THE SHOCK
LU THI HARRIS
liked to dress up when she went out, even for a Walmart shopping run.
On March 20, 2018, Harris freshened her bright pink lipstick then
slipped on a gold and jade necklace, along with a few other favorite
pieces of jewelry. The slim Vietnamese American widow—“Kim” to her
friends and family—had moved to a house on Warm Breeze Lane in Dallas
with her husband, Bill, in 2003 and stayed on after his death a few
years later.
A
spry 81, Harris was known as fun and friendly. She gave away $2 bills
as good luck gifts, which she did so often that she ordered them from
the bank in bundles, her son-in-law later recalled. “She was just a hoot
to be around,” he said.
But
on that day in 2018, Harris didn’t seem to notice the bald,
clean-shaven male shopper, wearing neatly pressed slacks and a collared
shirt, standing in an adjacent checkout line at Walmart. The man
blended into the background like a security guard, probably because he’d
once worked as one. He exited the parking lot first and drove away in a
gray sedan, security footage later showed. Harris went home. A few
hours later, police following a tip arrived and discovered her lifeless
body on the bed.
It
looked at first as if Harris had passed away peacefully in her sleep.
The front door had been locked and her cozy home was intact, stuffed
with her late husband’s vast collection of model airplanes.
But
gone were her own prized possessions: her collection of lucky $2 bills,
her gold necklace with its jade pendant, her rings—and her oversize red
jewelry box, with drawers full of jade, gold and other treasures,
including papers that showed her journey from a restaurant owner and
mother in Vietnam to a U.S. military veteran’s wife in Texas.
Her house keys had disappeared, too.
The
clue to foul play was discovered on the underside of a pillow: a smudge
of Harris’ magenta lipstick on the polka-dotted case. Later, a Dallas
County pathologist found patterns of tiny red dots on her skin known as
petechiae and other subtle signs around her eyes and throat that he
determined to be indications she was asphyxiated. The most likely murder
weapon: her pillow.
A homicide investigation began immediately.
Within
days, high-ranking law enforcement leaders in the Dallas area,
including the district attorneys of Dallas and Collin counties, gathered
for an unusual press conference and made a shocking announcement: It
appeared that Lu Thi Harris was not the only older widow to be stalked
and smothered for her jewelry, but just one of many.
With
TV cameras rolling, officials admitted that a serial killer had been
stalking older Dallas and Plano women for at least two years in a
previously undetected crime spree that could include hundreds of cases.
Detectives in Dallas, the sprawling suburb of Plano, and the smaller
cities of Richardson and Frisco had already begun reviewing older
Texans’ deaths connected to jewelry thefts, to determine if those
deaths—all deemed “natural” at the time—were in fact homicides.
The
Dallas Police Department alone planned to examine at least 750 recent
deaths, an admittedly “monumental task,” said Dallas assistant police
chief David Pughes. Pughes revealed they had already identified a
suspect: Billy Chemirmir (pronounced Sheh-meer-meer), the man who had
been surveilling Harris at Walmart and was arrested with her jewelry
clutched in his hand. Chemirmir had worked in home health care for
years, and cellphone tracking suggests he surveilled older victims in
parking lots and upscale retirement complexes. He was looking for
expensive jewelry and plotting his access and exit routes to and from
their homes and apartments. He often pretended to be a maintenance man
to gain entry, authorities said.
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| March 2018: Billy Chemirmir, caught on Walmart security cameras. A few days later he tailed Lu Thi Harris from there to her home, suffocated her and stole her jewelry. |
Over
the following months, a series of horrific phone calls went out to
sons, daughters and other relatives all across North Dallas and beyond.
They had long ago buried loved ones who were assumed to have passed
away peacefully.
Loren
Adair-Smith heard from a Dallas homicide detective in April 2018. Her
mother, Phyllis Payne, had died two years earlier. “I have some shocking
news for you,” the officer said. “We believe she may not have died of
natural causes.”
“I said, ‘If this is a joke, this is really sick,’ ” Adair-Smith recalls. It wasn’t.
Chemirmir,
then in Dallas County jail on $1 million bond, eventually faced a long
list of capital murder charges in Dallas and Collin counties. He
repeatedly proclaimed his innocence. “I just can’t believe this,” he
said. “Where I come from, our culture, we don’t even think about
murder.”
“News of a serial killing at an upscale independent living facility is bad for business.”
His
first trial for Harris’ murder, in November 2021, ended in a hung jury.
But in his second trial on the same facts five months later, a new jury
convicted him after deliberating for 45 minutes. The families of other
people Chemirmir allegedly killed were not sure they’d ever get their
day in court. So they gathered to hear the verdict. Among them: M.J.
Jennings, whose mother, Leah Corken, is one of 13 victims named in
Dallas County indictments. “Elated, ecstatic, thrilled, relieved!!!!”
Jennings texted. “Finally.......SOME justice. It was so wonderful to
hear GUILTY!!!!!”
Chemirmir
is now in prison serving two sentences of life without parole for the
murder of Lu Thi Harris and, after another verdict was handed down
October 7, for the murder of Mary Sue Brooks. He faces additional
murder charges in two counties for killing 20 more victims, all in
similar circumstances. Victims’ families believe he is also linked to
two more deaths, for which he has not been indicted.
His
days of freedom may be past, but his case poses a troubling question
that goes far beyond Texas. Assuming authorities are correct in their
assertions that Chemirmir is guilty of dozens of murders, how could
such a brazen crime spree unfold over the course of two years—presenting
case after unsolved case, sending more and more families into unending
grief—without alarms being raised by police or the facilities charged
with the protection of those victims? Our shocking conclusion: because
the victims were old.
AARP
asked me to investigate the alleged murders of these older Americans,
whose ages ranged from 76 to 94. Over 18 months I sifted through
thousands of pages of court records, police reports and witness
statements, and interviewed dozens of relatives, lawyers, police and
others. Ultimately, two things became clear. First, while Chemirmir has
been convicted of just two murders so far, the evidence against him for
those and other cases is overwhelming and compelling. Second, the
criminal justice system and the adult living complexes entrusted with
protecting these victims’ health and safety appeared to be blinded to
the crimes by a fatal strain of ageism.
In
almost every case, investigators failed to collect fingerprints or DNA
evidence, order autopsies, or photograph crime scenes—all standard
death-investigation practices, particularly when paired with a theft or
burglary report, as was the case with nearly every homicide in this
grim procession. Time and again, the deaths were attributed to heart
attacks and strokes. Doris Gleason’s suspicious death in 2016 was
instantly attributed to natural causes. As her daughter, Shannon Dion,
puts it: “The mentality of it was, ‘They were old, and they just
died.’ ”
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| At the Lu Thi Harris murder trial, a prosecutor shows jury the murder weapon and her jewelry box. |
The
most damning admission of an ageist and uncaring system came from
Jeffrey Barnard, M.D., medical examiner for Dallas County. In
Chemirmir’s first trial, he conceded that his office rarely orders
autopsies for anyone over 65. Instead, thousands of “unattended deaths”
(outside a hospital with no doctor present) are handled by phone—even
those involving robberies or burglaries. Otherwise, he asserted, the
workload would be overwhelming: “No office can handle that. So you have
decisions based on those cases, the findings and the medical history.”
(Barnard and his office, as well as the Collin County medical examiner,
declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing investigations.)
“When
crime rates are rising in the major cities, the police and medical
examiners would rather expend their forces on other crimes rather than
on the death of someone who’s reaching their expiration date,”
concludes Mitchel Roth, a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston
State University in Huntsville, Texas, and an expert on serial killers
who has reviewed the facts of the case. “A police force also hates to
admit there may be a serial perpetrator out there because it reflects
badly on them. And the same is true of an upscale living facility. News
of a serial killing there is bad for business.”
THE BEGINNING
WHO DID THE KILLER TARGET? Widows
mostly, women living alone, but women of means with the resources to
pay for what they believed was safe housing. Most of the alleged murders
(plus two attempted murders) described in indictments against Chemirmir
were committed in upscale senior independent living complexes. These
places are heavily marketed to buyers as secure places to retire to, and
they aren’t cheap—one rented apartments for $4,000 a month, and another
required residents to buy in for as much as $1 million. But court
records and police reports show that, for the two years prior to
Chemirmir’s arrest, the murder victims were robbed of tens of thousands
of dollars’ worth of jewelry, including wedding rings and large
collections of gold, diamonds and coins, as well as two safes. All too
often, administrators at these complexes ignored the crimes—and, most
important, failed to warn other residents about intruders, home
invasions and major thefts.
“Chemirmir
was not dumb,” says Dallas lawyer Trey Crawford, who represents 13
victims’ families. “He knew which facilities to go to, the target-rich
environments that do not have robust safety and security measures. We
counted 30 or 40 [suspicious deaths] within a 5- to 10-mile radius” of
where Chemirmir lived.
Billy
Kipkorir Chemirmir, 49, could face trial for another 20 murders. A
Kenyan-born immigrant, he held a series of short-term home health aide
jobs during his 15-plus years as a legal permanent U.S. resident. He was
comfortable around older people—his father lived to be 100—and he had
years of experience caring for older, fragile people in private homes
and upscale apartments. After working through health care agencies, he
grew tired of paying commissions and began recruiting his own clients.
When first questioned by a Dallas County homicide detective in March
2018, Chemirmir explained away his presence at crime scenes by insisting
he was simply soliciting health care work.
Yet
before his 2018 arrest, Chemirmir was known to Dallas police as a
small-time criminal with prior arrests and stints in jail for domestic
assault, drunk driving and trespassing. In the domestic assault case,
he’d been convicted after admitting to beating an ex-girlfriend with a
frying pan following a night of drinking at a Dallas club.
At
some point Chemirmir began to use a fake ID with the name Benjamin
Koitaba—which allowed him to work at a Dallas home health agency that
required a background check he could not have passed under his real
name. That company communicated with him only as Koitaba, and Chemirmir
frequently took short nighttime assignments.
From
2016 to 2018, records show that Chemirmir roamed the hallways and
parking lots of at least three upscale senior living complexes where
sudden deaths occurred. He was repeatedly stopped and questioned as an
intruder but then left free to continue. “We believe one of his
techniques was looking for women who walked their dogs or used
walkers—and needed extra time coming in their doors,” says attorney Ali
Ohlinger, who worked with Trey Crawford to investigate the murders on
behalf of victims’ families.
Chris
Bianez, a Plano police officer who specializes in crime prevention and
is familiar with the murders, notes that the serial killer didn’t rely
on fancy burglary tools or technology. It is in precisely these kind of
cases, he says, that standard crime-prevention techniques—like posting
flyers to alert residents about an intruder—could have worked: “He was
committing robberies—but mainly he was able to access residents by just
knocking on the door and posing as a maintenance worker or using some
other way to gain their trust.” As Dallas County District Attorney John
Creuzot said in the October trial for the murder of Mary Brooks,
Chemirmir had a “fundamentally different approach” to his job. “We go to
work to produce,” said Creuzot. “He goes to work to kill, strip, steal,
sell.”
Though Chemirmir
repeatedly made unauthorized forays into senior living complexes for
years before the murders were detected, he was arrested only once for
trespassing, at the Edgemere retirement community, where authorities
believe the murder spree began.
CATHERINE SINCLAIR, M.D.,
had a successful medical practice—a U.S. Army veteran, she’d worked in
hospitals in several states. Near the end of her career, she and her
husband shared a sprawling home in Pennsylvania and had the means to
collect gold and precious gems on regular trips to the Virgin Islands.
She was still working ER shifts when her husband contracted cancer and
then died. For a while, Sinclair kept rattling around their big old
house. Then one day she called her beloved niece in Texas and said: “You
know, this isn’t really working for me.”
That
niece, Jane Fold, and a nephew, Dan Probst, talked their aunt into
moving closer to their families in Texas in 2014. Together they settled
on Edgemere, near the exclusive Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park.
The place was luxurious. It offered condos for as much as $1 million, as
well as exceptional cuisine, a putting green, a jewelry-cleaning
service, an oversize pool, an upscale salon and a spa.
“It
was as nice as any five-star hotel,” says Probst. “I mean, dinner was
served on cloth tablecloths, with flowers on the table and candles, and
they would fix anything special you ordered.”
Sinclair
soon settled in. She used a walker but, as far as her niece and nephew
knew, took no medicine at all. She dined with them in early April 2016,
and the 87-year-old had seemed in perfect health. So, both were
astonished when they were notified only a week later that their aunt had
died. When they entered her apartment, things got stranger.
“We
saw blood on the bed,” Probst recalls. What’s more, their aunt’s
oversize safe with her collection of gold, loose diamonds and fine
jewelry was gone. He and his sister insisted the Dallas Police
Department open a homicide investigation—even though the Dallas County
medical examiner quickly attributed Sinclair’s death to natural causes. A
robbery detective was assigned but didn’t return calls for about a
month; the Dallas Police Department, which had about 500 retirements in
2016, was regularly rotating that detective, and other robbery and
homicide detectives, to patrol shifts.
As
for Edgemere, civil court records indicate that security guards
detected several intruders in the independent living facility that year
but didn’t always summon police or immediately review security camera
footage.
Sinclair is now
believed by her family to be Chemirmir’s first victim. But her case
remained unsolved—and had already been officially attributed to natural
causes—when another Edgemere resident, Phyllis Payne, died the next
month.
At 91, Payne was
still vibrant, a “ball of energy,” according to her daughter Loren
Adair-Smith, who lived nearby. Payne’s brunette hair remained naturally
dark, and she rarely complained of aches or illnesses. In fact, Payne
provided welcome support to Adair-Smith, whose husband had terminal
cancer. “She was my best friend, and we talked every day,” says
Adair-Smith, adding that she often invited her mother on family trips,
including one to a beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, in May 2016. But Payne
was too busy to go on the trip.
“Not
this time,” she had said. “I have too much going on.” Payne loved
hanging out with members of her longtime bridge club in Edgemere’s party
room and spent hours fussing over the menu and the seating
arrangements. Adair-Smith called her mother en route to Alabama and
learned the gathering had been a success. Payne crowed that both the
food and her cards had been “really good.” Adair-Smith was dipping her
toes into the warm waters in Gulf Shores on May 14 when she got another
call.
“Mom died,” her brother said.
“What?? I just talked to her. What do you mean?” said Adair-Smith, sinking to her knees on the sand.
Adair-Smith
rushed back to Dallas, where her mother’s tidy apartment appeared
undisturbed. Only later, as she began packing up flatware and cleaning
the fridge, did she notice the missing valuables. Pieces of silver. A
coffee can her mom always kept in the refrigerator—a hiding place for
her 18-karat gold jewelry. Adair-Smith reported the thefts to the
police and the complex’s administrators. But again, no one reviewed
security footage, no real investigation materialized, and Payne was
declared to have died of natural causes.
The
Edgemere’s failure to alert its residents or take steps to protect them
after the two deaths reflects a pattern that would emerge elsewhere. A
former Edgemere executive later alleged in a civil lawsuit that the
company “cut corners and security and put residents at serious risk of
bodily harm.”
On April
19—about a month before Payne’s murder—Chemirmir was found by police
roaming the halls at Edgemere and formally warned to leave and stay
away. He returned anyway, and was arrested and charged with trespassing
on June 18, 2016, less than two weeks after the third victim at the
complex, 94-year-old Phoebe Perry, was found dead in her unit. She, too,
was missing valuables and pronounced dead of natural causes. Chemirmir
was sentenced to 70 days in jail but released after only 12. Incredibly,
neither police nor administrators made the connection between the
deaths, the thefts and the serial trespasser.
Edgemere
did retain its security footage and, much later, was able to help
police link Chemirmir to Payne’s murder. Its owners also improved
security—adding hundreds of cameras. But all that came well after three
of its residents—and many other women elsewhere—were already dead.
“Think
of all the people who could have been saved over the next two years if
there had been some connection made to that man,” Adair-Smith now
laments.
Indeed,
within a few days of his release, it appeared that the killer moved on
to Tradition-Prestonwood Senior Living, another luxury independent
living complex just minutes away in North Dallas.
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| Juanita Purdy, right, with her daughter and granddaughters at her apartment, a few months before she was allegedly robbed and killed there in July 2016 |
SUDDEN DEATHS, MISSING RINGS
TRADITION-PRESTONWOOD Senior
Living, the flagship of a Dallas-based company, beckoned customers with
manicured lawns and beautiful magnolia trees. Marketing literature
promised “24/7 access control” and a “cutting-edge security and visitor
management system,” a lure for both older couples and widows like Joyce
Abramowitz, who moved there from her comfortable home in Dallas. Other
residents moved there from across the country to live closer to adult
children and grandchildren. Security cameras ensured their safety,
residents were told, and concierges conducted rounds to check for
irregularities, like propped-open exterior doors.
In
April 2016—the same month as Sinclair’s murder—Abramowitz reported to
the police that, while she was away on a three-week vacation, someone
had entered her apartment, number 208, and removed more than $3,500
worth of items from a jewelry box, including an opal heart pendant with
diamonds, a white gold pendant, a sapphire ring and an antique bracelet.
She feared it might be a maid, since police found no sign of a
break-in. Tradition’s written policy was to have its management
investigate thefts, though residents could also call police, as
Abramowitz did. No one was charged.
The
crime remained unsolved when a second burglary occurred, on July 18; an
intruder made off with a safe Abramowitz had bought after the previous
burglary, and a jewelry collection worth roughly $5,000. This time,
Abramowitz could provide no more information: She was dead. But
authorities again dismissed her sudden and unexplained death as natural,
and no autopsy was ordered.
Over
the next 18 months, eight more residents in the complex died under
similarly suspicious circumstances. All of their homes had been
burglarized, according to public records and interviews, and several
victims were missing their wedding rings.
One
of them was Juanita Purdy, a hale, outgoing 83-year-old featured on the
complex’s Facebook page. Two weeks after Abramowitz died,
Tradition-Prestonwood’s facilities director, a jovial man named Edmundo
Sanchez, discovered Purdy dead in her bed. When her daughter Diana
Tannery arrived that Sunday, Sanchez declared that Purdy “had died
peacefully in her sleep.”
But
the same modus operandi came to light: Tannery quickly discovered that
the box in which her mother kept her wedding ring was empty. In tears,
she began to clean out the apartment and found a recent appraisal that
confirmed that items worth more than $20,000 were missing from her
mother’s jewelry collection.
Administrators
assured Tannery the burglary would be investigated internally. But they
sent out no alerts to residents about that crime or others, and Tannery
never got any updates. “How much has to happen before they let the
residents know that, ‘Hey, something’s going on?’ ” Tannery asks.
Three
weeks later, Leah Corken, an 83-year-old widow who’d spent the
previous day shopping at the mall, was found dead in her unit at the
same complex, lying face down on the floor in her living room, with her
body laid out in an oddly straight line. Her wedding ring was missing.
Her
daughter M.J. Jennings knew her mother loved that ring, which had been
reset by a jeweler during the years the family lived in Brazil. “And she
never took that off,” says Jennings. “Never, ever.”
Sanchez,
the facilities director, told Jennings, who arrived minutes after she
had been notified of her mom’s death, that “old people misplace things,”
and then suggested she check her mother’s panty drawer for the missing
ring. (Police reports and interviews indicate that Tradition often
relied on Sanchez, who moonlighted as a pastor, to speak with families
and first responders during the complex’s 2016 wave of robberies and
deaths.)
Less than two weeks
after Corken’s death, another body was found: Margaret White, 87, also
a widow who lived on the fourth floor at Tradition. Her jewelry boxes
had been emptied.
As the
body count grew, the police apparently considered it business as usual
for older people, even those in upscale, higher-security independent
housing. Death investigation procedures—routine for younger victims in
Dallas—were not followed in most cases later identified as murders and
attributed to Chemirmir. Officers did not take photos, collect forensic
evidence or dust for fingerprints. The county medical examiner did not
send investigators to most death scenes.
Police
finally launched a murder investigation of sorts when Solomon Spring,
an 89-year-old grandfather—possibly Chemirmir’s only male victim—was
discovered dead in his apartment at Tradition by his daughter, Marsha
Repp. Like Corken, he lived on the complex’s fourth floor. Crime scene
photos show his bedroom and bath contained extensive but unexplained
blood trails, an out-of-place lamp and a piece of wood that suggested a
worker had entered the apartment (though no maintenance had been
ordered). Items of value were missing, too, including a watch and a ring
he rarely wore.
That investigation ended when the medical examiner listed the death as accidental, the result of a fall.
By
October 1, 2016, it appears, the killer had struck eight times in a
matter of months: three at Edgemere near the exclusive Dallas
neighborhood of Highland Park and five at Tradition-Prestonwood in North
Dallas. Administrators at Tradition-Prestonwood knew that four
apparently healthy widows and one man had died suddenly there—and all
were missing jewelry. But it took a sixth unexpected death at the
Tradition complex in a three-month span—again involving a dead widow and
a stolen wedding ring—before the Dallas Police Department mounted its
first major theft investigation.
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| The medical examiner deemed Solomon Spring’s death “accidental” despite a massive blood trail. |
BLAME THE EMTs
NORMA FRENCH, 85, a
proud alumna of the University of Texas, went away in September to
visit her daughter, Ellen French House, in Indiana, but made a point to
return home to Tradition by Saturday, October 8, 2016. There was no way
she was missing a UT football game against their archrival, the Oklahoma
Sooners. She considered going in person, but ultimately decided to
watch on TV. French House knew her mom probably wasn’t happy with the
outcome—her beloved Longhorns lost a hard-fought game, 45-40. But even
that didn’t explain why French failed to answer her phone afterwards.
Her
adult children requested a welfare check, and complex employees found
her prone on the floor next to the TV. They summoned a paramedic, but it
was already too late.
French
House was so upset that she insisted her siblings take and send to her
photos of her mother’s body. She immediately noticed her mother’s
wedding ring was missing: Her ring finger was red and swollen. The ring
appeared to have been forcibly removed, French House thought. She and
her siblings kept calling the Dallas Police Department until a detective
was finally assigned to the case.
Sanchez,
who still worked for Tradition at press time, responded to questions
from two Dallas police officers about the theft of French’s jewelry. And
he referred to the other recent unattended deaths, but if he had
concerns about the unusually high number, he apparently did not share
them with the investigators, who made no mention of that in their
report. (Sanchez did not return calls for comment for this article, but
in an email, Tradition responded that “allegations that staff withheld
any information are absolutely false.”)
In
her conversations with police, French House passed on a tip she’d
gotten from Tradition employees, several of whom suggested to her that
paramedics had taken the ring. The Dallas officers investigating the
theft apparently bought that angle, and launched an internal affairs
investigation, rather than a broader criminal probe. That theft case was
still open a week later when Glenna Day, 87, was found dead in her
fourth-floor apartment at Tradition. Sanchez assured Day’s daughter,
Sherril Kerr, that her mother must have fallen ill while painting and
then climbed back into bed. “God took her,” he told Kerr.
Kerr
found it strange that her mother would rest atop her fancy $400
bedspread with her hands and smock still stained with paint. “She never
would have laid down on it like that to take a nap,” said Kerr. “It just
wouldn’t have happened.” But like other victims’ daughters, she was in
shock—her lively mother had gone dancing the night before she died—and
she knew nothing about Tradition’s crime wave.
When
Sanchez met with the detective investigating French’s missing ring, he
did not mention the odd circumstances of Day’s death. Sanchez also did
not mention that French was at least the third dead widow at Tradition
within a few months whose wedding ring had gone missing.
On
October 27, 2016, Jeff Wells, one of the administrators at Tradition,
met with the detective, too. Under Tradition policies, managers
participated in its internal reviews of all thefts and other incidents
reported by residents, but Wells played down the crime wave. He offered
scant information to police and, worse, repeated accusations against the
firefighters and EMTs who had responded to the deaths.
Two
days later, on October 29, 92-year-old Doris Gleason was found dead at
Tradition by her daughter, Shannon Dion, who immediately reported yet
another large jewelry theft. Gleason was missing a necklace with a solid
gold guardian angel handcrafted in Italy, an amulet identical to one
Dion also always wore. For both women, the angels were treasured gifts
from Dion’s sister, who had died of cancer.
Wells
and others on staff who spoke to the Dallas police in 2016 did not
mention that the complex was experiencing an unusual wave of sudden
deaths—all involving widows who’d expired without even having time to
call 911. Usually, Tradition-Prestonwood mourned only three or four
residents each year: in 2016, there were eight.
“I knew when I saw the green rubber gloves that my life was in grave danger.”
In
November 2016, a low-level staff member at Tradition called the Dallas
Police Department to report an intruder who had been repeatedly spotted
posing as a maintenance man. The man was gone when officers arrived. The
description provided was general: “Suspicious person—prowler. BM [black
male] 5'10"—180 lbs. dressed in a clean suit carrying a satchel,” the
officer wrote. The report further said that “the suspect has been seen
on numerous occasions … and has stated he was there to check pipe
leaks.” Officers advised Tradition employees to “tighten security and
possibly go door to door.” That did not happen.
Residents
were finally alerted about an intruder in December 2016, when Wells
himself escorted someone—perhaps Chemirmir—off the property, according
to information shared with residents. The complex also publicly
congratulated Wells, posting a notice that read, with unintended irony:
“Jeff has been promoted to Security Specialist.”
The
facility turned out to have only window-dressing security: The few
security cameras, for instance, were located near the entrance—not on
residential levels, including the oddly deadly fourth floor. Further,
the concierges who conducted checks weren’t armed or trained to confront
intruders; none were security guards.
Instead
of tracking down intruders, tightening security and putting two and two
together (eight deaths, all with thefts, all within a few months, with
reports of a stranger lurking), Tradition officials, and the detective
investigating French’s theft, focused on emergency responders. The
investigation of the wedding ring was closed in 2017 with no arrests.
Wells was promoted again, taking an executivedirector role at
Tradition-Prestonwood and later at another Tradition complex in Houston,
according to his LinkedIn page. (It’s unclear where he works now, and
he did not return messages seeking comment for this article. As noted,
Tradition says all its employees cooperated with police, and also that
it relied on the police department’s professional expertise in assessing
the deaths.)
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| Shannon Dion on a cruise with her mother, Doris Gleason. Two months later Gleason died suddenly—and her angel pendant was missing. |
THE SPREE REVIVES
WHAT CHEMIRMIR was
busy doing in the nearly year-long gap after the murder of Doris
Gleason in October 2016 remains a matter of speculation and
investigations. Perhaps he was living a more peaceful life with his
wife and son after having sold enough stolen jewelry to meet their
needs. (He also supported an older son back in Africa.)
Or
perhaps more of his crimes remain undetected. Either way, it appears he
resumed, and then accelerated, his killing spree in September 2017. In
just three months, from September 2017 to December 2017, prosecutors say
Chemirmir stalked and killed seven more women, including five residents
of two senior living complexes in suburban cities just over the Dallas
County border, in neighboring Collin County.
First,
it appears he targeted Parkview in Frisco, a complex for seniors with
an attractive stone clubhouse and apartment units clustered around a
rectangular pool. Helen Lee and Marilyn Bixler, friends who often dined
together, were killed there on September 2 and September 17. Their
deaths were initially dismissed as natural by the Collin County medical
examiner, though both women were missing jewelry. But the killer was
getting sloppy—or overconfident.
In
October 2017, a well-dressed man knocked on the door of Kay Lawson’s
apartment in the assisted living section of Parkview, claiming he was
there to check for leaks. Once inside, the man attacked her, attempting
to smother her with a pillow. Lawson began “to pray, believing she was
about to die,” according to an affidavit. As the attacker helped himself
to her jewelry, the resourceful 93-year-old played dead and managed to
press her medical alert button, which activated an alarm and summoned
911. In an ambulance, Lawson provided a detailed description to local
police.
The tally of
Chemirmir’s alleged victims had now reached 14—all residents of senior
living communities. Only Lawson had managed to survive. But the
shorthanded Frisco police department identified no suspects and made no
arrests. The murderous spree continued unabated, now at the Preston
Place retirement community in Plano.
Chemirmir
knew this large senior living apartment complex well; his former
girlfriend had once worked as a caregiver there, he later told police.
It is a gated community but did not require its employees to wear IDs.
There were few security cameras and visitors could access large parking
lots without checking in with anyone, court records show. Three women
died there from October to December 2017: Minnie Campbell, 84; Diane
Delahunty, 79; and Mamie Dell Miya, 93. Valuable jewelry was missing
from all three apartments, but again, if these were murders, as evidence
now suggests, they went undetected.
Right
before Christmas, it appears that Chemirmir returned to Dallas County
to kill another resident at Tradition—90-year-old Doris Wasserman. Her
death was blamed on natural causes, though she, too, had been robbed.
On
New Year’s Eve 2017, Chemirmir allegedly killed the only one of the
victims he admits he knew: Carolyn MacPhee. MacPhee first met Chemirmir
in October 2016, when she contacted a home health care agency to hire an
aide for her beloved husband, Jack, who was dying of a rare nervous
system disorder. That New Year’s Eve, MacPhee, then an 81-year-old
widow, returned dressed in her Sunday best, which is what she was
wearing when she was found dead on the floor of her home. Her wedding
ring was gone, and her neat home contained unexplained blood stains in
several rooms and on her glasses, too. Her son Scott MacPhee was shocked
when the Collin County medical examiner classified her death as
natural, without an autopsy, and cited a heart condition, without
contacting his mother’s doctor. (Scott MacPhee did keep his mother’s
glasses, and more than a year after her death, investigators found
Chemirmir’s DNA in a blood spatter on the glasses.)
In
January 2018, Chemirmir allegedly stalked, robbed and killed Rosemary
Curtis, 76. A couple weeks later, he killed 87-year-old Mary Sue
Brooks, a woman he’d met at Walmart and followed home. Surveillance
video shows he met Brooks at the same Walmart where he’d later encounter
his last murder victim, Lu Thi Harris. He followed Brooks in his silver
sedan to her Richardson, Texas, condo, where he smothered her with a
pillow, stole the wedding ring off her finger and pocketed heirloom
jewelry from her bedside table and a portable safe.
Then
in March 2018, Chemirmir returned to Preston Place. At the large Plano
facility, managers were again handed strong evidence of a continuing
crime wave involving, at the very least, burglaries and home invasions.
But they did not alert residents—with fatal consequences.
On
March 4 he allegedly smothered 80-year-old Martha Williams. But the man
prosecutors in 2022 would describe as a career killer again slipped. He
left a silver platter and creamer, Williams’ family heirlooms, in the
trunk of his car. And in the glove box, he stashed away a rubber glove
containing incriminating DNA evidence that a lab eventually linked to
Williams. Still, those discoveries came far too late to spare others,
including some of Williams’ neighbors.
Three
days later, Miriam Nelson, 81, accidentally left her door unlocked at
Preston Place because she’d just received a regular grocery delivery.
The stranger who knocked and said he was a maintenance man was neatly
dressed but wore rubber gloves and presented no identification. Nelson
was immediately alarmed: She picked up her phone and watched him from
her living-room recliner. The man walked into her bedroom, then left
after several minutes.
Suspicious,
Nelson called the complex administration and left a long voice mail
with a description of the odd stranger. Later she discovered a valuable
necklace had been taken. When Nelson confirmed the man was not an
employee, she called all her neighbors in her two-story building. But
the complex itself did not alert other residents or call police, a
failure to act that her daughter finds incomprehensible.
“She
called the office and explained in great detail what had happened—and
his description,” recalls Karen Nelson. “We didn’t know that all the
deaths had been happening with missing jewelry. But they knew.”
On
March 9, Nelson was found dead, her diamond rings, family heirlooms
and other jewelry worth more than $11,000 all missing, according to an
indictment and allegations in a civil lawsuit her family later filed
against the complex.
Plano
police immediately began to investigate Nelson’s death as a possible
homicide, but only because this particular victim had recently reported
an intruder. They searched her apartment for missing jewelry, dusted for
fingerprints and ordered an autopsy. Even so, the complex’s
administration seemed uninterested in alerting residents and apparently
did more or less the opposite: That month, another neighbor’s daughter
posted flyers on residents’ mailboxes, warning of a man in a business
suit who’d been roaming around knocking on other residents’ doors since
late 2016, always claiming to be “checking for leaks.” Her flyers were
removed.
In mid-March, a man
whose mother lived at Preston Place reported seeing a stranger who fit
the description of Billy Chemirmir lurking for hours parked in a silver
car in the parking lot. On March 18, 2018, Ann Conklin, 82, died after
going out to walk her dog—just as had happened to another woman, Minnie
Campbell, at the same complex in October 2017. Conklin’s daughters
later found the dog next to their mother’s body, still on its leash.
Mary
Annis Bartel lived directly across the hall from Conklin in Building 8.
She knew nothing about reports of an intruder at the complex when a
stranger knocked on her door only a day after Conklin’s death.
BREAKTHROUGH
ON MARCH 19, 2018,
Bartel, 91, got up around 6:30 a.m. to pray and read the Bible in her
room as usual. She had just finished a regular morning phone call with
her sister-in-law when a knock came at the door of her ground floor
apartment. A stranger identifying himself as a maintenance man pushed
the door open when she answered. She was hard-of-hearing and hadn’t been
able to understand him, but her eyes immediately fixed on the
stranger’s hands. “I knew instantly when I saw those two green rubber
gloves. Number one, I should not have opened the door. Number two, my
life was in grave danger,” she later told a prosecutor.
The
intruder told her to lie down on her bed. Then he picked up a pillow
and smashed it down over her head and chest so intensely that Bartel
blacked out. While she was unconscious, it turned out, the man rifled
through her jewelry boxes, took gold crucifixes and a distinctive gold
locket with her dead husband’s photo inside—and then removed her diamond
rings. Bartel regularly attended morning aerobic classes, and friends
found her door ajar when they arrived minutes later. The intruder was
gone. They called 911 and began CPR.“We have a neighbor we cannot
awake,” one friend told the operator. Still, Bartel appeared to be
breathing—her pacemaker had kicked in.
Bartel,
a straight talker with a strong Catholic faith and thick Indiana
accent, regained consciousness in the emergency room and told her sons,
Rick and Tom Bartel, to summon the Plano police. But the first officer,
skeptical, told her sons that Bartel’s weird story about being
suffocated by a guy wearing green gloves seemed more like an old lady’s
delusion than a real-life robbery. “She probably hit her head and became
confused,” he said to them.
The
brothers looked at each other incredulously. “That doesn’t sound like
Mom,” said Tom Bartel. She would not imagine the loss of her wedding and
engagement ring—or of the unusual ring with its parallel rows of
diamonds that she’d worn on her right ring finger for 50 years. When she
woke up in the hospital, all three rings were gone. The sons asked to
see a Plano detective, who took their mother seriously. He thought her
story sounded a lot like the bizarre tale that 93-year-old Kay Lawson
had shared in 2017 of being attacked and smothered by a robber posing
as a maintenance man.
Meanwhile
the police, upon receiving the tip about Chemirmir loitering in the
parking lot at Preston Place, ran his license plate, found an
outstanding arrest warrant for public drunkenness and finally
mobilized.
On the
afternoon of March 20, 2018, seven Plano officers in unmarked cars and
trucks surrounded a silver sedan as it pulled into the parking lot of
the apartment linked to the license plate. It was an unbelievably
damning scene: Undercover officers watched and listened as Chemirmir
stopped near the entrance to toss into the complex’s dumpster an ornate
oversize reddish orange jewelry box that fell with a heavy thunk. When
officers moved in to arrest him, they found a dead woman’s jewelry in
his hands. Chemirmir was arrested on the outstanding warrant, though the
police planned to question him about the attempted murder of Mary
Bartel. Then a quick search of that discarded jewelry box led them to
immigration papers with the name of Lu Thi Harris and a nearby North
Dallas address.
The house
keys the Dallas police officers recovered from Chemirmir’s car fit the
lock on the front door of Harris’ home on Warm Breeze Lane. Inside, they
discovered the 81-year-old widow’s body.
‘A DEEP BIAS AGAINST ELDERLY WOMEN’
CHEMIRMIR AGREED to
speak with both Plano and Dallas police, even after officers revealed
they suspected him of serial jewelry theft and murder. In hours of
recorded interrogations, he declared his innocence. He could not explain
how he’d obtained distinctive jade and gold jewelry, private papers or
house keys that belonged to a murdered woman. Plano police also obtained
a search warrant for his phone and found photos of the unique rings and
gold crosses stolen from Mary Bartel. He’d posted them for sale online
hours after she reported being attacked.
After
Collin and Dallas county officials held their unusual joint press
conference to inform the public about the killing spree, Plano and
Dallas police reviewed hundreds of neglected reports of unsolved
robberies involving unattended deaths of older Texans and
cross-referenced them with Chemirmir’s cellphone data, security camera
footage and jewelry sales records. Time and again, the information
synced up. Though Bartel died in 2020, her riveting testimony was
digitally preserved, and prosecutors also assembled literally hundreds
of exhibits of actual and circumstantial evidence such as Chemirmir’s
cellphone pings to local towers, photographs of Bartel’s rings and
necklaces posted online, and Harris’ jewelry and house keys.
Today,
Chemirmir is serving two sentences of life without the possibility of
parole for the murders of Lu Thi Harris and Mary Brooks. At press time
he faced 20 additional capital murder charges, but Dallas District
Attorney John Creuzot has said he will likely drop all other capital
murder indictments against Chemirmir in his jurisdiction. Nine capital
murder charges and two charges of attempted murder stand in Collin
County, where the district attorney remained undecided on whether to
seek a death sentence.
But
is Chemirmir the only guilty one here? What of the housing complexes and
investigators who time and time again—whether consciously or
unconsciously—ignored chilling evidence and declared the deaths
“natural”?
“These crimes are
horrifying, and the repeated failures of systems that should have been
in place to protect the victims add to the tragedy,” says Tina Tran, the
AARP Texas state director. “A killer exploited a deep bias against the
elderly, particularly women, in our society, which allowed a murderous
spree to continue unquestioned and undetected. The
callousness—particularly of the police and those who ran the
facilities—should shake us to our core.”
A
number of the victims’ families have filed wrongful death suits against
the facilities where their relatives lived. Attorney Trey Crawford
represents 13 of those families.
“The
owners and operators prioritized the profits of their private equity
investors over the lives of the elderly residents they undertook to
protect,” he asserted in one suit. The current owners (Preston Place was
purchased by a private equity firm in 2018) have settled the suits and
issued a statement acknowledging the “long and difficult journey for the
families and friends of the victims.” They suggest that pending
criminal indictments and Chemirmir’s guilty verdicts offer a “welcome
path toward finality and closure.”
Another
apartment complex with three or more alleged attacks, Edgemere, also
promptly settled wrongful death allegations with families. In a
statement released after Chemirmir’s conviction for Harris’ murder,
Edgemere said that security is a “primary focus” and that they hope “the
trial will deliver a small measure of justice, comfort and closure to
all.”
The third,
Tradition-Prestonwood, home to nine people prosecutors believe Chemirmir
killed, settled at least two lawsuits, and the families of other
victims have been forced by the company into arbitration, where they are
continuing to pursue claims of as much as $10 million each.
In
the filing to secure arbitration, Tradition argued that under the terms
of their leases, the elderly residents were responsible for their own
safety, and that Tradition had relied on the police and medical
examiners to properly investigate the deaths.
Tradition’s
parent company declined our requests for interviews with CEO Jonathan
Perlman or Jeff Wells, or to answer specific questions about the deaths.
In a statement, the company said, in part: “The deaths by an alleged
serial killer in peoples’ homes and at multiple senior living
communities in the DFW Metroplex is a true tragedy. The
Tradition-Prestonwood regards all our residents as family.”
But
for the victims’ real families, the horror has continued unabated. “You
find out your mom’s been murdered, then you find out it’s a serial
killer … and just every day the grief is overwhelming,” says M.J.
Jennings, daughter of Leah Corken. “And to realize that this horrible
psychopathic serial killer was the last thing my mom saw on this earth. …
I still can’t believe it.”
Systemic
change in Texas has been slow. The Plano and Dallas detectives who
worked on the cases, and their superiors, declined to be interviewed,
citing the pending murder cases. A Plano police spokesperson pointed out
the department had updated its policy for treating unattended deaths,
but those 2019 changes related only to the proper removal of a body, not
to the investigation. A Dallas police spokesman, in an emailed
statement, insisted that “our goal is always to bring justice to
victims, regardless of age.”
At
the behest of victims’ families in this case, and largely through the
work of the nonprofit advocacy group the families formed after the
murders came to light, Secure Our Seniors’ Safety (SOSS), the Texas
Legislature passed a law that requires all medical examiners to
inform next of kin whenever the cause of death is changed, after the
daughter of one of Chemirmir’s alleged victims learned from another
friend via a Facebook message that her mother’s death was now being
investigated as a murder. The push for further reforms—from victims’
families, SOSS and other advocacy groups, and politicians—has only just
begun.
Meanwhile, Karen
Harris—whose mother, Miriam Nelson, had tried to report an intruder
before he returned to kill her—can’t stop replaying the attack on her
mother in her mind. As the list of likely murder victims has lengthened,
her unease was replaced by a sense of outrage—shared with other
victims’ families—at what she considers the ageist biases of police and
facilities that had been home to their murdered relatives.
“It’s
very frustrating, hearing all of this,” says Harris, who helped form
SOSS. “It seems like this story should have been on everyone’s lips in
Dallas. They’re saying this is the most prolific serial killer in Texas
history. If these were toddlers or children or coeds. … Do elderly lives
not matter?”
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