Glenn Dunn was fourteen, and at about ten o'clock on the night of September 22, 1980, he was sitting in a car in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket at Genesee and Floss Streets on Buffalo's East Side, waiting for a friend who had gone inside. A man in a hooded sweatshirt who had been sitting near the entrance with a brown shopping bag at his feet walked to the car and fired four shots into it. A shopper who had passed within arm's reach of him going in watched him fire and saw his face as he turned to run. At 12:20 the next afternoon Harold Green, thirty-two, was shot twice in the head as he sat in his car outside a Burger King on Union Road in Cheektowaga. That night Emanuel Thomas, thirty, was shot once in the head as he walked with a friend down Zenner Street, seven blocks from where Dunn had died. On September 24 Joseph McCoy, forty-three, was shot dead in Niagara Falls. All four were Black, all four were killed with a .22, and the Buffalo papers named the gunman the .22-Caliber Killer.
What followed made the fear worse. On October 8 the beaten body of Parler Edwards, a seventy-one-year-old cab driver, was found in the trunk of his taxi in Amherst, and the next day Ernest Jones, forty, also a driver, was found beside the Niagara River in Tonawanda; both men's hearts had been cut out. Two days later a white man tried to strangle Collin Cole in his bed at a Buffalo hospital, snarling a racial slur at him, and was driven off when a nurse walked in. Christopher was never charged with the cab drivers' deaths or the hospital attack, and he denied the attack on Cole, but the district attorney who prosecuted him said decades later that he was sure Christopher had killed the two drivers.
Joseph Gerard Christopher was twenty-five. He was the only son of a Buffalo sanitation worker who had taught him to hunt and shoot and who died in 1976, and of a registered nurse, and he had grown up on the East Side with three sisters. He had dropped out of a vocational high school, lost a maintenance job at Canisius College in 1979 for sleeping on the night shift, and moved back in with his mother. In September 1980, by later accounts, he went to the Buffalo Psychiatric Center asking to be admitted and was told he was no danger to himself or anyone else. In November, after the shootings, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia.
He came north on Christmas furlough. On December 22, in Midtown Manhattan, men were stabbed one after another over about twelve hours: Luis Rodriguez, nineteen, at about 3:30 in the afternoon; Antone Davis, thirty, at 6:50; Richard Renner, twenty, late that night; and Carl Ramsey, stabbed on the subway around eleven, who died before midnight. Two other men survived. The press called the unknown attacker the Midtown Slasher. Back in Buffalo, Roger Adams, thirty-one, was stabbed to death on December 29, and Wendell Barnes, twenty-six, in Rochester the next day; three more men were attacked in Buffalo over New Year's and survived. Most of these killings are attributed to Christopher on the strength of his later statements and the pattern of the attacks. He was tried for only a few of them.
On January 18, 1981, back at Fort Benning, he attacked a Black soldier with a paring knife and was put in the stockade, charged with assault with intent to kill. He stopped eating, convinced his food was poisoned, lost twenty-five to thirty pounds, and was moved to the psychiatric ward of the base hospital; returned to the stockade in April, he was readmitted after cutting himself with a razor. To military staff there he said he had killed several Black men in Buffalo. Within hours Buffalo's district attorney, Ed Cosgrove, had the call from Georgia, and within the hour after that he was in the kitchen of Christopher's mother's house. She told him she had a troubled son. Shell casings found at the house and at the family's hunting camp in Ellington, New York, had been fired by the same gun as the casings at the three Buffalo shootings, and Christopher was known to have owned a Ruger 10/22, the kind of rifle used.
He was indicted in April 1981 and brought back to Buffalo in May. He refused the lawyers his mother had hired, waived a jury and represented himself, and in 1982 a judge sitting alone convicted him of the murders of Dunn, Green and Thomas; he was sentenced to sixty years to life. The Appellate Division affirmed in 1984. On July 5, 1985, the Court of Appeals reversed, four to two: at the hearing on whether he had become fit to stand trial after a period of psychiatric commitment, the judge had refused to hear the experts his lawyers wanted to call, and that, the court held, he could not do, even with Christopher himself opposing the hearing. It ordered a new competency hearing and, if he was fit, a new trial.
He was found fit. In October 1985 he was convicted in Manhattan of one of the December 1980 killings there, and he was then tried again in Buffalo. This time his lawyers conceded that he had done the shootings and argued that he was insane, and the jury saw a videotaped interview with a prosecution psychiatrist in which he said he had heard voices, had believed he was in a race war and had a mission to kill, and had thought the television could hear his thoughts. The jury returned what the prosecutor later called a compromise verdict: three convictions of manslaughter in the first degree, on the ground of extreme emotional disturbance, rather than murder. The Appellate Division affirmed in February 1991, finding that the trial prosecutor had behaved improperly in front of the jury, as the special prosecutor conceded, but that the judge's control of the courtroom had prevented any harm.
Accounts of how the case ended still disagree. Many give the retrial verdict as second-degree murder with a sentence of sixty years to life, the outcome of the first trial; the 1991 appellate decision, the controlling record, describes the retrial convictions as manslaughter. At Attica Correctional Facility he told the Buffalo News he had killed thirteen Black men. He died there of cancer on March 1, 1993, aged thirty-seven. It was reported at the time as a rare male breast cancer; later research by a writer on the case put it down to testicular cancer. Four decades on, when a white gunman killed ten Black people at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue in May 2022, Cosgrove, then eighty-eight, said it was a repeat of 1980.