Raymont Hopewell said nine words to the families before he was sentenced. "I just wanted to tell everybody that I'm sorry for their losses," he said on September 14, 2006, staring ahead with no expression, and two women burst into tears and hurried out of the Baltimore courtroom. Isaiah Carter, the grandson of one of the five people he had killed, said afterward that it would have been better if he had said nothing at all. "It was very fake, unreal."
He had grown up in the streets of west Baltimore where he killed. Between February 1999 and August 2005 he got into the homes of older people in his own neighborhood, most of them women, raped and beat or strangled them, and robbed them. Several of the victims knew him. Jerrold Wingfield, whose seventy-eight-year-old mother Lydia was the last to die, told the court he had played with Hopewell as a boy.
The first was Constance Wills, sixty, a friend of his family, on February 21, 1999. He broke into her home, tied her wrists, sexually assaulted her, beat and strangled her in her bedroom and took her valuables, and her daughter and a neighbor found her. Her surname is spelled Willis in some reports. On November 30, 2002 he went into the Greenwell Apartments, a building for elderly and disabled residents in northern Baltimore where his own mother lived, broke into the apartment across the hall from hers and raped and strangled Sarah Shannon, eighty-eight, in her bed. A relative found her after she stopped answering the phone. On May 31, 2005 he got into the apartment of Sadie Mack, seventy-eight, in Sandtown, tied her hands with a shoestring, raped and strangled her; her son Ernest found her that day. On August 21 he tied Carlton Crawford, eighty-two and deaf, by the ankles and beat him to death. Neighbors heard the noise and called security, and when a guard knocked, Hopewell opened the door, said Crawford had fallen, refused to let her in, dared her to call the police, and ran once she walked away. On August 31 he came to the Windsor Hills door of Lydia Rowena Wingfield, seventy-eight, introduced himself only as Money and said he had known her son Jerrold as a boy. She telephoned Jerrold to ask about the stranger. That afternoon Hopewell broke in, tied her up, raped and strangled her, and Jerrold found her.
Nobody treated the deaths as a series. Older people found dead at home were recorded one at a time. In 2001 he had been arrested for trying to sell cocaine to an undercover officer, and in September 2002, two months before Sarah Shannon died, he was given two years' probation. On April 10, 2004 he was sentenced to eighteen months for violating it, and under a 2002 city policy he should have been made to give a DNA sample; nobody asked him for one. Moved to a halfway house, he walked away on a furlough on September 2, 2004 and was put on a local wanted list. A year later he was still at large. On September 2, 2005 he broke into the west Baltimore home of a sixty-three-year-old woman, ate from her kitchen, found her hiding in the cellar and raped her at knifepoint. On September 9 he cut through a screen door on Spaulding Avenue and threatened a couple with a knife for $150, and fled when the woman said she had called the police. The next day he forced his way into the home of Thomas Tabron, eighty, and Amelia Gertrude Tabron, seventy-six, told her he had come to kill them both, sliced her hand when she grabbed for the knife, fought her husband, and left with some money.
The Crawford guard picked him out of a lineup, and he was arrested on September 20, 2005. Jerrold Wingfield, meanwhile, had told police what his mother said, and a friend of his recognized the nickname: Money was Raymont Hopewell, a boy they had played with. Once he was in custody his DNA was entered into the system, and it tied him to Crawford, to Lydia Wingfield and to the other attacks.
In December 2005 he was charged with five counts of first-degree murder, and Judge John M. Glynn put a gag order on the case. Prosecutors offered a plea in place of the death penalty. On August 11, 2006 he pleaded guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court to five murders, four rapes and robbery with a deadly weapon, assault and burglary, under a deal meant to convict him of at least one count in every crime charged and to give him one of the longest terms any city prosecutor could remember.
At the sentencing nine people spoke. Rosellen McDavid, sixty-three, who uses a cane, described how he broke into her home, ordered her down into the cellar and raped her. John Mack said he did not want to call his mother's killer a person or a man, and Ivan Wingfield said he wished Hopewell could be put to death. The prosecutor, Matthew Fraling, turned to him and said, "You are the vilest of the vile." Glynn sentenced him to four consecutive terms of life without parole, with further life terms and long sentences on the other counts.
He was born in Baltimore on June 11, 1971, and grew up near Gwynns Falls and Leakin Park, remembered as an ordinary boy who rode bikes and played hide and seek with a large group of friends. He was known on the street as Money. He dropped out in his sophomore year of high school, became addicted to heroin, and built up convictions for drug possession and dealing, burglary, battery, theft and resisting arrest. He is held at the Western Correctional Institution near Cumberland in Allegany County, Maryland.