Sean Patrick Goble

Victims

3 killings covered by convictions - 2 counts of FIRST-degree murder in Tennessee, of Brenda Kay Hagy and Alice Rebecca Hanes, and 1 of SECOND-degree murder in North Carolina, of Sherry Tew Mansur, for which he received fourteen years. He has been investigated in at least ten other states and cleared in some; nothing beyond these three is established, and a 2018 ruling granted him a hearing on post-conviction DNA analysis in one of the Tennessee cases

Years active

January-March 1995

Location

North Carolina/Tennessee, USA

Method

Smothering or strangulation

Status

Arrested on April 13, 1995 in North Carolina and confessed to three killings. He pleaded guilty on December 15, 1995 in Greene County Criminal Court, Tennessee, to two counts of first-degree murder, of Brenda Kay Hagy at a Baileyton truck stop in January 1995 and of Alice Rebecca Hanes in Jefferson County that March, and Judge James E. Beckner imposed two consecutive life terms. The prosecutor said there were no aggravating factors that would have allowed him to seek the death penalty. In North Carolina he was convicted of the SECOND-DEGREE murder of Sherry Tew Mansur, whose body was found in February 1995 beside Interstate 40 in Guilford County, and sentenced to fourteen years. In July 2018 the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals at Knoxville held that he was ENTITLED TO A HEARING on post-conviction DNA analysis in the Hagy case. Held at the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City, Tennessee. Authorities in at least ten other states investigated him for unsolved killings of women at truck stops; he was cleared in some, denied being the Midwestern "Stargazer" killer on the ground that those deaths predated his trucking licence, and his own lawyers said in 1995 that they believed he was involved only in the three he had confessed to.

Sean Patrick Goble was a long-haul trucker who killed three women in three months in early 1995, picking them up and leaving their bodies near the roads he drove.

He was born in 1966 and lived in Asheboro, North Carolina. Brenda Kay Hagy, forty-five, Sherry Tew Mansur, thirty-four, and Alice Rebecca Hanes, thirty-six, were smothered or strangled between January and March 1995. Rape was charged.

He was arrested on April 13, 1995, confessed to two of the killings in Tennessee and was charged with the third in North Carolina. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in Tennessee on December 15, 1995. Investigators at the time considered whether he was responsible for other deaths along his routes; the figure of three or more reflects that, and nothing beyond the three has been established.