On the night of December 31, 1975, Kathleen Diane Cook, twenty-four, went with her husband to a nightclub on Route 40 West in Baltimore County to see in the New Year with family. She was the daughter-in-law of a lieutenant colonel in the Maryland State Police. A man told the doorman that her car was blocking his, and when she came out he forced her into his own car and drove away. By one account he had mistaken her for a social worker involved in a court case of his. At a vacant parking lot at a mall in Catonsville he raped her. She told him who her family was and mocked him. He shot her four times in the chest with a .38 revolver, and when she tried to sound his car horn he caught her. Some accounts say he then stabbed her. She died behind the shopping center.
Eight months later, on August 24, 1976, Peggy Ellen Pumpian, twenty-three, the daughter of a retired clothier from Pikesville, stopped a man on Interstate 95 to ask the way to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. He followed her, got her to pull over by saying he knew a better route, and she let him into her car. He spent some time drawing her a map with a pencil, then produced a revolver and demanded her money. He raped her at gunpoint. When she hit him in the face trying to get away, he shot her five times in the chest. He wiped his fingerprints off the car and drove to New York to set up an alibi. Her body was found eight hours later.
The bullets tied the two killings together: rifling marks showed the same revolver in both, and investigators knew they were looking for one man long before they could prove who he was. Charles William Davis Jr. was questioned during the investigation, and no case could be made.
He was the son of a police lieutenant. He had attacked at least one woman before the killings: in late 1974, the court and press accounts say, he stopped to help a twenty-three-year-old after a traffic accident, dragged her into the woods, raped her and strangled her until she lost consciousness, and left her for dead. She survived and helped police build a composite sketch. In John Douglas's account in the book Mindhunter, Davis also worked as a volunteer ambulance attendant, and was on duty at St. Agnes Hospital when Kathleen Cook's body was brought in; Douglas describes a killer who left bodies in his own territory and then answered the call. Nothing in the appellate record mentions that pattern.
The case against him came together in the summer of 1977. In July two Maryland state troopers passed him driving a Volkswagen in Baltimore, recognized him as a man questioned about both murders, and learned that the license plates belonged to another vehicle. On September 1, 1977, he was arrested in Reno, Nevada, on unrelated charges. Two days later, while two troopers were driving him and an escaped prisoner back to Maryland, he told Trooper Hartman, waiting in the car while Trooper Horan took the escapee into a prison, that he wanted to talk about the Pumpian homicide, and said it again when Horan returned. He was read his rights, confessed, and agreed to say it on tape. At the Waterloo Barracks of the Maryland State Police, from 6:43 p.m. until about 10:30 that night, he recorded statements admitting both murders. The same week a twenty-one-year-old woman who had run out of gas on Interstate 95 reported that a man who stopped as if to help had raped her; he was also charged with that assault and one from the previous February.
The trials were moved west to Allegany County. On April 12, 1978, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Kathleen Cook and a handgun offense and sentenced to life plus fifteen years. A jury convicted him of Peggy Pumpian's murder in April 1979, and he received a second life term, to run consecutively. His lawyer argued in that trial that the existing life sentence made another one pointless; the motion was denied. On appeal he argued that his confessions were the fruit of an unlawful stop, and in 1979 the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland rejected the argument.
In 1980 he was tried in Anne Arundel County for the murder of Lydia Victoria Norman, sixteen, strangled in a car at a remote spot near the Baltimore-Washington airport in September 1975. His statement described a night of drinking before he strangled her when she refused him. He was convicted and given a third life term.
There was one more. Roseann Sturtz, twenty, known as Ann, was last seen outside the Tic Toc Club on Eutaw Street in downtown Baltimore and reported missing on August 24, 1975. Her body was found on December 15 in woods off Route 108 in Columbia, in Howard County, near what is now the Oakland Ridge Industrial Park, and her coworkers identified her from a sketch printed in the newspaper. In 1981 Howard County detectives interviewed Davis about her. On October 14, 1981, the county's state's attorney, William R. Hymes, gave him transactional immunity in writing: he would not be prosecuted if he told them everything. On tape Davis acknowledged knowing about the case, but he could not pick her out from a photograph, and the file stayed open for more than four decades.
Cpl. Wade Zufall took over the Sturtz case in 2022. In 2024 he found the 1981 recording and the immunity letter, went to see Davis, and showed him a different photograph, taken in July 1975, a month before she disappeared. Davis recognized her; he told Zufall he remembered the scar on her face. He said he met her at a bar, they left together, argued and fought, and he strangled her. Howard County police announced the case closed on March 11, 2025, their second-oldest cold case. State's Attorney Rich Gibson said the 1981 immunity still stood and Davis could not be charged. "We just wanted Roseann to rest in peace, and now she can," her family said in a statement. Her four sisters still lived in the area.
Davis was then in his seventies and, according to the 2025 reporting, serving three life terms plus forty-five years at the Jessup Correctional Institution, where he had been held since 1978.