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March 19, 2003
BATON ROUGE, La. -- DNA evidence confirmed that the slaying of Carrie Lynn Yoder is the work of the same serial killer who has murdered four other women in the past year and a half, Police Chief Pat Englade said Tuesday.
Yoder, 26, an LSU graduate student from Tampa, was found dead of asphyxiation Thursday, more than a week after she was reported missing from her Baton Rouge home.
Authorities already had linked the killer to the unsolved murders of Gina Wilson Green, Charlotte Murray Pace and Pam Kinamore, all of the Baton Rouge area, and Trineisha Dene Colomb of Lafayette.
Police say DNA evidence left on the victims has connected five murders to one man.
Yoder died of asphyxiation, but police have refused to say if she was strangled, suffocated or drowned. Her body was found by a fisherman Thursday in the Whiskey Bay area of the Atchafalaya River Basin.
Green, 41, was found strangled in her home. Pace, 22, was stabbed to death. Kinamore, 44, was abducted and her throat was slit. Colomb, 23, was beaten to death and her body found in rural Lafayette Parish.
Lynne Marino, Kinamore's mother, had assumed Yoder's murder was linked to the others because Yoder's body was dumped in the same marshy area off Interstate 10 where Kinamore's body was found in July.
"That doesn't surprise me. It's the same (pattern)," Marino said.
With the news that another murder was linked, a dozen federal, state and local officials, including Gov. Mike Foster, tried to reassure Baton Rouge area residents Tuesday that a strong effort was under way to find the killer.
"Anything we're asked to do, we'll do," Foster said. "Money won't be an object, personnel won't be an object."
The comments from public officials, including the mayor and U.S. Attorney David Dugas, followed a rally two days earlier on the steps of the state Capitol, where family members and friends of the serial killer victims expressed frustration at the seeming lack of progress in the investigation.
"I understand that the fear and anxiety in this community is very high, but let me assure you the task force is very committed to finding this killer," Englade said.
FBI profilers believe the serial killer is a white male, and police released a sketch several months ago of a "person of interest" in the case. More than 1,000 men have opened their mouths so police investigators could swab them in search of DNA that might match the evidence left behind by the killer.
The Kinamore family is offering a $100,000 reward for evidence that leads to the killer, and thousands of tips have poured into a hot line set up by the task force.