Terry Anthony Blair was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on September 16, 1961, the fourth of ten children of a mother who struggled with mental illness and had left school after the ninth grade. He grew up in a family where violence was common. On August 16, 1978, his mother, Janice, shot and killed her common-law husband; she entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder and was given probation on condition of psychiatric treatment. The next year his brother Walter Blair Jr. abducted and shot dead Katherine Jo Allen, twenty-one, for six thousand dollars, and was executed by Missouri on July 21, 1993. Several other relatives were later convicted of serious crimes.
In May 1982, at twenty, he killed Angela Monroe, his former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, who was five months pregnant. According to court records reported by the Kansas City Star, he confessed to beating her with a tree limb and said he had done it because he was angry that she was, in his words, working the streets as a prostitute. Sources differ on the charge, some giving first-degree murder and others second-degree, and on the sentence, given as twenty-four years in 2004 reporting and twenty-five elsewhere. He was paroled twice, the Star found; it later dated his release to 2002, while other accounts give 2003.
Within two years of his release, women began to be found dead along the Prospect Avenue corridor east of downtown Kansas City, an impoverished area that the Associated Press described in 2004 as frequented by drug users and prostitutes. Six bodies were recovered in an eighteen-block stretch, on vacant lots, near derelict buildings and, in two cases, in a garage, between June and September 2004; some of the women had been missing for weeks. They were Sheliah McKinzie, thirty-eight; Anna Ewing, forty-two; Patricia Wilson Butler, forty-five; Carmen Hunt, forty; Claudette Juniel, thirty-one; and Darci Williams, twenty-five. Two had been strangled. The others were too badly decomposed for a cause of death to be established. At sentencing, their relatives testified that the women had struggled with hard circumstances and that their lives had been valued.
On September 3, 2004, a man began calling 911. He said he had killed two women whose bodies police had just found, called himself Scott, claimed four more killings and told dispatchers where three bodies could be found. He said he had killed the women because they were prostitutes. Police formed a task force. Prosecutors argued at trial that the caller was Blair; the defense called a linguistics expert who testified that it was unlikely to have been him, and prosecutors replied that no one could say that about a man disguising his voice. His semen was found on Sheliah McKinzie's body, though he had told police he had never had contact with her; her body had been found in a garage on September 2 with that of another woman.
He was arrested on a parole violation in September 2004, at first described by police as one of many people they wanted to question rather than a suspect, and on the following Tuesday was charged with first-degree murder in McKinzie's death.
He was charged with eight killings. Two were dismissed in October 2007, those of Nellia Harris, thirty-three, and Sandra Reed, forty-seven; Harris had died in 2003, which set her apart from the rest. Separate charges of three rapes and an assault, involving four women who survived, were also dropped, on the ground that the facts differed from the six murders.
He gave up his right to a jury in exchange for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty, and was tried by Jackson County Circuit Judge John O'Malley. On March 27, 2008 he was found guilty of six counts of first-degree murder and one of first-degree assault. The defense had argued the case was circumstantial, and that semen on a victim showed he had had sex with her, not that he had killed her. He denied the killings throughout.
He was sentenced on April 24, 2008, to six consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole, with a further consecutive term for the assault. Judge O'Malley told him that he was not clever or brave or powerful, but simply a middle-aged man destined to die in a prison cell.
On May 11, 2024, he was taken by ambulance from Potosi Correctional Center for a medical emergency and pronounced dead at 1:18 in the morning at Washington County Memorial Hospital, aged sixty-two. An autopsy was planned and no cause was released. He was convicted of seven killings, the one in 1982 and the six in 2004, and investigators believed there were further victims who were never identified.