Timothy Wilson Spencer was convicted of four capital murders committed in Virginia in the fall of 1987: Debbie Dudley Davis and Dr. Susan Hellams in Richmond, Diane Cho in Chesterfield County, just outside Richmond, and Susan Tucker in Arlington, about 100 miles to the north. Each was killed in her own home. He had been released from prison to a Richmond halfway house only weeks before the first killing.
His case is remembered for the science that convicted him. Samples from the crime scenes were sent to Lifecodes, a private laboratory in New York, which used a technique then called DNA printing to compare them with his blood. At his first trial, in Arlington in July 1988, a jury convicted him of the murder of Susan Tucker and sentenced him to death. Arlington Magazine, ARLnow and WTVR in Richmond have all described it as the first capital murder conviction in the United States built on DNA evidence. The Supreme Court of Virginia upheld the use of the technique in a series of opinions in 1989 and 1990.
The same investigation reopened a 1984 Arlington case. Carolyn Hamm, a 32-year-old lawyer, had been killed in January 1984, and a local man named David Vasquez had entered a plea and was serving 35 years for it. Arlington investigators concluded that the man who killed Susan Tucker had also killed Carolyn Hamm. The evidence in her case was too degraded for the DNA testing of the time, so Vasquez could not be cleared in court. Governor Gerald Baliles granted him an absolute pardon on January 4, 1989. Spencer was never charged with the Hamm killing.
Spencer was executed in Virginia's electric chair on April 27, 1994. In 2026 his case was one of eight executions named in a state review of the work of a Virginia forensic serologist.
Spencer grew up in Arlington. Joe Horgas, the Arlington County police detective who later arrested him, told Arlington Magazine that he remembered him as a neighborhood troublemaker named "Timmy" whom he had investigated for burglary about ten years before the 1987 killings. When Horgas searched driver's license records in January 1988, he looked for a Timothy Spencer born in 1962.
The court records give the outline of his criminal history. By the time of his trials he had six burglary convictions, three as a juvenile and three as an adult, along with three convictions for trespassing. On January 29, 1984, he was arrested for a burglary in Alexandria, next to Arlington, according to Arlington Magazine, and he served a prison term for that offense. In September 1987 the Department of Corrections released him to a halfway house in Richmond while he remained in its custody; Arlington Magazine gives the release date as September 4, 1987. His mother still lived in Arlington, less than a mile from the sites of the Arlington killings, according to Arlington Magazine.
People who knew him did not describe him as violent. At the penalty phase of his Richmond trial for the death of Debbie Davis, six witnesses called by the defense said he was shy, quiet and nonviolent, and none of them believed he had committed the crimes. At the Hellams trial a community center employee, his mother and his grandmother described him as a respectful young man who had not caused trouble.
Carolyn Jean Hamm was a 32-year-old lawyer who worked in Washington and lived alone in Arlington. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, she was killed at her home some time after 10 p.m. on Monday, January 23, 1984. When she did not come to work for two days, a friend went to the house, and she was found dead on January 25.
Between June 1983 and January 1984, nine women in Arlington had been attacked by a man the police called the "black masked rapist," according to Arlington Magazine. The last of those attacks took place on the day Carolyn Hamm's body was found. The women who survived those attacks have never been publicly identified, and none of the cases was ever tried.
Arlington police focused on David Vasquez, then 37, a former janitor at an Arlington high school who had moved to Manassas, lived with his mother and worked at a fast-food restaurant. The Innocence Project says police questioned him after tips from local residents. The Registry describes him as having an IQ below 70.
Detectives picked him up for questioning on February 4, 1984. In the first recorded interview he denied having been in Arlington. The detectives then told him, falsely, that his fingerprints had been found in the house, and he began to make admissions, with the officers suggesting details of the crime. In a later interview he described what he called a dream about the killing. He was charged with murder, rape and burglary. The trial judge suppressed his first two statements but allowed the third, and the "dream" account became the center of the prosecution's case.
Other evidence pointed away from him. Biological evidence from the scene did not match his blood type, and shoe impressions did not match his shoes, although a forensic analyst reported that hair from the scene was microscopically similar to his. On February 3, 1985, the day before his trial was to begin, Vasquez entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder and burglary, a plea in which a defendant does not admit guilt but accepts that the evidence could convict him. The rape and capital murder charges were dropped. The Arlington Circuit Court sentenced him on February 4, 1985, to a total of 35 years.
In September 1987 Spencer moved into the halfway house in the south of Richmond. The Supreme Court of Virginia later wrote that within 30 days of his release he had killed Debbie Dudley Davis.
Debbie Dudley Davis was 35 and lived in an apartment in Richmond's Southside. Arlington Magazine described her as an accounts clerk; Richmond magazine wrote that she was an account executive for a Richmond weekly newspaper. She was last known to be alive on the evening of Friday, September 18, 1987. The next day, Saturday, September 19, a car registered to her was reported abandoned near her home, and police found her dead in Richmond. The medical examiner found that she had been strangled with a ligature.
Spencer lived about 2.7 miles from her apartment, the court noted.
Dr. Susan Hellams was 32, a resident in neurosurgery at the Medical College of Virginia. She lived with her husband in a house in Richmond's Southside protected by a six-foot security fence. She was last seen alive at about 10:50 p.m. on October 2, 1987. Her husband came home at about 1:30 or 1:40 the next morning and found her dead; police received his call at 1:56 a.m. on October 3. The medical examiner recorded the cause of death as ligature strangulation. A screen had been cut from a bedroom window.
Two killings of women in their homes within two weeks frightened the city. The press began to call the unknown killer the "Southside Strangler," the Fourth Circuit later noted. Ray Williams, a Richmond homicide detective, told WTVR in 2014 that at night the city was "lit up like Christmas" because people left their lights on, and that nearly every dog at the city pound was adopted. Residents stayed inside and locked their doors, WTVR reported in 2018.
According to WTVR, criminal profilers working with Richmond police believed the killer was probably a local white man, and the police found no solid leads. Horgas said later that the Richmond investigators were focused on a white suspect. Richmond police did, however, send samples from the crime scenes to Lifecodes in New York for DNA testing, a method that had not yet been used to solve a homicide in the United States, according to Arlington Magazine.
Diane Cho was 15, a freshman at Manchester High School. Richmond magazine reported that she was the daughter of recent Korean immigrants and that her parents had moved to the Richmond area in July 1987, four months before her death. She lived with her parents and her brother in an apartment complex in Chesterfield County. She went to her room at about 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 21, 1987. Her parents found her dead at about 2 p.m. the next day, November 22. The cause of death was ligature strangulation.
Spencer had signed out of the halfway house that night, according to the evidence later presented at his trial for her death.
Susan Tucker was 44, a writer who lived in the Fairlington neighborhood of Arlington. Spencer spent the Thanksgiving holiday of 1987 at his mother's home in Arlington, which the Supreme Court of Virginia placed about seven blocks from Tucker's townhouse. On December 1, 1987, after a neighbor reported her missing, she was found dead in Arlington. The medical examiner estimated that she had been dead for three to five days.
Joe Horgas was called to the Tucker case on December 1. The detectives saw at once how much it resembled the Hamm killing, which had happened a few blocks away. The killer had left no fingerprints, fibers or footprints, and there were no suspects.
Horgas at first wondered whether David Vasquez had had a partner who was still free. On December 7, 1987, he visited Vasquez at Buckingham Correctional Center. Vasquez withdrew his confession, told Horgas that he did not drive, and could not name anyone who might have been with him. Horgas told the warden, according to Arlington Magazine, "I don't think Vasquez belongs here."
Horgas then went back to the Hamm file and to the unsolved Arlington rapes of 1983 and 1984, and began to think that one man was responsible for all of them and for Tucker's death. He contacted other police departments. A teletype from Richmond described the Davis and Hellams killings, and Richmond detectives told him about Diane Cho and about the samples they had sent to Lifecodes. On December 28 he flew to New York with evidence from the Arlington cases and delivered it to the Lifecodes laboratory in Valhalla, where he was told the results would take at least six weeks.
The next day, December 29, two agents of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Stephen Mardigan and Judson Ray, reviewed his material. They told him that an attacker of this kind usually begins where he feels comfortable, probably near his own home, and stops only when he dies or is locked up. They suggested that he look for a man who had been arrested for burglary soon after the Hamm killing and released shortly before the Richmond killings began.
Horgas and his partner, Mike Hill, went through parole records by hand. The search turned out to be beside the point: Arlington Magazine notes that a release to a halfway house was not technically a parole, so Spencer's name would not have appeared in those records. It was Horgas's memory that produced the lead. He recalled the boy called Timmy, and on January 6, 1988, he remembered the surname. The driver's license search returned Timothy W. Spencer, born in 1962, with an address in Richmond. His record showed the burglary arrest in Alexandria four days after Hamm's body was found and the release to the Richmond halfway house in September 1987. Horgas found that the dates of the crimes matched Spencer's time in prison and his time out of the halfway house, ARLnow reported.
Richmond police watched Spencer for about a week and then ended the surveillance.
Helen Fahey, the Arlington Commonwealth's Attorney, worried that an arrest resting on deduction alone could be challenged in court. Horgas proposed asking a grand jury for an indictment, which would be harder to attack. After he presented the evidence, he arrested Spencer at the Richmond halfway house at 5:50 p.m. on January 20, 1988, on a burglary charge. Following the FBI agents' advice, he did not mention the killings on the drive back to Arlington. When Horgas told him that a blood sample was needed for comparison in the burglary case, Spencer agreed to give one, at about 2 a.m.
At his arrest a drawing was found under his mattress. Prosecutors in the Cho case later compared it with a mark left at that scene; a handwriting analysis was inconclusive.
Horgas sent the blood sample to Lifecodes. On March 16, 1988, a technician at the laboratory called him with the result: the DNA in Spencer's blood matched the material from the Tucker, Davis and Hellams cases, as well as one of the Arlington rapes of 1983 or 1984. Horgas said he was ecstatic.
The laboratory's figures were later put before the juries. In the Arlington case Lifecodes estimated that the profile would occur in about one in 135 million Black people, against a population of roughly 10 million adult Black men in the United States. In Richmond the laboratory's March 1988 report gave the same one in 135 million figure for the Davis evidence, and an update to its database on August 30, 1988, raised it to one in 705 million. The Hellams jury heard the one in 705 million figure. An independent test by Cellmark Laboratories in the Arlington case confirmed Lifecodes' results, the Fourth Circuit noted.
The older methods pointed the same way. Spencer was a type O secretor, and the stains in each case came from someone with a combination of blood and enzyme traits shared by about 13 percent of the population.
Spencer's trial for the death of Susan Tucker opened in the Arlington Circuit Court on July 11, 1988, before Judge Benjamin Kendrick. Fahey prosecuted; Carl G. Womack Jr. and Thomas J. Kelley Jr. defended him. Fahey and Horgas were nervous, Arlington Magazine reported, because the case rested almost entirely on DNA. Kendrick held a special hearing on the new evidence and ruled it admissible, although he remarked that many people called it "hocus-pocus."
Three scientists testified for the prosecution: Dr. Richard Roberts of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Dr. Kenneth Kidd of Yale and Dr. Michael Baird of Lifecodes. Spencer conceded on appeal that he could find no expert to dispute the technique. The prosecution also presented hair comparisons and glass fragments that matched a broken basement window through which the killer had entered.
On July 16, 1988, after about six hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of capital murder and rape, and it fixed his sentence for capital murder at death, with life imprisonment for the rape. ARLnow described it as a six-day trial. At the penalty phase the jury heard evidence that within 30 days of his release Spencer had committed two similar killings in Richmond. Judge Kendrick said it was the first capital conviction in the United States based on DNA evidence, according to Arlington Magazine.
Spencer was tried twice in Richmond, before the same trial judge and with the same defense lawyers, Jeffrey L. Everhart and David J. Johnson. The opinion in the Hellams appeal refers to the judge as Wilkinson.
In the Davis case he was tried on three indictments together: capital murder, rape, and burglary, the burglary being a nighttime entry with intent to commit rape. Spencer asked to act as co-counsel in his own defense while represented, and his lawyers sought the laboratory's working notes, and challenged the late disclosure of the updated statistics; the trial court rejected each point. Dr. Kevin McElfresh of Lifecodes testified on the technique and on population genetics, and Dr. Roberts said that no one in the scientific community disputed its reliability. Hairs consistent with Spencer's were also found. The jury convicted him on all three counts and, in September 1988, unanimously fixed his sentence at death. He received life for the rape and 20 years for the burglary.
The Hellams case was heard by a jury brought from Norfolk because of extensive pretrial publicity, United Press International reported. The defense presented no evidence during the guilt phase. The jury convicted him of capital murder, rape, forcible sodomy and burglary. After about an hour of deliberation, it decided that he should receive a third death sentence, along with two life terms and 20 years. At both Richmond trials the jury found the two aggravating factors that Virginia law then required for a death sentence: that he would remain a continuing serious threat to society, and that his conduct was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman."
The DNA evidence in Diane Cho's case was weaker. The conventional DNA test failed because the sample held too little DNA. The prosecution turned to a newer method, PCR amplification, which identified a genotype found in about 5 percent of the population; combined with the blood and enzyme results, the profile occurred in less than 1 percent. Dr. Edward Blake, a forensic serologist, and Dr. Haig Kazazian, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins, testified that the method was reliable, and their testimony was not rebutted. A hair found at the scene was microscopically similar to Spencer's.
The prosecution also put the three earlier killings before the jury to prove identity. The court allowed it because the crimes shared a pattern: a man staying at a halfway house, a weekend night, a window entry, and the same forensic links. He had been seen at two shopping malls that the victims had frequented, which he had falsely denied visiting. Christopher J. Collins defended him, with Everhart on the brief.
The trial was interrupted by an outburst from Diane's mother in the courtroom, a bomb threat and a power outage; the judge gave the jury curative instructions each time and refused a mistrial. The jury convicted Spencer of capital murder and related offenses, including burglary, and the final judgment orders were entered on October 17, 1989. He received his fourth death sentence, with life for the rape and 20 years for the burglary.
The Supreme Court of Virginia heard each case on direct appeal, and Justice Roscoe Stephenson wrote the first three opinions. On September 22, 1989, the court affirmed the Tucker and Davis judgments. It held that DNA printing was reliable and had been properly carried out, and it declined to adopt the Frye test, the standard many other courts then used for new scientific evidence. It rejected the claim that a rape committed after death defeated a capital murder charge, upheld the exclusion of jurors who said they could never impose death, and found the death sentences neither excessive nor disproportionate.
On November 10, 1989, the court affirmed the Hellams judgments. Spencer had objected that the jury was told one prosecution expert worked at a laboratory whose director had won a Nobel Prize; the court found no reversible error. It repeated its holding that DNA testing was reliable and said that DNA printing would satisfy the Frye test anyway.
On June 8, 1990, in an opinion by Justice Russell, the court affirmed the Cho judgments. It held that the PCR evidence was admissible, and it adopted a new standard for evidence of other crimes: crimes need not be "carbon copies" of each other to be admitted to prove identity, as long as they bear a strong resemblance to the crime charged. The Library of Virginia, in an online exhibit on law and justice in the state, says that Justice Stephenson's opinions established Virginia as a leader in the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases.
Spencer then challenged the Richmond convictions in federal court. In the Davis case the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied his petition on April 30, 1992, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed on September 16, 1993. Most of his challenges to the DNA evidence were procedurally barred, because his state habeas appeal had been filed one day late. The court also rejected his claim of actual innocence, which relied on articles and on a New York trial court decision criticizing DNA work in another case; the court found that decision distinguishable.
In the Hellams case the district court denied relief on January 21, 1993. An execution date of August 26, 1993, was set, but the Fourth Circuit stayed it on July 27, 1993, while the appeal was heard. On February 3, 1994, the Fourth Circuit affirmed. It found that his trial lawyers had not been ineffective in failing to obtain a defense DNA expert, in their questioning of jurors about racial bias, or in their handling of mitigating evidence and the DNA evidence, and it held that his actual innocence claim did not state an independent constitutional claim. Rehearing was denied on February 28, 1994. At that time his appeal in the Arlington case was still pending before the Fourth Circuit.
The day after the Arlington verdict, Horgas and Fahey began to discuss how to free David Vasquez, Arlington Magazine reported. The evidence from the Hamm case was too degraded for DNA testing, and Virginia law offered no court remedy, so a pardon from the governor was the only route. Arlington police, Arlington prosecutors and the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime reinvestigated the killing and concluded that another person was responsible. John Douglas, the FBI profiler who had founded the Behavioral Science Unit, helped with a 35-page report drafted by Mardigan.
In October 1988 Fahey and Vasquez's defense lawyer asked the governor for a pardon. The Arlington police and the prosecutor who had handled the original case agreed with the request, and the Virginia Parole Board recommended it. Governor Baliles granted an absolute pardon on January 4, 1989, and Vasquez was freed that day. He had been in prison for about four years. In 1990 the General Assembly passed a special act awarding him $117,000, which the Registry calculates at $65.14 for each of the 1,796 days he was held. The Innocence Project calls him the first person in the United States exonerated through DNA testing; Arlington Magazine says he was exonerated "indirectly" by DNA, since no test was ever run on the Hamm evidence.
Spencer never admitted any of the killings. WTVR reported in 2014 that before his death he called the scientists and detectives in his cases liars and "set-up men." His brother told Radio IQ in 2026 that Spencer had always maintained he was not guilty.
He was executed by electrocution at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, on April 27, 1994, after the United States Supreme Court denied last-minute requests for a stay. He was 32 and made no final statement, according to Arlington Magazine. WTVR wrote that he showed no remorse.
Arlington Magazine reported in 2015 that Horgas, then 69, lived in Florida and supervised federal background investigations.
WTVR reported in 2018 that the case helped push Virginia to create a DNA database. In 1989 the state forensic laboratory became the first state laboratory to offer DNA testing to law enforcement, and Virginia created a DNA data bank for convicted sex offenders, expanded in 1990 to all convicted felons, according to the Department of Forensic Science. Paul B. Ferrara, the longtime director of the state laboratory, championed the data bank, Richmond magazine and WTVR reported. By 2021 it had recorded its 15,000th match.
The case also reached popular fiction. Patricia Cornwell had worked in the office of Richmond's chief medical examiner in 1987, and when her first novel, Postmortem, appeared in 1990, critics noted how closely its plot resembled the Richmond killings, Arlington Magazine reported. A book, Stalking Justice, covers the investigation, WTVR noted, and in 2026 Radio IQ reported that his brother had written a book, History in the Making, about the case.
From 1973 to 1988 Mary Jane Burton worked as a forensic serologist for the state of Virginia. After an independent journalist, Tessa Kramer, raised questions about her methods, the General Assembly passed a law in 2024 to reexamine her work, and a 2025 law set up a review panel under the Virginia State Crime Commission. A Crime Commission status report dated July 15, 2026, said staff had reviewed all 7,545 case files in which she was the examiner and were working to identify the people convicted and their current status, including those executed.
In August 2026 Radio IQ reported that the Department of Forensic Science had named eight men executed between 1986 and 1998 whose cases would be reviewed, and that Spencer was one of them. Amy Jenkins, the department's chief deputy director, said the cases were included "because of the historical significance of these cases." Shawn Armbrust of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, who had looked at the eight executions in the spring of 2024, said she found no sign that Burton's involvement had affected the outcomes. Radio IQ did not report what Burton's role in Spencer's cases had been, and no findings had been published as of its August 2026 report. Spencer's brother told Radio IQ that he believed evidence in the investigations had been mishandled; that is his claim, not a finding.
The Hamm killing. Spencer was never charged with the death of Carolyn Hamm, and no DNA test was ever run on the evidence from her case. United Press International reported in January 1989 that he was conclusively linked to a Northern Virginia rape and killing but would not be charged with it because he already faced multiple death sentences. ARLnow reported in 2018 that he was never tried for it because the DNA from the scene had degraded. The pardon document says only that the reinvestigation found another person responsible. His responsibility for her death rests on the investigators' conclusions, not on a verdict.
The Arlington rapes. Arlington Magazine reported nine attacks between June 1983 and January 1984; ARLnow wrote that investigators believed he committed about eight rapes in and near Arlington in that period; the Registry says Horgas linked the killings to ten rapes in Arlington and Alexandria. The Lifecodes result of March 1988 matched one of them, according to Arlington Magazine. None was tried.
The "first" claims. Several accounts call the Arlington trial the first capital murder conviction in the United States based on DNA, and Vasquez the first person exonerated by DNA. Arlington Magazine's qualification, that Vasquez was cleared only indirectly, is the more exact description.
Spencer's own position. He maintained his innocence to the end, and his brother has challenged the handling of the evidence. The 2026 state review had reported no findings about his cases as of August 2026.
1962: Timothy Wilson Spencer born (the birth year on his driver's license record).
June 1983 to January 1984: series of rapes in Arlington, later attributed by police to one man.
January 23, 1984: Carolyn Hamm killed in Arlington; found January 25.
January 29, 1984: Spencer arrested for a burglary in Alexandria.
February 4, 1984: David Vasquez questioned by Arlington detectives.
February 3 and 4, 1985: Vasquez enters an Alford plea; sentenced to 35 years.
September 1987: Spencer released to a Richmond halfway house.
September 19, 1987: Debbie Dudley Davis found dead in Richmond.
October 3, 1987: Dr. Susan Hellams found dead in Richmond.
November 22, 1987: Diane Cho found dead in Chesterfield County.
December 1, 1987: Susan Tucker found dead in Arlington.
December 7, 1987: Horgas visits Vasquez in prison.
December 28 and 29, 1987: Arlington evidence taken to Lifecodes; FBI agents review the case.
January 6, 1988: Horgas identifies Spencer as a suspect.
January 20, 1988: Spencer arrested in Richmond.
March 16, 1988: Lifecodes reports the DNA match.
July 11 to 16, 1988: Arlington trial; convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Susan Tucker.
September 1988: Richmond jury sentences him to death for the murder of Debbie Dudley Davis.
October 1988: Pardon request for Vasquez sent to Governor Baliles.
January 4, 1989: Vasquez pardoned and freed.
1989: third death sentence, for the murder of Dr. Susan Hellams.
September 22, 1989: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the Tucker and Davis judgments.
October 17, 1989: final judgment in the Cho case; fourth death sentence.
November 10, 1989: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the Hellams judgments.
1989: Virginia creates its DNA data bank.
June 8, 1990: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the Cho judgments.
1990: General Assembly compensates Vasquez.
September 16, 1993: Fourth Circuit affirms denial of habeas relief in the Davis case.
February 3, 1994: Fourth Circuit affirms denial of habeas relief in the Hellams case.
April 27, 1994: Spencer executed at Greensville Correctional Center.
July and August 2026: Spencer's case named in the state review of Mary Jane Burton's work.