Fear Over Killings Grips Baton Rouge

The fear festered for months: Women had disappeared in broad daylight, had vanished from home and from shaded trails--and turned up dead. They were students and wives, improbable victims. It wasn’t until this week that police gave the fright a name: A serial killer is loose.

DNA evidence indicates the same man has killed at least three women in the last 10 months, and now investigators are reexamining 30 other unsolved deaths to see whether those women too were victims of this city’s mysterious killer. As the heat of summer presses this shadowy landscape of overgrown glades and clammy nights, a controlled panic has seized Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital.

Women are buying up guns faster than the hunting stores can stock them. Jogging paths are desolate. The easy interactions of these laid-back streets have been replaced by terse responses and lowered eyes. “You don’t know what he looks like,” said Donna Allen, a 28-year-old math teacher. At night she peers into the darkened yard, jostles her husband awake--did you hear that? “Everybody’s on edge, paranoid. You jump at every little noise.”

The killer could be anybody, and so women here say they see him everywhere. His victims had no obvious common trait, and so many women fear they could be the next to disappear. “If we had a picture of him, at least we’d have something to look for. But right now he’s a ghost,” said Police Chief Pat Englade. “And we’re seeing ghosts all over Baton Rouge.”

Gina Wilson Green was the first to die. The 41-year-old nurse was strangled at home last fall near the oak-shaded campus of Louisiana State University. Police were baffled: There were no broken windows, jimmied locks or busted doors.

Then in May, a graduate business student, Charlotte Murray Pace, was stabbed to death at her townhouse in the middle of the afternoon. As in the Green case, the home of the 22-year-old Mississippi native showed no signs of forced entry.

Pace was living a few doors down from Green when the nurse was killed, but the two women apparently didn’t know each other. Pace was slain just two days after moving to a new house four miles away.

Last month, police tested the DNA evidence and found that the same man had killed Green and Pace. Investigators have refused to say whether the women were raped or what sort of DNA samples were found at the crime scenes. But Chief Englade acknowledged this week that at least one of the women was sexually assaulted.

From the alleyways of the old neighborhoods to the swampy gardens of the university, news of the two related killings gave Baton Rouge the jitters. Then Pam Kinamore disappeared. She was 44, an antique dealer, real estate broker and artist, the mother of a 12-year-old boy.

Investigators believe she came home from work late to an empty house on July 12, only to be snatched away into the summer night. Her body turned up four days later in the woods off Interstate 10. Her throat had been slashed.

A few days later, investigators made another announcement: Kinamore was slain by the same man who killed Green and Pace. Once again, he was linked by DNA, they said. “That was when it really, really started to get scary,” said Julie Newman, director of a Baton Rouge community center. “That’s when it got spooky.”

FBI investigators are helping local authorities profile a suspect. But in the meantime, the dearth of information has imaginations running wild. People in Baton Rouge tell the stories sheepishly: Allen says she won’t stay home alone, not even at midday. And Southern hospitality is out the window--Newman doesn’t like to give directions to strangers anymore.

“I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen the community afraid like this,” police Cpl. Mary Ann Godawa said.

After Kinamore’s death, police received a tantalizing tip. A few hours before sunrise on the night she disappeared, a driver spotted a white man pulling off the interstate in a white pickup truck, a nude woman slumped in the passenger seat. Police hypnotized the witness and drew out more details: It was a Chevrolet. The bumper had a bad paint job. The truck bore a Louisiana plate that might have included the number 8.

Word moved fast. The next morning, a 69-year-old nurse named Rosalie Sweet drove to aerobics class gripped by fright. “I saw 25 white trucks, white trucks on every corner, and I was scared,” she said, shaking her head. “I turned around to come back and saw 15 more. I was just looking and looking.” So far, police have been unable to find the pickup.

Paranoia is palpable between the long glass cases of Jim’s Firearms in east Baton Rouge. Usually the haunt of a modest assembly of hunters, the store has been crowded with unlikely buyers from morning to night. Manager Dan Calvert keeps expecting the gun zeal to taper off--but every time another news report comes out, the customers come in waves. Even Gov. Mike Foster got on the radio this week to remind women they have the right to carry concealed weapons.

“Ever since this started I have two bed partners: Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson,” said Kitty Wascom, a 54-year-old school bus driver who lives alone. “And I’m still not sleeping at night.”

Jim’s Firearms is moving as many as 20 guns a day, and 250 vials of pepper spray a month. In calmer times, the shop sells a couple of guns a day and a dozen cans of pepper spray in a good month.

Even before Baton Rouge heard that a serial killer was lurking in its shadows, the city of more than 200,000 was on edge. After the first two deaths were linked, worried residents packed community safety meetings. The Advocate, Baton Rouge’s daily newspaper, ran a series of stories tallying more than 30 unsolved slayings of women and suggesting that there could be connections.

“I wouldn’t expect all of the cases to be connected--they won’t be. But I really don’t know what kind of person we’re dealing with here,” Englade said. “We’ve got a whole parish or even the whole southern part of the state with some guy traveling around doing this.”

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Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.