Billy Chemirmir Convicted at Retrial of Smothering Lu Thi Harris, 81, in Dallas
His first murder conviction came five months after a deadlocked jury. He was still charged in the deaths of 17 more older women.
Published
Lu Thi Harris was found dead in the bedroom of her Dallas home in March 2018. She was 81. There was lipstick smeared on her pillow. On Thursday, April 28, 2022, after deliberating for well under an hour, a Dallas County jury convicted Billy Chemirmir, 49, of capital murder in her smothering death. Because prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty, the verdict carried an automatic sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
It was the second time a jury had heard the case. The first, in November 2021, deadlocked 11 to 1, and the judge declared a mistrial. The families of the women Chemirmir was accused of killing said afterward that they had been stunned there was a holdout.
The trial was about one death, but prosecutors set it beside two others to show jurors what they called a pattern of stalking, smothering and stealing. On March 19, 2018, the day before Harris was found, 91-year-old Mary Annis Bartel opened the door of her apartment at an independent living community for older people to a man wearing green rubber gloves. "He said: 'Don't fight me, lie on the bed,'" she recalled in a taped deposition, made before her death in 2020. He pressed a pillow over her face and took her wedding band and engagement ring. She survived. Prosecutors also presented evidence about the death of Mary Brooks, 87, about six weeks earlier.
Bartel's attack led police to Chemirmir. A report of a suspicious person at her community gave them a license plate, and the next day detectives watched him pull into the parking lot of his apartment complex and throw things into a dumpster. When they took him out of his car he was holding jewelry and cash. A large red jewelry box in the dumpster held documents that led officers to Harris's home, where they found her. Prosecutors told jurors that Chemirmir and Harris had both been at the same Walmart hours before she died, and showed surveillance video to prove it, and that he had listed jewelry belonging to Bartel and Brooks on an online selling site.
Chemirmir, who has maintained his innocence, did not testify, and his defense rested without calling a single witness, as it had at the first trial.
"This is a just verdict and a delayed sense of justice the families of Lu Thi Harris, Mary Bartel, Mary Brooks and Mr. Chemirmir's other alleged victims so crave and deserve," Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said. Cliff Harris, whose mother-in-law, Miriam Nelson, was among the women Chemirmir was charged with killing, had sat behind him during part of the trial. "You could feel evil there," he said.
The conviction was his first. He was still charged with capital murder in the deaths of 17 more women, 12 in Dallas County and five in Collin County, most of them found in their apartments at independent living communities, and Creuzot said his office planned to try him for at least one more.
What came next. Chemirmir was convicted of a second capital murder, in the death of Mary Brooks, in October 2022. He was killed in prison in September 2023 (see Related News). The two convictions are the only killings a court found him guilty of; the other deaths remained charges, and the number of deaths linked to him grew as investigators reopened cases first ruled natural. Brooks's age is given as 87 by the Associated Press and as 88 in NBC's list of indictments.
Sources
- Suspected Texas Serial Killer Convicted At Retrial In Murder Of Elderly Woman, Associated Press, via Oxygen
- Accused Texas Serial Killer Billy Chemirmir Found Guilty of Capital Murder, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth (via NBC New York)
- Dallas serial killer Billy Chemirmir charged with killing 22 Texas women gets 2nd conviction, WFAA (Dallas)