A man walking his dog through Gillham Park in midtown Kansas City on the night of Monday, April 9, 1990, came on what looked at first like two people having sex in the bushes. When he got closer he saw that the woman was being raped and choked. He intervened and the attacker ran. The woman came to, described the man, and later picked Ray Shawn Jackson out of a photograph. By then six women had been found dead in and around that park in seven months.
The first was Annette Stewart, thirty-three, found on September 16, 1989, near Thirty-first and Oak streets. Four days later Kimberly Creer, twenty-two, was found in Gillham Park. Tresa Williams, twenty-one, was found on October 22 at 4136 Euclid Avenue, and Janice Berryman, thirty-six, in the park six days after that. There was a gap of nearly three months. Tonya Ward, twenty-three, was found in the park on January 18, 1990, and Michelle Mitchell, twenty-two, on April 5, four days before the attack the dog walker stopped.
All six were Black women in their twenties and thirties. Several were addicted to crack, and most, the police said, had links to prostitution, and a Kansas City paper reported that winter that women working the streets of midtown were frightened by the deaths. Five had been strangled. The sixth had been suffocated with mud forced down her throat. Seven women had been found strangled in the city since September, and investigators came to believe one man was responsible for six of them.
By the spring the deaths had become a public grievance. Many in Kansas City's Black community said the police and the press had given the case too little attention because the victims were Black women who used drugs and worked the streets. "Gillham Park has become a death trap for black women," Ron Finley of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime had said.
The police had a rough idea of their man's geography. The bodies clustered on the park, and he seemed either to live near it or to have reason to be there. Asking around the neighborhood brought them to Jackson, who lived a few blocks away. He was twenty-two, born in Kansas City on August 28, 1967, an only son who had grown up poor, and in his late teens he had gone to work as a laborer who could barely read.
Under questioning he confessed. He told detectives he walked alone at night and asked women on the street whether they wanted to smoke crack. When one agreed, he led her to a secluded spot in or near the park, choked her from behind until she passed out, then brought her round, stripped and raped her, and strangled her. He left the bodies posed and their clothes scattered. The woman who lived had been different: he had followed her, and when she refused to go with him, he attacked her anyway and dragged her into the bushes.
On Friday, April 13, 1990, he was charged with six counts of first-degree murder and with the assault, at a news conference shared by Police Chief Larry Joiner, Jackson County Prosecutor Albert Riederer and Mayor Richard Berkley. Joiner called the charges the product of thousands of hours of work that had picked up speed again after Michelle Mitchell's death, when a composite drawing of a man sought in her killing brought in more than three hundred phone calls. Accounts of what he said about the lure differ. The Deseret News, reporting the conference the next day, had him saying that all six women had been drawn to the places where they died, in or near Gillham Park, by the promise of crack; United Press International quoted him as saying Jackson had admitted using that promise on at least one of them. David Fry, the chief warrant officer in Riederer's office, asked Circuit Judge George Aylward to hold Jackson without bond.
The seventh strangling in that period was never charged to him.
Missouri could have sought his execution. To avoid it, Jackson pleaded guilty in December 1991 to all six murders and to first-degree assault of the survivor, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was sent to the South Central Correctional Center at Licking, Missouri. The Kansas City Public Library keeps a seventy-page file of Star and Times clippings on the case under the names of the six women.
August 28, 1967: Ray Shawn Jackson is born in Kansas City.
September 16, 1989: Annette Stewart, thirty-three, is found dead near Thirty-first and Oak streets; Kimberly Creer, twenty-two, is found in Gillham Park four days later.
October 22, 1989: Tresa Williams, twenty-one, is found dead at 4136 Euclid Avenue; Janice Berryman, thirty-six, is found in the park six days later.
January 18, 1990: Tonya Ward, twenty-three, is found dead in Gillham Park.
April 5, 1990: Michelle Mitchell, twenty-two, is found dead.
April 9, 1990: a man walking his dog in Gillham Park interrupts Jackson raping and choking a woman, who survives and later identifies him.
April 13, 1990: he is charged with six counts of first-degree murder and with the assault.
December 1991: he pleads guilty to all six murders and the assault and is sentenced to life without parole.