Monday, January 15, 2018

75 women have been strangled or smothered in Chicago since 2001. Most of their killers got away.

By Chicago Tribune

Dreamcatcher Foundation volunteers drive around Chicago’s West Side and Cicero on Oct. 5, 2017, looking to help prostitutes. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)
Annie Sweeney and Ariana FigueroaChicago Tribune

More than 10 years have passed, but Margaret Gomez’s family members still look for the man they believe strangled the 22-year-old and left her in a muddy lot in the shadow of the Stevenson Expressway.

They don’t expect to find him but feel it’s something they must do. That and pray.

“Lately, I said a prayer to the Virgin Mary,” the mother, who shares the same name as her daughter, told a reporter in a quiet voice. “And then you called. Maybe it’s a sign?”

Other families have waited even longer for an answer.


Over the last 17 years, at least 75 women have been strangled or smothered in Chicago and their bodies dumped in vacant buildings, alleys, garbage cans, snow banks. Arrests have been made in only a third of the cases, according to a first-ever analysis by the Tribune.

While there are clusters of unsolved strangulations on the South and West sides, police say they’ve uncovered no evidence of a serial killer at work. If they are right, 51 murderers have gotten away with their crime.

Fifty-one people who used belts, bras, ropes, packing tape or their bare hands to kill these women. Fifty-one families still looking for justice for a mother, a sister, a daughter.

It has mostly been a silent vigil. There have been few news stories and even fewer memorials or other public gestures that would have focused attention on these women and how they died.


The Tribune began reviewing their cases while following up on the largely ignored story of a woman strangled last summer, her body dumped along a curb on the West Side. We wanted to find out how many other women had been strangled and abandoned: Who were they and had their killers been caught?

“It’s a staggering number,” said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. “It is odd how easy it is to disrupt people’s sense of comfort when a large number of people are all killed at once. It is likewise upsetting to realize how, if you spread out over a long period of time, how inured people are to the murdering of women, particularly marginalized women.”



Loree Williams prays in front of a photo of his cousin Theresa Bunn in November 2007 during a vigil near Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side — at the site where her strangled body was found that year. (Chuck Berman / Chicago Tribune)

The Tribune searched through thousands of pages of medical examiner records and public crime reports to build a database. Here is what we found:

• At least 75 women have been strangled or smothered in the city since 2001, the earliest year that crime reports on the slayings were publicly available. Many of them struggled with drugs or prostitution, making them particularly vulnerable to predators on the street. Some had no arrest records at all.

• Twenty-five of the cases have been closed with the arrests of 13 men, some of them charged with more than one murder. That leaves 67 percent still unsolved. The Police Department would not say if there are active suspects in those cases, but officials reviewed more than a dozen of them after they were contacted by the Tribune and have referred three to cold case detectives.

• There are clusters of strangulations around Washington Park on the South Side and Garfield Park on the West Side. Twenty-seven slayings happened in three police districts on the West, South and Far South sides long marked by violence and drug use. Of those, just two have been solved.

Around Washington Park, two women were strangled and left in burning trash bins over two days in November 2007. Theresa Bunn, 21 years old and eight months pregnant, was found south of the park. Hazel Lewis, 52, was found the next day north of the park behind an elementary school. Neither case has been solved.

• The women ranged in age from 18 to 58, and most of them were African-American. One of the victims was a grandmother of 20 and a great-grandmother of two. Others were nurses, waitresses or young women hoping to finally conquer their addictions and go back to school.

• At least 47 of the women had histories of prostitution. Based on the Tribune’s analysis, along with interviews with women who worked in prostitution, strangulation is one of the main ways people in the sex trade have been killed in Chicago over the last two decades.


“It’s upfront and personal,” said Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute who co-founded The Dreamcatcher Foundation, an organization that provides outreach and mentoring for those in the sex trade. “I have been (choked) so much, it became, like, you don’t let guys get close to your neck.”

Autopsy reports indicate some of the women were also raped and beaten. Some were gagged; some had plastic bags tightened around their head. One had a broken nose; others suffered severe head injuries and bruises over their bodies.

“The brutal nature of these crimes is very disturbing,” said Chief of Detectives Melissa Staples.

Staples, along with victim advocates, say the dangerous world some of these women frequent makes it more difficult to solve their slayings. The last person with the victim is often unknown. People use aliases. Witnesses don’t trust cops. DNA evidence doesn’t always lead to a suspect.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the bodies of dozens of women were found, the Police Department responded by forming a task force that solved the slayings of 40 women. The task force was eventually disbanded even as, the Tribune review shows, the attacks continued at a steady pace.

Staples is not certain the task force needs to be reinstated. But Cook County’s top prosecutor said it is worth considering to raise the “level of urgency” in clearing cases.

“If we knew there was someone picking off children on their way to school, I think the fierce urgency of trying to figure out who would require us to (have a task force),” State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said in a recent interview. “That is not the level of urgency we have with these women.”
‘She wanted friends. And this is what happened’

A dozen years ago, Margaret Gomez left home for the last time, chasing a heroin addiction that crushed the spirit of the slight, doe-eyed young woman.

Her mother, also named Margaret Gomez, had moved her daughter to the western suburbs when she was a child in search of streets safer than outside her Little Village home.

Gomez said her family was stable. She had high expectations for her daughters, who were close to one another. And she was a strict mother, she said, unafraid to ground her children for months if they broke rules.

Her daughter thrived for a time. She was on the cheerleading squad. She loved art and was featured, with a toothy smile, on the front page of the local paper after winning a contest.

But Gomez said her daughter was shy, had low self-esteem and, like most adolescents, longed for friends. “She just wanted everyone to like her. She wanted friends. And this is what happened to her.”



Margaret Gomez was strangled and killed over 10 years ago in Chicago, and the case remains unsolved. (Family photo)

The family believes Margaret got addicted to drugs while hanging out at a park near the family home. She had a boyfriend who used drugs. She was crazy about him. Soon she went missing for days and would return home battered, her glasses often broken.


Through tears, family members recalled their desperate efforts over four years to help her. They found a spot at a rehab facility, but her boyfriend wouldn’t go with her and she refused to go without him.

Friends of the family who worked in law enforcement would often track her down on the West Side and bring her home. Her mother would sometimes take harrowing drives in search of her wayward daughter.

There were patches of success. Margaret earned her GED and worked as a waitress, a job listed on her death certificate. Along with her sisters, she received First Communion and was confirmed as an adult, two rites of passage in their Catholic faith.

As with many of the women found strangled, addiction had a tight grip on Margaret. Here’s how she described herself in a letter left on her mother’s dining room table months before she was killed:

“Momma,” she wrote in pencil on lined paper her mother keeps neatly folded inside a plastic baggie. “I wanted to let you know how thankful I am having such a forgiving, caring + determend mother. … I know how much stress + heart ach I put you through and I want to apologize and promise it won’t happen again. I had hit a point where I had become real weak and I don’t know how I let it get that bad. .. I only want improvements from this day on. I LOVE YOU + LOVE how your always on my side no matter what.”



A letter Margaret Gomez wrote to her mother shortly before she was killed. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Margaret’s body was found in a gravel lot in the 4200 block of South Knox Avenue on the Southwest Side. She was partially clothed, lying on her back in mud, a brown rope around her neck.

On her upper back was a tattoo that read, “Love Mom.” She was 22.

The family says police pushed hard to gather evidence in the initial weeks. But in retrospect, family members think investigators focused on the wrong suspect. After about a month, the drive of the detectives seemed to ease, they said.

No arrest was made.

More than a decade later, altar candles remain lit on dressers and walls.

“I just ask Jesus if he would find the killers,” Gomez said of her nightly routine. “And I tell her I love her.”
‘A lot of these women want out’

Catherine Saterfield-Buchanan’s body was discovered under a street light not long after midnight on a June morning last year, the latest woman to be found strangled on Chicago’s streets, according to the Tribune database.

Saterfield-Buchanan was lying on her back near a large tree, legs splayed over the curb. Police covered her with a white sheet as a few curious neighbors gathered in the East Garfield Park neighborhood. Her feet poked out the bottom amid empty bottles and shattered glass. Her face was badly beaten.

Her slaying also remains unsolved.

Saterfield-Buchanan was 58 and, like most of the victims, was older than Margaret. She had finally come for help to Breakthrough on West Carroll Avenue, a sunny, loftlike shelter and health center.

Cheron Massonburg, director of adult services at Breakthrough, said many of the women there have experienced traumatic childhoods or poverty and homelessness. They are often estranged from families. Saterfield-Buchanan struggled with learning disabilities and was arrested at least once for prostitution..

“They have experienced some things most of us couldn’t comprehend,” she said. “A lot of women want out, but they just don’t know how.”

A report last year by the Cook County sheriff's office surveyed 172 women who worked in prostitution and found 44 percent of them had started working in the sex trade before the age of 18. More striking, 37 percent reported starting before they were 16. One said she began at 9. An alarming number of the women surveyed — 88 percent — said they had experienced violence, such as a beating. And 35 reported being sexually assaulted as an adult.

Massonburg said she last saw Saterfield-Buchanan at the food pantry two weeks before she was found dead. “Catherine was so timid,” she said. “I couldn’t believe anyone would want to hurt her.”

A close relative, who asked not to be named to protect her privacy, said Saterfield-Buchanan always made sure you had something to eat. Red was her favorite color, she said. Occasionally, you could find her listening to rhythm and blues, but she mostly stuck to jazz.



A Chicago police officer investigates where Catherine Saterfield-Buchanan was found dead with blunt force trauma to the face and defensive wounds on her body in the 3500 block of West Huron Street on June 22, 2017, in the East Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

The night Saterfield-Buchanan was killed, the relative spoke with her on the phone about a Fourth of July barbecue.

“I love you,” Saterfield-Buchanan told her. “Tell the kids I love them.”

Two hours later, she was killed.

The relative said detectives did not interview her or other immediate family members who knew about Saterfield-Buchanan’s whereabouts.

“You tellin’ me they got away?” the relative said. “She was a nice, caring person.”

Staples, the chief of detectives, said investigative notes show detectives did interview a relative, though the family says it was a cousin who was not close to Saterfield-Buchanan.

Massonburg said she doesn’t recall talking to police about Saterfield-Buchanan, even though the shelter is known for helping women in the sex trade on the West Side.

Massonburg believes police should regularly visit her shelter — something they don’t do now — and get to know the women, build trust and maybe collect leads to solve some of the cases.

“People know what’s happening (on the street),” Massonburg said. “But they don’t talk because they don’t feel protected.”
‘Where were you?’

The same unease can grip neighborhoods where the women have been discovered.

In 2014, Velma Howard was found frozen in the snow in East Garfield Park. On the block where she was discovered, an elderly man recently answered his door, scrunched his face and jutted out his chin at the mention of the slaying.

“Why are you here?” he barked. “Three years later? After all this time? Where were you?”

He shook his head and slammed the door. His son, who lives in the apartment below him, came outside and talked to the reporters.

Yes, he said, they remember when the body was found, buried in a snowbank.

Official reports tell the story in vivid detail:


Howard wore two white socks on her left foot, one on her right foot, and a metal hoop earring hung from her left earlobe. Black leggings were under her jeans, and a cigarette lighter and napkin were tucked into the left front pocket of her pants. Her fingernails were painted blue, and her toenails were red.

With the temperature near freezing, she bundled herself in a blue sweatshirt and brown jacket.

It wasn’t until the snow was shoveled that her body was discovered wrapped in a tan blanket, tied together with a red rope. A white electrical cord was wrapped around her neck so tightly, purple bruising was visible.

The son explained to a reporter why his dad was so upset: Neither he nor his dad was interviewed by police.

“They just picked the body up and left,” the son said. “We (are) just looked over.”


Neither man wanted to be named.

The department would not allow the newspaper to see the files on Gomez, Saterfield-Buchanan, Howard or the other women because the cases are considered open and still active. But Staples said she personally reviewed 15 of the unsolved cases and referred three to cold case detectives.

Staples would not disclose which cases, saying she wanted to protect any new investigative work.
‘They deserve the same investigation as anyone else’

Staples sits in her fourth-floor office at Chicago police headquarters on the South Side, a 4-inch stack of case files to her left.

She came up through the ranks of the detective division and has worked cases in neighborhoods where some of the women were found dead. They are tragic and tough cases to solve, she acknowledged.

Like other murder cases, they are assigned to the regular rotation of homicide detectives in the city’s three major investigative divisions. There are teams of specialists for sex-related crimes. As in any homicide, detectives canvass for witnesses, talk to family members and draw on help from the department’s vice unit and its human trafficking team when investigating the cases. DNA and other evidence are collected and sent to the Illinois state crime lab.

If a DNA profile is obtained, it is entered into a national database called CODIS. It contains samples from arrested felons as well as unnamed samples from victims and crime scenes. In that way, cases can be matched even when a suspect is not known.

In the 51 unsolved cases found by the Tribune, no such case-to-case associations have been found, Staples said. And no cases have been linked by other investigative means.

In the 1990s, Chicago police were caught off-guard when DNA analysis detected at least four patterns of sexual assaults and slayings of prostitutes in several South Side neighborhoods.

The Tribune account in a 2000 story outlined the problem in terms strikingly similar to those of Gomez, Saterfield-Buchanan, Howard and the others: Most of the victims were strangled or suffered blunt force trauma. Many had arrests for drugs and prostitution and were engaged in what police at the time called a “high-risk lifestyle.”

A task force was created to investigate dozens of rapes and murders. It was staffed by about 10 detectives who could dedicate their time to tracking down witnesses and reviewing DNA results. Officials at the time pledged to stay vigilant and continue to use it when appropriate.

"Years ago, nobody cared about these girls,” Sgt. Tony Kuta said at the time. “Well, they're homicide victims. They're people, citizens of Chicago and they deserve the same investigation, the same integrity of investigation as anyone else.”

Staples and other department officials said they did not know what happened to the task force over the years. She doesn’t think one is needed now, believing the nature of the crimes and the troubled backgrounds of the victims can be handled by detectives on regular duty.

“It’s all evidence and witnesses,” she said.



Margaret Gomez's body was found in this industrial area near the Stevenson Expressway in the 4200 block of South Knox Avenue in Chicago. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

But some outside experts and law enforcement officials think a task force or other kind of stepped-up effort is needed, both to watch for serial killers and to clear up the backlog of strangulations at a time when detectives are burdened by a spike in gang killings.

There were 670 homicides in Chicago last year and 792 the year before, the most in nearly two decades, according to data kept by the Tribune. Many of those were fatal shootings involving gangs.

“We are talking a lot about gun violence in the city of Chicago because we should, because we have a ridiculous amount of gun violence in this city,” State’s Attorney Foxx told the Tribune.

Asked if a task force could help, Foxx said such collaboration between her office and police could increase clearance rates by focusing more attention on the cases and detecting possible patterns. She noted that her office already has staff that specializes in human trafficking.

“I think sometimes we forget that we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Foxx said. “There has to be sustained advocacy around women who are losing their lives because they are vulnerable.”

Jody Raphael, a researcher at DePaul University who has studied prostitution in Chicago for years, said the number of unsolved cases is a reminder how much time and resources these crimes demand.

“Because of the fact that you could have a serial murderer out there, you have to investigate these cases,” Raphael said. “It could be weeks and weeks of pounding the pavement and very hard work.”
‘I know you got some dreams’

Researchers across the country are trying to better understand violence against people who work in prostitution and how to reduce it.

While serial killings are declining in this country, they are decreasing at a slower rate when the victims are prostitutes.

“The likelihood of being a victim of serial murder has declined for everyone,” said Kenna Quinet, an associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. “But it hasn’t as much for prostitutes. They are unable to protect themselves. … The nature of their work is they will go with a stranger. That it is illegal forces it into an underground and invisible economy.”

One study found that 65 percent of serial murder victims were female, and nearly 78 percent of them were prostitutes.

Morris Hoffer, from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, said all this points to an obvious law enforcement approach: Make it riskier for men to prey on these women.

“They should be aggressively going after men who buy sex,” Morris Hoffer said. “People think about the prostitution as a problem about her, but prostitution is a problem about him. … Culturally if we could flip the focus and stop saying the question is the choices or the behaviors that she is engaging in and think about the choices and behaviors of the buyers. … Most men don’t buy sex. We have to move toward judging and condemning and penalizing the men whose disposable income fuels this entire thing.”

While some have argued for more cameras in areas frequented by customers, others have pressed for more outreach and social services to keep the women off the streets.

“We are the ones that are actually in the belly of the beast,” said Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, who co-founded Dreamcatcher with Myers-Powell. “And crisis doesn’t make an appointment. We are in the street doing this.”



Brenda Stewart, executive assistant at The Dreamcatcher Foundation, visits friends at Hody's Grill in Cicero as she goes on her route helping prostitutes. Stewart and fellow Dreamcatcher worker Tracey Whitney, both former prostitutes, spent their night Oct. 5, 2017, driving all over the city of Chicago searching for prostitutes to hand out comforting words and toiletry kits. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

One night in early October, an eight-passenger van emblazoned with “Dreamcatcher Foundation” bounced along Marquette Road west, then north on Halsted Street as the clock edged toward midnight. The streets were empty.

The van cruised up 47th Street and then over to the area known as K-Town on the West Side.


“It’s definitely dangerous,” said Brenda Stewart, gazing out the passenger seat window, a box of care packages on the seat behind her. “A lot of vacant buildings. It’s dark.”

They paused at a weedy lot near Kilbourn Avenue and Wilcox Street, where a transgender woman had recently been killed. Stewart finished her thought.

“These streets will chew you up and spit you out,” she said.

Behind Stewart and across the street, a young woman walked out of a house and down the front steps and headed down the dimly lit block.

Stewart, lead outreach worker at Dreamcatcher, and her co-worker that night, Tracey Whitney, got back in the van. It took just a block to catch up to the woman.

The woman, with a soft voice and a sweet face, told her story quickly, sparing details but for the key points. Her boyfriend had killed her son, she said. Nightmares followed. Heroin and cocaine were next.

And now here she stood at nearly 1 a.m., in patterned leggings and dark top, working to support her habit.

Stewart, who worked for 15 years in prostitution, listened. Then she ripped a piece of paper from a spiral notebook and wrote her name and phone number in a large scrawl. She held it up under her chin and stood back from the woman.

“How ’bout you call me?” she said. “How ’bout you call me — 24 hours — and I will answer the phone?”

The young woman nodded.

“I ain’t gonna tell you to go rehab,” Stewart assured her. “You ain’t got to go nowhere. I ain’t trying to make you stop doing nothing that you doing. I just want you to call me ’cus I want you to talk to me. ’Cus I want you to know that there is somebody that care about you. ... You can call me and say, ‘Ms. Brenda, I’m OK.’ Just call me … I ain’t gonna be shocked. And I’m not gonna judge you.”

Stewart paused just a half-second. “ ’Cus I know you got some dreams,” she said, a smile in her voice.

The young woman smiled back.

Yes, she told them. Someday she’d like to be a nurse.

Chicago Tribune’s Jennifer Smith Richards, Elyssa Cherney, Madeline Buckley, Liam Ford and Peter Nickeas contributed.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous1/15/2018

    The "community" doing what it does best!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1/16/2018

    Time to call the fire dept. If you want something done, those are the guys.

    ReplyDelete