Police were searching victim DNA for one serial killer. Instead, they discovered a possible new one

The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday

Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

He was a long haul trucker who considered himself a ladies’ man. “The Wild One” was emblazoned on the cab of his truck that he drove back and forth across North Carolina state lines, picking up women – sex workers, mainly – strangling them and dumping their bodies along the interstate.

After a years-long killing spree, Sean Patrick Goble, later dubbed “The Interstate Killer,” was captured in North Carolina in 1995, for at least four murders in four other states in the early 1990s.

He confessed to killing 45-year-old Brenda Kay Hagy of Bloomington, Indiana, at a service station in Tennessee in January 1995. He dumped her body along an access road off Interstate 81 in Bristol, Virginia and ran over her legs as he drove away.

Goble also confessed to killing 36-year-old Alice Rebecca Hanes, a sex worker from Ohio whose body was found in Kingsport, Tennessee.

Goble later pled guilty to the murders of both women and then confessed to the murder of Sherry Tew Mansur, 34. Goble picked Mansur up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and they had sex before he strangled her and left her along Interstate 40 in Guilford County, North Carolina, where her body was found on February 19 1995.

In January 1994, Goble picked up 29-year-old Lisa Susan O’Rourke along Interstate 10 in Mississippi and had sex with her before he strangled her. He then dumped her body under a bridge on Interstate 65 in Alabama where her body was found on January 23. Her death was initially ruled as hypothermia, but later ruled a homicide.

Goble, who was 28 years old at the time of his arrest, was questioned about other killings too.

Nona Cobb seemed like a possible victim: she was a 29-year-old found strangled by the side of an Interstate 77 on-ramp in Surry County, North Carolina, on July 7 1992. But a DNA test found that Goble wasn’t a match with the semen collected from Cobb’s body, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.

For 30 years, Cobb’s murder remained unsolved.

Until investigators found out that she may be the victim of another possible serial killer, who hauntingly was also a long haul truck driver.

In April 2021, investigators re-tested the DNA found on Cobb’s body and turned to genealogy to help solve the case. Dr Fitzpatrick with Identifiers International was called in to help.

“As time went on and technology developed, they got a partial CODIS [Combined DNA Index System, the national law enforcement DNA database] profile,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “But it took time, it was a gradual buildup.”

But they found a match.

On March 15 2022, Warren Luther Alexander, now 73, was arrested in Diamondhead, Mississippi and extradited to North Carolina to face charges in Cobb’s murder.

Once in custody, his DNA was entered into CODIS.

And that’s when investigators began searching to see if he matched with any other crime scenes. What they hadn’t expected to find was a possible serial killer.

His DNA matched with three murders in other parts of the country and going back 20 years before Cobb’s killing.

Kimberly Carol Fritz, 18, Velvet Ann Sanchez, 31, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez, 21, were all killed between May and December 1977 in California. Like Cobb, all three women were sex workers and had been strangled to death.

Detectives discovered that Alexander had lived in Oxnard, California, from the late 1950s and into the1960s. He worked as a taxi driver, an electrician with the Marine Corps, and a long-haul trucker which took him across the country.

It’s believed that Alexander returned to Oxnard in the 1970s, coinciding with the period when the murders took place.

DNA profiles had been developed for the 1977 cold cases of Kimberly Carol Fritz, 18, Velvet Ann Sanchez, 31, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez, 21, years earlier but a previous attempt to find a match had come up empty.

That was, until 2023, when Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said investigators re-examined the 1977 cases and tried the DNA in CODIS again. This time, there was a hit: Alexander.

“We believe there may be additional victims locally and in other states,” Nasarenko said. “This is not in any way closed.”

Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifiers International LLC, told The Independent she also believes more victims may be found.

“The significance here is that he was in North Carolina and then he was in California, what 15 years earlier? He’s a long haul trucker – think about that. About all the victims that could be between here and there in that amount of time. A lot,” she said.

Alexander has been extradited to California to face charges in the murders of the three women.

“The day of reckoning in Ventura County has finally arrived,” Nasarenko said.

Investigators have long speculated that the killings of the three women in 1977 were likely done by the same person.

All three women were sex workers who were strangled in their underwear after picking up clients at the Plaza Marina Shopping Center and taking them to nearby motels, Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said at a press conference last week.

Kimberly Carol Fritz, 18, was the first known victim. She was discovered dead in the Marv-Inn Motel in May 1977, Nasarenko said.

Four months later, an employee at the Villa Motor Court Motel in Oxnard found the body of Velvet Ann Sanchez, 31, in one of the rooms. Sanchez was reportedly separated from her husband and three children in Bakersfield and had been living in the motel for about a month, Nasarenko said.

Witnesses told police that a bearded man “with a stocky build and brown hair, wearing overalls and a tan jacket” was seen with Sanchez shortly before her death, the Ventura County Star reported at the time.

A man seen with Fritz before her death also matched the description.

Lorraine Ann Sanchez, 21, was found dead two days after Christmas. She had been dumped on a bridge on Laguna Road in Oxnard. Her bra had been left tied around her neck.

Investigators learned she was living at the Villa Motor Court Motel, just like Sanchez, before her death. The married mother-of-two was last seen alive on the evening of December 26; it was believed she was killed elsewhere and dumped at the bridge.

In February 1978, Ventura County medical examiner Ronald Kornblum publicly suggested that the murders of Fritz, Sanchez, along with another woman, 26-year-old Cassandra Lee Miller, were likely connected.

Miller, another sex worker, was found dead in 1975 at the Port Hueneme Surfside Motel. She had been strangled and her body posed in a way similar to the others which appeared to intend to degrade them.

He told the Thousand Oaks Star at the time that he was “frankly a little surprised” that the links hadn’t been widely publicized.

Kornblum noted that Fritz, Sanchez and Miller had all been seen with a customer before being found dead in motel rooms; each had been posed to “degrade the victim,” he said.

Investigators are now looking into Alexander’s possible involvement in the death of Miller, Nasarenko said at last week’s press conference.

The district attorney said he will not seek the death penalty for Alexander because it would take too long and “witnesses are aging.”

This is also why officials in Surry County, North Carolina, agreed to the extradition request, despite their own murders charges brought against Alexander, Nasarenko said.

Alexander is set to be arraigned in Ventura County Superior Court on August 21 and then stand trial in California before being sent back to North Carolina.

He is currently being held in Ventura County Jail without bail.

According to the FBI Highway Serial Killings initiative, long-haul truckers are responsible in most cases of highway homicides, with at least 850 murders along America’s highways over the past few decades being linked to truckers.

Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi, who wrote the book Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers, said his research revealed truckers’ jobs allow them to “grab a victim in one jurisdiction, kill them in a second jurisdiction, dump their body in a third jurisdiction – and be on their way before anyone has figured anything out.”

More than 200 cases of highway murders remain active and unsolved, with the bureau making its way through a list of about 450 suspects.