Patricia Butler

Patricia Ann Wilson-Butler—a 45-year-old Black woman from Kansas City, Missouri—was gone by Thursday, September 2, 2004, the day her death began rippling outward into a neighborhood already exhausted by loss.

That early-September stretch along the Prospect Corridor had turned tense, the kind of tension you can feel in the way people watch the street a little longer before they step outside. Bodies were being found on vacant property in a rough pocket east of downtown, and police publ ...