Angela Maria Wilkerson, a 22-year-old Black woman, disappeared after being reported missing on January 5, 1987, and what began as a search for one young woman soon folded into something far darker. In Suitland, Maryland, a wooded area near the Bradbury Recreation Center had already become the uneasy center of a widening investigation, a place where the quiet of winter brush kept giving up terrible secrets.
Her body was found in that same wooded stretch, discovered not far from where other victims had been located during an intensive police search of the area. Investigators described a pattern that linked the deaths: sexual assault followed by stabbing, with the remains of multiple women left in close proximity as if the woods were being used as a dumping ground rather than the place where the violence began. The medical examiner could not determine the exact dates of death, and the condition of the bodies suggested they had been dead for some time before they were found, deepening the fear that the crimes had been unfolding unseen for weeks or months.
As officers worked the scene and tried to reconstruct Wilkerson’s last known movements, reports noted the kind of small, haunting detail that often marks desperate resistance: investigators said there was skin from an attacker beneath a victim’s nails, a trace that hinted at a struggle and the possibility of identification if it could be matched. Police also floated the idea that the women may have been killed elsewhere and brought to Suitland afterward, a theory that widened the hunting ground and complicated every timeline.
The pressure to name a killer grew intense, and attention turned to a Washington, D.C., man named Alton Alonso Best. He was arrested in late January 1987 in connection with the killing of Janice Elaine Morton, a separate case in which the death was described as bearing similarities to the Suitland murders. Investigators treated him as a possible link and did not rule out his involvement, even as they acknowledged they lacked proof tying him directly to the Suitland victims. Part of the scrutiny centered on a van associated with Best’s nephew, William Armah, a D.C. police officer who was placed on leave; authorities examined the vehicle and investigated reports of blood inside it, while also weighing statements about the interior being cleaned.
In June 1987, Best pleaded guilty in the Morton case to second-degree murder and sodomy under a deal that reduced the original charge and dismissed a separate drug count, and he was later sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Yet despite the timing—murders in Suitland stopping after his arrest—he was not charged with the killing of Angela Maria Wilkerson, and the case remained without a courtroom conclusion for her and the other women found near the recreation center. What remained instead was a story of a community gripped by dread, detectives chasing leads across jurisdictional lines, and a young woman whose disappearance ended in a patch of woods that became infamous for what it concealed.
