The Conspiracy Club

54

Visiting Doctor Tagged

As Serial Killer

Exclusive to the Clarion:

Police have identified a Seattle-based surgeon and medical researcher working at City Central Hospital on a one-year fellowship, as a serial murderer believed responsible for the deaths of at least five local women, and a possible suspect in as many as three dozen other unsolved murders around the world.

Augusto Omar Graves, 40, holder of both a medical degree and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and an acknowledged expert on laser technology and surgery, was shot dead by police Thursday evening in the subterranean storage locker of his luxurious Hale Boulevard condominium. Graves, believed to have been born in Syria and raised in Brazil and the United States, was found in the company of his fifth victim’s corpse. According to the coroner, that woman, Kristina Schnurr, a recent immigrant from Poland who’d worked as a housekeeper at the hospital, had been strangled.

Schnurr, 29, and Graves had been seen talking the day of the murder, and it is believed Graves lured Schnurr on a date, strangled her in his car, and hid her body in the condominium’s parking garage. He then drove the car back to the building’s entrance so that a doorman would see him enter alone. Graves managed to transport Schnurr’s corpse two floors down, to the storage locker, a dank, cellarlike space that he had converted into a dissection chamber.

Graves’s other local victims include a nurse from City Central, Jocelyn Lee Banks, 27, murdered six months ago and formerly thought to have been carjacked from a hospital parking lot. Police now believe Graves convinced her to go with him willingly, under false pretenses. In addition, Graves is the prime suspect in the deaths of three recently murdered prostitutes, Tyrene Mazursky, 45, Odelia Tat, 38, and Maisie Donovan, 25. Given the time span between the Banks killing and those of the other victims, as well as Graves’s frequent business trips, there is reason to believe that he will be tied into murders in other cities.

Graves has also been implicated in the mutilation slayings of at least two women murdered in Kent, England, during periods when he was conducting research at a London think tank and writing about science for The Guardian newspaper. Investigators from Spain, Italy, France, and Norway are reexamining unsolved murders involving surgical dissection that may have links to Graves’s methodology.

Police Chief Arlo Simmons cited “numerous man-hours and first-rate detective work” as the factors that led to the discovery of Graves’s lair.

“We’ve been interested in this individual for some time,” said Chief Simmons. “I regret that we weren’t able to save Kristina Schnurr. However, the death of this man can be truly said to have brought an end to a reign of terror.”