After a Tennessee jury convicted him of murdering a woman 34 years ago, an accused serial killer died Friday morning before prosecutors could bring him to trial for allegedly killing two women in Wyoming.
Clark Perry Baldwin, 64, died at 8:50 a.m. Friday, Tennessee time, which would have been 7:50 in Wyoming, after suffering a heart attack two days earlier, Pam Anderson, assistant district attorney general for the 22nd Judicial District of Tennessee, told Cowboy State Daily.
Baldwin was convicted May 5 for murdering a woman in Tennessee in 1991, and was slated for two different trials in Sheridan and Sweetwater County, Wyoming, to answer for the deaths of two women found dead along the state’s interstates in 1992.
Those killings happened during Baldwin’s career as a commercial truck driver.
Years of investigation and multiple DNA breakthroughs linked Baldwin to all three women, investigators say.
“There’s not going to be an extradition (to Wyoming),” said Anderson, “because Clark Perry Baldwin died this morning.”
Baldwin was in a hospital when he died Friday, she added.
More than two months after his conviction in Tennessee, Baldwin remained there with some legal processes still pending.
He hadn’t yet been scheduled for an extradition hearing, said Anderson.
His defense attorney had recently filed a motion for a new trial, and the court had yet to hold a hearing on that, she added.
“Obviously, (that) will be a moot point,” she said.
Well, I’m Disappointed
Sweetwater County Attorney Danny Erramouspe voiced disappointment at not being able to bring Baldwin to justice in Wyoming.
He filed a first-degree murder charge against Baldwin in spring 2020, and watched the man’s Tennessee case closely in the five years that followed.
“This was a Wyoming case, largely driven by the Wyoming Crime Lab and Loy Young with DCI,” said Erramouspe in a Friday phone interview, referring to the retired investigator who worked Baldwin’s case for years and interviewed him just before his May 6, 2020, arrest.
The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office initially performed “great investigative work” despite not having the tools to identify the victim in the early 1990s, Erramouspe said. DCI Crime Lab Director Scott McWilliams also “did great work,” and the FBI was instrumental to the case as well.
The Tennessee prosecution took five years, which Anderson attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, in a May interview with Cowboy State Daily.
Erramouspe was critical of the delay.
“It took Tennessee five years to take him to trial, which affected the Wyoming cases,” he said. “In all my years I’ve never seen a case take five years to come to trial. It wouldn’t have happened in Wyoming.”
He said he hopes the victims’ families have some closure with Baldwin’s death, though he believes it would have been better to see him stand trial in Wyoming.
Even with Baldwin’s death, “We know what happened to Irene. And we know who did it.”
That’s a reference to Irene Vasquez, the victim in Erramouspe’s case.
For years before a DNA breakthrough, investigators knew Vasquez as “Bitter Creek Betty,” a young Hispanic woman whom a female trucker found dead with strangulation marks in March 1992 off Interstate 80 in Sweetwater County.
One Month Later, And North
One month later in April 1992, Wyoming Department of Transportation crews were checking the right of way fence off Interstate 90 about 15 miles north of Sheridan.
They found a young, petite, pregnant female in the barrow ditch, dead with strangulation marks.
They named her “I-90 Jane Doe,” and the moniker remained for 33 years as the investigation persisted.
Following a DNA link with the woman’s biological mother, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation publicly identified I-90 Jane Doe on Thursday as Cindi Arleen Estrada, who was born in Torrance, California, and was 21 years old when she died.
Sheridan County Attorney Dianna Bennett filed her case against Baldwin in spring 2020, the same time as Erramouspe’s charging.
Her case was filed under seal, but became publicly available last month.
Bennett did not immediately respond to a Friday morning request for comment.
Shopping Carts And Garbage Dumps
Through other DNA breakthroughs using male genetic data found on or near each woman, investigators were able to link the Sheridan and Sweetwater Count decedents to the same man — and eventually to a male DNA profile found on the Tennessee victim, Pamela McCall.
FBI investigators in 2020 shadowed Baldwin around his then-hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, so they could pull DNA swabs from his shopping cart handle at Walmart, and his home garbage.
The Wyoming State Crime Lab received those swabs in April 2020, pulled the DNA and found a match with DNA from McCall’s case and both Wyoming cases, says an evidentiary affidavit Erramouspe compiled from years of investigations.
Strapped with recording devices, Wyoming DCI investigator Young and Tennessee’s 22nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office criminal investigator Tommy Goetz approached Baldwin’s tiny, sixth-floor apartment in Waterloo the morning of May 6, 2020.
Wyoming Goes To Iowa
They rode the elevator in silence, Goetz told Cowboy State Daily in a May interview. They knocked, and after four minutes, Baldwin answered the door.
After 44 years of interviewing “every criminal element out there,” Goetz wasn’t nervous, he said. He was just eager to find the truth.
Baldwin wasn’t working at that time. He allowed the investigators into his living room, but he had just one couch and no other furniture, Goetz recalled.
Baldwin sat while both investigators stood throughout the hourlong interview.
They asked general questions about trucking while Baldwin wore a blank expression.
Then Goetz got specific, delivered Baldwin’s Miranda rights and asked questions about McCall, he said.
Baldwin conceded that he may have had sex with McCall, who was a prostitute, but said he didn’t remember her at all, Goetz related.
“He never asked why we were there. He knew he was talking to cold-case investigators — but he never asked why the entire time we were there,” said Goetz. “I think he was expecting that knock to come at some point in his life.”
After that interview, FBI investigators served a search warrant for more DNA, and law enforcement arrested Baldwin.
Goetz tried to interview Baldwin again at the jail, but by then the man had asked for a lawyer.
A key witness against Baldwin at his May trial was Mary Ann Newton, a woman he allegedly raped in 1991, but who was able to escape his commercial truck after he asked her to shoot him.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
