On February 23rd, 2002, the nude and partially decomposed body of a woman was found in a pond near a bridge in a rural part of Comanche County, Oklahoma. Authorities quickly identified the victim as twenty-nine-year-old Janice Buono, a known sex worker in the area. The medical examiner determined that Janice had died from an overdose of cocaine and methamphetamine. According to some accounts, Janice had last been seen alive on New Year’s Day of 2002.
Because of a string of very similar deaths in the area, law enforcement eventually determined that Janice had likewise been attacked by a still-unknown serial killer prowling the remote backwaters of Oklahoma. Beginning in 1999, several victims of comparable appearance and lifestyle had likewise turned up nude and dead in bodies of water; for example, twenty-eight-year-old Jane Chafton was found on August 13th of 1999 in Sandy Beach Creek, and on March 22nd of 2000, the body of twenty-five-year-old Cassandra Ramsey was discovered in a ditch off US 70. In both of these cases, the exact cause of death could not be determined. Further, in June of 2000, twenty-one-year-old Mandy Raite was also found in a creek, and like Janice Buono, she had died from a cocaine overdose.
Though some investigators speculated that serial murderer John Robert Williams, otherwise known as the I-40 Killer, might be responsible for the crimes, another compelling suspect was taken into custody in Phoenix, Arizona in April of 2003. This was twenty-four-year-old Cory Morris, who admitted to police after his arrest that he lured sex workers to his trailer, plied them with drugs, then strangled them. One of the victims, Julie Castillo, was found in Morris’s camper, and from the state of decomposition, she appeared to have been there for at least three days.
Morris was convicted of five murders in Arizona and sentenced to death, and was subsequently given the nickname The Crackhead Killer. It remains unknown whether he perpetrated the murders of Janice Buono and the other victims in Oklahoma.
Crime Immemorial 