On October 2, 1990, 80-year-old Eva Jones, a Black woman who lived alone in Richmond, Virginia, was found stabbed to death in her home. Her killing was one of the early fatalities in what became known locally as the Golden Years Murders, a series that targeted elderly people and stirred deep fear in Richmond’s senior community.

The early victims in the series, including Jones, were all Black women who had been fatally stabbed, a pattern that prompted criticism from some community members who felt those cases were not investigated as vigorously as later killings of white victims thought to be connected. In the late 1990s a man named Leslie Burchart confessed to four of the Golden Years slayings but did not admit to killing Eva Jones; he later recanted and died in 2002. No arrests have been made in Jones’s death and the case remains officially unsolved.

Did anyone in Richmond in 1990 have information about Eva Jones, her routines, or people who might have had access to her home?