That stranger barely let her breathe. Her knife was pressing so hard against his throat that it almost drew blood. However, the worst was yet to come. In the middle of an abandoned building, Claudia was savagely raped by her assailant while he did not stop beating her. The violence exerted against her was merciless.
When the individual finished, he grabbed a cable and began to strangle her. She then beat him to death and, when he left her for dead, she took her shoes. But Claudia was still alive and her killer didn’t know it. The testimony of this survivor was crucial to hunt down a dangerous serial killer in Chicago with seven corpses on his back, although he would take the lives of four other girls. It took the police two years to arrest him.
Andre Crawford was born on March 20, 1962 in Chicago, into a broken family. On the one hand, his father decided not to parent and abandoned him after his birth. And, on the other hand, his mother also found herself unable to take care of the child and, finally, social services chose to withdraw custody of her and give the child up for adoption.
But, according to Andre, things did not get better in his new family. It appears that he suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of several members of his adoptive family, and when he ran away from home at fourteen to return to her biological mother, she forced him into prostitution. From there, the teenager entered a self-destructive spiral of alcohol and drugs.
In fact, Andre dropped out of school, broke ties with both his biological mother and his adoptive family, and became an addict. To get his life back on track, the young man decided to enlist first in the army and then in the navy, however, his problems did not disappear. Andre continued using and this led to his disciplinary expulsion. It was then that he returned to Chicago and began a budding criminal career.
At first, Andre lived as a homeless man on the streets of the Englewood and New City neighborhoods, living in true squalor, squatting in abandoned buildings, using drugs and alcohol, and volunteering as hustlers to earn some money, which he then spent on his addictions. .
Those who knew him said of him that he was “a good-natured and kind guy,” who never said or did anything that “made people think he was violent” or that he hated women. But the reality was that, beneath that facade of a good man, a prolific and dangerous serial killer was hiding in search of new prey to hunt.
Between March 1993 and November 1999, Andre killed 11 women, but in between was arrested and convicted on robbery and drug possession charges. Nobody thought that that individual was a sexual predator. His modus operandi was as follows: he selected young African-American women, most of them prostitutes with addiction problems, he lured them to an abandoned building with the promise of giving them crack in exchange for sex and, once there, the monster emerged.
The sequence of events consisted of: sexually assaulting them in a savage manner, beating them with any object that was nearby or with their own hands, proceeding to strangle them with a telephone cable until they died, and, once they were dead, they smoked a crack joint. Afterwards, he would put a cloth over their faces, steal their shoes, and abandon their bodies. Hours or even days later, she would return to the place to practice necrophilia with their bodies.
In most cases, the victims’ bodies were discovered some time after the murders, so some of them were already very decomposed and barely recognizable.
One of the first women murdered was Patricia Dunn, found on September 23, 1993. Among the details that caught investigators’ attention was the ritual of her murder, including a cloth on her face, and her missing shoes. No trace of DNA or fingerprints of her attacker.
A year and a half later, in the spring of 1995, the body of another woman murdered under the same circumstances as the previous one was discovered. Her name was Angela Shatteen. The similarities with Patricia’s case were surprising, but this time DNA could be recovered.
While the police searched for the culprit, Andre was arrested on May 3, 1995 for another assault and rape, and was sent to pretrial detention to await trial. However, the victim’s testimony was questioned due to his drug addiction and he was released. As soon as he left, Andre savagely attacked Claudia Robinson, whom he left for dead.
Thanks to the DNA found on Claudia’s body and her harrowing testimony, investigators were able to connect her attempted murder to previous crimes and draw a profile. Additionally, the survivor helped create a sketch with her detailed description of the attacker, which was then distributed throughout the city. That drawing could help identify him.
But the investigation was going too slowly since, in the following months, more bodies of African-American women murdered following the same procedure appeared. To this we would have to add the issue of the shoes and that in all of them they found the same DNA. The agents were facing an elusive serial killer.
The police continued to explore the areas where they had found the women and took DNA samples from 500 men, but none matched the killer. In 1999, the city of Chicago already had eleven women murdered and no culprits in jail. But, suddenly, the crimes stopped, but everything had an explanation that became known later.
That year, Andre was arrested again and convicted of drug possession, although his sentence was suspended and he was released on probation. Likewise, the FBI also intervened in the investigation and involved the entire community in those months. That strategy paid off and there was a buzz.
Two women told officers that a man named “Dre” took women to abandoned buildings and became violent with them. And another witness stated that a certain Andre used drugs with prostitutes in that same type of property. This is how they found an African-American man, with physical features similar to the sketch of the suspect they were looking for, who had a history of sexual assault and drugs, and who responded to the name of Andre Crawford.
The serial killer was arrested on January 28, 2000 and, although he did not want to collaborate by providing his DNA at first, when investigators cornered him with evidence implicating him in seven murders, he agreed and acknowledged a total of eleven.
For three days, Andre carefully confessed the facts, explaining that he exchanged drugs for sex and that, when prostitutes betrayed him, he became violent and murdered them. The ex-marine killed in anger, hence the brutality of the crimes, and covered his face so that they would not see him. As for the shoes, Andre claimed that he stole them to sell them and make money from them.
“He wanted to make these women suffer because that is what he wanted to do to his mother,” forensic neuropsychologist John Fabián theorized after evaluating him in prison. He also noted that covering his victims’ faces could indicate shame or regret, but nothing could be further from the truth. Andre displayed an undaunted and icy demeanor throughout the trial. He cared little about the suffering of others.
On December 10, 2009, the court sentenced Andre Crawford to life in prison for eleven murders, one attempted murder, and twenty-four aggravated rapes. And, while the judge read the verdict and intoned the word “guilty” up to twenty-four times, the murderer remained undaunted. Behind him, the victims’ relatives could not hold back their tears.
Seven years later, on March 18, 2017, the Chicago Strangler died in prison from liver cancer. He was 55 years old. The most chilling thing of all is that, today, the police still believe that Andre is responsible for fifty more deaths. However, they have never found evidence to prove it.
