Suspected Dating App Serial Killer Admits to Queens Murder

SPRINGFIELD GARDENS, QUEENS — A murder suspect accused of raping and trying to kill a woman in North Hollywood reportedly told police he's killed at least six others, including a Queens nurse he met on Tinder.

Danueal Drayton, 27, of New Haven, Connecticut, is expected to appear in court Monday on charges that he sexually assaulted and attempted to murder a 28-year-old woman after they went on a date and headed back to her North Hollywood apartment, police said.

Police arrived at the apartment on July 26 to arrest Drayton for the murder of Samantha Stewart, a 29-year-old nurse found strangled to death in her Springfield Gardens apartment on July 17. By the time they found him, he was holding the other woman hostage, authorities said.

The New York Daily News reported Drayton confessed to murdering two others in Connecticut, one in the Bronx, one in Suffolk County, one in either Queens or Nassau County, and possibly another in California.

"My body did this, not my mind," Drayton told investigators, according to the Daily News. "I didn't want to do this. My body made me do this."

It was unclear if Drayton was telling the truth about the additional crimes, a police source said. Authorities said Drayton likely preyed on women he met through online dating sites.

Though Drayton was originally wanted for the murder of Stewart, whose lifeless body was found by her brother and father, he's now believed to be behind the rape of another Queens woman just a month before Stewart was killed, police said.

Authorities said he seemed to be repeating a pattern of rape and strangulation seen in Stewart's murder in the North Hollywood attack before officers intervened .

The Daily News also reported that Drayton was released by authorities at a July 5 hearing in Nassau County after he was arrested for choking his girlfriend in Inwood Park. A judge ruled that Drayton posed no flight risk and rejected the county district attorney's call to hold him on $7,500 bail.

"It would have been impossible for the judge at that time to foresee the allegations that are presently unfolding and coming to light," a Nassau Court spokesman told the Daily News.

But Drayton had several other brushes with the law, several of which resulted in stints in Connecticut prisons over the last few years.

Drayton was sentenced to three years in prison after a 2011 strangulation arrest in East Haven and ordered to serve another two years for unlawful restraint and violating a protective order in 2012, court records show. He was again sentenced to two more years in prison for violating a protective order in Waterbury in 2015 and most recently served three months in jail after a February arrest for harassment in New Haven.

In his latest arrest, Drayton was charged with attempted murder, forcible rape, false imprisonment by violence and sexual penetration by a foreign object. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison.

Drayton was supposed to be arraigned on the charge Friday, but he refused to board a bus meant to take him to court, according to ABC7. If he refuses to voluntarily appear for his rescheduled arraignment Monday, a court order will be issued to force him to appear.

City News Service and Patch Staffers Rich Scinto and Paige Austin contributed to this report.

Photo courtesy of the NYPD