A Surry County inmate who has been jailed for more than two years while awaiting trial on a local murder charge has been extradited to California, where he faces murder charges in three deaths that occurred more than 45 years ago.
Warren Luther Alexander, 73, was initially arrested in Diamondhead, Mississippi, on March 15, 2022, on a charge of murder in the July 7, 1992 murder of Nona Starney Cobb, whose body was found alongside Interstate 77 in Surry County, near Elkin.
Alexander has been in prison since, awaiting his murder trial in Surry County, when officials from Ventura County, California, contacted local authorities with information tying Alexander to three additional homicides there, dating back to 1977.
According to the Ventura County District Attorney’s office, a string of strangulation deaths that year claimed the lives of at least three women: Kimberly Carol Fritz, 18 at the time of her death, who was killed on May 29, 1977; Velvet Ann Sanchez, 31, who was killed on Sept. 8 of that year; and Lorraine Ann Rodriguez, 21, whose death occurred on Dec. 27, 1977.
Alexander, who was a long-haul truck driver at the time of the deaths, is charged with murder in each of the three California cases. Officials in Ventura County this week labeled Alexander a serial killer, although they have not said if he may be suspected in other deaths around the nation.
The California District Attorney’s office said the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit began re-examining the 1977 deaths, although DA officials did not specifically say what prompted the unit to reopen the case.
While DNA testing was not an available technology in 1977, during the recent re-examination of the evidence, sufficient DNA samples were present to point the finger at Alexander. Since he was already in jail in Surry County, linking the DNA to him was a simple task.
He was extradited to California on Tuesday, with a brief court appearance there Wednesday. His arraignment on those charges is set for Aug. 21
The use of DNA from cold case files there was similar to what led to his initial capture in the Surry County case.
In the local case, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s Cold Case Investigation Unit along with Surry County Sheriff’s Office officials began examining evidence from Cobb’s 1992 death. While a witness who saw Cobb climb into the cab of a track-trailer at a rest stop in Cleveland County was able to give a description of the driver, it wasn’t until modern DNA technology was applied to the evidence that authorities had enough evidence to arrest and charge Alexander.
He remains jailed in Ventura County without bond.
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