It began in October of 1965, with the gruesome sexual assault of Elizabeth Kreko. Kreko was approached by a man outside of her apartment in the peaceful Walnut Hills section of the city at around noon. He asked if he could speak with the caretaker and when she led him to the basement, he dragged her into a side room, raped her, and attempted to choke her to death with a double-knotted clothesline. She was found barely alive. Within two weeks, two more women in the neighborhood were attacked in similar fashion.

All three reported that their assailant had been a black male, but otherwise the descriptions differed. Less than a week later another woman, 39-year old Margaret Helton, was attacked by a black man who asked politely for directions, then dragged her into a car, told her she was being robbed, and wrapped a rope around her neck. She was able to scream, leaning on her horn as he ran off into the afternoon.

The attacks continued through the latter part of 1965 and into 1966, as fear gripped Cincinnati’s white community. In December, Emogene Harrington, 56, was found strangled with her clothing ripped in her apartment building by a double-knotted plastic cord. In January of 1966, an intruder attempted to choke a woman in her Walnut Hills basement. Her husband reported hearing the screams and chasing off a tall black man wearing a trench coat and hat. In April of 1966, Lois Dant was strangled and sexually assaulted in her Price Hill apartment by an assailant who reportedly knocked on her door asking for the apartment manager.

As the stories piled up, the investigation proved increasingly frustrating to police. Authorities wavered on whether or not these attacks were committed by the same person, but key elements seemed to link them. Ropes or cords were used to strangle the women in most cases, and most of the attacks included sexual assault But most importantly, the survivors reported that the assailant was black.

Police chief Jacob Schott announced that the same man had been responsible for the murders. “There cannot be three of them,” he told the press. Desperate to put an end to the threat, police expanded their squad, putting 22 men to work on over 1,000 tips. A Cincinnati Enquirer article dated June 25, 1966 ran the headline “Negro Killed Three Women, Police Say.”

An event of this magnitude shook the sleepy city to its core. Mark Twain once said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati. It is always ten years behind the times.” The town prided itself on its bucolic and virtuous disposition, largely removed from the terrors of nearby urban centers like Chicago and St. Louis. But in America, the discomfort of race has a way of insisting itself upon everyone’s pretensions of innocence. After riots shook Watts in 1965 and nearly a decade of race-related turmoil had rocked the South, including Cincinnati’s southern neighbor, Kentucky, an October 1965 Gallup Poll cited civil rights problems as the number one worry in the country. Cincinnati was not immune. The sudden appearance of a cold-hearted and seemingly unstoppable rapist/murderer, combined with white America’s growing anxiety, made for a heady mixture.

As the summer progressed, riots took place in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dayton, Ohio, just 53 miles northeast of Cincinnati. While the local assaults continued, police began to indiscriminately round up black men, particularly in Cincinnati’s Avondale neighborhood, and put them in lineups. Civil rights groups protested, but the environment of fear won out. Police would ultimately deputize a vast network of firefighters, meter readers, security guards, and mail carriers, to report any suspicious activity. At full strength, 5,000 citizens and police were working on the case. A hotline received 800 tips per day; 15,000 cars were checked out; and editorials were printed in the Enquirer begging the killer to come forward. Halloween would officially be moved to daytime.