THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260345
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LIGNUM LENGTH: 89 lines
A 20-year-old woman was the third murder victim in 4 1/2 months to turn up in a rural crossroads of only six houses and a post office. Now the few who live here fear a serial killer is in their midst.
Anne Carolyn McDaniel was a slightly retarded woman who told housemates she was meeting a mystery date on the night she disappeared, officials said.
Police used dental records to identify her burned body Wednesday.
Lignum residents and police are asking whether McDaniel's slaying is related to a stalker who may have lured a Baltimore woman to her death last spring.
The body of Alicia Showalter Reynolds, 25, a pharmacology student, was found in May about five miles from the latest victim. In July, Thelma Scroggins was found dead in her house across from the post office.
The person who dumped McDaniel's body near an abandoned hunting cabin knew his way around the desolate backroads and knew how to avoid being seen, men gathered at the post office said Wednesday.
``I believe it must be someone who lives here local or who has lived here in the past,'' said Harold Myers, a retired police officer who lives three miles from town.
Lignum is barely a wide spot in state Route 3 about 20 miles west of Fredericksburg: frame farmhouses, an abandoned store. The post office is a two-room trailer next to a hay field.
``Talk about this is pretty much constant,'' postmaster Bob Tabor said.
Until Reynolds' badly decomposed body was found in May covered with brush just off a seldom-traveled gravel road, no one can remember a killing in Lignum.
The location and timing are the only clear link between the killings, which involved women of varying ages and hometowns. Virginia State Police will not say how any of the women died and will not discuss the possibility that one killer is responsible.
``Certainly the investigators are looking at whether there is a link, but there is not enough to say that there is a link now,'' State Police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said.
Larry McCann, a State Police serial killer specialist who has done personality profiles of suspects in other serial cases, confirmed Wednesday that he is involved in the Lignum-area slayings but refused to discuss it further.
All three cases apparently involve a trusting woman and a mysterious killer.
Scroggins, 74, hung up the phone the Saturday night she died, telling a friend someone was knocking on her door. Members of her church found her body the next morning when she did not show up to play the organ.
She was well-known around Lignum, and her death hit closest to home, Tabor said.
Reynolds disappeared March 2, while driving to meet her mother in Charlottesville. The two women planned to shop for dresses for the wedding of Reynolds' brother.
Witnesses reported seeing Reynolds peering under the hood of her car, then getting into a dark pickup truck with a man who appeared to be helping her.
Other women told police similar tales of a Good Samaritan who convinced them their cars were malfunctioning. Police found nothing wrong with Reynolds' car.
Posters with a drawing of the mystery man are everywhere, and a wreath marks the spot on U.S. 29 where Reynolds vanished.
A wreath also hangs on a street sign in Lignum, near Scroggins' house.
McDaniel lived in a group home for mentally and physically disabled adults in Orange, a town 25 miles from where her body was found. Managers of the privately run home reported her missing on Sept. 19, the morning after she left to meet her date, Orange Police Chief James R. Otto said.
Managers at the home would not comment on McDaniel's death.
Yellow posters with her picture hang in businesses in Orange, alongside the U.S. 29 suspect.
McDaniel's father, Gary McDaniel, said his daughter may be the victim of a serial killer.
``It's starting to look like that with all these bodies turning up in the same area,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
THE VICTIMS
The three women whose bodies were found near Lignum:
Alicia Showalter Reynolds, 25, of Baltimore. Her body was found
May 7, a little more than two months after she disappeared while
driving on U.S. 29 south of Culpeper.
Thelma Scroggins, 74, of Lignum. Her body was found July 14 in
her home after she failed to show up at church, where she was the
organist.
Anne Carolyn McDaniel, 20, of Orange. Her body was found Sunday
by sportsmen exercising their dogs.
KEYWORDS: MURDER SERIAL MURDER by CNB