A defendant dubbed by police as the “shopping cart killer” is on trial in Virginia accused of slaying two women in 2021, having met them on social media dating apps and taking them to his hotel room.
Jurors on Monday were shown a video purporting to show defendant Anthony Robinson going into Room 336 of the Howard Johnson Hotel in October 2021 with Beth Redmon, 54, of Harrisonburg, and then the following morning wheeling a sheet-covered body out of the room.
He then wheeled the car toward the tree line, near the back of the hotel, police said.
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Prosecutors at Rockingham County Circuit Court say he did the same thing the following month with Tonia Smith, 39, of Charlottesville.
In opening statements, prosecutor Marsha Garst told jurors Robinson “killed these women to fulfill his sexual demands,” according to WTOP News.
Robinson has also been linked to two other women’s deaths in Fairfax County and one in Washington, D.C. but is not on trial for their deaths.
“Beth and Tonita entered the gates of hell,” Garst told the court, per WMRA, “He kills women for sport,” she said.
On Nov. 24, 2021, the Harrisonburg Police Department found the corpses of Redmon and Smith behind the Howard Johnson Motel parking lot.
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Investigators found multiple injuries to different parts of the women’s bodies, sweatshirts wrapped around some of their mouths and left naked except for the socks on their feet, according to WHSV. Police also found thousands of pornographic URLs on his phone because the headlines resembled the two victims.
Robinson’s defense team asked “What really happened in room 336?”
Robinson was staying in the hotel as part of his compensation for working in a nearby chicken processing plant, according to a hotel front desk employee, and his defense say prosecutors are not able to present evidence of what happened during the period the women were killed.
The coroner ruled the manner of death as a homicide but had no clear cause of death, according to WHSV, and that evidence presented by the prosecutors would leave more questions than answers.
Louis Nagy, Robinson’s defense lawyer, said there was “a ton of evidence” leading up to and after the alleged incident, but nothing could prove what happened in the middle, per WHSV.
He also called out the prosecutor’s use of inmates to prove the middle ground and said the inmates’ credibility isn’t sustainable. For instance, one of the inmates had been convicted of fraud previously, the publication reports.
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