Sweet Sixteen murders

The Sweet Sixteen murders are a serial-killing case defined by the selection of sixteen-year-old girls and by escalating brutality. Makayla Howell’s murder became the seventh known attack, exposing the sexual violence behind the killer’s pattern and deepening the danger confronting those who sought to stop him.

The Seventh Murder: Makayla Howell

The day after a killer walked away from the gate without apparent concern, news broke that the Sweet Sixteen Killer had struck again. Makayla Howell, a Black girl of sixteen, was the seventh victim; the account describes her killing as the most sadistic atrocity yet. Once a model student, Makayla had begun defying her parents and dating older boys during her sophomore year. One of those boys got her drunk and tried to take advantage of her. When she refused him, he made her leave his apartment and walk home. Someone whose identity the authorities never established offered her a ride, which she accepted. The killer drove her to a secluded park, where he got her out of the car and attacked her.

Misidentification and the Killer’s Identity

The reported facts about Makayla Howell’s death marked a sharp escalation: she had been tortured and raped, and was still alive when the killer began cutting her. The account withholds further details, but those facts alone establish that the attack was deliberate, sexually violent, and exceptionally cruel. After learning what had been done to her, Crowder resolved that the killer should suffer the same kind of violence. His response was complicated by the danger of relying on Malephar: he feared the demon might take control when summoned and that he might not regain control of his own body afterward.

Crowder initially believed Father Sutherland was the Sweet Sixteen Killer. That conclusion proved false. The killer was Danny Hartman, a policeman whom Crowder had once invited to his cottage. The revelation recast the crimes as more than a pattern of attacks by an unknown predator: the murderer had been admitted into Crowder’s private life, while Crowder’s certainty about Sutherland had directed his suspicion toward the wrong man. The case’s deceptive clues extended into Sutherland’s study, where a thick floorboard shifted underfoot and came up easily when Danny pried at it with a pocketknife. Its looseness suggested that someone had repeatedly removed and replaced it, though the discovery at this point does not disclose what lay beneath.

A Case That Splintered

The killings did not stop with Makayla Howell. When another attack was reported, Liz Hartman told Crowder that the Sweet Sixteen Killer had struck the previous night. The latest murder brought the reported death toll to eight, but its changed method unsettled the apparent pattern. People were already calling it a copycat crime, and Crowder agreed that it seemed to be the work of a different killer: the reported time of death made it impossible, in his reasoning, for Danny Hartman to have killed Julia Deveroux.

Julia’s photograph made the widening case personal. Liz showed Crowder the school-uniform picture, and he recognized Julia as one of the faces he had glimpsed in Danny’s thoughts during Danny’s attempt to kill him: a laughing schoolgirl walking with friends, unaware of the danger. Crowder had seen her before her death and now wondered whether he could have prevented it. Liz explained that she was pursuing the case for Julia and for the seven earlier victims. Their photographs showed girls smiling toward futures that would never arrive; their deaths had become part of a larger tragedy, while the killer’s pursuit of notoriety threatened to turn their individual lives into mere entries in a mounting toll.

The victims’ connections also reached into the community around St. Matthew’s. Joy Smith had lived only twelve blocks from the church and sometimes attended services with her aunt. She knew Casey Hartman, a connection that likely drew Danny’s interest to her. The crimes therefore reached beyond strangers selected by age: familiar neighborhoods, family ties, and parish life could also become points of exposure. In a later confrontation, Crowder recognized Liz among the faces he had glimpsed in the killer’s thoughts and understood that she remained in danger; the same vision included Julia, whom Tyler Raines had disemboweled. Danny then killed Raines by slashing his throat and placed the knife in Crowder’s hand, setting up a false account in which Crowder would appear to have attacked him. The case’s competing killers and manipulated evidence made the investigation not simply a hunt for one offender, but a struggle to distinguish one murderer’s crimes from another’s and to survive being framed in the process.

The Case’s Personal Cost

The Sweet Sixteen investigation also unfolded amid forces that made Jason Crowder’s own actions difficult to trust. During a conversation, he looked down to find that he had failed to replace a cruciform letter opener on the stand beside him and had driven it through the back of his right hand, beneath a prominent vein and out through the skin on the other side. Blood spurted from both wounds before pain registered. The injury does not identify another victim or solve a murder; instead, it makes the struggle around the case bodily and immediate, showing how a search for the killer could coexist with a threat to Crowder’s control of himself.