A former truck driver has been arrested in a Tennessee murder case from 1991 and in two similar cases in Wyoming the following year, officials said.
Clark Perry Baldwin, 59, was charged with two counts of murder in the 1991 death of a woman in Tennessee, because the victim was 24 weeks pregnant at the time, 22nd Judicial District Attorney Brent Cooper said in a news release.
Baldwin, who was living in Iowa when arrested on May 6, has also been charged in the Wyoming deaths, according to Cooper.
It’s unclear whether Baldwin has an attorney.
Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall, 33, was found strangled in March 1991 near the off ramp of a road in Spring Hill, Tennessee, according to the release.
At the time, evidence and witnesses indicated the victim, who was from Virginia, may have been traveling with a semi-truck driver, Cooper said. But the investigation eventually went cold.
In April 2019, the Spring Hill police department contacted Cooper’s office for assistance in reopening an investigation into McCall’s death, the release said. Criminal investigators in the DA’s office have been tasked with investigating unsolved crimes since 2014.
Investigators had DNA recovered in 1991 analyzed and submitted it to a national database, where it matched DNA from two unsolved homicides in Wyoming in March and April of 1992, according to the release. Those victims have not been identified.
“Those homicides were also similar in nature to the McCall homicide with a truck driver possibly being the suspect,” Cooper said.
Investigators, helped by agents in Wyoming, Iowa, and the FBI, narrowed the search to Baldwin—they did not say how—and they were able to get DNA samples on items from Iowa, the release said, without giving details.
“Subsequent analysis has established that the DNA left at all three murder scenes was that of Clark Perry Baldwin,” Cooper said.
Baldwin will be extradited to Tennessee, where he will have his first court appearance, Cooper said, and will face charges in Wyoming “once the Tennessee charges are resolved.”
