Tennessee Authorities Think They've Nabbed a Serial Killer

Authorities in Tennessee believe they've nabbed a serial killer. Clark Perry Baldwin, a 59-year-old former truck driver, was arrested in Iowa Wednesday and charged in the 1991 death of a 24-weeks-pregnant woman in Tennessee. In March 1991, Pamela McCall was been found strangled in Spring Hill, Tenn., a few miles from a truck stop where she was seen getting into a tractor trailer. Per CNN, DNA from the scene was submitted to a national database a year ago, and it matched DNA from two killings of unidentified women that occurred near interstates in Wyoming in March and April of 1992. "Those homicides were also similar in nature to the McCall homicide with a truck driver possibly being the suspect," said 22nd Judicial District Attorney Brent Cooper.

"I think he preyed on young women that frequented truck stops," Cooper told People. "It appeared they would travel with him and then he would end up possibly raping them and then killing them." Baldwin was tracked through genetic genealogy: Investigators followed him to a Walmart and swabbed a shopping cart and items he returned to shelves. The collected DNA "matched the profile at our murder scenes," says Cooper. Baldwin is being looked at in other cases, per the Des Moines Register, including two more from 1992. Baldwin had been arrested for raping and strangling a female hitchhiker in Texas a month before McCall was killed. But the charges were dropped after the out-of-state woman refused to return to Texas. Cooper says Baldwin will be extradited to Tennessee and then to Wyoming "once the Tennessee charges are resolved." (More serial killers stories.)