Hunted in the Heartland

On May 12, 1978, a woman is assaulted and brutally murdered in her home. It happened in broad daylight, as her husband lunched with friends, and neighbors bustled in and out of their houses. Two nearby women have encounters with a strange man and remember him. Neither would have believed that they would be the only living survivors able to identify who was then an unknown serial killer in the midst of his most deadly killing frenzy. The two become part of a police investigation that ends up a cold case. It wasn’t until 2007, when a detective working another murder ran a new DNA analysis on a piece of evidence, that a computer registers a hit on the killer’s identity. This led to a convicted rapist who had no prior murder charges. Thus began the unmasking of a serial killer of nine women, and resolved sixty rapes and robberies. The true story of the dark life of Timothy Krajcir, who hunted his victims in parking lots and neighborhoods, ends with his sentencing at a federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri on April 4, 2008. Author Bio: Bonney Hogue Patterson says, “The murder of my neighbor, Virginia Lee Witte, occurred in the small, middle-American town of Marion, Illinois, on May 12, 1978. I had only moved to the area in January of that year, did not know everyone who lived nearby, and did not realize an encounter with a rather ominous stranger was not someone generally known in the area.” This is the author’s first book. She now lives near St. Louis, Missouri.