Sick Timothy

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, the case of serial killer Timothy Krajcir goes from bad to worse when investigators uncover a long web of sexual assaults and murders spanning decades. Follow the chain of overlooked clues and evidence as Timothy uses his periods of parole to escape justice and commit even more heinous crimes right under law enforcement’s noses.

1944, West Mahanoy Township, Pennsylvania became the home of a life steeped deep in pain and tragedy. Timothy Wayne McBride had just been born to Charles McBride and Fern Yost. Only a year later the scene would be set for a winding trail of death and destruction when Charles left Fern and their one-year-old son to fend for themselves.

Chasing after jobs and trying to keep afloat, Fern moved Timothy and herself from place to place, never staying anywhere long enough to establish a home and grow some roots before moving onto the next. Timothy would later describe his relationship with his mother, especially during these times, as cold and un-affectionate. But in 1950, some of that turbulent and unstable childhood changed. Even though Fern was still emotionally distant from her son, that wasn’t always how she was with others and when Timothy was around six years old, she married Bernie Krajcir.

Bernie adopted Timothy as his own, but by the time Timothy had gained one stable parental figure in his life, he’d also already taken the first step down a very slippery slope.

At the age of only six, Timothy made his first acquaintance with the law when he was charged with his first crime. He’d stolen a bicycle and been caught and with that came the first blemish on his criminal record.

Only four years later and things had taken a drastic turn from the relatively harmless to the beginnings of something extreme. Timothy began showing signs of obsession and possessiveness towards women, or more accurately one woman in particular. Fern became the target for Timothy’s sexual and emotional desires, further driving a rift between mother and son.

Timothy acted out these urges in any way that he could. He started wearing feminine clothing and stalking other women. By the age of thirteen, Timothy had established himself as an exhibitionist who often got caught fondling and groping women on the streets.

By the age of seventeen, Timothy had left home and appeared to be trying to correct the course. He joined the Navy as a cook, but his attempt to stay on the right side of the law didn’t last for long. Only fourteen months into his training, Timothy was dishonorably discharged for a crime that Timothy had become all too comfortable committing: sexual assault.

Now completely free of anything that could provide him with a sense of structure or even morality, Timothy was unleashed. One crime he later admitted to happened almost right after he was dishonorably discharged and that was when he raped a woman in Waukegan, Illinois. He then stabbed his victim with a pair of scissors before leaving her to bleed out at the scene. The woman miraculously survived, but her assailant was still free to strike again.

That same year, Timothy attacked another woman in Chicago. His second victim also survived the assault, but this time Timothy was caught and convicted for rape and attempted murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years behind bars, but he would get out after serving only fourteen.

In 1977, Timothy was released on parole and he seized his newfound opportunity. On the surface, he played the part of the reformed inmate and bided his time. As part of the conditions of his parole, he enrolled in the Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he studied Administrative Justice with a minor in psychology. This would turn out to be the perfect degree for anyone looking to learn how to avoid getting caught for any future crimes that they wanted to commit. Timothy then went on to study and then become an EMT ambulance driver, then giving himself the perfect mask and the authority to hide behind to commit them.

By day, he walked the streets, seemingly an upright citizen and reformed inmate. He was first a student and then an EMT medic. His colleagues became his friends and both the men and women who knew him found him to be pleasant and charming, but by night Timothy Krajcir was someone else entirely. He stalked the streets, often traveling to other cities to help muddle the waters and keep the authorities off the trail of his crimes.

In 1977, the very same year that Timothy was released, he broke into a home in Carbondale and stole a .38 caliber handgun. He then later broke into another home, where he attacked a mother and her twenty-five-year-old daughter. He sexually assaulted the daughter before shooting both of the women in the head, killing them and eliminating any witnesses to his crimes.

But one of his victims was a little closer to home. She was the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his neighbors and by 1979, Timothy had already been molesting her for over two years. When he was finally caught and arrested for sexually assaulting a minor, his EMT friends and colleagues couldn’t believe that the Timothy Krajcir they knew could be capable of such a heinous crime. He told them that the girl had lied to him about her age, and they believed him. His friends all banded together and posted his bail, essentially releasing a killer and a rapist back onto the streets.

Timothy then seized his opportunity again. While out on bail, he attacked and killed two more women in Pennsylvania and raped a third. When he was found guilty of the child molestation charges, his former colleagues were beside themselves with guilt and shame.

Almost unbelievably, Timothy was released only about a year after sentencing. In 1980 his psychiatrist announced that he believed Timothy to be reformed and said that the only way to prove his theory was to put Timothy to the test.

It’s crucial to remember that at this point in time, no one had connected the trail of bodies and assaults to Timothy, in fact, the authorities hadn’t even pieced together that these crimes were being committed by the same person yet. Timothy had put all the knowledge he’d gained from his administrative justice degree to good use, but far from his intelligence, it was the lack of DNA technology that had actually kept him ahead of investigators for as long as he would be. For the most part, Timothy only had to conceal his identity from his victims and keep variables in his MO for the authorities to think that there was more than one killer out there.

The closest they came to pinning everything on one person was when Timothy became known as the “blue bandanna rapist”. He often wore a blue bandanna over his face when committing his crimes and perhaps this marked the beginning of the end of him evading suspicion. Maybe spurred on by his success in eluding the authorities so far, Timothy began to get careless.

In 1982, he broke into a house wearing that same blue bandanna. He then proceeded to rape a thirty-four-year-old woman while her ten-year-old daughter watched. He then left and later attacked a fifty-seven-year-old woman in Cape Girardeau. He then strangled her to death, but left several strands of his own hair behind at the scene. 

Later that year, he killed another sixty-five-year-old woman in Cape Girardeau. This time he left behind his blood, a palm print, the bootlace he’d used to strangle her and several of his skin samples were recovered under his victim’s fingernails.

Unbeknownst to Timothy, the noose was tightening.

When he murdered twenty-three-year-old Deborah Sheppard, he would leave behind a clue that would unravel the long web of crimes that Timothy had gotten away with so far. This time the investigators recovered a sample of Timothy’s semen from Deborah’s shirt and even though DNA technology still hadn’t reached a point where they could do much with it, they saved and stored that sample and the countdown began ticking.

In 1983, when Timothy was thirty-eight years old, the police found him sitting in his car, holding a pistol which was a direct violation of the terms of his parole. They arrested him, probably thinking that their job was done, but it was only the beginning. Behind the scenes, investigators had begun to connect the dots and the technology was finally catching up to a point where they could start to prove that Timothy was guilty of so much more.

In 2007, investigators ran Timothy’s DNA against the semen sample recovered at Deborah Sheppard’s murder. The results were a match. When he was first confronted with this new evidence, Timothy denied his crime, but confessed the very next day. He still concealed his other crimes, but the other DNA samples he’d left behind over the short spree of his most heinous crimes were starting to catch up with him.

When the victims’ families announced that they wouldn’t be seeking the death penalty, Timothy came clean. He confessed to the murders of nine more women and at least seven more sexual assaults. He was sentenced to forty years for the murder of Deborah Sheppard and another forty for Virginia Lee Witte in Marion, Illinois. He then pled guilty to the murder of five women from Cape Girardeau and was given thirteen consecutive life sentences.

For once, it’s pretty safe to say that Timothy won’t be getting out of prison again. He is currently still serving his sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois which is a prison designed for inmates who need extra security or simply can’t follow the rules of other prison systems.