In the autumn of 1997, a sense of fear gripped the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., as a series of women's deaths remained unsolved. The community's anxieties were tragically confirmed with the discovery of 39-year-old Jacqueline Teresa Birch. On November 18, 1997, her body was found in a vacant row house on Princeton Place NW. It was in this same abandoned building that another woman, Lateashia Blocker, had been found dead earlier that year.
For the first time in this string of deaths, the medical examiner swiftly ruled Jacqueline's death a homicide by manual strangulation, solidifying the community's fear that a killer was in their midst.
Jacqueline, a Black woman, was among a number of female victims in the area, many of whom were vulnerable due to drug addiction and occasional work as prostitutes. The discovery of her body, and the subsequent homicide ruling, intensified the investigation into the cluster of deaths that had been plaguing the neighborhood since 1996. This led to the formation of a special task force involving D.C. police, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration to probe the series of unsolved homicides that had instilled terror in the community.
The investigation soon zeroed in on a suspect living right next door to where Jacqueline's body was discovered. In January 1998, police arrested Darryl Donnell Turner, a 34-year-old former liquor store clerk who resided on Princeton Place NW. He was charged with the murders of Jacqueline Birch and another woman, 34-year-old Dana Hill, whose body was found on December 1, 1997, also in a vacant building. Turner was portrayed by prosecutors as a predator who would befriend his victims before raping and strangling them.
The case against Turner was built on crucial forensic evidence. Investigators found Turner's semen on both Jacqueline and Dana Hill. Additionally, orange acrylic fibers found on both women were matched to a blanket in Turner's home. This DNA and fiber evidence became the cornerstone of the prosecution's largely circumstantial case. In October 2001, a D.C. Superior Court jury found Darryl Donnell Turner guilty of first-degree sexual abuse and felony murder in the deaths of Jacqueline Birch and Dana Hill. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Following the sentencing, Jacqueline Birch's mother, Mary Phillips, expressed that her daughter could finally rest in peace.
