Free The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter Page A

May 1970, as a suspect in the rape-murder of an eighty-five-year-old Albany, New York, woman, Gary managed to pin the blame on an acquaintance.
    Eventually after several stints behind bars on lesser charges, he escaped from prison and made his way back to his native city, Columbus, Georgia. Between September 1977 and April 1978, that city was rocked by a string of murders committed by a shadowy intruder dubbed the “Stocking Strangler.” His victims were seven white women, the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest just shy of ninety. After embarking on a string of restaurant holdups, Gary was arrested for armed robbery in 1978 and sentenced to twenty years in jail. Four years later, however, he escaped. He wasn’t nabbed for good until May 1984. Charged with three of the “Stocking Strangler” murders, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to die in Georgia’s electric chair.
    Other African-American serial killers include:
    Coral Watts. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Watts began dreaming of killing women in his childhood. When a psychiatrist asked if these dreams disturbed him, Watts replied: “No, I feel better after I have one.” He first assaulted a woman when he was fifteen years old. When asked about his motives, he shrugged, “I felt like beating her up.” He began to make his homicidal dreams a reality in 1980 when he terrorized Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the “Sunday Morning Slasher.” Falling under suspicion, he relocated to Houston, where he killed an indeterminate number of women, perhaps as many as forty. Finally arrested in 1982, he struck a controversial deal with the prosecutor’s office, confessing to thirteen murders in exchange for a burglary conviction and sixty-year sentence. Despite a public outcry, he is slated to be paroled in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight.
    She was evil. I could see it in her eyes.
    —Coral Watts, explaining his reasons for killing one of his thirteen admitted victims Alton Coleman. During a fifty-three-day period in the summer of 1984, Coleman, along with his female accomplice Debra Brown, murdered eight people in five Midwestern states, beginning with seven-year-old Tamika Turks of Gary, Indiana. After raping the little girl, Coleman jumped up and down on her chest until her rib cage fractured and punctured her vital organs. His other victims, all black, ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-seven. Some were strangled, some stabbed, others bludgeoned or shot.
    Besides serial murder, Coleman committed at least seven rapes during this period, as well as three kidnappings and fourteen armed robberies. Arrested in July 1984, he was tried and convicted in three different states: Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. He managed to delay his execution until April 26, 2002, when—after devouring a last meal of filet mignon, fried chicken, corn bread, biscuits with brown gravy, french fries, broccoli with cheese, salad, onion rings, collard greens, sweet potato pie with whipped cream, and butter pecan ice cream—he was put to death by lethal injection. Relatives of his many victims watched on closed-circuit TV.
    Celeophus Prince, Jr. Unlike most serial killers, Prince preyed exclusively on victims outside his own race. Between January and September 1990, he brutally murdered six women in the San Diego community of Clairemont, stabbing one of them more than fifty times and leaving bloody circles smeared on his victims’ breasts as a “signature.” His MO involved following unsuspecting women to their homes, then breaking in and butchering them with a kitchen knife. Like Alton Coleman—whose victims included an Ohio woman and her ten-year-old daughter—Prince murdered a mother and daughter, then bragged about the double killing to a friend and took to wearing the dead woman’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck. Dubbed the “Clairemont Killer” during his nine-month reign of terror, he was the object of the largest police manhunt in the history of San Diego. Arrested