A suspected serial killer has been charged with the murders of three girls in Southern California almost 50 years in the past.
Kimberly Fritz, 18, Velvet Sanchez, 31, and Lorraine Rodriguez, 21, have been all strangled to dying in 1977, however investigators ran out of leads on the time.
“Whereas believing these three crimes have been certainly linked, leads ran chilly, and detectives have been unable to determine who was chargeable for these horrific murders,” Ventura County District Legal professional Erik Nasarenko stated at a press convention this week.
Warren Luther Alexander of Diamondhead, Mississippi, who labored as a long-haul truck driver on the time, was linked to the murders when his DNA matched the crime scenes after being uploaded to the Mixed DNA Index System (CODIS), a nationwide database, final 12 months.
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Alexander was extradited from North Carolina Tuesday, the place he was in custody and charged with a homicide there in 1992.
The California victims have been all murdered between the top of Might 1977 and December 1977.
“These murders might have occurred 47 years in the past, however the investigators with the Ventura County DA’s workplace, the investigators with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Division Chilly Case Unit, officers and detectives with Port Hueneme and Oxnard by no means gave up. They by no means gave up looking for justice for these three victims and family members and their households,” Nasarenko stated.
“Simply because the case has gone chilly doesn’t imply it ought to ever be forgotten.”
All three girls have been intercourse staff and frequented a shopping mall and motels within the LA space that have been recognized for prostitution on the time, officers stated.
Alexander is being held with out bail.
Officers stated they consider he may very well be a suspect in different unsolved murders in California and different states whereas he was working as a truck driver from the Nineteen Seventies till the Nineteen Nineties.
“We consider there could also be further victims each regionally and in different states,” Nasarenko stated. “That is an ongoing investigation, and we’ll proceed to pursue all leads that turn out to be out there. This isn’t in any approach closed.”
He was arrested in North Carolina in 2022 for the 1992 killing of Nona Cobb, 29.
Alexander grew up in Oxnard, California, the place Sanchez was killed in September 1977, and he moved again to the realm within the Nineteen Seventies.
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“For Warren Luther Alexander, as soon as a fugitive from justice, the day of reckoning in Ventura County has lastly arrived,” Nasarenko stated.
FOX 5 and the Related Press contributed to this report.
