Volume 6 · Chapter 11
The Crybaby Killer
Kenneth Biros
Victim: Tami Engstrom
Case at a glance
- When
- February 1991
- Where
- Masury, Ohio, and Butler and Venango counties, Pennsylvania
- Perpetrator
- Kenneth Biros
- Victim
- Tami Engstrom
- Outcome
- Convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to death in 1991; executed by single-drug lethal injection on December 8, 2009
The case
Tami Engstrom, 22, spent the evening of February 7, 1991, at the Nickelodeon Lounge in Masury, Ohio. By early morning she had been drinking heavily, and Kenneth Biros, 32, offered to take her for coffee. They left together around 1:15 a.m., and Tami never came back.
When her family and police asked questions, Biros said Tami had jumped out of his car in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and run off. He had fresh cuts and scratches on his hands and a wound near his eye. On February 9 he went in for an interview and eventually admitted doing something “very bad,” claiming she had fallen and struck her head near the railroad tracks. He then led investigators to her remains, which he had dismembered and left in Butler and Venango counties in Pennsylvania, about 30 miles apart.
Biros was convicted of aggravated murder, attempted rape and aggravated robbery, and in 1991 he was sentenced to death. His appeals lasted almost two decades. After the failed attempt to execute Romell Broom in September 2009, Ohio switched to a single dose of sodium thiopental. Biros was executed at Lucasville on December 8, 2009, the first person in the country put to death that way.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 6 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 6 on AmazonCase photographs
2 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“Tami Engstrom accepted a ride for coffee from a man she had met that night, a friend of her uncle’s. It sounded harmless. Biros’s first story was built to sound ordinary too, but the fresh scratches on his hands made people doubt him. Many readers remember the execution method. Tami deserves to be remembered first.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
