CHICAGO _ More than 10 years have passed, but Margaret Gomez's family members still drive by a Southwest Side corner searching for the man they believe strangled the 22-year-old and left her in a muddy lot in the shadow of the Stevenson Expressway.
They don't expect to find him but feel it's something they must do. That and pray.
"Lately, I said a prayer to the Virgin Mary," the mother, who shares the same name as her daughter, told a reporter in a quiet voice. "And then you called. Maybe it's a sign?"
Other families have waited even longer for an answer.
Over the last 17 years, at least 75 women have been strangled or smothered in Chicago and their bodies dumped in vacant buildings, alleys, garbage cans, snow banks. Arrests have been made in only a third of the cases, according to a first-ever analysis by the Chicago Tribune.
While there are clusters of unsolved strangulations on the South and West sides, police say they've uncovered no evidence of a serial killer at work. If they are right, 50 murderers have gotten away with their crime.
Fifty people who used belts, bras, ropes, packing tape or their bare hands to kill these women. Fifty families still looking for justice for a mother, a sister, a daughter.
It has mostly been a silent vigil. There have been few news stories and even fewer memorials or other public gestures that would have focused attention on these women and how they died.
The Tribune began reviewing their cases while following up on the largely ignored story of a woman strangled last summer, her body dumped along a curb on the West Side. We wanted to find out how many other women had been strangled and abandoned: Who were they and had their killers been caught?
"It's a staggering number," said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. "It is odd how easy it is to disrupt people's sense of comfort when a large number of people are all killed at once. It is likewise upsetting to realize how, if you spread out over a long period of time, how inured people are to the murdering of women, particularly marginalized women."
The Tribune searched through thousands of pages of medical examiner records and public crime reports to build a database. Here is what we found:
_ At least 75 women have been strangled or smothered in the city since 2001, the earliest year that crime reports on the slayings were publicly available. Many of them struggled with drugs or prostitution, making them particularly vulnerable to predators on the street. Some had no arrest records at all.
_ Twenty-five of the cases have been closed with the arrests of 13 men, some of them charged with more than one murder. That leaves 67 percent still unsolved. The Police Department would not say if there are active suspects in those cases, but officials reviewed more than a dozen of them after they were contacted by the Tribune and have referred three to cold case detectives.
_ There are clusters of strangulations around Washington Park on the South Side and Garfield Park on the West Side. Twenty-seven slayings happened in three police districts on the West, South and Far South sides long marked by violence and drug use. Of those, just three have been solved.
Around Washington Park, two women were strangled and left in burning trash bins over two days in November 2007. Theresa Bunn, 21 years old and eight months pregnant, was found south of the park. Hazel Lewis, 52, was found the next day north of the park behind an elementary school. Neither case has been solved.
_ The women ranged in age from 18 to 58, and most of them were African-American. One of the victims was a grandmother of 20 and a great-grandmother of two. Others were nurses, waitresses or young women hoping to finally conquer their addictions and go back to school.
_ At least 47 of the women had histories of prostitution. Based on the Tribune's analysis, along with interviews with women who worked in prostitution, strangulation is one of the main ways people in the sex trade have been killed in Chicago over the last two decades.
"It's upfront and personal," said Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute who co-founded The Dreamcatcher Foundation, an organization that provides outreach and mentoring for those in the sex trade. "I have been (choked) so much, it became, like, you don't let guys get close to your neck."
Autopsy reports indicate some of the women were also raped and beaten. Some were gagged; some had plastic bags tightened around their head. One had a broken nose; others suffered severe head injuries and bruises over their bodies.
"The brutal nature of these crimes is very disturbing," said Chief of Detectives Melissa Staples.
Staples, along with victim advocates, say the dangerous world some of these women frequent makes it more difficult to solve their slayings. The last person with the victim is often unknown. People use aliases. Witnesses don't trust cops. DNA evidence doesn't always lead to a suspect.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the bodies of dozens of women were found, the Police Department responded by forming a task force that solved the slayings of 40 women. The task force was eventually disbanded even as, the Tribune review shows, the attacks continued at a steady pace.
Staples is not certain the task force needs to be reinstated. But Cook County's top prosecutor said it is worth considering to raise the "level of urgency" in clearing cases.
"If we knew there was someone picking off children on their way to school, I think the fierce urgency of trying to figure out who would require us to (have a task force)," State's Attorney Kim Foxx said in a recent interview. "That is not the level of urgency we have with these women."
