Clarence Walker

Victims

15 ATTRIBUTED - NO MURDER CONVICTION. He was never tried for a single killing. The 1968 convictions are for rape, armed robbery and attempted murder, and prosecutors did not charge murder because he refused to talk after his arrest and the evidence was judged insufficient. The fifteen rest on police attribution across five states, not on any court finding. Four of the 1965 Benton Harbor deaths are documented in the reporting: Mary Jones, 37, Delores Young, 19, Amelia Boyer, 60, and Diane Carter, 7

Years active

1944 / 1951-1965

Location

Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, USA

Method

Shooting / Stabbing with knife

Status

Arrested in Chicago on September 20, 1966 and convicted at a bench trial on March 3, 1968 of RAPE, ARMED ROBBERY AND ATTEMPTED MURDER, receiving consecutive terms of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years, and nineteen to twenty years, a minimum of two hundred and nineteen and a maximum of three hundred and twenty. HE WAS NEVER TRIED FOR ANY OF THE KILLINGS: he said nothing after his arrest and prosecutors judged the evidence insufficient to charge him with murder. He was RESENTENCED IN 1992 by Judge John J. Moran to concurrent terms of a hundred to three hundred years on each count, a minimum of a hundred years, and appealed on the ground that the new terms were more severe per count. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board has refused parole repeatedly, telling him that release would deprecate the seriousness of the offences; the Seventh Circuit twice heard his complaints about the process, holding in one case that denying him access to his parole file breached the Board’s own rules. He used the alias James Darnell.

Walker was born in Tennessee on February 25, 1929. He was convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned at the age of fourteen, in 1944, and was paroled.

Between 1951 and 1965 he moved through Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, committing rapes and armed robberies, and killings were attributed to him in several of those states. He was arrested in June 1965.

In 1968 an Illinois court sentenced him to 320 years for attempted murder, rape and robbery. That is the disposition this roster records, and it is worth noticing what it does not include: the sentence was not for murder.

The figure of fifteen covers deaths attributed to him across the five states. The accessible record does not establish a murder conviction in any of them, and gives no account of which cases were investigated or on what basis they were connected to him.

He was fourteen at the first conviction and the record from that point is continuous. The entry rests on the 1968 sentence, which is the only disposition that can be verified, and treats the rest as attribution.