Benjamin Tony Atkins was born on August 26, 1968. At his trial it was established that he had been raped at ten years old and had grown up watching his mother work as a prostitute, and he told investigators that what drove him was a hatred of prostitution.
Between December 1991 and August 1992 he killed eleven women in Detroit and Highland Park. Debbie Ann Friday, Bertha Jean Mason, Patricia Cannon George, Vickie Truelove, Valerie Chalk, Juanita Hardy, an unidentified woman, Brenda Mitchell, Vicki Beasley-Brown, Joanne O'Rourke and Ocinena Waymer. They were aged between twenty-two and forty-three, most had histories of prostitution and drug dependency, and all were raped and strangled. Three of them were found on a single day, February 17, 1992, in three separate rooms of the Monterey Motel in Highland Park. A twelfth woman, Darlene Saunders, was attacked in October 1991 and survived. The Detroit press called him the Woodward Corridor Killer, after the avenue the women worked along.
The bodies were left in vacant buildings and derelict motels along the Woodward Avenue corridor, an area of Detroit that had been emptying for two decades and where an unoccupied building could go unentered for months. Nine months, eleven victims. FBI investigators said afterwards that no American case on record had produced that many in that time.
He was tried in Detroit Recorder's Court over four months and convicted, and received eleven life sentences. He died on September 17, 1997, at the Duane Waters Hospital attached to the Egeler Correctional Facility in Jackson, of an infection caused by HIV, four years into the sentence and aged twenty-nine. His appeal was pending and was declared moot.