On February 6, 1965, Mary Jones, thirty-seven, left a bar in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and did not come home. Nine days later Delores Young, nineteen, was taken off a street in the same town; her naked body was found days afterward in a burned-out house. In March, Amelia Boyer, sixty, was abducted from a laundromat. On April 4 searchers found the remains of Jones and Boyer, and with them those of seven-year-old Diane Carter. Police came to attribute all four deaths, and eleven more across five states, to one man, Clarence Walker. He was never tried for any of them.
Walker was born in Tennessee on February 25, 1929. At fourteen, in 1944, he was convicted of manslaughter for the killing of a boy his own age. He was paroled, drifted, supported himself by petty crime and served two more prison terms. Between 1951 and 1965, by the police account, he moved through Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, and rapes, armed robberies and killings in several of those states were later laid at his door. He sometimes used the name James Darnell. Beyond the Benton Harbor four, the published accounts do not identify the other victims or explain how each case was tied to him.
The dates of his capture are reported two ways. A retelling of the Benton Harbor series has him arrested in Chicago in June 1965, soon after the last of those deaths. The disposition record in the Illinois case gives the Chicago arrest as September 20, 1966. They may describe two separate arrests with a release between them, or one of the dates may be wrong; the records consulted do not reconcile them.
The case that held him was an Illinois one. At a bench trial on March 3, 1968, he was convicted of rape, armed robbery and attempted murder, and the court imposed consecutive terms of 100 to 150 years, 100 to 150 years and 19 to 20 years, a combined minimum of 219 years and maximum of 320. No murder charge was ever filed in any state. He said nothing after his arrest, and prosecutors judged the evidence in the killings insufficient to try.
His long imprisonment produced its own paper trail. His first parole hearing came in 1977, and the Illinois Prisoner Review Board heard him again every year from 1978 through 1989. After denying him in February 1989 the Board used a 1988 amendment to set his next hearing three years out. Walker sued, arguing that the change was an ex post facto law. He lost in the circuit court and in the Third District Appellate Court, but after the Illinois Supreme Court decided Tiller v. Klincar in 1990 it sent his case back. When the circuit court ruled against him again in August 1992, on the ground that he had been convicted before annual hearings were written into law in 1973, the appellate court reversed and held that he was entitled to a parole hearing every year like any other prisoner. The court let stand its earlier finding that the Board's reasons for refusing him were constitutionally adequate.
In 1992 Judge John J. Moran resentenced him to concurrent terms of 100 to 300 years on each count, a minimum of 100 years, and Walker appealed on the ground that each new term was harsher than the one it replaced. The Board went on refusing him parole, telling him that release would deprecate the seriousness of his offenses. The Seventh Circuit twice heard his complaints about the process and held, in one of them, that denying him access to his own parole file broke the Board's own rules.
Fifteen deaths, then, stand against a record of three convictions for crimes that were not killings. The attribution comes from police investigators across five states, and it has never been tested in a courtroom.