Maury Travis was never tried for any killing. He was arrested on June 7, 2002, at the house where he lived with his mother in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb north of St. Louis, and was held on a federal complaint accusing him of kidnapping that caused the deaths of two women, Alysa Greenwade and Betty James. Three days later he was found hanged in his cell in the St. Louis County jail. Investigators attributed to him the deaths of about a dozen women whose bodies had been found in Missouri and Illinois over the previous two years, and an anonymous letter that police tied to him claimed 17. No court ever heard the evidence.
The case is remembered for the way it was solved. In May 2002 a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter received a letter from someone claiming to be the man police were looking for, with a computer-printed map marked with an X. Searchers found a woman's remains near the spot. An Illinois State Police cybercrime investigator worked out that the map had been printed from Expedia.com, and federal subpoenas to Expedia and Microsoft produced a single internet address that had viewed that area in the hours before the letter was mailed. The address led to the house in Ferguson.
Little has been published about Travis's early life. He was 36 at the time of his arrest, according to KTVI (FOX 2) in St. Louis and an Associated Press report, and he worked as a waiter; ABC News described his job as hotel food service. He lived in a ranch-style house in Ferguson that, according to KTVI, was owned by his mother.
He had been in prison in Missouri before. A report published in June 2002 by AccessWDUN, citing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said he lived in Atlanta in the mid-1990s after his release, and that St. Louis police had sent DNA samples to Atlanta because detectives there were looking at a series of deaths of women in 1994. Detectives in St. Louis also noted that a short spell he spent in prison in late 2001 coincided with a gap in the deaths, KTVI reported; it gave no detail of that sentence. The offenses behind either term, his date of birth and his schooling and family, beyond his mother, were not reported.
After his death, investigators looked for something in his history that might explain the case. KTVI reported that they found no evidence of abuse or trauma in his childhood. In the note he left in his cell, addressed to his mother, he wrote that he had been "sick in the head" since he was about 14, the station reported.
Between the summer of 2000 and the spring of 2002, the bodies of women were found on both sides of the Mississippi River around St. Louis, in St. Louis itself, in West Alton, Missouri, and in towns in the Illinois counties across the river. Most were Black women from north St. Louis. Police said many of them struggled with drug addiction and sold sex in the Baden neighborhood on the city's north side, and that the man they were looking for offered them money and drugs to go with him. ABC News reported that police believed Travis met women there and took them back to his house in Ferguson.
KTVI later published the list of women whose remains investigators connected to Travis, with the date each was found and the town. Little was reported about most of them beyond their names and ages. What they do record follows.
Mary Shields, 61, was found in East St. Louis, Illinois, on July 31, 2000. Investigators came to think the series might have begun with her.
Cassandra F. Walker, 19, was found in Washington Park, Illinois, on March 24, 2001. She was the youngest of the women named.
Alysa Greenwade, 34, was found in Washington Park. KTVI's list gives April 1, 2000, which places her out of order; Officer.com places her death among those in the months before May 2001. Her name is also spelled Alysia in some reports. She was one of the two women named in the federal complaint, and the anonymous letter of May 2002 asked the Post-Dispatch to write about her.
Teresa Wilson, 36, was found in West Alton, Missouri, on May 15, 2001, according to KTVI and Officer.com, and was identified through dental records. It was a profile of her in the Post-Dispatch a year later that drew the letter.
Betty James, 46, was found in St. Louis in late May 2001; KTVI gives May 30 and Officer.com May 23. She was the second woman named in the federal complaint. Tire marks found where she was left were later matched to one of Travis's vehicles, KTVI reported.
Verona Thompson, 36, was found in West Alton on June 29, 2001, about a month after Betty James.
Yvonne Crues, 50, was found in East St. Louis on August 25, 2001.
Brenda Beasley, 33, was found in East St. Louis on October 8, 2001. DNA from the same unknown man was found on her body and on that of Yvonne Crues.
Kelly Johnson was found near Mascoutah, Illinois, on January 30, 2002. She could not be identified at the time. For 23 years she was listed only as an unidentified woman.
Crystal Lay was found near Highland, Illinois, on March 11, 2002. She too was listed as unidentified until 2025.
Carol Jean Hemphill was found in Columbia, Illinois, on March 28, 2002, by a state highway crew. She had been reported missing in St. Louis on July 27, 2001, according to the Republic-Times of Columbia. A forensic anthropologist estimated that she had been dead for six to 12 months, and an autopsy classified her death as a homicide. Columbia police kept the case open for years as that of a Jane Doe, describing her from the remains as a Black woman in her 30s or 40s who had had at least one child. "Jane Doe is somebody's daughter, mother or sister," the Columbia police chief, Jerry Paul, said in 2017, appealing for help. She was identified in 2025.
The last woman on the list was found in West Alton on May 25, 2002, after the map that came with the letter led searchers there. No identification of her was reported.
The deaths fell across several jurisdictions: the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County, West Alton on the Missouri side, and a string of Illinois towns handled by their own police departments and by the Illinois State Police. According to Officer.com, the agencies at first did not connect the cases. Writing in July 2002, the St. Louis reporter and editor Traci Angel noted in The Commonspace that the Post-Dispatch and the Belleville News-Democrat ran their first analysis stories about the series only in October 2001, after bodies were found on consecutive days, and that law enforcement asked the FBI for help that month. St. Louis police joined a task force with other agencies some weeks later, she wrote, and she described a period in which the agencies blamed each other and newspaper editorials criticized them.
Two kinds of physical evidence linked some of the deaths. DNA from one unknown man was found on the bodies of Yvonne Crues and Brenda Beasley, KTVI reported. Tire tracks were found at the places where Betty James and Alysa Greenwade were left; they were later matched to Travis's two vehicles, one fitted with a Goodrich Advantage tire and the other with a Bridgestone Potenza. Neither line of evidence pointed to a name. According to Officer.com, the task force spent the rest of 2001 and the first months of 2002 following leads that went nowhere, while more remains were found in Illinois.
By June 2002 the Post-Dispatch was reporting that authorities had found ten Black women dead since April 2001, four of them still unidentified, according to the AccessWDUN report that relayed its coverage.
On May 19, 2002, the Post-Dispatch published an article by its reporter Bill Smith about Teresa Wilson, the woman found in West Alton the year before. Less than a week later Smith received a typed letter, postmarked in St. Louis, from someone who claimed to be the man responsible for the deaths. The return address was a made-up New York address under the name "I Thralldom," and the text was set in a typeface made to look like handwriting, KTVI reported.
The letter opened "Dear Bill, nice sob story about Teresa Wilson," according to KTVI. Officer.com quotes it as asking him to write one about Greenwade, and it offered, as proof that the writer was real, directions to what he called number seventeen, with an instruction to search within 50 yards of the X. The letter linked further information about bodies to more coverage. Angel wrote that its tone was arrogant and mocking.
Enclosed was a map of the West Alton area printed from a computer, with a small X on it. Searchers went to West Alton and found a woman's remains. Investigators found no fingerprints or DNA on either the letter or the map, KTVI reported.
Accounts differ on some dates. KTVI says the letter came less than a week after the May 19 article and was postmarked about May 21. Officer.com says the paper received it on May 25, 2002, and puts the Wilson article in March, which conflicts with KTVI's date of May 19. The remains found at the X are listed by KTVI with the date May 25, 2002.
The map gave investigators what the letter did not. An Illinois State Police investigator who specialized in computer crime set out to find which mapping service had produced it, and matched it to Expedia.com, which at the time used maps supplied by Microsoft, KTVI reported. Officer.com describes Microsoft as Expedia's parent company then.
Federal investigators served subpoenas on Expedia and Microsoft for records of who had looked at that part of West Alton. Microsoft's records showed that only one internet address had viewed that area of the map recently, according to Officer.com; KTVI reported that the address downloaded the map on the evening of May 20, 2002, the day after Smith's article ran, and that the internet service behind it was provided by UUNET. The address was traced to a house in Ferguson. KTVI reported that the house was owned by Travis's mother and that he lived there.
On Friday, June 7, 2002, FBI agents went to the house with a federal search warrant. Detective Sergeant Tim Sachs of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department went with them, KTVI reported. Travis answered the door. Investigators questioned him at the house for about two hours.
In the basement they found bloodstains and women's belongings, according to KTVI, and ABC News reported newspaper clippings about the deaths. Investigators also found a collection of videotapes. On his computer were drafts of the letter sent to the Post-Dispatch, and police found a diagram for an extension to the basement. St. Louis police Captain Harry Hegger said the diagram showed plans for cells, KTVI reported.
Travis was taken to police headquarters for more questioning. According to KTVI, he asked to see photographs of the dead women and at one point offered to lead detectives to another body, then changed his mind. He asked for a soda. Police kept the can and swabbed it, and the St. Louis police crime laboratory matched the DNA on it to the unknown profile found on Yvonne Crues and Brenda Beasley.
Travis was held on a federal criminal complaint. According to the AccessWDUN report, it accused him of kidnapping and of having "caused the death" of two women, Alysa Greenwade and Betty James. Officer.com describes the charges as two federal counts of kidnapping resulting in death, and says the federal case rested on the women having been taken across a state line. Other jurisdictions were still deciding whether to bring charges of their own, KTVI reported. No murder charge was ever filed against him, in state or federal court.
A complaint is the first step in a federal prosecution, not a finding of guilt. The case never reached an indictment, a preliminary hearing or a trial, and the evidence described by police in 2002 and afterward was never tested in court. The complaint's contents are known from news reports.
Travis was held in the St. Louis County jail in Clayton. He was under round-the-clock observation, with guards scheduled to check his cell every 15 minutes, KTVI reported. On the night of Monday, June 10, 2002, three days after his arrest, guards found him hanged in his cell. He was 36.
Two consecutive checks had been missed, KTVI reported, which gave him the time. Angel, writing a month later, said he had been reported to be on suicide watch yet still had bedding in his cell, and that authorities were being asked why the checks were only every 15 minutes. She wrote that he died on the night he was formally charged.
He left a note addressed to his mother. AccessWDUN reported that it said he did not want to spend the rest of his life in prison. KTVI quoted it as saying his death seemed to be "the only way out and a fast end to all the publicity." It contained no admission of guilt and no expression of remorse, KTVI reported.
"I was devastated," Sachs told KTVI. "It was terrible. It was the worst thing that could happen in the investigation." He said detectives had "a million questions" and that Travis took every answer with him.
Travis's death ended the prosecution but not the investigation. Laboratory work on the basement went on: more than a thousand blood samples were taken from it, KTVI reported, and they matched at least six of the women already known to investigators. St. Louis police also sent DNA samples to Atlanta, where he had lived in the 1990s, so that detectives there could compare them with evidence from deaths of women in that city in 1994, according to the AccessWDUN report. No result from Atlanta was reported, and no authority is reported to have linked him to a death there.
The videotapes found in the house became evidence of a different kind. The police chief, Joe Mokwa, ordered psychological counseling for officers who had to view them, ABC News and KTVI reported. Police later released excerpts to ABC News, which broadcast them nationally on its Primetime program.
Mokwa also spoke about what police believed drove the man they had arrested. "He had a lot of disdain for prostitution," he said, adding that, in his view, Travis drew self-esteem from degrading people, according to KTVI. These were the views of the police chief; no court or jury ever weighed them.
KTVI reported that local police wrote up the investigation for federal authorities and that their report was later used in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
The numbers attributed to Travis have always been estimates, and they vary by source and by year.
The letter claimed 17. "He claims he killed 17 women. We're missing five of them," Mokwa told ABC News. ABC reported that police believed he had killed between 12 and 20 women and that they had identified 12 victims, women whose bodies were left along city streets and country roads around St. Louis; ABC gave the span as March 2001 to May 2002, although its own figure of 12 and KTVI's list include Mary Shields, found in July 2000.
In June 2002 the Post-Dispatch's count, as relayed by AccessWDUN, was ten women found since April 2001. An Associated Press report in 2014, carried by Fox News, said police had called him a suspect in as many as 20 deaths in the area. KTVI put the number of women whose remains were found and linked to him at 12, against the 17 he claimed, and said police believed five more might never be found.
In 2025 the director of the Illinois State Police, Brendan Kelly, said that Travis had killed 17 women in the early 2000s, St. Louis Public Radio reported; the same report said law enforcement believed he had killed at least 12 women, though he had claimed more. Officer.com, in December 2025, wrote that investigators had connected him by DNA to 12 known victims out of a possible 17. That description goes beyond the evidence reported elsewhere: the DNA results described in the news coverage concern two of the women (by the soda can) and at least six (by the blood in the basement), with tire tracks linked to two more.
None of these figures was tested in court. The only accusations ever filed were the two in the federal complaint.
The house in Ferguson returned to the news in 2014. A woman who had rented it learned from a television program that it was where Travis had lived, the Associated Press reported, citing KMOV-TV. She said she had not known its history when she signed the lease. After her landlord refused to release her, she went to the St. Louis Housing Authority, which said she could break the lease and move out at the end of the month.
For more than two decades, three of the women found in Illinois in early 2002 had no names. All three were listed as Jane Does. The Illinois State Police entered their cases into NamUs, the national database of missing and unidentified people, in 2014.
The first to be named was the woman found in Columbia. Two Columbia police detectives, Detective Sergeant Michael Barnett and Detective Luke Moravec, reexamined the case, and in December 2022 it received a grant for forensic genetic genealogy testing, the Republic-Times reported. An October 2024 report from the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification linked the remains to a man who proved to be her son, and further testing, with samples from her family, confirmed that she was Carol Hemphill. Columbia police announced the identification at a news conference in March 2025, attended by members of her family.
"This case is not done," the Columbia police chief, Jason Donjon, said. He said the department was contacting the other agencies that had handled cases linked to Travis to see whether DNA or other evidence matched, and KMOV reported him as saying the homicide investigation remained very much open. Bob Hill, the Monroe County coroner and mayor of Columbia, said officials were relieved to give her family some closure. Her daughter said, "This journey is still not over."
In July 2025 the Illinois State Police and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville announced that the other two women had also been identified, as Kelly Johnson and Crystal Lay. The work came out of a partnership in which SIUE students, placed in unpaid internships with the state police, review cold cases and rank them by how close they are to being solved; St. Charles County police in Missouri had collected DNA from relatives of missing people, and the testing was done at the University of North Texas center. The state police said all three women were believed to have been victims of Travis. "Every person deserves to be identified and remembered," said Ryleigh Franklin, an SIUE graduate who worked on the cases. Scott Wobbe, a state police investigator, said the biggest hurdle in such cases was identifying the victim first.
The reports give no ages for Kelly Johnson, Crystal Lay or Carol Hemphill, and no public identification of the woman found at West Alton in May 2002.
Proven in court: nothing. Travis was never indicted, tried or convicted.
Charged: kidnapping that caused the deaths of Alysa Greenwade and Betty James, in a federal criminal complaint filed in June 2002. The charges ended with his death.
Attributed by investigators, never charged: the deaths of the other women on KTVI's list. The evidence police described publicly was DNA linking him to two women, blood in the basement matching at least six, tire tracks matching his vehicles at two scenes, the drafts of the letter on his computer and the map traced to his internet address. None of it was tested before a judge or jury.
Claimed but unconfirmed: the letter's count of 17, and police estimates of up to 20. Five or more of those deaths, if they happened, have never been tied to a body.
Not established: any connection to deaths of women in Atlanta in 1994. Police sent DNA samples there in 2002; no result was reported.
Details that vary between sources: the date Alysa Greenwade was found (KTVI lists April 1, 2000); the date Betty James was found (May 23 or May 30, 2001); the date of the Post-Dispatch article that drew the letter (May 19, 2002, per KTVI, or March 2002, per Officer.com) and the date the letter arrived; whether a federal charge was filed on the night he died (Angel) or earlier; and the span of the deaths (ABC gives March 2001 to May 2002, while KTVI's list begins in July 2000). The Republic-Times in 2025 described Travis as a convicted serial killer; he was never convicted of anything connected with these deaths.
July 31, 2000: Mary Shields, 61, is found in East St. Louis, Illinois.
March 24, 2001: Cassandra F. Walker, 19, is found in Washington Park, Illinois.
Before May 2001 (date varies by source): Alysa Greenwade, 34, is found in Washington Park.
May 15, 2001: Teresa Wilson, 36, is found in West Alton, Missouri.
Late May 2001: Betty James, 46, is found in St. Louis.
June 29, 2001: Verona Thompson, 36, is found in West Alton.
July 27, 2001: Carol Hemphill is reported missing in St. Louis.
August 25, 2001: Yvonne Crues, 50, is found in East St. Louis.
October 2001: newspapers publish their first analyses of the series; law enforcement asks the FBI for help.
October 8, 2001: Brenda Beasley, 33, is found in East St. Louis.
Late 2001: Travis spends a short time in prison, during a gap in the deaths.
January 30, 2002: a woman, later identified as Kelly Johnson, is found near Mascoutah, Illinois.
March 11, 2002: a woman, later identified as Crystal Lay, is found near Highland, Illinois.
March 28, 2002: a woman, later identified as Carol Jean Hemphill, is found in Columbia, Illinois.
May 19, 2002: the Post-Dispatch publishes Bill Smith's article about Teresa Wilson.
May 20, 2002: a single internet address views the West Alton area on Expedia.
Late May 2002: Smith receives the letter and map; a woman's remains are found in West Alton (listed May 25).
June 7, 2002: FBI agents and St. Louis detectives search the house in Ferguson; Travis is taken into custody and questioned.
June 2002: a federal complaint charges him with kidnapping that caused the deaths of Alysa Greenwade and Betty James.
June 10, 2002: Travis is found hanged in his cell in the St. Louis County jail in Clayton.
2014: the Illinois State Police enter three unidentified cases into NamUs; a tenant of the Ferguson house is allowed to break her lease.
December 2022: the Columbia case receives a genetic genealogy grant.
March 2025: Columbia police announce the identification of Carol Hemphill.
July 22, 2025: the Illinois State Police and SIUE announce the identification of Kelly Johnson and Crystal Lay.