A mass murderer, on the other hand, is someone who kills several people at one time. Richard Speck, for example, was a mass murderer. In 1966, Speck killed eight student nurses in one night in South Chicago.
And a spree killer is someone who murders his victims in a short period of time. Andrew Cunanan is an example of a spree killer. In 1997, Cunanan shot and killed five men, including renowned clothing designer Gianni Versace, in a cross-country murder spree before he turned the gun on himself. Unlike serial murders, there wasn’t a cooling-off period in between Cunanan’s kills.
If a serial killer was on the loose in Peoria and Tazewell Counties, forming a task force was exactly the right thing to do, because it was important for all the law enforcement agencies to work together. They reviewed all the incoming information, collated the information, and assigned leads to various members of the task force. Throughout the investigation the task force received over a thousand leads, and assigned a priority—low, moderate, or high—to each one.
They got a number of leads related to the death of Linda Neal. One caller told police that Linda had been arguing with her roommate the week before Linda’s body was found. The caller said the roommate’s cousin told Linda, “I’m going to kill you.”
Linda Neal wasn’t the last black woman to turn up missing or dead in Peoria and Tazewell Counties.
Shaconda Thomas’s grandmother went to the Peoria Police Department on October 7, 2004, and reported the thirty-two-year-old woman missing. She hadn’t seen her granddaughter, who lived with her, since the last week of August.
About eight o’clock in the morning on Friday, October 15, the body of forty-one-year-old Brenda Erving was discovered in a ditch in Elmwood Township. An employee of the New Horizons Dairy in Elmwood who found her shook her toe to see if she was still alive. When she didn’t respond, he went back to his truck and called the police.
Brenda was found lying faceup in the mud. She was nude, except for a pair of white socks. In the mud near her body, there were fresh tire marks that went north in a bean field for about half a mile, then turned back onto Taggert Road. But the only footprints in the mud were those of the deliveryman.
Brenda’s mother hadn’t seen her daughter since Wednesday, when a male friend had picked her up. Although Brenda had been convicted of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, she had never been convicted of prostitution. Brenda Erving had three young daughters.
Dr. Violette Hnilica performed an autopsy on Brenda on Saturday and determined that she had been asphyxiated, but she had also suffered blunt-force trauma to her head. Medical tests showed that she had toxic levels of cocaine in her system.
Although the task force was doing everything it could to find out what had happened to the missing and murdered women, area residents didn’t think police were doing enough to investigate the murders of Brenda Erving, Linda Neal, Frederickia Brown, Barbara Williams, Sabrina Payne, and Wanda Jackson, plus the disappearances of Shirley Trapp-Carpenter, Shaconda Thomas, Tamara Walls, and Laura Lollar.
To air their grievances, nearly five hundred residents held a town hall meeting at City of Worship Refuge Center with members of the task force on Monday, October 25. Photos of the dead and missing women adorned two posterlike maps of Peoria and Tazewell Counties at the front of the congregation hall. The pictures of the dead women were placed on the spots on the map where their bodies had been found.
At the meeting Gary Poynter, the interim chief of the Peoria Police Department, told the residents that authorities had added more people to the task force. In total, there were ten detectives just working on the investigation.
Peoria County sheriff Mike McCoy said although the task force didn’t have any solid suspects, the investigators were gathering information. But, still, the people in attendance wanted to know why police waited until five African-American women had been murdered to form a task force.
Police hadn’t formed a task force earlier because the deaths of the women weren’t all the same. Although there were similarities, there were also a number of differences.
Residents also wanted to know why the task force was made up of only white officers from the Peoria Police Department, the Illinois State Police (ISP), and deputies from the Peoria County and Tazewell County Sheriff’s Offices. They believed an African-American officer might be able to get more information from members of the African-American community.
For police, though, race wasn’t an issue in the investigation, and investigators were treating the deaths like they treated any other deaths, without regard to the race or lifestyles of the victims.
Although the task force was working with an FBI profiler, an FBI agent wasn’t part of the task force because a federal crime hadn’t been committed.
About four hundred people attended another community meeting held at the City of Worship Refuge Center a couple weeks later. Residents talked about the possibility that a serial killer was stalking women who were drug abusers and worked as prostitutes to feed their habits. They worried that their daughters, sisters, and mothers weren’t safe on the streets of Peoria. And they were still concerned that police, who had added three African-American investigators to the task force, weren’t doing enough to find out what had happened to the dead and missing women.
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Toward the end of October, a corrections officer (CO) from the Tazewell County Jail called Detective Hal Harper to let him know that an inmate had some information about Brenda Erving for the task force.
Her name was Tyresa, and she had known Brenda for about five years. The last time “Ty” saw Brenda was a couple days before Brenda was murdered. Ty told the detective that Brenda used to stay at Brenda’s uncle Johnny’s house on Madison Park Street in Peoria. According to Ty, Brenda and a guy named Kevin, a known drug user, were partying in his car, an older tan Oldsmobile or Buick, about a month and a half before she was killed.
Ty said Kevin was a white man, thirtysomething, with shorter blondish brown hair. He was about five feet nine inches tall and weighed 170 pounds. He always wore a baseball cap.
“One time me, Brenda, Kevin, and another guy were at her uncle Johnny’s house, and me and Kevin were in another room kind of on a drug binge,” she said. “Kevin started coming on to me. He was rubbing my neck. He was really aggressive. I pushed his hand away because I was so afraid. But he was so aggressive that he scratched me with his keys. I still have a scar.”
Ty also told Harper about another white guy who could have been involved with Brenda’s death. The man was about forty-five years old, five feet seven inches tall, 150 pounds. He had shoulder-length black hair and blue eyes. The guy drove an older, bigger pickup truck, with a loud exhaust. He lived in the Brimfield area and was a chicken farmer. He traveled to a number of towns in the area, making deliveries. Ty said the “chicken man,” as she called him, wanted to go out with Brenda, even though he was married.
Ty also gave Harper the names of two other men, who might have had something to do with Brenda’s death. One of the men was a registered sex offender who drove taxis in Peoria; the other was a guy who routinely let the girls use his house to party.
At the conclusion of the interview, Ty told Harper she wanted to do whatever she could to help police in their investigation.
Rhoshanda Fisher called police at the beginning of November with a story about her friend Teracita, who had been with a white guy who tried to choke her. She thought it might be the same guy who had killed the other black women. Police tracked thirty-one-year-old Teracita down at the Dwight Correctional Center in Dwight, Illinois, where she was being held for failure to appear in court. They met with Teracita on the morning of December 10. She agreed to tell them