Brenda Kay Hagy, forty-five, from Bloomington, Indiana, spent the night of January 22, 1995, in a homeless shelter in Gainesville, Florida, and the next day made her way to a truck stop at Baileyton, Tennessee. There a trucker raped her and strangled her, breaking her neck, then drove on with her body to Bristol, Virginia, and left it beside an access road to Interstate 81, running over her legs as he pulled away. A newspaper carrier found her the next morning. The most promising tip came from another trucker, who had seen a semi parked on that access road hours before. The strongest evidence was a plastic bag left beside her with the killer's fingerprint on it.
When the print was run, it matched one taken in September 1994 from Sean Patrick Goble, arrested then on several misdemeanors. He was born in Asheboro, North Carolina, on November 1, 1966, the son of Kenneth and Emma Goble, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. When he was six his father raped a ten-year-old girl during a home invasion in Rockford while the boy sat outside in the car; Kenneth Goble served four years, and was convicted again in 1986 of raping a six-year-old in New Mexico. Sean dropped out of Auburn High School in his senior year in 1984 and joined the Army. He married, had a son, and moved back to North Carolina in 1988, to a trailer park in Asheboro, and began driving trucks in 1991. That April he told Greensboro police a couple in a Ford Fiesta had abducted him and held him for nearly two days; he later admitted he had made it up to hide an affair.
Hagy was not the first. In January 1994 he had picked up Lisa Susan O'Rourke, twenty-nine, of St. Louis, on Interstate 10 in Louisiana or Mississippi, had sex with her and strangled her, and left her under a bridge on Interstate 65 in Alabama, where she was found on January 23. Her death was put down at first to hypothermia and she was not identified until April. Sherry Tew Mansur, thirty-four, was last seen by her family on January 31, 1995, visiting her sister in Bowie, Maryland; he picked her up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, strangled her and dumped her beside Interstate 40 in North Carolina, where she was found on February 19 and remained a Jane Doe for months. Alice Rebecca Hanes, thirty-six, of Columbus, Ohio, called from a truck stop on Interstate 70 in Salina, Kansas, and hitchhiked to Tennessee, where he took her from a gas station in Jefferson County, smothered her, and left her beside Interstate 81 in Virginia. Hagy, Mansur and Hanes all had records of prostitution arrests.
He was arrested on April 13, 1995, outside the Winston-Salem offices of Rocky Road Express, the trucking company he was driving for. In his truck police found Hanes's pocketbook, along with travel bags, pornographic magazines and women's underwear. That day he wrote a statement describing how he raped and strangled Hagy at the Baileyton truck stop and carried her body to Bristol. He confessed to Hanes as well, and to a woman in North Carolina, who turned out to be the Jane Doe on Interstate 40 and was then identified as Mansur. He claimed briefly that Hagy's death was unintentional, which investigators disproved.
On December 15, 1995, in Greene County Criminal Court, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Hagy and Hanes and received two life sentences. Extradited to North Carolina, he pleaded guilty to Mansur's murder and received fourteen more years, and he would have to serve at least 103 years before becoming eligible for parole. In April 1996 a Baldwin County, Alabama, grand jury indicted him for O'Rourke's murder, but the charge was dropped a year later, prosecutors saying that with his life sentences he was no longer a threat. He later recanted his confessions.
Authorities in ten other states looked at him for unsolved killings of women found along highways. He was investigated the day after his arrest for the 1992 murder of Tammy Zywicki, and briefly as the killer called Dr. No and as the I-70 killer, and was cleared, in some cases because he had still been in high school or the Army, in another because he did not match the description. DNA ruled him out in the death of Nona Cobb, attributed in 2022 to another suspected serial killer.
In 2015 he petitioned for DNA testing in the Hagy case, arguing that swabs taken from her had never been compared with his profile and would prove he did not kill her. The Greene County court dismissed the petition as too late, and on July 12, 2018, the Court of Criminal Appeals at Knoxville reversed, holding that the Post-Conviction DNA Analysis Act has no time limit. On remand the state produced a lab report showing DNA from Hagy and from an unknown person, still not compared with his. The court denied the petition, finding that no result could outweigh his detailed confession, and on September 13, 2019, the appeals court affirmed. He is held at the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City, Tennessee.