Next came Shiela Cole, who was kidnapped from a Wal-Mart parking lot and killed in November 1977. Her body was found at a rest stop in southern Illinois.

In 1982, two homicides in Cape Girardeau were strikingly similar to the killings of Mary and Brenda Parsh. In both cases, a man broke in through a bathroom window and waited for his victim to arrive home.

In January, Margie Call, 57, was found dead in her home, lying on her bed partially nude. Her hands were crossed behind her back and it appeared they had been bound. She had been raped and strangled.

In June 1982, 65-year-old Mildred Wallace was found killed and partially nude in her bed. Her hands were tied behind her back and she had been shot in the head.

Hughs said the similarities in most of the murders — the tied hands, the killer waiting at home — led investigators to believe that the killings were connected. But it was tough to conceive the killer might be a stranger who chose them at random.

“I didn’t even know what the term serial killer meant — I thought it was someone who went after Cap’n Crunch,” Hughs recalled.

All the 100 serious suspects in the case lived in Cape Girardeau, Hughs said. Police looked at old classmates, mutual friends, past lovers of the women.

When he left the Cape Girardeau police department around 1984, Hughs said he took a copy of the case file with him and read it dozens of times, hoping to spot a missed clue.

“I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights,” he said.

There was a lull in Krajcir’s murder spree when he was jailed in Illinois in 1979 for having sex with his Carbondale landlord’s 13-year-old daughter. A judge conditionally released Krajcir in 1981, and he reportedly returned to Pennsylvania to be with family.

In 1982, Krajcir was arrested on sexual assault charges and served time in a Pennsylvania prison. The crime violated his parole in the Illinois case, so when the Pennsylvania term expired in 1988, he was brought back to Illinois to resume serving the sentence. He has been in the state’s custody since.

While he left some forensic evidence at the crime scenes, like hair or bodily fluid, investigators have not found any of his fingerprints that might have been entered into a national database, Smith said.

Police found a palm print matching Krajcir’s at one crime scene, but palm prints weren’t put into a database when Krajcir was arrested in the early 1980s, Smith said.

Echols said advances in DNA technology eventually let him test a small sample from Deborah Sheppard’s killing. It matched Krajcir’s, which was in a database. Smith then did a similar test with material from Wallace’s killing, which matched Krajcir.

After initially denying his involvement in the murders, Krajcir confessed on Dec. 3, Smith said.