#RememberThem: Valerie

Valerie was born in December 1956 to Buster and Jessie Brown. The family lived on Ford Street in Highland Park. Valerie attended church and sang in the church choir (she had a beautiful voice, her son André told me). She was the baby of the family, the youngest of five kids. Everybody knew her in this tightknit community. And though André didn’t often get to see the “real” Valerie, the person his mom was at her core, unaltered by substances, he knows from glimpses here and there, and from what her family members have said, that she was a very sweet person. A big-hearted person. A funny person. A fairly naïve and innocent person, too, as the youngest in her family.

When Valerie disappeared in the fall of 1991, her family put up fliers all over town. They were intent on finding her. She was not just another missing girl; she was valuable to them. But Valerie would not be found until February 17, 1992, a day when a certain case police were investigating was blown wide open. Valerie was one of three women found at the Monterey Motel that day.

Valerie was a loved human being who did not deserve to encounter a serial killer, to be left amid the rubble of a room at an abandoned motel off Woodward Avenue in Detroit. She's the female we honor today in this ongoing #RememberThem series.

A modern shot of the site on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, Michigan, where the Monterey Motel once stood.

A still from the crime-scene video: the floor of Room 68 of the Monterey Motel on the day Valerie and two other women were discovered. The Monterey was heavily trafficked by transients, drug users and sex workers after it was abandoned in the 1980s.

Police sketch of Room 68 where Valerie was found, with numbered markings for other items collected as evidence that day.  

This post is part of a series on this blog that I am calling #RememberThem, a chance to honor the women who encountered the two Detroit serial killers I have researched, John Eric Armstrong and Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins. In this continuing series, with installments dropping every week or so, we first learn more about the women Armstrong was known to have killed in Detroit, plus two of his survivors, then we turn to the women who encountered Atkins. Click on the "Honoring the Victims" label on the left to see all of the parts in the series thus far.

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Above images are copyrighted and specifically for use in The Crack City Strangler: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins; any other use prohibited without permission.

BRBates.com
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Murders in the Motor City Series

(And yes, that photo on the book's cover is actually a photo of Atkins; see this blog post on the confusion over his photos.)