On January 2, 2000, a man called the Dearborn Heights police to report a woman's body in the Rouge River. By one account he had been out walking when he felt ill and, leaning over the side of a bridge, saw her on the riverbank twenty feet below; by another he had been driving and stopped the car to vomit. She was Wendy Jordan, thirty-nine, a former drug addict who had been arrested before for soliciting in Detroit and whose family had reported her missing on New Year's Day. An autopsy the next day showed she had been strangled, and a rape kit was taken. The caller was John Eric Armstrong, twenty-six, a Navy veteran with a wife and a baby. His story was plausible, a Wayne County prosecutor later said, but he was squirrelly. He was interviewed and released.
Fibers on Jordan's body matched fibers in Armstrong's Jeep, but the Wayne County prosecutor's office would not issue a homicide warrant until the State Police laboratory delivered its final report, and the police had only preliminary results. While they waited, he attacked again. On April 2, Wilhelmina Drane got into his Jeep and escaped after spraying him with Mace. On April 7 he offered Devon Marcus forty dollars for sex and tried to strangle him; Marcus got away and identified him to the police. On April 10 officers found three bodies in a railroad yard in southwest Detroit, women who had worked as prostitutes, strangled and left posed: Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Kelly Jean Hood. The killings were linked to a fifth, Monica Johnson, found beaten unconscious in Dearborn Heights on December 3, 1999, who died the same day. On April 12, 2000, with DNA from Jordan's body matching him, he was arrested. Investigators said he had thrown Jordan from the bridge into the river because he did not yet know the railroad tracks.
Armstrong was born in New Bern, North Carolina, on November 23, 1973. He said his father abused him and that his mother sexually abused him. When his baby brother, Michael, died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1978, he tried to take his own life, and his father left soon after. He joined the Navy in 1992 and served aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, which took him around Asia and the Middle East. Some shipmates called him moody, others remembered him fondly; he was promoted four times and earned two Good Conduct Medals. He was honorably discharged in 1999 and moved with his wife, Katie Rednoske, to Dearborn Heights, near her family. Their first child was born in February 1999, and he enrolled at Schoolcraft College in Livonia.
He was arraigned on five counts of murder and three of assault with intent to kill, hanging his head and fighting back tears as not guilty pleas were entered for him. Outside the Dearborn Heights courthouse, asked how he felt, he whispered, "So bad," and asked if he had anything to say, "Sorry." He had told investigators that while in the Navy he had either killed, or tried to kill, every prostitute he had ever had sex with, and he named eleven killings away from Michigan: three in the Seattle area, two in Hawaii, two in Hong Kong, and one each in North Carolina, Virginia, Thailand and Singapore. Police in at least seven countries looked at what he had said. Hawaii and Thailand found no cases like the ones he described. A possible link to a woman's murder in Haifa was dropped when Israeli authorities established he had not been there at the time, and one of the Seattle victims changed in his telling from a transsexual to a black man who had tried to bum money from him. None of the claims produced a charge.
His trial for Wendy Jordan's murder ran two weeks in March 2001. He pleaded insanity, and the forensic evidence undid it; the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life without parole. On June 18, 2001, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Kelly Jean Hood and received a second life term, and he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson, for thirty-one more years. He later said he had posed the three women in the rail yard so that he could always go back and have sex with them, because he knew they would be there.
He serves the five sentences at the Cotton Correctional Facility near Jackson, Michigan. The case has been the subject of television episodes and of a 2024 book by B. R. Bates and Gerald Cliff, The 'Baby Doll' Serial Killer.