VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: A Serial Killer Targets Unhoused Tunnel Residents

In the tunnels beneath Las Vegas, a serial killer preys on the unhoused population living there under unfortunate enough circumstances as it is.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s true,” said Jay, 45, one of the tunnel’s residents, in a 2023 video posted by YouTuber Brandon Buckingham.

The tunnels are no myth. They’re part of a 600-mile system of flood channels begun in the late ’70s to redirect storm water underneath the Strip and its surrounding communities.

That’s according to Shine a Light, a 501(c)3 nonprofit formed to try to help those wanting to return to society, and to care for those who don’t.

Jay told Buckingham he ended up living in the tunnels after a near-fatal shooting left him blind in one eye and homeless. He claims to have tried upgrading his situation. However, he explained, without an ID or the documentation necessary to get one — including a Social Security card or birth certificate — he can’t qualify for help or a legitimate job.

The tunnels turn out to be an ideal shelter from the unrelenting summer heat and from the police officers who break up homeless encampments on the streets above.

Until it rains. Then they become death traps.

At least once a year — sometimes several — bodies are washed through the tunnels toward Lake Mead by the runoff from surprise rainstorms in the mountains west of town.

So far, though, none of these bodies has been found to be a victim of murder.

Myth Understanding

“I  think it’s kind of a conflation of a lot of individual events,” Dayvid Figler explained the myth’s origin on a previous episode of City Cast Las Vegas.

Figler, who co-hosts the podcast, is a Las Vegas defense attorney who once represented a client accused of sexually assaulting female tunnel residents.

“He was a really big guy … who kind of just grunted and yelled at people,” Figler said. “Everyone said that he would carry around an actual severed head to lord over (people).”

Granted, he really was a killer, but not of fellow tunnel residents. According to Figler, his client later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a case with no tunnel connection.

Terminator 2

There was another known murderer living in the tunnels once, but only for a week in 2002, so he could evade a police dragnet. Coverage of the case inspired Matt O’Brien, author of the 2007 book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, to enter the tunnels for the first time as a journalist for the old Las Vegas alt-weekly, CityLife.

Timmy “T.J.” Weber lived with Kim Gautier and her children in downtown Las Vegas. He had been having sex with Gautier’s daughter since she was 9 years old and producing pornographic images of her, according to court records. Just as Gautier and her 15-year-old son were on the verge of uncovering the long-running abuse in 2002, Weber killed them.

Reading that he fled into the tunnels “piqued my interest,” O’Brien told the website bldgblog.com in 2007.

I wondered what Weber experienced in the storm drains,” he said. “What he saw, what he heard, what he smelled. How, apparently without a light source, he’d splashed more than three miles upstream. I also wondered what was beneath Las Vegas. What secrets the storm drains kept.”

Weber’s case was covered on the national TV show “America’s Most Wanted’ before he was apprehended at a vacant mobile home in 2003. He was convicted of two counts of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2003. He died of natural causes in custody in 2022.

“That’s how urban legends start,” Figler said. “There’s always some grain of truth, or different parts of the story that come together. So it’s not without its factual basis on some level.”

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