On June 17, 1995 Angela Geralds found a body in a trash bin behind a house on South May Street in Englewood. It was Mary Blackman, forty-two, a friend of hers; one account places the bin behind a neighbor's house, another at the house Blackman shared with the Geralds family. Angela called the police, and she told them about her brother: that he used drugs, and that he sometimes became violent when he did. Hubert Geralds Jr. was arrested the next day. Detectives noted that he had called the police himself in March about the death of another woman, Joyce Wilson. Sergeant Jack Ridges and Chief of Detectives Michael J. Malone led the investigation.
He was born on November 13, 1964. His father, whose name he carried, left when he was small, and he was abused by his mother's boyfriend. He spent years in New York, where the only trace of him is a prison record; he was paroled there on June 19, 1992 and charged with residential burglary in Chicago that November 21. By one account he was convicted in 1993, given five years and paroled on October 29, 1994, less than two months before the first killing.
He was thirty, and he had the mental age of an eight-year-old. Psychologists put his IQ in the mildly disabled range. Under interrogation he confessed to six killings.
Five of those women he had killed. They were sex workers he met around the Stroll on South Halsted Street; he drew them in with crack cocaine, knew some of them from before, and strangled them with what was called a Guardian Angel chokehold, covering the nose and pressing a thumb to the throat. Doretha Withers was thirty-seven, found on December 22, 1994. Alonda Tart was twenty-three, found on March 14, 1995. Joyce Wilson was twenty-eight, found on March 26. Millicent Jones was twenty-five and known as Peanut, found on June 12. Mary Blackman was the last.
The sixth was Rhonda King, found strangled in an abandoned building on December 21, 1994, the first of the series and the one that was not his.
A seventh woman survived. She was raped on April 14, 1995 and escaped, and she identified him.
His lawyers argued at a suppression hearing that a man with his cognitive limits could not properly understand a Miranda warning or hold out against days of questioning, and that the details in his statement did not match the scenes. His lawyer, Allen Sincox, went on to argue that he was intellectually disabled and brain-damaged and suffered from paraphilia; experts put his IQ below 73, he often slept in court, and family members described severe abuse in his childhood. Judge Michael P. Toomin of the Cook County Circuit Court ruled the confession voluntary and admitted it.
The trial ran three weeks. On November 14, 1997 (November 13, his thirty-third birthday, in other accounts) the jury convicted him of six murders, an attempted murder and residential burglary, found nothing in mitigation sufficient to preclude a death sentence, and on January 9, 1998 Toomin sentenced him to die.
Two years later the case came apart. Andre Crawford, who had been killing women in the same few streets of Englewood in the same period and was eventually convicted of eleven murders, gave a credible confession to the killing of Rhonda King. DNA testing identified Crawford and excluded Geralds. On February 10, 2000 prosecutors moved to vacate that conviction.
They then vacated the other five as well, and Geralds pleaded guilty to those five and was sentenced to life without parole.
The National Registry of Exonerations carries him as an exoneration dated 2000, with false confession recorded as the contributing factor and DNA as the means. Both halves of that are true at once: he strangled five women, and he confessed to a sixth killing he did not commit.
Accounts of what happened after the plea do not agree. The exoneration registry and the Northwestern clinic both say he pleaded guilty in 2000 and received life without parole. Other accounts, including the Cook County State's Attorney's own, say he remained under sentence of death until January 2003, when Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois. The outcome is the same either way.
He is sixty-one and held at Menard Correctional Center in Randolph County, Illinois, under number B39967, admitted on January 16, 1998.
A man with the mind of a child was convicted of six killings, and one of them was somebody else's, in a neighborhood where two men were killing the same women at the same time and the police were treating the deaths as a single series. The correction came from DNA, years later, and not from the investigation.