Wayne Adam Ford

Four dead women dumped in remote bodies of water: the California Aqueduct, an irrigation canal and an isolated marsh. Four cold cases, no leads and no suspects, the kind of investigations that haunt a law enforcement officer. Then Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department with a troubled heart and a woman's breast, two hours before the polls closed Tuesday. And everything changed.

Law enforcement authorities are investigating a truck driver who may have left a trail of more than 20 women dead along Interstate 10 from California to Florida, police said Thursday. San Diego police, working with the FBI, have taken DNA samples from a man who has been identified as a suspect in the murders, believed to have occurred between 1980 and 1990. "The information that we have is that the guy is responsible for murders from Florida to California," said San Diego Police Sgt.

In the final phase of serial killer Wayne Adam Ford's trial, a prosecutor told a San Bernardino County jury Thursday that death was the only suitable punishment for a man who killed three prostitutes and a hitchhiker and dumped their nude bodies in California waterways "like trash." The brutal way Ford killed and disposed of the four young women -- strangling them during intercourse, cutting off some of their body parts and keeping them as souvenirs -- showed the Arcata, Calif.

A long-haul trucker who walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department carrying a severed female breast is cooperating with authorities throughout the state in their investigations of four slain women. Wayne Adam Ford, 36, surrendered to sheriff's deputies in the North Coast city of Eureka on Tuesday evening and gave information about an unidentified woman whose torso--without arms, legs or head--was found a year ago in a marshy area outside of town called Ryan's Slough.

Accused serial killer Wayne Adam Ford of Arcata will stand trial for four gruesome slayings even though a San Bernardino County judge tossed out his confession for one of the slayings, a prosecutor said Tuesday. Judge Michael A. Smith ruled Monday that Ford's confession is invalid because Ford effectively had invoked his right to an attorney on Nov. 5, 1998, when he asked for a lawyer while being interviewed by psychologist Paul Berg at the Kern County Sheriff's Department.

During the 20 long minutes in 1998 when serial killer Wayne Adam Ford waited to speak to a deputy so he could surrender, he was at a crossroads between freedom and a possible death sentence -- and he was ready to head for the door. His brother, Calvin Rodney Ford, who accompanied the killer to the Humboldt County sheriff's station, recalled that he did not yet know his brother had murdered four women -- dismembering some -- and dumped their bodies in waterways throughout California.