Shaquanta Langley, whose first name appears as “Shaguanta” in the Illinois appellate court record, was a Black/African American woman whose killing became part of the sweeping investigation into serial murderer Andre Crawford on Chicago's South Side. Langley was one of the women prosecutors said Crawford preyed upon in and around the Englewood and New City neighborhoods during a series of killings stretching through the 1990s.
Authorities eventually connected Crawford to 11 murdered women and another victim who survived a brutal attack.
The clearest account of what happened to Langley comes from Crawford himself. During his prosecution, jurors watched his video-recorded statements concerning Langley and several other victims. Crawford said that he and Langley had reached an agreement involving cocaine in exchange for sex. According to his confession, she wanted to use the cocaine first, and he became angry and killed her. Crawford admitted that after killing the women in this group of cases, he sexually assaulted their bodies, left to smoke crack cocaine, and then returned to sexually assault them again. Those statements became an important part of the prosecution's evidence against him in Langley's case.
Langley's death was investigated within a much larger pattern of killings that had left women dead in abandoned buildings and other isolated locations on Chicago's South Side. By 1999, Chicago police and the FBI were working together in a major task-force investigation. Investigators reviewed thousands of names, interviewed and re-interviewed people connected to the victims, and collected DNA samples from hundreds of men. A break came when people familiar with the victims identified Andre Crawford as someone investigators should examine more closely. Contemporary reporting said police received a tip about him and arrested the 37-year-old Crawford on January 28, 2000. Investigators obtained his DNA and connected him forensically to several of the cases.
Once in custody, Crawford's admissions dramatically expanded the case. Police initially said DNA evidence connected him to seven murders, but he confessed to those killings as well as additional homicides investigators had not previously recognized as part of the same series. His statements contained details about how he approached women, took them into abandoned buildings and attacked them. Prosecutors ultimately identified Langley as one of Crawford's murder victims and charged him in Cook County under case number 00 CR 5456. The larger prosecution encompassed 12 separate victims and originally contained more than 200 criminal counts.
Before trial, prosecutors dismissed many duplicative or alternative counts, but serious charges remained specifically for Langley's death. Crawford went to trial facing three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault in connection with her case. Langley's case was tried together with the cases involving Crawford's other victims, allowing the jury to hear the pattern of violence, forensic evidence, testimony and Crawford's own recorded confessions as a single body of evidence.
After a lengthy trial, the jury found Crawford guilty on December 10, 2009. He was convicted in the murders of all 11 women as well as aggravated criminal sexual assaults connected with numerous victims, including Langley, and the attempted murder and sexual assault of the surviving victim. Jurors deliberated for about 10 hours before returning the guilty verdicts. In Langley's case, the court ultimately merged the multiple murder counts into one first-degree murder conviction and merged the sexual-assault counts into two aggravated criminal sexual assault convictions.
Crawford was eligible for the death penalty because of the number and circumstances of the murders, but the jury declined to sentence him to death. The court instead imposed natural life imprisonment for the murders, meaning he would have no possibility of parole, along with 30-year prison terms for aggravated criminal sexual assault convictions. The verdict gave Langley's case a legal resolution nearly a decade after Crawford had first been taken into custody.
Crawford later challenged his convictions before the Illinois Appellate Court, raising issues involving jury selection, DNA evidence, his attorneys' performance and testimony concerning forensic evidence. On December 16, 2013, the appellate court rejected his arguments and affirmed the Cook County judgment. Langley's murder conviction therefore remained intact as part of Crawford's 11 confirmed murder convictions, closing the major appellate challenge to the prosecution that had finally identified and convicted the man responsible for her death.
