Grand Rapids: A Brief Look at the Seventeen Victims

Introduction

The Christmas season is always a hectic one for families. There are Santa parades, and holiday concerts, family traditions, and winter weather. Parents rush around shopping for Barbies, or action figures, video game consoles – trying to find the perfect gifts for their children. Christmas 1993 was a bustling year in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But the city was unaware that they had a violent killer living amongst them, someone who would be responsible for taking multiple lives. Over the span of three years, there would be seventeen victims. Some disappeared without a trace, while other victims would show up dead.

The city’s most vulnerable residents were put at risk, and at first, the police were doing very little to protect them. The killer would strike again and again, and it would be years before they were finally caught.

The First Victim

On December 12, 1993, twenty-nine-year-old Linda McHugh had decided to go out for an evening of fun. Linda was a new mother, with a baby daughter. Linda had told her younger sister, Norma, that her friends were coming to pick her up. Linda said she was going to return later on that evening, but unfortunately, Linda disappeared that night.

When the police began to investigate Linda’s disappearance, they learned that she had called her boyfriend– sometime between three, and three-thirty in the morning. During their phone call, Linda had been extremely upset, and had started crying. She asked him to pick her up at the ‘Bottle House’, which was a party store on Division Avenue. Her boyfriend promised to go pick her up, but by the time he arrived, Linda was already gone.

LINDA MCHUGH WAS WHITE, with brown hair. She was 5’5", and weighted 130 pounds. Linda had an ‘X’ tattoo on the back of her left hand.

Linda McHugh had started drinking when she was thirteen, and had struggled with substance abuse throughout her life. Her alcoholism had been a way of coping with the child abuse she had been dealing with at that age. Once she’d graduated from high school, Linda took business classes. She got married, and they had a baby daughter together. She had her whole life ahead of her, and things had been looking up.

But unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse. In her twenties, Linda’s substance abuse problems began to resurface – and she went from alcohol, to crack. It was a costly habit, and