Kansas City serial killer, convicted of murdering seven women, dies in state custody

A serial killer who terrorized Kansas City’s East Side and was convicted in the murders of seven women died in custody over the weekend.

Terry A. Blair, 62, was pronounced dead at 1:18 a.m. Saturday at Washington County Memorial Hospital, according to Missouri Department of Corrections spokeswoman Karen Pojmann. Blair had been transported there by ambulance for a medical emergency from Potosi Correctional Center, about 70 miles south of St. Louis.

A cause of death has not been determined, but an autopsy will be conducted, Pojmann said.

Blair was convicted by Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John O’Malley in 2008. In exchange for a bench trial, two other murder charges were dropped. Prosecutors also agreed not to seek the death penalty.

On Sept. 3, 2004, a man began making 911 calls. He said he had killed two women whose bodies had just been found by police. The man, who called himself Scott, also told dispatchers that he had killed four other people and told them where to find three of the bodies, according to The Star’s archives.

The caller said he had killed the women because they were prostitutes.

Police formed a task force as fear spread through the community. Blair, who had been convicted in 1982 of murdering his former girlfriend Angela Monroe, was arrested within weeks. According to court records, Blair confessed to beating Monroe because she was working as a prostitute.

He was paroled in 2002.

Blair came to be known as the “Prospect Corridor Killer” because he dumped the bodies along Prospect Avenue. The killings horrified Kansas City in 2004 and also exposed conditions in some neighborhoods along Prospect Avenue. Some of the victims had been missing for weeks and were found in trash-strewn lots.

During the trial, Blair’s defense attorneys called the identity of the caller into question and a linguistics expert testified that it was unlikely that Blair was the caller. Prosecutors said it was impossible to say that about a person disguising his voice.

DNA on one of the bodies was matched to Blair.

Relatives testified that their loved ones had battled difficult circumstances, but that their lives were valued, according to previous Star reporting.

O’Malley sentenced Blair to six consecutive life terms for the killings of Patricia Wilson Butler, 45, Anna Ewing, 42, Carmen Hunt, 40, Claudette Juniel, 31, Sheliah McKinzie, 38, and Darci Williams, 25.

“He is not clever or brave or powerful,” O’Malley said at the April 2008 sentencing hearing. “He is simply a middle-aged man destined to die in a prison cell.”