RACIST GOES ON FEARFUL KILLING SPREE
Left a trail of Black victims from Buffalo to city before dying in jail
John Adams hardly noticed the man, never saw the knife.
He also barely remembered staggering three city blocks in the bitter cold, clutching his chest and praying he’d make it to a hospital before he bled out from the hole in his heart.
But Adams was absolutely certain of one thing as he laid in bed recovering from emergency surgery: He was the lucky recipient of a Christmas miracle.
The Manhattan man was the sole survivor of a brutal morning-to-midnight rampage by a madman who massacred four other victims in a succession of random attacks on city sidewalks.
A few weeks later, Adams came to another stunning realization. He was likely the only man to cheat death at the hands of a twisted serial killer who may have left a trail of bloody bodies across New York state.
At a little before noon on Dec. 23, 1980, Adams was walking out of the subway station at Seventh Ave. and W. 14th St. when a man in a blue ski jacket and cap walked towards him, too close for comfort even on a typically crowded street crammed with holiday shoppers and workers out to grab a quick lunch.
The 24-year-old Adams, a part-time mover taking bartending classes, suddenly felt like he’d been punched in the chest. He managed to get a quick look at the man before glancing down and noticing a tear in his coat — and a widening circle of bright red blood.
Despite the severity of his wound, he made a slow, grueling trek to nearby St. Vincent’s, where he underwent emergency surgery to repair a punctured aorta. Doctors would later say Adams was minutes from death before he stumbled into the emergency room.
Four hours later, Luis Rodriguez, a 19-year-old messenger, was walking along Madison Ave. and E. 40th St. when a man approached, mumbled something and then plunged a large blade into Rodriguez’s heart. The assailant ran off amid several screaming witnesses. Rodriguez died on the spot.
The bloodshed continued as night fell. At around 6:45 p.m., a building porter named Antone Davis, 30, was killed by a single stab wound to the heart at Seventh Ave. and W. 37th St. Witnesses said the slayer was dressed in a gray top coat and cap.
Four hours later, along a busy stretch of Broadway at W. 49th St., 20-year-old Richard Renner was attacked by a man with a knife. He, too, was stabbed in the heart and died. Witnesses said the killer wore a gray topcoat and matching cap.
Then just before midnight, another helpless victim fell prey to an unknown assailant with a sharp blade and impeccable aim. Carl Ramsey, age unknown, was found dead on the frigid sidewalk at Seventh Ave. and 33rd St. near Penn Station. He had been stabbed in the heart.
Police were initially hesitant to say the day’s bloody toll was the work of a lone lunatic — or that the attacks may have been racially motivated. All of the victims were Black; Rodriguez was a dark-skinned Latino. Robbery didn’t seem to be a motive.
But the Daily News on the following day — Christmas Eve — easily connected the dots for readers by noting the race of the victims and the killer’s likely motive as the front page blared “Midtown Stabber Kills Four, 5th Clings To Life.”
The horrific stabbing spree was like an urban-set plot straight out of an ’80s slasher flick, but with a malicious, knife-wielding menace whose bloodlust was fueled by bigotry — and who had a particularly sadistic signature.
Not only did he go straight for the heart, he made sure to twist the blade to ensure
maximum damage.
Cops soon admitted the bloodbath was the work of a single slayer, with one detective uttering the obvious with a cheesy line that would’ve been right at home in a bad screenplay: “We’ve got a man out there with a knife,” he told The News, “and we’ve got to find him.”
From his hospital bed, Adams gave investigators a description of the killer that matched what most witnesses saw. The assailant was a white male around 40 years old, not tall but muscular, with shortcropped hair. He also didn’t look very dangerous — he wore wire-frame glasses.
The discrepancy between the blue jacket and hat he wore in earlier attacks and the gray coat and cap later in the evening was given a chilling explanation by police: He’d probably gone home and changed out of his blood-stained clothes before setting out again to resume his rampage.
NYPD cops, however, deflected reporters’ questions about a possible connection to a series of bizarre, apparently race-related killings in the Buffalo area that had occurred the previous September.
In that spree nearly 400 miles away from New York City, four Black men ranging in age from 14 to 43 had been shot dead over two consecutive days. The murderer was described as a white man wearing glasses, but instead of a knife his weapon of choice was a .22 rifle.
The upstate New York press, of course, dubbed him “the .22 Caliber Killer.”
Two weeks later, the Buffalo investigation took a spine-tingling turn when two Black cab drivers were found dead a day apart.
Both had been stabbed to death; both had their hearts cut out. The killer had kept their organs, it was assumed, as trophies.
The days before and after Jan. 1, 1981, less than a week after the Manhattan stabbings, also saw a rash of knife attacks on Black men in the Buffalo area, two of them fatal. Local police weren’t ready to link all of them to the earlier shootings or the two slain cabbies, though.
A few days later, the dozens of investigators separately working both the Manhattan murders and the Buffalo slayings were handed a late Christmas gift.
A recent U.S. Army recruit named Joseph Christopher had stabbed a fellow soldier, a Black man, and got tossed into the stockade while in basic training in Fort Benning, Ga. Christopher, 25, soon began to exhibit bizarre behavior while behind bars, including cutting himself.
Originally from Buffalo, Christopher soon gave Army shrinks something more serious to ponder — he told them he was intent on killing Black people, and boasted he had committed several murders. When a check of his whereabouts during Christmas furlough showed he was in New York City at the same time as the slayings, Christopher became the prime suspect as both the .22 Caliber Killer and the Midtown Stabber.
A search of his mother’s home uncovered a cache of .22 caliber ammunition, and Christopher was arrested and charged in three of the Buffalo shootings and two of the New York knifings.
Though his sanity was in question, Christopher was eventually convicted in Buffalo for three murders in a nonjury trial that had its share of bizarre moments — at one point he showed up to court in a gray ski mask.
He was given a life sentence and never tried for any of the other slayings linked to him, though he claimed to have killed up to 13 people. He died in 1993 while in Attica prison at age 37 from breast cancer, taking the reason for his alleged murderous sprees to the grave.
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