On an evening in June 1987, a fourteen-year-old girl in Yonkers, New York, went out to buy dinner for her family and did not come home. Over the next three years two more young women were killed in Westchester County, and for most of the following decade nobody treated the three deaths as one case. They happened in different places, the victims were of different ages and did not know one another, and different police departments worked them.
What tied them together was evidence collected at the scenes and kept. In 2000 the Westchester County forensic laboratory was able to test semen samples that had been too small to analyze when they were collected. The results pointed to one man, Patrick Baxter, who was already in a state prison on unrelated charges. He was indicted for all three killings in November 2000, convicted by a jury in 2002, and lost his appeal in 2005. He has denied the killings.
Michelle Walker was fourteen and in the ninth grade at Emerson Junior High School in Yonkers. A News 12 report in 2025 described her as a popular girl from a close family who had just started wearing makeup. One person interviewed for the report called her "a friendly nice face in the neighborhood."
On June 5, 1987, according to News 12, she had plans to meet friends that night at the Westchester County Fair, an annual event at Yonkers Raceway. First she had errands to run. Her parents sent her to a deli and a pizza shop on Warburton Avenue to pick up dinner and milk for her younger sisters. Her plan, as the report put it, was to finish the errands, go home and then go to the fair.
To get home she took the Croton Aqueduct trail, an overgrown and secluded path, rather than the main street. Her mother, Elaine, had not wanted her to use it. Michelle chose it anyway, News 12 reported, because she did not like the catcalls she got from men and boys when she walked along the street. She never reached home.
Accounts differ by a day on the dates. A 2025 News 12 report places her disappearance on the evening of June 5. The Westchester district attorney's office and The New York Times, as reported at the time, gave June 6 for her disappearance or death and June 6 or 7 for the discovery of her body.
The Associated Press, reporting in 2000, said only that Baxter was accused of killing a fourteen-year-old girl in 1987, that she had been sexually assaulted, and that semen had been recovered at the scene. The quantity was too small for the DNA tests available then.
The second victim was a nineteen-year-old woman killed in 1988, and the third a twenty-five-year-old woman killed in 1990. AP gave their ages and the years and said that semen was recovered in each case. New York Times reporting at the time named them as Patricia England of Yonkers, who left home on New Year's Day 1988, her birthday, and was found that February near the Greenburgh and Yonkers border, and Lisa Gibbens, who was killed in Tuckahoe in July 1990 while walking to a train station.
Little more about either woman, her family or her last day appears in the published reporting.
The three victims were of different ages, according to AP, and press reports at the time added that they were of different races. They died in different parts of the county over three years. A 2004 episode of A&E's Cold Case Files about a Westchester serial case described detectives from three police departments in the county working together, though A&E's listing does not name the defendant.
The physical link existed from the start. Semen had been collected at each scene, and each sample was kept. But the 1987 sample was too small to be tested with the methods of the late 1980s, according to AP, and without it there was no way to compare that case with the others. The samples sat in storage while the methods improved.
In 2000 the Westchester County forensic laboratory determined that the same man was responsible for the 1987 and 1990 killings, AP reported. That gave investigators one unknown profile linked to two of the three cases.
They had a name to test it against. Baxter, AP said, "had been a suspect." Neither AP nor the appellate record says when he first came under suspicion or why. The district attorney's office went to court for an order requiring a DNA sample from him. He was then serving a state prison term for reckless endangerment and possession of stolen property.
The sample matched. In June 2000, AP reported, police officials said the DNA linked Baxter to the killings, but he was not charged then. Investigators went on to the third case. Later in the year the laboratory made a positive match to the 1988 killing as well.
On Wednesday, November 15, 2000, an indictment charging Baxter with all three killings was unsealed in Westchester County Court in White Plains. He was thirty-one. His lawyer entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.
The AP report of that day does not say whether Baxter was questioned about the killings or what he said, and no interrogation or statement was ever described in the reporting. District Attorney Jeanine Pirro was quoted in The New York Times as saying she would "definitely consider the person responsible for these crimes a sexual serial murderer."
Baxter was tried before a jury in the Supreme Court, Westchester County. The presiding judge, identified in the appellate record as Justice West, entered the judgment on July 10, 2002. The jury found Baxter guilty of twelve counts of murder in the second degree. The appellate decision does not break the counts down by victim, and how the twelve were divided among the three killings was not reported.
The trial testimony, the witnesses, the defense case and the jury's deliberations are not described in the appellate decision or the AP reporting. The date of the verdict is also unconfirmed; press reports placed it in May 2002. During jury selection the prosecution used a peremptory challenge to remove a Black prospective juror, which became an issue on appeal.
The appellate decision says the trial court imposed sentence on July 10, 2002, but it does not state the term. Press reports from the time gave it as 75 years to life. What Baxter said at sentencing, if anything, was not reported.
Baxter appealed to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, Second Department (docket number 2002-07575). The case was decided on February 28, 2005, by a panel of Justices Schmidt, presiding, Santucci, Luciano and Mastro, and is reported as People v Baxter, 15 AD3d 671, 2005 NY Slip Op 01552.
The court affirmed the conviction on every point. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, it found the proof legally sufficient to establish his guilt on all twelve counts. Using its own power to review the facts, it was satisfied that the verdict was not against the weight of the evidence.
Baxter argued that the prosecution had struck a Black prospective juror because of race, a claim under Batson v Kentucky. The court held that he had not preserved the claim for review, and that it failed in any case: the trial court had accepted the prosecution's race-neutral explanation, and Baxter had not met his burden of showing that the explanation was a pretext. His other arguments, including those he raised himself in a supplemental pro se brief, were rejected as unpreserved or without merit.
Baxter's conviction stands. The Appellate Division affirmed it on February 28, 2005, and no later appeal, whether to the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, or in state or federal court, has been reported.
The case has been revisited on television. A&E's Cold Case Files aired an episode, "The DNA Link," in March 2004 about detectives from three Westchester departments tracking a serial killer. In May 2025 News 12 broadcast a Crime Files special by senior reporter Tara Rosenblum titled "Sins of a Serial Killer: The Baxter Cases," which went back to the night Michelle Walker went out on her errands. News 12 described her killing as the start of a serial killer's "reign of terror."
The case is an example of a kind that became more common as DNA testing improved: physical evidence collected years before it could be used, kept in storage, and later tested against a man who was already known to investigators.
Proven: Baxter was convicted by a jury of twelve counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of a fourteen-year-old girl in 1987, a nineteen-year-old woman in 1988 and a twenty-five-year-old woman in 1990, all in Westchester County. The Appellate Division found the evidence legally sufficient and the verdict consistent with the weight of the evidence.
The DNA: AP reported that semen recovered at each scene was matched to Baxter, the 1987 and 1990 cases first and the 1988 case later. The laboratory methods and statistics presented at trial were not described in the reporting.
Not established: when and why Baxter first became a suspect; whether he made any statement to investigators; how each victim died; and the sentence term, beyond press reports of 75 years to life.
Denied: Baxter pleaded not guilty through his lawyer at the 2000 arraignment, and press reports at the time said he denied killing anyone.
No other killings: no report connects Baxter to any other killing, and none reports a confession.
June 5 or 6, 1987: Michelle Walker, 14, goes out on errands on Warburton Avenue in Yonkers and is killed; dates differ between sources.
1988: A nineteen-year-old woman, named in press reports as Patricia England, is killed in Westchester County.
1990: A twenty-five-year-old woman, named in press reports as Lisa Gibbens, is killed in Westchester County.
2000: The Westchester County forensic laboratory links the 1987 and 1990 cases to one DNA profile; a court order obtains a sample from Baxter, who is in state prison for reckless endangerment and possession of stolen property.
June 2000: Police officials say the DNA links Baxter to the killings; he is not charged.
Later in 2000: A positive match is made to the 1988 killing.
November 15, 2000: An indictment charging Baxter, 31, with all three killings is unsealed in Westchester County Court; he pleads not guilty.
2002: A jury in the Supreme Court, Westchester County, convicts him of twelve counts of second-degree murder.
July 10, 2002: Justice West enters judgment and imposes sentence, reported at the time as 75 years to life.
March 2004: A&E's Cold Case Files airs "The DNA Link," about a Westchester serial case.
February 28, 2005: The Appellate Division, Second Department, affirms the conviction.
May 2025: News 12 airs "Sins of a Serial Killer: The Baxter Cases."