Joseph Christopher: "The Midtown Slasher"

4. Joseph Christopher: "The Midtown Slasher"

The war began September 22, when 14-year-old Glenn Dunn was shot and killed outside a Buffalo supermarket. The victim was sitting in a stolen car when he died, and witnesses described his assailant as an unidentified "white youth."

The local black community was verging on a state of panic now, made worse by an incident in a Buffalo hospital on October 10. A black patient, 37-year-old Collin Cole, was recuperating from illness when a white stranger appeared at his bedside and snarled, "I hate niggers." Descriptions of the would-be strangler roughly matched eyewitness reports on the ".22-caliber killer."

The last victim, discovered just before midnight, was a black "John Doe" stabbed to death on the street near Madison Square Garden. Police were still searching desperately for the elusive "Midtown Slasher" when 31-year-old Roger Adams, a black man, was stabbed to death in Buffalo on December 29.

The case broke twelve days later, in Georgia, when Pvt. Joseph Christopher, age 25, was arrested at Fort Benning, charged with slashing a black GI. A search of his former residence, near Buffalo, turned up quantities of 22 caliber ammunition, a gun barrel, and two sawed-off rifle stocks. More to the point, authorities learned that Christopher had joined the army on November 13, arriving at Fort Benning six days later.

Hospitalized with self-inflicted wounds on May 6, 1981, Christopher bragged to a nurse of his involvement in the September slayings around Buffalo. Four days later, he was charged with three of the local shooting deaths.

In October 1981, Christopher waived his right to a jury trial in Buffalo, placing his fate in the hands of a judge. Two months later, he was found mentally incompetent for trial, but the ruling had been reversed by April 1982. On April 27, after twelve days of testimony, he was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder, drawing a prison term of 60 years to life.