Dellie Jones, a 33-year-old Black woman described as sweet and well-liked, was battling formidable demons in the summer of 2002. She struggled with a drug addiction that had cost her custody of her child and left her without a home, pushing her into sex work on the streets of Chicago to survive. Friends and even law enforcement officers saw the good in her, a glimpse of the person she was beneath the hardship.
One of those officers, Paul Olson of the Cook County Sheriff's vice unit, knew Dellie from his time patrolling the West Side. He arrested her for solicitation on August 10, 2002, less than a month before her death. She pleaded with him, crying, "Paul, I'm sick of going to jail. I'm dope sick, I lost my kid, and I don't have anywhere to live."
Instead of taking her to jail, Olson issued her a lesser city ticket and urged her to go to Genesis House, a rehabilitation center for women seeking to escape life on the streets. Dellie took his advice and found a sponsor there named Frazier, who recalled that "Everybody liked Dellie." She was known for her sweet nature, but the grip of her addiction was relentless. "It was just the drugs," Frazier said. "She couldn't stop using." One evening, against her sponsor's desperate pleas, Dellie decided to leave the relative safety of the center. "I begged Dellie not to leave that day," Frazier remembered. "She left and got killed that night."
On September 7, 2002, Dellie Jones was found dead in a garage on Chicago's West Side. She had been strangled. Her death was not an isolated tragedy but part of a terrifying and long-unrecognized pattern of violence against vulnerable women in the city. Her murder was one of the first in what would become a list of 51 unsolved strangulation and asphyxiation cases involving women in Chicago between 2001 and 2018. This cluster of killings has led to the theory of one or more serial killers, often dubbed the "Chicago Strangler."
The victims in this series of homicides were predominantly Black women, many of whom, like Dellie, were involved in sex work and struggled with drug use. Their bodies were often left in abandoned buildings, alleys, garbage cans, and parks on the city's South and West Sides. The method of death was consistently strangulation or asphyxiation. This pattern was identified by the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization that uses an algorithm to detect potential serial homicides.
Despite the clear pattern, the investigation into Dellie's murder appeared to stall before it ever began. Her sponsor, Frazier, said that police never visited Genesis House to ask questions or investigate Dellie's final days. It was a common complaint among the families of the victims, a sense that because of the women's transient lifestyles or involvement in street life, their cases were not given the priority they deserved. The Chicago Police Department has historically stated it has not found evidence to link the 51 murders to a single killer, though it agreed to review the cases following pressure from activists.
Dellie Jones's case, like the 50 others, remains unsolved. She is remembered not just as a statistic in a horrifying list of victims, but as a woman who was loved and who was fighting a difficult battle. Her death highlights a tragic reality for many women living on the margins of society, whose lives are often seen as disposable. The search for justice for Dellie and the many other women killed in a similar fashion continues, carried on by family members, activists, and organizations who refuse to let them be forgotten.
