The Diamondhead water tower looms over the community in 2013. On the manicured, rolling fairways in Diamondhead, Warren Luther Alexander loved to golf. He had a good swing.
He was a country club regular, a man known for his temper but who also might lend a hand to a neighbor or fix a friend’s broken golf cart. No one suspected he may have held a secret. “He was just so normal,” said Ernie Knobloch, a former Diamondhead council member who played golf with Alexander.
“Nobody would have ever dreamed of something like this.” Now Alexander is being held without bail as a suspected serial killer accused this month of three cold-case murders in Southern California. He was also charged two years ago in the decades-old killing of a woman in North Carolina.
Police say he could be responsible for other unsolved deaths across the country. Many in Diamondhead’s tight-knit community are bewildered and shaken by the idea that a man they once knew as an ordinary retiree may have been a murderer. Alexander, 73, had no criminal record on the Mississippi Coast before he was first arrested two years ago.
The latest development horrified people in Diamondhead again: Authorities extradited Alexander to California this month and accused him of strangling three young women in 1977. A golf cart crosses Golf Club Drive, leaving the Cardinal golf course at Diamondhead. Detectives in cold-case units across the country say his DNA matches evidence collected at old crime scenes, where police f.