Virtually 50 years after three girls had been strangled to demise in Ventura County, chilly case investigators stated Thursday that they’d discovered the suspected serial killer who dedicated these murders.
Via fashionable DNA know-how and more and more superior information sharing throughout regulation enforcement businesses, murder detectives had been in a position to join the dots on Warren Luther Alexander, 73, who was extradited this week from North Carolina — the place he’s awaiting prosecution in a chilly case killing from 1992 — and is now being held in Ventura County Jail with out bail.
And cracking these chilly instances — three in Southern California, one in North Carolina — seems to be simply the tip of the iceberg.
“We consider there could also be extra victims, each regionally and in different states,” Ventura County Dist. Atty. Erik Nasarenko stated when he introduced Thursday morning that his workplace had filed three counts of first-degree homicide in opposition to Alexander. “That is an ongoing investigation, and we’ll proceed to pursue all leads that grow to be obtainable. This isn’t in any manner closed.”
Alexander, who was a cab driver and a long-haul cross-country truck driver, is suspected of killing Kimberly Carol Fritz, Velvet Ann Sanchez and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez in 1977 in a collection of horrific slayings that had stumped detectives for many years.
A person has been arrested within the 1977 slayings of Kimberly Carol Fritz, left, Velvet Ann Sanchez, heart, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez.
(Ventura County District Lawyer’s Workplace.)
Fritz, who was 18, was discovered lifeless in a motel in Port Hueneme on Might 29, 1977. Sanchez, 31, was found in an Oxnard motel that 12 months on Sept. 9. Each had been strangled to demise with their undergarments.
Months later, in late December, Rodriguez’s physique was discovered dumped on Laguna Street within the Oxnard Plain space. Her explanation for demise? Additionally strangulation. She was 21 when she died.
In any case these years, detectives nonetheless bear in mind how a lot every girl meant to their households.
Rodriguez had a son and daughter and her household described her as a loving and devoted mom who liked spending time together with her children.
Sanchez was additionally a mom, stated Oxnard Police Chief Jason Benites, and she or he had only recently left her job on the U.S. Navy Alternate when she was killed. And Fritz, contemporary out of college, was certainly one of three sisters and had moved to California from Ann Arbor, Mich.
Information studies on the time additionally famous similarities to a fourth killing, in October 1975, of a younger girl named Cassandra Lee Miller. (Nasarenko, when requested by reporters, stated that authorities had been nonetheless investigating potential connections between Miller’s slaying and the three 1977 killings which have now been linked to Alexander.)
Again in 1977, detectives working these instances did discover there have been patterns. All the ladies had been industrial intercourse staff, and there have been eerie similarities in the best way they had been slain. Within the killings of Miller, Fritz and Sanchez, every of their our bodies had been organized in nearly similar methods, with what the coroner on the time stated “appeared was the intent to degrade the sufferer,” based on a Ventura County Star article from 1978.
The coroner on the time declined to be extra particular about what was performed to the our bodies, however he instructed the Star in 1978 that it was unlikely that a couple of killer would have adopted by with that sort of element in all three killings.
For many years, the Oxnard Police Division, the Port Hueneme Police Division and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Workplace’s chilly case unit couldn’t observe down who was behind these slayings. Leads ran chilly, and exhaustive makes an attempt over time to attach the DNA dots didn’t result in any matches.
However then, in 2023, there was a breakthrough. The county’s chilly case unit was reexamining the 1977 killings and had began importing proof to an enormous DNA database utilized by murder detectives throughout the nation.
A transparent DNA match emerged. A 12 months prior, Alexander had been charged in North Carolina in reference to an unresolved homicide from 1992. The 29-year-old sufferer, Nona Cobb, had been equally strangled and dumped alongside Interstate 77. Superior DNA forensics had additionally cracked open this case.
“Due to Nona Cobb’s alleged homicide, we — the Sheriff’s Division, the district legal professional’s workplace, the Oxnard and Port Hueneme police — are working with the FBI, particularly their Violent Legal Apprehension Program and the Freeway Serial Killings initiative to attract parallels, to see when patterns emerge and to hopefully clear up extra crimes,” Nasarenko stated.
Alexander appeared in Ventura County Superior Court docket on Thursday morning and can face arraignment later this month. He’s from Diamondhead, Miss., however authorities famous that he lived in Oxnard within the late Fifties and ’60s and attended elementary faculty, center faculty and the primary two years of highschool in Oxnard.
He labored as an electrician with the U.S. Marine Corps and returned to Oxnard within the Seventies, authorities stated, and from the Seventies by the ’90s, he was a long-haul cross-country truck driver.
“These murders could have occurred 47 years in the past, however the investigators … by no means gave up,” Nasarenko stated. “They by no means gave up in search of justice for these three victims, their family members and their households. Simply because a case has gone chilly doesn’t imply it ought to ever be forgotten.”
