In August 1999 Ronald Macon, thirty-five, was arrested for the sexual assault of a sixty-five-year-old woman in Chicago and held in the Cook County Jail on a $1.25 million bond. While he was there, detectives working a set of sixteen unsolved killings and sexual assaults of women on the South Side ran DNA from the cases. Three matched him. "Once we had a chance to speak to him, his status escalated to that of a suspect," said Police Commander Frank Trigg, and the police obtained a videotaped confession to all three murders.
The three women had been killed that year in Englewood. Angelnetta Peeples, forty-three, was found on February 20, strangled and struck on the head. Linda Soloman, thirty-six, was found on April 14 in a stairwell, also strangled and beaten. Rosezina Williams, fifty, was found strangled in a dumpster on June 21. By accounts of the case he had bought crack cocaine for the women and had sex with them before killing them. His arrest left nine murders and three sexual assaults among the sixteen cases, dating back to 1995, unsolved.
He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in October 1999. Judge James Schreier took the death penalty off the table in his case, a decision later cited when the same judge accepted a plea from another Chicago serial killer, Ronald Hinton, and Macon was convicted of the three murders and the sexual assault.