Fourteen Killed In "Cold-Snap" Violence

Palo Alto: The morning of December 18th was a morning Palo Alto County Medical Examiner Hugh Reily will not soon forget.

     "You usually don't get many murders up here. Sometimes there's a hunting accident or somebody whallops a guy with a pool cue but I've never had a night like last night. I've been to five murder scenes today, and none of them are related in any way."

     The fourteen murders all took place in and near the village of Old Town and occurred between the hours of 11pm and 3 am Wednesday morning.

     "I can't understand the motive," says Sheriff Walter Kreusberger. "I've known some of the victims for twenty years-they were nice, religious people with good families."

     "We've estimated it took between 20 and 30 minutes for everybody to die at the store," Reily says. "And the wounds in all of the bodies indicate that these people did not die easily. O'Donnell killed at least two people while impaled with a broken broomstick before someone got him. We've ruled out any sort of burglury or rampaging motorcycle gangs. These people were hunting each other and taking an awful lot of punishment to do it!"

     One of the most gruesome night's events happened twelve miles outside of town on the farm belonging to Alice and John Llewellyn. Sheriff Kreusberger explains, "It looked like John fired his shot gun point-blank at his wife's head while she was watching tv. I don't know how she did it, she was awful messed up, but she stabbed him in the chest with a steak knife four times before going down. We found him on the front lawn."

     Both the State Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have refused comment on the killing spree.

     The Llewellyn property is the closest of all the sites to the mysterious area known as Black 11. Covert sources have labeled a connection between the killings and Black 11 as "highly probable".