DNA snags suspected serial killer in brutal 1977 slayings in Ventura County

Almost 50 years after three women were strangled to death in Ventura County, cold case investigators said Thursday that they’d found the suspected serial killer who committed these murders.

Through modern DNA technology and increasingly advanced data sharing across law enforcement agencies, homicide detectives were able to connect the dots on Warren Luther Alexander, 73, who was extradited this week from North Carolina — where he is awaiting prosecution in a cold case killing from 1992 — and is now being held in Ventura County Jail without bail.

And cracking these cold cases — three in Southern California, one in North Carolina — appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.

“We believe there may be additional victims, both locally and in other states,” Ventura County Dist. Atty. Erik Nasarenko said when he announced Thursday morning that his office had filed three counts of first-degree murder against Alexander. “This is an ongoing investigation, and we will continue to pursue all leads that become available. This is not in any way closed.”

Alexander, who was a cab driver and a long-haul cross-country truck driver, is suspected of killing Kimberly Carol Fritz, Velvet Ann Sanchez and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez in 1977 in a series of horrific slayings that had stumped detectives for decades.

A man has been arrested in the 1977 slayings of Kimberly Carol Fritz, left, Velvet Ann Sanchez, center, and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez.

(Ventura County District Attorney’s Office.)

Fritz, who was 18, was found dead in a motel in Port Hueneme on May 29, 1977. Sanchez, 31, was discovered in an Oxnard motel that year on Sept. 9. Both had been strangled to death with their undergarments.

Months later, in late December, Rodriguez’s body was found dumped on Laguna Road in the Oxnard Plain area. Her cause of death? Also strangulation. She was 21 when she died.

After all these years, detectives still remember how much each woman meant to their families.

Rodriguez had a son and daughter and her family described her as a loving and devoted mother who loved spending time with her kids.

Sanchez was also a mother, said Oxnard Police Chief Jason Benites, and she had just recently left her job at the U.S. Navy Exchange when she was killed. And Fritz, fresh out of school, was one of three sisters and had moved to California from Ann Arbor, Mich.

News reports at the time also noted similarities to a fourth killing, in October 1975, of a young woman named Cassandra Lee Miller. (Nasarenko, when asked by reporters, said that authorities were still investigating potential connections between Miller’s slaying and the three 1977 killings that have now been connected to Alexander.)

Back in 1977, detectives working these cases did notice there were patterns. All the women were commercial sex workers, and there were eerie similarities in the way they were slain. In the killings of Miller, Fritz and Sanchez, each of their bodies were arranged in almost identical ways, with what the coroner at the time said “appeared was the intent to degrade the victim,” according to a Ventura County Star article from 1978.

The coroner at the time declined to be more specific about what was done to the bodies, but he told the Star in 1978 that it was unlikely that more than one killer would have followed through with that kind of detail in all three killings.

For decades, the Oxnard Police Department, the Port Hueneme Police Department and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office’s cold case unit could not track down who was behind these slayings. Leads ran cold, and exhaustive attempts over the years to connect the DNA dots did not lead to any matches.

But then, in 2023, there was a breakthrough. The county’s cold case unit was reexamining the 1977 killings and had started uploading evidence to a massive DNA database used by homicide detectives across the nation.

A clear DNA match emerged. A year prior, Alexander had been charged in North Carolina in connection with an unresolved murder from 1992. The 29-year-old victim, Nona Cobb, had been similarly strangled and dumped along Interstate 77. Advanced DNA forensics had also cracked open this case.

“Because of Nona Cobb’s alleged murder, we — the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, the Oxnard and Port Hueneme police — are working with the FBI, specifically their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Highway Serial Killings initiative to draw parallels, to see when patterns emerge and to hopefully solve additional crimes,” Nasarenko said.

Alexander appeared in Ventura County Superior Court on Thursday morning and will face arraignment later this month. He is from Diamondhead, Miss., but authorities noted that he lived in Oxnard in the late 1950s and ’60s and attended elementary school, middle school and the first two years of high school in Oxnard.

He worked as an electrician with the U.S. Marine Corps and returned to Oxnard in the 1970s, authorities said, and from the 1970s through the ’90s, he was a long-haul cross-country truck driver.

“These murders may have occurred 47 years ago, but the investigators … never gave up,” Nasarenko said. “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.”