A man already jailed for murder in Colorado told police he killed 48 people, including a US soldier in South Korea, during a 25-year spree, police said on Thursday.
If his claim is true, it would make Robert Charles Browne, 43, one of the country's worst-ever serial killers.
Browne, who was sentenced to life in prison after being arrested in 1995 for one killing, formally pleaded guilty on Thursday to a second murder -- of a 15-year-old girl in 1987 -- and said he had killed 48 people in total, according to the county sheriff's office in Colorado Springs.
PHOTO: AP
"Robert Brown has provided details about numerous other murders throughout the United States, including nine in Colorado," the sheriff's office said in a statement.
"Browne claims that he has committed up to 48 murders," the statement said.
The sheriff's office told the Colorado Springs Gazette that Browne claimed his killing spree began in the early 1970s when, while stationed in South Korea, he killed a fellow soldier in a dispute over a prostitute.
After that he killed dozens of men and women across the southern and western US.
The Gazette said that many of the murders had possibly not been noticed because the victims were transients.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, police said they had ascertained that 26 of 54 women who had been feared to be victims of another already-jailed murderer were still alive. The murderer had posted the women's photographs in his home.
But they had also discovered that another had been found decapitated years ago.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department posted on a website photographs of 54 young women whom they said "may have been victims of foul play between 1977 and 1984" after letting photographer William Richard Bradford take their pictures.
Bradford, now 60, was sentenced to death in 1988 for murdering two women in 1984 whom he had invited to have their pictures taken.
He is now on death row in northern California's San Quentin prison.
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