Iran police believe they have caught the country’s first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie. The woman identified only by her first name as Mahin, age 32, has confessed to the murders which were committed between February and May.

The 32-year-old suspect, stands accused of killing at least six people, including five women, according to officials in the city of Qazvin, near Tehran. Mahin’s modus operandi would be to approach her victims, who were mostly females, aged between 50 and 70 years old, and offer to give them a ride in her yellow Renault. Mahin is said to have carefully chosen her victims, targeting elderly and middle-aged women, picking them up at shrines where they had been praying. After offering her victims a lift, Mahin allegedly gave them fruit juice, which she had spiked with an anesthetic to knock them out. She would then suffocate them before stealing their jewelery and other possessions and dumping the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar.

A local police chief in Qazvin said psychologists believed Mahin’s motives could be traced to her troubled relation with her parents in childhood.
“It is likely that the murderer took revenge on women who resembled her mother and were of the same age because of her intense hatred of her own mother,” the police chief, Akbar Hedayati said.

He said, Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two, had been arrested after her last prey – a 60-year-old woman – managed to get away from her car on May 11 and provided the police with major leads. Police said she confessed in custody to killing four such women in Qazvin since January, claiming to have been driven by a desperate need for money after chalking up debts of more than $24,000 (€17,300).
“Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself,” Mohammad Baqer Olfat, the Qazvin prosecutor, told Iranian journalists.

Murder is punishable by death in Iran, which hangs hundreds of people every year.

-article by Robert Tait from Irish Times rewritten and adapted by admin-

Los Angeles detectives were going through cold case files, following the arrest of a 72-year-old man suspected of being the city’s worst serial killer, for raping and murdering dozens of women decades ago. Police believe that John Thomas Jr is responsible for as many as 30 murders dating back to the 1970s and 1980s.

John Floyd Thomas Jr., 72, may have begun his killings as far back as 1955 and he could be one of the worst serial killers in United States history, according to Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton.

Thomas was arrested on March 31 when police linked a DNA sample taken from him to the crime scenes of two women murdered four years apart in 1972 and 1976. Evidence linking him to three other murders has also been found. “Thomas, at this time — and we think this is probably going to expand — is also suspected in as many as 25 other murders that occurred in the Southland in the 1970s and 1980s,” Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton said, “We have not yet reached the depth of what he’s done“.

Thomas, who sits in a Los Angeles jail, has been charged with two killings — in 1972 and 1976 — but prosecutors will likely add more cases when he faces arraignment on May 20.

While Thomas was arrested “a number of times between 1955 and 1978″ for sex crimes and burglaries, detectives did not have the technology to identify him as a suspect when the region was terrorized by a series of killings then blamed on the “Westside Rapist,” Bratton said.

As part of an ongoing Los Angeles Police Department program to collect DNA evidence from convicted sex offenders, officers asked Thomas for a DNA swab – and that’s when they first matched his DNA to rape kit evidence collected from first two victims, and investigation went on.

“Because of Thomas’s criminal background, the close proximity of his homes to murder locations, similar victim descriptions [white elderly females] and other evidence that suggests the type of modus operandi used by the suspect, detectives strongly believe Thomas is very likely the suspect in ‘The Westside Rapist’ cases,” a police statement said.

By most available accounts, John Floyd Thomas Jr. spent the last two decades living a relatively quiet life:
“He always had a smile on his face. He was placid, congenial and affable, a pleasant fellow who, if the allegations are true, may in fact be a monster,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an L.A. community activist who once worked with Thomas. “It almost takes your breath away.”

While he served about 12 years in prison between 1955 and the late 1970s for his previous convictions, he has no record since his last arrest in 1978, police said.

Deputy Chief Beck said the growing use of DNA databases and computers to match them to crime evidence will likely lead to more cold case killers being identified.

-article by Alan Duke and Andrew Blankstein rewritten and adapted by admin-

The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the past three decades.

In 2004, a somber group of seventeen law enforcement agencies gathered in Oklahoma City. A string of vicious murders along I-40, with most linked to the city, had raised the specter of death riding in the cab of a long-distance trucker.

A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female crime victims, the majority of whom were killed and whose bodies were discarded at truck stops, motels and other roadside locations along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the United States.

The database also has information on scores of truckers who have been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, officials said. Authorities said they do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers.

Ten suspects in 30 homicides have been detained, according to the FBI. One trucker was arrested in Tennessee and charged with four murders. The FBI office in El Paso said it can not comment on the map or specific cases because the cases are not being investigated by the FBI. The office said the FBI’s role is to provide the map for other agencies.

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police “connect the dots” to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

Though many of the dots on the map now appear connected to one another by similarities — such as the killers’ MO – modes of operation — the majority are not connected to any known suspect.

They are potential serial slayings waiting to be solved, the FBI says.

-article by Scott Glover from Los Angeles Times, rewritten and adapted by admin-

A 16-year hunt for a female serial killer nicknamed “The Phantom” has collapsed after German police admitted they had been misled by a DNA mix-up. Police had linked DNA evidence from 40 crimes — including the famous homicide of a policewoman in the southern German town of Heilbronn — to the same woman.

The police thought they’d been looking everywhere. But it turns out they should have been looking down — at the cotton swabs they were using to collect DNA samples. On March 26, German police revealed that the cotton swabs they use may have all been contaminated by the same worker at a factory in Austria — and that the Phantom of Heilbronn never existed.

Suspicions arose after the suspect’s DNA turned up during an investigation into the identity of a male body, believed to be an asylum seeker who had disappeared in 2002. The man had had his fingerprints taken for his asylum application and police found, to their surprise, that DNA from the fingerprints matched up with the phantom serial killer’s DNA.

“Obviously that was impossible, as the asylum seeker was a man and the Phantom’s DNA belonged to a woman,” said Ernst Meiners, a spokesman for the Saarbruecken public prosecutor’s office.

A second check did not find the Phantom’s DNA in the fingerprints: “That aroused suspicions that the materials were contaminated.”

According to experts, even though cotton swabs are sterilized before being used to collect DNA samples, sterilizing removes bacteria, viruses and fungi, but it does not destroy DNA. The Phantom case is now considered the most embarrassing lapse in German DNA analysis yet – even though it is a relief for German police to find out that Phantom female serial killer doesn’t actually exist, it is hard  to justify all the wasted hours, and 40 criminal investigations that are now back to square one.

-article by Allan Hall from telegraph.co.uk rewritten and adapted by admin-

Two retired NYC detectives, Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, have been trying to solve “Smiley Face” murder mystery for the past 11 years, connecting the drowning deaths of 40 young man across the country. In a number of cases, the detectives have reportedly found “a smiley face” caricature near the crime scenes thereby giving it the Smily Face Killer theory. It has been suggested that the smiley face “Signatures are ritualistic crime scene behaviors that are done for psycho sexual gratification.”

At least 50 men in 11 states have been found dead in the last 10 years, though no police department has said that the cases are connected. Their causes of death have been blamed on drunken accidents, as these young men were attacked while they were leaving parties or bars where they were drinking. All cases, except one – Chris Jenkins, a University of Minnesota student, was found dead in 2003 and was the only one whose cause of death was changed to homicide. When the detectives took a look at Jenkins’ death, they discovered that the position of his body and other physical evidence proved that the college student didn’t drown accidentally.

Paul McCabe of the FBI office in Minneapolis said the bureau investigated some of the deaths late last year and concluded that they were accidental drownings.

However, in city after city, the two detectives claim they found a smiley face painted somewhere at the crime scene, what they believe to be a sick signature claiming responsibility. And it looks to be the work of more than one person because there have been strikingly similar deaths and smiley faces in numerous cities and states, some in a relatively short time span, they assert. The detectives found the smiley faces in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa. Gannon and Duarte also came to the surprising conclusion that more than one person is involved in the murders:

“Because there’s such a wide range of states the killings are through,” Gannon said today in an exclusive interview on “Good Morning America.” “Besides the fact that we have multiple victims on the same night.” “Right now really we’re out of finances and really can’t do any more on the cases. In fact, we looked at 89 cases in totality. We knocked out 30 right away and there was 19 cases that we haven’t even done yet and out of those 19, they look like at least 10, 15 of those could be connected,” Gannon said.

So far, all theories are acceptable, since there is a pretty good reason to believe these drownings are connected, however without any more evidence no one can be sure this is a work of a serial killer, or even serial killers. As Duarte said though, “It is almost a perfect crime”…

-article by Kristi Piehl from ABC news, rewritten and adapted by admin-