Terry Blair: The Prospect Avenue Predator

Terry Blair: The Prospect Avenue Predator examines one of Kansas City's most devastating serial murder cases through the lens of systemic failure and urban decline. In the summer of 2004, Terry Anthony Blair murdered at least six women along the Prospect Avenue corridor, targeting sex workers in a neighborhood that decades of disinvestment had transformed into what criminologists call a "criminogenic environment." This comprehensive work goes beyond true crime narrative to explore how Blair's crimes emerged from intersecting failures across multiple institutions: a parole system that released him despite killing a sex worker in 1982, police procedures that delayed recognition of his serial pattern, and social conditions that left vulnerable women without protection or alternatives to survival sex work. Drawing on court records, police files, interviews with investigators and victim families, and analysis of the Blair family's multi-generational criminal network, this book traces how one predator exploited systemic vulnerabilities that persist today. The work examines forensic breakthroughs including voice analysis and DNA evidence that led to Blair's conviction, his twenty-year imprisonment until his death in 2024, and the haunting question of possible additional victims whose cases remain unsolved. More than a chronicle of individual evil, this is an indictment of the institutional failures and urban policies that enabled serial predation against society's most marginalized members.