When 23-year-old Angelina Hopkins and her cousin, Brenda Whiteside, disappeared following a night on the town, Angelina’s mother refused to wait passively for answers.
She brought photographs of both women to the Blue Note bar, the last place they were known to have been seen. There, she showed the images to patrons and employees, leaving her phone number with the bartender in case anyone recognized them.
Her persistence paid off when a man seen with the women appeared outside the bar. The bartender contacted Mrs. Hopkins, who arrived and confronted him herself—unaware that she was standing before a ruthless serial killer.
“While police are trying to run down leads,” retired Orange County District Attorney Frank Phillips said on Oxygen’s Unknown Serial Killers of America, “the mother of Angelina Hopkins…was so tenacious in trying to find out what happened to her daughter that she engaged in an investigation on her own.”
During that brief encounter, Mrs. Hopkins quickly wrote down the man’s license plate number. That detail became the crucial lead investigators needed to identify and stop Nathaniel White.
White, later known as the “Robocop Killer” after claiming the film had influenced him, was eventually convicted in the murders of six women, among them his girlfriend’s niece.
Nathaniel White Investigation Begins With Chilling Discovery
The case that exposed his killing spree began on March 26, 1991, when two young people walking along an abandoned railroad bed in Middletown, New York, came across the body of 29-year-old Juliana Frank.
“She was totally nude,” Phillips recalled. “She was stabbed beyond recognition. The body was found posed in a very unusual position.”
Frank’s abdomen had been cut open, while the majority of the 47 stab wounds were concentrated around her head. Retired Middletown Police Detective Barry Bernstein said the attack had left her face “totally destroyed.”
“It looked like somebody went beserk,” Bernstein said, “[and] just kept stabbing her and stabbing her.”
Because of the extent of her injuries, Bernstein did not immediately recognize the woman as someone he had known.
“It was emotional,” he said. “She would hang out downtown and if I parked my car, she would come over and say hello to my partner and I and we got to just be friendly. She was a good person.”
The autopsy revealed that Frank had been four months pregnant when she died. Investigators also confirmed that she had been stabbed 47 times, though there was no evidence of sexual assault.
“At that point, I said, ‘I believe we have a monster on our hands,’” Bernstein remembered. “It was unconscionable to think that somebody would be able to do that, even in a fit of rage.”
Frank was also the mother of two young sons.
“Julie was my best friend,” her sister-in-law, Toni Tyrian, said. “Very pretty and she did have such blue eyes. Never saw her in a bad mood.”
Detectives examined Frank’s personal relationships and questioned people in her circle, but the investigation failed to produce a suspect who could be tied to the killing.
Laurette Huggins, Described as “Angel on Earth,” Found Dead in Apartment
More than a year later, on July 10, 1992, police were summoned to Laurette Huggins’ apartment after a worried neighbor found her dead in the living room.
Huggins’ death bore striking similarities to Frank’s murder. She was discovered naked and face up, with roughly 40 stab wounds—many of them on her face. Her body had also been posed, and investigators again found no indication of sexual assault.
The similarities immediately led detectives to believe that Huggins’ murder was connected to Frank’s unsolved death.
They also noted that there were no signs of forced entry, leading investigators to believe it was likely that Huggins—a single mom of three from the island of Saint Vincent—knew her killer.
“My mother was independent, hardworking,” her daughter Adenna Huggins remembered. “She worked for an insurance company. She always seemed to make it work. We never had a sense of lack in our life.”
She described her mother as an “angel on earth.”
At the scene, investigators discovered what would become a critical clue: a bloody fingerprint on the paper insert of a coat hanger. Still, at the time, they didn’t have anyone to match to the print.
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Investigators Discover More Victims, Link to Nathaniel White
Later that month, the body of 27-year-old Adraine Hunter was discovered by a dog walker on July 31, 1992 in a wooded area in Goshen, New York.
Like the others, Hunter was found naked and posed with multiple stab wounds.
“The M.O. was pretty much the same in all three cases,” Bernstein said. “They were all single women.”
As detectives delved into the new case, they learned of Hopkins and Whiteside’s July 20, 1992 disappearance in the Poughkeepsie, New York area.
The night the cousins disappeared, one of the victims’ sisters had been out with them at the Blue Note bar. She remembered some men inviting the group back to their house. While she declined the offer, Hopkins and Whiteside agreed to go and were never seen again.
Using that clue, Hopkins’ mother began her own investigation, ultimately confronting White outside the bar after he’d been identified as one of the men with the missing girls that night.
Though he told her that he’d dropped the pair off in Middletown, the anguished mother was still suspicious and jotted down his license plate number, which was given to New York State Police.
The license plate had been stolen, but police conducted a traffic stop and identified the driver of the vehicle as White, an Army veteran with a criminal record. White was taken into custody on a parole violation after he was discovered with the stolen plate and asked about the murders.
Nathaniel White Described “Built Up Rage” Before Murder Spree
Although he initially denied any involvement, his fingerprint was matched to the evidence found at Huggins’ murder and investigators learned he had once been her neighbor.
White initially confessed to just five of the murders, telling police he first spotted Frank as he was driving around town.
After offering her a ride, he said he had an uncontrollable urge to attack her.
“It just came all at once,” he later said in a media interview. “You know, I had never felt it before, that’s the first time.”
He added that he’d just “snapped.”
“I’ve never hurt nobody before,” he said. “And I don’t know if its built up rage or what it is. All I know is that each time I did it, I had less control of it.”
He later led police to the bodies of Hopkins and Whiteside after admitting to beating the cousins to death in the Goshen woods with a metal object.
“He later admits he stopped beating them with this metal object when he became too physically exhausted to be able to beat them anymore,” Phillips explained, “which corresponds to the overkill of the three stabbing victims.”
During the investigation, detectives learned that he’d also been the last person seen with 14-year-old Christine Klebbe, his girlfriend’s niece, before she disappeared in June 1992.
Although he initially insisted he hadn’t killed Klebbe, he eventually confessed to his sixth murder and led authorities to the teen’s remains.
Nathaniel White Claims He Was Inspired by RoboCop
After his arrest, White agreed to give an interview to local news station WNBC, claiming that he had been inspired by the movie RoboCop.
“I seen ‘em um, cut somebody’s throat, and then take the knife and then slit ‘em down the chest, and the stomach and, left the body in a certain position, ” he said in the interview, replayed on Unknown Serial Killers of America. “And that was the first person that I killed. I did exactly what I seen on the movie.”
What Happened to Nathaniel White?
Though White later recanted his statements to the police and media, he was convicted of all six murders. He was sentenced to 150 years to life in prison.
He is currently serving out his sentence at Elmira Correctional Facility in New York.