A man Los Angeles prosecutors once described as one of the city's most prolific serial killers has been charged with another murder: that of a woman in Utah in the late 1990s.
Utah authorities announced Friday the filing of an aggravated murder charge against Chester Turner in the killing of Itisha Camp, 22, in Salt Lake City, where Turner had moved after absconding from parole in California.
Turner is sentenced to death at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center after being convicted of killing 14 women in the 1980s and 1990s in the Figueroa Corridor, an area then famous for sex work, sex-related crimes. drugs and violence. Most of his victims were raped and strangled.
“It must have been deeply difficult for Ms. Camp's family and loved ones over the past 25 years, not knowing whether the suspect in her murder was still in public,” the Salt Lake County District Court said. Lawyer. Sim Gill said in a statement. “We hope that the filing of this charge brings some relief to Ms. Camp's loved ones and our entire community, knowing that the defendant is already behind bars.”
Gill said the case was solved thanks to the diligence of Salt Lake police cold case investigators.
Camp's body was found by three teenagers in a stairwell behind a business south of downtown in September 1998. She had a scarf around her neck and an autopsy revealed she had been strangled. Investigators also discovered evidence that she may have been sexually assaulted.
DNA from the scarf was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI's national combined DNA index system, leading investigators to Turner, according to authorities.
According to a post on the Utah Department of Public Safety website, Camp had been in town only two or three weeks before his body was found. She supported herself by doing sex work in the South State Street area, the post said.
Detectives later learned that Turner had moved to Utah from California that same year, in violation of his probation. The investigation revealed a police report of an assault in Salt Lake City in 1998, in which Turner was listed as a victim.
Turner, a one-time pizza delivery driver, was one of at least five serial killers who preyed on victims in South Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic in the city.
Police initially suspected other people in three murders for which Turner was eventually convicted. A part-time janitor was charged and convicted of the murders of Mary Edwards and Deborah Williams in 1992. That man spent 11 years behind bars before DNA evidence exonerated him and implicated Turner in 2004.
Another man was charged in connection with the death of Cynthia Annette Johnson, who was murdered in 1997. The case against the man was later dropped and Turner was found guilty of her murder.
