Ralph Searl began his killings in 1964 at the age of nineteen when he launched a sudden murder spree that eventually culminated in the deaths of five innocent men. By the time Ralph had hitched a ride with an unlucky man named Earl Foote in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he had already killed two Michigan gas station attendants and a Nevada man who had also made the mistake of offering Ralph a lift. Ralph soon murdered Foote, put him into the trunk of his own car, and proceeded on to Elkhart, Indiana,where he robbed and killed another gas station worker. The teen-aged killer was arrested soon afterwards, confessed to the five slayings, and was sentenced to life in prison for Foote's homocide, though his lawyer managed to obtain a re-trial in 1971. Rather than go through the whole thing again, however, Ralph simply plea-bargained and was sent to a reformatory for youthful offenders where he inexplicably changed his name to Luke Karamazov.

Unlike the siblings of most Serial Killers, Ralph's brother Tommy followed in his older brother's footsteps. Tommy Searl had no involvement in Ralph's crimes but embarked on his own string of homocides in 1972 when he raped and stabbed Cynthia Kohls in Kalamazoo, leaving the woman's eighteen-month-old child alive huddled next to it's mother's corpse. Then in July two bodies were found in a car parked in an isolated area twelve miles from town. Because of decomposition it took some time to identify the pair as Cornelia Davault and Nancy Harte of Chicago. The nineteen-year-old girls had been raped and strangled to death.

A fifteen-year-old accomplice of Tommy's was the star witness at trial, testifying as to how Tommy had submitted his victims to rape and torture before ending their lives. The younger Searl brother closed the book on the unique tale of independently active Serial Killer brothers when he was sentenced to life in prison for the four murders.