800 Residents Crowd Meeting About 5 Slayings : Crime: Officials urge caution but reassure residents fearful about serial killer. Meanwhile, police continue the city’s biggest hunt for a slayer.

More than 800 nervous University City residents--fearful of a serial killer in their midst and eager to protect themselves--crammed a school auditorium Tuesday night and spilled into an outdoor courtyard for details of the city’s largest-ever murder investigation.

The huge, anxious gathering came on the same day that an expanded team of police detectives began an unprecedented probe into the serial slayings of five women in the Clairemont-University City area and began sorting through 400 tips related to the killings.

“We feel very violated,” said Catherine Leffler, who lives near the house where two women were found stabbed to death Thursday. “We feel as if our community has been raped. We used to feel we lived in a very safe neighborhood. We no longer feel this way.”

Police believe a lone killer fatally stabbed all five women after walking through unlocked doors between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on four separate days this year. Police believe he might have staked out his victims before killing them.

Four of the women were between 18 and 21 years old with shoulder-length brown hair. The fifth is Pamela Clark, 42, the mother of 18-year-old Amber Clark, who was also a victim. The Clarks were slain Thursday at their University City home. The killer might not have expected Pamela Clark to be there, police said.

Alarmed residents filled a 518-seat auditorium Tuesday night at Standley Junior High School in University City and 50 more stood in the aisles, listening to police describe the investigation so far and offering safety tips.

So many people packed the school during the 90-minute presentation that police had to set up an additional outdoor courtyard for 250 others.

Police Chief Bob Burgreen, along with several other top investigators on the case, tried to reassure the throngs but also urged caution as they shuttled between the two groups.

The large turnout did not surprise Burgreen.

“We all have wives, daughters and sisters--loved ones who mean everything to us,” he said. “What these people are doing is what we’re all doing: identifying with the victims. They could be our wives, our daughters. We need to catch this suspect.” Burgreen told those assembled that they needed to get deadbolts for their doors and make sure their windows lock properly.

“You needed to be doing this all along, but you particularly need to be doing it now,” he said.

The serial killer case, he said, “is a tough one. We need some help. We need a break.”

Police said they received about 200 tips Monday after announcing they were staging the largest homicide investigation in the department’s history. By Tuesday, the number had doubled.

“Some are better than others,” Deputy Chief Cal Krosch said. “A lot of people have suspicions that they’ve seen the suspect. Then there are the people who say, ‘I just saw a black guy driving up Genessee Avenue.’ We really have to cut the wheat from the chaff.”

Krosch said the department has sent some investigators to track down the more serious allegations, although he would not be specific.

Homicide Capt. Dick Toneck would not say if the department had any solid suspects, but he did say police have “several people we are looking at.”

Fifteen detectives are working the case full time. They are being assisted by 10 other department members, mostly patrol officers assigned to the Clairemont-University City neighborhoods and technicians helping sift through evidence.

The Guardian Angels also have joined the neighborhood patrols, although Toneck warned the public Tuesday not to regard the group as “ultimate security” for their protection.

During the first of what is to become a series of daily press briefings, Toneck shed little new light Tuesday on the latest killings, declining to say how many times the Clarks had been stabbed, what evidence might have been left in the house or other crime scene details.

While police had been willing before Thursday to talk openly about the killings, they now are refusing to provide anything related to the cases beyond the barest details. Krosch said the danger of providing any new information that may link the crimes is that others may try to duplicate the killings using the same techniques.

“We are reaching a point that we really fear a copycat killer,” he said. “There are some real nuts out there.”

Krosch reiterated, however, that, although the five killings differ in varying degrees, the similarities--time of day, closeness of victims’ appearance, murder location--lead police to believe that a single killer is involved.

“In the first killing, we weren’t sure what we had,” he said. “In the second, our suspicions were raised. In the third, where the suspect was almost caught, we were convinced that we were dealing with the same suspect.”

Police said they are looking for a violent killer who may have become agitated in the days following each attack. If he held a job, police said, the killer may have taken a few days off after each murder, a detail co-workers would notice.

Although the killer is described as a loner, police are convinced that someone knows him or has seen him in the neighborhood.

“I can’t understand how someone could walk away from (a murder) without somebody seeing it,” Toneck said Tuesday. With hundreds of fresh tips, he said, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Toneck said police were checking out the possibility that the killer might have ridden on a bus line that connects all of the murder scenes. They are looking at the possibility that the killer had a connection to United Cancer Research flyers recently circulated in the neighborhood.

They even are considering whether to send investigators to Gainesville, Fla., to see if there is a link to serial killings near the University of Florida.

The first in the series of slayings occurred Jan. 12, when Tiffany Paige Schultz, a 20-year-old San Diego State University student, was found stabbed to death at her apartment on Cowley Way. Clad only in underwear, she was stabbed more than 50 times.

On Feb. 16, Janene Marie Weinhold, a 21-year-old UC San Diego student, was found fatally stabbed in her Clairemont Drive apartment. On April 3, Holly Suzanne Tarr, an 18-year-old high school senior from Michigan, was discovered stabbed to death in her brother’s apartment, part of the same complex where Weinhold lived.

The three killings all occurred within two blocks of each other. The Clarks lived about three miles away.

A composite drawing of the assailant released after the third killing is that of a black man, 18 to 23 years old, with close-cropped hair and a medium build, between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10.

But Toneck said the suspect may not be black but have a dark complexion. He also said the suspect might be as young as 14.

“Nobody has seen his face with the exception of a couple of people,” he said. “You could be 23 and look 14. It’s tough to narrow it down.”

After Tarr was stabbed, maintenance man Richard Williams saw the killer bound out of the apartment where she died. Williams, responding to a call of trouble at the apartment, briefly confronted the killer before he escaped. Williams described him as Mexican.

Toneck said police are sticking to the original composite. On Monday, officials said they did not want to confuse the public with varying police sketches.

Police believe the suspect is fairly strong. Schultz was stabbed more than 50 times in the head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, left arm, left leg and lower leg, according to her autopsy report. A second victim was stabbed about 30 times.

No details have been released as to how many times the Clarks were stabbed other than a coroner’s statement that the wounds to both women were “multiple.”

A $35,000 reward has been established through a variety of sources--the Crime Stoppers group, money seized by police in drug raids and a donation from a University City service organization--and may produce some solid information.

“If in fact a person who brings forward a name or a person that results in an arrest and conviction, then that reward will be given . . . confidentially,” Toneck said. “If (several similar tips) lead to the same person, we’d split the reward.”

On Tuesday, friends and family of the Clarks held a three-hour memorial service in Hillcrest and were scheduled to retreat to the home of Chuck Lazzaro, the brother of Pamela Clark’s husband, Joseph.

“The only good thing to come out of this is that the police said they’ll stay on this case,” Chuck Lazzaro said. “I hope they check everything out because this guy’s going to kill again.”