On April 11, 1992, Patricia Magers, thirty-two, who owned La Bride d'Elegance, a bridal shop in Wichita, Kansas, and her employee Patricia Smith, twenty-three, stayed past the six o'clock closing time so that a male customer could collect a cummerbund. When a man knocked, they let him in, thinking he was the customer. He shot them both. Then the real customer arrived and came face to face with a slender white man with reddish hair holding what looked like an Uzi-style gun, who asked him to come into the back of the store. He refused, and the gunman told him to leave. He was so frightened that more than an hour passed before he reported it. His description became one of the composite sketches of the man who came to be called the I-70 killer.
Three days earlier, at about 1:30 on the afternoon of April 8, Robin Fuldauer, twenty-six, the manager of a Payless ShoeSource in Indianapolis, had been shot while alone in the store; her body was found in the back storeroom about three o'clock, and less than a hundred dollars was gone from the register. On April 27, at about four in the afternoon, Michael McCown, forty, was shot from behind while kneeling to stock shelves in his mother's shop, Sylvia's Ceramics, in Terre Haute, Indiana. His wallet and less than fifty dollars were taken. He was the only man killed, and investigators believe the killer chose the shop for its woman's name and mistook McCown, who wore his hair in a ponytail, for a woman.
On May 3 Nancy Kitzmiller, twenty-four, was shot in the back of the head while working alone at Boot Village, a footwear shop in St. Charles, Missouri. She was not meant to be working that day; she had come in so that a coworker could have the day off. She opened at noon and customers found her at 2:30. A witness had seen her with a customer minutes before, and that sighting produced another composite. On May 7, in Raytown, Missouri, the owner of the video store next to Sarah Blessing's gift shop, the Store of Many Colors, saw a man go in, heard a pop and saw him leave, and found Blessing, thirty-seven, dead. A clerk at a nearby grocery store saw the man climbing a hill toward Interstate 70.
A St. Charles detective first suspected the connection. All the victims were shot with a .22-caliber firearm, all but the Wichita pair were alone, all were shot in the back of the head, and none had been sexually assaulted. The stores were small specialty businesses with little cash, several in strip malls near I-70, and the killings came at slow times of day, after lunch or near closing. Robbery seemed secondary. The victims were mostly young, petite women with long dark hair. From witness accounts police believe the weapon was an Intratec Scorpion or an Erma Werke ET22 pistol, and the bullets were CCI copper-clad lead with traces of jeweler's rouge on the casings. The killer was described as a thin white man in his twenties or thirties, five feet seven to five feet nine, with drooping eyelids and sandy blond or reddish hair.
Two men were investigated and eliminated: Donald Waterhouse of Dyer County, Tennessee, arrested in June 1992 for killing his mother and stepfather, ruled out on height, age and hairstyle, and Sean Patrick Goble of North Carolina, arrested in 1995 for murdering four women, ruled out on method and description. Investigators suspect the same man in the killings of Mary Ann Glasscock, fifty-one, at an antiques store in Fort Worth on September 25, 1993, and Amy Vess, twenty-two, at a dance apparel store in Arlington, Texas, on November 1, 1993, and in the shooting of Vicki Webb, thirty-five, at a gift shop in Houston on January 15, 1994. Webb survived because the bullet struck a vertebra, and the gunman's second shot misfired. The same caliber was used, but ballistics showed it was not the same gun, and Texas authorities were not convinced. In November 2001 Terre Haute police named the I-70 killer as a suspect in the murder of Billy Brossman, thirty-one, shot in the back of the head at a liquor store seven blocks from where Michael McCown died; unlike the 1992 killings, that one was caught on camera, and police have said they have a person of interest.
The case has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted. In 2021 the St. Charles police published age-progressed versions of the composite sketch. No suspect has been publicly named.