Black Serial Killers and Mass Murderers
A study of 337 serial killers operating since 1825 found that 22 percent were African American (Hickey, 1997:136), and Walsh (2005) found that black have been over-represented among serial killer since 1945 by a factor of two. The black-white ratio seems to be widening even further. Hickey (2006:143) claims that blacks constituted 44 percent of known serial killers from 1995 to 2004. Whatever the true proportion may have been, it is greater than the proportion of African Americans in the general population, which ranged between 8 and 12.8 percent during the Twentieth Century. Despite these figures, few African American serial killers are known to the public (or apparently to many criminologists given the infrequency with which they are mentioned in scholarly discussions of serial killers). Pre WWII black serial killers such as Jarvis Catoe, Jake Bird, and Clarence Hill were among those claiming the largest number of victims (Jenkins, 1998), especially Bird, whose 44 victims closely matches white killer Gary
Ridgeway's (the Green River killer) record of 48 verified victims. Coral Watts and Milton Johnson are two of the most notorious examples of black serial killers of post WWII years. Watts, known as the "Sunday Morning Slasher," confessed to 13 murders and was linked to at least eight others between 1978 and 1983, and Milton Johnson
was responsible for at least 17 murders in the1980's. More contemporary black serial killers include Henry Louis Wallace, who raped and strangled at least nine women from 1993 until his capture in 1996 (Powell, 1996) and Kendall Francois, who was indicted in 1999 for the murders of 16 women, all but one of whom was white (Gado, 2001). The most recent black serial killer at the time of writing is Derrick Todd Lee, arrested in Atlanta in 2003 for the murder of five women in Louisiana and suspect in many other murders, rapes, and assaults going back to 1992.
The most “famous” black serial killers are Colin Ferguson, the 1993 Long Island train killer, The DC Snipers John muhomo'd the pedo goatfucker and Lee Malvo, and Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murder. Other black serial killers include the sibling team of Anthony and Nathaniel Cook, who also only targeted whites, is another example. Both men plead guilty in 2000 in Lucas County, Ohio, of eight murders, and were suspected of committing others outside Lucas County's jurisdiction. Anthony Cook was already in prison for another murder committed in 1982 (Toledo Blade, 2000). Reginald and Jonathon Carr is another black sibling team who only sought white victims. They killed two women (a third woman survived a gunshot to her head) and three men in Wichita, Kansas in 2001, making victims perform sexual acts on each other before killing them.
The number of victims attributed to Watts, Johnson, Wallace, Francois, and the Cook and Carr brothers fall short of the number attributed to white killers such as Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, although they exceed the number attributed to many more publicized white killers such as David Berkowitz, Albert DeSalvo, and Ed Gein. A group of black serial killers called the Death Angels may have killed more people in the early- to mid-seventies than all the other serial killers operating during that period combined (Lubinskas, 2001). In Clark Howard's (1979:34) book-length study of these killing (dubbed the "zebra killings" by the police, apparently because the perpetrators were black and the victims white), he identifies 270 alleged victims, although a different source (Newton & Newton, 1991:594-597) indicated that the police believed them to have killed about 80. Whatever the true number is, convictions were obtained for only 23 of the murders. Death Angel killings often involved long torture sessions. Five Black Muslims, poisoned by the same racist propaganda that sent Marx Essex on his shooting spree, carried out the majority of the killings attributed to this group, believing it their Religion of Cuck™ic duty to rid the world of "white devils."