentioned some of the things that he did mention it seems to his cellmate seem to be things that weren't out in the public. And so like only things that only perhaps the killer himself would know.

[00:06:05] Are you aware of some of the things that may have like really sort of you know pinned this case on him? Well I did correspond by email and spoke by phone with his cellmate and with another

[00:06:19] inmate who said that they had heard him you know bragging about these killings and it's it's a tough one to evaluate. I never met them in person and they would have possible reasons

[00:06:34] for wanting to lie. For example, they might be trying to get by cooperating trying to get credit for some of their time or perhaps you know revenge maybe they had it in for the guy

[00:06:47] in some manner but the investigator who at that point was assigned to the case did meet with them in person and his take was that they were serious people who had believable reasons for talking because as you indicated it's a terrible thing to go through prison under any

[00:07:03] circumstances. But of course there is a social hierarchy in prison you know a bank robber somebody doing something that is kind of cinematic is going to be regarded much more highly than somebody who preys on little children. In fact if somebody who preys on little children

[00:07:20] could genuinely have their life in peril in many prisons in the US not so much in the federal system where he was but certainly in state systems but even in the prison system I

[00:07:32] mean you're going to be looked down upon as the lowest of the low and so to elevate his status and gain respect it's very plausible that he did brag about the killings and

[00:07:49] the accounts that were given by these prisoners revealed some details that were not in my LA Weekly article. That was the article at that time that laid out the facts of the case. I

[00:08:02] didn't talk about the fact that if you go from where the Berman's camped up this rugged road for about two miles you come to some natural hot springs but that's one of the things that according to these prisoners he talked about and that he talked about also that

[00:08:21] Louise was wearing some little gold he called them bangles little things around her neck. Well I never talked about the jewelry she wore but it is true that she had a couple of a pair of little dangly necklaces and they offered details that sounded you know quite plausible

[00:08:40] is it possible somebody made good guesses and you know that these fellows in prison in Texas somehow or pardon me in Arizona somehow came up with this out of the blue maybe but it's

[00:08:53] also plausible that indeed Michael Pepe bragged about this in an effort to elevate his jailhouse status. Yeah and he you know as I kind of alluded to earlier you know he he didn't

[00:09:09] necessarily this this crime is still technically unsolved and so you know if in fact he did do it you know he didn't pay for this particular crime but he does end up in prison

[00:09:20] and it almost gets thrown out and you just think gosh like is justice ever going to be served here but he does does end up in prison and gets quite quite a long sentence but talk about sort of the

[00:09:33] sort of back and forth we're like gosh is this guy going to actually pay for anything he's done because they've without a shadow of a doubt proven what he's done to these children right so that's without question. There's no doubt that he committed the most horrific behavior

[00:09:48] against the the children not only did they testify twice because he won a retrial not only did they testify twice there was all this corroborating evidence the most damning of which was hundreds and hundreds of naked photos of these girls in his bedroom including some

[00:10:05] that he had tried to delete that computer forensics experts in the U.S. Embassy were able to recover you know if you don't overwrite data it's not really deleted and they were

[00:10:16] able to recover photos showing him naked with one of the girls and then the girls were very very very clear in their testimony he tried to claim that they had somehow been manipulated

[00:10:29] but they came to court both as little girls and then later as young women who had been adopted by American families and spoke English and their stories were just very clear about

[00:10:41] what he did and exactly how it came down and then there was evidence in his house that supported their allegations like the ropes that he tied them up with and the children's toys I mean

[00:10:49] he had them living in a in a bedroom right down the hall from this massage room and he even wrote a letter home where he kind of admitted some of these details so the fact he committed these

[00:11:00] horrors against children would be very hard for anybody to dispute I mean the evidence is is to a dead certainty however there's technicalities involved because this happened overseas and normally things that happen overseas aren't the business of the United States government

[00:11:19] but when an American travels overseas or or goes overseas for certain kinds of heinous purposes one of which would be to engage in in these kinds of sex crimes with children the U.S. government has several statutes in place that will respond in that kind of and

[00:11:40] cover that kind of an incident and so he was prosecuted brought back to the United States and prosecuted under those statutes but I mean it was just this this up and down of different

[00:11:52] courtroom dramas and as I mentioned the case got reversed on appeal at one point and and then it went back he got convicted again but I have to tell you even today he's still seeking

[00:12:06] Supreme Court review there's still a chance that this thing could take another turn again I mean John this is the craziest story we're talking decades have gone by and there's still no closure here

[00:12:20] and he's I mean this is we're talking about a story that's almost 40 years old at this point and so not only are there not a lot of firsthand you know witnesses left you know

[00:12:31] there's you know some of the law enforcement even that worked on the case but he's got to be getting up there in age as well and so you know what what like what other things have they looked

[00:12:43] into around him because it seems to me that what we know of folks who commit these types of crimes is that typically you know the first one's kind of rushed and hurried and

[00:12:53] they make mistakes and then you know as they commit additional murders down the road they sort of perfect it and clearly when they found the bodies someone did a fairly decent job of hiding

[00:13:03] them so is there any is there anything to indicate that maybe perhaps he had he had murdered before at least within the U.S. There's no indication that he had committed either these kinds of child sex crimes or any other crimes up until the time that

[00:13:24] the Bermans are murdered and again he's never been charged in that but there's all this circumstantial evidence including you know his own inconsistent stories that points towards him and of course you know now what we know about is violent propensities.

[00:13:44] After the Bermans were killed and before he goes to Cambodia there's a period of time where we just don't know. We don't know if he was just living an upstanding life or whether he was

[00:13:57] engaging in deviant behavior. We do know that during that time period he married yet again it was his third time to a much younger woman from Russia, an immigrant. He brought her over

[00:14:09] on a fiance visa and we know she fled the marriage very quickly and I was told by his own family that she did so because he was deviant and he was hurting her in bed. So we know that much.

[00:14:24] Wow that's kind of terrifying to think that there may be other unsolved crimes connected to him out there. One of the other questions I had for you is based on one of the things

[00:14:36] you mentioned too is sort of how they were able to tie the crimes back to him, the more recent ones that happened in Cambodia through you know searching through his hard drives and stuff

[00:14:44] like that. So one of the things that came to mind is obviously a crime that occurred so many decades ago, technology has evolved significantly since then. Is there any hope that you know with

[00:14:54] the remains that they're able to run any sort of tests that might tie it back to him? It would be very difficult from the research I've done and I didn't do extensive research in

[00:15:06] this area but I did enough research to determine that it's highly unlikely that if he had for example you know shed a piece of skin or something like that. Let's assume that he was involved

[00:15:21] in the murders and that he was was burying the remains. We'll assume that even though he's never been charged because I do believe the evidence points that direction. So if he's out there engaged in this all-day activity, nowadays if the bodies had been found quickly

[00:15:41] DNA evidence could likely be found. There would probably be you know some skin, maybe some hair but remember Marines wear their hair short so it'd probably be a pretty small piece of hair.

[00:15:53] Now there was a lot of material gathered up when the bodies were exhumed from this grave and there was all kinds of debris and things and presumably that material still exists. I did

[00:16:09] ask the Inyo County Sheriff's Office if they would review all that because I do believe that if there are hair follicles in there, there's a possibility that testable amounts of DNA could be recovered. However they never got back to me on it. I doubt that it's happened

[00:16:26] and I'll be the first to admit it would be a needle in a haystack. Nonetheless why not give it a go? Yeah absolutely. Well I really appreciate your time today. This is an absolutely fascinating story, heartbreaking in many ways especially for the family who remain.

[00:16:45] Tell folks a little bit about where they can keep up with what you're up to and also get a copy of the book. So the book is The Berman Murders. I have a copy here and it's published

[00:16:59] by Roman and Littlefield, very respected publisher. I was really fortunate to have them back the project and I have a website, a Facebook page and I'm on Instagram so the website is Doug Kerry and it's D-O-U-G K-A-R-I, it's a Finnish name so just dougkerry.com and then

[00:17:23] at Doug Kerry author on Instagram and Doug Kerry author on Facebook. You can find me there. There's lots of material about the cases I've worked on, links to articles, that kind of thing John. Well again fascinating book. I highly encourage folks especially if you're a lover of true

[00:17:40] crime this is a truly fascinating mystery. The Berman Murders Unraveling the Mojave Desert's Most Mysterious Unsolved Crime by Doug Kerry. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you, I appreciate it John. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to From the

[00:18:03] Void. If you enjoyed this or any prior episode please consider rating, reviewing and sharing with a friend. We'll be back next week with an all new mystery and until then you've been listening to From the Void.