Timothy Wilson Spencer was born in 1962 and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He was a burglar first, with the climbing and entry skills that went with it, and he used them to get into women's homes at night, wait, and then bind, rape and strangle them.
In January 1984 Carolyn Jean Hamm was raped and killed in her Arlington home. Another man, David Vasquez, was convicted of it. Vasquez had an IQ below seventy and confessed under questioning that included false claims about the physical evidence against him. He was serving a thirty-five year sentence.
Spencer was in prison for a 1984 burglary and was released to a halfway house in south Richmond. The killings resumed in September 1987 with Debbie Dudley Davis, who was thirty-five, raped and strangled in her apartment. Dr Susan Hellams followed weeks later. In November it was Diane Cho, who was fifteen. Susan Tucker was killed in Arlington the following month. All five women were attacked at home, and Spencer cleaned up after himself, so the scenes gave investigators very little to work with.
What broke the case was geography and timing. The halfway house was within walking distance of both the Davis and Hellams addresses, his mother's home in Arlington was about a mile from Susan Tucker's, and he had travelled there at Thanksgiving. Arlington detective Joe Horgas connected the 1987 Richmond murders to the 1984 Arlington case that was supposed to have been solved. Spencer was arrested on January 20, 1988.
The case against him was largely circumstantial, but the crime scenes had yielded biological samples, and Virginia sent them for DNA testing. His first trial opened in Arlington on July 11, 1988 for the rape, burglary and murder of Susan Tucker. It was the first case in Virginia in which DNA was used to prove identity, and the conviction made him the first person in the United States sentenced to death on DNA evidence. At the Richmond trial for Debbie Davis, the odds that the DNA came from someone other than Spencer were put at one in 705 million. Further trials followed for Susan Hellams and Diane Cho.
The same tests cleared David Vasquez, who was pardoned on January 4, 1989 after five years in prison, and who is generally described as the first person in the United States exonerated by DNA evidence. Spencer was never charged with the Hamm murder.
His lawyers appealed on the ground that DNA identification was not sound enough to convict on. The appeals were rejected and the technology upheld. He never confessed and maintained his innocence throughout.
He was executed in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt on April 27, 1994, aged thirty-two. He made no final statement.
Five murders are attributed to him and he was convicted of four. He was also linked to at least nine rapes across the two cities.