Inglewood Victims Show Murder Has No Age Limit

William Tillett was a fourth-grader who liked to make funny faces and draw Bart Simpson cartoons. Sadie Hancock was a gregarious old woman who knew everybody on her block.

In 1990, they became Inglewood’s youngest and oldest homicide victims.

William, 11, was kidnaped as he walked home from Bennett-Kew Elementary School on May 24. His body was found later that evening in the carport of a Hawthorne apartment building. A classmate, speaking at a lunchtime memorial service at the school, said of William: “I wish the police would catch the killer. It’s sad that a boy can’t live to be 20.”

Sadie, as the 84-year-old woman was widely known, was stabbed to death in her 7th Avenue home on the weekend of Aug. 25 during what police say was probably a robbery attempt. Some years before, she had successfully urged her neighbors to form a Neighborhood Watch group to keep crime off the block. The sirens alerting neighbors to her death interrupted a meeting of the group across the street from her home.

Both cases remain unsolved.