Every one of the six women Lorenzo Gilyard was convicted of killing was found without her shoes.
That was the prosecutor's point, and it was the clearest statement anyone made about what tied the cases together. Jim Kanatzar told the court that all six had been found dead inside the same eighteen months, all had been left in secluded or obstructed places, all had been strangled, all showed signs of a struggle, all were missing their shoes, and all but one showed distinct signs of sexual intercourse.
Catherine Barry was thirty-four. Naomi Kelly was twenty-three. Ann Barnes was thirty-six. Kellie A. Ford was twenty. Sheila Ingold was thirty-six. Carmeline Hibbs was thirty. They all died in 1986 or 1987.
They were not the only women Kansas City police came to believe Gilyard had killed. Between 1977 and 1993 thirteen women and girls died in circumstances eventually attributed to him: the six above, plus Stacie L. Swofford, seventeen; Gwendolyn Kizine, fifteen; Margaret J. Miller, seventeen; Debra Sue Blevins, thirty-two; Helga Kruger, twenty-six; Connie Luther, twenty-nine; and Angela Mayhew, nineteen. The youngest was fifteen. Most were working as prostitutes. Most were using drugs.
The record of where they were found is its own map of the city. Stacie Swofford, a newcomer working the streets, was found on a vacant lot a week after she was last seen in April 1977. Gwendolyn Kizine was found on January 23, 1980 with wire wound tight around her neck and wrists, a day after her father reported her missing. Margaret Miller was found on May 9, 1982. Catherine Barry, who was mentally ill and the one victim not known to be a prostitute, was found in an abandoned building on March 14, 1986 with a stocking around her neck. Naomi Kelly, a business-school student raising two children, was strangled with a towel in a park and found on August 16, 1986. Debra Blevins was found naked in bushes beside a church that November 27, Ann Barnes near the city center on April 17, 1987, and Kellie Ford at the edge of a bluff near a park on June 9. Angela Mayhew was found fully clothed at the side of a road on September 12, with no sign of sexual assault. Sheila Ingold was found on November 3, 1987 in an abandoned van near an auto shop, a van Gilyard had pretended he wanted to buy, and two rings had been taken from her. Carmeline Hibbs was found in an apartment parking lot on December 19. Helga Kruger, an Austrian immigrant, was strangled with a towel in February 1989. Connie Luther was found in a snowdrift on January 11, 1993 with a noose of shoelaces around her neck. He has also been named as a possible suspect in the 1987 death of a twenty-one-year-old store clerk, Paula Davis, whose body was found in Ohio.
They were strangled, several with their own clothing, and left where anyone might find them: in alleys, in vacant lots, in derelict buildings, in parking areas, on industrial ground, in a snowdrift, in an abandoned van. Nothing was buried and nothing was hidden.
The connection between them was not drawn at the time. The killings ran through the 1980s in a city where the women dying were poor and selling sex, and the files sat. Police first linked two of the deaths forensically in 1994.
The man they belonged to was a trash collection supervisor. Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr. was born in Kansas City on May 24, 1950, one of five children of Lorenzo Gilyard Sr. and Laura Brown. He was bigger than the other boys and used it, and he left school after the tenth grade. On November 20, 1968 he married Rena Hill, who was pregnant; he would marry four times. The people who later worked under him described an unremarkable boss.
He had a record, and so did his family. His father was convicted of rape in 1970, and a sister, Patricia D. Dixon, was convicted in 1983 of killing a client and sentenced to eleven years. His own arrests began in January 1969, when a girl he knew accused him of assault and rape and withdrew it after he apologized. In 1972 another woman said he had choked her unconscious and picked him out of a lineup; the charges were dropped. In 1973 his wife told police he had abused her physically and sexually for their whole marriage, and he paid a fine. A rape complaint by a twenty-five-year-old dancer in February 1974 was dropped. Five months later a friend's thirteen-year-old daughter accused him of raping her by the Missouri River; the rape charge fell when her account changed, but he was convicted of sexual acts with a minor and served nine months in the Jackson County jail.
Two more wives left him, both saying he had beaten and sexually abused them. In 1979 he was charged with attacking a young couple, raping the woman and threatening to kill her fiance, and a jury acquitted him in September 1980. In February 1981 he knocked out his ex-wife's front teeth and, on a second occasion, stabbed her hand with an ice pick; he was convicted of third-degree assault and put on probation, then given four years for violating it. Paroled on January 10, 1983, he was sent back after bomb threats in Wyandotte County, Kansas, and released again late in 1985. In January 1986 he went to work as a garbage man at Deffenbaugh Disposal Service, where his father worked in maintenance, and he rose to supervisor. A neighbor complained in 1996 of two years' sexual harassment; no charges followed.
What eventually broke the case was a police decision rather than a break in the pattern. In 2001 the Kansas City police won a multimillion-dollar federal grant to re-examine cold cases with DNA, and by some accounts the review that reached him began in 2003. On December 23, 1987 Gilyard had been questioned as a suspect in Sheila Ingold's death and had given a blood sample, then been let go for lack of evidence. That profile matched DNA from six of the bodies. He was arrested in April 2004, seventeen years after the last of the six died; accounts give April 16, 18 and 19.
He was charged at first with twelve counts of first-degree murder. On June 23, 2006, after another DNA result, a thirteenth was added, for Helga Kruger, and a grand jury's indictment covered all thirteen.
He was tried on seven, and the reason is a bargain struck in January 2007. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty on one condition: that Gilyard give up his right to a jury. He waived it. Six of the thirteen counts were dropped.
So the price of his life was the jury, and six of the thirteen women went with it.
The trial ran twelve days that March in the Jackson County Circuit Court, before Judge John O'Malley sitting alone. The case was DNA: sexual contact with the victims around the time each of them died. Gilyard, represented by Susan Elliott, maintained throughout that he was innocent, and he has never given any account of any of it.
On Friday, March 16, 2007, O'Malley convicted him on six counts and acquitted him on the seventh, the murder of Angela Mayhew, for want of sufficient evidence. Relatives and friends of the dead held each other and wept in the courtroom. Elliott would not comment.
That acquittal is worth holding onto. It is the strongest argument that the arrangement produced a real trial rather than a formality: a single judge, hearing twelve days of scientific evidence with no jury to persuade, declined to convict on one of the seven counts in front of him.
He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole. It was the only sentence available. Reports of the date disagree: contemporary coverage of the verdict said sentencing was set for April 13, 2007, and later accounts give the 14th and the 27th.
He is serving those terms in Missouri, at Cameron, though accounts differ over which of the two prisons there holds him. The Crossroads Correctional Center, named in most of them, closed some years after his conviction.
The part of this case that has never been resolved is the part nobody argued about. Thirteen women are attributed to Gilyard. Six are convictions. One is an acquittal. The other six were dropped to make a deal, and no court has ever heard evidence about them at all. Their families learned who had killed them from a press conference.