He was arrested in his home state of Iowa and is awaiting extradition to Tennessee.
Police have arrested a former truck driver in connection with three, separate murders of women that took place in the early 1990s after they said DNA evidence linked him to the crime. They are investigating whether he can be linked to other unsolved murders around the same time, according to investigators.
Clark Perry Baldwin, 58, who lives in Waterloo, Iowa, has been arrested in connection with three murders in Wyoming and Tennessee in the deaths of two pregnant women and one other young woman.
The case was broken open when when cops were able to find a similar DNA sample on a genealogy site to a DNA profile created last year from semen and other materials found on the victims several decades ago, authorities said. It turns out the sample on the genealogy website allegedly belonged to a relative of Baldwin, according to court documents obtained by KCCI.
Police zeroed in on Baldwin and the FBI obtained a DNA sample from Baldwin’s trash and a shopping cart he used at Walmart. It later turned out that his DNA allegedly matched the DNA profile in all three cases, court documents said.
In Wyoming, Baldwin has been charged with the deaths of two women whose bodies were found separately in two different counties in 1992. One was found naked and it was determined she’d suffered head trauma and was strangled. The other, found a month later, was pregnant and found in a ditch off I-90. She also suffered head trauma.
Both women’s bodies had been there for weeks before they were found, according to authorities. The young women, believed to be in their late teens or early 20s, were never identified.
A third woman, 32-year-old Pamela McCall, who was also pregnant, was found dead in 1991 in the woods off Interstate 65 in Tennessee. She died of strangulation and had last been seen a truck stop a few days before she was found. Baldwin has been charged with two counts of murder in that case.
Baldwin was a truck driver at the time, police said. His ex-wife allegedly told police he had talked about “killing a girl out west by strangulation and throwing her out of his truck,” according to court documents.
Investigators are also trying to see if Baldwin has any connection to the 1992 death of Tammy Jo Zywicki, 21, who was stabbed to death after her car broke down on an Illinois highway. They are also looking into the death of Rhonda Knutson, 22, a truck stop store clerk in Iowa who was bludgeoned to death while working an overnight shift.
Police said they are “hopeful.” Already on Baldwin’s criminal record is a conviction for allegedly printing counterfeit money from his home computer in 1997. He served 18 months in prison and was released in 1999, according to reports.
He is currently in Black Hawk County awaiting extradition to Tennessee.
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