Phoenix police say they have 'Baseline Killer'

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Police said Thursday they have evidence linking a jailed sexual assault suspect with the nine killings attributed to the "Baseline Killer" who terrorized the Phoenix area for months.

Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said investigators are recommending that Mark Goudeau be charged with 71 criminal counts, including murder.

Goudeau has been in custody since September, when he was arrested in connection with the 2005 sexual assaults of two sisters, one of whom was pregnant, in a south Phoenix park.

The assaults were among the crimes detectives linked to the Baseline Killer case, one of two serial killer cases that had gone unsolved for months as the attacks continued in the Phoenix area.

The Baseline Killer case originally included 23 shootings, rapes and robberies that left eight people dead between August 2005 and June.

The dead, seven of them women, ranged in ages from 19 to 39. They were killed going about their daily activities, such as leaving work, washing a car or waiting at a bus stop.

A ninth killing wasn't publicly revealed until Thursday. The victim was a woman found dead in her Phoenix home by her 8-year-old son in April, police said.

Police have said the killer struck at night and wore disguises, which included a wig of dreadlocks and a fisherman's hat. The name Baseline Killer came from the Phoenix street where some of the earliest crimes in the string were committed.

In September, police said they were looking into whether Goudeau, a former construction worker, could be tied to those attacks.

"That investigation has come to the point where today we are submitting 71 criminal charges to the county attorney for prosecutions against Mark Goudeau," Harris said Thursday.

He said police had followed up on 8,000 leads to get to that point.

Nine of the 23 Baseline Killer attacks occurred within three miles of the east Phoenix home Goudeau shared with his wife. One of the victims, 37-year-old Carmen Miranda, was killed just around the corner from their home.

According to the Department of Corrections, Goudeau also has unrelated convictions on three aggravated assaults in 1989 and armed robbery and kidnapping in 1990. He served 13-1/2 years on those convictions before being paroled in 2004, eight years before his sentence was to end.

Goudeau previously admitted to being a recovering cocaine addict and once blamed his history of violence on a weakness for crack cocaine.

After his arrest, Goudeau's wife, Wendy Carr, lashed out at Phoenix police and the mayor for their handling of the case, saying accusations "have been spilled into the streets with complete disregard for the truth."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/12/07/baseline.killings.ap/index.html