A hitchhiker who survived a ride with a notorious serial killer learned why he was allowed to go in a jailhouse interview.
In the fall of 1975, Steve Fishman, then 19, was hitchhiking from Boston to Norwich, Connecticut, when he was picked up by a man in a green Buick sedan who called himself Red.
Six months later, Fishman saw that man again in a news alert that identified him as Robert Frederick Carr III, a murderer who He confessed to having kidnapped and raped more than a dozen people and murdered four of them.
This baffled Fishman, who was left wondering how he had managed to escape Carr’s clutches. Years later, he would finally get his answer in a jailhouse interview.
“One of the questions I asked him was, ‘Why not me?’ That seems like a really weird question to me, but I did it. He basically shrugged and said, ‘I thought you were too big,'” Fishman said. CNN.
In the fall of 1975, then 19-year-old Steve Fishman was hitchhiking from Boston to Norwich, Connecticut, when he was picked up by serial killer Robert Frederick Carr III (pictured).
Fishman, now an award-winning journalist for New York Magazine and successful podcaster, was interning at a local newspaper in Norwich when Carr picked him up.
She recalled that Carr was very talkative, but then realized he had missed several red flags, including that the passenger-side car door latch was stuck and that the driver had mentioned he was being released from jail.
“I’m an intern at a local newspaper and I thought, ‘Wow, that could be a good story about a guy getting out of prison and trying to reintegrate into the community,'” Fishman said. “I didn’t really stop to think or ask him what the crime was. I had no idea.”
When Carr picked up Fishman, he was on parole after serving time in Connecticut for rape.
Fishman (pictured) asked Carr in a jailhouse interview why he let him go that day, to which Carr simply said, “I thought you were too big.”
In 1972, he picked up 16-year-old Tammy Ruth Huntley and drove her from Miami to Mississippi before strangling her.
Later that year, Carr picked up his 11-year-old friends, Todd Payton and Mark Wilson, from North Miami Beach, raped and strangled them, and then buried them in Louisiana and Mississippi.
He killed his fourth victim, 21-year-old Rhonda Holloway, shortly after her encounter with Fishman and buried her in Connecticut.
While still an intern, Fishman contacted Carr’s family and attempted to arrange an interview with the killer. In the mid-1970s, he was finally able to speak to the man who left him alive.
“An interview with a serial killer was big news. It was a big journalistic scoop that really set me on the path to being a journalist. And yet, it was a story I didn’t really like to think about because I did it when I was 19 and 20, and I was so afraid of what I had focused on,” Fishman said.
Carr confessed to kidnapping and raping more than a dozen people and murdering four of them in the 1970s.
‘I was very afraid that I had misunderstood the story, that I had not understood or appreciated the horror of the story.
‘At the time, I saw it as a social problem: How do we treat criminals? How do we rehabilitate rapists? And the sheer depravity of it was lost on me.
“I’m a father several times over now. I think about crime and victims differently.”
Fishman recently teamed up with Carr’s daughter Donna to unravel the heinous crimes of serial killers in a new season of the Smoke Screen podcast titled ‘My Friend, the Serial Killer.’