CAPE GIRARDEAU - In the late 1970s and early 1980s, residents here believed a calculating killer was in their midst.

They believed he was a man who studied his victims. A man with an almost mystical ability to elude detection. A man with a master plan.

They were giving him too much credit.

It wasn't skill that kept Timothy Krajcir a mystery for nearly three decades. It was luck.

His luck ran out last year when Carbondale police Lt. Paul Echols resubmitted evidence from the murder of college student Deborah Sheppard for DNA testing. Results pointed to Krajcir.

Carbondale's success sparked Cape Girardeau detective Jim Smith to compare DNA evidence from several murders there. It matched, too.

Krajcir, meanwhile, had been in prison since 1983 for unrelated sexual offenses.

Prosecutors agreed to waive the death penalty for the murders in exchange for a full confession from the killer. So for four hours last December, Krajcir, 63, recounted his crimes to police.

Echols and Smith expected to learn how Krajcir covered his tracks. How he knew when to ambush his victims.

How he planned everything.

Instead, Krajcir told them all he did to hide his identity was wear gloves and tie a blue bandana across his face. He never had a plan B. He selected his victims at random. Chose what windows to break or what doors to enter on the spur of the moment. Did nothing to quiet the screams of his victims or the shots he fired.

"When you think of the heinousness of his crimes, you'd expect more in a confession," Smith said. "He was just a predator."

In all, Krajcir confessed to nine murders in four states. He pleaded guilty Friday to killing five women in Cape Girardeau.

The Post-Dispatch viewed his taped confession to those murders. This is what he told police.

The killing begins

Krajcir's job as an ambulance driver in Southern Illinois took him to Cape Girardeau to transport patients on occasion. He returned during his off time to look for victims.

He liked Mary Parsh's neighborhood because it wasn't well lighted. While peeping in windows in August 1977, he spotted Parsh at home. He assumed she lived alone, and a week later, came back to assault her.

The night he attacked Parsh was the first time he carried a gun. He had taken it during a burglary in Carbondale.

"God I wish I never would have picked up that gun," Krajcir said in his confession.

The house looked vacant when he arrived, so he held his coat to a back window and hit it with a rock. About 30 minutes later, Parsh came in with her daughter, Brenda Parsh, 27. She was visiting from St. Louis, where she had lived for about four years. Her father was in the hospital recovering from heart surgery, and she was home for a visit.

"I didn't know what was gonna happen," Krajcir said. "But I was already in the house."

He confronted the women, sent them to the master bedroom and began to assault the daughter.

The phone rang.

Krajcir let Brenda Parsh answer.

"She said something like, 'I love you daddy,' or 'I'll see you tomorrow,"' Krajcir said. "I learned he was in the hospital from the phone call."

Then he ordered the women to lie on their stomachs on the bed. He bound their hands with a TV cord.

"Probably up until the time I shot them, I didn't know if I could … if I would," Krajcir said.

Krajcir shot Brenda Parsh first, in the back of her head, then fired at her mother.

He had taken to heart a lesson his recent cellmate in prison had taught him: Never leave a witness.

Just before leaving, he heard Mary Parsh sobbing. He rushed back into the bedroom and shot her again.

The sobbing stopped.

The keys jingled in the lock as he pulled the front door closed behind him.

After the murders, he attended a bachelor party in Carbondale and stood up in a friend's wedding the next day.

A resting place

Krajcir looked for victims in parking lots of grocery stores or shopping centers.

In November 1977, he spied Lindbergh High School grad Sheila Cole in a Wal-Mart lot. The Southeast Missouri State University student was parked next to a truck that blocked the view from the store. She was in her car when Krajcir pointed his gun at her and ordered her into his.

He drove her to Carbondale and assaulted her in his trailer.

"It was stupid on my part, because any one of my friends could have come over," Krajcir told detectives. "And how could I explain what was going on? It's just one of those things that you do without thinking."

Afterward, Krajcir drove Cole toward Cape Girardeau. She told him she lived with two roommates and was a college student. Just before he got to town, he pulled into a rest area off of Illinois 3. He forced Cole into a bathroom stall. She stood with her back to him as he used the toilet; he shot her in the back of her head.

"When did you decide to kill her?" Smith asked.

"Not until I got close to Cape," Krajcir said. "It wasn't premeditated."

He stopped on a bridge over the Mississippi River, got out of his car and chucked the gun into the river as traffic zipped by.

A white rose

Krajcir first saw Marjorie Call, 57, in a Kroger parking lot.

He followed her inside the store and bought rawhide strings to bind her hands.

Krajcir followed Call home a few blocks from the Parshes' and looked in her back window.

He returned a week later, in January 1982. Again, he assumed no one was home and broke her bathroom window. She came in about 30 minutes later and headed for the bathroom.

Krajcir said she saw the window was broken and started to run toward her front door, but he caught her.

He assaulted her in her bedroom. Even though he was armed with a gun, Krajcir strangled her.

He severed one of her nipples, he said, but flushed it before he left. He offered no explanation as to why.

"I was going to take a souvenir," he said.

He emptied her church envelopes of donations and left through her carport door.

Police found a white rose on a bed in another room.

"It was thought someone was trying to send a message," Smith said.

Not so.

Krajcir said he never saw a rose that night.

The final victim

In June 1982, Krajcir was again in the Kroger lot. This time, his eyes locked on Mildred Wallace, 65. He followed her home, once again to a neighborhood close to where Call and the Parshes had lived, on one of the busiest thoroughfares in town.

He peered in her bathroom window and saw her getting ready to leave again.

He guessed she had forgotten something at the store.

After she left, he broke a window with a brick. He cut himself on the broken glass, leaving enough DNA on the window caulking to link him to the crime two decades later.

Once inside, he helped himself to a Band-Aid. He covered the broken window with a towel so she wouldn't detect any breeze.

He cut her phone cord, "So I wouldn't be interrupted more than anything."

Ten minutes later, Wallace came home. Krajcir ambushed her in her bedroom.

"She asked me if I was the guy who killed the woman across town," Krajcir recalled. "Evidently she was fearful of an attack."

He denied being that killer.

He assaulted her, ordered her to stay on her bed and blindfolded her. He rummaged through her belongings. Before he left, he shot her in the head.

Krajcir said she had a chair pushed in front of her door, "So nobody could get in."

He pushed it aside and opened the door.

Cars rushed past as he walked along the busy street and disappeared into the night.

CHRISTINE BYERS is a reporter for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a sister paper of The Southern; both newspapers are owned by Lee Enterprises, Inc.