Six women died in their rooms at the Kearsley Home in Philadelphia in the first seven months of 1983, and for most of that time nobody treated any of the deaths as a crime. The home, part of Christ Church Hospital, was then the oldest operating institution of its kind in the country. The women were between eighty-three and ninety-two years old, and the first four deaths were put down to age, a weak heart, or nothing in particular.
On January 12 Margaret Eckard was found dead. She was ninety-two. There was blood around her nose, her mouth and her genitals, and the staff concluded she had died of natural causes.
A month later to the day, on February 12, Kathryn Maxwell was found dead in her bed. She was eighty-five and the circumstances were almost identical. Elizabeth Monroe, eighty-six, died a few days after that. Medical staff found blood and injuries to her genitals, but no autopsy was carried out, on account of her age and what was later described as negligence, and the cause of death was recorded as a heart attack.
On June 1 workers found Lily Amlie. The signs were the same again, but she had a history of heart trouble and her death was not treated as suspicious. She was eighty-nine by one account; a wire report from the trial gave her age as ninety.
On July 19 two women were found dead on the same day: Eugenia Borda, ninety, and Mildred Alston, eighty-three. The doctor who examined Borda found blood and injuries on her thighs and genitals and refused to sign off the death as natural. He insisted on autopsies of both women. They showed that both had been raped, that Borda had been strangled and that Alston had been suffocated, and he took the findings to the police.
The police reasoned from the building. The home had its own security staff, so an outsider was unlikely to have come and gone unseen, and the killer was probably someone who worked there. Interviews with the staff placed a kitchen worker, Anthony Joyner, in the cellar in the early hours of July 19. The theory that followed was that he came in through a cellar door after midnight, reached the residents' rooms from the basement, and left the same way and went back to work.
He had been at the home since October 1981, hired as an assistant nutritionist in the kitchen. Staff and residents liked him. They described him as talkative and energetic, and as highly affectionate toward the elderly patients. He was born in Philadelphia on May 26, 1962 (the same published account also gives May 25), and little is on record about his early life beyond a portly, physically weak teenager who had little success with girls, whose acquaintances suspected he was gay, and who denied it hard. He had no higher education and had lived on odd jobs.
He was interrogated on August 1, 1983 and confessed to the rapes and murders of Eugenia Borda and Mildred Alston. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two of rape. Investigators said he seemed remorseful and wanted to make a full confession because he could not sleep. Eighteen suspicious deaths had occurred at the home since he was hired, and the inquiry widened.
Police obtained warrants and exhumed Margaret Eckard, Lily Amlie, Kathryn Maxwell and Elizabeth Monroe. The autopsies found that Maxwell and Monroe had been raped and strangled, and that Amlie had been drowned in the bathtub of her own room. Eckard's body was too far decomposed for a cause of death to be established.
When Joyner was told what the autopsies had found, he signed a written confession to all six killings, and to the rape of a sixty-nine-year-old woman on a Philadelphia street, who had survived. The date of that attack is reported two ways: as the month before his arrest in one account, and as July 1982 in another, which adds that the woman was found, identified him, and that he himself described the attack as the thing that turned him toward old women, because they could not fight back.
Asked why, he gave answers that did not fit together. He said he had no sex life and could not be intimate with women his own age, and that the anger this left him with ended in the rapes; he also said he killed the women because they knew him well and could send him to prison. A former girlfriend told police that after they broke up he became preoccupied with being thought gay and set out to prove otherwise, and that a few days before his arrest he had called her to say he would soon be famous and written about in the papers.
While he awaited trial, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives honored eight of the officers involved in his arrest.
The trial opened in April 1984 and lasted three weeks. Joyner testified that he was innocent and that the police had tricked him into signing. His lawyer, Arthur James, disputed what he called the purported confessions, predicted his client would be cleared, and argued that Joyner was mentally ill and had been given a statement already written out.
The prosecutor, assistant district attorney Judith Rubino, ran it as though there were six separate murder trials, putting in the whole of the evidence on one death before moving to the next. A homicide detective, Philip Checchia, read out the statements about Kathryn Maxwell, in which Joyner said he had crept in through the cellar door after midnight, that he raped her because he was angry and wanted to have sex with somebody, and that she stopped moving during the attack. Rubino told the jury he had said he did it after fights with his girlfriends.
The jury deliberated for eight hours over two days and convicted him on May 4, 1984 of first-degree murder in five of the deaths and second-degree murder in the sixth, with six counts of rape. The burglary verdict is reported as six counts in one account and as a single count in another. He was twenty-one and had no previous record.
Rubino asked for death. The six men and six women on the Common Pleas Court jury deliberated for about four more hours and reported themselves hopelessly deadlocked, six to six, and Judge Edwin Malmud imposed life imprisonment, the only sentence the law then left him. Contemporary reports put that on Saturday, May 5; a later account dates it May 6. Joyner stood without speaking as it was read. James said he was glad it had not come down to one holdout juror. Rubino said the case had warranted death, that she thought the jury was tired and wanted to get home, and that it had been a clean trial.
He is suspected in as many as eighteen deaths at the home and was tried for six. As of March 2025 he was held at the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix in Skippack Township.
The employment is the point, and so is the arithmetic. He had legitimate reason to be in the building and the residents had no reason to be wary of a man from the kitchen. But four very old women were buried as natural deaths, one of them without an autopsy despite injuries the staff had seen, and that is what allowed the series to run for seven months in a single building. It took a doctor who refused to sign a certificate on July 19, and then Joyner's own confession, to get the other four exhumed.