The Main South Woodsman is an unidentified serial killer who murdered between three and five prostitutes in Worcester, Massachusetts from 2002 to 2007. His nickname derives from the Main South neighborhood, where he picked up most of his victims.
The prime suspect in the murders, Alex Scesny, was identified in 2008, due to the fact he had a history of sexual abuse and was suspected in the murder of a prostitute. Although convicted of the aforementioned offenses, he has never been charged in the Main South Woodsman cases, all of which remain unsolved.
Murders
All of the Woodsman's known victims were Hispanic girls and women with slim builds, short statures, dark hair color and aged between 29 and 42 at the time of their deaths. Each of them engaged in prostitution in some way, and suffered from drug addiction.
The killer's first confirmed victim was 29-year-old Carmen Rudy, who went missing from Worcester on September 30, 2002. She had had two children by different men but raised them as a single mother, as both of the fathers left. Rudy was involved in prostitution and suffered from a drug addiction for which she underwent treatment at the Linda Fay Griffin House, a substance abuse treatment facility. Her skeletonized remains were discovered almost a year after her disappearance on September 29, 2003, on the campus of the Hillside High School in Marlborough. A few dozen meters away from where Rudy's remains were discovered, authorities also located the skeletal remains of 29-year-old Betzaida Montalvo (also known as Maritele Burgos), who had gone missing in April 2003. She was a mother of three children who had a history of prostituting herself, as well as having a drug addiction and a criminal record for possessing drugs. She had been released from a jail in Framingham in December 2002. Initially, Montalvo's identity could not be established due to the severe decomposition of her body, due to which she was named "Jane Doe No. 1" in the criminal case. In October 2003, forensic scientists reconstructed her skull and then distributed a digital rendition of what her face supposedly looked like, in addition to releasing information about her clothing and jewelry. When this failed to generate leads, her remains were sent to a Smithsonian Institution in the District of Columbia in December 2003, where a comparison of photos and the forensic sketch led to the tentative identification of Montalvo as the decedent. She was conclusively identified in April 2004, after her relatives provided a DNA sample that was matched to the remains. During the investigation, police located a witness, 59-year-old Worcester resident Joseph Parson, who claimed that he knew Carmen Rudy and that he had seen her in the company of Montalvo. On March 3, 2004, the body of 33-year-old Dinelia Torres, missing since the fall of 2003, was found in a wooded area near Hudson, approximately two kilometers away from where the previous victims' remains had been found. Like Rudy and Montalvo, she had a history of prostitution and drug abuse. As a teenager, Torres gave birth to a child and dropped out of school, and after the baby's father left her, she developed a drug addiction. She was prosecuted for car theft in 1994, and eventually signed over guardianship of her three children over to her parents. In the early 2000s, Torres was treated in the same treatment facility as Rudy, but there is no evidence to indicate that the two women knew each other.