After committing murder, she needs retail therapy.

Dana Sue Gray

A disturbed mind can lash out when at least expected, as it did on a clear morning in Canyon Lake California. A 38 year old Dana sue gray is setting out on a shopping trip. There was something about money, having it and spending it that made Dana sue feel important. She looks like a typical suburban mom on her way to the mall but Dana is a woman with a startling secret. She used ligature strangulation, she used bludgeoning, she used knives. Dana sue gray is a psychopath, she just committed a brutal murder and now she needs some retail therapy. Detective Joe will never forget the gruesome crime scene, Dana sue gray left behind that day in 1994. It was a shock because it was only his second homicide case as a detective and it was overwhelming.

A 66 year old June Roberts has been strangled and bashed with a bottle. It crossed his mind that she had a serial killer on his hands. No one has ever seen a serial killer like this one. The killing spree begins two weeks earlier. The community was very affluent and they did not have a lot of homicides. Alice Williams has not seen her neighbor, Norma Davis for two days. She is concerned that the 86 year old has fallen ill but the reality was far worse. A neighbor came by and found her body. The neighbor was never the same after that. The brutality of the murder also shocks crime writer Cathy braid Hill. Norma has been stabbed, a fillet knife is buried to the hilt in her chest. The handle of another protrudes from her neck, the blade inserted so deep it almost severed Norma's head.

We did not have a lot of information. The only piece of evidence that we had was, in the entryway of the condominium, found a faint shoe print on the floor of the condominium and it was a six and a half size shoe. The shoe print would later be traced to a former nurse named Dana Sue Gray. Dana Sue Gray was in her mid-30s. She loved thrill sports, she loved rock and roll. As a young woman, Dana enjoyed skydiving but increasingly it's her personal life that's going into freefall. Dana's life right before the murders was chaotic. She had a lot of emotional setbacks, she had a miscarriage. She had also sunken into depression and alcoholism and she was accused of stealing drugs from her job as a nurse. Fired from her job, separated from her husband, she seeks solace in alcohol and prescription drugs.

We really don't know why she had started to use drugs, perhaps it was because of the depression from the miscarriage. It could have been any number of things but when the drugs don't work there is one thing guaranteed to make Dana Sue feel good, spending and purchasing made Dana feel like it reduced her anxiety. It became compulsive and it got way out of control. Dana sue is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Her disturbed mind is becoming desperate enough to kill. Once this killing spree started, she was clearly out of control and I don't think anyone around her was safe. Two weeks later, a 66 year-old June Roberts answers a knock at the door, recently widowed, June welcomes the visit by a family friend. Little does she know, she has admitted a killer into her home, a killer who leaves her boyfriend's five-year-old son waiting outside.

I think the fact that Dana Sue had her lover's five-year-old boy in the car with her, waiting outside in the car, while she went into these homes and killed these women really speaks to the coldness and how little she thought that what she was doing was wrong. It was very brutal, the victim had been strangled with her own telephone cordon and tied to a chair and she was struck so hard it fractured her skull. She used her hands and extreme violence to kill her victims. We do not usually see this in female serial killers. We usually see poison or gun. With a gun you can kill someone from afar. Dana Sue wanted hands on but perhaps just as shocking as the murders is what Dana chooses to do next. She didn't even go home after she killed these women and lay low for a while, she just needed to get to the mall.

Canyon Lake California 1994, a 38 year-old Dana Sue Gray is in the mood to be pampered. Dana was so meticulous about her appearance and she always went to a salon for services, for manicures, pedicures, hair color, cotton collar, all of that beauty treatments make Dana Sue Gray feel good. But lately she's found another activity that gives her a thrill, murder. Dana is halfway through a month-long killing spree, her first stop after killing her second victim is the mall. What was taken from June was her checkbook and her credit cards. Right after the murders, Dana went out and she got a beauty treatment and she went shopping. She immediately went out and drained their bank accounts and used their credit cards on high ticket items, hundreds and hundreds of dollars with a little kid. Her boyfriends little five year old with her.

Despite being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt Dana Sue is obsessed with spending money. Dana Sue's issues with money are reported to have existed when she was a girl. Her brother does describe this. She said I had to spend, it made me feel good that the feeling would not last so the behavior became compulsive. She would repeat it to get the high again. Psychologists have a term for compulsive shopping Owniomania but it is not the only reason Dana kills. Dana did not take any rings from the victims or some valuables from the home that were obvious. So I don't think anything was motivated there by money. The next attack reveals more about Dana's motives. Two weeks later in Lake Elsinore California, a 57 year old Dorinda Hawkins is working alone in an antique store.

Dorinda was working at the time Dana had walked in and asked about picture frames and it was there, behind the framing tables that Dana strangled Dorinda, Dorinda was begging for her life when Dana was strangling her and Dorinda told her you can have anything you want, take the cash, you know I have eight kids, let me just live and Dana told her I'm not doing this for the money. She said that twice and that really gives you an insight into what Dana was thinking when she was was committing these crime. Thinking Dorinda is dead, Dana Sue steals just $25 and flees but Dorinda is still alive. She's had a lucky escape from a woman with a long history of violence. When Dana Sue was a young girl and she would be reprimanded or punished by her mother. It was reported that she frequently lashed out violently as a little girl and grew up to do it as a woman.

Dana Sue is motivated by more than money, she also has a deep-seated need for power, a need she satisfies with murder. Dana liked the fight and we believe that she killed because she enjoyed having power over somebody and watching them struggle and watching them die. There is something hidden in Dana's past that explains not only why she killed but who as police traced the clues left by her shopping sprees. The final piece in the puzzle of Dana Sue's disturbed mind is about to be revealed. We were able to do a paper trail with the credit cards and go to the different stores that she had used these credit cards at, and with the merchants we were able to get a general description of the suspect the shopkeepers recognized the face so do residents of Canyon Lake. Dana Sue gray is arrested for murder.

When they finally did apprehend her, her Cadillac was full of grocery bags, her house was full of expensive perfume. I mean she had a veritable department store in her house. Dana Sue Gray denies the murders but while she is questioned by detective Joe the case takes a horrifying turn in the interview. Dana began talking about finding a purse and that purse belonged to a woman by the name of Dora Beebe. In this station at the same time, there are sheriff's deputies working another murder. Joe went to them and asked them the name of their victim. They told him Dora Beebe and Joe instantly said well we have your suspect in the other room. Earlier that day Dana Sue had knocked on the door of a stranger asking for a map. So I knew that we had the right suspect in this case. But I did not know that on the same day that I was serving the search warrant, she was out killing her last victim.

Like Dana's other victims, Dora Beebe is elderly alone and totally unprepared for a vicious attack. Dora Beebe was found murdered inside her home. She was beaten with a clothes iron and her skull was fractured. The attack on Dora Beebe is the final clue in a revealing pattern, all four of Dana Sue's victims were elderly women. Women old enough to be her mother. Dana sue had a lot of unresolved anger toward her mother. I think these older women that Dana sue killed represented her mother and she was just unleashing rage and anger. To avoid the death penalty Dana sue Gray pleads guilty to multiple murders. A desire for money, a need for power and a hatred of her own mother. Dana Sue Gray’s disturbed mind made her a ruthless killer, who will spend the rest of her life behind bars.

Then when you look at her history and you see how violent she could be as a child with her mother when, she was reprimanded. For 30 years, she enjoyed doing things that were risky, she was a thrill seeker and I think that she really enjoyed what she was doing. She got a thrill out of it.