Serial killer survivor discovers chilling reason he was allowed to walk away alive in jailhouse interview with evil murderer

A hitchhiker who survived a ride with a notorious serial killer learned the reason he was allowed to walk away in a jailhouse interview.

In the fall of 1975 then 19-year-old Steve Fishman 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 on a news alert that identified him as Robert Frederick Carr III, a murderer who confessed to kidnapping and raping more than a dozen people and killing four of them.

This rattled Fishman who was left wondering how he was able to get away from Carr's clutches. Years later he would finally get his answer in a jailhouse interview.

'One of the questions that I had for him was, "Why not me?" And that feels like a really bizarre question to ask. But I did. And he basically shrugged and said, "I thought you were too big,"' Fishman told 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 New York Magazine journalist and hit podcast creator, was an intern at a local newspaper in Norwich when Carr picked him up.

He recalled Carr being talkative but later realized he had missed several red flags including the car door latch on the passenger side was jammed and the driver had mentioned getting released from jail.

'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 said. 'I really didn’t stop to think or ask him what the crime was. I didn’t have any idea.'

When Carr picked Fishman up, 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 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 he strangled her. 

Later that year, Carr picked up 11-year-old friends Todd Payton and Mark Wilson from North Miami Beach, raped and strangled them, then buried them in Louisiana and Mississippi.  

He killed his fourth victim, Rhonda Holloway, 21, not long after his encounter with Fishman and buried her in Connecticut.

While he was still an intern, Fishman reached out to Carrs family and tried to schedule an interview with the killer. In the mid-1970s he finally got to speak with the man who let him live. 

'An interview with a serial killer was a big story. It was a big journalism scoop that really kind of sent me on the path to be a journalist. And yet, it was a story that I didn't really like to think about because I did it when I was 19 and 20, and I was really afraid of what my focus had been,' Fishman said.

Carr confessed to kidnapping and raping more than a dozen people and killing four of them in the 1970s

'I was really afraid that I had gotten the story wrong, that I somehow didn't understand or appreciate the horror of the story.

'Back then, I looked at it as a societal problem of how do we treat criminals? How do we rehabilitate rapists? And the utter depravation of it kind of slipped by me.

'I'm a father now a few times over. I think about crime and victims differently.'

Fishman recently teamed up with Carrs daughter Donna to unpack the serial killers heinous crimes in a new season of the Smoke Screen podcast titled, 'My Friend, the Serial Killer.'