Marcus Shrader was born in 1941 and was a Navy corpsman stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, living at Cedar Point in Onslow County.
In January 1974 he kidnapped Ginger Rader, twenty-three, forced her to help him rob a bank, and shot her dead.
On August 2 that year Karen Amabile and Cindy Howard, both fifteen, went to the post office to post a letter. They were stopped by Shrader's sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Debra Ann Brown, who knew Amabile from school and offered them a lift home. Shrader was waiting in his van. He handcuffed both girls, bound their mouths with a pair of tights and taped over their eyes, then sexually assaulted them and strangled them. Their bodies were found in the Bear Creek area, wearing only their underwear. Brown later gave that account in evidence.
On August 16 he took Cheryl Potter Boyd, nineteen, from the car park of the post office on New Bridge Street in Jacksonville. Her brother said she was getting into her car when Shrader got in the other side. He forced her to help him rob a nearby bank, shot her in the face and left her body in her car behind the New River Shopping Center. Her brother believed she realised who he was when he put on a green ski mask for the robbery; the police were already looking for a man in a green ski mask.
He was arrested two days later because of an accident. A retired Jacksonville officer recalled that the Camp Lejeune military police had a building next to the police station, and a corpsman walking through it saw the wanted photograph pinned to the wall. Even with the ski mask on, he recognised the freckles round the suspect's eyes. He had had dinner with Shrader a week earlier. He was taken to the detective working the case, and the police raided the house at Cedar Point within three hours.
That detective, later an Onslow County commissioner, said the attic was the most eerie thing he had encountered in his life, and described it as a chamber of horrors and a torture chamber. Shrader was suspected of repeatedly molesting and raping his five stepchildren there.
He was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Cheryl Potter Boyd. That is the only one of the four he was tried for. The police accused him of the other three and no trial on them ever took place, which is why the count here is one conviction and three attributed.
His stepdaughter was convicted too. Debra Ann Brown gave evidence against him and served seven years of a fifteen-year sentence for her part in the Boyd kidnapping. She testified that he had beaten her with chains, fists, guns and bottles. He testified that he had begun having sex with her when she was fourteen; she testified that he had begun raping her when she was twelve. She was pregnant with his child at the time of the trial, and a relative is thought to have taken the baby. He wrote to her while they were both in prison.
His wife told a local paper decades later that she had packed up her four other children and left the county in the middle of the night, going to Boston to the home of her husband's aunt, the only family she had left.
Two matters of record. The date of his death is given as July 10, 2007 in the roster, while the newspaper report of July 11 says he died on the Friday, which was July 6. And the account here comes from that report, published on his death, which is the only substantial source available.