Sean Lannon was living in Grants, New Mexico, a small city on Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque, at the start of 2021. He had been married to Jennifer Lannon, born Whitman, who was thirty-nine, and they had separated. What is known of his life before that year comes almost entirely from what he told police after his arrest, and this entry does not build on it.
In January 2021 he killed three people in Grants over a period of weeks: Jennifer Lannon; Jesten Mata, forty, described by the prosecutor as her boyfriend; and Matthew Miller, twenty-one, a friend of Mata. Police said the three were lured to their deaths. He dismembered the bodies and put the parts in plastic storage bins.
In February 2021 he hired Randall Apostalon, sixty, to help him move and store the bins. Apostalon did not know what was in them. In the parking lot of an apartment complex in south-east Albuquerque, Lannon beat him to death. He drove Apostalon’s red Ford Ranger pickup to the Albuquerque International Sunport, left it on the top level of the parking garage with Apostalon’s body in the cab and the bins in the bed, and went east.
On March 5, 2021 the truck was found and opened. Three days later, on March 8, Michael Dabkowski, sixty-six, was found bludgeoned to death with a hammer at his home in East Greenwich Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey. Lannon had known him since childhood, and later said Dabkowski had sexually abused him as a boy; he claimed self-defence. He took Dabkowski’s car and drove west. On March 10, 2021 he was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, driving it.
Brought back to New Jersey, he told investigators he had killed sixteen people, fifteen of them in New Mexico. Nothing has ever been found to support the number beyond the five, and no other death has been charged.
New Jersey tried him first. In October 2022 he pleaded guilty to Dabkowski’s murder and in December 2022 was sentenced to thirty-five years without parole. In June 2023 he was extradited to New Mexico. In May 2024 he pleaded guilty in Albuquerque to second-degree murder for Apostalon and was sentenced to fifteen years; at that hearing Apostalon’s brother Daniel asked him what deranged state of mind had consumed him. On June 5, 2024 he pleaded guilty to three more counts of second-degree murder, reduced from first, for Jennifer Lannon, Mata and Miller, and was sentenced to forty-five years, consecutive to the Apostalon term. Sixty years in New Mexico, thirty-five in New Jersey to be served first.
Five convictions, five named victims. The sixteen he claimed is his own figure and is recorded here as a claim.