Patrick Baxter (serial killer)

Last updated
Patrick Baxter
Born (1969-04-28) April 28, 1969 (age 54)
White Plains, New York, U.S.
Conviction(s) Murder x3
Auto theft
Criminal penalty Life imprisonment
Details
Victims3
Span of crimes
1987–1990
CountryUnited States
State(s) New York
Date apprehended
2000
Imprisoned at Elmira Correctional Facility, Elmira, New York

Patrick Baxter (born April 28, 1969) [1] is an American serial killer who raped and killed two women and a teenage girl in Westchester County, New York, between 1987 and 1990. [2] Due to DNA profiling, Baxter was arrested for the murders in 2000 while serving a sentence for car theft and was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment. [3]

Contents

Murders

In the span of three years, one girl and two women were sexually assaulted and subsequently murdered in Westchester County. Initially, they were believed to be unrelated cases, as the victims were of different races, shared no commonalities and each was killed in a different town. Thanks to advancements in DNA technology, all three murders, which had become some of the county's oldest cold cases, were finally connected and solved. [2] They were the following:

At the time, her boyfriend and a carpenter named Douglas Steadman were considered suspects, but both were later eliminated. Baxter came across Gibbens by chance, as his only connection to the area was hanging out with some friends at the Crestwood Train Station. [2]

Exposure and imprisonment

Since 1990, Patrick Baxter was jailed and released from prison on several occasions for different crimes. In the mid-1990s, he was convicted of auto theft in The Bronx and sentenced to 3-to-7 years imprisonment at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, with eligibility for parole in 2001. [2] In early 2000, investigators examining cold cases noticed that Baxter's name kept popping up in relation to these cases, and they ordered that he give a blood sample for testing. After a legal battle, a sample was provided, which matched the killer's DNA in all three cases. [2]

Charges were soon filed, and Baxter was brought to trial in 2002. He was convicted of all three murders and sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for each murder, to be served consecutively. During his sentencing, he expressed his condolences to the victims' families, but calmly denied committing the murders. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chester Turner</span> American serial killer (born 1966)

Chester Dewayne Turner is an American serial killer and sex offender who was sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and murdering fourteen women and an unborn baby in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Goudeau</span> American serial killer and rapist on death row

Mark Goudeau is an American serial killer, kidnapper, thief and rapist. Goudeau terrorized victims in the Phoenix metro area between August 2005 and June 2006; coincidentally, Goudeau was active at the same time as two other Phoenix serial killers, jointly known as the "Serial Shooter.”

Mark Philip Dixie is a British serial rapist and a murderer who was convicted on 22 February 2008 of murdering 18-year-old singer and model Sally Anne Bowman on 25 September 2005 in South Croydon, London. He has 17 other criminal convictions. He was known by various pseudonyms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorenzo Gilyard</span> Convicted American serial killer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derrick Todd Lee</span> American serial killer (1968–2016)

Derrick Todd Lee, also known as The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was an American serial killer. From 1992 to 2003, Lee murdered seven women in the Baton Rouge area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Floyd Thomas Jr.</span> Convicted American serial killer

John Floyd Thomas Jr. is an American serial killer, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the murders of seven women in the Los Angeles area during the 1970s and 1980s. Police suspect Thomas committed 10 to 15 more murders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter E. Ellis</span> American serial killer and rapist

Walter Earl Ellis, known as The Milwaukee North Side Strangler, was an American serial killer who raped and strangled at least seven women in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin between 1986 and 2007. Until May 2009, the killings were considered to be independent of one another, but were then linked together via DNA profiling. Ellis was arrested as a suspect on September 7, 2009, and convicted for the seven murders in February 2011, receiving seven consecutive life sentences without the chance of parole.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andre Crawford</span> Convicted American serial killer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Joanna Parrish</span> British murder case

Joanna Marie Parrish was a British tutor and language student from Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire, England, who was murdered in the Burgundy region of France while working at a local school as part of her degree course in 1990. Parrish, a University of Leeds undergraduate who was studying French, disappeared on the night of 16–17 May after placing an advertisement in a local Burgundy newspaper offering private English lessons, and arranging to meet a man who it is believed contacted her with details of a potential student. Her naked body was found in the Yonne River in Monéteau a small town next to Auxerre the following day. She had been raped, beaten and strangled.

The Gypsy Hill killings were a group of five homicides of young women and girls in San Mateo County, California, during early 1976. The killer became known in the media as the "San Mateo Slasher." It was later proven that there were at least two different perpetrators with Rodney Halbower convicted of the murders of Baxter, Cascio and Michelle Mitchell and Leon Seymour being convicted in the sole murder of Lampe. It is believed Blackwell and Booth were killed by Halbower, but there's no evidence yet to tie him to those cases and Friedman's murder is also unsolved with these killings being partially unresolved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Angela Samota</span> 1984 murder in Texas, US

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rodney Halbower</span> American murderer and suspected serial killer

Rodney Lynn Halbower is an American serial killer. He is the prime suspect in the Gypsy Hill killings, a series of murders of young women in San Mateo County, California and Reno, Nevada), whose killer was named The San Mateo Slasher. In March 2014, based on DNA profiling, Halbower was named as a person of interest in the murders. By this time, Cathy Woods, a mental patient who was convicted for one of the victims' murders, had already been exonerated after 35 years behind bars. He has been convicted of three murders and is believed to be linked to two murders related to the Gypsy Hill killings. At the time of his identification, Halbower himself had been imprisoned for 38 years in Oregon.

Donald Murphy is an American serial killer, sex offender and bank robber, convicted of murdering two prostitutes in Detroit in 1980. During this time, several similar murders occurred in the city, presumably committed by two or more killers operating in the area, with Murphy himself confessing to committing at least six of them. However, he was convicted of only two with the available evidence, and sentenced to 15–30 years imprisonment for each murder.

Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace is an American serial killer and burglar. Between 1988 and 1989, he robbed and killed elderly women primarily in Atlanta's Vine City neighborhood. Among his burglary victims was Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow. Pace was convicted of four murders, but was not tried for a fifth, and was sentenced to death for his crimes.

Alexander Wayne Watson, Jr. is an American serial killer. Initially convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1994 murder of a woman in Forestville, Maryland, Watson's DNA was later matched to three additional killings in Anne Arundel County committed years before. For these crimes, he pleaded guilty and received four additional life imprisonment terms.

The Favoriten Girl Murders were a series of sexually-motivated crimes committed against a young woman and two young girls: Alexandra Schriefl, Christina Beranek and Nicole Strau in the Viennese district of Favoriten. This case was among the most extensive and costliest investigations in Austrian history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Sumpter</span> Deceased American serial killer and rapist

Michael Eugene Sumpter was an American serial killer who raped and strangled three women in the Greater Boston area from 1969 to 1973. Because Sumpter died before his DNA was matched to the rapes and murders, he was never tried for or convicted of these crimes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vernon Lee Clark</span> Convicted American serial killer

Vernon Lee Clark is an American serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered at least four women in the Baltimore metropolitan area between 1980 and 1989. For his known crimes, he was sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment, and remains a suspect in several cold cases.

The Great Basin Murders is the name given to a series of murders of at least nine women committed between 1983 and 1997 across the states of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. It derives its name from the Great Basin geographical area, as most of the victims had their bodies dumped near interstate highways that transverse it.

Francisco Acevedo is an American serial killer who was convicted of strangling three women to death in New York between 1989 and 1996. Acevedo was linked to the murders in 2009, after voluntarily giving his DNA as a parole condition for drunk driving. In 2012, he was sentenced to 75 years to life imprisonment.

References

  1. ↑ "NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision". nysdoccslookup.doccs.ny.gov. Retrieved December 27, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 David W. Chen (November 15, 2000). "DNA Test Points to Suspect in 3 Unsolved Killings". The New York Times .
  3. 1 2 Jim Fitzgerald (July 11, 2002). "Yonkers serial sex killer gets 75 years to life". The Daily Gazette.
  4. ↑ Marlene Aig (July 18, 1990). "Woman Found Slain in Queit Community". The Daily Gazette.
  5. 1 2 "Woman murdered in Westchester park". The Evening News. July 18, 1990.
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.