The Animal

Jerry Walter McFadden was convicted of rape three times in Texas and served only part of each sentence. Paroled in December 1978, he traveled to the Pacific Northwest the next summer. On July 24, 1979, Anna Marie Hlavka’s sister came home to the Portland apartment they shared and found the twenty-year-old dead. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with the cord from her clock radio. The case went cold.

McFadden was paroled again in 1985. On May 4, 1986, near Lake Hawkins in East Texas, he abducted eighteen-year-old Suzanne Harrison, nineteen-year-old Bryan Boone and twenty-year-old Gena Turner. Harrison was raped and strangled; Boone and Turner were shot. Police arrested him two days later. That July he struck a deputy in Gilmer, took a young jail employee, Rosalie Williams, hostage at gunpoint and escaped, setting off one of the largest manhunts in Texas history. She got away on the second night; he was recaptured the next day.

A jury convicted McFadden of Suzanne Harrison’s murder in 1987 and sentenced him to death. He was executed at Huntsville on October 14, 1999. Because he died before his profile ever reached the national DNA database, Anna Marie Hlavka’s case stayed open. Forensic genealogists built out his family tree from crime scene DNA, relatives gave samples, and Portland police announced the match on February 1, 2019.