In May 2002 a letter reached Bill Smith, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who had just written a profile of Teresa Wilson, a thirty-six-year-old woman found dead in West Alton, Missouri, the year before. The writer demanded that Smith keep writing about the victims, promised confessions to more killings if he did, and enclosed a computer-printed map of the West Alton area marked with an X, to prove he was real, directions, he wrote, to number seventeen. Searchers found the skeletal remains of a woman at the spot. She has never been identified. The return address on the envelope was I THRALLDOM, the name of a website devoted to bondage and sexual torture.
By then police on both sides of the Mississippi had been linking the deaths of women taken from the streets of north St. Louis and left in Missouri and Illinois. Most were Black women, many working as prostitutes or dependent on crack. The ones later attributed to the same man included Mary Shields, sixty-one, found in East St. Louis on July 31, 2000; Cassandra Walker, nineteen, and Alysa Greenwade, thirty-four, found in Washington Park, Illinois, in the spring of 2001; Teresa Wilson; Betty James, forty-six, found in St. Louis on May 23, 2001; Verona Thompson, thirty-six, found in West Alton; Yvonne Crues, fifty, and Brenda Beasley, thirty-three, found in East St. Louis in August and October 2001; and two unidentified women found near Mascoutah and Highland, Illinois, early in 2002. Several had been bound and strangled. DNA from one unknown man was on the bodies of Crues and Beasley, and tire tracks were found near two of the bodies, including a Goodrich Advantage tread mark on Betty James's leg.
The map was the mistake. An Illinois State Police cybercrime investigator worked through every online and CD-based mapping service until he matched it to Expedia.com, which was using proprietary Microsoft maps. Federal investigators subpoenaed Expedia and Microsoft for everyone who had viewed that patch of West Alton between the article's publication on May 19 and the letter's postmark on May 21. One computer had. Its internet address led to an MSN account in the name of Maury Travis.
Maury Troy Travis was born in St. Louis on October 25, 1965. He had served time on a fifteen-year sentence for a 1989 armed robbery before his parole in 1994, and had been on probation for drug offenses in 1998. He worked as a hotel waiter and lived at his mother's house on Ford Drive in Ferguson. On June 7, 2002, FBI agents and St. Louis detectives came to the door, and Travis was arrested. In the basement they found what they described as a torture room, with bloodstains on the walls and floor, bloodied belts and ligatures, a stun gun, newspaper clippings about the killings, and a filing cabinet of videotapes showing him with bound women. Betty James was identified from one of the tapes, and a tire on his car matched the mark on her leg. Investigators said there were indications of as many as twenty victims; four women believed to be his were still unidentified.
Travis was named in a federal complaint filed in East St. Louis charging him with two counts of kidnapping resulting in death, for Alysa Greenwade and Betty James, whose cases crossed the state line; state charges in other deaths were expected. He was held in the St. Louis County jail in Clayton on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. On June 10, 2002, three days after his arrest, he hanged himself in his cell. No court ever heard the evidence, the tapes were never tested before a jury, and the count attributed to him, twelve to seventeen or more, remains an investigative estimate. The Expedia subpoena is often cited as one of the first times a commercial website's logs identified a murder suspect.