It was not uncommon for Millicent Jones, the 25-year-old woman known by family and friends as “Peanuts,” to disappear onto Chicago streets for hours, and even days.
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But it was not like her to miss her 6-year-old son’s 1st-grade graduation this month. That’s when her mother and sisters knew something was very wrong, even in her often-wrong life.
“She was sweet and she had a kind heart,” said her mother, Mary Jones, 50. “She never forgot birthdays, holidays, Mother’s Day or anything that pertained to her sons.”
And then her family got a call from a friend who told them a body, believed to be Millicent Jones’, had been found near Garfield Boulevard and LaSalle Street.
Another woman who lived life on the streets had died a violent death, and, in all likelihood, it would have gone unnoticed, except for a common thread that tied Millicent Jones to the deaths of several other Englewood community women in recent months.
They all had histories of drug abuse, some had known records as prostitutes selling their bodies to feed their narcotic habits, and, they all, apparently, had been killed by the same person, who police say confessed this week to a series of killings of women on Chicago’s South Side.
Rhonda King, 25, who already had a 13-month-old son when she disappeared shortly before Christmas was another South Side woman who had turned to drugs and the street. Her stepmother, Delores Hicks, said she had spent a lot of time lecturing the young woman, urging her to enter a drug rehabilitation program in an attempt to rescue her young life.
But the lectures were in vain, and after a monthlong disappearance, her body also was found discarded in an abandoned house near 51st and Halsted Streets. At the time, she was considered to be just another victim of the streets and the life they breed.
Alonda Tart was even younger when she left home. At 14, she packed her bags, headed for the streets, and became a drug addict, ending up shooting heroin directly into her veins. When the men she had chosen to live with couldn’t provide the money for her drugs, she turned tricks along Halsted Street.
“Alonda didn’t want help,” said Davida Tart, her younger sister. “She loved heroin, and she was afraid of kicking it. The streets were the only means of supporting her habit.”
The men she chose to share her life on the streets often turned violent, and at times, she had been beaten with a clothes hanger and threatened with death during arguments over missing money.
When Alonda Tart’s 23-year-old body was found on West 54th Street on March 14, it was just another apparent case of the streets taking another victim.
Mary Blackman, 42, was a longtime friend of the family of the man now accused of killing her. She continued to live in Chicago, even when her four children moved to Kansas earlier this year. But Blackman, a known drug addict, chose to stay in the more familiar environs of Chicago. Several times, her children implored her to join them in Kansas, and, although she repeatedly pledged to do so, she kept putting off the move, and on June 17, she was found dead in the garbage behind her home.
If Dorothea Withers was different from the other women apparently now linked in the chain of serial killings, it was that she didn’t spend as much time on the streets as the others. At 37, she was a mystery to most of her neighbors in the three-story brick complex at 236 W. 57th St.
Some did know that she had some type of job during the day, but they also knew that there were often two or three men visiting her apartment each night. They knew, they said, that she was a prostitute in the evening. After a burglar stole much of her possessions late last year, she moved out, and her neighbors said they didn’t know where she had gone.
She was found dead in December, another apparent random victim.
Joyce Wilson, 28, was told by her mother and eight brothers and sisters in February that if she didn’t enter a drug treatment center, they would refuse to watch her four daughters, ranging in age from 6 to 11. But she didn’t go. She wouldn’t go.
“We used to tell her, you need to stop going with everyone you meet because you are going to find yourself dead somewhere,” said a sister, Beverly Wilson, 20.
On March 26, that prediction, half made as a threat, came true. Joyce Wilson’s body was found in an abandoned meat truck. She had been strangled.
To spare her mother the pain of the truth, Joyce Wilson’s brothers and sisters told her a different story-a gentler one, but one steeped in the realism of the street life that the young woman had led. They told her mother that Joyce Wilson had died of a drug overdose.
In each of the cases, the individual deaths were at first seen as tragic, but not unusual, incidents of the toll street life can take for women who chose to be in the wrong places most of the time.
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It was only as links in a chain of serial killings that their deaths, in some cases, months later, became noteworthy.