http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ/MGArticle/WSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173353860204&path=rssDNA ties trucker's knife to Pennsylvania death
Prosecutor says that match is evidence in homicide probe
Friday, December 14, 2007
A prosecutor in Pennsylvania says that the DNA of a slain woman matches DNA in blood found on a knife belonging to a North Carolina truck driver who is a suspect in a string of unsolved crimes along the East Coast.
Adam Leroy Lane of Jonesville, N.C., has not been charged in the July death of Darlene Ewalt, but District Attorney Ed Marsico of Dauphin County called the DNA match “the major part of the evidence gathered so far” in the homicide investigation.
Lane, 43, pleaded guilty Tuesday to attacking a 15-year-old girl with a knife during a home invasion in Chelmsford, Mass.
After Lane’s arrest in Massachusetts, police found a hunting knife and a copy of the Hunting Humans, a B movie about a serial killer who picks his victims at random, in his truck.
Lane also is accused of killing a New Jersey woman and is suspected in the slashing of a woman in York County, Pa., four days after Ewalt was killed. The York County victim survived.
Authorities in New Jersey and Massachusetts say that Lane parked at truck stops and walked short distances looking for female victims.
The investigation into the trucker has grown to cover five states, including Virginia, where authorities searched his trucks, and North Carolina.
North Carolina officials have said that they intend to question Lane about the 1996 roadside killing of Sgt. Gregory Keith Martin of the Jonesville Police Department. In August, several people called local authorities to say that Lane resembles a sketch of a suspect.
“He’s a person of interest right now,” Police Chief Roger Reece said yesterday. “It’s just so case-sensitive. I can’t say anything. As of right now, we’re going to wait this thing out.”
In Jonesville Lane was known as a loner in black. He was hard to get along with, former employers said, and usually wore black clothes. He was a high-school dropout, who worked as a long-distance truck driver or as a laborer.
The two Pennsylvania attacks bear similarities to the ones in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Both are near interstates along Lane’s route.
Ewalt, 42, of West Hanover Township near Interstate 81 was speaking to a friend on a cordless phone at 2 a.m. on July 13. According to news reports, she was just feet away from a sliding-glass door to her house, with her husband and college-age son asleep inside, when she was stabbed and killed.
At 2 a.m. on July 17, a 37-year-old woman in Conewago Township near Interstate 83, less than an hour south, was slashed across the throat as she slept in her downstairs bed. Her relatives were asleep upstairs. The woman, whose name has not been released, survived.
