In or around October 1991, Darlene Saunders, thirty-five, agreed to go with a man she had seen around the neighborhood who offered to pay her for sex. He took her into a vacant restaurant on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, made her lie on broken glass and trash, and then put her in a chokehold. Someone on the street saw the struggle, and he let go. She lived. On March 6, 1992, she flagged down a Detroit police car on Woodward and told the officers what had happened, and in mid-May a telephone tip about the attack came in. By then women had been turning up dead in abandoned buildings up and down the avenue for five months.
Debbie Ann Friday, thirty, missing since December 8, 1991, was found on Elmhurst Drive in Highland Park on December 14, the first body discovered. Bertha Jean Mason, twenty-six, who had left her four children at home with her boyfriend and walked into a store on December 11, was found on Alger in Detroit on December 30. Workmen demolishing an abandoned house on Kenilworth found Patricia Cannon George, thirty-six, last seen November 30, on January 3, 1992. Vickie Truelove, thirty-nine, was found on January 25 in the former Longfellow Nursing Home on Woodward. On February 17 three women were found in three separate rooms of the derelict Monterey Motel in Highland Park: Valerie Chalk, thirty-four, whose family had been searching for her since November 6; Juanita Hardy, twenty-three; and a woman who went unidentified until genealogists named her in 2024, a name withheld at her family's request.
Brenda Mitchell, thirty-eight, left her mother's home on April 5 and was found four days later in an abandoned house at Woodward and Grand; her death had first been classed as an overdose. Vicki Beasley-Brown, forty-three, who had gone out on March 25 to buy school lunches for her two children, was found in a vacant apartment on Second Avenue on April 15. JoAnn O'Rourke, forty, of Muskegon, was found in a Highland Park building on June 15 and identified on July 3. Most of the women were poor, some homeless, many struggling with addiction and working as prostitutes, and several lay undiscovered for weeks or months.
Police had picked Benjamin Atkins up at an abandoned building at the end of January, after the first four bodies, and let him go for lack of evidence. After the Monterey discoveries they began comparing the deaths with thirteen other killings in Detroit, Inkster, Ypsilanti and Romulus since 1985. In June the FBI assigned two agents to a Highland Park task force, and on July 30 the FBI, Michigan State Police and the Detroit and Highland Park departments met for the first time to share what they had. The FBI agent Paul Lindsay, working through hundreds of dead-end tips, found Saunders' report. A state police officer, Royce Alston, drove her around the area for more than a month until, on August 20, 1992, she pointed Atkins out.
He was born in Detroit on August 26, 1968, the younger of two sons of parents who were both addicted to drugs and alcohol. His father left soon after his birth, and in 1970 his mother abandoned him to an orphanage, where other children beat him and, at ten, an employee raped him. At fifteen he ran away and found his mother and brother, and watched his mother have sex with clients at home and in her car. By the late 1980s he was homeless, sleeping in shelters, working low-wage labor jobs and addicted to crack. Acquaintances who liked him said that drunk or high he turned hostile toward women.
Arrested for the attack on Saunders, he first denied the killings and said he was homosexual. After twelve hours of questioning, on August 21, he confessed to eleven murders, describing the women's appearance and clothing, and led police to the bodies of Ocinena Waymer, twenty-two, and LaTanya Showanda Smith, twenty-nine, whose disappearances had not been connected to the series; both were found that day. He said he hated women who sold sex, and that he had lured his victims into empty buildings with drugs, alcohol and money. The first woman he killed, he said, was Patricia George, in the fall of 1991.
Prosecutors feared Saunders would not appear at the preliminary hearing, and Detroit police held her in custody for sixteen days in September 1992. She said she had always meant to testify. On the stand she admitted she had been a prostitute and high on crack when he attacked her, and she did not budge from her account. With little physical evidence beyond a palm print at one scene and semen and blood stains at another, the case rested largely on her testimony and his confession.
The trial began in January 1994, with about 150 prosecution witnesses, many of them victims' relatives. Atkins admitted the killings but claimed insanity, and sat through most of the proceedings as if he were somewhere else, while his lawyer asked for leniency on account of the abuse he had suffered as a child. He was convicted and in April 1994 given multiple life sentences. He died of AIDS on September 17, 1997, at the Duane Waters Hospital in Jackson, at twenty-nine.