Dana was fired from the Medical Center on November 24th, 1993 as she was unable to explain missing doses of opiate painkillers and Demerol. Dana consulted a doctor for depression who prescribed her anti-depressants. Dana’s life had begun to spin into a free fall.
In February of 1994, shock and fear ran through the residents of the Canyon Lake community. Elderly eighty-seven-year-old Norma Davis was discovered by her neighbor Alice Williams brutally murdered in her condominium. A fillet knife was stuck in her chest, and a wooden handled utility knife protruded out of her neck.
Norma had been repeatedly stabbed, as if in anger. She had also been strangled with a phone cord with such massive force that she was almost beheaded. A valuable ring was still on her finger.
Detective Joseph Greco was put in charge of the murder investigation of Norma Davis. It was only his second murder investigation.
The detectives investigating the murder found no signs of forced entry into the condominium and were told by neighbors that Norma always kept her door locked. It appeared to the detectives that the murderer knew how to get into the security tight community and into the condominium. This made detectives suspect that it was someone Norma had allowed into her home. No valuable items of any kind were found to be missing. Norma's relatives and friends were questioned at length. No one could think of any enemies Norma might have had. The police had no leads.
To the community residents it reminded them of the 1969 Manson murders: a seemingly random, though bloody, attack.
On February 28th, just two weeks later, sixty-six-year-old June Roberts was found murdered in her Canyon Lake property. It was her birthday. June was found lying on her back on the floor of the den. A heavy, crystal glass, wine decanter had been used to beat her and a telephone wire was used to strangle her. A large diamond ring remained on her finger. As in the case of Norma, there was no evidence of a break-in, neither woman had shown signs of a struggle, neither (as far as could be ascertained) had been significantly robbed, and both women lived alone. Both murders appeared to be motiveless. Detective Joseph Greco suspected that the Roberts’ and Davis’ cases were connected.
The Canyon Lake community was terrified, especially the older women who lived alone. One of the most disturbing thoughts for women living on their own is the idea that someone might break into their homes and rob, hurt, or even kill them.
Russell and Geri Armbrust were also shocked and terrified. They had known both the victims well. Russell, like many of the other residents of the community, kept a loaded gun by him 24 hours a day. Many of the older residents moved in with each other or with relatives. The nearby locksmiths’ trade increased ten-fold.
The Canyon Lake City Council, in an emergency meeting, increased security and an additional police patrol car was added to the area.
The police asked for help or information about anyone seen in the area. They did checks on gardeners, housekeepers, and service personnel working and having access to the community. The police were no nearer to finding a clue until June Roberts’s bank called her family to notify them of massive spending on her credit cards in the Temecula, California area.
The police detectives then began visiting all the establishments where the cards had been used. These ranged from beauty parlors, spas, restaurants, and expensive clothes shops and jewelers. They quickly established that they were seeking a petite blond woman who had recently dyed her hair red and often had with her a five-year-old boy named Jason.
On the 10th of March in 1994, Dorinda Hawkins at the age of fifty seven, was at work in a shop named The Main Street Trading Post in Lake Elsinore. It was a picture framing and antiques shop.
In the afternoon, a small blonde woman about thirty-five-years-old entered the shop and began to browse around. As Dorinda stacked some frames away at the back end of the shop, she suddenly felt something around her throat and realized she was being strangled. She struggled and managed to turn around to see the blond woman with eyes of “penetrating, cold-blooded steel” tightening the yellow nylon rope around her neck. Dorinda continued struggling and kicking her attacker until she finally lost consciousness. When Dorinda came around, she called the police and was taken to the hospital for head and neck injuries. She realized that she was extremely lucky, as the attacker had obviously thought she was dead. About $25 was missing from the cash register as well as Dorinda's purse and credit cards.
Dorinda gave the police a full description of the woman, and they made a composite sketch. The following day the story, sketch, and description were in the local newspaper.
Geri Armbrust, the following morning as she drank her coffee and read the newspaper, nearly choked. The description she was reading, and the composite sketch of a woman who was suspected of a brutal assault and attempted murder, was of her step-daughter Dana. She phoned Detective Greco and told him of her suspicion. Dana, she told the detective, had recently dyed her hair red and had a boyfriend with a boy named Jason. She was well-known to Norma Davies and June Roberts.
Composite sketch
Detective Greco applied for a search warrant for Dana's home. He received it late on the morning of March 16th, 1994.
Elsewhere on the morning of March 16th, Julia Whitcombe was worrying that her 87-year-old mother, Dora Beebe, was not answering her phone. It was the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Ernest Beebe, Julia’s father, from cancer; a day Dora always felt depressed. Julia’s mother lived in Sun City on her own in a condominium. Worried, Julia decided to drive round to see her with a friend, Louis Dormand. When they arrived later in the afternoon, they were disturbed to find Dora’s door unlocked. They eventually found Dora’s battered body lying in the fetal position on the floor of the bathroom. There was blood everywhere. She had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy iron and strangled. Her credit card was missing.
Crime scene Dora’s bathroom
Detective Greco, with search warrant in hand, went to the house Dana shared with her boyfriend in Wildomar. In her house, they found a wallet containing $2,000 stashed in the washing machine, along with jewelry, brand new clothing with the labels still on, June Roberts' bank book, credit cards, and keys to her home. They also found keys to the antiques shop where Dorinda was attacked, and Dora Beebe’s credit card was found in Dana’s lingerie drawer: a woman whose murder the detective had only learned about thirty minutes before entering Dana’s house.
Detective Greco arrested Dana for forgery and possession of stolen property, cautioned her about her rights, and then took her in for questioning.
The questioning lasted for several hours. During it, Dana admitted to the use of June Roberts’s credit cards, thereby implicating herself in the February 28th murder. Dana then said she had found the bankbook and credit cards belonging to Dora Beebe. She even admitted to having been in Beebe's house and seeing her body. Dana, however, denied having anything to do with her murder.
When asked why she hadn’t handed the credit cards and bank books she apparently found over to the police, she replied, “I got desperate to buy things. Shopping puts me at rest. I'm lost without it”.
Detective Greco then charged Dana with the murders of June Roberts and Dora Beebe and the attempted murder of Dorinda Hawkins. Dana was detained without bail in the Riverside County Jail. The following day, the police held a press conference announcing her arrest.
Riverside County Jail.
Friends and acquaintances of Dana’s were stunned and shocked; they could not believe Dana as the kind of person who had allegedly assaulted one woman and killed three others. “She was,” they said, “an extremely nice girl”. Others said that Dana had been a good, friendly neighbor while others said that when her life had started to fall apart, she’d become strange and withdrawn.
Dana was not charged with Norma Davis’s death as the police had as yet no direct evidence connecting her to the crime. The newspapers speculated as to whether the DA would seek the death penalty.
On April 8, 1994, Dana pled, through her public d
efender lawyer, Stuart Sachs, innocent to the charges. On June 23rd, Richard Bentley, the Deputy DA, announced he would be seeking the death penalty due to the brutality of the murders.
Dana’s mug shot
On the lead up to the trial, Dana’s defense lawyer Stuart Sachs employed several psychiatrists. Stuart Sachs believed that Dana, due to the circumstances of her life in 1994, had been acting in a position of decreasing mental function. He wanted to prove to the court that Dana, who had been a respected registered nurse and married to a man with whom she loved, had in a short period of time in 1993 undergone severe stress. Dana had lost her job; her marriage had broken down, she had entered into bankruptcy, she had lost her Canyon Lake house, and she had suffered a miscarriage. A doctor from whom she had sought help, as she had felt suicidal, had prescribed her anti-depressants.
On March 10 1995, as Dana's trial was about to start in the Superior Court of Riverside, Stuart Sachs entered an insanity plea on Dana’s behalf. He told the court the psychological problems Dana had suffered from during the period of time the murders took place were now no longer an issue but at the time, they had caused her behavior.
After Dana changed her plea to evaluate her claim, two psychiatrists were appointed. The defense psychiatrist found her insane and felt that the events that happened prior to the killing spree to be the catalysts for her insanity. Before the killing binge, the defense claimed, she had been abusing alcohol and had given up taking her anti-depressants. During examination by the psychiatrists, Dana admitted that when she had murdered June Roberts, she had left five-year-old Jason in her Cadillac while she went into June’s house. Following the murder, she took Jason out for lunch and on a shopping trip.
The prosecution’s psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Rogers, claimed that Dana was well aware of her actions at the time of the murders. She said that despite being stressed, Dana had planned and prepared for the murders fully aware they were wrong.
While these evaluations were going on, Detective Greco was still looking for evidence linking Dana with Norma Davies’s murder. A gardener in a house across the road from Norma’s condominium had seen Dana wandering around Norma Davis's condo on the day of her murder. However, Detective Greco did not think this statement on its own was sufficient evidence for charging her with murdering Norma. Nevertheless, he was determined he would find the evidence.
Three and a half years later, Dana’s trial had still not begun and then just before the police charged her with Norma Davies’s murder, Dana changed her plea. She had accepted a prosecution plea agreement On Sept. 8, 1998. Dana, now at the age of forty, pleaded guilty to robbery and the murder of two women and attempted murder of another. In this way, Dana avoided any possibility of the death penalty and the charge of murdering Norma Davies.
Over four years after Dana’s killing spree, on October 16th, 1998, Dana was sentenced. She elected this opportunity to make a statement to the court. The local newspaper reported her as saying, “My life and my career have been focused on healing. It has strayed so far from that purpose; it was so out of character. I'm sorry, and I know that these words will never be enough. I will live with this the rest of my life”. Dana continued by expressing her remorse to Judge Magers saying that she accepted responsibility but thought her judgment at the time of the offenses had been somewhat cloudy.
Judge Magers, on delivering her sentence, said, “It's hard to find words to describe the atrocity in this case. The crimes were horrendous, callous, and despicable”.
He sentenced Dana to life in prison without parole.
Dana lives incarcerated in Chowchilla, in the California Women's Prison, where she will stay until she dies.
California Women's Prison, Chowchilla
The local newspaper, The Press Enterprise, covered the case in detail. One story wrote about Dana’s movements after killing June Roberts. While she was killing June, she had left Jason in the car, telling him that she wouldn’t be long. When she returned to the car, she first took Jason to lunch and then she’d had her hair done. Both her hair and lunch were paid for with June’s credit card. Following this, she bought $695 of clothes and jewelry. People who had encountered her that day described her as happy and cheerful. At the end of the day, she had spent $1,700 on June’s card.
Dana Gray
Just what was it that made this attractive young woman of thirty-six suddenly decide to brutally slaughter old ladies and then go on lavish shopping sprees using their credit cards?
CONCLUSION
As of now, we are only thirteen years into the 21st century and already according to the website The Unknown History of MISANDRY, thirty women serial killers around the world have already been listed.
The Black Widow in the 21st century has changed little. She still manipulates as she smiles in your face and adds poison to your wine, tea, or coffee.
A case in point is the Canadian woman, Millie Weeks, known as “The Black Widow of Benzodiazepene.” Millie has a criminal record that stretches back years. As Melissa Stewart, in April, 1991, aged fifty-five, she was convicted in Nova Scotia of drugging, running over and killing, Gordon Stewart, her second husband while still married to Russell Sheppard, her first husband.
Upon her release from prison, she moved to Florida and married, in June 2000, Robert Friedrich whom she defrauded and who died under suspicious circumstances in December 2002. In November 2004, Millie then took up with another Florida man, Alex Strategos, who she also drugged and defrauded.
Luckily for Alex, after eight hospital visits, his son noticed benzodiazepine showing up on his father’s blood tests. It was not a drug his father’s was prescribed. Alex’s son then noticed $18,000 missing from his father’s bank account. The police were called and Millie was arrested. Melissa Friedrich accepted a plea agreement and pleaded guilty to grand theft, and forgery, and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 2009, she was freed and deported to Canada.
In September 2012, Melissa, now aged seventy-seven married Fred Weeks, aged 75 after a month long courtship. On their honeymoon, Fred Weeks became ill and was taken to hospital. Blood tests showed a high dose of benzodiazepine in his body. The police arrested Millie and on searching her apartment discovered large amount of benzodiazepine.
Millie is now awaiting trial charged with the attempted murder of Fred Weeks.
The caring nurse and caregiver still enjoys her power of life and death. Even more horrifying is the supposedly loving mother who still murders her children.
A former FBI profiler has said that the serial killer's greatest defense is that he/she is virtually unrecognizable by sight, as they tend to look so normal: the kind granny, the devoted nurse, the loyal wife, the devoted mother, or the friendly helpful neighbor. They look like you and I. The other thing that sets them apart is that they are usually not insane but are fully aware of the difference between right and wrong, and that’s what makes them so scary.
Yet, despite the number of women serial killers in history, very little research has been done on them, even to this day and because of this lack of research, I feel that many of these female predators will never be caught and will continue to get away with their crimes.
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS: FEMALE RAMPAGE KILLERS (WOMEN WHO KILL)
ASIN:B00CW16O28
“I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS.”
The Famous hit song “I don’t like Mondays” penned by Bob Geldof, was written after the school shootings in San Diego, California, committed by Brenda Spencer. Once she was apprehended and asked why she had done it. Her reply was:
“I don’t like Mondays, do you?”
When one thinks of spree killers or rampage killers, normally one thinks of a male. Men such as the Aurora Colorado Movie Theater James Eagan Holmes, Seung-Hui Cho Virginia Tech Massacre, Columbine school killers Eric David Bennet and Dylan Bennet Klebold, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the 2011 massacre at a summer camp in Norway, by Anders Behring Breivik to name just
a few.
Yet, women have also committed these crimes just not in such large numbers as men.
Welcome to the world of the Female Rampage Killer.
VISIT THE AUTHOR’S BLOG AND WEBSITE
http://women-in-the-news.blogspot.com.es/
http://sylviaperrini.goldmineguides.com
OTHER GOLDMINE GUIDES.COM PUBLICATIONS
SAILING INTO THE ABYSS (TRUE SMUGGLING ADVENTURE) (MARIJUANA SMUGGLING) Bridget Lane
ASIN:B009N1IRSE
This is the true life story of a young English woman, who initially set out single-handedly to smuggle two tons of marijuana from Colombia to the US. It is a gripping story of battling storms, snakes, engine problems in Great White Shark infested waters, days at sea facing deprivations barely imaginable, and Mexican gun boats.
A journey that finally sees Bridget incarcerated in the most infamous prison in Mexico-La Mesa. This is truly an extraordinary adventure story of a remarkable woman operating in a man’s world.
Women Pirates (SCANDALOUS WOMEN) Anna Myers
ASIN:B007KQCBF4
There is an old superstition among sailors that women at sea bring bad luck. Despite this, many women have proved their seafaring skills. When we think of Pirates we have a tendency to think of masculine men. But did you know that the most successful pirate of all time was a woman? Neither the Chinese, British or Portuguese navies could stop her.
She Devils Around the World Page 32