Walter E. Ellis was convicted in February 2011 of killing seven women in Milwaukee between 1986 and 2007. He entered no-contest pleas in Milwaukee County Circuit Court to five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, and Judge Dennis Cimpl sentenced him to seven consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. Prosecutors said all seven women were strangled. He was 50 years old. He died in custody in South Dakota in December 2013.
The case was solved by DNA, and it was also delayed by DNA. Ellis had been required to give a sample to the state databank while he was in prison around 2000 and 2001. Authorities later said he had another inmate give it in his name, so the databank held no profile under his name for the rest of the decade while the killings went unsolved. When Milwaukee police finally obtained his DNA in 2009, from a toothbrush taken in a search, it matched evidence from the deaths of seven women, and investigators linked it to others as well. The search for him led Wisconsin to discover that thousands of required offender samples had never reached the databank. It also helped clear men who had been convicted in two killings that DNA later connected to him.
Ellis grew up on Milwaukee's north side, the same part of the city where the women were later killed. He had moved there from Mississippi as a child, the Associated Press reported in 2009, and neighbors knew him by the nickname "Wadell." At his arrest he was 49, unemployed, and without a high school diploma. Neighbors described years of regular contact with him and his family, sometimes friendly and sometimes violent. One woman who had grown up a block away told reporters she could not have imagined saying she had grown up with a serial killer.
His record ran to about 15 arrests from 1978 onward, according to the 2009 reports. Burglary, drug delivery and retail theft cases had ended in probation or fines. Charges of soliciting prostitutes, battery, robbery and reckless endangerment had been dismissed. In 1981 he received a three-year prison sentence for drug possession. In 1998 he pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of second-degree reckless injury after an attack on a former girlfriend, and he served three years of a five-year sentence.
Milwaukee's police chief, Edward Flynn, said after the arrest that the record had not marked Ellis out. "Yes, he does have a criminal history," Flynn said, but in his view it did not point to him as a prime suspect, and the science that linked the cases had only recently advanced far enough to do so.
The killings attributed to Ellis spanned 21 years and a small area of the city's north side. The Milwaukee Police Department's own list of the victims in its DNA-linked homicide cases gives the dates: Deborah L. Harris, October 10, 1986; Tanya L. Miller, October 11, 1986; Florence McCormick, April 24, 1995; Sheila Farrior, June 27, 1995; Joyce Mims, June 20, 1997; and Ouithreaun Stokes, April 27, 2007. Two women found strangled one day apart in October 1986 opened the series, NPR's Milwaukee member station reported in 2009; six years passed before another woman was killed.
Deborah Harris was 31. Tanya Miller's brother spoke for her family at the sentencing in 2011. Irene Smith, whose sister spoke at the same hearing, was another of the seven women in the convicted cases. Relatives described some of the women as mothers of small children.
Sheila Farrior was 37 when she was killed in 1995. Her father told reporters in 2009 that he had little faith in the authorities who had failed for so long to solve the case. "They lose things. They make mistakes," he said.
Joyce Mims was 41 when she was strangled in June 1997. Her brother, who lived in Madison, followed the case from the arrest to Ellis's death. When police announced the arrest, he said that "justice one day is better than no justice at all."
Ouithreaun Stokes, 28, was killed in April 2007. Police described her as the last of the seven. Her cousin later said that if the state had collected Ellis's DNA when it was supposed to, her cousin might still be alive.
Investigators also linked the DNA to three other deaths that were never charged against Ellis: Carron Kilpatrick in 1994, Jessica Payne, a 16-year-old girl, in August 1995, and Maryetta Griffin, 39, in February 1998. Each of those cases had already led to the conviction or prosecution of another man.
Wisconsin law required DNA from every convicted felon, and Ellis was in prison on the reckless injury sentence when his sample was due. In 2000, according to a Wisconsin Public Radio report in October 2009, he paid another inmate to have his mouth swabbed and pose as Walter Ellis. A 2015 Associated Press report said the inmate who gave the sample in his name had already been convicted of a sex crime himself. The discrepancy was noticed but never corrected, and Ellis left prison with no profile of his own in the databank.
The two agencies involved later gave different accounts. Right after the arrest, the Department of Corrections said it had taken a tissue sample from Ellis in 2001 and sent it to the Justice Department's crime lab, which said it had never received one. By mid-September the Justice Department reported that samples from Ellis had been mismatched with another inmate's. The Corrections secretary, Rick Raemisch, blamed a breakdown in communication: the Justice Department, he said, had never sent back the information showing that the sample had been given under another man's name. "That information was not given back to us by the Department of Justice," he said, adding that it had "basically sat there, frankly, for years." Governor Jim Doyle was reported to have said that too few people had been trying to collect too much DNA.
The cost of the gap became clear in hindsight. In 2003, analysts tried to identify DNA from bodily fluids in one of the north side killings, and the databank produced no match. Stokes was killed in 2007. Police said that a sample taken from Ellis when it was due might have led them to him before her death.
The investigation that found Ellis grew out of a review of unsolved killings of women on the north side. In 2007, the DNA profile from the Payne case was found to match two other unsolved killings in the same neighborhood, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. By the spring of 2009, police had connected more of the cases to that single profile.
In May 2009, Chief Flynn and District Attorney John Chisholm announced that DNA linked the deaths of several women killed between 1986 and 2007 to one unknown man. CBS News, reporting the announcement with the Associated Press on May 19, named Deborah Harris and Tanya Miller (October 1986), Sheila Farrior (1995), Joyce Mims (1997) and Ouithreaun Stokes (April 2007), as well as Jessica Payne (1995), and said police had then added Florence McCormick, found dead in April 1995. The killer, police said, did not appear in any database. Flynn said more than 20 DNA samples from other unsolved homicides were being sent back to the state crime laboratory to check for links, and that the Milwaukee cases were not connected to killings of women then under investigation in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mesa, Arizona. Chisholm said improving technology made it more likely that the man would be found. "We're convinced we're going to be able to bring justice to these victims and their families," he said.
Investigators then worked through the department's records. Flynn later said they reviewed "every sexual assault investigation over the course of 23 years," some 16,000 cases, along with about 6,000 prostitution-related arrests, and submitted hundreds of names for DNA profiles. The cold case unit tested the DNA of more than 100 people. Resubmitting old samples to the crime lab also produced progress in at least ten unrelated killings. Ellis's name, police said, kept coming up in reports connected to several of the unsolved homicides, and officers had stopped him while investigating some of them.
On August 29, 2009, detectives searched Ellis's home with a warrant. They took a toothbrush and razors that a woman who shared the home said were his. The state crime lab matched DNA from the toothbrush to a sample from one victim and to fingernail samples from another.
Ellis knew police were looking for him, and investigators had to test the evidence quickly. A warrant was issued on a Friday, and the next day an officer in the suburb of Franklin spotted his car. Ellis was taken into custody at a motel there after a struggle with officers. The arrest came on September 5, 2009.
At a news conference after the arrest, Flynn announced that DNA tied Ellis to the deaths of nine women, aged 16 to 41, killed on the north side between 1986 and 2007. "Good police work and good police science led us to Walter Ellis," he said. "These cases, some more than 20 years old, were never forgotten." He would not speculate about a motive or describe any relationship between Ellis and the women. Mayor Tom Barrett called the work "a phenomenal feat" and said, "There is never a totally cold case in the city of Milwaukee." Of the nine, investigators said at the time, one was a runaway; authorities had earlier suggested that someone else might have killed her.
By September 7, Chisholm had charged Ellis with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide. At his first court appearance a court commissioner set bail at $1 million, and in a report dated September 10, CBS News said prosecutors had filed the full set of charges: five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, the second being the equivalent charge under state law at the time the earliest deaths occurred. The charges carried mandatory life sentences. Ellis was not charged in the deaths of Jessica Payne or Maryetta Griffin.
Ellis pleaded not guilty, and his case was headed for trial. Before trial his lawyers asked for a change of venue because of national publicity, and for each killing to be tried separately so that jurors could not use the evidence in one case to draw conclusions about another. The trial judge refused both requests.
On February 18, 2011, at what had been scheduled as a motion hearing, Ellis entered no-contest pleas to all seven counts. He appeared in court shackled and in a wheelchair. He had earlier signaled that he would change his plea and then changed his mind after relatives of the women gathered in court for the hearing. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt, but it carries the same legal result, and Judge Cimpl, satisfied that Ellis understood he was giving up his right to a trial, found him guilty of five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder. Joyce Mims's brother said the form of the plea made no difference to him. "His punishment is still going to be the same," he said. "As long as he's behind bars, he will not be able to harm anyone else."
At the sentencing on February 24, 2011, the law required life terms, and the only question was whether Ellis would ever be eligible for release. Cimpl ruled that he would not and imposed seven consecutive life sentences, one for each woman. He gave Ellis little credit for sparing the families a trial, calling it "a feather against thousands of pounds of bad things." Of strangulation, he said: "Of any way to kill somebody, that's probably the most despicable way to do it."
Relatives spoke in anger and grief. One called Ellis the devil, another said they hoped other inmates would hurt him, and a few said they regretted that Wisconsin has no death penalty. Irene Smith's sister would not go that far. "I'm not one to judge," she said. "He's going to get the worst thing God can give him." Tanya Miller's brother said Ellis had received the sentence he deserved, and that he prayed for him "to do what he has to do with his life to make himself a better person."
Chisholm told the court that Ellis was one of the few defendants he had seen who truly deserved to be called evil. He said Ellis's later crimes, and the deception over his DNA sample, showed a growing awareness of forensic evidence. Ellis declined to speak. He had refused throughout to cooperate with the authorities or his own lawyers, and his silence left the families without any account of why the women died. His lawyer at sentencing, Patrick Earle, declined to comment.
Ellis appealed through his attorney, Richard Hart. He argued that he had pleaded no contest only because the court's rulings left him no chance of a fair trial: refusing to move the case put him before jurors in a county saturated with publicity, and refusing separate trials, his filing said, "handcuffed" the defense. "This put him in a position where he did not have a chance," the filing said. The Court of Appeals agreed with the trial judge's reasoning and upheld the conviction. In December 2012 Hart asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take the case, conceding that the odds were "a longshot." In March 2013 the court declined to hear it, leaving the convictions final.
Ellis was sent to a state prison in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in June 2011, under an interstate compact. The South Dakota Department of Corrections said such transfers are used mainly for security, though inmates can also ask to be moved, for example to be closer to family; it did not say why Ellis was held there. He was returned to Wisconsin in September 2012 for medical reasons and came back to South Dakota in April 2013.
In late November 2013 he was admitted to a Sioux Falls hospital with what a corrections spokesman, Michael Winder, called an "advanced disease," without naming it. He had been there since November 26 when he died on a Sunday, of apparent natural causes, the department said; the Associated Press reported the death on December 2, 2013. He was 53. The state Division of Criminal Investigation reviewed the death, and an autopsy was planned. Joyce Mims's brother said Ellis had not suffered enough. "God took him away way too soon," he said.
The DNA that identified Ellis also undid three earlier prosecutions in killings he was never charged with.
Jessica Payne was 16 and had run away from home when her body was found on August 30, 1995. In March 1996, a jury convicted a 21-year-old Milwaukee man, C.O., of first-degree murder and attempted robbery in her death, and he was sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 50 years. No physical evidence tied him to the crime; the case rested on two men who testified that they had been with him. One of those men, S.H., had pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in the case and received five years. A DNA test in 2002 excluded both of them, and the profile matched no one in the FBI's database. In 2007 it was found to match two other unsolved killings in the neighborhood. With the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, C.O. won a new trial from the Wisconsin Court of Appeals on December 23, 2008, was released on bond on January 8, 2009, and saw the charges dismissed on June 5, 2009, after 13 years in prison. In September 2009 the profile from the three killings was matched to Ellis. Both witnesses later said their testimony had been false. Milwaukee agreed in 2015 to pay C.O. $6.5 million to settle his civil rights lawsuit, which alleged that detectives had pressured witnesses into lying. S.H. was allowed by the Court of Appeals in August 2018 to withdraw his guilty plea, and prosecutors dismissed his case on October 8, 2018. Each man received $25,000 from the state, the most Wisconsin allows.
Maryetta Griffin, 39, was found strangled on February 17, 1998. A man, W.A., then 25, went to the police voluntarily in March 1998. Detectives said he had made incriminating statements, which he later said they had made up. He was not charged with her death then, but in 2004, after three inmates said he had confessed to them, he was charged with reckless homicide. He was convicted on March 9, 2005, and sentenced to 40 years. In April 2010 he asked the district attorney's office to test DNA evidence from the case; the result excluded him and matched Ellis. He was released in May 2010, and on September 23, 2010, his conviction was vacated and the charges dismissed. The inmates who had testified against him recanted. His federal lawsuit alleged that detectives fabricated his statements; a jury awarded him $1 million in 2015, the trial judge set the verdict aside, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reinstated it in 2017. The city paid the judgment plus $987,000 in fees and costs that October. He died in July 2018. No one was charged in Griffin's death.
A third man had been tried and acquitted in the 1994 killing of Carron Kilpatrick, a case later linked to Ellis by DNA.
The failure in Ellis's case turned out not to be unique. By December 2009, a Wisconsin audit prompted by the case had found that about 12,000 required samples from convicted offenders were missing from the state databank. By the time Ellis was sentenced in February 2011, the figure reported by the Associated Press was nearly 17,700. An AP review in December 2009 found tens of thousands of samples missing from state databanks across the country, citing gaps in Illinois, Colorado and Virginia, and used the Ellis case as its leading example. A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee criminal justice professor told NPR's Milwaukee station that he was not surprised; poor coordination between agencies and lost evidence, he said, were not unusual.
The case also prompted a broader look at old convictions. After DNA cleared three people who had been charged or convicted in killings later linked to Ellis, Milwaukee County prosecutors reviewed about 2,100 homicide convictions from the previous two decades. Assistant District Attorney Steven Licata read the full files of 486 cases and sent 60 to Norman Gahn, a prosecutor who specialized in DNA, and a review committee. In July 2011 the office announced that it had found no case in which DNA testing was warranted. Keith Findley, co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said the group was "really surprised and disappointed" and that at least seven cases met the legal standard for post-conviction testing. Jon Loevy, who represented both exonerated men in their lawsuits, asked, "Why is the prosecutor's office so afraid of DNA testing?" Chisholm said three cases linked to Ellis remained active, but would not say whether Ellis would be charged in them. He was never charged in the Payne or Griffin deaths.
Ellis never explained the killings. He refused to cooperate with investigators or with his own lawyers, did not speak at his sentencing, and pleaded no contest rather than guilty, so there is no account from him of how he chose the women or why. Chief Flynn declined to speculate on a motive.
The count of killings linked to him is not settled. Police said in September 2009 that DNA tied him to nine women; he was convicted of seven. The Payne and Griffin deaths were linked to him by DNA but never charged, as was the Kilpatrick case. When Ellis was sentenced, prosecutors said he was suspected in at least two more killings, and investigators planned to review other homicides in which no DNA had been found. Investigators were also reviewing the cases of about 20 other women found strangled in the city over the two decades, NPR's member station reported in 2009.
The figures for the gap in the databank changed as the audit went on, from about 12,000 missing samples in late 2009 to nearly 17,700 in 2011, and the two state agencies gave conflicting accounts of who had failed to act on the sample given in Ellis's name.
October 1986: Deborah Harris and Tanya Miller are killed a day apart on Milwaukee's north side.
1994: Carron Kilpatrick is killed; another man is later tried and acquitted.
April 24 and June 27, 1995: Florence McCormick and Sheila Farrior die, according to the police list of dates.
August 30, 1995: Jessica Payne, 16, is found dead.
March 1996: C.O. is convicted in Payne's death; S.H. pleads guilty to attempted robbery in the case.
June 1997: Joyce Mims is killed.
February 17, 1998: Maryetta Griffin is found dead.
1998: Ellis pleads no contest to second-degree reckless injury and receives five years.
2000 to 2001: A sample given by another inmate in Ellis's name enters the system in place of his own, authorities later say.
2002: DNA from the Payne case excludes C.O. and S.H.
2003: DNA from one of the killings is run against the databank with no match.
March 9, 2005: W.A. is convicted in Griffin's death.
April 2007: Ouithreaun Stokes is killed.
2007: The Payne profile is found to match two other unsolved killings.
December 23, 2008: The Court of Appeals orders a new trial for C.O.; he is freed on January 8, 2009, and the charges are dismissed on June 5, 2009.
May 2009: Police and prosecutors announce that DNA links several killings to one unknown man.
August 29, 2009: Police search Ellis's home and take his toothbrush.
September 5, 2009: Ellis is arrested in Franklin.
September 2009: He is charged with five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder; a state audit finds about 12,000 offender samples missing.
May 2010: W.A. is released after DNA in the Griffin case matches Ellis; his conviction is vacated on September 23, 2010.
February 18, 2011: Ellis pleads no contest and is found guilty on all seven counts.
February 24, 2011: He receives seven consecutive life terms without parole.
June 2011: He is moved to a prison in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
July 2011: Prosecutors say their review of 2,100 homicide convictions found no case needing DNA testing.
September 2012 to April 2013: He is held in Wisconsin for medical reasons.
March 2013: The Wisconsin Supreme Court declines to hear his appeal.
Late November 2013: He is hospitalized in Sioux Falls and dies there; the death is reported on December 2, 2013.
2015: Milwaukee settles with C.O. for $6.5 million; a jury awards W.A. $1 million.
October 8, 2018: The case against S.H. is dismissed.