Nearly 50 years after three women were strangled to death in Ventura County, cold case investigators said Thursday they had identified a man suspected of the serial killings.
Thanks to modern DNA technology and increasingly advanced data sharing between law enforcement agencies, homicide detectives were able to connect the dots on Warren Luther Alexander, 73, who was extradited this week from North Carolina, where he awaits prosecution in an unsolved 1992 murder case, and is now being held in the Ventura County Jail without bail.
These unsolved cases (three in Southern California and one in North Carolina) could be just the tip of the iceberg.
“We believe there may be additional victims, both locally and in other states,” Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said Thursday morning when he announced that his office had filed three counts of first-degree murder against Alexander. “This is an ongoing investigation and we will continue to pursue all leads that are available. This is by no means closed.”
Alexander, who was a taxi and long-distance truck driver, is suspected of killing Kimberly Carol Fritz, Velvet Ann Sanchez and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez in 1977 in a series of gruesome murders that stumped detectives for decades.
A man has been arrested for the murders of Kimberly Carol Fritz, left, Velvet Ann Sanchez, center, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez in 1977.
(Ventura County District Attorney's Office).
Fritz, who was 18, was found dead at a motel in Port Hueneme on May 29, 1977. Sanchez, 31, was discovered at an Oxnard motel that year on Sept. 9. Both had been strangled with their underwear.
Months later, in late December, Rodriguez's body was found dumped on Laguna Road in the Oxnard Plain area. The cause of death? Strangulation, too. She was 21 when she died.
After all these years, detectives still remember how much each woman meant to their families.
Rodriguez had a son and a daughter and her family described her as a loving and dedicated mother who loved spending time with her children.
Sanchez was also a mother, Oxnard Police Chief Jason Benites said, and had recently left her job at the U.S. Navy Exchange when she was killed. And Fritz, fresh out of high school, was one of three sisters and had moved to California from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Press reports at the time also noted similarities to a fourth murder, in October 1975, of a young woman named Cassandra Lee Miller. (Nasarenko, when questioned by reporters, said authorities were still investigating possible connections between Miller's murder and the three 1977 killings that have now been linked to Alexander.)
By 1977, detectives working these cases noticed there were patterns. The women were all sex workers, and there were eerie similarities in the way they were killed. In the murders of Miller, Fritz and Sanchez, their bodies were arranged in a nearly identical manner, which the coroner at the time said “appeared to be intended to degrade the victim,” according to a 1978 Ventura County Star article.
The coroner at the time declined to be more specific about what was done with the bodies, but told the Star in 1978 that it was unlikely more than one killer would have followed such details in the three murders.
For decades, the Oxnard Police Department, the Port Hueneme Police Department and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit were unable to track down who was behind these murders. Leads went cold and exhaustive attempts over the years to connect the DNA dots led to no matches.
But in 2023, a breakthrough came: The county’s cold case unit was re-examining the 1977 murders and had begun uploading evidence into a massive DNA database used by homicide detectives across the country.
A clear DNA match was found. A year earlier, Alexander had been charged in North Carolina in connection with an unsolved murder from 1992. The 29-year-old victim, Nona Cobb, had been similarly strangled and dumped along Interstate 77. Advanced DNA forensics had also helped solve that case.
“In light of the alleged murder of Nona Cobb, we — the Sheriff’s Department, District Attorney’s Office, Oxnard and Port Hueneme police — are working with the FBI, specifically their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and Highway Serial Killings initiative to draw parallels, see when patterns emerge and hopefully solve additional crimes,” Nasarenko said.
Alexander appeared in Ventura County Superior Court Thursday morning and will be arraigned later this month. He is from Diamondhead, Mississippi, but authorities said he lived in Oxnard in the late 1950s and 1960s and attended elementary school, middle school and the first two years of high school in Oxnard.
He worked as an electrician in the U.S. Marine Corps and returned to Oxnard in the 1970s, authorities said, and from the 1970s to the 1990s, he was a long-haul truck driver.
“These murders may have happened 47 years ago, but investigators … never gave up,” Nasarenko said. “They never stopped seeking justice for these three victims, their loved ones and their families. Just because a case has gone cold doesn’t mean it should ever be forgotten.”
