Most calls to a tip line are useless. Investigators know this before they open the line, and they open it anyway. In the autumn of 1966 a police hotline in Cincinnati was taking about 800 tips a day. In the summer of 2010 a task force in Flint, Michigan, logged nearly 500 in a few weeks. In October 2002 the FBI put some 400 agents on a sniper case around Washington and ran a public line that rang without stopping. Almost all of it was noise: neighbors, cranks, the frightened and the hopeful, men who looked like the sketch and men who did not.
The cases that follow are the exceptions. In each, one call out of the many carried the piece that mattered: a name, a car, a hospital ward, an old crime in another state. Sometimes the caller was a stranger who recognized a face. Sometimes it was a co-worker’s daughter, or an anonymous voice from a neighboring county. Twice the callers were the very people the police were hunting. And once, a call to a Crime Stoppers line in Kentucky sent detectives in exactly the wrong direction, which is its own lesson about what a tip line can and cannot do.
On October 18, 2002, after two weeks of shootings that had left the Washington region afraid, a caller reached a Montgomery County, Maryland, police officer. He said he knew who was doing the shootings. Then he told the officer to check the details of a liquor store shooting in Montgomery, Alabama.
The call was one of several from the same source. Three days earlier a man had told a dispatcher in Rockville that he and another were the ones causing the killings, and had hung up when the dispatcher tried to transfer him. On October 18, by the account CBS News published after the arrests, a priest in Ashland, Virginia, took a call in which a voice referred to a recent shooting and to the robbery in Alabama. The FBI’s own history of the case dates the Alabama call to October 17. Either way, the men behind the shootings had begun trying to talk to the police, and in boasting they gave themselves away.
The Montgomery lead was not quite accurate. The caller claimed two women had died there; one had. But a similar crime had happened, and investigators in Alabama had a file on it. On October 21 an FBI agent from Mobile flew that file to Washington, and the FBI Laboratory worked through it overnight. By the next morning the bureau had a name: Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, whose fingerprints were on record from an earlier arrest in Washington State. Malvo’s record listed his companion, John Allen Muhammad, 41, a former Army sergeant. An FBI agent in Tacoma recognized Muhammad’s name from an earlier tip, and motor vehicle records tied him to a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey plates. The description went out to the public on October 22.
The last link in the chain was also a phone call. A truck driver who had heard the description on the radio recognized the car at a rest area off Interstate 70 and dialed 911, he later told CBS News. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested near Myersville, Maryland, early on October 24, 2002.
Ten people had been killed and three badly wounded in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, the FBI said. A Virginia jury convicted Muhammad in November 2003 of capital murder in the death of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, a Vietnam veteran and engineering project manager killed near Manassas, and he was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed in 2005. In May 2006 a Maryland jury convicted him of six more murders. He never admitted the shootings. He was executed by lethal injection in Virginia on November 10, 2009. Killings in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Washington State and Arizona were linked to the pair by investigators but never tried against him.
Between late May and early August 2010, a series of assaults in and around Flint left 14 men hurt, five of them fatally. Survivors described a big man driving an SUV. Most of the men were Black. A task force led by the Michigan State Police, working with the FBI, released a sketch of the suspect and his vehicle and asked the public for help. By August 11 it had received 469 tips, CBS News reported.
One of them settled the matter. According to the Associated Press, the daughter of a man who worked at a market and liquor store in Mount Morris Township, just outside Flint, saw the sketch and called investigators. The Michigan Court of Appeals later described the same call from the trial record: the caller told the tip line that the sketch looked like a new co-worker at a local market, and that his vehicle fit the description of the SUV. The co-worker was Elias Abuelazam, 33, an Israeli citizen with a green card who had arrived in Flint that spring and taken a register job for about 10 dollars an hour. Investigators questioned the store’s employees, and the prosecutor said its surveillance video showed a man matching the description they had.
By then Abuelazam had left Michigan, and he was nearly out of the country. On the night of August 11, 2010, Atlanta police, acting at the request of the Michigan State Police, arrested him at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where he was waiting to board a flight to Tel Aviv.
On May 22, 2012, a Genesee County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of the first-degree premeditated murder of Arnold Minor, 49, a Flint handyman and the last man to die in the series. Judge Judith Fullerton sentenced him on June 25, 2012, to life without parole. He had also been charged with the murders of Darwin Marshall, 43, and Frank Kellybrew, 60, and with assaults on six other men, but in October 2012 the county prosecutor, David Leyton, suspended those cases unless the first conviction was overturned. "We have him life without parole. You can’t do any better than that," Leyton said. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in June 2014. In 2017, under a grant of immunity, Abuelazam confessed to the 2009 killing of Jammie Lane, a former neighbor in Leesburg, Virginia; Loudoun County’s prosecutor said he would bring no charge. Abuelazam was serving his life term in Michigan as of 2017.
On Thursday, October 20, 1988, a Texas A&M University student was attacked in College Station. She survived, and she gave police a description good enough for a composite sketch. Karen T. Taylor, a forensic artist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, drew it from the young woman’s account, and police released it on October 24. More than a hundred tips came in, The Battalion, the university’s student newspaper, reported.
The one that counted had arrived even earlier. According to The Battalion’s arrest report of October 31, 1988, investigators began looking at Daniel Lee Corwin on October 22, after an anonymous Crime Stoppers tip from Madison County, north of the campus. The Madison County sheriff, Ed Fannin, passed the tip along and identified Corwin to Bob Wiatt, the director of the university police. The paper’s later account, published after Corwin’s execution, said the call came from the sheriff himself, prompted by a friend who suggested the name. Taylor has written that after the sketch was published, several more people named Corwin too.
Corwin, 30, lived in Huntsville. He was not a student, though he had posed as one. He was on parole after serving about nine years of a 40-year sentence for a 1975 attack on a woman in Bell County. Police put him under watch, laboratory comparisons tied him to the case, and a witness picked his photograph out of a lineup. Officers from four agencies arrested him in Huntsville on a Friday night late in October 1988. He pleaded guilty in Brazos County to attempted capital murder and was sentenced to 99 years.
That might have been the whole of it. But in 1989, while serving the 99-year term, Corwin confessed to investigators that he had killed three women in 1987: Alice Martin, 72, in February, in Madison County; Debra Ewing, 26, in July; and Mary Risinger, 36, killed in Huntsville on Halloween night. Montgomery County’s district attorney, Peter Speers, said his office had numerous signed statements and a videotape of the confession. In March 1990 a Montgomery County jury in Conroe convicted Corwin of capital murder under the provision of Texas law that covers the murder of more than one person in different criminal transactions under the same scheme or course of conduct, and it sentenced him to death after about 35 minutes. The Associated Press called the trial one of the first tests of that provision.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 1993. The Fifth Circuit refused him a certificate of appealability in August 1998, calling the evidence against him "overwhelming." He was executed at Huntsville on December 7, 1998, at 40. Wiatt, speaking afterward, credited the College Station case with getting Corwin identified at all. Without the call from Madison County, the three 1987 deaths might have stayed where they had been for a year: open files in three counties with, as police admitted that autumn, little evidence.
On March 3, 1998, Glendale police in Southern California received an anonymous call about a respiratory care therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. The caller said that on or about February 16 the therapist, Efren Saldivar, had "helped a patient die fast." The words were quoted by the Associated Press from a declaration by Officer William Currie, one of three Glendale officers who took up the case. A local history column published in the Crescenta Valley Weekly in 2022 adds that the tip first reached the hospital, which called the police, and that detectives traced it to a man who had heard hospital gossip in a bar and who denied making the call.
Currie and his partner, Detective John McKillop, later told 60 Minutes II that they had expected to clear Saldivar. He was one of many employees they planned to interview. When he came to the station on March 11, 1998, and the idea of a polygraph came up, he began describing things that troubled him. Read his rights, he waived them and kept talking. By the end of the interview he had told detectives that he had caused between 40 and 50 deaths at the hospital since 1989.
A confession was all they had. Saldivar was held for about two days and released for lack of evidence, and within weeks he had taken the confession back, telling ABC’s 20/20 that he had lied because he was depressed and wanted to die. "I just need one case to put him behind bars," Sergeant Rick Young of the Glendale police told CBS News.
Getting that case took nearly three years. A Glendale police task force went through the records of the patients who had died on his shifts, and a physician went through 150 charts and flagged 50 as suspicious. The forensic chemist Brian Andresen at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed a way to test for the paralytic drug Pavulon, long thought impossible to detect after death, and identified it in six of the patients, according to a laboratory release of January 2001. Saldivar was arrested that month as he arrived at a new job as an electrician’s apprentice.
On March 12, 2002, he pleaded guilty before Judge Lance Ito in Los Angeles County Superior Court to six counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, admitting the special circumstances of multiple murder and murder by poison, the poison being Pavulon. The six patients were Eleanora Schlegel, 77; Salbi Asatryan, 75; Jose Alfaro, 82; Luina Schidlowski, 87; Balbino Castro, 87; and Myrtle Brower, 84. A seventh patient survived and spoke at the sentencing. In return the district attorney’s office gave up any attempt to seek death. On April 17, 2002, Ito imposed six life terms and a further 15 years to life. The deputy district attorney, Al MacKenzie, said the true count would probably never be known. "What I know is what we can prove in a court of law," he said. In February 2003, 60 Minutes II reported that Saldivar was serving a life sentence.
Through the summer of 1980, young women were being killed in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, and Los Angeles newspapers had a name for the unknown killer. Detectives had no name of their own. Until August 11, 1980, the California Supreme Court later wrote, police had not focused on Douglas Daniel Clark at all.
That day a vocational nurse named Carol Bundy telephoned police. Los Angeles Magazine reported that she first called with a tip and then confessed. She told detectives she had killed her former lover, Jack Murray, and she named the man she lived with, Clark, a 31-year-old steam engineer at a plant in Burbank, as the man behind the killings of the summer. Clark was taken into custody for questioning about Murray’s death and then questioned about the others. He denied everything, and he went on denying it for the rest of his life.
The call gave detectives a name; the courts required proof, and the prosecution built it from many directions, the California Supreme Court said, most of it circumstantial. A Los Angeles County jury convicted Clark of six counts of first-degree murder, for Gina Marano, 15; Cynthia Chandler, 16; Karen Jones; Exxie Wilson; Marnette Comer; and a young woman who has never been identified and is known in the record as Jane Doe 18. On March 16, 1983, he received six death sentences. His defense was that Bundy and Murray had committed the killings together; Bundy, testifying for the defense under immunity, said Clark had done them, and the state’s high court said Clark’s claim against Murray had no supporting evidence. The killing of Jack Murray was Bundy’s crime, not his. She pleaded guilty in 1983 to two counts of first-degree murder, City News Service reported, and died in prison in 2003.
The California Supreme Court affirmed Clark’s murder convictions and death sentence on July 30, 1992. The Ninth Circuit rejected his federal appeal on October 10, 2023. He died of natural causes the next day, at 75, still under sentence of death.
Shasta County, California, ran a Secret Witness line. Residents could phone in information about crimes, and the program paid rewards for tips that helped. Between 1985 and 1987 the line took a series of calls about three women from the Redding area: Averill Weeden, who disappeared in 1985, and Belinda Jo Stark and Dawn Berryhill, who disappeared at the end of June 1987. The calls carried details that investigators could check, and they checked out.
The caller, a Shasta County jury decided in 1989, was Robert Edward Maury, and he was also the man who had killed the three women. On August 24, 1989, after a trial of about five months, the jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Weeden, Stark and Berryhill, with special circumstances of multiple murder and murder in the course of a robbery, and of crimes against a fourth woman, who survived. Weeden had been his roommate. His lawyers maintained his innocence throughout.
In its 2003 decision affirming the convictions, as quoted by a state appeals court in 2024, the California Supreme Court held that the evidence allowed the jury to find that Maury made the calls, and that the calls showed knowledge only the killer or an eyewitness would have. The same court said jurors could reasonably infer that the reward money was at least part of his motive. The appeals court noted that he was sometimes called the "Tipster Killer."
Maury asked his penalty jury for death, telling the jurors that life without parole was "totally unrealistic" in light of their verdicts. On September 8, 1989, they gave him what he asked for. The United States Supreme Court denied review in 2004. A second state habeas petition, built on a 2018 Supreme Court decision about a defendant’s right to control his defense, failed in the California Court of Appeal on October 2, 2024, and the California Supreme Court denied review on January 15, 2025. Six days later a federal judge in Sacramento sent his long-running federal case back to a magistrate judge for further findings. It was still pending then, more than 35 years after the death verdict.
The Shasta County calls invert the usual story. A tip line exists because the people who know things are not the police. In Maury’s case the person who knew the most was the one dialing.
Cincinnati in late 1966 was a frightened city. Since December 1965 five women, most of them past 50, had been killed in a series the newspapers attributed to a single unknown man, and in August a younger woman, Barbara Bowman, 31, had died in a case of its own. Residents paid locksmiths for extra locks, and Halloween trick-or-treating was moved into daylight. A police hotline took about 800 tips a day, according to an account published by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and officers checked more than 15,000 cars.
The call that mattered came on December 9, 1966, the morning Lula Kerrick, 81, became the seventh woman to die. The accounts disagree about who made it. WCPO, Cincinnati’s ABC station, says a caller reported seeing a strange man near the place where she lived and gave police a license plate number. The Cincinnati writer Dennis Whitehead, who later worked through the police files and court transcripts for a two-part history in the Northern Kentucky Tribune, traces the plate to a different source: a neighbor who had written down a car’s number earlier that night. Both accounts agree on where the number led. It belonged to Posteal Laskey Jr., 29, and police arrested him within hours.
What happened next shows the limits of a single tip. Police held Laskey on a probation violation and built their murder case not on the series but on Barbara Bowman’s death, the one with witnesses and a dispatcher’s record. On April 13, 1967, an all-white Hamilton County jury convicted Laskey, who was Black, of her first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life. He died at the Pickaway Correctional Institution on May 29, 2007, at 69, FOX19 reported.
The killings stopped after his arrest, and many officers believed he was responsible. "There was no doubt in my mind he was guilty," one of them, Artie Crum, told WCPO. But Laskey was never charged with any of the six, no court weighed the claim, and Whitehead reports that the cases are still carried as unsolved by the Cincinnati Police. His family regarded him as a scapegoat. The call gave Cincinnati a suspect. Whether it gave the city its strangler is a question the courts never answered.
In March 1981 Dallas detectives had been looking for David Villarreal for about two years. For 14 of those months, United Press International reported, he had been in a Texas state prison on a burglary conviction, out of reach. Then, on a Tuesday that March, someone recognized the 25-year-old drifter as a suspect in three 1979 killings and called the police.
He was taken into custody that day. According to the Dallas police spokeswoman, Vicki Eiker, he then confessed to seven killings in Dallas and San Antonio. His statements brought one recent death in San Antonio to light within hours: that of Robert Manley, 70. On the Thursday, Dallas police filed three murder charges against him, for the 1979 deaths of Ernest Garcia, 26, and of Garcia’s roommates, Tony Gutierrez, 32, and Charles Moya, 30, and his bond was set at $90,000. San Antonio police said charges there would follow, including in the March 2, 1981, death of Joe Edward Duque, 18. Villarreal told UPI he wanted to be executed rather than spend his life in prison.
The outcome of the Dallas and San Antonio cases has not been reported, and on the public record Villarreal stands accused, not convicted. The tip that put him in a Dallas cell came from an unnamed caller, and what became of any reward is not known.
The longest-delayed call of all was made in December 2023. An anonymous caller contacted the Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers TIPS Hotline and urged the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to look into the whereabouts of Sharon Kinne in Canada, according to the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. The police department received a tip at about the same time, and the two agencies worked separately until they realized they were chasing the same woman.
Kinne had been a fugitive from a women’s prison in Mexico City since December 7, 1969. She had been serving a 13-year sentence for killing Francisco Paredes Ordoñez in Mexico City in 1964, her only final conviction. In Missouri a jury had acquitted her in 1961 of the murder of Patricia Jones, 23. A second jury convicted her in 1962 of murdering her husband, James Kinne, 25, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed that verdict in 1963, and the retrials that followed ended in a mistrial and a hung jury. Her case became, in the words of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, the longest outstanding murder warrant in Kansas City’s history.
The tip pointed north. Sergeant Dustin Love of the sheriff’s office and Darin Lee, an intelligence analyst with the Kansas City police, traced a 1970 Los Angeles marriage record that connected Kinne to the surname Glabus. In Taber, a farming town in southern Alberta, a realtor and volunteer named Diedra "Dee" Glabus had lived for about five decades. She had died there of natural causes on January 21, 2022, at 81. Fingerprints recorded by a funeral home service after her death, obtained by administrative subpoena and compared with prints from her 1960 arrest, confirmed on May 31, 2024, that she was Kinne, the police said. Jackson County’s prosecutor dismissed all pending charges as of January 29, 2025, and the agencies announced the result the next day.
Love was blunt about the timing. "It just so happens that someone had that tip and was not willing to release it until after her death," he said. Kinne’s family, in a statement read at the news conference, said she "never faced the consequences of her actions, leaving them for her children to deal with." The Kansas City police called her a "fugitive serial killer." The courts said something narrower: one conviction, in Mexico; one acquittal; one charge that ended without a verdict.
A tip line can also produce a confession that is false. In December 2005, after a national television program covered the unsolved killing of Georgia Thompson, 19, in Tempe, Arizona, a jail inmate in Paducah, Kentucky, told a Crime Stoppers line that a fellow inmate had bragged about a killing in Tempe. The fellow inmate, J.M., was a 33-year-old career criminal facing a long sentence, the Phoenix New Times reported. In January 2006 a Tempe detective interviewed him in Kentucky and he confessed. A grand jury indicted him the next day, and he was extradited to Arizona on a second-degree murder charge.
His account contradicted known facts, and the New Times reported that the detective repeatedly supplied him with details. In July 2006 Phoenix police announced that forensic evidence linked Thompson’s death to the series of attacks the city knew as the Baseline cases, The Spokesman-Review reported. On August 3, 2006, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office dismissed the charge against J.M.; County Attorney Andrew Thomas said the man "appears to have made up a story." At the 2011 trial of the man eventually charged, J.M. testified that he had never been to Arizona and had taken the idea from television in the hope of a lighter sentence in Kentucky. The Tempe detective told the jurors, in tears, that she had mishandled the investigation.
That man was Mark Goudeau, a construction worker on parole, arrested in Phoenix on September 6, 2006, after a state crime lab match. On October 31, 2011, a Maricopa County jury convicted him of nine counts of first-degree murder, Georgia Thompson’s among them, and of 58 other counts, and on November 30, 2011, he was sentenced to death nine times. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in 2016. Goudeau has always said he is innocent, and a post-conviction petition filed in February 2026 claims he was framed. As of April 2026 he was on Arizona’s death row and the petition had not been decided, the Arizona Mirror reported.
None of these calls solved a case by itself. The Montgomery call was half wrong about its own crime, and it took an overnight laboratory run in Washington to turn it into a name. The Flint tip gave detectives a co-worker; the jury convicted on other evidence. The Glendale call produced a confession that collapsed within weeks and a prosecution that took four years to build. In Cincinnati, a plate number led to a suspect whose conviction covered one death of seven.
What the calls supplied was direction. A task force with hundreds of leads and no name is working blind; a single caller who says look at this man, this car, this ward, this town in Alberta, gives it somewhere to stand. Sometimes the caller was brave, sometimes vindictive, sometimes the killer himself, and once a jailhouse informant with his own sentence in mind. Detectives cannot tell which in advance. They answer the phone, write it down, and check, and the Kentucky tip is the reminder of what happens when the checking is skipped.
• December 1965 to December 1966: Six women die in the Cincinnati series the press attributes to one man; a police hotline takes about 800 tips a day.
• December 9, 1966: A license plate number reaches Cincinnati police; Posteal Laskey Jr. is arrested within hours.
• April 13, 1967: Laskey is convicted of the first-degree murder of Barbara Bowman; the six deaths of the series are never charged.
• 1979: Ernest Garcia, Tony Gutierrez and Charles Moya die in Dallas.
• August 11, 1980: Carol Bundy telephones Los Angeles police and names Douglas Clark.
• March 1981: A tipster’s call puts David Villarreal in Dallas custody; he is charged with three murders.
• March 16, 1983: Clark receives six death sentences.
• 1985 to 1987: Calls to Shasta County’s Secret Witness line concern three women from the Redding area.
• October 22, 1988: An anonymous Crime Stoppers tip from Madison County, Texas, names Daniel Lee Corwin.
• September 8, 1989: A Shasta County jury returns a death verdict against Robert Edward Maury, the caller.
• March 1990: Corwin is convicted of capital murder in Conroe for three 1987 killings and sentenced to death.
• March 3, 1998: An anonymous caller tells Glendale police that Efren Saldivar "helped a patient die fast."
• December 7, 1998: Corwin is executed at Huntsville.
• April 17, 2002: Saldivar is sentenced to six life terms after pleading guilty.
• October 18, 2002: A caller tells a Montgomery County, Maryland, officer to check a liquor store shooting in Montgomery, Alabama.
• October 24, 2002: John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo are arrested near Myersville, Maryland.
• December 2005: A Kentucky inmate’s Crime Stoppers tip leads to the false confession of J.M.
• August 3, 2006: The charge against J.M. is dismissed.
• September 6, 2006: Mark Goudeau is arrested in Phoenix.
• November 10, 2009: Muhammad is executed in Virginia.
• August 2010: A caller tells the Flint task force that the sketch resembles a co-worker; Elias Abuelazam is arrested in Atlanta on August 11.
• November 30, 2011: Goudeau is sentenced to death nine times.
• May 22, 2012: Abuelazam is convicted of the first-degree murder of Arnold Minor.
• January 21, 2022: Sharon Kinne, living as Dee Glabus, dies in Taber, Alberta.
• October 11, 2023: Clark dies on California’s condemned list.
• December 2023: An anonymous caller to the Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers TIPS Hotline points investigators to Canada.
• May 31, 2024: Fingerprints confirm that Glabus was Kinne.
• January 30, 2025: Kansas City police and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office announce the case closed.