On October 4, 1980, the naked body of Jodie Jameson was found in the bathtub of a motel room in Las Vegas. She worked for an escort service. Her arms and legs had been bound tightly with pantyhose, and around her neck was a loose ligature made of thin knotted strips torn from a pillowcase. The autopsy found that she had been strangled. The Nevada courts give her age as twenty-six; some later reports say twenty-five.
The man who killed her explained it himself, on videotape, after his arrest on November 16, 1980. Thomas Wayne Crump said that while he and Jameson were in the bathtub someone came into the room and took his money, and he decided she had set him up by leaving the door unlocked. "I snapped," he said. "I told her she could take it to hell with her and I drowned her." He went on: "She deserved what she got, I don't feel no remorse over it. I could have obtained my money without killing her. I just wanted to kill her. It's an eye for an eye. I premeditated. I knew I was going to kill her and I did."
Crump was forty. He was born in 1940 in Muncie, Indiana, and as a teenager in the mid-1950s stole cars with two other boys, Larry Morris and William Wagner. In 1958 he was charged with his first serious crime, the attempted murder of a woman who had quarreled with his mother, and while police were searching for him he hitched a ride from a fifty-eight-year-old man in a pickup truck and slashed him with a knife. By 1980 he was a drifter with a long record of robbery and kidnapping.
The Las Vegas killing was one of several that summer and fall. The series ran from July 13, 1980, across New Mexico and Nevada. In Albuquerque Irving Plaisted, seventy-eight, a Minnesota man who had given him a ride, was killed, and so, in the account on record, was Crump's second wife, Rhonda, who was shot. Other people he attacked survived; he told a reporter in 1984 that he would have "finished the job" had he known they lived.
New Mexico tried him first. He was convicted of first-degree murder, attempted murder and robbery and sentenced to life, and the New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed on December 17, 1981. The Nevada Supreme Court later recited those convictions as two first-degree murders; reference accounts list three New Mexico murder counts in all. The life sentence did not hold him. He escaped, and on June 17, 1982, he killed an Albuquerque cab driver, a death that came after one state had already convicted him of murder.
Nevada then tried him for Jodie Jameson. A jury of seven women and five men convicted him of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon and robbery with use of a deadly weapon after less than an hour of deliberation; the verdict is dated April 25, 1984, in the Nevada Supreme Court's later opinion and April 26 in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. At the penalty phase the prosecution played two videotaped confessions in which he admitted seven murders and seven attempted murders, along with numerous robberies, assaults and kidnappings, some of them in other states. The jury found three aggravating circumstances: that he had previously been convicted of murder or a violent felony, that the killing happened during a robbery, and that it involved depravity of mind. It found no mitigating circumstances. The sentencing hearing was moved to another courtroom because he had threatened to kill someone, and on May 2, 1984, he was sentenced to death.
In a jailhouse interview with the Review-Journal's Kent Lauer that month, he said he had hoped a lethal injection would put an end to his rage. "I don't feel compassion for the victims or anything that I've ever done," he said. "Why? I don't know. I have no idea. I've searched for that 'why' for so many years."
The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed in 1986, rejecting every claim of error as meritless, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case that year. Reviewing the sentence, Justice Charles Springer remarked, "If you want a death penalty candidate, this guy is a 10." Crump filed his first petition for post-conviction relief in October 1986. In 1997 the Nevada Supreme Court sent the case back for a hearing on whether his post-conviction lawyer had been ineffective. He filed a federal habeas petition in April 2007, and in 2016, at seventy-six, lost his fourth state petition, which argued that his earlier lawyer had failed him, that he had not premeditated the killing, and that he was brain-damaged when he confessed.
Of the seven murders he admitted, three were never charged anywhere.
He was granted stay after stay and was never executed. At 5:15 in the morning on Friday, June 14, 2018, he died at a medical facility inside the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City, at seventy-eight, thirty-four years, one month and thirteen days after he was sentenced to death. The Nevada Department of Corrections said he had been sentenced to death twice.