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The killer hunts women mostly on North Street, between Acadian Thruway and Foster Drive. When he finds them, he usually strangles them. A few he’s beaten to death. One victim he killed by stabbing.

The last victim likely linked to this killer was Deanna Wesley. At 7:30 on the morning of July 30, 2004, someone walked into the office of the director of the North Street Park summer day camp and reported finding a dead body in the park. When police arrived, they found 37-year-old Wesley lying partially clothed in a small stand of trees behind the recreation center. She’d been stabbed to death.

Wesley, who also went by the name Deanna Lafayette, lived what police euphemistically call a “high-risk” lifestyle. Her rap sheet included arrests for possession of marijuana, possession of a crack pipe, forgery and theft.

Wesley was the 11th woman found dead within a four-square-mile area around that stretch of North Street since July 1996.

All of the slayings remain unsolved.

In a city all too familiar with serial killers and the fear they create, it’s remarkable another one may still be operating with little or no notice.

This killer targets black women, many of whom have been prostitutes.

The victims are linked—at least circumstantially—by location, manner of death, and in all but one case, by the similarity of the victims. Most had drug arrests. All but two were in their 30s. Ten were found nude or partly undressed. Seven were strangled. Three had been beaten to death. Four were found either in or adjacent to North Street Park.

The rest were found within two and a half miles of the park. Most were killed somewhere other than where they were found. In police lingo, they were “dump jobs.”

Retired Baton Rouge Police Capt. Ben Odom spent 18 years investigating homicides. In an exclusive interview with 225, Odom says he thinks there is still a serial killer stalking the streets of north Baton Rouge.

Odom, who left the Homicide Division in 1998, says he can only speculate as to how many women might have been victims of the same killer. “Conservatively, I’d say 20. There were at least 17 I knew of before I left.”

Some of the victims were sexually assaulted. Some showed signs of having fought hard for their lives. “They didn’t all go easy into the night,” Odom says.

What linked the killings, the retired homicide cop says, was the way the victims were killed, where they were found, and in some cases, the position of their bodies.

“A lot of them were displayed,” Odom says. “I think they were killed by the same guy.”

Another source familiar with many of these cases tells 225 that one victim, a 36-year-old woman who was found inside the old Dynasty Lounge on North Boulevard, looked like she had been “sacrificed on an altar.”

“The thing that was so glaring to us was that it was so personal with this guy,” Odom says. “This guy definitely wanted these women to suffer.”

The notion of another Baton Rouge serial killer is especially upsetting, so soon after the serial killer era the past few years.

Derrick Todd Lee was captured in May 2003, and in April 2004 police arrested and charged Sean Vincent Gillis. Lee was linked through DNA to seven murders and has been convicted of two. Gillis has confessed to killing eight women and is scheduled to go on trial later this year.

Could there really be a third serial killer in Baton Rouge?

“There’s another one out there,” says Sid Newman, former chief of detectives with the Baton Rouge Police Department. Newman was head of the department’s Criminal Investigation Bureau when Ben Odom was a homicide detective. Odom says sometime around 1996, he took 17 unsolved homicide case files to Newman.

“I think we have a serial killer north of Florida Boulevard,” Odom recalls telling his boss, “and I think we have a problem south of Florida.”

What Odom was referring to south of Florida Boulevard was the unsolved abduction and murder of six young women that occurred near LSU in the 1980s. Those killings eventually stopped, but no arrests were ever made.

“I think there was another serial killer in south Baton Rouge that’s gone, that got away,” Odom says.

Nothing about those killings matched the ones in north Baton Rouge, a fact that leads Odom to believe they were the work of two serial killers.

Odom says he and other homicide detectives knew many of the killings in north Baton Rouge were linked to the same killer, but back in those days, his supervisors didn’t want to hear what they called the “s-word.” Back then, no one wanted to admit there was a serial killer in Baton Rouge.

“It was very frustrating,” Odom says.

Then, during a 10-month period, between September 1999 and June 2000, six women were found dead in north Baton Rouge.

In 2000, then-Chief of Police Greg Phares, now acting East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff, formed a task force to try to determine if the killings were connected. After a few months of frustrating work, the task force disbanded. The results of their investigation were inconclusive. They could not prove a connection between the north Baton Rouge killings, yet neither could they prove that they weren’t connected.

“There clearly were similarities in location and somewhat in the manner of death, and in the profiles of the victims,” Phares tells 225. “Beyond that I won’t speculate.”

One reason a definite link between the killings could not be established was there was no DNA match. Only some of the victims showed signs of having been sexually assaulted. And prostitutes, by the nature of their work, often offer a confusing mix of DNA material. Recently retired Baton Rouge Police Lt. Keith Bates, a former commander of the Homicide Division, says, “The thing about prostitute killings, when you are relying on DNA, it’s your worst nightmare.”

Not all serial killers rape their victims. Some can’t. Others get gratification from the act of killing. “One of the characteristics of a serial killer is they are not able to function in a normal sexual manner,” Phares says.

If there is another serial killer operating in Baton Rouge, was he killing only prostitutes?

Maybe not.

On April 11, 2002, the strangled body of Renee Newman was found on Laurel Street behind the old Maison Blanche building. Newman wasn’t a prostitute or a drug addict. She didn’t lead a high-risk lifestyle, but she was a 46-year-old black woman who lived in the 2000 block of North Boulevard, a mile and a half from North Street Park, and just nine blocks from where Florida Edwards’ body was found.

Accused serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis has admitted to killing eight women in Baton Rouge over a 10-year period. Six were prostitutes. Two others apparently were just targets of opportunity. Ann Bryan lived at St. James Place on Lee Drive, across the street from the Circle K convenience store where Gillis worked. Hardee Schmidt was out for an early morning jog just a couple of miles from Gillis’ Bergin Avenue home.

Gillis admitted to police that he stabbed Bryan to death and strangled Schmidt.

If there was another serial killer hunting women in Baton Rouge, is he gone?

Again, maybe not.

It’s been more than two years since Deanna Wesley was found stabbed to death behind the North Street Park recreation center, but that doesn’t mean the killer has quit.

Derrick Todd Lee left a gap of more than three years between his abduction and presumed killing of Randi Mebruer, whose body has not been found, and his strangulation murder of Gina Wilson Green.

According to Gillis’ confession, he waited nearly five years after killing his first victim, Ann Bryan, before killing his second, Katherine Hall, and nearly three years between his sixth and seventh victims, Marilyn Nevils and Johnnie Mae Williams.

And just because a serial killer normally preys on prostitutes doesn’t mean they will always be his only victims, as evidenced by some of the cases mentioned above.

Because DNA technology has improved dramatically since the task force investigating these killings disbanded in 2000, and since the cost associated with DNA testing has dropped significantly, perhaps the Police Department will take another look at these cases. Maybe they can catch him before he kills again.

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the former East Baton Rouge Parish coroner who was involved with the investigation of the North Street-area killings, says, “Everybody I know pretty much still thinks there’s another serial killer out there.”