Glaze was born in 1944 and also went by the name Jesse Sitting Crow. He was an itinerant labourer with a long record and was drinking heavily in Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Between 1986 and 1987 three Native American women were killed in the city: Kathleen Bullman, Angeline Whitebird Sweet and Angela Green. All three were beaten and stabbed, and objects were used in the assaults. He was arrested on August 31, 1987 and convicted on February 14, 1989 of all three murders, receiving three consecutive life sentences. The case against him rested on witness accounts of racist statements he had made about Native American women and on circumstantial evidence; there was no physical evidence tying him to any of the three. He was called Butcher Knife Billy.
In the 2000s the Innocence Project took the case. DNA testing of the biological evidence in all three cases excluded him and, in at least one, identified male DNA from someone else. His lawyers petitioned for a new trial.
The Minnesota courts refused. In 2015 the state supreme court declined to order relief, holding that the DNA results did not conclusively establish innocence given the trial evidence. He died in prison of cancer in December 2015, weeks after that ruling, still convicted.
This entry is retained because the convictions stand, and it should be read with that history in full view. Three Native American women were killed and the man convicted of it has been excluded by the physical evidence, which means the killings are, in any practical sense, unsolved. The case appears in the record of murdered and missing Indigenous women in the United States for exactly that reason.