The Chicago Strangling Undertaker serial murders are linked by the killer’s evolving methods of selecting victims, preparing and positioning their bodies, and avoiding detection. The chronology traced in the investigation suggests that the murders were preceded by a period of experimentation and that the intervals between victims may have shortened as the series progressed.

Early Pattern and Escalation

The investigation treated Susan Warner’s death as a turning point in the pattern. She was estimated to have been killed on April 5, 2016, give or take a day, and was found on April 12. Unlike the later victims, she was attacked at home, where the killer remained to embalm her. The result appeared to fall short of what he intended: her clothing and position did not fit the presentation he was attempting. Zoe Bentley interpreted the discrepancy as evidence of failure rather than a finished method.

The gap after Warner’s death became part of that interpretation. Nearly three months passed before the next known murder. Zoe considered the possibility that the killer used the intervening period to learn how to preserve and arrange a body more successfully. That hypothesis was informed by a separate pattern of embalmed cats and dogs reported in West Pullman. The earliest reports were sporadic: two in July 2014, one in August, two in September, and one in October. After a report-free stretch, cases appeared again in March 2015, followed by repeated reports through the year. The record then rose sharply, with five embalmed pets found in West Pullman in March 2016. Zoe read the increase as a sign that the killer’s activity was intensifying, though the reports could not establish how many animals had been taken or when.

The murders that followed brought the earlier incidents into sharper focus. Monique Silva was estimated to have been killed around July 1, 2016; Krista Barker was killed on July 10 or 11. Their deaths were separated by only about nine days. The victims and their circumstances differed from Warner’s: Monique and Krista were prostitutes, whom Zoe thought the killer could persuade to accompany him to a more secluded place. The first victim, an art student attacked in her own home, had therefore not established a fixed target type. In Zoe’s reconstruction, the killer’s approach shifted with the opportunity: a home in the first case, then victims he could bring with him in the later ones.

The short interval between Monique and Krista raised the possibility of acceleration, but Zoe acknowledged that the available timeline was incomplete. She could not be certain that the pace was increasing, or how soon another victim might be at risk. The chronology nonetheless made the cases more than a collection of separate discoveries: the animal reports, Warner’s death, and the closely spaced murders of Monique and Krista suggested a changing process whose earlier failures might help explain its later form.

Earlier Cases and the Emerging Link

The investigation’s scope widened when Zoe Bentley searched older unsolved cases for the same combination of strangulation, body placement, and other recurring features. One early lead was Veronika Murray, a twenty-one-year-old woman found dead in an alley in West Pullman on April 21, 2014. Her death was attributed to strangulation, the case remained open, and the body had been discovered six days after the estimated time of death. The location also mattered to Zoe: pets began disappearing in West Pullman three months later, placing the unresolved murder near the area where the animal cases would emerge.

Zoe’s review of Chicago records from 2008 identified two more unsolved murders, seven months apart. Shirley Wattenberg was found in the Little Calumet River beneath a bridge on Woodlawn West Avenue; the object used to strangle her was missing. Pamela Vance was found in Saganashkee Slough with a tie around her neck. Although the cases were separated in time and place, both victims had been strangled, and their discovery scenes recalled the arrangement of bodies in the 1997 Maynard murders. In Shirley’s case, the throat marks suggested a broad, smooth, flexible ligature. A detective had considered a belt, but the absence of buckle marks left room for Zoe’s theory that a tie had been used.

Pamela’s case supplied a further point of comparison. The autopsy described signs of a struggle and overlapping ligature marks, indicating that the first attempt to strangle her had not succeeded. The findings also documented sexual assault. Zoe read the case alongside the 1997 Maynard murders and the later Chicago killings, looking not for an identical method in every detail but for a recurring combination of method and signature. In her reconstruction, the three Maynard murders, the two Chicago cases from 2008, and the five murders between 2014 and 2016 formed a sequence of related episodes, even though the suspected killer had never been convicted in the earlier case and the intervening years contained no known murders in the pattern.

The proposed connection was not based on chronology alone. Zoe also had to account for the gray ties sent to her and for the killer’s apparent fixation on her, while presenting similarities that could distinguish a genuine link from resemblance. The old cases therefore changed the investigative question: rather than treating the recent murders as an isolated series, Zoe argued that investigators should examine whether the same offender’s methods had persisted across years, with periods of apparent inactivity and changes in victim, location, or execution.

Opportunity, Presentation, and Adaptation

Zoe’s developing profile emphasized how the killer’s choices could serve practical needs as well as private meaning. The sites were public, but she noted that they were likely to be empty at night and lacked security cameras. She questioned whether the crimes showed a search for fame or a deliberate game with investigators; body placement, in her view, seemed meaningful, and the selected locations might have been connected to that meaning. This remained an interpretation, not a confirmed motive. At a task-force meeting, the map marked Ohio Street Beach and the Brighton Park area where Krista Barker had worked on the night she disappeared. Their distance from one another suggested that the killer was not concentrating on a single Chicago neighborhood.

The victims’ differing circumstances also shaped the reconstruction of how he gained control. Susan Warner, the first victim in the recent sequence, was attacked at home, where the killer could remain and work on the body. Zoe reasoned that Monique Silva and Krista Barker, both prostitutes, could instead have been persuaded to accompany him to a safer location. She challenged the possibility that they had been attacked in a street or alley: the evidence that they had been restrained while still alive made that scenario less plausible to her. On this reading, the change in victim type was accompanied by a change in approach, from exploiting access to a home to arranging a private encounter away from the street.

The way the bodies were dressed suggested another step in that process. Zoe and Tatum Gray considered the differences in the women’s heights and sizes, and the fact that the later victims had only the clothes they were wearing, unlike Susan, whose wardrobe was available in her home. They inferred that the killer might have taken the women shopping before the murders, presenting the trip as part of a client’s plans for the evening. Tatum then traced Lily Ramos’s known route from the corner of Clark and Grand in River North to Huron Street, reasoning that a clothing store along the way—or near the eventual location—might have captured the pair on surveillance footage. Zoe pressed a store employee to provide the footage, arguing that the man was a serial killer who might approach another worker there. The proposed shopping trip remained an investigative theory, but it offered a concrete way to search for evidence of the killer’s movements before an attack.

The approach was vulnerable to disruption because it depended on repeated choices: whom to approach, where to take them, and how much time to spend preparing the scene. After the investigation nearly caught him, the narrative presents the killer as recognizing that he had left a victim’s phone behind, a mistake that could not safely be repeated. He would kill more quickly and might seek someone vulnerable outside the group investigators expected him to target. Zoe consequently warned that future victims might no longer expose his pattern as clearly; investigators would have to work backward from the traces left in earlier crimes. The series thus turns adaptation into both a threat and a source of evidence: each refinement could make the next offense harder to anticipate, while prior errors remained available for comparison.

Investigative Limits and Personal Stakes

The case’s emerging pattern did not immediately yield a practical way to prevent another murder. Lieutenant Martinez proposed staking out likely areas where prostitutes might be approached, but admitted that investigators did not know what to look for. Zoe Bentley could offer only a broad sketch of a strong man who was not especially intimidating and had a reasonably good-looking car; Martinez observed that this could describe much of the department. The contrast between a growing theory of the killer’s methods and the absence of a distinctive suspect profile left the investigation with risk but little precision.

For Zoe, the search was also bound up with a neighbor she had already tried to identify as dangerous. Her parents and Rod Glover had exchanged spare keys a year earlier, so Glover could check on her mother; what had once seemed a sensible arrangement now meant that he could enter their home. Zoe used her own key to enter his house and look through his bedroom, drawing on details she had observed there as well as her research into serial killers. When she later described her suspicions to an officer, she carefully explained the reasoning behind them, including Glover’s connection to Durant Pond and what she had found in his home. She knew that her word alone might not persuade police to search the house, and framed the account in the hope that it would prompt them to investigate.

The inquiry’s procedural bottlenecks recur in the effort to obtain clothing-store surveillance footage. Zoe and Tatum Gray reasoned that Lily Ramos might have been taken shopping before her murder, but a store employee resisted providing the recording. Tatum insisted that investigators needed to see it, while Zoe warned that the suspected killer might approach another worker. The scene makes the search for evidence an urgent contest over access: a route reconstructed from known locations could point toward a recording, but the recording had to be secured before it could test the theory.

As the crimes continued, the killer’s changing behavior made the past more useful than a simple forecast of his next target. After nearly being caught, he recognized that leaving a victim’s phone had exposed a mistake; Zoe anticipated that he would act faster and choose someone outside the group police expected him to target. Her conclusion was that investigators would have to trace the evidence backward through earlier crimes rather than rely on future victims to reveal a stable pattern. The murders therefore leave the inquiry in an uneasy position: each linked case sharpens the account of what the offender has done, but his capacity to adapt makes that account an increasingly uncertain guide to what he will do next.