On July 23, 1993, seventeen-year-old Faith Davis was raped and stabbed to death in her apartment in East St. Louis, Illinois, and her killer set the apartment on fire to destroy the evidence. Witnesses saw him and named him: Lorenzo Fayne, twenty-two, who lived next door with his grandmother. Police found bloodstains on his clothes and in the house. Taken in the next day, he admitted robbing the apartment but denied the murder. Then, on August 4, a fingerprint from the Davis scene was matched to one found on the body of Aree Hunt, a six-year-old boy who had been raped and strangled not far from the grandmother's house on July 14, 1989. Confronted with it, Fayne confessed to both.
His grandmother, Nelly Willis, talked to him later that month, and he confessed three more killings to her. Latondra Dean, fourteen, had been raped and stabbed to death on March 20, 1992. Fallon Flood, nine, had been raped and strangled on July 20, 1992. Glenda Jones, seventeen, had been raped and stabbed on June 25, 1993. All five had lived and died within a few hundred yards of the house where he was staying. He said he had killed Aree Hunt out of a sense of inferiority, to make himself feel better.
He was born in Milwaukee on April 2, 1971, one of several children, and grew up on the city's northwest side. Both his parents had trouble with the law and with alcohol and drugs, and they beat him. At seven he was sexually assaulted by a neighbor boy. He skipped school, failed and dropped out, and between 1984 and 1989 he was arrested again and again for robbery, burglary, assault and car theft and spent years in juvenile institutions, where he was beaten and sexually assaulted by other inmates. An IQ test there put him between 68 and 75. In 1989, released, he left Milwaukee to live with his grandmother in East St. Louis.
He was tried first for Aree Hunt, in early 1994, and convicted. His lawyers asked for mercy on account of his childhood, and his grandmother testified for him in glowing terms; hearing her, Fayne broke down in tears for the first time in the trial. In August the jury voted eleven to one for death. Illinois required a unanimous jury, so the sentence was life without parole. He was later tried for the other four murders, convicted, and in 2001 sentenced to death.
In January 2003 Governor George Ryan, citing wrongful convictions elsewhere in the state's capital system, commuted every death sentence in Illinois, Fayne's among them, to life without parole. He is held at Menard Correctional Center in Chester.
In January 2009 Milwaukee's homicide cold case unit resubmitted evidence from the killing of Rita D. Scott, thirty-two, a mother of three found half-clothed near a loading dock on the city's north side on September 15, 1989, her head smashed with chunks of concrete. In May the DNA matched Fayne's profile in the national database. Interviewed on October 27, he confessed to the killing and to having sex with her body afterward, and he was charged in Milwaukee County that month with first-degree intentional homicide. The outcome of that charge has not been traced.
He was also suspected in the death of Nicole Willis, sixteen, raped and beaten to death near East St. Louis High School on October 16, 1989, which he always denied. DNA testing eventually excluded him. Another man, Carlos Garrett, was charged with her murder in 2013 and acquitted in 2014.