Ronald Macon was born in 1964 and lived in Chicago. He was thirty-five when he was charged.
He was arrested on felony charges three times in 1998: for retail theft on January 13, for defacing property on July 20, and for retail theft again on September 8. Illinois did not then require a DNA sample on a felony arrest.
On February 18, 1999 a woman of forty-three was found murdered on the hundred block of East 45th Street. DNA evidence was recovered. On April 4 a woman of thirty-five was found choked and beaten to death with an electrical box on the fifty-nine hundred block of South Damen Avenue; DNA was recovered again. On June 21 a third woman was found on the four hundred block of East 69th Street: choked, raped, her hands and feet bound with shoelaces, and strangled with the strap of a bag. DNA again. The three are named in the police record as Angelnetta Peeples, Linda Soloman and Rosezina Williams. In each case he had bought crack cocaine for the woman and had sex with her before killing her.
On August 9, 1999 he was arrested for the criminal sexual assault of a woman of sixty-five. He had held a knife to her neck and demanded her jewellery and money, tied her hands with a cord, taken her into a bedroom and raped her. She survived, and it was that case that caught him: he was in jail on it while detectives ran DNA from a string of unsolved killings and rapes, and the samples matched.
He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder on October 10, 1999. A police commander said he had confessed to all three. The police called it their first significant break in the hunt for a killer who had been preying on poor neighbourhoods, and said their inquiries would go on in an area where at least ten similar killings had happened in the previous six years. Those ten are not accounted for in anything accessible here, and none of them is included in the count.
He was convicted in 2003 of the three murders and the sexual assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment together with thirty years for the rape.
The reason this case is on the public record at all is an argument about DNA collection. The Illinois state's attorney's office published his timeline to make the point that if a sample had been taken at his first felony arrest on January 13, 1998, the DNA recovered from the first murder would have identified him, and the two later murders and the rape of the sixty-five-year-old woman would not have happened. That is the office's own conclusion, and it is set out here as such.
The second victim's age is given as thirty-five in the state's timeline and thirty-six in the case summary, and the sentencing date as both September 11 and September 15, 2003.