David Alan Gore killed six women and girls in Indian River County, Florida, between February 1981 and July 1983, with his first cousin Fred Waterfield. The press called them the Killing Cousins.
The badge is the case. Gore was an auxiliary deputy with the Indian River County Sheriff's Office, and he used the authority, along with handcuffs and a police-issue appearance, to stop women who had no reason to refuse him. His police powers were revoked in 1981 after he was found sitting in a parked car with a pistol and binoculars, watching a woman. He kept offending after that.
The victims were Ying Hua Ling, seventeen, and her mother Hsiang Huang Ling, forty-eight, in February 1981; Judith Kay Daley, thirty-five, in July 1981; Barbara Ann Byer and Angelica Lavallee, both fourteen, in May 1982; and Lynn Elliott, seventeen, in July 1983.
He was caught because a neighbour called the police to report a naked girl running down a driveway pursued by a naked man with a gun. That was Lynn Elliott, and he shot her twice in the head in the driveway. Officers found a second girl alive in the attic of the house, bound. Everything known about the other five deaths comes from what he said afterwards.
He pleaded guilty to Elliott's murder and was sentenced to death. His testimony convicted Waterfield of two of the killings. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on April 12, 2012, aged fifty-eight.
Seven years before the first killing, in July 1976, Gore and Waterfield were arrested for the rape at gunpoint of a woman near Vero Beach. The case was dropped and neither man was charged. That woman's own account of what happened to her, and of the interrogation that followed, is published in this archive.