John Eric Armstrong is the former sailor turned murderer of prostitutes, arraigned in Detroit, Michigan, in August of 2000 for the deaths of at least five women in that city. He confessed to the killings after DNA tests linked him with the victims. Charges were pending in several other cities, both in the United States and abroad, for similar murders. On July 22, 2000, a district court judge in neighboring Dearborn Heights, Michigan (where Armstrong resides), ruled that the 26-year-old accused was mentally competent to stand trial.

A native of North Carolina, Armstrong was the perfect baby-faced "boy next door." When he joined the U.S. Navy in 1992, his fellow sailors dubbed him "Opie," after the Andy Griffith Show character of that name, because of Armstrong's pudgy, freckled face and red hair. The 300-pound man served an uneventful six years with the Navy as a barber and shopkeeper aboard the U...