As a young hitchhiker he survived

At 19, he was hitchhiking from a friend’s place in Boston to Norwich, Connecticut, where he was an intern at a newspaper. Fishman was not far from his destination and sticking out his thumb when a man pulled over in a green Buick sedan, said his name was “Red,” and told him to hop in. The man appeared friendly and had a balding head with wispy patches of red hair, likely the reason for his nickname. But as Fishman would learn later, the man harbored a dark secret: His name was Robert Frederick Carr III, and he was a serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers. Three years earlier, Carr had raped and strangled two 11-year-old boys and a 16-year-old girl who’d hitched a ride with him in the Miami area. When he gave Fishman a ride, he was on parole after serving time for a rape in Connecticut. Fishman’s ride lasted only about 15 minutes — Carr dropped him off unharmed — but his memories of that fall 1975 encounter have haunted him for decades. About six months later, Carr was arrested for an attempted rape of a hitchhiker in the Miami area and then startled detectives when he confessed to kidnapping and raping more than a dozen people and killing four of them. Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami police reporter who wrote a book about Carr, once said: “He was about the most evil person I ever met.” Fishman was stunned when he saw Carr’s picture on a breaking news alert. He recognized him instantly as the talkative man who’d given him a ride. In retrospect, Fishman said, he missed several major red flags that day. First, the sedan’s door latch on the passenger side was jammed and Fishman had to roll down the window and open it from the outside. And Carr had casually mentioned he had just got out of prison. “I’m an intern at a local newspaper. And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that could be a good story about a guy getting out of prison, trying to reintegrate into the community,” Fishman told CNN