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Navy Veteran John Eric Armstrong Gets a Second Life Term in the Detroit Strangulations

Already serving life for Wendy Jordan's murder, Armstrong was sentenced to life again for killing Kelly Jean Hood, one of three women found in a Detroit rail yard in 2000.

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Illustration of case files and a legal pad on a table in an empty courtroom. Not an actual scene from the case.

In January 2000, John Eric Armstrong reported finding a woman's body on the bank of the Rouge River. She was Wendy Jordan, 39, and he had killed her.

By June 18, 2001, Armstrong had two life sentences for murder. A jury convicted the Navy veteran of Jordan's first-degree murder in March 2001, and he was sentenced to life without parole on April 3. On June 18 a second life term for first-degree murder was imposed in Wayne County, this time for Kelly Jean Hood, 34. Hood was one of three women found dead in a railroad yard in southwest Detroit in April 2000, along with Robbin Brown, 20, and Rose Marie Felt, 32.

Police took Armstrong, then 26, into custody two days after the three women were found. He had served aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, left the Navy in April 1999 and moved to Dearborn Heights. He was charged in the strangulation killings of five women in the Detroit area, among them Monica Johnson, and in assaults on three other people, who survived. Detroit police said he was also being investigated in the killings of eleven women over an eight-year span, in North Carolina, Seattle, Honolulu, Virginia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore, but none of those killings was confirmed. Armstrong later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of Robbin Brown, Rose Marie Felt and Monica Johnson.

One later account says Armstrong was convicted of all four of the remaining murders on June 18, 2001, while Michigan Department of Corrections records list the three second-degree murder pleas with sentences dated August 21, 2003.

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