Chapter 1: What is the story behind the serial killer in Newark?
Hi, this is Rebecca Everett. I'm a reporter at NJ.com, part of the same network of advanced local news sites that worked with Wondery to bring you Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, and Death County, PA. Today we're bringing you the beginning of our new podcast, Someone's Hunting Us, a story about a serial killer you've never heard of and the women who took him down.
Stay tuned for the first 10 minutes of Someone's Hunting Us. A silver BMW purrs across the Newark City line on a summer night in 2016. Behind the wheel, his mind is clear. He is part id, driven by his desires and unable or unwilling to resist them.
But he isn't all impulse. In the pocket of the driver's side door are the items he's collected for his kill kit. Tight black clothes, zip ties, a body fluid cleanup kit. There's also pepper spray and a small container of lighter fluid, sloshing when the car dips into a pothole. The tools of his craft lovingly assembled for a night just like this one.
He's been planning this like he plans everything. It's finally happening. Death has come to Newark.
The killer isn't from Newark, but he knows the city well, including the area they call Down Bottom. Graffitied warehouses and impoverished people carrying their lives in bags. Women in need of a fix, a meal, who find themselves in this forgotten place. He imagines picking a girl like this. A girl who is unlikely to raise alarm bells if she doesn't come home.
How hard would anyone look for a girl like that, he thinks.
He's thought about the places where he can execute the plan, driven slowly past the abandoned homes, seen the broken locks that would let him slip inside to dispose of his victim.
Even if he could never really be charming, he knows how to be disarming, just totally non-threatening, with his glasses and skinny frame. He looked nice.
Like, if you look at him, you don't look at him and think he's a serial killer.
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Chapter 2: How did Khalil Wheeler-Weaver select his victims?
This is Someone's Hunting Us, a podcast from NJ.com and The Star Ledger. It's a story about five young women where only one survives. A story about love, pain, indifference, and depravity, where women are both the victims and the heroes. It's 2016, and there's a serial killer prowling the streets of Newark. One girl disappears, then another, then another, and another.
But there was no widespread panic, no scary headlines. People go missing all the time in a city like Newark.
Police didn't realize this polite, pleasant young man was systematically murdering young Black women.
They felt safe with him, and obviously he could talk to them enough to feel safe. He looked like a little boy, but I think he's a predator. There's no doubt about it. He would commit a heinous crime, and he would go on about his days, and nothing would happen. Especially the immature, inexperienced killers will feel that rush and then want it as fast as they can.
This was the type of stuff that we used to read about. I never thought it would happen to one of us.
I'm Rebecca Everett. I'm an investigative crime reporter and a podcaster.
And I'm Daisy Calabria Robertson, a columnist at NJ.com reporting on diverse communities. For the last year, we've been digging into this case. And as a woman of color, this story hits so close to my heart.
It's a story all tied up in race, poverty, a tough city, and the way the system and even society dismiss missing girls who don't look like Gabby Petito or Natalie Holloway with their pale skin and blue eyes. I had just moved here to New Jersey when this case first broke, and the storyline was like, wow, they caught this serial killer in a few months. Great job.
Turns out that was kind of bullshit.
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