Anthony Balaam

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS on counts of knowing or purposeful murder, part of fifteen crimes he was convicted of, with four counts of aggravated sexual assault alongside them. He was investigated over further killings in Detroit and no charge followed

Years active

1994 - 1996

Location

Mercer County, New Jersey, USA

Method

Strangulation

Status

Arrested on August 8, 1996 after an intended fifth victim escaped, and gave Trenton police statements linking himself to all four killings. HE DID NOT PLEAD GUILTY. Prosecutors offered him four life terms with a 120-year minimum before trial and he went to trial instead, was convicted by a jury of FIFTEEN CRIMES including four counts of knowing or purposeful murder and four of aggravated sexual assault, and his DNA was found on two of the victims. Two co-prosecutors sought the death penalty on the grounds that the killings involved sexual assault and were committed to silence the women as witnesses. THE JURY DECLINED TO IMPOSE IT, and on January 26, 2001 Superior Court Judge Thomas P. Kelly sentenced him to four consecutive life terms, each carrying thirty years of parole ineligibility, a minimum of one hundred and twenty years. The Appellate Division affirmed on direct appeal on May 16, 2003 and the New Jersey Supreme Court denied certification that year. A petition for post-conviction relief, filed ten months out of time and arguing that his trial and appellate lawyers were ineffective and his confession involuntary, was denied without a hearing in June 2010 and that denial was affirmed on September 24, 2012. Held at New Jersey State Prison, with parole eligibility recorded as 2116.

Anthony Balaam, born in 1965, strangled four women in Trenton, Mercer County, New Jersey, between 1994 and 1996: Karen Denise Patterson, 41, Valentina Cuyler, 29, Concetta Hayward, 27, and Debra Ann Walker, 37. All four were sex workers and the killings followed exchanges of sex for crack cocaine, to which he was addicted. The Trenton press called him the Trenton Strangler.

He was arrested on August 8, 1996 after a fifth woman he attacked escaped and identified him. He confessed to sodomising and strangling the four, and was sentenced to life in prison on January 26, 2001.

English-language sourcing beyond the confession and the sentencing is limited, and the entry does not attempt to reconstruct the individual killings.