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 found women dead in motel rooms or on highway roadsides, and a killer vanished with almost no trace.
People who knew him remember Alexander’s frequent calls to police and his temper toward neighbors whose children wandered, unwittingly, onto his well-kept lawn. They remember how he would ride to the club each day in his golf cart, which is still painted with a logo for the Marines. Old classmates remember him from even longer ago, when he graduated from Long Beach High School, class of 1969.
He seemed just like anyone else, they said. Now they wonder. Was he? Some remembered another side of him.
Waitresses at several local restaurants said he would sometimes explode over an incorrect order. A golf cart blocking a sidewalk could also make him fume. “He just wasn’t a very nice person,” said Vanessa Benson, a former neighbor.
“He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave.” Neighbors said Alexander frequently called police over petty disputes, like when someone stepped on his lawn or threw something on his grass.
Benson recalled Alexander did not like her son riding a bike up his driveway. She said Alexander grew angry one day when her employee briefly pulled onto his property. “He had a short fuse,” said Forest Dobronich, another long-time neighbor.
Warren Luther Alexander, 73, is charged in four cold-case murders across North Carolina and California. He lived in Diamondhead for years before his first arrest in 2022. Alexander’s temper also flared at the club, where he worked as a marshal to monitor play, pacing and enforce policies of the course, Knobloch said.
But Knobloch, who went to eat with Alexander several times, also remembered him as a pleasant person, a stickler for the rules who might socialize with his golf group after a morning on the course but usually kept to himself and never drank even a beer. Dobronich said Alexander might knock on his door if he needed a hand, or consult with him about concerns on the street. He once helped Alexander tarp his roof after a storm, and said he never heard Alexander speak poorly of women.
Alexander sold Dobronich his old golf cart for a good price. His arrest “just floored us,” Dobronich said. “Nothing ever crossed my mind that he murdered anyone.
” Alexander was born to a mother from Mackeys, North Carolina. She worked for the Civil Service, including as an assistant to the Navy Exchange Officer, before she died in Long Beach, according to an obituary. Alexander lived in Oxnard in the late 1950s and 1960s and attended elementary, middle and high school in the city until his sophomore year, Ventura County authorities have said.
In 1969, he graduated from Long Beach High School, where former classmates said they remembered little about him, except that he attended none of their reunions. He was a cab driver and electrician with the U.S.
Marine Corps, authorities said. They believe he returned to Oxnard in the 1970s, but they are unsure whether he had children. He spent the rest of his career crossing the country as a long-haul trucker, and neighbors said he arrived in Diamondhead sometime after Hurricane Katrina.
For a short time, he took real estate photography for a few local agents, and also worked as a truck driver on the Coast, Dobronich recalled. But he rarely spoke of his past. Warren Luther Alexander is escorted by law enforcement in August 2023 into the Ventura County jail, where he is being held after authorities charged him in three cold-case murders in Southern California.
He also wrote to his local newspaper. In a 2011 letter to the editor published in the Sun Herald under his name, Alexander railed against what he called the “political correctness” of the NBC television network and worried liberal forces would threaten Christianity. “I am not a staunchly religious man,” he wrote, signing his name “Warren Alexander, Diamondhead.
” “But I do not see the problem with a religion that stresses love of your fellow man and, until recently, social standards to live by. Religion should be the muse of our societies, for as people we need unifying directions to keep us and our consciences in order.” Other letters, signed with his name between 2010 and 2014, describe a conservative man who called himself a Baby Boomer and “former business owner.
” The letters condemned a proposal for an expensive new city maintenance building, criticized a plan by former President Barack Obama to create jobs, expressed disgust at the younger generation’s tendency “to take the easy way out of any problem” and applauded Arizona’s efforts to stop immigrants from crossing the southern border. Then Warren Alexander disappeared. It was March 15, 2022.
Dobronich said he was supposed to meet Alexander at the Diamondhead Police Station. Police had asked for information on a neighbor Alexander complained about, Dobronich said. But when Dobronich got there, Alexander was gone.
“They turned me around and walked me right out,” Dobronich said. A black SUV parked outside of Alexander’s house. Neighbors saw law enforcement agents gather on the street for much of the evening.
“Something happened,” Dobronich remembered thinking. “Something terrible happened to Warren.” He later learned authorities charged Alexander with murder and accused him of killing Nona Stamey Cobb, a 29-year-old found strangled to death in 1992 along an interstate in Surry County, North Carolina.
Alexander has been jailed ever since. And this month, authorities charged him with three more killings in Ventura County. There was Velvet Sanchez, a 31-year-old mother of three who once worked at the Navy Exchange.
Police said they found her strangled in a motel room. There was Lorraine Rodriguez, a 21-year old mother of two found strangled on a rural bridge. And there was Kimberly Fritz, an 18-year-old found strangled on the floor in another Southern California motel room.
All died in 1977. All were strangled by some kind of cord or rope, according to authorities. And all were sex workers, police said.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office showed images of three women who were murdered in 1977. Warren Luther Alexander, 73, of Diamondhead is now accused in their deaths. One day around the time of Alexander’s arrest, another shiny, black SUV pulled up to Knobloch’s house.
The FBI wanted to talk, he said. He recalled the conversation as brief, and remembered one question especially well. “Did y’all ever talk about sexual fantasies?” Knobloch recalled the young federal agents asking him.
“I was put out the chair,” he said. The answer, he said, was never. “To my knowledge, we’ve never had anything like this occur before,” said Diamondhead Councilmember Anna Liese, who did not know Alexander but was as shocked as anyone when she heard he lived in her city.
“No one suspected that he had this kind of past.” Dobronich puzzled over similar questions, and also over Alexander’s frequent calls to police about neighborhood matters. “Maybe he wanted to look like a model citizen,” Dobronich said.
“It would’ve been a good front.” He has considered traveling to the trial in North Carolina, just to listen to what prosecutors might say about his old neighbor. He would like to know how the man he knew became accused of such horrible crimes.
He has racked his mind for clues. “It’s just hard to fathom,” he said. “There’s nothing that would ring a red flag.
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