An article in the  New York Times by Andrew Jacobs about the man who was killed in Prospect Park on Saturday. No suspect yet but ivestigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia—the Vale of Cashmere, where the murder took place, has been the site of  gay attacks in the past.

William Oliver was a housecleaner, a gardener, a patient uncle and a
reliable jack-of-all-trades. But more than anything, Mr. Oliver, 61,
was known by those who loved him as a walker.

His
tireless amblings across the city were almost always accompanied by the
music that, wearing oversized headphones, he played on a portable CD
player.

On Saturday afternoon, police officers responding to a
911 call from a passer-by found Mr. Oliver’s rain-drenched body in a
thickly wooded corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Mr. Oliver, who lived with relatives in Brooklyn, was killed by a knife plunged into his chest, the police said.

Yesterday,
the authorities said they had no suspects in Mr. Oliver’s killing,
which took place about 4 p.m. in the Vale of Cashmere, a lush, hilly
swath near Grand Army Plaza, which draws bird-watchers and, in good
weather, gay men looking for sexual encounters.

Reared in rural
Virginia, one of seven children born to a tobacco-farming couple, Mr.
Oliver was a quiet, courtly man who, according to family members, held
a variety of jobs after moving to New York in the 1970’s: as a worker
in a handbag factory, a salesman at a jewelry store and, in recent
years, a housecleaner for affluent clients in Manhattan.

Wilson
Oliver, 67, said he could not imagine why anyone would want to harm his
brother, a pacific soul who mostly kept to himself.

Although he
worked when he could, his brother said, William Oliver did not earn
enough money to rent his own place so he alternated between his older
brother’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant and his sister’s house in
Flatbush. Mr. Oliver would get a bed and home-cooked meals, and his
siblings would enjoy his good-natured company and the benefits of his
industriousness.

In the winter, Mr. Oliver shoveled snow, and
in the spring, he prepared his sister’s backyard vegetable garden. Not
long ago, he painted her living room robin’s-egg blue.

"You didn’t have to ask him to do anything," said the sister, Shirley Puryear, 69. "He just did it."

Walking
and listening to music, family members said, seemed to be his solace.
He would regularly stroll the 3½ miles between his brother’s and
sister’s homes. Sometimes, he would hike all the way into Manhattan.
"He’d just walk and walk and walk," said a niece, Evelyn Puryear.

Prospect
Park is near the route he usually took between the homes of his brother
and his sister. Last night, investigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia. When asked, Mr.
Oliver’s brother and sister said they did not know whether he was gay.

Over
the years, the Vale of Cashmere has often been the site of attacks on
gay men. Last October, two men were shot and wounded there; in 2000, a
man dressed as a ninja slashed and beat five men there. No arrests were
made in those attacks.

Clarence Patton, executive director of
the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, said he was
consulted yesterday by an investigator from the Police Department’s
hate crimes unit, who was trying to determine whether the victim was
gay.

Though Mr. Patton said he did not know, he said at least 10
percent of victims of anti-gay violence are not gay, but rather are
targeted in places thought to be gathering spots for gay men or
lesbians. "It’s hard to say whether you hope it was a robbery or an
anti-gay attack," he said. "At the end of the day, a man is dead, and
it doesn’t really matter."