Tawanda Hodges, a 28-year-old Black woman from the Bronx, was found dead on March 28, 1991, in an industrial stretch of Yonkers near the Hudson River at 1 Federal Street. Detectives reported the scene suggested the killer had staged her body rather than simply abandoning her, and they believed Hodges’s killing was connected to other violent deaths in the area from the late 1980s into the mid-1990s.

Forensic evidence including DNA recovered during the original investigations eventually tied multiple cases together, but for years the investigation produced only a genetic profile and no name. Yonkers detectives reviewed well over a hundred potential suspects before a match was obtained. In 2010 a man was charged after a DNA match linked him to the killings; at trial jurors were presented with testimony about the DNA and the claim that the same offender was responsible for multiple deaths.