It could have been a metaphor, a cliché even, except it was real. Someone threw her away. Literally folded her small body into a garbage can, covered her in grass clippings, and shut the lid. This was in an alley, in a Black neighborhood, on Chicago’s distant south side. Those details are not meant as shorthand to signal murder and mayhem. The alley was free of debris and sat behind a chain of tidy single-family homes, the compact houses and yards as neatly arrayed as place settings. An owner of one of the homes took out her trash over the weekend and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, except that her garbage can was full, and teeming with maggots—she’d never seen so many maggots, she later told detectives.
Months later, Pam Zekman, an investigative reporter with CBS News, took a closer look at the killing of Reo Holyfield, seeing in it the possibility of a much larger story. Zekman tracked down one of Reo’s relatives, Riccardo Holyfield, and showed him the autopsies of dozens of other women murdered in Chicago. Riccardo, four years younger than his first cousin, called Reo his big sister, and growing up together in Englewood people assumed they were siblings—they had the same cheeks as round as a child holding her breath, the same high, illuminating foreheads. Riccardo couldn’t comprehend what he was now being shown.
The list went on. The victims, almost all of them Black, many with histories of drug use and sex work, had been strangled or asphyxiated. Their bodies were discovered on the south side or west side. Some of the crimes were 20 years old.
Cities like Chicago with exceptionally low homicide clearance rates have the potential to throw off the Murder Accountability Project’s serial-killer algorithm. From inside a labyrinth of unsolved death, with so much dark material at hand, it was possible to construct all sorts of groupings, to see patterns where there were none. Hargrove called these false positives the “Flint effect,” for the infrequency with which police in Flint, Michigan, arrested murder suspects.
“We don’t work that way with, like, the dots on the map, and this says x, y, z, so it must be this,” the city’s Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said about Hargrove’s findings. “We can only work with what we know and what we can prove.”
A coalition of activists, religious leaders, and violence interrupters soon rallied outside FBI headquarters in Chicago to “demand justice for the 51 murdered.” In television and radio interviews, community organizers said they wanted crimes taken as seriously in their neighborhoods as they were on the north side, in the suburbs, in white communities, where accountability and protection were the norm. Why weren’t these 51 cases investigated properly? Where were the alerts? The dragnets?
