It was sometime in the beginning of September. Tiffany had just left her aunt’s house on Aiken Street. The guy caught her by surprise when he asked if she wanted to get high. Usually a john asked for sex in exchange for money, but Tiffany didn’t care that this man was different. She just wanted drugs.
The guy told Tiffany he had some crack, but it was back at his house. She went with him without a second thought. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the man. It never did. It didn’t matter that so many women—women she knew—had turned up missing or dead. All that mattered was getting high.
Tiffany told the man she knew a house in the neighborhood where they could buy some crack. He wasn’t interested. Instead, he drove her to his house on Starr Court, just outside of the city. When they arrived, he parked in the front yard. The pair got out of the truck and walked through a large gate attached to a tall wooden fence to get to a small ramshackle house. As they made their way to the man’s residence, Tiffany also noticed another larger house and a pond.
Once inside, Tiffany noticed a bed on one side of the shabby one-room apartment. There was a bathroom, but no kitchen. She also saw some drugs and drug paraphernalia in plain sight on a table in front of a couch.
Before she knew what was happening, the man grabbed her from behind and began beating her and squeezing her throat.
“Bitch, you say anything and I’ll fucking kill you,” the man said as he pushed her down on the bed and started raping her.
Afraid for her life, Tiffany told him that her family would be looking for her if she wasn’t around. She told him her aunt had seen her get in his truck and would go to the police. In fact, she said, some of her relatives were in law enforcement. She was terrified and just wanted him to let her go.
When he was finished, he told her he was a cop, so there was no point telling anyone he raped her because no one would believe her. He also said that neither the truck nor the house was his, so she had no way to identify him. Then, without saying another word, the man walked Tiffany to his truck and drove her back to where he had picked her up.
Tiffany saw the stranger again later that month. It was September 24. Tiffany was walking on Laramie Street with several women, including Linda Neal, when she saw the guy driving his pretty blue Dodge Dakota. Tiffany recognized the man immediately. She warned Linda not to get in the guy’s truck, because he was crazy, but Linda said she’d be fine. She told Tiffany not to worry about her. Tiffany never knew if Linda went with the guy. She only knew that the next day, a group of campers found Linda’s body along a gravel road in a nearby town close to the Mackinaw River.
After hearing about Linda’s death, Tiffany decided to tell police about her run-in with the man in the sky-blue truck. She explained that she had been distressed to see the man in the area again after he raped her. Tiffany told police the guy took her to a house at the end of Starr Court. Police had had previous dealings with a suspect who lived in that area on unrelated charges, so they showed Tiffany some photos of white men, including that suspect.
But Tiffany didn’t recognize any of the men in the photographs as the person who had picked her up, then raped and beat her. Police knew that the suspect they had in mind drove a sky-blue Dodge Dakota pickup truck, so they asked Tiffany if he was the man she saw driving the truck. But she said she was 100 percent sure that he was not the person driving the truck or the man who had raped and beaten her.
Tiffany told police she would be more than willing to cooperate further, and told them where she would be staying. They gave her a card and told her to call if she had any other information to pass along.
2
March 21, 2001, started out as an ordinary day for Ken Givens, but it ended up being anything but.
It was about two in the afternoon. Givens, who lived in Norwood, was fixing the steps of the First Presbyterian Church of Pottstown, when he noticed a guy taking his dirt bike out of his truck. A short time later, he heard the biker calling out to a friend.
The dirt biker had almost ridden over the body of a woman in a vacant lot near a dry creek bed. He assumed she was sleeping and wanted his friend to help wake her up. But even though they continued to yell at her, she didn’t respond. Wondering what was going on, Givens went over and looked at the woman. She was a black female. She was wearing a sweatshirt and pink sweatpants, which had been pulled down. Givens checked for a pulse. There was none.
Investigators soon identified the woman as forty-year-old Wanda Jackson, of Peoria. She had been strangled and left in the field off Illinois Route 8 in Pottstown. A deputy had seen Wanda about eleven-thirty walking near Main Street on Farmington Road. He was responding to a call from someone who reported that a woman was walking in the street. The deputy told her to get off the street. There was little else he could do, because she wasn’t engaged in any illegal activity and she wasn’t drunk.
Witnesses told detectives with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) that they saw her get into a four-door cream or off-white car at just about that time. The man driving the car was in his late thirties or early forties. His sandy blond hair was tied in a long ponytail. The last time anyone saw the car, which was thought to be a 1990s Buick LeSabre or an Oldsmobile Delta 88, it was headed south on Western Avenue, at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Wanda’s body was found approximately two miles north of where another woman’s body had been found the previous October. The partially mummified body of thirty-one-year-old Kimberly Avery had been found in a field about two months after she had been murdered. Investigators were unable to figure out how she had died because her body had been so decomposed. Investigators said they didn’t have any reason to think the murders of the two women were related.
During their investigation police learned that Wanda had used crack cocaine and had been arrested for prostitution and shoplifting. She lived off and on with either her parents or her oldest daughter. But sometimes the streets were home. Family members told the local newspaper that she had used crack for years, and she had been in and out of rehab. Wanda had nine children—the youngest was nine, the oldest twenty—two grandchildren, and eighteen brothers and sisters.
Like other women caught up in the vicious cycle of drugs and prostitution, Wanda Jackson wasn’t a bad person. She was a good person who had made some bad choices and had done some bad things, but she hadn’t deserved to die for her mistakes.
In August, investigators, who were trying to solve Wanda’s murder, got some particularly gruesome news. A human skull had been discovered by a man fishing in Kickapoo Creek, near Edwards. The man found the skull in about three feet of water in the creek on August 17. Sometimes, though, the creek could be eight feet deep, and it was possible that the skull had drifted downstream before it was found.
Thinking it might be some kind of artifact, the fisherman took the skull home, but a friend convinced him to turn his find over to the Peoria city police. After the discovery investigators from the Peoria Police Department, the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office, and the Peoria County Coroner’s Office (PCCO) went to the creek to search for more bones. They did find some, including what looked like a leg bone.
Although officials knew that the bones were human, they didn’t know much else. They didn’t know how long the bones had been in the creek or if they had belonged to a man or a woman. And they certainly had no idea how the person had died. They just had no way of knowing what they were dealing with, and they also had no way of knowing how much worse things were going to get.
Police set about trying to match the victim’s teeth with any missing persons on file in both the city and county police departments. They also asked an anthropologist to inspect the bones, to try and get some answers. About ten days later, the anthropologist determined that the skull belonged to a woman over