Krajcir waited in parking lots for victims

In 1983, Timothy Wayne Krajcir sat in the driver's seat of his car, parked on the outskirts of the parking lot of Mountainview Shopping Center in Allentown, Pa. A loaded pistol rested in his lap. A woman crossed the lot on her way to her car, and noticed the lone vehicle. Tape was wrapped around the license plate, concealing the identifying numbers. Alarm bells went off. She called the police.

It wasn't the first time Krajcir lurked in a store parking lot, waiting for the right victim to walk to her car alone. But it would be the last.

When Pennsylvania police responded, they found the loaded gun and identified Krajcir as a parolee from Illinois, convicted in 1979 of child molestation charges. Because Krajcir was still on parole, the firearm was a violation of his conditioned release.

When police snapped handcuffs on Krajcir, they didn't know at the time the arrest signified the end of a five-year reign of terror for Cape Girardeau.

Krajcir was convicted Friday of killing five Cape Girardeau women, sexually assaulting five others and robbing a couple at gunpoint, all the crimes occurring between 1977 and 1982.

On Nov. 16 1977, Sheila E. Cole, a 21-year-old student at Southeast Missouri State University, was getting ready to drive out of the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Cape Girardeau. She'd been picking up some photographs at the store and put the packages in her father's year-old Chevy Nova. She started her car.

Again, Krajcir's vehicle was close by. He was watching, waiting for a victim.

"I ... that was my, uh, a way of finding a victim," said Krajcir during a 2007 interview with Cape Girardeau Police Detective Jimmy Smith and Lt. Paul Echols in a room at the Big Muddy Correctional Center in Ina, Ill.

"I would go to parking lots and just wait for victims and look." Krajcir said.

When he zeroed in on Cole, he approached her and brandished a .38-caliber pistol. It was the same gun he'd used three months earlier to slay Mary Parsh and her 27-year old daughter, Brenda, in Mary Parsh's Koch Street residence.

Cole left her keys in the ignition of her car and the windshield wipers going as she followed the man with the gun.

Krajcir ushered Cole into his own car and drove her to his mobile home apartment in Carbondale, Ill., where he sexually assaulted her. Taking her to his own home was risky, and a spur of the moment decision, he said.

"When I was in that mode, you don't think," he said.

On the drive, they spoke little, but Krajcir learned that Cole shared an apartment with two other girls.

"I told her I'd take her home," he said.

Cole lived across the street from the police headquarters, but she did not make it home that night.

At 7:40 the next morning, a tourist discovered Cole's body on the floor of a public restroom in McClure, Ill. Her hands were in the pockets of her yellow jacket, and she had been shot twice in the head.

Krajcir had pulled over to the rest stop because he wanted to use the bathroom, and Cole politely asked if she could also use the facilities, he said. He escorted her to the woman's room.

"I think at that point in time I... I... I decided I was gonna kill her," he said.

He acted on what another man had told him when they were cellmates in prison: leave no witnesses, he said.

Krajcir pleaded guilty Friday to Cole's murder, along with those of the Parshes, Margie Call and Mildred Wallace in 1982. He received 13 life sentences on the murders, seven sexual assault charges and one count of robbery.

bdicsosmo@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245

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