Could Samuel W. Legg be the killer police across Ohio have been searching for since Ronald Reagan was president?
On Thursday morning, the 49-year-old former big-rig driver stood before a Medina County judge on charges that he raped a 17-year-old girl near a truck stop outside of Seville 22 years ago.
Hours later, about 70 miles east, Mahoning County officials announced Legg’s indictment for the murder of Sharon Lynn Kedzierski, who was found dead at an Austintown truck stop in 1992.
Officials have said DNA also links Legg, who most recently lived in Chandler, Arizona, to three other homicides — two in Ohio and one in Illinois.
All the victims were women left naked or partially clothed at truck stops, investigators said, but they have not yet revealed when or where those deaths occurred.
During the mid-1980s — when Legg was still a teen — and 1990s, investigators across Ohio found an alarming number of prostitutes slain near freeways.
Some investigators at the time suspected a serial killer was using his job as a truck driver to prey on women and dump their bodies along the routes he traveled.
Officials this week said the 17-year-old raped by Legg at a Medina County truck stop told investigators her attacker was a trucker.
An Arizona man recently indicted in a 1997 Ohio rape case has been linked through DNA to the unsolved slayings of four women at truck stops in Ohio and Illinois, authorities say.
That a potential serial killer was trolling truck stops along interstate highways crisscrossing Ohio was first revealed 28 years ago in a series of Columbus Dispatch stories.
Read more from the Dispatch here.
She said she met him while hitchhiking home to Lexington, Ohio, after visiting her boyfriend in Cleveland.
Mahoning County officials Thursday didn’t speculate on how Legg met Kedzierski, but said they had no reason to believe she was involved in prostitution.
Kedzierski worked as a bookkeeper or in the income tax preparation field in Pembroke Pines, Florida, from 1979 until about 1982, her former husband told The South Florida Sun Sentinal.
She was last seen alive in Southeast Florida on a friend’s doorstep in October 1989.
No one knew who Kedzierski was when her body turned up 1,200 miles away three years later in Ohio. She was found beaten and perhaps strangled at an Austintown truck stop, officials said Thursday.
A coroner’s report said she died from choking on her own blood.
Kedzierski’s body wasn’t identified for 21 years until her family’s quest to find her collided with new efforts by a former Mahoning County coroner to put a name on the unsolved case.
About 2011, Kedzierski’s daughters submitted their own DNA to a database called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
Funded by the U.S. Justice Department, NamUs allows the public and law enforcement to provide DNA samples to the database in an effort to identify missing persons and unidentified remains. There is no charge.
Separately, but about the same time, a Mahoning County coroner submitted DNA from Kedzierski’s unidentified remains to NamUs, too.
There was a match. Kedzierski was identified, but investigators didn’t reveal her potential killer as Legg until Thursday.
Until now, Legg appears to have had no serious run-ins with the law.
Records show he’s lived in Cleveland, Massillon, Elyria and Arizona.
Officials said he had a commercial truck driver’s license and worked for an independent trucking company in Hinckley, criss-crossing much of the state and country for his job.
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