WASHINGTON – An abandoned supermarket trolley near Union Station in the heart of Washington, a stone’s throw from Capitol Hill. Inside, covered by a cloth, the corpse of a woman in an advanced state of decomposition. The authorities have no doubts: she is certainly the fifth victim of the serial killer now known as ‘the Shopping Cart Killer’.
Anthony Robinson, 35, African American, has been in his cell 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. He lured victims through some online dating sites, his favorite the Canadian “Plenty of Fish”, by giving them dates on the web and luring them to some motels. Here he would have killed his prey after hitting them making them lose consciousness, then hiding them and transporting 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. Last March, in fact, the Democratic governor Ralph Northam signed the law that makes Virginia the twenty-third US state to abolish the death penalty.
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