On December 29, 1976, children playing on a path in Central Park found three green garbage bags. Inside was the naked body of Harry Carillo, sixteen, cut into three pieces with a saw. The man who had done it had carried the bags into the park in a shopping cart. He had known the boy for about six months, and because he was the last person seen with him, detectives questioned him again and again over the next two weeks. On January 10, 1977, they brought him back and laid out the circumstantial evidence against him, and after five hours Waldo Grant confessed. "Harry is very attractive to me and I desire him very much," he said, "and that was the only way I could get him."
Soon afterward he confessed to three more killings, saying he had an uncontrollable urge to kill. The first was on September 13, 1973. Phillip Mitchell, twenty, was struck on the head with a lead pipe, and his body was dragged to the roof of 203 West 91st Street and thrown into a rear yard to look like an accident. Grant said Mitchell had demanded money after sex and started going through his closet; that was never substantiated. Grant and other residents of the building were questioned at the time, and no one was arrested. Almost two years later the body of George Muniz, twenty-three, stabbed repeatedly in the throat and back, was found in a metal trash can in front of 210 West 91st Street, half a block from Grant's apartment, where he had been killed. On October 3, 1976, Harold Phillips, twenty-two, was beaten to death with a hammer in his own apartment at 27 East 124th Street.
Grant was born in Bulloch County, Georgia, on November 3, 1946, one of the fifteen children of Jerome Grant and Mattie Rucker Grant, and grew up in Statesboro. At sixteen he became a self-ordained minister in a Black gospel church. In 1971 he moved north to get away from a failed marriage and settled in an apartment on the Upper West Side. His neighbors knew him as a quiet loner; in the neighborhood's gay community he was fairly well known.
On June 30, 1978, he was found guilty of all four murders and given four concurrent life sentences. He spent the rest of his life in New York state prisons. According to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, he died at Albany Medical Center on June 6, 2023, at seventy-six.