Suspected serial killer's family talks

DETROIT - Two decades before becoming the man police suspect as an international serial killer of prostitutes, John Eric Armstrong was a shattered boy looking for a way out, his family says.

At age 5, he rode his bike across a busy street, ignoring the risk of speeding cars and hoping to join a brother who had died as an infant, relatives say.

"He said he wanted to be with his baby brother," his mother, Linda Pringle, said tearfully last week in her North Carolina trailer home.

Now 26, Armstrong was arrested Wednesday and arraigned two days later on five counts of premeditated first-degree murder and three counts of assault with intent to murder.

Authorities worldwide are trying to match the Dearborn Heights, Mich., man's account of at least 11 other slayings while he was serving on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, then based in Bremerton, where shipmates knew him as "Opie."

Police said that since 1992, Armstrong is suspected in three slayings in Washington state, including a man's; two in Hawaii; two in Hong Kong; and one each in North Carolina, Virginia, Thailand and Singapore.

Some investigators warn that Armstrong may be exaggerating.

"We're having a real problem reconciling all of this," said his stepfather, Ron Pringle.

As the family tries to ferret out the facts, Armstrong remains held without bond in the Wayne County Jail, apparently adapting to his maximum-security confinement segregated from the rest of the prisoners.

"It's been pretty routine at this point," Wayne County Sheriff Robert Ficano said yesterday of Armstrong's stay in a jail where he's routinely being monitored.

"Apparently, he's following all the rules. To date, there have been no problems or complications."

All the while, Armstrong's family tries to imagine how a once-quiet child who earned decent grades, played Nintendo and enjoyed fishing and baseball could emerge as a suspected global serial killer.

"The Eric we raised could not have done these things," his mother said. "This is just not the person we know.

"We just did the best we could."

In youth, Armstrong talked of becoming a policeman. He preferred to be called Eric - not John, the name of the father his mother said abused him before walking out on the family.

Armstrong's father "was abusive to me as well, and Eric saw that," said Linda Pringle, a 49-year-old elementary-school teacher's assistant.

Even so, the family remembers Armstrong as a loving son who only got counseling for a brief time after young brother Mikey died. He played sports and won a small trophy for a school debate.

He had a girlfriend in high school, but the two grew apart after she went to college. Armstrong loved her and took it hard when their relationship didn't bloom, his family said.

He went to two proms, his parents said. After high school, he worked for months at a grocery store, then enlisted in the Navy in 1992 and left the next year.

While the family describes Armstrong's childhood as troubled, some details of his statement to authorities, reported in The Detroit News, don't match family recollections.

The newspaper said he told police he was teased and pushed around as a kid because he was overweight. His stepsister, Ronni Pringle, said he was not excessively large.

Armstrong allegedly told police he lost a girlfriend to a rival who stole her affections with expensive gifts. Armstrong's parents said they didn't know if that happened.

On the Nimitz, he worked as a barber and took required safety-education classes, including one that warns against soliciting prostitutes. Aboard the Nimitz, he met Katie Rednoske, a former swimmer and Dearborn High High graduate who in 1998 became his wife and is now pregnant with their second child.

As a sailor aboard the Nimitz from 1993 to 1999, police have said Armstrong may have killed while the ship was in various ports.

Last Monday investigators found the bodies of three strangled prostitutes in a railroad yard in southwest Detroit. Police, using the description of Armstrong and his vehicle, arrested him two days later.

"Everyone on the ship's talking about it," said Nimitz Petty Officer Stephen Olson, who arrived after Armstrong was discharged. "For God's sake, he was a barber."

Armstrong had no charges of misconduct and got two good-conduct medals, military personnel records show. He was a third-class petty officer at the time of his discharge.

After Armstrong left the Navy, he applied for a job with the Virginia State Police and got far enough along that the agency called a neighbor as a reference, The News said.

Armstrong was in North Carolina just a month ago to visit his family, stopping at his brother's grave site, his mother said. He played with his 14-month-old son.

Lately around Detroit, he took classes at Schoolcraft College and had temporary jobs as a department-store clerk, a security guard and a Detroit Metropolitan Airport plane fueler.