Serial Killer’s Hand Is Still Felt a Year After First Slaying : Crime: Authorities are still baffled, families still hurting, and thousands have altered their behavior.

One year has passed since Tiffany Paige Schultz, an English major at San Diego State University who moonlighted as a nude dancer, was found stabbed to death in her Clairemont apartment.

Her slaying marked the beginning of what police now believe to be a series of killings. Four other women, all living in proximity, have been slain in a similar fashion. In each case, the killer appears to have entered through unlocked or open doors in the middle of the day.

Police have processed more than 3,000 leads and are offering a $30,000 reward for information leading to the suspect. Full-time investigators--once numbering 27 detectives and seven superior officers--have been reduced to 18 and five, respectively.

But the killer has not been found.

On Jan. 12 of last year, he stabbed the 20-year-old Schultz more than 50 times--in the chest, abdomen, neck and legs.

On Feb. 16, moments after baking cookies and doing her laundry, 21-year-old UC San Diego student Janene Marie Weinhold was stabbed more than 30 times in a Clairemont apartment, two blocks from where Schultz was killed.

On April 3, 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr was stabbed to death in her brother’s apartment, on the same street--Cowley Way--where Schultz lived, and in the same complex, Buena Vista Gardens, in which Weinhold was a tenant.

It was after Tarr’s slaying that police labeled the crimes those of a serial killer. Then, on Sept. 13, 42-year-old Pamela Gail Clark and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, were found stabbed to death in their home in University City, about a mile and a half from the previous three murders.

The San Diego Police Department has labeled its search the largest manhunt in the history of the force. Those close to the case say it is easily the most publicized series of homicides in the city’s history and the one provoking the most fear.

In more emotional moments, police describe the case in other ways: heartbreaking, frustrating, expensive. The killer has stabbed to death five women who were in the prime of their lives, and in the process has changed thousands of other lives and baffled police in the nation’s sixth-largest city.

For the first time, Capt. Dick Toneck conceded last week that the killer may never be caught. Even so, amid their despair, he said, police are encouraged that the assailant has not struck for four months and that people throughout the city are taking precautions. He credits the media for the heightened awareness.

For months, the search for the killer has been the object of a weekly news briefing, at which police have had little or nothing to report. They do say the investigation has cost more than $771,000, a figure compiled only since April 3.

It was not until then--with the death of Tarr--that police began tracking what the serial-killing inquiry was costing. Counting all five slayings, the figure is now approaching $1 million, Toneck said.

Police talk of needing “a break--a big break,” as Toneck said, to unravel the case. They almost had it April 3, the first and only time the killer was seen by witnesses. It was on that afternoon that Tarr, an aspiring actress who had come to San Diego from Okemos, Mich., to visit her brother during spring break, alerted neighbors with a scream. Moments later, she lay dead in a pool of her own blood.

A middle-aged maintenance man pried open the door to Tarr’s brother’s apartment. There, for a brief moment, he confronted a hooded man wielding a blood-stained knife.

The killer ran toward the maintenance man, knocking him down. Drawn by the commotion, a painter at the complex got what he called “a good look” at the killer, who dropped the knife and ran.

What police know of the killer is contained in a composite drawing, details of which were furnished by the painter who saw his face. He is believed to be a black male, 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-10, 18 to 23 years old, with a trim to medium build and short-cropped hair. On the day of Tarr’s death, he wore a red T-shirt, dark pants and running shoes.

The killer has left his mark in myriad ways. He forced 10% of the tenants at Buena Vista Gardens (about 100 people) to move out, apartment manager Suzanne Rosborough said last week. Buena Vista Gardens is back up to near-capacity, she said.

And the apartments where the murders occurred?

“Those are rented,” Rosborough said. “People were made aware of what happened before they signed up and moved in. Some were spooked, but to others, it didn’t really matter.”

The killer prompted Rosborough to hire a new 24-hour armed security force that will, upon request, escort tenants inside their homes. Buena Vista Gardens spent more than $25,000 replacing the locks on its 1,000-plus units, so that none can be opened with a “master” key, Rosborough said. (Police do not believe the killer had one, however.)

The killer has altered the living habits of thousands of others. Women in Clairemont and University City now talk of never opening the door for strangers, especially in broad daylight. And many live with baseball bats, knives and guns stashed under their beds or near the front door.

These are the people whose lives have not been directly affected. For those who lost a loved one, the killings have forced a re-examination--of themselves and the world around them. For the most part, the world has come up lacking.

“My wife and I are just a hell of a lot more aware of the extent of violent crime in America,” Raymond Weinhold said last week from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Prior to that, we’d watch the news every night, but now we’re acutely aware of every robbery, every murder.” “Before, it would just pass over us, but now, we think, ‘God, it’s happening day after day, all over America.’ We wonder what’s happening to the country and why. The magnitude of it just overwhelms you. We grew up in an area of rural Oregon, where you never locked your door at night.

“But now, even there, you hear of drugs and murders and thefts, and God, you wonder--what in the hell is happening to America?”

Weinhold called the recent holidays “an absolutely horrible time.” To escape the grief, which is always there but which hit with a jolt at Christmas, he and his wife sought refuge in a small town in Nevada, “to get our minds off it. And it helped . . . a little bit.

“But we couldn’t completely escape the memories of Christmases past. The last time we saw Janene was Dec. 30 of 1989, a day before my 52nd birthday. And now we’re coming up on what would have been her 23rd birthday. She was killed exactly one week before her 22nd.

“In a just world, she should be home, sharing tales of law school (where she was headed after UCSD), but instead, she’s gone, the victim of a serial killing.”

Ramona Schultz is the mother of Tiffany Schultz, whom she and her ex-husband--Willard W. (Bill) Schultz, a Board of Supervisors member in Nevada County, Calif.--adopted at birth. Mr. Schultz is the only relative of any victim to have criticized police.

He publicly chastised San Diego authorities for delaying the processing of DNA evidence--hair and skin samples believed to be those of the killer--taken from his daughter’s palm after the slaying. Police conceded the delay, and the mishandling of evidence, but dispute its importance to the case.

Schultz questioned why police in San Diego failed to devote the same manpower and resources to a serial killing as Gainesville, Fla., a college town of 120,000, where 150 law-enforcement agents have been commissioned to search for the killer of five students slain in August.

Mrs. Schultz said she supports the investigation. She summed up her daughter’s death, and the feelings surrounding it, by reading from a written text:

“My heart goes out to the families of the others who have been killed, because no one knows the pain as well as one who has been there, and believe me, that pain is like no other. The death of a child is like an amputation. For the rest of your life, something that is a vital part of your very being is missing. It was taken from you forever . . . and will never be the same again.”

Members of the Schultz family are not on speaking terms with Christopher Jon Burns, Tiffany’s fiance, who was jailed for five days after she died. Burns was released when the district attorney failed to issue a murder complaint, citing insufficient evidence.

His name surfaced last Thursday at the weekly police press briefing. Capt. Toneck said police want to question Burns further, that “many unanswered questions” remain. Burns has not been cleared as a suspect in the Schultz case and won’t be, Toneck said, until he answers the questions or the killer is caught. Burns is white.

“There are some things we didn’t have a chance to discuss with him,” Toneck said. “We want things to be completely clear, so we don’t have to go back to him. But, if he doesn’t want to talk to us, we can’t force him to.”

Contacted by The Times recently, Burns declined to be interviewed. He said his attorney had advised him not to talk with the media since his recent appearance on television’s “Hard Copy.” He said he was injured late last year in a motorcycle accident but is now back at work as a construction worker.

Toneck reiterated that police believe one man killed all five women in Clairemont and University City, but conceded the possibility that Schultz’s killer may differ from that of the other four.

“Suffice it to say that we’re looking for the dark-skinned male,” Toneck said. “We believe he’s responsible for all the murders.”

A source close to the investigation said this week that police believe Burns may have information leading to the killer. They also believe that, because of his own troubled relationship with Tiffany Schultz--with whom he fought bitterly over her work as a nude dancer--that, when finding the body on the night of Jan. 12, he may have hidden the murder weapon, fearing he would be suspected.

“The killer may be someone they had met, or someone she had met through Les Girls,” the Loma Portal nightclub where she worked, the investigator said. “He (Burns) could be a lot of help, but for some reason, he’s not cooperating.”

Burns’ attorney, Michael Popkins, said his client has told police everything he possibly can and has no intention of discussing the case further.

Burns’ refusal is one of dozens of reasons that Toneck calls this case “the most difficult and time-consuming I’ve ever seen. So many pieces of information, so many people to talk to. . . . It’s real hard to manage.”

Toneck said the frustration is, at times, maddening, but it’s hardly the emotional pain felt by those having lost a wife, a daughter, a sister.

Joseph S. Lazzaro has returned to the University City home where his wife and stepdaughter were murdered Sept. 13. Once again, he’s living there.

“The term shock comes to mind first,” he said of the slayings. “It’s like being in an auto accident. Although the body is injured, you don’t feel the pain, and then, as time passes, you do. Afterward, I was absolutely numb.

“And slowly, as the shock wore off, I felt the pain--intensely.”

Lazzaro fantasizes about what his feelings will be when the killer is caught, “whether some additional deep-seated rage will surface.”

But, he added, “I don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the perpetrator. My job is to focus on healing and recovery. And so far, I’m doing well with that.

“I have a choice. The enormity of this event is like a mountain. I can be crushed by it, or I can walk up it. I can lay around and be devastated, or I can say, ‘Well, what’s the next step?’ ”