A SERIAL killer stalking a rural South Carolina county has caused panicked residents to reach for their guns and evoked painful memories of a killing spree that took place more than four decades ago.
A team of more than 100 law enforcement officers was scouring Cherokee County yesterday, looking for a hulking white man suspected of having killed five people in the past week.
The killer may be targeting families: he bound and shot to death an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter, and killed a teenage girl and her father. His apparent first victim was a 63-year-old peach farmer, who was found shot to death last week by his wife.
“All I can say is what the experts are telling me,” Cherokee County Sheriff Bill Blanton said. “This guy is an impulse actor. He’s unpredictable.”
Fearful that armed and jittery Cherokee County residents will react with violence to the slightest threatening shadow, police have warned door-to-door salespeople to take a break from their routes while the investigation continues and have asked people who suffer vehicle breakdowns on back roads to wait at the roadside instead of approaching strangers’ houses.
Homicides are rare in Cherokee County, a community of about 54,000 people that is 45 minutes south of banking hub Charlotte, North Carolina.
The five killings since last week are more than double the number reported in 2007. But for residents of the modest community, they evoke four-decade-old memories of a town paralysed with fear and of parents patrolling with shotguns.
In 1967 and 1968, a man dubbed the Gaffney Strangler killed four females, including two teenagers, one of whom he kidnapped from a bus stop. Lee Roy Martin, who was later convicted of the deaths, taunted the community, sending a local newspaper a list of names and locations of the victims’ bodies. Martin was stabbed to death in his prison cell in 1972.
Martin killed only females and largely stuck to Gaffney. This killer, identified only as a 6ft 2in white man weighing about 17½ stone, has killed both men and women of all ages.
The first victim, 63-year-old Kline Cash, was found shot to death last Saturday. Gena Linder Parker (50) and her mother Hazel Linder (83) were found bound and shot in Linder’s home on Wednesday. Abby Tyler (15) and her father Stephen Tyler were found dead on Thursday.
Police have determined that they are hunting the same suspect in each of the five deaths.
However, they have released few details of the crime scenes, describing them as sensitive to the investigation. Investigators are looking for an SUV spotted at Cash's house and at the Tyler store. – ( Guardianservice)