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Killer Comparisons: John Eric Armstrong and Paul Stephani, the 'Weepy-Voiced Killer'

When you're a serial killer, that idea of subconsciously wanting to be caught is a very interesting one from a psychological perspective. Do you secretly want to be apprehended because you're living in a sort of hell that you just want to end? Do you have a deep sense of right and wrong and know that you cannot keep committing these crimes, that eventually you'll be caught anyway? Or are you sadistically playing cat and mouse with police, not really intending to be arrested at all? What is actually going on in the mind of a serial killer who contacts police and seems to want to be caught?

Let's take a look at two convicted serials from this framework. One was born in North Carolina in 1973, the other in Minnesota in 1944. One hunted on a seedy strip of the inner city of Detroit in 1999 and 2000, the other in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area years earlier, in 1980–1982. Both came from childhoods marked by divorce. Both married as adults and assumed seemingly normal lives. But Paul Stephani had a considerably tougher time hanging onto jobs. He blamed it on his epilepsy; the jury is still out on that. John Eric Armstrong's main career was the U.S. Navy, through the 1990s, then he had no trouble finding employment in Michigan afterward.

Armstrong, from the Michigan Dept. of Corrections.

Stephani's stepfather was said to be a very strict Catholic, and that could lead you to speculate on Stephani's state of mind during the murders. Stephani divorced his wife a few years after marrying her in 1970, so ... more guilt? Armstrong was saved in church as a teen. I spoke to a mentor of his who was at the church that day in this conservative, Southern America setting. He also married, and like Stephani, fathered a child before starting his crimes.

Stephani began his crimes in his 30s, but Armstrong was in his 20s, more fitting the serial killer stereotype. And their M.O. varied: While Armstrong was a manual strangler, Stephani used a variety of objects. He hit his first victim over the head with a tire iron. She survived but wasn't expected to because of the extensive beating. He had a five-month cooldown after that, then stabbed a woman with an ice pick. It was a violent assault with many stab wounds. This second victim was also choked to death with shoelaces. In an odd detail, both of these first two victims were wearing red.

Stephani, from Brandt Kettwick Defense.

After each of these first two attacks, Stephani called police, weeping as he described the crimes. He even called a few more times in the days following the second attack. He earned himself the nickname of the “Weepy-Voiced Killer.” He cooled it for a few more months, much like Armstrong when he was first getting started in Michigan -- he attacked in August 1999, then December 1999 and January 2000, then March 2000. I have often wondered what a serial is thinking in those cooldown periods. Are they thinking they can stop? Are they essentially trying to stop, but then the urge becomes too strong again?

In Armstrong's case, after he killed his second victim in Detroit, he alerted police to the body like Stephani did. His method was a tad less direct. He checked on Wendy Jordan's body in the Rouge River in the western suburb of Dearborn Heights, hours after he had left her there, then flagged down a passing motorist to pretend he had just "found" her. Police didn't believe the Good Samaritan thing, though, but Armstrong gave it all he had, doubling and tripling down on his deceit while being questioned at the station. This might not reflect a whole lot of subconscious guilt, but one of his later arresting officers would say that in the car ride to the precinct, Armstrong was muttering under his breath that he was glad it was over.

After Stephani attacked his fourth victim, who was his third fatality (there was a second fatality in there that was largely under police radar), he called police, weeping again. "Please don't talk, just listen," he told them. "I'm sorry I killed that girl. I stabbed her 40 times."

Like Armstrong, Stephani sometimes hunted sex workers, and this was his fifth and final assault. The woman survived and proved to be his undoing when a bystander disrupted the attack and helped her. Stephani had stabbed her multiple times with a screwdriver.

Law enforcement speculated that Stephani in his weepy alter ego wanted people to have sympathy for him. But he did not cooperate with police after his arrest. That is, until they showed him crime scene photos. He then became more agitated. His voice elevated to a higher pitch, getting hysterical like when he called police during the crimes. The weepy phone calls were key evidence in his case, particularly with the identification of him in the audio by people close to him such as his ex-wife and sister. But was this enough to convince a jury he was the killer? Partially. He was convicted of some crimes but not others. Armstrong, on the other hand, was known to attack 10 people in Detroit, killing five. DNA was Armstrong's undoing, along with the powerful testimony of his survivors.

About 12 years into his prison sentence, Stephani was diagnosed with terminal skin cancer. This was a turning point for him. He summoned police and admitted to the other crimes he had not been convicted of. He also confessed to the 1982 drowning murder of a school teacher that police had not linked to him. He knew this woman, had spent time with her prior to the murder. He had feelings for her. But, as he told authorities, he also had a sudden urge to kill her.

As he neared death, Stephani reached out to one woman who had worked his case, asking her for help in placing flowers on the graves of his victims. She refused, but it's an interesting request, thought by some to be his futile attempt to assuage his own guilt. Armstrong has expressed no such guilt, not these days. After his arrest, he was weepy himself, even handwriting on a couple of his confessions how sorry he was for his crimes, but some Detroit police believe that was just posturing. Then, since being convicted in 2001, he has clammed up about his crimes.

To learn more about the Stephani case, see the "World's Most Evil Killers" episode in particular, but the case has been featured on several true-crime docs over the years.

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See photos from the Armstrong case at the gallery on the WildBlue Press website.
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