8 Women Slain, but Little Else Is Revealed : Crime: Investigators withhold key details in effort to nail down a suspect. The killings have some things in common, but police do not have evidence of a serial killer.

Even for a county that last year logged 2,589 homicides, eight women killed and dumped in November alone is not normal, officials said.

“Occasionally, there are young ladies or males found dumped, but it’s unusual for that number . . . to be found in a month,” said coroner’s official Scott Carrier.

The bodies were found in business parks, by roadsides and along alleys, sparking murder probes from Sunland to Culver City to Pomona. Half of the women were either San Gabriel Valley residents or had ties to the area, and two of these were friends.

Law enforcement officials have been silent about the killings. “Security holds”--the withholding of details about the cases--were imposed by the various agencies involved in the investigations.

Police say the quash on information could help detectives rule out those who might falsely claim to have committed the crimes, or trip up suspects who might give away details that have not been revealed.

Meanwhile, police firmly deny the San Gabriel Valley or Culver City deaths are linked to a serial murderer.

“Do we have evidence to indicate we have such a killer? The answer is no,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Frank Merriman. “There is no hard evidence that connects any of these cases.”

Yet five of the killings bear similarities.

In Culver City, two women--one white and one black, both believed to be prostitutes--were found dead within five days of each other in the same alley.

In the San Gabriel Valley, three women, all black and in their mid-30s, were found dead in business parks. (Another black woman, also from the San Gabriel Valley, was found dead the same month in nearby Chino in San Bernardino County. Her body was dumped by a rural road.)

None of the killings have been solved.

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The silence from police angers some women’s activists who believe police should warn the community about the unusually high number of slayings.

“The bottom line is that the victims are poor or middle-class, so it’s no one’s business,” said Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. “But what would happen if eight socialites were found dead on their lawns in Pasadena?”

Police silence is common, said Cathy Friedman, associate director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. In the commission’s 23 years of existence, police have in the past refused to divulge information when multiple slayings appear to be related. Other times, information is given freely, she said.

The commission is “always a little bit more suspicious when the issue is race,” Friedman said. “Traditionally, black women, Latinos and women of color have gotten the short end of the stick.”

But Merriman said all homicides are investigated with equal zeal regardless of the status or race of the victims.

“That never is an issue,” he said. “We don’t separate the cases. The cases tend to separate themselves.”

And that separation is based on evidence, he said. Cases with information and informants get solved. Those without, don’t, no matter how much attention is paid to the investigation, he said.

“Take the case of Mickey Thompson,” he said, referring to the millionaire racing promoter who was found slain, along with his wife, Trudy, in Bradbury in 1988.

“We had a lot of influential people asking a lot of questions of us, but we still haven’t solved it,” he said.

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Such comments are cold comfort to grieving relatives of the San Gabriel Valley victims, who say they are frustrated and continue to ponder any possible links among the deaths.

“We’re very shocked,” said Wilma Mottley, of Milwaukee, the mother of victim Donna Goldsmith, 35. “We still are waiting for answers, and there aren’t any. We beep the detectives and they never call back.”

The night before Goldsmith’s body was found, she dropped by her estranged husband’s home for a visit of only a few minutes, said Goldsmith’s daughter Toni, 18. That was the last time her family saw her alive, the daughter said.

Born in Milwaukee, Goldsmith grew up there, was married for nearly 20 years and raised three daughters, her mother said. She worked at blood banks and hospitals as a medical technician drawing blood.

When the family moved to California five years ago, Goldsmith got an administrative credential and found work as a receptionist, her mother said. When the marriage faltered, Goldsmith moved out and care of the three girls alternated between the parents.

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But Goldsmith hit hard times.

“She couldn’t get a job,” Toni Goldsmith said. “She had arthritis in her arms.”

The former medical technician ended up shoplifting and was arrested, her mother said.

“We talked about it. I told her it wasn’t the way to go,” Mottley said. “She said she did it because she was broke.”

In the months before her death, Goldsmith lived in a succession of motels and rented rooms, her daughter said.

Donna Goldsmith’s hard times caught the concern of Helen Hill, a close friend.

“Helen was going to let my mom stay at her house,” Toni Goldsmith said.

But Hill was killed Nov. 14, three days before Goldsmith’s death. Police will not comment on whether they believe the two are linked in any way.

Hill’s relatives could not be reached for comment.

Another of the victims, Betty Sue Harris, 37, of Pomona, had struggled unsuccessfully for the past six years to regain her sense of self-esteem after a mastectomy, said her sister Arlene DuRousseau, a Chino resident.

“She said she felt like a monster,” DuRousseau said.

Harris’ mother had died from breast cancer when Harris was a teen-ager, and she was devastated by her own bout with cancer, DuRousseau said.

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Born in Peoria, Harris came to Pomona when she was 6 but moved back to Peoria at age 16 when her mother died. She returned to California as an adult, attended Chaffey College in Upland and had four children. She became ill in 1987; the next year she was convicted of passing bad checks, her sister said.

“She always seemed like the bad sheep of the family, the one who couldn’t get it together,” DuRousseau said.

On Halloween night, the night before her body was found, she brought her youngest child to her home in Pomona for a visit. She told two girlfriends that she would be back in an hour and left on foot for the store, DuRousseau said. She was never seen again until her body was found the next day.

The place where her body was found “was a neighborhood she had never been in, 50 miles from where she was living,” said Harris’ stepmother, Vera Harris.

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Relatives of Roxanne Brooks Bates say the Birmingham, Ala., native never managed to get her life together.

Raised in Omaha, Neb., from the age of 6, Bates had four children but never managed to hold a steady job, said her sister-in-law Mavis Bates of Los Angeles.

Two years ago, she married Jeffrey Bates, the father of two of her children, in at attempt to find stability. She worked for a while as a custodian in a Christian school, but the marriage and job didn’t last.

Bates returned to cocaine use and prostitution, Mavis Bates said.

“Periodically, she would go to church,” Mavis Bates said. “But all of a sudden, she just stopped. . . . She never got her life straight.”

Her body was found Nov. 5 near a Chino dairy.

The Victims

Since Nov. 1, the bodies of nine women have been found dumped in streets and alleys from Pomona to Culver City. The victims include:

* Betty Sue Harris, 37, of Pomona, found Nov. 1, partially clothed and lying near a parking lot in the 19700 block of Business Parkway in the City of Industry.

* The body of an unidentified woman, 18 to 22 years old, found Nov. 5 in a Pacoima alley.

* Roxanne Brooks Bates, 31, of Pomona, found Nov. 5 along a roadside in the 13900 block of Cypress Avenue, just inside an agricultural area near a Chino dairy.

* Terri Myles, 27, a transient, found Nov. 8, lying with hands and feet bound between two trash bins in a Culver City alley in the 6000 block of Washington Boulevard.

* Patrice Rosalind Wells, 22, of Palmdale, found Nov. 13, partially clothed, with a gunshot wound of the head, by the side of the road in the Big Tujunga Canyon.

* Jamie Harrington, a transient, age not given, found Nov. 14 in a shopping cart in the same Culver City alley as Terri Myles.

* Helen Ruth Hill, 36, of West Covina, found Nov. 14 in the parking lot at 19705 Business Parkway in the City of Industry.

* Donna Lenore Goldsmith, 35, of Montclair, found Nov. 17 next to a trash bin in a Pomona business park at 1140 Price St.

* Josephine Ong Tan, 40, of Carson, found Nov. 29, naked and beaten, by the side of the Harbor Freeway near 220th Street in an unincorporated county area.