Authorities stated on Thursday that a former long-haul truck driver who is currently awaiting trial for the 1992 murder of a woman in North Carolina is also accused of killing three other women in California more than 40 years ago in a possible serial crime.
At a press conference in Ventura County, law enforcement officials said that Warren Luther Alexander, 73, had been charged with three counts of murder in relation to the 1977 strangulation deaths of Lorraine Rodriguez, 21, Velvet Sanchez, 31, and Kimberly Fritz, 18.
According to officials, the women, who were all sex workers, were discovered dead in May, September, and December of that year in Port Hueneme, Oxnard, and an outlying area of Ventura County, respectively.
Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko told reporters that Alexander, who is being held without bond at a Ventura County jail, was extradited earlier this week from North Carolina, where he was accused of killing Nona Cobb by strangulation two years ago.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation reports that on July 7, 1992, Cobb, 29, was discovered dead on an interstate northwest of Winston-Salem.
An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled, Winston-Salem NBC station WXII-TV said.
The FBI announced in a news release at the time that Alexander had been taken into custody in relation to the March 15, 2022, killing in Diamondhead, Mississippi.
It’s unclear who is defending Alexander or whether he has filed a plea because court documents for his North Carolina case were unavailable on Friday night.
According to court documents, Alexander is expected to be arraigned on the California allegations on August 21. An inquiry for comment on Friday night was not answered by Alexander’s attorney.
According to Nasarenko, genetic genealogy—a method that compares DNA from crime scenes and other locations to profiles created by genetic testing companies—was utilized by North Carolina officials to connect Alexander to Cobb’s murder.
Alexander’s DNA was added to a national law enforcement database upon his arrest in 2022, and Ventura County authorities were made aware of the case, according to Nasarenko.
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According to Nasarenko, the county’s detectives transferred DNA preserved from the 1977 murder scenes to the same database in 2006. However, it wasn’t until Alexander’s arrest that his DNA was added to the database and a match was found.
According to Nasarenko, Alexander attended school in Oxnard, which is about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The district attorney said, “He went back there in the 1970s and worked for the next thirty years as a long haul trucker.”
According to him, investigators into the crimes first thought the same person was behind the string of murders, but after running out of leads, the cases were abandoned.
Through the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the authorities are currently collaborating to find further victims who may be connected to Alexander. stated Nasarenko.
According to him, authorities think there might be more in the area and in neighboring states. “This is not in any way closed,” Nasarenko stated.
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