The product of a broken home, Steven Judy grew up nursing memories of violent arguments between his parents. Later, when a foster family provided him with loving care, it was apparently too late; the violence of his early years had taken root and twisted something in his personality.

At twelve, he visited a neighbor's home, pretending to have cookies for sale. Upon discovering that the young housewife was home alone, Judy forced her into the bedroom, raped her at knifepoint, and stabbed her forty-one times, finishing off his assault with a hatchet. His victim survived after brain surgery and testified against Judy, earning him a nine-month period of treatment in a mental institution. Therapy proved ineffective, and at age eighteen he was convicted of beating a woman in Chicago, spending twenty months in jail. Later, in Indianapolis, he abducted a young woman and forced her to drive into the countryside, but she managed to leap from the car and escape on foot. A kidnapping charge put him back in prison for a year.

On April 28, 1979, a group of mushroom hunters found a woman's naked body floating in White Lick Creek, outside Indianapolis. Further downstream, the bodies of three small children -- two boys and a girl -- were also found in the water. The woman had been raped and strangled; her children had drowned when they fell -- or were thrown -- into the creek.

A bank book found nearby identified the adult victim as 20-year-old Terry Chasteen. Her boyfriend told police that she left home around seven o'clock that morning, taking her children to their babysitter before she reported for work at a local department store. None of them had made it to their destination.

Public appeals for information brought reports of a distinctive red-and-silver pickup truck, observed near the murder scene. Detectives traced it to a building site, where its owner, 22-year-old Steven Judy, was employed as a bricklayer. Arrested at the home of his foster parents, Judy described how he had tricked Terry Chasteen into stopping her car, then disabled the engine while "checking under the hood." She had accepted his offer of a ride to the nearest filling station, but he took her to the murder site instead, not far from where his previous victim had escaped two years earlier. Chasteen's three children were sent for a walk while he raped her, strangling his victim when she began to scream. The woman's children returned at the sound of her cries, and Judy threw them in the creek, where all three drowned.

At trial, the unrepentant Judy told assembled jurors, "You had better put me to death, because next time it might be one of you or your daughter." They took him at his word, and on February 16, 1980, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair .

Resisting all appeals on his behalf, Judy steadfastly fought for the right to die on schedule. While awaiting execution, he regaled authorities with tales of other homicides across the country. He had killed so many women, Judy said, that he could not remember all his victims, but there was a "string of bodies" spanning Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Florida. Despite investigation, sketchy details kept police from verifying any of his claims before he met his fate on March 8, 1981.