A 22-year-old Black woman in Missouri who escaped after a white man abducted, tortured and held her captive for weeks in a basement has said several other Black women were killed by her captor – less than a month after police dismissed community concerns about a serial killer as “completely unfounded”.
The woman, who has not been named, escaped on 7 October after about a month in captivity, still wearing a metal collar locked with a padlock that authorities had to remove.
She told Kansas City police that 39-year-old Timothy M Haslett had imprisoned her in a basement room in Excelsior Springs – a city just north-east of Kansas City – where he whipped and raped her repeatedly. She escaped while Haslett was dropping his child off at school, and she sought help from neighbours whom she told that her friends “did not make it out” and were killed by Haslett.
Around the time she went missing, several prominent community leaders raised concerns about the disappearance of multiple Black women and girls. Last month, the Kansas City Defender, a nonprofit newsroom, published a video of Bishop Tony Caldwell saying that he had received information that the missing women had all been kidnapped from Prospect Avenue in Kansas City.
The police dismissed the concerns outright as “completely unfounded”, saying in a statement that “there is no basis to support this rumor”.
Haslett, a scruffy looking white man with dark brown hair and a greying beard, was detained and last week pleaded not guilty to charges including rape, kidnap and assault.
The case is just the latest example of a predominantly white police force refusing to take seriously reports of missing and murdered Black, Brown and Indigenous victims – especially women and girls.