Alfred Gaynor stands convicted of murdering eight women in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1990s. A jury convicted him in May 2000 of the aggravated rape and first-degree murder of four women who died between November 1997 and February 1998, and he received four life sentences without parole. Ten years later, already in prison, he pleaded guilty to four more murders, the earliest from April 1995. He also confessed to killing a fifth woman, Amy Smith, in 1996, a death for which his own nephew had been convicted.
Prosecutors in Hampden County said his eight convictions were the most murders known to have been committed by one person in Springfield's history, and among the most in the state. The women he killed left 16 children, according to a 2010 wire report, and in three cases it was the women's children who found their mothers' bodies.
Between 1995 and 1998 women were found dead in alleys, in vehicles and in their own homes in Springfield. Requests for permits to carry Mace rose sharply as the killings went on, the Philadelphia Daily News reported in 2010, looking back on the period. A prosecutor at Gaynor's trial spoke of a "time of terror" in the city, a phrase the Supreme Judicial Court later said should not have been used in closing argument but did not overturn the verdicts.
The Associated Press, reporting the 2000 verdicts, wrote that the killings had spread fear through the city, especially in its minority neighborhoods. Gaynor and all four women in the case that went to trial were Black, as the trial judge noted when deciding where the case should be heard.
Little is known about Gaynor's early life. He grew up in Springfield, which wire reporters called his hometown. He was 33 when he was convicted in May 2000, 43 at his last guilty plea in November 2010, and 44 a month later.
He was described in 2000 as a handyman and auto body repairman. Court testimony and files summarized by reporters in 2010 showed that he held occasional odd jobs in the 1990s but spent much of his time going from one crack cocaine purchase to the next. The record of the 2000 trial shows him as a regular at a Springfield house where crack cocaine was sold. A week before one of the killings he had picked up a promotional ballpoint pen at a local auto body shop, a detail that would matter at his trial.
In 1997 he was tried on a rape charge and acquitted.
His mother was the center of the family and his strongest supporter, according to the 2010 reporting. She was 67 when she died in 2006. Gaynor told police and prosecutors in 2008 that he had stayed silent until after her death because he "just couldn't destroy everything she believed in."
Several of the women were low-income single mothers, often women he knew. Police and prosecutors said he robbed some of them for drug money and raped most of them.
Vera Hallums was a mother of four. She was strangled in Springfield in April 1995, and in 2010 Gaynor said her death was his first killing. Before his confession he had been one of several suspects in her death, Hampden District Attorney William Bennett said. One of her daughters spoke after his plea in 2010.
Amy Smith was 20. She lived in Springfield with her daughter, Destiny, who was 22 months old. Smith was found dead in Springfield in 1996. Destiny died too, after being left alone without care following her mother's death.
Jill Ann Ermellini was 34. She had moved to Springfield from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, shortly before she was killed in 1997. Her mother spoke publicly about her in 2010.
Robin Atkins and Yvette Torres were also killed in Springfield in the 1990s. Bennett said in 2010 that Gaynor had been the prime suspect in their deaths, as in Ermellini's, for years.
The four women whose deaths went to trial in 2000 were JoAnn Thomas, Loretta Daniels, Rosemary Downs and Joyce Dickerson-Peay. The Supreme Judicial Court's 2005 opinion does not name them; it numbers them in the order of their deaths. All four, the court found, were known at the same Springfield house where Gaynor was a regular, and each died of strangulation or asphyxiation.
The court's account of the four cases runs from the autumn of 1997 to the late winter of 1998.
The first of the four women was last seen alive late on October 31, 1997, and was found dead in Springfield on November 1. She had been strangled. Gaynor's thumbprint and palm print were later found on objects at the scene. His brother testified at trial that he had driven Gaynor to that neighborhood several times in October and November 1997.
The second woman's body was found in Springfield at about 9 a.m. on February 2, 1998. The pathologist estimated that she had been dead one to two days when the autopsy was done the next day. She had been strangled. Police found a ballpoint pen at the scene like the one Gaynor had picked up at the auto body shop the week before.
The third woman was seen with Gaynor at the same house at about 9 or 9:30 p.m. on February 10, 1998. They left, came back about two hours later, and left again. She was found dead in Springfield on February 11. The pathologist placed her death between 10 p.m. on February 10 and 4 a.m. on February 11. Gaynor's palm print was found at the scene.
The fourth woman spent the night of February 18, 1998, with Gaynor and another woman at a friend's home in Springfield. They tried to sell a pair of her gold earrings, drove to Holyoke and back, and then she drove off with Gaynor in the front passenger seat of her car. No one saw her alive again. Her teenage daughter reported her missing on February 19. Her car was found abandoned. On February 20 Gaynor pawned her earrings, in his own name, for twelve dollars. Her body was found in Springfield on March 11, 1998. She had been strangled.
The investigation that led to Gaynor's arrest began with the fourth woman's disappearance. Police started work on it on February 20, 1998, after interviewing the two women who had been with her on the night of February 18. One of them told officers she had seen the missing woman drive off with Gaynor.
On February 27 Gaynor went to the Springfield police station voluntarily and gave a statement about February 18. He said he had not driven away with the woman and had never sat in the front seat of her car. He said he had walked to a bar instead and had a drink there with a former co-worker. The bartender and the co-worker both denied it. Police also brought in his girlfriend to clear up when he had arrived at her home in the early hours of February 19. He tried to persuade her that it had been 12:30 a.m.; she later called police to say it had been 6 a.m. A friend testified that Gaynor had turned up at his home at about 1 a.m. on February 19 asking to borrow fifteen dollars.
While he was at the station, Gaynor saw the missing woman's car, with a bloodstain on the passenger seat. Officers asked him for his fingerprints, palm prints and a blood sample. He agreed. He was told he could refuse, and he signed a consent form allowing police to use the sample "for whatever purpose said police officers desire in connection with a police investigation." A nurse at a hospital drew four vials of blood. Police had already taken blood samples from eight other people before his.
On March 3 his lawyer told police not to contact him about the missing woman's case. Her body was found on March 11.
On April 6, 1998, detectives went to Gaynor's workplace and told him that the blood on the car seat was not his. Because he had a lawyer, they did not question him about her case. Gaynor then asked them about the other killings, unprompted. He said he wished he could help but did not know the other women, and on his lawyer's advice he declined to say more.
The blood Gaynor gave had been drawn for one case, but its DNA profile was compared with evidence from all four. The testing was done by Cellmark Diagnostics Laboratories in two series. In the first, Gaynor could not be excluded as the source of biological evidence in any of the four cases. The second series tested the CODIS loci. In the first and second cases it produced a match at a frequency the laboratory put at about one in 64 quadrillion among African-Americans. In the third case the sample was a mixture, so no frequency was calculated. In the fourth, evidence from the front seat and armrest of the woman's car gave frequencies of one in 450,000 and one in 709,000.
DNA samples from seven other suspects were also tested. All seven were excluded in every case. The prints added to the DNA: his thumb and palm prints in the first case and his palm print in the third.
Six indictments against Gaynor were returned on May 20, 1998, and two more on April 13, 1999.
Gaynor's lawyers asked to move the trial out of Hampden County because of what they called massive and prejudicial publicity, and they asked for Suffolk County. The judge, Daniel A. Ford of the Superior Court, agreed that the case should be moved but sent it to Berkshire County.
The defense objected that only Suffolk County had a pool of minority jurors comparable to Hampden's. Judge Ford took race into account. He noted that Gaynor, all four women and several witnesses were African-American, but found no allegation that race had been a motive in the killings. He drew on his own experience of trying African-American defendants in Berkshire County and found no compelling reason to burden the victims' families or to send the case to Suffolk County.
The trial was held in Pittsfield. The four murder cases were tried together over the defense's objection. The judge, and later the Supreme Judicial Court, held that they were related: the evidence showed a common scheme of preying on cocaine-addicted women for sex, and the four deaths were close together in time and place.
Gaynor filed notice of an alibi for one of the four cases only, the death of the second woman, naming two witnesses who would say he was not near the place where she died. Neither witness testified.
Prosecutors argued that the killer had lured the women with the offer of cocaine. In closing, a prosecutor told the jury that the twelve dollars Gaynor got for the fourth woman's earrings was "the value he put on [her] life," and referred to a "killing zone," meaning the physical evidence found near each body.
The jury convicted Gaynor of aggravated rape and murder in the first degree in all four cases, returning verdicts under all three theories of first-degree murder in each case. The verdict was reported on May 20, 2000. He was sentenced at once to four terms of life without parole. A fifth killing, the Associated Press noted, remained unsolved.
Gaynor still said he was innocent.
The Supreme Judicial Court heard Gaynor's appeal on October 7, 2004, and affirmed all four convictions on January 11, 2005, in an opinion by Justice Spina for a panel of Chief Justice Marshall and Justices Greaney, Spina and Sosman. Kenneth J. King argued for Gaynor and Assistant District Attorney Marcia B. Julian for the Commonwealth.
The defense raised eleven issues. The main ones concerned the blood sample. Gaynor argued that police had tricked him into giving it by implying it would be used only in the fourth woman's case. The court disagreed. Police had made no promise limiting its use, and the trial judge was entitled to find that Gaynor was not a suspect in the other three killings on February 27. A reasonable person, the court said, would have understood that a blood sample given in a homicide investigation could be used for DNA testing, and using the resulting profile in other cases needed no new consent.
The court also held that the April 6 conversation did not violate his right to counsel, because he was not in custody and had not been charged, and because his questions about the other killings were his own. It upheld the transfer to Berkshire County, the joinder of the four cases and the admission of the Cellmark DNA results, finding that objections to the laboratory's methods went to the weight of the evidence rather than its admissibility. Some of the prosecutor's closing remarks, including the comment about the value of a life and the "time of terror," were improper, the court said, but not prejudicial given the strength of the evidence. It declined to reduce the verdicts or order a new trial.
Amy Smith's death had been laid at the door of another man. Her former boyfriend, Paul Fickling, who is Gaynor's nephew, was convicted in the deaths of Smith and Destiny and sent to prison.
After his mother's death in 2006, Gaynor admitted to being a rapist and killer, according to the 2010 reporting. In 2008 he spoke to police and prosecutors. He confessed to killing Smith, and early in 2010 Fickling was granted a new trial after that confession.
On October 18, 2010, in Hampden Superior Court, Fickling pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Smith's death and involuntary manslaughter in Destiny's. He admitted that he had hit Smith during an argument and held her in a headlock. He was sentenced to 19 to 20 years in prison, with credit for about 14 years he had already served. Under the deal, prosecutors agreed to give Fickling consideration if Gaynor gave police statements about the other killings he had committed.
Gaynor confessed to four killings that had never been solved: those of Jill Ann Ermellini, Robin Atkins, Yvette Torres and Vera Hallums. In the fall of 2010 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Ermellini, Atkins and Torres. In a hearing reported on November 24, 2010, he pleaded guilty to Hallums's murder, admitted it had been his first killing, and received an eighth life term.
"That's all I have left to give, is the truth," he told the court. "Without my truth, they have nothing."
The details he gave in court left family members inconsolable. Ermellini's mother said she felt a weight lifted after his confession, but that hearing the details left her no peace. "Some people are just evil through and through," she said. Hallums's daughter said the confession had made things worse rather than better. "We really don't have any understanding of why he did it," she said. "This is not nowhere near closure." Assistant District Attorney Carmen Picknally called the hearing a sad occasion for the family, who had to relive the torment of 15 years before.
District Attorney Bennett had said in October that prosecutors would seek indictments for the deaths of Smith and her daughter, and that he expected Gaynor to plead guilty to those as well. In November Picknally would not comment on the status of the Smith case, and Bennett said only that he expected to be "taking further action." In December 2010 prosecutors had still to decide whether to indict him.
No nickname for Gaynor and no television film about him were reported. By December 2010 he had more murder convictions than David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer in New York, or Aileen Wuornos in Florida, each of whom had six, and as many as Michael Ross, executed in Connecticut, who had eight. The Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox suggested that Gaynor drew less attention than a killer such as Ted Bundy partly because his killings seemed less random. Of a Bundy-type killer, Fox said that his ordinariness is "intriguing and scary at the same time to people."
As of December 2010, Gaynor was serving four life sentences without parole and four further life terms.
Amy Smith and Destiny. Gaynor confessed to killing Smith, and his nephew's murder conviction gave way to manslaughter pleas. As of December 2010 Gaynor had not been indicted in her death or her daughter's, and prosecutors had not said whether he would be.
The 2000 jury verdicts cover only four of the women. The deaths of Ermellini, Atkins, Torres and Hallums rest on his 2010 guilty pleas, and Smith's on his confession alone.
1995, April: Vera Hallums is strangled in Springfield; Gaynor later says she was his first victim.
1996: Amy Smith, 20, and her daughter Destiny, 22 months, die in Springfield; Paul Fickling is later convicted.
1997: Jill Ann Ermellini, 34, is killed in Springfield. Gaynor is tried on a rape charge and acquitted.
1997, November 1: the first of the four women in the 2000 trial is found dead in Springfield.
1998, February 2 and February 11: the second and third women are found dead.
1998, February 18 and 19: the fourth woman drives off with Gaynor; her daughter reports her missing.
1998, February 27: Gaynor gives a statement and a blood sample at the Springfield police station.
1998, March 11: the fourth woman's body is found.
1998, April 6: detectives tell Gaynor the blood in the car is not his.
1998, May 20: six indictments returned.
1999, April 13: two more indictments.
2000, May: convicted in Pittsfield of four aggravated rapes and first-degree murders; four life terms without parole.
2005, January 11: Supreme Judicial Court affirms.
2006: his mother dies.
2008: he speaks to police and prosecutors.
2010: Fickling granted a new trial; October 18, Fickling pleads guilty to manslaughter.
2010, fall: Gaynor pleads guilty to the murders of Ermellini, Atkins and Torres.
2010, November: he pleads guilty to the murder of Vera Hallums and receives an eighth life term.