“Kill,” they said.
And he obeyed.
Under cover of darkness on that warm September evening in 2004, he cruised the backstreets of Peoria in his Chevy Blazer, looking for his next victim. “Hunting,” he called it. And then he found her. His prey. She was standing in the parking lot of the furniture store, next to Woody’s Bar, like she often did. He pulled up to her and she jumped in. She had no idea it was her night to die.
“You wanna party?” he asked, showing her an eight ball.
“Yeah, but can you take me to get more crack for my friend first?” she asked.
So he drove her to a little house next to a yellow building on the south side of town. He dropped her off, circled the block, and waited for her to come out. Then he took her back to Woody’s so she could deliver the drugs.
When she finished her business, she got back in the car and he drove her to his place on Starr Court. They went inside, where they drank whiskey and smoked crack until they were wasted. Then they got naked and had sex. He wore a condom, like he always did, but it broke.
“You can’t let her go. You can’t let her go. You gotta do it. You gotta do it.”
The voices again.
He put his hand on her throat and squeezed the life out of her. He had to get rid of the body, but he couldn’t do the fire thing because his mom was home and his grandma was coming the next day. He tried to pick her up, but her body was slick from the lotion she had been wearing, and he couldn’t get a grip. So he pulled a bootlace out of one of his work boots and tied it around her neck. Then grabbing onto the lace, he pulled and dragged her off the bed, out of the house, and into the Blazer.
He drove to a place in rural Hopedale that he called “Pitzer’s Cabin,” although he never remembered ever seeing an actual cabin there. He took the interstate until he spotted a cruiser a couple cars ahead of him; then he turned off, onto Route 98, and drove the back roads the rest of the way. He drove down a dirt road and over a levee. He parked the Blazer on top of the levee, then dragged her body a ways and discarded it by a tree.
He got back in his car and drove home, tossing her clothes and shoes out the window on the way. As he was driving, he realized he didn’t have his false teeth. Worried he had lost them when he dumped her body, he turned his car around and headed back to the levee. When he got there, he pulled over and used his headlights to look around. Unable to locate them, he left. When he got home, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had found his teeth.
It was a beautiful early-fall evening. Perfect for camping. Michael McDonough and Casey Kauffman wanted to take advantage of the weather, so they packed up Kauffman’s truck and headed to their favorite spot, near the Mackinaw River on King Road. When they arrived at about 9:15 P.M., they noticed a blue Dodge Neon and a gray Ford Ranger parked near the exact place they had planned to camp. They realized that the owners of the two vehicles were having sex, so Kauffman drove a little farther and parked his truck along the trail.
He and McDonough unpacked the truck and set up camp. They spent forty-five minutes trying to light a fire, but the wood they brought with them didn’t want to burn. So McDonough set out with his flashlight to gather up some small sticks and branches, while Kauffman set up the tent. The other two vehicles had since left the area, so McDonough walked over to where they had been parked to find some wood.
What he found, instead, was the nude body of a black woman lying on her back on the ground in the woods, her head facing toward the right. The woman had what looked like some kind of string or necklace around her neck. He yelled for Kauffman, who called 911 as soon as he saw the corpse.
It was just about half past ten at night when Deputy Sergeant Darryl Stoecker and Deputy Sheriff Dan Nieukirk, of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO), were dispatched to King Road to investigate the discovery of the body of a black woman who had been found naked in the woods. A gravel road, King Road ran north about a half mile from Wildlife Drive, coming to a dead end at the Mackinaw River. Detective Hal Harper and Deputy Dave Wilson were also en route to the scene.
Wilson was the first to arrive. He parked his squad car at the crest of the hill at the end of King Road. When he got out of his car, he saw McDonough and Kauffman standing at the base of the hill where the road split into three sections. As Wilson walked down the hill, he noticed one of the men pointing to a wooded area to the east of the roadway. As he moved closer, Wilson saw the body of a black woman lying on her back on the ground. By then, the other investigators also had arrived.
Wilson walked back to the campers and listened as Kauffman explained how he happened to find the woman’s body. The detectives asked for the license plate numbers of the vehicles that belonged to the man and woman who had been having sex. Then he telephoned them to determine what, if anything, they had seen. The couple told police all they saw before they left were the two campers and a farmer working in a field.
As they continued to investigate, the deputies stopped a red Ford F10 that was leaving one of the farms. The driver said he and his five-year-old son, as well as his buddy, who had been driving a silver Chevrolet Tornado, had been camping in the area on property owned by a local farmer.
Wilson talked to the men, then turned the scene over to task force members, Detective Cy Taylor, Captain Bobby Henderson, and Detective Hal Harper, who had arrived with a crime scene technician to investigate and process the scene.
The woman’s nude body was lying a few feet from a large tree in a grassy area covered with leaves on the right side of the dirt road, just over a steep rise. She was lying on her back with her arms extended up from her body. Her legs were slightly apart and extended, but it didn’t appear her body had been posed. There was a black-and-tan–striped shoelace or bootlace around her neck. Police couldn’t figure out if there were two laces or one lace that had been wrapped around her neck twice. There were leaves on the left side of her head and maggot eggs on her face, genitals, and the other openings on her body.
Police also found empty shopping bags and facial tissues near the woman’s body, which they collected as evidence. About a hundred feet away from her body in the shoulder-length grass next to the road and near a bean field, police found a white tennis shoe with blue striping on it. A short distance away, police discovered the other tennis shoe in a thicket. It appeared that someone had tossed each shoe separately into the brush from the road, because police didn’t find any evidence that anyone had trampled on the scrub in the area. Police also observed a glove that had been tied as some sort of marker on the top of a hand-made barbed-wire fence, most likely by a farmer.
The woman’s body was photographed and sealed, then recovered by employees of a local funeral parlor under the direction of an assistant coroner. Investigators conducted a thorough search of the area, but their observations were limited because it was dark. Detectives finished up a little after two-thirty in the morning. Henderson and Harper went back to the Peoria Police Department (PPD) to try and identify the body. They looked through mug shots and missing persons reports, but they couldn’t figure out who she was.
At just about the same time Harper was on the phone at the Peoria Police Department trying to identify the body, a woman from East St. Louis, Illinois, called the police with information that her sister Benita might have been murdered in Peoria. The woman said someone had telephoned her to give her that information.
The woman said a female called her at home and, trying to disguise her voice, said Benita had been murdered. Then a man, who identified himself as “Detective Mike Williams,” also called Benita’s sister to say Benita had been murdered and that the family should go to Peoria.
The problem was that police hadn’t yet released the information about the body found on King Road. So they were worried that the person or people making the phone calls had “suspect knowledge” about the crime. However, the female caller and the “detective” said the body had been found in Peoria, not in Tazewell County where it was actually found.
So police went to Benita’s home