He didn't mix well with those around him and he generally kept to himself. Married with two grown children he was 'a little different' from other people in town. “Murder was NOT on the list of things we thought he had done and gotten away with.”Īssociated Press journalists Rhonda Shafner in New York City and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming contributed to this report.Many people in Albion, Illinois thought Bruce Mendenhall was loud, hot-tempered and a little peculiar, but they were still stunned to hear police say he has confessed to killing six people.
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“I heard rumors about his ‘possible crimes’ but always thought they were bogus,” she wrote in a Facebook message. The two had been in contact over Facebook since then, she said. The charges stunned Jazz Baldwin, 32, of New Hampton, Iowa, who said she learned two years ago that Baldwin was her father after he purchased a DNA test kit.
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In a court hearing Thursday, he didn't challenge his extradition to Tennessee, where he is expected to be transferred in coming weeks and eventually face trial first. Baldwin was sentenced to 18 months in prison and released in 1999.īaldwin is being held without bond at the Black Hawk County jail. He and two female associates were indicted on counterfeiting charges. In 1997, Secret Service agents raided Baldwin’s apartment in Springfield, Missouri, after learning he was making counterfeit U.S. His ex-wife told police then that Baldwin once bragged about “killing a girl out west by strangulation and throwing her out of his truck,” court documents say.
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Ultimately, he wasn't prosecuted.īaldwin, who has previously lived in Nashua, Iowa, and Springfield, Missouri, was a cross-country truck driver for Marten Transport.īaldwin's name also surfaced during a 1992 homicide investigation in Iowa. He allegedly admitted to the assault but was released pending grand jury proceedings. The 21-year-old woman told police that Baldwin struck her on the head, bound her hands and mouth and tried to choke her to death. “I'm also very happy to be able to give Rose McCall's mother a chance to see justice for her daughter's and granddaughter's murders,” he said.Ī similar allegation of violence against Baldwin helped investigators make their case.Ĭourt documents say that Baldwin allegedly raped a female hitchhiker from Kansas in Wheeler County, Texas, at gunpoint in his truck in 1991. Tennessee District Attorney General Brent Cooper praised investigators for “bringing this serial killer to justice.”
Last month in Waterloo, the FBI secretly collected DNA from Baldwin’s trash and a shopping cart he used at Walmart and testing revealed that it was a match. Investigators zeroed in on Baldwin after finding DNA in commercial genealogy databases of someone related to the suspect’s profile, court documents say. A check in a national database matched the profile to one that had been developed years earlier linking the two Wyoming deaths. Investigators never identified the women, nicknaming them “Bitter Creek Betty” and “I-90 Jane Doe.” In Tennessee, Baldwin is charged with two counts of murder in the 1991 killing of a 32-year-old pregnant woman from Topping, Virginia, Pamela McCall, and her fetus.Ī Tennessee crime lab developed a DNA profile of the suspect in McCall's death last year after a cold case investigator submitted evidence for analysis. In Wyoming, Baldwin is charged in the deaths of two women whose bodies were found in 1992 roughly 400 miles (645 kilometers) apart. Zywicki’s body was found in rural Missouri.Īnother involves Rhonda Knutson, 22, a truck stop convenience store clerk in northern Iowa who was bludgeoned to death during an overnight shift in 1992. A man driving a semitrailer was seen near her vehicle. One case involves the 1992 death of Tammy Jo Zywicki, 21, an Iowa college student who was last seen after her car broke down on an Illinois highway. They include women who were beaten, strangled and stabbed and left in ditches. Jody Ewing, who operates the Iowa Cold Cases website, said she gave investigators a list of more than two dozen slayings since 1980 that could fit Baldwin’s pattern. “Obviously there are several cases that need to be followed up on,” said Krapfl, who confirmed that agents interviewed Baldwin after his arrest.
He said other agencies were also scrutinizing Baldwin, who traveled the country.
Detectives with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation are “looking at any connections” that Baldwin may have to other cold cases, special agent Mike Krapfl said.
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