On the morning of September 12, 1974, a maid found Pauline Spanierman, sixty-nine, dead in her apartment in a building next to the Park Plaza Hotel on Manhattan's West Side. A witness had seen a young man carrying a television down the fire escape at dawn. Another, a tenant of the Park Plaza, told detectives that a friend of his, Calvin Jackson, twenty-six, had come to his room that morning asking him to hold on to some valuables, a television among them. Spanierman's relatives identified the things as hers. Six hours after the body was found, Jackson was arrested near the hotel.
At the station he confessed to her murder and to ten others. Until then none of the deaths had been treated as murder. The Park Plaza was a poor, crime-ridden hotel, and the elderly women who died in their rooms there had been put down to natural causes or accidents. His descriptions of the women and of the dates matched closely, but at most of the scenes there had been no sign of a struggle or a break-in, and exhumations over the following months were inconclusive. Two of the women he said he had killed turned out to be alive. Two other residents came forward to say they had survived attacks by a young Black man: Maria Gallino, ninety, on April 4, 1973, and Sylvia Cohen, seventy-four, beaten unconscious in an attempted robbery that August.
The dead were single women between thirty-nine and seventy-nine. He went into their rooms to rob them, smothered most of them with a pillow or strangled them, and had sex with the bodies. Theresa Jordan, thirty-nine, died on April 10, 1973, and Kate Lewisohn, sixty-five, on July 19. In 1974 came Mable Hartmeyer, sixty, on April 24; Yeria Vishnefsky, seventy-nine, stabbed on April 29; Winifred Miller, forty-seven, on June 8; Blanche Vincent, seventy-one, on June 19; Martha Carpenter, sixty-nine, on July 1; the sculptor Eleanor Platt, sixty-four, found on August 30; and Pauline Spanierman.
Jackson was born on March 5, 1948, in Buffalo, New York, into a poor family. He became addicted to drugs as a teenager and left school after the tenth grade. In October 1965 he was convicted of robbery and served his sentence at Elmira. Paroled in the late 1960s, he moved to New York City, married Valerie Coleman, and lived on odd jobs and theft, with a string of short sentences for drugs and theft. Early in 1972 he moved into the Park Plaza, gave up drugs, and took work as a porter, and the people who knew him spoke well of him.
He was charged with nine murders and convicted. Accounts differ on when and on the sentence: most give a conviction in July 1976 and four life terms with a chance of parole, while others report a jury verdict of May 25, 1975, and eighteen consecutive life terms. His New York prison number, 76A2732, points to an admission in 1976. He has been held in the state prison system, latterly at Green Haven Correctional Facility.