On September 26, 2021, a woman walking the Chautauqua Rails to Trails near Woleben Road in the Town of Portland, New York, noticed something in the woods just off the path. It was a human skull. Sheriff's investigators, working with a forensic anthropology team from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, dug the skeletal remains of a woman out of a shallow grave, bones that had plainly been there for years, if not decades. While they worked they noticed an odor and found a garbage tote. Inside it was the body of a second woman, left there far more recently.
Two bodies so close together, even years apart, did not look like coincidence, but until the women had names investigators could not say what connected them. The body in the tote was identified within weeks as Marquita Mull, fifty, of Buffalo. She had disappeared in June 2021 from her neighborhood near the Broadway Market, and her sister, Wendy Mull, had reported her missing to Buffalo police.
The other woman stayed nameless for more than three years. Samples went to several laboratories and came back with nothing. In late 2024 the sheriff's office sent them to Othram, a Texas laboratory that specializes in forensic genetic genealogy, and it extracted DNA that matched someone who appeared to be a relative. That gave her back her name: Cassandra Watson, another Buffalo woman, who was about forty when her family last saw her, in 2003 or 2004.
Investigators went back to Watson's life at the time she vanished and found that she had been living with a man named Richard J. Fox II. His record was long. A judge would later trace it in open court to 1981 and sum it up in three words: burglary, rape, sexual abuse. He was a registered sex offender who had been to prison twice, the first time in 1993 for sexually abusing his stepdaughter from the age of three until she was eleven, the second in 2005 on sexual assault charges involving a woman he lived with on Buffalo's West Side. Investigators believe Watson was strangled. And Fox had grown up on Woleben Road, about half a mile from where both women were found.
In January 2025 investigators arrested him in Niagara Falls, and he was arraigned in Buffalo City Court on a charge of second-degree murder in Mull's death. A second-degree murder charge in Watson's death followed in February.
Looking into Fox's past, the Chautauqua County investigators came across an older death. In July 1976 his grandmother, Beatrice Meabon, had been found lying on the floor of her home on Cain Road in the Town of Brant, where there was then a mobile home park. She had been stabbed, and she died at a hospital. Her death was considered suspicious, and no one was ever arrested. "There was this story where a suspicious death happened that involved his grandmother when he was fairly young," Captain Jake Stahley of the sheriff's office said. Working with Brant police, the investigators tracked down old witnesses, among them one of the EMTs who had answered the call. "One of them in particular did recall Mrs. Meabon saying that her grandson had stabbed her," Lieutenant Alex Nutt said. Her death certificate recorded that she had been stabbed in the heart.
Brant police said investigators established that Fox had been inside the house the day she died, and that in an interview in January 2025 he admitted killing her. He had been thirteen. By Stahley's account of the confession, the boy had been built up with rage and hatred that night; he stabbed his grandmother and left. Because Fox was a juvenile in 1976, and under the law as it stood then, officials said he could not be prosecuted, and no charge was filed.
His arrest opened a third case. Niagara Falls police began investigating him that January, and in the spring of 2025, acting on a tip, they searched a house on Orleans Avenue where he had once lived. Boarded up beneath the basement stairs, wrapped in plastic and a tarp, were the near-skeletal remains of a woman. Police at first called Fox only a person of interest. Weeks later a crime scene unit returned to dig through the backyard, and police released nothing further about what it found. In December 2025 dental records identified the woman as Crystal Curthoys, thirty-two, of Lockport, and Fox was indicted on a charge of second-degree murder. Prosecutors put her death in January 2023. Accounts differ over when the remains were found: the Niagara County district attorney's office gave March, WKBW reported May.
By then Fox had already answered for the women on the trail. In September 2025, before Erie County Judge Suzanne Maxwell Barnes, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, admitting that he had killed Mull and Watson nearly two decades apart and left them off the trail near where he grew up. At his sentencing on November 20 the families spoke, and Wendy Mull pleaded with him to come clean about any other killings. Barnes said she had never said such a thing in her courtroom before. "I can honestly say that you should never see the light of day," she told him. "Evil. That is the one word that sums up this case. Evil." She imposed twenty years to life for each murder, to run consecutively, forty years to life in all. Chautauqua County Sheriff Jim Quattrone said other investigations connected to Fox were under way.
In January 2026 he pleaded guilty in Niagara County Court to murdering Crystal Curthoys. "Crystal was not just a number to be added to this defendant's tally sheet," the district attorney's office said. Her family stayed away from his sentencing on April 15; First Assistant District Attorney Doreen Hoffman told the court they did not want their last memories of Crystal to be associated with him.
Judge John Ottaviano said he felt morally compelled to speak plainly first, so that the suffering of the victims would be acknowledged in open court. Fox, he said, had access to her home as a handyman. She died of sharp force trauma inflicted during a physical assault. He hid her body beneath the basement stairs and drywalled over the opening. "You entombed her as though she were not a person," the judge said. "As though she were not someone's daughter, someone's friend." When investigators came for him, Fox had told them he was waiting to be arrested; they had had a big argument, he said, he had lost his temper, beaten her until she was dead and choked her. "You felt no particular urgency to call for help, no remorse, no horror at what you had done," Ottaviano said. He sentenced Fox to twenty-five years to life, to be served after the forty years to life he was already serving.
Fox has now admitted to killing four women over nearly half a century: his grandmother when he was thirteen, Cassandra Watson, Marquita Mull and Crystal Curthoys. Three of those killings brought murder convictions; the fourth can never be charged. The investigators who reopened Beatrice Meabon's death do not believe the count is necessarily complete. "It always leaves us as investigators, anyone in law enforcement to think, are we missing something?" Stahley said. "Is there something else that is not being looked at or overlooked?"