Nearly a decade ago, a Dallas man named Billy Chemirmir began a murdering spree at luxury senior living communities that would make him the most prolific killer in the city’s history.
Three weeks ago, Texas legislators in the House and Senate unanimously ed a law in response to the slayings and at the urging of the families of the nearly two dozen victims. It provides the most comprehensive security requirements for senior living communities — a rapidly growing industry that’s largely unregulated in Texas and nationwide.
But the law, Senate Bill 1283, still leaves loopholes that would not have stopped Chemirmir in a majority of the murders he committed.
Between 2016 and 2017, he posed as a maintenance worker to sneak into the apartments of older adults before smothering them to death with a pillow and raiding their apartments of precious jewelry and cash. Chemirmir was convicted twice of capital murder in Dallas County and was killed by a cellmate in 2023 while serving a life sentence.
The newly ed law requires background checks for senior living employees and would require communities to alert residents if a crime is committed on the property.
Chemirmir found some of his victims through his legitimate work as an in-home caregiver, and it is possible that some victims would not have opened their doors to him if they knew a treser had been reported on the property.
Yet Chemirmir also found victims by stalking them at a Walmart and following them to their private homes, and many of the cases were brushed aside by police and medical examiners as natural causes due to the age of the victims and where they lived. Those victims were only discovered after police began investigating his crimes years later.
Crimes like those aren’t so easily stopped by background checks or community crime watches.
Part of what made Chemirmir’s crimes — and the response by investigators — so insidious was that they preyed on biases against the elderly. The thinking goes that if an older person dies alone in a senior living community, they must have died of a heart attack, stroke or other natural cause.
In apartments across North Texas, investigators ignored bloody carpets, bruised faces and other clues that Chemirmir left behind.
These are what are called “false negative” mistakes in forensic science, and are especially prevalent when subjective biases influence investigative decision-making. A 2011 FBI study, for example, found that 85% of investigators made those “false negative” mistakes when analyzing fingerprints — essentially ignoring a wide majority of all possible evidence.
But SB 1283 does close one additional loophole that Chemirmir’s crimes laid bare.
After his arrest, police visited senior living communities across the region, asking to speak to residents about possible tresers in an attempt to identify additional victims. Yet according to testimony to Texas lawmakers during the debate on SB 1283, property managers refused to let police in to ask residents about what they may have seen or heard.
The new law requires property managers to allow police access to community common areas to talk to residents.
Today, in part because of those and many other hurdles police faced at the time, investigators still don’t know how many people Chemirmir actually killed. Could there be more unidentified murder victims out there? I asked some of those investigators.
“Absolutely,” said Plano Detective Paul Martinez, who led the department’s investigation into Chemirmir.
”I’m convinced there are,” said former Dallas County Medical Examiner Jeffrey Barnard.
“The 24 homicides that, or the deaths that he was charged with, I’m convinced that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Charlie Scudder is a professor of practice in journalism at Southern Methodist University and host of The Unforgotten: Unnatural Causes, an investigative journalism podcast about the Billy Chemirmir case. He is a former reporter for The Dallas Morning News, where his reporting on the case won multiple state and national awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Award in 2020.
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