A new report from the Texas Attorney General’s Office says that Billy Chemirmir, who was thought to be a serial ki!!er in North Texas, was ki!!ed by a “knife or edged instrument” in his prison cell. The report, which was filed on September 27, confirmed what officials had said before: that Chemirmir’s cellmate was the suspect in his death.
The report, which was filed as a “custodial death report” as part of the attorney general’s investigation into Chemirmir’s death on September 19, did not give much information about what happened. It only said that Chemirmir “was assaulted by his cellmate and suffered injuries that led to his death.”
The report said that Chemirmir died from “blunt force trauma” and that a “knife/edged instrument” was used to ki!! him. The name of Chemirmir’s cellmate has not been made public, but police have said he is in jail for m*rder in Harris County.
The ki!!ing happened at the Coffield State Jail in Tennessee Colony, which is about halfway between Houston and Dallas. John Creuzot, the Dallas County District Attorney, told WFAA that Chemirmir was ki!!ed because he had made s*xually inappropriate comments about his cellmate’s children.
Creuzot says that the cellmate beat Chemirmir, pulled him out of his cell, and ki!!ed him in front of other prisoners. Creuzot said that since no one helped, Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”
In April 2022, Chemirmir was found guilty of ki!!ing Lu Thi Harris, who was 81 years old, by smothering her. After being found guilty of ki!!ing 87-year-old Mary Brooks, he got the same sentence.
Chemirmir was caught because Mary Annis Bartel lived through an attack in March 2018. Bartel, who was 91 years old at the time, told police that a man had broken into her room in a community for seniors who live on their own, tried to suffocate her with a pillow, and taken her jewelry.
Before Bartel died in 2020, she talked about the attack in a taped interview that was played at Chemirmir’s earlier trials. She said that as soon as she opened her door and saw a guy wearing green rubber gloves, she knew she was in “grave danger.”
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The next day, the police said they found Chemirmir in the parking lot of his apartment building. He was handling jewelry and cash, and he had just thrown away a big red jewelry box. Documents in the box lead them to Harris’s house, where she was found dead with lipstick on her pillow in her bedroom.
Most of Chemirmir’s claimed victims lived in apartments in communities for older people who want to live on their own. He is accused of ki!!ing women in their own homes, including the widow of a man he looked for when he worked as a caregiver.
After Chemirmir died, the families of the people Chemirmir was accused of ki!!ing got together at a press meeting to talk about how they felt. “Perhaps this is a form of justice,” said Shannon Dion, the daughter of victim Doris Gleason. “My mother died in fear. This man did not have a peaceful passing. There’s some relief in feeling that he didn’t get off easily.”
Loren Smith, Phyllis Payne’s daughter, talked about a sense of relief. “We certainly don’t condone murder, but one of the things that we said was, ‘Ah, it’s over,'” Smith said.