Town note
Chunchula is an unincorporated community in Mobile County.
about 0:05:52The story
His parents divorced and he was raised by his mother and a stepfather who worked as a builder, in comfortable middle-class circumstances. He drifted through construction jobs and a short spell as a pipe welder, and was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and schizoaffective disorder.
On 11 May 1992, Jennifer Judd, a twenty-year-old woman who had been married for nine days, was found stabbed to death on the kitchen floor of her apartment in Baxter Springs, Kansas, by her husband. She had been due to bring him lunch between 10.30 and 11 that morning and never arrived.
In one of the rapes he fired a gun beside a woman's head and threatened to shoot her with the next round. He also stopped attending the sex offender classes he was ordered to attend, telling his mother he did not want to listen to perverts.
In 1996, Daniel Oakley, thirty-eight, and Doris Harris, forty-one, were found shot to death in Delaware County, Oklahoma. On 30 December 1999, Danny Freeman, forty, and his wife Kathy, thirty-eight, were shot dead in their mobile home in Welch, Oklahoma, and the trailer was set on fire. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Ashley and her friend Laura Bible, also sixteen, who was staying the night to celebrate her birthday, were missing. The bodies were never found.
A bounty hunter found him there and he moved on to Mobile, where he met Mark Bentley, a home builder, and talked his way into a job by offering to work a day for free. Bentley hired him and let him stay at his trailer with his family.
Baxter let him sleep in the basement, but his wife Jan disliked him and they eventually threw him out for using meth and not paying rent. A neighbour, John McIntosh, took him in and got him a job as a welder at the Young Refinery in Douglasville.
On 31 October 2002, before he met Freeman, Tina Mayberry, twenty-eight, left a Hallowe'en costume party at Gibson's Bar in a Betty Boop outfit and was stabbed repeatedly in the midsection. She staggered back inside and died at the hospital two hours later.
Her body was found on 20 April 2004, stabbed repeatedly with her neck broken. On 14 April 2004, Patrice Endres, thirty-eight, vanished from Amber's Trim & Tan, her isolated salon on Georgia Route 369 north of Cumming. He said he raped and killed her in Douglas County and threw her body off a bridge into a creek.
On Valentine's Day 2004 the body of Catherine Collins, a forty-five-year-old New Orleans prostitute also known as Catherine Gieselman, was found nude and badly decomposed in a lot near the Port of New Orleans.
In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf Coast. On the Friday, after a night on meth with a neighbour, he took a .25 calibre handgun he had found in the Bentleys' closet and a six-pack of Bud Light next door to the trailer of Lisa Nichols, a forty-three-year-old grocery worker. He raped her, shot her three times in the head and set the body alight in the bathroom. The petrol exploded loudly enough for a neighbour, Ann Pardon, to hear it between seven and eight that evening.
On Saturday 18 September Nichols did not turn up for work. Shortly before midnight her daughters Jennifer and Amber and their brother-in-law Todd found her burned body. An autopsy showed she died of three gunshot wounds.