To the people of Olney, Texas, 39-year-old Faryion Wardrip was an upright citizen - a happily married man, a valued employee, and a respected Sunday school teacher. But everyone in Olney would soon learn the chilling truth about the man they thought they knew.
In January, 1999, investigators reviewing the files of three unsolved murders dating back 15 years came across information linking Wardrip to the attractive young female victims - Terry Sims, 20, who had been bound, raped and stabbed to death; Toni Gibbs, 23, who was found slashed and sexually assaulted in a deserted bus shell; and Ellen Blau, 21, who disappeared after working a night shift, her badly decomposed body found a month later. Smart police work snared a sample of Wardrip's DNA, matching it with semen found in the Sims case. Wardrip confessed to the three murders, and one more - the strangulation death of Debra Taylor, 25 - though it was Sims' murder that put him on Texas' death row and made him the prime suspect in 10 other similar unsolved murders in Fort Worth.
