The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (20 page)

During a search, police also found a 1982 gold Monte Carlo similar to one seen leaving the Hilton Airport Inn near Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on 18 February 1991. Inside the car, police found luggage similar to that used by Northwest Airlines employees. And on 11 February he was charged with the murder of Nancy Ludwig. He was arraigned in Romulus District Court on five felony counts of murder and criminal sexual conduct. Convicted in the Ludwig case, he pleaded no contest to the rape and murder of Margarette Eby.

Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Cox promised that detectives would be doing a thorough follow-up.

“There are a lot of things here that are very disturbing that we’ve uncovered,” Cox says.

Homicide investigators in Orange County, Florida, contacted Michigan authorities about the disappearance of a 14-year-old Vickey Willis in April 1983, when Gorton was living nearby in Orlando.

The investigation goes much wider than that. A total of 800 pairs of women’s panties labelled with dates and places were found in Gorton’s house. But that takes investigators no closer to the killer of the seven African-American women in Flint.

The Florida Lady Killer

On 17 February 1981, the body of a young African-American woman was found in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale’s ghetto area. She could not be identified and the medical examiner could not determine the cause of death, describing it as a “homicide committed by unspecified means”.

On 1 June 1981, the skeletal remains of a black girl were found on the same patch of rough ground. She was roughly 13 years old, but she was carrying no form of ID. Again she could not be identified and a post mortem revealed no cause of death.

A third victim was identified. She was 30-year-old Eloise Coleman, a resident of the neighbourhood. Her corpse was found in the same lot on 10 June 1981, roughly 100 yards from where the first body was found. She had last been seen alive three days before when she left home on the evening of 7 June. This time the medical examiner could also determine the cause of death. It was described as blunt trauma to the victim’s head, caused by a powerful blow.

Despite the fact that all the bodies had been dumped on the same patch of waste ground, the police were reluctant to call the murders the work of a serial killer and the killer, or killers, remain at large.

The Fort Lauderdale Lacerater

Florida police found themselves investigating another series of unsolved murders in the Fort Lauderdale area, after the mutilated body of Delia Lorna Mendez was found in a dumpster on Federal Highway in nearby Hollywood on 21 May 1999. They sought to connect her death with the murder of four Fort Lauderdale prostitutes who worked the highway at one time or another.

At least three of the women had strawberry-blonde hair and a slender figure. Three were last seen strolling along US 1 in Fort Lauderdale and, when their bodies were found, they had been strangled. The fourth was mutilated and dumped near a Palm Beach highway.

Boston police flew to Florida, looking for connections between Mendez’s death and the murder of 20-year-old Swedish nanny Karina Holmer living in Dover, Massachusetts. She was last seen outside Zanzibar, a nightspot near Boston Common, between 3.30 and 4 a.m. on 22 June 1996. Her body was found in dumpster the next day by a man rummaging through the trash. She had been strangled and her torso was cut in half with surgical precision. The two halves of the body had been washed and placed in a garbage bag under a pile of rubble in the dumpster.

The Grand Rapids Grim Reaper

The murder of 11 women in the area around Grand Rapids, Michigan, remains unsolved. The police said that they were not sure that they were the work of a serial killer, though they assigned a task force of 15 to investigate.

The first victim was 25-year-old Lesa Otberg of Grand Rapids, whose body was found some 35 miles away in Muskegon in March 1994. Eight months later, another body was discovered to the south in neighbouring Ottawa County. The victim has not been identified. The remaining victims have been found in Grand Rapids itself, except for 29-year-old Victoria Moore. Her badly decomposed body was discovered by a squirrel hunter 20 miles north of the city.

Nine of the victims were prostitutes and at least five of them had contacts with the Rose Haven Ministry, a sanctuary for sex workers. By and large they were young white women with dark hair. Other than that, there are few clues and their killer remains at large.

The I–10 Long-Distance Lorry Driver of Death

Police in San Diego have been looking for a serial killer responsible for a string of murders along Interstate 10, the 2,500-mile highway running across eight states in the lower United States from California to Florida.

The investigation was instigated by a woman who accused a truck driver of a 1981 murder in San Diego’s Balboa Park, along with a string of slayings across the southern States. The unidentified female informant described how the 1981 killing was committed and took detectives to the spot, providing details that only someone who had witnessed the murder or who had been told about it by the killer could have known.

The woman said the truck driver had killed up to 20 people, largely prostitutes and hitch-hikers. Many were killed in Texas and their bodies deposited hundreds of miles away.

Law enforcement agencies all along I–10 had unsolved cases that might correspond to the trucker’s movements. They were afraid that the I–10 had struck again when the Baton Rouge serial killer began dumped his victims along the same Interstate some 1,800 miles to the east.

The I–35 Killer

The I–35 had been the hunting ground of a serial killer – or killers – before. Between 1976 and 1981, there were at least 22 murders along the 420-mile stretch of the I–35 in Texas. The victims were largely hitchhikers and motorists in trouble.

The killer’s first “official” victim was 21-year-old Lesa Haley, who was hitch-hiking from Texas to Oklahoma City. She was last seen climbing into a van outside Waco. Her body was found dumped on the hard shoulder of the eastern branch of the I–35 two miles north of Waxahachie, Texas, on 23 August 1976. She had been stabbed in the neck with an awl.

On the night of 5 November 1978, Rita Salazar, aged 18, and Frank Key, 19, were out on a date in the state capital Austin, Texas, when they ran out of gas. The next morning, Frank Key’s body was found north of Georgetown. He had been shot nine times with a. 22-caliber pistol, including four shots in the back of the head after he was dead. Rita Salazar’s body was discovered 70 miles further on, dumped on a frontage road near Waco. She had been shot six times with the same gun.

On 3 September 1979 – Labor Day – 27-year-old Sharon Schilling was found 125 miles to the south of Austin on a street in San Marcos, Texas, just a few blocks from I–35. She had been shot once in the abdomen with a .410-gauge shotgun. She died ten days later without regaining consciousness.

Sandra Dubbs was driving from St Louis to San Antonio when her car broke down on the I–35 on 8 October 1979. She was abducted from the disabled vehicle. Her body was discovered near Austin in Travis County, Texas. She had been stabbed 35 times.

On 31 October – Halloween – the body of a woman, naked except for a pair of orange socks, was found near Georgetown in a culvert under the I–35. She had been strangled and has never been identified. Henry Lee Lucas confessed to her murder but work records and a cheque he cashed indicated that Lucas was somewhere else and Texas Attorney General Dan Morales concluded that it was “highly unlikely” that Lucas was guilty in the “orange socks” case.

On 23 June 1980, the body of Rodney Massey was found in a field near Temple, Texas, 60 miles north of Austin. He had been shot four times. Then on 9 July, the body of an unidentified Hispanic woman was discovered near Pflugerville, 13 miles north of Austin. Although her pants had been pulled down, there was no evidence of sexual assault. She had been stabbed 27 times with a screwdriver. In May 1981, the body of another unidentified female was found near New Braunfels, 25 miles outside San Antonio. She had been shot in the head six times with a .25-caliber pistol.

It was now clear that a serial killer was at work and the authorities involved met in Austin on 30 October 1981. They decided to pool their resources but even there they could come up with no solid suspects.

In 1983, the prolific serial killers Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole confessed to most of the I–35 murders and Lucas was convicted and sentenced to death in the “orange socks” case. But it was later demonstrated that Lucas was working as a roofer in Florida in October 1979. Work records and cheque-cashing evidence show that he could not have done it. Subsequently it has been shown that Lucas and Toole were not guilty in many of the 350 murders they confessed to. It seems that the police were merely trying to clear their books of troublesome cases. The “orange socks” case and the other I–35 returned to the “unsolved” list. Many believe that the I–35 killer is still at large.

The I–70 – “America’s Sewer Pipe”

The I–70 has been the killing ground of so many serial killers that it has become known as “America’s Sewer Pipe”. One killer who used the stretch between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s and has never been caught became known simply as the “I–70 Killer”. The killer dumped the bodies of nine gay men within a few miles of the highway. No suspect has ever been apprehended, despite the widespread publicity the murders have generated, including their being featured several times on the television show
America’s Most Wanted
.

In October 1998, authorities announced that they strongly suspected that Indianapolis businessman and serial killer Herb Baumeister could have been the I–70 Killer. Baumeister was a closet homosexual. A married man with three children, he secretly frequented gay bars in Indianapolis. In the summer, when his wife and kids were away at his mother’s lakeside condominium, he took young men back for a “cocktail and a swim” to their $1-million Westfield estate, known as Fox Hollow Farm.

In May 1993 gay men began disappearing in Indianapolis. Ten went missing over two years, but the killer left no clues. Then in the autumn of 1994, a man told the police that he had been picked up by a man who called himself Brian Smart. They had gone to Smart’s sprawling estate and engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation. Smart was a devotee and admitted that, sometimes, there had been accidents. A year later the man spotted Brian again and, aware of the disappearances, took down his licence-plate number. The car belonged to Baumeister.

Although the police lacked the necessary evidence to obtain a search warrant, in November 1994, they turned up at Fox Hollow Farm and ask for permission to search the grounds. When Baumeister refused, they petitioned his wife Julie. They told her that her husband cruised gay bars and that they suspected him of being a serial killer. He was a devoted husband of 20 years standing and she refused to believe them.

“The police came to me and said, ‘We are investigating your husband in relation to homosexual homicide,’” she recalled. “I remember saying to them, ‘Can you tell me what homosexual homicide is?’”

It was only when their 13-year-old son found parts of a skeleton in the woods that she gave her permission. Then, when her husband was away in June 1996, the police began their search. The remains of seven men were found. They had been strangled. All the victims used the same bars that Baumeister did and disappeared at times when his wife and kids were away. Meanwhile, 49-year-old Baumeister disappeared. On 3 July 1996, campers discovered his body lying beside his car in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park. He had a bullet hole in his forehead and a .357 Magnum in his hand.

An FBI profiler said that Baumeister’s cavalier manner of openly dumping his victims’ corpses in his back yard indicated that he had killed many times before. Baumeister insinuated to a potential victim that he had killed 50 to 60 people. He was known to have travelled on the I–70 from Indiana to Ohio around the time of the highway killings, which stopped in 1990, around the time that Baumeister bought Fox Hollow Farm.

In 1998, investigators concluded that Baumeister probably killed 16 men in all after linking him to nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990. Baumeister’s wife provided credit card receipts, phone call records, and even gave the police the use of the car that her husband had used on those business trips.

Baumeister’s photo matched the police sketch drawn from descriptions provided by witnesses who thought they had seen the I–70 Killer. One eyewitness identified Baumeister’s picture as the same man who had given his friend Michael Riley a lift home from a bar one evening in 1988. Riley was found dead the next morning.

“We’ll never know for sure, of course, if he was indeed the same man,” said Virgil Vandagriff, a private investigator employed to look into the disappearance of some of the missing men. “Everything points to him – even the fact that the roadside killings ended at the same time he bought his house and now had a place with plenty of room to dump his bodies with a lot less hassle.”

However, Vandagriff complained that, as a private detective, he did not always have the freedom or the money to follow his suspicions to the limit.

“I would have taken the Baumeister case a lot further than I feel the police did,” he said. “While there were many fine moments in the investigation . . . I think there were certain loose ends that should have been tied up.”

For example, while Baumeister was active in Fox Hollow Farm, his older brother in Texas was found dead in his pool.

However the killings along I–70 did not stop with the death of Baumeister. On 4 May 2006, the body of 24-year-old Dusty Shuck was found by a motorist on I–70 near a truck stop in Frederick County, Maryland. Last seen in New Mexico on 24 April, she had died from a combination of blunt force trauma to the head and a slit throat. Her head was wrapped in blood-soaked cloth and, although fully dressed, she had no shoes.

The I–70/I–35 Shootist

During a 29-day killing spree running from 8 April to 7 May 1992, a man in his mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties killed five women and one man along the I–70, which runs from Utah to St Louis, and I–35 which branches off at Kansas City and heads south through Wichita, Oklahoma City and Dallas to Laredo on the Mexican border. The victims were shop assistants in stores within two miles of the two Interstates. The one male victim had long hair and an earring and the authorities believe that the killer mistook him for a woman. The killer also robbed his victims, but seemingly as an afterthought.