Between September 1965 and August 1966, the Jersey Shore of Monmouth and adjoining Ocean County was the scene of half a dozen unsolved murders, marked in nearly every case by similar - if not identical - technique. Two decades later, homicide investigators are no closer to a suspect in the case than when the crimes began.

The slayer's first target was 18-year-old Mary Klinsky, a high school senior in West Keansburg, killed in what detectives called an "especially vicious attack." The victim left her home at 9 p.m. on September 15, bound for the corner mailbox with a letter to her fiancee; seven hours later, her nude and battered body was discovered by motorists near the entrance to Garden State Park.

Joanne Fantazier, a 17-year-old dropout, was next, found on the ice of Yellow Brook, in Colt Neck Township, on February 11, 1966. Fully clothed, with no sign of sexual assault, Fantazier had been fatally beaten and thrown off a highway bridge, her impact failing to break the ice as her killer plainly intended.

A month later, on March 17, 16-year-old Catherine Baker left her home in Edison Township, trekking toward the neighborhood bakery, a block away. Her semi-nude body was found on May 14, floating in a branch of the Metedeconk River, in a remote area of Jackson Township. Death was attributed to multiple skull fractures, the result of a vicious beating.

The first male victim, five-year-old Paul Benda, was discovered on June 21, in the high grass bordering an unpaved road near Raritan Bay. Sexually abused before death, he had also been beaten, tortured with lit cigarettes, and finished off with five strokes of an ice pick. The body was nude on discovery, his clothes piled nearby.

Another male, 18-year-old Ronald Sandlin, was abducted from his job at a Lakewood service station on August 7, beaten to death with a tire iron and dumped in a ditch in Manchester Township. Three days later, 44-year-old Dorothy McKenzie was found shot to death in her car, the vehicle mired by sand near a diner on Route 9. The latest victim was fully clothed, her purse untouched on the seat beside her.

In the absence of a suspect or a clear-cut motive, officers could only say that the McKenzie murder, with its use of firearms, seemed to break the chain. Or did it? As with Joanne Fantazier, there had been no sexual assault, and if one slayer was responsible for five of the recorded deaths, he had already shown his "versatility" by raping boy and girl alike, abstaining when it suited him. It would have been no trick to swap his tire iron for a gun, but we may only speculate, because the case remains unsolved, the killer(s) still at large.