Florida Technique No Help in Hunting S.D. Killer

Despite the success of a multi-agency task force in tracking the killer of five college students in Florida, such a force “would not be appropriate” in investigating the stabbing deaths of five women in San Diego, a local police official said Thursday.

“In this particular case that we’re dealing with now, it really wouldn’t be,” Capt. Dick Toneck said at a weekly briefing on the Clairemont-University City slayings. “In their case, they had a lot more things to work with than we have.

“Each investigation of this nature has to be done differently--depending on how much evidence you have, how much information you have on your suspect. . . . A lot of those different things would cause you to either increase or decrease the staff of the investigation.

“In their case, they had a whole bunch of different things to allow them to do what they were doing . . . without going into specifics.”

Closer to home, 23 members of a multi-agency task force are investigating the serial slayings of 44 prostitutes in San Diego County, but without elaborating, Toneck said the Clairemont-University City case is different from both that one and the one in Florida.

Asked if San Diego’s rank as the sixth-largest city in the country made it harder to assign a multi-agency force, because of the volume of crime, Toneck said, “No. . . . I think that if it were appropriate and we could use the people, all jurisdictions in this county would give us help to work on the case.

“But, as it turns out, we have sufficient numbers to work it the way we’re working it.”

He said 13 detectives are now probing more than 3,000 leads, the investigation of which has cost more than $1 million since the murder of 20-year-old Tiffany Paige Schultz on Jan. 12 of last year.

He said $841,000 has been spent on the case since 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr was slain in her brother’s Clairemont apartment April 3.

A light-skinned black male, described as 18 to 23 years old, 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-10, with a trim to medium build and short-cropped hair, was seen running from the apartment moments after Tarr was stabbed.

It is that man--believed to be the killer of all five women--that police are looking for, Toneck said.

At one time, 27 investigators and seven superior officers were assigned to the Clairemont-University City case. But, despite the leads and the public attention focused on the case, no arrest is in sight, Toneck said.

Authorities in Gainesville, Fla., where five college students were slain in August, announced last week that an arrest in that case was imminent.

Gainesville, a college town of 120,000 residents, commissioned a multi-agency force to investigate the case. At one time, more than 150 officers were assigned full time.

Willard W. (Bill) Schultz, the father of the first victim in the Clairemont-University City series, and a Board of Supervisors member in Nevada County, Calif., sharply criticized San Diego police last year for not devoting the same manpower and resources as a city a tenth its size.

Toneck said that only “a break” is needed to unravel the case.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody somewhere knows who this person is and just hasn’t come forward,” he said. “If you know who it is, call us. If you have the slightest doubt, let us work with it. It could be the lead that saves us all a lot of footwork and a lot of energy and maybe somebody else’s death.”