The Shopping Cart Serial Killer TRAIL OF A MONSTER

THE BODIES OF MISSING WOMEN WERE SHOWING UP IN VACANT LOTS AND WOODED AREAS IN VIRGINIA, APPARENTLY TRANSPORTED THERE IN SHOPPING CARTS. NOW POLICE HAVE A SUSPECT IN CUSTODY

- K.C. BAKER

In the desperate months after her 29-year-old daughter Cheyenne Brown was last seen alive at a Washington, D.C., Metro station, Nicadra Brown nervously awaited a call from police.

On Dec. 7, 2021, Fairfax County Police Department detectives scoured the grounds of a motel in Alexandria, Va., where the cell phone of Cheyenne, a single mother pregnant with her second child, had last pinged on Oct. 4, "but they didn't find anything," says Nicadra, 49. Undeterred, the investigators returned days later. They had concluded a second fruitless search of the Moon Inn on busy Richmond Highway when a detective getting back into his car spotted a shopping cart and, next to it, a large plastic container in a nearby vacant lot. Inside the container were the badly decomposed remains of two women-one identified by her tattoo as Cheyenne Brown. "They found my daughter," says Nicadra, crying. "I wish I could have protected her." The victim found alongside Brown was identified as Stephanie Harrison, a 48-year-old tourist from Redding, Calif. Sadly, the grim discovery of the two bodies may not have been an isolated event.

Weeks earlier, police in Harrisonburg, Va., about 130 miles southwest of Alexandria, had recovered the remains of two other missing women-Allene "Beth" Redmon, 54, a mother of two born and raised in Harrisonburg, and Tonita Smith, 39, a mother of six from Charlottesville, Va.-in a field next to a Howard Johnson motel.

Next to their bodies there was also an abandoned shopping cart. Later that day, Nov. 23, 2021, police arrested Anthony Robinson, 37, a factory and waste-removal worker, on charges of first-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the deaths of Redmon and Smith. He had been staying at the motel while working at a nearby poultry processing plant.