Eerie Serial Killings Have San Diego Women on Edge

They are hiding their knives, avoiding daytime showers, changing their locks, keeping baseball bats beside their beds. They are afraid to show their faces on television or allow their names to be used in print.

Women in the San Diego neighborhoods of University City and Clairemont are frantic over reports that a serial killer has fatally stabbed five women since January, two of them last week.

“As much as everyone tries to hide it, people are really frightened,” said Jack Edison, who lives with two women in Clairemont on the street where two of the murders occurred. “I’m a guy and it even bothers me. There’s someone out there who is wacko.”

The killings have fit an eerie pattern: Four of the five victims are brunettes between 18 and 21, all stabbed between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. after their killer entered through open or unlocked doors. The fifth is the 42-year-old mother of one of the women, whom the killer did not expect to be home, police suspect.

Some had just showered before they were killed. Three were slain within a two-block area of Clairemont. The two most recent stabbings occurred three miles away in University City.

“There was a level of security here that people used to take for granted,” said Richard Madsen, a professor of sociology at UC San Diego who lives in University City. “Now that’s gone.”

After the third murder, in April, police released a composite drawing of a suspect--a black man, 14 to 23 years old, with close-cropped hair, a medium build and 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Although they did not change the drawing after the latest murders, police now are hedging on their description: The suspect may not be black but dark skinned.

Still, there are complaints that police are harassing blacks near the sites of the murders and taking their photographs. On Thursday, police officials denied the charges, saying they were simply conducting an aggressive investigation.

With 19 detectives working full time on the case and extra patrols roaming neighborhoods in both areas, police are calling the investigation the largest in San Diego’s history.

They are working on a dozen different theories. Among them: The killer staked out his victims before attacking; the killer rode a bus line that connects all four murder sites; he delivered flyers in the neighborhood; he was a service repairman, or homeless, or a gardener.

Police in this city are used to highly publicized murders: A team of city, county and state investigators has been working for two years on the cases of 43 women, mostly transients or prostitutes, killed since 1985.

But they are not used to the public reaction generated by the University City-Clairemont killings. Since Sept. 13, dispatchers have been swamped with calls from more than 600 tipsters, many claiming to have seen the killer.

When law enforcement officials arranged a neighborhood meeting this week in University City to discuss safety precautions, more than 800 alarmed people showed up, filling the auditorium and spilling outdoors.

Police have assigned five full-time community service workers to help residents make sure their homes are secure. Normally, only two are assigned and they do five checks per week. Lately, they have been doing about 15 a day.

To protect their homes, residents are emptying hardware stores of locks and security systems.

“Door locks and window guards are flying out of here,” said Connie Johnson, assistant manager of the Home Depot in Clairemont. “We’ve had to air-freight our orders. Some of these people are getting to the panic stage.”

Diane Ainslie, who sells window screens affixed with burglar alarms to about 140 alarm companies throughout San Diego, said sales to stores in University City “have gone sky high.”

So have gun sales, especially to women.

Woody Seals, owner of A & W Guns, said many of the women who have recently bought guns from his shop chose revolvers and other small handguns--”something small and simple, easy to handle,” Seals said.

Deputy Police Chief Cal Krosch said women should be cautious but should not panic.

“I suggest to people that they cannot change their lifestyles,” Krosch said. “You’ve got to continue living your life. There’s no reason to turn it upside down. Life’s too short.

The killings started in January. Tiffany Paige Schultz, the first victim, was a 20-year-old student at San Diego State who moonlighted as a nude dancer at a local nightclub. She was stabbed more than 50 times.

Schultz lived on Cowley Way, just two blocks from where Janene Marie Weinhold, 21, a UC San Diego student, was murdered the next month. Weinhold, who was doing her laundry and baking cookies, was stabbed more than 30 times, according to authorities and her father.

The third to die was Holly Suzanne Tarr, an 18-year-old high school student and aspiring actress who had come to visit her brother from her hometown of Okemos, Mich. She had left the Buena Vista Gardens swimming pool for home and had just showered when she was killed, her family said. Police said some of the other women had showered shortly before they were killed but would not specify who they were.

The latest victims were Pamela Clark, 42, and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, who were found stabbed to death inside their University City home. Amber Clark bore a striking resemblance, police say, to the three earlier victims.

Police believe the killer used kitchen knives taken from the homes in all but the first murder.

Many women in the University City-Clairemont area are so frightened that they could be next that none of those interviewed Thursday would allow their full names to be published.

Barbara, a 41-year-old mother, said she is keeping her 15- and 13-year-old daughters out of school “to have them closer to me.” Fearful of being home during the morning hours when the killer is believed to attack, she takes her daughters out of the house every day. On Thursday, they went bowling.

“Our lives have been changed drastically by this,” said the woman, who lives in Clairemont. “We live in fear of something happening.”