Between 1993 and 1999, women in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, were found dead one after another. When the Illinois State Police crime laboratory began testing the evidence from the unsolved cases, it found that the killings were not the work of one man but of several. The man the police called "Pattern A" turned out to be Andre Crawford, a Navy veteran who lived much of the time as a vagrant in the same streets.
Crawford was arrested in January 2000 and confessed on videotape. In December 2009, after ten years in the Cook County Jail, a jury convicted him of murdering 11 women and of the attempted murder of a 12th, who survived. The case also exposed a wrongful conviction: another man, Hubert Geralds, had already been sentenced to death for one of the killings that Crawford confessed to and was later convicted of.
Little about Crawford's early life is set out in the court record. At his arrest in late January 2000 he was 37 years old, and police said he had a criminal record going back to 1985, though the commander in charge of the investigation would not describe it. At trial, prosecutors described him as a Navy veteran who lived essentially as a vagrant in Englewood and in New City, the neighborhood just to the north. During the sentencing hearing in December 2009 his lawyers told the jury that he had been abandoned as a baby and abused through his teenage years, and they asked for mercy.
A study later published by the City of Chicago, which used his case to argue for taking DNA samples at felony arrests, listed several of his earlier arrests: for felony theft in March 1993, for felony attempted sexual abuse in May 1995, and for felony drug possession in January 1998. No DNA sample was taken from him on any of those occasions, the study said.
By the late 1990s Englewood had been the scene of several overlapping series of killings of women. In September 1999, Newsweek reported that cold-case officers had pulled together 12 unsolved murders and three rapes in the area over the previous four years, all with similar victims, and had sent the physical evidence to the state police laboratory for DNA testing. The results showed four separate attackers, whom the police labeled Patterns A, B, C and D. Pattern A was linked to six killings, more than any of the others. None of the four profiles matched any of the 261 registered sex offenders in the area, and the magazine reported that about three dozen detectives were working the cases. A woman who visited a makeshift memorial on 51st Street told the magazine simply, "I'm scared."
The neighborhood had already seen one serial murder prosecution. Hubert Geralds Jr. was convicted by a Cook County jury on November 14, 1997, of murdering six women in Englewood, and on January 9, 1998, Judge Michael P. Toomin sentenced him to death. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the first of the six was Rhonda King, 18, who was found on December 21, 1994. Geralds had confessed under police questioning to all six killings; the registry notes that he had an intellectual disability.
The 11 women whose murders Crawford was convicted of are named in the Illinois Appellate Court's 2013 opinion as Patricia Dunn, Rhonda King, Angela Shatteen, Tommie Dennis, Shaguanta Langley, Sonji Brandon, Nicole Townsend, Evandre Harris, Cheryl Cross, Sheryl Johnson and Constance Bailey. The families who came to court in 2009 were under a gag order during the trial.
Patricia Dunn was the first. Prosecutors said in their closing argument that the killings began with her death in September 1993, followed by that of Rhonda King.
Rhonda King was 18. A friend testified at the trial that she had last seen King walking with Crawford. In his video statement Crawford said he had known King for about two years. She was found dead on December 21, 1994, and the medical examiner could not at first determine the cause of death; the examiner later said a stab wound was a possible cause. Her death was the one for which Geralds had been sent to death row.
Angela Shatteen, whom Crawford called "Angel," was found by schoolchildren on April 3, 1995. The medical examiner found that she had been strangled. Crawford said he had known her for two or three years.
Nicole Townsend and Evandre Harris were both found on August 13, 1998. Both had been strangled. Crawford said he had known Townsend for a couple of years and had met both women in the second week of that August.
Cheryl Cross was found on December 8, 1998, in an empty house whose owner testified that he had looked through it in the autumn and seen nothing. She had died of a stab wound, with a blow to the head as a significant contributing cause. Crawford said he had known her for several years.
Sheryl Johnson was found on April 20, 1999. She had been strangled.
The dates of the deaths of Tommie Dennis, Shaguanta Langley, Sonji Brandon and Constance Bailey have not been reported. Their cases rested, like the others, on Crawford's video statements and, for Bailey and Dunn, on DNA testing.
Across the series, prosecutors said, Crawford approached women he knew from the neighborhood, offered them drugs, and then killed them. Many of the bodies were not found until long after the deaths. The CBS News report on the charges said that all of the women had been strangled or had died of blows to the head.
On the night of November 27, 1997, Thanksgiving, a woman was attacked on the South Side and left for dead. She survived by lying still and pretending to be dead until her attacker left, she told the jury twelve years later. A neighbor heard her screaming and went to call the police. A doctor who treated her took a sexual-assault evidence kit, and the state police laboratory later matched the DNA from it to Crawford. After his arrest she picked him out of a police lineup. She was the one woman in the 12 cases who survived.
In 1999 the Chicago Police Department and the FBI set up a joint task force to work on the Englewood killings. The female victims in the Pattern A cases, the appellate court later wrote, shared a single male suspect's DNA. Newsweek had reported that the profile matched none of the registered sex offenders in the area.
The break came in the last week of January 2000. Acting on a tip from an informant, police arrested Crawford on a Friday on a matter unrelated to the murders and brought him in for questioning. He agreed to give a DNA sample, which matched the Pattern A profile, and then gave a series of video-recorded confessions. Commander Frank Trigg said Crawford confessed to seven murders committed over six years on the South Side and also admitted three other killings that police had not connected to the case.
On Sunday, January 30, Crawford was charged with ten counts of first degree murder, 11 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one count of attempted murder, covering killings between September 1993 and June 1999. At a news conference attended by dozens of police officers and FBI agents, Superintendent Terry Hillard credited the detectives' work. "Nothing takes the place of good old-fashioned police work," he said, and he told reporters that "we have put the residents of these communities at ease." Police said at the time that another man arrested earlier had been charged with three of the killings in the area, that three other men had each been charged with one, and that two killings and two rapes remained unsolved.
No DNA had been recovered from Rhonda King's body, and Geralds already stood convicted of her murder. On January 29, 2000, after she had taken his statements about the other killings, Crawford told Assistant State's Attorney Margaret Wood that he remembered three more murders, King's among them. He was worried, Wood testified, that she would be angry with him; she told him she would be upset only if he was not telling the truth. In his video statement he said he had met King in the autumn of 1994 and he described how she died in terms that later had to be tested against the physical evidence.
Geralds had told a prosecutor on June 19, 1995, that King was one of the women he had killed. On February 10, 2000, prosecutors moved to vacate Geralds's conviction and death sentence for King's murder. The National Registry of Exonerations, which lists the case as an exoneration with a false confession as a contributing factor, records that prosecutors then vacated Geralds's five other murder convictions as well, and that he pleaded guilty to those five killings and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Crawford's case took nearly a decade to reach a jury. When the trial opened in late 2009 he had spent ten years in the Cook County Jail, and ABC7 reported that he was the longest-held inmate in the jail's history. By trial the State had filed more than 200 counts across 12 separate cases, 11 murders and the attack on the woman who survived, and it dropped 139 of those counts before trial. The 12 cases were joined for trial before a single jury in the Circuit Court of Cook County, with Judge Evelyn B. Clay presiding.
The trial took place in late 2009; one juror said afterward that she had listened to testimony for six weeks. About 90 witnesses testified and some 450 exhibits were admitted, and the transcript ran to nearly 10,000 pages. The jury heard from medical examiners, police officers, the people who had found the bodies, the woman who survived, and the forensic scientists who had done the DNA work.
The State's DNA evidence came from two analysts. Joanna Wenk had used the older RFLP method, which compared five genetic markers, and she testified to match frequencies of about one in 30 billion among Black people, one in 10 billion among white people and one in 22 billion among Hispanic people. Mary Greer-Ritzheimer of the Illinois State Police had used the newer PCR-STR method, which compared 13 markers, in the cases of Patricia Dunn and Constance Bailey, and reported frequencies in the trillions. In several cases DNA could not be recovered, and in those cases, including King's, the State relied on Crawford's confession and the physical evidence.
The jury also watched Crawford's video statements. In them he described meeting each woman and then becoming angry. Asked how he had felt afterward, he said he "didn't feel too good about that."
The woman who survived testified about the night of November 27, 1997, and told the jury that she had played dead until he left. The defense attacked the King evidence, pointing to Geralds's earlier confession and to gaps between Crawford's account and the physical evidence. Its broader argument was that, given the lives the women had led, the DNA of more than one man should have been found. "It is suspect."
Closing arguments ended on Wednesday, December 9, 2009. Prosecutors went through each killing for the jury and showed it the crime-scene photographs. "The defendant turned Englewood into his city," one prosecutor said.
The jury deliberated for a little more than ten hours and returned its verdict shortly before 6 p.m. on Thursday, December 10, 2009. The judge read the word "guilty" 24 times, ABC7 reported, for the murders and sexual assaults of 11 women and the attempted murder and sexual assault of the 12th. According to the appellate court, the jury found him guilty on all counts, including three counts of first degree murder for each of the 11 women, two counts of attempted murder for the survivor, and numerous sexual assault counts. Crawford showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. A relative of one of the women said afterward that he had waited ten years for that day.
The State asked for death. Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said in a statement that the crimes were "worthy of a death sentence." Prosecutors also told the jury that Crawford had sexually assaulted a cellmate in the Cook County Jail and would be a danger to other prisoners if he were placed in the general prison population rather than on death row. The defense asked for mercy, telling the jury that he had been abandoned as a baby and abused as a teenager.
The jury found that Crawford was eligible for the death penalty but did not impose it. One juror said afterward that ten jurors had voted for death and two had held out. The result was a sentence of life in prison. Some relatives of the women ran from the courtroom, and many cried as they gathered in prayer downstairs in the courthouse. "Justice was not served today," the brother of one of the victims said. A relative of another said she had wanted him dead.
The court sentenced Crawford to natural life imprisonment for the murders and to 30-year prison terms for the sexual assault convictions and for the attempted murder. He was to be moved from the county jail to a state prison.
Crawford appealed, and the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, affirmed his convictions on December 16, 2013, in an opinion by Justice DeLort, with Presiding Justice Connors and Justice Cunningham concurring.
His lawyers raised four main arguments. The first concerned jury selection: the State had used a peremptory challenge to remove a Black prospective juror, and Crawford argued that the trial judge had not given him a proper hearing on whether the strike was based on race. The court found that the record supported the State's race-neutral reason, the woman's views on the death penalty, and that the defense had never supplied the comparison with seated jurors that the judge had asked for.
The second argument was that the evidence was not enough to convict him of Rhonda King's murder, because his confession did not match the physical evidence and because Geralds had confessed to the same killing and been convicted of it. The court held that independent evidence corroborated Crawford's account and that it was for the jury to weigh the conflicts. It did not pass over the history of the case. "Finally, it is undisputed that the State tried and convicted another individual, Hubert Geralds, for King's murder," Justice DeLort wrote. "Geralds was sentenced to death, but the State later moved to vacate his conviction and sentence. We find this series of events extraordinarily troubling."
The third argument was that his trial lawyers had failed to explain to the jury the limits of the five-marker RFLP matches in six of the cases, and that prosecutors had overstated the DNA evidence. The court found that defense counsel had cross-examined the analyst on the point and drawn the concession that the newer method was more discriminating, and that each of the six cases was in any event backed by a corroborated video confession. The fourth argument, that his right to confront witnesses had been violated when a substitute medical examiner described the autopsy findings in Nicole Townsend's case, was also rejected.
On March 26, 2014, the Illinois Supreme Court denied his petition for leave to appeal, leaving the convictions final.
With the Illinois Supreme Court's order of March 2014, his convictions and his sentence of natural life became final. As of March 2014, he was serving that sentence.
The case became one of the examples the City of Chicago used in a study arguing that DNA samples should be taken from people arrested for felonies, not only from those convicted. The study argued that if a sample had been taken from Crawford at his felony arrest in March 1993, it could have been matched to the DNA recovered from the first murder in September 1993, and that the later killings might have been prevented.
The King case also became part of the record of wrongful convictions in Illinois. The National Registry of Exonerations lists Geralds's conviction for her murder as an exoneration, with a false confession as a contributing factor, even though he remained in prison for five other killings.
Rhonda King. The appellate court states that no DNA was recovered from King's body and that the King conviction rested on Crawford's confession and the corroborating physical evidence. The National Registry of Exonerations states that DNA testing identified Crawford and excluded Geralds in that murder. The two accounts cannot both be right, and the court's account is the one tested at trial. At trial the defense argued that Crawford's confession to the King killing could not be relied on.
The three other killings. Police said in January 2000 that Crawford had admitted three killings that they had not linked to the series. They were not identified at the time. The 12 cases tried in 2009 included Rhonda King's, one of the three killings he raised with a prosecutor on January 29, 2000.
Pattern A. Newsweek's September 1999 report linked Pattern A to six killings; at his arrest, police said Crawford had confessed to seven murders tied to the series. At trial, prosecutors said DNA linked him to almost all of the crimes; in several cases DNA could not be recovered.
Earlier chances. The City of Chicago study's claim that the later killings could have been prevented by an earlier DNA sample is an argument made by the city, not a finding of any court.
March 1993: Arrested for felony theft, according to a City of Chicago study; no DNA sample taken.
September 1993: Patricia Dunn killed, the first of the charged cases, according to prosecutors.
December 21, 1994: Rhonda King, 18, found dead.
April 3, 1995: Angela Shatteen found dead.
May 1995: Arrested for felony attempted sexual abuse, according to the city study.
June 19, 1995: Hubert Geralds tells a prosecutor that King was one of the women he killed.
November 14, 1997: Geralds convicted of six Englewood murders, including King's.
November 27, 1997: A woman is attacked on Thanksgiving night and survives.
January 9, 1998: Geralds sentenced to death.
August 13, 1998: Nicole Townsend and Evandre Harris found dead.
December 8, 1998: Cheryl Cross found dead.
April 20, 1999: Sheryl Johnson found dead.
1999: Chicago police and the FBI form a joint task force; Newsweek reports four DNA patterns among the Englewood killings.
Late January 2000: Crawford arrested on an unrelated matter, gives a DNA sample and confesses on video.
January 29, 2000: He tells a prosecutor he remembers three more killings, including King's.
January 30, 2000: Charged with ten murders, 11 sexual assaults and one attempted murder.
February 10, 2000: Prosecutors move to vacate Geralds's conviction for King's murder.
Late 2009: Trial before Judge Evelyn B. Clay in Cook County.
December 10, 2009: Jury finds Crawford guilty on all counts.
December 2009: Jury declines to impose death; sentenced to natural life plus 30-year terms.
December 16, 2013: Illinois Appellate Court affirms.
March 26, 2014: Illinois Supreme Court denies leave to appeal.