Wendell Barnes, a 26-year-old Black/African American man, was fatally stabbed in Rochester, New York, on December 30, 1980. Barnes was waiting at a bus stop on East Main Street when he was attacked and stabbed in the chest. He was rushed to a hospital, but the wound proved fatal. The killing appeared to be sudden, and accounts of the case do not describe a confrontation between Barnes and his attacker or identify an ordinary robbery or personal dispute as the motive.
Barnes's death occurred in the middle of a disturbing succession of knife attacks that investigators were beginning to believe were connected. The previous morning, Roger Adams had been stabbed to death near a bus stop in Buffalo. The day after Barnes was killed, Albert Menefee was stabbed in Buffalo but survived, and additional men were attacked around New Year's Day. Only a week earlier, on December 22, several men had been stabbed in Manhattan during a one-day rampage in which multiple victims were killed. By January 6, 1981, investigators were publicly considering the possibility that the recent knife attacks were connected not only to one another but also to an earlier series of shootings of Black men in western New York.
Suspicion eventually centered on Joseph Gerard Christopher, an Army private from Buffalo who later became known as the ".22-Caliber Killer" and the "Midtown Slasher." Christopher had enlisted in the Army in November 1980 and was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, but he was on leave during the period in which Barnes and the other late-December victims were attacked. Investigators established that Christopher had returned to New York during that leave, giving authorities a timeline that placed him away from Fort Benning when the killings occurred. Rochester reporting later identified Christopher as a suspect in Barnes's death, and law-enforcement officials came to regard the Rochester killing as part of the broader series of racially motivated attacks attributed to him.
The break in the investigation came on January 18, 1981, after Christopher attacked fellow soldier Leonard Coles at Fort Benning with a knife. Coles survived, and Christopher was confined. During the aftermath of that assault, Christopher attempted to injure himself, and during psychiatric evaluation he made statements indicating a compulsion to kill Black people. Investigators subsequently searched property connected to him and recovered items that included. 22-caliber ammunition, a gun barrel and sawed-off rifle stocks. Those discoveries were especially important because several earlier victims in the Buffalo area had been shot with a. 22-caliber weapon. Authorities soon began treating Christopher as a major suspect in murders and assaults across Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester and Manhattan.
Christopher was indicted in 1981 in connection with three of the September 1980 Buffalo shootings. In April 1982, he was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder and received lengthy prison sentences. Those convictions were ultimately overturned in 1985 after New York's highest court determined that psychiatric evidence relevant to his mental condition had improperly been excluded. Christopher nevertheless remained in serious legal jeopardy. In Manhattan later that year, a jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of murdering Luis Rodriguez and attempting to murder Ivan Frazier during the December 22 stabbing spree. He was also subsequently convicted again following further proceedings involving the Buffalo killings.
Although Christopher became the principal suspect identified in accounts of Barnes's killing and Barnes is routinely included among the fatal victims attributed to Christopher, the documented prosecutions that produced Christopher's convictions centered on other victims. Available accounts do not show a separate Rochester trial or conviction specifically for murdering Barnes. As a result, the legal record is more precise than later descriptions of Christopher's overall killing spree: he was arrested, prosecuted and convicted for other murders and attacks connected to the same period, while Barnes's December 30 death remained one of the killings investigators and later case histories attributed to him without a separate conviction for that homicide. Christopher remained imprisoned until his death in 1993.
