John Eric Armstrong was 26 years old, a husband and father and a former sailor on the aircraft carrier Nimitz, when Detroit police arrested him early on April 12, 2000. Within days he was charged with five counts of premeditated first-degree murder in the deaths of women who worked as prostitutes in Detroit and Dearborn Heights, and with three counts of assault with intent to murder. He told police he had killed many more women in ports around the world during his years in the Navy. Investigators in several countries checked his account; none of those claims was confirmed.
He had been known to police since January 2, 2000, when he called the Dearborn Heights police to report the body of Wendy Jordan, 39. Officers questioned him repeatedly, and fibers found on her body matched fabric in his Jeep. DNA samples went to a state laboratory, and by March the laboratory had a definite match. The Wayne County prosecutor's office would not seek an arrest warrant until the written confirmation arrived. In the weeks of waiting, three more women were strangled. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in Jordan's death in March 2001, and on June 18, 2001, he was convicted of killing Kelly Jean Hood, Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson.
Armstrong was born on November 23, 1973, in New Bern, North Carolina. He preferred to be called Eric rather than John, which was his father's name. His family told the Associated Press in April 2000 that his father was abusive to the boy and to his mother, that the boy saw that abuse, and that the father later left the family.
A younger brother died as a baby. When Armstrong was about five, his mother said, he rode his bicycle straight across a busy street without looking at the traffic, and when she asked him why, he said he wanted to be with his baby brother. He had counseling after the death, but only for a short time.
In other ways, his family said, he was an ordinary boy. He was quiet, got decent grades, played Nintendo, liked fishing and baseball, played sports and won a small trophy in a school debate. As a youth he talked about becoming a police officer. In high school he had a girlfriend; they drifted apart after she went to college, and he took the breakup hard. He went to two proms. After high school he worked for some months at a grocery store before enlisting in the Navy. "The Eric we raised could not have done these things," his mother told the Associated Press, speaking through tears at her home in North Carolina.
His family also said some of what he told the police did not match their memories. The Detroit News reported that he had told police he was teased and pushed around as a child for being overweight; his stepsister said he had not been especially heavy. He reportedly told police that a rival had won away his girlfriend with expensive gifts; his parents said they did not know whether that was true. His stepfather told the Associated Press that the family was having a real problem reconciling everything they were hearing.
Armstrong joined the Navy in 1992, and from 1993 to 1999 he served aboard the USS Nimitz, which was then based at Bremerton, Washington. Newsweek reported that he spent seven years as an enlisted sailor on the carrier. Shipmates knew him as "Opie." He worked as a barber and became a petty officer who supervised the ship's barbershop. He was promoted four times and received two Good Conduct Medals, and the Navy said his record showed no psychological or disciplinary problems and no misconduct charges. He left the Navy in 1999 as a petty officer third class. The Seattle Times, citing news-service reports in the first days after his arrest, described him as a fueler on the ship; the later Associated Press and Newsweek accounts describe his work as a barber.
Like other crew members, he had completed the Navy's required safety classes, among them one that warned sailors against soliciting prostitutes. A petty officer who joined the ship after Armstrong had left told the Associated Press, "For God's sake, he was a barber."
He met his wife aboard the Nimitz, and they married in 1998. She was from the Detroit area, and after his discharge in 1999 they settled in Dearborn Heights. Their son was 14 months old in April 2000, and his wife was expecting their second child. After leaving the Navy he applied to join the Virginia State Police and went far enough in the process that the agency called a neighbor for a reference. In Michigan he enrolled at Schoolcraft College in Livonia and took temporary jobs as a department-store clerk, a security guard and a plane fueler at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
Neighbors in Dearborn Heights described him to Newsweek as a nice man who sometimes took a blind woman who lived across the street shopping. "He didn't seem like a killer," his next-door neighbor said. About a month before his arrest he visited his family in North Carolina, stopped at his brother's grave and played with his young son.
Wendy Jordan was 39. She had been arrested before for soliciting in Detroit, The Arab American News reported. On January 2, 2000, Armstrong called the Dearborn Heights police and reported finding her body. He said he had felt sick and had stopped to vomit when he saw her. She had been strangled.
He became the leading suspect in her death. Police questioned him several times, and fibers found on Jordan's body matched fabric in his Jeep. DNA samples were sent to the Michigan State Police laboratory. In March the laboratory reported a definite match, but Wayne County prosecutors would not seek a warrant for his arrest until they had the result in writing. "We wanted the final DNA findings before we went ahead," Richard Padzieski of the prosecutor's office told Newsweek. The written confirmation arrived on April 12, the day Armstrong was arrested. Padzieski acknowledged to Newsweek that acting sooner might have saved the three women found in the rail yard.
In April 2000 Newsweek reported that one woman had been found strangled in December, before Wendy Jordan's death, and that she was one of the five Detroit-area killings with which Armstrong was charged. The Associated Press reported that all five killings in the charges had taken place in the Detroit area within the past year.
Women working on the streets of Detroit began telling police about a man who had attacked them, according to Newsweek. The women described a heavyset man driving a dark blue Jeep, which police later identified as a black Jeep Wrangler. After consulting FBI agents, Detroit police increased patrols in the areas where the women worked, CBS Detroit reported in 2012.
On Monday, April 10, 2000, police found the bodies of three women who had been strangled, in Detroit. It was then, Newsweek reported, that Detroit police concluded they were dealing with a serial killer. Donald Johnson Jr., a Detroit officer assigned to the Violent Crimes Task Force on the case, later said that visiting the scene, and then hearing Armstrong describe each death, was "very overwhelming."
The five women whose deaths ended in his convictions were Wendy Jordan, Kelly Jean Hood, Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson.
Two days after that discovery, early on Wednesday, April 12, Armstrong was arrested in an area of Detroit where prostitutes worked. Police had a description of him and of his vehicle. According to the 2012 CBS Detroit account, officers got their break while they were interviewing a woman on the street: Armstrong drove past, and she identified him as the man who had tried to kill her.
Johnson led the interrogation, which he described as very difficult and which ended in a confession. Armstrong reportedly broke down under questioning and said he needed help. Police said he cooperated and answered their questions without a lawyer, and that he did not ask for one. After his arrest, Detroit police said, he told them that he hated prostitutes and wanted psychological help. Assistant Police Chief Marvin Winkler, quoted by the Detroit News, said Armstrong had claimed that he "either killed, or tried to kill, every prostitute he'd ever had sex with," and that he had expressed remorse several times and cried.
Armstrong was arraigned two days after his arrest. In Detroit a court magistrate entered pleas of not guilty for him on four counts of murder and three counts of assault with intent to kill, and he was then arraigned in Dearborn Heights on a fifth murder count, where a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. He was ordered held without bail. The Wayne County assistant prosecutor Robert Agacinski said the charges were five counts of premeditated murder and three counts of assault with intent to murder, and that the murder charges carried mandatory life sentences on conviction.
At the courthouse Armstrong hung his head, tried to avoid the television cameras and fought back tears. Asked how he felt, he whispered, "So bad." Asked whether he had anything to say, he said, "Sorry." Agacinski said he appeared lucid, that there was no sign of babbling or incoherence, and that a psychological examination would probably follow. "I don't have any indication why he did it," he said.
Armstrong was held in a segregated maximum-security section of the Wayne County Jail. Sheriff Robert Ficano said his stay was routine and that he was following all the rules.
In questioning Armstrong gave police an account of at least 11 other killings during his years in the Navy, many of them in ports where the Nimitz had called. As reported by the Associated Press in April 2000, he named three in the Seattle area, two in Hawaii, two in Hong Kong, and one each in North Carolina, Virginia, Thailand and Singapore. Except for one man in Seattle, all of the people he described were women who had been strangled. Newsweek listed the places as Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok and Newport News, Virginia. Detroit police said the first of these may have been a strangling in North Carolina in 1992, eight years before his arrest. The Arab American News, writing in 2022, described his claims as one killing in 1991 and 11 between 1993 and 1998.
Other figures were given. Winkler told reporters the total could reach 18 to 20 worldwide, and detectives in Japan, South Korea and Israel checked for possible links to killings of prostitutes there. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, citing a Detroit police official, reported that he had admitted to at least 16 killings, all unconfirmed. In 2012 CBS Detroit reported that he had later confessed to killing more than 30 people around the world.
From the start investigators were cautious. "There are gaps in his timeline that we are concerned about," said Commander Dennis Richardson of the Detroit police, quoted by the Detroit Free Press, adding that nothing outside Michigan had been confirmed. The Navy, called by the FBI on the day of his arrest, began comparing the places and dates he gave with the Nimitz's ports of call.
In Washington state, a Seattle police spokeswoman said the department had received little information. A King County police spokesman said that without credible details of where the killings took place, the search would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Dick Steiner, an investigator in the Washington Attorney General's Office, said no open homicide case matched the dates and places Armstrong had given Detroit police. "Nothing has panned out so far," he said, adding that Armstrong was changing his story so often that few would believe what he said about killings in Washington.
In Hawaii, a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman said the Nimitz had visited only twice in the years in question: for one day in 1993 and for four days in 1996. Honolulu police reviewed unsolved killings from both visits and found none that matched the women Armstrong described. The one local case with a similar profile dated from 1994, and Lieutenant William Kato of the Honolulu homicide unit said there was no evidence linking Armstrong to Hawaii in that year. Police and state records showed no arrests of Armstrong in Hawaii, and he had no arrest record in New Bern either.
Some investigators warned in April 2000 that he might be exaggerating, and his family's doubts about parts of his statement were reported the same week.
His trial for Wendy Jordan's death took place in March 2001, and the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. On June 18, 2001, he was convicted of killing Kelly Jean Hood, Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson, The Arab American News reported. CBS Detroit, in 2012, described the 2001 outcome as convictions for the murders of four women in the Detroit area; the 2022 account gives five.
Armstrong was serving his sentences at the Cotton Correctional Facility near Jackson, Michigan, as of January 2022, according to The Arab American News. No later change in his custody has been reported.
The case has been retold on television. In 2012 Investigation Discovery featured it in an episode of the documentary series "Very Bad Men," with Donald Johnson Jr., by then a Detroit police inspector and commanding officer of the department's homeland security unit, among those interviewed. In January 2022 it was the subject of an episode of a cable true-crime series, The Arab American News reported.
Proven by verdict: the first-degree murder of Wendy Jordan (jury, March 2001). Convictions reported on June 18, 2001, for the killings of Kelly Jean Hood, Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson; the 2022 report does not say whether each was by trial or by plea, or give the degree of each conviction or the sentences. How the three assault charges ended was not reported.
Claimed, never confirmed: every killing outside Michigan. Police in Washington state and Hawaii found no cases matching his account in April 2000, and Detroit police pointed to gaps in his timeline. His totals varied from 11 to at least 16 in April 2000, to 18 to 20 in an estimate by a Detroit police official, to more than 30 in a 2012 report; the 2022 account gives 12 claimed killings from 1991 to 1998.
Details that vary between sources: his job aboard the Nimitz (barber in the Associated Press and Newsweek; fueler in the first Seattle Times report); the number of Michigan murders of which he was convicted (five in the 2022 account; four in CBS Detroit, 2012); and the start of his claimed killings (1992 in Detroit police statements in 2000; 1991 in the 2022 account). His family disputed some of what he told police about his childhood.
November 23, 1973: John Eric Armstrong is born in New Bern, North Carolina.
1992: enlists in the U.S. Navy.
1993 to 1999: serves aboard the USS Nimitz.
1998: marries a woman he met aboard the Nimitz.
1999: leaves the Navy and settles in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
December (year not stated in the April 2000 report): a woman is found strangled, one of the five Michigan deaths later charged (Newsweek).
January 2, 2000: Armstrong reports Wendy Jordan's body to the Dearborn Heights police and is questioned.
March 2000: the state laboratory reports a definite DNA match; prosecutors wait for written confirmation.
April 10, 2000: the bodies of three women are found in Detroit.
April 12, 2000: written DNA confirmation arrives; Armstrong is arrested early that morning in Detroit.
Two days later: arraigned in Detroit and Dearborn Heights on five murder counts and three assault counts; held without bail.
April 2000: police in Washington state and Hawaii report no cases matching his claims.
March 2001: convicted by a jury of first-degree murder in Wendy Jordan's death.
June 18, 2001: convicted of killing Kelly Jean Hood, Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson.
September 2012: the case is featured in "Very Bad Men" on Investigation Discovery.
January 2022: the case is featured in a cable true-crime series; Armstrong is reported held at the Cotton Correctional Facility near Jackson, Michigan.