Searching for One Missing Woman Leads to Diabolical Serial Killer
Meet the New “Printz” of Darkness
What does it say about a person who, when a former friend or lover finds out he’s a serial killer, responds with “I’m not surprised?” Certainly nothing good.
But those were the exact words of a long-time acquaintance of Daniel Glen Printz, a man who recently pleaded guilty to the 2021 kidnapping and murder of eighty-year-old Edna Suttles. But that’s not all. He also confessed to the deaths of three other women; sixty-six-year-old Nancy Rego, eighty-eight-year-old Delores Sellers (Nancy Rego’s mother), and sixty-one-year-old Leigh Goodman.
The first of his victims, Delores Sellers, was killed in 2017. Printz told police he gave her a lethal amount of her prescription medication. He alleges that he did so after her daughter, Nancy Rego, asked for his help “euthanizing” her mother. Printz said he agreed to this request because Nancy was “a close friend.” However, he said that, as the months went by, Ms. Rego had a conscience crisis and said she would confess what they had done to the police.
Is any of that true? We’ll never know because, a year later, he shot and killed Rego. Conveniently, she had signed over power of attorney to Printz just days before she died. So he buried her body and began collecting her social security checks. For four years, he also impersonated Rego to her family via emails and texts, making excuses to avoid seeing them or talking on the phone.
The details of what happened to victim number three — Leigh Goodman — are unknown. We know she died in 2018. Printz described her as another friend he was trying to help but who “ended up dying.” They apparently weren’t friends for long, as she died shortly after they met. His fourth (known) victim brought his killing career to a screeching halt.
Murder in a Parking Lot
Printz has been pretty mum about the details of Ms. Suttles’ death. Fortunately, the evidence filled in a lot of the holes.
Here’s what we know. Edna Suttles failed to show up for work on August 27th, 2021. On August 28th, concerned coworkers reported her missing. Police got to work and soon spotted her Jeep Grand Cherokee in a hotel parking lot in Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
Investigators canvassed surrounding businesses and located August 27th surveillance footage of Ms. Suttles and an unknown man carrying a carton of yogurt in a local Food Lion parking lot. The two of them got into Suttles Jeep and drove off. Later the same day, surveillance showed the same man returning to the parking lot and moving a “motionless Suttles” from her Jeep to his car.
Luck was with the officers. Printz’s criminal plans did not prevent him from using his frequent shopper card when the cashier rang up his purchase. Now, the police had a name to go with his face.
On August 30th, investigators searched Suttles’ home for evidence. They found no clues. But, when the Food Lion surveillance footage gave them probable cause to search Printz’s house, they hit pay dirt, including multiple firearms and electronic devices. They also found personal documents — a driver’s license, passport, and bank account information — belonging to a woman named Nancy Rego.
They soon discovered that no one had laid eyes on Nancy Rego since 2017. Rego’s family said she and Printz had been in a relationship before disappearing.
This disturbing information expedited a second search of Printz’s property, which they conducted in late September. In the meantime, Printz was arrested on weapons violations and the theft of Edna Suttles’ Jeep. This search yielded more treasure; a wallet belonging to Delores Sellers (Nancy Rego’s mother), partially filled pill bottles for drugs including the potent narcotic Tramadol, the muscle relaxer Flexeril, and the anxiolytic Ativan (all dated 2017), and a black bag containing various items, including zip-ties, a taser, lubricant, and crushed pills in a plastic bag.
There was more to come. According to the warrant, Printz’s wife was removing birds from their property one day in October 2021 when they found a bee box (a box for raising bees) on the couple’s property. Inside were some very non-bee-related items. They called the police. Detectives found a menagerie of incriminating evidence, including Ms. Suttles’ purse, rubber gloves containing Ms. Suttles’ DNA, Jeep Cherokee keys, and “other items belonging to Suttles.” Perhaps most damning was a yogurt container that, when tested, contained traces of the same medications (Flexeril, Tramadol, and Ativan) found in the previously discovered pill bottles.
On May 16th, 2022 — nine months after she went missing — Printz led investigators to her body. Thirty feet from the bee box lay an interior vehicle panel, black trash bag, and a tarp. No bodies were found, although a cadaver dog alerted to the scent of human decomposition at Printz’s property. During a third interview, conducted after all the evidence had been collected, Printz all but confessed. He wanted a lawyer before going into specifics but told investigators that he could take them to “within three feet” of Suttle’s body.
Daniel Printz’s criminal career was coming to an end. It had been a long one.
The Writing on the Wall
It will surprise no one that Printz has a violent criminal history, including a 1997 Michigan conviction for kidnapping a woman. He served twelve years. A former acquaintance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described that kidnapping incident this way:
“She had her wrists shackled and her legs tied up with duct tape. And she woke up in the back of his vehicle. I guess she felt she had nothing to lose. She grabbed a screwdriver on the floor and slashed his throat.”
This same source said Printz exhibited red flags even as a teenager. “He killed the neighbor’s dog and she later found the dog with an arrow in it,” they say. “He went into the army right out of high school. He was basically told if he didn’t go into the army, he would go to jail because he was in trouble then.”
He has other convictions for possessing firearms (forbidden for convicted felons) and assault and battery. The criminal complaint also talks about Printz being a person of interest in missing person cases for other women. U.S. Attorney Corey F. Ellis summed Printz up by describing him as “a monster who has a long history of targeting, kidnapping, and killing women — causing unimaginable loss to his victims and their families.”
The Finale
In October 2021, Printz confessed to killing multiple people. As part of a plea deal, he received life without the possibility of parole. In exchange for his cooperation in the investigations of his other victims, he will not be charged with their murders.
U.S. Attorney Corey Fl Ellis said, “He has earned every day of his life sentence.” Have truer words ever been spoken?
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Originally published at https://joniejohnstonpsyd.substack.com on June 24, 2022.