Several of the women had already been linked to two other area serial killers. Valerie Sloan, of Peoria, who was twenty, and Stacey Morrison, twenty-five, of Pekin, had been missing since the fall of 1993. Police said they were probably victims of serial killer Joseph Miller. And Peoria native Arlie Ray Davis, who had been convicted of murdering one woman, most likely had something to do with the murder of a Peoria woman and the disappearances of four other Peoria women, who had been reported missing in the mid-1990s. However, he was never charged in those cases.
In July 1994, Miller was found guilty of murdering three Peoria prostitutes, whose bodies were found along roads in western rural Peoria County in the fall of 1993. In 1995, he also pleaded guilty to having murdered eighty-eight-year-old Bernice Fagotte around the same time he murdered the prostitutes. Investigators matched blood in Miller’s apartment and Bernice’s car to the three slain women. The link was established by analyzing the DNA in the blood. The Miller case was the first time in the history of Peoria County that DNA had been used by prosecutors to obtain a conviction.
Before he killed the four women in Peoria, Miller had served fifteen years in prison for the 1976 and 1977 murders of two Chicago prostitutes. He had been out of prison for only five months before killing the Peoria prostitutes. Miller was sentenced to death for killing the prostitutes. However, he pleaded guilty to killing Fagotte and received a sentence of life in prison without parole. In 2003, just days before he left office, the governor, George Ryan, commuted the death sentences of Miller and 167 inmates on death row in Illinois.
In May 1996, Arlie Ray Davis was convicted of raping and strangling Laurie Gwinn, of Kewanee, and was sentenced to die by lethal injection. But police were convinced he was a monstrous serial killer.
Laurie’s nude and decomposed body had been discovered in the Hennepin Canal, near Annawan, about fifty-two miles northeast of Peoria. Before she was murdered, Laurie met Davis and his cousin at a bar in Kewanee. After a night of drinking, Davis told Laurie she was too drunk to drive and offered to give her a lift home. But Davis drove Laurie and his cousin to another relative’s home, where he had set up a tent in the yard. When Laurie said she wanted to leave, Davis choked her, dragged her into the tent, coughing and gasping, raped her, then finished her off. The next morning Davis and his cousin, who was also charged in the case, tossed Laurie’s body into the Hennepin Canal. Davis’s cousin, who testified against him in court, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Even though Davis was only convicted of murdering Laurie Gwinn, police figured him for the murder of Ginny Miles, of Peoria. Ginny’s nude body was discovered in a shallow grave next to a creek in Menard County in 1994. After Davis died in prison of a heart attack in 2002, authorities said publicly that DNA recovered from Ginny’s body matched Davis’s DNA, indicating that he had had sex with her before her body was buried. But because there was no other evidence to tie Davis to her murder, prosecutors had been unable to bring him to trial.
In addition to Ginny’s murder, Peoria investigators believed Davis was linked to the disappearances of Stephanie Gibson, Loretta Tinkham, Sheryl Murwin, and Cheryl Murray.
About quarter past five in the evening on Sunday, July 27, 2003, a farmer found a partially clothed woman’s body in his cornfield along Augustin Road, about four miles northeast of Tremont, Illinois.
The farmer, who owned the land, was checking the field with his children when he found the body of a black female, four rows into the cornfield. She was lying on her back, with her head facing to the west and her feet to the east. She was nude, except for a pair of red panties and a pair of shorts, which had been pulled down around her ankles. The farmer immediately called police, and Detective Sergeant Jeff Lower, of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office, responded to the call.
Lower figured that as her body was being dragged into the field, her pants probably caught on a cornstalk, which caused them to come down. The woman’s body was taken to the morgue by the coroner’s office, where her fingerprints were taken. A forensic technician then ran the prints through a database and matched them to thirty-six-year-old Sabrina Payne. They were also able to identify her by the repair plate she had in her right ankle.
During the investigation detectives determined that her boyfriend, Brian Montgomery, had been the last person to see her alive. That was on the Friday before her body was found. No one had seen her after four o’clock on Friday afternoon. Sabrina and Brian had met three years earlier when they both had lived in Chicago. Before she was killed, they had been planning to get married.
Police also learned that Sabrina had a drug habit. In June 2002, she was convicted of unlawful possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to thirty months of probation, fourteen days in jail, and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.
On the Thursday before her body was found, she was at home with her boyfriend and two other people smoking a whole lot of crack. The other two people supplied most of the drugs. At one point they gave Sabrina some money to go out and score more crack. When the pair left Sabrina’s the next morning, her boyfriend was still with her, but he left at about four o’clock that afternoon. Sabrina’s neighbor saw her leave her house a little after that.
Police questioned Brian for hours the next day about Sabrina’s disappearance. He said the last time he saw her was about one on Friday afternoon. She left the house, saying she would be gone for a few minutes. The next morning, when she hadn’t come home, Brian figured she had gone to Chicago to visit her three teenage children, who still lived there. But he really got worried when she wasn’t back by Sunday.
On August 28, 2003, Tazewell County coroner Robert Dubois held an inquest into Sabrina’s death.
In Illinois, the coroner’s verdict has no civil or criminal trial significance. The verdict and inquest proceedings are held to determine the facts of death. However, if a person is implicated as the murderer, the outcome of the coroner’s inquest could have an effect on an arrest. But that rarely happened because the state’s attorney (SA) usually called a grand jury to indict a suspect.
At the inquest Lower told the jury about how Sabrina’s body was found, and Dubois told them about the results of Sabrina’s autopsy. He said that the doctor who examined her body didn’t find any evidence that she had been murdered. He categorized her death as undetermined, although he thought it could be drug related because she had cocaine, as well as alcohol, in her blood.
However, he couldn’t, with absolute certainty, rule out that someone might have killed her without leaving any evidence. That’s why he said she probably died from an overdose of cocaine. He just couldn’t be sure what killed her, since there was no sign of trauma, disease, or any other congenital anomalies.
Lower also testified that he had no evidence to conclude that Sabrina had been murdered. He said it appeared she had died from a cocaine overdose, and someone dumped her body in the cornfield.
After deliberations the jury decided that the manner of Sabrina Payne’s death was “undetermined.”
It was about half past seven in the morning on Thursday, February 5, 2004. Neal Barry had just left his house to drive his wife to work, when he noticed something unusual in a ditch—a woman’s body. She was lying on top of the snow, not far from his house on North Valley View Road in Edwards. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but no shoes. She had been dumped facedown on the side of the two-lane road, off Kickapoo-Edwards Road. Her feet were sticking out into the road. Barry drove by the body, backed up, then drove home to call police.
During their investigation police determined that the body of the black female could have been there since the previous evening. They canvassed the neighborhood, but no one reported seeing anything unusual. The woman’s body was dumped about four miles from where Wanda Jackson had been found three years earlier.
By the next day, police had identified the woman through her fingerprints. Her name was Barbara Williams. She grew up in the Harrison Homes housing development in Peoria, and still lived in the area. Even though police knew who the woman was, they still had no idea how she had died or how she had ended