In December 1991, the bodies of two women were found in abandoned buildings in Detroit and neighboring Highland Park. They had been lured in with crack cocaine, strangled, and left for someone to find. When more bodies started appearing, police in both districts realized a predator was roaming their streets. The community was livid.
They wanted it solved now. We didn’t have a clue how to get to the suspect yet. One woman was sure she had survived an attack by the killer—a man she knew as Tony. But her claims were ignored.
The police filed a report and nothing came of it. They basically just told her, “Go home. ” Everybody knew her. Go home, darling.
With every month that passed, the body count rose. Until one officer finally took Darlene’s claims seriously and drove her out onto the streets to look for her attacker. She started hyperventilating. I grabbed her and physically shook her.
“What’s wrong, darling? What’s wrong? ”
She said, “That’s him. That’s Tony.
”
When the truth finally emerged, Benjamin Atkins would be unmasked as one of the world’s most evil killers. In 1994, a case that had horrified the city of Detroit concluded with 24-year-old Benjamin Atkins being locked away for life. But when the killings began three years earlier, they had gone largely unnoticed. The victims were known prostitutes and drug addicts—they were just thought of as typical homicides happening in the city at the time.
Finding a deceased sex worker was not at all unusual in Detroit. When the community started demanding answers, four law enforcement agencies came together to catch the killer. Atkins had the whole city paralyzed with fear. Women were genuinely afraid to go out at night on their own, particularly in the Highland Park area.
FBI profilers stated that he killed more people in less time than Jack the Ripper. This killer’s story begins in Ohio on August 26th, 1968. Benjamin Atkins had what you could describe as a catastrophic childhood. He was the younger of two brothers, and by 1970, his father had disappeared.
His mother, Judy, was on her own with two very young boys. She moved to Detroit where her mom was living, but she was largely absent through Benjamin’s childhood. She was addicted to heroin and doing prostitution. She simply couldn’t cope.
It wasn’t long before Benjamin was put into care. He and his brother were shuttled from one foster home to another, eventually winding up in a boy’s home where he was physically and sexually abused on a regular basis. In 1980, at age 11, Atkins was discharged from the care system and returned to his mother. But nothing had changed.
He watched her have sex with various men. The boys were left to their own devices, and that’s when Benjamin, as a teenager, started hustling on the street, selling himself to men. From there, he got into drugs—crack cocaine, specifically. It was an escape from the horrors of the life he was leading.
In the 1980s, Detroit was a city in decline. Street sales of crack and heroin were rampant. The city was overwhelmed with the narcotics trade. By the time Atkins was an adult, he was homeless off and on, sometimes staying with his brother, sometimes sleeping in abandoned buildings.
That’s when the crimes began. Atkins was methodical. He followed the same formula. He’d meet a female—maybe someone he’d seen around Woodward Avenue in Highland Park.
He’d talk to her, engage her in conversation. “Hey, I’ve got something to smoke. Do you have a pipe? ” That was the question he asked the one known survivor, Darlene.
That’s how he lured her off to a dark corner and tried to kill her. Darlene was a mom and a wife in Highland Park. She had boys. In October 1991, her youngest son, Rashard Green, was 12 years old.
Not enough time for the words to put in about my mother. Nothing she wouldn’t do for her family, especially her kids. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for us. Alongside caring for her family, however, 34-year-old Darlene struggled with drug addiction.
She was known around the area—part of the community. She’d spent time on the street, spent time doing prostitution. But even when she ventured off into different things, she would always make her way back to see if nobody else got me or her baby. I used to sit in my front room window and look out, looking for my mother to come walking up at any moment.
Some days I wouldn’t go to sleep, just waking up looking for her. I would get on my bike and ride through the neighborhood looking for my mother. That’s my mama. Darlene had seen Atkins on Woodward Avenue and knew him as Tony—his street name.
One night, early morning hours, around 3 or 4, Darlene encountered Tony. He asked, “Do you have a pipe? You want to go smoke somewhere? ” There was nothing unusual about that at all.
Highland Park had been a prosperous community, but it had gone downhill quickly, reflecting the collapse of Detroit’s economy. Most of the buildings on the southern Woodward corridor were abandoned—hundreds, if not thousands, of houses. They went to the outside of an abandoned restaurant. Tony said something about it being windy, let’s go inside.
Once inside, she reaches for the pipe, and all of a sudden he grabs her and uses the coat she’s wearing to pin her arms down so she can’t move. He attacked her. He raped her. But then he attacked her again.
At that point, she started screaming. She realized her life was in danger, and she was fighting him. She managed to hit him hard enough to give herself a moment to run outside. She’s yelling, screaming, “Help!
Help! Rape! ” There was actually someone nearby. He heard Darlene screaming.
That was enough to make Atkins run away. Darlene was embarrassed. She didn’t want to tell anybody about the attack. She simply went home.
Rashard remembers his mother arriving home that night. She just hugged me all night, sat right there with me. “I just love you so much. ” And I knew something was wrong.
I’m just asking, “Mama, what’s wrong? ” Once she did finally go to sleep, I had to go to school in the morning. I got myself together, went to school, came back, and she was still here. Normally she would be gone.
That night wasn’t the last time Darlene would meet her attacker. She saw him at a crack house not too long after. She said, “Tony, why did you do that to me? ” He said, “I don’t want to talk about it.
”
She didn’t go to police because, truthfully, women in her situation get attacked all the time. She kept the story to herself. I don’t think it’s surprising at all that Darlene didn’t report it. Look at the world she was living in.
I fully expect that she didn’t think anyone would believe her or see her as important enough to investigate. Benjamin Atkins had got away with assaulting a vulnerable young mother. But he wasn’t about to stop there. The next time, his attack would end in murder.
December 14th, 1991, Debbie Friday was discovered in Highland Park. She was probably only killed the day before. Later that month, Bertha Mason was discovered by Detroit police. At the time, we were dealing with not as many officers as we should have had on the street.
We weren’t getting properly funded. We had laid off 10 police officers. It was not good conditions to be catching a violent, fast-moving killer. Both victims were sex workers, known to police.
Just a few days later, at the start of the new year, the body count continued to rise. On January 3rd, a demolition company worker saw something over by a chainlink fence. Almost thought it was a mannequin at first. It was the body of a woman—Patricia Canon George.
With the discovery of a third body, the media started asking questions. A writer for the Detroit News asked to speak with me. He was asking, “What information do you have on the serial killers? ” We didn’t use that term at the time.
We used “multiple homicides. ” The Detroit Police Department homicide division said there was no such thing occurring in their community. We knew that wasn’t true. Usually there’s cooperation between police agencies.
Our officers from Highland Park went to Detroit and got brushed off. There was no communication, which made it extremely difficult. Only a few weeks later, police were called to yet another crime scene. Late in January 1992, Vicki True Love was discovered at an abandoned nursing home along Woodward Avenue.
That’s four women—three in Detroit, one in Highland Park. Detroit had no choice but to think, okay, maybe it’s the same person doing this. Same MO. Same victim type.
Maybe we have a serial killer. All four victims had cracked cocaine in their systems and all had been manually strangled. Some of the bodies had been there for several weeks. The crime scenes were yielding some clues.
Used condoms were found near some of the bodies. At one location, they got a palm print. Then came the discovery at the Monterey Motel in February 1992 that blew the case wide open. The motel was in Highland Park on the Woodward corridor.
It had a good past, but like Detroit itself, it had begun to decay and had become a home for vagrants, often used by sex workers. On February 17th, a man searching for scrap material made a gruesome discovery. He goes into the bathroom of one of the empty rooms and sees what appears to be a body part. He realizes, okay, wow, this is a dead woman.
He runs out and gets police. Highland Park public safety officers arrived and made the decision to check the rest of the motel. There was trash everywhere—rubble, wrappers from food and cigarettes, liquor bottles. They go through each room, and lo and behold, they find two other females in two other rooms.
All three women had been left there at different times. DNA wasn’t a big thing in the early ’90s. We didn’t have a DNA database. Most were identified by their fingerprints.
Two of the three were identified as Valerie Chalk and Oneita Hardy. The identity of the third body would remain a mystery for many years. When they found three at once, all killed in the same fashion, they realized it had to be one person. They linked it together with the other bodies being found, and they knew they needed assistance.
Michigan State Police profiler David Msy was called in to help. Profiling is something we can provide detectives who may never have investigated a serial killer. I always felt he was in that area specifically because he was comfortable there. I thought maybe somebody else was coming in from the suburbs, but I never felt that to be true.
I thought he was in there. He didn’t stand out. He didn’t draw any attention to himself. That’s how he was able to operate for so long and do so much damage.
Seven bodies had now been discovered. Women were terrified to go out after dark. The killer was far from finished. Usually, when you start looking at a murder, the first thing you think about is motivation.
If there’s no relationship, where do you even start? That’s why serial killers are difficult to catch—that complete lack of relationship. This could be literally anybody. At the time it was chaos.
We were going around asking informants for leads. A lot of people gave us names. We had girlfriends reporting their boyfriends, wives reporting their husbands. None of it was credible.
There was a lot of fear. Residents in Highland Park worried about their children walking to school, worried about just taking a walk anywhere in the city. The streets were barren. As soon as the streetlights came on, you could walk from one end to the next and probably not pass two people.
As the body count grew, so did the interest from the media. It worked the community up into a frenzy. They wanted it done right now. Why haven’t we solved this?
We’re finding bodies. What are you doing about this? When are you going to solve it? We didn’t have a clue of getting to the suspect yet.
Darlene Saunders, who’d survived an attack the year before by the man she knew as Tony, heard the news reports. She could feel in her heart that it was Tony who did this to those women. And so in March, she goes to police and she sits down and tells her story. They file a report, but nothing comes of it.
They looked at her as a drug addict, a prostitute. Who’s going to do something to you like this? They basically just told her, “Go home. ” Everybody knew her.
Go home, darling. She was overlooked. Treated like an object, just pushed to the side. Meanwhile, 43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown went out one night and didn’t return home.
She was a mom. She had kids at home. Her eldest daughter, Renee, was 23 when her mom went missing. My mom was a very innocent, creative, charismatic ball of energy.
She loved singing and drawing and writing and cooking, but she didn’t really have a lot of street sense. She trusted people probably a little bit too much. She had a home, but she’d had struggles in her adulthood with dependency on drugs. She struggled with addiction, but she was not a prostitute.
That was not her lifestyle. Renee was out of the country when she heard her mom was missing. Her nine and ten-year-old sisters still lived at home with their mom. We were living in Germany with the Air Force and had just had our first baby when we got the news that my mom was missing.
From that, I just kind of knew something was wrong because she missed my little sister’s birthday, and that’s something she would have never done. It was terrifying because I’m not only thinking about the fact that she’s missing—I’m thinking that I have two little siblings who are little girls. Where are they at? Who are they with?
On April 15th, 1992, yet another body was uncovered at an abandoned building in Highland Park. Public safety officer Craig Pulver Varenti was first on the scene. We found a female body. She was covered in debris.
Her clothes were half off. We realized it was probably a murder and a sexual assault at the same time. The body was soon identified as 43-year-old Vicky Marie Beasley Brown. It was the news her daughter had been dreading.
The thing that’s really tragic is that she just ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time and met up with the wrong person. That was not her life. That was not what she did. That wasn’t who she was.
It was probably the scariest, most helpless time in my life because I felt like there was nothing I was going to be able to say or do to make things right for those two little people who lost their mom. Highland Park Police knew they needed to start communicating with the Detroit Police Department if they were to have any hope of finding the killer. Finally, a meeting was set up, and a multi-agency task force was created. Michigan State Police, Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, and the Detroit Office of the FBI all sent officers in to help.
They realized that all the victims had similarities. They were all choked. They were all sexually assaulted. With the arrival of summer, the temperatures increased.
In June, police were alerted to a foul smell coming out of an abandoned commercial building on Woodward Avenue. The original call came in that there was a stench coming from the building and somebody believed it to be a body. I was dispatched there along with a couple command officers. As we got there and entered the building, there were flies everywhere.
It appeared the stench could just be from the garbage. The two command officers stood back at the door, and I said I’d go in and further investigate. As I walked in further, I looked down and saw a leg hanging out from beneath the garbage. The 10th body was identified as 40-year-old Joanne Ouk.
David My concluded that the killer was likely to be a black male who lived in the local area. He indicated that he could be a familiar face to some, if not all, of the victims. They gave us a perfect profile of what the killer would be, and they were dead on. I think the profile really helped the investigators know they’re on the right track, that they’re going to find him.
What police didn’t realize is they’d already taken and put aside a statement from a possible survivor of the killer they were so desperate to catch. In the summer of 1992, one of Darlene’s family members put pressure on the police to look at her evidence again. At that point, they finally found Darlene’s old police report from March and had her come back in. Finally, police were taking her seriously that this Tony could be the killer.
They decided, okay, we want to go out to Woodward Avenue and see if we can find this Tony guy who attacked Darlene. Darlene was assigned to an officer with the Michigan State Police named Royce. My job was to take Darlene out every night, hoping that we spotted the guy that had assaulted her. Officer Royce, he just kept saying that we going to get him.
My mother said they didn’t believe me. So why you believe me? I believe you. We going to get him.
Nighttime was Tony’s time, and Darlene knew that. It was always nighttime when they went out. Royce and Darlene would be out prowling around Woodward Avenue looking for Tony a few times a week. Darlene took him to all kinds of places, all kinds of little nooks and crannies on Woodward in the drug culture, in the street culture, that police had no idea even existed.
They did this for a few weeks before one night when Darlene finally spotted Tony. He was at a pay phone. Royce and Darlene were in a car, and Darlene started to react. She started to hyperventilate.
I thought she was sick. “What’s wrong with you? ” I grabbed her and physically shook her. “What’s wrong, darling?
What’s wrong? ”
She said, “That’s him. That’s Tony. ”
“Are you sure?
”
“Royce, that’s him. ”
He stops the car. He gets out. He approaches this guy.
“Are you Tony? ”
“Yeah. ”
“Do you know who I am? ”
“Yeah.
You’re the state trooper that’s been looking for me. ”
“Well, son, you got two choices. Either you can lay down on the ground or you can die. ” I drew my weapon.
With nowhere to run, the man lay on the ground, and the arrest was made. Darlene’s attacker, Tony, was in fact 24-year-old Benjamin Atkins. He knew he was going to get caught. It was the inevitable ending.
I don’t think he’d have stopped until he was stopped. I was glad that he was caught because I still didn’t understand what happened. My father just kept saying that my mother did a good thing. Darlene was very important to the case.
To be honest, I don’t think we would have got this solved if it wasn’t for Darlene. Police were certain they finally had their man. A killer responsible for at least 10 murders was in custody. But what he had to tell detectives would shock them to the core.
On August 20th, 1992, Benjamin Atkins was in police custody. About a day and a half after his arrest, they questioned him. At first, Atkins was denying everything. Nope, didn’t do it.
Don’t know these women. Have no idea what you’re talking about. They were getting nowhere. That’s the nature of an interview with somebody like him.
You can’t go in and get a confession in five minutes. It takes time. You have to learn about him, learn about why he may be the person that he is. They called in an officer with Detroit police named Ron Sanders, known to be a very good interrogator.
Sanders took an approach of redemption. Like, okay, you can’t save these women now, but you can help yourself. He was able to get Atkins to finally crack and confess. No remorse whatsoever.
I did this. I’m no guy that did that. On August 21st, 1992, Atkins started spilling the details of all 10 murders police were aware of. He also confessed to the assault on Darlene Saunders.
He would follow this formula of engaging the female in conversation, taking her to an abandoned house or commercial building—there were lots to choose from on Woodward. There they would start to smoke crack. Then things went sideways. Benjamin knew if he had drugs, these girls would follow him to the end of time.
You manipulate somebody to kill them. That’s evil. Almost always he would take a piece of their clothing or an object found nearby to bind them. They would pass out.
He would rape them. Sometimes they would come to. He would strangle them again. When he had strangled them to the point that he felt they were dead, he would check to make sure.
He’d press on their chest or stomach. Feel for a pulse. Check for breath. He followed all of these steps to make sure they were dead.
Then he would find some place to hide them. For a person to just willingly go out and kill people like that, I think that’s a new level of evil. Saunders wrote out every confession, had him sign it as soon as he finished, then went to the next one. We literally looked at each other like, “Whoa!
”
Atkins’ confessions didn’t end there. He had one more shock in store. He said, “I’m going to give you a body that you guys haven’t found. ” That right there hit me like a ton of bricks.
Out of nowhere, Atkins had confessed to an 11th murder—CC Waymer, the final person he killed at the end of May. Police went that day in August to discover her body in an empty garage in Highland Park. He said it was down in the basement. Now, this was a garage.
I walked that beat and I knew the exact place they were speaking of, but I never knew it had a basement. The crime scene was ideal. There was nothing else in the basement. Not one thing.
The temperature was cold enough that the body was in ideal condition. Police were keen to find out the motive behind Atkins’ crimes. He did talk about a hatred for prostitutes. Ron Sanders was picking up on a very troubled childhood—the mom who would take her little boys and put them in the back seat while she was in the front seat with a John.
When it comes to serial killers, quite often we see that same childhood experience—that they weren’t really loved like you should love a child. There were cops who worked this case who said that he was killing his mother over and over and over. They fit the characteristics of his mother. They were women who were working the streets.
They were women who were using drugs. They were women of color. They were varying ages, but they fit the type of his mom. I actually have no sympathy at all for Atkins and his troubled past.
People have even worse pasts than Atkins had, and they do not go on to hurt, much less kill, anyone. After Atkins was arrested, police tried to put together a timeframe. It was probably 6 to 7 months that these 11 murders happened. Which is very chilling.
There seemed to be a lot of media attention before Atkins was identified—when there was a killer out there who was unknown and we didn’t know who he was going to strike next. But by the time his trial came around in January 1994, Judge Kerwin couldn’t help but notice: where did the media go? Does anybody still care about this case? I think it has become a bit of a cliché.
This is just another serial killer killing sex workers. So why should we care about that? They were mothers. They were somebody other than a drug addict or a prostitute.
They were people. The prosecution went in with confessions Atkins made to all the crimes, DNA evidence against him, and a witness—a survivor who identified him as the person who attacked her. That was quite a lot to overcome for his defense attorney. He felt he might pursue an insanity defense and hired a psychiatrist to evaluate Atkins.
By this point, Atkins was telling police and psychiatrists that he was hearing voices, that he had alternate personalities in his head. The dominant one was named Tony. And Tony was the one who told him to do the crimes. But how much was pretense and how much was genuine?
I think that’s something only Benjamin Atkins knew. In my opinion, he was that one evil person that once he killed somebody, he enjoyed it. The man was a monster. Let’s just be truthful.
He was a monster. He didn’t care. Psychiatrists deemed Atkins fit to stand trial, and on January 10th, 1994, proceedings began at the Wayne County Circuit Court. Darlene Saunders, now clean from drugs, was called to testify.
Darlene Saunders was an extremely brave woman. When she testified at Atkins’ preliminary hearing, she stood up to a barrage of cross-examination designed to question her character and her reliability as a witness, but she fought her corner admirably. She showed the prosecutor how he tried to strangle her. It was like, you know, wow.
Amazing woman. There’s nothing that she couldn’t do. On April 14th, 1994, the jurors began their deliberations. It took them less than 3 days to reach a verdict.
Benjamin Atkins was found guilty on all 11 murder charges and the rape of Darlene Saunders. When the time came for sentencing and he had his chance to make a statement, he did not apologize to anyone. He put the emphasis on himself, what he had gone through. Benjamin Atkins received 11 life sentences for the murders, plus an additional life sentence for Darlene Saunders’ rape.
When Atkins was sentenced, it was a great relief to everyone from the victim families who was in the courtroom, to Darlene herself. When they announced the sentence for her own charges, for the rape and the attack that she had suffered, she yelled, “Praise you, Jesus. ”
On September 17th, 1997, after serving just 3 years of his life sentence, Benjamin Atkins died in prison. He was 29 years old.
He was serving out his sentences in one of the correctional facilities in Jackson, Michigan, and then he died of HIV/AIDS. So we have to wonder—did he get tested? Did he learn he had HIV? Was there any of that going on in his brain when these murders were happening?
We just don’t know. In 2023, over 30 years after the murders, the Jane Doe found at the Monterey Motel was finally identified using forensic genetic genealogy. At the request of her family, her name has not been publicly disclosed. It’s fantastic how well the scientific community has helped with police investigations.
It’s a very good thing for law enforcement and a very bad thing for criminals because it’s a little harder for them to get away with things these days. One of the problems with serial killers and this interest that we have in them is that we completely forget sometimes there are real people who were victims here who really really suffered. I would like my mom to be remembered as a loving mom who cared about her kids, but who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a gift to our family.
So many times we allow people’s decisions and their past to dictate and shape your future. Ultimately, you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you navigate it. Her life has created a legacy of love and purpose and identity and value in all of us that we share with the people that we come in contact with. Darlene Saunders continued to struggle with her addictions, but she’d been clean for a year when she passed away in 2002.
My mother did a lot of things not so nice and she did a lot of things that were nice. I’ll do anything to experience that again. You don’t know how important somebody is until you don’t have them anymore. Benjamin Atkins took the lives of 11 women.
He lured them to their deaths by preying on their vulnerabilities and made sure their final moments were filled with horror. Had it not been for Darlene Saunders, he may never have been revealed as one of the world’s most evil killers.
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