Boontem Anderson was thirty-four, a mother of two, and worked at Fort Meade. On October 8, 1986 she was home sick in Gambrills, and that day her fiance's eleven-year-old son found her body in the bathtub. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled. Alexander Watson was seventeen. He knew the family through their son, who worked with him at a fast-food restaurant, and he lived nearby; one account says a few doors away, another a couple of miles. He was not considered a suspect.
The crime-lab technician at her autopsy, Cover, said afterward that the brutality of it and the bathtub had stayed burned in his mind. Swabs were taken from her body, tested, and, more importantly, kept.
Mary Elaine Shereika was thirty-seven, a paralegal and a mother of two, and she went out for a run near her home in Four Seasons early on May 23, 1988 before work. She did not arrive. Her fiance reported her missing, and that afternoon a Gambrills farmer plowing a rye field found her partially clothed body. She had been raped, stabbed and strangled, and there was a bloodied sock beside her. She had passed Watson in a park that morning while he was using drugs, and he went after her and dragged her into the field.
By the early 1990s he had married, had a child, and moved to the Southgate apartment complex in Glen Burnie.
Lisa Kathleen Haenel was fourteen, a ninth-grader at Old Mill High School. On the morning of January 15, 1993 she set off on her usual walk to school and never got there. Her mother reported her missing, and the next morning her mother's boyfriend found her body in a ravine behind the school. She was nearly naked, stabbed and strangled. There was no sexual assault, so there was no semen, but a few feet away lay an unsmoked Newport cigarette with Lisa's blood on the burn end and the killer's saliva on the other. A white cross with her name on it was still on a tree near the spot eleven years later.
In each of the three cases, address records later showed, he lived a few doors from the person he killed.
Debra Cobb was thirty-seven, an office manager and a mother of two. On the evening of June 13, 1994 she was closing up a business in Forestville, in Prince George's County, where Watson worked in the same office plaza. He came in carrying a knife and handcuffs and asked if he could use the bathroom. He stabbed her during a robbery. He was arrested soon afterward, and he blamed his crack cocaine addiction.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and in December 1994 was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. He went to the Jessup Correctional Institution.
That conviction is the reason the other three were solved. Maryland had brought in a law requiring DNA samples from all convicted felons, so his was taken in prison and entered into CODIS, the national index.
Anne Arundel County formed its cold case unit in 1998, and its first detective, Waltemeyer, started on Anderson, Shereika and Haenel almost at once. We thought we were investigating three separate cases, another of the detectives, Herbert Hasenpusch, said later. In the summer of 2002 police announced that Shereika and Haenel had been killed by the same man, and in 2003 they added Anderson. Year after year the laboratory worked on specks of the Newport cigarette to build a better profile, and in the fall of 2003 it matched a convicted felon. In 2004 improved testing tied the swab from Anderson's body to him as well.
Detectives obtained a warrant for a fresh sample to confirm the database result. They did not have to look for him. He had been in prison for a decade.
He was charged on July 12, 2004 with three counts of first-degree murder. He was thirty-four. The county police chief, P. Thomas Shanahan, said the case showed they never close a case. The state's attorney, Frank R. Weathersbee, said witnesses tend to forget, and that DNA is a timeless stamp.
The death penalty was available in only one of the three. Watson was a juvenile when he killed Boontem Anderson, so that was out. Haenel's case did not involve a rape, which under Maryland law was what would have allowed the state to ask for death. That left Shereika alone, and her family chose not to seek it and joined the other families in accepting a plea instead.
He admitted all three in the circuit court at Annapolis, and when he was asked about any others he said these were the only ones. On August 16, 2007 Judge Joseph Manck imposed life imprisonment on each of five counts, three for the murders and two for the rapes, two of the murder sentences carrying no possibility of parole, and told him he would spend his life in a cell where he could not harm anyone else. He was later moved to the North Branch Correctional Institution.