In September 1980 a series of shootings frightened Buffalo, New York. In about a day and a half, a Black teenager and three Black men in the Buffalo and Niagara Falls area were shot dead, and the unknown gunman became known as the ".22-Caliber Killer." Two Black taxi drivers were killed in October. A Black hospital patient was attacked. In December more Black men were stabbed in Buffalo, Rochester and New York City.
The man charged was Joseph Christopher, a white Buffalo resident who was 24 in 1980. He had enlisted in the Army that November. He was identified only in the spring of 1981, while he was held in the stockade at Fort Benning, Georgia, for attacking a Black soldier with a knife. In April 1982 a Buffalo judge, sitting without a jury, convicted him of three counts of second-degree murder. That judgment was overturned on appeal. At a second trial his lawyers conceded that he had done the shootings and argued that he was insane, and the jury convicted him of manslaughter, finding that he had acted under extreme emotional disturbance. He died in prison in 1993.
Police suspected him in 12 deaths in all, by ABC News's account in 2023, and seven men he was accused of attacking survived. The three Buffalo deaths of September 1980 are the ones for which he stood trial twice.
Little is known about Christopher's life before 1980. He was a white Buffalo man whose family home was on the city's East Side; his mother was a nurse at a local Catholic hospital, according to ABC News. He was 24 when the shootings began. In November 1980, after the September killings, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia.
At his 1982 sentencing, one of his lawyers told the court that the killings were not racially motivated but were the work of "an extremely disturbed mind." Prosecutors argued the opposite at trial: that he hated Black people and killed his victims because of their race. A retrial jury later accepted that he had acted under extreme emotional disturbance. Tom Eoannou, then a young assistant district attorney, told WGRZ-TV that he had worried that Christopher was more sick than criminal.
On September 22, 1980, Glenn Dunn, 14, a Black boy from Buffalo, was shot without warning in the parking lot of a supermarket in Buffalo. A white woman shopping at the store had noticed a white man behaving oddly outside it just before the shooting. Her account would later place Christopher at the scene.
Within the next day and a half three more Black men were shot dead. Harold Green, 32, of Cheektowaga, and Emmanuel Thomas, 30, of Buffalo, were killed in the Buffalo area. Joseph McCoy, 43, was killed in Niagara Falls. United Press International, reporting the prosecution's case in 1982, said the same .22-caliber weapon was used in the deaths of Dunn, Thomas and Green over a 25-hour period that began on September 22. The Washington Post described the four deaths as falling within about 30 hours, from September 22 to September 24.
All four victims were Black.
The killings frightened the city's Black community. James Pitts, a former member of the Buffalo Common Council, told WKBW-TV in 2023 that "the fear was palpable." People tried to arm themselves, he said, and Black leaders held meetings on how to protect their neighborhoods. Ed Cosgrove, the Erie County district attorney, said the killings caused havoc in the Black community and that Buffalo suffered enormously.
By October two more Black men, both Buffalo taxi drivers, had been killed. ABC News reported that both were beaten to death. ABC News identified Ernest Jones, 40, a Black man found in Tonawanda on October 9, 1980, as the sixth man killed in the space of a month.
Christopher was never charged with the taxi drivers' deaths, according to WGRZ-TV. Cosgrove said years later that he was certain Christopher had committed them.
In October a white man attacked a Black patient at a Buffalo hospital and tried to strangle him. The patient survived and told police that his attacker had used a racial slur.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson came to Buffalo during the weeks of fear and urged the city's Black residents not to seek revenge, warning, WGRZ-TV reported, that retaliation would only give police a reason to shoot them.
Cosgrove, a former FBI agent who had served under J. Edgar Hoover, obtained special permission from Governor Hugh Carey to lead the hunt, according to ABC News. He formed a task force of homicide detectives, state police and FBI agents. The task force concluded that the killer was probably a single white man who knew the community, WGRZ-TV reported.
The investigators were under heavy pressure from Black political leaders and residents to solve the case. Charley Fisher III, a former at-large member of the Buffalo Common Council, told ABC News in 2023 that in 1980 there "wasn't the kind of will and commitment to stamp out white supremacy."
Christopher came north on a Christmas furlough from the Army. ABC News reported that four killings in New York City were attributed to him, of three Black men and one Hispanic man stabbed during that furlough, and that two other Black men were attacked. By 1982 he had been indicted in Manhattan for killing a Hispanic man and stabbing a Black man on December 22, 1980, The Washington Post reported.
ABC News also reported that he was accused of fatally stabbing a Black man in Rochester. The Washington Post reported that Christopher faced charges over nonfatal knife attacks on Black men in Buffalo on December 31, 1980, and January 1, 1981. In May 1981 a Buffalo grand jury indicted him for a fatal stabbing and another knife attack, UPI reported.
In January 1981, back at Fort Benning, Christopher attacked a Black soldier with a knife. He was held in the base stockade on a military charge of attempted murder, according to UPI. ABC News, writing in 2023, placed his confinement in the stockade in April 1981.
While he was confined he told a staff nurse that he had killed 13 people in Buffalo and elsewhere in New York State, some of them with a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle, ABC News reported. He later told another nurse that all his victims had been nonwhite men. WGRZ-TV reported that he made the statements while held in a psychiatric unit. Military officials passed what he had said to Cosgrove's investigators.
Cosgrove went to the Christopher family's house on Buffalo's East Side and spoke with Christopher's mother. "I'll never forget that," he told ABC News in 2023. "She was a nice woman."
Police searched the house and, according to WGRZ-TV, a farm in Chautauqua County; ABC News described the second search as one of a family hunting cabin. They found .22-caliber shell casings and ammunition and the sawed-off barrel of a .22-caliber rifle. The evidence tied him to the first three Buffalo killings, according to ABC News and WGRZ-TV.
Cosgrove said the evidence was strongest for those three deaths, in part because of the .22-caliber shell casings. He also told ABC News that he chose to try those killings first partly to spare the families of other victims from graphic testimony at trial.
The woman who had seen a white man acting strangely outside the supermarket before Glenn Dunn was shot picked Christopher out of a police lineup. She testified at both of his trials. She told ABC News in 2023 that she could only place him at the store at the time of the first killing. "I didn't see him do anything," she said.
Christopher was returned to Buffalo and indicted in the September shootings. At his first arraignment he wore a ski mask. At a later court appearance in May 1981, without the mask, he pleaded not guilty to a superseding indictment in the shooting deaths of three Black men and to charges of attempted second-degree murder in knife attacks on two Black men, UPI reported. The judge ordered him held without bail, and security in the courthouse was unusually tight.
Prosecutors said they were ready for trial. The court had ordered psychiatric examinations to decide whether he was competent to stand trial and whether he was competent to represent himself. With the new indictment for a fatal stabbing and another knife attack, the Buffalo charges against him covered three shootings and four stabbings. Cosgrove, who led the task force, said that a single white man had been responsible for a series of attacks on Black people across New York State, and that Christopher would be taken to New York City to be arraigned there.
His trial in State Supreme Court in Buffalo was heard without a jury and lasted about two weeks. Prison officials told UPI in May 1982 that after he came back to the Erie County Holding Center from a downstate psychiatric center he had begun talking with guards and some other prisoners; before that, they said, he had sat in his cell with a blanket over his head.
On April 27, 1982, he was found guilty of three counts of second-degree murder, in the deaths of Glenn Dunn, Emmanuel Thomas and Harold Green. Christopher showed no emotion when the verdict was read, The Washington Post reported. A crowd outside the courtroom cheered, and Black community leaders praised the verdict. Buffalo's mayor, James Griffin, said: "It's great for the community to know that justice has been served."
His lawyers, Mark Mahoney and Kevin Dillon, planned to ask Justice Frederick Marshall to overturn the convictions, arguing that they had not been familiar with some of the prosecution's evidence and that errors had been made at the trial and at the competency hearings held before it.
On May 24, 1982, Marshall, a State Supreme Court justice, sentenced Christopher, then 26, to three consecutive prison terms of 15, 20 and 25 years to life, a minimum of 60 years. Under the sentence he could not apply for executive clemency for 30 years, and he could be paroled only through clemency, UPI reported. Marshall said the sentence was not based "on whether the victims were white or black." Christopher was taken to Attica Correctional Facility. His lawyers filed an appeal.
At that point he was also accused of the fourth September shooting, the death of Joseph McCoy in Niagara Falls, and still faced trial over the knife attacks in Buffalo, in New York City and at Fort Benning.
Three years later the murder convictions were overturned on appeal, WGRZ-TV reported.
At the retrial Christopher had new lawyers. They conceded that he had carried out the shootings and argued that he was insane. A key piece of evidence was a videotaped interview with a psychiatrist, in which Christopher said that he heard voices and believed that he was fighting a race war, and spoke of a mission.
The jury did not convict him of murder. It found him guilty of manslaughter, on the ground that he had acted under extreme emotional disturbance, WGRZ-TV reported. ABC News described the second trial, which it placed in 1987, as having ended in "another conviction."
Besides the three Buffalo deaths, Christopher was accused, in charges reported between 1981 and 1982, in the death of Joseph McCoy, in a fatal stabbing and knife attacks in Buffalo, in a killing and a knife attack in Manhattan, and in the knife attack at Fort Benning. He was never charged with the deaths of the two taxi drivers.
Christopher died in prison in 1993, at the age of 37. ABC News reported that the cause was a rare male breast cancer.
In 2022 a racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket brought the 1980 killings back into public view. Cosgrove, by then 88 and a Buffalo attorney, saw the same pattern. "It's a repeat," he told ABC News. "If you want to take the totality of the circumstances, it's a repeat of what happened in '80." Asked whether the community had healed, he said: "Are we healed yet? I don't think so. But we will be as time goes on."
Cosgrove's nephew, John Flynn, was the Erie County district attorney prosecuting the 2022 case. Cosgrove called the family connection a "terrible coincidence," WKBW-TV reported. James Pitts said that the 2022 shooting was far worse than the .22-caliber killings, and that ending hate crimes starts with what children are taught.
Total count. Police suspected Christopher in 12 deaths, according to ABC News, and WKBW-TV reported that he attacked 19 people and killed 12. He told military staff in 1981 that he had killed 13 people. Three deaths were tried to a verdict, and the final verdict for those three was manslaughter.
The taxi drivers. Christopher was never charged with the deaths of the two taxi drivers. Cosgrove has said he was sure Christopher killed them, but no court has found so.
The Manhattan attacks. ABC News reports four deaths in New York City attributed to Christopher; the Manhattan indictment described in 1982 charged him with one killing and one knife attack there.
Motive. Prosecutors at the first trial said he killed out of racial hatred; his defense said the killings were the product of severe mental illness; the retrial jury found extreme emotional disturbance.
Dates of the retrial. ABC News places the second trial in 1987. The degree of the manslaughter verdict and the sentence imposed after it have not been reported.
September 22, 1980: Glenn Dunn, 14, is shot dead in a supermarket parking lot in Buffalo.
September 22 to 24, 1980: Harold Green, 32, Emmanuel Thomas, 30, and Joseph McCoy, 43, are shot dead in the Buffalo area and Niagara Falls.
October 1980: two Black taxi drivers are killed; Ernest Jones, 40, is found in Tonawanda on October 9; a Black hospital patient in Buffalo survives an attack.
November 1980: Christopher enlists in the Army and is sent to Fort Benning, Georgia.
December 22, 1980: a Hispanic man is killed and a Black man stabbed in Manhattan, the acts later charged against Christopher in a Manhattan indictment.
December 31, 1980, and January 1, 1981: nonfatal knife attacks on Black men in Buffalo.
January 1981: Christopher attacks a Black soldier with a knife at Fort Benning and is held in the stockade.
Spring 1981: he tells military staff he has killed 13 people; Cosgrove's investigators search his family's house and hunting property.
May 1981: he pleads not guilty in Buffalo to a superseding indictment and to attempted murder charges; he is indicted for a fatal stabbing.
April 27, 1982: convicted, after a nonjury trial, of three counts of second-degree murder.
May 24, 1982: sentenced to 60 years to life and taken to Attica.
Three years after the trial: the murder convictions are overturned on appeal.
Retrial (placed by ABC News in 1987): convicted of manslaughter, on the ground of extreme emotional disturbance.
1993: dies in prison, aged 37.
2022: after a racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, Cosgrove calls it "a repeat" of 1980.