Free The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter

newspapers barely reported the story.
    Indeed, some white serial killers have deliberately exploited this sorry circumstance in order to avoid detection. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, preyed mostly on African-American and Asian young men, apparently in the belief that the police would pay less attention to the disappearance of minority victims.
    And in the 1920s, the hideously deranged child-killer/cannibal Albert Fish snatched an untold number of black children from the streets of inner-city ghettos for the same reason.
    In short, one reason that most Americans haven’t heard much about black serial killers is that, throughout the decades, the police have been lax in pursuing them and the media uninterested in reporting on them—so long, that is, as the victims were also black.
    Jarvis Catoe
    It is significant that one of the most notorious African-American serial killers of the mid–twentieth century, Jarvis Catoe, only got caught after he began to target white women. In March 1941, a twenty-five-year-old newlywed named Rose Abramowitz approached Catoe, who was loitering outside her Washington, DC apartment building. Abramowitz hired him to wax the linoleum floor of her kitchen.
    Once inside her home, Catoe strangled and raped her, then made off with twenty dollars. A few months later, twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Strieff got into his car during a rainstorm, mistaking it for a taxi.
    Driving her to a nearby garage, Catoe raped and strangled her, then dumped her nude body in another garage a short distance away. His final victim, also Caucasian, was a twenty-six-year-old Bronx waitress named Evelyn Anderson. A watch belonging to Anderson was recovered from a New York City pawnshop and traced back to Catoe. In custody, he confessed to having strangled ten women with his bare hands and raped at least four others during the preceding three years. The majority of his victims had been—as the newspapers put it—“Negro women,” a fact that undoubtedly accounted for the initially lethargic response of the police in pursuing the culprit. Convicted of the Abramowitz murder, Catoe was sentenced to death and electrocuted on January 13, 1943.
    Henry Louis Wallace
    In restricting himself to victims of his own race, another African-American psychopath—Henry Louis Wallace—was more typical of serial killers in general, though he deviated from the usual pattern in another regard. Whereas most male serial killers prey on strangers, Wallace murdered a string of acquaintances. Between September 1992 and March 1994, the crack-addicted Wallace raped and strangled nine young black women in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, all people who knew and trusted him. Some were employees at the Taco Bell he managed. Several worked with his girlfriend.
    One was his girlfriend’s roommate. Others knew his sister. As with many serial killers, the pace of Wallace’s crimes escalated over time. His first six murders occurred over a twenty-month span; his final three within seventy-two hours. Finally arrested in January 1994, he promptly confessed to all nine killings and was sentenced to death. Because they were slow to acknowledge a link among Wallace’s earliest murders, the Charlotte police were accused of racism: of failing to take the case seriously because the victims were black.
    Carlton Gary
    Carlton Gary, another notorious black serial killer, had particular tastes when it came to victims. He only killed outside his race, limiting himself to female Caucasians. He also liked his women old.
    Abandoned by his father and shuttled from pillar to post throughout his hardscrabble childhood, Gary accumulated a long rap sheet for robbery, arson, and drug dealing while still in his teens. His combination of exceptional intelligence, glib charm, and psychopathic cunning made him especially dangerous. At one point in his life, he was even dating a female deputy sheriff while pushing drugs and committing serial murder on the side. Arrested in