In July 1986 the body of Kathleen Bullman, nineteen, was found in brush under a tree near a railroad warehouse at 10th and Holden in Minneapolis. In April 1987 Angeline Whitebird Sweet, twenty-six, was found behind the American Indian Center at Franklin and Bloomington Avenues, and that same month Angela Green, twenty-one, was found under the Park Avenue railroad bridge. All three were Native American. All had been beaten to death, sexually assaulted and mutilated, and all were found nude or mostly nude, their bodies positioned in ways that led police to look for one killer. The deaths set off an outcry in the city, including accusations that police had not pursued crimes against American Indians with any energy.
The suspect who emerged was Billy Richard Glaze, a drifter with a long criminal record who also used the name Jesse Sitting Crow and was known on the street as Butcher Knife Billy. He was born in 1944. He was arrested on August 31, 1987. Witnesses said he had made violent sexual remarks about Indian women, and prosecutors said he had told many people he wanted to rape Indian women with sticks. Several witnesses testified that they had seen him with the women before their deaths, and some placed him at or near the scenes; the prosecution said Bullman's killing had been witnessed and Glaze identified. After Green's death, prosecutors said, he gave his girlfriend a ring that had belonged to her. Several inmates testified that he had admitted the killings. No physical evidence tied him to any of the three.
On February 14, 1989, a Hennepin County jury convicted him of first- and second-degree murder in all three deaths, and he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. His appeals went to the Minnesota Supreme Court and the federal courts and failed.
Glaze always said he was innocent. In 2004 he wrote to the Innocence Project of Minnesota, and in 2007 the national Innocence Project joined the case. Three laboratories tested thirty-nine items from the three scenes, including swabs, clothing and cigarette butts. In June 2014 his lawyers filed for a new trial: none of the results matched Glaze, they said, and a full DNA profile from a rape swab taken from Angela Green matched another man, a convicted rapist who had served his sentence for raping another young Native American woman. A partial profile of the same man came from a fresh cigarette butt at the Whitebird Sweet scene. "You would certainly expect to see some DNA from the perpetrator at the scene," said Olga Akselrod of the Innocence Project, "and we didn't find any DNA from Billy Glaze."
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office said the right man had been convicted. It called the evidence of his guilt overwhelming and said Glaze had confessed to the murders both before the trial and again fifteen years after it, confessions his lawyers said were false. "This was never a DNA exoneration case," the office said.
Before the courts decided, Glaze fell ill. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in December 2015, after twenty-eight years in custody, the last of them in a prison in Delaware. His lawyers kept going, arguing that his name deserved to be cleared and that the real killer should be found. A Hennepin County district judge ruled that they had not proved his innocence and that with Glaze dead there was no live controversy left to decide. In March 2018 the Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed their appeal.
The convictions stand. So does the DNA evidence that points to another man, who has never been charged in the three deaths.