Police Concede the Possibility of Serial Killer : Crime: They acknowledged for the first time that the fatal stabbings of three young women in Clairemont may be the work of the same killer.

Investigators for the San Diego Police Department conceded for the first time Wednesday that Tuesday’s killing in a Clairemont apartment complex may be related to two other stabbing slayings of young women in the same area since January.

Until Wednesday, police had been reluctant to comment on the growing fears about a serial killer stalking young women in the sprawling rows of apartment buildings on Clairemont Drive and Cowley Way. All three of the killings have occurred within two blocks in the residential neighborhood, which consists largely of apartment buildings in an area not far from Mission Bay.

A statement prepared by the Police Department Wednesday said that, “because of two other similar cases in recent months, police do not discount the possibility that the crimes may be related.”

Police also announced that the probable weapon in Tuesday’s killing--a knife--was found outside the one-bedroom apartment at 3410 Cowley Way, where 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr was found stabbed to death in unit No. 3 at 12:35 p.m. Tuesday.

Investigators said a 15-year-old boy, walking home from school, found the knife in an alley behind the apartment Tuesday afternoon.

Tarr, an aspiring actress and high school senior from Okemos, Mich., was in San Diego during spring break, visiting her brother, Richard Tarr, whom General Dynamics officials identified Wednesday as an engineer in the company’s space systems division.

Frank DeWald, choral director at Okemos High School and Kinawa Middle School in Okemos, said he had taught Tarr for seven years and considered her his most cherished student in a lengthy career. He said she had appeared in numerous productions since sixth grade, the most recent of which was the lead in a musical, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.”

DeWald said the last time he saw her, in his office last Thursday, just before she left for San Diego, “she stepped in to say how excited she was to sing this aria from an opera called ‘The Tender Land’ by Aaron Copeland. Her character was that of a young girl about to graduate from high school. She’s singing about her future, and I’ll always remember the last line of the piece, which asks, ‘What will the future bring?’ ”

A family friend of the Tarrs, who asked not to be quoted by name, said that Holly and a woman friend had come to San Diego “to visit Rich and the woman he lives with, who’s also his fiancee.” Spring break at Okemos High School lasts for a week, and, the friend said, Holly was scheduled back in class on Monday.

Tarr’s death, coming after two similar recent killings, has terrified neighborhood residents.

“There are lots of similarities in each of these cases,” police spokeswoman Dorothy Powell said. “We can’t discount the possibility that the three may have been committed by the same person. All of the victims were young women. All were students. All were murdered in upstairs apartments. And all were stabbed during the day.”

Powell said authorities are looking for an “old, battered, small car” coated with “oxidized or primer paint and resembling a (Ford) Pinto (sedan), which may be involved in the crime.” She said witnesses saw the suspect running west from the scene, and one man has said the suspect started a gray Pinto and drove away.

Powell described the suspect as a “black male in his late teens, medium build, 5-foot-8 to 5-foot-11, with short hair, wearing a red T-shirt and black Levi’s.” Police said the T-shirt was later found in a canyon near the Buena Vista Gardens apartments, where Tarr died from what the San Diego County Coroner termed “a single stab wound to the chest.”

On Jan. 12, Tiffany Paige Schultz, a 20-year-old English major at San Diego State University, was found dead in her apartment at 3187 Cowley Way, two blocks from where Tarr was killed. The autopsy report notes that Schultz was stabbed more than 50 times, and that some of the wounds were as deep as 6 1/2 inches.

On Feb. 16, Janene Marie Weinhold, a 21-year-old senior at UC San Diego, was found dead in her apartment at 3301 Clairemont Drive. The coroner lists Weinhold’s cause of death as “stab wounds to the chest.”

Although the autopsy report on Schultz has been released, a deputy coroner said Wednesday that the inquiry into Weinhold’s death has been sealed, at the request of homicide detectives, and will not be released or commented on.

Within hours after Schultz’s killing, her fiance, Christopher Jon Burns, a 28-year-old construction worker with whom she shared the apartment in the Canyon Ridge complex next to Buena Vista Gardens, was arrested on suspicion of murder and held for five days in County Jail. Burns was released when the district attorney failed to issue a murder complaint. He has not been rearrested and has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

Even after Weinhold’s killing, homicide investigators said they continued to believe Schultz’s death was “domestic in nature.” Authorities maintained that the first two slayings were probably not related.

Wednesday, police and almost everyone connected with the case conceded that evidence now points to a serial killer.

“If we have a serial killer--and it sure looks like it--such killings can occur a dozen or 2 dozen times before the suspect is finally caught,” said City Councilman Bruce Henderson, whose District 6 includes the neighborhood of the slayings.

Henderson said an elderly tenant, who lives downstairs from Richard Tarr’s unit, heard a woman scream and notified the rental office.

That woman has been identified as 84-year-old Elizabeth Langworthy, one of the last people to see Holly Tarr alive.

“I pushed her hair back, and she rolled her eyes, and she tried to speak, but she just let out this gurgling noise like she was breathing through liquid,” Langworthy told the San Diego Tribune. “And then she was gone.”

Authorities said that Tarr died in a paramedic’s arms.

After Langworthy’s call, the rental office summoned to the scene a 58-year-old maintenance man named Richard Williams. Williams said he briefly confronted the suspect, who wore a cloth bag over his head and a knife held high.

“She screamed, and I thought, ‘Well, she’s inside, she probably just fell down,’ ” Williams said Wednesday, after a sleepless night. “I hit the door, and it opened right up. I took two to three steps, and the guy came out with a knife. I backed up and fell into a breezeway. I kicked at him, thought I’d mess him up or knock him down the stairs, but he was too far away. I couldn’t reach him. He was probably more scared than I was.”

Williams made no mention of a security guard following him to the unit, and the question was raised about why he was summoned and not the beefed-up security detail that Buena Vista Gardens hired after the killing of Weinhold.

Suzanne Rosborough, a spokeswoman for Anza Management Co., which oversees Buena Vista Gardens, where the second and third slayings occurred, and Canyon Ridge, where Schultz was slain, said Williams simply showed up first, before security guards could get there.

“He had a voice pager and knew the address,” she said. “The security guards had a digital pager and had to ask the address.”

Although conceding similarities in the three crimes, police spokeswoman Powell said, “It’s entirely possible the first one (Schultz’s killing) was not related to the second one, or the third one. It’s all speculation at this point to say what is or isn’t about any of these deaths.”

Tarr was a bright, well-liked teen-ager described by almost everyone who knew her as “talented,” “extraordinary” or “very popular.” Holly Suzanne Tarr had appeared in many school productions and had made frequent appearances on the stages of community theaters in nearby Lansing, Mich.

Her credits included “Carousel,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “Heidi.” She and her father had recently auditioned for twin lead roles in the musical, “The Fantasticks.” She was scheduled to return to school for the lead role in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Her father, Paul Tarr of Lansing, is divorced from her mother, Dorothy Rubin, with whom Holly and her stepfather lived in nearby Okemos. Holly was the youngest of three children, including Richard and her older sister, Christy, who is an actress in New York.

“Holly was sensational,” said DeWald, her longtime mentor. “She was almost the perfect student. She was extremely talented. She sang, played the violin, acted and had a wonderful stage presence. She used her talent very, very well, which not every student will do.

“She also had a wonderful attitude. She was not conceited or standoffish and had many, many friends. I think everyone admired her, and there wasn’t the jealousy that sometimes results when students are so gifted.”

DeWald said that Tarr planned to attend the University of Michigan in the fall, majoring in both music and theater. He said she was slated to be honored April 25 as the area’s Outstanding Student of the Year.

DeWald said Okemos High School had suffered a student’s suicide a couple of years ago, but “a murder is what we thought happened to other people. None of us ever dreamed such a thing could happen to Holly.”