On January 28, 2000, Chicago police arrested Andre Crawford, a thirty-seven-year-old Navy veteran who lived more or less as a vagrant in the Englewood and New City neighborhoods on the South Side, after a DNA test tied him to seven murders. In his first interrogations he admitted them and told investigators he was responsible for three more killings and for several attacks on women who had survived; the survivors identified him. He showed no remorse, and he said he would not have stopped, that killing had become an addiction. Police had called the unknown killer Pattern A. After the arrest it came out that Crawford had helped with the police operation to find him, taking part in surveillance around the neighborhood and handing out leaflets with composite sketches of the suspect and advice on how women could protect themselves.
The eleven were Black women and girls who worked as prostitutes or were addicted to drugs, most of them casual acquaintances whom he lured to abandoned houses and vacant lots with the promise of crack cocaine or of money for sex. He strangled them or stabbed them, left the bodies where they lay, went off to smoke crack, and came back later to have sex with the corpses. Most were found long after they died, some so decomposed they were barely recognizable. Their names were Evandrey Harris, Patricia Dunn, Rhonda King, Angel Shatteen, Shaquanta Langley, Sonja Brandon, Nicole Townsend, Cheryl Cross, Tommie Dennis, Sheryl Johnson and Constance Bailey. A twelfth woman, attacked on Thanksgiving 1997, was left for dead and survived.
He was not the only killer in Englewood. Hubert Geralds had been sentenced to death in January 1998 for the murders of six women there, one of them Rhonda King. When Crawford confessed to raping and killing King, and his account held details Geralds's had not, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office moved to set aside that conviction. Geralds was cleared of King's death but stayed in prison, since DNA confirmed his guilt in the other five.
Crawford was born in Chicago on March 20, 1962. His father left soon after his birth, and his mother neglected him so badly that she was prosecuted in the late 1960s, and he and his sister were placed with a foster family that had four other children. He said later that his foster parents beat him and other members of the family sexually abused him, and that as a teenager he ran away to his mother's relatives, who abused him too and forced him into prostitution; his sister, his adoptive parents and other relatives denied it, and none of it was proved. His adoptive father said he became addicted to drugs in the mid-1970s, and he left school at seventeen. In the early 1980s he enlisted in the Army and later the Navy, went on using drugs, was repeatedly disciplined and was dishonorably discharged.
Back in Chicago he drank heavily, used drugs, drifted between low-skilled jobs and slept in abandoned houses, shelters and friends' homes, spending his free time among prostitutes and pimps. Most people who knew him spoke well of him. Between March 1993 and November 1999 he was arrested again and again for theft and drug possession. On May 3, 1995, he was arrested for assault and rape and spent more than a year in the Cook County Jail before the charges were dropped, because the woman would not cooperate and her drug addiction was used to question her account. In 1999 a conviction brought a suspended sentence and probation, and with it a blood sample.
Charged with eleven murders, with aggravated criminal sexual assault and with one attempted murder, he waited nine years and ten months in the Cook County Jail, longer than any other inmate in Illinois history, while errors in both his case and Geralds's, the state's moratorium on executions and motion after motion delayed the trial until November 2009. The jury saw his videotaped confession and DNA evidence linking him to almost all the crimes; the defense argued that given the victims' work, the DNA of more than one man was only to be expected. The prosecutor told the jury that Crawford had turned Englewood into his city. On December 10, 2009, the jury found him guilty on all counts. He was eligible for death, but he was sentenced to life without parole. He served it at the Menard Correctional Center, where he died of liver cancer on March 18, 2017, two days before his fifty-fifth birthday.