Charles William Davis Jr was about twenty-nine when he was charged in 1977. His father was a police lieutenant.
On the night of December 31, 1975 Kathleen Diane Cook, twenty-four, went with her husband to a night club in a shopping centre in Baltimore County to meet family for a New Year's Eve party. She was lured out to the car park behind it and shot four times in the chest with a .38 revolver. She was the daughter-in-law of a lieutenant colonel of the Maryland State Police.
On August 24, 1976 Peggy Ellen Pumpian, twenty-three, of Pikesville, stopped him on Interstate 95 to ask the way to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. He talked to her, then followed her car and got her to pull over by saying he could show her a better route. She let him into the car; he spent some time drawing a route with a pencil, then produced a revolver and demanded her money. He raped her at gunpoint. She hit him in the face trying to get away and he shot her five times in the chest. He wiped his fingerprints from the car and drove to New York to give himself an alibi. Her body was found eight hours later.
The bullets are what connected the two. Rifling marks showed the same revolver had been used in both killings, and investigators knew they were looking for one man well before they could name him. Davis had been questioned months earlier and no case could be made.
On September 3, 1977 he raped a woman of twenty-one who had run out of petrol on the same interstate, having again approached her as though to help. He left her alive.
What put troopers back onto him was a traffic stop. In July 1977 two Maryland state troopers passed him driving a Volkswagen in Baltimore, recognised him as a man questioned over both murders, and knew the plates had been issued to another vehicle. He was arrested at Reno, Nevada on September 1, 1977 on unrelated charges, and while being taken from the jail he told one of the troopers that he wanted to talk about the Pumpian killing. On September 4 and 5 he gave statements, recorded on tape in his own voice, admitting both murders.
He was convicted of the first-degree murder of Kathleen Cook at Allegany County on April 12, 1978, with a handgun offence, and sentenced to life and a further fifteen years. A consecutive life sentence followed for Pumpian. On appeal he argued that the confessions were inadmissible as the fruit of an unlawful stop; the Court of Special Appeals rejected that in 1979.
He was tried separately for the murder of Lydia Victoria Norman, sixteen, who had been strangled in a car at a remote spot near the Baltimore-Washington airport. His statement in that case described a night of drinking before he strangled her when she refused him.
Three corrections to this entry as it stood. It gave the method as strangulation; both women he was convicted of murdering were shot, and the strangling belongs to the separate Norman case. It gave the count as a range of two to five; two produced convictions, a third was tried on its own, and at least two women survived attacks. And its central claim was that he dumped bodies within his own ambulance service area, telephoned in the reports himself and then attended the scenes, which it described as the whole of what distinguished the case. Nothing in the court record or the contemporary reporting supports that. He did work for an ambulance service, in Reno, after leaving Maryland. The claim has been removed.