Dead Zones

Dead Zones: Serial Killer Eugene Victor Britt

In the summer of 1995, the city of Gary, Indiana, already hollowed by decades of industrial collapse, became the hunting ground of Eugene Victor Britt, a convicted rapist released on parole with no support, no housing, and no therapeutic engagement with the violence that had already defined his life. Between May and September, Britt killed at least seven people across Gary and the neighbouring suburb of Portage, exploiting the city's landscape of abandoned structures and unmonitored corridors to conceal both his crimes and himself. Six of his victims were poor Black women from Gary's east side. Their deaths were misclassified, their cases uninvestigated, their killer invisible. The seventh was an eight-year-old white girl in Portage looking for frogs a block from her home. Her death generated the meticulous forensic investigation that the summer had been demanding since June.

Dead Zones is the full, unflinching account of the summer of 1995, a narrative that traces the making of a predator, the destruction of a community, and the systemic failures that allowed both to proceed unchecked. Drawing on forensic records, criminological research, and the social history of post-industrial America, Michelle Labelle-Scott restores the full human weight of seven lives to a case that the official record has too long reduced to statistics. A searing work of narrative nonfiction about race, justice, and the cost of a society that decides, in practice if not in policy, that some lives matter less than others.

Michelle Labelle-Scott grew up in County Cork and has spent two decades researching the intersection of criminal justice, race, and the legacy of post-industrial decline in American cities. A longtime student of true crime narrative and forensic history, she came to the Eugene Victor Britt case through her broader interest in the structural conditions that allow predatory violence to flourish in communities abandoned by economic and institutional investment. She is particularly drawn to cases in which the official record has failed the victims it purports to honour - cases where restoring the full human weight of those lost becomes the writer's primary obligation. Dead Zones is her most personal and most urgent work. She lives in Cork and writes across history, criminology, and social justice.