Joseph Christopher was born in Buffalo in 1955. He was a solitary young man who had enlisted in the United States Army in November 1980, part way through the series.
Between September 22 and December 30, 1980 he attacked and killed twelve Black men in western New York and in Manhattan. The first four, in Buffalo over two days, were shot at close range with a .22 rifle. Two more were killed days later and their hearts were cut out. He then moved to New York City and stabbed six men in a single stretch of December, including a series of attacks in Manhattan and Queens on the same day. The Buffalo press called him the .22-Caliber Killer, after the weapon.
The men named in the record are Glenn Dunn, fourteen; Harold Green, thirty-two; Emmanuel Thomas, thirty; Joseph McCoy; Parler Edwards, seventy-one; Ernest Jones, forty; Luis Rodriguez, nineteen; Antone Davis, thirty; Richard Renner, twenty; Roger Adams, thirty-one; and Wendell Barnes, twenty-six. One man was never identified.
The killings were racially motivated and were understood as such immediately, and Buffalo's Black community lived through those months under a level of fear that the city has not forgotten. The press called it the .22 Caliber Killings and, for the later stabbings, the Midtown Slasher.
He was arrested in January 1981 at Fort Benning after stabbing a Black fellow soldier, and confessed to a nurse in the psychiatric ward there.
He was convicted in 1982, had the conviction overturned on appeal in 1985 on the ground that his competence had not been properly assessed, and was retried and convicted again on November 14, 1985, receiving sixty years to life. He died of cancer in prison in March 1993, aged thirty-seven.