Between nine at night on September 18, 1987, and half past nine the next morning, Debbie Dudley Davis, a thirty-five-year-old account executive, was raped and strangled in her apartment in the Westover Hills neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Police found her naked on the bed. The killer had used a ligature tightened with a ratchet-like device, and he had left almost nothing behind. Two weeks later, on the night of October 2 or early on October 3, Dr. Susan Hellams, thirty-two, a neurosurgery resident at the Medical College of Virginia, was killed in her home on West 31st Street. Her husband found her partly clothed on the floor of their bedroom closet with two belts around her neck. The intruder had cut away most of a second-story window screen to get in.
On November 22, Diane Cho, fifteen, a high school student, was found raped and strangled with a rope in her family's apartment on Gavilan Court in Chesterfield County, near Richmond. Her mouth was taped, and a figure eight had been painted on her left hip in nail polish. The press named the killer the Southside Strangler. About November 27, Susan Tucker, forty-four, was raped and killed in her condominium in Arlington, a hundred miles north. She was not found until December 1.
Timothy Wilson Spencer was born on March 17, 1962, in Arlington, to a single mother, and had a younger brother, Travis. He was sent to juvenile detention as a young teenager for petty thefts and truancy and in his twenties was in prison for robberies around Richmond. He was a practiced burglar. He watched his victims and followed them around the local shopping mall, climbed in through windows at night, and raped them, strangling them into unconsciousness again and again before he killed them with a belt or a stocking. The only trace he left was semen.
The Arlington detective Joe Horgas saw in the Tucker killing the pattern of an Arlington murder three years earlier, of Carolyn Jean Hamm in January 1984, which was supposed to be solved. Spencer had served a sentence for a 1984 burglary, which explained the gap, and had been released to a parolees' halfway house in South Richmond within walking distance of the Davis and Hellams homes. At Thanksgiving he had traveled to Arlington to stay with his mother, who lived about a mile from Susan Tucker. On January 20, 1988, Arlington police arrested him, at twenty-five, for Tucker's rape and murder, and he was charged with the Richmond killings too.
His first trial opened in Arlington on July 11, 1988, for the rape, burglary and murder of Susan Tucker, with Carl Womack and Thomas Kelley defending. It was the first case in Virginia in which DNA was used successfully to prove identity, and it ended in a death sentence. In Richmond, where semen and hairs from the Davis scene were consistent with his DNA, the jury heard that the chance they came from someone else was one in 705 million, and on September 22, 1988, he was convicted of her rape, burglary and capital murder and sentenced to death. His trial for Susan Hellams began on January 17, 1989, with the same result. In Diane Cho's case the DNA was inconclusive, but he was convicted anyway and given a fourth death sentence.
When his DNA was compared with older cases, it pointed to the Hamm murder, for which David Vasquez, a man with an IQ below seventy, had entered an Alford plea in early 1985 after an interrogation that included false claims about the evidence against him. The DNA itself was inconclusive, but the FBI was confident enough, given the similarities, to report that Spencer was most likely responsible. Vasquez received an unconditional pardon on January 4, 1989, after five years of a thirty-five-year sentence, and is described as the first person in the United States exonerated on DNA evidence. Spencer was never charged with killing Carolyn Hamm.
His appeals argued that DNA identification was too new to convict on, and the courts upheld it. He never confessed. His last meal was fried chicken, french fries and a soft drink. He was executed in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt at 11:13 on the night of April 27, 1994, at thirty-two, and declined to make a final statement.
Paul Mones told Horgas's story in the 1995 book Stalking Justice, and the former FBI profiler John Douglas devoted a chapter of his 1996 memoir Journey into Darkness to the case. Patricia Cornwell, who had worked as a computer analyst in the Richmond medical examiner's office during the 1987 killings, drew criticism in the city for how closely her 1990 novel Postmortem resembled them, particularly the Hellams case. He was also linked to at least nine rapes in the two cities.