Timothy Krajcir pleaded guilty, between December 2007 and March 2010, to the deaths of nine women killed between 1977 and 1982 in southern Illinois, southeast Missouri, western Kentucky and eastern Pennsylvania. He was already a prisoner when the cases were solved. He had entered the Illinois prison system in 1963 and had been free only for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and worked on an ambulance crew. The killings he later described took place in that short window.
He was found because a Carbondale police lieutenant, Paul Echols, who had been a rookie patrol officer when a university student named Deborah Sheppard was killed in April 1982, sent the old evidence from her case back to the state crime lab in 2007. The DNA profile matched Krajcir in the database of Illinois offenders. A Cape Girardeau detective, Jimmy Smith, then linked him to five unsolved killings of women in that Missouri river town. After prosecutors and the victims' families agreed not to seek the death penalty, Krajcir confessed to nine killings. His confessions also showed that a Black man, Grover Thompson, had been wrongly convicted of a 1981 stabbing in Mount Vernon, Illinois. Thompson had died in prison in 1996, and in January 2019 he became the first person in Illinois to be exonerated after death.
The Southeast Missourian reported that he was born in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Associated Press described him in 2007 as a native of Allentown. He was 63 when he pleaded guilty in December 2007.
The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University, wrote in 2019, citing research by Radford University's psychology department, that he had an unhealthy fixation on his mother from about the age of 10 and began exposing himself and peeping into windows at 13.
He served in the Navy. After that, according to the Associated Press, he entered the Illinois prison system in 1963. The Daily Egyptian reported that he was sentenced to 25 to 50 years after attacks on two women in northern Illinois, one in Waukegan and one in Chicago, and that he was convicted of attempted murder, with other charges. In prison he earned an associate degree from Shawnee Community College and trained as an emergency medical technician, the paper said. The Southeast Missourian reported that he was later found in Jackson County, Illinois, to be a sexually dangerous person.
Krajcir was paroled in 1977. The Daily Egyptian reported that enrolling at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was a condition of his parole, and that he graduated in 1981 with a degree in administration of justice and a minor in psychology. The South County Times, a St. Louis area weekly, wrote in 2007 that he enrolled at about 30, after his prison term, and studied psychology and law enforcement. Investigators told that paper they suspected he had studied police work in order to avoid being caught.
KFVS12, the Cape Girardeau television station, reported that after prison he settled in southern Illinois and worked as an emergency medical technician and ambulance driver. The Southeast Missourian, drawing on his statements to police, wrote that a job with an ambulance service in Jackson County took him to Paducah, Kentucky, several times.
Carbondale is about 35 miles from Cape Girardeau, 55 miles from Paducah and 16 miles from Marion, according to the Associated Press. All four places would later appear in the list of his crimes. Police in the 1970s and 1980s did not connect them. The killings were spread across three states and several police agencies, and the methods varied.
The Daily Egyptian reported that he wore a blue bandanna over his face during his attacks and that he came to be called the "boogeyman in the blue bandana." In court in Cape Girardeau in 2008, according to the ABC-owned station KTRK, he described the same pattern in each case: he saw a woman in a public place, followed her home, and came back later to attack her at gunpoint. Investigators said he drove to Cape Girardeau specifically to find victims, which helped explain why detectives there had concentrated on local suspects.
Mary Parsh, 58, and her daughter Brenda Parsh, 27, were shot to death in Cape Girardeau in August 1977. The Southeast Missourian gives the date as August 12, 1977, in its 2008 and 2009 accounts. Brenda Parsh was visiting her mother at the time. A phone call from her father reached the house that evening, and it was the last time they spoke, the Southeast Missourian reported.
Krajcir described the killings to investigators 30 years later, and his account was read into the record when he pleaded guilty in 2008. He admitted that he had broken into the house, sexually assaulted both women and shot them, and that he had taken money. The Daily Egyptian reported that the gun was a .38-caliber handgun he had stolen in a Carbondale burglary in 1977.
Sheila Cole, 21, was a student at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. She had grown up in Crestwood, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Lindbergh High School in 1974. A neighbor who had known her family told the South County Times in 2007 that she was a quiet, sweet girl. She had a brother and a sister. Her father, the neighbor recalled, was so angry after her death that he drove to Carbondale to look for her killer himself. Both her parents died before the case was solved.
In November 1977 she was abducted from a store parking lot in Cape Girardeau. Krajcir later admitted that he sexually assaulted and shot her, the Southeast Missourian reported; she was killed near McClure, Illinois. The Southeast Missourian dates her death to November 16, 1977.
Virginia Lee Witte, 51, lived in Marion, Illinois. She was killed in Marion in 1978. Williamson County prosecutors said in 2008 that Krajcir had confessed that he sexually assaulted and killed her. The Associated Press called it a stabbing death. In December 2007 Marion police said that Krajcir had given them "pertinent pieces of information" and that there were "notable similarities" between her death and Deborah Sheppard's.
Joyce Tharp, 29, lived in Paducah, Kentucky, and was a graduate of Southern Illinois University, according to the university. Her daughter was 10 years old when she died. Her body was found in Paducah in March 1979.
According to Krajcir's statements to police, reported by the Southeast Missourian, on March 22, 1979, he broke into her apartment in Paducah and took her to Carbondale, where, he said, he sexually assaulted and strangled her. Because the killing appeared to have taken place in Illinois, the McCracken County commonwealth's attorney, Tim Kaltenbach, said he would not charge Krajcir with murder in Kentucky. A grand jury instead indicted him for kidnapping and burglary in January 2008; under Kentucky law a kidnapping that results in death can carry the same penalties as murder.
Myrtle Rupp, 51, was a widow who lived alone in South Temple, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, near Reading. She was strangled in 1979. A week earlier she had reported a break-in, and police believed then that the same person was responsible for both. No one was arrested.
Krajcir later told police that he had committed the earlier break-in, and that a week later he returned and sexually assaulted and strangled her. DNA from the scene matched his profile in the national database, Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Thomas G. McDaniel told the Associated Press in December 2007.
In 1979, according to the Associated Press and the Daily Egyptian, Krajcir was jailed again in Illinois on a new charge, with a two-year sentence. A judge released him conditionally in 1981, the Associated Press reported. The Southeast Missourian wrote that he was paroled in May 1981, that a prison psychiatrist had written that he showed no homicidal tendencies, and that eight months later Margie Call was dead.
On the evening of September 7, 1981, an elderly woman was attacked and stabbed in her home in Mount Vernon, Illinois. She survived. A neighbor who heard her screams forced his way in, and the attacker escaped. Both the woman and the neighbor described the attacker as a Black man.
Police found Grover Thompson, a 46-year-old Black man, asleep in the lobby of the post office nearby. He had a history of mental illness and was traveling by bus from Milwaukee to visit family in Mississippi, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. He was not wearing shoes because of an injury to his leg. Police took a pocketknife from him that held a speck of blood too small to type. No blood was found on his clothes or belongings, no fingerprints were found on the window screen the attacker had removed, and his socks did not match a fabric impression left at the scene. The neighbor identified him through a one-way mirror after being shown only him.
Thompson was tried in Jefferson County Circuit Court in December 1981. The trial lasted two days. He testified and denied the attack, and on December 9, 1981, the jury convicted him of attempted murder. He was sentenced to 40 years. His health failed in prison, and about 12 years after his arrest he was using a wheelchair, CBS News reported. He died at Menard Correctional Center on June 28, 1996, still maintaining his innocence.
Margie L. Call, 57, was a widow who lived alone in Cape Girardeau. She had worked for Woolworth's for many years, the Southeast Missourian reported. Her son Don Call later said in court that she loved children and had missed the family milestones that came after her death, among them his daughter's speech as high school valedictorian. He and his brother had checked on her often. "When your dad's dead you're supposed to take care of your mom," he said in 2008.
She was found dead in Cape Girardeau on January 27, 1982. Krajcir later told investigators that he sexually assaulted and strangled her, the Southeast Missourian reported. A hair found at the scene would later be matched to his DNA.
Deborah Sheppard, 23, was a senior at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She came from Olympia Fields, south of Chicago. On April 8, 1982, she was killed in Carbondale. The Associated Press reported in 2007 that a second autopsy found she might have been strangled or suffocated. KFVS12 reported that she was strangled. Krajcir was later convicted of her murder; the Associated Press described the crime as a sexual assault and murder.
Paul Echols was a rookie patrol officer with the Carbondale police that year. The case was not solved, and he kept returning to it as he rose through the department, the Daily Egyptian reported. A shirt from the scene held a biological stain that would, 25 years later, yield a DNA profile.
Mildred Wallace, 65, was shot to death in Cape Girardeau on June 21, 1982. Krajcir later told investigators that he broke into her home while she was out and cut himself doing so. She asked him whether he had killed Margie Call, and he told her he had not, the Southeast Missourian reported. His blood and a partial palm print left at the house were kept as evidence.
After 1982 Krajcir left southern Illinois. The Associated Press reported that a judge had released him conditionally in 1981 and that he returned to Pennsylvania. Records show he was arrested in Allentown in 1983 on sexual-assault charges and served time in a Pennsylvania prison, according to the Associated Press, which cited the Allentown Morning Call. The Daily Egyptian reported that he was arrested after being found in a parking lot with a gun. The Southeast Missourian wrote that, held for a parole violation, he tried to escape by climbing down a wall on a rope made of bedsheets, fell, broke a leg and was recaptured. The Southeast Missourian also reported that he had been considered a suspect in a series of rapes in the Lehigh Valley known as the "Southside Rapist" cases. He was not reported to have been charged in those cases.
The arrest violated his Illinois parole. When his Pennsylvania term ended in 1988 he was returned to Illinois, where he stayed in custody from then on, the Associated Press reported. By 2007 he was held at the Big Muddy River Correctional Center in Ina, Illinois. KFVS12 described his Illinois sentence there as 25 years to life. He kept silent about the killings for about 25 years.
Jimmy Smith began looking again at the five Cape Girardeau killings in the early 1990s, KFVS12 reported in 2016. He believed they were connected. Over the years he stayed in touch with the families; Don Call kept calling the police, hoping for an answer.
In Carbondale, Paul Echols, by then a lieutenant and the department's investigations commander, had already helped solve an older case: the 1981 killing of another Southern Illinois University senior, Susan Schumake, which ended in a guilty verdict in 2006, according to the university. In the summer of 2007 he submitted the Sheppard evidence to the Illinois State Police crime lab and worked with forensic scientists there on newer DNA techniques. The stain on the shirt yielded enough genetic markers to be entered in the database. Krajcir, who had recently been moved to Big Muddy, was in the Illinois DNA registry, and the profile matched him in August 2007.
Echols went to the prison to interview him. Krajcir first denied any involvement, the Daily Egyptian reported. The next day he called Echols and confessed to killing Deborah Sheppard. Carbondale police announced on August 31, 2007, that they had made an arrest in the 25-year-old case.
After the Sheppard arrest, Smith went back through the Cape Girardeau files and connected Krajcir to a 1982 sexual assault in Cape Girardeau, the Southeast Missourian reported. DNA from the Wallace case matched Krajcir's profile in CODIS, the national DNA database, and the partial palm print from her house matched him too. A hair from the Call case was later matched to his DNA as well.
The Cape Girardeau County prosecuting attorney, Morley Swingle, had planned to seek the death penalty. He consulted the families of the Missouri victims, and they agreed that closure mattered more to them than vengeance. Swingle agreed not to seek death in exchange for full confessions. "These cases would not have been solved if not for the death penalty," he said in 2008.
In a series of recorded interviews at Big Muddy, including one on December 3, 2007, Krajcir described the five Cape Girardeau killings, the killings of Virginia Witte and Joyce Tharp, and the killing of Myrtle Rupp in Pennsylvania. Smith told the Associated Press that Krajcir "disclosed some things he wasn't really forced to up front." Asked whether there could be others, Smith said, "could he have done others? Yes," but he doubted it. Police in Missouri, New York, New Jersey and Colorado reviewed unsolved cases for possible links, the Associated Press reported in December 2007.
Smith later recalled meeting Krajcir face to face. Thirty years after the killings, Krajcir still remembered vivid details about each woman. "He appeared to me to be just a worn out old man at that time," Smith said.
On December 10, 2007, Krajcir was taken to the Jackson County Courthouse in Murphysboro, Illinois. He waived his right to a jury trial and pleaded guilty to the murder of Deborah Sheppard. He showed no visible emotion as his confession was described. He was sentenced to 40 years, the maximum for murder in Illinois in 1982, KFVS12 reported.
Echols told the station that Krajcir seemed an easygoing, gentle man with a dark side. Asked whether he felt remorse, Krajcir said he was sorry, but that he was not like the people he was talking to, and that if he had been, the killing would not have happened.
The same day, Morley Swingle filed five counts of first-degree murder in Cape Girardeau, with other charges. Dozens of relatives of the victims came to a press conference to thank the police for not giving up, KFVS12 reported. The Southeast Missourian named the case the top local story of 2007.
Williamson County prosecutors announced in January 2008 that they would not seek the death penalty in the killing of Virginia Witte, because Krajcir had helped solve it. On January 18, 2008, before Judge Phillip Palmer in Marion, he pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree murder; prosecutors dropped a second count. The hearing lasted about 15 minutes. The judge ordered the 40-year sentence to run after the Sheppard sentence. "For all practical purposes, this is a life sentence," Palmer told him, calling the plea fair and reasonable and saying it spared her family a long trial and years of appeals. The prosecutor, Charles Garnati, said Krajcir was "a very dangerous man who should never be out of prison," and that the outcome was "justice she has deserved all these years."
On April 4, 2008, under heavy security, Krajcir appeared before Cape Girardeau County Circuit Judge Benjamin F. Lewis. The hearing was held in the federal building in Cape Girardeau to handle the security needs and the large crowd. He pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, including a count of first-degree robbery, 13 counts in all. Lewis imposed 13 life sentences, to run one after another. Because the crimes came before Missouri's newer sentencing laws, he would not be eligible for parole for 50 years on each, the Southeast Missourian reported. The sentences were added to the 80 years he was serving in Illinois.
Relatives filled the courtroom. Don Call said he had dreamed for 26 years of seeing justice done. "The overwhelming question was why; now we know," he said. "We've got Mom back now. She can rest in peace." He described the guilt he and his brother had carried for years, feeling they should have protected her. A woman who survived one of the 1981 attacks also spoke.
Krajcir cried as he apologized. "I'm terribly sorry for what I've done," he said, according to the Southeast Missourian. He thanked the families for agreeing to spare him: "I don't know if I could have been so generous if I were in the same situation. Thank you for sparing my life." He said he would spend his remaining years helping as many people as he could, including counseling younger sex offenders. Judge Lewis, who did not use a gavel, said he had been surprised by the apology and wanted Krajcir to live the rest of his life aware of the pain he had caused. He was returned to the Illinois Department of Corrections that night.
By mid-January 2008 prosecutors in Berks County had charged Krajcir with first-degree murder, rape, possessing instruments of crime and impersonating a public servant in the death of Myrtle Rupp. In April 2008 he appeared by closed-circuit television from the Tamms supermaximum prison in Illinois before a court in Reading. "I did it," he said of the killing, and of Rupp, "She didn't deserve to die." The district attorney, John T. Adams, said he did not expect to seek the death penalty and expected a plea at a preliminary hearing set for June 19. The Southeast Missourian later reported that Krajcir received a life sentence in Pennsylvania in June 2008, and CBS News reported in 2019 that he had pleaded guilty to a killing there.
On March 25, 2010, Krajcir pleaded guilty in McCracken County Circuit Court in Paducah to first-degree burglary and kidnapping resulting in death in the case of Joyce Tharp. He was sentenced to 20 years for the burglary and life for the kidnapping. Her sister and her daughter were in court. "I was 10 years old when you robbed me of my mother," her daughter told him. Her sister said she had always wondered who could have hated her sister enough to take her. Krajcir said he had spent 10 years in intensive therapy trying to learn why he had committed so many crimes and that he deeply regretted what had happened. He was then returned to Illinois.
In May 2012, back in the same court, he pleaded guilty to robbery and burglary in a 1978 home invasion in Paducah in which no one was killed, and a judge added 65 years to his sentences. By then, WKMS and the Associated Press reported, he was serving 15 life terms. He told the court he had confessed to show his remorse and to help the victims find closure.
In December 2007, during his interviews with Echols, Krajcir admitted two sexual assaults and one attempted assault in Mount Vernon, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. One of them was the attack on the elderly woman in Mount Vernon. He drew a diagram that matched her apartment and described the attack in detail.
At first the Mount Vernon police could not find a report of the attack, and the investigators did not know the woman's name, WSIU reported. When Krajcir added more details, he mentioned that he thought someone had been arrested for it. "And I mean, this is, this is not what you want to hear," Echols recalled in 2019. Echols said Krajcir's dark hair and complexion had probably led the woman to describe her attacker as Black. Krajcir is white.
After the confession became public, the neighbor who had identified Thompson told a reporter that he now believed an innocent man might have gone to prison, the Registry reported. Krajcir was never charged with the Mount Vernon attack.
Echols wrote about the Krajcir investigation in a book, In Cold Pursuit, with the St. Louis journalist Christine Byers; he signed copies at the university in April 2011. Its 21st chapter dealt with Grover Thompson. In 2011, students from the Southern Illinois University School of Law and the downstate office of the Illinois Innocence Project began to investigate. That year Thompson's nephew, S.T. Jamison of Minnesota, and the Illinois Innocence Project filed a petition for executive clemency with the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. Police from Carbondale and Cape Girardeau supported it, KFVS12 reported, and no one opposed it. In December 2015 Governor Bruce Rauner denied it without explanation.
The Innocence Project kept pressing. In January 2019, after losing his bid for reelection and just days before leaving office, Rauner granted Thompson posthumous executive clemency based on innocence. The National Registry of Exonerations gives the date as January 14, 2019; a Prisoner Review Board spokesman, Jason Sweat, told the Associated Press that it was granted on a Friday. The Illinois Innocence Project said it was the first posthumous exoneration in Illinois history and the 21st in the country. The Registry lists mistaken witness identification and official misconduct among the factors in the case.
"We cannot bring this beautiful man back, whom we love so much, but we can clear his name," Jamison said. "He was an innocent black man just trying to get home to his family and he never came home." John Hanlon, the Illinois Innocence Project's executive director, said the wrongful conviction "was essentially a death sentence for him." Echols called Thompson's case "the poster child of injustice." He said he uses it in training: "So, from something bad, I do try to bring something good out of it."
In late 2007 and early 2008 Krajcir was held at the Tamms Correctional Center, Illinois's supermaximum prison. After his Kentucky plea in 2010 he was returned to the Pontiac Correctional Center, KFVS12 reported. The Southeast Missourian listed him at the Stateville Correctional Center in October 2009. The Daily Egyptian reported in March 2019 that he was serving his sentences at Pontiac.
Jimmy Smith was named the Cape Girardeau Police Department's officer of the year in 2008 for closing the five killings. He retired in June 2016 after more than 30 years with the department. Paul Echols retired from the Carbondale police in 2009 and taught criminal justice at Shawnee Community College and at Southern Illinois University.
Echols and Byers used the proceeds of their book to fund the Nine Angels Scholarship at Southern Illinois University, a memorial to the nine women, awarded to a criminology and criminal justice student. Echols said he hoped to build an endowment of at least $25,000 to make the scholarship permanent. "It's great to see something good," he said in 2015.
The number of victims. Krajcir admitted killing nine women, and courts in four states accepted his guilty pleas in those cases (in Kentucky, to kidnapping resulting in death rather than murder). WSIU reported in 2019 that the nine were two killings in Carbondale, one in Marion, five in Cape Girardeau and one in Pennsylvania, which counts Joyce Tharp's death in Carbondale, where Krajcir said she was killed. Police in other states reviewed their cold cases, and Jimmy Smith said in 2007 that others were possible, though he doubted it.
Other crimes. The National Registry of Exonerations wrote that he confessed to more than 30 sexual assaults in several states. The Southeast Missourian reported that he had been a suspect in the Lehigh Valley "Southside Rapist" cases.
The Pennsylvania outcome. A life sentence in June 2008 and a guilty plea were reported; the offense of conviction has not been reported.
Remorse. Krajcir apologized in court in 2008 and 2010. A survivor who spoke in 2008 said she did not believe the apology was genuine.
1963: After Navy service, enters the Illinois prison system.
1977: Paroled; enrolls at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
August 1977: Mary Parsh and Brenda Parsh are killed in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
November 1977: Sheila Cole is abducted in Cape Girardeau and killed near McClure, Illinois.
1978: Virginia Lee Witte is killed in Marion, Illinois; a home invasion in Paducah, Kentucky, for which he is sentenced in 2012.
March 1979: Joyce Tharp of Paducah is killed.
1979: Myrtle Rupp is killed in South Temple, Pennsylvania. Krajcir is jailed again in Illinois.
1981: Released; graduates from Southern Illinois University.
September 7, 1981: An elderly woman is stabbed in Mount Vernon, Illinois; Grover Thompson is arrested and on December 9, 1981, convicted of attempted murder.
January 27, 1982: Margie Call is found dead in Cape Girardeau.
April 8, 1982: Deborah Sheppard is killed in Carbondale.
June 21, 1982: Mildred Wallace is killed in Cape Girardeau.
1983: Arrested in Allentown, Pennsylvania; serves a Pennsylvania prison term.
1988: Returned to Illinois custody.
Early 1990s: Cape Girardeau detective Jimmy Smith begins reviewing the five Cape Girardeau killings.
June 28, 1996: Grover Thompson dies at Menard Correctional Center.
August 2007: DNA from the Sheppard case matches Krajcir; he confesses to her killing.
December 2007: Recorded confessions to nine killings and the Mount Vernon attack.
December 10, 2007: Pleads guilty to Sheppard's murder; 40 years. Charged in Missouri with five murders.
January 2008: Indicted in Kentucky in the Tharp case; charged in Pennsylvania in the Rupp case.
January 18, 2008: Pleads guilty to Witte's murder; 40 more years.
April 4, 2008: Pleads guilty in Cape Girardeau; 13 consecutive life sentences.
June 2008: Life sentence in Pennsylvania, as reported.
March 25, 2010: Pleads guilty in Paducah in the Tharp case; life plus 20 years.
2011: Echols's book In Cold Pursuit appears; clemency petition filed for Grover Thompson.
May 2012: Another 65 years in Kentucky for the 1978 home invasion.
December 2015: Governor Rauner denies Thompson's clemency petition.
January 2019: Rauner grants Thompson posthumous clemency, the first posthumous exoneration in Illinois.
March 2019: The Daily Egyptian reports Krajcir at Pontiac Correctional Center.