BREAKING NEWS New England serial killer twist as suspect DIES in jail after sparking wild theories
Fears that a serial killer could be terrorizing New England have taken a shocking turn after the suspect in one of the murders suddenly died behind bars.
Donald Coffel, 68, died Friday while being held at the Corrigan Correctional Center in Connecticut, according to the Connecticut Department of Correction.
His cause of death remains a mystery but it is not considered suspicious, officials said. Coffel had previously been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment at L&M Hospital.
Coffel's sudden death comes after he was charged with the brutal murder of his roommate Suzanne Wormser, whose dismembered torso was found stuffed in a suitcase in a cemetery in Groton, Connecticut, back on March 19.
The 68-year-old was accused of bludgeoning the 58-year-old victim to death with a baseball bat because she stole $200 worth of crack cocaine from him.
Coffel then lived with her body for more than a week inside their home.
He then allegedly dismembered her, disposing of her body parts across several locations.
On March 19, a passer-by stumbled across Wormser's torso in a bag in the Colonel Ledyard Cemetery.
This grim discovery soon became central to a rampant theory that a serial killer was on the loose in New England, with at least 11 unexplained deaths or murders discovered close by in just two months.
Those fears began back in March when members of a true crime Facebook group started noticing m ultiple bodies or sets of human remains had been found across Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The remains began showing up in early March and continued all throughout April.
Many of the victims were female and several of the discoveries were clustered close to the borders between the New England states - some just minutes driving distance apart.
Speculation and rumors quickly spread online, with local residents and online sleuths connecting the dots between at least 11 bodies found within just two months.
Law enforcement agencies went into overdrive trying to bat away rumors of a pattern and deny any connection between the cases.
The rumors began when authorities found the body of 35-year-old Paige Fannon in the Norwalk River in Norwalk, Connecticut on March 6 - two days after her family reported her missing.
That same day, a man stumbled across a human skull in the woods in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Around two weeks later, on March 19, Wormser's remains were found.
Then, on March 20, the remains of 59-year-old Denise Leary were found close to her home in New Haven, Connecticut - six months after she allegedly vanished.
On March 26, 56-year-old Michele Romano's body was discovered in a wooded area in Foster, Rhode Island.
As March turned into April, bodies kept showing up.
On April 9, the remains of an unidentified man aged between 25 and 45 were found in Killingly, Connecticut, with another unidentified individual found in Framingham, Massachusetts, the next day.
On April 20, around 40 miles south of Framingham, an unidentified body was found in the Seekonk River off Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
On April 22, 45-year-old Meggan Meredith was found murdered near a bike path in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Three days later, walkers came across the body of 51-year-old Samuel Stovall in Mill River in Taunton, Massachusetts.
The next day, on April 26, 72-year-old Mary Colasanto was found in the Connecticut River in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.
As the number of bodies rose, social media users began connecting the dots, suggesting some or all of the cases could be the work of a serial killer.
A Facebook group - previously titled the New England Serial Killer - ballooned to a whopping 68,000 members within days and, on TikTok, videos posted by amateur sleuths and armchair detectives racked up millions of views.
Police in New England denied any connection between the cases.
In late April, Coffel was arrested and charged with Wormser's murder.
According to an arrest warrant, Coffel confessed to police that he had killed the victim inside the apartment they shared.
'Alright man, I did it. I hit her in the head with a f***ing baseball bat and it cracked her f***ing head open,' he admitted, according to the arrest warrant.
The murder is believed to have taken place in December.
Police said he acted alone and there was no ongoing threat to the public.
Several of the other deaths have also been debunked as the work of a serial killer.
New Haven Police said there is no sign of foul play and no indication of any crime in Leary's death.
Romano's family has also publicly denied she died at the hands of a serial killer.
'Take my sister Michele's name and pictures off of this effing website right now. She was not killed by a serial killer,' Romano's sister Valerie posted in one Facebook group.
America's top serial killer experts Dr. Katherine Ramsland and Dr. Ann Burgess told Daily Mail earlier this month that there was not enough information to either confirm or deny that any of the cases could be the work of the same killer.
'Right now, there isn't enough information to say yay or nay,' said Dr. Burgess, known for her groundbreaking work developing serial killer profiles with the FBI's behavioral unit.
'You almost have to go case by case, then take a look at it.'
In many of the cases, it is not even clear if the person was the victim of a homicide, let alone what their cause of death was.
'You can't just assume all of them were murdered, and they're all murdered by one person. That's just silly,' said Dr. Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University who studied BTK serial killer Dennis Rader and co-wrote his book.
Some of the bodies still have no identity, gender or age because they were found in such a progressed state of decomposition.
'We need to keep watching, we need to see if any more bodies show up,' Dr. Burgess said, adding that the number of bodies within the short timeframe was curious.
'I think what's impressive is how many bodies they had that nobody can account for - I think that's a little alarming that these bodies are just showing up. So where they had been or how well they had been hidden is always quite interesting.'
To determine any possible linkage between any of the murders, the experts said they would need information on the death circumstances (once it's confirmed a homicide) - such as how the victim died, the weapon used (if there was one) and the types of wounds.
They also would need victimology (a victim's identity, age, gender, work life and social connections), their risk level (based on factors such as involvement in criminal activity and drug use) and their pre-death activities.
There's also the crime scene patterns such as where the body was found and how it was left.
With that information, authorities can then see if there's any links between cases before taking further action.
'[In any murder], you don't start with a serial killer or a stranger killer as your first part of the investigation… You start with people who knew [the deceased], then you go out in widening circles,' Dr. Ramsland said.
Dr. Ramsland - who counts Idaho murders suspect Bryan Kohberger among her former students - said the way the rumors of a potential serial killer spread shows the 'nature of true crime culture these days.'
'There's a lot of what I think of as fuzzy thinking going on in social media and there's this fun about it - even though these are real victims, people are forgetting that part of it,' she said.
She also blamed a lack of public trust of what law enforcement is saying, in large part because of what happened in the Gilgo Beach serial killer case on New York's Long Island.
The Gilgo Beach case - where the remains of 11 victims were found along Ocean Parkway - was notoriously hampered by law enforcement corruption in Suffolk County.
This corruption - which saw the FBI pushed off the case and ended with both top cop James Burke and District Attorney Tom Spota behind bars - has been blamed for suspected serial killer Rex Heuermann walking free for more than a decade after the first victim was found in 2010.
Because of that botched investigation, Dr. Ramsland said social media users are taking matters into their own hands this time around.
'I think people are highly influenced by the LISK [Long Island serial killer] situation where remains were found all over the place and now they're beginning to be connected to one individual,' Dr. Ramsland told the Daily Mail.
'Because of the way that investigation was poorly handled, because there were cover-ups and the FBI was shoved out, I think people are very suspicious of police handling these investigations.
'I don't blame them because I think that one was so egregious and embarrassing for that area, that I can understand people saying, 'Well, why would we wait on the police?''
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