On the morning of August 19, 1974, a Navy military policeman named Roy Besancenez, attached to the Jacksonville, North Carolina, police station next door to the Camp Lejeune military police building, stopped in front of a bulletin board. Pinned to it was the bank camera photograph of the man in a green ski mask who had taken a young woman hostage three days earlier, robbed a bank with her and shot her in the face. Besancenez knew the eyes. One of them had a cast and did not track with the other, and the freckles around them were a corpsman's he had eaten dinner with a week before. The man in the picture, he told Chief Clyde Cook, was Marcus Shrader. Within hours police were at Shrader's house at Cedar Point.
They already had a name from another direction. The afternoon of the robbery, the manager of a lounge on Jacksonville's strip, Debra Ann Mumby, had called Cook to say that a Navy corpsman calling himself Marcus Shrader had applied for membership there and, just before one o'clock, asked her to go for a ride with him. She had declined. When she heard the radio report of the holdup she understood what the ride was for. Cook had told reporters he was sure the robbery was the work of the same man who had taken a hostage in a bank robbery on January 25.
Marcus B. Shrader III was thirty-three, a Navy medical corpsman stationed at Camp Lejeune, married with a household of stepchildren at Cedar Point in Onslow County. The four deaths police laid at his door all fell in 1974. In January he kidnapped Ginger Rader, twenty-three, made her help him rob a bank and shot her dead. On August 2, Karen Amabile and Cindy Howard, both fifteen, walked to the post office to mail a letter and were offered a ride home by Shrader's sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Debra Ann Brown, who knew Karen from school. Shrader was waiting in his van. He handcuffed the girls, gagged them with pantyhose, taped their eyes, sexually assaulted them and strangled them; their bodies, in nothing but their underwear, were found in the Bear Creek area. That account came from Brown, in court. On August 16 he took Cheryl Potter Boyd, nineteen, as she got into her car in the parking lot of the New Bridge Street post office. Her younger brother, Gerald Potter Jr., said Shrader climbed in the other door. Shrader forced her to help him rob a nearby bank, shot her in the face and left her in her car behind the New River Shopping Center. Her brother believed she realized who he was when he pulled on the green ski mask.
Shrader was arrested at home on August 18, 1974. In jail he said he had killed a couple of people, and asked that Debra not be hurt. Debra Brown, two weeks short of seventeen and reminded that the death penalty applied to her too, talked. She said Shrader had used her sexually since she was twelve, that she was three months pregnant by him, and that he beat her with chains, fists, guns and bottles. Shrader's own testimony put the start of their sexual relationship at fourteen. Ballistics matched his .45 to the bullet that killed Cheryl Boyd. The young detective on the case, Delma Collins, later an Onslow County commissioner, went through the attic of the Cedar Point house and called it a chamber of horrors; Shrader was suspected of raping his five stepchildren there over years. His wife later told a local paper she gathered her four other children and left the county in the middle of the night for Boston, to the home of her husband's aunt, the only family she had left.
He was charged with all four murders but tried, in December 1974 in Onslow County Superior Court, for Cheryl Boyd's alone. He pleaded guilty to the kidnapping, which the court accepted and withdrew from the jury, and testified himself to the abduction and the chain of events that ended in her death. A witness named Hines identified him as the man in Boyd's car, seen minutes before she was killed while Hines waited to make a left turn at an intersection. Brown testified against him; if I had not helped him, she said, I would not be here today. On December 10, 1974 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death, the sixty-fifth man on North Carolina's death row. The Supreme Court of North Carolina upheld the conviction, rejecting among other things his complaint about Brown's testimony. Brown was convicted for her part in the Boyd kidnapping and served seven of a fifteen-year sentence; a relative is thought to have taken the child. He wrote to her in prison: until I am dead and in a box, you belong to me body and soul.
He never went to the death chamber and never stood trial for Ginger Rader, Cindy Howard or Karen Amabile. In July 1976 the United States Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's mandatory death penalty statute in Woodson v. North Carolina, and Shrader's sentence, like every other on the state's row, became life imprisonment. Under the law of the time he was eligible for parole from 1986, and the parole commission turned him down at each review. He died at Central Prison in Raleigh on a Friday in early July 2007, aged sixty-five, of what the state described as a chronic illness; a local television report put the date as the Friday before its July 11 story, which was July 6, while other records give July 10. He had served thirty-three years. Families of the four women said it was the end of a long nightmare.
January 1974: Ginger Rader, twenty-three, is kidnapped, made to help rob a bank and shot dead, one of four deaths police lay at Shrader's door; he is never tried for it.
August 2, 1974: Karen Amabile and Cindy Howard, both fifteen, are lured into his van, sexually assaulted and strangled, by his stepdaughter's later testimony; he is never tried for their deaths.
August 16, 1974: Cheryl Potter Boyd, nineteen, is taken from a post office parking lot, forced to help rob a bank and shot in the face.
August 18, 1974: Shrader is arrested at his home at Cedar Point.
December 10, 1974: an Onslow County jury convicts him of the first-degree murder of Cheryl Boyd, and he is sentenced to death.
July 1976: after the United States Supreme Court decides Woodson v. North Carolina, his sentence becomes life imprisonment.
1986: he becomes eligible for parole; he is turned down at each review.
July 2007: he dies at Central Prison in Raleigh, aged sixty-five (July 6 by one report, July 10 by other records).