Gary Addison Taylor

Victims

4 named victims and 3 CONVICTIONS: one at trial in Washington for the murder of Vonnie Stuth, and two by guilty plea in Michigan. Up to twenty deaths across four states were attributed to him at the height of the investigation, NONE of them charged, and the twenty is a police working figure rather than any court finding. He escaped custody in 1972 not by breaking out but by NOT RETURNING FROM AN UNSUPERVISED HOSPITAL PASS, having been committed as a criminal sexual psychopath in 1957

Years active

1972 - 1975

Location

Michigan/Texas/Washington, USA

Method

Hitting with a hammer / Shooting

Status

Committed to Michigan mental institutions in 1957 after shooting at women with a rifle, having been diagnosed A CRIMINAL SEXUAL PSYCHOPATH, and held on and off for fifteen years. IN 1972 HE WAS GIVEN AN UNSUPERVISED PASS FROM THE IONIA STATE HOSPITAL AND SIMPLY DID NOT RETURN. The killings followed. Arrested in Houston on May 20, 1975 after the remains of Vonnie Stuth, twenty, were found buried at a house he had rented near Seattle. He was tried in WASHINGTON for that murder and SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN APRIL 1976. He was later returned to MICHIGAN, where he pleaded guilty to two further murders and received additional life terms. Twenty deaths across four states were at one time attributed to him; those attributions were never charged and several were subsequently reassigned or discounted. He remains in custody.

Taylor was born in Michigan in 1936 and began attacking women in his teens. In the late 1950s he shot at women from cover in the Detroit suburbs and became known locally as the Royal Oak phantom sniper. He was arrested in 1957.

He was found to be criminally insane and committed to the Ionia state hospital in Michigan rather than convicted. What happened next is the case. Over the following years he was granted repeated unsupervised leave. He absconded, was returned, was granted leave again, was arrested for assaults while at liberty, and was returned again. Hospital records and later reporting show that the risk was understood inside the institution and that he was released regardless. In 1972 he was discharged. The Michigan press called him the Royal Oak Sniper, after the suburb where he shot at women from cover.

The four named in the record are Lee Fletcher, twenty-five; Deborah Heneman, twenty-three; Susan Jackson, twenty-one; and Vonnie Stuth.

Between 1972 and 1975 he killed at least four women in Michigan, Texas and Washington, striking them with a hammer or shooting them, and burying bodies at properties he rented. He was arrested on May 20, 1975 in Houston.

He was convicted in Washington in April 1976 and sentenced to life imprisonment on one count. The range of four to twenty in this roster covers attacks and disappearances across three states which were attributed to him and not charged.

The consequence outlasted him. The disclosure that a man committed as criminally insane had been let out on furlough repeatedly, and had killed after discharge, produced an inquiry in Michigan and a tightening of the rules on leave and release from its forensic hospitals.

This entry belongs with the other release cases in this archive, and it is the starkest of them: not a parole board weighing an old conviction, but a psychiatric institution that let the same man walk out over and over while he was still doing it.