Bone Crusher. Linda Rosencrance
to feed her habit. That night she was walking near a local recreation center. It was around six in the evening. She was looking for drugs, when a white guy in a gray Chevy Blazer pulled up next to her. He was in his late thirties or early forties, tall with a slight beer belly. He had short blondish brown hair and grayish eyes. He hadn’t shaved for three or four days.
“I got about an ounce of cocaine,” he said. “Do you want to get high?”
That’s the only thing Teracita wanted to do, so she got in the guy’s truck, which was cluttered with tools. As she got in, she looked out the window and saw a man named Tarzie. She wasn’t sure if he saw her.
“Do you work construction?” she asked.
“I work on houses and do brickwork.”
Teracita didn’t have a good feeling about the guy, but her need to get high ultimately overpowered her sense of fear.
“Can you take me to meet some friends so I can tell then where I’m going to be?” she asked.
The guy refused and, instead, drove her back to his house. It was a brown-colored brick house with an unattached garage at the end of a long driveway. There was a lot of stuff in the driveway and in the garage. There was also a table in the driveway with miscellaneous items on it, and some potted plants on the porch.
“You moving?” Teracita asked.
“Nah, my mom is having a yard sale,” he said, adding that the house belonged to his mother.
They walked around to the rear of the house and went into the kitchen through the back door. Teracita noticed a large wooden table and chairs, and a square wooden clock hanging on the wall. As she looked around, she also saw some brand-new Barbie dolls still in their boxes.
“Go on down into the basement,” the man said, pointing to the door.
Teracita did as she was told, and a few seconds later, her host joined her. Even though it was dark, Teracita could see a big bed and a long wooden table, with a lava lamp on it, as well as a barbell and a space heater. Clothes, used condoms, vibrators, dildos, as well as pornographic books and magazines, littered the carpeted floor. There was also some aluminum foil on a plate under the bed, with what Teracita thought was crystal meth.
A couple seconds later, the man came downstairs, grabbed Teracita from behind, and put a knife to her throat.
“You’re under arrest,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re under arrest for prostitution. Get the fuck out of your clothes,” he said. “I’m going to kill you, like I killed the rest of the girls.”
Frightened, Teracita started taking off her clothes.
“Do what I say, and I’ll think about letting you live and see your son.”
Teracita had just given birth and she was still wearing a tampon. She pulled the tampon out and threw it on the floor. The man kicked it, and it went under the bed. He then pushed Teracita down on the bed, put on a condom, and raped her anally and vaginally for the next six or seven hours. He placed Ben Wa balls—three small marble-size metal balls used for sexual stimulation—in Teracita’s vagina and anus. And he pulled her hair back and stuffed socks in her mouth, to keep her from screaming. Unable to ejaculate, the man became increasingly frustrated. He removed his condom, but he still couldn’t have an orgasm.
Finally he told Teracita to put her clothes back on.
“You won’t get into another car, will you?” he asked. “I should take your ass down to the station and let them book you on prostitution.”
The guy walked her to his truck and drove her back where he had picked her up. As soon as she got out of the truck, Teracita took off running.
A couple weeks later, Teracita saw her attacker again. He was driving the same truck. He looked in her direction, but he apparently didn’t recognize her. Angry, Teracita picked up a bottle and threw it at the truck. The guy just kept on driving.
Teracita gave police the names of three other women who had survived similar incidents, one of whom was in the same prison.
A couple weeks later, police went back to the correctional facility to talk to Teracita again. They were trying to locate Jeannette, the woman Teracita had told them was in the facility with her. The detectives pulled out a photo of a woman named Jeannette Smith, who was in the Dwight Correctional Center, but Teracita said she wasn’t the right Jeannette. The Jeannette she knew was real short and had dark skin. Her nickname was “Nett,” and she lived near Starr Court.
According to Teracita, Jeannette had been picked up in Peoria by a man in a newer model blue or turquoise truck. Despite Teracita’s information, detectives were never able to find Jeannette.
Police then showed Teracita two photo lineups. The first lineup contained a picture of a man named Larry Bright, with long hair, and the second lineup included a photo of Larry, but with shorter hair.
The second Teracita saw Larry’s face, she pointed at the photo and said, “This is the guy. That’s him. I will never forget his face. That’s him. That’s him. But when he raped me, his hair wasn’t that long.”
When Teracita looked at the photo of Larry with shorter hair, she again recognized him. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the guy who raped me. That’s the guy I threw the bottle at. I’m positive it’s the same guy. His hair was longer in front like the other picture, but it was shorter on the sides. Not as short as this.”
The detectives asked Teracita if she had seen any Peoria newspapers while she was in jail, or if she had talked to her family about the deaths of the black women in Peoria. She said she hadn’t read any newspapers or talked to her family about the other women. In fact, she said she hadn’t even told her mother that she had been raped.
But she did tell her friend Tarzie.
Just after Christmas, Tarzie contacted the police to tell them what he knew about the night Teracita was assaulted. He said that sometime in the summer, he was near his house on West Kettelle Street, and he saw Teracita walking down the street. He also saw a gray or black Blazer in the area, but he didn’t see Teracita get in the truck. When he looked up, he saw the Blazer driving away, and Teracita was nowhere around. The next time he saw Teracita, she told him she had been raped by the guy in the Blazer. She told Tarzie she thought she knew the guy, and that’s why she got in his truck.
“She was crying and acting like something very bad happened,” Tarzie told police. “I don’t know anything else about what happened, because that’s all she told me.”
Around the same time they talked to Teracita, members of the task force got a tip that a thirty-five-year-old prostitute named Vickie Bomar had recently been picked up by a man who took her to his house and raped her. Vickie didn’t report it to the police because the man had threatened to kill her, and she was afraid.
On November 9, Sergeant Scott Cook, of the Peoria Police Department, went to talk to Vickie at the South Side Mission. Vickie agreed to talk to him.
It was sometime in the middle of July. She was walking near the Harrison Homes, a public housing development built in 1942. She was trying to score some crack cocaine. As she was walking, a white man in a truck pulled up to her and said he was looking to party. He said he had $200 in cash and an eight ball of coke. As soon as Vickie heard those magic words, she hopped into his truck and they drove to his house.
It was a small house with a porch, almost like a summer cottage, that sat behind a larger house. The property was partially concealed by a tall wooden privacy fence. The man opened the gate and the pair walked into the one-room house. There was a bed off to the right, and a couch, coffee table, and some other furniture on the left. There was no kitchen. The door to the bathroom was closed.
Vickie pulled her crack pipe out of her purse. She was looking forward to getting high. Suddenly the guy started talking.
“You