Man pleads guilty to murdering 4 women found in Detroit

DETROIT (AP) — A man pleaded guilty on Friday to murdering four women whose bodies were found in vacant houses in Detroit and to sexually assaulting two other women, authorities said.

Deangelo Martin, 37, agreed to a plea deal just days before he was scheduled to stand trial. Martin's agreement with prosecutors calls for a sentence of 45 years to 70 years in prison, Wayne County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Maria Miller said, according to the Detroit News.

Martin was arrested in June 2019 on charges of stabbing and sexually assaulting a 25-year-old woman and kidnapping and assaulting a 51-year-old woman. Three months later, he was formally charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of felony murder in the killings of four women whose bodies were found in abandoned houses between February 2018 and June 2019.

At the time, authorities characterized the slayings as the work of a serial killer and said they believed all of the women were sex workers.

Medical examiners determined that 57-year-old Annette Nelson and Nancy Harrison, 52, died of blunt force trauma. But they could not determine how Trevesene Ellis, 55, and Tamara Jones, 55, died because their bodies were badly decomposed.

Martin is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 6.