Wayne Adam Ford | |
---|---|
Born | Petaluma, California, U.S. | December 3, 1961
Conviction(s) | First degree murder with special circumstances (4 counts) |
Criminal penalty | Death Penalty (de jure) |
Details | |
Victims | 4+ |
Span of crimes | October, 1997 –November 3, 1998 |
Country | United States |
State(s) | California |
Date apprehended | November 3, 1998 |
Wayne Adam Ford (born December 3, 1961) is an American serial killer. Ford, a former long-haul truck driver, murdered four women from 1997 to 1998. He strangled them and dismembered three of his four victims. He turned himself in with a woman's breast in a bag in his coat pocket.
Ford was born in Petaluma, California, the second son of an American father and a German immigrant mother. His parents divorced when he was 10. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served six years before being honorably discharged in 1985. [1]
In November 1980, he was hit by a drunk driver, causing a head injury and leaving him in a coma for nine days. According to relatives, his personality drastically changed after the incident. [2]
He had two marriages, both of which ended in divorce. In 1981 he forced his first wife, Kelly Pletcher to get an abortion in Napa, California. [3]
Beginning in 1983, he had escalating problems at work with psychological decline, necessitating several hospitalizations. [4] Ford was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. [5]
He had a series of scrapes with the law, including allegations of beating and robbing a sex worker in 1986 in Garden Grove, California. In 1990 he was arrested for animal cruelty, for which he served a brief jail sentence in San Clemente, California. [6]
Between 1997 and 1998, he murdered at least four women. At the time of the murders he lived in a trailer park in Arcata, California working as a long-haul truck driver. [7]
Ford turned himself in; he walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff Department on November 2, 1998, with his brother and had a woman's severed breast in his pocket. [4] He confessed to having killed four women and is thought to have killed others. [4]
He was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder on June 27, 2006, [10] and was sentenced to death in August 2006. [11] Currently, he resides on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California.
Multiple documentaries covered the case.
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