The Sex Beast

The father lay in the ditch, hands bound in front of him, face savagely bludgeoned. A gruesome sight, but even veteran cops were not prepared for what they saw when they lifted him up: the body of an infant, dressed in a red-and-white pinafore. The baby had been tossed into the ditch alive. She had suffocated when her father's body was pushed on top of her.

The man's wife and another daughter were missing for two years. After they were found nearly a hundred miles away, it was clear that the killer's motive was sexual. The father and the baby were quickly discarded. The real prize had been the wife. Her body bore a silk stocking knotted around the neck in an odd-looking harness and her knees were bruised. Police believed she had been ordered to perform a sexual act and had refused, so her killer used a collar to make her do what he wanted. She appeared to have been bludgeoned and hanged, and her little daughter had been beaten to death.

This area had been linked to an earlier murder with one suspect, but he had passed a polygraph exam. He was intelligent, educated, mild-mannered, and self-assured.

As this case grew more complicated, with more murders linked to a single predator, the emerging motive baffled even the most experienced detectives.