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Killer Comparisons: John Eric Armstrong and Wayne Adam Ford

A gruesome killer on wheels, traveling the highways and byways in his long-haul truck, claiming the lives of sex workers wherever he went -- dismembering them and leaving their body parts in different places. And when confessing his crimes to police, even producing a woman's severed breast in a plastic bag. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and the case of Wayne Adam Ford is definitely in that category.

But how does this lesser-known serial stack up to the convicted Detroit serials I have researched? I always have to compare, when I discover another serial who targets prostitutes, as that is my special area of interest -- I have a heart for these girls. So in looking at the life and crimes of Wayne Adam Ford in comparison to John Eric Armstrong and Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins, I would have to say the former is more similar to him.

Wayne Adam Ford

Ford was born in 1961 in Petaluma, California, more than a decade before Armstrong, and he certainly was older when committing his crimes. Though Ford's father was a military man from the U.S., his mother was a German immigrant who abandoned the family when she and Ford's father divorced. This reportedly left the 10-year-old Wayne very angry. He had felt close to his mother but not his father. 

He started his crimes with breaking and entering and car theft as a teen. He never finished high school, instead enlisting in the U.S. Marines. That military background he shares with Armstrong, though Armstrong did just fine with the U.S. Navy whereas Ford had quite a few issues while enlisted. A pivotal point for him was when he was in a car accident at age 19, suffering a head injury and time spent in a coma. Some believe it affected his behavior.  

Like Armstrong, Ford got married while in the military, but he had a tumultuous  marriage, and his wife asked for a divorce in 1983. He went into a tailspin and was sent to psychiatric facility for evaluation, said to have depression and addiction, along with suicidal tendencies. He was put on drug therapy, which appeared to help. He was then sent on assignment for the Marines in 1984, but he became insubordinate. He was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and eventually discharged from the military in 1985. He floated around with various short-term jobs.

It was right around that time that Ford's behavior escalated. He allegedly beat and raped a prostitute in the mid-'80s, though the female did not press charges. He had a handsome, muscular appearance to his credit, seeming normal on the outside just as Armstrong did, while harboring dark proclivities, even toward young girls, and overall promiscuity.

Ford married again in the early 1990s, but he reportedly became controlling and abusive, with odd sexual habits. His second wife had their son in 1995, and she had tried to leave Ford before that. They tried a new life in Las Vegas. But she left soon after, in 1996.

Ford moved back to California and started working as a truck driver, traveling all over the state. Then things really got ugly. In fall 1997, the torso of a woman was found in a river, all cut up and even disemboweled and not able to be identified (she finally would be, via DNA, decades later). Then in June 1998, shortly after Ford's second divorce was finalized, another woman was found in a waterway, and she was ID'd as a 26-year-old white female sex worker. A third woman was found later that year in an irrigation ditch, this time a 25-year-old prostitute. Soon after, another woman was found floating in an aqueduct, ID'd as a 29-year-old prostitute. She was strangled, and one of her breasts was removed. The four victims were all stabbed and/or strangled. By comparison, Armstrong was solely a strangler, and he never mutilated his victims. He didn't do much of anything after killing them and disposing them, though there was a small degree of necrophilia in his case. Armstrong had five known fatalities in Michigan, with another five who survived, while Ford was known to have killed four females and assaulted at least a couple others who survived. All of Ford's victims were white female prostitutes in their mid-to-late-20s, while Armstrong wasn't at all choosy while hunting Detroit's notorious Michigan Ave, scooping up whatever age or ethnicity was available. Also, like Armstrong, Ford wasn't making much effort to hide his victims.

Both of these men may have subconsciously wanted to get caught. For Armstrong, he reported one of his own victims to someone nearby so that they could call police, under the guise of being an innocent bystander. But you really have to wonder, especially since after his arrest, he was telling the officers, as he sat in the back seat of the squad car, that he was relieved it was over. For Ford, there were a couple times when he wanted to show his older brother Rodney a space -- like part of his bedroom or his long-haul truck -- where there was incriminating evidence, but his brother wasn't interested and had no idea what was going on. And thus, Ford continued on unchecked.

John Eric Armstrong
Would Armstrong ever have turned himself in? I have to wonder. I tend to doubt it, though I do believe his conscience was searing him, at least below the surface. For Ford, the pressure got to be too much. After a day of drinking and feeling suicidal (another trait he shares with Armstrong), he started confessing to Rodney, his only sibling, who convinced him to turn himself in. Wayne did so in November 1998, with that plastic zippered bag and its terrifying severed body part in his coat pocket. He blamed the killings on his second wife and was afraid he might kill her too if not stopped.

These two killers varied a lot in M.O. Ford tortured the women for a while before killing them, and even carried them in his truck for days. Police found body parts of his victims in his home, some in a coffee can, some in a freezer. Shades of Jeffrey Dahmer. He was even said to have tried to cook some parts. He buried other body parts in remote locations. But in one similarity to Armstrong, Ford claimed to not remember all his violence. Armstrong claimed to have sort of blackouts in the actual act of killing, not remembering some moments of the crimes later, waking up and finding himself somewhere else or whatever.

Both men felt a a sense of abandonment in childhood, and the resentment that can accompany that, Ford toward his mother, Armstrong toward his biological father. And both seemed so normal on the surface (of course a lot of serials are that way, right?). Ford's one particular survivor testified at his trial, saying Ford seemed like a normal guy until you got into his truck, when he changed into someone else.

Ford was found guilty in June 2006. sentenced to death and sent to San Quentin. Armstrong was convicted in 2001 and remains incarcerated with multiple life sentences in Jackson, Michigan.

To learn more about the Ford case, see the episode of "World's Most Evil Killers." Ford's first wife also spoke in an episode of "Evil Lives Here," and his brother Rodney was interviewed on "I Lived With a Killer."

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