![]() The investigation only began after Chemirmir’s arrest, with his cellphone records and hundreds of police reports of thefts and deaths in several north Texas cities. The other 20 cases will probably be dismissed. That way, the district attorney told families, if one gets reversed on appeal the other will stick. Now prosecutors have tried a second case to give Chemirmir a second life-in-prison sentence. In April, he was convicted of killing Harris and sentenced to life in a Texas prison without parole. Several other cases have not yet been brought before a grand jury for indictment. Medical examiners evaluated each case, changing death certificates from “natural causes” to “homicidal violence” or “undetermined”.Ĭhemirmir was indicted with 22 counts of capital murder. Investigators then began combing through hundreds of death cases and reports of missing jewelry, matching them to records from Chemirmir’s phone. ![]() They forced their way inside and found her dead on the floor of her bedroom. When police arrived at Harris’s home, they found the doors locked. When they pulled it out of the trash, they found a name: Lu Thi Harris. Police had seen him throwing a red jewelry box into a dumpster before they arrested him. They set up a sting operation at his apartment in Dallas and arrested him the evening after the attack on Bartel.Ĭhemirmir was gripping cash and jewelry as they put him in handcuffs. Police in Plano began investigating the attack on Bartel and found a suspicious person report linked to Chemirmir at two area senior living communities. A pacemaker in her chest kept her alive until a neighbor arrived and called 911. She tried reaching for an emergency alert button but couldn’t press it before he slammed a pillow on to her face and she lost consciousness. “Don’t fight me,” she remembered him saying. Jurors this week heard how Bartel remembered the man wearing green gloves as he forced his way into her apartment. ![]() It wasn’t until Mary Bartel survived an attack in March 2018 the day after Roan found her mother’s bloodstained pillow that the investigation began in earnest. Many police officers who responded to crime scene after crime scene assumed the dead were old people who must have died from a heart attack, not homicide. Smothering deaths, Dallas county medical examiner Jeffrey Barnard testified this week, leave few signs for an untrained eye. Prosecutors say he would shove them on to a bed or the floor, pushing a pillow over their faces to smother the women to death, then he’d then rifle through their cabinets and drawers to steal jewelry, cash and other precious items.īut throughout the string of deaths and thefts, officials attributed each to natural causes. In other cases, like with the death of Brooks, he stalked women at a Walmart store before following them home and forcing his way inside. In some cases, police say, he went from door to door at independent living apartments, pretending to be a maintenance worker. He was convicted and began serving a life sentence several weeks later.įrom top, victims Mary Brooks, Martha Williams, Mary Bartel and Lu Thi Harris. He told the Dallas Morning News earlier this year that he would never go to prison. He is accused of smothering at least two dozen elderly women in north Texas, which places him among the deadliest serial killers in the history of Texas and the United States.Ĭhemirmir says he is innocent of all the crimes he’s accused of. As he was handcuffed, police found cash and more jewelry from yet another victim, and quickly realized there could be even more cases.Ī serial killer had been at work among the elderly, preying on some of the most vulnerable people in America.Ĭhemirmir was convicted of capital murder this week for the second time in Dallas county, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the death of Mary Brooks, an 88-year-old woman who was found dead in January 2018. Police arrested Billy Chemirmir, a Kenyan immigrant to the United States, after tracking him to a Dallas apartment complex the day after. The next day, in one building over from their mother’s apartment, another woman was found dead and a third survived an attack from a man she said tried to smother her with a pillow. “I knew exactly what it was,” Roan remembered this week. She brought it into the other room to show her sister, frozen in fear. On the back of one, she saw the imprint of a face and a deep and dark bloodstain. While cleaning, Roan had a strange feeling about the bedroom, and decided to turn over her mother’s pillows. In the dining room, a mess of open and empty jewelry boxes – not the careful way their mother organized her precious heirlooms. On a counter, a pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses that were not her style. In the bathroom, a necklace and ring they didn’t remember belonging to their mother.
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