businessman noticed a bad smell in the area and turned up the decomposing body of Kristin Nicole Gibbons, who had been shot in the head.
At 9 p.m. on 1 May 2006, a man in a Halloween mask abducted a woman at gunpoint outside Las Brasas restaurant and sexually assaulted her on North 32nd Street.
One woman displayed what the police called “heroic actions” and escaped the suspect’s predations. She had just walked out of a check-cashing business when she saw a man in a mask pushing a shopping trolley. She was opening her car door when he ran up to her, pointed a gun and told her to give him a ride, the police said. He forced her to drive to a secluded area, then ordered her to make the seat lie flat and told her to take off her clothes.
“I am going away for a long time,” he said, “and you are the last woman I am going to be able to touch.”
However, the woman refused to perform oral sex, even after he threatened to kill her.
“Would you rather die?” he asked.
“Yes, kill me,” she said. “You’re not going to violate me.”
She took the car keys and ran.
At 8.30 p.m. on 29 June 2006, 37-year-old Carmen Miranda was abducted from a carwash while she was on her cellular phone. She was found dead from a gunshot to the head behind a barber shop at the corner of 32nd Street and East Thomas about 100 yards away. The abduction was captured on CCTV.
By August 2006, the number of major crimes attributed to the Baseline Killer had risen to 23. The reports show the sexual assaults have ranged from fondling to rape. In many cases, victims had conversations with the man before they were attacked. He appeared always to have a gun, and often threatened to shoot and kill victims —and sometimes did. The varying descriptions of the attacker and his mannerisms show that he is “apparently clever with disguises,” said Sergeant Andy Hill. Some victims said he appeared smart; other victims the opposite. One woman said the man smelled of old beer. One said he appeared handsome at first; another told police he appeared to be a “crazy transient” asking for money.
While being interviewed by police in Kentucky on a burglary matter, James Dewayne Mullins claimed responsibility for the murder of Georgia Phompbon. Having been charged with second degree murder, he publicly maintained his guilt, then changed his story when the police linked the homicide to the Baseline Killer. Since then, he has told police that he acted with two other men, one of whom he is unable to identify. The police still hoped that Mullins could help them discover the identity of the Baseline Killer. But on 3 August 2006 the homicide charge against Mullins was dropped. Authorities angrily stated that he had caused a significant diversion of resources during the hunt for the genuine killer.
Police have, as of late, given a more detailed description, citing that he is most likely in his late twenties to early thirties, and wears a baseball hat backward or a beanie, along with his fisherman’s cap. His hair may now be short.
On 4 September 2006, Phoenix police arrested 42-year-old construction worker Mark Goudeau for an attack on two sisters, aged 21 and 24, as they were walking in a Phoenix park at night. He allegedly forced them to disrobe and put a gun between the legs of the older sister, who was pregnant, while he repeatedly raped the younger woman. The press immediately announced that he was the Baseline Killer, although the police have not charged him with any of the other attacks.
According to Arizona prison officials, Goudeau is an ex-convict who served 13 years for aggravated assault. Goudeau’s wife and friends insist the police have the wrong man.
Meanwhile two men—Dale S. Hausner, aged 33, and Samuel John Dieteman, 30—were under arrest for Serial Shooter’s crimes. The police believe the men took turns shooting random victims late at night and early in the morning.
Pittsburgh’s Prostitute Killer
In 1999, the police in Pittsburgh began to suspect that a serial killer was at work in their city. Twelve women who had taken to prostitution to support a drug habit had been killed and their bodies dumped in suburban or rural areas.
Jessica Freeman of North Braddock was a ward of the county and a runaway who worked as a prostitute at Penn Avenue and Ninth Street, Downtown. She was just 15 when she was found beaten to death in the early morning hours of 26 July 1992 on the railroad tracks in a remote section of Willis Road off Horning Road in Bethel Park.
The severed arms and legs of Faye Jackson–aka Faye Norris–of Garfield were recovered from a creek off Route 286 in Monroeville on 13 October 1994. She was identified from her fingerprints. The cause of death could not be determined. Jackson was last seen three days before in Garfield, where she worked as a prostitute. The previous August, she was rescued by police after her boyfriend kept her shackled to a gas line for 52 hours and raped her repeatedly in his Lawrenceville home. However, her boyfriend was not considered a suspect in her death.
Twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy B. Siemers was originally from North Carolina but had moved to Allegheny West and was working as a prostitute in the area of Cedar Avenue, East Ohio Street and at the north end of the Ninth Street Bridge. Her body was found embedded in the ice of Pine Creek in Shaler on 15 January 1997. The cause of death could not be determined, but drowning was suspected.
The body of 32-year-old Leah J. Hall of Oakland was found by a track inspector just after 11 a.m. on 28 February 1997 near Conrail tracks in Carnegie. The mother of three, she worked as a prostitute in the Uptown section of the city. She had been strangled. The police suspected that there was a connection between the murders of Dorothy Siemers and Leah Hall.
The skeleton of 45-year-old Cherida Oden Warmley of Garfield was found on 10 October 1998, on a steep, wooded hillside along the Triboro Expressway just west of the former Westinghouse Electric plant in North Versailles. She had last been seen alive over a year before, on 10 June 1997, by her live-in boyfriend. Like the other victims, she had worked as a prostitute in Pittsburgh. Her remains had been thrown over the hillside and had landed just 28 feet from the road. The cause of death could not be determined and she could only be identified from her dental records.
Then on 28 June 1999 the skeletal remains of a young women were found in a vacant house in Wilkinsburg and on 6 October the skeletal remains of 27-year-old Angelique Morgan, a known prostitute and drug addict, were discovered in an abandoned house in Shadyside. The cause of death could not be determined, but police believed she had been killed because she was found under a carpet and a mattress with her sweatshirt wrapped around her head.
Although there is no hard evidence linking the cases, Pittsburgh police Commander Ron Freeman thinks it improbable that so many similar deaths–perhaps as many as 18–would be the work of different people.
Rapid City’s Creek Killings
Eight homeless men were found drowned in a stream that runs through a park in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, over the course of 16 months in the late 1990s. In a typical year, just one corpse is fished from the creek.
When the first few bodies turned up in the stream on the edge of the Black Hills, police thought nothing of it. As more men died, however, law officers became suspicious. And after 49-year-old Timothy Bull Bear Snr, of the town of Allen on the Pine Ridge Reservation, was found in the creek on 8 July 1999 they realized they had a problem on their hands.
“There’s just too many of them to say it’s coincidence,” said Police Chief Tom Hennies.
Authorities have no witnesses and no motive for the killings. There are no bullet holes, stab wounds or evidence of foul play. Police do not even know where most of the men entered the stream. What investigators do know is that six of the eight dead were Native Americans, and all but one had been drinking heavily just before they died.
