Gaynor was born in 1967 and lived in Springfield, in western Massachusetts. Between 1995 and 1998 he killed at least eight women, most of them women he knew from the drug trade in the city's north end. He raped them, strangled them, and took what was in their flats to sell.
The women named in the record are Vera E. Hallums, forty-five; Amy Smith, twenty; Jill Ann Ermellini, thirty-four; Robin M. Atkins, twenty-nine; JoAnn C. Thomas, thirty-eight; Yvette Torres, thirty-three; Loretta Daniels, thirty-eight; Rosemary Downs, forty-two; and Joyce Dickerson-Peay, thirty-seven.
He was arrested on April 10, 1998. He was convicted of four murders and sentenced to life without parole on May 19, 2000. He was later convicted or pleaded guilty in four further cases as DNA evidence was worked through, the last of them in November 2010, and received consecutive life terms.
He has since been at the centre of a long argument in Massachusetts about the reliability of his own confessions and about a co-defendant, Paul Fickling, who was convicted partly on Gaynor's evidence and later sought to overturn it. Gaynor has given differing accounts at different times, including implicating and then exonerating others.
Eight convictions stand and a ninth woman is named in the record without a charge. Because most of the cases were resolved by plea rather than trial, most of the evidence was never tested in court.