An FBI bulletin identifies a truck driver sought in the 1996 strangulation of a Denver mother of three as a suspect in a series of rapes and murders of women across the United States.
A first-degree murder warrant has been issued for convicted killer Chester Leroy Todd, 63, in the death of Sherri Majors, 27, said David Fisher, Denver’s chief of police investigations.
On March 16, 1996, Majors got into an argument with friends and walked to a pool hall to get a ride home. Todd allegedly offered to take her home in his truck, according to a November alert by the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program Unit.
Majors’ beaten and strangled body was found the next day near railroad tracks in an alley between Blake and Market streets, the FBI law enforcement alert says.
Todd, who once lived in Commerce City with his wife, Clara, abandoned his semi in Sioux City, Iowa, said cold-case Detective Dixie Grimes of the Denver Police Department. Evidence in the truck tied Todd to the murder, she said.
Police have been searching for Todd and his wife, who also goes by Clara Taber, for 11 years.
“I’ve sent people throughout the United States to find him,” Fisher said. “He’s been involved in other cases. There have been sightings, but none confirmed.”
In 2004, eight years after Majors’ murder, police, FBI agents and sheriff’s investigators from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Indiana identified a pattern of homicides involving prostitutes who worked in and around truck stops, the FBI alert says. Since then, law enforcement officers from across the country have met regularly to consult about the pattern crimes.
They compiled timelines for 30 truckers who are suspects, the alert says. Todd is the only one whom the FBI has named in a series of rape and homicide cases involving prostitutes, stranded motorists, hitchhikers, transients and unidentified bodies.
Linda Donelson, Majors’ mother, said investigators pulled up his trucking logbook hoping to find links to murders across the country.
A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment about Todd.
Grimes said Denver is the only agency that has filed a warrant for Todd’s arrest. At about the time Majors’ body was discovered, Sterling police considered Todd a person of interest in the murder of a girl whose body was found beside the road, she said.
Donelson said she raised her three grandchildren after her daughter, who was a nurse’s assistant, was killed. She also has followed progress of the attempts to capture Todd.
“You can’t change your character,” Donelson said. “He’s bound to do something awful again.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
