Terry Anthony Blair was born in Kansas City, Missouri on September 16, 1961. His brother, Walter Blair Jr., was executed by the state of Missouri.
In May 1982, at twenty, he beat and strangled Angela Monroe, his former girlfriend and the mother of his two children. She was five months pregnant. Sources differ on the charge: some give first-degree murder and others second-degree. He was sentenced to twenty-five years, served twenty-one, and was paroled in 2003.
Within about a year of his release, women began to be found dead in the Prospect Avenue corridor east of downtown, an area known for drugs and prostitution. Six bodies were recovered in an eighteen-block stretch, on vacant lots, near derelict buildings and in a garage, between June and September 2004. The women were Sheliah McKinzie, thirty-eight; Anna Ewing, forty-two; Patricia Wilson Butler, forty-five; Carmen Hunt, forty; Claudette Juniel, thirty-one; and Darci Williams, twenty-five. Two had been strangled. The others were too badly decomposed for a cause of death to be established.
Somebody telephoned 911 to say where bodies could be found, and said the women were prostitutes and scum and that was why they had been killed. Prosecutors presented evidence at trial that the caller was Blair. His semen was found on Sheliah McKinzie's body, though he had told police he had never had contact with her.
He was arrested on September 14, 2004, while on parole for the 1982 murder.
He was charged with eight killings. Two were dismissed in October 2007, those of Nellia Harris, thirty-three, and Sandra Reed, forty-seven; Harris had died in 2003, which set her apart from the rest. Separate charges of three rapes and an assault, involving four women who survived, were also dropped, on the ground that the facts differed from the six murders.
He gave up his right to a jury in exchange for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty, and was tried by a judge. On March 27, 2008 he was found guilty of six counts of first-degree murder and one of first-degree assault. The defence had argued the case was circumstantial, and that semen on a victim showed he had had sex with her, not that he had killed her. He denied the killings throughout.
He was sentenced on April 24, 2008 to six consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole, with a further consecutive term for the assault.
He died at a hospital in Potosi, Missouri, at 1.18 in the morning on May 11, 2024, aged sixty-two, while serving the sentence at Potosi Correctional Center. An autopsy was planned and no cause was released.
The count here is seven, being the 1982 murder and the six of 2004. Murderpedia gives seven to nine, and investigators believed there were further victims who were never identified.