To Baltimore City police, William Brown is a serial predator who attacked, raped and killed several women in the city.
But neighbors who know Brown — who goes by his middle name, Vincent — say he never came across as the monster police have described.
“Everyone was shocked,” said Hamiel Edgar, 86, a retired postal worker who lives a few doors from Brown’s childhood house on Winchester Street in West Baltimore.
“The whole neighborhood couldn’t believe it.”
Edgar said Brown was friendly to a fault — occasionally helping him carry his wife, who uses a wheelchair, up the stairs of his house.
“As my daughter said when the news broke, ‘He’s the nicest serial killer I ever met,’ ” Edgar said.
Brown, 41, has been charged with murdering a woman and a teenage girl in 2004 and savagely beating and raping another woman in 2003.
On Winchester Street, another neighbor who did not want to be identified said Brown spent much of his time close to his childhood home, even after he moved to Baltimore County with his wife.
“He was around here all the time,” said the neighbor, who also described Brown as “very friendly.”
But residents of Brown’s last known address, a plain, two-story house near apartments on Carmine Avenue in Gwynn Oak, said Brown struck them as odd.
“A girlfriend of mine said he was always trying to get her in the car,” said Tracey Smith, 35, who lived a few doors from Brown.
“He tried to get me to take a ride with him, too, but I didn’t feel comfortable.”
Brown’s former neighbors said they did not know he had been convicted of drug dealing.
Brown was charged with a plethora of crimes, including malicious destruction of property in 2000 in Baltimore County, drug distribution in Howard County in 2001, and drug distribution in 2004, 1992 and 1991 in Baltimore City.
Only in Howard County was he convicted and given a suspended sentence.
A recent DNA hit prompted police to charge Brown in connection with the 2004 slaying of Emma O’Hearn, a convicted prostitute; the slaying of a 15-year-old girl; and a violent rape in 2003.
Police have not yet said whether Brown is connected to the five slayings of women linked to prostitution in Baltimore since April.
Another prostitute, Michelle Dawn Wolford, recently told The Examiner that Brown strangled her unconscious after picking her up on Wilkens Avenue.
Police are considering charging Brown with her assault.
Sources close to the investigation said police were probing several clues that may link Brown to more recent killings, including a mysterious 911 call from a pay phone on the 900 block of Poplar Grove Street, three blocks from Winchester Street.
The caller alerted authorities to the location of Brenda Hatfield’s body, who was found strangled behind the auxiliary parking lot of the New Psalmist Baptist Church in July, two miles away on the 4500 block of Old Frederick Road.
The body of Yolanda Brown, who witnesses told police was dragged onto the street by a black man, was found close to the spot of a 2003 rape in which William Brown has been charged.
The body of Emma O’Hearn was left behind an elementary school on Whitmore Avenue, just three blocks from Winchester Street, where Brown was allegedly living at the time.
O’Hearn used to prostitute herself along Wilkens Avenue, the area where Brown allegedly assaulted Wolford, police sources said.
Meanwhile, Brown has a preliminary hearing scheduled Aug. 28 on charges of murder, rape and assault in Baltimore City.
Those charges also have prompted an Aug. 22 hearing in Howard County, where Brown will face allegations he violated the terms of his probation from his 2003 drug distribution conviction.
