In the spring of 1977, people living in the high-rise apartment area of western Alexandria, Virginia, were afraid to walk to their cars alone. Within a few weeks, two women from the same apartment complex had been found dead and a third was missing. Police then reopened the strangling of a young woman from a nearby building the previous August, and in May they learned that a woman found dead in neighboring Fairfax County in March might belong to the same series.
On May 17, 1977, the man police had been watching around the clock confessed. He was Montie Ralph Rissell, 18, a high school dropout who lived with his mother within walking distance of the victims' homes. In September he pleaded guilty in Alexandria Circuit Court to four counts of first-degree murder. He also admitted to Fairfax police that he had killed the fifth woman. He has been in prison ever since, and in November 2025 the Virginia Parole Board turned him down again.
The outline of Rissell's early life comes from court records summarized by The Washington Post in the days after his arrest. His parents separated in 1965 and divorced in 1968. His mother remarried and was divorced again in 1971.
By his early teens he was in serious trouble. Court records listed charges ranging from disrupting classes to burglary, robbery and attempted rape. According to the Post, his juvenile record included a rape in 1973 and an attempted robbery in 1975. He received psychiatric treatment, was placed on juvenile probation and was committed to the state Department of Corrections as a juvenile. From February 1974 to August 1975 he was a patient in a children's hospital in Miami; the Post later described this as more than a year in a Florida mental hospital under court supervision. Because his fingerprints had been taken after a juvenile arrest, they were on file with Alexandria police. That fact would decide the case.
He attended T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria. The school withdrew him on April 20, 1977, after he stopped attending. Former classmates who spoke to reporters remembered him in contradictory ways: some as friendly and polite, others as short-tempered and a heavy drinker. At one point he worked at a service station.
The first of the five women to die was Aura Marina Gabor. She was born in Guatemala and lived in Rissell's own apartment complex in the Landmark section of western Alexandria, a few hundred yards from the larger complex where three of the later victims lived. The Post gave her age as 26 in most reports and as 24 in two May 1977 stories.
In early August 1976 she was found strangled in a creek near the interstate that runs through that part of the city. For months her death was treated as an isolated case. Only after the bodies of two more women were found in the spring of 1977 did Alexandria police reopen her file, and even then, in early May, they had not formally linked it to the new deaths.
Ursula Miltenberger was 22 and lived in Springfield, in Fairfax County. She was a management trainee at a fast-food restaurant in Lincolnia, near western Alexandria. On March 6, 1977, a Fairfax County police officer found her body in a field near Burke, in western Fairfax County, about a mile from her car.
At a preliminary hearing in June 1977, the Fairfax commonwealth's attorney, Robert F. Horan Jr., said that Rissell had told police she picked him up while he was hitchhiking, and that she had been stabbed to death. Her killing was the only one of the five outside the city of Alexandria, which is why it was handled by a different prosecutor in a different court.
Aletha Byrd worked in the personnel or employment section of a large Washington-area department store at Tysons Corner. The Post gave her age as 34 in early May and as 35 after her body was found. She lived in the same apartment building as Jeanette McClelland.
A friend reported her missing on April 10, 1977. Her car was found in a parking lot across the interstate from her home. For more than five weeks she was listed as missing and presumed dead, and extra officers were assigned to search for her. Her body was found in a wooded area of western Alexandria on the same day in May that police searched Rissell's car and found her wallet.
Gladys R. Bradley was 27 and worked as a distribution clerk at a post office in Washington, D.C. She lived in the same apartment complex as Byrd and McClelland. On the evening of Saturday, April 30, 1977, she was found in a stream about a mile from her home, near another apartment complex. The medical examiner found that she had drowned, and police treated her death as a homicide from the start.
Jeanette M. McClelland was 24 and worked as a proofreader for a printing firm. Friends described her as quiet and sensitive. She lived with her father in the same apartment building as Aletha Byrd. Not long before her death she had told her father that she had seen a man with a knife in the building's elevator.
She was found stabbed to death in a culvert near her home on May 5, 1977. The Post's reports spell her first name in several ways (Jeanette, Janette, Jeannete); Jeanette is the spelling in the paper's most detailed report on the investigation.
By the first week of May 1977, Alexandria police had two confirmed homicides in the same apartment complex within a week, a third resident missing, and an unsolved strangling from the previous summer a few hundred yards away. All of the Alexandria women had been last seen late at night. Their homes, their bodies and their cars were all found within about a mile of one another.
Captain Clyde Scott, chief of the city's criminal investigation division, put all 21 of the department's detectives on the cases. The FBI gave technical help but was not otherwise involved. Scott told the Post on May 7 that police had no strong leads or suspects and did not yet know whether one person or several were responsible. He said he saw no ritual or execution-style pattern. Neither McClelland nor Bradley had a purse with her, but police said that was not enough to establish robbery as a motive. Laboratory tests on whether any of the women had been sexually assaulted were still pending. Detectives thought the women might have been approached in the parking lot of their complex.
A research team began going through old records: reports of prowlers and peeping toms, and lists of people recently released from prisons and mental institutions. Scott called it "an elimination process." Residents told reporters about vandalism, noise and fights at the complex, and the management company declined to discuss security. In the Landmark area, the Post reported, residents became afraid to go out alone or unarmed.
Police questioned several possible suspects. In mid-May, Fairfax County police detained a 19-year-old for questioning about the Miltenberger killing; he was cleared of that case and of the Alexandria deaths within days, and he was never named in the press.
The break came from a single telephone call. On May 5, 1977, the day McClelland's body was found, an Alexandria detective called Fairfax County police to ask whether the Alexandria deaths might be connected to the March 6 killing of Ursula Miltenberger. Captain Scott declined to name the detective.
Fairfax police sent Alexandria a set of fingerprints that had been lifted from Miltenberger's car. One of them matched Rissell, whose prints were on file from his juvenile arrest. Investigators quickly found other links. A source told the Post that Rissell had worked at a service station where Miltenberger had probably had her car serviced, and a key found among her belongings suggested she had access to an apartment near his home.
Rissell lived in the same high-rise area as the other victims. Fairfax and Alexandria officers put him under what the Post called a round-the-clock "shotgun stakeout." They kept watching him even when he rode along with an assistant apartment manager on night security patrols of the complex.
On May 13, 1977, police questioned Rissell about the killings. They held him on a malicious wounding charge from a fight at a party in Fairfax County the previous month, a case unconnected with the deaths. Over two days of questioning he denied any part in them.
On May 17 police searched the car he had been driving. It was a 1969 Ford bought with money from his mother and titled, registered and insured in her name. It had broken down on the Capital Beltway in Maryland three or four weeks earlier and been towed back to the Lincolnia area. His mother gave written permission for the search. Inside, officers found Aletha Byrd's wallet, credit cards and key case, a comb, and a kitchen steak knife. Byrd's body was found the same day.
According to police testimony at a later hearing, when officers told Rissell they had found the missing woman's wallet in the car, he said, "I did it." That day he dictated a 19-page statement about the Miltenberger killing to Fairfax investigators, and in May he told police he had killed four women in Alexandria and a fifth in Fairfax County. Fairfax investigator Carl F. Pfeiff later testified that Rissell said he did not want to die and did not want a lawyer present while he gave the statement. Later on May 17 police also found a wristwatch belonging to Jeanette McClelland in his apartment.
Fairfax County then charged him with Miltenberger's murder. The Post reported his arrest in the five killings on May 19. Police Chief John Holihan said the arrest might ease the fear in the neighborhood. In the first reports, police said they did not suspect robbery or sexual assault as the motive; the indictments that followed charged both abduction and rape.
On May 20, 1977, an Alexandria grand jury indicted Rissell on 12 counts: abduction, rape and murder of each of the four Alexandria women. The grand jury heard about 30 minutes of testimony from Alexandria homicide investigator John W. Turner. Commonwealth's Attorney William L. Cowhig said he would seek life imprisonment and hoped to try the case by September. Virginia's new death penalty law, due to take effect that July, could not be applied to crimes committed before it.
Rissell was held in the Fairfax County jail and brought to Alexandria for a hearing before Circuit Judge Donald H. Kent, where counsel was assigned. In Fairfax, attorney David C. Roehrenbeck was appointed to defend him, and Judge G. William Hammer agreed to a defense request for a psychiatrist to examine him.
On June 8, 1977, Judge Hammer held a preliminary hearing in Fairfax County General District Court. Horan relied on the dictated statement, which the judge read; the prosecutor refused to let reporters see it even though it was entered into evidence. Roehrenbeck asked Pfeiff whether officers had told Rissell they did not care if he went to prison, or that they only wanted to help him because he was sick. Pfeiff said no. The defense called no witnesses. Hammer found probable cause and sent the case to a Fairfax grand jury, which met on July 18. In July the grand jury indicted Rissell on charges of murder, rape and abduction in Miltenberger's death.
Rissell's Alexandria lawyers, Stephen R. Pickard and Stefan C. Long, asked Judge Kent to throw out both his statements and the evidence from the car. They argued that he had been arrested on May 13 under a "preconceived plan," questioned over a weekend before a lawyer could be appointed, and pressed into confessing only after being confronted with the victim's property. They also argued that the car search was illegal because he had not been asked for permission.
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney T. Rawles Jones Jr. answered that the car belonged in law to Rissell's mother, who had authority to allow the search and had signed for it. After an hour-and-a-half hearing in August 1977, during which Rissell sat without expression, Judge Kent ruled that "the statements were voluntarily and understandingly made and the search was legal." The ruling left the prosecution's main evidence intact.
In September 1977 Rissell pleaded guilty in Alexandria Circuit Court, before Judge Kent, to four counts of first-degree murder: one each for Aura Marina Gabor, Gladys R. Bradley, Jeanette McClelland and Aletha Byrd. The Post reported the pleas on September 24, 1977. His only words in court were "guilty" and "yes."
Under the agreement, prosecutors dropped the four rape counts and four abduction counts. They said those charges could not have added to his time in prison. Prosecutors also agreed to his request that he receive psychiatric help in prison. Cowhig said there had been negotiations between Rissell, his lawyers and the prosecutors "every other day" for at least three weeks. Asked whether pleading guilty was his client's own choice, Pickard said, "It's always his decision."
Because the rape and abduction counts were dropped, no court ever ruled on them. In legal terms Rissell stands convicted of the four Alexandria murders; the sexual assaults are part of the original charges and of his own later accounts, not of any conviction.
At the time, first-degree murder in Virginia carried a sentence of 20 years to life. The Post explained that two or more life sentences would make him eligible for parole after 20 years, while anything less than two life terms would make him eligible after 15. Sentencing was set for October 11, and the Fairfax trial for October 12.
Judge Kent sentenced Rissell on October 11, 1977. The Washington Post's report the next day ran under the headline "Rissell Gets 4 Life Terms In Murders."
The Fairfax County case for Ursula Miltenberger's death, in which he had given police a dictated confession, was scheduled for trial the day after the Alexandria sentencing. The outcome of that case, and whether it added a fifth life term, were not reported. In a 2019 local news item, ALXnow reported that Rissell was serving five consecutive life sentences.
Rissell has spent nearly all of his adult life in Virginia prisons. In 2019 ALXnow reported that he was held at Pocahontas State Correctional Center. The same report recounted an episode from his own later account of the killings: one woman he abducted told him that her father had cancer, and Rissell, whose brother had cancer, let her go. The woman has not been identified.
In 2017 his case was dramatized in the Netflix series Mindhunter. ALXnow described Rissell as a major focus of the fourth episode of the first season.
The Virginia Parole Board publishes its monthly decisions with reasons.
The board's list for November 2025 shows that it decided not to grant parole to Montie Ralph Rissell, inmate number 1113794, on November 3, 2025. The list gives his age as 67 and classes his case as one of dual eligibility. Two board members, Lloyd Banks and Phil Ferguson, voted not to grant. A third, Michelle Dermyer, voted not to grant on November 10, 2025, writing that release at that point would diminish the seriousness of the crime, and that the board encouraged him to keep moving in a positive direction.
The board's chair, Patricia West, wrote that she had reviewed Rissell's file and voted not to grant, recommending a three-year deferral. Her reasons were the crimes themselves; the serious nature and circumstances of the offenses; that release would diminish the seriousness of the crime; an extensive criminal record; prior failures under community supervision, which suggested he would be unlikely to comply with release conditions; and a history of violence and of substance abuse. The board's general reasons also included a need for further participation in institutional work or education programs and its judgment that he would be a risk to the community.
As of the Virginia Parole Board's November 2025 decision, Rissell remained in the custody of the Virginia Department of Corrections, serving life sentences, with his next parole review deferred. His prison was last reported in 2019, when ALXnow named Pocahontas State Correctional Center.
Several details about the case vary between sources or remain uncertain.
The number of life sentences. The Post's headline after the Alexandria sentencing reported four life terms, matching the four Alexandria murder pleas. ALXnow's 2019 report gave five consecutive life sentences. The difference is most likely the Fairfax case, but how or when it was decided was not reported.
The dates of the killings. When it reported his pleas, the Post described the four Alexandria murders as committed between August 1976 and March 1977, yet its own earlier reports place Byrd's disappearance in April and the deaths of Bradley and McClelland in late April and early May 1977.
Ages and names. The Post gave Gabor's age as 26 and as 24, and Byrd's as 34 and as 35. Gabor's name appears as Aura Marina Gabor, Atira Marina Gabor and Aura Merina Garbor in different 1977 reports, and McClelland's first name is spelled three ways.
The rapes. Rissell was indicted for rape in all five cases, and the charges were dropped in the Alexandria plea agreement. Accounts that give him a specific total of rapes rest on his own statements or on secondary retellings, not on any court finding.
The FBI interviews. Rissell is widely described as one of the prisoners interviewed by FBI agents in the research that grew into criminal profiling. The content of those interviews has not been reliably reported.
1965: His parents separate; they divorce in 1968.
1971: His mother's second marriage ends in divorce.
1973: Juvenile record includes a rape.
February 1974 to August 1975: Patient in a children's hospital in Miami under court supervision.
1975: Juvenile record includes an attempted robbery.
Early August 1976: Aura Marina Gabor is found strangled in a creek in western Alexandria.
March 6, 1977: Ursula Miltenberger, 22, is found dead near Burke, Fairfax County.
April 10, 1977: Aletha Byrd is reported missing.
April 20, 1977: T. C. Williams High School withdraws Rissell for nonattendance.
April 30, 1977: Gladys R. Bradley is found drowned in a stream in western Alexandria.
May 5, 1977: Jeanette McClelland is found dead; the same day an Alexandria detective calls Fairfax police, leading to the fingerprint match.
May 13, 1977: Rissell is questioned and held on an unrelated Fairfax malicious wounding charge.
May 17, 1977: Police search the car he drove and find Byrd's wallet; Byrd's body is found; Rissell confesses and is charged in Fairfax with Miltenberger's murder.
May 20, 1977: Alexandria grand jury indicts him on 12 counts covering four women.
June 8, 1977: Fairfax preliminary hearing finds probable cause.
July 1977: Fairfax grand jury indicts him for murder, rape and abduction.
August 1977: Judge Donald H. Kent refuses to suppress his statements and the car evidence.
September 1977: Pleads guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in Alexandria; rape and abduction counts dropped.
October 11, 1977: Sentenced in Alexandria Circuit Court; reported as four life terms.
2017: Portrayed in the first season of Netflix's Mindhunter.
2019: Reported serving five consecutive life sentences at Pocahontas State Correctional Center.
November 3, 2025: Virginia Parole Board does not grant parole; the chair recommends a three-year deferral.