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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking Killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about him Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. Every serial killer is a nice guy until he's found out. The shocking true account was Southern charmer who left a trail of victims in his wake. Jerry Marcus fooled them all. He was a nice guy, always helped at home, did well in school, an athlete, and always employed. When things went wrong, he was the first to help clean up the mess. He was the last person anyone suspected of being a killer. After Marcus was caught and sentenced to life in prison in the late seventies,
author Linda lou Long spent years corresponding with him. The Tuskegee Strangler gives an inside look into the workings of a man who is not your typical serial killer. The book they were featuring this evening is the Tuskegee Strangler, the nicest serial killer they ever met with my special guest author and researcher, Linda lou Long. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.
Linda lou Long, thank you, thank you very much for having me.
Thank you so much. Let's start off with how you came to be the author of this story.
Where should I start?
It just all started as a college class and I just had to write about a serial killer. And I just happened to be on the phone to some friends in the state where Jerry Marcus was finally arrested, Mississippi, and they told me about usial killer there, and I looked up the arresting officer and that's how it all started.
Let's go back. You say, these murders began in Tuskegee, Alabama, where this Tuskegee University is located, and Jerry Marcus, his father was Eddie Marcus, and his mother was Ruth, and his aunt lived next door, his paternal ant live next door. Tell us about Jerry Marcus, his family life, what that looked like, and how he grew up.
Well, I would say that they had a typical family as it were down south here, the street was dead end and all the neighbors everyone knew that each other, and the aunt was next door, so it was a pretty comfortable setting on.
The father worked and so did the mother.
The father had a drinking problem, but it was just that was partially I guess what started the one lot of everything for Jerry Marcus because he grew up seeing his mother getting abused.
By his father due to the alcohol, and he just went his own way with it.
You say that he was also abused by his father, and not only did he witness this and along with his siblings, but he also you say, his behavior changed around eight or ten years old, he felt the badness. With this badness, you say that he first tortured animals, and we're talking very specific. So what was that torture of animals? Like, what did he have to say?
Well, it was kind of a rural area, so it wasn't like you were in the city in the city because Tuskegee is a small town even now, and so there were lots of stray animals around and Jerry had an affinity for pestering and torturing cats.
He liked cats, He liked to torture them.
And one in particular, which was mentioned in the press and mentioned in other accounts, is that he would there was one particular female and she was hanging around all the time, and so he dipped her. He got a whole lover and dipped her tail in I think it was gasoline and set it on fire, so she would, you know, chase her tail until she died. Practically, so he was like that, and he liked to watch when
things like this would happen. Even though whether he set it up or watched it happen, you know, in the wild, he still liked to watch and like to see the animal tormented.
What did he progress to when he saw the when he felt the excitement of fire and its effect on these animals.
Well, early on, he.
Was still really young, and he was still pre adolescent, and so he really didn't get a grasp of what these behaviors could lead to, or what he was really experiencing, or any of that. He was just experiencing a lot of different and he was usually by himself. He didn't seem to have he didn't He shied away from playmates, their kids other than he would torment them at church and stuff. But he stayed away from the other kids,
and he was pretty much a solitary anyway. But he was always with the animals and all and catching them in the timber. And because the whole house was it was a real timber, large pine trees, real wooded area where they lived in, and so there was a lot of wild animals around that he had access to.
Him would do things too.
You write about that his fascination again with fire led to again this interesting fire and what did that lead to in terms of his behavior. What happened at the family home.
Well, the family home caught on fire.
Now there wasn't a police report or anything like that about it to read, And I just interviewed both his mother and his grandmother and we all talked about it, but they never really the grandmother and the mother never suspected Jerry of having anything to do with setting that fire. No one knew how it started, but they really didn't
suspect him. Whereas it was probably one of Jerry's first efforts reaching out, you know, and seeing just how much he could get away with, and I think it simply got out of control.
You know, he didn't really relate.
Specifically what it was that triggered him, and I never could get that out of him. But he just really felt an affinity to fire and the smell of burning things and all, and like when he watched this hot his family house burn, he was sitting back in the timber and he was just really getting off on it and watching the sparks and everything in the grass, and he.
Was really getting off on it. But there is a he didn't really relate.
We didn't, Okay, I will say that we didn't discuss it any further than the fact that he had said that he was involved with it. And I suspect it was a couch that was caught on fire, and he thought it was more of a controllable thing, but it was not, so it caught the rest of the house on fire.
Now, a person that plays into this story of great importance is Gwen. And at fourteen in grade school, Marcus and Gwen meet tell us what happens at the same time in terms of what's going on in his family between his parents.
Well, I will say that I don't.
I only know about Gwen as far as Jerry was able to tell me. I have not personally met nor interviewed her because that was her request. She didn't want a part of it, and I respect that, so I wasn't going to do that. But according to Jerry, you know, they just met, had a lot in common, and she really impressed him because she was really smart, and he liked that, you know, he liked having a female that
he could relate to. He's so I'm not sure what that meant, but you know, that's his major interest in her. And he never was any threat to Gwynn as far as her safety or her well being or anything either. It was like their relationship was completely separate from his other personality.
Which it truly was. I mean, she had no idea.
Yeah, I'm sure you right. That the parents were experiencing well, the mother was experiencing violence at the hands of the father. It was progressively getting worse, and that Marcus was certainly resorted to peeping in the neighborhood. He thought that everybody knew what was going on in his family anyway, and that was his justification, you write, for him to go
and peep at young women in their underwear. After that, his schoolwork wasn't affected by his behavior, but at some point he excels in sports and then tell us about the relationship as it develops with Gwynn and they get married.
Well, there was a gap in there because Gwynn had another relationship before Jerry, and even believed that she was in New Orleans for a while.
But I'm not sure of that, so I can't say.
But they were having a relationship and seeing each other and stuff before they actually went to the courthouse and signed the papers and got formally married.
You know, they had a relationship.
I guess they got back together, shall we say, you know, between being young and in love and in grade school and junior high and high school and stuff, and then the breakup between the two of them, you know, just when she went her own way and then they got back together.
That was difference in there.
She hadn't even been around, you know, when Jerry had been starting working there at the university and all. She hadn't even been around really, But they got back together, and it was odd that there was such a stable relationship, and he still said that he respected her and he had no intention of ever doing any harm to her her family, which he adopted as his.
It's interesting, You're right, before this as well, that when it was time to go to school, there wasn't any money. But when he asked his father anyway, he said, I wouldn't give you a red scent because you abandoned me and the family when the family had problems and the mother moved to New Orleans and left the family. So the father saw it as an abandonment of him and the family and said, I wouldn't give you a red
cent for education. Marcus Jerry went to his aunt, and his aunt provided the tuition for him to go to college. And in college he did well enough. Like you say, he was always as you write, he was always concerned with being employed, and by all reports he was a good worker. So he was working at a hospital, the John D. Andrews Community Hospital.
Right that was a Tuskegee hospital, right on the campus grounds.
Now being on the campus grounds and being this person with this developing anger and hatred and obviously justification for everything he did do and had gotten away from the law and straight by with various decisions in the courts, so he was definitely confident that he could fool law enforcement. What did this lead to on the campus of the Tuskegee university.
Well, you know, Jerry never had anything but a parking ticket on his record, nothing, and he was real good about skirting the law, you know, or just being on the edge of possibly being involved. And he was always seemed to be around, you know, the detective in that area,
Al Kendall, out of Tuskegee. He never could quite pin Jerry because Jerry always just be on the fringe of things, always be there, always be looking, but not close enough to really pin him to anything for other issues in the future or even in the past when he was younger, because he had known him when he was really young. But I really can't say shere is just it was just an odd relationship because it was him and Gwen.
They were so natural, so normal.
He's back to Gwen and said, well, we should do this and we should get married now, and that's what they did and it went on from there.
But it just seemed like once that happened, it just started going downhill. The relationship.
Tell us about the incidents with the two student nurses, what they have to say, what he has to say, and the ramifications from.
That, Well, they really didn't have anything to say since they were both dead. But it's so they couldn't have ever done. It was just like those two girls, and what happened to them dropped out of time, you know. It was almost impossible to find out and to trace this pattern all the way back to this starting with the two girls, and the one, the very first one.
He was working on campus then in maintenance, and that's how he saw her and began to know who she was and follow her, follow in the sense of footsteps, not by electronic means, because there weren't computers like that back then. But he was interested in her and he followed her, and that happened in nineteen seventy one, and that was when her body, not even her body, was never recovered, you see, and so she was just reported
missing and she just dropped out of society. And then the next girl was less than a year later, and of course they found Margaret's body. You know, he'd gone a step further with her. With the first girl, he hadn't. He supposedly had just strangled her by accident and dumped her body.
But then no one ever found it.
He never went he went back, he couldn't find it, and so no one knows whatever happened to her, and I never could find anything anything other than the small mention in the student newspaper about her in particular, so her and Margaret sturred. Event the very first two now Margaret starred event wasn't a nursing student.
She was an engineering student, right, but she was getting ready to graduate.
She had a family, already, was married, had a child, and so it was odd that she was the one that he aggressed against and assaulted physically and left.
Her body new to be recovered. Now that was strange too.
But then once those two acts were committed within practically weeks after that, he ended up getting offered by someone who had gone to school with, who now was in Tennessee and Knoxville College, and he offered him a position there if he would come and play on their ball team. And then all of a sudden, nothing else mattered anymore, and he left when this family behind and his parents and that part of the family behind, and he went to Tennessee.
What I had mentioned about the nursing students was it just seemed to set up an mo where he would be on the campus. He said that he wou was working at the hospital and got some fenom barbeital for these women, they told a different story. And then I say that when he hooks up with Gwen, he marries Gwen. Then this is when he decides to go on this these murderous urges that he can to kill, that he
responds to. Right, And then you say that again he leaves Gwen and is able like a true psychopath, as you call him to be able to just go and excel at school and go on this well at least go but to school on this scholarship and excel in sports as attested to this scholarship. Right, you say, he moves to Tennessee. Now, what's unusual about this serial killer is that he's a very nice guy and no one suspect him. But there is something else about the serial killer this unusual.
Tell us, Well, it was almost eight years between what he did to the two students on the university in seventy one, early in late seventy one, and then his next act wasn't committed until October nineteen eighty three, So he went many years with a break before he planned to attack someone else.
Because see, these weren't strangers.
The next girl that he goes after he met her when he went and he applied for public aid and for food stamps. Yes, and she helped him get food stamps, and he set up a date with her and they went out two or three different times, and then I think it was the third date, he just decided he was done with her.
And it kills her too.
And so you're talking about Francine Davis.
Yes, yes, franccene.
So police have no idea again have He's never a suspect, except later we'll talk about al Kendall and his suspicions. Right, let's talk about what happens with the case of Francine Davis. How do police respond and what do they find, if anything.
Francine Davis was another weird sort of thing because he completely switched over is whatever mo o he was trying to establish with those other girls, and he really wasn't you know. Both of those were incidents building up to what else was going to happen in the future. They really weren't planned and all of that. But this with this girl, he spent quite a bit of time in her apartment. They had gone to play tennis and she had gone into shower and came out of the shower
and he assaulted her and he strangled her. But he didn't just assault and strangle her. He was really worried about the other girls. In the back of his mind. He never knew if someone was going to pop their head up and say hi, I'm so, and so on and so on so and you tried to kill me all those years ago. He was very afraid of that that someone was going to come back and get him someday. So he wanted to make sure that franccene was dead.
So he submerged fran scene in the bathtub and held her under water until the air bubbles quit coming up, and he describes that, and then he took her out of the tub and dried her off and redressed her in a fresh set of well pajamas whatever she had, and set her up in the bed and propped her up and had a note beside her hand with a name with a pencil saying I hate you Arthur, her husband's name who she was separated from. And he really set her up. He cleaned them hire apartment, He cleaned
everything up. The place looked like it was a hotel fradically.
And that was what you know.
The officers who came on the scene, and they thought she had had an attack related to a respiratory disorder she had, right, and that she had simply suffocated with the medication or whatever because he had laid out her medicine and all, you.
Know, And that's what they thought happened.
They had no idea until he confessed and they were contacted that he was the one who had killed her, and that she was a murder suspect, not an incidental death because the case had already been closed.
Yeah, he was trying to frame the boyfriend. He saw a photo and then he oh forged a note that said I hate you Arthur and sort of this note that he wanted police to find and in fact they did, right.
So they blame him. Yeah, Now he is a very nice person. I met him and he gave me a pretty picture of fren.
Scene right now. At the same time, Marcus has a dilemma because he has been using his girlfriend Lyn's car. He's supposed to pick her up. Meanwhile he's doing this murdering, So what's the idea that he hatches in his mind.
He gave her some excuse that he didn't pick her up from work, and he gave her some excuse that when he finally got home. I believe she reported him to the police missing because he had her car, and he just told her that he had been robbed and assaulted. He said sexually assaulted at first, and then he decided to just change it to assaulted because he wanted to leave the second part out. And it was it was funny the way he described it, and that's that was
the excuse that he got. And he went to the police station there.
And filed a report and all this stuff.
About something that never happened when he slept in her car in a parking lot across the street. So you know, it was interesting in that sense that he got out of picking her up. And that was the excuse he provided, was that he had been assault to drob when he didn't have any money in the first place.
And she said, so right, you're right that he knew and he had experienced al Kendall for years since the seventies, so he wanted to call somewhere else where he knew al Kendall wasn't unbeknownst to him, al Kendall speaks to the person that speaks to Marcus.
Yeah, but that's a little bit later, a short while later, Yeah, anyway.
He is questioned police think this story sounds cock eyed anyway. So his initial questioning began May fourteenth, nineteen eighty six. And you say he told several different stories, raising one red flag after another. But there is another person that's missing, and mister class May eighth, nineteen eighty six, you Vet Chambers, so right, tell us about this questioning and what happens.
He met a VET at a local bar and they sawry each other about three different times, and he gives her or three to his ideas of what he did and who was involved, and the cars they were driving and what they were wearing, and most of it was never able to prove it. All was, you know, different stories.
He told the police there in Tennessee one story and then he told everyone he got home, he told another story, and another story after that, and just changing little bits like what she wore, how she wore it, and where he saw them arguing on the bridge, and all kinds of excuses. Really didn't have anything to do with anything, but he started tangling things up. Then, you know, I guess he had tried to. He didn't have to keep anything straight with the first two individuals.
They were just gone but when.
He started adding more was fran scene and then with event he started getting confused and mixing up his own stories, not meaning to, but he wasn't prepared. He didn't feel like he was going to be questioned. He thought that he was going to be special and ignored like he'd been ignored in the past, back in to Ski because everyone had no idea that he would ever do anything
like that, so he was never questioned or suspected. But it was different once he came back and he started killing again because he came back and started working on campus again, except this time for a construction crew, but he still had access to the campus and that's where he found the vet Chambers the first time.
Tell us about this Leonora Wright, which was murdered eighteen days after your vet Chambers. Right, and this is a wild story again, so bizarre. Marcus is grocery shopping with his aunt, Missus Owens. Right, what does missus Owens do? She knows Leonora what happens.
She didn't it ever dream anything like this was going to happen when she introduced them.
Sure, and she just introduced them at.
The grocery store and she just knew her from seeing her going in and out of church.
She wasn't intimate with her, knew her mother or grandmother any of that stuff.
But you know, when she introduced them and they hit it right off, she was all for it because she thought she was a nice girl and her you know, nephew was a wonderful kid, and he deserved a break and meeting someone nice. He went to her church and dah dah, dah da dah. But it wasn't that way at all, you know, it ended up being well, she ended up dead, and he didn't even hardly pause. She was a pickup date a couple of times. He picked her up at home and took her out and brought
her back. And then this incident happened, and she fell and she heard herself supposedly in the stories he gave, and he gave several, you know, more than one story about her too.
Now you right though that she talked. It's six days before her disappearance is brought to the attention of Tuskegee Police Department. And then they search your house and find her body. Right, no one ever but again, but again there's an autopsy. What's the cause of death?
Determination strangulation was his favorite they like to strangle.
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go to talkspace dot com. Make sure to use the code true Murder to get one hundred dollars off your first month and show your support for the show that's true Murder and talkspace dot com. Now, Linda, we talked about the news tightening around Jerry Marcus and beginning in June eighteenth, eighteen ninety seven. You say that Marcus gave his first confession to Captain David Linley when finally arrested
for his last murder in Starkfield. Now, that last murder is a woman named Ellerby, So let's talk about wadin Braun Ellerby and where she was buried.
Interestingly, well, Weadine was.
Her body was recovered in April of nineteen eighty seven, but she was killed by Jerry Marcus an estimated honor before September sixteenth, nineteen eighty six, so she was in the ground for several months, but they were after she came home to his house to use his telephone to supposedly call and find stronger form of drug, not fine fine cocaine, I believe it was. And they used the phone and she supposedly faked it and held the receiver down and all this stuff, and he knew she had lied.
He heard the tone and he knew she had lied, but he went along with it, you know, and played, Okay, well, let's go ahead and go and get in the car and go drive back to the bar whatever and check so and so and check it there. So they're leaving, and the house a lot of these brick houses concrete block houses in the south will have the staircases to the second story on the outside of the house, which
is the way it was with this house. And he made sure she lost her footing going down, and she fell and fell all the way to the bottom from the second story to the first. Now I was there, and I took pictures and I could see us someone you know, could kill themselves falling. But we're not really sure she was dead when he drug her into the timber or not, because he drug her into the timber to sexually assault her, and he never really knew if she was dead or alive or checked anything like that.
But once he was finished with her. He realized she hadn't woken up, you know, and she was probably dead, but again he's not sure, and he decides to bury her back there in the timber behind the house, you know. But the ground in the south is really clay and really hard and hard. And he was back there with sticks trying to dig out a spot to put her in, and he used whatever tools they had at the house and he made a depression deep enough to lay her
body in. But he went back to the house and got the red plastic tablecloth out of the lower level they've been on table down there, and he wrapped her body and that and put her in a grave of sorts because it's still, like I said, it's impossible to dig holes in this city, you know, without major tools.
The grounds really hard. And he just started covering her with debris and just kept covering her and visiting the body and recovering it and adding more stuff to break down the body because he knew by that time she was dead. She may not have been dead when he first put her under and started baring her and left her there.
She may have well bled to death. Oh we just don't know.
Now, right again about another murder. April fourteenth, there's a missing person's report for a Dorothy Dot. Davis tell us about Dorothy and her demise.
Well, Dorothy, she went by Dot. She was the last one.
And again she was someone he just met while he was using his girlfriend's car and living at his girlfriend's house. He met Dot out and started meeting Dot and going places with Dot. And why it is a good question, because it happened, you know, it wasn't it was, you know, Well, Ellerby was gone and no one knew she was just missing. No one knew she was buried in Jerry marcus backyard. And he was never he was never hooked to her. The girlfriend, her girlfriends and such said that he was.
She was going on a date with somebody. She didn't really say that it was Jerry Marcus or he was the one she was meeting. And then when Dot died, when he murdered Dot, they hadn't been seeing each other anymore than two and a half to three weeks and he killed her too, So he had just he had just reached the phase where he couldn't stop killing them, and he wasn't sure why he was wanting to do it, but he just couldn't stop, right, you know, in the end,
you know, I guess they all reach a peak. But it's just all you know, he went so many years, seven and a half, eight years with nothing, and then all of a sudden, he blows and he doesn't really know why. He doesn't know what happened other than the fact that he lost his job. That's the only correlating factor there is. He lost his job, and that's why he killed Francine Davis, or met Franccene Davis.
To kill her. So it's interesting. Dot was an innocent party. She just met him, went out with them a couple of times, and he killed her.
You know, she was They were all innocent girls, women, they were prostitutes or anything like that. They weren't looking for trouble. They were a waitress of state employee students. There were no reasons. They weren't asking to be killed or asking to become victims of a serial killer.
Let's talk about his capture and then the confession and how was gained.
Okay, Well, like I said, he was captured.
I mean, he was questioned repeatedly over the other girls, and they just couldn't hook him. There were no witnesses, no one actually saying well, hey, I saw it, I saw them. So there was no real witnesses to tie in to any of those except for the Dot Davis one. And that's the one where he finally broke down himself. It wasn't that they had more evidence or a way to tie him or other witnesses, because that's what there wasn't was any witnesses, but they managed.
He managed to lose it himself.
He had reached his peak and he lost it, and he told about He gave up on the one. He told several different stories about Dot Davis, and then he finally gave up on her. He said, Okay, I did kill it.
She did.
And that's when he started telling about all the rest. He said, well, then I guess I'll have to tell you about the rest of them too. And these guys had no idea, David Linley, they had no idea. He had just finished a class in the FBI headquarters on Sireal homis be serial killers before he ever met Marcus, though I guess he was fresh with current data to use to follow a serial killer.
But no one knew.
No one knew until the very last minute when he confessed that he had killed all those girls all in the past.
No one did you write about the correspondence that you have with Jerry Marcus eventually and the things he told you after you'd already read and been privy to all the confessions officially and all the information did eat imparted at those confessions. Let's talk about his justification that he talks about and that he says to these Al Kendall and David Linley and other others in his confession. What
is his justification? Why does he do this? What seems to be the pattern in terms of whose fault and why this occurs?
You know, I can go over a million different times and you can't pin it down to one thing.
Or even two, or any instigating factors.
It could be other than employment and losing a job or gaining a job, but that doesn't that's never been proven before as being a factor in someone who's a serial killer, that they are a repeat offender. For work is kind of what he is. There isn't there isn't any specific thing. He just loses control and he doesn't try to stop. You know, with the first two girls, I think he tried to stop during those several years
he tried to get control of himself. That he realized that what he had done wasn't what he should be doing, and he tried to get control, but then he lost it again, and once it was gone the second time, he just started a downhill roll as far as one right after another, because he didn't, you know, once he stepped over the line. The third time, the real time, that was when he just started one right after another.
And he never ask him repeatedly, why why do you do it? Why do you feel the need, And he says, I'm just that way.
I just feel like I should kill that's all. And there's no other rationale for it. I mean, I'm hoping to link him what was written about in this book, right.
You write that what I was getting to was that in each one of these instances, there's something that compels him in terms of his anger, and he just can't turn back. But they are very much like when.
He was young.
You write that there were small, insignificant, relatively insignificant events which created this murderous anger. A woman stole sixty dollars that he is driving her around, and then when he went to look for his sixty dollars. He says, she admitted that she stole the sixty dollars that would pay him back. They have sex, he said, They say they make love, describes as making love, and then he has to kill her. The other woman lied to him, The
other woman possibly cheated on him. So for verrely insignificant reasons he was willing to.
Kill and things he created himself. Yeah, certainly, you know, I mean, we don't know if that's even true. But the way he describes it, I mean, is insignificant. It doesn't make any sense why someone would kill someone else for such a trivial reason.
And as you write, it's very unusual for a serial killer to prey on people that he's intimate with, dated played tennis with, recommended by Za knows, the family, knows the family.
And yet and he went back to his comfort zone, you know, he left his comfort zone of Tuskegee and where he'd been before him, where he had felt all those initial emotions, and they went to Tennessee. But then he came back to Tuskegee, So he came back to his comfort zone. After having stepped out and killed somewhere else, then he came back.
So it's interesting returning to the scene of the crime.
You interestingly right again, not to look for excuses, but more so for reasons psychologically connecting the behavior at these crimes to the behavior that he witnessed from his father beating his mother. In particular, this brown belt tell us the significance of the brown belt leather belt.
Well, his dad always wore it, the brown leather belt, and I have seen it, but I was not allowed to take its in the hands of the sheriff of that counting, or at least it was. He wouldn't let me have it in evidence. But anyway, when he was a kid, they would listen for the snap of that belt being pulled out, you know, when his father would pull it out of his belt loops. The snap that
that belt would make would make those children jump. You know that they knew that that's what that meant, that they were going to get whipped, or mom was going to get whipped, or mam had done something. He's always Mama done something, you know. So I think it was the sound of it was just embedded in his brain from youth and the pains that that would be related to him if he didn't have his if he didn't have the belt in his hand and could control it that way that he would get struck himself, or he
would be injured, or his mother would be injured. But if he could just wear the same belt and use the same belt in a different way, than he could keep from being injured by it.
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When I mentioned the belt, though, it's you have a very vivid graphics scene where he goes to strangle this woman. Unbeknownst to her, he reaches in the back seat for a leather belt and wraps it around her neck. This is one of his techniques, isn't it correct?
He came at her from behind, Like I said, I believe they were drinking in the car or have been, and she was relaxed. She wasn't thinking she was in the car with a killer. And he was in tennis shorts,
so it had no belt loops. So he had the belt laying in the floorboard behind her, and he reached behind her, and she wasn't sure what he was doing back there, and he's moving some stuff around to loop it and then slip it back over her neck and strangle her from behind basically, I mean when she turned towards him, he dropped it over her and he held it in his right hand, and he supposedly put his other hand on her shoulder and strangled her like that he turned her in the seat towards him.
That these are just his descriptions.
We didn't talk about the trial, but you briefly mentioned the trial May thirtieth, nineteen eighty nine for the murders in Alabama. And he was tested psychiatric testing, and there's some we'll talk about what those with that diagnosis was, but he was a sentence it in Alabama to a life sentence, yet he is detained. He's on a detainer for the other two states, Mississippi and Tennessee. Isn't that correct?
Well, I'm not sure about the Tennessee ruling because it had already been you know, they would have to bring him out of prison to send you know, put him in court again. I mean that would have to be heard, sure, and as a different state. So the laws, you know,
the rulings could be different in statute and time. But the one in Mississippi is first because that's where he was captured, right, and that is a life sentence because I believe at the time they were having some sort of a legal thing going on with the death penalty, so the death penalty was suspended at that time or frozen or whatever word they choose to use.
So he got life imprisonment.
But the way the judge wrote it, he said, I'll make sure that you never get out again in the society.
But after when he went to jail for that, then the.
Other proceedings in Tuskegee and all of that, they weren't really heard as cases because there weren't no witnesses, there were no victims, there was only him, So they weren't really heard. He was just it was just charged in
the Mississippi case. Now this has just been recent. I mean he's had he's filed charges against the Mississippi Correctional System a couple of different times from Mishandledmand and that's been since he's been in the only one he was seriously tried for and convicted of was the Mississippi case.
And that'd be Dot Davis, Dorothy Davis.
Let's talk about your visit to the Parshman Penitentiary in Mississippi to visit Jerry Marcus and how did this come about? Whose suggestion was this? Let's talk about doctor Eeger and how he convinced you to do.
This and why.
Well, like I said, I met Steve Egger when he was the instructor in the class, and I had never really I'd studied a little bit about serial killers, but it wasn't on the top of my list. But I really developed an interest in it, and he helped me go through the paperwork and helped me determine what was right and wasn't, or what could be used and whatnot. Because see, initially, initially I wrote the chapter for Jerry Marcus in his two thousand textbook, and that was the.
First time it had ever been in print.
But it's written in a format that doctor Eger followed for each of the serial killers that were a chapter in that book.
So you were went to the prison to visit him. What was that experience, like, what did you what do you expect and what did you experience?
I didn't know, Steve said, doctor Egger. He said, well, you should go down and visit him, And I said, how do you do that?
I didn't know.
So I got a hold of the public Information officer who sent me the proper forms to fill out and I had to fill out this. They had to fill out that and all these forms. And they had to ask him because he'd never had any visitors, right, he had to consent to see me. Now, I don't know anything about I don't know anything about that prison, harsh From Penitentiary, but it supposedly is one of the strictest in the state you know of Mississippi. Sure, but he
gave me permission. So I went down there and it was just it was almost I can't describe it. It was just really strange because I was, you know, I was in business clothes. Khakis and roll up sleep shirt and all this stuff. But it was like families, and you got on a bus. You went through the first level of security, and these they had these little buildings attached to each other, and you went through the first level and then practically a body search, and then you
get in the bus to go. And the only thing that I had was a pad of paper and a pen. They said, can't take either once, so I had to leave. I couldn't take anything. So you go through at least five different of those little cabins for body checks and searches, and threw machines and this and that and the other. But the others were like the other people visiting were
like families with little kids and everything. But the family dog and groups and big brown bags of stuff, which I didn't relate to its time.
And then we finally get through all those levels of security.
Then it all opens up into the first real building, real building down there in the Delta, a big concrete building like a gymnasium, and that's.
What it was.
And it had the pull down hoops, and it had the pullout wooden seats, the old fashioned wooden seats, and they were pulled out and there were tables and chairs scattered everywhere, and it was just like a big picnic. And they just turned everybody loose in the room with each other. So, you know, I've been expecting back in Illinois, I've been expecting a little more like maybe sheet of glass and a phone. But no, No, they turned everybody
loose together, and everybody has a fine old time. And so, you know, I actually met him and sat beside him and talked to him. What was I like?
You had corresponded with him for over a year, years.
Years and years. Well, he said, you don't look like I thought you would. And I said, well, I can't say that because I saw your pictures already. And we laughed, you know, because that was my whole goal to get him know that he can relax and talk to me and talk, you know, And so I just made a couple of jokes. He was, he was so neat, you know, he's he has a real strong lean towards narcissism.
He always has, even when he was a kid.
And when he when I first met him, his uniform it was spotless. The one a thing wrong with his uniform. It was practically creased in the knees. His shoes were clean, his socks were clean, his hand looked like he'd been to a manicurist, and everything he looked really neat and clean.
And I was just kind of looking at him sideways, and he said, well, what do you what are you looking for? What do you keep looking at me like that for? And I said, I said, I don't know. I guess I'm kind of disappointed.
I expectedly blood dripping from your fingers or from your mouth or something. And he just thought that was the funniest thing. And he just started laughing. He thought that was really funny. And I said, there, that's what I want you to do. I want you to relax, I want you to laugh, but I want you just to talk to me. And we we just talked about stuff, you know about you know, I couldn't really say, well, can we talk about so ands over? Can we talked
about songs? Because we'd already done all that. You'd already written everything out, every page and rewritten and written.
So it really wasn't like that. But we just basically talked. And I said, so, what do you expect to.
Do with all this?
I mean, with this with here? I said, are you here like forever, and.
He said, oh no, I'll be going on pictic with my kids soon with my grandkids, and we're going to meet out there and we're going to see that table over there.
Da da da da da. You know, just dreamland. He has no concept that he's there forever.
You know, you talk about interviews with his mother and his aunt. Yes, you say that everything that was going to be said that was said. That information about the murders expanded from those confessions he gave to you in that correspondence, so that the interview you had was anti climatic in that regard. Well, what about the interviews with the mother and the aunt?
What was that like?
Well, I wanted to do it right.
I wanted to be respectful to these ladies for giving me the time to talk to me, because they, like everyone else, was totally shocked and really were kind of out of touch with it. I really didn't believe he'd done it right, so they were willing to talk to me. I took pictures with them. As a matter of fact, I took my mother with me on the trip down there because she's from Mississippi, and I just figured that, well, maybe they'd feel a little calmer.
You know, we could all just all the old ladies having a discussion.
So we sat down and there in the ants front room and we talked, you know, for a couple of hours. I brought them both a bouquet of flowers, and I brought them some sort of a coffee cake that I got down at the bakery and all this stuff, because I wanted.
To be respectful to these women.
But they in turn answered my questions that I had about Jerry, you know, when did he start? And they related to me about the cats with the tail on fire and how I used to torture animals and how they find animals that were dead. That they knew that Jerry had been busy again and such as that. But they said they never dreamed that that would lead to what it did lead to, and that would be that he would start killing human beings.
I don't think that really. They just thought that that was a phase.
You know, in the darkened room and the covered windows and the anger spurts that he used to have. They just thought that he would grow out of it, that it was just a phase. They never dreamed he would grow more so into it than he ever had.
Yeah, that must have been a fascinating conversation, but also the resignment of those two people, like you say, to be inextricably involved in some of this of his murderous behavior, he introducing the one woman and burying a victim in the backyard of the home of a family home.
Right right.
Ye, Well, they were equally shocked about all of that, and they just they.
Were just still so sure that he really couldn't have done that, you know, I mean, they just kept trying to trying to rational that somehow it just still had to be a mistake, that he couldn't have really done that. Someday they're going to find out that Jerry was innocent.
He isn't and wasn't, you know, But they were just because he had always been the perfect son and always been the perfect nephew and always been there for to help everyone, and including the neighbors, and so it was just it was just these ladies tried to give me as much information. They answered every question that I had, and especially with Francina, believe you know, she said I had no idea, you know, she said, I just knew
her from church. I thought that they would be a nice pair, and they were going to go out and eat out. She thought, I thought that was a good thing, but then it wasn't. But then again, that was many years later, so they she had no idea that what she had, you know, the introduction had ended up, and this is what happened.
And his aunt thought he was such a fine nephew. You right at the very end with your visit with Jerry Marcus that again that he was charming, exhibited all those things you knew you would find, but you were seeing him in person for the first time, and and you saw his well manicured hands, and he was dressed
well and all appearances. But you realized in the circumstances of that visiting room that he certainly could have ended your life quite easily with those bare hands that us he used to strangle other women to death.
Well, now you got to remember this was in a gymnasium and we were sitting on wooden pull out seat, so it was like so casual. I mean, it was just like there were no guards anywhere around except the far doors, you know, so he could have really done anything. And that's why I told him, I guess you know, I said, well, I guess you can do about anything.
You wanted now, and he said, yeah, I could kill you. Wow, he said, you're the only other woman I know now, he said, I could kill you, he said, but then he said, I wouldn't get to talk to you anymore. Admitted that he liked to talk to me, but like I said, we haven't spoken since there was the law enforcement in Tennessee who sought to talk to him directly without saying anything.
To me, and he considered that offensive.
And he has not spoken to me since that time or answered any letters or just for a while, I sent him, you know, occasionally I deposit money in his account. I'd send him money for personal stuff and all. But he never spoke to me again after that. So that also tells me that there's probably something else going on in Tennessee to relate him to also, since it's shut him right down and he didn't want to talk at all.
So chances are there something going.
On absolutely or had been something going on. Did he know that you were writing this book?
Yes, he did from day one, from day one, because I started writing to him as Jane Doe, you know, and I told him, I said, I you know, it was three or four letters before I was finally willing to give him my name, and then I had a special PO box and I had that po box for all those years. And that was the sole reason for the po box was to ride him and get lettered back from him.
It's very interesting your book. You we just touched on them, but elaborate detailed confessions of what he did, how he killed these people, the conversations he had beforehand, and most interestingly, his thoughts behind his behavior and his actions. I want to thank you very much, Linda lu Long for coming on and talking about the Skegee Strangler, the nicest serial killer they ever met. This is a Wild Blue Press release. But when did this book? When? Was it released on.
August the second, twenty two, nineteen twenty two or twenty.
Twenty two, just a few weeks ago? Yes, thank you so much, Linda lu Long, The Tuskegee Strangler, the nicest serial killer they ever met. You have a great evening. Thank you so much for this interview, and good night, Thank you, bye bye bye bye.