PHILADELPHIA -- Six elderly women were sexually assaulted and murdered in the quiet of their private rooms of a Philadelphia nursing home this year, police said Friday in ending a lengthy investigation.
The women, who ranged in age from 83 to 92, were sexually assaulted and then strangled, suffocated or drowned. Most of them were found dead in their beds by nursing home staff, police said.
Four of the slayings, the first of which occurred last January, were not discovered until two suspicious deaths July 19 led police to exhume the bodies of other former home residents and conduct autopsies.
Police said Anthony Joyner, 24, a former kitchen worker at the home who was charged last month with raping and killing two of the women, would be charged with four new charges of homicide.
At Joyner's arraignment Aug. 10 for two slayings, an officer of the police sex crime unit testified that Joyner previously admitted raping an elderly woman in the summer of 1982 and told her it 'gave me the idea about having sex with the ladies at the rest home.'
He was being held without bail for the July 19 slayings of Eugenia Borda, 90, and Mildred Alston, 83, who were found dead at the Kearsley Home, Christ Church Hospital, touching off the massive police probe into 16 other deaths at the home since 1981.
Eugenia Borda had been strangled and Mildred Alston was suffocated, and both women had been raped, police said.
The four other slayings were announced Friday by police after autopsies on the bodies were completed following court-ordered exhumations from area cemeteries.
Police said the four additional homicide charges would be filed early next week against Joyner, who also is charged with one count of rape of a 69-year-old woman in July 1982.
They said that charges would be brought in connection with the slayings of Margaret Eckard, 92, who died Jan. 12; Kathryn Maxwell, 86, who died Feb. 12; Elizabeth Monroe, 86, who died Feb. 12; and Lily Amlie, 90, who died June 1.
Homicide Lt. James Hansen said Kathryn Maxwell and Elizabeth Monroe were suffacated and Lily Amlie was drowned in the bathtub of her room. He said autopsy results were not complete on Margaret Eckard because her body was badly decomposed, but police were treating it as a homicide.
All of the women lived alone in small, private rooms at the home.
Joyner began working at the home in October 1981.
