Robert Todd Burmingham is dead. The convicted kidnapper and rapist known as the “Blue-Light Rapist” died at 54 from complications of COVID-19, officials said last week.
Burmingham was serving a life sentence for raping four women. His M.O.:He used a blue-light to pull over the victims. One of those women was a 17-year-old girl when it happened.
“I was on my way home, actually from Lonoke,” Shannon Woods told Fox 16 in a 2017 interview. “I was pulled over by who I thought was a police officer.”
The July 1997 incident marked the end of a seven-month hiatus for the suspect, and a sparked a new search for him, according to a New York Times report at the time. Burmingham was arrested the following September.
What does Woods think now that Burmingham is dead? She told KARK that she’d been getting notifications that Burmingham was getting medical treatment. The last one arrived in April. But she said that now that he’s dead, she doesn’t have to worry about him possibly escaping while on hospital leave.
“Am I happy?” she said. “No. Am I sad? No. I am relieved.”
[Screengrab via Fox 16]