Search for serial killer’s victims may take years
Police fear Vann may be a serial killer who has killed others in the state as far back as 20 years ago.
Authorities say seven bodies were found in several locations in north-western Indiana over the weekend after Vann’s confession in one killing led police to the discovery of other deaths. The bodies were found in abandoned houses.
Abandoned houses overgrown with trees and weeds are a prominent feature of Gary’s landscape — as they are in much of the US rust belt of formerly well-off manufacturing and steel towns that have fallen on hard times. More than 35% of Gary’s residents live below the federal poverty level and its population has fallen to 78,000 from more than twice that in the 1960s.
Police fear that some of Vann’s alleged victims may have been prostitutes or people who had fallen through society’s cracks, further complicating the investigation.
Vann, 43, of Gary, Indiana, was charged in Lake County with one of theseven murders. He was being held in custody, said John Doughty, police chief of the neighbouring city of Hammond.
Vann, a registered sex offender following a 2008 assault in Texas, was arrested in Gary on Saturday, a day after police were led to the body of Afrika Hardy, 19, in a motel 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, 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.
“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.
Doughty was unable to say whether the other victims were sex workers.
Jones was reported missing on October 8, triggering a search for her in Gary, a city on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, 48km south of Chicago.
“As we find buildings are open, we do in fact board them up,” said Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson. “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,”
Doughty said it was not known if the victims were murdered in the abandoned houses or if their bodies were dumped there.
Vann lived in a ranch-style home in Gary with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend.
A neighbour, Latonya Ramson, 36, said abandoned homes in the neighbourhood have long been a concern.
“It makes me very uncomfortable,” said Ramson. “There’s abandoned houses everywhere you look. If we didn’t have all these abandoned houses, he wouldn’t have been able to leave people in them. That’s part of the problem.”
Authorities in Gary and in Austin, Texas, said they were reviewing missing persons cases to try to identify the bodies or other potential victims.
Vann was sentenced to five years in 2009 and was released in October 2013 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting and trying to strangle a 25-year-old woman in Austin.
On the online Texas Department of Public Safety sex offender registry, his risk level was listed as “low”.
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