A Colorado man serving life in prison for the murder of a 13-year-old girl claims he has killed 48 people across the United States.
Police in El Paso County, Colorado, said Robert Charles Browne described a string of murders, beginning with the killing of a soldier in South Korea in 1970 and ending with the death of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church for which he was arrested in 1995.
The officials said they were inclined to believe Browne, who pleaded guilty yesterday to the 1987 strangling death of 15-year-old Rocio Sperry.
El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said Browne (53) began confessing by writing to detectives "almost in a taunting fashion," and described murders in at least nine US states - California, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.
Detectives had corroborated only seven of the murders, partly because Browne spent little time with his victims and could not remember their names, Mr Maketa said.
Browne told investigators that most of his victims were strangers whom he strangled, shot or stabbed, often after what he claimed was consensual sex. Their bodies were sometimes dismembered and dumped in lakes, rivers, ditches or rubbish bins, he said.
Browne has been imprisoned since 1995, when he pleaded guilty to Heather Dawn Church's murder, telling a judge he broke into the home intent on burglary and unexpectedly found the teenager, who was baby-sitting her five-year-old brother.
When Ms Church's skeletal remains were found two years later in a ravine, coroner's investigators determined that she had died from blows to the head.