Rees was born in 1933 and worked as a pianist and saxophonist in and around Washington. On June 26, 1957 he shot Margaret Harold, a twenty-six-year-old army secretary, in a car outside Annapolis, Maryland, after she resisted him. Police searching a derelict building nearby found a scrapbook of pornography and crime reports on the walls of a room inside.
On January 11, 1959, on a road in Virginia, he forced a car off the highway and abducted Carroll Jackson, twenty-nine, his wife Mildred, twenty-seven, and their daughters Susan, aged eighteen months, and Janet, five. Jackson was shot and his younger daughter was found beneath his body, having suffocated. Mildred Jackson and Janet were held, assaulted and killed, and were found in Maryland weeks later. The American press called him the Sex Beast.
He was caught because of a letter. A musician acquaintance, Glenn Moser, who had discussed the killings with him and had been disturbed by what Rees said, wrote to the police naming him. Rees was arrested in Arkansas on June 24, 1960. In his parents' house police found a typed account of the Jackson killings written in the first person, and Mildred Jackson's stocking.
He was convicted in Virginia and sentenced to death in 1961, and separately convicted of the Harold murder in Maryland. The death sentence was commuted in 1972 following the Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia, and he died in the federal medical centre at Springfield, Missouri, in 1995. Four further killings in Maryland were attributed to him and never charged, which is the range of five to nine in this roster.