Timothy Wilson Spencer

What the record shows

Timothy Wilson Spencer, known as the Southside Strangler, was convicted by four separate Virginia juries of the rape and murder of four women killed in Richmond, Chesterfield County and Arlington between September and November 1987. Each jury fixed his punishment at death. He was the first person in the United States convicted of murder on the strength of DNA evidence, and his case also led to the pardon of David Vasquez, who had been wrongly convicted of a 1984 Arlington murder that investigators later attributed to Spencer. Spencer never confessed and maintained his innocence. Virginia executed him in the electric chair on April 27, 1994.

The first killing came in Richmond. According to the Fourth Circuit's 1993 opinion in Spencer v. Murray, Debbie Dudley Davis, 35, was killed in her Southside Richmond apartment between the evening of September 18 and the morning of September 19, 1987; the cause of death was ligature strangulation. On the night of October 2 or early on October 3, 1987, Dr. Susan Hellams, a 32-year-old neurosurgery resident at the Medical College of Virginia, was strangled with ligatures in her Richmond home after an intruder cut through a second-story window screen, according to the Fourth Circuit's 1994 opinion. In November 1987, Diane Cho, a 15-year-old high school student, was found dead in her family's apartment in Chesterfield County, just south of Richmond. Days later, around November 27, 1987, Susan Tucker, 44, was killed in her Arlington condominium; her body was found on December 1.

Arlington County police arrested Spencer on January 20, 1988. Police established that he had travelled from Richmond to Arlington over Thanksgiving to stay with his mother, who lived about a mile from Tucker's home. According to the Innocence Project, Spencer had been released on September 4, 1987 from a burglary sentence to a Richmond halfway house, and its sign-out records placed him away from the facility at the times of the murders. The linking evidence was semen recovered at the scenes. The Fourth Circuit recorded that Lifecodes Corporation, a private laboratory, found that DNA from Spencer's blood matched the semen in the Davis case, and an expert put the chance of another Black North American man sharing the pattern at about one in 705 million. A Library of Virginia exhibit notes that experts told a 1988 court the evidence would match only about one in 135 million African American men.

Spencer was tried first in Arlington County. The trial opened on July 11, 1988, and Style Weekly described it as the first capital murder conviction in United States history based on DNA evidence; he was convicted on July 16, 1988 and sentenced to death. On September 22, 1988, a Richmond jury convicted him of the rape, burglary and capital murder of Davis and fixed his sentence at death. His trial for the Hellams murder began on January 17, 1989 in the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond and ended in convictions for capital murder, rape, sodomy and burglary and another death sentence. He was then convicted in the Cho case of capital murder, rape and breaking and entering and received a fourth death sentence, which the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed on June 8, 1990 in an opinion that accepted DNA analysis as reliable evidence.

His appeals turned largely on the DNA evidence. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed each conviction. In federal habeas proceedings, the Fourth Circuit held in September 1993 that the admission of the DNA results in the Davis case did not violate due process, and in February 1994 it rejected his claims in the Hellams case, including an argument that his lawyers were ineffective for not hiring a DNA expert. On April 27, 1994, Spencer, aged 32, was electrocuted at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. He declined to make a final statement.

The case had a second consequence. According to the Innocence Project, Carolyn Hamm, a 32-year-old lawyer, was raped and murdered in her Arlington home on January 23, 1984. David Vasquez, whose IQ was below 70, entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder and burglary on February 3, 1985 and was sentenced to 35 years. After Spencer's arrest, Arlington investigators concluded that the Hamm killing fit his pattern; the physical evidence had degraded too far to test, and Spencer was never charged with it. Governor Gerald L. Baliles granted Vasquez an unconditional pardon on January 4, 1989, the first exoneration in the United States brought about by DNA testing, and the General Assembly voted him $117,000 in compensation in 1990.

In 2026 WHRO reported that Spencer's convictions are among eight Virginia executions being reviewed by a State Crime Commission panel as part of a broader reassessment of the work of former state serologist Mary Jane Burton. A review by Shawn Armbrust of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project found no evidence that Burton's involvement affected the outcome in any of the eight cases. Spencer's brother, Travis Spencer, has said in a book that his brother told him he was not guilty.

Spencer was born on March 17, 1962 in Arlington, Virginia and raised by a single mother. Wikipedia records that he was sent to juvenile detention as a young teenager for petty theft and truancy, and in his twenties served prison time for burglaries and robberies in the Richmond area. He was serving a sentence for a 1984 burglary conviction until his release to the Richmond halfway house in September 1987, weeks before the first killing.