Gary Addison Taylor spent more than a decade in Michigan psychiatric hospitals because he could not stop attacking women, and he said so himself. "I just had an urge to shoot at women," he told an Oakland County prosecutor in 1957. He was let out anyway, on condition that he report for treatment and medication. He stopped reporting in 1973. There was no National Crime Information Center listing for him, and by the time anyone went looking he had killed at least four women in three states.
He was born in Michigan in 1936, in March by one account, and grew up in Howell with his parents and an older brother; his parents kept a menswear store there. He lived in Howell at least into his junior high school years, and then the family moved to Florida. There he began attacking women with a hammer, usually waiting near bus stops. One of those attacks, in St. Petersburg, was on a woman who had just got off a bus; he was charged and a jury acquitted him. Other accounts say the hammer attacks earned him a term in juvenile detention.
Back in Michigan, living in Southfield Township, he began driving the Detroit suburbs at night with a gun. Over three months in late 1956 and early 1957 he shot sixteen women and girls. None of them died. The newspapers called him the phantom sniper, and then the Royal Oak Sniper after the suburb. He was arrested in February 1957 after what one local paper described as a wild shooting spree, and he confessed to Assistant Prosecutor William Lang. He was diagnosed a criminal sexual psychopath and committed to the Ionia State Hospital rather than convicted.
What followed is the case. He spent about three years at Ionia and was moved to the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit, and over the 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. The risk was understood inside the institutions, and in 1973 he was released regardless, on an outpatient arrangement requiring him to collect medication.
He quickly stopped collecting it, and nobody circulated the fact.
He had rented a house on Loch Erin, near Onsted in Lenawee County. Lee Fletcher, twenty-five, and Deborah Heneman, twenty-three, both from Ohio, died there. He wrapped them in plastic and buried them in shallow graves just outside a bedroom window, and then he left Michigan.
In the Seattle area on November 27, 1974, he abducted and killed Vonnie Stuth, a young married woman. Her body was later found buried near the house he had been living in at Enumclaw. Detectives working her disappearance tracked him to Enumclaw and questioned him. He sat through the interview but refused a polygraph. With no NCIC listing to tell them he was an absconded mental patient, they had nothing to hold him on and let him go. He went to Houston.
He was arrested there on May 20, 1975, on a charge of sexually assaulting a woman. When the news reached his estranged wife she went to the police with something he had once told her, that he had killed and buried four people. Under questioning he confessed to four murders. On May 22 Houston called the Lenawee County Sheriff's Department, and trusties from the county jail were driven out to the Loch Erin house to dig. A deputy, Richard Germond, said later that it took less than an hour to reach the first body, and that without the tip there was no telling how long the remains would have lain there. Michigan State Police technicians lifted both women out of the ground.
Accounts disagree on this point. One version has officers tracing him to Onsted in November 1974, finding him gone and finding the graves, before he killed in Washington. The contemporary Lenawee County account has the graves found only on May 22, 1975, after the call from Houston.
He also gave written confessions to the deaths of Vonnie Stuth and of Susan Jackson, twenty-one, of Houston. Investigators in Washington went on to clear him of six other killings there that were later attributed to Ted Bundy. Police in Texas, Michigan and California kept him in view for as many as twenty unsolved homicides, including, in Ann Arbor, the disappearance of Sandra June Horwath, thirty-three, on October 1, 1973, for which the Ann Arbor News reported a search in Lenawee County in May 1975. None of those deaths was charged, and the figure of twenty was a working police estimate rather than anything a court found.
He was tried in Washington for the murder of Vonnie Stuth, sentenced to life imprisonment in April 1976, and booked into the Washington State Penitentiary on May 4, 1976. Some accounts say he was later returned to Michigan and pleaded guilty to the murders of Fletcher and Heneman, receiving further life terms; others record only the Washington conviction.
Three institutions had a chance to stop him and none of them took it. A hospital system granted unsupervised leave to a man it had diagnosed as a criminal sexual psychopath, repeatedly, while he was still attacking women. When he vanished from outpatient supervision nobody entered him in the national system. And detectives in Washington had him in a room, questioned him about a missing woman, and let him go because they did not know who he was.
The disclosure that a man committed as criminally insane had been let out again and again, and had killed after discharge, produced an inquiry in Michigan and a tightening of the rules on leave and release from its forensic hospitals.
He would be ninety now. No confirmed report of his death or of any release has been published.