Police Question Credibility of Ex-Sailor’s Confession

He told police he hated prostitutes; that’s why he strangled them.

The former sailor was calm, police said, and sad, too, as his 300-pound body heaved with tearful confessions.

Police matched some of his claims to bodies--three women found along a desolate stretch of Conrail tracks where “No Dumping” signs haven’t stopped rotting tires and metal scraps from piling up.

And a fourth, pulled from the Rouge River just west of Detroit. It was the former Navy man himself, John Eric Armstrong, who alerted police to the partially clad woman’s body in the icy waters. That’s when they began to wonder whether he might be more than just a witness.

When Armstrong recently sat down with police, this hulk of a man with the little boy’s face-- pals nicknamed him “Opie” for his red hair and freckles--told a story that was horrifying and, sometimes, seemingly incredible:

The women he killed in the Detroit area, police said initially, were the frenzied end of a global murder spree. The beginnings, they said, had occurred far away and years ago, as Armstrong traveled from port to port on the aircraft carrier Nimitz.

After police arrested Armstrong last month, they rattled off names of his suspected murder locales as if they were reciting the index of an atlas:

Hong Kong. Singapore. Thailand.

And in this country:

North Carolina. Virginia. Washington. Hawaii.

The numbers of victims changed --20, 18, 16 to who knows how many.

Now, as investigators examine the confession, they are beginning to wonder how much of this really happened. Did the 26-year-old father create a trail of terror around the world, or is this a sick fantasy?

And in the shadowy world of prostitutes, smoky bars, dark alleys and exotic ports in distant lands, can the whole truth ever be known?

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The FBI is putting together a timeline to see how much of Armstrong’s confession pans out.

They’re poring over his statements, the Nimitz ports of call, and a Detroit police list that linked 16 murders to Armstrong: the first in 1992, the year before he joined the Navy, and the last ones in recent months.

Police listed three murders in Washington, two in Hawaii, two in Hong Kong, one each in Thailand, Singapore, Virginia and North Carolina and five in the Detroit area. All the local ones occurred in just five months.

So far, the only charges pending against Armstrong are in the Detroit area, where he faces five counts of murder. The fifth woman died shortly after being discovered on a highway service road last December.

Some experts say serial murderers usually start slowly and then quicken their pace, so if a killer has struck several times within a few months, it’s likely he started years earlier.

“Once they start, they’re pretty cautious about the first one,” says Robert Ressler, a former FBI profiler. “Once they get away with it, they do it again and again. Once they get used to it, they start getting more careless and cavalier. Then they get caught.”

But outside Detroit, Norfolk, Va., is the only city where police have discovered a possible link between Armstrong and a woman’s death.

The body of a 34-year-old woman was found in Norfolk on March 5, 1998, four days after the Nimitz docked in its home port, Newport News, 12 miles away. Linette Hillig, who had a string of prostitution arrests, was discovered behind a bingo parlor.

Norfolk police won’t say how she died or identify Armstrong as a suspect, but they have talked with Detroit police.

In other cities, police say they have doubts about the former sailor’s credibility. From Singapore to Hawaii to Washington, investigators have said they either have no unsolved murder or no case that fits what Detroit police attributed to Armstrong.

“We’re actually thinking now that he hasn’t done anything here, because nothing he said remotely matches any [killing] we’ve got here,” says Dick Steiner, head of the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, a division of the Washington state attorney general’s office that tracks serial killers and rapists.

For example, he said, Armstrong first told Detroit investigators he had killed a transsexual in downtown Seattle.

“Then his second story was that it wasn’t a transsexual, it was a black guy who tried to bum money off him and that made him mad,” he says.

In Honolulu, police say Navy investigators told them Armstrong talked about two murders of prostitutes in hotel rooms in Waikiki--one in 1993, the other in 1996--but they found nothing in their records.

In Thailand, officers have reviewed hundreds of pages of handwritten or typed reports dating from Nimitz visits and come up blank.

In Israel, initial suspicions that Armstrong may have been involved in the murder of a Haifa woman in 1994 were discounted when it was learned that his ship was not in the area then.

Armstrong’s court-appointed attorney also downplays his client’s confessions of a deadly worldwide stalking expedition.

If Armstrong is lying, he would not be the first accused serial killer to enlarge his own importance with elaborate stories.

Henry Lee Lucas, the one-eyed drifter from Texas, may have been the most notorious. He confessed to up to 600 murders, but police found much of what he said preposterous. For example, he claimed he poisoned the Kool-Aid used in the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, according to Mike Cox, author of a book on Lucas and a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Serial killers “are pathological liars,” says James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston and author of “Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed.”

“You have to take everything they say not with a grain of salt but with the whole shaker,” he says.

While there are doubts about Armstrong, there is still the haunting possibility that the sordid tale--or parts of it--may be true.

Even seemingly simple homicide investigations can prove fiendishly difficult. But the trail in this case is cold and spans eight years in which Armstrong was constantly on the move, traveling from the Mideast to the Far East to both coasts of the United States.

One fact investigators must confront is that in some ports of call, life is distressingly cheap. In Thailand, for instance, murders of prostitutes are commonplace and often unsolved.

“It’s relatively easy to get away with murder when you’re preying on prostitutes,” Fox says. “The community response is minimal; the police response is sometimes delayed.”

Hundreds of prostitutes crowd the bars in places such as Pattaya, the seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand, one of the world’s most brazen sex-for-sale capitals. On beachfront streets there, scantily clad women wave placards that promote sex clubs.

Then there’s Hong Kong’s Wanchai district, made famous in the movie “The World of Suzie Wong,” a neon red-light strip with attractions such as the Popeye Model Dancers Club. Men strolling by often encounter hawkers, usually middle-aged women, who grab their arms to lure them into bars.

Both areas were on the Nimitz tour while Armstrong was in the Navy, but it is unknown whether he ever visited these districts. What is known is that the carrier usually docked for less than a week, then moved on.

The Nimitz arrived home in 1998. A year later, Armstrong left the Navy, eventually found work as an aircraft refueler at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and began a quiet new life with a wife and son.

But soon his name was in the headlines.

Armstrong’s arrest last month was not his first police contact.

On Jan. 2, police in neighboring Dearborn Heights questioned Armstrong, who lived in the suburb with his pregnant wife, Katie (whom he met on the Nimitz) and their 14-month-old son.

Police say Armstrong had flagged down a car to report seeing a body in the Rouge River as he leaned over a bridge. When police arrived, they were immediately suspicious.

“Unless you were a contortionist and hung over the bridge, you wouldn’t have seen her,” says Dearborn Heights Lt. Gary Tomkiewicz.

Weeks later, a DNA test found a match between Armstrong and the victim, Tomkiewicz says, but prosecutors wanted to wait for a full DNA lab report before issuing an arrest warrant.

In that interval, three bodies were found in the Detroit rail yard.

Two days later, on April 12, Armstrong was arrested. Police say a transvestite--one of three prostitutes who allegedly escaped his attacks in recent weeks--helped lead them to him.

According to police, Armstrong had sex with prostitutes in his Jeep Wrangler with the vanity license plate “Baby Doll,” choked them and dumped their bodies.

News of Armstrong’s arrest stunned family and friends, including his mother, Linda Pringle, of New Bern, N.C. She offered a glimpse into her son’s troubled past, telling reporters he was traumatized as a child by his infant brother’s crib death and his abusive father.

In fact, Armstrong used his middle name instead of the first name he shared with his father.

“The Eric we raised could not have done these things,” Pringle said after visiting her son in jail in Michigan. “This is just not the person we know.”

Nor is he the sailor Tony Palmer remembers from the Nimitz--an easygoing country boy with a Southern drawl dubbed Opie after the redheaded son in the Andy Griffith show.

“He was one heck of a nice guy,” says Palmer, from Bremerton, Wash., where he is stationed on the Rainier. “He was always laughing, joking. He was always trying to have fun.”

Armstrong went skating, attended church even in midweek, and once performed in a Christmas play there, Palmer recalls. He says Armstrong never talked about prostitutes, showed little interest in the bar scene and was the kind of guy who could nurse a beer for an hour.

He worked hard too, both as a barber and in the ship’s store.

“He was real diligent,” Palmer recalls. “You’d ask him to do something, and bam! He was right on it. Then he’d say, ‘What else?’ He never complained.

“It’s hard to believe,” he adds, “that anyone like this can do the things police say he’s doing.”

As Armstrong undergoes competency tests to determine his mental status, investigators are forging ahead. Whether they will ever put all the pieces of this puzzle together, Fox says, may be moot.

“I don’t think it’s critical that we know if it’s 12 or 18 or 22 murders,” he says. “Sometimes the serial killer doesn’t even remember.”