Terry Blair was convicted in 2008 of murdering six women in Kansas City, Missouri, in the summer of 2004. He had been out of prison for only months. In 1982 he had killed Angela Monroe, his former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, who was pregnant, and he had served 21 years of a 25-year sentence before he was paroled.
The 2004 case turned on two kinds of evidence: DNA linking him to one of the women, and a series of anonymous 911 calls in which a man told dispatchers where to find bodies and said he had put them there. Jackson County Circuit Judge John R. O'Malley, hearing the case without a jury under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table, found that Blair was the caller and that the caller was the killer. He sentenced Blair to six consecutive terms of life without parole. Blair denied the killings. He died in custody in May 2024, at 62.
Blair grew up in Kansas City, the fourth of ten children, according to an Associated Press report written after his arrest in 2004. The same report described a family whose members had repeatedly appeared in criminal court. His mother shot and killed a man in 1978. She entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder, a plea in which a defendant does not admit guilt but accepts that the evidence would likely convict, and received five years' probation. The lawyer who represented her told the AP he could not recall the case, and the court file did not explain the light sentence.
One of his brothers was charged in 1979 in a murder-for-hire killing of a 21-year-old woman who was due to testify in a criminal case. He confessed, later recanted, and was executed by the State of Missouri in 1993. A half-brother was serving two life terms plus 240 years for a 1992 abduction and attack on a woman, the AP reported.
None of this was evidence against Terry Blair, and none of it was offered as such. It was part of the public picture that formed around him in September 2004, when Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said Blair was eligible for the death penalty because of his own earlier conviction.
That earlier conviction was for the 1982 murder of Angela Monroe. She was Blair's former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, and she was pregnant when she died. Witnesses told police at the time that Blair had been angry because she was working as a prostitute and he was not getting any of the money, according to a 2004 report in the Lawrence Journal-World.
He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He served 21 of them and was released on parole about seven months before his arrest in September 2004, the Associated Press reported in 2004. Reports written later describe him as having been on parole, or on probation, when he was arrested.
Years afterward, the 1982 killing surfaced again in court through a woman who had a personal connection to Blair in the summer of 2004. She testified at his 2008 trial that he had told her he had killed his first wife because she had become a prostitute, and that he would kill prostitutes one by one. News reports call Angela Monroe his former girlfriend, not his wife.
The six women whose deaths led to Blair's convictions were Sheliah McKinzie, 38; Anna Ewing, 42; Patricia Wilson Butler, 45; Carmen Hunt, 40; Claudette Juniel, 31; and Darci I. Williams, 25, who was from Kansas City. Court opinions spell two of the names differently, as Sheliah McKenzie and Patricia Wilson.
Darci Williams's mother had last seen her daughter on the afternoon of August 25, 2004, when she was dropped off in the city, according to the appeals court. When Blair was convicted, family members of the women hugged and cried in the courtroom gallery.
The police were careful in how they spoke about the women. Asked in September 2004 whether the victims had been engaged in criminal activity, Kansas City police Capt. Rich Lockhart said only that some had led "high-risk lifestyles" and would not elaborate. When the further charges were filed, news reports said at least six of the women named in the charges had faced drug charges and three had prostitution or solicitation convictions. Prosecutors later argued that Blair had set out to kill as many women who worked as prostitutes as he could.
The first of the six to be found was Anna Ewing, on July 14, 2004. Police did not connect her death to any others until September.
On September 2, 2004, police found the bodies of Patricia Wilson Butler and Sheliah McKinzie. Over the next two days three more bodies were found, all of them after anonymous calls to 911. Carmen Hunt was found on September 4, as were Darci Williams and Claudette Juniel. Police later said they would not have found Claudette Juniel without the caller's directions, according to the appeals court.
That weekend police linked Anna Ewing's death to the five newer ones. At a Sunday news conference Captain Lockhart said three of the women had been identified. He said he had lived in Kansas City for 14 years and could not recall anything "on this scale."
The next day police announced that they believed one person was responsible for all six deaths. Lockhart would not say what had led them to that view, and the Lawrence Journal-World reported that the killings had not yet been linked forensically. Police were working with the FBI on a profile of the killer, and autopsies were under way. Two of the women had still not been identified.
On September 8, Lockhart told the Fox News program "On the Record" that four of the six had been identified. Police had set up a hotline for anyone with a missing relative or friend, and Lockhart asked the anonymous caller to get back in touch the same way he had on the previous Friday and Saturday nights. Police had not heard from him since.
The calls became the center of the case. According to the Missouri Court of Appeals, they were made from a stolen T-Mobile phone that had been deactivated and had no SIM card. The first, on August 30, 2004, was a hang-up. The second came at about 10:39 p.m. on September 3, when the caller reported a body and told the dispatcher, "I put it there." He tied it to the two women found on September 2, saying he had put them where they were found as well. In the third call, at 6:51 p.m. on September 4, he directed police to two more bodies. Asked why he had killed the women, whom he described as prostitutes, he answered, "Because they are scum." He also said, "Yeah, and I have more." The calls stopped after the caller learned that police were trying to trace him, the court said.
Two kinds of evidence were later used to tie the calls to Blair. Police made test calls from the apartment of Blair's mother and the duplex of his sister and found that they connected through the same cell towers as the 911 calls. Background sounds on one call, a train horn and children playing, were consistent with the area around his sister's home. A linguistics professor described the caller as an urban, native English-speaking African American man of the lower-middle to upper working class.
On September 6, 2004, the woman who later testified about Blair's remarks flagged down police and told them what he had said to her. She also said he had been stalking her.
On September 10, Blair's photograph ran on a television newscast that described him as a person of interest. He was visiting a friend at the time; the friend did not let on that he recognized him and called police after Blair left. Blair came back and hid in the friend's garage, where police found him the same day. He was held at first on a parole violation. Early press reports said police wanted to question him but did not yet call him a suspect.
He waived his Miranda rights and was questioned for about seven hours. He denied knowing any of the victims and denied being at the places where they were found. He denied making the 911 calls and said he had spent September 3 and 4 helping his mother move out of her apartment and staying at his sister's duplex. He said he recognized Darci Williams and had seen her ten or eleven days before.
A television crew recorded part of the interrogation. The police did not record it themselves and never obtained the crew's footage, and the production company did not keep it. That gap later became a central issue on appeal.
Within days police had more. Laboratory analysis found that DNA on Sheliah McKinzie's body was Blair's, though he had told detectives he had never had contact with her. On the Tuesday after his arrest he was charged with one count of first-degree murder in her death, and police asked prosecutors to charge him in the other five deaths and in three cases of assault and rape involving women who had survived, the Associated Press reported. A sample taken in Anna Ewing's case later produced a DNA profile that included Blair as a possible contributor; the court record says that profile occurs in about one in 1,400 African Americans.
In December 2004 a Jackson County grand jury indicted him on eight counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and three counts of forcible rape. The murder counts covered the six women found in 2004 and two others: Nellia Harris, 33, and Sandra Reed, 47. The Lawrence Journal-World reported that Reed's body had been found on June 30, 2003, at a time when Blair was moving in and out of prison and halfway houses, and that Harris's body had been found on September 20. Prosecutor Mike Sanders called Blair "one of the most prolific alleged serial killers in this community's history."
Before the trial, Judge O'Malley criticized prosecutors for delays in handing evidence to the defense and voiced concern that police had not videotaped the seven-hour interrogation, the Associated Press reported.
The Harris and Reed murder counts were dismissed, as were the assault and rape counts. According to the appeals court, the dismissals were part of a pretrial agreement under which the State also agreed not to seek the death penalty. In return Blair gave up his right to a jury trial and agreed that a witness's earlier statement could be admitted if she could not be found to testify. The Associated Press reported that the counts involving the four women who survived were dropped because their facts differed from the six murders, and that the Harris and Reed counts were dismissed in October before the trial. Missouri Lawyers Media reported that the agreement on the death penalty and the jury was reached the month before the trial began.
Because of the dismissals, Blair was never tried for the deaths of Nellia Harris and Sandra Reed, or for the attacks on the women who survived, and he was never convicted of any of them.
The trial opened in March 2008 before Judge O'Malley, with no jury. Blair was 46. Prosecutor Michael Hunt told the court that the anonymous caller had made detailed 911 calls that led police to several of the bodies, that the caller had claimed responsibility and had explained why he killed the women, and that the caller was Blair.
Blair's lawyer, David Kenyon, argued that the case rested on two weak links. The first was the DNA on Sheliah McKinzie. Another man's DNA had also been found on her body, and Kenyon argued that if Blair's DNA had been left earlier than the other man's, Blair could not have been the person who killed her. "The question for the court is, what came first," he said. The second link was the 911 calls. Kenyon said a defense expert would dispute the prosecution's evidence that the calls had come from near the homes of Blair's mother and sister, and a linguistics expert would testify that the voice on the calls was not Blair's.
The medical examiner had been able to determine the cause of death for only one of the six women, Sheliah McKinzie, who showed signs of strangulation, Missouri Lawyers Media reported from the trial; the other five deaths were ruled homicides from the circumstances in which the bodies were found. The Associated Press reported after the verdict that two of the women had been strangled. Both sides agreed at trial that one person had killed all six women, the appeals court later noted, so the question for the judge was whether that person was Blair.
A medical examiner who had not performed three of the autopsies testified about them, under a stipulation agreed by the defense. Another witness identified Blair in court. Expert witnesses testified about the DNA evidence. A friend of Blair's testified that trains could be heard from his sister's duplex.
On March 27, 2008, Judge O'Malley read a 15-page order and found Blair guilty of all six counts of first-degree murder. He relied heavily on the 911 calls. "The 911 caller is the person who murdered at least five of the six women," he wrote. He found that remarks the caller made were "stunningly identical" to what Blair had said to the woman who later went to police. He found that the other man's trace did not carry much weight, because the DNA showed that Blair had lied about having had contact with Sheliah McKinzie. The judge acknowledged that the case involved conflicting expert testimony and, in his words, "small pieces of circumstantial evidence."
O'Malley also criticized the Kansas City Police Department. He faulted the department for letting film crews from "The First 48" accompany detectives, saying the cameras had contributed to mistakes, and he said sloppy police work had given the defense room to attack the evidence. Officers, he wrote, should "pursue the criminals instead of the cameras." A police spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.
Blair looked down at the table as the verdict was read. His lawyers left without speaking to reporters. In the gallery, Darci Williams's mother said "the truth will always survive over lies and evil," and that she had known from the start how the case would end.
On April 24, 2008, Judge O'Malley sentenced Blair to six consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, one for each of the women.
Blair appealed, arguing that the evidence was not enough to convict him, that the trial court had drawn conclusions about the DNA evidence that the record did not support, and that his statements to police should have been suppressed because the police had not recorded the interrogation. On August 18, 2009, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, affirmed. The opinion was written by Judge Zel Fischer of the Missouri Supreme Court, sitting as a special judge.
The court held that the record supported the trial judge's finding that Blair was the anonymous caller, and that the DNA was not the only evidence of guilt: his denial of ever knowing Sheliah McKinzie, his flight from police and the caller's admissions all supported the verdict. It held that expert testimony in the record supported the trial court's reasoning on the DNA. On the recording issue, it held that neither the Missouri nor the United States Constitution requires police to record custodial interrogations, noting that most state courts had reached the same view and that the question belonged to the legislature. Missouri Lawyers Weekly reported that it was the first time a Missouri court had addressed the question. Missouri had just enacted a law requiring such recordings, effective August 28, 2009, but the statute itself says that a failure to record is not a ground to exclude evidence.
In March 2010 Blair filed a motion for postconviction relief. Appointed counsel argued that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for agreeing to let one medical examiner testify about autopsies another had performed, for not objecting to a witness's in-court identification of him, and for advising him not to testify at the hearing on his motion to suppress. After an evidentiary hearing on February 10, 2011, the motion court denied relief on November 22, 2011, and the Court of Appeals affirmed on June 25, 2013.
Blair then filed a federal habeas corpus petition while held at Potosi Correctional Center. On November 3, 2014, U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple denied it, finding the state courts' rulings neither contrary to nor an unreasonable application of federal law, and declined to issue a certificate of appealability.
Blair died on May 11, 2024, while serving his sentences at Potosi Correctional Center. He was 62. According to the Missouri Department of Corrections, as reported by the Associated Press, he was found unresponsive in his cell early that Saturday and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. KCTV5 reported that he died at 1:18 a.m. at a hospital in Potosi, and KSHB 41 reported that he was pronounced dead at Washington County Hospital in Potosi. An autopsy was planned. No cause of death was released in the reports of his death.
Blair denied killing any of the six women from his arrest through his appeals. The convictions rest on a judge's findings from circumstantial evidence: the DNA on one woman, a possible DNA match on a second, the location and content of the 911 calls, a witness's account of what he had said to her, and his flight from police. The trial judge acknowledged the conflicting expert testimony, and every court that reviewed the case upheld the verdict.
The deaths of Nellia Harris and Sandra Reed were charged and then dismissed. Blair was never tried for them, and no court has found that he caused them. The same is true of the counts involving the four women who survived.
Reports of his death in 2024 did not all agree on his record. One Kansas City television report said he had been convicted in 2008 of murdering seven women and listed Angela Monroe among them. The 2008 verdict covered six women; his conviction for Angela Monroe's murder was a separate, earlier case.
The causes of most of the deaths were never determined. The medical examiner could not establish how most of the women died, and those deaths were ruled homicides from the circumstances in which the bodies were found.
1978: Blair's mother shoots and kills a man; she later enters an Alford plea to second-degree murder and receives probation.
1979: one of his brothers is charged in a murder-for-hire killing; he is executed by Missouri in 1993.
1982: Angela Monroe, Blair's former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, is killed while pregnant. Blair is convicted of her murder and sentenced to 25 years.
2004: having served 21 years of the sentence, Blair is on parole in Kansas City; in September the AP reports that he had been released seven months earlier.
July 14, 2004: Anna Ewing's body is found.
August 25, 2004: Darci Williams is last seen by her mother.
August 30, 2004: a hang-up 911 call is made from the stolen phone later used by the anonymous caller.
September 2, 2004: the bodies of Patricia Wilson Butler and Sheliah McKinzie are found.
September 3, 2004: about 10:39 p.m., the anonymous caller reports a body and says, "I put it there."
September 4, 2004: Carmen Hunt's body is found; at 6:51 p.m. the caller directs police to two more bodies, and those of Darci Williams and Claudette Juniel are found.
September 6, 2004: a woman who knew Blair tells police he had said he would kill prostitutes.
September 8, 2004: Capt. Rich Lockhart appeals on national television for the caller to make contact again.
September 10, 2004: Blair's photo airs as a person of interest; police find him hiding in a friend's garage. He is held on a parole violation and questioned for about seven hours.
September 2004: he is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Sheliah McKinzie.
December 2004: a grand jury indicts him on eight counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and three counts of forcible rape.
Before trial: the Harris and Reed murder counts and the assault and rape counts are dismissed under a pretrial agreement; the State drops the death penalty and Blair waives a jury.
March 2008: the bench trial opens before Judge John R. O'Malley.
March 27, 2008: Blair is found guilty of six counts of first-degree murder.
April 24, 2008: he is sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole.
August 18, 2009: the Missouri Court of Appeals affirms the convictions.
November 22, 2011: his postconviction motion is denied; the denial is affirmed on June 25, 2013.
November 3, 2014: a federal judge denies his habeas corpus petition.
May 11, 2024: Blair dies in custody at 62 after being taken from Potosi Correctional Center to a hospital in Potosi, Missouri.