A 73-year-old man has been charged in the strangulation deaths of three southern California women in 1977, after cold case detectives obtained a DNA match. Authorities said they believe there could be more victims.
Warren Luther Alexander of Diamondhead, Mississippi, made his first court appearance on Thursday but his arraignment on three counts of first-degree murder was postponed until later in August, the Ventura county district attorney’s office said. Alexander remained jailed without bail.
Alexander is suspected in the murder of three women in California in 1977. Kimberly Fritz, 18, was found dead in a motel room the city of Port Hueneme on 29 May 1977. Velvet Sanchez, 31, was found dead in the Villa Motor Court on 8 September of that year in nearby Oxnard. Lorraine Rodriguez, 21, was found on 27 December 1977 on a bridge in an unincorporated area.
All three victims were sex workers in Ventura county, and were killed by “ligature strangulations”, the district attorney, Erik Nasarenko, said.
“And while believing these three crimes were indeed connected, leads ran cold and detectives were unable to identify who was responsible for these horrific murders,” he added.
Ventura county’s cold case unit started re-examining the murders last year, KABC reported. They uploaded DNA in the cases into a national database. While a 2006 query of the database had failed to yield clues, this time there was a match.
Investigative genealogy had identified Alexander as a suspect in the 1992 killing of 29-year-old Nona Cobb, whose body was left along Interstate 77 in North Carolina.
Alexander lived in Oxnard in the late 1950s and 60s, attending elementary, middle and high schools, and returned in the 1970s, Nasarenko said.
From the 1970s into the early 1990s, he was a long-haul, cross-country truck driver, leading authorities to believe there may be additional victims locally and in other states.
“This is an ongoing investigation, and we will continue to pursue all leads that become available. This is not in any way closed,” Nasarenko said.
Alexander’s case was assigned to the county public defender’s office. A telephone message was left at the office seeking comment on the case.
• This article’s headline was amended on 9 August 2024 to clarify that Warren Luther Alexander was charged in three separate murders, not for triple murder as an earlier version mistakenly said.
