Angela Ford, thirty-two, was found on January 4, 2001. Charlotte Day, forty-two, was found in March, Winifred Shines, thirty-three, and Brenda Cowart, fifty-two, in August, Elaine Boneta, forty-one, in November, and Saudia Banks, thirty-nine, in December. All had been strangled or smothered, and none of their killings was solved. They are the first six names on a list of fifty-one women that, by 2018, had come to stand for one of the most argued-over questions in American homicide investigation: whether a single man, or a few men, had been killing women on the South and West Sides of Chicago for nearly two decades while the deaths were handled one at a time.
The list was not made by a detective. The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Virginia, founded by the former journalist Thomas Hargrove, runs an algorithm over federal homicide data looking for clusters of killings with the same method, victim profile and geography and an unusually low rate of arrests. In Chicago it flagged strangulations of women. In a report published in March 2019 the project described fifty-one unsolved cases from 2001 to 2018 on the West Side, the Near South Side and the Far South Side. According to its figures, seventy-five women between eighteen and fifty-eight were strangled in the city in roughly that period, and by the end of 2019 police had solved twenty-four of those killings.
The women who remain on the list were found in alleys, abandoned buildings, vacant lots and garbage containers. About three-quarters were Black, and nearly half had a history of sex work. Hargrove pointed to patterns he thought no coincidence: on the Near South Side, he said, the sites where bodies were recovered formed an almost perfect north-south line along the elevated tracks of the CTA Green Line, and the killings stopped in 2014 and started again in 2017, with two women killed within three months, a gap he suggested could mean a killer who had been briefly locked up. These fifty-one women, he said, had not been killed by fifty-one separate men, and most had probably been killed by men who had killed before.
The Chicago Police Department met with Hargrove in 2017 and reviewed his data, and it has not accepted his conclusion. Brendan Deenihan, then the chief of detectives, said police could not work from dots on a map; they could work only with what they knew and could prove. Under pressure from activists and families, the department announced in 2019 that a task force of Chicago detectives and FBI agents would review the unsolved killings, using newer DNA testing, updated video analysis and new witness interviews. The Chicago Tribune, reporting the review, put the number of cases at fifty-five. Police have said that they found no evidence that one serial killer was responsible for any of the fifty-one.
The families and the activists who took up the case argued that the question of a single killer mattered less than the fact that so many deaths had gone unsolved at all. Samantha Latson, whose sister Gwendolyn Williams is on the list, said the women were treated as America's most unwanted, because they were Black and because they were women. At Roosevelt University, journalism students working with the reporter John W. Fountain spent two semesters on a project called Unforgotten 51, writing portraits of the women: Williams, remembered as a protective big sister with a heart of gold; Nancie Carolyn Walker, who, Fountain wrote, danced.
The review has produced some movement in individual cases; in 2025 a man named Arthur Hilliard was reported convicted of the murder of Diamond Turner, one of the women whose deaths had been examined. Most of the fifty-one remain unsolved. Whether they are the work of one offender, several, or many unrelated men whose crimes were never properly investigated is still unknown.