Since 2001 more than fifty women have been found strangled or smothered on the South and West Sides of Chicago, many of them in alleys, abandoned buildings, vacant lots and rubbish containers. Almost all were Black. A large proportion had drug dependencies or had worked as prostitutes, and a large proportion of the cases remain unsolved.
The cluster was identified statistically rather than by a detective. Thomas Hargrove of the Murder Accountability Project, using an algorithm applied to national homicide data, flagged an anomalous concentration of unsolved strangulations of women in Chicago and published it in 2018 and 2019. Community groups on the South Side had been saying the same thing for years without the data.
The Chicago Police Department has consistently said there is no evidence of a single serial offender, that the deaths span too long a period and too wide an area, and that DNA has connected some of them to separate men. Critics respond that DNA has been recovered in a substantial number of the cases and that the clearance rate for murders of Black women in the city is the actual problem, whether one man or thirty are responsible.
This entry is included because the question is live and because the families have been asking it publicly for twenty years. It is not a finding that one killer exists.