Sarah Lynn Paulsen was eight, and she held her own, her mother said, with her two older brothers, Jason and Dan. On August 22, 1995, her body was found near her home in Portage, Indiana; she had been raped and strangled. The Portage police investigation turned on fibers found at the scene, blue polyester that matched the uniforms worn by employees of Hardee's, and on a man who worked there, Eugene Victor Britt, thirty-seven, a convicted rapist who moved between homeless shelters in nearby Gary and rode around the city on a bicycle.
Britt had been born in Gary on November 4, 1957. For a sexual assault in 1978 he had been sentenced to thirty years and served about half, and he was paroled in August 1993. Between May and September 1995 he attacked girls and women in Gary and Portage. Betty Askew, fifty, of Gary, was walking through an alley when he began talking to her; she became suspicious and screamed, and he carried her to a vacant lot, where her body was found on September 2. That autumn, living at a shelter where a pastor had tried to bring him to God, he threw himself in front of a train and spent weeks in a wheelchair. In the end he confessed to the shelter's manager, Clyde Smith, who persuaded him to go to the police.
He was arrested on November 3, 1995, and over some eight hours of questioning admitted to ten murders, describing an uncontrollable thing that drove him. His statements led investigators to further remains, among them a skeleton found on December 2, 1995; Tonya Dunlap, twenty-four, was identified in December. Investigators were able to confirm seven victims.
In May 1996, under a plea agreement that took account of his intellectual disabilities and spared him the death penalty, he pleaded guilty but mentally ill to Sarah Paulsen's murder and was sentenced to life plus one hundred years. In February 2000, after a long investigation of his other statements, he was charged with six more murders and the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. His lawyers argued that he was criminally insane, but psychiatric evaluations found him sane and fit for trial.
On October 6, 2006, he pleaded guilty but mentally ill to murder in the perpetration of rape in the deaths of Nakita Moore, fourteen, Tonya Dunlap and Maxine Walker, forty-one, and to the rape of the thirteen-year-old. Charges in the deaths of Betty Askew, Michelle Burns, twenty-seven, and Deborah McHenry, forty-one, whom he had also admitted killing, were dropped under the agreement, in which he gave up his right to appeal. In November 2006 he was sentenced to 245 years, to run concurrently with the first sentence. He broke down in court and asked the families to forgive him. He was held afterward at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.
Twenty years after Sarah's death, Patty Paulsen said there was not a day that she and her husband did not think of their daughter or talk about her, and that as long as people remembered her, her spirit lived on.