Tennessee Serial Killer 1902
28, 2012He admitted to killing the women.He kept souvenirs from them in his bedroom.Yet Thomas Dee Huskey will never serve a day in prison for Knox County's only reputed serial killings. The convicted rapist known as the 'Zoo Man' sits in a cell today, found guilty of sex crimes but legally blameless in the deaths of four prostitutes.The case, one of the most expensive in Tennessee's history, hit a wall when judges ruled Huskey's confession and trophies couldn't be presented to a jury.Huskey, 52, qualifies for parole in three years.
Jeremiah Lexer Grave
Active Serial Killers In Tennessee
He never denied the crimes but blamed them on 'Kyle,' an alternate personality, in an insanity defense unprecedented in East Tennessee's legal annals.' Zoo Man' was just a nickname given by local prostitutes to Huskey, who had worked in the elephant barn at the Knoxville Zoo, until a hunter walked up on a woman's body Oct.
20, 1992, in some woods off Cahaba Lane in East Knox County. Prostitutes and their customers knew the spot well.Patricia Rose Anderson never left it.
The days that followed turned up the bodies of three more women, all naked and strangled.Knoxville Police Department Investigator Tom Pressley recognized the woods as the place he'd arrested Huskey months earlier. Two women claimed Huskey had taken them there, tied them up, raped them and robbed them.He walked free when they wouldn't testify.Knox County Sheriff's Office investigators acting on a tip from Pressley tracked Huskey to his parents' home in nearby Pigeon Forge, where they found the Zoo Man, along with rope, pornography and jewelry they believed he'd stolen from the dead prostitutes' bodies.
But courts refused to accept the search warrant that yielded the evidence because it came from a city judicial commissioner and not from a judge.Randy Nichols, Knox County district attorney general, pushed for the death penalty, even after judges tossed Huskey's statement and the evidence seized from his parents' home. The first jury to hear the case deadlocked on Feb. 13, 1999.Two juries found Huskey guilty of rapes committed before the killings, but the murder case sputtered and died. Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner finally dismissed the murder charges in October 2005 after prosecutors gave up that case.Huskey continues to serve a 64-year sentence at the South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tenn., with a chance for a parole hearing in April 2015.