Maury Troy Travis was born in St Louis on October 25, 1965. He worked as a waiter, was on parole for a 1989 robbery, and lived at his mother's house in Ferguson.
Between 2000 and 2002 he abducted women from the streets of north St Louis, almost all of them Black and dependent on crack, took them to the basement, restrained them, tortured them over hours or days, and strangled them. He recorded it. The bodies were left along roads and in derelict buildings across St Louis city and county and in Illinois. Because the victims were transient and their families were often not in a position to press, the disappearances were slow to be linked.
In May 2002 the St Louis Post-Dispatch published a piece by the columnist Bill McClellan about one of the dead women. Travis wrote to McClellan, taunting him, offering to prove himself, and enclosing a printed map with a numbered dot marking where a body would be found. There was a body there.
The map had been printed from expedia.com. The FBI subpoenaed the site's server logs, found the single session that had generated that exact map view at that time, and got the internet address, which led to Travis's telephone line. He was arrested on June 7, 2002. At the house police found the restraints, the basement and a videotape running to several hours.
He hanged himself in a cell at the Clayton jail on June 10, 2002, before any trial and before he had identified the women on the tape. Several have never been named. The expedia subpoena is cited as one of the earliest uses of a commercial web server log to identify a suspect.