Thursday, Feb. 1, 2001 | 10:59 a.m.
With the discovery of a woman dead in a downtown motel, January ended with 19 homicides -- the third highest single-month total in the Las Vegas Valley.
The statistic comes on the heels of a year that set a record on the other end of the spectrum: 2000, with its 95 homicides, marked the first time in a decade there had been fewer than 100 slayings in Metro Police's jurisdiction.
Detectives have looked for a common motive in last month's slayings that could help them prevent more, but have found none.
"We are very concerned about the number of homicides. We have checked, and none of them are connected in any way," Sheriff Jerry Keller said. "We have had a reduction in violent crime for six years and continue efforts to get violent criminals off the streets."
January's 19 homicides are not a record -- that belongs to July 1997, when 24 people were slain. The second highest single month is 20, in September 1997. There were also 19 homicides in June 1999.
"I really think (the number of homicides in January) is an anomaly, especially when you consider the decline in homicides over the past four years," Lt. Wayne Petersen of Metro's homicide unit said. "We are concerned."
The number of homicides in Metro's jurisdiction -- about a million people in Las Vegas and the unincorporated areas of Clark County -- has gone down every year since the record of 168 homicides in 1996. In 1997 there were 147, followed by 124 in 1998, 113 in 1999 and 95 last year.
"There is no pattern to the homicides this year, and none of them are even related, much less connected," Petersen said. "We're just trying hard to bring the killers to justice so they can't kill again."
Statistically the number of homicides in one month won't yield any accurate predictions for the rest of the year, said Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"There is no clean explanation. There could be two in February," said Blumstein, who also is on the National Consortium on Violence Research. "There are always month-to-month fluctuations."
Since there are no patterns and the slayings are not linked to one another, Blumstein said, it could simply be a bad month.
"But it is unusually high," he said. "Especially when there has been a downward trend. But it may have just been a fluctuation."
The reasons for the homicides this year include a few domestic slayings, a murder for hire, several that stemmed from previous disputes, child abuse and several where the motive is not known.
One is just an outright mystery. A skull and some other skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave in the desert near Pabco and Powerline roads on Jan. 10. The person has not been identified and could have died years ago. Police have listed it as a homicide, though no cause of death has been determined.
The number of slayings this year does concern police, who have tried several programs aimed at lowering homicides. A few years ago the number of domestic homicides was increasing, so Metro started a domestic violence unit. The number of domestic violence-related homicides decreased in 2000.
The gang unit also has targeted drive-by gang shootings over the recent years, leading to a decline in those shootings and those types of homicides.
"We are very concerned by the number of homicides and are constantly looking at why they occurred for ways of preventing more," Undersheriff Richard Winget said. "Targeting causes can be effective, like in domestic violence homicides. In 1999 one-third of all homicides (in Metro's jurisdiction) were domestic violence related, and last year that dropped to about 15 percent."
Petersen said one month can't be used to judge the violence of the area.
"It was a busy month, and I really hope it's not indicative of what's in store for the rest of the year," Petersen said.
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