Man charged in 31-year-old cold case murder. Police suspect he may have killed others

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - In blue jeans and a black town of Perinton hoodie, Larry Timmons, a bespectacled and grandfatherly man with a paunch, cut an unthreatening figure as a town parks watchman.

What few people who encountered Timmons when he worked for Perinton in 2014, or in his years prior as a real estate salesman around Rochester, could know was that police in his native Missouri suspected him in several killings whose investigations had long gone cold.

On Friday, police there charged Timmons, 65, who now resides in that state, for the 1988 murder of Cynthia Smith, a 31-year-old woman whose slaying he was questioned in at the time.

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Investigators there said police in neighboring Oklahoma, where Timmons lived for several years, had reopened investigations into at least two homicides, namely the 1994 murder of Timmons’ first wife, Deborah Jean Timmons, and the 1998 drowning death of an 11-year-old girl who was friends with a daughter Timmons had with Deborah Jean.

“We call him an opportunist,” said Sgt. Melissa Phillips, of the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office in southwest Missouri. “He does not target on sex or age. He has little boys in his past. He has little girls in his past. He has women in his past.”

Locally, law enforcement officials received word earlier this year about the suspicions of Timmons' involvement in unsolved homicides, and have been investigating his time here.

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office has no unsolved homicides that Timmons would be a suspect in, and also does not have unsolved rapes in which he would be a likely suspect, said Sheriff's Office Investigator Mike Shannon.

If people have information about Timmons that they think would be of interest to law enforcement, Shannon asked that they call the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.

From his early 20s through his early 40s, a period that spanned 1976 to 1994, Lawrence Gene Timmons was linked to no less than five separate violent crimes in Missouri, despite spending seven of those years in prison or on parole.

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He was charged in the kidnapping and assault of a young boy, the home invasion robbery of a female college student, and the gunpoint rape of a woman, and was questioned but never arrested in the homicides of his first wife and Smith.

Timmons was acquitted of the rape charge at trial, had his robbery conviction overturned on appeal, and was sentenced to seven years in prison for kidnapping and assault, although he served just three years before getting paroled.

Then, as a single father on the cusp of middle age, his run-ins with the law abruptly stopped.

He met a woman named Mechele Lokar, a single mother from Perinton whose stint in the Army had landed her in Oklahoma, where Timmons had settled. They had a daughter, married, and eventually relocated to her hometown in 2006.

Once in western New York, Timmons reinvented himself. He became Larry Timmons, an everyday real estate salesman and, for a brief time, a shuttle driver for senior citizens and a parks watchman for the town of Perinton.

Perinton officials say they plan to review his employment with human resources officials Monday before commenting further.

Timmons lived in two different Perinton locations, said Sheriff's Office Investigator Shannon. Shannon said he sent information about Timmons to police across the state through an internal network but has not heard from any law enforcement considering him a suspect in an unsolved crime.

"We sent a flyer out to everybody in the state essentially," Shannon said Saturday.

Marty Lasher, who was a Perinton neighbor of Timmons, remembered going to Timmons' home once for a cookout.

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"He just seemed like good-natured and everything, but I just felt like I’m not going to continue this," Lasher said. “He just kind of made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. He was weird."

Gilbert Lester, the caretaker and landlord of a Whitney Road home where Timmons lived, said Timmons was quiet and easy-going.

"He paid his rent all right," Lester said. "I had no problem at all."

The murder charge came Friday as Timmons was being held on a $250,000 bond in Lawrence County Jail in Missouri on a forgery charge for allegedly lying about his criminal past on a job application at local liquor store.

Prosecutors also alleged he falsified employment applications and used as many as 17 variations of his name, along with four Social Security numbers and six dates of birth.

Timmons was arrested Aug. 19 at his Pierce City home.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Man charged in 31-year-old slaying suspected in other murders: Police