Luis Perez, a 40 year old handyman, was charged this week with two sex-attack strangulations in San Jose dating back to the 1980s, and is a suspect in a similar 1996 murder in San Francisco. City detectives are digging through records of long unsolved sex assault slayings of women to see if they can be linked to the California convict believed to be a serial killer. The review of NYPD homicide files was triggered by a San Jose police teletype warning law-enforcement agencies nationwide that Perez said he had attacked other women in the early 1990s and that he had spent time in New York City during that period.
Perez, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1999 for raping and attempting to kill 14 year old San Francisco girl, was linked to the three California murders during a review of cold-case homicides in San Jose. His DNA, which was in California's statewide database, tied him to the 1989 sex attack strangulation.