SIGN ME UP Related: 5 Disturbing New Ways Debt Collectors Are Getting Your Money 4 The Eastbound Strangler
That seems like an easy enough problem to solve, but our gavels are made of squeaky plastic, so cops don't listen to us. In 2010, they identified two women who might have information about the case, but they've yet to come forward, likely because of their own comparatively minor legal troubles. It could also be someone totally off the police's radar. That means that, best-case scenario, the killer is dead or already serving a 90-year prison sentence. Another is a convicted rapist with connections to many of the victims and a suspicious amount of women's clothing and jewelry in his home. One is a man who lived nearby, on land connected to the mass grave via dirt trails, who was shot dead by the boyfriend of a woman he'd lured to his home and strangled right around the time the murders stopped. NASA For maintaining our satellite office?īut police do have some leads. All police had to go by were eerie satellite photos of tire tracks and fresh graves that, really, the satellite should have reported. That was, unfortunately, pretty much all it contained developers had recently descended upon the site, probably shaking loose the bone found by the dog but thoroughly contaminating any other evidence that might lead to the person that's become known as the West Mesa Bone Collector. In fact, it was these similarities that first algorithmically alerted the Murder Accountability Project, who brought it to the local authorities' attention that, according to math, they had a serial killer on their hands.ĬBS The bodies formed a pattern, according to the MAP. Almost all were killed outside or in abandoned buildings (strange if the murderer was known to them) and left in alleys, dumpsters, and other semi-public places, plotting a neat line clean across the city. except all the ways in which the deaths are really, really similar. Police say there's no evidence that the at least 55 mostly Black women who have been found strangled to death since 2001 were killed by the same person. Officially, the Chicago Strangler doesn't exist. Related: 6 Terrifying Serial Killers (Who Are Still Out There) 7 The Chicago Strangler Macy being anything other than a national treasure. Macy … aw hell, we can't even joke about William H. In 2020, the new police chief released an image of a belt they believed was handled by the killer bearing the initials HM or WH, so if you see William H. None of them could be conclusively linked to the deaths. He was one of many suspects who have come and gone, including a police chief who shut the FBI out of the investigation.
Gilbert's mother also received a phone call from a man who claimed to know where she was, but he later denied making the call (though his phone records proved otherwise) and police ruled him out as a suspect. Two of the victims' loved ones even received phone calls in 20 from someone claiming to know what happened to them, but police couldn't trace them. Whatever the case, there was no denying that a serial killer was on the loose and had been for more than a decade. Gilbert wasn't found until December 2011, and officially, she stumbled into a marsh and drowned, which somehow led to injuries consistent with strangulation and being found face up. Some had been missing since as early as 1996, and body parts of two of them had been found years earlier in the same city 45 miles away. Within a few months, police found the remains of a total of 16 people in the area, at least 10 of whom appeared to have been killed by the same person. Mitchazenia/Wiki Commons Suddenly, there was a real risk that CBS would greenlight CSI: Atlantic City. Upon further examination, three more bodies turned up, and the police had a whole new problem on their hands. After months of searching the area, police finally found the body of a young woman near Gilgo Beach along the Ocean Parkway-but it wasn't Gilbert. She banged on doors screaming for help and was never heard from again. In the middle of the night on May 2, 2010, 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert called 911 from Oak Beach near Long Island, insisting someone was chasing and trying to kill her.