You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Geesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
The Crack City Strangler The Homicides of serial killer Benjamin Atkins offers a chilling, in depth account of the horrifying crimes committed by one of America's most notorious serial killers. Award winning journalists VR Bates delves into the twisted life of Benjamin Tony Atkins, whose reign of terror in Detroit spanned less than a year in the early nineteen nineties.
Known for targeting vulnerable women in Detroit's most dangerous neighborhoods, Atkins attacked at least twelve women, killing eleven along a mile and a half stretch of Woodward Avenue, one of the city's most iconic streets. Akins' crimes were brutal and relentless, leaving victims abandoned in the dark corners of the Cast
Corridor and Highland Park. Only when the lone survivor of his horrific spree came forward did law enforcement begin to connect the dots and ultimately capture the monster behind the killings through meticulous research. In this second book, in her murders in the Motor City series, Bates uncovers the complex web of motivation, abuse, and desperation that led Atkins to target sex workers, while also exploring the societal pressures and
systemic neglect that shaped his dark path. A poignant look at a killer psychology, Baits invites readers to understand how this troubled life could give rise to such monstrous behavior. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Crack City Strangler, The Homicides of serial killer Benjamin Atkins, with my special guest, journalist and author br Baits. Welcome to the program. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, bur Baits.
Thank you for having me back.
On Congratulations on this latest book, The Crack City Strangler.
Yes, yes, thank you. It's been a labor of love in some ways and I'm glad to see it released.
Now. First question, how did you come to be involved in this book project? Tell us about the genesis of this book.
This book really followed from the first book I did, and the Murders and the Motor City series. I researched the case of John Eric Armstrong for the first book, The Baby Doll serial Killer, and that really came from meeting one of the people who had worked the case back in the day, back in the nineteen nineties early two thousands, doctor Jerald Cliff. He had always thought that the case would make a good book project. So we have a mutual friend who introduced us, and then the
collaboration went from there. And I enjoyed the research so much. I'm really a big follower of true crime on television, and so I really enjoyed this research because I felt like it returned me to my journalism, roots, to my newspaper roots, for one thing. But I just found it so fascinating. And so when I finished that book, I
wanted to work on another. And when you talk about Detroit serial killers, Armstrong is a big one, but this one, the subject of the second book is another well known Detroit cereal.
Give us the setting in nineteen ninety one, Detroit and Highland Park and the state of the city at that time. As you write in this book.
Well, Detroit has added its ups and downs. Detroit is doing great nowadays. If you go to the city, if you go to downtown, it's like a whole different city. I live there in the latter nineteen nineties, from nineteen ninety five to two thousand and two or so, and I saw a lot of changes in the downtown at that point. And that was a few years after this case took place. But at the time, Detroit was really
not doing well. If you went through downtown on a Sunday morning, like I often did, because living there, I'd get out and walk like early on the weekends, and it was like a ghost town. There was no one around. Definitely a lot of economic troubles, lot of economic depression, and so not a very pretty place.
You take us to a central figure in the story, and her name is Darlene Saunders, and she knew a person as Tony. She had known him for say, four years beforehand, but she knew him as Tony in the area around Woodward Avenue. So tell us a little bit about Darlene Saunders, how she ends up on the streets at this time. Tell us a little bit about Darlene Saunders.
Yeah, Darlene, she had a family, she had kids, she had been married, but she did have an addiction to drugs and she was very very honest about that later on after this case was being investigated, And so she spent a lot of time on the street. And there was one particular night that she was out walking and she would go to and fro here and there, and yeah, she knew this guy named Tony. She had seen him
around a lot. They even smoked together before, and they went to some of the same crack houses to make their purchases. And so there was one night that she saw him and he said, Hey, I've got something to smoke, you want to go smoke? And it was a night like any other night. There was nothing unusual about it. And there was nothing about Tony that gave Darlene any feeling like there was any danger. This was just a guy that she saw around that everybody seemed to know.
He was part of the landscape of Woodward Avenue in Detroit. And this is where the story takes place. And so they went together to an abandoned structure. It actually used to be a Howard Johnson's restaurant. It was right next to a motel called the Monterey, which was very well known in the area and was quite the hotel back in the day, maybe the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties. It was a great place and a lot of people came
to stay there. But over time it I think the story was it reverted to the city for back taxes or unpaid utility, something to that effect. It became abandoned, it changed ownership, and somebody tried to make a homeless shelter out of it at one time and that didn't fly.
But it was an empty structure. And so it was sitting there on Woodward Avenue, which is essentially Detroit's main street and Highland Park's main street, and so sitting there right in the center of town, and there was a Howard Johnson's restaurant also abandoned as part of it, on the same property, and so Darlene and Tony went over and they were sitting outside, like right probably near the entrance of the restaurant, and they were going to smoke,
but Tony suggested, you know, it's a little breezy out here, let's go inside. And so they went inside, and that's really when things went sideway. He had other things on his mind than getting high, and so he started to assault Darlene. She tried to fight him off. He actually raped her, and then at one point in the scuffle, he was trying to drag her deeper into the building, like down to the basement, and she knew that that was really bad news, and so she fought him off
even more. She was able to, I guess, knock him off his feet, kick him or whatever to get him off his feet so that she could get a few steps out the door. And at that point she's yelling and screaming, and someone nearby heard her, and that man yelled back, Hey, where are you at? I hear you? Where you at? And Atkins was coming out after her. He was right behind her out the door of this restaurant, and then he heard the other voice, and so it was enough to make him run off. And that's what
really saved Darlene's life. Well, a combination of things, but that certainly helped immensely in ending the assault and saving her life.
Now, you're right, does she report this incident to police? And if not, why not?
Yeah, she thought about it, but when you are on the street, and she was admittedly not just doing drugs on the street, but she was working prostitution, and so she was trying to get extra money. She was trying to buy drugs. She's part of that culture, and a lot of females who are in that culture will tell you that going to the police really doesn't help things for them. Oftentimes the police do not believe them, and oftentimes they won't really investigate anything even if they do
believe the story. So she considered it, but she let it go and she did not report it at that time. This is in the fall nineteen ninety one, and she would see Tony around town still. She even ran into him at a crackhouse not long after that, and she asked him. He was standing at the door of this crack house and she was about to go in, and he was holding the door for her to go in, and she said, Tony, why did you do that? And
he said, I don't want to talk about it. And it was such an eerie, chilling encounter, but it did not do anything to help how she felt about being assaulted by him. So as time went on, she did decide to make a report to police. She thought about it and thought about it, and then of course as the case progressed, it was in the news. And that's really what drove her to the police in March to
file a report. Is when people realize that police realized there was a serial killer in Detroit and Highland Park and three women were found on the same day at the Monterey Motel. And so at that point Darlene is like, I think that could be Tony. So she went to the police in March, but unfortunately, they took a report, they listened to her, they logged it, but then nothing
came of it. It was basically just a dead report until months later when some phone calls and some more conversations finally caused police to bring her into the station and really hear her story. So that's said because that could have if it was better investigated at the time, it could have saved some lives.
Well, let's go back now, because you now introduce some of the characters that go missing and encounter this mysterious Tony person. Patricia Cannon George last seen by her family around Thanksgiving November twenty eighth, nineteen ninety one. She was one of eight siblings and she went by the name pat You provide the account of this serial killer talking about how he lured this woman, Tricia Cannon George to her death. Tell us about some of the things the
ruse he uses. We talked about Darlene Saunders. What was the ruse according to the serial killer to lure Patricia Cannon George to her death?
It was all about drugs. Every one of these women who he encountered, who he assaulted, they were all working prostitution and they were all doing drugs. They were all basically addicted to drugs. And for a lot of these women living at risk on the street, that is what puts them out on the street is an addiction to drugs, and so they're trying to get money to get their drugs. And so, just like with Darlene, it's just really casual. Hey, you know, I got something to smoke. Let's go smoke.
Let's go party. Sometimes it was an invitation to have sex, but it was always involving drugs. It was all like, I've got this, I know you want to smoke some so let's go. Let's go smoke. So that's the way it was with Patricia Cannon George as well, and then things escalated from there.
You introduced Valerie Brown, Chalk again. Her family reported her missing at some point. Tell us about Valerie Brown Chalk and her family's search for her.
Yeah, she was one that her family. You know, I've heard prostitutes called the missing missing, Like when a female who's working doing sex work on the street comes up missing, she's the missing missing And I heard that on a true crime TV special one time, and really it addresses the idea that before she ever really disappears, she's missing from her family too. And that's how a lot of these family members feel about their loved one who's on
the street, is that, Okay, I never see her. And you know, a lot of the time when the female does, like if something like this does happen, they don't even realize it for a while. The police go to question and them it's like, okay, I last saw her on the seventh or wasn't the tenth, And you know, it's really hard to even pinpoint when she actually disappeared, which is very sad. But for Valerie Brown Chalk, her family intensely missed her and knew right away when she was gone.
She was very much loved. She had grown up in a good family, a nuclear family. She went to church. She sang in the choir. She had a beautiful voice, her son told me. And she had kids, and so she was definitely missing that her family when she came up missing. This was the fall nineteen ninety one too. She probably is the second person killed by Tony, the third or fourth person attacked, depending on how you count it.
When she came up missing, it was also like late November early December, and they put up flyers all over town. They made a big deal out of it. And then later on in the case when women started being found and unidentified, because these females do not exactly carry a driver's license and generally they have to be identified. Later, when these females started being found, Valerie's family came to the police station. You know, I want to know if this might be Valerie, and so her prints were run
a number of times to try to id her. But it wasn't until several weeks later when she actually was found in id positively.
Well, let's explain before we introduced another victim, Vicky and Truelove. But let's explain how the bodies were discovered at the Monterey Hotel.
There was it seemed to be a familiar refrain in this case that okay, all of the women involved in this case were found in abandoned structure, abandoned houses or buildings of some kind, and often they were found because someone went in looking for something to fix the toilet at their house, or look, there were scrappers. They basically were scrappers going into these buildings, and that tended to
be often how these women were found. And that was the case with the Monterey Motel, is that someone went into the motel. It was well known to be abandoned and it was used quite a lot actually, because there was just trash everywhere all through the motel, every room. This was a two story motel with like two wings or two buildings, I guess you would say, and it had quite a few rooms in it and they were all trashed, and people were coming and going all the time to do drugs and to have sex or to
stay the night. Homeless people slept there. In fact, Tony slept there quite a few times. So a scrapper came in and was looking for parts and went into the bathroom of one of the rooms and saw what looked like a part of a human being, and so ran out, got the police the police were called. Highland Park Public Safety responded to the call and it was in the afternoon on February seventeenth and nineteen ninety two, and so they arrived and you know, they started processing the scene.
They called in their evidence text, yes, we do have a dead body here, and then they realized, you know, maybe we should look around in the motel. And so sure enough they did a sweep of the motel and they found two other females in two other rooms, again in the bathroom. All three women left in the shower stuff of the bathroom of a room, but at different times. It was pretty clear they were killed at different times,
but they were fairly decomposed. And so that really blew this case wide open because a few other females had been found up to that point, a couple other There was two people found in December, there was one or two I think two in January. So two in December, two in January, and then in February. They had to admit, okay, we've got a serial killer here, because this is the same mo this is the same demographic of female victim,
same victimology every time. And the case crossed between Detroit and Highland Park and then Detroit and Highland Park really realized they had been working on the same case for a couple months now. So, yeah, that was the Monterey Motel. It was a big, a big event.
In this case, you've met the mo but we haven't talked about that. In that case, there is very very similar similarities in as far as how the bodies were found, how the victims were found. They were bound behind their back, but he also put one of their socks most times in their mouth, then secured that sock as a gag with either torn shirt or sweater material that he have or he'd find, and placed that around her head to secure that gag. Also, they were strangled affixiation through strangulation
and so. But what they found in many of these scenes was initially frustrating them was that there was a lot of evidence among potential debris or so there was a lot that they had to sort through. They didn't know what was relevant evidence in those crime scenes, but they had all those similar characteristics which once they did put their head together. And you do write about the again constant theme I think that police don't cooperate between jurisdictions.
So tell us about the Highland Park Public Safety and also the Detroit Police Department. And also how this Paul Lindsay from the FBI gets involved in this case.
M Highland Park Public Safety. The Highland Park had its own struggles over the years, its own financial difficulties. One time it was the headquarters of Chrysler, and Henry Ford built a big plant there that produced the Model T. So it grew up with the auto industry and it flourished through the thirties, forties, fifties, but then Chrysler left. Later Henry Ford shut that plant down, and so it came down when the auto industry left too, and so
Highland Park was definitely financially struggling. And their fire and safety at that point had been combined into one department. And it wasn't always that way. They used to have separate police and fire departments, but at that time, in nineteen ninety one and nineteen ninety two, it was a combined department and it had oh gosh, I think that I spoke with John Maddox, who was the director of Highland Park Public Safety at the time, and I think what he told me is they had ninety two people,
ninety two staff members. But when they got a murder. It was big. They were a small town and it in some ways it felt like a small town. Darling's son Rashat, even told me that that, yeah, it was like a small town, like everybody kind of knew everybody else. And when you're from Highland Park, it is more of
a small town feel. And this town is only is only about three or so square miles and it's centered right on Woodward Avenue, which also runs right up through the center of Detroit, and Highland Park is what they call an enclave that is completely surrounded by the city of Detroit, so it's a city within a city. But the Highland Park Public Safety they first had found the body of Debbie Friday in mid December nineteen ninety one,
and for them that was a big thing. Detroit at that time, believe it or not, saw about six hundred in some homicides in the year nineteen ninety one. Highland Park, in contrast, would see about twenty nineteen or twenty homicides around that time nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety one to
nineteen ninety two, and so a dramatic difference. And so they investigated their mid December find quite strenuously, and then when it came to later December, and then in early January, there were a couple more victims, but they were found in Detroit, and so Detroit logged those crime scenes, but perhaps did not approach them in the same way because Detroit saw a lot of homicides. So after the start of nineteen ninety two, then these women start they keep
showing up. There was another one in January. As I mentioned, the two jurisdictions still don't realize that this is a single perp who has killed all of these females. But as you know, they do see the similarities. They see the sock in the mouth. That is not every time, but it's often he did that. He definitely gagged them, and he definitely bound their hands behind them, and he strangled them. And so they were seeing the similarities in
these cases. But Hyland Park really felt it first, and their guys got together in public safety, they're detectives that were investigating this case. They're like, you know, we got to go to Detroit and we got to have a meeting with them. We got to all sit down, we got to share notes, because this is the same guy. This has got to be the same guy, and so they arranged a meeting. About six or seven officers between Detroit and Highland Park both got together and they had
a meeting. But the inspector they called that job position and basically was the leadership of homicide at the time. His job title was inspector. He was part of the meeting, but he said, no, this is not a serial killer. This is not a serial killer. He pretty adamantly opposed that idea that I was a serial killer. And so
the Highland Park public safety officers got pretty frustrated. They came away from that meeting frustrated thinking, well, this didn't help at all because we're not sharing notes, we're not sharing knowledge, we're not any closer to finding this guy because they're not even willing to admit that as a serial killer. And so time went on and eventually, through some more conversations and some more maybe pressure than other agencies were brought in as women continued to be discovered.
Then we had the Michigan State Police being pulled in. We actually had the FBI, the Detroit office of the FBI get pulled in. Even the Wayne County Sheriff's department got pulled in. So Eventually, as this investigation went on in the ensuing months, it became an inner agency task force. And that's what really helped helped the investigation.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, you say there's a hunt for a serial killer. Police don't want to release that officially, and you say that one of the central characters in this from Highland Park, Jim Dobson, had to ask a reporter what a serial killer even was.
Oh, yeah, actually that was John Maddox, the director of public safety. Yeah that you know, serial killers, I guess had their heyday in the eighties and nineties. And there was a reporter at the Detroit News at the time. His name was Corey Williams, and he knew John Maddox over at Island Park Public Safety, and yeah, John was really not familiar with the term serial killer. I guess perhaps it was a relatively new term at that point
in the late eighties early nineties. And so this reporter from the News, I think he lent him a book that talked about serial killers, and he told him about the case of the Green River killer, which is pretty well known, and that helped him you know understand, Okay, this is a thing, this whole idea of a serial killer. Yeah, kind of funny.
Let's get to you went. Let's go back and let's talk about Darlene Saunders again. You say that she had this violent encounter with who she thought was a person named Tony. She saw him again a couple times. She even confronted him and said, why'd you do that to me? She finally calls police, makes a report. It's ignored, but at some point other people intervene and get police to listen to what she has to say. Tell us about that effort.
Yes, she knew someone who worked in a Highland Park public safety. She knew an officer named Donna, and then she had I don't know if it was her brother or Rashad. I talked to her son Rashad about this and he said, yeah, it was my uncle who called the station and said, you know, you people are finding these women and you had a police report in March on the guy that could be this killer, and you didn't even listen to Darlene when she told you about this.
And so yeah, this was a family member of Darlene who called the police and really advocated on her behalf and just really pressed into the police and said, you told her to go home. You said go home, Darleyne. We're not even listening to you. Just go home. Because I guess the police knew her. Rashad told me that the police had seen her around and they knew Darley. And Darlene actually had been a business owner in Highland
Park at one time with her husband. They owned a hardware store and so they were well known in the community for that too. But at the time she filled out a report in March, they just like shook their head and just sent her home. And so it took a couple people to advocate for her and tell the police, you really need to take this seriously. And so finally at that point, it was Jim Dobson that you had
mentioned before at Highland Park Public Safety. He was the officer in charge of this case, and he was the one who brought Darlene in and finally gave her the audience that she needed and that they needed as well to help break this case open.
So tell us about this journey that they take, because she thinks she can identify him and see him again, so somebody has to take her up on this offer and that person dresses up as a homeless person to aid in this Search'll tell us about this search for the serial killer.
Well, as I mentioned, this was an inner agency task force at this point, and this is August nineteen ninety two. Probably July is when they started involving Darlene in the investigation. Yeah, I think it was July when she came in and was able to talk with Jim Dobson about this. But it was a Michigan State trooper named Royce Alston, and so he was part of this task force. He was one of the officers that was going to help out
with this case. And they were pursuing different leads. They actually had a couple different suspects who had come and gone in the investigation. They had a couple people they were looking at pretty seriously that they thought looked good and then it just fizzled out. So they were pursuing other leads, and to them, Darlene was one of the leads that they were pursuing. What she was saying about this tony guy, Okay, you know, maybe we'll find this guy and talk to him and see if it goes anywhere.
So she was one of those leads, and Royce Elston was assigned to help that lead along. And that meant that the two of them grabbed an old plunker car and they drove around the Woodward Avenue area of Detroit where all of these women had turned up. Along Woodward Avenue, that was the hunting ground for Tony. And so they drove around because Darlene was, yeah, like you said, pretty
sure that she was going to see him again. She had seen him around a lot, and she had seen him before the attack, and she had seen him after the attack. So he was out there, and so she wanted to id him and so they rode around. They drove around, but then they also walked around. They were on foot part of the time too, and she took him into places that law enforcement were not they were
not even aware of. Crack houses and places of ill repute all over Woodward Avenue in the Cast Corridor, a lot of seedy joints, a lot of places that you wouldn't even know they were there from the outside. And you kind of have to know if you know, you know.
And so he kind of joked to me when I interviewed him that he said, well, there were a couple of places he went to that he had to wait a few days, but then after that he had the cops go in and raid the place because it's like, Okay, this is a new place we had never seen before. It was several weeks that he took Darlene out, and then finally one night in August, it bore fruit and she spotted Tony.
Very interesting. You have a very vivid scene in this book where they talk about they were driving and she was very very talkative, and then she spotted them, and he saw her hyperventilating and noticed that there was something dramatically wrong and she had indeed spotted this Tony.
Now, Darley, you will admit that, or she would admit she has passed since then in more recent years, but she would admit at the time that she was still even on drugs. Even at this point. She really did not get off the drugs until they quite literally locked her up after the arrest of the perp, just to make sure that they could have her for trial because she was so important for this case. They actually put
her under house arrest. I guess maybe you would say it wasn't until that point that she got off the drugs. So when she was with Royce Aalston. She was sometimes high and he had a handful on his hands, you know. He had a little bit of trouble sometimes getting her to focus because she was telling them all kinds of stories about her life on the street and it was
very lively. And so at the night that they finally that she finally spotted Tony and this was near the Cast Corridor, which Woodward kind of goes into this area of Detroit that's called the Cast Corridor where cass Avenue is, and she saw him, I think it was at a payphone,
and she reacted. She just reacted so like you said, hyperventilating, and that's how he described it to me, like she just all of a sudden, you know, started going a little bit crazy next to him in the car, and he's like, okay, Darlene, calmed down, calmed down, and she said, it's him. It's him. And he said, calm down, you have to focus. You have to be absolutely sure because I might have to kill this man, so you have to be sure. And so yeah, she finally said, over
and over, it's him, it's him, It's Tony. And so at that point he got out of the car and he drew his weapon and he walked up to him and he said Tony, and he looked at him and he said yes, and he said do you know who I am? And Tony said yes, and he said who am I? And Tony said, you're the state trooper has been looking for me so so much for that cover. You know, word gets around on the street, and so Royce Elston told him. He said you have two choices,
and he said, okay, what are my choices? And he said you could lay down or die? And Tony said, I'd choose to lay down and that was it. He called for backup, and well he had actually already called for backup. A backup arrived and they were able to make the arrest and bring the guy in, and as it turns out, it was Tony and it was the killer that they were looking for.
And that person is a person named Benjamin Atkins.
M hm. Yes, that was his real name, even though he had come on police radar a couple times previously and he had given different names. One time, he even gave his brother's name to police.
Yes, yeah, Benjamin Thomas Atkins, you say that right away. Police try to hide the arrest from the media. They just arrested him on a misdemeanor, but they were ready and set to question him. And you say that they set up a room and they had people observing, and then they put in somebody that was very skilled interrogation, you write, and that was a person named Ron Sanders from the Detroit Police Department.
Yes, they had set up they had this building that was converted from a school and the police, Detroit police were talking about now Detroit had used it now and then for these kind of purposes, maybe to question of suspect or for offices or whatever. And it was a location that the media did not know about. It was over it Brush Street in Detroit, and so they decided to use that location. They had been followed, these police officers who were working this case had been followed around
by the media. The TV news anchors or reporters were following them. They were going to the station and feeling the hood of their cars to see if they had just been out, they had just gotten back or whatever. And so even Jim Dobson, he had a really good friend who was a high profile TV reporter in Detroit, and he even asked her, It's like, why do you guys, why are you guys doing this stuff? You know, we're trying to We're trying to solve the case here, basically, like,
you know, why is the media so aggressive? And so they knew that the media really wanted to blow this wide open if there was a suspect in custody, and so they did keep it on the down low. They questioned him I think a day and a half or so after he was arrested, and they questioned him at this obscure location that nobody really know about knew about.
And then when they were finally able to draw the confessions out of him, that's when everything really went crazy in the media and everybody started talking about Benjamin Atkins, and the media went out and interviewed people he knew, people in the building where he sometimes lived with his brother, and people who knew him growing up, you know, anybody they could find to learn more about this mysterious character of Benjamin Atkins.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, it's very interesting with this Ron Sanders, he has a different interrogation technique. Many police officers will employ certain techniques to try to relate to the killer, saying, what about the families? You can sleep at night? This guy had a completely different approach. And also many officers would approach slowly and gradually and listen to the story even though they knew it was nonsense or ridiculous. Ron
Sanders had a different approach. Tell us about his different approach.
I think, what are the big differences? And the way that he explained it to me when I interviewed him. A lot of the time, when police are interrogating a suspect, especially a suspect that is possibly a killer, they might use this technique where they make the victim seem a little meaningless. Well, you know, they were just prostitutes. I
can understand you got upset, you know whatever. They try to sympathize with the suspect, almost take their side and try to assume the view that that suspect is taking of the victim. Well, that was not Ron Sanders. Ron Sanders went into that room where Atkins was sitting and went right at it with him. How'd you get those scratches? You got scratches on your arms? How'd you get them? Well? Atkins said, my boyfriend did that because he was claiming to be gay at the time, and that did not
go anywhere with police. That just kind of went up into the air and disappeared. But he claimed, Okay, my boyfriend did that. You know, things get a little rough. No, your boyfriend did not do that. That was the women you cam hold. And so he was very aggressive, went head on and just nailed them to the wall. Because from Ron Sanders' perspective, what the angle that he really was going to play was one of redemption. Okay, you did this. Now, don't worry about whether or not you
did this, because we know you did this. Worry about your own redemption. So that was the angle he was going for, is what's going to happen to you? You know, we already know you did it. So it was a very aggressive method that he used, and it did cause Atkins to break. At one point he was finally, okay, I did them all. I'll tell you about it. And he told about all eleven women, and he even talked about Darlene, the one survivor that we knew about at the time.
What's most shocking is how he explains his killing technique where he would choke them unconscious and then he would rape them. He would then they would they would be revived, he would rape them again, he would choke them out again, and eventually he would strangle them completely and then make sure the air was out of them. He would check their pulse, their heartbeat, and then he would make sure the air was all out of her body. So he did this over and over again. When these victims didn't he.
Yes, there was a certain torture element to what he was doing. Beyond the fact that he was killing these women and he was strangling them to kill them, there was a little bit of a torture element in that he did talk to police about the idea of choking her out, letting her pass out, then letting her wake up, and deliberately doing that. Sometimes a victim would just wake up like he was in the process. He often raped them after they passed out. That tended to be what
he did. And sometimes they would just start to wake up, and it wasn't like he was allowing them to wake up so much as they just started to wake up, because that does happen with strangulation. Unfortunately, that does happen to wear You can pass out and then wake up again, and this can happen repeatedly. So, but there were times when he deliberately as if to torture them, let them wake up, and then strangle them again and finally finished them off. But he was very methodical about when he
was going to leave them. He absolutely made sure that they were dead. And that was one thing that in contrast, John Eric Armstrong, the other Detroit serial I mentioned, did not do. He often left them alive and they later died. Sometimes he left them alive and they survived, and sometimes he thought they were dead, and sometimes I think he even thought they were alive and that was fine. He just left. So it's weird. That was a weird situation
with him psychologically. But for Atkins, he definitely made sure that they were dead. And he had read in a book. You know, there was a library, a very well known library right there on Avenue that I imagine he even wandered into because he largely was homeless and he did not have a whole lot of schooling. But he said he read in a book how to make sure a person is gone. In that you press, you make sure that all the airs out of their lungs, You check
their pulse, you listen for breathing. You know, you check for their breath out of their mouth, and so he would follow these steps every time to make absolutely sure that she was gone. She was dead. And he did tell police that he killed them because he did not want them going to the police to tell their story. And so that's interesting. It kind of makes you wonder, Okay, was he just out to rape and assault them to overpower them and he didn't really want to kill them.
I don't know. I tend to think he just really was going to kill them all along. But the way that he phrased it to the police is that he killed them so that they could not tell the police their story. But yes, he did absolutely make sure that they were dead.
The press plays it up finally with man confesses he's a serial killer. You say that initially or earlier on, when there was just a few bodies four or five, it wasn't even a blip on the radar, But now it's more than a blip on the radar, isn't it.
Yes, And it was. It made pretty big news. I want to say, it even made national news. But by the time he was tried, and even the verdict at his trial was I think maybe not even given as the attention that it probably should have had, unfortunately, but yeah, I mean to me, it's a big case. Eleven people in the span of about six to nine months. We know when his last murder was. That was CEC Weimer
on the last day of May nineteen ninety two. If you backtrack from there, the first one could have been November or December, so it really could have been a span of as little as six months that he killed eleven people, and that to me is pretty significant.
Yeah, you have the names Valerie Chalk, cc Weymer, Vicky Truelove, Bertha Mason, Patricia George, Juanita Hardy, an unknown woman you just call fifteen unfortunately, Debbie Friday, Joanne O'Rourke, Brenda Mitchell, Vicky Brown, and of course the survivor, Darlene Saunders.
Yes, and we do know about one more survivor. Her assault happened the December before Darlene, so December nineteen ninety and she has never told her story until now. Her assault was not quite as violent. Her assault didn't really
get physical like they had gone off. She knew Miss Tony again and they went off to smoke something, and he became a different person after he got high, and she realized, Okay, this is getting a little weird, and he was going to go for her throat and she was able to fight him off and basically talk her way out of that situation. In a nutshell, that's what
happened with Margie. But so we know even of an additional survivor, and it really makes you wonder how many other how many others there could have been to varying degrees, like how many other encounters Atkins had with females on Woodward Avenue where maybe it didn't get that violent, or it could have become that violent. I don't know. I guess we won't know.
Tell us about the planned prosecution and the defense for Benjamin Atkins.
The planned prosecution, I think the prosecuting attorney, Michael Reynolds, who has since passed on, I think he was very much in the lead up to trial anticipating an insanity defense. And indeed, the defense attorney, Jeffrey Edison did file emotion to allow for an insanity defense. So you know, when you have a guy that's idd by an assault survivor, and he actually had DNA evidence against him too from a couple of the scenes, and he's made all these confessions.
So it comes time to trial, what on earth are you going to do to defend this client? You're going to probably go for an insanity defense. And so Atkins was evaluated by four different psychologists or psych psychiatrists in the let me see. He was arrested in August nineteen ninety two. His trial began in January nineteen ninety four, so a year and a half or so, he was a valued evaluated by forty different professionals, and most of
them well. The first two were for the record's court in Detroit, the Detroit City Court system, and then one was for the prosecution to basically establish, okay, he's not insane, and then the defense also had a professional evaluate him to hopefully say, yes, he is insane, but they were not able to do that. The psychiatrist who was hired by the defense, doctor Bramski, did do a pretty good evaluation of Atkins and brought up lots and lots of issues, but would not go so far as to say that
he was insane. He did diagnose him with what he felt was a borderline personality disorder because at that point Atkins as things progressed with these evaluations, at Kins started to talk about hearing voices and started to imply or say that he was hearing voices and he had sort of alternate personalities who had egged him on to commit
these crimes. And so doctor Bramski for the defense, did talk about the voices that Atkins claimed to hear, and he did believe that Atkins was hearing something was believing that he was hearing these voices. But he diagnosed Atkins with what he called splitting, and so not split personality, but splitting, which is a little bit different. And what it came down to, though, is that Atkins was not determined to be insane, so that sort of defense was
just not going to work. But on the other side, Michael Reynolds had cueued up some people to testify for the prosecution who knew him. Atkins occasionally had a regular job. He worked at a pizza place, for instance, and so the prosecution had talked with some people who worked with him pizza place, and he seemed pretty normal. Never talked about hearing the voices there, you know, never talked about
gaeling people, never talked about any of that stuff. They were preparing to head that insanity thing off at the past, and of course they were successful with it.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now, what we haven't spoken about is that he talked to these psychiatrists, and psychiatrists were willing to testify to the damage done or the trauma done during his early background, his family background, and one of the most profound things that did elicit some sympathy from people when they look at this case is that at an early age, he and his brother were taken by their mother in a vehicle while she did perform sex acts on tricks on clients in the front seat of a car.
So he very well knew what their mother did, but also got to had to witness the sex acts as a young child.
That opens up a whole other area of this case that is a very very significant one, and that is at Kins's childhood, his upbringing. He had his brother was one year older, and they had all the same experiences growing up essentially, but they had a mom who was addicted to heroin and was working prostitution herself, and so yes,
when they were little boys. What Atkins told police right away when he was making those confessions, and he and Ron Sanders were talking about this idea of redemption, and he was even telling Ron Sanders, don't tell my mom about any of this, which, you know, it was obvious that there was a lot going on there with him and his mom. And he did tell Sanders at that point that, yeah, mom used to take us along, me
and my brother along. We'd be in the backseat and she would be in the front seat with a client. And so Atkins witnessed that as a very young child. And that was only part of the trauma that he suffered. He did suffer a great deal of trauma. So yes, those are things that came out in the psychological evaluations that were done for Atkins in his lead up to trial as well. And all of those factors are things that would just make you shake your head and think, Okay,
no wonder, I mean, no wonder. We talk about nature versus nurture. But it was a very troubled life that Atkins led before his arrest at a very young age of only twenty three years old. He was a young man, but he had seen a lot in his life, a lot of trauma.
Let's get to this very important factor, possibly potentially in this case, you right and near the end of this book that Atkins realized that he had HIV, and so the lawyer, his attorney said he had HIV and realized that at the time. Tell us how if that were true, that he knew he had HIV at that time, how that would factor into the motivation for these murders.
I really believe, I really believe that was in there somewhere that as far as his mindset. He died in nineteen ninety seven. And we all remember, well not all of us, but a lot of us were around back then when HIV and AIDS first hit the news. That I mean, I remember hearing about Rock Hudson and hearing Freddie Mercury, my beloved Freddie Mercury, who I loved very very much, these high profile cases, and it was known
when AIDS first came on the pop culture radar. I guess you'd say that if you were diagnosed as having HIV, your life expectancy back then, before the drugs and the technology that we have now, the advancements, the scientific advancements, your life expectancy back then was about ten years. That was the general idea. And so he died in nineteen ninety seven, so you would think that he had had
it for quite a few years. Now. I've heard at least one pop that worked the case that I was talking with him about this and he said, well, it is possible that he got it in prison and he just happened to die, and then you know, he died with it instead of of it. I guess you would say, yes, that's entirely possible. But I also remember back then you
could get an HIV test completely anonymously. You could be given a number to where anybody do the testing would never even know your name, So you could completely anonymously get an HIV test, and it was protected, very much protected information even back then. And so it's possible he
went to clinics from time to time. When he had his encounter with C. C. Weimer, he had to go get stitches at Detroit Receiving Hospital that morning the end of May June first, actually early morning hours, he got stitches. So he had to go to clinics and hospitals now and then, and he did get tested. There are medical records of his getting tests, and that kind of test would not be in these medical records necessarily, And so I really really in looking at all the case files.
I really have to believe that he knew that he had HIV before he started killing these women, and so the defense attorney, Jeffrey Edison, did remember knowing it at the time before he has tried, but it did not come out in any of this. Nowhere, in any of this at trial or anywhere any questioning by police or anything like that, did this ever come out. And it could have been fairly explosive, I think as far as mindset, again back to the mindset and possible motive, I don't know.
I am not a lawyer, so I shouldn't never even pretend to be a lawyer to know anything really about the law. But it just really makes me wonder what a factor it might have been. It was sort of in the case of Benjamin Atkins, it was sort of almost a footnote, Okay, nineteen ninety seven and this notorious serial killer has died behind bars, and oh he died with or of HIV. So it was kind of like that.
But I just have a feeling it was more important than that, But again that's just my personal feeling.
Very interesting, Darlene Saunders goes to court and testifies and it's a very very good witness, and you have that documented in this book, and the judge lauded her for her courage for coming forward and basically crack this case open with her courage by coming forward.
Yes, she was definitely key to the case. You do have to wonder at what point he would have been arrested without Darlene to actually to actually get them off the sidewalk that night in August. I don't know, because he did have a cooling off period after C. C. Weimer end of May. He did tell police later that he got off drugs at that point he was trying to clean things up, but I think he had done that a few times before and so he probably likely would have bounced back into it and then start of
killing again. So it is an interesting question. Okay, if there had not been a Darlene in the picture in this investigation, how much longer would this have gone on? So, yes, she was very important, and I hope that she realized that.
There was various monikers for this killer, like the Woodward Avenue Court or Woodward Corridor Killer. There's another couple ones that were bandied about. But the title of this book is the Crack City Strangler tell us how you came to that title, and yeah, just tell us a little bit about where that title came from.
The Crack City Strangler was something that he was actually called at the time. During the investigation before Atkins was arrested in August of that year, this was all over the media, like I said, and there was a paper in camp that did a very splashy center is a tabloid newspaper. They did a splashy color center spread story on the case, and in that story they dubbed him the Crack City Strangler. Now they're over there in Canada looking at Detroit, like, okay, crack City. I guess that's
what they were implying. Crack was Atkins's drug of choice. Crack is what he used to lure his victims, So I guess it possibly makes sense. At the time the papers were starting, the papers in Detroit were starting to call him the Woodward Corridor Killer or the Woodward Avenue Strangler or something to that effect. But yeah, Crack City Strangler, that was an interesting title for that paper in Canada to give him. And in that same story, I will note and this is crazy, and this also goes back
to the previous thing. I think you know where I'm going with this. That that newspaper, the writer of that story, this is summer nineteen ninety two, before he was identified, they speculated that this killer, this serial killer that was being hunted down, could possibly have HIV and maybe got it from someone on the street and it sent him on a bit of a rampage starting to kill people. So that was interesting that the paper speculated that.
They also you write that they also speculated that he was seeking revenge over treatment from his mother.
Ah, yes, yes, wow, yeah, absolutely.
I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about the Crack City strangler, the homicide of serial homicides of serial killer Benjamin Atkins. And this is Murders in the Mortar City Book two for those people that might want to take a look a further look at this. Do you have a website or do any social media? I know that you include your email at the end of this book.
I have the domain brbaits dot com. So if you go to brbaits dot com, there's links to the books, there's links to different things, interviews that I've done, including with yourself, and that kind of thing. A little bit more of what went into the books a little bit more of a description of the book. So yeah, brbaits dot Com. I'm also on Instagram. I think it's brbaits dot author or something to that effect. I do YouTube,
i do Pinterest a little bit too. I'm on Reddit, so I'm in different channels under br baits right.
Thank you so much, br Bates, The Crack City Strangler, The Homicides of serial killer Benjamin Atkins, Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great interview, and good night, Thank you, Thank you so much.