The Suitland murders refers to a series of murders of young girls and women committed from October 1986 to January 1987 in the unincorporated area of Suitland, Maryland, considered a suburb of Washington, D.C. All victims were black, and each had been sexually assaulted and stabbed afterwards.
During the investigation, police arrested a resident of D.C., Alton Alonso Best, for the murder of a girl that was never officially linked to the other killings but who was considered a possible suspect. The killings stopped after his arrest but he has never been charged with any of them.
Murders
As victims, the killer chose young, dark-skinned girls of slender build, short in stature, and with short hair. The first of them was 20-year-old Dorothy Ann Miller, whose body was found in a wooded area in Suitland on December 13, 1986. During the investigation, an autopsy determined that she had been viciously raped before her death, but that the cause of death itself was a drug overdose.
On January 12, 1987, employees of the local Bradbury Recreational Center found pieces of women's clothing on a tree in the bushes near the facility, with further exploration leading to the discovery of a body. The victim was identified as 25-year-old Pamela Malcolm, who had evidently been raped and stabbed to death. Malcolm was a local who lived less than one mile away from where her body had been discovered.
On the next day, while investigating Malcolm's murder, a 75-member task force cordoned off the area amounting to eight acres in order to conduct a search operation. During this, they found two additional corpses which were identified later on as 22-year-old Cynthia Lee Westbury and 26-year-old Juanita Marie Walls. Both women had been raped and had multiple stab wounds. The day after, the body of yet another woman, 22-year-old Angela Maria Wilkerson who had been reported missing on January 5, was found not far off, having suffered from the same injuries as the previous victims.
A background check on the victims revealed that four out of five of them lived in southeast Washington, D.C., about one kilometer apart from one another, and that all with the exception of Malcolm (an employee of the USPTO) were unemployed. The medical examiner who performed the autopsies on the bodies was unable to determine the exact dates of death.
Upon delving into the victims' past, investigators started to uncover the circumstances of their disappearances. Malcolm was last seen on the evening of October 21, 1986 when she left her apartment in Suitland, which she shared with her mother, to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Nine days later, Walls left her apartment in D.C. to attend a birthday party organized by her family and friends, but was reported missing after failing to arrive. On November 10, Westbury left her apartment to meet up with a friend, but vanished on the way there.
The bodies of the three women, all of which were in a state of severe decomposition, indicated that they had been killed shortly after they disappeared. Because of this, law enforcement officials declared in February 1987 that Dorothy Miller, whose body was found first, was likely the fourth canonical victim due to the fact her body was not as decomposed as the rest.
Investigation
In mid-January 1987, the Prince George's County Police Department set a special task force of 25 officers to investigate the crimes which, over the next few days, raided a variety of establishments in the red-light districts of D.C., as well as interviewing numerous witnesses, including relatives, friends, neighbors, shopkeepers, bar owners and other residents who could potentially provide useful information. During these interviews, officers learned that at least two of the women frequented a local bar, Clancy's, based in southeast D.C., and could have been acquainted with one another. This rumor was then quickly disproven by the owner of the bar, Ed Byrd, as well as his employees, who claimed that they had never seen the women.