Aug 4, 2002 4 min read

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Two of the murdered women drove BMWs, but the third victim didn’t. Two loved antiques, but the third had no interest. Two lived on the same street at one point, but the third lived on the outskirts of the city. There are no obvious threads to bind the three women together, but police say DNA evidence shows their murders over less than a year were committed by the same man. The killer remains loose and police remain tight-lipped.

Family members are ferreting through scraps of information about each victim to find a link between the three, a clue that could lead to the serial killer who slashed Pam Kinamore’s throat, strangled Gina Wilson Green and stabbed Charlotte Murray Pace.

“We have not been able to come up with anything that is common for all three, and believe me, we’re trying,” Ann Pace, mother of Charlotte Murray Pace, said in a telephone interview from her home in Jackson, Miss.

Authorities won’t say if the women were sexually assaulted.

Police connected the murders of Pace and Green first, in early July.

Green, a 41-year-old nurse, was found strangled in her home Sept. 24. At the time, Pace lived just three doors away.

Pace, 22, a recent graduate of Louisiana State University, was stabbed to death May 31, two days after she moved to another neighborhood.

Ann Pace said it doesn’t appear the two women knew each other.

Three weeks after police connected the deaths of Pace and Green, they announced the link to Kinamore’s murder – and set the city on edge with news of a serial killer.

Kinamore, 44, a decorator and antique store owner, had been abducted from her home July 12. The killer slit her throat and dumped her body at an exit off Interstate 10, about 30 miles away from Baton Rouge.

After police announced few leads, relatives and friends of the murdered women started talking by telephone and e-mail, comparing gyms, beauty salons, nightclubs and other bits of information about the slain women.

“We’re going to try to meet Sunday, sit down at a round-table discussion and compare notes,” said Kinamore’s brother, Ed Piglia. “There’s got to be something there.”

Ann Pace knows the killings could be random, the work of a madman.

“I think whatever connections there are to be made are floating in his sick, revolting, evil head,” she said. “We’re trying to apply traditional reasoning and rational techniques to an irrational person.”

The tiny overlaps so far:

– Pace and Green both drove BMWs.

– Pace and Green both jogged on the same lakeside path near LSU.

– Green and Kinamore both had an interest in antiques. Pace, however, “liked everything to be an hour and half old and shiny,” Ann Pace said.

– Green and Kinamore share some physical characteristics and were both older, petite women. Pace was tall and young.

“There’s precious little to connect the process he uses,” Ann Pace said.

There was no forced entry in any of the victims’ homes.

Police won’t comment on details of the investigation. They have said they received nearly 1,000 tips about a white Chevrolet pickup truck they were seeking in connection with Kinamore’s murder.

Nearly three dozen murders of Baton Rouge women over the past decade remain unsolved, and police said they are scouring the evidence to see if any of them are connected to Kinamore, Pace and Green. The FBI is working with local authorities.

Kinamore’s family is offering a $75,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. Two billboards advertising the reward went up Wednesday near Kinamore’s home and her antiques store emblazoned with a huge picture of Kinamore and the words “Justice for Pam. Justice for All.”

“We’re just so afraid that without the pressure, this thing will become stagnant and go out of the newspapers altogether,” Piglia said from his home in Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans about an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge.

“I can’t let it rest until this individual is caught,” he said.

Ann Pace said her daughter put up a tremendous fight and the killer should have “strange injuries.” She said she knew that from information she got from the coroner, but wouldn’t give details.

“He is hideously brutal. She fought so hard to live, and she was capable of putting up one hell of a fight,” she said.