Ellis was born in 1960 in Milwaukee and lived on the city's north side. Between 1986 and 2007 he raped and strangled seven women: Deborah Harris, thirty-one; Tanya Miller, nineteen; Florence McCormick, twenty-eight; Sheila Farrior, thirty-seven; Jessica Payne, sixteen; Joyce Mims, forty-one; and Ouithreaun Stokes, twenty-eight. Most were left in derelict houses and alleys on the north side. Another man, Chaunte Ott, served thirteen years for the Payne murder before being exonerated in 2009 by the DNA that identified Ellis.
He was identified when Wisconsin ran unsolved cases against its offender database. The match came out of a search that should have worked years earlier: Ellis had been required to give a sample as a convicted offender, and had arranged for another inmate to give one in his name, so the profile on file was not his. The eventual match came from a swab of a toothbrush taken from his flat. The Milwaukee press called him the North Side Strangler, after the part of the city.
He was arrested in September 2009 and pleaded guilty in December 2010 to seven counts of first degree murder. On February 24, 2011 he was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without parole. He died in prison on December 1, 2013.
The case produced an audit of Wisconsin's DNA collection which found thousands of samples that had never been taken from offenders legally required to give them, and Ott's wrongful conviction, and the seven deaths, are all attributable to the same failure. That is what the case is cited for.