Police have finally caught up with a serial killer from the 1970s who had so far evaded justice. Warren Luther Alexander, of Mississippi, was a long haul truck driver when 18-year-old Kimberly Fritz, 31-year-old Velvet Sanchez, and 21-year-old Lorraine Rodriguez were strangled to death in Southern California in 1977. Investigators at the time linked the three murders, but could not locate the killer.
Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko recently announced, however, that the nationwide Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database had tracked him down. Alexander was in custody in North Carolina, having been arrested in 2022 for the murder of 29-year-old Nina Cobb, and police suspect his involvement in a number of unsolved murders across America. “This is an ongoing investigation, and we will continue to pursue all leads that become available,” Nasarenko said.
The three women, who all worked as prostitutes, were found dead in Southern California between September and December 1977. The 73-year-old suspected killer was awaiting trial in North Carolina when he was recently extradited to California and charged with the murders.
Police arrested Alexander in March 2022 after motorists found the body of 29-year-old Cobb by side of an interstate highway near Winston-Salem. She had been strangled to death. After his arrest, his DNA was entered into the CODIS system and matched DNA taken from the 1977 murder scenes.
At a recent press conference, Erik Nasarenko explained that Alexander grew up in Oxnard, California, moved away in his teens, but moved back in the 1970s. The three California victims lived in and around Oxnard, and two of the three were found dead in hotel rooms in the area. All worked around the Plaza Marina shopping center, and in all three cases, autopsies revealed a common type of strangulation had caused their deaths.
Mr. Nasarenko told reporters that the police had never given up on finding their killer, adding, “Just because a case has gone cold does not mean it should ever be forgotten.”
The DNA Identification Act of 1994 formalized CODIS, which had been in the works since 1989. Its national launch came in 1998, and many law enforcement professionals consider it one of the greatest crime-fighting tools ever created. It is maintained by the FBI and has multiple search engines, depending on what kind of crime the police are investigating.
Several cold cases have been solved thanks to CODIS, including the murder of Teree Becker in Colorado in 1975. Two motorcyclists discovered Becker’s body on a roadside about 10 miles from Denver – she was raped and strangled. Police could not pin down a suspect at the time, although a DNA profile from the scene was generated. In 2013, Las Vegas police entered the DNA found at a murder scene there, and it matched that of Thomas Martin Elliot, a career criminal who died by suicide soon after the 1991 Las Vegas murder. Police determined that Elliot was responsible for Becker’s murder, which had gone unsolved for nearly 50 years.
