For several days last week, Baltimore police suspected the scariest of scenarios: One unknown man systematically preying on women and strangling them in a neighborhood north of the city's old, touristy Fells Point area.
Their fears intensified last Wednesday when a schoolboy chasing an errant football found the body of 27-year-old Cecilia Mosca outside Lombard Middle School, the fourth woman slain in a similar manner since 1993 within two square blocks.
But the situation took a twist yesterday as a squad of homicide detectives brought together to investigate a possible serial killer developed new information that could lead to multiple arrests in what now seem to be coincidental slayings.
"In all likelihood, these are unrelated homicides," said Lt. Wendell M. France of the homicide unit, adding that arrests were expected shortly. "As it stands now, we have three suspects who possibly are responsible for the killings."
Lieutenant France said police first suspected in November that a link might exist between the killings, when Glenice Cornish was found dead in a boarded-up, city-owned rowhouse across the street from the school -- the second body discovered there in seven months.
By Wednesday, detectives suspected that one person was targeting women -- some of them prostitutes and crack-cocaine addicts -- who frequented the streets just north and east of Fells Point.
That theory changed in the past two days as detectives gathered more information and interviewed prostitutes. "We learned quite a bit," Lieutenant France said.
The slayings occurred on the northern edge of the Perkins Homes public housing project and the southern edge of Washington Hill. Debris-strewn lots and boarded-up rowhouses are common in the two areas, nestled between the tourist draws of Little Italy restaurants, Fells Point bars and nightclubs and Butchers Hill rowhouses.
Police have raided the Perkins Homes housing projects for drugs numerous times in recent years and in August broke up what they described as a Dominican Republic-based cocaine organization with ties to a Central American drug cartel.
Most prostitutes who work parts of Southeast Baltimore, police say, ply their trade around Patterson Park -- on the Eastern Avenue and the Baltimore Street sides, and along Broadway.
Lt. R. Jay Fisher of the Southeastern District said that "it would be quite out of the ordinary to find someone soliciting" in the area of the slayings. Some of the victims likely were picked up by men a few streets to the west and taken to where they were killed, he said.
