Billy Chemirmir, accused Dallas serial killer, found guilty of capital murder
Billy Chemirmir, the 49-year-old Dallas man accused of the 2018 killing of Lu Thi Harris, was found guilty of capital murder Thursday by a Dallas County Jury, according to a news release from the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.
After about 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury decided the evidence showed beyond a reasonable doubt that Chemirmir killed the 81-year-old woman, according to the Dallas County DA.
The automatic sentence for the crime is a life sentence without the possibility of parole, according to the DA’s office.
Chemirmir, an accused serial killer, was arrested in 2018 after police said he assaulted another woman who survived the attack. He has also been accused in the murders of 17 other women over a two-year period in Dallas and its suburbs.
At the start of his trial, the jury was shown a video deposition in which a 91-year-old woman said she survived an attack by Chemirmir.
“My eyes were just fixated on these green rubber gloves that I saw. ... I knew instantly when I saw those two green rubber gloves, number one, I should not have opened the door, number two, my life was in grave danger,” Mary Annis Bartel said in the video.
The Associated Press reported in 2021 that Chemirmir was arrested in March 2018 after he attacked Bartel at her apartment in Plano. Bartel died in 2020.
“This is just a verdict and a dealyed sense of justice the families of Lu Thi Harris, Mary Bartel, Mary Brooks and Mr. Chemirmir’s other alleged victims so crave and deserve,” the Dallas County DA said in a news release Thursday.