About a year ago, patrolman Ty Hadley of the Spring Hill (Tennessee) Police Department saw a book on a desk inside a co-worker's office and unknowingly started a life-changing conversation.
The hardback, “In the Name of the Children” by retired FBI Special Agent Jeffrey L. Rinek, belonged to Melissa Wilson, the department's evidence technician manager and his colleague of seven years.
“I don’t like true crime, but it would be really cool to solve a cold case,” said Hadley, a 31-year-old field training officer with the Spring Hill P.D., which serves the middle Tennessee town of about 41,000 people.
“We have one," Wilson said. "And we have a lot of good evidence on it.”
Little did the duo know their chat would not only help close a nearly 30-year-old homicide case in their department, but lead to the discovery of a man accused of being a serial killer whose victims span two states and counting.
Their curiosity ended in a search earlier this month that led local, state and federal law enforcement officers about 700 miles from Spring Hill, Tennessee, to Waterloo, Iowa, where they ultimately arrested 58-year-old Clark Perry Baldwin and charged him with murder in the 1991 death of 33-year-old Pamela Aldridge McCall and her unborn child.
Baldwin, a long-haul truck driver who'd traveled across 48 states, Canada and Mexico, was arrested without incident May 6 at his downtown Waterloo home after investigators last month linked his DNA with semen and other materials recovered from McCall and two other victims in Wyoming in the 1990s.
“It’s definitely really weird how it came up. Just a chance thing," said Wilson, a 35-year-old married mother of one daughter who, over the course of the reopened yearlong investigation, spent hours sifting through thousands of papers and boxes of evidence in the unearthed case.
"That was a really good phone call to get. I knew it was just a matter of time before they would be able to locate the person (Baldwin)," Spring Hill Police Chief Don Brite said, recalling the initial frustration and final elation in his department of 63 sworn officers.
“This is satisfaction knowing all the years that this case has not been solved. It just shows through joint cooperation with law enforcement across the country that we can work together," said Brite, who has led the department since 2010. "Good old-fashioned police work came into play, too.”
A free-spirited life ends in Tennessee
McCall, whose mother called her Pammy and often went by the name Rose, was born in 1958 in Cedar Rapids.
Described by her mother, Marsha Lyell of Topping, Virginia, as free-spirited and transient, McCall often hitchhiked through states including Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
"She would ride the country with truckers," recalled retired Spring Hill Police Capt. Ron Coleman, the lead detective in the woman's slaying.
On March 10, 1991, about 12:30 p.m., a passerby found McCall's body on a hill off the shoulder of a road in Spring Hill.
"I think she was shoulder-carried up there and dropped," Coleman, now 63, said.
"We think she’d been killed in that area within 12 to 24 hours of her being found," said Brent Cooper, attorney general of the 22nd Judicial District in Tennessee, whose office formally reopened the case.
An autopsy determined McCall had neck injuries and died of manual strangulation. Sperm was recovered from pantyhose worn by McCall, who was last seen at a nearby Tennessee truck stop a day earlier.
"It took a month to ID her," Coleman said. "I had to send out fingerprints to every police department I thought she could have been at."
At the time, police had several people of interest in mind, said Tommy Goetz, the chief investigator for Cooper’s office who traveled to Iowa last month to help catch Baldwin.
"She was known to ride with one particular trucker frequently, but he was eliminated because of an alibi and his log books," Goetz said.
No suspect was named, and DNA in the case was sent to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in 1991. Lab technicians couldn’t match it because the sample they had in the McCall case was too small. At that time, DNA technology was just starting to take hold in law enforcement and databases weren't as robust.
"You had to have a definite suspect back then," Coleman said. "We had such a small amount (of DNA) that we'd have to put it through a replication process and, as part of that replication process, it would have destroyed the original sample, which would have basically ended the case. The decision was made to let technology catch up to us."
Then the case went cold.
More on Clark Perry Baldwin:
- Suspected serial killer arrested in Waterloo
- Woman who lived with accused serial killer describes him as 'gentle giant'
- Illinois police say Iowa man not involved in 1992 killing of Iowan Tammy Zywicki
Criminal charges pile up for trucker
Meanwhile, that same year Baldwin, an over-the-road truck driver living in Nashua and Waterloo, Iowa, and Springfield, Missouri, was charged with raping a 21-year-old hitchhiker at gunpoint in Wheeler County, Texas. The woman told police that Baldwin struck her on the head, bound her hands and mouth, and tried to choke her to death.
The charges were dismissed after the state was unable to locate the victim, court documents show.
In 1997, Secret Service agents raided Baldwin's apartment in Springfield, Missouri, after learning he was making counterfeit U.S. currency on a personal computer, court records show. He and two female associates were indicted on counterfeiting charges. Baldwin was sentenced to 18 months in prison and released in 1999.
Baldwin's stint in prison irked Coleman for years. At the time, they only took fingerprints for people behind bars. It wouldn't be until early May 2020 that Coleman would learn Baldwin was named a suspect in McCall's case.
"There was no requirement for a criminal's DNA to be put in a database for law enforcement access," Coleman said.
Decades later, everything changed.
Preserved evidence, meticulous notes
Twenty-nine years can do a lot for a small town.
Back then, Spring Hill's population was just over 2,000 people and the police department had just over a half-dozen officers.
Today more than 41,000 people live there and the department has 10 times more staff.
When Wilson and Hadley's curiosity sparked last year, they approached police Lt. Justin Whitwell, who turned to Cooper for help.
"Usually the first roadblock we run into with cold cases is that departments over the years ... tend to clean house, and sometimes that means getting rid of old evidence," Cooper said.
Not in McCall's case.
“How well preserved it was for over 29 years was incredible," Hadley said.
"We had her clothes, her pantyhose, her fingernail clippings … the DNA evidence all stored in a box in the department's evidence room at City Hall," Wilson said. "We didn’t see the larger case file until we visited the detective Criminal Investigation Division closet back at the police department. It was the amount of notes, I was surprised at how big the case file was.
"Coleman really put a lot of heart and soul into solving the case. It was full of his notes, his initial report, crime scene photos, paperwork, TBI lab forms from where they had sent stuff early on in the case."
It took Goetz days to go through it.
"We went to every truck stop in the Nashville area, picked up gas records, not having anything to compare it to but to know we'd have it if we needed it if the time came," Coleman recalled.
Cooper reopened the McCall case in April 2019, and using DNA recovered from the crime scene, Goetz said authorities were able to create a DNA profile of the suspect.
"We sent her pantyhose to Wyoming," Hadley said.
When put it into a national database, the DNA came back as a match for a suspect in the two unsolved homicides in Wyoming.
Investigators then zeroed in on Baldwin after finding DNA in commercial genealogy databases of a relative's profile, Goetz said.
For 10 days in April, Goetz said, state and federal officials in Iowa had Baldwin's apartment under surveillance.
One morning last month, he went to the local Walmart and the FBI collected DNA from a shopping cart he used. They also snatched DNA off a peach can, orange peelings and soda they watched him toss in trash outside his apartment.
"The same DNA found on McCall's pantyhose was on those items that Baldwin had touched," Goetz said. "We got him May 6 at his home on the sixth floor of the eight-floor apartment building."
Goetz said when he and another armed investigator knocked on Baldwin's door, he opened it and agreed to answer questions.
They questioned him for most of May 6 and arrested him without incident the next day, Goetz said.
Authorities won't say what they talked about, but Baldwin waived extradition May 7 and was expected to be back in Tennessee this month.
The Wyoming slayings
In Wyoming, Baldwin is charged in the deaths of two unidentified women whose bodies were found in 1992 roughly 400 miles apart. The women are referred to as "Bitter Creek Betty" and "I-90 Jane Doe." Both were believed to be in their late teens or early 20s, Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Cmdr. Matt Waldock said.
Authorities said a female trucker discovered the nude body of the first victim in March 1992 near the Bitter Creek truck turnout on Interstate 80 in southwestern Wyoming. An autopsy determined the woman suffered head trauma consistent with strangulation and her body had likely been in the snow for weeks.
A month later, Wyoming Department of Transportation workers found the partially mummified body of a pregnant woman in a ditch off Interstate 90 near Sheridan in northern Wyoming.
An autopsy didn't determine the cause of death but found the victim had an injury potentially consistent with suffering a blow to the head.
Authorities are investigating Baldwin's potential ties to more unsolved cases.
"We’re looking at him at other cold cases as a person of interest. We’re getting calls from all over — Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, and that’s just calls I’m getting,” Goetz said.
Police: Clark Perry Baldwin 'does not appear to have been involved' in 1992 killing of Iowan Tammy Zywicki
Baldwin's name also surfaced during a 1992 homicide investigation in Iowa. His ex-wife told police then that Baldwin once bragged about "killing a girl out West by strangulation and throwing her out of his truck," court documents say.
"I don't know what the legal definition of a serial killer is, but we feel strongly he's responsible for multiple deaths," Waldock said. "Obviously other cases are still under investigation. We're hopeful that we're able to further this investigation."
Progress is being made to identify the women, Waldock said.
'We waited a year'
McCall's mother is now 78 and still living in Virginia.
At the time of her daughter's death, Lyell said she wanted her daughter's killer, if ever caught, to face the death penalty.
"I give her birth and air, and he takes the air out of her," her mother told the Newport News Daily Press in Virginia in April 1991. "That's what makes me mad — he's still breathing."
Goetz called Lyell the day of Baldwin's arrest and broke the news.
"I told her he was in custody," he said. "She was just hysterical. Just God blessing everyone."
When Coleman spoke to Lyell for the first time in 29 years, he said he was overcome with emotion.
"At age 78 she remembers every bit of our conversations up there. She is so thankful for everyone doing this — especially in Tennessee. I cried like a baby," Coleman said. "I said, 'I couldn't complete it (myself), I had to have some help.' "
Lyell told The Tennessean on May 13: "I'm past elated. For 29 years I've been to her grave. It's been a long, hard walk."
This month, Hadley and Wilson sat side by side in the same office where just over a year ago, they started a conversation that ultimately led to Baldwin's arrest.
"We waited a year for this," said Hadley, a married father of one daughter. He and his wife are also expecting their second child.
“I cried when I saw the press release," Wilson said. "My heart has always ached for her mom. I have a daughter, and I can’t imagine going years and years without knowing who killed her but also knowing that they’re still walking the streets. Just that one case, to know how much it would mean to her mom if it would get solved."
Meanwhile, the book that sparked the conversation last year that ultimately led to Baldwin's arrest remained on Wilson's desk.
"It’s been a year yet I actually haven’t had time to finish it," she said.
She said she does now.
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