"Trinity Slasher" Strikes Again

[Desmond Vinson]

"Trinity Slasher" Strikes Again
By Milton Harding

The "Trinity Slasher", named for the practice of leaving victims with inch long cuts on both temples and between the eyebrows, claimed an eighth victim this week; the young woman was found lying in an alleyway in Ithaca, NY. This stretches the killer's previous pattern, as until now all victims were found in New York City. The FBI has been brought in on the investigation, and a spokesman informed reporters that the possibility of an imitator or even a growing murder cult is being investigated.

"It is a very real possibility that the Trinity Slasher's activities have given rise to one or more imitators," the spokesman said in a phone interview. "Our priority right now is to find the original, as he has the higher body count, but you can be sure that we will do everything we can to determine if there are others and to bring them to justice." An autopsy will be conducted today in the hopes of finding evidence that will help police determine whether there is now more than one Slasher.

Thus far very little evidence of any kind has been uncovered due to the killer's thoroughness. No murder weapon has been recovered at any of the eight scenes, all of which are separated by at least a mile, and despite evidence that victims were severely beaten before and after being killed no fingerprints or hair samples not belonging to the victims have been recovered. All evidence points to the victims having been moved from some unknown location where the torture took place, but security camera footage doesn't show the same sort of vehicle near any two crime scenes at the correct times.

Nor is there any apparent connection between the victims. The most recent victim, an NYU student visiting her family in Ithaca for the weekend, is quite a departure from the businessman before her and the prostitute before him. It is the general police consensus that the Slasher cares very little who is tortured and killed, and is likely criminally insane but functional on an unheard of level. Why the Slasher leaves victims in easily accessible areas is also unknown, but it is assumed that he or she wants the bodies to be found.

Memorial services for Tara McClellan, the college student and most recent victim, will be held at St John's Episcopal Church of Ithaca next Sunday. Friends and relatives have set up a website at www.tarasmemorial.org, and are accepting donations through this site to help with the cost of the funeral. "I hope they catch the ," Yvette McClellan, Tara's mother, tearfully said in a televised interview. "Losing her... it's like this void just opened up in all of us, and there's no way to fill it in ever again."