CHICAGO-- A woman currently being held in a mental institution for allegedly stabbing a senior citizen with a butcher knife at a bus stop has been charged with the 2006 ax murders of two members of her church.
Pamela Myles, 43, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder Tuesday after she submitted a written confession on June 20, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Myles was a suspect when the deaths were originally investigated in 2006 after witnesses reported seeing her walking around her South Side neighborhood with an ax or large hammer.
Annie Mae Davis, 59, and Everleana Brame, 74, were both found murdered in April 2006. They died from blunt trauma and multiple wounds to the head inflicted by an ax, court records indicate. The women were murdered three weeks apart and were both members of New Triedstone Church, where Myles often attended services and had a falling out with the pastor and several members, according to the Sun-Times.
Myles, who has a long history of mental illness, was found guilty but mentally ill of the aggravated battery of a senior citizen and sentenced to the Elgin Mental Health Center until 2014, the Chicago Tribune reports. She received a similar sentence for an armed robbery charge in 1994.
Myles initially denied involvement in the crimes and said she didn’t know either victim, though detectives say Brame had told a neighbor two days before her death that Myles threatened her with a large hammer, demanding money, according to the Sun-Times. Chicago Police investigating the murders obtained consent from a family member to search Myles’ home and found an ax and hammer in a suspended ceiling, along with a document titled “Mothers who won’t make it to Mother’s Day” containing a list of women’s names. A second list of women’s initials included “ANN” and BRA,” both of which had “dead” written next to them. A note on the list said “Congratulations to me.”
A lack of physical evidence stalled the case against Myles in 2006, Assistant State’s Attorney John Maher said, according to MSNBC. She remained a person of interest for years.
Myles was questioned again about those murders and the death of another man on June 17 this year, but she refused to speak. Maher says that three days later, Myles told a worker at the facility that she had “killed two people” and wrote out and signed a confession admitting to killing Brame and Davis, but not the man, MSNBC reports.
Myles wept while the charges against her were detailed in Cook County bond court Tuesday, where her attorney pointed out that the “sole piece of evidence offered by the state is a confession from a woman who is mentally ill,” the Tribune reports.