Yvette Torres, thirty-three, had known Alfred Gaynor for years and let him into her home in Springfield, Massachusetts, on November 14, 1997, as an old friend. They drank and used drugs together, and late that evening he raped and strangled her. Her eleven-year-old son found her body on the bathroom floor. Gaynor was by then trying to sell her videocassette recorder for drug money. It would be thirteen years before he admitted to her murder in court.
He was born in Springfield on December 10, 1966, one of several children, left school with little education and did laboring work; by the late 1980s he was working at an auto repair shop and doing day labor, and he was addicted to drugs and alcohol. Many of the women he killed met him in the same pursuit of crack cocaine. Prosecutors said he robbed them for drug money, raped most of them, and often left their bodies posed to shock whoever found them. In several cases that was one of their children.
The first was Vera Hallums, forty-five, a mother of four, tied with electrical cords, beaten and strangled in her apartment in April 1995; she was found on April 20. In June 1996, Amy Smith, twenty, was killed in her apartment, and her twenty-two-month-old daughter was left locked inside with her body and died too. On June 15, 1997, Gaynor lured Jill Ann Ermellini, thirty-four, to a parking lot with the promise of drugs, strangled her and hid her body in a truck. On October 24 he beat, raped and strangled Robin Atkins, twenty-nine, after they had used cocaine together, and on October 31 he raped and strangled JoAnn Thomas, thirty-eight, in her apartment, leaving fingerprints and semen behind. Two weeks later came Yvette Torres.
In February 1998 he killed three women in eighteen days. Loretta Daniels, thirty-eight, whom he met at a crack house on February 1, was strangled in an alley several blocks away and found the next day. On February 10 he went back to the same house to trade CDs for crack and met Rosemary Downs, forty-two; they smoked crack in her apartment until morning, and he raped her, tied her up and gagged her, and she suffocated. On February 18 he strangled Joyce Dickerson-Peay, thirty-seven. Her daughter reported her missing the next day, and witnesses placed Gaynor with her. Police questioned him on February 27 and took a blood sample, but with no body they let him go. She was found on March 11. DNA tied him to her death and to Downs's, and he was arrested on April 10, 1998. The city had been in a state of alarm, with community forums, a special task force and unlimited overtime for detectives.
At a hearing on April 30, 1998, Rosemary Downs's adult son, who had found his mother dead in her bed, leaped over the courtroom divider and beat the shackled Gaynor bloody with a chair. Feeling in Springfield ran so high that the trial was moved an hour north to Berkshire County. DNA and fingerprint evidence proved four of the killings, those of Thomas, Daniels, Downs and Dickerson-Peay, and in May 2000 he was convicted and given four sentences of life without parole. He had never admitted anything. Police were sure of the others but lacked the physical evidence to charge him.
The rest came out through his nephew. Paul Fickling, Amy Smith's former boyfriend, had been convicted of her murder in 1997 and sentenced to life. In 2008, Gaynor approached the Hampden County district attorney's office offering to confess to the four unsolved killings, and to Smith's, if Fickling got a new trial. He said later he had waited until after his mother's death in 2006 because he could not bear to put her through it. Fickling won his new trial largely on Gaynor's confession and pleaded guilty to manslaughter for his role in the deaths of Smith and her daughter, a sentence of nineteen to twenty years, less the fourteen he had already served.
On October 26, 2010, in Hampden Superior Court, Gaynor pleaded guilty to raping and murdering Yvette Torres, Jill Ermellini and Robin Atkins, while families wept at the details. In November he pleaded guilty to Vera Hallums's murder and received an eighth life sentence. "That's all I have left to give, is the truth," he said. "Without my truth, they have nothing." Hallums's daughter Oletha Wells said the confession had only made things worse and was nowhere near closure. He has confessed to killing Amy Smith but has never been indicted for it. Massachusetts has no death penalty. He is held at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, where his attempts to sell his paintings have outraged the families of his victims.