On the Trail of the Shopping Cart Serial Killer: Dating Sites, Motels, Blunt Force Trauma

The bodies of missing women were showing up in vacant lots and wooded areas in Virginia, apparently transported there in shopping carts. Now a suspect is in custody

In the desperate months after her 29-year-old daughter Cheyenne Brown was last seen alive at a Washington, D.C., Metro station, Nicadra Brown nervously awaited a call from police.

On Dec. 7, 2021, Fairfax County Police Department detectives scoured the grounds of a motel in Alexandria, Va., where the cell phone of Cheyenne, a single mother pregnant with her second child, had last pinged on Oct. 4, “but they didn’t find anything,” says Nicadra, 49.

Undeterred, the investigators returned days later. They had concluded a second fruitless search of the Moon Inn on busy Richmond Highway when a detective getting back into his car spotted a shopping cart and, next to it, a large plastic container in a nearby vacant lot.

Inside the container were the badly decomposed remains of two women—one identified by her tattoo as Cheyenne Brown. “They found my daughter,” says Nicadra, crying. “I wish I could have protected her.”

The victim found alongside Brown was identified as Stephanie Harrison, a 48-year-old tourist from Redding, Calif. And sadly, the grim discovery of the two bodies may not have been an isolated event.

Weeks earlier, police in Harrisonburg, Va., about 130 miles southwest of Alexandria, had recovered the remains of two other missing women—Allene “Beth” Redmon, 54, a mother of two born and raised in Harrisonburg, and Tonita Smith, 39, a mother of six from Charlottesville, Va.—in a field next to a Howard Johnson motel.

Next to their bodies there was also an abandoned shopping cart. Later that day, Nov. 23, 2021, police arrested Anthony Robinson, 37, a factory and waste-removal worker, on charges of first-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the deaths of Redmon and Smith. He had been staying at the motel while working at a nearby poultry-processing plant.

The investigation has since expanded, with authorities saying Robinson is a suspect in at least six deaths in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, with most of the bodies dumped next to the killer’s signature calling card—a shopping cart.

According to police, Robinson, whom they described as a transient and who is known to have a daughter and sometimes live in Washington, D.C., allegedly met women on dating websites and lured them to motels where he brutally killed them.

“We have a serial killer,” Fairfax County police chief Kevin Davis said at a press conference on Dec. 17, 2021. “He preys on the weak and the vulnerable,” and after doing “unspeakable things” to his victims, “he transports their bodies to their final resting place literally in a shopping cart.”

In light of Robinson’s arrest, police in Maryland are also reportedly reexamining the 2018 sudden death, supposedly of natural causes, of Robinson’s fiancée Skye Allen, 30. Robinson also has been named the sole person of interest in the death of Sonya Champ, 40, whose body was found in a shopping cart in Washington in September 2021.

Robinson has pleaded not guilty in the Redmon and Smith murder cases and is currently awaiting trial in a Virginia jail. He has not been charged in any of the other women’s deaths, which remain under investigation. “I will not rest until he pays for what he’s done to my daughter and these other women,” says Nicadra Brown.

In August 2021 Cheyenne Brown met Robinson online and invited him to meet her family at the house in Washington that she shared with her then-7-year-old son Juan, her mom, Nicadra, and her sister Amelia, 18.

But the visit didn’t go well: Amelia “started screaming” after Cheyenne’s guest saw her wearing only underwear, and a cousin who was visiting that day asked the man to leave, says Nicadra. More than a month later Cheyenne left the house to catch a bus and was never seen again.

On Thanksgiving, however, her cousin happened to see Robinson’s mug shot in an Instagram post about his arrest on suspicion of two murders in Harrisonburg and immediately contacted Nicadra.

“He said, ‘That’s the guy I put out of the house!’ My instinct was like, ‘He’s the one who did something to my daughter,’ so I called the police,” she says.

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Meanwhile, authorities had already learned that Robinson allegedly crossed paths—lethally—with two women at a motel in Harrisonburg: Redmon, who was reported missing after failing to show up for work on Oct. 24, 2021, and Smith, whose brother believes she met Robinson on a dating site and went to the motel where he was staying to see him.

“We had just lost our mother, just lost two of our aunties, and my son has been missing since 2012, so we were dealing with a lot of sad situations,” says Dean Smith, 48. “She was dealing with trauma and I guess just looking for love in the wrong place, and somebody took advantage of her.”

During a preliminary hearing in Robinson’s murder case on Sept. 12, 2022, prosecutors showed surveillance footage allegedly of Redmon walking into a motel room with Robinson in October 2021, followed by footage of Robinson leaving the room with a shopping cart and a large object wrapped in sheets, according to court filings.

Other surveillance footage allegedly shows Robinson doing the same with Smith in November of that year. “He’s killed four victims already,” says Fairfax County police chief Davis. “We suspect that he has more.”

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Robinson’s attorney Louis Nagy said at a hearing in 2022 that “there is no evidence this [the deaths of Redmon and Smith] is a coldblooded, premeditated murder” and told People that his client has had a history of mental illness since at least 2014.

The first of Robinson’s two trials, for Smith’s murder, is due to begin on Sept. 23. While waiting for justice to be done, the families of his alleged victims are struggling to make sense of their losses.

“This is a worst-case scenario,” says Harrison’s daughter Destiny Livingston, 34. “I didn’t grow up with a dad. All I had was my mom—and now she’s gone too.”

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