From [HERE] On Oct. 7, a terrified 22-year-old Black woman escaped from a home in Excelsior Springs. She told police she had been locked up there for about a month, after being abducted from Prospect Avenue in Kansas City by a man who lives in the home.

The man, Timothy M. Haslett Jr., 39, is in custody facing charges of rape, kidnapping and assault in Clay County. The woman told neighbors and police that she was restrained in a small room in Haslett’s basement, where he repeatedly raped, beat and tortured her. She managed to escape when he took his elementary-age son to school. 

The woman told a neighbor and police something else: There were other victims, she said. Women who “didn’t make it out.” 

The woman’s escape and Haslett’s arrest occurred a month after The Kansas City Defender, a Black-owned news publication, republished a video of Bishop Tony Caldwell, a community and church leader, alerting the public of assertions that at least several Black girls and women are missing from the Prospect Avenue corridor. 

“We got four young ladies that have been murdered within the last week off of here at 85th and Prospect,” Caldwell said in the video. “We got a serial killer again.”

After the video went viral on social media, the Kansas City Police Department released a statement calling Caldwell’s assertions “completely unfounded.” The department makes the public aware of every homicide it investigates, the statement said. It said police had responded to one homicide of a woman in six weeks, at a location not close to Prospect Avenue.  Several local news outlets, which had not reported on Caldwell’s allegations, did report the police rebuttal. 

Authorities in Kansas City and Excelsior Springs have told news outlets they have not found a link connecting the woman imprisoned in Haslett’s home with any other reported missing or murdered women. A police investigative squad in Clay County is working the case and searching for any other victims. 

But the woman’s emergence, and her story of being abducted in Kansas City, has roiled Black leaders and residents. They contend that the events are proof that police don’t take reports of missing Black women seriously and that mainstream news outlets are too quick to accept the police version of events. 

“I’m tired of hearing these excuses. I’m tired of hearing people thinking what people know, instead of going to the people and seeing who they are,” said Gloria Ellington, the founder of GYRL, a nonprofit she started in 2000 with the mission of empowering women, especially victims and survivors of domestic violence. Ellington is part of the group searching for missing women and girls along the Prospect corridor.