Montie Rissell killed five women before his nineteenth birthday, and every step that led there was already on a file somewhere.
He was born on November 28, 1958 and spent his first seven years in Wellington, Kansas; his father left when he was seven, and his mother had married and divorced twice by the time he was twelve. He had an older brother and sister. He raped a woman at fourteen. He was institutionalized in 1973 after a run of lesser charges and released in 1975, and within weeks he was arrested for trying to rob a woman at knifepoint in an elevator a few blocks from his home. For that he was given a five-year suspended sentence. He dropped out of T. C. Williams High School at seventeen.
Then, between August 1976 and May 1977, five women died in the west end of Alexandria, Virginia. Most of them lived in the same apartment buildings he did, or a short walk from them.
Aura Marina Gabor was twenty-six and lived in his own complex on the 400 block of North Armistead Street; she is described as a masseuse in one account and a sex worker in another. On the night of August 4, 1976 Rissell's girlfriend had ended their relationship by letter; he drove to see her, found her with another man, said nothing, went home and drank. Around midnight he saw Gabor coming back to her apartment in his own complex. He threatened her with a knife. By his own account she offered him sex instead of money, and what enraged him was that she behaved as though she was enjoying it. He strangled her with her own bra and drowned her in a creek off Shirley Highway.
Ursula Miltenberger was twenty-two and a manager trainee at a McDonald's near the apartments. She was raped and stabbed, and her body was found on March 6, 1977 in woodland near Burke, in Fairfax County, with her hands and feet still bound. His fingerprints turned up on her car.
Aletha Byrd was thirty-four, a personnel counselor at the Woodward & Lothrop store at Tysons Corner, and lived in the complex. She went missing on April 4, 1977 (April 10 by another account) and was stabbed fourteen times in the chest. Nobody found her for six weeks.
Gladys Ross Bradley was twenty-seven, a post office clerk and a divorced mother, and she lived in the complex too. Later in April he waited outside her door with a steak knife taken from his mother's kitchen. He raped her twice, dragged her by the feet to a nearby creek and drowned her. She was found on April 30 (April 29 in another account).
Jeanette McClelland was twenty-four, lived at the Hamlet Apartments, and proofread for Bru-El Graphics in Springfield. She finished a shift at three in the morning on May 5, 1977 and he followed her home. She was raped and stabbed and left in a culvert near Shirley Highway. Accounts of how many times she was stabbed run from twenty-four to a hundred.
Alexandria called it the West End Murders. Four women were dead and the city knew it.
Police already suspected Rissell and had him under surveillance. On May 18, 1977 they searched his car and found Aletha Byrd's wallet, her keys and her comb. Her body was found that same day (May 17, the day before, by one account), in woodland near Polk and Pegram Streets, a woman missing six weeks, her property in his car and her body located within hours of each other.
He was eighteen. He confessed to all five.
He was charged with abducting, raping and murdering the five women, and he pleaded guilty to the murders in exchange for the abduction and rape counts being dropped. That bargain is why the twelve rapes usually attributed to him are admitted rather than proved: no court ever heard evidence on any of them.
It also produced a discrepancy that has followed the case ever since. Some accounts give five consecutive life sentences and some give four, and the explanation is jurisdictional. The Washington Post reported on September 24, 1977 that Rissell had pleaded guilty the previous day to murdering four young Alexandria women, and the four named in accounts of that plea are Gabor, Bradley, Byrd and McClelland. The missing one is Ursula Miltenberger, the only victim whose body was found outside the city, in Fairfax County. An Alexandria court could not dispose of a Fairfax killing. Which court entered the fifth sentence, and when, is not recorded anywhere that has surfaced.
He was sentenced on October 11, 1977, still eighteen years old.
In prison he wrote a 461-page account of the killings, and in June 1989 he was one of twelve inmates who earned associate degrees from Southside Virginia Community College. He became one of the offenders the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit interviewed for the study that produced criminal profiling. It is why a teenager from Alexandria appears in the professional literature, and in the 2017 Netflix series Mindhunter, where Sam Strike played him, far more often than the size of his case would suggest. The interviews are cited for what he said about control, about how his own explanations fell apart under questioning, and about how fast the interval between killings shortened.
He has been eligible for parole since 1995 and has never been granted it.
The Virginia Parole Board publishes its decisions with reasons, and the most recent turned him down on November 3, 2025, certified a week later. Lloyd Banks and Phil Ferguson voted not to grant. Michelle Dermyer wrote that release would diminish the seriousness of the crime and encouraged him to keep moving in a positive direction. The chair, Patricia West, voted not to grant and recommended a three-year deferral, citing the crimes themselves, the circumstances of the offenses, an extensive criminal record, prior failures under community supervision, a history of violence and a history of substance abuse.
A three-year deferral means there is no annual hearing now. Nothing is due until about 2028.
He is sixty-seven and held at Lawrenceville Correctional Center, though one account places him at Pocahontas State Correctional Center instead. He has been in prison for forty-nine years, which is more than two and a half times as long as he had been alive on the day they searched his car.