Elton Manning Jackson

Victims

1 conviction, for the first-degree murder of Andrew D. "Andre" Smith, affirmed on appeal in 2000. He was initially charged in connection with twelve deaths and police named him as prime suspect in ten or eleven others; NO CHARGE WAS EVER BROUGHT in any of them and he denies all of them. Published estimates of his victim total range from one to twelve

Years active

1987 - 1996

Location

Norfolk area, Virginia, USA

Method

Ligature strangulation

Status

Arrested on May 6, 1997 and gave a videotaped statement to Chesapeake police in which he said the victim had visited his home on the evening of July 20, 1996 and that the two of them "had a good time". Andre Smith's body was found on July 22, 1996 near a dirt road in Chesapeake; the medical examiner put the time of death at between eighteen and forty-eight hours earlier. At trial he testified that he had had sex with Smith and given him twenty dollars. He was found guilty of FIRST-DEGREE MURDER by a jury on August 21, 1998, and on October 27, 1998 Circuit Judge James A. Cales Jr accepted the jury's recommendation of the maximum sentence and imposed life imprisonment, saying the jury had taken into account the violent nature of the crime and the lack of remorse. He appealed on three evidentiary grounds: that three witnesses should not have been allowed to describe their own sexual encounters with him, that part of his statement about an encounter with Kevin Benton should have been excluded, and that a witness should not have been allowed to repeat what Smith had said to him. THE COURT OF APPEALS OF VIRGINIA AFFIRMED THE CONVICTION ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2000, in an opinion not designated for publication. HE HAS DENIED KILLING ANYONE and has never been charged with any of the other deaths. Police identified him as the prime suspect in a series of killings of gay men in the Norfolk area between 1987 and 1996, described at the time as ten or eleven unsolved slayings; contemporaneous reporting noted that investigators had almost no evidence linking him to any of them.

Jackson was born in 1956 and lived in Chesapeake, Virginia. The Virginia press called him the Hampton Roads Killer, after the region.

Between 1987 and 1996 the bodies of men were found in fields and beside roads around Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, strangled with a ligature. Most were gay men who had been in bars or cruising areas, and in the local reporting the series went largely unremarked for years, a point the community there made repeatedly at the time.

He was arrested on May 6, 1997 and initially charged in connection with twelve deaths. The prosecution did not hold together at that scale. He was tried and convicted of one murder, that of Andrew Smith, and sentenced on October 27, 1998 to life imprisonment. The remaining charges were dropped or not pursued.

The range of one to twelve is therefore exact, and unusually so: one conviction, twelve alleged.

The reason the series ran as long as it did was given by police at the time as the difficulty of establishing that the deaths were connected, and by local activists as the difficulty of getting anyone to treat the deaths of gay men in that area as a series at all. The entry records both.