Jackson was born in 1948. In 1973 and 1974 he was living at the Park Plaza Hotel on West 77th Street in Manhattan, a run-down single-room residence whose tenants were mostly poor and mostly old.
He entered the rooms of women who lived there, robbed them, strangled or suffocated them, and in several cases assaulted the bodies. Nine women died between April 1973 and September 1974: the eldest was in her eighties. He was arrested on September 12, 1974 after being found in a victim's room.
The nine women were Theresa Jordan, thirty-nine; Kate Lewisohn, sixty-five; Mable Hartmeyer, sixty; Yeria Vishnefsky, seventy-nine; Winifred Miller, forty-seven; Blanche Vincent, seventy-one; Martha Carpenter, sixty-nine; Eleanor Platt, sixty-four; and Pauline Spanierman, fifty-nine.
He was convicted and sentenced in 1975 to eighteen consecutive life terms.
The part of the case that produced a public argument in New York was his record. He had been arrested nineteen times before the first killing, had convictions including for burglary, and was on parole for the whole period. The killings took place in one building over ten months, and the deaths of elderly women in a residential hotel were not initially treated as connected.
The case is cited in the New York literature on both counts: the parole supervision, and the length of time it took for nine deaths at a single address to be recognised as a series.