An Iowa man suspected of murdering three women, inducing two who were pregnant, in the 1990s has been arrested.
Clark Perry Baldwin, 58, was taken into custody Wednesday at his Waterloo home after investigators linked his DNA with semen and other materials recovered from the victims.
A former truck driver, Baldwin has been charged in the 1991 killings of Pamela "Rose" Aldridge McCall, 33, and her unborn child in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and the murders of two unidentified women in Wyoming a year later.
Investigators told the Associated Press they were looking into whether Baldwin could be responsible for other unsolved slayings.
"I’m sure he thought it had been forgotten about," said Brent Cooper, attorney general of the 22nd Judicial District in Tennessee. "He certainly hoped it had."
Cooper's office helped relaunch the investigation last April that led to Wednesday's arrest.
McCall was found strangled to death on March 10, 1991, in Spring Hill — about 35 miles south of Nashville. She was pregnant and last seen with a truck driver, police learned at the time. McCall was born in Cedar Rapids and had family in Iowa, according to a 1991 obituary published in the Newport News Daily Press in Virginia.
A month passed between when McCall's body was found and when she was identified, according to Virginia news clippings at the time.
In Wyoming, Baldwin is charged in the deaths of two unidentified women whose bodies were found in 1992 roughly 400 miles apart.
A female trucker discovered the nude body of the first victim in March 1992 near the Bitter Creek Truck turnout on Interstate 80 in southwestern Wyoming, according to the Associated Press. An autopsy determined the woman suffered head trauma consistent with strangulation and her body had likely been in the snow for weeks.
A month later, Wyoming Department of Transportation workers found the partially mummified body of a pregnant woman in a ditch off of Interstate 90, near Sheridan in northern Wyoming.
An autopsy didn’t determine the cause of death but found the victim had an injury potentially consistent with suffering a blow to the head.
Investigators never identified the women and referred to them as “Bitter Creek Betty” and “I-90 Jane Doe.” Both were believed to be in their late teens or early 20s, Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Cmdr. Matt Waldock told the AP.
McCall, the Tennessee victim, was described by her mother as free-spirited and transient, often hitchhiking through Virginia and Tennessee, according to the Daily Press. Marsha Lyell in 1991 told the newspaper her child's killer should be executed by the state. Capital punishment is legal in Tennessee.
"I give her birth and air, and he takes the air out of her," Lyell said in April 1991. "That's what makes me mad — he's still breathing."
Her cold case was reopened in April 2019 when Spring Hill police approached the district attorney's office for help investigating the crime.
"Fortunately for us, the Spring Hill Police Department still had all of the evidence and the original file," Cooper said. "That’s usually the first roadblock we run into with cold cases is that departments over the years ... tend to clean house, and sometimes that means getting rid of old evidence."
DNA found at the scene of McCall's death was submitted to a Tennessee crime lab, and a suspect profile was built. When put into a national database, the DNA came back as a match for a suspect in the two unsolved homicides in Wyoming.
"This is only the second serial killer that I’ve seen in my 20-year experience," Cooper said.
His office has not yet decided whether it will seek the death penalty in this case, he said.
Federal authorities used forensic genealogy, the practice of using genetic information in online databases, and looked at similar cases, which Cooper said eventually led them to Baldwin.
"There was a crime in Texas that was very similar to our murder that Mr. Baldwin was actually arrested for," he said. "It was not a murder. It was an attempted rape and an attempted murder that occurred in his semi truck."
Court documents say that Baldwin allegedly raped a female hitchhiker in Wheeler County, Texas, at gunpoint in his truck in 1991, the AP reported. 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. He allegedly admitted to the assault but was released pending grand jury proceedings.
Cooper said the charges were dropped after the victim, who lived out of state, refused to return to Texas.
Investigators from the FBI and Iowa authorities within the past two or three months conducted surveillance in Waterloo and obtained items that contained DNA samples of Baldwin.
“They were able to collect some items ... without him knowing about it, and we submitted those items to the lab and got a hit," Cooper said. "The same DNA that we had at our three murder scenes was on those items that Mr. Baldwin had touched.
"That’s what got us to Iowa, and today was the day that we knocked on his door.”
Lyell, now 79 years old, was unaware that police were once again looking into her daughter's case until a few weeks ago, Cooper said.
"We didn’t want to give her hope if there wasn't anything to be hopeful about," he said.
When notified that police were nearing an arrest, Lyell broke down on the phone, Cooper said.
"She thought that she would go to her grave never knowing who killed her daughter and grandchild," he said.
Cooper said federal authorities are looking into other cold cases to see if there is a link to Baldwin.
"I heard a number at one time — I can’t recall it right now — but a number of similar unsolved murders across the country that may be attributed to him," he said.
Baldwin, who has previously lived in Nashua, Iowa, and Springfield, Missouri, was a cross-country truck driver for Marten Transport at the time, the AP reported.
He is being held at the Black Hawk County jail pending extradition proceedings to Tennessee.
Source: desmoinesregister.com, Tyler J. Davis and Charles Flesher, May 7, 2020
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