Marjorie “Margie” Call, 57, a White woman, was living alone in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, when the quiet routine of her neighborhood was shattered on January 27, 1982. By then, the river town already carried a nervous edge from years of violence that seemed to strike without warning, and her death would come to feel like another cruel entry in a pattern no one could yet name.
That day, Call was found dead inside her home on Brink Street.
Investigators determined she had been strangled, and reporting from the period later described her as found on her bed, partially nude, in a back bedroom of the residence. The scene suggested an intruder had come into her most private space and taken his time—close enough to kill with his hands, quiet enough to leave the city wondering how many doors and windows were never truly “locked.”
For her family, grief mixed with a lingering, helpless guilt. Years later, when the case finally moved in court, her son Don Call spoke publicly about how often he and his brother checked on their mother, and how the unanswered questions sat on their shoulders for decades—especially because she was a widow who lived alone. Even as life in Cape Girardeau moved forward, the not-knowing kept pulling her loved ones back to that winter day.
Call’s killing didn’t stand alone. Police believed the same offender was responsible for multiple murders spanning the late 1970s into 1982—cases that felt “random” to the community, but began to look chillingly consistent to investigators. In accounts of those cold cases, authorities said the attacker sometimes entered homes through a bathroom window, and the string of homicides helped spur the region’s law enforcement agencies to organize into a Major Case Squad to marshal more investigative resources when violence hit.
The break came decades later, carried in the slow-building power of forensic science. DNA tied an imprisoned man, Timothy W. Krajcir, to related killings, and authorities announced formal charges in Cape Girardeau on December 10, 2007, after the long-unsolved murders of five women—including Call—were finally connected to him. Reports said Krajcir confessed only after DNA evidence linked him to cases in both Missouri and Illinois, turning what had been a haunting mystery into a prosecutable narrative.
In April 2008, the story reached its most public reckoning. Krajcir pleaded guilty to the murders of five women in Cape Girardeau, including Call, and also admitted to additional crimes, in a deal that spared him a possible death sentence. The courtroom heard the pattern prosecutors described—how he selected women in public, followed them home, then returned later to attack—while relatives sat feet away, finally hearing the “why” they’d been denied for so long. He received multiple life sentences in Missouri, and reporting noted additional lengthy sentences he already faced in Illinois for other killings.
