Darren Deon Vann, 43, who is a convicted sex offender.
A northwest Indiana man suspected of murdering at least seven women may be a serial killer who has killed others in the state as far back as 20 years ago, local police said yesterday.
Darren Vann, 43, of Gary, Indiana, was in custody and police were seeking murder charges against him, said John Doughty, police chief of the neighboring city of Hammond.
Vann, a registered sex offender from a 2008 assault in Texas, was arrested in Gary on Saturday, a day after police were led to the body of 19-year-old Afrika Hardy in a Motel 6 in Hammond.
Doughty said Hardy had advertised sexual services on the classified ads website Backpage.com, and that she and Vann met at the motel. When Hardy did not return from the appointment, a woman who had helped to arrange the encounter went to track her down and found her dead from strangulation.
Once in custody Vann was co-operative, admitted his involvement in Hardy’s murder and led police to the bodies of six other women, all in abandoned houses in Gary, Doughty said.
“It could go back as far as 20 years based on some statements we have and that’s yet to be corroborated,” Doughty said. “It is possible other victims could surface.”
Doughty said the victims included Anith Jones, 35, of Merrillville, Teiarra Batey, 28, of Gary, and Christine Williams, 36, also of Gary. Three other victims have yet to be identified.
“He is giving us descriptions, cooperating and accompanying us to locations,” Doughty said, adding he was unable to say whether the other victims were sex workers.
Jones was reported missing on Oct. 8, triggering a search for her in Gary, an economically struggling city on Lake Michigan, 30 miles (50km) south of Chicago. The city’s population has fallen by more than half to about 78,000 people, from a peak of 178,000 in the 1960s.
As in much of the rust belt, abandoned houses overgrown with trees and weeds are a prominent feature of Gary’s landscape.
“As we find buildings are open, we do in fact board them up. We are in the process of demolishing buildings. But when you have 10,000 buildings you don’t have the resources to demolish all of the ones that would be candidates,” Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson told reporters.
Doughty said it was not known if the victims were murdered in the abandoned houses or if their bodies were dumped there.
Freeman-Wilson said police were looking through missing persons files and working with the coroner’s office to see if they could identify more of the victims. She said some of the bodies were significantly decomposed but not skeletal. Doughty said the victims known so far were killed more recently than two decades ago.
Vann was jailed in Texas in July 2008 after police said he sexually assaulted and tried to strangle a 25-year-old woman in an Austin apartment the previous December, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark told Reuters.
He was sentenced to five years and released in October 2009.
On the on-line Texas Department of Public Safety sex offender registry, Vann’s risk level was listed as “low.”
