Billy Chemirmir, Charged in the Deaths of 22 Older Women, Is Killed by His Cellmate in a Texas Prison
Serving life for two capital murders and charged in the deaths of 22 older women, Chemirmir was found dead in his prison cell. Officials said his cellmate killed him.
Published
Billy Chemirmir was found dead in his cell at the Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, Texas, early on Tuesday, September 19, 2023. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his cellmate, a man serving a sentence for murder, was the one who killed him. Chemirmir was 50. The department's Office of Inspector General opened an investigation, and officials released no other details that day, not even the cellmate's name.
A former caregiver in senior living communities, Chemirmir had been charged with killing 22 older women in North Texas over about two years and was convicted of killing two. Dallas County juries found him guilty of capital murder in the smothering death of Lu Thi Harris, after his first trial in that case ended in a mistrial, and in October 2022 in the death of Mary Brooks, 87. He was serving two sentences of life without parole. He had been indicted on 22 capital murder charges, 13 in Dallas County and nine in Collin County, and maintained throughout that he was innocent.
The case against him began in March 2018, when Mary Bartel, a 91-year-old resident of a Plano retirement community, survived an attack in her apartment and told police a man had forced his way in, tried to smother her with a pillow and taken her jewelry. Police found Chemirmir the next day in the parking lot of his apartment complex holding jewelry and cash, having just thrown away a large red jewelry box. Papers inside it led them to Harris's home, where they found her dead in her bedroom. Most of the deaths later charged against him had first been ruled natural, even when families reported missing jewelry and circumstances that did not add up.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot had planned to win two convictions and then dismiss the rest of his county's cases. In August 2023, Collin County's district attorney, Greg Willis, said he would not seek the death penalty and did not plan to try the nine indictments his office held. None of the other cases had gone to trial when Chemirmir died.
The families were told early that morning, and some said that afternoon that the news brought relief. "My mother died in fear. This man did not have a peaceful passing. There's some relief in feeling that he didn't get off easily," said Shannon Dion, whose mother, Doris Gleason, 92, was among the women Chemirmir was charged with killing.
The killing came during a statewide lockdown. Earlier that month the department had locked down its 98 prisons to fight a rise in dangerous contraband and killings behind bars, and the Coffield Unit was among those still locked down.
Sources
- Convicted murderer Billy Chemirmir killed by cellmate in Texas prison: TDCJ, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, with the Associated Press
- Convicted murderer Billy Chemirmir killed in prison by his cellmate, officials say, The Dallas Morning News, via The Spokesman-Review