Pa. murder charge swells trucker's list

Already convicted in Bay State attack

(jon hill/associated press/pool/file)

HARRISBURG, Pa. - Before he was captured in Massachusetts, Adam Leroy Lane was drawing blood in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, authorities said.

Police in central Pennsylvania filed a murder charge Wednesday against the North Carolina trucker accused of carrying out several violent attacks against women and a teenage girl along the East Coast last summer.

Lane fatally stabbed Darlene Ewalt on July 13, 2007, while she was on the phone on the rear patio of her suburban Harrisburg home at 2 a.m., police said.

He went on to stab another Pennsylvania woman and kill a New Jersey woman, authorities said, before Massachusetts police caught him about two weeks later in the bedroom of a 15-year-old girl he attacked.

Lane, who turned 44 yesterday, allegedly carried out the late-night attacks randomly along his trucking routes. Police say they found Ewalt's blood on a knife later recovered from Lane's truck.

In the other Pennsylvania case, Lane is accused of slashing a woman across the neck as she lay asleep in her home in a rural area north of York. Police investigating that assault said they found a pair of black gloves in a yard a half-mile from the victim's home. The gloves had Lane's DNA and Ewalt's blood on them, police said.

In December, Lane pleaded guilty in the Massachusetts attack and was sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison. He is being held in a New Jersey jail, where he is awaiting trial in the slaying of Monica Massaro of Bloomsbury. Lane pleaded not guilty to that crime on Tuesday.

Police in Lane's hometown of Jonesville, N.C., also said they want to question him in the unsolved October 1996 slaying of a police officer. It was unclear whether Lane is represented by a lawyer on the Pennsylvania charges.

Ewalt, 42, had been married for 23 years and had a college-age son. She was a fun-loving free spirit, her husband told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg last year.