In mid-July 2004 a man in a pickup truck stopped beside Vickie Bomar and a friend near the Harrison Homes on Peoria's far south side and offered her drugs for sex. She agreed. At his place on West Starr Court, a shed behind his mother's house where he lived and where his mother was not allowed to go, he said he was a police officer, made her undress at knifepoint and forced her into sex acts. They had drunk and taken drugs together; when he tried to rape her she fought free and ran. She told no one, because there was a warrant out for her arrest on other charges. Five months later, in December 2004, she was arrested for theft, and in the county jail she offered detectives something in exchange for a plea bargain: the name of the client who had attacked her. It was Larry Bright.
By then the bodies of six women had been found in the countryside around Peoria and Tazewell counties, and four more women had been reported missing. In October the Peoria police had formed a task force of thirteen officers, with the Illinois State Police and neighboring departments. Sabrina Payne had been found on July 27, 2003, in a cornfield near Tremont; Barbara Williams, thirty-six, on February 5, 2004, in a ditch near Edwards; Linda K. Neal, forty, on September 25, 2004, near the Mackinaw River by Hopedale; Brenda Erving, forty-one, on October 15, in a ditch near Farmington. Shaconda Thomas, thirty-two, and Shirley Ann Trapp, forty-five, who also went by Carpenter, had gone missing in August 2004, Tamara Walls, twenty-nine, in September, and Laura Lollar, thirty-three, the mother of eight children, in October. Most of the women used crack cocaine and paid for it with sex work, and all of them were Black.
Bright was born in Peoria County on July 8, 1966. His parents divorced when he was young. At nineteen he served two years in prison for residential and vehicle burglary, and his family said he came out harder and with a taste for cocaine. He worked laying concrete. Not long after 2000 he began spending much of his free time with sex workers, and particularly with Black women.
Detectives found at least six other cases in which he had turned violent with Black sex workers. They brought him in late in December and told him he could be charged with aggravated unlawful restraint. He denied everything and was released for lack of evidence. On January 20, 2005, they searched the property with a warrant. Several patches of freshly turned earth caught their attention, and his mother said she and her son had dug out some raspberry bushes. Under them officers found ashes and many small fragments of bone. Bright was held in the Tazewell County Jail, and when the fragments proved to be human he was charged with murder and the yard was excavated. He then confessed to killing eight women.
Payne had been the first. He picked her up on the edge of Peoria, offered her money for sex and drove her home, and said later that he had been too drunk to remember how she died; the autopsy pointed to strangulation. He loaded her body into his SUV and left it in the cornfield. "I knew then I would kill the others I would pick up," he told investigators. "I went out hunting." In early August 2004 he picked up Lollar, strangled her during sex and burned her body in the backyard pit, and in January 2005 he identified her from a photograph. He burned Thomas, Trapp and Walls there too, and crushed what was left with a hammer, which is where the name Bonecrusher came from. The other four he dumped in the country. He met Neal in late September in a furniture store parking lot, smoked crack with her at the house and strangled her with a shoelace after she fell asleep; because his mother was home he drove the body to Tazewell County, and DNA from cigarette butts in his house later matched evidence from her body. On October 14 he killed Erving, who fought so hard she nearly knocked him out and almost reached the door before he beat her on the back of the head and strangled her. He meant to put her body in a lake, got lost, and left it near a dairy farm.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty. Under a plea agreement he confessed to all eight deaths in open court, gave up his right to appeal, and pleaded guilty to seven counts of first-degree murder and one of drug-induced homicide, for the woman who died of the cocaine he gave her. On May 30, 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The prosecution said the full confession gave the families, especially those of the missing women, some closure; DNA could not identify the burned fragments found at half a dozen sites.
At his hearings he claimed further killings in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Washington and Arizona, then withdrew them. He said he had thought about suicide many times and held back for religious reasons, and that he had planned to rush the arresting officers with knives so they would shoot him but stopped because his mother was there. He denied that race was his motive. First he said he had turned against Black women after catching HIV from a sex worker, but he tested negative. Then he said that at nineteen, in prison, he had been sexually assaulted by Black inmates and wanted to punish Black men, and that because he was not attracted to men the hatred had shifted onto women who sold sex.