White male John Alexander, 66, was found stabbed to death on August 20, 2016, in the basement apartment he occupied on the 2500 block of West Moffat Street in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood.
Family remembered him as a stonemason with a generous streak and a free-spirited, bohemian bent, the kind of neighbor who took in people who needed a place to stay.
The discovery of his body came just sixteen months after his girlfriend, 58-year-old Bernadette Glomski, had been strangled in the
same apartment, a grim echo that rattled the family and the block.
Police said a male suspect fled into the night after the stabbing, and investigators worked the case as relatives mourned and tried to make sense of two killings in one small home.
In the days that followed, attention turned to a man already entangled with the household: John Skyblue Antone, a 29-year-old acquaintance who did odd jobs with Alexander and had been present around the couple before Glomski's death in April 2015.
Antone had just been arrested and charged in Glomski's case after prosecutors said new forensic results tied him to her killing, including DNA evidence and surveillance showing him using her Link card shortly after she died.
At the time reporters spoke with Alexander's family in late September 2016, Chicago police had identified Antone as the prime suspect in Alexander's homicide as well, though Alexander's case remained under investigation and no charges in his death had been announced.
Alexander's killing unfolded amid one of the most violent months Chicago had experienced in two decades, a backdrop that made the family's grief feel both intensely personal and hauntingly emblematic.
August 2016 closed with 90 murders citywide and hundreds more people shot, a surge that strained detectives and crime lab resources and left families across the city waiting on answers.
Against that citywide tally, the particulars of Alexander's life stood out: a 66-year-old man, male and aging but stubbornly rooted in the apartment where his companion had been slain, determined, his brothers said, to find her killer even as danger seemed to gather around his door.
Community remembrances would later note the stark details, age 66, fatally stabbed, Logan Square, while his relative's voiced frustration that the arrest in Glomski's case came only a day after Alexander was killed.
They wondered whether events might have unfolded differently had the first case advanced sooner, even as some family members expressed empathy for investigators working under heavy caseloads.
What remained, in the end, was a portrait of a 66-year-old man who loved Dylan and stonework, whose life intersected with people in need, and whose death, like his companions before him, left a small apartment on West Moffat carrying a weight far larger than its square footage.
