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Killer Comparisons: John Eric Armstrong and Richard Paul White

Two killers born just a year apart, similar in age when doing their respective murders, even resembling each other quite a bit -- young, white men with reddish hair. Targeting the same kind of victim. Childhoods marked by divorce. Younger siblings. Working regular jobs much of the time, seeming like regular guys, with romantic involvements, family ... but dark secrets. Secrets lurking just below the surface. A double life, for each of these men.

John Eric Armstrong;
photo from the Michigan
Dept. of Corrections.
They are John Eric Armstrong and Richard Paul White, the first born in 1973 in North Carolina, the second born in 1972 in Colorado. The first arrested in Michigan in spring 2000, the second arrested in Colorado in fall 2003. And they both ended up with the same fate -- multiple life sentences with no possibility of parole after killing several prostitutes.

White had a childhood that created in him a bent toward violence. After his parents divorced, his mother began a relationship with an abusive man, one who would beat his mom in front of White and his two younger sisters, a man who would also point a gun at the family members. The young Richard became the protector of his sisters, but the siblings often went hungry. It probably didn't help much that they had the instability of moving around a lot in those years as their stepdad was fleeing the law. The kids attended many different elementary schools and no doubt had very little grounding and foundation. This differs from Armstrong's own upbringing, where his family stayed in one place, though he did get a new stepdad and he did allege there was abusive and dysfunctional behavior in the home. There may have been -- but not originating from where he said it was.

On the subject of the Macdonald triad markers -- wetting the bed, abusing animals, setting fires -- White killed a parakeet as a child. Armstrong had no apparent markers. White told police he committed his first rape when he was in the eighth grade. Armstrong said upon his arrest that he killed his first victim as a teen, but there is the possibility it may have been years before that.

Richard Paul White;
police mugshot.

Growing up in a violent household and becoming rather desensitized to it, White went on to beat his girlfriend when he was in his 20s. She later said in a TV doc on the case that he raped her, even pointed a gun at her -- as his stepdad had done to him. She said he read books about serial killers and was fascinated with them. He once told her that prostitutes made good victims because no one would miss them (which I know from my research is not true, though it is a perception out there and a driving force behind many serials).

When White and his girlfriend broke up, he needed a place to live. He moved in with a male friend, who incidentally ended up dead. It was around this time that sex workers in the area started disappearing, in 2002. Like Armstrong's own victims, these were young moms, often drug addicts who were hustling to get some cash. But unlike Armstrong, White would rape and torture the women in his home for hours or days before killing them. This was even happening before he moved out of his girlfriend's house, and he buried at least a couple in the yard where they lived. He kept one woman in the basement for a while, his girlfriend unaware of all of this terror going on. I believe Armstrong's own wife was unaware of his crimes, though he never brought a woman home. The closest he came to that was taking her body in his car to a bridge just a block or two away.

White sometimes drove his victims miles (hours) away to remote locations to try to hide them (and to let the wildlife consume them), whereas Armstrong did not make any effort to hide his victims. He pushed them out of his Jeep and left them wherever was convenient, and they were readily discovered. Both men, however, went back to check the bodies later, and for Armstrong that led to his questioning by police in one jurisdiction. 

Both men used strangulation as an M.O., but where Armstrong was a manual strangler, White used a ligature. Both men also had survivors -- three women got away from White (he released one of them himself), while Armstrong assaulted five people in Detroit who survived.

It's interesting to note that both men had some kind of relationship with God. Armstrong was saved in church as a teen. Who knows when or if White was actually saved, but whatever relationship he had with the Lord was twisted. As a child, he and his siblings had gone to lots of churches to get food, and somewhere along the way, young Richard believed he had a demon, his sister Maureen later said. He even enlisted his younger sisters to try to get help for him. He would go on to pray with his victims, because reportedly he wanted their help, too. But he also claimed God told him to commit the crimes. We certainly know that was not true, but it does mark him as one of several commonly accepted varieties of serials, one bent on social justice, on a crusade to rid the world of "street walkers."

I have to note, too, after watching his sister's interview, where she said she felt that Richard was killing their mom over and over again in his crimes, that in this he bears a striking resemblance to fellow serial Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins. "He was punishing my mom," Maureen said.

I'm always interested to see what degree of penitence -- if any -- these killers show when they're shut down. I know when Armstrong was arrested, he was crying and confessing, but my collaborator who worked the case for Detroit Police will tell you that he was just posturing for the cameras. Armstrong did go on to claim innocence (unsuccessfully) at trial, and he does not discuss the case these days in his incarceration. When White was arrested, he showed remorse and said he had needed to be stopped. Unlike Michigan where Armstrong was, Colorado had the death penalty available for White, but he did a plea bargain to avoid that, giving up the location of some victim remains. As a result, he ended up in the same boat as Armstrong, with multiple life terms and no possibility of parole.

To learn more about the White case, see the "World's Most Evil Killers" and "I Lived With a Killer" episodes.

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