Maury Travis was an extremely disturbed individual. Since the age of 14, he harbored thoughts of committing murder. As an adult, he converted his basement into a place of torment where he killed at least 17 women, capturing their agony and demise on video.
During his teenage years, Maury, also known as “Toby” Travis, began by exterminating pests and even his neighbor’s dog. He took pleasure in tormenting and eliminating women, but managed to restrain these impulses for many years.
As a young man in college, Maury developed a $300-a-day cocaine and crack addiction, which took over his life. Dropping out of school, he turned to robbing shoe stores. He paid sex workers for violent encounters in order to suppress his dark side.
The Release of Maury Travis from Prison
After serving time in prison for the robberies, Maury was released on parole and moved into his mother’s house in Ferguson, Missouri. He found a job as a server at a high-end restaurant in Chesterfield, Missouri, and became engaged. However, when his fiancée broke off the engagement, Maury could no longer suppress his dark side.
He frequented an area known as “The Stroll” in St. Louis, where he picked up sex workers and brought them to his house to indulge in crack with him. In his basement, he subjected these women to violence and death, documenting his brutality on video.
When police in St. Louis searched the home of suspected serial killer Maury Travis last summer, they discovered a hidden torture chamber in the basement, equipped with bondage gear, a stun gun, and clippings related to his suspected killings.
Most shockingly, they found a videotape containing footage of his crimes.
The tape, titled “Your Wedding Day,” showed Travis tying up and torturing women, including scenes of him apparently suffocating one of his victims.
The images on the tape were so disturbing that Police Chief Joe Mokwa recommended psychological counseling for the officers who viewed them. “They will haunt your nightmares,” he said.
Travis, a 36-year-old hotel waiter, took his own life in prison without confessing to any of the murders, but St. Louis police believe he was responsible for the deaths of between 12 and 20 women. At least two women survived his violent attacks; one suffered brain damage, and the other declined to press charges when police arrived after she fled from his home screaming in 2001. Authorities have identified 12 of his victims as drug-addicted prostitutes whose bodies were discarded along city streets and country roads in the St. Louis area between March 2001 and May 2002.
However, in a letter sent to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — which helped lead police to him — he boasted of killing 17 women.
“He claims he killed 17 women. We’re missing five of them,” said Mokwa.
Police believe Travis picked up prostitutes along a strip of Broadway just north of St. Louis, infested with crack houses and prostitution, and then took them to his ranch-style home in Ferguson.
They found numerous videotapes in Travis’ home showing him providing crack cocaine to the prostitutes and engaging in consensual sex with them. Afterward, he apparently allowed some of the women to leave.
With one exception, the excerpts released to Primetime did not show Travis physically torturing the women, but blood stains were visible on the walls and floor. When they examined the basement after his arrest, police noticed that the walls had been repainted multiple times, with layers of paint, blood, paint, and more blood.
In 2002, Post-Dispatch reporter Bill Smith wrote a profile of one of the victims, “heart-wrenching tale;” five days later, Smith received an anonymous letter claiming credit for 17 murders. Accompanying the letter was a map of West Alton, marked with an “X” indicating the location of a body.
Following the discovery of a skeleton there, authorities focused on the map, which appeared to have originated from an Internet service. Detectives identified a clear match on Expedia.com, according to an affidavit by FBI agent Melanie Jimenez.
On May 30, Expedia informed Jimenez that Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., provides the information for its mapping site.
So the FBI, using a subpoena, requested records of any maps of West Alton made between May 18, the date of the newspaper story that prompted the letter, and May 21, the postmark on the envelope. It took four days to receive a response.
On June 3, Microsoft reported that only one computer had accessed it. They stated that on May 20, the computer had “zoomed in on the map of the West Alton, Missouri area approximately 10 times in a chronological order to end with an exact match of the map” sent to the Post-Dispatch, as mentioned in the affidavit.
However, Microsoft could not provide any specific individual’s name, only an inconsequential address: the Internet Protocol address 65.227.106.78.
The FBI turned to WorldCom Inc. to trace the IP number, which assigns local telephone numbers to connect Internet services to their dial-up customers. The question was not just who used 65.227.106.78, but who used it at the specific time in question.
On June 4, WorldCom’s Internet division, UUnet, identified the user on the evening of May 20 as MSN/maurytravis, Jimenez stated. The MSN stands for Microsoft Network.
The FBI revisited Microsoft Network later the same day to identify the user. It was Maury Troy Travis of Ferguson.
This provided the basis for further investigation and, on June 7, an arrest and search warrant, which officials claimed was instrumental in securing the case with DNA and tire tread evidence linking Travis, a 36-year-old waiter, to some of the murders. He was charged with two counts of kidnapping in federal court documents connecting him to seven murders in total. Police suspect he may have committed ten or more.
Following his apprehension, Travis was confined in a super-maximum security jail cell and placed on suicide watch with a guard stationed outside his door. However, during a one-hour break for a shower — the only time of day the guard did not have an unobstructed view of his cell — Travis managed to hang himself in the far corner, using a makeshift rope braided from torn bedsheets. He had also bound his hands behind his back.
St. Louis police are certain that Travis was responsible for the bodies discovered between 2001 and 2002. Whether his claim of 17 victims is substantiated or not, the police believe he likely killed more victims than the 12 identified thus far.
“Who are these other women and where are they?” said Chief Mokwa. “There are some families out here that have a lost loved one, and they’ll always be uncertain of what happened to them.”
Details about his Victims
- Alysa Greenwade, discovered in 2001 (formally charged)
- Teresa Wilson, 36, found in 2001 (Court documents link him to her death)
- Betty James, 46, found in 2001 (formally charged)
- Verona Thompson, 36, found in 2001 (Court documents link him to her death)
- Yvonne Crues, 50, found in 2001 (Court documents link him to her death)
- Brenda Beasley, 33, found in 2001 (Court documents link him to her death)
- Cassandra F. Walker, 19, found in 2001
- Several unidentified women
It appeared that Travis had underestimated the ease with which Internet usage can be traced. In fact, ignorance – along with the straightforward utilization of technology by law enforcement and the sheer abundance of information on the Web – presents a challenge for civil liberties.
Things seemed to be going smoothly for Travis. He was systematically targeting drug addicts and prostitutes in St. Louis, Missouri, and neighboring East St. Louis, Illinois. Police were reluctant to acknowledge the presence of a serial killer behind the spate of killings. His activities had caused barely a ripple even in the cities where he operated.
Possibly due to this potential lack of awareness, he thought it wise to direct authorities to the decaying remains of an undiscovered victim near West Alton, Missouri, by providing instructions to a local newspaper. The woman’s body (still unidentified) was indeed found just across the road from where two of Travis’ previous victims had been discovered.
Unfortunately for Travis, he had included an Internet-generated map with his written letter. Police swiftly traced the map back to the sole IP address that recently downloaded it.
