Catoe was born in 1905 and worked as a driver and a labourer in Washington, District of Columbia.
Between 1935 and 1941 he raped and strangled eight women, in Washington and in New York City, some of them in their homes and some in cars. He was arrested on August 29, 1941, after a fingerprint and a stolen watch connected him to one of the deaths, and confessed.
The eight women were Florence Darcy, Josephine Robinson, Lucy Kidwell, Mattie Steward, Ada Puller, Rose Abramovitz, Jesse Elizabeth Strieff and Evelyn Anderson.
He was convicted and executed in the electric chair in the District of Columbia on January 15, 1943.
He was a Black man and most of his victims were white women, and the national press coverage of 1941 and 1942 was written in the racial language of the period, describing him in terms of his colour before anything else. The entry does not, and notes instead that the coverage tells a reader more about American newspapers in 1941 than about the case.
What the case is, once that is stripped away, is eight killings over six years in two cities, solved by a fingerprint.