Harold David Haulman III, who went by Dave, has been convicted of causing four deaths on two continents over a span of 21 years. In 1999, at the age of 20, he pleaded guilty before a court in Zweibrücken, in southwest Germany, to the manslaughter of Joseph Lawrence Whitehurst, the 21-year-old son of an American Air Force colonel stationed at Ramstein Air Base. In September 2021 he pleaded guilty in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, to two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Tianna Phillips, 25, and Erica Shultz, 26, and was sentenced to two terms of life without parole. In February 2023 he pleaded guilty in Calhoun County, Michigan, to the second-degree murder of Ashley Marie Parlier, a 21-year-old from Battle Creek whose case had stood unsolved since June 2005. He received 37.5 to 60 years for that crime.
The order in which the cases came to light ran almost exactly backward. Investigators in Pennsylvania were working on the most recent death, that of Erica Shultz, when they reached Haulman at the end of 2020. Questioning about her led them to Tianna Phillips, and questioning about both led to a name from Michigan that no detective there had connected to him. The German conviction, by then more than 20 years old, surfaced along the way. Until 2021, Michigan detectives said, Haulman had not been on law enforcement's radar.
He was 42 when he was first charged in Pennsylvania in December 2020 and 44 when he entered his plea in Michigan in February 2023. Detectives in Michigan said his family worked for the United States government and that he lived in a number of places over the years. At the end of the 1990s he was living in Germany, near Ramstein Air Base, and he was still under 21 in the spring of 1999.
Joseph Lawrence Whitehurst was 21 and was known as Jay. He was living abroad at the base, where his father, a U.S. Air Force colonel, commanded the base's medical group. He died near Ramstein at the end of May 1999.
On June 5, 1999, German police arrested Haulman over an unrelated incident. In custody he confessed to killing Jay Whitehurst. Because he was under 21 at the time of the offense, his case went to the juvenile court system, and the court at Zweibrücken heard it. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter at the age of 20.
The court sentenced him to six years at a German reform school, a term within the juvenile range, which could reach ten years. As an adult he could have faced five to 15 years. The court showed leniency because of a "diminished mental state" and what appeared to be a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Michigan investigators, two decades later, put it plainly: Haulman had served time in connection with a death in Ramstein in 1999.
By the fall of 2002 Haulman was in Michigan. Calhoun County detectives later established that he lived in Battle Creek from the fall of 2002 until the middle of 2009, and that he worked during those years as a truck driver.
Ashley Marie Parlier was 21 and lived in Battle Creek with her family. Her sister described her as trusting, and inclined to believe people who were kind to her.
Michigan investigators opened a case in 2005, but no arrest followed and the case went cold. June 12, 2005, became the date fixed to it, and it was the date investigators used when they charged Haulman 16 years later.
Her parents did not live to see that charge. Both died in 2020. Her sister, who carried on the family's effort to learn what had happened, later said of the man who admitted killing her: "He didn't just kill my sister. He destroyed my parents. He ruined their lives back in 2006." In May 2021, once a suspect had been named, she said she was "excited for the closure but upset it was not two or three or 10 or 15 years ago when my parents were alive." Of the turn the case had taken, she said: "This doesn't happen in your real life."
When Haulman finally described Ashley's death to detectives in 2021, he told them the two had argued in Emmet Township, in Calhoun County. That account became the basis of the Michigan murder charge. Detective Jonathan Pignataro of the Calhoun County Sheriff's Office, asked why it had happened, said: "It only makes sense to him, in his mind."
Haulman left Battle Creek in 2009. By 2018 he was in central Pennsylvania. He was married, and he formed relationships with women he met online. By the end of 2020 the state police described him as a transient with no permanent address.
Tianna Phillips was 25 and came from McClure, in Snyder County, Pennsylvania. Her case was first taken up in 2018 by police in Berwick, in neighboring Columbia County. Friends told investigators that she had been in a romantic relationship with a man named Dave, and police later identified that man as Haulman. Investigators dated her death to around June 13, 2018.
For more than two years no charge followed. When police first asked Haulman about her, he denied any part in her death. That changed only after he was in custody for a second death. Investigators later took a statement from his then-wife, who told police that he had confessed to her that he had killed Tianna, and her account, together with his own later admissions, became the core of the Phillips case. Tianna's death was placed in Butler Township, Luzerne County, the same township where Erica Shultz would die two and a half years later.
Erica Gene Shultz was 26 and lived in Bloomsburg, in Columbia County. She had met Haulman through an online dating service, as Tianna had, and she had been on dates with him. She died in Butler Township in early December 2020; Pennsylvania investigators dated her death to December 4.
The Pennsylvania State Police, the Bloomsburg and Berwick police departments, county detectives from Columbia and Luzerne counties, the Columbia County District Attorney's Office and the FBI all took part. On December 23, 2020, FBI agents interviewed Haulman in Battle Creek, Michigan. He did not appear for a second interview on Christmas Eve. He was taken into custody in Duncannon, in Perry County, Pennsylvania, on December 27, and he made admissions to detectives.
On December 28, 2020, the Columbia County District Attorney's Office charged him with criminal homicide, kidnapping and a further offense. He was 42. He was held in Luzerne County, where the death had occurred and where the case would be prosecuted.
The Shultz case opened the door on the Phillips case. Investigators spoke to people who had known Tianna, to Haulman's then-wife, and to Haulman himself. On May 14, 2021, the Pennsylvania State Police announced that he had been charged with criminal homicide, kidnapping and a further offense in her death. Troopers described the work behind the charge as "an exhaustive investigation" involving state and local police and district attorneys from several counties. He was charged as he walked into a hearing in the Shultz case, and he was held without bail.
Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Daniel Zola told reporters after the second arrest that a "serial killer" had been taken off the streets. Haulman told police that he did not intend to take either case to trial. He asked investigators whether the cases against him might be combined.
On January 4, 2021, while being interviewed by Pennsylvania investigators about the two Pennsylvania women, Haulman raised another case. He named Ashley Parlier and gave details of her death in Michigan. Pennsylvania authorities contacted the Calhoun County Sheriff's Office early that year. "David Haulman became a person of interest that was not previously disclosed," Detective Dave Homminga of the sheriff's office said. Ashley's sister said: "I want any of his victims to come to light."
The sheriff's office reopened the 2005 file. Detectives traveled to California, Maryland and Pennsylvania, interviewed witnesses in several states, and then interviewed Haulman himself in Pennsylvania. He admitted to them that he had killed Ashley. A review of his social media activity found that he had researched serial killers. In May 2021, before any Michigan charge, prosecutors in Luzerne County publicly identified him as a suspect in the Parlier case, and the Calhoun County sheriff called him a person of interest.
On July 26, 2021, the Calhoun County Prosecutor's Office issued a warrant charging him with first-degree premeditated murder. Sheriff Steve Hinkley announced the charge the following day. "I'm pleased to say that after 16 years, Ashley Parlier's family can know that justice is near," he said. "Let me be clear, this case is not over." Ashley's sister reacted with a single line: "We got our indictment!" She said she would attend his sentencing in Pennsylvania as well as any trial in Michigan.
Haulman never went to trial in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday, September 8, 2021, in the Luzerne County courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Tianna Phillips and Erica Shultz. The plea spared him a possible death sentence. First-degree murder in Pennsylvania carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and Judge Michael Vough imposed two such terms. He also ordered Haulman to repay police nearly $14,000.
More than two dozen people filled the courtroom, among them relatives of both women, and family members of each spoke. Zola, who had prosecuted the case, said in more than 20 years he had "never seen a more emotional courtroom." He said Haulman had "preyed on these women's vulnerability." Erica's mother said the women "just wanted friends," and that they had trusted the wrong person.
Judge Vough spoke directly to the defendant. "You are evil," he said. "You took the lives of these women for no reason whatsoever."
In Michigan, Ashley Parlier's sister welcomed the outcome in Pennsylvania and the work that had led to it. "My family is thrilled the detectives from Michigan and Pennsylvania built such a strong case," she said.
The Michigan case moved more slowly, because the man it charged was serving two life terms in another state. In December 2022 Haulman was extradited from Pennsylvania to Michigan and held in the Calhoun County Jail. On December 14, 2022, he was arraigned in Calhoun County District Court in Battle Creek on a charge of first-degree murder, and he was denied bond. Calhoun County Prosecuting Attorney David Gilbert led the case. Detectives said they could not rule out other victims. A preliminary examination was set for later that month.
There was no trial in Michigan either. On February 1, 2023, Haulman, then 44, pleaded guilty in Calhoun County District Court to second-degree murder in the death of Ashley Marie Parlier. Gilbert announced the plea, which was entered under an agreement with prosecutors and replaced the first-degree charge.
On Monday, April 10, 2023, in Calhoun County Circuit Court, Haulman was sentenced to 37.5 to 60 years for the murder of Ashley Parlier. The sisters of Tianna Phillips and Erica Shultz traveled to Michigan to sit with Ashley's family.
Ashley's sister read a victim impact statement. She said that Haulman "stole 18 years of her life," and that her parents had died in 2020 without the answers they had waited for. Then she turned to him. "Eighteen years ago, you stole my life, destroyed my family," she said.
After the sentencing he was returned to Pennsylvania to continue serving his life terms.
As of April 2023, Harold David Haulman III was serving two terms of life without parole in a Pennsylvania state prison, with a Michigan sentence of 37.5 to 60 years standing behind them. He pleaded guilty in each jurisdiction, and no appeal of any of the convictions is known. Under Pennsylvania law, only a court overturning the convictions or a commutation could shorten the life terms.
Haulman's four convictions came from three systems that treat homicide very differently, and the difference shows in the sentences.
Germany has allowed people up to the age of 21 at the time of an offense to be tried in its juvenile system since 1953. By the late 2010s about two thirds of young adults who broke the law were tried that way, including more than 90 percent of those accused of homicide or rape. Juvenile courts can impose sentences of up to ten years, though very few are anywhere near that length: fewer than 1 percent of young adults receive five to ten years. Haulman's six years at Zweibrücken fell within that small band; as an adult he could have faced five to 15 years.
Pennsylvania sits at the other end of the scale. Life without parole applies automatically to first- and second-degree murder in the state, and sometimes to third-degree murder. More than 99 percent of such sentences are imposed as mandatory terms, which leave a judge no discretion to impose anything less. A sentence of this kind can be reduced only if the conviction is overturned or the governor grants a commutation. First-degree murder also carries the possibility of a death sentence, which is why Haulman's guilty pleas were described as a means of avoiding it.
Michigan's second-degree murder statute is broad and leaves sentence length to the trial judge. Under section 750.317 of the Michigan Compiled Laws, every murder that is not first-degree murder is second-degree murder, punishable "by imprisonment in the state prison for life, or any term of years, in the discretion of the court trying the same." The minimum and maximum in Haulman's Michigan sentence, 37.5 and 60 years, reflect that discretion.
The German conviction was for manslaughter, not murder.
Haulman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the Parlier case, not to the first-degree premeditated murder in the original warrant. Detectives in Michigan said other victims were possible given his history, but no other charge against him is known.
Late 1990s: Haulman, whose family works for the U.S. government, lives in Germany.
May 29 or 30, 1999: Joseph Lawrence "Jay" Whitehurst, 21, dies near Ramstein, Germany.
June 5, 1999: German police arrest Haulman on an unrelated matter; he confesses to killing Whitehurst.
1999: Haulman, 20, pleads guilty to manslaughter at the Zweibrücken court and is sentenced to six years in a juvenile institution.
Fall 2002 to mid-2009: Haulman lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, and works as a truck driver.
June 2005: Ashley Marie Parlier, 21, of Battle Creek, dies; the case goes unsolved.
Around June 13, 2018: Tianna Phillips, 25, of McClure, Pennsylvania, dies in Butler Township, Luzerne County.
2020: Ashley Parlier's parents both die.
December 4, 2020: Erica Shultz, 26, of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, dies in Butler Township.
December 23, 2020: FBI agents interview Haulman in Battle Creek.
December 27, 2020: Haulman is taken into custody in Pennsylvania.
December 28, 2020: He is charged with criminal homicide, kidnapping and a further offense in the Shultz case.
January 4, 2021: During questioning in Pennsylvania, Haulman raises the Parlier case.
May 14, 2021: He is charged with criminal homicide, kidnapping and a further offense in the Phillips case.
July 26, 2021: Calhoun County, Michigan, issues a warrant for first-degree premeditated murder in the Parlier case.
September 8, 2021: Haulman pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in Wilkes-Barre and receives two terms of life without parole.
December 14, 2022: After extradition, he is arraigned on first-degree murder in Calhoun County District Court and denied bond.
February 1, 2023: He pleads guilty to second-degree murder in the Parlier case.
April 10, 2023: Calhoun County Circuit Court sentences him to 37.5 to 60 years; he is returned to Pennsylvania.