On September 7, 1981, Ida White, seventy-two, was getting ready to shower in her basement apartment across the street from the post office in Mount Vernon, Illinois, when she pulled back the curtain and a man hiding in the stall stabbed her repeatedly. A neighbor, Barney Bates, heard her scream, pushed through the door between their apartments, pulled her away and grabbed the attacker's shirt, which tore. He said the man was Black. Police arrested Grover Thompson, a Black man who had been sleeping in the post office, and Bates identified him. Thompson was sentenced to forty years for attempted murder and died in prison in 1996. In December 2007 a white prisoner named Timothy Krajcir told a Carbondale police lieutenant, Paul Echols, about an attack in Mount Vernon: how he had crawled into the apartment across from the post office, hidden in the shower, stabbed the elderly woman when she screamed, and thought afterward that somebody had been arrested, "a black guy." He drew a diagram that matched Ida White's bathroom. In January 2019 Governor Bruce Rauner granted Thompson a posthumous exoneration.
Krajcir was born Timothy Wayne McBride in West Mahanoy Township, Pennsylvania, on November 28, 1944. His father left the family when he was about a year old, and his mother married Bernie Krajcir, who adopted him in 1953. He was charged with stealing a bicycle at six, was exposing himself and peeping at thirteen, and at ten, by later accounts, had become sexually and emotionally obsessed with his mother. He enlisted in the navy at seventeen in 1962 and was dishonorably discharged for sexual assault after fourteen months. In 1963 he went into the Illinois prison system on a rape conviction, and he spent most of his adult life after that locked up for sex crimes. Released in 1977, he was required as a condition of parole to enroll at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where in 1981 he earned a degree in administration of justice with a minor in psychology.
In the years of freedom around it he killed nine women. He drove to towns he had no connection to, stalked women, broke into their homes and waited for them. On August 12, 1977, he killed Mary Parsh, fifty-eight, and her daughter Brenda, twenty-seven, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. On November 17, 1977, Sheila Cole, twenty-one, a student at Southeast Missouri State who had told friends she was going shopping at Walmart, was shot twice in the head in a women's restroom on Illinois Highway 3 near McClure; her car was found in the Cape Girardeau Walmart lot. Virginia Lee Witte, fifty-one, was killed in her home in Marion, Illinois, on May 12, 1978; Joyce Tharp, twenty-nine, was found behind a church in Paducah, Kentucky, on March 23, 1979; and Myrtle Rupp, fifty-one, was killed in her home in Muhlenberg Township, Pennsylvania, on April 17, 1979. Some of the women were found tied in their beds, some were taken across state lines, most were raped; some were shot, others stabbed or asphyxiated. With no DNA testing and so many methods, nothing tied the crimes together, and he became known only as the bogeyman in the blue bandana he wore over his face.
On January 27, 1982, he strangled Margie Call, fifty-seven, in Cape Girardeau, leaving strands of his hair. On April 8 he killed Deborah Sheppard, a twenty-three-year-old Southern Illinois University student, in her Carbondale apartment. In June he went back to Cape Girardeau and shot, sexually assaulted and strangled Mildred Wallace, sixty-five, in her home, leaving blood, the bootlace he used as a garrote, a palm print and skin under her fingernails. In the spring of 1983 police in Allentown, Pennsylvania, found him in his car holding a pistol in violation of his parole. He broke his leg in a failed escape that May, was convicted of indecent assault, robbery and criminal trespass, and served five years at Graterford. In 1988 he was moved to the Big Muddy River Correctional Center in Ina, Illinois, on his parole violations, and there, he said, he chose to stay in prison so he would not hurt anyone. He was still there almost twenty years later.
In 2007 Detective Jimmy Smith of the Cape Girardeau police contacted Echols in Carbondale, and in August DNA from an old crime scene was matched to Krajcir; accounts differ over whether the first match was in the Sheppard killing or in Wallace's. "We had evidence in one case, but there were four murders in three cases," Echols said. "The only way to get him to confess was to negotiate." Missouri prosecutors took the death penalty off the table, and he confessed to four more Cape Girardeau murders, three killings outside the city and crimes in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. On December 10, 2007, he was sentenced to forty years for Deborah Sheppard's murder, and on January 18, 2008, to another forty for Virginia Witte's. On April 4, 2008, with the agreement of the victims' relatives, he pleaded guilty in Missouri to five murders in Cape Girardeau, seven sexual assaults and a robbery, and received thirteen consecutive life terms. "I don't know if I could have been so generous if I were in the same situation," he told the families. "Thank you for sparing my life." He has not been charged in Kentucky or Pennsylvania. He is held at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois. Echols wrote about the case in In Cold Pursuit in 2011, including the chapter on Grover Thompson that drew a law student from the Illinois Innocence Project to Thompson's case.