After Barbara’s body was found, members of her family talked to the Peoria Journal Star about her. Barbara came from a large family—eleven brothers and sisters. But she also had ten step-brothers and stepsisters. Her sister Shelley told the paper that no one had heard from her for a couple days before her death. Although she lived in the area, she was always moving around. Sometimes Barbara stayed with her mom, which was where her nine-year-old daughter lived. Barbara didn’t have a job at the time she died, but she had worked as a housekeeper.
Shelley had recently quit a job in Kansas City, Missouri, to care for their mother after she had triple bypass surgery. She described her sister as someone who was always smiling and always making people laugh.
An autopsy on Barbara’s body was inconclusive, and until they had something concrete to go on, investigators with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office weren’t about to speculate on how she died. Dr. Violette Hnilica, the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy, found several injuries on Barbara’s body that she had received before she died.
Barbara, thirty-six, had a contusion on the right side of her face, a contusion and abrasion on her left shoulder, and an abrasion on her left wrist. The doctor also found some injuries that Barbara had received postmortem, including a dislocated left wrist, abrasions on her left arm, and lacerations and contusions on her left hand. She also had scrapes, most likely drag marks, on her left arm, both heels, as well as drag marks on her clothing.
In her medical opinion, Hnilica said Barbara died of a cocaine overdose, because Barbara had toxic levels of the drug, as well as a small amount of alcohol, in her system. The doctor couldn’t find any evidence that Barbara had been smothered or strangled.
If police thought that was the last body that was going to turn up, they were dead wrong.
On Saturday, February 21, just a little more than two weeks after Barbara’s body had been found, Michael Hodges was driving an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) along a rural road near Hanna City in Peoria County when he made another grisly discovery—a woman’s body partially covered with snow, lying in the tall prairie grass.
The discovery slammed the door shut on Michelle Brown’s hope that she would ever see her twenty-nine-year-old sister, Frederickia, again. Since she reported her sister missing to the Peoria police on Christmas Eve, she held on to the hope that her sister would turn up safe. Now there was no more hope.
Police said Frederickia had been found about thirty feet from the roadway. They identified her through her fingerprints. She was thought to be wearing a red coat, a long-sleeved shirt, and blue jeans the last time anyone saw her. Detectives with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office wouldn’t say what she was wearing when her body was found.
Lieutenant Mark Greskoviak, a sheriff’s detective, said she wasn’t walking in the area when she died, but it appeared she had been there for quite some time. Police said Frederickia, a known prostitute, was last seen in the North Valley neighborhood, where she often stayed. Someone saw her get into a yellow car or a red truck driven by a white male around three-thirty in the morning on December 17 or December 18. But Michelle said her sister might have been seen again a couple days before Michelle had reported Frederickia missing.
Frederickia, who shared an apartment with her boyfriend, was also addicted to drugs. She had three children, who were in foster care. Over the years Frederickia had been arrested for prostitution, aggravated battery, robbery, mob action, and commercial burglary.
When her body was found, Greskoviak said it was too early to determine if Frederickia’s death was connected to the deaths of Barbara Williams or Wanda Jackson. But a few days later, police said she didn’t die of a drug overdose, but they refused to disclose exactly how she had died. Peoria County sheriff Mike McCoy said police were keeping that information from the public in order to determine who was responsible for her death. Ultimately a Peoria County coroner’s jury determined that Frederickia’s death was a homicide. She had been strangled; then her body was dumped in the snow.
On August 22, one of Laura Lollar’s friends told police he was concerned because he hadn’t seen her for about three weeks. Typically, he heard from her at least every three or four days. Laura’s ex-husband was also worried that she wasn’t around. He usually saw her at least once a week, and their three oldest children saw her regularly as well. He looked for her in all the usual places, but he hadn’t been able to find her. And no one he talked to seemed to have any idea where she was. Her ex-husband filed a missing persons report on the thirty-three-year-old woman on August 26.
On August 28, Shirley Ann Trapp-Carpenter’s boyfriend filed a missing persons report on her with the Peoria Police Department. The man told police he hadn’t seen the forty-five-year-old woman for a couple days, and he was worried because it wasn’t like her not to contact him.
Shirley’s family said the last time they saw her was August 25. They were concerned because she had diabetes and needed medication to control her condition. They had contacted her pharmacy to determine whether she had picked up her medication. She had not.
Twenty-nine-year-old Tamara “Tammy” Walls had been missing for about three weeks. On September 22, 2004, her sister finally reported her missing to the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office. Tammy never went that long without checking in with her family, and they were worried.
After the discovery of Linda Neal’s body on September 25, Tazewell County sheriff Robert Huston said there were enough similarities between her death and the deaths of the four other women found since 2001 that police were investigating any possible links.
Police described Neal, who had a history of prostitution-related arrests, as having an “alternative lifestyle,” much like the previous four women whose deaths they were investigating. All five cases were similar enough that the Peoria Police Department and the sheriff’s departments in Peoria and Tazewell Counties decided to form a task force to solve the crimes. But investigators admitted that finding the person or persons responsible for the women’s deaths could prove difficult because of the type of lives the victims led, moving around and living with different people.
After Linda Neal’s death, the task force began working hard to come up with any connections among the deaths of the five black women. However, the words “serial killer” hadn’t been spoken—yet. Maybe that was because serial murder was relatively rare, according to the FBI—although Peoria seemed to have more than its share. In fact, less than 1 percent of all murders in any year are attributed to serial killers. And those serial killers don’t always fit into the mold that society seems to have cast for them. So trying to zero in on a serial murderer wouldn’t be easy.
Interestingly, the majority of serial killers aren’t reclusive, social misfits who live alone. They’re not monsters, and they really don’t appear strange. Because they often have families and jobs, they’re able to hide in plain sight in their communities.
Take Robert Lee Yates, for example. During the 1990s, Yates killed seventeen prostitutes in the Spokane, Washington, area. He was married, had five children, lived in a middle-class neighborhood, and was a decorated U.S. Army National Guard helicopter pilot. During the time period of the murders, Yates routinely sought out the services of prostitutes. Yates buried one of his victims in his yard, beneath his bedroom window. He was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to thirteen of the murders.
Contrary to popular belief, all serial killers aren’t white; rather, they span all racial groups. Charles Ng, a native of Hong Kong, killed numerous victims in Northern California. Derrick Todd Lee, an African-American, killed at least six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a native of Mexico, murdered twenty-four people in Kentucky, Texas, and Illinois, before he turned himself in.
And just because the women killed in Peoria and Tazewell Counties were all prostitutes, it didn’t mean their murders were sexual in nature. Serial murderers killed for any number of reasons, including anger, excitement, money, and even because they thought they were