| Credit: courtesy
Chicago resident Nancie Carolyn Walker loved to dance. She was the captain of her high school cheerleading team, studied accounting at Columbia College and later opened up a yoga and jazzercise studio and bought five residential buildings. The 55-year-old entrepreneur disappeared on Jan. 28, 2003, and seven weeks later her dismembered remains were discovered in three contractor bags on the Bishop Ford Highway. She had been strangled.
Seven months earlier, on June 12, 2002, the strangled body of Gwendolyn Williams was found behind a Dollar Store in Chicago. Williams mother died before she ever found out what happened to her 44-year-old daughter.
Nancie Walker, who was slain in Chicago in 2003.
To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning .”
–Isaiah 61:3
Ashes. She disappeared like ashes upon a menacing swirling wind. Her name was Nancie Carolyn Walker. It was on an unseasonably warm overcast day in January, 18 years ago, that she vanished at least for seven weeks, until they found her.
These are among the words that I and my journalism students at Roosevelt University wrote about the 51 mostly Black women murdered in Chicago over 18 years and identified by the Murder Accountability Project as having perished at the hands of at least one serial killer.