Michelle Dehner was stabbed to death in Frankford on September 6, 1990, in the same manner as the eight women before her. Leonard Christopher was in a cell at the time, awaiting trial for one of those murders.
Philadelphia detectives ruled her death a copycat killing. It is a police conclusion rather than a finding of fact, and it may well be right. It is also the only available explanation that keeps intact the theory that the man already in custody was the man responsible.
Nine women were stabbed to death in and around Frankford, a working-class district in northeast Philadelphia, between August 1985 and September 1990.
Helen Patent was fifty-one, killed on August 19, 1985. Anna Carroll was sixty-seven, killed on January 3, 1986. Suzanna Olszef was sixty-four, killed on Christmas Day that year. Jeanne Durkin was twenty-eight, killed on January 8, 1987. Catherine M. Jones was twenty-nine and died later the same month, though her connection to the series is disputed. Margaret Vaughan was sixty-six, killed on November 11, 1988. Theresa Sciortino was thirty, killed on January 19, 1989. Carol Dowd was forty-four, or forty-six depending on the account, and was killed on April 29, 1990. Michelle Dehner was thirty.
Marissa Bluestine, the legal director of the Innocence Project of Pennsylvania, examined the case and described what the women had in common: they were all white, they lived in the area, and they had histories of mental illness or drug dependency. "They were women on the edges of society." Several drank in the same handful of bars along Frankford Avenue. Most were killed in their own homes or in the streets and alleys nearby, stabbed many times and left partially undressed. Press accounts describe every one of them as sexually assaulted, and several as posed after death.
Drinkers in those bars described a thin, middle-aged white man with glasses who had been seen with several of the women shortly before they died. Police questioned him. Then he disappeared. Later reporting described a person of interest who, unlike the man eventually tried, was white and middle-aged, and who was said to be a minister working in the neighborhood. He was never charged.
Carol Dowd's body was found in an alley behind a fish market on Frankford Avenue. She had been disemboweled. Leonard Christopher worked at the fish market, and that is how he became a suspect. He was arrested on May 5, 1990, six days after her death.
He was Black, and he did not match the description witnesses had given. No murder weapon was ever found. No motive was ever established. No blood or other physical evidence was ever linked to him. Two witnesses said they had seen him walking into an alley with Dowd the night she died; others said they had seen him in the company of a white man who matched the police sketch. Nothing tied him to any of the other eight deaths.
On December 12, 1990 a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life. The prosecution had asked for death. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Christopher showed no reaction as the verdict was read and that his lawyer shook his head. Christopher said afterward that he had been railroaded by women the police had pressured into testifying, and he referred to the man he believed responsible as the Northeast Stalker.
Dowd's killing is the only one of the nine that has ever gone to trial. Michelle Dehner died three months before that verdict, and according to Marissa Bluestine the jury heard nothing about her.
He maintained his innocence from the day he was arrested, through his appeals, all of which failed, and until he died in prison of cancer. Every account of the case says he died still asserting he had not done it. None of them says when. He served his sentence at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon. One online account puts his death in 2012; no official record confirming that year has surfaced. Bluestine summed up his life as that of a man who spent most of it in a prison cell for a crime he did not commit.
The conviction has never been overturned, and Philadelphia investigators have since concluded that there is no evidence supporting Leonard Christopher as the Frankford Slasher. Eight of the nine cases remain open with the police department, and the DNA evidence from them has been re-examined periodically. Nobody has been charged with any of them.
The prosecution has always pointed to the series ending with Christopher's arrest. The defense has always answered that a series ending proves nothing about who was arrested. The awkward fact, narrower than either position, is that the series did not end with his arrest.
Nobody has been convicted of killing Helen Patent, Anna Carroll, Suzanna Olszef, Jeanne Durkin, Catherine Jones, Margaret Vaughan, Theresa Sciortino or Michelle Dehner. And if Christopher did not kill Carol Dowd, then the man who disembowelled her in an alley in April 1990 was never named either.