On April 12, 2003, Cory Morris's uncle went looking for him at the camper parked in the back yard of the family's house in Phoenix. He smelled what he called a "rotten odor," saw flies inside the camper window, and opened the door to find flies and maggots "boiling on the floor" and, under a blanket, the decomposed body of a woman. She was Julie Castillo. Four other women had been found dead in the streets and alley around the house over the previous seven months, and that same day detectives questioned Morris about all five.
Morris was born in Oklahoma City on May 10, 1978, and was living in the camper behind his aunt and uncle's house and working at a bar about three nights a week. That April his boss had noticed for the first time that he had a body odor problem. His aunt and uncle had noticed it too, and that it had grown steadily worse over the six months since he moved in. His one earlier conviction was for theft, in 2002.
In the interview he admitted knowing all five women and gave two versions of each death. In the first, each had died of a drug overdose while he was away from the camper. When the detective told him he did not believe it, he said instead that each woman had asked him to choke her during sex and had died by accident. He also insisted he had used a condom every time. The prosecution later played the videotapes of these statements to the jury.
The first was Barbara Codman, found naked and decomposed on September 11, 2002, in the alley between East McKinley and East Pierce Streets, just north of Morris's home, with drag marks leading into it. Morris said she had agreed to come back to the camper for twenty dollars, and in his second account that she had asked him to choke her with a necktie. He kept her overalls, underwear and purse, and when he was arrested he was carrying her driver's license, Social Security card and check card in his wallet. The medical examiner first put her death down to morphine and cocaine and changed his finding to probable ligature strangulation after reading Morris's statements.
On October 10, 2002, Shanteria Davis was found naked in the same alley. Morris said she had come back with him for five dollars; in his second version, she asked him to wrap her hair extensions around her neck. Hair extensions were found in the camper, and his DNA was under her fingernails. On February 27, 2003, Jade Velasquez, whom he called a friend, was found clothed on the west side of 9th Street, just outside the gate to the yard, with ligature marks on her neck and a bruise under her eye. He said he had dressed her before dragging her out because he knew her and did not want to leave her in the street unclothed. Her autopsy found strangulation.
On March 29, 2003, Sharon Noah, who had the mental age of a child of ten or eleven, was found naked fifteen or twenty feet from where Velasquez had lain, with ligature marks on her neck, broken artificial nails and a hand and foot already mummified. Morris said she had suggested he choke her with the nylon strap of his gym bag. The broken nails were in his camper. Castillo, the last, was found face down with a necktie around her neck after lying in the camper for about five days. His semen was recovered from Velasquez and Noah despite his claim about condoms.
A grand jury indicted him on five counts of first-degree murder. He presented no defense; his lawyer moved for acquittal on every count, the judge refused, and the jury convicted him on all five. At the aggravation stage the jury found that each murder was especially cruel and especially heinous or depraved. A medical witness testified that people who are strangled stay conscious for a time and feel pain before they black out, and three of the women showed signs of having fought him. The prosecutor argued that Morris had kept the bodies as they decomposed because he enjoyed the smell and had had sex with every corpse except Davis's, pointing to patterns of skin slippage and to the semen. Morris had refused IQ testing and psychological evaluation before trial, and his mitigation case dwelt on the responsibilities put on him young, his lifelong trouble with his appearance and hygiene, especially body odor, his wish to better himself and his good work record.
On July 19, 2005, the jury decided on death for each of the five murders. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed on June 18, 2007, in the first case in which it applied the narrower review adopted in 2002 for murders committed after August 1 of that year. It found that the prosecutor had committed misconduct in the aggravation phase by singling out jurors and asking which of them would volunteer to be strangled, but held that the error did not deny Morris a fair trial. The start of the series is dated to September 2002 in most accounts and to July 2002 in one.
Arizona carried out no executions between 2014, when one was badly mishandled, and 2022, when they resumed. Morris was reported still held on death row at the Arizona State Prison Complex at Florence in 2024, and no execution date has been reported.