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Mass slayings shock Texas

Texas had more than it could handle last week. Within a span of four days, police were confronted with four mass slayings that claimed at least 23 lives.

It began a week ago Saturday. Police discovered the skeletal remains of two, or possibly three, men in an abandoned well in the woods near Blum, in north Texas. Arrested on suspicion of murder: Jerry Van Pendley and Henry Burton Merrill, a hermit and trapper. Then, on Monday morning, in a Dallas suburb, Truck Driver John Parrish, 46, after an argument with employers over $1,600 in wages, went on a rampage, fatally shooting six people and wounding four others at three places where he had worked. He was finally killed in a Shootout with police. A day later, Junett Bryant found her son Ricky Lee, 31, dead on the bedroom floor of his cottage near Fort Worth, stabbed, castrated and decapitated. Four more victims were next door. Larry Keith Robison, 25, who had been staying with Bryant while looking for a job, has confessed to the killings.

The fourth case surfaced in Houston. Coral Eugene Watts, 28, a bus mechanic, was about to go to trial for burglary and attempted murder when authorities announced an unusual plea-bargain deal. In exchange for a 60-year sentence on the burglary charge, making him eligible for parole in 20 years, as he would have been had he received a life sentence for murder, Watts agreed to help clear up a string of unsolved weekend murders of women in Texas. By the end of last week, Watts had admitted to strangling or stabbing eleven women (his motive: women are "evil") and had taken authorities to the grave sites of three victims. Police believe he may have killed as many as 40 women over an eight-year period in Texas, Michigan and Canada.

But until he began to talk, they had no proof he had committed any of the murders. Watts' luck ran out last May 23, when he was arrested while trying to drown Lori Lister, 20, in her apartment bathtub. In the end Watts' culpability came as no great surprise to Houston police. When Watts migrated south in March 1981, Michigan authorities warned Texas police that he was suspected of being Michigan's "Sunday Morning Slasher." Houston police placed Watts under surveillance, but he was obviously not watched closely enough.