Is a Serial Killer Loose in D.C. Suburbs?

Law enforcement in Alexandria, Virginia worry they could have a serial killer on their hands.

At a press conference on Friday, Alexandria Police Chief Earl L. Cook said detectives were

“looking at any similarities’ between the death of [Ruthanne] Lodato and the 2003 shooting of sheriff’s wife, Nancy Dunning and the November, 2013, killing of Ronald Kirby, the director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

The police chief went on to say that there is no evidence connecting the crimes, “other than the fact that they all took place during the day, all lived within two miles of each other, involved high-profile community members and showed no signs of forced entry.”

Officers described a murder on Thursday, involving a man who knocked on the door and opened fire on Ruthanne Lodato, a married mother of three, along with a nurse.  Lodato, a music teacher at Music Together Alexandria, was home with her 89 year-old mother and a nurse caring for her mother. “The mother-of-three was rushed to the ER in a critical condition but was later pronounced dead and the caregiver who gave police a description of the man who shot her in the arm is recovering in hospital.”

Two other murders are being considered in connection with this one.

In November last year, 69-year-old Ronald Kirby was shot inside his home, less than one mile from Lodato’s house and to date police have not arrested anyone in connection with that murder. And in 2003, real estate agent and the wife of now deceased Sheriff Jim Dunning was killed inside her Del Ray home – less than two miles from where Lodato lived.