Morris Solomon Jr was born in Albany, Georgia, on March 15, 1944, and raised largely by a grandmother who beat him daily and for anything: wetting the bed, poor grammar, complaining while she beat him. She made him strip and stand in a corner while she used electrical cords and switches she sent him out to cut himself. He rejoined his parents at thirteen in Isleton, a farming town forty miles from Sacramento, and the abuse continued in a household where both parents assaulted each other in front of him.
He served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, married, had a daughter, divorced, and settled in Sacramento working as a carpenter and general handyman. He had convictions for sexual assault, and had been confined in a state hospital under California's mentally disordered sex offender designation and released. Almost nobody who hired him knew any of it.
He worked in exchange for lodging, which put him alone in empty houses across the Oak Park district. Between 1986 and 1987 he killed at least six women, most of them dependent on drugs, and left them in the buildings: in crawl spaces, under floorboards, in a shallow grave in a back yard. Because the bodies were not found for months, the causes of death could not be established with certainty in several cases; what was consistent was that all of them had been sexually assaulted.
The women named in the record are Yolanda Johnson, twenty-two; Angela Polidori, twenty-five; Maria Apodaca, eighteen; Cherie Washington, sixteen; Linda Vitela, twenty-four; Sheila Jacox, seventeen; and Sharon Massey, twenty-nine.
He was arrested in 1987 after the body of Sandra Robinson was found at a house he had been working on. He was tried in 1992, convicted of six murders, and sentenced to death. He remains under that sentence in California, where no execution has been carried out since 2006.