Cory Deonn Morris was born on May 10, 1978 in Oklahoma City and moved to Phoenix as a young man. He lived in a camper in the back yard of his aunt and uncle's house and worked at a bar about three nights a week. His only previous conviction was for theft, in 2002, on which his probation was revoked.
Between September 2002 and April 2003 he brought five women to the camper, offering money for sex. All of them were working as prostitutes or using crack cocaine. He strangled them during sex, in the first case with a tie wound round her throat, kept the bodies for some days and interfered with them, and then put them out in the alleys and vacant ground nearby. The Arizona press called him the Crackhead Killer.
The five were Barbara Codman, forty-six, who had recently come out of prison and was on medication for heroin addiction; Shanteria Davis, who had agreed to sex for five dollars; Jade Velasquez; Sharon Noah; and Julie Castillo.
What ended it was the smell. In April 2003 his employer noticed for the first time that he had a problem with body odour. His aunt and uncle had noticed it too, and that it had grown steadily worse over the six months he had been living behind their house. He was arrested on April 12, 2003.
He gave accounts of each death on videotape, and the prosecution played them at trial. He first said the women had all died of drug overdoses, then changed each account to say he had strangled them accidentally during sex.
A grand jury indicted him on five counts of first-degree murder. He put forward no defence at all; his counsel moved for acquittal on all five counts and the judge refused it. The jury convicted him on all five.
At the aggravation stage the jury found unanimously that all five murders were committed in a manner both especially cruel and especially heinous or depraved. On the first, a medical witness testified that a strangled person remains conscious for some time and is in pain before losing consciousness. On the second, the prosecution argued that he had kept the bodies after they began to decompose because he liked the smell of it, and that he had had intercourse with all of the dead women except Davis. The physical case for that rested on patterns of skin slippage on the bodies and on semen recovered from some of them, which he had denied by insisting he always used a condom.
On July 19, 2005 the jury determined that he should be sentenced to death. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed on June 18, 2007. He is held at the state prison at Florence.
Two points on the record. The reference works give his victim count as five or more, and this entry previously read that as convictions plus further women considered and not charged; no source consulted here identifies any further woman, so the count is given as the five he was convicted of. And the start of the series is dated to September 2002 in most accounts and to July 2002 in one.
On the death penalty in Arizona: the state carried out no execution between 2014, when one was badly mishandled, and 2022, when executions resumed.