Donna Perry (1952 - ) convicted of murder

From 1975 to 1998 at least 26 prostitutes in Spokane, Washington State – population 200,000 - were murdered by shooting, apparently by a trick who had sex with them first. Their bodies were dumped in rural locations.

Douglas Perry of Spokane had a history of being arrested. In 1974 he was arrested for second degree assault. In 1979 he was found guilty of a dangerous weapons violation. In 1986 he was arrested for second degree assault. In 1987 he was found guilty of reckless endangerment with a firearm. In 1988 he was found guilty of assault.

Later in 1988 Perry was arrested by Federal Agents for possession of a pipe bomb. A search of his home discovered 22 handguns (including .22 handguns), 27 rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition. Thus he became a convicted felon.

In 1989 Perry was arrested in Spokane for soliciting sex from prostitutes.

Three sex workers, Nickie Lowe, Kathy Brisbois and Yolanda Sapp, were murdered in February and March 1990. All three were shot with a .22 caliber gun, and their nude or partially nude bodies were found in or near the Spokane River. At the time investigators considered the three deaths to be part of the longer string of prostitute murders.

In 1994 Perry was again arrested for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, including a .22 handgun and a couple of .22 rifles. As a convicted felon Perry was prohibited from possessing firearms.

Perry was in prison in Oregon from January 1995 to October 1997. Other inmates later reported that he talked about taking prostitutes home, and talked in such a way that they thought that he was involved in the prostitute murders.

In December 1998, a prostitute who had serviced Perry at home, reported to the police that she saw a lot of guns, knives and a cross-bow. She identified his car and police officers stopped and searched it. They found attorney papers that said that Perry had “a gender psychosis disorder where he does not like females”, and other papers explaining gender transition.

Robert L Yates (also born 1952) was arrested in 2000, initially for one murder, but was then tied by DNA evidence to 12 more. He was convicted and sentenced to 408 years in prison. However Yates had been in the US Army, was stationed in Germany in February-March 1990, and so could not have murdered Nickie Lowe, Kathy Brisbois and Yolanda Sapp. The three murders were reassigned as cold cases.

Also in 2000 Perry became Donna and flew to Thailand for correction surgery.

In 2001, Yates was charged and convicted of two more murders of women. For this he was sentenced to death.

Perry said too much in 2007-8 when talking to an agent of the Department of Social and Health Services. She talked of shooting people, and said: “I knew I was going to end up dead or in prison again if I didn’t do something. I got gelded just like a horse and got my life back under control.”

In 2009 matter found under Ms Brisbois’ left middle fingernail was submitted for DNA analysis. A full male profile was developed and entered into the DNA Indexing System.


In 2012 Perry was again arrested by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition. A search of her home recovered more firearms. She was sentenced to 18 months and placed in a Federal Prison in Fort Worth, Texas. She boasted to her female cell-mate that she was a contract killer who had killed nine prostitutes. “He told me … becoming a woman was a disguise to take the heat off of him, that an elderly lady with mental illness would never get caught.” She also claimed to have killed two others after returning from Thailand.

A check on Perry’s DNA revealed a match to that taken from Ms Brisbois’ fingernail. A further match was found with DNA found on the blanket wrapped around Yolanda Sapp’s body, and a fingerprint match to Nickie Lowe’s purse etc. which had been recovered from a dumpster. A further search of Perry’s home found a box containing panties – but in a size too small to be her own.

In an interview in November that year Donna said: 'Douglas didn't stop, Donna stopped it,' 'I'm not going to admit I killed anybody, I didn't. Donna has killed nobody.' And 'I don't know if Doug did or not, it was 20 years ago and I have no idea whether he did or did not.' She also said that a sex change is a “permanent way to control any violence” – that it results in “a very great downturn in violence”.

In July 2017, Perry was found guilty and sentenced to three life sentences without parole.


Yates is still on Death Row. He has contested his death sentence on the ground that he “suffers from a severe paraphilic disorder” (that is necrophilia).

*not the Playboy Playmate of November 1994.

• “Woman linked to 1990 prostitute killings”. The Spokesman Review, Nov 21, 2012. www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/nov/21/woman-linked-to-1990-prostitute-killings/
• “State of Washington v. Donna Rebecca Perry also known as Douglas Robert Perry” PDF.
• “Transgender woman, 62, blames her male persona for shooting dead 3 prostitutes in 1990”. Daily Mail, 19 March 2014. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2584343/Transgender-woman-62-blames-male-persona-shooting-dead-3-prostitutes-1990.html.
• “Cellmate of transgender murder suspect says Donna Perry claimed to have killed dozens”. The Spokesman-Review, June 23, 2017. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/23/cellmate-of-transgender-murder-suspect-says-donna-/
• “Transgender woman sentenced to life without parole for 3 Spokane-area slayings”. The Seattle Times, July 24, 2017. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/transgender-woman-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-3-spokane-area-slayings

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Two serial killers operating at the same time!     However this book says that London, Ontario, with almost 400,000 people, had six serial killers operating at the same time.  

I think that Perry was right in exploring lower testosterone levels as a way of becoming less violent.  However if she were not trans she would simply have had herself gelded. 

Of course a gender change does not confer absolution for crimes already committed.

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Frank Spisak (1951 - 2011) factory worker, serial killer, inmate.

Frank was the son of a factory worker in Cleveland, Ohio, who moved home because too many blacks had moved into the area. He had childhood fantasies of being a woman.  He married at 22, and they had one daughter. He read constantly on Hitler and the Nazis and his wife tried to ignore the issue. He worked in various factory jobs.

At 25 he suffered a head injury in a car accident. In 1977, he started dressing as female. As Frankie Ann, Spisak received treatment from the Gender Dysphoria clinic at Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, lived as female full-time, changed her ID, saw a psychologist and started taking female hormones. She was also saving for surgery. She was fired from her factory job after turning up as female. Frankie Ann found employment with a maker of eyeglasses until found not to be a woman. She tried prostitution until charged with solicitation, and briefly worked as a Kelly Girl temp. When she brought a trans woman home for sex, her wife and daughter moved out.

But in 1979 the Nazi Frank took over. He collected Nazi memorablia, and played Hitler’s speeches on his stereo. He was stockpiling guns and ammunition. He was also dating a black female prostitute. In February 1982 he found a black preacher in the next stall in the men’s toilet at the Cleveland State University Library and shot him dead. In June he shot a black man at a train station, who survived. In August he returned to to CSU and shot at a female student in the ladies room but missed. He became paranoid about a maintenance worker at CSU who might identify him, and so shot him dead, again in the men’s toilets. The next night he killed a young man waiting at a bus stop.

A week later he got drunk and shot his gun out of the window of his house. For this he was arrested, but was allowed to post bond. An anonymous phone call suggested to the police that they re-examine the guns that they had taken from Spisak’s house, and they were found to match those used in the killings.

Once arrested he admitted the murders, grew a Hitler-style mustache and carried a copy of Mein Kampf. At his 1983 trial, his attorney presented him as crazy but he was not found to be ‘legally insane’. He declared that he was under orders from God, and that Jews were to blame for his transvestite episodes, having seized control of his mind. The jury quickly found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

In jail, Spisak lobbied for a sex change, filed a lawsuit to force the state to refer to him as a woman, and appealed the death sentence. In 2006 the appeal court ruled that he had not received a fair defense and struck down his death sentence. In 2010, this was reversed.

He was executed 17 February 2011. He had been 27 years on death row.

• “Brief of Respondent for Smith v Spisak, 08-724”. www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/pdfs/07-08/08-724_Respondent.pdf.
• “Frank Spisak”. Serial Killer Central. Oct 11 2004. www.skcentral.com/articles.php?article_id=131.
• Jared Klaus. “Cheating Death: A cross-dressing Nazi murdered a prosecutor's dad 25 years ago. He's back”. Cleveland Scene. Dec 06, 2006. http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/cheating-death/Content?oid=1497024.

Were Henry Lee Lucas (1936 – 2001) and Ottis Toole (1947 – 1996) transvestites?.

Henry Lee Lucas was born in a one-room cabin near Blacksburg, Virginia, the youngest of nine children. His father, a former railroad employee has lost his legs after being hit by a freight train, and was frequently drunk. His mother, a prostitute, often violently beat the children. Lucas was once three days in a coma after she hit him with a piece of wood.

She forced him to watch what she did with her tricks, and often dressed him as a girl. One of his sisters confirms that he was dressed as a girl for the first day of school.

When he was 10, one of his brothers stabbed him in the left eye. His mother ignored the injury for four days and he lost the eye. When he was 13, his father died of pneumonia after collapsing drunk during a snow storm.

Soon afterwards, Lucas dropped out of school and lived as a drifter doing petty crimes and burglaries. He was convicted of burglary in 1954 and released in 1959.

In 1960 while visiting his sister in Michigan he stabbed his mother during a drunken brawl, and she died. He was convicted of second-degree murder, but released after 10 years, perhaps due to prison overcrowding, even after he had told the parole board that he would kill again.

In 1976 he met Ottis Toole and traveled with him for many years. Lucas was arrested in Texas in 1983 for unlawful firearm possession as he was an ex-con, and then charged with two murders. He pleaded guilty and confessed to a hundred other murders as well. The confessions eventually went up to several hundred murders. It is likely that many of these confessions were to obtain prison privileges and for police officers to clear up unsolved crimes.

He was convicted of 11 murders. There were 153 death penalty convictions in Texas while George Bush was governor. Lucas’ conviction was the only one that Bush commuted to life in prison.

Lucas died in prison at age 64.
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Ottis Toole was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father abandoned the family. His mother, who was deeply into evangelical protestantism, abused him and frequently dressed him as a girl.

Several of his family including his elder sister and a friend of his father had sex with him while he was child. He was gang-raped by hobos when six years old. He scored low on IQ tests, had dyslexia and attention deficiency and was epileptic.

He had his first gay affair when 12. As a teenager he did some prostitution and sometimes went out crossdressed.

At 21 he married a 15-year-old girl, but she discovered his gay activities and left after nine weeks. He became a drifter, living by begging and prostitution. He was a prime suspect in murders of women in Nebraska and Colorado.

He returned to Jacksonville and married a woman 25 years older. After 13 months of domestic violence they divorced and Toole went back to prostitution.

In 1976 he met Henry Lee Lucas and they became lovers.

In 1983 Toole was arrested for arson and confessed to several murders. He was sentenced to death, but the sentences were commuted to life in prison.

He died in prison of liver failure at age 49.

• John McNaughton (dir). Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Scr: Richard Fire & John McNaughton, with Michael Rooker as Henry and Tom Towles as Otis. US 83 mins 1986.
• Peter Vieira (dir) Death Diploma. Scr: Richard Mason, Peter Priamos & Peter Vieira, with Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. US/Canada 50 mins 1987.
• Brad Shellady. “Henry: Fabrication of a Serial Killer”. In Russ Kick. Everything You Know is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies. The Disinformation Company Ltd. 2002: 64-71.
• David McGowan. Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder. iUniverse, Inc. 2004: 71-6..

EN.Wikipedia(Henry_Lee_Lucas).     EN.Wikipedia(Ottis_Toole).

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These are interesting case studies. Not only do both men have the dominant mother and absent or passive father so beloved of psychoanalysts, they were both subjected to the forced femininity that is a popular theme in transvestite pornography both hard and soft. It seems that Lucas just grinned and bared it, but Toole continued as a teenage transvestite. I have found no statement that he continued to dress as an adult, nor that he was a transy hooker.

The forced femininity is featured in the movie version of their lives, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Obviously the forced femininity did not contribute to making them fine upstanding citizens.

Obviously there are many factors in their lives that do not apply to 99%+ of transvestites.

As I said, these are interesting case studies. They are technically part of the spectrum of gender variance, but they are also extremely untypical.

Thierry Paulin (1963 – 1989) soldier, drag performer, murderer.

Thierry was born in Martinique. His father returned to France, abandoning his son and the boy's mother. When he was 10, his behaviour was erratic, and his father agreed to take him to avoid paying alimony.


At school in Toulouse and later in the French Army parachute troop, he was rejected because of his skin colour. His army career ended when he was convicted of robbing a female grocer.

He became a drag performer at the Paris nightclub, Paradis Latin, where he impersonated Eartha Kitt. He met his lover Jean-Thierry Mathurin, from French Guyana, at the nightclub.

Sometimes with his lover, from 1984-1987 Paulin murdered at least 20 elderly women for small amounts of money. Though he was captured, Paulin died of AIDS-related complications before going to trial.


His partner, Jean-Thierry (right), served a life sentence, and was released in 2009.
Paulin is referred to as the ‘Beast of Montmartre’, and his story was filmed as J'ai pas sommeil.

• Clair Denis (scr & dir). J'ai pas sommeil. Scr: Jean-Pol Fargeau, with Richard Courcet as Camille Moisson (Thierry Paulin). France/Switzerland 112 mins 1994.
• “Thierry Paulin”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thierry_Paulin.
• “Thierry Paulin and Jean-Thierry Mathurin: The ‘Old Ladies Killer’ and the ‘Monster of Montmartre’". www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/paulin.htm