Scott Kimball is brought in to the courtroom for the start of his hearing at the Boulder County Justice Center in Boulder, Colo. Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009. Kimball was charged in the death of his uncle, Terry Kimball, and three others _ Jennifer Marcum, LeAnn Emry and Kaysi McLeod. (The Daily Camera | Mark Leffingwell) Serial killer Kimball could be linked to Peggy Hettrick's murder
By Kevin Vaughan
The Denver Post
16th Oct 2010
State and federal authorities have launched an investigation into serial killer Scott Kimball as a potential suspect in one of Colorado's most vexing unsolved murders — the 1987 stabbing and mutilation of Peggy Hettrick in Fort Collins, The Denver Post has learned. The twin investigations, by the FBI and the Colorado attorney general's office, came after a Denver Post examination of evidence in the 2004 murder of a woman in Westminster that has been linked to Kimball found eerie similarities to the wounds suffered by Hettrick.
Catrina Powell, 26, was found dead behind a Westminster strip mall in the early hours of Oct. 25, 2004. Her killer brutally beat and strangled her and severed her hands, apparently in an attempt to prevent the use of fingerprints or a tattoo to identify her. But an autopsy report showed that her killer also sliced the nipple on one of her breasts and cut tissue in her groin.
"That sounds just like the case in Fort Collins," said Dr. Mike Dobersen, Arapahoe County's coroner, after a Post reporter detailed the wounds suffered by Powell. Dobersen consulted in the Hettrick case, which is currently before a statewide grand jury, and was familiar with the injuries she suffered. Hettrick's killer cut off one of her nipples and sliced away tissue near her vagina. The Hettrick and Kimball cases have been front-page news in recent years — hers because Tim Masters was convicted of her murder and then ultimately freed after the discovery of new DNA evidence, his because he killed at least four people while serving as an FBI informant.
Neither the FBI nor state investigators would comment. "We can neither confirm nor deny that an investigation exists," said FBI agent and Denver division spokesman Dave Joly. "The Hettrick case is the subject of a ongoing grand jury investigation," said Mike Saccone, spokesman for the Colorado attorney general's office. "As such, we can't comment."
However, a law enforcement source familiar with the case said both agencies began looking at Kimball after The Post asked questions last month about the similarities between the sexual mutilations Hettrick and Powell suffered. While a definite link has not been established between Kimball and Hettrick's death, law enforcement officials have, in recent weeks, been attempting to determine his whereabouts at the time of the 1987 killing, the source said. At the time of Hettrick's killing, Kimball, a Boulder native, was spending a lot of time in Montana.
But The Post found that Kimball also spent time in Fort Collins in 1987. Court records show he was cited for harassment after an incident that year at a business that is a little more than half a mile from the field where Hettrick's body was discovered. On the citation, he listed himself as a University of Colorado student. Also, Montana police records raise the possibility that Kimball was not in that state at the time Hettrick was killed.
Kimball, who has a history of counterfeiting and bad-check writing stretching back to the 1980s, persuaded an FBI agent in 2002 to release him so he could act as an informant in a wide-ranging drug probe. Kimball had told the agent that his cellmate had asked him to murder a witness in the case. After his release Dec. 18, 2002, he went on to kill at least four people — three in the span of seven months: LeAnn Emry, 24, in late January 2003; Jennifer Marcum, 25, in February 2003; and Kaysi McLeod, 19, in August 2003. A year later, in the summer of 2004, Kimball murdered an uncle of his, Terry Kimball, 60. Kimball ultimately pleaded guilty to all four murders, and he was sentenced to 70 years in the state prison system. Now 44, he is at the Sterling Correctional Facility. But investigators have said repeatedly that they suspected he could have other victims, and in September The Post reported that he was being eyed as a potential suspect in Powell's unsolved killing.
Sexual mutilations
Hettrick was found dead early the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, in a field off Landings Drive in south Fort Collins. At the time, the area was largely undeveloped. Her killer stabbed her in the back, then sexually mutilated her. Those wounds were inflicted after she was dead. Almost immediately, police investigators focused on Tim Masters, at the time a 15-year- old high school student whose home overlooked the field where Hettrick's body was found. It wasn't until 1998, however, that Fort Collins police investigators ultimately arrested Masters, and when they took him to trial the following year, they had no physical evidence — no blood, no hair, no fingerprints — tying him to Hettrick's killing.
What they did have was a collection of survival knives and a series of violent drawings and writings as well as a forensic psychologist's opinion that they provided important clues showing that Masters killed the woman. A jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life in prison. However, attorneys ultimately uncovered numerous pieces of evidence that were never turned over to his defense team by prosecutors, and in January 2008, skin-cell DNA on Hettrick's clothing was linked to a former boyfriend of hers. A judge tossed out Masters' conviction, and the case was ultimately turned over to the attorney general's office.
The Post discovered the potential link between the Hettrick and Powell cases in September after the Adams County coroner's office provided it with a copy of Powell's autopsy report. After a Post reporter approached the FBI, seeking information about the potential link, federal agents began looking into the case. At the same time, The Post requested documents from multiple law enforcement agencies in an attempt to establish Kimball's whereabouts at the time Hettrick was killed. According to the law enforcement source, the FBI has requested the same documents.
Kimball was arrested Feb. 14, 1987 — three days after Hettrick's killing — in Hamilton, Mont. He had been wanted on a warrant for misdemeanor criminal mischief stemming from an incident six weeks earlier in which someone driving along a country road deliberately toppled several mailboxes. Kimball's whereabouts on the day Hettrick was killed could not be determined, and the Montana records do not detail what steps law officers took, if any, to locate him between the time the mailboxes were smashed on Dec. 28, 1986, and his arrest on Feb. 14, 1987. However, The Post found that later that year, Kimball was traveling between Colorado and Montana in a matter of days.
"Upset" about players
Late Aug. 7, 1987, a Fort Collins police officer cited Kimball with harassment after an incident at 216 W. Horsetooth Road. There at the time was a business called Whirly Ball, where teams of players in bumper cars faced off, attempting to put a ball in a goal at the other end of the hockey-rink-like court. According to court records on file in Larimer County, Kimball got "upset" with others "who would not play with him any more." He called the others a degrading name and threatened to fight them, leading to the citation.
The building that housed Whirly Ball is, by road, seven-tenths of a mile from the spot where Hettrick's body was found — closer if one were to traverse the area in a direct line, which was possible in 1987 in what was a largely undeveloped area on the south edge of Fort Collins. The citation was served early Aug. 8, 1987, and he was in jail, according to court documents, until later that day, when he posted $250 bail. Five days later, according to Montana court records, officers arrested him again in Hamilton on a warrant from Missoula County. Kimball is also known to have moved through Washington, California, Idaho and Alaska.
The Post also found one other possible link between Kimball and Hettrick's killing. In 1999, as Fort Collins police investigators prepared to prosecute Masters, they put together a list of potential suspects in Hettrick's killing that was drawn from thousands of pages of reports. Essentially, the list, which ultimately contained 94 names, included everyone who was mentioned anywhere in Fort Collins police reports on the Hettrick killing. Name No. 64 was Ted Peyton, who was of interest to investigators because he was behind bars when he mailed an article about Hettrick's killing to an inmate in another prison. Peyton, however, was not just any prisoner. He was behind bars after being convicted in 1990 of having molested both Kimball and his brother when they were boys.
One factor considered by investigators working to link the crimes is a similar "method of operation" — the way they are carried out, the profile of the victims and the type of weapons used, for example. On that front, there are differences between the Hettrick and Powell murders. Hettrick was stabbed, while Powell was beaten and strangled. Hettrick's body was apparently "posed" by her killer — her shirt pulled up and her pants pulled down — while Powell was apparently dumped in a rush behind a strip mall. Hettrick was a manager at a clothing store, while Powell was linked to both drugs and prostitution. And although Hettrick was stabbed and mutilated, there was no attempt to hide her identity, while Powell's killer cut off her hands, perhaps to hide the "Lil Powell" tattoo on her left hand. (The hands have never been recovered.)
But the similarities in the wounds to the private areas of both women remain. Dobersen, the Arapahoe County coroner, has more than three decades of experience as a forensic pathologist and estimated he has performed 6,000 autopsies. He said he has seen only one other case that was at all similar to the mutilations suffered by Hettrick and Powell.
Kimball, in a recent interview with 9News, denied that he was responsible for Powell's murder. "You can't go around and accuse me of every missing person or every single homicide — I mean, that's ridiculous," he told the station. "That's an easy out for investigators."
Russell Williams is escorted from court on Tuesday in Belleville 'You're going to kill me, aren't you?'
Adrian Humphreys,
National Post
Oct. 19, 2010
Belleville, Ont. — Marie-France Comeau, a 37-year-old Canadian Forces flight attendant, and Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd, a 27-year-old school bus scheduler, both showed their strength of character when Colonel Russell Williams bashed into their lives; each — in their own, very different way — tried desperately to survive the unimaginable brutality he heaped upon them.
Corporal Comeau, like a good soldier, fought like hell, screaming, lashing out, trying to flee in such a clash the drywall in her home where she was attacked was dented and spattered with her blood and his. Ms. Lloyd’s struggle came from the other end of the spectrum, submitting to his every degrading demand in hopes he would reward her with her life. That both women ended up dead — bruised and battered, raped and desecrated — speaks only to the impoverished mental state of Williams, the former commander of Canada’s busiest military air base, and his unrelenting, mission-oriented determination to kill.
As court heard the full account on Tuesday of the two sex murders he has already admitted committing, cries and weeping swept through the crowded courtroom. And it became clear that nothing either woman said or did could have saved them. The meticulous and organized military man carefully planned and coldly executed each attack, first assembling a kit of tools, court heard. The kit expanded with each attack as he added utensils he found he lacked on a previous mission.
Williams had met Cpl. Comeau once on a military flight and learned that she lived alone in Brighton, Ont., 20 kilometres west of the air base. “As commanding officer he had access to her schedule and personal information, including her home address,” said Crown Attorney Lee Burgess. “He learned that she was away on a military-related trip in mid-November.” He broke into her house and scouted it thoroughly. He stole seven pieces of lingerie.
A week later, on Nov. 23, 2009, he completed his military duties at the base, turned off his BlackBerry and returned to her home. Donning a mask, he broke in through a rear basement window and could hear Ms. Comeau on the telephone upstairs. He hid near the furnace of her unfinished basement and waited 30 to 40 minutes for her to go to bed, but his presence had not gone completely unnoticed. One of Ms. Comeau’s two cats had wandered downstairs and discovered him.
“Ms. Comeau did not go to bed but instead came downstairs in search of one of her cats. She was dressed only in a shawl. The cat was staring at Mr. Williams concealed by the furnace and as she walked toward it she saw him,” said Mr. Burgess. “She did not know who it was as he had his face covered. She called him a bastard and was screaming at him. He subdued her by striking her multiple times in the head area with a red flashlight that he had brought with him.” But she continued to struggle, evidenced by blood and disturbed items across the basement. She was bleeding so heavily from her head that her hair left a bloody swirl on the floor.
He bound her hands with plastic ties, wrapped her eyes and mouth shut with duct tape and tied her to a metal support post in the basement while he secured the house. He used kitchen knives to hold a sheet over her bedroom window and erased evidence of his break-in from the outside. He found her house key and broke the end of it off inside the front lock to prevent anyone from entering. As he tried to move her upstairs, Ms. Comeau again fought back, leaving pools, streaks and splashes of blood as well as a large dent in the stairway. She relented only with unconsciousness. And Williams immediately reached for his camera.
He moved her to her bedroom and with head bound in a towel wrapped in duct tape, he repeated over hours the abuse and rape while carefully videotaping and photographing his various attacks. Still she looked to escape. “Her fingers are weakly fiddling with the rope in an effort to find the ends behind her back,” said Mr. Burgess, describing the video of the attack that was not shown in court.
When Williams went to check that the house remained secure, Ms. Comeau fled to a bathroom but Williams chased and caught her and another struggle ensued. Police would later find her blood — and his — smeared in the bathroom. “Even though she was bound with rope and gagged with duct tape across her mouth, she was able to fight him off,” said Mr. Burgess.
More than four hours after he crept into her basement, the fight was over. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you,” Ms. Comeau says on the video. “I don’t deserve to die” she says and begs him to go away and says that she’s been good all her life. “By this time Ms. Comeau is huddled in the corner next to her dresser,” said Mr. Burgess. “She tells him that she wants to live so badly and begs him to give her a chance. Mr. Williams walks slowly up to her and places, what is believed to be duct tape, on her nose.” Williams then again reached for his camera.
On Jan. 29, 2010, Williams moved to take his second victim. He did not know Ms. Lloyd but said he had seen her working out on a treadmill in her basement. Again, he broke in the beforehand. Again he returned with a kit of tools. He surprised Ms. Lloyd in her bed and there she forged her own path that she hoped would lead to survival.
“You want to survive this, don’t you?” Williams said to her in a quiet and calm voice, as his video camera was recording and she lay bound and blindfolded on her bed. Ms. Lloyd nodded and said yes. “OK, good, you are doing good.” She complies with his vile demands and stoically suffers abuse over hours until he lead her to his SUV, placed her inside and drove to his cottage in Tweed where his assaults continued. While there, Ms. Lloyd suffered a seizure and begged Williams to take her to a hospital. Gasping and stumbling, the video shows her panicking, saying she feels she is going to die.
“If I die will you make sure my mom knows that I love her,” she says. The next day, after another day of abuse, Williams told her he was letting her go. He helped her dress. “As she began walking, however, Mr. Williams struck Jessica Lloyd on the head with a flashlight. He believed this caused her to be unconscious on the floor. He then strangled her with some rope, and did so until her body stopped moving,” said Mr. Burgess. And Williams photographed her body.
Despite all of Williams’ planning, there was one thing he had not accounted for. While he was inside Ms. Lloyd’s home, several people noticed his SUV, unusually parked at the edge of her property. When she was reported missing, police were alerted to where the vehicles had been seen and tire tread marks and footprints were found in the frozen ground. Police analyzed both. Only three types of vehicles had the same wheel base measurements as the tracks suggested and only one brand of tire had the specific tread marks: Toyo Open Country HT tires.
In a clever piece of policing, a week after Ms. Lloyd disappeared, a roadside check stop was set up on the highway beside her home on Feb. 4 to stop all cars and speak to the drivers while another officer checked the tires. Within minutes, Williams was one of the first drivers pulled over. Both his 2001 Nissan Pathfinder and tires matched the profile. He was allowed to continue on his way. Now a suspect, police put him under surveillance and on Feb. 7, officers secretly watched as he drove to a public car wash and vacuumed out his Pathfinder. As soon as he left, police seized the contents of the vacuum canister.
That day, he was asked to come to a meeting with police. He arrived at an Ottawa OPP office an hour later. At 3:03 p.m., Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth of the OPP’s behavioural science section, began interviewing Williams. Williams denied involvement in Ms. Lloyd’s disappearance, said he did not wish to have a lawyer present and consented to police taking a DNA swab, an impression of his boot print, and to take his BlackBerry for analysis. Just over an hour later, Det.-Sgt. Smyth confronted Williams with the boot print match.
“After a skilled and persistent interview” by Det.-Sgt. Smyth, Williams said he wanted to minimize “the impact on my wife.” He then asked for a map so that he could show where Ms. Lloyd’s body was. The floodgates opened. He admitted to killing Ms. Comeau and sexually assaulting two other women. Over the course of 18 hours of questioning by Det.-Sgt. Smyth, Williams recounted his two years and five month campaign of increasing indecency.
After two days of hearing Williams’ litany of crimes in court, Justice Robert Scott declared his finding of guilt on all charges. On Wednesday, prosecutors plan to show a two hour and 40 minute excerpt of the 18-hour interview of Williams and then more than a dozen victim impact statements are expected, primarily from members of Ms. Lloyd’s family. Just before he is sentenced, Williams will be given an opportunity to address the court. The question for most observers is what he might say.
Serial Shooter May Be On The Loose In Sweden
Adam Arnold,
Sky News Online
October 24, 2010
There are fears an attack that left two women injured could be the latest in a string of possibly racially-motivated shootings by a serial gunman in Sweden. Around 15 unsolved shootings have happened in the Malmo area in less than a year, leading to speculation it is the work of a lone attacker.
The two women, aged 26 and 34 and both of immigrant origin, were slightly injured when they were shot through a kitchen window. It is believed one of the victims was hit by the bullet while the other was wounded by a ricochet.
Police spokesman Borje Sjoholm said the series of shootings, which apparently targeted people with an immigrant background, could be linked. Investigators say the gunman is aged between 20 and 40 and they believe a large-calibre handgun was used in most of the attacks which began in December.
The crimes bear a chilling similarity to the case of a sniper dubbed 'Laserman' who carried out attacks in the capital Stockholm in the early 1990s. 'Laserman' was the nickname given to John Ausonius, who shot 11 people of immigrant origin, killing one of them, in and around the city from August 1991 to January 1992. Ausonius, who used a rifle equipped with a laser sight in many of the attacks, was sentenced to life behind bars in 1994 and remains in prison.
Police have been cautious about drawing parallels between the two cases. But the Swedish press picked up on the similarities, with some newspapers saying police were searching for "a new laserman". Police have said they were setting up a task force of up to 50 officers to look into the unsolved shootings. And there are reports that the profiler who helped solve the Ausonius case has joined the investigation team in Malmo.
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (abc40) -- Convicted Springfield serial killer Alfred Gaynor pleads guilty in Hampden County Superior Court to murdering three more women. In 2000, he was convicted of murdering four women.
The victims in the new pleas are Jill Ann Ermellini, Yvette Torres, and Robin Atkins. Family members like Jill Ermellini's mother Janice read impact statements, "Our family has changed forever, not a day goes by that I don't think of how much I love and miss Jill." Jose Torres, the brother of Yvette Torres, also addressed the court, "By murdering my sister, Alfred Gaynor also killed part of our family."
Gaynor has also been charged with the murder of Vera Hallums in 1995. He pleaded not guilty to that charge. Gaynor's admission to the additional murders comes after his nephew Paul Fickling was allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges of manslaughter in the deaths of Amy Smith and her young daughter Destiny.
Gaynor has admitted to killing Amy Smith and a new trial had been scheduled for Fickling. Gaynor will be back in court November 23rd in the Vera Hallums case. Gaynor has yet to be indicted in the Amy Smith murder.
Alleged serial-killer page on Facebook closed down
Nov 25, 2010
Berlin - A Facebook page on which a suspected serial killer seemingly promised to kill one child a day had gone offline Thursday. Police in Bodenfelde, Germany arrested Jan O at the start of this week on charges of murdering a girl, 14, and a boy, 13, one week apart. Police said an 'explicit' statement on the internet suggested O, a 26-year-old drug addict, was the killer.
News reports said a recent status update on O's Facebook page said, 'Slaughtered girl yesterday. One a day until they get me.' Andreas Borchert, a senior detective, said: 'Everything we know indicates he planned to keep going.' Asked if the Facebook entry was genuine, he said, 'I can't confirm or deny it. There are certain things we want him to tell us about in person.'
The bodies of the two children were found half-naked in woods near the town after they had been stabbed and strangled. The detective he said there was no evidence to link O to other unsolved killings near Bodenfeld, 250 kilometres west of Berlin.
Most serial killing victims are women, FBI reports
THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service
November 27, 2010
America’s serial killers prey on women — to an extent only hinted at by Hollywood films and best-selling novels. According to never-before-released FBI data, women accounted for 70 percent of the 1,398 known victims of serial killers since 1985. By comparison, women represented only 22 percent of total homicide victims.
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), based in Quantico, Va., released the data at the request of Scripps Howard News Service. SHNS is conducting an investigation into the nation’s more than 185,000 unsolved homicides committed since 1980. According to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, local police reported that about 33,000 homicides of women remain unsolved.
FBI agent Mark Hilts, head of the bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit No. 2 that profiles serial killers, said “a large number” of serial killers act with a sexual motive. “Sex can be a motivation, but it’s a motivation in conjunction with something else — with anger, with power, with control,” Hilts said. “Most serial killers do derive satisfaction from the act of killing, and that’s what differentiates them” from those who kill to help commit or conceal another crime.
Crime experts for decades have tried to define serial murder and to determine its causes and motivations. The Justice Department currently defines a serial killer simply as someone who kills two or more people in separate incidents, a definition that ignores the issue of motive.
The Justice Department for years has estimated that less than 1 percent of all homicides are committed by serial killers, but that assumption has come under question recently. Retired FBI agent Mark Safarik, a veteran serial killer hunter, discounts the official definition of serial murder. “Serial murder is more related to motive. We use a definition of two or more, but that’s really just for research purposes,” said Safarik, now of Forensic Behavioral Services International, a legal consultant firm based in Fredericksburg, Va. “For us, there is almost always some sort of sexual component to the homicide.”
The FBI has compiled victim data for 25 years. They also released information showing that nearly half the victims of known serial homicides were in their 20s and 30s, although people of every age and from every region of the county have been victims.
“We look at homicides and attempted homicides. We look at sexual assaults. We look at unidentified human remains cases where homicide is suspected,” said Special Agent Michael Harrigan, who headed ViCAP from 2007 to 2010 and agreed to release the data. We catalog this in a database to try to identify serial killers or serial offenders that transcend jurisdictional boundaries.”
Among states, New York leads in a grim statistic: It has had 137 victims of serial murder since 1985. California has had 128 and Florida 112. When shown the FBI data, criminologists and veteran homicide investigators asked why New York leads the nation. Does it lead because it has more serial killings or because it does a better job in detecting such killings? “That surprises me. I thought the numbers would always be higher in California and some of the Southern states,” said retired veteran New York City homicide detective Augustine “Gus” Papay.
California, which its immense population, ought to lead in every major crime statistic, Papay said. And he felt Southern states would be overrepresented because of recently documented highway serial killings by Southern truckers.
Papay was a key participant in the successful hunt for Alejandro “Alex” Henriquez, convicted in 1992 of murdering a woman and two girls, including 10-year-old Jessica Guzman. Papay said serial killers may be drawn to a major metropolitan area like New York City. “They think it’s easier to get lost in the big city. And think of all the victims! There are also sorts of different people here they could target,” Papay said. “And maybe they think it will be harder to get caught here.”
------------------
Just as well the FBI are on the case or I'd never have guessed!
Actually, I'm surprise NY leads as well, since the crime rate in general had gone down from where it used to be 20 or so years ago. I thought for sure it would be the southern states that led in the murders. I'm stumped. lol Well, I'm off for some more coffee........
Philadelphia law enforcement officials are tracking what they now call a serial killer in their area. The appearance of this serial murderer coincides with the appearance of a killer in New York, but there is no reason to believe that two cases are linked. The killer operating in Philly has come to be known as the Kensington Strangler. Thus far he has left three bodies in the Kensington area, all strangled and partially nude.
The women that have been killed thus far have also been sexually assaulted. DNA evidence left behind links the three murders to the same person and police announced this morning that the Kensington Strangler is a serial killer and he is currently loose in the area. However, that does not mean that they are any closer to catching him.
The law enforcement officials have spent considerable time stepping up enforcement in the area where the bodies are dumped but that also means that the killer was able to dump a body last night right under their noses. This has lead the investigators to believe that either the killer lives in the immediate area or he knows it very well.
Attempting to patrol an area so large and keep it safe is difficult. Philly has limited manpower when it comes to police officers and they are spread very thin as it is. Now they are having to watch for any other signs that the man is working the area and it is making their jobs that much more difficult.
Suspected serial killer admits to slaying 3 boys
15 Apr 2011
thelocal.de
Ten years after the murder of a nine-year-old child in Germany, police said Friday a man had confessed to killing him and two other boys and was suspected of further murders in France and the Netherlands. The 40-year-old German, who has worked as a youth leader and had already been questioned in the case four years ago, admitted to killing a nine-year-old boy called Dennis in 2001, as well as two other boys aged eight and 11 in the nine years before. He also confessed to sexually abusing "several" minors.
After he was arrested on Wednesday the unnamed serial murder suspect told investigators in the northern city of Hamburg that he drove one of his victims to Denmark and buried his body in a sand dune on a beach.
Authorities in Verden, northern Germany told reporters he may have also killed an 11-year-old French boy, Jonathan Coulom, who disappeared from a camp in western France in April 2004 and whose body was recovered six weeks later. He is also a prime suspect in the death of another boy, 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen, in 1998 in the Netherlands, although he has denied involvement in either case.
"We want to determine whether we are aware of all of this man's deeds or whether he may have committed other crimes," the head of the regional police investigation unit spearheading the case, Karsten Lemke, said.
The unit was established to hunt the killer of Dennis, who vanished during a school field trip on September 5, 2001. Mushroom pickers discovered his body about 40 kilometres away two weeks later, but the killer's trail had long gone cold. But earlier this year, a witness who saw a television programme about the case recalled seeing a station wagon parked on a forest path at about 4:30 am in early September 2001 with a boy who resembled Dennis in the back seat and a man in the front, investigators said. The witness, who was a soldier at the time, was training for a marathon before he had to report for duty that day. The brawny, bespectacled man in the car, who looked to be in his early 30s, matched a description police had received of the suspect from sex abuse victims.
Between 1992 and 2004, five boys were killed in the same way in Germany, France and the Netherlands while at least 40 children were sexually molested in the same regions during that period, according to media reports. Police had long suspected the murderer to be a serial killer living in Germany.
Texas authorities 'find up to 30 dismembered bodies' in mass grave The FBI was on Tuesday night investigating claims that at least 20 dismembered bodies, some belonging to children, were buried in a mass grave in the grounds of a house in rural Texas.
7 Jun 2011
telegraph.co.uk
Police received a tip-off that “between 25 and 30” corpses were buried at the property, between the tiny towns of Hardin and Daisetta, about 55 miles north-east of Houston, local reports said. Officers were said to have discovered traces of blood on their arrival and found reason to apply for a search warrant, according to radio and television news in Liberty County.
Citing unnamed law enforcement sources, two national TV networks said last night they had confirmed “many bodies” had been discovered. CNN said at least 20 were found. But the situation was thrown into confusion when the county sheriff's department, which was initially said to have told local media that it had found bodies, then withdrew the claim. A department official said in a press conference that there was "no evidence of deceased persons" yet, despite the widespread reports to the contrary.
About 15 police vehicles from the department were said to be on the scene last night, and at least one sniffer dog was examining the grounds. A 16-year-old girl next door was reported to have said that the occupant of the property moved out a week ago. Agents from the regional FBI office were called in to investigate, said a spokesman, Kim Barkhausen. A spokesman for the Liberty County sheriff’s office told The Daily Telegraph: “We have no comment to make, sir”.
Hardin is home to under 800 people, while Daisetta has little more than 1,000 residents, according to recent records.
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