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A long-haul trucker from Iowa was arrested Wednesday in connection with the cold case murders of three women almost three decades ago after new DNA evidence allegedly tied him to the crimes.
Detectives with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation are also investigating any connections that suspect Clark Perry Baldwin, 58, might have with other cold cases since 1980 that might fit his pattern.
He also allegedly raped and choked a woman in Texas in 1991, according to court documents.
Baldwin was charged in the slayings of two unidentified women known as “Bitter Creek Betty” and “I-90 Jane Doe” who were found 400 miles apart in Wyoming in 1992. In Tennessee, he was charged with two counts of murder in the 1991 killing of a pregnant woman, Pamela McCall, and her unborn baby.
Tennessee District Attorney General Brent Cooper praised investigators for “bringing this serial killer to justice.”
“I'm also very happy to be able to give Rose McCall's mother a chance to see justice for her daughter's and granddaughter's murders,” he said.
After a cold case investigator submitted DNA evidence to a Tennessee crime lab related to McCall's murder, the lab developed a DNA profile of the suspect. A national database search matched the profile to one that had been developed years earlier linking the two Wyoming deaths.
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Investigators zeroed in on Baldwin after finding DNA in commercial genealogy databases of someone related to the suspect’s profile, court documents say. Last month in Waterloo, Iowa, the FBI secretly collected DNA from Baldwin’s trash and a shopping cart he used at Walmart and testing revealed that it was a match.
A 21-year-old hitchhiker who Baldwin allegedly raped in Texas in 1991 told police at the time that he held her at gunpoint, hit her on the head, bound her hands and mouth and choked her. Baldwin allegedly admitted to the assault but was never prosecuted.
His name has surfaced in other unsolved murders, including the 1992 murder of a 21-year-old Iowa college student and a 22-year-old truck stop clerk who was bludgeoned to death in Iowa in 1992, authorities say.
Baldwin’s ex-wife told police then that he boasted about “killing a girl out west by strangulation and throwing her out of his truck,” court documents say.
Baldwin was indicted on counterfeiting charges in 1997 after Secret Service agents raided his apartment and found he was making counterfeit money on his computer. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
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Jazz Baldwin, 32, learned two years ago that she is Baldwin’s daughter after she bought a DNA kit. She said she was shocked to hear of his alleged crimes.
“I heard rumors about his ‘possible crimes’ but always thought they were bogus,” she wrote on Facebook. “Murder was NOT on the list of things we thought he had done and gotten away with.”
He was being held without bond in an Iowa jail and will be extradited to Tennessee where he’s expected to face trial first.
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