On April 1, 1990, firefighters were called to what looked like an arson in downtown Bridgeport. A sports car was burning on a city street, and when the fire was out they found the charred body of a woman in the passenger seat. Sharon Cunningham had been strangled with a strand of cloth, and male DNA on her body suggested she had also been raped. It was the first of four killings in the city's East End that would go unsolved for fifteen years, and the man responsible was a security guard working in the next town, Fairfield.
On March 28, 1992 police were called to a house on Webster Street and found Minnie Sutton partly clothed on her living room floor, stabbed in the forehead, neck, chest and stomach, with marks of strangling on her neck. Her three-year-old son was in the house and had not been touched. She too had been raped, and a cigarette end near her body carried male DNA.
Elizabeth Gandy, known as Maxine, went missing at Easter 1993. She was found topless in a pool hall in an abandoned building, her trousers unfastened. A piece of wood beside her was ruled the weapon. There was blood on the walls, and male DNA under her fingernails: she had fought.
On June 28, 1993 Sheila Etheridge's father and a friend went into her apartment after days without hearing from her and found her in the bedroom. She was twenty-nine. She had probably been sexually assaulted, and a beer can near her carried male DNA.
The ages of the first three are not consistently reported. One set of accounts gives Cunningham as thirty-nine, Sutton thirty-seven and Gandy thirty-four; another gives them as thirty, twenty-nine and thirty-three.
The local press called the man who killed them the East End Strangler. Police linked the four to one killer and looked at as many as fifteen other killings going back into the 1980s. In the late 1990s a cold case unit sent the physical evidence to the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory without result, and in 2000 the DNA from Gandy's body went to the FBI for comparison against convicted felons nationwide.
Emanuel Lovell Webb was born on April 9, 1966. During the East End killings he lived with his sister, whose apartment was inside the ten-block area where all four women died. On April 20, 1993, the day after Gandy is thought to have been killed, he checked into a hospital with serious cuts to his hand. He moved to Georgia in August 1993, and the Bridgeport killings stopped.
On July 11, 1994 Evelyn Charity, thirty-six or thirty-seven by different accounts, was found dead in her home in Vidalia, Georgia. She had been strangled and stabbed, the house had been ransacked and her Chevrolet Camaro was gone. Webb, twenty-eight and working construction, was arrested with the car. He admitted killing her but said he had strangled her by accident during consensual sex and had stabbed her and turned the house over afterward to make it look like a robbery. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, robbery and theft of a motor vehicle, not murder, and received twenty years.
He was paroled in late 2001, after about seven. What returned him to the Bridgeport cases was administrative rather than investigative. In November 2005 he was picked up for drug possession and for failing to report a move back to Connecticut, both breaches of his parole. He served a short term in Charlton County, Georgia, and gave a DNA sample as a matter of routine. In early 2006 it matched the profile from Gandy's body.
He was extradited in February 2007 and charged with Gandy's murder. At his first appearance, on February 15, bail was set at four million dollars, and a request to cut it to one million was refused. The same month his DNA was matched to the evidence from the other three scenes. The state brought the charges under two docket numbers, one for Gandy and one covering Cunningham, Sutton and Etheridge, and in June 2007 moved to consolidate all four for a single trial. On May 6, 2008 the trial court granted that motion in part and ruled that evidence of uncharged misconduct would be admissible. Those two rulings decided the case.
Webb did not go to trial and he did not admit the killings. Under a plea agreement he entered written pleas of nolo contendere to three of the four murders, a plea that accepts the consequences of conviction without conceding guilt, and he conditioned them on his right to appeal the May 6 rulings. The court accepted the pleas on May 22, 2008 and found him guilty on each of the three counts. The state entered a nolle prosequi on the fourth, the murder of Sheila Etheridge, at sentencing, and police treated her case as closed on the DNA.
On June 23, 2008, Judge Robert Devlin imposed sixty years on each count, to run concurrently. The appeal that followed was the point of the whole arrangement, and in 2011 the Connecticut Appellate Court rejected both of his claims, holding that the partial consolidation had not unfairly prejudiced him and that the uncharged misconduct evidence had been properly admitted. The opinion was written by Judge Lubbie Harper Jr. The decision is dated Monday, May 16, 2011 in contemporary reporting and May 24 elsewhere.
He was first sent back to Georgia, where he served out the parole violation until 2014. As of 2026 he was held at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut, with a release date of November 18, 2058, when he would be ninety-two.
Four deaths are covered by convictions and a fifth charge was dropped, and not one of the four rests on an admission of murder. Three are nolo pleas entered to preserve an appeal that failed. The fourth was reduced to manslaughter on his own account of an accident.