In the autumn of 1983, Janet Ann Benoit, an adventurous 22-year-old woman, was eagerly embarking on a new chapter of her life. A 1978 graduate of Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, she was traveling from Colorado to Arizona to start a new job and a new life. Her journey, full of promise, took her through Santa Fe, New Mexico, for an overnight stop on November 11, 1983.
It was a stop that would tragically be her last.
The following morning, a housekeeper at the Comfort Inn on Cerrillos Road entered Janet's room to find a horrific scene. Janet had been sexually assaulted, strangled with a handkerchief, and stabbed more than 30 times. The vibrant young woman who had been so full of plans for the future was gone. The Santa Fe police began a homicide investigation, but with few leads, the case quickly grew cold, leaving Janet's family with unanswered questions and the agonizing pain of an unresolved murder.
For years, there was no movement in the case. The break would come not from the initial investigation, but from the dogged determination of Janet's older brother, Dave Benoit. Unwilling to let his sister's memory fade or her killer remain free, Dave launched his own inquiry. He questioned the security practices at the motel, discovering that master keys were widely distributed, a fact that led him to file a lawsuit against Comfort Inn, which was later settled out of court. His pursuit of justice was relentless.
The investigation into Janet's death eventually intersected with other violent crimes. In June 1984, another Santa Fe woman, 25-year-old Teri Mulvaney, was found raped and strangled in her apartment. A neighbor, David Bruce Morton, a man with a history of armed robbery, was a suspect. Though a cellmate claimed Morton confessed to Mulvaney's murder, he was tried in 1988, and the jury deadlocked, resulting in his release. Morton then moved to Amarillo, Texas, where in 1990, he raped and murdered 22-year-old Kim Kendall. This time, a fingerprint left at the scene definitively linked him to the crime.
After Morton was convicted for the murder of Kim Kendall and sentenced to life in a Texas prison, Dave Benoit hired a private investigator. The investigator noted the chilling similarities between the murders of Janet and Kim Kendall, particularly the stab wounds to the back and neck. This information was brought to the Santa Fe police, urging them to take a new look at David Bruce Morton, the man who had slipped through their fingers years earlier.
The pieces finally came together in 2003. Faced with the renewed investigation and the evidence connecting him to the Santa Fe crimes, David Bruce Morton, already serving a life sentence, confessed to the murders of both Janet Ann Benoit and Teri Mulvaney. In February 2004, two decades after he ended Janet's promising journey, Morton pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and burglary. He received additional life sentences in New Mexico, ensuring he would never be free again.
The legal resolution brought a measure of closure to a case that had haunted Santa Fe and tormented a family for 20 years. Morton, known as "The Santa Fe Strangler," is suspected of killing up to five other women between 1983 and 1990, a period that cast a shadow of fear over the city. While justice was delayed, it was not denied, largely due to a brother's unwavering love and refusal to give up on finding the man who stole his sister's future.
