Hazel Connof, 23, a White/Caucasian female, was found dead on March 10, 1980, in Detroit, Michigan—left in a place that should have felt familiar and safe: her boyfriend’s driveway. Her body was discovered tied to a chain-link fence, her own belt drawn tight around her neck, a grim, intimate kind of violence that didn’t rely on guns or spectacle—just proximity and control. Investigators noted no signs that she had been raped or robbed, a detail that only deepened the unease, because it suggested the killing wasn’t about stealing anything tangible at all.
In the weeks and months around her death, Michigan communities were already wrestling with a string of attacks that seemed to share a chilling logic—victims found outside homes or near places they’d just been, violence delivered swiftly, leaving little behind but questions. As the pattern hardened, the press began calling the unknown assailant the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” a nickname that captured both timing and terror, and made every quiet morning feel like it could be the next page in the same story.
Over time, Connof’s homicide became associated with Carl Eugene Watts—better known as “Coral” and widely referred to by that “Sunday Morning Slasher” moniker—whose crimes in Michigan and Texas were later believed to span the years from 1974 to 1982. Watts was apprehended on May 23, 1982, and would come to be viewed by law enforcement as a suspect tied to a much larger constellation of killings, including deaths that had once sat in files with no name to attach to them.
But the road from suspicion to courtroom accountability was tangled. After his arrest in Houston, prosecutors there struck an unusual bargain: Watts pleaded guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder and received a 60-year sentence, and in exchange he was granted immunity that opened the door for him to confess to numerous killings. He admitted to thirteen murders, along with attempted murders and an assault, and he reportedly offered to talk about many more in Michigan—yet when authorities elsewhere refused to grant immunity, he stopped cooperating. In cases like Connof’s, that kind of legal stalemate mattered, because even when investigators believed they had their suspect, the mechanism to try him for every death didn’t cleanly exist.
Years later, Michigan did put Watts on trial for other murders: he was convicted for the killing of Helen Dutcher in 2004 and for the killing of Gloria Steele in 2007, receiving life sentences, and he died in 2007 while imprisoned. Those convictions cemented his place in the history of the case pattern that haunted Michigan, but they did not deliver a separate trial or verdict specifically for Hazel Connof—leaving her story with the unsettling feel of a chapter that points to its villain, yet never receives its own final courtroom punctuation.
