True Crime Podcast, Best Stories, Real stories, Investigations, Serial Killer · True crime

Douglas Perry: The Serial Killer With A Split Identity

December 8, 2025·43 min·3 clips

Douglas Perry went to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery, becoming Donna Perry to possibly throw police off his trail.

The opening is commercial noise. Once the ads clear, the case follows Douglas Perry moving through Spokane with enough familiarity to get close to women working near the river. Nikki Lowe would have seen a familiar face. Near a Green Street underpass, the narration says Perry slowed when he saw her, and she had little reason to fear someone known in the prostitution community. She got in, and they headed toward Perry's place. On March 25, 1990, her body was found about a mile away on East South Riverton, draped over a guardrail. The details stay blunt. The episode describes a killer who left victims naked and placed where their bodies would be found. Detectives searched nearby evidence. A dumpster held a sweater, blue tennis shoes, sex lubricant, and a hypodermic syringe connected to Nikki Lowe. But the case stalled there. Nothing in those items directly incriminated Douglas Perry, so he stayed out of custody. Fifty-one days passed. Kathy Brisbo left downtown Spokane for the area where she worked, about 200 yards from the river on East Trent. Perry spotted her there. The account calls him a gun obsessive with one of his small-caliber weapons, then follows them toward a secluded place he knew well. The pattern was getting harder to miss. The ending shifts from appearance and identity to DNA, which made Donna Perry and Douglas Perry one offender in the case. The sentence was life without parole. Around that ending, more car-wash advertising cuts in, oddly making the case feel even harsher.

As heard by us

A grim Spokane case where identity, evidence, and murder come together with ugly clarity.

Douglas Perry's Spokane murders are told with a cold, careful eye. Nikki Lowe is picked up near a busy underpass, her body is later found draped over a guardrail, and a nearby dumpster turns up clothing, lubricant, and a syringe that fit the scene.

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Why you'd press play

You want a serial-killer case where the identity reveal lands through the evidence.

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