Jacqueline Teresa Birch, a 39-year-old Black woman, was found dead on November 18, 1997, in a vacant row house on Princeton Place NW in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide by manual strangulation. That same abandoned building had earlier been the location where another woman, Lateashia Blocker, was found dead that year.

Birch was one of several women in the area—many vulnerable because of drug addiction and occasional sex work—whose deaths between 1996 and 1997 alarmed the community. A special task force made up of D.C. Police, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration was formed to investigate the cluster of unsolved homicides.

Investigators arrested a neighbor, 34-year-old Darryl Donnell Turner, in January 1998 and charged him in the deaths of Birch and Dana Hill, whose body had been found December 1, 1997, in another vacant building. Prosecutors relied on forensic evidence: Turner’s semen was reportedly found on both Birch and Hill, and orange acrylic fibers on both victims were matched to a blanket from Turner’s home. In October 2001 a jury returned convictions for first-degree sexual abuse and felony murder, and Turner was sentenced to life without parole.

Did anyone in Petworth at the time recall unusual activity around the vacant houses on Princeton Place NW?