Judge Fred Suria convicted Geoffrey Griffin of one murder and acquitted him of another on the same afternoon, from the same bench, at the same trial.
That is the whole of what any court has decided about a man Chicago police called the Roseland killer and charged with eight killings.
The conviction was for Angela Jones, who was killed on May 12, 2000. The evidence against him was a videotaped statement in which Griffin described squeezing her throat during sex, after the two of them had smoked crack cocaine. Suria found it sufficient, and on November 6, 2005 sentenced him to a hundred years.
The acquittal was for Beverly Burns, and the reason it happened is worth understanding. Griffin's shirt and jacket were spattered with her blood. The defense argued she had suffered a nosebleed in his presence. Suria said he was troubled that nothing placed Griffin at the scene where she died, and that none of her blood had been found there, and on that record he would not convict. Her body was found on June 22, 2000, a week after his arrest, too decomposed for the cause or the time of death to be fixed.
A judge who had just believed one confession declined to convict on physical evidence in the other case. Both rulings came on September 22, 2005.
Roseland sits at the bottom of Chicago, on the far South Side, around 103rd to 115th and State. The killings attributed to Griffin followed a pattern that repeats across a dozen Chicago cases of the same two decades: women working the streets, most of them using crack, offered drugs or money and led into abandoned buildings. They were raped and killed by strangulation or beating and left where they died, and a body in a vacant building on the South Side could lie a long time before anyone found it.
Griffin was born around 1971 and lived in the area. He was arrested on June 15, 2000 for the killing of Angela Jones, after another body turned up a few blocks away and police said the two deaths might be linked. The next day detectives disproved his alibi. That afternoon he confessed, just before a planned polygraph, and at two in the morning on June 17 he gave the videotaped statement. The charges accumulated afterward rather than all at once, because several of the bodies attributed to him were found while he was already in custody. By the end he faced eight counts of murder and one of aggravated criminal sexual assault.
He said afterward that detectives had beaten the statement out of him. At his suppression hearing he testified that one detective hit him in the forehead with a pair of handcuffs and another punched him in the jaw in a tussle over photographs pushed in his face; on the tape itself he said the mark on his forehead was a burn from work. Suria, looking at a photograph, found the injury already healing and more likely a work burn, and let the statement in. Griffin made the same claims in his appeals and to the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, which took up his case in 2019; a pathologist it consulted called the photographs inconclusive but said they did not show the redness and swelling a punch would leave. Police obtained no confession from him to any of the other deaths.
Accounts of the span of those killings disagree. The fullest dates them from July 1998 to July 2000; others say 1998 to 2000; a French account places all seven in the summer of 2000 and puts some of them in Englewood rather than Roseland.
Two women can be named: Angela Jones and Beverly Burns. The others have not been publicly named; the reporting at the time named the suspect and counted the victims.
Prosecutors said at the sentencing that trials on the remaining counts would follow. No later trial has been reported, and nothing public shows whether those charges were tried, dropped or left pending.
There is a reason to be careful with the number eight, or seven, or any number in a case like this, and it has nothing to do with Griffin in particular.
Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s the South Side produced a series of men convicted or suspected of killing women in these same circumstances: Hubert Geralds in Englewood, Gregory Clepper, Ralph Harris in Chatham and Avalon Park, Andre Crawford, Kevin Taylor, and after Griffin, Michael Johnson in Roseland again from 2008. The cases overlapped in geography, in method and in who the victims were, and the overlap did measurable damage to the record.
One of Geralds's convictions was vacated after Andre Crawford confessed to that killing in more detail than Geralds had managed. Gregory Clepper claimed around forty killings, was excluded by DNA in at least fourteen of them, and was convicted of one. Derrick Fluellen was convicted in 1995 of a murder that DNA later showed someone else had committed, after being coerced into confessing to it.
In a city where confessions in these cases have repeatedly turned out to be wrong, where one man's attributed victims were reassigned to another, and where an innocent man went down on a coerced statement, an attributed total is not a fact about what somebody did. It is a fact about what he was suspected of.
What Geoffrey Griffin was convicted of is the murder of Angela Jones. He is serving a hundred years.