Serial Killer Timothy Wilson Spencer

From September 1987 to December 1987, 4 women, aged 15 to 44 were attacked, raped, and strangled at the hands of a sadistic killer. There were no witnesses to any of the homicides, and investigators had struggled until a hair found at one scene was tested using early DNA testing methods. The Southside Strangler investigation was a landmark case involving DNA testing evidence. Eventually, one man was exonerated for crimes he didn’t commit, while Timothy Wilson Spencer was convicted of these horrific crimes and eventually sentenced to death.

We Start In Richmond, VA

Richmond is located Northwest of Norfolk, Va. It serves as the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia with a population of around 225K people as of 2020. Historically, Richmond played a role throughout the US fight for independence and then during the Civil War as well. In 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give me liberty or give me death,” speech in St. John’s Church, which was a huge factor in Virginia participating in the First Continental Congress, and eventually the Revolutionary War.

Edgar Allen Poe was born in Richmond, and one of the oldest buildings in Richmond is actually the Poe Museum. In more recent years, Richmond has become a destination for chef’s around the country to open restaurants. The low rents and diverse population make it alluring for restauranteurs to open different culinary concepts that continue to please residents and visitors alike.

In the 80’s, Richmond was similar to many mid-sized cities at the time. It was widely regarded as an extremely safe place to live. One resident at the time described it as a typical sleepy southern town. When you did hear of crimes, it was typically some type of gang activity that took place in a part of town that “you didn’t think anybody but the bad guys went to.” The southside of Richmond was described as a safe haven. The homes were old and large, usually made out of brick. It was an area more affluent residents called home.

In September of 1987 though, a call came into Detective Ray Williams about a woman that had been discovered strangled to death. Detective Williams passed away in February of 2019, and at the time of his death, his brother said of him being an officer, “That’s all he ever wanted to do. And I will tell you, it became not what he did but who he was, because he was a homicide detective 24/7. It really was his life’s calling. He wanted to help people.” Out of high school, Williams joined the Fire Department because he was too young to join the police force, but after a few short years he was able to transfer to the police force. Over the course of his career, he worked several major cases in the Richmond area, but perhaps none as big as the Southside Strangler.

The Victims

On Saturday, Sept 19, 1987, a mechanic named Arnold Ellis woke up and saw that a vehicle that had been parked on the road in front of his home when he got home at 1 AM the previous night was still there. In the daylight, he could see that the car was running, but there wasn’t anyone around. He assumed it had been abandoned and called the police. A patrolman was dispatched and upon running the plates, discovered that the car belonged to Debbie Dudley Davis, a 35 year old account executive who lived about a block away, on the ground floor of a big brick apartment building.

The officer drove to the apartment building and began to knock on the door, but there was no response. One of Debbie’s neighbors came out to check and see what all the commotion was about. The elderly woman told the officer she had a spare key for Debbie’s apartment and gave it to him. The officer entered the apartment and was horrified by what he found.

Debbie Davis’ body was lying face down across her bed, her head hanging slightly over the side. She was topless, wearing only a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Her right arm was tied tightly behind her back with thick boot laces. Her left arm was tied beneath her. The killer had tightly twisted a thick, black wool sock around her neck using a metal vacuum cleaner tube attachment like a tourniquet. The whites of her open eyes were dotted red from ruptured blood vessels, a telltale sign of prolonged strangulation.

Debbie Davis was described by people who knew her as someone who had a great, infectious laugh and brutal honesty. If she didn’t like the dress you were wearing, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. She loved pop culture and listening to Bruce Springsteen albums. The night before, she and a friend had gone to a neighboring city to see SNL Alum Dana Carvey perform. That friend dropped her off and watched her walk into her apartment before driving off.

Initially, because of the intimate nature of strangulation, Williams and his partner, Detective Glenn Williams (no relation, but they were referred to as the Williams Boys in the police precinct) suspected that the perpetrator had to be someone who knew Debbie. Possibly a boyfriend or close friend, but after talking to friends who knew Debbie, they ruled out everyone they came across.

When Detective Williams arrived on the scene, they combed over everything. They found that a rocking chair had been moved from a neighbor’s porch and placed under a window of Debbie’s apartment. The screen from that window had been cut and the person pulled himself up through it. They said that the man broke in and waited, preparing the scene. He created the tourniquet used to strangle Debbie from things he found at the scene. At the crime scene, investigators found a large deposit of seminal fluid. They said that he raped and strangled Debbie until she passed out, then released the tourniquet so she would regain consciousness, over and over. He tortured her. When the forensics report came back, detective Williams…es were both shocked. There was no hair, no fibers, nothing, just the seminal fluid, which was almost useless because of the DNA technology of the day. No witnesses, no one heard anything, they were left empty handed, with lots of questions and very few answers.

October 2nd, 1987, about two weeks after Debbie’s murder, Det. Williams gets a call to go back to the Southside area of Richmond. Around 1:45 AM, Marcel Slag parked his car and went into the home he shared with his wife, Dr. Susan Hellams. Susan was a neurosurgery resident at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical College of Virginia. As he entered, Marcel thought he heard Susan moving around upstairs, and quietly crept through the house trying not to wake her again as he got a shower. After his shower, he quietly entered their bedroom, but something was terribly wrong. With the light shining through from the streetlights outside, he saw Susan laying partially nude at the entrance to their closet.

Susan had a red leather belt tied around her neck and a black belt was tied to that, which was used to strangle her. Her hands had been bound behind her back with an extension cord and a necktie. Her skirt had been pulled up above her waist, and she was still wearing her bright red socks and one red shoe. Susan’s nose and mouth were covered in fresh blood, and her body was still warm to the touch. She had been raped and strangled to death like Debbie Davis, but she also sustained injuries from being savagely beaten. The medical examiner said that with the way the blood vessels burst in her eyes, that the strangulation had to have been prolonged and taken up to 20 minutes or more. She was suffocated, revived, and suffocated again.. Over and over.

Susan and Marcel’s home was about a mile from Debbie’s apartment. When the detectives arrived, they immediately noticed the similarities between Debbie and Susan’s murders. Det. Williams said that when Marcel arrived home, the noise he heard upstairs had to have been the killer, because Susan was already dead. When they searched, they found an open vaseline jar that had been used by the killer. To gain entry to the house, the perpetrator climbed the top of a fence and cut the screen on a second story window and pulled himself up. They traced the jar’s purchase back to a drugstore that was near Cloverleaf Mall.

Cloverleaf Mall had a bookstore inside. Coincidentally, Susan had been in that store to purchase some books and wrote a check for them. The check was endorsed by the part time employee.. Debbie Davis. When they made that connection between the victims, Det. Williams said it gave him cold chills. “In all my experience I didn’t think anything would surprise me in a homicide investigation, but this thing knocked me off my feet.” Again, the forensics report didn’t show any hair, fibers, or fingerprints, but there were seminal secretions, like at the other crime scene.

With the connections made between the two victims, word spread that the police were looking for a serial rapist / killer. The community exploded with fear. Hardware stores were sold out of locks and deadbolts. You could walk down streets that were normally dark, and now they were brightly lit when every front porch was on. Women were told to nail their windows shut if they felt unsafe, even if they were locked. The whole town was scared to death.

In the past, we’ve seen and talked about cases where victims who have been murdered in similar ways haven’t been connected until well after their deaths or the perpetrators are arrested and confess. That’s not the case here. As soon as he walked into the crime scene that night he said, “The same some of a bitch who killed Debbie Davis is responsible for this.” The police reached out to the FBI and tried to get a profile of who they should be looking for. Unfortunately the profile they were given was off. They were told that their killer was most likely a white male around 30 years old. He would be intelligent, but also a loner who wouldn’t talk to anyone about his crimes. He’d roam at night. They felt like he wasn’t a beginner though, he had done this before, if not in Richmond, somewhere in the US.

Late on the evening of November 21st / early morning on the 22nd, 15 year old Diane Cho had been studying in her bedroom when she decided to call it quits. Her parents slept in their room, and her brother slept in the room next to hers. When Diane was laying down to go to sleep, the killer struck after gaining access through a cut window screen. He used duct tape on her mouth and tied her wrists behind her back like he did with Debbie and Susan. She was covered with a sheet around her midsection. Again, there was almost no evidence left. This time though, the forensics report came back with a hair that had been found rolled up in a bed sheet.

Dian Cho lived less than a mile from the Cloverleaf Mall, where Debbie Davis worked part time and Susan shopped. Detective Williams, both of them, were doing everything they could to try to get some kind of identification from that hair, but as they were focused on that, the killer was already gearing up for another attack.

On or about November 27th, 1987 (they’re not sure the exact date because of when her body was found) Susan Tucker was in her condo in Arlington, Va, about a hundred miles away. She was preparing for Thanksgiving weekend. Susan was a young professional who was described as extremely quiet, always polite, and she didn’t have a bad bone in her body. Susan was home alone because her husband was away on a business trip. On December 1st, detectives were called about a murder that had taken place.

Susan Tucker was lying nude on her bed. Her hands had been tied around her back, with a rope going from her hands and feet to her neck. She had also died from strangulation after being raped. When they searched the scene, there was a basement window that had a screen cut and someone had crawled through. At the top of the basement steps, her purse had been dumped and the contents scattered. Outside, they found a blanket that had what they described as an “unusually large amount of semen.” They speculated that the killer masterbated as he murdered Susan. While the location had changed from Richmond to Arlington, investigators were certain that the perpetrator was the same person known in the media as the Southside Strangler.

The Investigation

In Arlington, homicides were pretty rare. Because of that, when Susan Tucker’s body was found and the manner in which she died came to light, investigators immediately began to connect it to a murder that had taken place a few years before. Carolyn Hamm was a hard working, young attorney whose star was on the rise. On Jan 25th 1984 though, her secretary became worried when she missed several appointments after not showing up for work for a 2nd day in a row. She called Carolyn’s best friend, Darla Henry, who then went to Carolyn’s home to check in on her. She had last seen Carolyn two nights before at a local social club, where Carolyn was talking about a trip she was taking the following weekend to Peru. Initially, Darla thought that Carolyn was just running errands in preparation for her trip.

When Darla got to her house though, her car was in the driveway still. More ominous though was the fact that her front door was partially open and snow had begun to creep its way into the home. After a frantic search, Carolyn’s body was found nude, face down in her garage. A rope was around her neck that went around a pipe near the ceiling, then to the bumper of a car and her hands tied behind her back. A nearby laundry room window had been opened and it was thought to be how the intruder got into the home. Initially, the police focused their attention on a young neighbor who had helped Darla search the home when she arrived, but his sister said she was best friends with Carolyn and that Carolyn had been complaining about a neighborhood man, David Vasquez.

Carolyn complained that Vasquez had been peeping on her while she sun bathed. The neighbor also said that 2 days before Carolyn’s body was found, she had seen Vasquez walking in front of her house. There was an issue though… Vaszuez had moved out of the neighborhood 7 months prior with his mother. He had a mental disability and functioned at the level of a 10 year old. He was living 25 miles away when Carolyn was killed and wasn’t able to drive himself. When the police went to talk to him, they lied and said that they found his fingerprints at the crime scene. As we’ve seen countless times, they interrogated him for SEVERAL HOURS, feeding him details here and there and eventually, he was able to parrot back a story of what happened, which became his confession.

Since he had “confessed,” his lawyers suggested that he enter an alford plea, which he did. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Back to 1987 and Susan Tucker, investigators couldn’t ignore the similarities between the attacks. In addition to the rape and murder of Carolyn Hamm, there were a series of rapes and burglaries that started in 1983 in the Arlington area. While they were looking into these cases, Arlington detectives began to comb through different cases from the area at the time. One recalled someone named “Timmy.” Timmy turned out to be career criminal Timothy Wilson Spencer.

Who Was Timothy Spencer

Timothy Spencer was from Arlington and grew up with his younger brother, Travis. They grew up in a lower income neighborhood, on a dead end cul-de-sac. His parents had both attended college and held steady jobs, but they divorced when the kids were young. Travis said that growing up, they were a “structured” family, meaning they had meals together at the table, they had rules to follow, etc. Travis said that Timothy was always looking out for him, since he was the older brother.

Travis said that growing up, he loved and looked up to his brother, and that probably blinded him to who Tim truly was. He told a story about when he was outside playing with a friend. They heard a noise that sounded like a thud. When they looked around, they heard another and realized that a rock had landed near them. Then they looked up and saw one of Tim’s friends throwing rocks at them. As they watched, he threw another which hit Travis right under his eye. The friend laughed as Travis ran inside. His eye was gushing blood and while his mom was cleaning him up, Tim came in and asked what happened. Travis told him what happened and who it was. Tim just said it will be alright little bro and looked at their mom and said he’d be back. As he left he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle that for ya.”

The next day, Travis was walking to the bus stop and that same friend came running up to him, calling his name. As he approached he said, “I apologize for throwing that rock and hitting you in the eye.” As he looked at the friend he noticed that he had a bruised face and black eye. When he asked him about it, the friend said nothing happened. Later that day, Tim asked Travis if the boy apologized, when Travis said he did, Tim told him that he handled it for him.

As they got older, Tim began to burgle local houses and Travis knew about it. Tim would break into neighbors houses or steal things from local stores. One day, Travis got caught stealing and was brought home by the police. His mom sent him to his room, but Travis was excited to talk to Tim so he could tell him he stole stuff too. In his mind, it was a way for him to bond with his older brother. When Tim found out though, he looked at Travis with disgust and told him that he couldn’t do the same things that he was doing. He told him to play sports and focus on that. Anything else would hurt their mom and leave her crying. Travis said that looking back, that moment changed his life.

Travis said that there were several guys who terrorized their neighborhood, and Tim was one of them. “If thieving was a sport, he would have been number 1. If you told me he stole your hubcaps, I would believe that.”

Arrest, Trials, and Sentence

Back in 1987, investigators in Arlington and Richmond started to work together. They’ve made the connection between the 1984 murder of Carolyn Hamm and the 1987 murders. They did some investigation into Tim Spencer and discovered that he had recently been released from serving time in prison for burglary; he had been arrested in 1984 after Carolyn Hamm’s murder. He was on parole and living in a halfway house in Richmond, VA. When they dug deeper, they discovered that when he was in the halfway house, he was required to sign out when he came and went from the facility. When they checked the dates he signed out, he was out when every murder occured. Around Thanksgiving, he had requested a furlough to go to Arlington to visit his mom, which was when Susan Tucker was killed.

With Spencer as their suspect they looked into his past. When he was younger, he would break into homes and vandalize them. As he got older he stole things. As he got even older, he began to break into women’s homes and assault them. With the evidence they had, they started to monitor Tim Spencer and eventually took him into custody at the halfway house he lived in. They took him to the station and interviewed him for 12 hours. Det. Williams said that he never broke or bit on anything. He just said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Detectives began to wonder if they even had the right guy but deep down they all believed he was the one.

While they had him, they took DNA samples to test against the semen found at the crime scenes. Now, this was when DNA testing took weeks to get back, so they all waited with bated breath on the results. When the results came back, it matched. It was a match to the crime in Arlington and 2 of the 3 in Richmond. From there it turned from who was it to “how can we convince a jury?

Between July 1988 and June of 1989, Spencer faced trial for the rape and murders of Susan Tucker, Debbie Davis, Susan Hellams, and Diane Cho. Using the DNA evidence, he was found guilty of the murders of Tucker, Davis, and Hellams. In the case of Diane Cho, the DNA evidence was inconclusive, but he was found guilty and convicted of her murder as well.

The DNA evidence also linked him to the murder of Carolyn Hamm in 1984, for which David Vasquez was serving a 35 year sentence. Although the standard of the DNA evidence had degraded to the point that it was deemed inconclusive, FBI investigators were confident that Spencer was the perpetrator. On January 4th, 1989, Vasquez was granted an unconditional pardon after serving 5 years. Having already been sentenced to death for the 4 capital murders, Spencer wasn’t charged for Carolyn Hamm’s murder.

Spencer’s lawyer’s filed motions to appeal the murders of Susan Tucker, Debbie Davis, and Susal Hellams on the basis that the new fangled DNA evidence technology wasn’t sound. The US court of Appeal confirmed the judgements, and Spencer’s death sentences were upheld.

On April 27, 1994 in Jarratt, VA, Timothy Wilson Spencer was put to death in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center. He declined to give a final statement. He was pronounced dead at 11:13 PM EST. When he was pronounced dead, there were activists outside the prison. Some were there to protest the death penalty, and others were there in favor. While some sang Amazing Grace, others chanted “Kill The Bitch” referring to Spencer.

The Southside Strangler was notable in the world of DNA testing because Timothy Spencer was the first serial killer to be convicted on the basis of DNA evidence. David Vasquez was the first man to be exonerated using exculpatory DNA evidence. After his release, Vasquez and his family / friends had a welcome home party. One family friend said,

“The homecoming was amazing. David had no ill feelings. He carried no grudges. I remember him saying repeatedly, ‘They just made a mistake.'”