On a cold Valentine's Day in 1994, the body of 29-year-old Mary Haskins Ferguson was discovered on a baseball field at Hamilton Junior High School in Northeast Washington, D.C. A passerby found the partially clothed young woman at approximately 9 a.m. near Gallaudet University. An initial examination by police revealed no immediate signs of gunshot or knife wounds, nor any clear marks of strangulation, though they suspected foul play was involved in her death.
Mary Haskins Ferguson, a Black woman known to have connections to the city's drug and sex trade, became one of a number of women whose deaths would instill fear in the community. In a city grappling with a high homicide rate, her case initially went unsolved, one of many in a period where the clearance rate for murders was distressingly low. The sheer volume of violent crime overwhelmed the police department at the time.
It would later be determined that Ferguson was a victim of a serial killer. Darryl Donnell Turner was identified as the man responsible for her death, as well as the murders of at least six other individuals in the Washington, D.C. area over a period of three and a half years. Turner, described as a classic serial killer, targeted women, often raping and strangling them. He is currently serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary.
