A former trucker is the main suspect of three murders nearly 30 years ago. The three women were killed in Wyoming and Tennessee in the early 90s and the former long-haul trucker made his first court appearance on May 7, where he waived extradition.
Serial killer finally caught
The suspect, Clark Perry Baldwin, told the court that an Iowa investigator spoke with him after his arrest and asked about a local case. According to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Iowa investigators have told the public that they are assisting detectives from Wyoming and Tennessee, the two states that issued warrants for the suspect's arrest.
The 58-year-old suspect was arrested at his home in Waterloo on May 6. The authorities from Tennessee have charged Baldwin with the death of Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall from Topping, Virginia. She was killed in 1991, as well as her unborn child in Spring Hill. The officials in Wyoming charged him with two unidentified women found dead in the state in 1992.
The district attorney of Tennessee's 22nd Judicial District, Brent Cooper, said in a news release that the body of McCall was found on March 10, 1991, with torn clothing, undergarments and injuries on the face and neck. Witness statements and evidence indicated that she may have been traveling with a trucker.
An autopsy of her body revealed that she died of strangulation and she was 24 weeks pregnant at the time of her death. According to the Courier, she was last seen at a Tennessee truck stop a few days before she was found dead, and sperm was recovered from the pantyhose that she was wearing.
The two women from Wyoming were found 400 miles apart. The first body was found by a female trucker in March 1992 near the Bitter Creek Truck turnout on Interstate 80 in the southwestern part of the state. An autopsy showed the woman suffered trauma consistent with strangulation. According to the coroner, her body had been in the snow for weeks and police were not able to identify her, and she became known as "Bitter Creek Betty."
The second murder victim was found by Department of Transportation workers in a ditch off Interstate 90 in norhtern Wyoming, near Sheridan. The body of the victim was partially mummified and an autopsy found that she had an injury that could have been caused by a massive blow to the head but the cause of her death is still not determined. The victim later became known as "I-90 Jane Doe."
Matt Waldock, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Cmdr. said that both victims were believed to be in their late teens or early-20s and I-90 Jane Doe was also pregnant when she was murdered.
The verdict
All the evidence gathered led to Balwin, according to Cooper, beginning in April 2019 when Spring Hill police contacted his investigators and asked for assistance in reopening the investigation into the death of McCall. The DNA recovered from McCall's clothing was submitted for analysis and matched the two killings in Wyoming.
Investigators were able to narrow the suspect list to Baldwin by using genealogical DNA tracking. According to KCCI, the FBI agents collected DNA from Baldwin's trash in April and they found that it matched the material that they collected from the three crime scenes.
Cooper stated that Baldwin will face two murder charges in Spring Hill, which are for McCall and her unborn fetus, and he will also be taken to Wyoming to stand trial for the murders.
