An upstate handyman is a suspected serial killer who was just charged with a third murder — and possibly has more victims out there, according to cops.
Richard Fox, a 62-year-old pedophile rapist, was sentenced to 40 years in state prison last month after pleading guilty to the slayings of two Buffalo, NY, women: Cassandra Watson in 2003 and Marquita Mull in 2021, the Erie County District Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
On Monday, prosecutors in nearby Niagara County added to Fox’s gruesome tally by charging him with the January 2023 murder of 32-year-old Crystal Curthoys, who was found in a boarded-up space under a basement staircase in the Niagara Falls home she once shared with the accused killer.
Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone said he now considers Fox a “serial killer” — who also may be responsible for “at least two or three” more murders, according to local outlet WKBW.
“I do believe that there is other victims,” Quattrone told Syracuse.com this week. “We’re hopeful that Richard Fox will hopefully try to ease his conscience a little bit and give us some more information.”
Fox of Buffalo was arrested in the first two killings in January.
Watson, 40, was strangled more than 20 years ago and her body dumped in the town of Portland, where her remains were discovered by a hiker in 2021.
Mull, 50, was killed in June 2021 — with her body found four months later near the Chautauqua Rails to Trails hiking spot in Buffalo, authorities said.
The judge who sentenced Fox in the two slayings called him pure “evil.
“I can honestly say you should never see the light of day. Evil. That is the one word that sums up this case. Evil,” Judge Suzanne Maxwell Barnes said in slapping Fox with two consecutive 20-year terms behind bars.
Fox had been convicted of two sex crimes in the past, WIVB-TV News reported this year.
In 1993, he was convicted in the third-degree rape of a 14-year-old girl and hit with a prison sentence of 18 months to three years, the outlet said.
In 2005, he was convicted of the first-degree attempted rape and aggravated sexual abuse of a 42-year-old Buffalo woman and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, WIVB said.
Fox is currently being held at the Niagara County Jail on the new charges and is due in court Jan. 5.
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