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Podcast
Unforgotten: "Behind The Story"
By Chijioke Wlliams
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Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Portraits of Life: Stolen 'Like Ashes In A Violent Wind'
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SHE DANCED. ON THE rhythms and winds of life, she danced. As if it were a part of her soul, life and being, she danced. Watching her dance—drift upon the elements, of music and drumbeats, as if they were one—is among the most vivid recollections of family and friends. It is the way they remember her before she left this world untimely, suddenly and violently, disappearing, like ashes upon a menacing swirling wind.Her name is Nancie Carolyn Walker. But those closest to her all called her Carolyn. She danced most of her life, including at Frances Parker High School on Chicago’s Near North Side, where she was also the captain of the cheerleading squad. Dancing remained a lifelong passion that she once studied at Columbia College before deciding to carve out a career as an entrepreneur. She also attended Roosevelt University.
Nancie loved hushpuppies. She loved to go out to various restaurants and sample different foods. She loved to “step”—the Chicago-bred bop and cool version of ballroom dancing to smooth grooves in the key of R&B, where couples glide majestically across the dance floor. She was loved. And she loved back. And her love is not forgotten.
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“When I lost her, I could not swallow my food. I felt like I was doing her an injustice because I could still eat and Nancie couldn’t.”
Myrna Walker, Nancie's sister
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"You're Dead: So What?"; Author says Telling Their Stories Matters
By Samantha Latson
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| Dr. Cheryl L. Neely, author |
Cheryl Neely can remember just like it was yesterday, laughing and talking while riding the Grandriver Avenue bus with her childhood friend Michelle Jackson and her own two sisters, while leaving Murray-Wright High School in Detroit. Seeing Michelle was part of her daily routine. After school Cheryl, Neely’s sisters and Michelle would all meet at the bus stop to go home.
On Tuesday, Jan. 24, 1984, the lives of Neely, and her sisters Suane and Cassandra would change forever. That was the date that Michelle, 16, was murdered and raped while on her way to school.
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"In journalism, there’s a narrative of black people being perpetrators of crime not victims. When we are portrayed as victims, somehow the media intimates that we had it coming..."
-Cheryl Neely
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Portraits of Life: Say Her Name; Say All Their Names
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| Reo Renee Holyfield |
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| Reo Renee Holyfield |
HER NAME WAS Reo. Reo Renee. Reo Renee Holyfield. Say her name. Say all of their names. Dispel this cloud of enduring shame. And remember their lives, despite the pain. Let us lift them beyond the realm of invisibility. To speak even from their graves to the dearth of human civility here in this city where they were slain with no indemnity.
Where their killers mostly remain unpunished, unnamed, unfound or free. And there remains no sanctity. For the lives of women poor Black and Brown. No collective pubic outcry by this shimmering city where glitz, glam and fortune abound.
No justice for the 51 who now lie forever frozen in time, six feet underground. Or as ashes after cremation.
So for each of the 51, let us invoke this recitation: Say her name. Say all of their names: Angela Marieanna Ford. Charlotte W. Day. Winifred Shines. Brenda Cowart. Elaine Boneta. Saudia Banks. Bessie Scott. Gwendolyn Williams. Jody Grissom.
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“It’s fire on the inside. I’m still feeling it like they just told me the news the other day. I don't think it’s going to go away.”
-Ricardo Holyfield, Reo's cousin
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A Quilt In Their Honor
By Adnan Basic
She’s piecing together the names of 51 women who were brutally murdered in Chicago without much mainstream media or political attention. So, how did the 63-year-old hear about this case based in a city over 1,200 miles away from her? The answer lies within the power of social media.
On June 6, 2019, Beverly Reed Scott, a self described local community activist, created a Facebook page titled “50WomenGone” following the murder of over 50 women in the Chicago area. These victims shared a number of traits: they were women of color who were strangled in alleyways before having their bodies dumbed in trash cans or abandoned houses. Most of these killings did not make the headlines, however, with the media mostly failing to cover what had happened in much detail.
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"The acknowledgement of these women has been removed, but putting their names on something soft and padded that brings warmth would show that these were real people..." -Enee Abelman, the quilt’s maker
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Portraits of Life: A Protector & Sister Stolen; A Family Still Waiting For Justice
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| Gwendolyn Williams |
and Samantha Latson
GWENDOLYN WILLIAMS WAS a protector, a loyal big sister with a “heart of gold,” true-blue. She was Rosa Mae Pritchett’s firstborn. And no matter how old she got, she was always her baby girl. Gwen’s sturdy light-caramel arms could cradle a younger sibling and also hold danger at bay. She was strong, a lover not a fighter—unless she had to be.
Gwen knew the streets. Chicago's mean streets, growing up in the sixties and seventies, had taught her that her little sisters and brothers needed a guardian angel, at least someone to keep them from the elements that consign countless children in hardscrabble urban neighborhoods to poverty and hopelessness.
Shaped by the bell-bottom and Afro wearing “Black power” 70's, Gwen was a peace, love and Soul Train child. She harbored no hate. The hateful act inflicted upon her body and soul decades later, however, would leave a lasting scar upon her family who, many years later, still hope for justice for Gwen. Some day…
"My sister didn’t deserve the way she died. ...It still hurts me to this day. You can’t have closure when your wound is still open."
-Rose Pritchett, Gwen's sister
Portraits of Life: Not One of The 51, But A Life No Less Cherished
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| Shantieya Smith |
By Amanda Landwehr
MISSING, LOST, CAPTURED, murdered… For some, these words will never appear outside of crime T.V. shows and breaking news reports. But for 46-year-old Kristena Hopkins, these words are commonplace in both her personal life and career.
Where many people might run in the opposite direction from this brand of violence, Hopkins tackles it head-on. Through her involvement in Mothers Opposed to Violence Everywhere (M.O.V.E.), Hopkins is dedicated to her role as director of Missing and Murdered Women.
For Hopkins, it’s personal.
Hopkins was first called to advocacy after her 26-year-old cousin Shantieya Smith—mother of a 6-year-old—was found murdered in 2018. Smith’s body was found badly decomposed beneath a car in an abandoned Chicago garage on the city’s West Side, so unidentifiable that only dental records could prove her identity.
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“Sometimes it does get unbearable,” said Hopkins. “But you have to just keep acting strong. Someone’s gotta do it.”
-Kristena Hopkins, Shantieya's cousin
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An Unforgettable Portrait: By The Numbers
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| Nancie Walker is among the 51 Unforgotten women |
By Mohammad Samra
Fifty-one women. Fifty-one lives. Fifty-one women strangled. Fifty-one souls. These are the Chicago women--from Jan. 4, 2001 to Sept. 10, 2018--whose homicides are believed connected to one or more serial killers.
This is a story by the numbers. Just the facts—a numerical summation of the data and analysis compiled by the Alexandria, Virginia-based Murder Accountability Project, which has used a computer algorithm to link the strangulation or asphyxiation murders of 51 Chicago women since 2001 to one or more serial killers.
These are the cold facts. A portrait of this case with no frills, although revelatory and piercing in its numerical simplicity:
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"One hundred percent of them have names. One hundred percent had lives and loved ones. One hundred percent of them had stories."
-Mohammad Samra
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Coping With Loss: A Mother's Journey Through Grief
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| The death of Kentayvia Blackful, fatally wounded on the day before her 13th birthday, has cast her family, like numerous other Chicago-area families into the sea of grief and the journey of coping with the tragedy of losing a loved one to murder. (Photo provided by family) |
It was a warm September day in 2019, and almost the end of summer. It was supposed to be a celebration of life for 12-year-old Kentayvia Blackful who was turning 13 on the morning after. But for her parents Kentnilla, 34, and Trenton Blackful, 34, who were planning for their daughter’s birthday party, a stray bullet that struck Kentayvia in the head altered those plans and forever changed their lives. Kentayvia died the following day on Sept. 25, her birthday, having succumbed to her injuries a day after being shot.
A week later, on a sun-drenched Indian summer’s day, Kentayvia was laid to rest at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in south suburban Harvey. A numbing pall hung over the service like a dark storm cloud as scores of mourners, many of them children and teenagers, gathered to pay their last respects.
Kentayvia lay in a white casket, wearing a gold tiara, appearing like a sleeping princess. A horse-drawn carriage carried her body to her final resting place.
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“People may say, ‘Oh, it’s been too long. You need to stop grieving and move on.’ But you’re never going to get past the loss of a child."
-Zonia Cooper, whose 26-year-old son was murdered
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Portraits of Life: Beyond Chicago, Evidence of The Toll of Murder Against Women of Color
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| Jessica Flores |
SHE WAS MADY PEREZ's sister. A “free spirit.” The “one in my family that always gave the best, big hugs.” She was the sister who gave the kind of big bear hugs that swallow you with a sense of warmth and love and that will forever linger in her family’s memories.
With brown eyes and auburn hair, her younger sister could light up a room when she walked in, Perez recalled. She “trusted easily,” “loved profoundly,” and her laughter was “always filled with life.”
That's who she was. That’s the way her family will always remember her. Not the way police say she was taken from them, from this life and from all of those who loved her. Her name is Jessica Flores.
“No matter what you were going through, no matter what was going on, she had a lot of love,” Perez said, remembering happier times. “She always had that laughter, that deep voice with the big laughter.”
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“She was always a butterfly, protector and went out of her way to make others feel better.”
-Mady Perez, Jessica’s sister
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Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Portraits of Life: Diamond Turner
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| Diamond Turner |
Compiled by Staff
DIAMOND TURNER. Say her name.
Not trash. Not widgets. Not just a statistic. Not forgotten. No, not one of the 51.
Despite the way their killer discarded their breathless brutalized bodies in assorted alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings or set ablaze in garbage cans from Chicago’s South Side to the West Side, they are human.
Not garbage.
A Tale of Women from Two Cities: Separate & Unequal
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| A memorial to slain Chicagoans on the city's far South Side is a grim reminder of murder's toll. (Photo: John W. Fountain) |
By Sydney Mishler
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, in a safe home in a good neighborhood with a loving family. I grew up going to a good school and on Sundays I went to a good church. I grew up with good friends in a city that prioritized community. I grew up seeing lots of people who looked like me and lived like me and thought like me and voted like me.
At 18 I moved to Chicago for college. At 21, I sat in a classroom as my journalism professor told the class the subject of our capstone project: Fifty-one women strangled in Chicago. Fifty-one women thrown in the garbage like trash. Fifty-one women pinpointed as unworthy to live.
Fifty-one women who would never go home to their families. Fifty-one women who would maybe never walk down the aisle.
Tears & Reflections In A Year of Telling “Their” Story
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| A young woman at a Black Lives Matter protest downtown Chicago last summer holds a sign. (Photo: Samantha Latson) |
“All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us” –Michael Jackson, 1995
By Samantha Latson
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| Samantha Latson |
I looked at the screen of my classmates, white faces who don’t resemble mine, yet my skin, my body and my face are on the frontline.
While peering into the screen, I said to myself. “Wow, is this man crying for me?” No, not crying for me in a literal sense, but crying for the black women who are so often left neglected, disrespected, crumbled, and tossed to the side.
America's unwanted is what I call women who look like me.
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| Margaret Gomez |
Compiled by Staff
MARGARET GOMEZ. Say her name.
Not trash. Not widgets. Not just a statistic. Not forgotten. No, not one of the 51.
Despite the way their killer discarded their breathless brutalized bodies in assorted alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings or set ablaze in garbage cans from Chicago’s South Side to the West Side, they are human.
Not garbage.
Portraits of Life: Hazel Lewis
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| Hazel Lewis |
Compiled by Staff
Hazel Lewis. Say her name.
Not trash. Not widgets. Not just a statistic. Not forgotten. No, not one of the 51.
Despite the way their killer discarded their breathless brutalized bodies in assorted alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings or set ablaze in garbage cans from Chicago’s South Side to the West Side, they are human.
Not garbage.
Portraits of Life: Theresa Bunn
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| Theresa Bunn |
THERESA BUNN. Say her name.
Not trash. Not widgets. Not just a statistic. Not forgotten. No, not one of the 51.
Despite the way their killer discarded their breathless brutalized bodies in assorted alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings or set ablaze in garbage cans from Chicago’s South Side to the West Side, they are human.
Not garbage.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Portraits of Life: Remembering "Jenny": Daughters Focus On Mother's Love, Not Her Flaws
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| Genevieve "Jenny" Mellas |
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| Jenny Mellas |
HER DAUGHTERS REMEMBER HER heart, how she lived and the way she died but most of all the way she loved. “I want a bra Jenny, I just want a bra,” a close friend had pleaded with Jenny, her daughters recalled. The circumstances weren’t great as living on the street makes for a life without many necessities. Except “Jenny” didn’t belong to Chicago’s mean streets, where addictions and other afflictions can consume beloved daughters and mothers whole.
Jenny had a childhood home where she lived with her mother in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. There, she had food, love, and a safe place to go whenever she needed it, anytime she needed respite from the streets. Oftentimes, she chose to stay out. Sometimes it was to help a friend who was less fortunate, or to just keep them company from another lonely night.
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“Our mom had her problems and everything. But overall she was a god in our eyes... She would do anything for us.
-Amber Mellas, Jenny's daughter
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West Side Group Engages Youth To Help Oppose Violence
By Reyna Estrada
Youth Opposed to Violence Everywhere, a West Side grassroots organization seeks to quell violence.
When Tiarra Collins was pregnant with her son, she said she was terrified. She was scared, not because of the challenges of motherhood but rather because of the way in which she says America treats young black men.
“I was pregnant and crying because I see a lot of black young men getting shot for no reason,” Collins said.
Collins is a 22-year-old mom, pre-nursing student and president of Youth Opposed To Violence Everywhere, an organization made up of young men and women that seek to address the issue of violence in Chicago. Collins said that her work to push for social change to protect young people was largely inspired by the birth of her son.
“Before I had a son, what inspired me was getting very involved, I felt like I made a difference in society, that my voice matters,” she said, “Not just my voice, the other youths matter.”
"Never Forget" Website, One Man's Living Tribute To Victims of Chicago Violence
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| Maxwell Emcays, founder Never Forget Chicago |
The Never Forget Chicago website shows rows of names and faces, each lined up in bubbles next to one another. Each displays a black and white photograph of a victim of Chicago violence, with details about their life and death only a click away.
Kelly Sarff and Antoinette Simmons, two of the 51 women whose murders remain unsolved in Chicago and are believed to have been committed by at least one serial killer, each have memorials on the page. Posted underneath Sarff’s memorial is a simple but grim detail of her killing: “She was 34 years of age when she was killed as a result of Strangling,” it reads.
Below the summary are posts from people who have visited the website:
“Where is Kelly’s killer?” wrote user Babe Schaub.
“Love you Mama!” wrote user Amanda Witt. “Wish you were here! We’ll find out who did this to you!”
Local Agencies Provide Help For At-Risk Women
By Andrew Vazquez
Assisting women who are at risk and likely to fall through the cracks is the aim of a number of Chicago organizations that provide everything from support groups to domestic violence services to court advocacy and educational training and housing. Advocates say their organizations, both publicly and privately funded, seek to provide a safety net for not only at-risk women but also for their children. Here’s a look at some of those services on the front lines working to save women and children:
Connections for Abused Women and their Children (CAWC) — Founded in 1976, CAWC offers recovery, counseling, and therapy for women and children who are victims of domestic abuse. CAWC offers women and children services, counseling, court advocacy, substance abuse treatment and a domestic violence hotline.
The Genesis of The Project: A Professor's Passion and Pursuit
By Andrew Vazquez
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| Fountain speaking with workers at Breakthrough Urban Ministries during a visit with his class while leading his first Convergence project on the subject of homelessness in Chicago. |
As a journalist, Roosevelt University Professor John W. Fountain believes that stories need to be heard, none more important than the stories of murdered Chicago women. That is what he says led him to choose in January 2020 as a subject for Convergence journalism, the capstone undergraduate course at Roosevelt, “Unforgotten: The Untold Story of Murdered Chicago Women.”
Fountain, a native son of Chicago, who has taught for the last 14 academic years at Roosevelt, said the subject is important because it not only gives students an opportunity to report on a timely subject that is also socially relevant but also serves to capture the voices of those people who lost loved ones, and the chance to be heard and not forgotten, to live on every day in spirit and by the presence of their stories.
Fountain said he realized that the project would not be easy for students to undertake.
“It is a lot of difficult cases because some of these cases are really cold and are hard to contact relatives,” he said in an interview.
A Reporter's Notebook: Covering the "Unforgotten" Story
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| Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst |
Editor’s Note: Over the spring and fall 2020 semesters, journalism students at Roosevelt University enrolled in the capstone undergraduate journalism course undertook a working investigative reporting project, examining the mostly unsolved strangulation murders of at least 51 Chicago women over two decades—more than three-quarters of these women are African American.
The first class of student-journalists enrolled in the Convergence course began in January 2020, and passed the torch to the next class in Fall 2020, which carried the project to year’s end. Arianna Thome was among the fall class. In an abbreviated form, her journal of the reporting experience—her thoughts, feelings and lessons learned—is presented here.
By Arianna Thome
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| Arianna Thome, student journalist |
IT'S LATE ON A SCHOOL NIGHT, and all I can hear is the television blaring. A female news anchor on the nine o’clock news is going on about how another murder has occurred in the city that I call home. Of course, I didn’t even know what this meant at the time. But I do remember the pained look on my mother’s face as she listened to the breaking news.
I have lived in Chicago my entire life, I grew up here. …Little did I know there (might be) a serial killer on the loose. Not once had I considered that being a possibility in my 22 years of life until this year when I first heard it would be the focus of one of my final journalism courses.
I was 3 at the time when the murders began, the first coming early in the new year of 2001. That year, five additional murders followed. Angela Marieanna Ford, Charlotte W. Day, Winnifred Shines, Brenda Cowart, Elaine Boneta, and Saudia Banks. These six women were the first of 51 others to lose their lives over the next 17 years—the most recent in 2018. The murders (according to the Murder Accountability Project) were carried out at the hands of one or more serial killers who specialize in asphyxiation and malevolence.
It’s my first week back in my final year at Roosevelt. I have spent my entire day researching about our new class project.
As I go through the lengthy list of victims, I face a dark abyss of absent information about the women and their murders. I am left wondering how an issue like this is left underreported, unsolved, and so unseen…
—Week One – Sunday, Sept. 6, 2020
A West Side Woman Seeks To Stem The Tide of Violence
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| Louvenia Hood, executive director of Mother’s Opposed to Violence Everywhere. |
By Reyna Estrada
One day, while riding the CTA bus with students after school, Louvenia Hood broke up a fight. A young boy had jumped onto a young girl. Louvenia Hood said she asked the boy why he had started the fight, and the boy had responded, “That's what my father did to my mother and it always made her be quiet.”
Throughout her career of working to stop violence within schools, Hood had witnessed many other fights between children. She said she always looked to address the root causes.
Hood is a North Lawndale resident and executive director of Mother’s Opposed to Violence Everywhere (MOVE), which she said has been fighting to bring safety to Chicago communities for 16 years.
She said that MOVE started with efforts to address the root causes of violence in overlooked Chicago communities--starting within schools.
One Mother Finds Purpose Over Pain After Loss
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| Tonya Burch holds a portrait of her beloved son, Deontae Smith, 19, murdered on Aug. 1, 2009. She has launched an organization in his memory, vowing to mentor and tutor other young people in her Chicago neighborhood. |
Tonya Burch, a cosmetology instructor, has been a part of the Englewood community since she was 8 years old, when her family moved up to Chicago from Greenwood, Mississippi. Since then, Burch has been hard at work. She has raised two sons, helped rear several grandchildren, gone through two schools to become a cosmetology instructor, and, most recently, has started an organization in honor of her late son Deontae Smith.
The organization, dubbed, “Taking Back our Community in Honor of Deontae Smith,” officially began around 2010, a year after her younger son’s murder.
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"They were saying two people there got shot, a girl and a boy. ...My mind just went. “They say I fainted a couple times, the whole nine yards."
-Tonya Burch, upon hearing news her son had been slain
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Clearing DNA Backlog Could Be Key In Solving Cases
Editor's Note: Story Updated Below due to Illinois State Police report in
By Mallory Renee Nickelson
They wait for weeks, months, years for their perpetrators to be arrested. They wait while living in fear and full of anxiety as their perpetrator walks free. Their families wait with no closure and an alleged murderer or rapist of their loved one goes free. They wait, knowing and fearing the potential that a murderer or rapist could kill or sexually assault someone again while their DNA is being processed. They wait, knowing justice may never come.
In January 2020, nearly three years after the 2017 brutal murder of Diamond Turner, 21, an investigation led to the arrest of Arthur Hilliard, a man long identified as a suspect in the case. It was widely reported that DNA processing was delayed in the case, which resulted in Hilliard’s release.
During this waiting period and his release, Hilliard pleaded guilty to stabbing to death another woman, identified by police as Andra Williams, 52. It was finally the results of DNA, police officials said that led to the arrest of Hilliard, then 52, for Turner’s slaying for which he has been charged with first-degree murder.
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