St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 6

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Jan. 17, 1984 Officials Working On U.S. Clearinghouse For Serial Killings 6A Region By Terry Ganey Of the Post-Dispatch Staff Copyright, 1984, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Law enforcement authorities estimate that at least 35 serial murderers like Charles Hatcher are terrorizing the country and say local police are not equipped to deal with them.

"We've got a heck of a lot of people out there who are killing people just because they want to do it," said Merlyn D. Moore, national field manager of the Criminal Justice Center at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Police define a serial murderer as one who moves from city to city, severing victims at random, as ojvosei! to a mass murderer, whose crimes take place in one geographic area over a relatively short period. "We in law enforcement just don't really have the mechanism right now to find out if a local homicide is involved with another homicide that occurred 50 miles or 100 miles away," said Capt. Robert Robertson of the Michigan Highway Patrol.

Robertson is a member of a task force working to set up a national clearinghouse in the Justice Department to correlate information on unsolved, motiveless killings of a particular senseless and depraved nature. He said that in 1 977, he had become convinced of the need for an Information-exchange system on a national scale. At the time, lie had been working on four child murders in Oakland County, just north, of Detroit They were never solved. "It was quite evident during that investigation that we did not have a mechanism for keeping track of those kinds of homicides," Robertson said. "I just knew these (types of) vicious crimes had taken place somewhere else and that they would continue to take place.

"It was clear there was a tremendous number of serialized murder going on. When you start checking around the country, you really become surprised how many are going on." Statistics are hard to pin down, but Moore said among children between 5 and 14, homicide is the fourth leading cause of death. In 1982, 4,000 children were murdered in the United States, he noted. Robert O. Heck, program manager of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Washington, is the source of the estimate of 35 serial murderers roaming the United States.

He said he had arrived at it through a survey on unidentified dead taken from medical examiners in cities of 300,000 or more. "We're finding that about 50 percent of the victims are children or juveniles from the serial murders that we've looked over," Heck said. "How many kids who leave home and are never heard from are victims and their bodies never recovered? There's an estimate that 560,000 kids leave their homes a year because of child abuse (in the home); but we don't know how many come back. There's an estimate of 160,000 kids we think do not come back. What happens to them?" The task force is proposing a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, under which police departments across the country would funnel information on vicious, motiveless murders to a single agency.

The agency would then match the crimes according to the methods used and evidence gathered, then put police in contact with one another when it appears that they are looking for the same killer. Authorities theorize that their chances of solving serial murders would improve if clues collected on similar crimes in other jurisdictions could be assembled with the information already available. It's like putting a picture puzzle together, with police in isolated jurisdictions having pieces that other departments lack. Right now, no offical method exists for assembling the puzzle pieces. A A A crime that would fit this pattern is the death of a girl, 9 or 10 years old, whose headless body was found in a St.

Louis tenement Feb. 28. The girl bad been sexually assaulted; she was never identified, and her head was never found. The body was buried Dec. 4.

Newspaper and magazine stories led St. Louis police to question Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole, two of the most Infamous serial murderers. But both denied knowledge of the girl's death. Lucas, 47, and Toole, 36, have begun confessing to as many as 165 murders that have taken place across the country. At first authorities doubted their stories until they began to piece together the facts both men were giving them.

Police have been virtually powerless to solve such crimes unless the serial murderer confesses. After Eric Scott Christgen, 4, was killed in St. Joseph in 1978, police concentrated on local suspects. Eventually, they convicted Melvin Reynolds, 25, of St. Joseph.

Reynolds was freed in October after Hatcher confessed to the crime. Hatcher has told the FBI that he had killed 15 other people across the country, including William J. Freeman, 12, in Antioch, in 1969. Lt. David Lewis, the detective division commander of the Antioch Police Department, said police sometimes tended to be provincial in their approach to homicide.

"We have to keep from putting blinders on to be aware of the possibilities of transients committing them," Lewis said. He added that murders committed by those just passing through town were the hardest to solve. "You almost have to exclude everyone locally to determine it is not a local case before you conclude it is a transient," Lewis said. As he was being interviewed about the Hatcher case, officers under Lewis were trying to solve another child murder. "Today, the whole population mobility is such that we've got individuals preying on kids and adults who are moving from one jurisdiction to another," Moore said.

"I have medical examiners telling me that one-half of the unidentified dead out there are kids into their middle teens. "We want to look at the whole phenomena of child abuse and sex exploitation of kids and what that leads to. What we think that leads to is antisocial behavior that may lead to killing people." Hatcher 7 V5 A Nation argued that the police, who had solved every murder in St. Joseph for the previous 30 years, had seized upon Reynolds because he was "a ready-made patsy." But Michael A. Insco, Buchanan County prosecutor, praised the police for their thorough work.

"We are lucky in this county to have such fine investigators as we do," Insco said. "They checked to be sure. They double-checked to be doubly sure. And they finally checked to be absolutely sure in the case of Melvin Lee Reynolds. They spent so much time and so much effort in order to find the details and find the truth." Reynolds was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Missouri Penitentiary, where he was the target of homosexual attacks from fellow inmates.

Mrs. O'Meara was forced to move from her home because of vandalism and harassment. Four years later, in the summer of 1982, the police in St. Joseph had another child murder on their hands the rape and strangulation of 11-year-old Michelle Steele. They had arrested and charged a man first identified as Richard Harris and later as Richard M.

Clark. The man's real name was Charles Hatcher, who had been born just north of St. Joseph in 1929. Authorities were aware that Hatcher had attacked a 16-year-old in St. Joseph in 1959, had a lengthy prison record and had attacked a child in 1969 in California.

In May 1 983, Hatcher gave a note to a sheriff's deputy in the Buchanan County jail. "Please call the FBI," the note said. For the next two months, FBI agent Joseph Holtslag listened to Hatcher's rambling, ugly tale of his travels, including the murder of a boy in California and a death in Rock Island, 111. In all, there were 1 6 murders. In spite of all the evil, Hatcher said he wanted to right a wrong.

Two years earlier, he had read of Reynolds' conviction in a detective magazine. He said an innocent man was being held in the Missouri Penitentiary. "You're smart enough to know what those bastards in St. Joe will do for a conviction, even if they have to frame someone to get it," Hatcher said. On July 25, 1983, Hatcher wrote a detailed confession to the murder of Eric Christgen about how he had drunk a half pint of whiskey in his hotel room, gone for a walk and grabbed the boy by the hand and walked him to a point near the Missouri River, where he molested him.

"I squeezed hard enough to cut off his air," Hatcher told Holtslag. "I don't leave marks." Some of the authorities who had charged Reynolds with the crime did not believe the new confession. But grilled from about 8:30 a.m. until 1 a.m. "I don't want to have to come out every month and pick you up," said Highway Patrol Sgt Robert Anderson during that session.

At another point he said: "You don't know what it is to tell the truth." A court transcript shows that Anderson talked about other charges that could be filed against Reynolds. "We can charge you here," Anderson said. "I don't want to slap these charges on you." Reynolds made four confessions to the Christgen murder that day. The first written confession was in the form of "yes" and "no" answers to six written questions posed by police officers. By the time Reynolds was writing his own statement in confession No.

3, he was using words from the police officers' written questions asked earlier. After Reynolds confessed, police took him home. The next day, they picked him up there and charged him. A few months later, while Reynolds underwent psychiatric tests at the Missouri State Hospital at Fulton, he was interviewed by a reporter for the Columbia Tribune. "I'm just hoping when I go to court, the son-of-a-bitch that did it I just hope his conscience bothers him so bad he can't take it no more and he just confesses to it," Reynolds said.

On Oct. 9, 1979, Reynolds went on trial in St. Joseph before a jury of eight xS UPI Melvin Reynolds is kissed by his mother, Wanda O'Meara, last uciooer aner neynoias' release from prison, where he had served four years for a murder later confessed to by Charles Hatcher. From page one Mark Youngdahl, a lawyer whose office is in the Corby Building, described Fox as "a fat slob who was a hell of a nice guy." While being interrogated, Fox went into convulsions and was taken to a huspital. where he was pronounced dead at 1019 p.m.

An autopsy showed he had died of a heart attack. "They kept on questioning him and questioning him until they brought on a heart attack," said William Rosenthal, a lawyer who knew Fox. "They accused him in the Christgen boy's death. It was not the first time they questioned him. My personal opinion was that he could have had nothing to do with it.

He was nowhere close to the description." St. Joseph Police Chief James R. Hayes refused to discuss the cm umstances surrounding Fox's He said the Christgen murder case was closed, and he had been ordered by city officials not to discuss any aspect of it. The day after Fox died, the man who killed Eric Christgen checked out of a hotel in St. Joseph and headed for Omaha.

Detectives had checked the hotel register for transients like him, but they looked only at daily registrants. The killer had signed a weekly guest register. On June 16, the task force investigating the murder was disbanded. But officers continued to question Reynolds, a homosexual whom police had arrested before for shoplifting. As a child, Melvin Reynolds suffered from rheumatic fever that left him thin, frail and with an IQ of 75 The product of a broken home, Kynolds had been expelled from elementary school, had run away from home at aye 10 and once had set fire to his closet "Mom couldn't stand it no longer, so she made an appointment with one of the judges and had me put into a boys' home," Reynolds said.

He said that at the home, where he was the youngest and smallest, he had been subjected to homosexual attacks. "A lot of times, there was more than one guy," Reynolds said later. "One would do it, and the others'd be waiting in line." In the nine months after the Christgen murder, police questioned Reynolds an average of once a month. Two days before Christmas 1978, they took him to a hospital were sodium amytal (a "truth was administered with Reynolds' permission. On Valentine's Day 1979, they picked him up again and took him to the Missouri Highway Patrol Headquarters, where Reynolds was others did, including the judge and something you see in people who are prosecutor.

Hatcher was convicted of innocent. They have this oblivious capital murder in the Christgen case stare in their eyes, like they have on Oct. 13, Reynolds was freed a day cancer and they don't know what's later. going on." "Hatcher didn't get fed a lot of lines," Nation said. "I have always WEDNESDAY: The attack on Duane thought Melvin was innocent.

There is K. Ween yoe warn voe coold and up women and rour men. Some of them knew of Reynolds or had heard that he was a homosexual. Reynolds' mother, Wanda O'Meara, paid Lee M. Nation, a lawyer in Kansas City, $10,000 to defend her son.

Nation did not call any of the witnesses wno had seen a man much older than Reynolds leading a boy from the mall by the hand. He said later that he had believed the jurors already knew from news reports that an older man had first been sought in the Christgen murder. The confession was the key in the state's case, and Buchanan County Circuit Judge Frank D. Connett Jr. allowed it to be admitted over Nation's objections.

Reynolds recanted the confession on the witness stand, saying he had given it because he was scared and tired of the questions. "How long could any of you continue to deny something?" Nation asked the jury. "Isn't there a point when every human being asked the same questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over again and denies, denies, denies, denies; how long before that person says, 'You're going to keep asking me this EASTERN FREQUENT TRAVELER BONUS PROGRAM Fire Kills Elderly Couple In North St. Louis Home Warner Murff. 73.

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Mrs. Murff was a retired private nurse. Investigators from the police bomb and arson unit were called to the scene. Coburn said it was impossible Monday night to determine exactly how or where the fire started because the basement had been flooded by fire hoses. He said it did not appear that an explosion had occurred.

Murff is survived by a brother, Matthew of St Louis, and a sister, Hester Reeder of Olivette. Relatives said the couple had raised two nieces who are now married. Zenova Ellison, a neighbor of Werner and Nora Murff, said "everybody on the block knew them. They were real nice people." North Side, Wellston Lose Power For Hour About 4,700 Union Electric customers In north St. Louis were without power for about an hour this morning.

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Available on domestic and selected international Eastern flights; not available on Eastern's 1984 Eastern Air Lines, Inc. the house, said Deputy Fire Chief John Coburn. The two-story home was gutted. Two alarms were turned in, bringing six pumpers, a hook-and-ladder truck and various other pieces of heavy equipment to the scene. The first alarm sounded at 8:33 p.m.; firefighters extinguished the last flames about 10 p.m.

Murff was found lying about two feet from a window in the rear of the house. It appeared that he had been overcome by smoke while trying to escape, Coburn said. Mrs. Murff, who was bedridden, was lying in her hospital bed in the downstairs middle room of the home, Coburn said. Her body had been severely burned, he said.

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