In March 2018, Mary Annis Bartel, 91, was at home in her apartment at a senior living community in Plano, Texas, when a man forced his way in, pushed a pillow over her face and told her, as her son Rick later recounted, "Don't fight me." He took her jewelry and left. She survived, and she called the police.
The next day officers found a man in the parking lot of his apartment complex holding jewelry and cash. He had just thrown away a large red jewelry box. Papers inside it carried the name and address of Lu Thi Harris, 81. When police went to her home, they found her dead in her bedroom, with lipstick smeared on her pillow. The man was Billy Kipkorir Chemirmir.
Chemirmir was born in Kenya and remained a Kenyan citizen. According to Crime+Investigation UK, he moved to the United States in the late 1990s, followed his sister to Texas and lived there as a permanent resident. He sold cars and later worked as a caregiver for older people in North Texas. He was arrested on drunk driving and family violence charges between 2010 and 2011.
Prosecutors said that beginning in 2016 he targeted older women who lived alone, most of them in independent living apartments for seniors. He gained entry by posing as a maintenance or health care worker, smothered the women with pillows, and took their jewelry and other valuables to sell or pawn. One of the women he was charged with killing lived in a private home; she was the widow of a man he had cared for as an at-home caregiver.
Almost every death was first recorded as natural. Many of the women were in their eighties and nineties, and smothering leaves little physical trace. The local medical examiner later testified that his office missed the signs because police had not passed on any suspicions. Families had reported missing jewelry, and the reports went nowhere.
After the arrest, police in Dallas, Plano and Frisco went back over deaths at senior communities across the area. The charges grew in stages. By January 2021 a Dallas County grand jury had returned an 18th capital murder indictment, for the 2016 death of Glenna Day, a resident of The Tradition-Prestonwood in Far North Dallas. In June 2022 a Collin County grand jury added four more: Helen Lee, 82, who died at the Parkview senior living center in Frisco in September 2017; Marilyn Bixler, who also died in September 2017; Diane Delahunty; and Mamie Dell Miya. That brought the total to 22 counts of capital murder and two of attempted murder, 13 of the murder counts in Dallas County and nine in Collin County. "Oh my god, we can say 22 now," Bixler's daughter, Cheryl Pangburn, said when the news came.
Lawsuits filed by families described two clusters. At The Tradition-Prestonwood, the suits listed deaths through the second half of 2016, among them Norma French, 85, in October and Doris Gleason, 92, at the end of that month. At Preston Place, an upscale gated community, the suits listed women who died between October 2017 and March 2018, among them Minnie Campbell, 83; Carolyn MacPhee, 81; Rosemary Curtis, 76; Martha Williams; Miriam Nelson, 81; and Ann Conklin, 82. Phyllis Payne, 91, and Phoebe Perry, 94, died in May and June 2016.
Martha Williams had moved to Preston Place in May 2017 because she thought it was safe. Her daughter found her on the floor after she stopped answering her phone. Ann Conklin was found in her apartment, still dressed, with her dog on its leash; the day before, she had texted her daughter, "I love baby birds." The families' suits alleged that the community had not told residents about the jewelry missing from earlier victims' apartments.
At a sentencing hearing in October 2022, relatives spoke directly to Chemirmir. Ellen French House held up two photographs of her mother, Norma French. "This is my beautiful mother," she said, and then, of the second, "This is my mother after you pried her wedding ring off of her finger that she couldn't even get off." Loren Adair Smith said her mother, Phyllis Payne, had still been active and living a full life; the family had expected her to reach 100. Lindsey Watkins was 18 when she found her grandmother, Helen Lee, dead after Lee missed church. "Her jewelry was the least valuable thing that you stole," she told him.
The victims' children formed a group, Secure Our Seniors' Safety, to press for laws to protect older people.
Chemirmir pleaded not guilty and maintained his innocence throughout. His lawyer, Phillip Hayes, called the evidence circumstantial and said the charges rested on the medical examiner changing his mind. "It seems like every unexplained death they come up with, they're pinning on him," Hayes said in late 2020.
His first trial, for the death of Lu Thi Harris, ended in a mistrial. At the retrial in April 2022 he was convicted of capital murder and, with the state not seeking death, received an automatic sentence of life without parole. Prosecutors showed that Harris had been at a Walmart hours before she died.
The second trial was for Mary Brooks, 87, who was followed home from that same Walmart in January 2018 and smothered in her home. Surveillance video showed a car resembling Chemirmir's leaving the area just after her, and grocery bags from the store were found in her condo. Prosecutors also used cellphone records placing him near the women, testimony that he had tried to sell their belongings, and, for the first time in these cases, DNA evidence, which linked him to the death of Martha Williams. On October 7, 2022, a jury deliberated for under 30 minutes and found him guilty. It was a second sentence of life without parole. Mary Bartel had died in 2020, but her recorded interview with police was played in court.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot described the scheme as "a conscious, dedicated effort to stalk, surveil, kill, steal, strip and sell," and said the two sentences meant Chemirmir would die in prison. His office said it would dismiss its remaining 11 capital murder cases. In 2023 Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis said he did not plan to try the nine indictments in his county.
On September 19, 2023, Chemirmir, 50, was found dead in his cell at the H.H. Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his cellmate, who was serving a murder sentence, was the assailant. The Office of the Inspector General later identified him as Wyatt Busby, 39, serving 50 years for a 2016 fatal stabbing in the Houston area, and reported that Chemirmir had been "stabbed/beaten to death." Creuzot said Chemirmir had apparently been killed after making sexual comments about Busby's children. The killing came about two weeks after a statewide lockdown of Texas prisons over a rise in killings inside them.
Some families said they felt relief. "My mother died in fear," said Shannon Dion, whose mother was Doris Gleason. There was, she said, "some relief" in feeling he "didn't get off easily."
Two murders were proved in court, those of Lu Thi Harris and Mary Brooks. Twenty other capital murder charges were brought and never tried, because prosecutors dismissed them after the two life sentences or because Chemirmir died first. More deaths were attributed to him in lawsuits and medical examiner filings without any charge. He never admitted any of them.