The body of 40-year-old Joanne O’Rourke was found in an abandoned building in Highland Park, Michigan, on June 15, 1992. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her killing was linked to a series of similar murders along the Woodward Avenue corridor that began in late 1991 and targeted vulnerable women who were lured to derelict locations with promises of drugs or shelter.

Investigators tied O’Rourke’s death to the others after a survivor of an October 1991 attack identified her assailant as Benjamin Thomas Atkins. Atkins, then 24 and homeless, was arrested on August 21, 1992, and reportedly gave a detailed confession to eleven murders, including O’Rourke’s. He said his crimes were motivated by hatred of women involved in prostitution and by his traumatic childhood. In April 1994 he was convicted and sentenced to eleven life terms without parole; he died in prison on September 17, 1997, from complications related to AIDS.

Anyone who knew Joanne, her movements that spring of 1992, or who has information about the locations where these women were lured is asked to come forward.