| Criminal | |
|---|---|
|
Name |
Donald Allen North |
|
Alias |
Donald Allen Fallbrooks (birth name) |
|
Gender |
Male |
|
Birth Date |
May 27, 1973 |
|
Family |
Travis Fallbrooks (father; deceased) |
|
Occupation |
Park ranger (at the time of 1998 arrest) |
|
Pathology |
Serial Killer |
|
Modus Operandi |
Varied |
|
Status |
Deceased |
|
Portrayed By |
|
"What can I say? I love a good chase."
Donald Allen North, a.k.a. "The Houdini Killer", was a serial killer and rapist known for escaping from prison multiple times and going on killing sprees.
Background[]
North was born as Donald Allen Fallbrooks in Chesapeake, Virginia. His alcoholic father Travis was physically and emotionally abusive towards all three of his children, especially North, while their mother Martha ignored the abuse. According to North, he would often try to hide from Travis during one of his drunken rages, but Travis would always somehow find him. Eventually, on his thirteenth birthday, North killed his entire family by burning the house down. The fire was written up as the result of faulty wiring, and North was put into foster care. He was adopted by Blake and Hannah North, members of the wealthy North family, who lived in Coeur d'Alene. North grew up exhibiting a number of psychopathic traits, such as setting fires and killing small animals, but the Norths ignored it, believing it was his way of letting out his grief for his family.
As an adult, his adoptive parents died, leaving a sizable portion of their wealth to him. North became a ranger with the Heyburn State Park, near Lake Coeur d'Alene. In 1995, he took advantage of his job to start killing women and teenage girls. He would do so by raping and stabbing them to death, then dumping their bodies in Lake Coeur d'Alene. The murders garnered widespread fear and panic in the city, leading him to be known as the "Coeur d'Alene Killer", or simply the "CDA Killer". In his personal life, he had three failed marriages. After killing sixteen victims, North was finally apprehended on the night of November 12, 1998, by the BAU, which was led by Jason Gideon at the time. At the time, he was about to kill a seventeenth victim, Tiffany Cobb, but she was rescued. However, while at the local jail, he took advantage of a restroom visit to slip out of his handcuffs using lip balm. After killing a police officer and stealing his gun and uniform, North escaped the jail and used the uniform to enter an apartment complex and hold five women hostage. He was rearrested after the standoff left four of the hostages dead.
After being tried and found guilty on all counts, North was imprisoned at Idaho Maximum Security Institution. In 2005, he and two other inmates managed to escape from the prison through a ventilation duct. Luke Alvez and the rest of the FBI's Fugitive Task Force were assigned to recapture the escaped convicts; it was Alvez's first case on the Fugitive Task Force. Though North's accomplices were recaptured within days, North himself remained at large for a month, during which he managed to kill seven women before his recapture. As a result of these new crimes, he was imprisoned at the United States Penitentiary in McCreary, where he remained until September 28, 2016. That day, the prison was targeted by a Virginia-based anarchist group carrying out the second phase of an attempted terrorist attack. In the chaos, thirteen serial killers escaped from prisons all across the U.S. Unbeknownst to everyone, North took advantage of the chaos to stage his own death. He killed a corrections officer, switched identities with him, and triggered a gas explosion to escape, thereby becoming the fourteenth serial killer escapee.
North then killed a recently evicted plumber named Alexander Bishops and stole his identity. Finally, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, and founded a successful real estate business. During that time, he came across Strawberry Heights, a neighborhood notorious for its high rates of crime and prostitution, and deduced that four serial killers were active in the area, unbeknownst to the police. Since all four killers strangled their victims to death with minute differences in their M.O.s, he took advantage of the opportunity to kill victims of his own and cover them up as additional victims of any of the other killing sprees. Because of this, when Detroit authorities were alerted to the possibility that prostitutes were being murdered, they opened an investigation with the assumption that only one killer was responsible and never came to suspect North. In July 2018, North was approached by Hattie Guzman, a freelance journalist and podcaster, for an interview about the serial murders. Fearful that she suspected him in the murders, he later tracked her down at her studio while she was livestreaming an episode. There, he fatally shot her, her co-host, and a guest. This led to the summoning of the BAU, which included Alvez as a member.
History[]
Known Victims[]
- May 27, 1986, Chesapeake, Virginia: The Fallbrooks family (his family; all killed in a house fire; their deaths were written up as an accident until 2018)
- Travis Fallbrooks (father)
- Martha Fallbrooks (mother)
- Russell Fallbrooks (brother)
- Cassie Fallbrooks (sister)
- Unspecified dates from 1995 to 1998, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (all were raped, fatally stabbed repeatedly, and their bodies dumped in Lake Coeur d'Alene):
- Lynette Reyes
- Renee Webb
- Mary Daniels
- Claire Nash
- Amanda Parsons
- Danielle Holloway
- Brandy Bates
- Crystal Lloyd
- Carrie Blake
- Lindsey Allen
- Tanya Dawson
- Grace Sims
- Annie Fowler
- Robyn Mills
- Ora Davis
- Terry Flores
- November 12-13, 1998, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho:
- Tiffany Cobb (attempted to abduct and kill)
- Officer John Alwood (bludgeoned and stole his gun and uniform)
- The apartment standoff:
- Linda Ball (raped and shot execution-style)
- Priscilla Collins (raped and shot execution-style)
- Maxine Rose (raped and shot execution-style)
- Mable Floyd (raped and shot execution-style)
- Colleen Hunt (raped and attempted to shoot)
- July 2005:
- Boise, Idaho: Kathy Reeves (raped, then run over with a car in Salt Lake City, Utah, and her body dumped in Great Salt Lake)
- Salt Lake City, Utah: Lana Burns (raped, then beaten to death in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and her body dismembered post-mortem)
- Colorado Springs, Colorado: Daisy Kim (raped, then burned alive in Albuquerque, New Mexico)
- Albuquerque, New Mexico: Edith Estrada (raped, then asphyxiated with a plastic bag in Dallas, Texas, and buried her body)
- Dallas, Texas: Martha Murphy (raped, then slashed her throat in Little Rock, Arkansas, and buried her body)
- Little Rock, Arkansas: Lillie Flowers (raped, then snapped her neck in Nashville, Tennessee, and buried her body)
- Nashville, Tennessee: Jeannie Gardner (raped, then strangled in Louisville, Kentucky)
- Louisville, Kentucky: Erin Crenshaw (abducted, raped, and attempted to kill; was rescued)
- September 28, 2016, Memphis, Tennessee:
- Unnamed corrections officer (bludgeoned and burned his body post-mortem; stole his uniform and car)
- Alexander Bishops (killed by unknown causes and buried his body; stole his identity and car)
- Unspecified dates from 2017 to 2018, Detroit, Michigan:
- Ruby Brooks (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Judith Mitchell (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Heather Rodriguez (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Dorothy Edwards (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Anna Cox (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Denise Green (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- Christine Campbell (raped, tortured, and strangled)
- 2018, Detroit, Michigan:
- July 26:
- The podcast studio shooting:
- Hattie Guzman (shot twice in the chest and once in the head with a .357 Magnum revolver)
- Raymond Bryant (incidental; shot once in the back of the head with a .357 Magnum revolver)
- Valerie Ortiz (incidental; shot twice in the chest with a .357 Magnum revolver)
- Gary Wood (Valerie Ortiz's ex-boyfriend; inebriated with alcohol, fatally shot in the side of the head, and made his death look like a suicide)
- The podcast studio shooting:
- July 27: The Norman family (abducted and intended to kill)
- Connie Norman (mother; also raped; was rescued two days later)
- Billy Norman (son; was rescued two days later)
- Daisy Norman (daughter; she escaped the next day)
- July 26: