VENTURA, Calif. – A 73-year-old man pleaded not guilty Wednesday in an unsolved Southern California case in which he is accused of strangling three women in 1977, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office said.

Warren Luther Alexander of Diamondhead, Mississippi, was charged with murder after DNA analysis was used in the investigation of the long-unsolved murders.

Alexander was extradited to California from Surry County, North Carolina, on August 6 to await arraignment in an unsolved 1992 murder case.

All of the victims in California were sex workers in Ventura County, District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said earlier this month.

Kimberly Fritz, 18, was found dead in the city of Port Hueneme on May 29, 1977. Velvet Sanchez, 31, was found dead in the city of Oxnard on September 8 of the same year, followed by Lorraine Rodriguez, 21, on December 27 in an unincorporated area.

A match with Alexander emerged last year when DNA evidence was uploaded to a national database, the district attorney said.

Genealogical investigators had identified Alexander as a suspect in the case of 29-year-old Nona Cobb in North Carolina, whose body was left along Interstate 77. Alexander was arrested in March 2022 for Cobb’s murder, but that case has yet to go to trial.

Authorities said Alexander lived in Oxnard in the 1950s and 1960s and returned in the 1970s. He worked as a long-distance truck driver from the 1970s until the early 1990s.