Bright was born in 1966 and lived with his mother in Peoria County, Illinois.
Between July 2003 and late 2004 he picked up women, strangled them or gave them quantities of cocaine sufficient to kill, and disposed of the bodies, burning several in a fire pit behind the house and dumping others in rural Illinois. Eight women died.
All of them were Black, all were using drugs, and most were working as prostitutes. Women in Peoria had been telling police for months that women were disappearing and that something was happening; the local reporting afterwards recorded that the department was slow to accept there was a series, and the families said so publicly and at length.
The eight women were Sabrina Payne, thirty-six; Barbara Williams, thirty-six; Linda K. Neal, forty; Brenda Erving, forty-one; Shaconda Thomas, thirty-two; Shirley Ann Trapp, also known as Carpenter, forty-five; Tamara Walls, twenty-nine; and Laura Lollar, thirty-three.
He was arrested in January 2005 after a woman who had escaped from him gave a description and a vehicle. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on May 30, 2006 to life imprisonment without parole.
The case is now cited in Illinois as an example of what happens when the missing are poor, addicted and Black: not that nothing was done, but that a great deal of time passed before anything was. Eight women died in a city of a hundred thousand people over fifteen months.