On this day, June 26, in 1957, serial killer and D.C.-area jazz musician Melvin Rees shot and killed a woman on a remote road near Annapolis, leading to a case known as the Sex Beast killings. Near the slaying of Margaret Harold, police found a building full of violent pornography and autopsy photos of murdered women.
Two years later the decomposing bodies of Carroll Jackson and his wife, Mildred, and their two infant children were found in Apple Grove, Va.
Tips led to Rees, then working at a piano store in Arkansas. Inside his saxophone case, they found a gun and a newspaper clipping about the Jacksons’ slaying with a note, “Now the mother and daughter were mine.”
Rees was convicted of killing Harold and the Jackson family. He also confessed to two other murders. He died in prison in 1995.
-Scott McCabe
