Few Leads in Slayings of 13 Women

The first body was discovered nearly two years ago in an abandoned house shrouded with roof-high weeds. The next was found three months later in a desolate field. A search for clues netted a third body stuffed into a trash bag.

And that was only the beginning.

In the last 23 months, the corpses of nine women have turned up in this battered riverfront city--including two last month. Four more female victims have been dumped in nearby communities. The bodies have been found mostly by gruesome happenstance: a construction worker wandering past a decomposing corpse, a pedestrian spotting motionless feet in the weeds, a neighborhood dog gnawing on what turned out to be a human leg bone.

Nearly all 13 victims were prostitutes or drug addicts. All but one--the first--were black. At least seven of the bodies were found nude or nearly so. Four had been crammed into plastic bags, several had been strangled and at least four showed signs of having been bound hand and foot. Five of the corpses had been dumped within a few blocks of one another.

Given those common threads, police from several local agencies have suggested that a serial killer, or perhaps more than one, could be at work. They even have a suspect in mind for four of the murders, although there’s not yet enough evidence to charge him. But here in East St. Louis, which is taking the lead on most of the cases, officials angrily turn back suggestions that a multiple murderer is on the prowl.

“I don’t know anything about a serial killer,” Police Chief Delbert Marion said. “At this point, we’re not associating any of [the cases]. We’re investigating them one at a time, as they come.”

A Shrinking Police Force

Marion has promised vigorous detective work. But he concedes he is woefully short-staffed. More than two dozen veteran officers quit when the city offered an early retirement package in 1999. And the turnover rate remains disastrously high.

There were 98 sworn officers on the force three years ago. Today there are 61. That works out to one officer for every 500 residents. By comparison, across the river in St. Louis, there is one officer for every 250 citizens. (Los Angeles has one officer per 400 residents.) The force here is so overextended that Mayor Debra Powell has declared a policing “emergency.”

Marion himself says his force can do little other than respond to 911 calls. For instance, he can spare no officers to crack down on the prostitutes, pimps and drug pushers who strut through the city’s “strip areas”--including the decaying industrial neighborhood where 41-year-old Lolina Collins, one of only two victims not believed to be a prostitute, was found strangled earlier this month.

“We don’t have the manpower to be a proactive department,” Marion said.

The FBI repeatedly has offered to help. After the fifth body was found in the spring of 2000, local agents suggested calling in FBI experts on serial killers. But Marion’s predecessor as police chief rebuffed that offer.

Marion, who took office last month, said he would welcome federal help. Now that the city is open to collaboration, however, the FBI is otherwise engaged. “Everyone in this country realizes that with what has happened on Sept. 11, this [case] is not going to be a priority right now,” said FBI agent Reginald Joseph, who is based in nearby Fairview Heights, Ill.

Local detectives are collaborating with the Illinois State Police and other law enforcement agencies in the region. They have identified all 13 of the women, who ranged in age from 28 to 61. And they have determined that several of the victims frequented the Princess Motel--a grubby cinder-block establishment where rates start at $10 for two hours and vodka is sold behind bulletproof glass at the front desk.

Yet beyond those basics, progress has been slow. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that it was impossible to determine the cause--or even the approximate month--of death. Authorities are not even sure whether the nine victims found within city limits were killed here or just disposed of here.

“East St. Louis has historically been used as a dumping ground because there are so many derelict areas,” Powell explained.

The mayor is struggling to change that reputation, pushing for a $500-million development of a golf course, theaters and a convention center on the city’s waterfront along the Mississippi River. She also has ordered cleanups of the head-high weeds in vacant lots.

Yet such efforts are hampered by continual financial crisis in this city of 31,500, where 1 in 5 families lives in public housing and more than half the children live in poverty.

To balance the books for the fiscal year that starts in January, the City Council must trim $2 million from the $19-million general fund budget, which means cuts in the department responsible for clearing vacant lots, Powell said. Meanwhile, several police officers have been ordered to focus almost exclusively on issuing traffic tickets, in the hopes of generating enough funds to hire recruits who then can go out and solve crimes. Until they get reinforcements, Marion said, the seven detectives on his force do not have time to bother with cases in which there are no clear suspects.

“We do the best we can with what we have,” he said with a shrug.

That’s not good enough for Christy Curl, whose sister was the first of the nine female victims found here. “It’s been almost two years, and we have heard absolutely nothing,” she said, fuming. “It’s a joke, that’s what it is. I have a saying now: If you’re going to get killed, don’t get killed in East St. Louis, because they will never find out who did it.”

Despite the lack of progress in the cases, the city’s homicide rate actually has been dropping: There were 21 murders last year and 22 so far this year, compared with 68 in 1998. “We don’t live in fear here,” Powell said.

One young woman did say she was uneasy over the prospect of a serial killer. Cradling a beer in the back seat of a car parked in an empty lot known as a hub of prostitution, she shuddered and murmured again and again: “It’s scary.”

But other young women working a construction job in a nearby neighborhood brushed off the threat. “Long as I’m not running the streets and jumping in cars with different men, I’m not worried,” 21-year-old Takisha Shaw said.

Business as Usual at the Princess

Even at the Princess Motel, where iron grates shield the ill-fitting doors to each room, owner Bhoga Masiura said the mounting body count has not scared off the women who rent rooms by the hour or by the night. Several of the victims were frequent guests at the motel, but Masiura insisted no one sold sex--or courted danger--at the Princess. “This is a safe place.”

And, he added, it’s as busy as ever.

Business apparently still is brisk as well along a strip notorious for drugs and prostitution. Although Collins’ nearly naked body--jammed into a trash bag--was found nearby just a few weeks ago, a local businessman said the sex trade in the area has not cooled a bit. “It’s 24 hours a day,” he said.

From his window, the businessman can watch the melodramas of the strip: the cars cruising, the women preening, the fights, the shouts, the slaps. As he watches, he thinks of the dead women. He wonders who killed them--and who will be next.

“You see the regular johns, the guys who come around all the time, and you wonder, ‘Is it him?’ ” the businessman said. “You see new girls come out and then a few days later they disappear. You wonder what happened to them.”