Clark Perry Baldwin was born in Charles City, Iowa on August 22, 1961 and drove long-haul freight. A woman who had lived with him told a reporter afterwards that she could not reconcile the gentle giant she had known with what he was accused of.
In March 1991 the body of Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall, thirty-two, from Topping, Virginia, was found in Maury County, Tennessee. She was twenty-four weeks pregnant; the child she was carrying was named Angel. Skid marks on the road in front of where she lay showed that an unloaded tractor-trailer had locked its tyres up at that spot, and those marks became part of the case against him.
On March 1, 1992 a woman driving her own rig stopped at the Bitter Creek turnout on Interstate 80, about forty miles east of Rock Springs, Wyoming, and found a dead young woman with marks of strangulation on her. She was unidentified for thirty years and the investigators called her Bitter Creek Betty. In May 2022 she was named as Irene Vasquez, who had been reported missing in 1990.
The next month, in April 1992, Wyoming transport crews checking a right-of-way fence off Interstate 90 about fifteen miles north of Sheridan found another young woman in the ditch, also strangled, also unidentified, and also pregnant. She was called I-90 Jane Doe, and was later identified as Cindi Arleen Estrada through a DNA match with her mother. The two Wyoming bodies were found four hundred miles apart.
Two of the three were pregnant when they were killed.
Male DNA recovered from the two Wyoming scenes had already been shown to come from one man. In 2019 a Tennessee crime laboratory built a profile from evidence in the McCall case, ran it through the national database, and matched it to that Wyoming profile. Three murders in two states were now one case, with no name attached to it.
The name came from a bin. In early 2020, having worked out where he was living, investigators watched him for several days and took away the rubbish bags he put out. They recovered saliva from scraps of food in them, extracted DNA, and matched it. He was arrested in Waterloo, Iowa on May 6, 2020. A detective who had worked the McCall case said that putting the handcuffs on him ended a thirty-four year search.
Prosecutors in the two states met and agreed he would be tried in Tennessee first and Wyoming second. The pandemic then delayed the Tennessee trial repeatedly, and it did not conclude until May 5, 2025, when he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. Pamela McCall's mother had died before the verdict came.
He never reached Wyoming. His lawyers had filed for a new trial and no hearing had been held; no extradition hearing had been scheduled either. He died in hospital in Tennessee on July 18, 2025. The Sweetwater County attorney, whose case for Irene Vasquez would now never be heard, said that they knew what had happened to her and knew who had done it.
Two further matters were reported and never charged. Court documents alleged that he raped and choked a woman in Texas in 1991. Investigators also re-examined other killings of women near highways in the same period for a possible connection, among them the 1992 death of Tammy Jo Zywicki, a Grinnell College student whose car had broken down on Interstate 80. Neither produced a charge, and neither is counted here.
The count is one conviction, three charges, and two counts that his death left untried. Wikipedia gives at least three.