On August 20, 1983, 29-year-old white female Pamela Marie Ryan was among four women brutally murdered inside the Greenware by Mary ceramic shop on East Cass Street in Joliet, Illinois. Pamela Ryan had accompanied her 75-year-old mother-in-law, Anna Ryan, and 38-year-old Barbara Dunbar to the shop that Saturday morning. The store owner, 45-year-old Marilyn Baers, was also present. All four women were attacked and killed in what became one of the most shocking mass murders in Will County history.
The crime scene was gruesome: the women were stabbed a total of 43 times. Pamela Ryan, a 29-year-old white female, along with Barbara Dunbar and Marilyn Baers, died from multiple stab wounds, while Anna Ryan was both stabbed and shot in the neck. The attack appeared to be unprovoked, and the victims were found bound inside the shop.
The murders were part of a broader killing spree that terrorized the Joliet area during the summer of 1983. The perpetrator, Milton Johnson, a 33-year-old African American male from Joliet, had been released from prison just five months earlier after serving 12 years for a 1970 rape conviction. Between June and August 1983, Johnson committed a series of violent crimes, including multiple homicides, earning him the nickname "The Weekend Murderer."
Johnson was arrested in March 1984 after forensic evidence linked him to the murders. He was tried and convicted for the killings at the ceramic shop, including that of Pamela Ryan, a 29-year-old white female. Initially sentenced to death, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment without parole following the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.
