Man arrested for 1992 Surry County killing charged in 3 California homicides

SURRY COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — A man who was charged in the cold case killing of a woman whose corpse was found in Surry County has been charged with three identical homicides on the other side of the country.

KTLA reported on Wednesday that Warren Luther Alexander, of Diamondback, Mississippi, was charged with the 1977 killing of three women, 18-year-old Kimberly Carol Fritz, 31-year-old Velvet Ann Sanchez and 22-year-old Lorraine Ann Rodriguez.

Alexander was in custody in Surry County for the 1992 killing of Nona Cobb . He was arrested on March 15, 2022, and extradited to North Carolina on March 27, the Surry County Sheriff’s Office said in an April 2022 press conference.

According to KTLA, “the exact circumstances surrounding the women’s deaths were not disclosed by the [Ventura County DA], an article published in 1978 in the Utah publication The Daily Herald stated that the three women were prostitutes who were strangled with their own underwear.”

Cobb was also found strangled to death 15 years after Fritz, Sanchez and Rodriguez were killed. Sanchez and Fritz were found in motel rooms and Rodriguez was found near a highway, but reports at the time believed she was also killed at a motel but dumped after the fact.

Similar to Rodriguez, Cobb’s body was found on the side of a highway. She was found on a ramp to I-77 in Elkin in July of 1992 by a truck driver. She was last seen alive in Cleveland County when a woman said they saw Cobb get into a tractor-trailer with a man, believed to be Alexander.

Investigators retested the DNA found on Cobb’s body in 2021, which eventually led them to Alexander, who was arrested in Mississippi.

Over in California, investigators began looking back into the deaths of Fritz, Sanchez and Rodriguez in February 2023, according to KTLA.

Alexander, now 73, was extradited from Surry County to Ventura County, California where he is being held under no bond.

“While this may be an old case, this is a new phase in the investigation, because there may be other victims. We are asking anyone with information, whether it’s law enforcement with an unsolved homicide or murder where a woman’s body was found along a highway or an interstate, or someone with other information or insight on this. We ask you to contact the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Hickory office,” Captain Scott Hudson of the Surry County Sheriff’s Office said when Alexander was taken into custody in 2022.

The FBI defines serial killings as three or more victims sharing common characteristics.

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