He went undercover and discovered a flourishing sex-for-sale industry at stops throughout the state. Michael began an investigation that took him into a little known subculture of Ohio's interstate truck stops. Finally, each worked at truck stops or were last believed to have been working at one. Each was a known or suspected prostitute. Each was found alongside a major interstate. Eight women in eight different counties had been beaten or strangled to death. He began to cross-reference unsolved murder cases in Ohio. He started looking at prostitute deaths across Ohio, primarily using newspaper stories as a way to track them.
#I 5 killer victims serial#
He had remembered a statement that an FBI agent had made about prostitutes being the ideal serial killer victim because they are transient and, often, their disappearances are not reported immediately. In November, Michael Berens, a reporter for " The Columbus Dispatch", began preliminary research for a possible story on serial killers. No one would connect the nearly identical murders until 1990. As in the case of the Jane Doe, all jewelry and several pieces of clothing had been removed from the body. Four years earlier, on July 20, 1986, the body of twenty-three-year-old Shirley Dean Taylor was found behind a traffic barrier on Interstate 71 in Medina County, about 100 miles away. No one was aware that her murder was not an isolated case. Despite an extensive investigation by county sheriffs, the victim was never identified. All of her jewelry and some articles of clothing were missing. Map of where victims were dumped Case ĭetails: On April 19, 1990, the partially nude body of a woman was found behind a truck stop in Licking County, Ohio.