The State - News from Jan. 26, 1986

A sailor arrested on five counts of attempted murder and two counts of forcible rape is a suspect in the slayings of as many as seven young black women in the Oakland area during the last six months, authorities said. Anthony McKnight, 32, an enlisted man stationed at the Alameda Naval Air Station since 1982, has been known to frequent neighborhoods where some of the victims were last seen alive. McKnight has only been charged with five “very violent, serious assaults,” but “we have not eliminated him” as a suspect in the unsolved string of slayings, said Oakland Police Lt. Al Perrodin. McKnight has been charged with beating, stabbing and raping five Oakland-area women--three of them prostitutes.