THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MANIAC: A Colt Ryder Thriller by J.T. Brannan

Author:J.T. Brannan [Brannan, J.T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grey Arrow Publishing
Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

A couple of days later, Bronkowski and I had finally managed to track down Detective Aurora Sullivan; and as I waited on an uncomfortable bench for her to finish giving a deposition in Courtroom 1 of the Domestic Violence Courthouse on West Harrison Street, I went over what Bronkowski and I had discovered since my meeting with Rivera.

After returning from Logan, we’d gone through the reports he’d managed to find listed on the CPD’s internal system, which covered strangulation and asphyxiation murders that had occurred since the late ’90s. Bronkowski ran his own algorithm, and it turned out that there had been eighty-seven such cases, of which only twenty-four had been closed by the police; and some of those looked a bit suspect, with very little in the way of evidence securing the convictions, mainly of boyfriends or pimps of the victims. Appeals were still ongoing in many of the cases that had actually come to court, and six of the verdicts had actually already been overturned.

The other cases were all still unsolved, although not many were still the subject of a current criminal investigation – most had been designated as cold cases, only to be reopened in the light of new evidence.

Having trawled through the paperwork, we’d discovered the same thing the algorithm had noticed – there were a lot more similarities between these cases than there were differences. The victims were all female and mostly black, typically with a history of sex work and drug and alcohol abuse, many of them already known to the police in one capacity or another.

All of the women had been killed in a brutal fashion. Some victims were raped and beaten before being strangled, others were bound and gagged, and some of them had been found with plastic bags tied over their heads. Almost all of them were stripped of at least some of their clothing, while half a dozen had been set on fire. The bodies were dumped in similar locations, predominantly within Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods.

Bronkowski had also plugged in other cases, where the victim had survived – as in Abril Rivera’s case – and had found more than half a dozen similar incidents. In each of these cases, the witness reports were startlingly similar to what Rivera had told me, including the description of the perpetrator, and his use of insults as he raped and beat them.

Interestingly, five of those six unfinished murders had occurred in the late ’90s and early 2000s, which indicated to both me and Bronkowski that it was probably the same guy. He made mistakes early on, learned from them, and became more effective as the years went on.

The same thing jumped out at us in terms of the assaults themselves; they seemed to become more efficient over time. Early on, there was a lot more overt aggression, more striking of the face and head with closed fists. The most recent cases seemed to lack that sense of frustrated anger – or

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