City Looks Over Shoulder for Serial Killer

The two women lived in the Peartree Apartments, 150 feet from each other. But in the way of the world now, even in clean, friendly, middle-class suburbs like this, they were not acquainted.

Christine Vu and Wendie Prescott, as it turns out, had much in common. Vu, 25, was a third-grade teacher; Prescott, 22, a second-grade teacher’s aide.

Both had just begun living on their own, away from loving families, and it was no coincidence that they were drawn to these pleasant, well-tended apartments. Five schools are within a short walking distance, and the complex had become a magnet for young female educators living alone.

Now the two women are linked in a mystery that has baffled police, shaken area residents, and frightened neighbors so profoundly that many have packed up and moved elsewhere.

First, on Sept. 17 of last year, Vu was found tied up and strangled in her bathtub, submerged in several inches of water. Her neighbors felt certain it would prove to be a domestic incident, isolated and quickly solved. They were wrong.

Shortly after midnight on Christmas Day, a relative found Prescott strangled, bound and lying in her bathtub, and no one here could deny any longer that a killer was at large, close by, perhaps watching.

“It gives me the creeps,” said Tammy Walpool, 28, a store clerk who lives in the complex. “I see these locked security gates [around the complex], and all I can think is, we’re not locking the evil out, we’re locking him inside with us every night.”

Here in Arlington, a city of 300,000 that is better known as part of the suburban sprawl between Fort Worth and Dallas, mysterious homicides are not common. Prescott’s death was the 17th and last homicide of 1996.

Although a team of detectives has been working overtime to solve the dual slayings, and rewards totaling $20,000 have been offered by the apartment management and a local dairy company, no arrests are imminent. And police are beset by residents worried that a serial killer is in their midst.

“That’s the $64,000 question: When do you deem someone a serial murderer?” said Sgt. Mike Simonds, who is leading the investigation. “Is it two victims? Is it four? There is no way of knowing if the individual will strike again, but obviously he has struck twice. We do believe one person is responsible for the deaths.”

Police also believe that person is male, although Simonds will not discuss whether the victims were sexually assaulted or any possible evidence leading to that conclusion. In both cases, there were no signs of forced entry into the apartments, no evidence of robbery and police have established no links between the two women. There was “no reason to believe they were living high-risk lifestyles,” Simonds said.

Police say Vu was killed in the late-afternoon hours after returning from a day of teaching. Prescott was last seen by relatives the day before her body was discovered; they became worried when she failed to show up for the family’s traditional Christmas Eve gathering at her grandmother’s house. She would never have missed the celebration, they said, unless something was horribly wrong.

Brenda Norwood, Prescott’s aunt, told the Dallas Morning News that the young woman had been disturbed by the September slaying of Vu but had figured the chances of another homicide at the complex were small.

Prescott had described to her family the fright of seeing the police-car lights outside and the unpleasant memories the incident stirred from her childhood. Her mother, Ora Lee Prescott, had been choked to death in a Fort Worth park in June 1977, when Wendie Prescott was only 3. That slaying, too, was never solved, and relatives said Prescott lived in fear of a nameless murderer who would someday kill her as well.

For several weeks after the second Peartree homicide, moving vans were seen at the apartment complex as terrified residents relocated. “I don’t want to be victim No. 3,” said a 27-year-old teacher who was planning to move but asked that her name not be used. “He may be living in the next building for all I know, looking to see who he’s going to get next. If he’s targeting teachers, I’m outta here.”

The Peartree Apartments and a sister complex across the street, the Plumtree Apartments, have about 600 residents, many of them young, just starting out in their careers and attracted to the average rent of $463 per month.

David Margulies, a Dallas public-relations executive hired by the complexes, said that “while some people have chosen to leave the apartment community, others have renewed their leases or moved in.” He said he could not provide specific figures.

Police said the management has been cooperative in the investigation and said the two homicides did not necessarily mean the killer is living in the complex. “It’s certainly a possibility,” Simonds said, “but it’s a small geographic area. The suspect would be one comfortable with that area, for whatever reason, whether he was a past resident, a past employee, a past delivery person.”

The surrounding area looks like a stereotype of suburbia, with people jogging along the sidewalks lined with prosperous brick homes, shopping centers all around, a McDonald’s on the corner. But the dual homicides have made people stop and think along their daily circuits about the possibilities of danger and evil.