Trial to get underway for suspected serial killer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- No one will be playing to the jury when the trial of a man charged with killing 13 women during a 16-year span gets under way Monday in Jackson County Court.

Prosecutors agreed in January not seek the death penalty against Lorenzo Gilyard, as long as Gilyard's attorneys agreed to a trial before a judge without a jury. His attorneys also agreed to give up nearly all of their client's appeal rights.

Gilyard, 56, has been in jail since 2004 on allegations that he strangled 12 women and girls between 1977 and 1993 in Jackson County. Authorities added a 13th murder charge last year.

He will be tried on seven of the 13 murder cases, although neither side would say which of the seven cases will be presented this week.

Court papers filed last week by the defense list the victims as Catherine M. Barry, 34; Naomi Kelly, 23; Ann Barnes, 36; Kellie A. Ford, 20; Angela Mayhew, 19; Sheila Ingold, 36; and Carmeline Hibbs, 30.

The other victims were Stacie L. Swofford, 17; Gwendolyn Kizine, 15; Margaret J. Miller, 17; Debbie Blevins, 32; Helga Kruger, 26; and Connie Luther, 29.

The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, will revolve largely around DNA evidence -- without which the homicides might have continued to languish without a suspect.

If Gilyard is convicted on even one of the first-degree murder counts, his only possible sentence would be life without parole.

In telephone conversations between Gilyard and relatives, the suspect consistently contends that he is innocent and eager to go to trial.

"I know I couldn't get convicted of something I didn't do," Gilyard told a relative in one call, which was among more than 200 minutes of recordings that The Kansas City Star recently obtained through a Missouri Sunshine Law request.

Gilyard rarely discussed details of his case, but in one conversation he discussed the DNA evidence that prosecutors say linked him to the victims. He told to a friend that his trial would come down to "their scientists against my scientists."

Gilyard had a long history of scrapes with law and has served time for crimes including child molestation. State probation records show that from January 1969 to June 1974, he was suspect in five rape cases, though he was never convicted of the crime.

But Gilyard was largely off the police radar when he was arrested in April 2004 and charged with killing a dozen of the victims -- all but one a prostitute.

By that time, Gilyard lived with his wife of about a decade in a modest, single-story home at the end of a quiet dead-end street in south Kansas City. He worked as a supervisor for a trash-collection company in Kansas. His wife divorced him after his arrest.

One of his neighbors worked at the city's crime lab, which was using a federal grant to test evidence in cold cases using DNA technology.

The cases the lab examined included two homicides that had been linked to a common suspect in 1994. Over a 10-month period in 2003 and 2004, investigators linked 10 other killings to the same suspect.

But the identify of the suspect remained unknown until the crime lab analyzed a blood sample taken from Gilyard in 1987, when he was a suspect in the death of one of the women he is now charged with killing.

In June 2006, Gilyard was charged with the death of the 13th victim -- an Austrian national who was killed in February 1989.

Steve Egger, a serial killer expert and associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said DNA is being used much more frequently to catch serial killers.

"It's a better tool," Egger said. "They're going back to old cases where semen and trace evidence was kept, but they didn't have the kind of matching technology we have today. It's certainly helped in serial murder cases."

But DNA evidence has its limitations: Defense lawyers can argue that proving a woman had sex with someone does not prove the woman was raped.