Andre Crawford was born in Chicago in 1962. He and his sister were taken into foster care as infants after being found alone in a flat; his mother later admitted leaving them unattended for long periods. He grew up in and around Englewood on the South Side, dependent on crack, and was known on his street as a helpful man who would offer to shovel your snow.
Between 1993 and 1999 he killed eleven women in Englewood, all of them working as prostitutes or dependent on crack, most of them lured into derelict buildings with an offer of drugs. He beat and strangled them, and in at least one case had sex with the body. A twelfth woman, Claudia Robinson, was beaten almost to death with a piece of wood and survived, and it was her account and the DNA that eventually made the case.
The eleven women were Patricia Dunn, Rhonda King, Angel Shatteen, Shaquanta Langley, Sonja Brandon, Nicole Townsend, Cheryl Cross, Tommie Dennis, Sheryl Johnson, Constance Bailey and Evandrey Harris.
He was arrested in 1999 and confessed on videotape over three days, to seven killings the DNA had already connected him to and to three more the police had not linked to him at all. He told them he was glad he had been caught, because he had been like a shark in a pool.
The detail that stayed in the neighbourhood was that he had been present the whole time. He went to community meetings at which police and residents discussed the South Side murders, and he volunteered for Operation Safe Passage, escorting children through dangerous streets to school.
He was tried in December 2009 on ten counts of first degree murder, eleven of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one of attempted murder. The defence case was a childhood of abuse and neglect and a family history of violence and mental illness, most of it uncorroborated beyond his own account. He was convicted, and the jury did not reach the unanimity required for a death sentence, so he received life without parole.