Title: Buffalo Human Sacrifice Murders

Dates: 1980

Overview: A radical white killed and assualted a lot of people

Status: resolved

Buffalo Taxi Murders

In October 1980, residents of Buffalo, New York were stunned by the grisly murders of two black taxi drivers on successive nights, details of the crime suggesting human sacrifice or worse. The first victim, 71 year old Parker Edwards, was found in the trunk of his cab on October 8, his skull crushed with a blunt instrument, his heart cut out and missing from the murder scene. One day later, 40 year old Ernest Jones was found beside the Niagara River in Tonawanda, New York, likewise bludgeoned to death, with his heart carved from his chest. Jones blood spattered taxi was retrieved by police in Buffalo, three miles from the site where his body was found. After the second slaying, Erie County district attorney Edward Cosgrove told reporters, This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my life. Any word I reach for to describe it is inadequate.

Worse yet, from the standpoint of racial harmony, four other Buffalo blacks had been killed in the past 18 days all gunned down with the same .22 caliber weapon. Then, barely 24 hours after the murder of Ernest Jones, 37 year old Colin Cole was assaulted in his Buffalo hospital room by a white man who told him I hate niggers. A nurses aid arrival saved Cole from death by strangulation, but he sustained severe injuries to his neck. Descriptions of the would be strangler roughly matched eye witness reports of Buffalos elusive .22 caliber killer.

Some authorities believed the mystery was solved three months later, with the arrest of army private Joseph Christopher at Fort Benning, Georgia, charged with stabbing a black fellow soldier. A search of Christophers former residence, near Buffalo revealed quantities of .22 caliber ammunition, a gun barrel, and two sawed off rifle stocks. Police also learned that Christopher had joined the army on November 13, 1980, arriving at Fort Benning six days later. He was absent without leave from December 19, 1980, through January 4, 1981, with a bus ticket recording his arrival in Manhattan on December 20, just two days before five blacks and one Hispanic victim were staved there, four victims fatally, in random street attacks.

Hospitalized following a suicide attempt on May 6, 1981, Christoppher bragged to a nurse of his involvement in the September shootings around Buffalo. Four days later, he was charged with three of the .22 caliber slayings, a forth murder charge added to the list on June 29, 1981,, four further counts related to nonfatal Buffalo stabbings in December 1980 and January 1981. In New York City, indictments were returned in two of the December 1980 stabbings.

Joseph Christopher was ruled incompetent for trial in December 1981, but that verdict was reversed four months later. On April 27, 1982, after 12 days of testimony, Christopher was convicted on three count of first degree murder in Buffalo, drawing a prison term of 60 years to life. Seventeen months later, in September 1983, he sat for an interview with Buffalo reporters, boasting that his murder spree had claimed a minimum of 13 lives. Journalists noted that he did not deny the Jones Edwards heart murders of October 1980, but neither did he confess to the crimes, and no charges were filed in those cases. Christophers Buffalo conviction was overturned in July 1985 on grounds that the judge improperly barred testimony pointing toward mental incompetence. Three months later, in Manhattan, a jury rejected Christophers insanity plea, convicting him on one count of murder and another attempted murder. The murders of Parker Edwards and Ernest Jones remain officially unsolved.

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