The woman who ended it got away. In the summer of 1996 a woman Anthony Balaam had attacked escaped from him and was able to identify him, and on August 8, 1996, Trenton police arrested him; one account gives the day before. In the hours that followed he gave detectives statements linking himself to the deaths of four women over twenty-two months, all of them killed within about two miles of the house on Stuyvesant Avenue where he lived with a roommate. The detail in the statements, prosecutors said later, showed how each killing had followed a deal for sex in exchange for money or crack cocaine that went wrong. Laboratory tests later linked his DNA to at least two of the four.
Karen Denise Patterson, forty-one, was killed on October 24, 1994. Valentina Cuyler, twenty-nine, was killed on March 19, 1995, and Concetta Hayward, twenty-seven, known as Connie, on April 10, 1995. Debra Ann Walker, thirty-seven, whose first name also appears as Debora, was killed on July 29, 1996. All four worked the streets of Trenton, and according to later accounts he approached them in the early hours with an offer of crack, threatened them with a knife once they were somewhere out of sight, raped them and strangled them. Three were left in vacant lots and one in a derelict hotel. At least one other woman, attacked in February 1996, survived and later identified him.
Balaam had been born in Trenton on July 9, 1965. He was a crack user with arrests for drugs and burglary, and he had a long relationship with a woman with whom he had two children; people who knew him described him as polite and soft-spoken. Between July 1995 and January 1996, in the gap between the third and fourth killings, he lived in Detroit. Trenton investigators consulted Detroit police about unsolved cases there, and no killing in Detroit was ever attributed to him.
He was charged with four counts of murder along with robbery and weapons offenses, which were later dropped. Prosecutors offered him four life terms with a combined minimum of 120 years if he pleaded guilty, and he refused and went to trial, where a jury convicted him of fifteen crimes, among them four counts of knowing or purposeful murder and four of aggravated sexual assault. The co-prosecutors, McCauley and Doris Galuchie, then asked the same jury for death, citing two aggravating factors: that the killings were accompanied by sexual assault, and that they were committed to silence the women as witnesses. The jury declined to impose it.
On January 26, 2001, Superior Court Judge Thomas P. Kelly sentenced him to four consecutive life terms, each carrying thirty years without parole, a minimum of 120 years, the same term he had turned down. The Appellate Division affirmed in May 2003, and the New Jersey Supreme Court denied review that year. A petition for post-conviction relief, filed ten months late and arguing that his lawyers had been ineffective and that his confession was involuntary, was denied without a hearing in 2010, and the denial was affirmed in September 2012. He was sent to New Jersey State Prison, and his parole eligibility date is recorded as 2116.