Curtis Don Brown | |
---|---|
Born | U.S. | August 2, 1958
Criminal penalty | Life imprisonment |
Details | |
Victims | 3–18+ |
Span of crimes | 1985–1986 |
Country | United States |
State(s) | Texas |
Date apprehended | April 14, 1987 |
Curtis Don Brown (born August 2, 1958) is an American serial killer and rapist who raped and murdered three women around Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas, between 1985 and 1986, though he is suspected of up to 18 murders. [1] Convicted of one murder in 1987, in 2009 he was convicted of the two additional murders from 1985, based on results of DNA profiling. [2]
Brown was born on August 2, 1958. At 13-years of age, Brown narrowly escaped a house fire that killed his two younger siblings, and injured his mother. [3] Afterwards, he began to act out on worrying behavior. In the early 1980s, he moved to Texas to live close to his mother.
On May 28, 1986, Brown was arrested for, and later charged with, the murder of 51-year-old Jewel Woods. Woods, a former Fort Worth nurse, was raped and bludgeoned to death just outside of her Fort Worth home. [1] Brown was spotted fleeing the scene by officers who were scouting the area for an unrelated matter. When stopped, he was out of breath having run just under a mile, and was found to be in possession of Woods’ purse. In 1989, Brown was found guilty of killing Woods and was sentenced to life imprisonment. [2]
In 2005, due to a newly formed prison precondition, Brown was required to submit a sample of his DNA to be run in the crime lab. Later that year, when the tests were completed, Fort Worth Cold Case detectives contacted Arlington Cold Case detectives to share information. Brown's DNA profile corresponded with physical evidence found on two 1985 murder victims whose deaths had up to that point been unsolved. They were 29-year-old Terece Gregory and 18-year-old Sharyn Kills Back, whose bodies were found in Arlington and Fort Worth between March and May 1985. [2]
The first of these was Sharyn Kills Back, whose body was found on March 23, 1985, by a plumber inside a storm drain in Southern Arlington. [3] She had a rope tied around her neck, indicating strangulation as a lead cause of death. [2] Kills Back had gone missing eight days prior on March 15. On May 30, 1985, the nude body of Gregory was found floating in the Trinity River in Fort Worth. [1] She was last seen the previous day, after leaving a downtown nightclub. After examining her body, it was determined she had been raped and shot, and DNA from the perpetrator was found in her body, and was later collected.
Following this, Brown was indicted on capital murder charges for the Gregory killing, and soon was further charged in Kills Back's killing. [2] In 2009, based upon the result of a plea agreement, Brown pleaded guilty to the two additional murders to avoid the death penalty, and was subsequently given two life sentences without the possibility of parole to run concurrently. [4] Investigators hypothesize that Brown had been responsible for 18 other murders that started back in 1984. No new charges have been filed.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
The murders of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon, two young women from London, England, occurred in separate, sexually motivated attacks by the same unidentified individual during 1975. Stratford was a bunny girl and Weedon was a schoolgirl who was killed almost six months later, on the other side of London. After Weedon's cold case was re-opened in 2004, new DNA techniques revealed that she and Stratford had been murdered by the same person. Stratford's case was re-opened in 2007, but neither case has been solved. A £40,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the killer remains on offer.
Timothy Wilson Spencer, also known as The Southside Strangler, was an American serial killer who committed three rapes and murders in Richmond, Virginia, and one in Arlington, Virginia, in the fall of 1987. In addition, he is believed to have committed at least one previous murder, in 1984, for which a different man, David Vasquez, was wrongfully convicted. He was known to police as a prolific home burglar.
Anthony Allen Shore was an American serial killer and child molester who was responsible for the murders of one woman and three girls. He was active from 1986 to 2000, and became known as the "Tourniquet Killer" because of his use of a ligature with either a toothbrush or bamboo stick to tighten or loosen the ligature. The instrument was similar to a garotte or a twitch, a tool used by farmers to control horses. Shore was sentenced to death in 2004, and executed by lethal injection on January 18, 2018.
Rodney James Alcala was an American serial killer and sex offender who was sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979. He also pleaded guilty and received a sentence of 25 years to life for two further murders committed in New York and was also indicted with a murder in Wyoming, although charges were dropped due to a technicality. While he has been conclusively linked to eight murders, Alcala's true number of victims remains unknown and could be much higher – the actual number could be as high as 130.
Lucious Boyd is an American convicted murderer, rapist, and suspected serial killer who is currently on death row in Florida. Boyd was sentenced to death for the 1998 rape and murder of 21-year-old Dawnia Dacosta and is a suspect in at least ten other homicides and disappearances. He was acquitted of the 1993 murder of a man whom he claimed he stabbed in self-defense. He was profiled on Forensic Files.
Faryion Edward Wardrip is an American serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered five women. Four of the women were killed in Wichita Falls, Texas, and the surrounding counties, and one woman was murdered in Fort Worth. Wardrip's killing spree began at the end of 1984 and lasted until the middle of 1986. All of his victims were white, were between the ages of 20 and 25, weighed less than 120 pounds (54 kg), and were under 5+1⁄2 feet (170 cm) tall.
The Texas Killing Fields is a title used to roughly denote the area surrounding the Interstate Highway 45 corridor southeast of Houston, where since the early 1970s, more than 30 bodies have been found, and specifically to a 25-acre patch of land in League City, Texas where four women were found between 1983 and 1991. The bodies along the corridor were mainly of girls or young women. Furthermore, many additional young girls have disappeared from this area who are still missing. Most of the victims were aged between 12 and 25 years. Some shared similar physical features, such as similar hairstyles.
CeCe Moore is an American genetic genealogist who has been described as the country's foremost such entrepreneur. She has appeared on many TV shows and worked as a genetic genealogy researcher for others such as Finding Your Roots. She has reportedly helped law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects in over 300 cold cases using DNA and genetic genealogy. In May 2020, she began appearing in a prime time ABC television series called The Genetic Detective in which each episode recounts a cold case she helped solve. In addition to her television work, she is known for pioneering the genetic genealogy methodologies used by adoptees and others of unknown origin for identifying biological family.
The murder of Muriel Drinkwater, also known as the Little Red Riding Hood murder, is an unsolved 1946 child murder case from Wales. Drinkwater, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, was raped and shot in the woods in Penllergaer, Swansea. It is one of the oldest active cold cases in the United Kingdom. In 2008, a DNA profile of the suspect was extracted from Drinkwater's clothes, possibly the oldest sample in the world to be successfully extracted in a murder investigation. In 2019, the DNA was used to rule out notorious Welsh murderer Harold Jones as a suspect.
Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. is a company based in Reston, Virginia, that develops nanopharmaceuticals and provides DNA phenotyping services for law enforcement organizations.
The murder of Angela Samota occurred on October 13, 1984, when she was attacked while in her apartment, raped and killed. The case remained unsolved until DNA evidence surfaced in the 2000s, following which charges were brought against a convicted rapist, Donald Andrew Bess Jr., who was subsequently tried and received a death sentence. He died of natural causes while awaiting execution in October 2022.
April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her killer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 93 people, nearly all women, 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.
Gerald "Jerry" Walter McFadden, known as The Animal, was an American serial killer and sex offender who was convicted of the May 1986 murders of two women and one man in Smith County, Texas. He fled from jail shortly after his arrest, leading to the biggest manhunt in Texas history, with it coming to an end in July. He was later sentenced to death and executed in 1999. Years after his execution, he was found to have perpetrated an earlier 1979 murder in Oregon through DNA evidence, and authorities have since speculated he could have committed other killings.
Carla Jan Walker was an American homicide victim abducted from a bowling alley parking lot in Fort Worth, Texas on February 17, 1974. Her body was found three days later in a drainage ditch 30 minutes south of Fort Worth.
Kenneth Granviel was an American serial killer and rapist who was responsible for the sexually-motivated murders of seven people in Fort Worth, Texas from 1974 to 1975, most notably the mass murder of three women and two children. After willingly admitting to the crimes, he was convicted, sentenced to death and executed in 1996, after several delays and challenges to his sentence.
Reginald Perkins was an American serial killer and sex offender who was executed in Texas for the December 2000 murder of his stepmother. He was also linked with DNA to the murders of two women in Fort Worth in 1991, and he is suspected of killing a further three women in Ohio in the early 1980s.
Joseph Michael Ervin, also known by the alias Joe Michael Erwing, was an American serial killer who was indicted for two murders committed in Texas and Colorado in 1969 and 1981, respectively, but has been posthumously linked to four others committed in the Denver metropolitan area from 1978 to 1981. Ervin was never convicted of the crimes, as he hanged himself while awaiting trial for the final murder.
Emanuel Lovell Webb, known as The East End Killer, is an American serial killer who raped and killed four women in Bridgeport, Connecticut, from 1990 to 1993. After the murders were connected and a search for the killer was underway, Webb moved to Georgia, where he raped and killed a woman in Vidalia in 1994. He was convicted of that murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison, being paroled in 2001. He was detained for a parole violation in 2005 and afterwards DNA evidence linked him to the Bridgeport murders. He was extradited to Connecticut and pled no contest in 2008 and was sentenced to 60-years in prison.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)