The day before the Jackson family disappeared, Melvin Rees sat up with a friend named Glenn Moser and talked about whether murder could ever be acceptable. Rees was on Benzedrine. He told Moser that killing was simply another part of the human experience, one he wanted to take part in. "You can't say it's wrong to kill," Moser remembered him saying. "Only individual standards make it right or wrong." Months later, when the bodies were found, Moser went back to Rees and asked him straight out. Rees neither confessed nor denied it, and turned evasive. Moser wrote an anonymous letter to the authorities in Fredericksburg, Virginia, naming him.
Rees was a jazz musician, one of the better known on the Washington club circuit, who played saxophone, piano and clarinet; other musicians called him Dave. Most sources give his birth year as 1928, and his army service, which began in October 1946, rules out the 1933 that also circulates. Little is known of his childhood. He went to the Edwards Military Institute at Salemburg, North Carolina, and the Woodward School for Boys in Washington, graduated from Hyattsville High School in Maryland, and served as a military musician in Europe until 1953. He then studied at the University of Maryland in College Park and left before graduating. In July 1954 he married a fellow student, Elaine Rachmaninoff; they had a son, Philip, and the marriage lasted five years. In 1955 he was arrested for trying to force a thirty-six-year-old woman into his car. She got away and would not press charges, and the case was dropped.
On June 26, 1957, Margaret Harold was being driven near Annapolis by her boyfriend, an army sergeant on weekend leave, when a green Chrysler forced their car off the road. The driver walked up, showed a nickel-plated .38 revolver, and demanded cigarettes and money. When they refused, he shot her in the face at point-blank range. The sergeant ran across the fields to a farmhouse and called the police. By the time officers reached the car, the killer had stripped Harold's body and sexually assaulted it.
Searching the area, the police found an abandoned cinder-block building with a broken basement window. Inside, violent pornography and autopsy photographs of women had been taped all over the walls. They also found a University of Maryland yearbook photograph of a woman named Wanda Tipton. Questioned, she said she did not know anyone like the tall, dark-haired man the sergeant described. The case went cold. Tipton later admitted that she had dated Rees and had ended it when he told her he was married.
On January 11, 1959, Carroll Jackson, twenty-nine, his wife Mildred, and their daughters Susan, five, and Janet, eighteen months, were driving home from a family visit in the Apple Grove area of Virginia when they disappeared. A relative coming home from the same gathering found their car abandoned at the roadside, with no sign of a struggle. The same afternoon a local couple had been chased by a tall, dark-haired man in an older blue Chevrolet who flashed his lights, forced them off the road and got out and walked toward them before they reversed away.
On March 4, two men gathering brush near Fredericksburg found Carroll Jackson's body in a ditch, his hands tied behind him and a bullet in the back of his head. Janet was underneath him. She had been put into the ditch alive and had suffocated under her father's weight. On March 21 the bodies of Mildred and Susan were found in woods near Annapolis. Both had been tortured and sexually assaulted before they died. Near where they lay stood the same cinder-block building searched after the Harold murder, and inside it the police found a red button from Mildred's dress. The investigators concluded that one man had committed both crimes.
The case drew crowds, and the self-described psychic Peter Hurkos, who handled the Jacksons' belongings, visited both scenes and led investigators to a trash collector who confessed. When Rees was caught instead, The Washington Post ridiculed Hurkos. Moser's letter had also pointed to the Harold murder, since he and Rees had been working as salesmen around Annapolis at the time. Rees had left his house with no forwarding address, and the police could not find him at the clubs. In 1960 Moser told them that Rees had been in touch and was working at a music store in West Memphis, Arkansas, where he had gone with Pat Barrington, a dancer and actress he had been living with in Hyattsville. He was arrested there on June 24, 1960. In his home the police found written notes describing the Jackson murders, and Margaret Harold's boyfriend identified him as the man who had shot her.
He was tried in three courts. Maryland convicted him of Harold's murder and sentenced him to life. In 1961 a federal court convicted him under the Federal Kidnapping Act of the interstate kidnapping and murder of Mildred Jackson and gave him another life sentence. Virginia then sentenced him to death for the other Jackson murders. The sentence was never carried out. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found mentally unable to assist in his own defense, and his habeas corpus case reached the Supreme Court in 1967, where it sat undecided for nearly three decades. His sentence was reduced to life in 1972. He died in federal custody at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, on October 26, 1995, and the Supreme Court then dismissed the case.
Investigators also suspected him of four other killings of young women around the University of Maryland: Mary Shomette, Michael Ann Ryan, Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable, all raped and murdered in separate attacks. He was never charged with any of them. Someone else later confessed to the Shomette and Ryan killings. Rees reportedly told a reporter in 1985 that he had killed Venable and Fellers in 1956, and that claim was never tested in court. Five murders were proved against him; nine is the count only if every one of the suspicions is added.