The killer of the trolley and the mystery of the corpse of a 40-year-old

What was the corpse of a woman in an advanced state of decomposition doing in a shopping cart? The police started from here, from this discovery in front of a supermarket near Union Station, in the heart of Washington, a stone’s throw from Capitol Hill to shed light on a story that could have very different implications by opening a real case. Because the discovery of this body covered by a cloth leaves no doubt to the local authorities: it is certainly the fifth victim of the serial killer now known as ‘the Shopping Cart Killer’, the killer of the shopping cart.
Anthony Robinson, 35, African American, has been in jail since the end of November. He is imprisoned in the penitentiary of Rockingham, Virginia, already accused of the death of two women whose bodies were found in a plastic bag also placed in a trolley, abandoned in the bush outside the town of Alexandria. The same fate of two other girls made to disappear in the same way and always found in Virginia, just outside Washington. All were between 29 and 54 years old, including a pregnant woman and a mother of six children. After the discovery of the fifth victim, 40, the fear is that the list could be lengthened.
Little is known about Robinson’s private life, homeless and made up of odd jobs between New York and Washington.
However, investigators have reconstructed his criminal plan
The investigators have put together the pieces of a puzzle that initially seemed very intricate and which, gradually, has taken on more clear connotations. According to the authorities, the serial killer lured the victims through some online dating sites, his favorite the Canadian “Plenty of Fish”, giving them an appointment on the web and luring them to some motels. Here he would kill his prey after hitting them causing them to lose consciousness, then hide them and transport them away with supermarket trolleys. Those trolleys that especially in times of pandemic in American cities it is common to see the homeless go around, who use them as a means of transport for what little they have left.
Even in the last case, that of the body found near the station in the US capital, investigators found that Robinson was the last person contacted by the victim via mobile phone, after an appointment made online. The last traces of the two, through the data of the telephone cells, while in Washington they take the subway heading out of the District of Columbia, right in Virginia.
The alleged serial killer, if found guilty, should however avoid the electric chair or lethal injection. In fact, last March, Democratic Governor Ralph Northam signed the law that makes Virginia the twenty-third US state to abolish the death penalty.