#RememberThem: Joanne

She was known by different names. Which was her real name? A lot of the time these women living at risk on the streets used different names.

Very little is known about her. We know she was born in August 1951. We know she had a sister named Katie in Muskegon Heights, on the west side of Michigan. We know she had a husband named James, who died before she did. She had an address on Ford Street near Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, a couple blocks north of the Davison Highway. That’s about it, however, because as with several other victims, no one could be reached to speak for her for this book. But still we honor Joanne as part of our Remember Them series.

Joanne was discovered in June 1992 in an empty three-unit commercial building on the west side of Woodward Ave between Cortland and Richton streets, in the storefront area of what was a suite of three rooms in the middle unit. The unit had once been a restaurant and a politician’s headquarters, as well as a church, and that's how her attacker remembered it, as a church. He knew this area; he was part of the landscape and blended right in, wandering from one abandoned building to another. Though Joanne was discovered in June, he killed her months earlier, when there was still snow on the ground.

The sketch by Highland Park Public Safety from the scene where Joanne was discovered.

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 is a copyrighted image of a case file 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

(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.)