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Almost 50 years after three girls had been strangled in Ventura County, chilly case investigators mentioned Thursday that they’d recognized a person suspected of the serial killings.
Through trendy DNA expertise 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.
These chilly circumstances — three in Southern California, one in North Carolina — may very well be simply the tip of the iceberg.
“We believe there may be additional victims, both locally and in other states,” Ventura County Dist. Atty. Erik Nasarenko mentioned when he introduced Thursday morning that his workplace had filed three counts of first-degree homicide in opposition to Alexander. “This is an ongoing investigation, and we will continue to pursue all leads that become available. This is not in any way 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 sequence 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, middle, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez.
(Ventura County District Attorney’s Office.)
Fritz, who was 18, was discovered useless in a motel in Port Hueneme on May 29, 1977. Sanchez, 31, was found in an Oxnard motel that 12 months on Sept. 9. Both had been strangled with their undergarments.
Months later, in late December, Rodriguez’s physique was discovered dumped on Laguna Road within the Oxnard Plain space. Her reason for dying? Also strangulation. She was 21 when she died.
After all these years, detectives nonetheless keep 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 beloved spending time along with her children.
Sanchez was additionally a mom, mentioned Oxnard Police Chief Jason Benites, and she or he had only in the near past left her job on the U.S. Navy Exchange when she was killed. And Fritz, recent out of college, was considered one of three sisters and had moved to California from Ann Arbor, Mich.
News reviews 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, mentioned that authorities had been nonetheless investigating potential connections between Miller’s slaying and the three 1977 killings which have now been related to Alexander.)
Back in 1977, detectives working these circumstances did discover there have been patterns. All the ladies had been intercourse employees, and there have been eerie similarities in the best way they had been slain. In the killings of Miller, Fritz and Sanchez, their our bodies had been organized in nearly similar methods, with what the coroner on the time mentioned “appeared was the intent to degrade the victim,” in line with a Ventura County Star article from 1978.
The coroner on the time declined to be extra particular about what was achieved to the our bodies, however he advised the Star in 1978 that it was unlikely that multiple killer would have adopted by means of with that form of element in all three killings.
For a long time, the Oxnard Police Department, the Port Hueneme Police Department and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office’s chilly case unit had been unable to trace 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.
But then in 2023 got here 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. Advanced DNA forensics had additionally cracked open this case.
“Because of Nona Cobb’s alleged murder, we — the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, the Oxnard and Port Hueneme police — are working with the FBI, specifically their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Highway Serial Killings initiative to draw parallels, to see when patterns emerge and to hopefully solve additional crimes,” Nasarenko mentioned.
Alexander appeared in Ventura County Superior Court on Thursday morning and can face arraignment later this month. He is from Diamondhead, Miss., however authorities famous that he lived in Oxnard within the late Nineteen 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 Nineteen Seventies, authorities mentioned, and from the Nineteen Seventies by means of the ’90s, he was a long-haul cross-country truck driver.
“These murders may have occurred 47 years ago, but the investigators … never gave up,” Nasarenko mentioned. “They never gave up seeking justice for these three victims, their loved ones and their families. Just because a case has gone cold does not mean it should ever be forgotten.”
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