Who is Thomas Eugene Creech? Idaho set to execute serial killer with love for poetry

Idaho is set to execute one of the nation’s longest-serving death row inmates by lethal injection on Wednesday, February 28. 73-year-old Thomas Eugene Creech will be executed for murdering a fellow prisoner with a battery-filled sock in 1981.

Creech, a notorious serial killer, is not accused of just the killing of David Jensen, a young, disabled man serving time for car theft. Overall, he was convicted of five murders in three states, and is suspected to have killed at least a half-dozen other people. He is currently serving time in the Idaho Maximum Security Institution.

Creech is known in prison as a well-behaved elderly man with a penchant for poetry. Prison staffers said he wrote poems of support or condolence for them.

Who is Thomas Eugene Creech?

At the time of Jensen’s murder, both Creech and Jensen were inmates housed inside the maximum security prison at Idaho’s penitentiary. Creech was serving time for two murder convictions in Idaho at the time.

Court documents say that Jensen attempted suicide in the past, shooting himself in the head. This resulted in the removal of his brain, and a plastic plate was subsequently placed in his skull. This caused impaired speech and motor functions.

Creech and Jensen are said to have not been on good terms. According to court documents, Jensen attacked Creech with a sock filled with batteries, but Creech was able to snatch the weapon away. He later used it to beat Jensen to death. Creech claimed he killed Jensen in self defence.

Former Ada County Prosecutor Jim Harris said Creech told him about his childhood, according to Idaho News 6. “I think it was potentially the loss of his father at a very young age. Particularly since the man essentially died in his arms. His first enemy. His first attempted murder was the male nurse that failed to get help to his father before he died,” said Harris.

The Journal News out of Hamilton, Ohio, reported that Creech admitted that he committed his first murder when he was 17 by “drowning a friend in New Miami who he believed was responsible for the traffic death of his girlfriend.” Creech reportedly also claimed that he murdered as many as five people from a motorcycle gang in Ohio for “satanic cult worship rituals.” These are only a few of his several murders he allegedly committed.

Creech has been accused of killing a man in San Francisco at a time he was involved with the Church of Satan. He eventually married Thomasine Loren White, and both of them were soon wanted in connection with the murder of Paul C. Schrader in Tucson, Arizona.

In a letter Creech sent to Idaho News 6, he said that he killed some men who raped his wife and threw her out of the window that was four stories high. Creech said the attack left his wife “paraylzed and damaged mentally.” She later died by suicide in the Oregon State Hospital.

Creech was later also convicted of killing 22-year-old William Joseph Dean. Dean’s body was found in Creech’s living quarters inside the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Portland. He was later accused of killing travelling painters Edward T. Arnold and John Wayne Bradford. 

Creech reportedly denied killing Arnold and Bradford, but did admit that he was a mass murderer. 

A statement from the Idaho Supreme Court previously said, “Creech ‘has admitted to killing or participating in the killing of at least 26 people. The bodies of 11 of his victims who were shot, stabbed, beaten, or strangled to death have been recovered in 7 states.”