RAIFORD, Fla. — A convicted serial rapist and killer imprisoned in Florida has confessed to a series of six murders, including two double homicides, committed in 1977 and 1978 in western Pennsylvania.
Edward Arthur Surratt, 79, formerly of Aliquippa, has been in Florida prisons since July 1978, when he was arrested in connection with an armed home invasion in which he tied up a family of three and raped the woman and the 15-year-old daughter before drunkenly falling asleep. The father was able to escape the electrical cord binding him and run to a neighbor’s house for help.
Surratt, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, was taken into custody at the family’s South Valano Beach home. He was later tried and convicted in the attack and sentenced to two life sentences and an additional 200 years in prison, according to Florida prison records.
He was also convicted and sentenced to life in the June 1, 1978, murder of Luther Langford, 66, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat inside his home near Columbia, South Carolina. Langford’s wife, Nell Langford, was beaten but survived.
Because of Surratt’s life sentences in both Florida and South Carolina, prosecutors in Pennsylvania do not plan to pursue charges in the cases to which he recently confessed, WPXI in Pittsburgh reported.
“Transporting someone who is serving homicide life sentences in Florida up here would be too risky to him and people transporting him, to the jury and court personnel,” Beaver County District Attorney David Lozier told the news station. “It’s more important to get the closure than another conviction for homicide.”
Beaver Township police Chief Carl Frost told WKBN in Youngstown that authorities believe there are additional homicides that Surratt has not admitted to.
A string of brutal attacks
Authorities in Florida did not initially know what, or who, they were dealing with when they found Surratt asleep in that house in Valano Beach. Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio had been in a state of panic in 1977 and early 1978, when the area suffered more than two dozen unsolved murders.
According to TribLive.com, authorities have linked Surratt, an unemployed long-haul trucker, to 18 of those killings, mostly couples. His pattern was to immediately kill the husband and either rape and kill the wife or abduct her.
Children in the homes were left physically unharmed. At least three of his alleged female victims have never been found.
Florida investigators stumbled upon Surratt’s history following his 1978 arrest, when they compared his fingerprints to those in the FBI’s files. It was then that they learned he was a fugitive suspected of the Dec. 31, 1977, shotgun murders of Guy Mills, 64, and his wife, 65-year-old Laura Mills, in their home in Breezewood, Pennsylvania.
Surratt was also suspected of killing Joel Krueger, 36, of Greenwood, that same day at a rest stop about 3 miles from the Mills home. Krueger’s body was found in his car New Year’s Day by a trucker, according to the Altoona Mirror.
Those are three of the murders Surratt confessed to in March, state troopers said in a news release. He has also admitted he was responsible for the Nov. 19, 1977, murders of William and Nancy Adams, both of Fallston, as well as the Jan. 7, 1978, murder of John Shelkons Sr.
Multiple reports indicate Surratt admitted at his Florida trial that he fatally shot Shelkons, 56, inside his Baden home and severely beat Shelkons’ wife, who survived the attack. The couple were found by their daughter when she returned home from a date.
Prosecutors in 1980 dropped the charges in the Shelkons case because Surratt had been sentenced in Florida and faced additional murder charges in South Carolina.
Shelkons’ son told WPXI that the confession in his father’s murder wasn’t a surprise.
“This wasn’t some big weight off me, but it’s still good to hear he finally ‘fessed up to it,” he told the station.
Authorities in Boardman, Ohio, also at one time charged Surratt with murder in the March 27, 1978, beating death of Katherine Filicky, a 70-year-old widow slain in her home. According to the Pittsburgh Press, Surratt was arrested on a traffic violation that same day in Boardman.
Like the Shelkons case, the Ohio murder charge was never brought to trial.
A Press report from 1977 states that police were called to the Adams home Nov. 20, 1977, after the couple’s two children, ages 7 and 4, found William Adams, 31, shot to death in the master bedroom. Nancy Adams, 29, was nowhere to be found.
Police officers arrived after the couple’s son called his grandmother and said he couldn’t find his mother. William Adams had been killed by a shotgun blast to the chest.
Nancy Adams’ body remains missing.
Surratt became a suspect in the serial murders following the New Year’s Eve attacks on Krueger and Guy and Laura Mills. According to contemporaneous news reports, he was placed under surveillance after detectives learned his car had been seen in Breezewood around the time of those killings.
He was already on the police’s radar when Shelkons was slain.
Authorities in South Carolina ultimately sought a warrant charging Surratt with the murder of Luther Langford and the assault of his wife. He was tied to that crime after Langford’s car was found in Aliquippa with the murder weapon inside.
Surratt’s fingerprints were found on the baseball bat, authorities said.
Investigators also found items in the car that belonged to Joseph Weinman, 30, and his wife Katherine, 29, who were beaten to death Sept. 30, 1977, at their Marshall Township, Pennsylvania, home. Joseph Weinman, a Vietnam veteran, was paraplegic.
His wife was both beaten and raped before her throat was cut, according to news reports.
Detectives staked out Langford’s stolen car and tried to arrest Surratt when he returned to the vehicle, the Press reported. He was able to elude the troopers, however, and was on the run until his arrest in Florida the following month.
‘He was like a machine’
Surratt’s recent confessions are not the only ones he has offered since he began serving his Florida life sentences. In 2007, he confessed to the murders of six other people.
His alleged victims were mostly killed in similar manners, sometimes days or even hours apart from one another.
“I think he was like a machine,” Frost told WKBN.
Surratt admitted that he killed David and Linda Hamilton Sept. 19, 1977, in their Beaver Township, Ohio, home. David Hamilton had been shot three times with a .38-caliber revolver, authorities said.
Linda Hamilton, 28, was missing, and the couple’s two young children were found unharmed in the house. They had slept through their father’s killing.
“The Hamiltons’ car was later found parked at the entrance of a closed strip mine off State Route 7, near the truck stop where Linda worked,” according to the Charley Project, a nonprofit dedicated to missing persons cases. “A man’s boot prints and a woman’s bare footprints led away from the driver’s side of the car.”
Linda Hamilton was initially a suspect in her husband’s death and police issued a warrant for her arrest, according to reports. Her father told the Press in 1987, a decade after she vanished, that the warrant was “completely crazy.”
“It seemed like they were pretty lax in Beaver Township here and let things get overlooked in their investigation,” Chester Hall told the newspaper. “They tore through the house, tearing up a lot of the evidence.”
Linda Hamilton remained a wanted suspect for years, even after she’d been declared legally dead by a judge. Her body has never been found.
Frost, who was a sergeant in 1987, acknowledged then that Beaver Township investigators “overlooked some obvious clues” in the case.
“I’ll have to admit that this case is in a shambles,” Frost said then. “Ten years ago, our department was not up to investigation of a major case like this.”
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The Hamilton case was linked through ballistics to the killing of truck driver Frank Ziegler, 28, of Kittanning, Ohio, whose body was found in his tanker truck a week after David Hamilton was found slain. The two men were killed with the same gun and ammunition.
Ziegler was found dead in Marshall Township, not far from the home where the Weinmans were slain three days later.
Surratt also confessed in 2007 to the Nov. 10, 1977, murders of John and Mary Davis, as well as the Oct. 22, 1977, killing of John Feeny.
The Davis couple were found dead inside their North Lima home, which had been set on fire. The couple’s son-in-law discovered the blaze after going to the home because his in-laws could not be reached.
Mary Davis, 61, was found in the bedroom, while John Davis, 63, was found in the kitchen, according to the Salem News. Both had been killed with a shotgun.
Feeny, 17, of Coraopolis, was killed while out with his fiancée, Ranee Ann Gregor, 15, of Robinson Township.
“Ranee’s father believed the couple was going to a nearby pizza parlor,” according to a case summary by the Charley Project. “They were last seen at approximately 10 p.m. that day at a gas station.”
Feeny’s parents had asked him to return the family van by that time so his mother, who worked a night shift, could drive to work. They never saw him alive again.
“When Ranee didn’t come home, her parents became concerned and contacted authorities,” the Charley Project’s website says. “The following day, John was found murdered at the steering wheel of his family’s van, which was parked with its motor running off Crescent Road, near an old strip mine in a spot known as a lover’s lane.”
Feeny had been killed by a shotgun blast to the neck. The only sign of Gregor was her purse and her blue and white jacket, which remained in the van.
The high school junior has never been found.
In his 2007 confession, Surratt told investigators that the girl’s body, along with that of Linda Hamilton, was “unrecoverable.”
Feeny’s mother, Rita Feeny, told WPXI this week that Surratt’s punishment of life in prison is not severe enough.
“I’d like to be the person who takes his hands and pulls his fingernails out by the roots, while he is awake,” Feeny said.
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