Top left inset: Velvet Ann Sanchez. Bottom left inset: Kimberly Carol Fritz. Top right inset: Lorraine Ann Rodriguez. Bottom right inset: Warren Luther Alexander. Background: Authorities escort Alexander off a plane in California (Ventura County District Attorney’s Office).
A former Mississippi trucker already facing murder charges in the strangling of a North Carolina woman 30 years ago is now facing murder charges in the strangulation slayings of three women in California in 1977.
The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office filed three counts of first-degree murder against Warren Luther Alexander, 72, related to the murders of Kimberly Carol Fritz, 18, Velvet Ann Sanchez, 31, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez, 21, prosecutors announced in a news release.
“These murders may have occurred 47 years ago, but the investigators with the Ventura County DA’s office, the investigators with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Unit, and officers and detectives with Port Hueneme and Oxnard never gave up,” Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said in a news conference announcing the charges. “They never gave up seeking justice for these three victims, their loved ones and their families. Just because a case has gone cold does not mean it should ever be forgotten.”
At the news conference, authorities outlined the long-ago cases in an area about 60 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Fritz was found dead in a motel room in Port Hueneme on May 29, 1977. Sanchez was found dead in a motel in Oxnard on Sept. 8, 1977. Rodriguez’s body was found on Dec. 27, 1977, in unincorporated Ventura County.
The victims were sex workers, a vocation Nasarenko said subjected them to violence, trafficking, and extreme exploitation in an area of Ventura County then known for commercial sex trafficking. Authorities long believed the cases were connected, but leads ran cold, and detectives were not able to identify the killer, Nasarenko said.
The break came in February 2023 when authorities said they reopened the cases and ran DNA evidence through a national database, which they said linked the suspect to the crime scenes and the victims.
Authorities said Alexander, a former U.S. Marine, taxi driver and trucker, lived in the area in the 1950s and 1960s before leaving and returning in the 1970s.
Alexander arrived in California on Tuesday after being extradited from North Carolina, where he is awaiting prosecution for a 1992 cold case murder he’s accused of committing.
As Law&Crime reported, Alexander is accused of killing Nona Stamey Cobb, 29, in North Carolina in 1992. She was last seen on the night of July 6 at the Welcome Center on Interstate 85 in Cleveland County, where she got into a truck being driven by an unidentified male, the Winston-Salem Journal reported. Her body was found at 6:15 a.m. on July 7, discarded on the northbound side of Interstate 77 in Surry County.
Authorities there said they linked the suspect to that murder through DNA after reexamining evidence in the case, and he was arrested in that case on March 15, 2022, in Diamondhead, Mississippi.
Alexander is being held in Ventura County Jail without bail. He is expected to appear in court on Aug. 21.
Law&Crime’s Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
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