Title: Castration Serial Murders - Nightly Night Stalker Detective

Dates: 1981 - 1986

Overview: Someone was collecting genitals. But you had to kill them first!.

Status: Cold Case.

Castration Serial Murders, US Serial Killings

Around 7:00 A, M. on June 14, 1982, sheriffs deputies in Wasatch County, Utah, were summoned to the banks of Daniels Creek, where a fly fisherman had reported a grisly discovery. On arrival, they found a mans nude body lying on its back, knees raised, with the genitals severed and missing from the scene. Autopsy results disclosed that the castration had occurred postmortem, and that the victim was shot once in the back of the head with a .38 caliber pistol. On October 11, 1983, the victim was identified from fingerprints as Marty Shiik, age 21, from Truckee, California. He had last been seen alive on June 12, 1982, leaving his mothers home on a hitchhiking trip to Colorado.

Another four years and seven months elapsed before Utah authorities submitted details of Shiiks murder to the FBI National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime, for comparison to other crimes reported from around the country. The marvels of computer science notwithstanding, it was May 1989, nearly seven years after the slaying, when G-men reported back on a strikingly similar case from Pennsylvania. There, six miles north of Williamsburg, another young man had been found on August 19, 1981, nude and emasculated, shot in the back of the head. The Pennsylvania victim was identified as 30 year old Wayne Rifendifer, a North Carolina native with a record of arrests for larceny. Ballistics tests proved that Shiik and Rifendifer had been shot with the same gun.

Authorities suspect the same killer is responsible for the November 1986 murder of 26 year old Jack Andrews, an Oklahoma native with a criminal record, found nude and wrapped in a blanket at a highway rest stop near Litchfield, Connecticut. In addition to the standard missing genitals, Andrews nipples were also cut off and both legs were severed at min thigh. None of the missing parts were found, and the cause of death was not determined in the Litchfield case. Andrews had not been shot.

No progress has been publicly reported on these crimes since 1989, and while investigators theorize about a transient killer, possibly a long haul trucker who preys on hitchhikers, they are no closer to a suspect now, than back in 1981. Barring spontaneous confession by the killer or killers, or coincidental matchup of a gun recovered by police, there is no prospect for solution of the mystery.

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