Wardrip was born in 1959 and lived in Wichita Falls, Texas. Between 1984 and 1986 he killed five women: Terry Lee Sims, twenty; Toni Jean Gibbs, twenty-four; Debra Taylor, twenty-five; Ellen Blau, twenty-one; and Tina Kimbrew, twenty-one. They were suffocated, stabbed or strangled.
He was convicted in 1986 of the murder of Tina Kimbrew, having confessed to it, and sentenced to thirty-five years. He was released on parole on December 11, 1997, having served eleven, and was living in Olney, Texas, working at a factory, remarried, and active in his church.
The other four murders were unsolved. In 1998 a district attorney's investigator, John Little, reopened them and worked out that Wardrip had lived near each scene. He obtained a DNA sample by following him and retrieving a coffee cup he discarded. A method that was litigated afterwards and upheld. It matched.
He confessed to all four and was sentenced to death on November 9, 1999. In 2010 a federal court overturned the death sentence on the ground of ineffective assistance of counsel, and he was resentenced to life imprisonment. He also received life sentences in the other cases.
The parole is the substance of the case in Texas: he served eleven years of thirty-five for a murder he had confessed to, and was at liberty for two years before the DNA work connected him to four more.