You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waterers. This podcast was recorded on It's a Chilly night in the Detroit, Michigan winter of nineteen ninety nine, just a few weeks before Christmas, and Monica Johnson turns to her client in his jeep Wrangler. It'll be fifty dollars for straight sex, she tells him. He agrees and puts on a condom. When it's over, he starts strangling her. He doesn't remember why, but eventually
Monica stops breathing. He places her body face down on the sidewalk and drives home. Did you intend to kill her? Police later ask no. He tells them, how did you feel after killing her? Awful, very hurt, Very sorry, he said. But the seemingly innocent looking man with the red hair and wire framed glasses didn't just kill Monica. The baby doll serial killer, as he'll soon become known, kills at least four more women until finally police cotton on to
his kills. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. After every kill, John Eric Armstrong went home to the house he shared with his wife and young son and had a long shower. He made no effort to hide the women he murdered before his post murder ritual, leaving
their bodies out in the open, sometimes posed. He became synonymous for his vehicle, a jeep with a distinctive number plate that read baby Doll, a nickname from his wife he used to pick up and kill his victims. In Armstrong is not your average serial killer, described as having a jeckyal and hide personality, He was remorseful one minute and describing his kills in horrific detail the next, describing having sex with these women's bodies after he killed them.
Those who knew him remember a boy next door with the soft, boyish demeanor. Not a vicious killer. But this was a man able to get away with multiple murders, potentially even as many as twenty. B. R. Bates is a longtime author and journalist who co wrote The Baby Doll serial Killer, The John Eric Armstrong Homicides with retired police commander and author Gerald Cliff b. R. Bates joins us. Now, br what can you tell us about Monica Johnson who
was found murdered in nineteen ninety nine. Who was she?
Well, she was a young lady and her thirty who had been born and raised in Detroit, and she grew up in the East Side mainly of the Detroit area. And she had what you would consider pretty normal upbringing a mom and dad's siblings, everybody together through her childhood and then she herself in her thirties, had a few kids. I think she had four kids, all aged ten and under. And she was working the streets. So and we don't
know why she was working the streets. For some of these girls, a lot of these girls, it's addiction that puts them out there at risk living on the streets and working the streets. But for Monica, we don't really know that. We don't really know that she was addicted to anything, but she was out there.
We know that she was murdered in the winter of nineteen ninety nine. She was strangled and found face down in a sidewalk. What else do we know about how she died?
It was an interesting her. I guess boyfriend. He's been called a boyfriend he's been called a friend. His name was Cliff. He was somebody that was close to Monica. He drove her that night to Michigan Avenue, and Michigan Avenue is a very thriving area of prostitution in Detroit. This seemed to have been a regular occurrence for them. He drove her there, he parked at Michigan and a side street called Sharon Street, and he waited there in the car while she walked away to do her thing
to make some money. And so she wandered off and he fell asleep while he was waiting for her in the car, and she didn't come back. And she didn't try to I guess back then nineteen ninety nine, maybe page him or something, you know, contact him on a phone. He didn't hear from her, and when he woke up, he realized, oh, okay, she isn't back yet, and he just headed home. So we don't know the nature of that relationlationship, or if this was, like I said, a
regular occurrence and this was just protocol for them. Who knows what was going on. But unfortunately Monica had encountered her last pain customer. You would say she had accepted a transaction with a person who then strangled her and left her to die on the sidewalk at a service drive off Interstate ninety four and Detroit, little service drive called spring Wells. And so he had left her there and driven away.
What is the crime right like over in Detroit is murda something that is common.
Yes, in the city of Detroit. Monica was one of about four hundred homicides I believe that year. Wow. And so this was December twod when Monica was killed. And so when the least realized, Okay, we have this young woman who is dead, and she appears to a better prostitute and they did id her and realize, yes, she was working the street. It really was not even a blip on the radar. It was not any cause of concern. It was investigated for a short time and then it was dropped.
Full hundred is an insane number. I knew it was high. I didn't realize it was that high. Right, Another sex worker was murdered in Detroit and her name was Wendy Jordan. What happened to her?
Wendy is somebody who did not live on the street so much as she wandered off there now and then but she also held down regular jobs in her life, and she had sisters who cared very much about her and would definitely know when she was missing or when she had fallen back on her own addiction, because that was what it was for Wendy. It was a matter of a day. It was January first when she encountered the same person who Monica had encountered, and this was
off Warren Avenue actually in Detroit. This was one of the very few people that Armstrong picked up who was not on Michigan Avenue. This is like the one case I think, or actually two cases out of ten people where the female was not on Michigan Avenue. But yeah, he picked up Wendy on Warren and took her to a side street parked behind a funeral home, as crazy
as it is, and he strangled Wendy. And the strange thing about the case with Wendy is that he took her in his jeep instead of just throwing her out of the jeep, which is what he did with all the rest of the assaults that he committed in Detroit. He took Wendy in his jeep almost all the way to his home, which was in a suburb of Detroit on the west side of Detroit, a suburb called Dearborn Heights,
and he was almost all the way home. He was about a block from home when he pulled over and he dropped her over a bridge onto the Rouge River, which, because this was January in Michigan, it was very cold and it was partially frozen. There was some water and there was some ice, and so he dropped Wendy down onto the river. And then he continued on home and went to bed like usual, as if you know, nothing was different about that night.
I noticed that he seemed to have, you know, like a kind of postmode of ritual. He'd go home and have a long shalla.
Every time he did say that in his confessions to police, they would say, okay, what happened, then what did you do? Then? Well, I went home and yeah, he often does mention a shower, and then he crawled into bed with his wife. And I think his wife was really not from everything that I understand, his wife really was not aware of how long he was even out, and I really don't believe she was aware of what he was doing.
I want to skip to another victim. Her name was Rose Marie Felt, and she died in March two thousand. What led her to sex work.
She was introduced to cocaine as a teenager. I want to say, like fifteen sixteen. I spoke with the man who was the one who was very honest about saying, I'm the one I can tell you exactly when Rose became addicted, because I'm the one who introduced her to it, and that was her. I guess you'd call it a baby daddy. That's another thing he was very honest about. Rose became pregnant at only age fifteen or sixteen, but she also had been living the street life a little
bit then. She was essentially a runaway. She was just kind of drawn into all of these things at a very young age, and so introduced to drugs in the of course, as with a lot of these other females, and how do I need to pay for my drugs? You know, how am I going to pay for my drugs? You know, that becomes the question, and so later they
will often turn to prostitution. But yeah, she was very young and had a child, and then her daughter was taken care of by her boyfriend's parents, and it was a very fractured situation in Rose's life from a very young age, unfortunately, and when she died she was in her thirties, and so she had been living in that life, in an unstable, at risk life for quite a few years.
And was she murdered in a similar fashion to the other women we've discovered.
Yes, yes, she was picked up on Michigan Avenue my arms Strong and they agreed on a transaction and he strangled her. She introduced him to a place because typically he wou he would hunt on Michigan Avenue, he would pick someone up and then he would drive somewhere close by. Well, Rose was the one who introduced Armstrong to the stretch of railroad tracks that are at Military and John Cronk Streets in southwest Detroit, and she told him she knew
a place, and so they drove over there. There was there's like a part where you're driving in that area and you pull into a parking lot where there used to be a business. I'm sure it's been long closed now, but you pull into a parking lot and then there's part of the parking lot that goes up into a service drive that's next to the railroad tracks and when
you get up there, it is pretty secluded. There's trees and other buildings around, and so it was a popular place for people to go to do drugs or to do prostitution back then. And so she knew up that place and pointed that out to him, and he drove up there and that's where he left her. He left her in the brush and then drove home from there.
And that's why he left the buddies of three minutes.
Yes, Rose was the first. Then he encountered Kelly Hood and he took her to that same place that Rose had shown him. And then the third female that he took there was Nicole Young, who was also known by the name Robin Brown on the street, and she was the last one left there, but he left her close to where the actual tracks were. He didn't really hide her in the brush. He left her out in plain view and she was discovered only hours later.
On all of those deaths, those last three in particular, were very close to get the went.
They Yes, Rose, we figure was mid March, based on the fact that she had been seen in Grand Rapids on the other side of the state in earlier March. I think it was like March seventh, she had gotten a citation in Grand Rapids for loitering. I believe it was, and so we know she was alive in the first full week of March, and based on timing and the research, it was probably around in mid March and Kelly Hood.
I think it was early April for Kelly because based on what her family members said about speaking with her on the phone and when they last saw her. And then Robin Brown, while Nicole would have been around the ninth of April, so he was escalating.
People are fascinated by serial killers. We always have been, we still remain to be. It struck me that in your book you spent so much time detailing the lives of these women, and you opened the book like that, one by one by one, detailing the lives of the women he killed. Was that a very kind of strong decision on your part to honor their lives?
Oh? Absolutely absolutely. I wanted this book to be victim centric, and so I was very determined to start out with a chapter on each one of the females who had died, and I ended up having two chapters for two of the survivors. Also, there were a couple there's one survivor who has passed in more recent years. And there's a couple survivors, well, one survivor I contacted and did not really want to go there, and then another survivor I
was not able to contact. So seven chapters of people who were assaulted as victim centric as I could make it, And boy, I will tell you that was quite a challenge, because you know, you hunt online for family members of these five women who lost their lives, and it's challenging to find them, but it's just as challenging or more challenging to be able to contact them and get a response. Because of course I totally understand why would you want
to talk about that. Okay, you're writing a book, Well, you're just going to make money off this case and whatever. There's that perception, and I can tell you this, these books are really not necessarily moneymakers, not at all. And I was very concerned and that I really was not going to be able to get enough information for a chapter on each one, and I set out to at least find one person to speak for each one of those gals, and thankfully for some of them, I got
multiple people. Rose felt I thought I was going to get nobody for Rose felt to even learn who she was, and ended up speaking with four different family members, including her daughter and her brother. So I'm very, very blessed by that that I was able to break through to that that was the most important thing to me, was to show these valuable lives that were taken, that each one of these people, no matter where she ended up, each one of these people deserved to live and had
a life just like you and me. I was hoping, honestly to startle people by this, to challenge their preconceived notions that a female living on the street has always been out and out and that's just the way they were raised, or what are our preconceived notions that people have about a sex worker, and show that, you know, a lot of people who end up in this kind of outrisk situation had very normal seeming lives as children.
He had loving parents, had just all the things that you would picture would make for a good life and something went wrong and again it comes back to addiction in a lot of these cases.
Well, you were definitely successful in humanizing these women and removing just the title of sex worker, because that's you know, when there's so many murders and so many women that's often what they got reduced to in news reports exactly and say it's so so important, Yes, thank you. Let's go back to the start of John Eric Armstrong's story. There seems to be two big things that kind of shaped his childhood. His father leaving when he was quite young, and his baby brother died.
He was around five years old when his baby brother died in the crib, and shortly after that his dad left the family, and there are conflicting reports of why that happened. I did speak to Armstrong's half brother that
he's never met. He's got a couple siblings, at least two half brothers that he's never met and maybe was not even aware of, to tell you the truth, who had relationships with their biological father, who were very loving relationships with their biological father, and who insists that the allegations that Armstrong made about his father were totally false.
And so there's that element, because after his arrest, Armstrong did allege abuse by his biological father who left the family at this young age that Armstrong was and so there's that angle. And again those allegations have really been disputed, and I think very convincingly by the half brother that I spoke to, but then the idea of the baby brother dying in the crib before any of this happened.
It's interesting Armstrong was so attached to this baby brother, and he was so attached that after his baby brother died, his mother later told the media after Armstrong was arrested in Detroit. Years later, his mom was interviewed in North Carolina, where Armstrong was born and raised, and his mom told the media that he was so attached to his baby brother that, for one thing, he had written his name in the family bible multiple times, almost like a strange
obsessive element. And also after the baby brother died, little Eric, as he went by went by the name Eric, rode his bike out into traffic, seeming to be attempting suicide, just such a young age, so not too long after the babie brother died. So that was definitely a traumatic experience for him, we have to say, an interesting element of his background.
Up next, we discussed Natasha, the first woman who escaped from John Eric Armstrong, and what happened to her After school, he joined the Navy, he met his wife, they had a baby. You know, reading his story, it all sounds like a pretty normal trajectory for a young man to take. Do we know what kind of person he was, what kind of colleague, husband, father?
Yeah, the people that I spoke with who served with him in the United States Navy. He served aboard a ship called the Nimetz, the uss N nemts and aircraft carrier, a pretty well known ship here in the US, traveled all over the place. And if you go online and you listen to podcasts that have been done on the case, not podcasts with interviews like the one that you're doing, but podcasts that cover like news headlines and cover facts
about cases. And you look at the comments that are made on some of those, and even blog posts about the case too. If you look at how people comment to those about Armstrong, you'll see that there's a lot of Nimets shipmates that go in and comment and they say things like, I never would have thought this was so shocking, this, I totally cannot believe this. You know,
this just does not seem real. And he was referred to as Opie while he served in the Navy aboard the Nimets, and that was because if you're familiar with the character and the Mayberry character, the TV show character, I guess, Richie Cunningham. I think of him as on happy days. He was red haired, and he was very innocent, sort of a sweet little boy. And that's how they saw Armstrong in the Navy. That's how they saw Eric
was as this sweet boy. He was big. He was over six foot and when he lived in Detroit after the Navy, he weighed by two hundred and fifty pounds, so he was just big all over. But one of his shipmates from the NIMTZ told me he was big, but he was soft. So he seemed to be soft spoken. That's how he carried himself. And there were others who went to school with him, like elementary school, and said that he was pretty shy. He didn't really talk a lot,
so soft spoken. And that's the impression that I got of him.
It's a very interesting profile to build, isn't it. How did Armstrong get on polices right? Initially?
That happened with the Jordan incident in January two thousand, because he had driven almost all of the way home to where he was living in Dearborn Heights at the time with Wendy in the car, and then dropped her there and went on home. This was Dearborn Heights, This was not Detroit, and that was a huge difference. Dearborn Heights did not see the homicides that Detroit did, and so when they got a homicide, they really investigated it. And so the thing was and he really put himself
on Blize radar with this. He didn't have to do it, but really just hours after he left Wendy. So he gets up the next morning and he goes to work, and he works at a store in Dearborn Heights and he complains that he's not feeling very well. I'm a little sick. Can I go home early? He asked his supervisor, and as supervisor agreed to let him go home a
little bit early. It was probably about four o'clock in the afternoon, and he started heading home to where he was living at Dearborn Heights, and he went by way of the bridge where he had left Wendy. And this is really just hours earlier. This is later that same day essentially, because it was the early morning hours when he left her and he drove up, he pulled over his cheep on the side of where the bridge was.
He got out, he walked over the bridge. He looked over the bridge, and he saw that Wendy was still there. She had not gone anywhere, she had not floated down the river or whatever. She was still there right where
he had left her. He also realized that across the street from where he was and a couple doors down, there was a young man standing outside of a house where he lived with his parents, and his girlfriend was there with him, and he was about to hop in the car and take his girlfriend home because she had been there visiting at his house. So the two of them got in the car and they headed They pulled out of the driveway and turned toward where Armstrong had
parked his jeep. And I guess he realized He didn't specifically say this when police questioned him later about it, but I guess he obviously realized, Okay, they noticed me pull over my jeep, they noticed that I went and walked up to the bridge and looked over the bridge, and they're going to know this body is going to
be discovered. So I guess he was thinking he was getting out in front of it by flagging down the two people in the car and saying, hey, you have to call nine one one, there's a body here in the river. I just saw someone. You have to call the police. He evidently didn't have a cell phone on him himself, so they called police. Dearborn Heights responded. They arrived at the scene. They started questioning everyone who was
there at the scene. They started processing the scene for evidence, and in all of that, their eyebrows were just a little bit raised at this guy who foul In quotes the body and the river. There was something about his story that was not making sense. He claimed that he had pulled over there to vomit. He was feeling sick. That's the story that he had set up at work that day. I'm not feeling well? Could I leave early? So what didn't make sense to them is that there
was no vomit anywhere. He didn't actually throw up. And one of the police officers who investigated the case told me years later, well, if you're pulling over for one thing, why are you going to pull over there when you're only a block from home if you're feeling sick. And so his behavior was a little strange. Plus they knew
the vehicle that he was driving. They were a little suspicious by something that they saw in the jeep when they were looking inside, Wendy had been wearing a pair of gold colored shoes, and it appeared that there were like little flecks of gold inside the cheep, like on the floor on the passenger side. So there were some suspicious things.
And tell me about what happened with the DNA, because they collected DNA, but because it was nineteen ninety nine, two thousand ish, it takes several months to kind of have that comeback.
It seems outlandish, but yes, it took three months. They collected Armstrong's DNA in like the second or third week of January two thousand they got the warrants. They took all kinds of samples and they sent them off to the lab, and they did not get the final results. They got some preliminary reports. But the DA, I guess you'd say, the prosecutor's office in Wayne County, which is where this was, would not issue the warrant for his arrest.
You know, they wanted to build a solid case as they could, to make sure that they could hold him and not have him released on some kind of technicality or weak part of the case. And so the prosecutor's office insisted on the final report of the DNA, which did not arrive until around April twelfth, I believe it was, So it was basically a full three months later before
those DNA results came in and were finalized. And yeah, nowadays, because our technology has advanced so much, it seems just crazy that that happened.
And what that delay meant was he murdered Rose Kelly and Nicole Yes.
In the meantime, he murdered three more people and he attacked three others who survived, so he forever affected their lives as well.
I want to talk about the crime scenes. They were numerous. At the rial tracks where he dumped three of the women's bodies, there was quite a lot of evidence for detectives to kind of bag and test. There wasn't there.
Yes, that was the challenge of it. You had this highly frequented area where there was a lot of illicit activity, like I said, drugs, prostitution, people just doing meetups or whatever the case. You also had the police talk to a couple people who just walked through there. One person would walk through there on their way home from work. So it was just a busy neighborhood. But everybody who lived in that surrounding part of the neighborhood and the
blocks around there. Knew that that area was frequented with illicit activity. So because of that, you had all kinds of stuff at those railroad tracks, and Detroit Police had crime scene photos that showed just the full range of articles of clothing that did not belong to the three females who were found, just articles of clothing that people had left there, the shoe, cigarette cases, and definitely condoms
and lots and lots of cigarette butts. And I think that was something that was remarked by one of the officers who was processing the scene as like, oh my gosh, like our commanding officer forced us to pick up each and every cigarette butt, and there were a lot of them. So that is a lot of processing at the lab, but definitely an array of evidence collected there and things like tire tracks and things of that sort that were processed in the lab as well.
What did that mean for trying to narrow down the evidence on Armstrong.
Yeah, it's difficult. It's I'm sure clouding up the picture when you have so many items to process, and of course, with each of the three women who were found, they're going to do the DNA testing. They're going to look for that kind of DNA evidence in them too, and
for instance, Wendy Jordan. The interesting thing about processing the Wendy Jordans scene at the Rouge River in Dearborn Heights is that she was lying on that combination of ice and water that I mentioned, and they had to get the county dive team out there, that part of law enforcement, and they had to suit up and get in there, and they had to before they lifted her out of the river, they had to wrap her hands in plastic bags just in case, for instance, she had some skin
under her fingernails or whatnot. Because they didn't want any evidence to be destroyed, so they had to be very careful. And their care really paid off because Wendy did have DNA from Armstrong in her body, so they were able to prove that. You know, when the DNA results came back in April, it did really seal the case against Armstrong.
But yeah, the railroad tracks, of course, you have all that different processing, and I'm sure it was a big challenge because of the nature of that place where the women were found.
Were these because these are two kind of separate police departments that went to looking about were they talking to each other? Did they know they were after the same guy.
Yep, that's a good question. I talked to an officer at Dearborn Heights who said, yeah, we shared information. We typically had like a daily call where we would just chat. Okay, what he got going on over there? I mean he would speak to officers in Detroit and just a touch base,
well we got this or we got that. And still, remarkably, even though they had homicide in Dearborn Heights, there was no connection and no inkling that there was a serial killer, even though Monica had been killed in December, Wendy was killed in January. And then the three women were found of the Rowad tracks. That really blew it wide open. That was April tenth, two thousand and when three people were found of the Rowad tracks in different states of decomposition.
They realized, Okay, we got something going on here. We actually have a serial killer in the motor City. And then it was like that day or the next day where the connection was made with Wendy Jordan like, oh wow, okay, this homicide, this could be connected, even though it is
another jurisdiction, but Yeah, they to. The short answer to your question, I guess is yes, they did exchange information in a normal routine, but it still was not evident that these cases were connected or that they actually had a cereal until that day in April at the railroad Tracks.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Jimmy Bass. I'm speaking with author and journalist bon Bates about the baby Doll serial killer. After the break. Bia tells us how the arrest of Armstrong finally went down. How did the arrest of Armstrong go down eventually?
Yeah, that's kind of a crazy story to you know. You had this Violent Crime Task Force, and my collaborator of the book, Gerald Cliff, he was part of the leadership of the Violent Crime Task Force, and you had a multi agency, multi jurisdiction panel of law enforcement that was out to get this guy, and it was a very quick time frame. They found the three women at the railroad tracks on April tenth, and they had him arrested about a day and a half later, But it
actually was not by the Violent Crime Task Force. As crazy as that was. The word went out, Okay, this is the person we're looking for, and the Violent Crime
task Force. They had members from the FBI, the Detroit office of the FBI, and I think it was an FBI profiler who told them, you know, and Jerry Cliff tells this story all the time, remembering it very well, that the FBI person said, you know, you're focusing on his three successes that you found to the rowad tracks so unfortunately, but why don't you focus on his failures, because for these three females being found dead, there's some other people out there who probably survived to probably have
seen this guy and can tell you about them. And
that is indeed what happened. And so they found someone who spoke to them, and after a lot of reluctance, were able to get that person to speak to them and come to find out it was someone who had encountered Armstrong and had survived an attack from Armstrong and was able to give a description, gave a description of the jeep that he was driving, his appearance, his work shirt that he had on with a name on the front of it, and right down to I think he
was even included the baby doll played on the front of the jeep, which we now know so well. And you know, just other elements of the description, so they had something to go on. There also was another survivor who came forward to police and filled out a police report because she had been trying to get home on
the bus one night on Michigan Avenue. And I guess there was something about her that struck Armstrong as interesting or you know, she wasn't by all accounts, she wasn't actually out there as a sex worker, but she was trying to get home waiting for the bus, and he offered to give her a ride, and so he tried to strangle her, and she was able to get away because she was wearing a scarf and it complicated betters
for Armstrong. Plus she was carrying mace, so she got him good with her mace and she was able to get away. And then when the news broke about the discovery of the road tracks, she came forward and she gave a description that matched the other survivor's description. She was talking about Armstrong's tattoos, which were very unique striking, and what kind of car he drove, and what he looked like and all of that. So police were pretty
sure they had a good description of their guy. And then it was like a night later, when these patrol officers were out and they were looking for that vehicle that the survivors had talked about, and lo and behold, there he was back out there on Michigan Avenue. As crazy as it was. Like I said, he was escalating, and so he was not trying to hide anymore. He did lay low for a little while while Dearborn Heights was investigating him back in January. He laid low, and
he cooled it for a couple months. But now he had just killed a few people, few different people, had assaulted others, and he was right back out there on Michigan Avenue. Even though he had to have heard about the discovery of the roilroad tracks, he had to have heard that these three females had been found. But yet there he was, back out hunting. And so they pulled them over, and they began to realize, okay, we actually have our guy here.
And he confessed pretty much straight away, didn't.
He It didn't take long. The patrol officers who took him downtown claimed that he was muttering under his breath in the backseat, I'm glad it's over. I'm glad it's over. Well, that's not really a confession, although the one officer said they started to give him his rights at that point because they were concerned they were here in a confession. They saw what he was saying. But he got downtown and police began to question him, and there were two
officers who were sent into the room with him. There was a guy who was a little bit more of a rookie who was young like Armstrong, just about his same age, and so there was an appeal to that idea of sending in a young guy to talk to him, to develop a rapport with him. And then the other officer who went into the room was a more seasoned veteran who was known to be a really good interrogator.
The two of them started with I guess your stereotypical small talk, you know, I'm talking about sports teams and breakfast cereals and whatever. And maybe it was an hour or two before they finally broke him and got him to confess. So once he started confessing, he confessed to not only five murders in Detroit, but he also made confessions very very freely to other murders while he was serving in the Navy in the nineteen nineties, as crazy as that was.
How many did he confess to.
The Navy murders? I think were ten additional murders, and he confessed to the five in Detroit, like I said, but he really did not confess to his survivors. Strangely enough, one of those five survivors was never known until recently for one thing. So there were only four survivors known at the time of the case. And I don't think he made any of those confessions. He only confessed to the murders. So that really begs the question of how many people did he really attack in Detroit. It could
have been more. But yeah, as far as the Navy ones, I believe there were ten additional that he claimed to have killed. They haven't all been corroborated. In fact, only one has really been paired with an actual murder, and that was the Virginia confession. But the rest are big question marks we don't know.
Interestingly, he was actually quite remorseful of the mood as he commuted.
He was he was crying, he was making extra notes as he was signing the confession sheets. The officers would read him his rights brand new with every single confession, And so when you're figuring like fifteen or so confessions and fifteen times reading his rights. Then at the end
they would have him sign every page. They have him acknowledge every single page of the confession that they had jotted down from what he was saying, because it was not recorded, it was handwritten from what he was saying. And so he signed each and every page, and then at the end sometimes he would write a little note, I'm sorry, I hope that the family can forgive me, or something to that effect. And there's different schools of thought on this. My collaborator Jerry, would tell you that
was all an act. It was all manipulation. He's trying to get sympathy. He knows that these statements are going to be read in court later, and he wants that little I'm sorry, the remorse part to be read. I don't know, it's difficult to say to me. In my research, he seemed very very penitent when he was making these confessions.
He seemed very very sorrowful. But of course then by the time it came to trial a year later, he was recanting everything he was claiming in so I guess you got to decide for yourself if he was actually sorry or not. It's a good question.
He was charged with five motives. In the end, he didn't played guilty to any of them.
Yes, he was being charged with five murders, and then three out of the four survivors he was being charged with their assaults too. There was one of the four survivors who bowed out of the whole process because she just this was the one who was trying to get a ride home on the bus. She was just nervous and just didn't want to go through the whole thing. And so we had three survivors and five fatalities for
the charges that he was brought with. He was tried for two of the murders, beginning with Wendy Jordan because that was the strongest case, and then the Kelly Hood trial followed that and it was two for two in convictions. He was convicted both times with mandatory life sentences. So at that point he just decided to plead out on the rest to the charges.
But with those two trials you mentioned, firstly he tried to use the insanity defense and then secondly for the second trial, he tried to use the criminally insane defense. So it's quite a change from someone who literally gave the exact details of how he killed these women to then claiming insanity and not guilty.
Yeah, there's a lot that people probably don't realize. It's kind of an uphill climb with the insanity defense. There's a lot you have to show or have to prove in the insanity defense. For him just went nowhere. It was just not going to happen.
Too much evidence.
For a variety of reasons. And then also he switched lawyers between the first trial and the second trial. He hired a new lawyer for the second trial, but his lawyer for the first trial at first seemed to be taking the approach that, okay, so you found DNA in the victim Wendy, you found Armstrong's DNA. So yeah, okay, he did encounter Wendy, they had a transaction, but she was perfectly fine. He didn't kill her, she was fine
when he left her. He was taking that approach, and the jury thankfully did not buy that either.
Well, the jury in both of those trials returned a guilty verdict within a few hours.
It was pretty short.
Yes, so what was this plea deal that he agreed to.
Well, he was convicted of multiple life sentences beyond the two. And you know, of course, when you're serving life in prison here in Michigan, USA, it's basically all the same. You're serving all sentences at once. But he was convicted of the others beyond the two mandatory life sentences for Wendy Jordan and Kelly Hood. And I couldn't tell you exactly like the but if you look at his prison record online, it will show you. It will outline for you all the sentences. But I know he was convicted
of more beyond the two. Really, not much was thrown out. I think one survivor. Maybe there was a charge that was thrown out, but basically he got sentences for everything. There's just no chance. There's one survivor. Natasha, the first one he was known to have attacked in Michigan, and that was in August nineteen ninety nine. Natasha, I've gotten to know her really well, and she's still oh gosh, she's so traumatized. She has a pretty high degree of
PTSD that she deals with regularly. I think she does honestly fear he'll get out someday and she has nightmares about it. She's very honest about having nightmares about him getting out, and sometimes she'll even see someone at our apartment complex with red hair that reminds her of him. And she even called me after one of these times, like, are you are you sure he can't get out? I mean,
it's honestly, it has been so traumatizing for her. But yeah, thankfully, with so many multiple life sentences, I really don't think there's anyway even though he is when you look at it, he's a relatively young man. He just turned fifty I think last year, so he's pretty young still, even though he's been behind bars for more than twenty years.
Do we know how his family reacted to all of these He had a wife and he ended up having two children. One I believe he hasn't met.
Correct, Yes, he has not seen his wife and his toddler's son since he was incarcerated. His wife was there for his trial. His wife was supporting him. His wife really did not want to believe this, and that's how police described her as just shocked and this is not my husband. You got the wrong guy. And I think
she honestly will it. But then by the time Armstrong was convicted, she left the picture and he has not seen her from what he told me, and like you said, he has not met the child that his wife was pregnant with when he was arrested. So yes, very sad. And his family in North Carolina, his mom and his stepdad have been very faithful in visiting him in prison. They have stood by him. His other family members, I'm
not sure. He just actually lost a stepsister recently, but I'm not sure where they where the rest of the family members stand.
Have you spoken to him, Yes.
I visited him a couple of times. I've spoken to her email for the past few years. And yeah, he doesn't talk about the case. He will be friendly, he will talk to you, you know, he does talk to people from prison. It doesn't really get many visitors, but does not wish to discuss the case.
How did you find him? What was he like?
Oh? Goodness, completely opposite of what you would expect. I heard people describe him as the boy next door. And the one gal who worked with him at the store. She was sort of a motherly figure to him, and she really liked him. She had either a son or a nephew in the Navy, I believe as well, and so they would talk about that. They would share stories. But yeah, like I said, a motherly figure to him,
and she described him as the boy next door. The prosecuting attorney, Betty Walker, actually was the other person who described him as the boy next door. She said, Yeah, I shopped at that store where he worked, and it just sent chills down my spine when I learned that he worked there. That was like my store that I went to. But sitting there in court even she described him as the boy next door, and those descriptions really struck a chord with me when I met him myself.
For one thing, so many years later, his physical appearance is a lot different from what it was when he was arrested in his twenties. He was twenty six when he was arrested, so he looks a lot different nowadays. But he is just not what she would think, not a serial killer at all. And that's why his arrest, his identification as the serial killer was so shocking to anyone who knew him here in Michigan, just so very
very shocking. And his demeanor and his appearance, he strikes you as very genuine when he chats with you, he smiles, he seems very kind in a genuine way, not a put on way or a manipulative way, but in a very genuine way. So it is seriously whacked that he just seems so different from being a serial killer.
Did we ever find out why he did this, why he picked six workers, why he noted and assaulted so many people.
Three of the survivors said that as he was strangling them, as he had his hands around their necks, he would say something or he would like mutter or yell something about hating prostitutes, I hate hookers, that sort of thing,
in a very angry way. And he himself said after he was arrested, he told police, and this was picked up by the media at the time as just sort of a strange element of the case, and I don't really personally lend much credence to it, but it was reported in the media what he told police that when he was in high school, he had a girlfriend and that girlfriend left him for someone else because that someone else bought her things and Eric did not buy her things,
and so he saw that he saw her as prostituting herself. And I'm thinking, what, that's kind of a loose association there, I don't know, I mean, is that a reason that you go on years later to kill prostitutes. I just don't know if that makes sense. So that is a mystery of why he so deeply hated prostitutes. It's really a mystery. I mean, obviously, like we discussed before, he was traumatized by his baby brother being killed at a
young age, and I don't know. It's you know, I hope that people will form their own conclusion when they read the story, because it is. It truly is a million dollar question, and it intrigued and befuddled me as I researched the case, and I still could not tell you for sure, really, what is in back of all of this?
Honestly, how many victims do you think there are out there? I've seen some reports saying there could be as many as twenty people did.
His Yeah, besides the five killed and five who survived in Detroit, and then the ten in the Navy. I really have to believe the Navy confessions because his level of detail and how it flowed out of him, and he would even try as he was making these confessions, he would even try to like pause and make sure that he was remembering correctly, and he would tell police, well, sometimes I don't always remember them correctly. I may think
of something else later. He seemed pretty serious and honest in the way that he was telling all of this in the confessions, and just the idea. You know, he didn't know any of their names, which is a sad aspect of that, but he often could say what she was wearing and her appearance. He could recall her hair color, he could recall what race she was, He could recall just other things like how tall, and things like that
about how old she seemed to her. He did confess to one survivor, and I was able to pair that confession that he made about Cynthia with Cynthia's own account of the incident, and so comparing those two there were a few things that matched and a few things that didn't match. So we know from that that he wasn't entirely accurate on all of his confessions. But I feel like in what I read in the confessions, he actually
was trying to recall this information. So all of that in consideration, I feel like those confessions to murders during his years in the Navy, those really did happen. And so if you figure ten, I mean that's attacking, assaulting at least twenty people, but you just have to wonder or when did all of this really begin?
And how many more bodies are out there exactly? Thanks to be Our Bates for helping us to tell this story. True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath and Tarlie Blackman, with audio design by Tom Lyon. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation