But hold the gripping Hollywood arrest scene. Officers poring over cold-case files have now isolated 12 unsolved murders, plus three rapes, in which the crimes and victims are similar. In each case police submitted physical evidence–typically semen taken from victims–to a state-police crime laboratory that examines DNA. But rather than pointing to a single madman, the DNA evidence has startled officers with the discovery that they must search for four different killers. The case is a powerful lesson in how DNA testing can make police work both easier and more difficult. “In the old days, we could implicate one suspect in many murders just because the crimes fit a pattern,” says Northeastern University homicide expert James Alan Fox. “Now DNA forces us to grapple with the truth.”
The tale told by DNA has at least helped Chicago police refine their investigations. The four perpetrators–known as Patterns A, B, C and D–have respectively killed six, one, two and three women. None has yet matched the DNA of a registered sex offender. Still, knowing which of them did what to whom has yielded important clues. The man called Pattern B, who raped one South Side woman and killed another in 1995, didn’t resurface until 1998, when he raped a woman on the city’s North Side. That suggests a criminal who’s frequented two distant locales, and who could have been out of town–maybe in a prison?–for three years. “Without DNA evidence, we might not have linked the North Side crime to the others,” says Sgt. Brian Murphy, an expert in pattern crimes.
The Chicago cases raise one troubling question. When there’s no DNA evidence, are serial killers routinely blamed for murders that someone else committed? Maybe. Wayne Williams, the Atlanta photographer suspected of 28 murders, was charged with only two and maintained his innocence. “Once any killer is identified, there’s a tendency to assign as many unsolved murders as possible to him,” Fox says. “That’s one way cases get closed.”
In Chicago, hookers still stroll lucrative corners like 51st and Halsted. But they aren’t the only potential victims now living on edge. Down 51st Street, Lizziestine Wells-Taylor and her four children stop at a makeshift shrine in a garbage-strewn lot. A scribbled prayer pleads, do these women no more harm. The killings and rapes have unnerved Wells-Taylor. “I’m scared,” she says. “I’m a woman, too.” DNA is one tool for tying perpetrators to her neighborhood’s crimes. But technology is no substitute for the three dozen detectives now trying to take four murderers off the streets.
