By Maurice Possley - Chicago Tribune

November 15, 1997

After nearly three hours of deliberation Friday, a Criminal Court jury voted the death penalty for Hubert Geralds Jr., convicted of strangling six women and linked to a seventh by his DNA.

The eight-woman, four-man jury rejected defense pleas to sentence Geralds, 33, to life in prison without parole. Three of the women jurors, including the forewoman, wept as the six verdicts of death were read. Judge Michael Toomin set Dec. 17 for the filing of post-trial motions.

Geralds, who dozed during much of the three-week trial and was portrayed as a mentally retarded man with the mind of an 8-year-old, sat impassively as the verdicts were read.

He joins 158 others on Death Row in Illinois. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977, eight inmates have been executed and two more are scheduled to die by lethal injection next week. Nine others were released after their convictions were set aside or vacated.

Geralds, a former South Sider, was convicted Wednesday of murdering six women from December 1994 to June 1995. He also was convicted of sexually assaulting one victim and of the attempted murder of a seventh woman who was choked unconscious and then awoke and managed to break free.

During the penalty hearing, Assistant State's Atty. Nick Ford and co-prosecutor Jeanne Bischoff presented evidence that Geralds' DNA was found in the body of a seventh woman who was strangled and dumped in a trash bin and that he admitted helping dispose of a murder victim's body in 1982 in Staten Island, N.Y., where he then lived.

The jury began deliberating Geralds' fate after a fiery closing argument from Ford, who said that sending the defendant to prison for life would be far too lenient.

"Life without parole is like sending Hubert Geralds to his room," Ford said. "A place he has been in and out of since he was 15 years old. . . . Endless days of playing basketball, watching TV, lifting weights and hanging out with his buddies. . . . It's like college without the classes."

Ford scoffed at the $28,000 spent on defense experts who assessed Geralds as a mentally retarded man who suffered from a sexual compulsion to have sex with women who were unconscious or asleep.

"For $28,000 I could take him to . . . my mechanic and for $28,000 he would say he needed a new carburetor," Ford declared.

He also ridiculed defense evidence that the crimes may have been the result of Geralds' smoking crack cocaine.

"That's not mitigation," he said. "What mitigation on this Earth is enough to spare this man? If he found a cure for cancer one day and the next day took a bullet for the president of the United States, it wouldn't be enough."

"I think it's time for Hubert Geralds to pay the price for what he did," Ford said. "And the price is a ticket to Death Row."

Defense lawyer Bernard Sarley urged the jury to spare Geralds' life.

"They were horrible crimes," he acknowledged, adding that, while the families of the victims "will never be the same, executing Hubert Geralds will not make them whole."

". . . He certainly deserves to be sent away for the rest of his life," Sarley said. "He certainly doesn't deserve to die."

Solving Riddle of Serial Killings

Doubts Remain Despite Arrest In Englewood

By Jim Casey and Mark Brown

Chicago Sun-Times

June 25, 1995

Sgt. Jack Ridges, a homicide investigator who works some of the deadliest neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side, keeps a database with information on 66 women who have died in the city since 1989.

What links the women is not necessarily the manner of their deaths, although all are at least suspected to be murder victims. More important is the manner in which they lived: abusing drugs and supporting their addiction by selling their bodies or stealing, sneaking off with men they may not even know.

Alleged serial killer Hubert Geralds Jr. is just the latest to be accused of preying on these women. His confession last week to six suffocation murders will make the streets safer for them, police say, but hardly safe.

Geralds himself as much as said so when questioned about whether he was involved in additional murders.

"He said, `Wait a minute. I didn't kill all these women. There's other people out there killing women,' " recounted Chief of Detectives Michael J. Malone.

Sgt. Ridges' collection of data makes the point.

Since the beginning of 1994, 11 others have been charged with killing nine women who fit the same profile in the same area of the South Side where Geralds allegedly operated. Another 13 cases in the same area are unsolved. That's 28 dead.

The abundance of similar crimes helps explain why police were so taken aback last week by the controversy that resulted from their arrest of Geralds, but also offers insight into the anger and fear of Englewood residents who just keep counting the bodies.

"I've never in my life resolved something like this and been criticized for it," Malone said while praising detectives. "We didn't miss anything. I'm telling you."

Many of the murders have been particularly difficult to solve because the bodies gave no apparent indication of foul play, police said. Geralds, who prosecutors say smothered his victims by covering their noses while pressing his thumb on their throats, left none of the marks usually associated with a strangling. Neither did Derrick Flewellen, who is accused of strangling two women in the same vicinity in the same time period, Malone said.

While police say they are still investigating whether Geralds is responsible for some of the 13 unsolved killings, they say they don't have any evidence that he is. In fact, they say they didn't have evidence that he committed the murders to which he confessed. Police are awaiting the results of DNA tests to see whether they can connect him to other victims.

In addition, Geralds must be eliminated as a suspect in many cases because he was in jail during most of the time he has lived here.

Geralds didn't even arrive in Chicago until he was paroled from a New York prison on June 19, 1992. He was charged with residential burglary in Chicago on Jan. 27, 1993, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Geralds was paroled on Oct. 29, 1994, said state Corrections Department spokesman Nic Howell.

Malone, who said police had no reason to believe there was a multiple murderer before the apprehension of Geralds, now says there is no evidence to suggest there's somebody else like him who is responsible for more than one of the 13. But he's not ruling it out.

Although police say they had no evidence of a serial killer, they knew they had a special problem in the Englewood area, tipped off in part by Ridges' database.

Malone said Ridges has been collecting information on the mur ders of female drug addicts since 1992, when he was assigned to assist Los Angeles police investigating the murder of a prostitute by a sailor who had lived here.

Los Angeles police wanted to know whether a connection might exist between the sailor and any unsolved homicides in Chicago.

Ridges, who could not be reached for comment, never found a link that would help the Los Angeles cops, but along the way, he came to the realization that there were a lot of unsolved cases that fit a pattern.

Ridges, who works in Area 1 where most of the killings have occurred, continued to follow the problem. As cases piled up, six Area 1 detectives were assigned part-time to help him track the problem.

Later, the same six detectives were assigned exclusively to work with Ridges on the female addict murders, switching to an 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, Malone said.

Chicago police, eager to show that they had taken the problem seriously, said that the six were assigned exclusively before the end of last year. But Lt. John Regan, commander of Area 1 Violent Crimes, who made the assignment, said it came in mid-May.

The break in the Geralds case came June 17, when his sister, Angela, told police that she believed he might have been involved in the death of her friend, Mary Blackman.

One of the detectives on the task force recognized Geralds' name as the person who in March had reported the murder of Joyce Wilson, 28, whose body was found in a truck on South Racine.

Last Sunday, Geralds confessed to the Blackman murder, police said. On Monday, they say he admitted killing Wilson, Rhonda King, Dorthea Withers and Millicent Jones. The next day, he added Alonda Tart to his list.

Police say many of the victims, weakened by ill health related to their drug addictions, hardly put up a fight with their attackers.

"The lifestyle makes these women very, very vulnerable," Malone said.

SEX: M RACE: B TYPE: T MOTIVE: Sex.

MO: Slayer of drug-addicted prostitutes.

DISPOSITION: Convicted Nov. 13, 1997.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers