Nicole Townsend was a 32-year-old African-American woman whose killing became one of the cases tied to Chicago serial killer Andre Crawford. Townsend was killed during the second week of August 1998 on Chicago's South Side. On August 13, a real estate appraiser entered an abandoned building at 5223 South Marshfield Avenue and discovered her body in a second-floor attic. Her remains had been there long enough to become severely decomposed and partially skeletonized, and she had been partly covered with a green blanket. The condition of her clothing and the scene immediately raised concerns that she had been sexually assaulted.
The advanced decomposition complicated the autopsy. Dr. Barry Lifschultz of the Cook County medical examiner's office initially made no determination regarding the cause of death, but later concluded that Townsend had died from strangulation after receiving additional information from police investigators. Dr. Nancy Jones, who later reviewed the autopsy report and photographs for Crawford's trial, agreed that strangulation was the cause of death. Although Townsend's hyoid bone and neck cartilage were intact, Jones explained that this did not rule out strangulation, particularly because some forms of strangulation do not fracture those structures. Investigators also recovered a pair of black pantyhose from debris in the attic. Testing revealed semen on the pantyhose, and forensic analysis produced a DNA profile that matched Andre Crawford's profile.
Crawford ultimately gave investigators a videotaped account of what happened to Townsend. He said that he had known her for several years and that they had previously exchanged drugs for sex. According to his confession, he encountered Townsend near West 53rd Street and South Ashland Avenue during the second week of August 1998. The two walked to the abandoned wood-frame house on Marshfield Avenue and entered through the rear before going upstairs. Crawford said an argument developed after Townsend wanted drugs before continuing their encounter. He admitted that he began strangling her and continued until she lost consciousness. He then sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious, took her shoes and left the building. Crawford said he smoked crack cocaine before returning to the attic, where he found Townsend still lying unconscious and sexually assaulted her again. Before leaving, he placed material over her body in an attempt to cover her.
Townsend's death was not investigated in isolation for long. During the 1990s, women were being found murdered in abandoned buildings around Chicago's Englewood and New City neighborhoods, and forensic testing eventually showed that several crime scenes shared the same unidentified male DNA profile. Chicago police and the FBI formed a task force in 1999 and examined hundreds of possible suspects. Investigators eventually received information pointing them toward Crawford, a man familiar with the neighborhood who had a history of arrests and was known to spend time in abandoned buildings. He was apprehended on January 28, 2000. Investigators obtained a DNA sample from him, and the comparison connected him to a number of the murders, including the evidence associated with Townsend's crime scene.
After his arrest, Crawford began confessing. Police initially announced that he had admitted seven killings connected by DNA and three additional murders that investigators had not previously recognized as part of the same series. Prosecutors filed an enormous collection of charges covering the killings and sexual assaults. Townsend's case was docketed as 00 CR 5462, and after prosecutors narrowed the original charging documents before trial, Crawford still faced three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault in connection with her death. Her case was ultimately tried together with the prosecutions involving ten other murdered women and a twelfth woman who had survived an attack.
Crawford remained in the Cook County Jail for nearly a decade while the complicated prosecution moved toward trial. During the proceedings, prosecutors relied on his recorded confessions, forensic evidence and testimony concerning the individual crime scenes. Townsend's case received particular attention because the defense challenged the medical testimony concerning her autopsy and questioned the DNA evidence recovered from the pantyhose. Nevertheless, prosecutors argued that the physical evidence, Crawford's detailed confession and the circumstances at the abandoned Marshfield Avenue building corroborated one another.
On December 10, 2009, after more than ten hours of deliberations, the jury found Crawford guilty in the murders of all 11 women, as well as the sexual-assault offenses and the attempted murder of the surviving victim. His convictions included Townsend's murder and aggravated criminal sexual assault. The jury subsequently determined that Crawford was legally eligible for the death penalty but declined to impose it. He instead received natural life imprisonment for the murders, along with additional 30-year prison terms for aggravated criminal sexual assault convictions and another 30-year term for the attempted murder of the surviving woman.
Crawford appealed, and Townsend's death remained an important part of that litigation. Among other arguments, he challenged the admission of testimony from a medical examiner who had not personally performed Townsend's autopsy, claiming that it violated his constitutional right to confront witnesses against him. The Illinois Appellate Court rejected his arguments and affirmed the convictions. As a result, the case that began when Townsend was found alone in the attic of an abandoned South Side house ended with her killer identified through a combination of forensic evidence and his own confession, convicted by a jury and condemned to spend the remainder of his life in prison.
