According to a federal task force, a serial killer may be responsible for the disappearances of three women who were mentally retarded and lived in Minnesota and North Dakota. The task force is focusing on Floyd Tapson, 38, who is charged in Montana with the rape and attempted murder of a 22-year-old woman with mental retardation. Tapson pleaded not guilty in the Montana case and is free on bail.
Tapson, a former supervisor in group homes in northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, is being investigated in three cases covering a nine-year period -- the homicide of a Moorhead, Minn., woman who was mentally retarded and the disappearances and presumed murders of women with similar disabilities in Wadena, Minnesota, and Grand Forks, N.D. Additionally, investigators in Maryland are reviewing cases of women who disappeared in the late 1980s, when Tapson worked at a group home in Baltimore.
On August 11, 1999, the former group home manager was sentenced to life in prison for trying to murder a mentally disabled woman in Billings last year. Calling Tapson "a cold-blooded, would-be killer" and "a grave risk" to women with disabilities, District Judge G. Todd Baugh ordered the maximum sentence sought by Yellowstone County prosecutors. Under Montana law, Tapson, 38, will have to serve at least 30 years in prison before he is eligible for parole.
An unrepentant Tapson, who continued to say the victim had fabricated her accusations and suggested that he should be released having served four months since his conviction. The sentence, one of the stiffest in Yellowstone County in recent years, could also have far-reaching effects as a task force of detectives in North Dakota and Minnesota try to solve the murders of three developmentally disabled women in those states.
Task-force members consider Tapson their prime suspect and hope that the long sentence will motivate Tapson to aid their investigations. Members of the task force have said they may offer Tapson immunity in exchange for his cooperation. Representing Tapson, Billings attorney Jeff Michael said afterward that Tapson may be willing to talk with those investigators, although Tapson continues to say he had nothing to do with the deaths of those women.
Yellowstone County prosecutors had stated that in October of 1998 Tapson lured the mentally challenged woman to the group home where he worked, took her to his home, restrained her with handcuffs for several hours in his basement and then repeatedly raped her. To cover his crime, he drove the woman west of town on the Molt Road, shot her twice at close range - once in the head - and left her for dead. Despite her injuries, the woman crawled through a barbed-wire fence and ran to a nearby home for help. She survived and identified Tapson as her assailant.