Shirley Winters
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Shirley Winters | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 27, 1958 |
| Conviction | Murder |
| Details | |
| Victims | 2–10 |
Span of crimes | 1966 – November 28, 2006 |
| Country | United States |
| State | New York |
Date apprehended | March 2007 |
Shirley Winters (born February 27, 1958) is a convicted murderer, arsonist, and suspected serial killer from upstate New York. In 1980, she smothered her five-month-old son, Ronald Winters III. In 2007, she drowned 23-month-old Ryan Rivers. She is also suspected of killing three siblings in childhood, setting a fire which killed two of her older children in 1979, and on the day prior to that killed a friend's three children. Per a plea bargain, she cannot be prosecuted for those.
In 1966, Winters' 10-year-old brother and 4 and 11-year-old sisters died from an apparent carbon monoxide leak in the family home.[1]
In 1979, Winters' first two children, 3-year-old Colleen and 20-month-old John, died in a fire in the family's Hyde Lake cabin in Theresa, New York. Investigators blamed an electrical defect.[2] When her children's bodies were exhumed in March 2007, autopsies showed Colleen and John received blunt force head injuries before the fire had started.[3]
The day before the fire started at Winters' cabin, another fire started at Winters' friend's house in Hermon, New York, while her friend's three children were still inside. St. Lawrence County police re-investigated this fire in 2007.[4]
Winters was near at least seventeen fires since the 1979 ones, nine determined as arson.[5] She pleaded guilty to criminal mischief in relation to two in 1981. A November 12, 1989, fire started in a Syracuse home where Winters was staying with her three children. She rescued her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, but lost her five-year-old daughter, who rescued herself.[6]