Walter Ellis
|
Walter Earl Ellis, AKA The Milwaukee North Side Strangler, (24 June 1960 - 1 December 2013) was an American serial killer who raped and strangled at least eight prostitutes in Milwaukee between 1986 and 2007. Until May 2009, the killings were considered to independent of one another, but were then linked together via DNA profiling.
Biography edit
Ellis was born in Holmes County, Mississippi, on 24 June 1960. He displayed delinquent behaviour from an early age, often getting into fights and eventually dropping out of school at the age of 14 and turning to crime.
Ellis was first arrested soon after leaving school, for robbery and attempted murder; however, he only received a small fine, as he was only a minor. He also received four years probation for another count of robbery, and was indicted for extortion and assault after an incident involving two prostitutes during a brief foray by Ellis into pimping. He was in and out of jail for next few years for assault, extortion, theft and other crimes until he was eventually jailed for seven years in 1990 for drug trafficking. He was released two years later, but went back to jail for a parole violation. He was placed in a halfway house, where he became a police informant about corruption among the guards. This status allowed him to get away with various assaults, including one against his girlfriend using a screwdriver, until his status was terminated because he assaulted a police officer.
In May 2009, the cold case killings of nine prostitutes were re-opened and were found through DNA analysis to have been committed by the same killer. A statewide investigation found no match; however, Ellis became a suspect because his DNA samples were missing due to having been lost on their way to the lab. Ellis was served with a court order to provide a sample, but refused. An arrest warrant was issued for failure to provide a DNA sample, and his apartment was searched. A DNA sample was retrieved from his toothbrush and found to be a match for the DNA from the killings.
Ellis was arrested on 7 September 2007 after his car was spotted in Franklin, Wisconsin. He was charged with raping and strangling seven of the prostitutes (two of them had been killed in different ways, causing police and prosecutors to suspect that he had merely had sex with them and someone else had killed them soon after). It was also found that an innocent man, Chaunte Dean Ott, had been convicted of one of the murders, and Ellis's DNA was linked to the murder of another prostitute, Maryetta Griffin, of whom William Avery had been convicted of killing. Both of their convictions were overturned and Ellis was forced to pay restitution, although he was never charged with Griffith's death.
Ellis pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and received seven life sentences without parole. He was imprisoned at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, where he died of diabetes-related complications on 1 December 2013.