Thomas Wayne Crump

Victims

7 attributed - 4 MURDER CONVICTIONS: three counts of first-degree murder in New Mexico, one of them his wife, and one count of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon in Nevada, for Jodie Jameson. On arrest he admitted seven other killings, some in other states, and none of those was ever charged

Years active

1970s - 1981

Location

New Mexico/Nevada, USA

Method

Ligature strangulation - other means in some cases

Status

Arrested on November 16, 1980. Convicted in New Mexico of three counts of first-degree murder, including that of his wife, together with attempted murder and robbery, and sentenced to life imprisonment; the New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed on December 17, 1981 (State v. Crump). He escaped from prison two years later and killed again. Convicted by a Las Vegas jury on April 26, 1984 of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon and robbery with use of a deadly weapon for the killing of Jodie Jameson, whose body was found in a motel bathtub on October 4, 1980; the jury deliberated less than an hour, found three aggravating circumstances and no mitigating ones, and he was sentenced to death on May 2, 1984. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed in 1986 (Crump v. State, 102 Nev. 158) and the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari the same year. He obtained multiple stays and four petitions were refused, the last in 2016; in 1997 the Nevada Supreme Court remanded for a hearing on whether his post-conviction counsel had been ineffective. He died at a medical facility inside the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City on June 14, 2018, aged seventy-eight, after thirty-four years under sentence of death.

Crump was born in 1940 and lived as a drifter across the American south west, with a record of robbery and kidnapping.

Killings were attributed to him in New Mexico and Nevada through the 1970s and into 1981, among them his second wife, a cab driver, a tourist from Minnesota, and Jodie Jameson, twenty-five, victims being strangled with a ligature or killed by other means in the course of robberies and abductions.

He was convicted in New Mexico and sentenced to life imprisonment, and convicted in Nevada and sentenced to death.

The range of four to seven is the difference between the convictions and the attributions. The accessible sourcing is an encyclopaedia entry and a small amount of American press material, and it gives no account of the individual cases, no victim names and no dates beyond the range.

Nothing accessible records whether the Nevada death sentence was carried out, commuted or overturned, and this entry should be re-checked before reprint for that reason.