11 Women Dead, Police Left Guessing
Feb. 19 -- Some were stabbed, some were strangled, some were bludgeoned to death. In all, the bodies of 11 women have been found in one Detroit neighborhood, and police fear they have a serial killer on their hands.
Three of the 11 have been tied to the same killer by DNA testing, and a fourth has been linked because of where the body was found and how the woman was killed, but investigators are looking at all the killings, trying to get a break.
Sgt. Odell Godbold of the Detroit Police Department's Homicide Cold Case Squad said so far the only common threads linking all 11 victims is that they are all women, all prostitutes and all black.
A joint task force has been formed with agents from the FBI and the state police, and an FBI profiler is being brought in to try to develop an understanding of who the suspect might be, Godbold said.
In the meantime, he said, police are hoping for a lead from the public.
"Until we get a lead or a suspect, all we can do is work with what we have," he said.
But the longer the killings go on, the more the residents of Detroit's Mack neighborhood, where the slayings took place, say they worry the cases won't be solved.
The bodies began turning up in 1999, and the most recent was found in December. The cause of death wasn't always the same, but all of the victims were prostitutes, and many in the community believe they are linked.
"I don't think it's coincidental," said Chaunci Wyche, the executive director of Mack Alive, a nonprofit group working to redevelop the neighborhood. "I think to some degree they are linked — where they are happening, how the women are killed."
Police are not so sure.
The four that are being investigated as the work of one killer were found between August 2001 and November 2002, but unless new evidence comes up to tie the other seven deaths together, they are being treated as the work of other people, even if one or more of those other people are copycats.
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