[UPDATE] How Accused Serial Killer Walter E. Ellis Managed to Stay on Milwaukee's Streets for the Last 8 Years

Walter Ellis: His DNA has been linked to nine women murdered since 1986

​One detective thought there was a serial killer loose way back in 1986. See update after the jump...

If not for mishandled DNA, Walter E. Ellis might have been captured by Milwaukee police eight years ago. And at least one of the nine murdered women he's been linked to might still be alive.

That's the troubling finding of Wisconsin investigators in the wake of Ellis' arrest over the weekend. According to prison officials, Ellis has had run-ins with the law going all the way back to 1978, when he was charged with burglary. They also say his DNA was taken in 2001 while he was in prison for reckless endangerment. But the sample was somehow lost in transit when it was mailed to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Without a match in its database, police spent months searching for a serial killer they believed had never been in contact with the law.

Consider it just one of the missed opportunities to catch Ellis, who was on probation and living in a halfway house when he's thought to have killed one of his victims...
Since his first burglary bust in 1978, Ellis would go on to be arrested 12 more times and serve five stints in prison. In 1992, he was released from the slam on a drug charge, but then sent to a halfway house after violating probation.

He was living at the Salvation Army when prostitute Irene Smith was found strangled and stabbed only a block from his former residence. He'd even been questioned at the scenes of several slayings near his home.

But without the DNA, crimes like hit-and-run and harassment didn't suggest that Ellis was a sexual predator or mass murderer. Police instead spent their time examining a stunning 15,000 sexual assault investigations going back to 1986. They also reexamined 2,000 arrests in the north Milwaukee area where the bodies were found. Not until last weekend did they catch their man.

Ellis has only been charged so far with two of the killings. But that tally is expected to climb later this week.

UPDATE I: Former detectives in Milwaukee's homicide squad believed they were looking at a serial killer way back in 1986, when Ellis' second alleged victim was found. But Bill Vogl, the leader of the homicide unit at the time, says department brass didn't want to hear about it.

Vogl told the Journal-Sentinel that he thought both women killed that year were done in by the same man. "I entered with a businesslike attitude to discuss the matter, and I used the word serial, and I got reamed out," said Vogl, who retired in 1991. "That was the end of the meeting. I think they were more fearful of the pressure the word could (create) via the media than anything else. . . . They didn't want the word used. They didn't want that to get out to the media."

And Detective Nick Sandoval, who worked under Vogl, said the unit was overwhelmed by the body count that year, which ended at 85:

"We were so short-handed. Homicides would come in and we would start on one and we never really got our teeth into them to the point that we could do decent follow-up work. We would come in the next morning and, lo and behold, we would have another one. It was like a vicious circle."