Who Was the 'Sacramento Slayer'? All About Morris Solomon Jr.

The Sacramento Slayer has become one of the most notorious serial killers in the state of California—but his murderous rampage lasted for years, all without the public truly taking note. 

In the 1980s, Morris Solomon Jr. began targeting sex workers in the low-income neighborhood of Oak Park, a section of Sacramento, Calif. A victim of a traumatic childhood and a veteran of the Vietnam War, Solomon already had a lengthy rap sheet filled with assault, attempt to rape and false imprisonment. But he was able to hide behind a friendly facade, earning the trust of neighbors as he worked as a local handyman. 

Solomon also had a positive reputation among sex workers in the area; but while he was well-liked among the women he encountered, few knew of his diabolical dark side. As women began disappearing, Solomon continued associating with these sex workers, trading their services for money and cocaine. 

It wasn’t until 1986 that Solomon ended up on the authority’s radar. After he sexually assaulted and killed sex worker Yolanda Johnson, he actually contacted police himself to alert them about a deceased body. Although he had hoped to mislead authorities with his cooperative attitude, it eventually was a key element to piecing together a string of murders. 

Over the course of nearly a year, Solomon murdered at least seven women, often sexually assaulting them and then binding them with electrical cords—much like his grandmother had done to him when she physically beat him as a child. The similarities in the murders helped police connect the killing all to one person.  

All throughout the time period, locals were unaware that a serial killer walked among them. Given the idea that sex workers partook in an inherently dangerous profession, their deaths didn’t make headlines. 

By the time Solomon was arrested in 1987, numerous women had been killed and even more had been attacked or assaulted. Solomon was ultimately convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. In 1992, he was sentenced to death.  

Solomon was born in 1944 in rural Georgia, raised by his grandmother, Bertha, after being abandoned at her home as an infant. 

The following years brought trauma and fear as Bertha frequently beat Solomon and his older brother for minor infractions including “wetting themselves, mispronouncing words, or crying during a beating,” according to court records. As Solomon grew older, he faced painful and humiliating punishments as she made him stand naked on a stool while she beat him with an electrical cord or switches.

At age 13, Solomon was reunited with his parents when Bertha moved the family to a small farming town 40 miles outside of Sacramento. The physical and verbal abuse continued, and Solomon was also often caught between his parents as they violently assaulted one another, per court docs. 

Despite his turbulent childhood, acquaintances described him as “outgoing, gentle, [and] normal.” He completed high school, went on to community college and bounced between jobs that included working as a mechanic and bus driver. 

In 1966, Solomon briefly served in Vietnam. While his platoon sergeant called him an “outstanding and trustworthy soldier,” Solomon returned home a changed man. Court records show that Solomon became “distant, untruthful and ill-tempered” and exhibited many signs of PTSD. Following two failed relationships, he returned to Sacramento, which marked the beginning of his life of crime.    

In 1969, several years after returning from Vietnam, Solomon sexually assaulted an 18-year-old sex worker in Oakland, Calif. Then in 1971, Solomon abducted, sexually assaulted and abandoned a young woman in the same neighborhood. Later that year, he attempted to kidnap and rape a college student who was hitchhiking on her way home from the campus of University of California, Berkeley.

Over the next several years, Solomon’s attacks continued, and in 1975, he sexually assaulted a sex worker and attempted to hold her prisoner. The following year, he abducted an 18-year-old woman and physically assaulted her. He imprisoned her in a closet in the home where he was staying overnight before she managed to escape the following day. 

Although he initially spent two years in a mental health facility, by 1975, Solomon was finally criminally convicted of aggravated assault, assault with intent to rape and false imprisonment. He was additionally convicted of three counts of grand theft in Arizona and classified as a mentally disordered sex offender, according to Crime Stories: Sacramento Slayer. 

In 1977, Solomon was sentenced to two-years-to-life in prison and held at San Quentin State Prison. While behind bars, he faced additional charges stemming from the imprisonment of the 18-year-old woman. Despite this, he was released on parole in 1980. 

After being released from prison, Solomon found work as a handyman around Oak Park. Well liked by the community, Solomon often received invites to live inside the homes he was helping to repair and renovate—his crimes and growing drug addiction unbeknownst to his employers. These locations ended up becoming the scenes of many of Solomon’s murders. 

On June 18, 1986, Solomon committed his first known murder, sexually assaulting and then killing sex worker Yolanda Johnson before leaving her body inside a closet on a property where he was working. But in the hopes of misleading authorities, it was Solomon himself who contacted police to alert them about the deceased body. 

While authorities questioned Solomon at the scene, it wasn’t until later that day that they uncovered Solomon had given them a fake identity. In a follow-up interview, Solomon admitted that he had lied because he had several outstanding warrants, including one for soliciting prostitution. Solomon then admitted that he did know Johnson and had used her services six months earlier. 

With no evidence to connect Solomon to the crime, he was released from police custody. Less than a month later, Solomon murdered his next victim, a sex worker named Angela Polidore. Her body, bound by an electrical cord, was found on July 20, 1986, in a condemned property that had recently undergone renovations but was still being used as a gathering spot by local drug addicts. With no witnesses or cause of death, authorities came up empty handed when looking for Polidore’s murderer.

Over the course of the next year, Solomon struck at least five more times, killing Maria Apodaca, Sheila Jacox, Sharon Massey, Linda Vitela and Cherie Washington. 

Following Polidore’s death, investigators noticed similarities between her death and that of Johnson. While uncovering DNA evidence was still a new process, authorities worked to connect the two cases. 

“Given the circumstances on Angela’s case where this is a house that was currently being renovated, nobody was living there…narcotic activity, maybe some sexual activity going on—that was what we could connect to Yolanda Johnson’s case, but at that point that is really all we really had,” former Sacramento Police Department detective John Cabrera said on Crime Stories: Sacramento Slayer. 

Investigators went on to track down numerous other sex workers, hoping to uncover whether other women who had mysteriously disappeared could be connected to the case. In March 1987, they got a break in the case when construction workers found the body of Apodaca, bound by electrical cords and buried in the yard of a repossessed home. 

A witness who previously lived on the property revealed that Apodaca and other sex workers had frequented the home, always accompanied by Solomon. Investigations discovered that all three properties had once been lived in or renovated by Solomon, allowing them to confidently connect him to the crimes.

After interviewing locals, friends and family of the victims, detectives were able to link Solomon to multiple different locations throughout Oak Park where he had either lived or worked. On one of these properties, they found Washington’s body buried in a shallow grave. Just days later, they uncovered the bodies of Jacox and Vitela at another property.  

Soon after, police issued a warrant for Solomon’s arrest and he was taken into custody. Solomon was charged with six counts of murder. When Massey’s body was found a week later, the charge was bumped to seven.

When the case went to trial in May 1991, the prosecution came forward with 15,000 court documents and over 600 exhibits that depicted Solomon as a serial killer who deviously used his unassuming manner to lure in vulnerable victims. Witnesses came forward to connect Solomon to his victims, confirming he had been seen with several of the women he killed before their deaths and had lived at the locations where their bodies were found. 

News of Solomon’s arrest prompted two women to report that he had sexually assaulted them, according to court docs, and police later discovered a third sexual assault victim.

While DNA from a semen sample at the scene of Johnson’s death was processed and positively linked to Solomon, the technology was still in its infancy and not heavily weighted in court, leaving the prosecution’s case to be partially circumstantial.

Meanwhile, his defense argued that Solomon’s actions stemmed from psychopathology and pointed to a history of severe childhood abuse and trauma from his service in the Vietnam War. Psychologists pointed out that his crimes were a “reenactment of the humiliation, abuse and sexual sadism defendant experienced in his formative years,” further fueled by his addiction to cocaine. 

While Solomon denied any wrongdoing, he was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. When the first jury deadlocked over the penalty, the judge declared a mistrial. During the penalty retrial, four women testified that Solomon had assaulted throughout the 1970s, but they did not report it to police.

He was ultimately sentenced to death by the new jury in September 1992. He remained on death row until his death from natural causes in August 2024.