Walter Earl Ellis was born on June 24, 1960, in Mississippi and later moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He experienced a troubled and unstable upbringing, reportedly marked by exposure to poverty, crime, and neglect. Details about Ellis’s early life remain limited, but he had a long history of criminal behavior dating back to his teenage years, including charges for armed robbery, assault, drug offenses, and attempted sexual assault. By the early 1980s, Ellis had been in and out of jail, and his interactions with law enforcement were frequent, yet his more heinous crimes had not yet been detected.

Ellis was known to drift in and out of homeless shelters and lived intermittently with various relatives and partners. He frequently stayed in inner-city Milwaukee neighborhoods and was known to abuse drugs and alcohol. Despite his repeated run-ins with the law, his eventual status as a serial killer would go undetected for decades. During this time, forensic technology had not advanced enough to connect the string of female strangulation victims who were being discovered across Milwaukee’s North Side.

Between 1986 and 2007, Walter Earl Ellis preyed upon vulnerable women—mostly Black women involved in sex work or battling addiction—on Milwaukee’s North Side. His modus operandi remained consistent: he lured victims to secluded locations or their own homes, where he assaulted and then strangled them. In total, DNA evidence would eventually link Ellis to seven murders, but he is suspected in at least two more killings and possibly others.

His first known victim, Deborah Harris, was found strangled on October 10, 1986. Over the next two decades, more women were found murdered in similar ways: Tanya Miller (1992), Irene Smith (1995), Florence McCormick (1997), Sheila Farrior (1998), Jessica Payne (1999), and finally Carrie Nash (2007). All victims were killed by manual or ligature strangulation, and most had signs of sexual assault. Due to the social marginalization of the victims and inconsistencies in evidence collection at the time, no definitive suspect emerged, and several murders went cold.

Ellis managed to evade suspicion for years, partly due to gaps in Milwaukee’s forensic database. Incredibly, at one point, another man named Walter Ellis (no relation) was wrongly arrested due to confusion over DNA samples. Ellis himself had given a DNA sample in 1995 while in custody, but it was mislabeled and never entered into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). It wasn’t until a re-investigation of cold cases in the late 2000s, paired with improved DNA matching techniques, that the pattern across the murders became clear.

In September 2009, Ellis was arrested in Franklin County, Arkansas, after his DNA was taken from a toothbrush and razor collected during a parole check in Milwaukee. He was extradited to Wisconsin and charged with multiple counts of first-degree intentional homicide. During interrogation, Ellis maintained his innocence and never confessed. In February 2011, rather than face a death penalty trial, he pleaded no contest to seven counts of first-degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Ellis was incarcerated at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin. On December 1, 2013, just two years into his sentence, Ellis died of natural causes related to heart problems. He was 53 years old at the time of his death. His death closed one of Milwaukee’s most harrowing serial killer cases, but questions remain about the total number of victims and how many lives could have been saved with earlier forensic diligence.