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James B. Grinder

American serial killer (1945–2010)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ114021741
Source-derived summary

James B. Grinder (1945–2010) was an American serial killer and rapist who murdered three teenage girls in Arkansas and a woman in Missouri between 1976 and 1984. Grinder was not apprehended until his confession in March 1998. However, authorities still had little evidence tying Grinder to the murders, so they used a technique known as brain fingerprinting to help prove his guilt. In 1999, Grinder was convicted of the four murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He remained imprisoned until his death in 2010.

Biography

James B. Grinder was born in 1945. In 1980, Grinder had a daughter, but he and his child's mother split up soon afterward. He later moved to Macon County, Missouri.

Murders

Triple murder

On December 2, 1976, Grinder picked up Teresa Williams, 13, Crystal Donita Parton, 14, and Cynthia Mabry, 13, outside Russellville, Arkansas. According to Grinder, the three girls voluntarily got into his car after he offered to buy them alcohol.

Editorial summary

“James B. Grinder” enters the record as american serial killer (1945–2010). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Grinder and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1945, 2010, 1976, 1984—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1945-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around James, Grinder and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“James B. Grinder” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, James, Grinder and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q114021741. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2010, 1976 and 1984.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Locating named sources
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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from James B. Grinder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.