﻿The idea of a serial killer taping the murder and torture of their victims seems too far-fetched to
be real life, sounding more like something out of a Hollywood film. However, in 2002,
St. Louise authorities were shocked and horrified to discover grisly and graphic tape recordings in
the house of one of their suspects; despite the initial reaction, these tapes would help the
police find a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least a dozen prostitutes.
Today’s video will be covering the brutal crimes of Maury Travis, and the top-notch
detective work that led to his capture. At the dead of night on April 1st, 2001, a woman
walks along the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, with the intention of getting a man to pay for
her time and body. This woman is 34-year-old Alysia Greenwade, and that night would be the last
time she was seen alive. At around 3:00 AM, a car pulls up with a male driver who propositions her,
prompting Alysia to get in the car and let the man drive her to his house, completely unaware
that this man would eventually be her murderer. The next morning in the nearby Illinois town
of Washington Park, passersby would notice Alysia’s body stripped nude in a ditch along
the side of 60th Street. The forensics team was able to identify Alysia using her fingerprints,
and through her previous run-ins with the law, they deduced that she was both a prostitute
and a drug addict. What they couldn’t deduce, however, was any tangible evidence or leads
that might point them in the direction of her killer, and the case soon went cold. That was
until a little over a month later, just 30 miles from where Alysia’s body was found,
when another dead body was discovered. On May 15th, 2001, the naked body of another woman
was found off the shoulder of a highway, near the border of Illinois and Missouri. There were
no clothes or personal items to help identify the woman, and she was much further along in
decomposition, which ruled out the possibility of getting an I.D. via fingerprinting. Desperate to
deduce the identity of the victim, a dental plate was removed from the victim’s mouth
during her autopsy, which leads the police to the dental records of one Teresa Wilson,
a known prostitute, and drug addict. While in the midst of investigating Teresa’s murder, a second
body showed up just one month later, and a mere 16 feet from where Teresa’s body had been discovered.
This woman was quickly identified as Verona Thompson, who had gone missing June 23rd, six
days prior to the discovery of her naked corpse along the side of the highway. The discovery of
Verona’s body prompted St. Louis police to believe they might have a serial killer on their hands,
and they soon contacted nearby departments to see if they had had similar murders showing up.
The police are soon contacted about another body discovered in a similar fashion, with the woman
being found naked and discarded on the side of the road. This woman had evidently been strangled,
as well as having clear tire marks imprinted on her leg. Connecting the dots that the killer was
clearly targetting prostitutes, the police find out which girls among the local prostitutes had
gone missing and determined that this was the body of a woman named Betty James. Not
only had each of the four victims involved been prostitutes and drug addicts, but each of them had
no family and friends to report them missing or to answer any questions from the police.
Despite knowing that they had a serial killer on their hands, the police had nowhere to turn
and had to let the cases get colder and colder as they waited for more bodies to show up.
On August 25th, the body of known prostitute Yvonne Cruz showed up naked and strangled on
the side of a highway, just like the four women found before her. Two weeks later the body of
Brenda Beasley, another prostitute, was found just two miles from where Yvonne was discovered.
While the murders of Yvonne and Brenda matched the M.O. of the other four women, there was a crucial
piece of evidence that separated them from the others. The killer had left traces of semen at the
crime scene, which was collected by the forensics team and tested against a database of DNA known
as CODIS. Unfortunately, however, they were unable to find any matches with the DNA they had on file,
once again leading the police to a dead end. The police felt the pressure as they raced
against the clock to find the killer before more women were killed. Based on the pattern that had
been established with the last six victims, the killer seemed to strike every six to eight weeks,
leading police to believe that there would be a new body discovered before Thanksgiving of 2001.
However, Thanksgiving came and went without any news, as did December and January. With a sudden
lack of killings, the police came up with several theories as to why the killer might have stopped.
Their most popular theory was that the killer was involved in the military somehow,
and had been called on for service in the wake of the 9/11 attacks,
as the murders stopped around the same time as the attacks. Another popular theory was that the
killer had been arrested for an unrelated crime and was currently serving time in prison.
In May of 2002, now over six months since the last body had been discovered,
a journalist named Bill Smith wrote up an article about Teresa Wilson, the second victim found,
where he told her story and expressed his desire to not only find justice for her but for the other
five women involved. Little did Bill know, he was playing an integral part in finding their killer.
Five days after the article is published Bill receives a letter from an unknown sender that
arrived for him at the newspaper office. The letter started out “Dear Bill, nice sob story
on Teresa Wilson…”. The author of the letter antagonized Bill and told him that if he wrote
a good story on Alysia then they would “...tell [him] where the others are. To prove I’m real,
here’s directions to number seventeen.”. The letter was delivered alongside a map that
had specific directions and coordinates to the supposed location of victim number seventeen.
Obviously, the person who wrote the letter was claiming to be the killer,
but disturbing letters from posers merely seeking attention is not uncommon in serial killer cases,
and the police knew the only way to fact check this was to cautiously follow the map and see
if it actually led them to a new victim. The authorities followed the directions carefully
and were indeed led to a corpse, however, this one was significantly more decomposed, with much
of the remains being skeletal. Not only had this proven that the letter had in fact been written
by the murderer, but this also implied that there were significantly more victims involved than the
police had previously suspected. The police intended to use the killer’s
confidence against him, and absolutely scoured the letter for any extra clues that might help
them identify the perpetrator. They searched the letter for fingerprints with little success,
they investigated the handwriting, and they even looked into the paper and envelope the letter had
been written on. Right when the situation seemed the most dire, the police were able
to determine that the map that was provided with the letter had been digitally generated,
which led them to an unexpected break in the case. The digital crimes department was able to deduce
that the map was created from Expedia.com, and from there they found logs that traced back to
the I.P. of the computer that had been used to visit the website. With this information,
they were able to eventually track this all back to someone named Maury Travis. A
quick background check revealed that Maury had recently been imprisoned from November of 2001
to February of 2002, lining up perfectly with the time period that the murders stopped.
On June 7th, at seven in the morning, the police knocked on the door of Maury Travis with a search
warrant, who irritatedly asked them what they were doing there so early. The police began to search
the house, and were initially thrown off by how clean and organized the upstairs was. When they
reached the basement, however, they were in for a rude shock. The basement had evidence of blood
along the walls and floors, as well as various items and tools that seemed as though they would
be used for violence and torture. Back upstairs, the police showed Maury photos of the six women
and asked if he had seen any of them. He replied that he hadn’t, but later asked investigators
if he could see the photos of the dead girls again. It was at this point they informed Maury
that they had never told him the women were dead, and Maury knew he was caught. While he was quickly
arrested and taken into custody on suspicion of murder, the officers still investigating
his home made a gruesome discovery. In the basement were a variety of videotapes,
all of which showed Maury torturing, violating, and murdering the women he trapped in his home.
The videos were especially brutal, with little information about them being released to the
public. However, clips were leaked that featured Maury harassing one of his victims
and forcing her to say “You are the master. It pleases me to serve you” over and over again.
In another clip he can be heard forcing another woman to apologize to him for being a prostitute,
as well as asking her what she would like to say to her kids, to which she replied “Momma’s sorry”.
The video and audio clips that have been released are incredibly disturbing and heartbreaking,
and just go to paint a picture about the kind of sick and twisted monster Maury was.
The police were able to tie Maury to 12 previously unsolved murders, however, they suspected he
was responsible for as many as up to twenty possible murders. Tragically, the authorities
would never get the chance to truly hold Maury accountable for his crimes. On June 10th, 2002,
Maury fashioned the bedsheets in his cell into a makeshift noose and hung himself until death.
The police discovered a suicide letter alongside his body where he apologized to his mother for any
pain his crimes caused her. Notably, Maury didn’t express any actual regret for his crimes, nor
did he apologize at all to the many women he had grossly brutalized. While the victims were unable
to receive any true legal justice, they can at least rest knowing that the world was able to hear
their stories and that Maury Travis, one of the most brutal serial killers of the modern age, was
found and taken off the streets before he could hurt more women. Leave your thoughts about this
case down in the comment section below, and let us know about any other cases you would like us
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