Antone Davis, a 30-year-old Black man, was killed in Manhattan on December 22, 1980, during a frightening series of seemingly random knife attacks that swept through Midtown over the course of the day. Davis was stabbed in Manhattan’s Garment District at approximately 6:47 p.m. Contemporary reports placed his killing in the middle of an hours-long rampage in which several people were attacked and multiple victims died. Police believed the assaults were connected and launched an intensive search for the unidentified attacker.
The violence had begun hours before Davis was attacked. John Adams survived a stabbing late that morning, and another victim, identified in contemporary reporting as Ivan Kramer and in later records as Ivan Frazier, was wounded early that afternoon. Luis Rodriguez, a messenger, was fatally stabbed at about 3:30 p.m. Davis was attacked several hours later, followed by the fatal stabbing of Richard Renner later that night. Another victim was killed before midnight. The similarities in the attacks convinced investigators that they were dealing with a single assailant, soon described in news coverage as the “Midtown Slasher.”
Police believed they had located a possible witness to Davis’s killing, although officials did not publicly disclose significant details about what that person had seen. Investigators described the wanted attacker as a white man, initially estimated to be about 40 years old, approximately 5 feet 7 inches tall, muscular, weighing roughly 160 to 170 pounds and wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses. A large police task force searched rooming houses and inexpensive hotels around Times Square, while a police sketch was circulated to the public. Investigators also contacted authorities in Buffalo because the apparent selection of victims and other circumstances raised concerns that the Manhattan attacks might be connected to a series of killings in western New York.
The investigation eventually focused on Joseph Gerard Christopher, a Buffalo man and Army private who later became known both as the “.22-Caliber Killer” and the “Midtown Slasher.” Christopher had been linked to an earlier series of shootings in the Buffalo region and was on military leave when the Manhattan attacks occurred. Records later established that he had arrived in Manhattan shortly before the December 22 stabbing spree. After leaving New York City, additional knife attacks occurred in Buffalo and Rochester during the closing days of December and the beginning of January.
Christopher was taken into custody at Fort Benning, Georgia, on January 18, 1981, after attacking another serviceman with a knife. While subsequently undergoing psychiatric evaluation, he made statements concerning a compulsion to kill Black people. Investigators searched his former residence and recovered evidence associated with the western New York shootings, including. 22-caliber ammunition and firearm components. Those developments led authorities to connect Christopher to a much broader sequence of racially motivated attacks. Davis subsequently became identified in historical accounts of Christopher’s victims and is generally attributed to Christopher’s December 22 Manhattan stabbing spree.
There is an important distinction, however, between the later attribution of Davis’s killing to Christopher and the charges that were actually prosecuted in Manhattan. New York City indictments were returned against Christopher for the murder of Luis Rodriguez and the nonfatal stabbing of Ivan Frazier, but available accounts do not show that Christopher was separately indicted or tried for Davis’s murder. In October 1985, a Manhattan jury rejected Christopher’s insanity defense and convicted him of murdering Rodriguez and attempting to murder Frazier. Thus, while investigators and later histories identify Davis as a victim of Christopher’s rampage, the conviction obtained in the Manhattan case did not specifically concern Davis’s death.
Christopher had also been convicted in 1982 of three killings associated with the earlier Buffalo-area shooting spree and received a lengthy prison sentence, although those convictions were overturned in 1985 because the defense had improperly been prevented from presenting psychiatric evidence concerning his competency. He was later convicted again in connection with the killings and remained incarcerated. Christopher reportedly acknowledged responsibility for a larger number of killings while imprisoned. He died at Attica Correctional Facility in 1993. Davis’s death therefore became part of the larger history of a short but exceptionally violent series of attacks attributed to Christopher, even though Davis’s individual murder did not result in a separate conviction.
