The next day Benita met Harper at the Peoria Police Department. She told him she had been having problems with her friend Sherry, who also lived in Peoria. Benita said Sherry had recently been arrested and charged with smashing out the windows in Benita’s car. Benita said she also believed Sherry had broken into her apartment and was probably the person who had made the phone call saying she was dead. Harper, however, didn’t quite believe Benita’s story. He figured there had to be more to it than what Benita was saying.
The next evening Harper and PPD detective Chris Hauk went to Sherry’s house to talk to her. Sherry told them that she and Benita were fighting because Benita had stolen some jewelry from her. But she was adamant that she hadn’t made any phone calls to Benita’s family in East St. Louis as a prank or for any other reason. And she said she had never smashed the windows in Benita’s car. She said Benita was lying to get her in trouble.
After he got back to the station, Harper called Benita and informed her that Sherry denied making the phone calls or doing anything else to her. He told Benita he believed she was lying to him and that she had actually called her family to tell them she was dead. Angry, Benita said she would “take the rap for all of it, if that’s what the cops wanted,” but she hadn’t done anything.
Later that night, Sherry and a man named Conroy showed up at the station to talk to Harper. Sherry said Conroy had helped Benita make the calls to her family and she wanted police to clear her as a suspect. Conroy told Harper he was sorry he ever let Benita talk him into pulling the prank on her family. And he wanted police to know that no one was killed, and he didn’t know anything about anyone being killed.
Conroy said Benita asked him to help her get back at her family for pranking her. Benita said someone in her family had called her to tell her a friend was dead, and she wanted to turn the tables on them. So with Benita listening in on an extension, Conroy called her sister and told her that Benita had been found dead and they needed to get to Peoria as quickly as possible.
But when Benita’s sister became terrified and panicky, Conroy realized it wasn’t funny anymore and immediately hung up the phone. Conroy decided to come forward to the police because the incident seemed to have sidetracked a real homicide investigation. Conroy told Harper he didn’t care if he was arrested for the stupid stunt he pulled on Benita’s family but he wanted to be cleared as a suspect in the real murder.
Harper called Benita’s sister and told her what had happened was just a practical joke gone horribly wrong. However, the timing of the prank was extremely coincidental, to say the least.
At about five in the morning, Detective Eric Goeken and other members of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office went back to collect evidence from where the body had been found. Goeken and Detective Cy Taylor took the evidence back to the Morton Crime Lab and began the process of trying to identify the victim.
While they were there, crime lab technicians were able to identify the woman by her fingerprints. She was forty-year-old Linda Kay Neal. After learning that Linda had been staying on Cass Street with Chucky Clinton, Goeken and Taylor went to pay him a little visit.
Chucky told police he hadn’t seen Linda since Thursday, September 23, when they were both at home. He wanted to know why the police were so interested in Linda, but he wasn’t at all prepared for their response. When he found out she was dead, he lost it and started crying and pacing around the house.
“Me and her were boyfriend and girlfriend, but I asked her to move out Thursday because she liked crack more than me,” he said. “I thought she went to stay with a friend, Alexander Lee, on George Street.”
Chucky told the police that Linda, whose nickname was “Chocolate,” often “dope-dated,” which meant she traded sex for drugs. When guys picked her up, she’d take them to one of the many hotels in East Peoria, and a lot of the times, she’d be gone all weekend.
“Was she strangulated?” Chucky asked.
“We’re not totally sure,” Goeken said. “We’re still looking into it.”
According to Chucky, Linda used to hang out with a bunch of white guys from a local towing company. Every Thursday, she’d buy drugs and take them to her “boys” at the tow lot. She also hung out at Woody’s Bar and Roger’s Place, bars located near the tow company.
“I tried to convince her not to be dope-dating,” Chucky said. “She told me she was raped by a white guy she didn’t know, who was driving a smaller dark-colored truck. Linda used to wear wigs to make her hair longer when she went out, and the guy took her wig as a souvenir before he let her go.”
Linda saw the guy drive by Chucky’s house as she was getting ready to leave on Thursday, and she screamed for Chucky, who was in the back room. But by the time Chucky got there, the guy was gone. Linda waited in the house for a short time, then left, most likely headed to Woody’s or the tow company.
The next day one of Linda’s regulars, a black guy in his fifties with a twisted face named Doe-Doe, went by Chucky’s house looking for her. When Chucky told him Linda was gone, the guy drove away.
Around ten on Saturday night, Chucky walked to Roger’s Place to get some cigarettes. He saw a white guy who hadn’t been around for a long time sitting at the bar. He was talking to the bartender, who was Roger’s sister-in-law. The guy knew Linda and had been with her before. Chucky asked the guy, whose name he couldn’t remember, if he’d seen Linda, but he said he hadn’t. Chucky told police Roger’s sister-in-law might know the guy’s name.
After talking with Chucky, the detectives went to Roger’s Place to talk to the bartender, who told them she last saw Linda about eleven on Friday night. She said Linda only had one beer, then left by herself.
Linda’s stepbrother, Kevin, told police she had called his house on Saturday, sometime during the second quarter of the Illinois-Purdue football game. When Kevin asked where she was, she told him not to worry about where she was and to let her talk to their dad, R.C. Kevin didn’t think anything of it because Linda had a great relationship with her father.
“The call lasted maybe three to five minutes,” Kevin said. “Even though R.C. talks to her, he forgets the conversation right away because he has Alzheimer’s.”
Kevin suggested police talk to Penny, one of Linda’s friends. Penny said Linda used to call her every day to tell her how things were going, but the last time she heard from her was Wednesday.
“She called me and said, ‘I got a new man,’” Penny said. “She told me she was just around the corner, and that meant somewhere near my house. She said she couldn’t talk long, because she had to fix her new man breakfast.”
Detectives also talked to Linda’s friend Sabrina, who said she remembered that Linda had been raped recently. She said there was a rumor going around that at some point after she had been raped, Linda spotted the guy in his car, and she and some people she was with beat him with a baseball bat.
“That’s really all I know, but I’ll try to get more information for you,” she said.
The police also talked to several of Linda’s other friends, but they really didn’t get any information to help them in their investigation.
Harper also went to talk with Alexander Lee, who said he was a close friend of Linda’s. In fact, he called Linda “his girl.” Lee said Linda had been sexually assaulted by a guy driving a dark red Ford pickup truck, with white wagon wheels. He said he thought her assailant lived on War Memorial Drive in Peoria.
Toward the end of September, Peoria Police Department detectives Sean Meeks and Chris Hauk met with thirty-nine-year-old Tiffany Hughes at Peoria’s South Side Mission. They wanted to talk to her about Linda Neal.
Tiffany knew Linda and the other women who had been murdered. And although she wasn’t sure if the information she had would help police find the person who was killing her friends, she decided to tell them her story, just in case.
Like the other women, Tiffany sold herself to get