Anthony Joyner

Victims

6 convictions of differing degrees - first-degree murder in five of the deaths and second-degree murder in the sixth, plus six counts each of rape and burglary; he is suspected in up to eighteen deaths at the home and was tried only for the six

Years active

January-July 1983

Location

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Method

Suffocation

Status

Confessed on August 1, 1983 to two of the killings and was charged with all six. Convicted by a Common Pleas Court jury in Philadelphia on May 4, 1984 of first-degree murder in five of the deaths and second-degree murder in the sixth, with six counts each of rape and burglary. The jury deliberated four hours on the death penalty and deadlocked six to six, so Judge Edwin Malmud imposed life imprisonment on May 5, 1984. Held at the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix, Skippack Township.

Joyner was born in 1959 and worked in the kitchen at a high-rise residence for elderly people in Philadelphia.

Between January and July 1983 six women who lived in the building, aged from eighty to ninety-two, were raped and suffocated in their own flats. The deaths of very old women in a residence for the elderly were not immediately treated as homicides, which is why the series ran for seven months in one building.

He was identified through fingerprints, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on May 5, 1984.

The employment is the point. He had legitimate access to the building and a reason to be in it, and the residents had no reason to be wary of a member of staff. Six women were killed in the place they had moved to in order to be safe.

The accessible sourcing is Philadelphia press reporting of the trial.