Raymont Hopewell

Victims

5 convictions of first-degree murder, all by guilty plea, together with 4 of first-degree rape and 4 of assault

Years active

1999 - 2005

Location

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Method

Strangulation / Beating

Status

Arrested on September 20, 2005 after DNA taken in the Carlton Crawford killing matched evidence from the earlier deaths, and charged in December 2005 with five counts of first-degree murder. Pleaded guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court on August 11, 2006 to five murders, four rapes and further counts of robbery with a deadly weapon, assault and burglary, the State having offered the plea the previous day in place of seeking the death penalty. Sentenced by Judge John M. Glynn on September 14, 2006 to four consecutive terms of life without parole for four of the deaths, with five further life sentences for the rapes and the fifth murder and lengthy terms for the other counts. Two women who survived his attacks gave evidence at the sentencing. Held at the Western Correctional Institution, Cumberland, Maryland.

Hopewell was born in 1971 and lived in Baltimore, Maryland.

Between 1999 and 2005 he entered the homes of people in his own neighbourhood, most of them elderly, raped and strangled or beat them, and took what was there. Five people died. Several of the victims knew him by sight, and one was a woman in her seventies who had employed him for odd jobs.

The five who died were Constance Wills, sixty; Sarah Shannon, eighty-eight; Sadie Mack, seventy-eight; Carlton Crawford, eighty-two; and Lydia Wingfield, seventy-eight.

He was arrested on September 20, 2005 and, after questioning, gave a full account. He was sentenced on September 12, 2006 to life imprisonment without parole.

The deaths had not been treated as a series. Elderly people found dead in their homes in that part of the city were recorded individually, and the connection was made only after the last of them.

The entry records the local access, which is the mechanism in almost every case of this shape in the archive: he was not a stranger to the street he was killing on.