In this part of town, on the South Side, the women who stroll the streets for business don’t waste much time worrying about their attire. There are no high heels, no fish-net stockings, no thigh-high boots.
These women–sisters, mothers and best friends–wear outfits as unassuming as sweaters, jeans and tennis shoes.
There is no Heidi Fleiss-like glamour involved, and no pimps look out for them–or abuse and intimidate them. They leisurely loiter along the streets alone, waiting to enter a car that pulls beside them. Or they wander with their customers to desolate sites behind factories or in a dark alley.
Some have weathered faces that make them look old far beyond their years. A few have open sores on their skin, while some have diseases that no outward symptoms reveal.
Many share another trait–one that fuels their desperation for a quick buck. They are drug addicts. And the $5 they sometimes are paid for oral sex is enough to buy a quick high.
These women also are vulnerable: to an overdose, to diseases like AIDS and to predatory men.
One such man, according to Chicago police, is Gregory Clepper, a South Side resident who three weeks ago was charged with strangling and beating 12 women.
On Wednesday, Clepper was charged with a 13th killing. Earlier in the week he was questioned by South Side detectives and police from Minnesota, where he once resided, about possible involvement in other murders.
Some of Clepper’s alleged victims were what authorities called “amateur prostitutes.” These “amateurs” are in it for the money; the description is more an allusion to the prosaic nature of the women’s lives.
When they weren’t on the street, they had lives that included children, boyfriends and even gardening. When they weren’t selling themselves, they blended into the neighborhood; before drugs, often crack cocaine, took hold of their lives, they weren’t prostitutes.
Caroline Swayzer, who allegedly was beaten and strangled by Clepper, turned to prostitution to support her craving for cocaine.
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The last time friends saw Swayzer, 30, was about midnight Sept. 10, 1994, when the woman entered the living room in her South Side cottage-style home to tell her boyfriend’s mother that she was “going out.”
“I was trying to keep her in the house, but she was out that door,” said Barbara Perryman, whose son George dated Swayzer. They lived with Perryman in the 5500 block of South Justine Street for two years.
Perryman’s futile attempt was one of many such tries to keep Swayzer off the streets at night. Swayzer, who was raised in a Christian family, would sneak out bedroom windows, Perryman said, to sell sexual favors for money she would use to buy cocaine.
“I’m telling you she was good when she wasn’t on it,” she said. “She would go off this stuff for maybe a month, then the next thing she would be on it. It would make me just want to cry.”
Lt. Kathryn Kajari, who supervises the Chicago Police Department’s Prostitution Unit, has seen this pattern before.
“The demon drugs take hold, and they just sort of throw up their hands and go out looking for the next hit,” said Kajari. “It’s really pitiful.”
Katrina Rice, a roommate of murder victim Janice Hilt, about 29, offered this summary of Hilt’s life: “She was a prostitute. Crackheads will do anything for drugs.”
“Hard times economically have always produced amateur prostitution,” said Robert Ressler, former FBI criminologist and psychological profiler of serial killers, who said these women throughout history have been targeted by serial killers.
“Women will get into this thinking they will not have a hard time. They get in over their heads,” he said.
Friends and family members insist some of Clepper’s alleged victims were not prostitutes but were friendly women who bumped into the wrong guy.
That was the case, prosecutors say, with the new charges involving Veronica Sims, 34, of the 7000 block of South Perry Avenue.
Sims was walking along the 6700 block of South Stewart Avenue in the early morning hours of March 3, 1992, when Clepper allegedly saw her and “became attracted to her,” according to Assistant State’s Atty. Adrienne Mebane.
“She reminded him of someone he knew,” Mebane said.
The two walked and talked until they came upon an abandoned garage at 6717 S. Stewart Ave. The suspect dragged Sims inside and strangled her, she said.
Despite some of their differences–and the fact not all were prostitutes–the victims shared some characteristics.
Police and neighbors said they were at ease on the streets day or night. Some used crack, a drug that impairs judgment.
And they were petite or thin; several weighed just over 100 pounds. Their size and the circumstances they found themselves in were no match for a muscular man who is 6-feet tall and 155 pounds–and also had a drug problem, according to those who knew him.
To their killer, these women were disposable. He threw most of them in or near trash containers, as allegedly did Hubert Geralds, who was charged last year with the deaths of six South Side women.
“Dumpsters. That tells you a lot about today’s killers. They are considering their victims nothing more than trash,” said former FBI agent Ressler. “It’s symbolic of their hostility and arrogance. In other words, `This human is worth nothing to me.’ “
Chicago police say the scare of two serial killers in the city in one year who strangled some of these women did nothing to slow the prostitution business.
Perryman recalled Swayzer laughing when warned of another murder of an area prostitute. Swayzer’s reasoning, according to Perryman: “There were so many girls out there doing the same thing. There was nothing happening to them.”
But for all the risk-taking in their lives, some of these women had experiences that were strikingly commonplace, even homey.
Alicia Thomas’s boyfriend helped her piece together from scraps of wood and white picket fencing a barrier to two vegetable gardens they planted in their South Side back yard.
Tomatoes and greens sprouted and drew the interest of some greedy neighbors. The couple responded by painting crosses and warnings: “Thou shalt not steal. . . . Thief never prosper. . . . Jesus Knows . . . He saw you.”
Neighbors insist Thomas, 28, was involved in a committed relationship and lived a life of listening to reggae music and baby-sitting for friends. But, they said, she had a drug problem.
In the 9400 block of South Peoria Street, neighbors watched as 24-year-old Jordana Ashley’s appearance began to deteriorate.
Money started disappearing from her elderly grandmother’s purse, and it became obvious to one neighbor Ashley was involved in drugs and prostitution after seeing her climb into trucks near 63rd and Halsted Streets, a known stroll for prostitutes.
“I think she kind of got wild,” a neighbor said. “Her grandma couldn’t get out to see what she was up to.”
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Farther south from where Ashley walked the streets–on Exchange Avenue, near 79th Street–China, 23, carries Mace and sometimes a knife for protection.
Her cousin was murder victim Kizzy Macon, 17. And China said she and Macon both had been high and intimate with Clepper, who has been charged in her death.
“I didn’t know he would kill her,” China said.
Despite realizing she spent time alone with an accused serial killer, China says she feels confident working in the business she equates with her survival.
“She (Kizzy) thought it was a game. I kept telling her to slow down,” China said. “It ain’t no game. But Kizzy would get high with anybody.”