The Milwaukee District Attorney’s office has filed five more charges against Walter Ellis. He's now accused of killing seven Milwaukee women between 1986 and 2007. The DA says he’s waiting for more information from the State Crime Lab before perhaps filing two more homicide charges against the 49 year old.
Meanwhile, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen says his office is investigating whether the state took DNA samples from Ellis when he was in prison for a felony in 2001 as a new law required, and if so, why there is no record of them. If they had been available, they may have led police to Ellis years ago instead of just last week.
“I’m obviously very concerned, that if there was a sample, and if it was forwarded to the Department of Justice and we did receive it, there obviously, since that time, is going to be some sort of an inherent problem in our recording-system that we need to correct,” Van Hollen says.
Van Hollen says there are still staff members today who were on the job then and hopefully they’ll shed light on what happened.
“What about other samples that were supposedly taken at the same time, and what if anything has happened to them? So there are a number of different ways we can look at things back in that age, so to speak, to determine how things were handled and whether we have other things that would give us a clue as to what came of this sample of Mr. Ellis if it ever existed,” Van Hollen says.
The Department of Corrections is supposed to take DNA tissue from incarcerated felons and submit those samples to the State Crime Lab. Van Hollen says state agents now handle the samples, but there was no such procedure in place eight years ago. Governor Jim Doyle was state attorney general at the time.
DNA led Milwaukee police to conclude that one person might have been involved in nine women’s deaths. Most had worked as prostitutes on the city's north side.
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