A midsummer sun bakes the corner of Wilkens Avenue and Monroe Street as a slow-moving caravan of pickups and slick BMWs rolls down the block.
Deanna White, 35, clings to a metal crutch, shuffling along the sidewalk and stumbling before lowering her frail body onto a stoop in front of a vacant building.
“I’m scared,” White says in a near whisper from her usual spot on one of Baltimore City’s busiest sex-for-sale thoroughfares.
She points to a tattered poster of Amanda Bishop, 22, that’s taped to a door. Bishop is one of five women strangled to death in the city in the past five months.
“I knew her, and now she’s gone,” White says. “I don’t want that to happen to me.”
Suddenly, White’s head drops to her chest. Her eyelids close. She appears asleep.
Only a blast from a car horn awakens her.
“Twenty dollars, that’s what I charge,” White says to no one in particular.
White is one of a dozen heroin-addicted sex workers interviewed by The Examiner as part of a monthlong investigation into the perils of Baltimore’s sex trade.
Five women linked to prostitution have died of asphyxiation since April.
Since 1997, 26 suspected prostitutes have been brutally murdered. Twenty cases remain unsolved, according to police and court records.
Nightly news broadcasts talk of a “serial killer,” but police repeatedly say the cases have little in common other than the alleged occupation of the victims.
“We’re not discounting any possibilities, but it’s very early to say they’re all related,” Commissioner Fred Bealefeld tells The Examiner.
Some women are beaten, others strangled and several more stabbed. Their bodies are discarded in hidden back alleys or along desolate stretches of road in the city’s industrial wasteland.
Some victims are simply forgotten, like 46-year-old Brenda Sue Wright, whose skeletal remains were found behind a trailer truck in a Southeast Baltimore industrial park in December 2000. Police say her body rested there for nearly a year.
Her remains may have stayed hidden forever had employees of a nearby company not hauled away the discarded trailer from a pile of weeds, revealing a skeleton with a clothesline tied around her neck.
“Violence is a constant,” says retired Sgt. Craig Gentile, the former head of a Baltimore City vice squad who retired this past year.
“The women are seeing five or six different men a day. Anything can happen.”
Gentile says he arrested more than 5,000 people accused of being a prostitute or patronizing one during his 22 years on the force. “I stopped counting after that.”
“I’ve arrested everyone from lawyers to construction workers, business executives from Howard County,” he says.
“It’s pretty much the standard all walks of life.”
Hard-core addictions and a rootless existence often lead to a deadly end, Gentile adds.
“Listen, we had guys who wanted to strangle prostitutes until they are unconscious just so they can do what they want to do with them,” he says.
“There are a lot of sickos out there.”
‘Heroin is my master’
The recent rash of violence has failed to persuade some women to abandon the sex trade.
“It’s mostly the young girls. They don’t have any fear,” says unemployed Carol Miller, 46, who quit the business seven months ago but says many of her friends are still walking the streets.
Standing on the sidewalk on Falls Road in Hamden, the strip she used to work, Miller says the younger women are bolder.
“They just don’t think it will happen to them,” Miller says. “But for me, now, I’m done with it; I don’t do it anymore.”
Others simply refuse to quit.
“I know, it’s scary out here,” says a 41-year-old woman who calls herself Alabama, after her native state.
“You never know what’s going to happen when you get in the car with someone, but heroin is my master, and it rules when I wake up, when I go to sleep and why I do what I do.”
Walking in the evanescent glow of a malfunctioning street light, Alabama says she accepts the risk of attack as part of her daily routine.
“I almost got killed in Chicago,” she recalls.
“I got into this guy’s car but didn’t want to go where he wanted to take me. Later police told me a guy who looked like him had strangled some other girls. I thought, ‘God am I lucky!’ ”
The near brush with death has not stopped her from turning tricks.
“I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years, and I don’t see anything changing,” she says, walking down a dark sidewalk.
“This is what I do.”
