On Tuesday morning, September 19, a Kenyan man convicted of killing two people in Texas and suspected of killing up to more than a dozen others was found dead in his prison cell.
50-year-old Billy Chemirmir was serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole after being convicted in 2022 of killing two women.
He was incarcerated in the H.H. Coffield Unity in Anderson County, Texas.
His cellmate, who is currently serving a murder sentence out of Harris County, was the assailant, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.
A Dallas County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson confirmed Chemirmir’s death to CBS News in Texas.
No further details, including the cause of death or the cellmate’s name, have been released amid an ongoing investigation by the state’s Office of Inspector General.
Chemirmir, a former healthcare worker, was suspected of the deaths of 18 elderly people in Dallas and Collin Counties between 2016 and 2018.
However, he was accused of killing 24 people from April 2016 through March 2018.
According to authorities, Chemirmir would allegedly dress as a maintenance worker or health care aid to get into homes and kill his victims, whose deaths largely went uninvestigated at the time because they were assumed to have been natural causes due to their advanced ages.
Last year, he was found guilty of capital murder by two separate Dallas County juries for the 2018 deaths of Lu Thi Harris, 81, and Mary Brooks, 87.
Chemirmir faced 11 more capital murder charges in Collin County and six in Dallas County.
Last month, Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis decided not to pursue the death penalty in those cases.
Chemirmir, who moved to the US in the 1990s after marrying an American citizen, had been described as a loner.
Soon after Chemirmir’s arrest in 2018 following suspicion that he could be a serial killer, his family and neighbours in Eldama Ravine described him as quiet and humble.
Those who knew him in the US said he lived a life of exclusion.
