On April 27, 1982, police in Montreal found the dismembered remains of two women. Sylvie Trudel, twenty-seven, had been dead for twenty to thirty hours, and Murielle Guay, twenty-six, for about ten days. Trudel had been raped, beaten and strangled in an empty apartment and then decapitated and cut apart with a hacksaw; Guay had been strangled and dismembered. The apartment where Trudel was found belonged to a man the police knew as Richard Owen, and witnesses said he was the last person seen with Guay. By the time Canadian arrest warrants were issued he had crossed into the United States. His real name was William Dean Christensen.
He was born on September 24, 1945, in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1969 he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., drove her to an isolated spot, raped her and stabbed her nineteen times in the arms, hands and face. She survived. He was sentenced to five years but was sent instead to a state facility for delinquents and let out the following year. In 1974 he and another man abducted a go-go dancer in Georgetown, took turns raping and beating her, and took her to his parents' house, where they raped her again; he told her he would dismember her with a hacksaw. He was sentenced to sixteen years and released early, in 1980.
In July 1980 he abducted a young woman at a bus stop in Washington, raped her at a relative's house and let her go, and warrants were issued for his arrest. In January 1981 he tried to move to Toronto and was jailed for twenty-one days for false information on his passport. Soon after his release he became Richard Owen. On April 16, 1981, as Owen, he kidnapped and raped a woman in Montreal, pleaded guilty that July and was sentenced to eighteen months. When the authorities discovered who Owen really was, the United States asked Canada to transfer him to a jail in Maryland, where he was wanted for rape. Through a clerical error, he was released instead.
After the Montreal killings Canadian detectives went to his parents' home in Maryland, and his parents admitted meeting him and smuggling him $5,000. Over the next months he was reported in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, living in Trenton and Philadelphia as John Robert Schrader. On September 23, 1982, he picked up Michelle Angiers, a twenty-three-year-old go-go dancer, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, drove her to Dickson City and raped her and stabbed her thirty times. On June 29, 1983, he shot two men at the Amtrak station in Trenton; both survived. He took another name, Jeffrey Shrader. On December 4, 1983, after an argument, he shot and killed Joseph Connelly, fifty-one, outside a bar. Witnesses told police what they had seen, and he was found and arrested a few hours later.
He insisted he was Shrader and was convicted of Connelly's murder under that name and sentenced to life. The FBI, asked to identify him, checked his fingerprints and reported, wrongly, that they matched no one. A few days after the conviction, Shrader was identified as Christensen. Investigators in both countries suspected him of more than a dozen killings in his two years on the run, and a Pennsylvania constable, Bill McAndrew, called him "a real American Jack the Ripper," a phrase the press took up. In early 1985 investigators found a bloody knife and a hacksaw in his home and linked him to Angiers's murder, and in 1990 he was convicted of it and given ten to twenty years. He was also taken to Maryland, convicted of a rape there and sentenced to forty years. He was never tried in Canada.
In 1990 a cellmate said Christensen had confessed to killing twenty-four people, among them two in England, four in Canada and sixteen in the United States. The claims were investigated and nothing was proved. Christensen died of cancer on October 31, 1990, at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. His death was not reported until July 1991.