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.
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. David Fry, the chief warrant officer for the Jackson County prosecutor, asked Circuit Judge George Aylward to hold him without bond. Police Chief Larry Joiner said Jackson had admitted using the promise of crack cocaine to lure at least one of the women to her death.
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.