Jeffrey Dahmer As Toll Hits 10
Adelaide, Australia - The death toll in Australia's worst serial killing reached 10 as an expert said the murders compared to the notorious crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, who butchered 17 men in the United States.
Police unearthed the remains of another body in the backyard of a house in Adelaide's northern suburbs and said they were looking for at least one more.
Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm said the corpse was buried three metres (10 feet) underground and was roughly below a body found in the same spot on Sunday.
Eight other bodies were discovered in six barrels in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, 150 kilometres (93 miles) north of Adelaide, last Thursday.
"We still have a number of places to look and we can't say at this point in time as to where the last body will be found," said Schramm.
"We think it's highly unlikely we will find more than one body here."
Schramm refused to comment on reports that the barrels were filled with a preserving fluid but confirmed some contained acid.
It also emerged Wednesday that one of the victims had only been lured to Snowtown two weeks ago to buy computer equipment.
Reports said another victim had told his mother he had helped dispose of a body eight years ago and was living in fear of his life.
Sylvia Lane, mother of Barry, a transvestite known as Vanessa, told commercial television he had cried as he told her: "I don't know what to do, I know too much."
"He was saying he covered up a murder," said Mrs Lane.
Lane, a convicted paedophile, shared his home with Robert Wagner, one of three men being held on murder charges.
The investigation centres on social security fraud, with claims that the killers were drawing up to 100,000 dollars (66,000 US) a year by cashing the pension cheques of the missing people.
Park Dietz, forensic psychiatrist for the FBI's Profiling and Behavioural Assessment Unit and the New York State Police Forensic Sciences Unit, said the use of acid and the number of suspects was intriguing.
"It's very unusual," he told reporters.
"When we see somebody putting bodies in vats of acids you naturally think 'weirdo individual', and how unlikely it is for two weirdoes to get together and unthinkable for three to get together."
Dietz, who worked on the Dahmer serial murders, said burying bodies was very common, but trying to dispose of bodies in acid was unusual.
"That's something that Dahmer did -- he had a very elaborate system in which he would remove the flesh from bones and put the flesh in a vat of acid and then he would ladle the acid with the dissolved soft tissue into the toilet," he said.
"The bones he would either preserve, baking them and painting them or else dispose of them in large trash bags and have them hauled off."
He said in his experience the only time three people were involved in mass killings was when profit was involved.
"You don't tend to think of them as serial killers but organised crime figures," he said.
"They are doing it for profit, it's business and that of course is the suspected motive here."
But the most astonishing aspect of the case, according to Dietz, was how so many people allegedly kept the secret of the killings for so long.
"The same characteristics that cause people to commit crimes cause them to lack judgement in other things as well," he said.
"They tend to shoot off their mouth and get caught."
May 26, 1999
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