On a late summer day, August 30, 2005, the body of 33-year-old Wanda Hall, a Black woman, was discovered in a vacant lot in Chicago, Illinois. Her life had been taken by strangulation, a violent end to a life about which few public details remain. The discovery of her body was not an isolated tragedy but one piece of a terrifying pattern of violence that haunted the city’s South and West Sides for nearly two decades.
Wanda’s death is believed to be the work of a suspected serial killer, or killers, often referred to as the Chicago Strangler.
The case is one of at least 51 unsolved homicides of women in Chicago that occurred between 2001 and 2018. This cluster of killings was identified by the Murder Accountability Project (MAP), a nonprofit organization that uses a computer algorithm to detect patterns in homicides. MAP’s analysis pointed to a potential serial killer preying on vulnerable women in the city. The victims were predominantly Black, and many, though not all, had histories of drug use or sex work. Their bodies were often left in desolate places: alleys, abandoned buildings, garbage cans, and vacant lots like the one where Wanda Hall was found.
The method of killing was chillingly consistent across the cases—strangulation or asphyxiation. In many instances, the women were partially or fully stripped of their clothing, and some were beaten or raped before they were killed. The geographic clustering of the crimes was also stark, with most victims found in just a few police districts in areas like Washington Park and Garfield Park, neighborhoods struggling with violent crime and poverty. This pattern suggested a predator who was intimately familiar with these parts of the city, able to operate and dispose of his victims without being caught.
For years, families of the victims and community activists voiced concerns that the murders were connected and that a serial killer was targeting women in their communities. They felt their pleas for justice were largely ignored, their loved ones forgotten because of their race and circumstances. The lack of attention to these cases stood in stark contrast to the media frenzy that often surrounds the deaths of white women. Activists like Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef took to the streets, holding signs that asked, "Who Killed Our Girls?" to draw attention to the string of unsolved slayings and demand accountability from law enforcement and city officials.
In response to growing public pressure and the findings presented by the Murder Accountability Project, the Chicago Police Department announced in 2019 that it would review the 51 cases. However, the department has consistently stated that it has not found definitive evidence to prove that a single serial killer is responsible for all, or even a majority, of the deaths. They suggest that the similarities in the cases could be coincidental, reflecting the tragic realities of street violence in certain neighborhoods. To date, only a handful of the cases on the list have been solved, and those have been attributed to different perpetrators.
The investigation into the death of Wanda Hall remains open but unsolved, entangled in the larger, complex web of the Chicago Strangler cases. With no arrests made and no suspects publicly identified in her murder, her case has gone cold. Her story, like those of the dozens of other women, represents a devastating loss for her family and a frustrating mystery for a city that has yet to find answers. The passage of time has not diminished the hope for justice, as advocates and the victims' families continue to fight to ensure that these women are not forgotten.
