#RememberThem: Vickie
Six months before she was killed, Vickie Ann T. was crouching her tiny, 5-foot-1, 110-pound frame inside the kitchen closet of a basement apartment on Detroit’s east side, hiding with the door barely cracked as she watched her friend Reggie get shot and killed on the couch by a couple drug thugs looking for their money.
Vickie was no stranger to violence, and she was also no stranger to police. She had some arrests on her record, and she also told police in April 1991 about a man who held her against her will -- she escaped by climbing out of a second-story window. Just months later, she was killed by Benjamin Atkins. It was the end of a troubled life, and it's the case for a lot of these women, living at risk on the streets, that they so often encounter violence. And they feel they have no other options. They feel they have no value. That's at the heart of all of this.
Vickie is the victim of Benjamin Atkins that we honor in this installment of the #RememberThem series.
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. Also see the #RememberThem series on YouTube.
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Above photo obtained by FOIA to Detroit Police and specifically for use in The Crack City Strangler: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins; any other use prohibited without permission.
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Murders in the Motor City Series
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