LAPD on the hunt for serial killer

Long stretches of time between known killings and a disjointed, often dormant investigation that spanned different generations of detectives left police unclear for years that a single man was behind the slayings. The latest slaying was tied conclusively to the others by DNA analysis in May 2007.

"The day those tests came in, we realized we had a serial killer on our hands who has been active for 23 years," said LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who heads a task force of seven detectives charged with solving the killings.

Except for one black man, the killer has targeted young black women. He sexually abused the women, detectives said, and left almost all of their bodies in a corridor along Western Avenue in South Los Angeles, often in alleys. Detectives suspect that most of the women were working as prostitutes at the time they were killed.

Kilcoyne and his team have been working quietly, trying to breathe life into the investigation without tipping off the killer. They have retraced cold leads and are collaborating with state officials on an exhaustive search of prison records. Detectives have begun examining nearly three dozen other cases that bear similarities to serial killers' slayings. The latest killing was reported this week by the LA Weekly.

For more than two decades before that, however, the killer slipped on and off the LAPD's radar.

The first known slaying occurred in the summer of 1985, when 29-year-old Debra Jackson was shot three times in the chest, police said. Her body was left in an alley near West Gage Avenue. It was a particularly dark period for the city, when widespread cocaine use, rampant crime and vicious killings were rife in South L.A. Three years passed before police realized that something larger was occurring, when ballistics tests showed that the same handgun used to kill Jackson had been used in seven other killings.

Detectives handling the investigation were stymied. In late 1988, the killer shot a woman in the chest with the same gun, sexually assaulted her and "left her for dead," Kilcoyne said. She survived, giving police their first, albeit vague, description of the man as an African American in his mid-30s. She also described his car -- an orange Ford Pinto. The new information led detectives to pull registration records on every Pinto in Los Angeles County, Kilcoyne said, but the search led nowhere.