On January 31, 1973, authorities in Montgomery County, Maryland, issued an all-points bulletin on Bruce Shreeves, a 22-year-old sailor suspected in four area homicides. 

Absent without leave from Patuxent Naval Air Station since September 1972, Shreeves had only made the shift to violence recently, participating in a string of unprovoked attacks that spanned the past nine days. Armed with a rifle and two pistols, Shreeves first abducted a Maryland real estate agent, unsuccessfully trying to extort $9,000 from his victim. 

Releasing the hostage unharmed, Shreeves subsequently shot and wounded a deputy sheriff, moving on to murder John Szasz, a construction worker, near Spencerville on January 28. Three days later, stopping over in a small community between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., he slaughtered three more victims in what police described as a ritualistic bloodbath. 

The three male victims - including Frank Meszaros, a beauty shop proprietor, and Laverne Miles, an employee of the U.S. Patent Office were discovered in the living room of a house fifteen miles from the nation's capital.

All were Iying on their backs, and each had been shot with two different guns, the latter rounds administered as a grisly coup de grace. Ballistics tests and other evidence linked the massacre with the death of John Szasz, and Shreeves was named as the suspect in warrants seeking his arrest. 

Captured by FBI agents and local police in Washington, on February 2, Shreeves could offer no rational motive for his crimes. Held over for trial and convicted of all counts in August 1973, he was consigned to prison for life.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers - Hunting Humans

SEX: M RACE: W TYPE: T MOTIVE: PC-nonspecific

MO: AWOL sailor; shot male adults in unprovoked attacks.