1989 murders in the United States

Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African American revolutionary and political activist who founded the Black Panther Party. He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966.
Under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service. The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service, which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers.
In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of police officer John Frey and injuries to himself and another police officer. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped. Later in life, he was also accused of murdering Kathleen Smith and Betty Van Patter, although he was never convicted for either death.
Newton learned to read using Plato's Republic, which influenced his philosophy of activism. He went on to earn a PhD in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980. In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Newton was known for being an advocate of self-defense and used his position as a leader within the Black Panther Party to welcome women as well.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.Although he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), schizotypal personality disorder (StPD), and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of fifteen of the sixteen homicides he had committed in Wisconsin and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment on February 17, 1992. Dahmer was later sentenced to a sixteenth term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

Robert John Bardo (born January 2, 1970) is an American man serving life imprisonment without parole after being convicted for the July 18, 1989, murder of American actress and model Rebecca Schaeffer, whom he had stalked for three years.

Ramón Bojórquez Salcido (born March 6, 1961) is a Mexican convicted spree killer who is currently on death row in California's San Quentin State Prison. He was convicted for the 1989 murders of six female family members and one male supervisor at his workplace. His victims included his wife and two of his daughters, four-year-old Sofía and 22-month-old Teresa. A third daughter, three-year-old Carmina, was left lying in a field beside the bodies of her sisters for thirty-six hours after being slashed across the throat by her father but was eventually rescued.Salcido's victims were killed in the cities of Sonoma and Cotati, California. Maria, Marion, and Ruth Richards were killed at a house at Lakewood Drive in Cotati, and Salcido's relatives and Toovey were killed in Sonoma.

Carol Ann Stuart (née DiMaiti; born March 26, 1959) was murdered on October 23, 1989, by her husband, Charles Michael "Chuck" Stuart Jr. (December 18, 1959 – January 4, 1990). Both persons were white. Charles Stuart claimed that a black man had carjacked their car in Boston and shot both his pregnant wife and himself.
His statement to police set off a months-long manhunt by the Boston Police Department for a purported black assailant. Police actions, with widespread stop and frisk of African-American residents in Mission Hill, was supported by the Suffolk County District Attorney. The hunt lasted until Charles' younger brother, Matthew, confessed that Carol was killed by Charles to collect her life insurance payout. Soon afterward Charles committed suicide.The shooting occurred in Boston's predominantly black Mission Hill neighborhood. It generated intense and sustained media attention both nationally and in Boston as an alleged example of black on white crime. During this period Suffolk County District Attorney Newman A. Flanagan lobbied the state legislature to pass a revised law to reinstitute the death penalty.Police arrested William "Willie" Bennett, a 39-year-old black man from Roxbury, on unrelated charges, but soon the investigation centered on Bennett. The media reported as though his guilt was certain.