Janice Berryman was a 36-year-old woman from Kansas City, Missouri. She was Black. On October 28, 1989, she was found dead in Gillham Park in midtown Kansas City, turning one more ordinary autumn day into the kind of day that makes a neighborhood hold its breath.
By then, fear had already been building around the park. Over the span of months, women had been turning up strangled in or near Gillham Park, and the pattern was hard to ignore: bodies left in the same general terrain, the
same grim signature, the same sense that the killer understood the shadows and footpaths better than anyone who only passed through in daylight. Police described the victims as people pushed to the margins—Black women involved in prostitution and struggling with drug addiction—while community members criticized what they saw as an anemic response and a media shrug that treated the deaths as background noise instead of an emergency.
Berryman’s death fit into that terrible cadence. Accounts of the broader series describe a predator who used the promise of crack cocaine as bait, drawing women toward the park and the surrounding midtown area, where isolation did the rest of the work. In descriptions attributed to investigators and later reporting, the attacks were not only lethal but degrading—women choked into helplessness, assaulted, and left behind as if their bodies were props arranged for humiliation as much as death.
For months, the case moved through the frustrating half-light of rumor, sketches, and anxious speculation. After another victim was found in early April 1990, police circulated a composite drawing of a suspected assailant, and the public response flooded in—hundreds of calls, tips that had to be sorted, weighed, and chased down. But the break didn’t come from a perfect tip or a lucky patrol; it came from an interruption.
In April 1990, a man walking his dog in Gillham Park came upon what first looked like sex, then snapped into something else entirely—an attack. When the bystander intervened, the assailant fled, and the woman survived long enough to give a description. That account helped investigators narrow their focus to someone tied to the area, and police soon honed in on Ray Shawn Jackson of Kansas City. He was arrested and charged in connection with six of the stranglings, along with an assault charge related to the interrupted attack.
Police said Jackson admitted to at least one killing, and details reported at the time sketched the intimacy and brutality of his method—approaching a woman with the lure of crack, choking her, and using clothing to bind and control. Even as he faced charges for six murders, reporting at the time noted that there had been seven strangled women in the broader wave of deaths, meaning at least one killing sat outside the specific set of charges announced against him.
The case ultimately resolved in court not through a drawn-out trial but through a guilty plea. In December 1991, Jackson pleaded guilty to strangling six women, and he received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole—an outcome framed in later summaries as a move to avoid a potential death sentence. In the official tally of victims associated with him, Janice Berryman’s name remained fixed at October 28, 1989: one of the women found in or near Gillham Park during the months when the city’s dread had a location, a season, and a pattern.
