#RememberThem: Ocinena (CC)
Of all the victims in the case of convicted serial killer Benjamin Atkins, CC was the one that police actually didn't know about -- at least not until they had arrested their perp and had gotten him talking. Then he told them that there was a victim they had not found yet. He told them where to find her, and that day police discovered the body of Ocinena, nicknamed CC.
She was born in October 1969. She lived at Ford Street and Second Avenue in Highland Park, Michigan, west of Woodward, in the same block as her grandmother’s apartment on Manchester Parkway, This was also just a block or so from the address on record of another of Atkins' victims, Joanne, and a few blocks in the other direction from where yet another victim, Valerie, grew up. CC was single, apparently with no kids. She had a sister named Charee. CC's grandmother, Ruby, last saw her in May 1992 at Ruby’s apartment.
CC is one of the women we honor in the #RememberThem series. When Atkins assaulted her on the last day of May, she got a little piece of him in their scuffle -- he had to go to Detroit Receiving Hospital in the early morning hours of June 1 and get stitches. He gave the attending ER doctor some story about how he got the injury. But he hid CC well, in a garage off West Grand in Highland Park that reportedly had a double basement configuration. Nobody went down there. So nobody discovered CC for months. She became another one of Detroit's many missing females until the perp starting talking upon his arrest in August.
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| A modern shot of Woodward Ave, with downtown Detroit in the distance. CC was the last one lured to her death by Benjamin Atkins along this historic thoroughfare. Photo by B.R. Bates; please do not copy without permission. |
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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Click on the "Honoring the Victims" label on the left to see all parts in this series.
For a deep-dive into the Atkins case, see The Crack City Strangler: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins.
BRBates.com
wbp.bz/CrackCityStrangler
Murders in the Motor City Series
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