The call said Phyllis Payne died peacefully in her sleep — lying in her robe on the bed at her Dallas senior living complex.
Loren Adair, Payne's daughter, couldn't believe it.
"She was 91, but you would've thought she was 70," Adair said. "She had a lot of good years ahead of her."
Then, two years after Payne's 2016 death, Adair got a different call from a Dallas police detective with startling news. He said he believed Payne had been murdered by a man now suspected of killing other elderly women in Dallas and Collin counties.
"At first I thought, 'This sounds like a really sick joke,'" Adair said, but she eventually realized it was no prank. "He got away with it for so long. It's unbelievable."
Three years to the day after Payne died, Billy Chemirmir was indicted with her death and those of 10 other women 75 or older. Chemirmir, 46, had already been charged with capital murder in another elderly woman's death in March 2018, and he's accused of the attempted murder of two other women.
In all, Chemirmir is accused of smothering a dozen elderly women with pillows before stealing their jewelry and other valuables. He is in the Dallas County Jail in lieu of $9.1 million bail. Immigration authorities have a jail hold on him. He is a citizen of Kenya and a permanent resident of the U.S.
Chemirmir's attorney, Phillip Hayes, could not be reached for comment, but he previously has said that his client maintains his innocence.
Local police continue to dig through records on recent deaths in search of more potential victims, but police and prosecutors in Dallas and Collin counties declined to talk about the cases. It's unclear whether prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty and which cases they might pursue in court.
It's also unclear whether medical examiners conducted autopsies right after the women were killed or if their individual doctors determined the cause of death. Police, prosecutors and medical examiners in Collin and Dallas are releasing little information about the cases.
But attorneys not involved with the case say the long delay between the death of the victims and the discovery of foul play could present hurdles for prosecutors.
"These are certainly suspicious" circumstances, said defense attorney Juan Sanchez, a former prosecutor. "But taking them all before a jury might be difficult."
'A little doubt'
Switching the cause of death from natural to homicide, Sanchez said, gives Chemimir's attorney "a lot to work with."
"That brings a little doubt" to a jury said Sanchez, referring to the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal proceedings.
Sanchez said he would be interested to know if the autopsies showed any fibers from pillows in the women's noses, mouths or throats.
A medical examiner, he said, can take findings from outside the lab into account when determining a cause of death. Police findings factor in, he said.
According to Dallas County medical examiner records, Payne did not have an autopsy right after she died. After Chemirmir became suspected in her death, Adair said, her body was exhumed for further investigation at the request of Dallas police. The ME's office then determined her death was a homicide.
Adair said that although she had no say in the exhumation, she was glad it provided more evidence.
"We were of course willing because we wanted to prove that she had not died of natural causes," Adair said. "We want justice and we want peace for all the families."
Ed "Bubba" King, a defense attorney and former judge, said prosecutors will have a much easier time making their case if it turns out no autopsies were performed initially and the women's physicians listed the cause of death as natural.
"That's not going to be a big hurdle to jump," he said.
If a medical examiner did perform autopsies and didn't declare the deaths homicides the first time around, that will make the prosecution more difficult, he said.
There was no delay in investigating the first known death as a homicide in March 2018. Police already suspected Chemirmir in connection with the attempted murder of a Plano woman. (He has been charged in that case.)
While monitoring him, police saw him toss a jewelry box into a dumpster. A name on the box led Dallas police to a Far North Dallas home where they found 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris dead of apparent suffocation. Chemirmir was arrested in connection with Harris' death that week.
It's possible Dallas prosecutors could try Chemirmir for Harris' death and, if he's convicted, introduce the other cases during the trial's punishment phase.
Questions about cause of death
Dee Wadsworth is a retired gerontologist — someone who studies aging — who works with the Gerontological Society of America.
She also knew Rosemary Curtis, one of Chemirmir's alleged victims, and led a church grief group that Curtis participated in.
"It is tragic to think this is how her life ended," Wadsworth said. "You cannot think of a kinder and gentler woman than Rosemary Curtis."
Wadsworth also said the case raises concerns about how deaths of older people are investigated.
"It tells me we don't have accurate information on death certificates," she said.
For example, she said, if a child or teenager is found dead in bed without signs of trauma, further investigation would be warranted to find the cause of death. In the case of many of the alleged victims in the Chemirmir case, she said, it appears someone jumped to conclusions.
"Maybe it's easier to say, 'this person is over 70 so they had a heart attack,' but we don't know that," she said. "If that person has no history of a heart condition, then further investigation is warranted by the medical examiner."
However, smothering by pillow leaves few signs that are red flags for investigators, said Bob Wall, a criminal justice lecturer at the University of North Texas.
"They are tough to detect, and they are actually tough to do," he said. "It takes a lot of force to do this and he'd have to stay in place for a long time."
Wall said smothering might cause some "petechiae" — broken blood vessels in the eye — but not always. And petechiae is not an automatic sign of foul play, he said.
Wall said that if an investigator suspects someone might have been smothered with a pillow, they might look for fibers on the body or other signs of a struggle. But it's not common that someone would normally check for those signs — especially if the person was weak or sick to begin with.
In the Chemirmir case, he said, it's possible the age of the women made it easier to hide their true cause of death.
"It doesn't surprise me because this is such an easy way of disguising a death, and he's preying on some really vulnerable people," Wall said.
The alleged victims
Chemirmir's indictments paint a picture of a killing spree that would rank him among Texas' most prolific serial killers. The indictments list the following as victims, alongside dates of death listed in their obituaries:
- Mary Brooks who died Jan. 31, 2018, in Richardson
- Minnie Campbell, 84, who died Oct. 31, 2017, in Plano
- Ann Conklin, 82, who died March 18, 2018, in Plano
- Rosemary Curtis, 75, who died Jan. 19, 2018, in Dallas
- Norma French, 85, who died Oct. 8, 2016, in Dallas
- Doris Gleason, 92, who died Oct. 29, 2016, in Dallas
- Lu Thi Harris, 81, who died on March 20, 2018, in Dallas
- Carolyn MacPhee, 81, who died Dec. 31, 2017, in Plano
- Miriam Nelson, 81, who died March 9, 2018, in Plano
- Phyllis Payne, 91, who died May 14, 2016, in Dallas
- Phoebe Perry, 94, who died June 5, 2016, in Dallas
- Martha Williams, 80, who died March 4, 2018, in Plano
CORRECTION, 8:20 p.m., Oct. 10, 2019: An earlier version of this story said Billy Chemirmir was in the country illegally. He is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.
