The bra murders were a series of murders committed against five sex workers from 1967 to 1971 in Stamford, Connecticut. Most of the victims were black sex workers or in active addiction, each had been strangled, sometimes with their own bras, from which the murders' moniker originated.
Benjamin Franklin Miller, a self-styled preacher from Norwalk, was charged and later acquitted by reason of insanity, spending the next 15 years in a mental institution before being released on appeal in 1988. His guilt has been questioned and remains the subject of debate to this day.[1]
Murders
The murders began on or after August 4, 1967, when 29-year-old Rose Ellen Pazda (known as "Sissi Rush") was reported missing from Stamford.[2] Despite the authorities' efforts, they were unable to locate her until April 4, 1969, when her skeletonized remains were found. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, the coroner was unable to determine her exact date of death.
On May 2, 1968, 22-year-old Donna Roberts was reported missing and found dead on the next day, followed up by 21-year-old Gloria Conn on September 8, whose corpse was found only 60 yards away from where Roberts had been killed. Conn, from Mount Vernon, New York, was the only victim not native to Connecticut.[3]
The next victim was 19-year-old Gail Thompson, who was found strangled on July 10, 1971, in an abandoned house.[4] On August 22, the fifth and final confirmed victim, 34-year-old Alma T. Henry, was found inside a trash can by two passing motorists who were on their way to watch a football game.[5] She differed significantly from previous victims, as she was not known to be a sex worker or in active addiction, but instead lived with her husband and four children in Southfield Village, a low-income housing project within Stamford.[5]
According to the investigators' conclusions, the murders ceased after her death. They were quickly linked together by the fact that all victims had been found within 400 meters along Merritt Parkway and the fact that three of the victims (Roberts, Conn, and Henry) had been strangled with their own bras.[5]
Investigation
In April 1969, the Stamford police received a call from a man who identified himself as a preacher named James Miller. The caller then told them where they could find Pazda's remains, claiming in turn that he had been told of the location during a phone call with a man he did not know. As they wanted to question him in person, investigators compiled a list of every clergyman in the state who bore the surname Miller, which eventually drew their attention to a resident of Norwalk: a 42-year-old white man by the name of Benjamin Franklin Miller.
According to the investigators, Benjamin Franklin Miller Jr., a native of Aurora, Illinois, moved to Connecticut in 1948 and within a few years changed several occupations.[6] He had shown signs of a mental illness as a teenager, and due to this, he was repeatedly incarcerated or interned at psychiatric clinics beginning in 1951.[3] In 1962, he found a job as a postal clerk with the Postal Service, where he worked until early 1972.[2] Miller was married and had a 12-year-old daughter, but was considered a loner by family members and coworkers.[6]
Due to his introverted nature and trouble with communication, Miller had no close friends or meaningful relationships with relatives. As a religious fanatic, he distributed religious literature while sorting mail at work and reportedly admired evangelistBilly Graham.[6] From time to time, he exhibited concerning behavior: he often felt anxious, fearful, agitated or depressed; was haunted by obsessive thoughts, suffered from hypochondria and had trouble sleeping.[1] Miller spent most of his free time attending church in Stamford's African-American community, and from the mid-1960s, he became a self-styled preacher who exposed his religious beliefs and doctrines on a street corner, paying special attention to black girls and women.[3]
The investigation into the murders was criticized by the aforementioned African-American community in Stamford, who accused the police of negligence due to the fact that the victims were poor, black women.[6] Some called for an internal investigation to be conducted on the city's police department and for the negligent officers to be punished on the grounds that they violated civil rights.[6]
Arrest and prosecution of Miller
Once among the suspects, Miller was interrogated several times between late 1971 and early 1972. While he denied involvement in the killings, he admitted to having sex in his car with one of the victims, Gail Thompson. Forensic examinations revealed no biological traces or signs of sexual intercourse on Thompson's body immediately prior to her death, but suspicions against Miller grew when he provided details about the killing which were not known to the public. According to investigators, once he was presented with photographs of the victims, Miller supposedly claimed that Thompson had been strangled with a handkerchief, not a bra - this contrasted with what was said in the media, which stated all five had been strangled with bras.
In late 1971, Miller agreed to undergo a polygraph test, but the results were inconclusive due to his unsound mind. As a result, he was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which concluded that Miller had schizophrenia. Due to this, he was interned for treatment at the Fairfield Hills Hospital on February 17, and during his internment, he exhibited symptoms of hypochondria and clinical delusions.
After some time, Miller suddenly confessed to the murders to a psychiatrist and declared that he wanted to talk to investigators working on the case. On February 29, Miller confessed to killing seven women in total, and according to investigators, he described killing Thompson in detail and indicated where three others had been dumped. On March 1, he recreated various aspects of the crime scenes on-site. Due to this, he was arrested in front of the Fairfield Hills Hospital on March 18 and formally charged with the five murders.[3] Following his arrest, representatives of the Stamford Police Department held a press conference to announce that they had arrested a suspect but declined to give details about what led to his arrest.[6] The announcement was met with skepticism from members of the black community in Stamford, who believed that Miller was simply a scapegoat.[2]
After the arraignment, Miller recanted his confession. At the trial, his father appeared as a witness for the defense and told the court that his son called him after he confessed to the murders, claiming that he was insane and that the policemen had duped him into confessing without verifying his claims.[1] He also said that they used coercive tactics such as threatening to beat him, exposing his infidelity, make him lose his job and custody of his child if he did not sign the confession. When pressed to explain what happened at the crime scene recreations, he said that he was unable to recall the circumstances of the murders and even factually inaccurate claims, despite knowing the area and expressing doubt about the investigators' conclusions.
Miller's attorneys eventually filed a motion to have him evaluated, with the results showing that he could not be legally held responsible for his actions due to his personality disorder and the hallucinations accompanying it. In February 1973, the prosecutor's office agreed to drop two of the murder charges, with Miller eventually being acquitted by reason of insanity of the remaining three.[7] He was ordered to spend the next 25 years in a psychiatric facility and was subsequently transferred to one after his trial ended.
The alternative suspect
After Miller's trial, his relatives hired lawyers who got full access to his criminal case. They studied the content and found out about the existence of another potential suspect, but this was not disclosed by the prosecutor's office at trial and due to this, an appeal was filed.[1]
The alternative suspect was a resident of Stamford named Robert Lupinacci, who was arrested in July 1972 while attempting to strangle a black sex worker in the same neighborhood where the other victims had been found.[1] The investigators learned that he spent much of his free time in the city's red-light districts and was acquainted with many sex workers and pimps, despite being a known racist. The bodies of the three women supposedly murdered by Miller were found within thirty meters of where Lupinacci was arrested, and his car was spotted several times near the crime scenes.[1] In 1967, he was spotted in several bars on the outskirts of Port Chester, New York, a place frequented by one of the victims, and employees at the Hazelton Hotel reported the following year that they had seen one of the victims staying in the same hotel room as Lupinacci.
In 1971, Lupinacci worked at the same motel where Gail Thompson, with whom he was allegedly acquainted, was staying. He was known to possess a heightened sex drive and was obsessed with sex, due to which he frequently viewed and collected pornographic photographs and videos. Following his arrest, police found a pornographic deck of cards in the trunk of his car, with the queen of hearts notably missing - a similar card was found near Thompson's body.[1] Additionally, Thompson was last seen boarding a car whose color and features matched those of Lupinacci's car, and after discovering her remains, police found a witness who claimed that he had seen a vehicle similar to Lupinacci's cruising around the area several times. Upon searching the trunk of his car, investigators found several strands of female hair, which were later determined to belong to a black woman.[8] And finally, he was a member of a club called "The German-American Club", situated in the Gray Rocks Place neighborhood of Stamford, from where Henry disappeared in August 1971.[1]
Second trial and aftermath
In 1988, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit accepted the attorneys' petition and ordered a new trial for Miller.[9] At the new trial, the court ruled that his confession was invalid because Stamford police had used coercive tactics during interrogations, with the judge ruling that this was likely a miscarriage of justice. Taking into account Miller's mental health; the low credibility of his confession; his health problems and evidence pointing towards Lupinacci's guilt, the charges against him were all dropped and he was officially acquitted.[1]
After his release, Miller was housed in a homeless shelter for the mentally ill because, due to his isolated lifestyle and inability for social contact, he was deemed incapable of adapting to life in society. He lived in the shelter until his death in February 2010, aged 80.[1]
Despite incriminating evidence, Lupinacci was never charged and later denied responsibility in a 2011 interview, but was forced to admit responsibility for assaulting the prostitute in 1972.[1] After being released from prison, he married, had children, worked as an electrician, and seemingly ceased any criminal activity. He died in February 2013, at age 79.[8] George Mayer, the lead investigator for the murders, consistently continued to deny that Lupinacci was responsible and insisted that Miller was the actual killer, a belief he held until his own death in 2013.[8]
Ultimately, the real killer remains unidentified and all five cases officially remain unsolved.[8]
In the media
Miller was briefly mentioned on the third episode of the crime thriller television series Mindhunter, when an attempt to have him interviewed by FBI agent Holden Ford is turned down.
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi is an American serial killer, kidnapper, and rapist. He is known for the Hillside Strangler murders committed with his cousin Angelo Buono Jr. in Los Angeles, California, as well as for murdering two more women in Washington by himself. Bianchi is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Washington State Penitentiary for these crimes. Bianchi was also at one time a suspect in the Alphabet murders, three unsolved murders in his home city of Rochester, New York, from 1971 to 1973.
Albert Henry DeSalvo was an American murderer and rapist who was active in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s. He is known to have confessed to being the "Boston Strangler", a serial killer who murdered thirteen women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. Lack of physical evidence supported his confession, and he was only prosecuted in 1967 for a series of unrelated rapes, for which he was convicted and imprisoned until his death in 1973. His confessing to having murdered multiple women was disputed, and debates continued regarding which crimes he truly had committed.
Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.
The Ipswich serial murders, commonly known as the work of the Suffolk Strangler, took place between 30 October and 10 December 2006, during which time the bodies of five murdered sex workers were discovered at different locations near Ipswich, Suffolk, England. Their bodies were discovered naked but there were no signs of sexual assault. Two of the victims, Anneli Alderton and Paula Clennell, were confirmed to have been killed by asphyxiation. A cause of death for the other victims, Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol and Annette Nicholls, was not established.
The Cincinnati Strangler was the name given to an American serial killer responsible for the murder of seven women in Cincinnati, Ohio, between December 1965 and December 9, 1966. During the investigation, a local resident, Posteal Laskey Jr., was declared the main suspect in the killings and was arrested on December 9, 1966, for one of the murders for which he was subsequently convicted. Although he was never charged with the other murders, the media and police blamed him for the other deaths since according to the official version of the investigators, the murders ceased after his arrest.
Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr., known as The Kansas City Strangler, is an American serial killer. A former trash-company supervisor, Gilyard is believed to have raped and murdered at least 13 women and girls from 1977 to 1993. He was convicted of six counts of murder on March 16, 2007.
The Alphabet murders are an unsolved series of child murders which occurred between 1971 and 1973 in Rochester, New York.
Manuel Delgado Villegas, also known as El Arropiero,[a] was a Spanish serial killer active between 1964 and 1971. Delgado claimed to have carried out 48 murders in Spain, Italy and France – of these cases the Spanish police were only able to investigate twenty-two in Spain and considered him the definite perpetrator of seven. He was never brought to trial, as he was diagnosed with a severe mental disorder. In 1978 the Audiencia Nacional ordered that he be preventively detained at Carabanchel Penitentiary Psychiatric Hospital. He was released into the care of a psychiatric hospital in 1996 and died two years later of a smoking-related lung disease.
Steven Gerald James Wright is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler. He is currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006 and Wright was found guilty in February 2008 and given a whole life order.
The Freeway Phantom is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who murdered five girls and a woman in Washington, D.C., between April 1971 and September 1972.
Andre Crawford was an American serial killer, rapist and necrophile who killed 11 women between 1993 and 1999 in Chicago. Many of the women were addicted to drugs or worked as sex workers. He also had sex with their corpses. In 2009, Crawford was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer of women who confessed to committing 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed Little's involvement in at least 60 of the 93 confessed murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in United States history.
Dr. No is the nickname given to a suspected American serial killer thought to be responsible for the murders of at least nine women and girls in Ohio, between 1981 and 1990. As victims, Dr. No primarily chose prostitutes working in parking lots and truck stops located alongside Interstate 71. There are suspicions that he committed three similar killings in New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, between 1986 and 1988.
Bernard Eugene Giles is an American convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered five girls and women in Titusville, Florida, in late 1973. After his arrest in December of that year, he fully admitted his guilt and was sentenced to serve several life imprisonment terms in 1974.
Calvin Jackson is an American serial killer and rapist responsible for the murders of nine women in Manhattan's West Side between 1973 and 1974. The killings were connected only after Jackson was arrested and confessed to them; until then, the deaths were considered to be from natural causes or accidents. In July 1976, he was convicted and sentenced to four life imprisonment terms with a chance of parole. One of his victims was sculptor Eleanor Platt.
The Southside Strangler is the media epithet given by the media, and later used by law enforcement, to a serial killer active in the South Side of Chicago from the 1990s and 2000s, responsible for the murders of numerous girls and young women. It would later be established that the killings were committed by different offenders, including several different serial killers.
Kevin Taylor is an American serial killer and rapist who strangled four prostitutes to death following sexual encounters in Chicago, Illinois, between June and August 2001. After a would be fifth victim survived and identified him, Taylor was arrested and sentenced to multiple life terms in 2006.
Donald Arthur Piper is an American murderer and suspected serial killer convicted of killing two women in hotels around West Des Moines and Clive, Iowa in 1993 and 1997, but is considered a suspect in four other killings. For his confirmed crimes, Piper was convicted and sentenced to two life terms.
John Peter Malveaux is an American serial killer and rapist who committed between four and five murders around Opelousas, Louisiana from January to October 1997. Following his arrest and confession to the crimes, Malveaux pleaded guilty on all counts and was given four life terms without parole.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
