User:Jclemens/George Russell (criminal)

George Walterfield Russell (born 1958) is an African-American serial killer who was cited as "a living example of the changing face of a serial killer" in the 1990s, a black man from an educated middle class family who grew up in an upper-class white neighborhood with a distinctive crime signature.

Early life
Russell was born in Florida to middle-class parents Joyce and George Russell Sr. When he was six months old, Joyce Russell left the family, and his father put him in the care of relatives. Joyce re-entered her son's life when he was six years old and took him to Mercer Island, Washington, to live with her and her new husband. When Russell was in his early teens, his mother left again, putting him in the care of his stepfather. Over the next few years, Russell developed into an amateur criminal, arrested many times for breaking and entering, trespassing, vandalism, and drug dealing. When he was 17, his stepfather kicked him out of the house. He then moved to nearby Bellevue, either living off of friends or supporting himself as a burglar.

Murders
On June 22, 1990, Russell picked up Mary Ann Pohlreich at a local bar, and then raped and murdered her. He left her nude body in a dumpster behind a McDonald's posed in a sexually explicit manner and holding a fir pine cone.

On August 9, he broke into the home of Carol Beethe, beating her to death and inflicting severe trauma to the corpse, including vaginal penetration with a shotgun.

On September 3, he murdered Andrea Levine, having broken into her house and beaten her to death. Once again, he had inflicted severe post-mortem trauma to his victim, cutting her multiple times with a table knife, shoving a vibrator in her mouth, and putting a copy of More Joy of Sex in her left hand.

Arrest and imprisonment
During the ensuing investigation, police learned that all three victims had been acquainted with George Russell, and that he had a lengthy arrest record. On September 12, he was arrested on a misdemeanor after being caught prowling through a residential area. When the arresting officers frisked him, they found a gun that traced back to a house that had been burglarized. A search of the house where he was staying yielded a bag containing a hair from Beethe's head, and a DNA test found his semen in Pohlreich's body.

He was tried and convicted of all three murders, and sentenced to life in prison.