Whatever Happened To Suspected Serial Killer Edward George McGregor?

In May 2006, police in Missouri City, Texas, a suburb of Houston, got a DNA match for a 16-year-old case. On the night of April 17, 1990, a woman named Kim Wildman called 911 to report she'd been stabbed. When police arrived, they found her on the floor nude and bleeding to death. "Help me, I'm dying," she told the officers, according to court documents (via Justia). She told them her assailant was a Black man that she didn't know. She died shortly afterward from two knife wounds. The case soon went dormant until Houston police began investigating two murders that took place six months apart from each other in 2005 and 2006. A DNA sample from a suspect, Edward George McGregor, matched with evidence found in Wildman's murder.

At the time of her killing, McGregor was 17 and lived a few doors down from the victim. He denied the crime but alleged he had consensual sex with Wildman on the night of her killing. Investigators believed McGregor was a serial killer and eventually connected him to four murders, per CT Insider. A jury found him guilty of capital murder for Wildman's killing in 2010, and he remains locked up in a Texas prison, per the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. As of 2024, he was 50 years old.

It was the 2005 murder of Danielle Subjects that first drew investigators' attention to Edward George McGregor. That August, police found Subjects' nude body in the bathroom of her Houston apartment, her head submerged in a tub and wrapped in clothing, according to court documents in the case (via Justia). McGregor was the last person to call her phone before her death. Six months later, someone murdered another woman, Mandy Rubin, in Houston. The circumstances were eerily similar to Subjects' murder.

While McGregor was never charged with these murders, investigators found DNA evidence in the second case, and after collecting a sample from him they got a hit on the cold case from Missouri City. "We believe that Edward George McGregor is a serial murderer who is responsible for three violent deaths of three women in the Houston area," a representative of the Houston Police told the AP. In December 2006, McGregor's DNA showed up in another cold case in Houston. In May 1994, someone shot and strangled Edwina Barnum to death in her apartment. She too had connections to McGregor.

Although McGregor was not convicted of Barnum's murder, evidence in that case was used as an "extraneous offense" during his trial in the Wildman murder. In Texas, prosecutors can use this type of evidence in certain cases as well as during the punishment phase, per the Law Office of Mark Stevens. After a jury convicted McGregor of killing Kim Wildman, a judge sentenced him to life in prison.

In 2016, Edward George McGregor sought a new trial based on prosecutorial misconduct and other issues. One of the prosecution witnesses, a jailhouse informant named Delores Lee, allegedly lied on the stand about overhearing a confession by McGregor on the night of the murder, per court documents in the case. The assistant DA also didn't disclose that she promised Lee and two other jailhouse informants — who alleged McGregor admitted to both murders — leniency for their cooperation. While a lower court found the defendant should receive a new trial, the Texas Supreme Court denied McGregor a retrial in a 2019 decision finding that despite all the prosecution's errors a jury still would have convicted McGregor. "Given the DNA evidence against [McGregor] and the long odds against the defensive theory that he innocently had sex with two women — whom he knew but denied knowing — shortly before their brutal murders four years apart, the State's case was fairly strong," the justices wrote.

McGregor became eligible for parole in December 2021 but has not been released. As of 2024, he remained in prison at the Stevenson Unit in Cuero, Texas, per the TDCJ. In the last few years, the prison has been in the news for its lack of air conditioning during the sweltering Texas summers as well as for a 2018 water main break that left the unit without water, forcing authorities to truck it in, according to the Associated Press and Chron. The prison houses nearly 1,400 inmates.