Dressed in a green Tarrant County Jail jumpsuit, Curtis Don Brown twice took the witness stand in Fort Worth on Wednesday, January 7, 2009, and answered "yes sir" when the prosecutor, Alan Levy, asked whether he had shot Terece Gregory in the face and strangled Sharyn Kills Back. Asked where he had met Gregory, he paused for several seconds. "I don't remember the name, but the area was Woodhaven," he said. Nobody asked how he had come upon Kills Back in Arlington, and he did not say. It was the only account he gave of two killings that had gone unsolved for nearly twenty-four years, and it came less than a week before jury selection was due to begin in a capital trial in which the state meant to seek his execution.
Sharyn Kills Back was eighteen and a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Born on July 1, 1966, at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to Mowis E. Kills Back and Audrey I. Bad Hair, she grew up in Porcupine, went to Clearfield, Utah, at sixteen for Job Corps training, and had been living in Arlington since January 1985. On March 15 she set out to walk to a friend's house and never arrived. Eight days later a plumber found her body in a storm drain in south Arlington, a rope tied around her neck.
Terece Gregory, twenty-nine, was a waitress. On May 29, 1985, she was seen driving away from a bar in downtown Fort Worth. The next day her nude body was found floating in the Trinity River with a gunshot wound to the face; she had been raped. Her death was one of a string of killings of women in Tarrant County in the mid-1980s that set off fears of a serial killer, and like the Kills Back case it went cold.
Brown was born on August 2, 1958. At thirteen he escaped a house fire that killed his two younger siblings and injured his mother, and in the early 1980s he moved to Texas to be near her. On May 28, 1986, officers in east Fort Worth on an unrelated matter saw a man running and stopped him, out of breath after nearly a mile, carrying a woman's purse. It belonged to Jewel Woods, a fifty-one-year-old nurse. He had slipped into her apartment, ambushed her, dragged her to a weed-filled lot, raped her and beaten her to death with a rock.
There was no trial for her murder. Prosecutors agreed to let him plead guilty to murder and burglary of a habitation in exchange for two life sentences running concurrently, with parole eligibility after seven years, a deal her son, Gregg Woods, said left him disappointed. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram dated the deal to 1986 and reported in 2009 that Brown had served nineteen years by early 2005; other accounts give the conviction as 1987 or 1989, and the record available does not settle the year.
The 1985 cases reopened because a new prison rule required Brown to give a DNA sample. In February 2005 police learned that a database had matched his profile to semen recovered from Terece Gregory's body, and he was indicted for capital murder. The match sent Fort Worth police back through twenty-five unsolved homicides committed while he lived in Tarrant County, more than a dozen of which they judged worth a closer look, and a wire report that June said he might have killed eighteen women. Arlington detectives searched their own files, and in September 2005 they received confirmation that his DNA matched semen on Sharyn Kills Back's body and clothing. A second capital charge followed.
Nearly four years later the state offered a plea, which Brown at first rejected: guilty pleas to both capital murders for two more life terms and no death penalty. The Star-Telegram reported that the terms would run consecutively; some later summaries say concurrently. Christy Jack, who prosecuted the case with Levy, gave the reasoning. Brown was eligible for parole on the Woods sentence at that moment, she said, and with the two capital life sentences "he'll die in prison, and it's no longer left up to the Board of Pardons and Parole." Levy framed it as a choice between a sure thing and rolling the dice. Tim Moore, who defended Brown with Bill Ray, called the plea a very wise decision, since he thought a jury that convicted would likely have sentenced his client to death.
The families were divided. Jim Gregory, Terece's brother, who lived in Arizona and had pressed for the death penalty, did not attend. He wrote to the Star-Telegram that another life sentence for a man already serving one for Jewel Woods amounted to no punishment at all and called the deal "a crime in itself." Suzanna Kills Back, Sharyn's older sister, said her family was pleased and grateful to be spared a trial; she had grown frightened as it approached, and she had not cared whether the state sought death "as long as he paid for what he'd done." Gregg Woods called the outcome a big improvement over the deal in his mother's case, because this time Brown would never be released.
No charge has been brought in any of the other deaths, and prosecutors said Brown had not been scientifically linked to them. Sgt. J.D. Thornton of the Fort Worth homicide unit said he had not been eliminated as a suspect, and that the proximity, timing and details of the Gregory and Kills Back killings pointed to a possible connection with other cases. Moore answered that investigators had had three and a half years, and if they had not linked him yet he doubted they would. The number eighteen is what investigators suspected. The three killings established in court, each by his own plea, are those of Sharyn Kills Back, Terece Gregory and Jewel Woods.