Homicide For The Holidays: Who Is Heather Matthews? Age & Whereabouts Now

Who is Heather Matthews? To know everything about the teenager who went berserk in the Christmas of 1992, keep reading.

Heather Matthews is one of the four members of the self-proclaimed The Downtown Posse, who went on a killing spree in December 1992.

Other members are Laura Tayor, Marvallous Keene, and Demarcus Smith. The incident left six people dead and two more injured. 

Retired Dayton Homicide Detective Doyle Burke said that once the killings started, all the participants enjoyed and lived that moment. He also believed that all four of them were willing participants.

Homicide For The Holiday: Who Is Heather Matthews?  

Heather Matthews is a convicted killer.

In December 1992, downtown Dayton was full of holiday decorations and activities.

Amongst such festive time, a group of estranged teenagers, Laura Taylor, Marvallous Keene, Heather Matthews, and Demarcus Smith, wanted some trouble. Self-proclaimed The Downtown Posse, they went on a rampage on Christmas Eve. 

The deads were 34-year-old General Motors worker Joseph Worker, 18-year-old Danita Gullette, 19-year-old Richard Maddox, 38-year-old Sarah Abraham, 16-year-old Wendy Cottrill, and 19-year-old Marvin Washington. As for the injured, they were Jones Pettus and Jeffrey Wright.

At first, Dayton homicide detectives didn’t have any clues on the crimes including, their interrelation of all those murders. The case became hard to solve as there wasn’t a motive. Later on 26 December, former Dayton Police Sergeant John Huber spotted a stolen car on Kumler Avenue.

Keene confessed to the crimes and received a death sentence. On 21 July 2009, he got executed with a lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, Lucasville. As for the other three, the law enforcement gave them life imprisonment sentences. 

In a 2000 interview, Heather explained the reasons for her involvement in the killing spree. She said she wanted to be like the other three, doing what they did.

Based on the incident, Retired Dayton Police Officer Steve Grismer, Detective Dennis Murphy, and Dr. Judith Monseur wrote a book, The Christmas Killings. Homicide for Holiday, an American TV series, also included this story.

Heather Matthews Age & Whereabouts Now

As for Heather Matthews’ age, she is about 45 years old.

According to reports, she was 16 in December 1992 when the killing spree happened.

Heather’s current whereabouts seem to be at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. She is serving the life imprisonment sentence following the crimes.

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