A serial murder investigation is supposed to end with detection. Eleven cases in this archive ended with a filing clerk.
In each of them the killings were unsolved, sometimes for decades, and the man responsible was found not because anyone was looking for him but because he was arrested for something else and the state took a sample of his blood or saliva as a matter of routine.
Timothy Krajcir was serving a sentence for rape in Illinois when a cold case unit ran old evidence against the offender database and matched him. Confronted in prison in August 2007, he confessed over several sessions to nine murders in four states, giving detail that was checked against the files. Nobody had been hunting him. He was already in a cell.
William Choyce was serving a prison sentence for rape when DNA connected him to three killings in Stockton and Oakland a decade after they happened. Ronald Macon was in jail for the rape of a sixty-five-year-old woman when the sample taken in that case matched three murder scenes in Chicago. Alexander Watson was serving a sentence for one murder in Maryland when testing connected him to three more.
James Canaday is the longest wait. He had been condemned for two killings in Seattle in 1965 and had his sentence commuted in 1972 when the capital statutes fell. The third case, a pregnant sixteen-year-old stabbed fifty-seven times in her own bed, stayed open for thirty-six years until DNA matched him in prison. He was already serving life for the others.
Three more were found by a database sweep rather than a database entry.
Houston ran its unsolved cases against the Texas state database in 2003 and matched a sample taken from Anthony Shore on a probation matter in 1998. Kansas City did the same in 2004 and matched Lorenzo Gilyard, from a sample given on an unrelated matter, more than a decade after his last killing. Ivan Hill's nine killings in California were reopened when scene evidence was run through the state offender database and came back with his name.
Samuel Little was arrested at a shelter in Louisville in 2012 on a drug charge and extradited to California, where DNA connected him to three unsolved Los Angeles murders from the late 1980s. He was eventually convicted of three, confirmed as responsible for around sixty, and confessed to ninety-three. A drug arrest at a homeless shelter is what began that.
Faryion Wardrip is the one that shows the timing problem. He killed five women in north Texas in 1984 and 1986, served eleven years for one of them, and was identified by DNA in 1999, after his release. The sample that convicted him was available while he was still inside.
Chester Turner's case did two things at once. His profile had gone into the California database after an unrelated conviction, and when it was compared against the South Los Angeles killings it matched him and cleared David Allen Jones, an intellectually disabled man who had served eleven years for three of them. Jones was released in 2004. Turner is on death row for thirteen murders.
Then there is Walter Ellis, who is here because his case is the exception that proves what the other eleven depend on.
Ellis strangled seven women in Milwaukee over twenty-one years and was in and out of custody the whole time, which by the logic of every case above should have caught him early. It did not, because his sample was missing from the Wisconsin database. Another inmate had given a sample in his place. He was finally identified in 2009, and the audit that followed found other missing samples in the same system.
What the twelve say together is uncomfortable. In eleven of them the investigation did not solve the case. A clerical process did, and it worked only because the man had been arrested for something unconnected and someone had correctly logged the swab. In the twelfth the same process existed, the man passed through it repeatedly, and one substituted sample kept him free for two decades.
That is a thin margin for the thing that closed all these cases. It also means the number of unsolved series in any jurisdiction is partly a measure of who has not yet been arrested for something else.